Posts Tagged ‘life’
“What do I know about the universe and life?”
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 6, 2021
Let’s experiment
Posted on November 26, 2010
Whether we admit it or not, every person has constructed a mental model of how he views the universe and life.
For example, was the universe created, is it infinite, is it timeless…
And what is life, the purpose of life, what happens after death, is there a soul, what happens to the soul, is the soul individual or a collective soul…?
Since antiquity, philosophers have been discussing and reasoning on the following matter:
“Do mankind enjoys an innate general spirit (regardless of ethnicity, culture, gender…) that expresses how he views the construct of the universe, or it is an individual learning process relevant to the manner the various sensory organs observe nature and people and organize the information”?
The hypothesis is:
Do people with sensory handicaps (blind, deaf…) extend the same kind of subjective understanding of the universe and life as “normal” people do, across all ethnic cultures with oral and written myths and traditions?
First, we need baseline stories on “What do I know about the universe and life?” from “normal” people with “normally” functioning sensory organs (vision, audition…).
The baseline stories should be captured from varieties of ethnic cultural entities in the five continents, privileging the oral cultures with No recognized written documents, and minority cultures with written cultures but Not read or disseminated universally.
The baseline stories must discriminate between genders (between group factors) and the ethnic stories within each gender groups.
The baseline stories must discriminate among the stage of maturity of the storyteller (young, adult, middle age, and older people).
The baseline stories must discriminate among the literacy levels of the subjects (such as they read and write in one language, read only, and only orally literate subjects). Thus, the team of experimenters must be trained to adequately record answers and stories in uniform fashion.
The next phase of the experiment is gathering stories of sensory handicapped people in the above ethnic and gender groups (blind, deaf…)
We may extend this experiment by artificially handicapping a normal subject by preventing him to see or to hear while resuming his “normal” live for a period. Do you think that his mental model of the universe might be altered significantly?
Another extension may be involving normal sensory subjects but with different mental capabilities and limitations (over developed or under developed brain powers).
This experiment would answer the question: “Are reading and listening to stories generate different types of observational data due to further brain processing mechanisms?”
The most essential preparation for the experiment is the designing of an exhaustive questionnaire with exhaustive options to educate the subjects on the varieties of viewpoints and myths.
For that purpose, the questionnaire will be tested on many preliminary samples of ethnic cultures in order to catch and collect the varieties of relevant options, sort of exhaustive compendium on the different myths and mental models.
I would recommend that the design requires every question to be answered. This means that those logical procedures of demanding the subject to skip several questions, as in filling tax forms, be eliminated: We should not fall in the bias of enforcing our rational logic on oral culture ethnic groups and the illiterates.
It is advisable that follow-up oral stories accompany answering the questionnaire. Then, another follow-up written story be attached to the oral story.
The written story would condense the individual story into a comprehensive and coherent story after the preceding two educational sessions.
The teams of trained experimenters would have to fill the initial questionnaire with the new information generated by the oral and written stories; missing information can be filled by default, using the original questionnaire for each subject.
Thus, data analysis can be conducted on the two questionnaires: the before learning process and the after learning process of the mental models.
I find it interesting that, after the written story, the subject would give his opinion on the current theories of astrophysicists on the universe in order to check the cohesion and compatibility of the subjects in their perception of the universe.
For example: what they think of the theory that this universe is the product of a collision between two universes; that a universe revolves around each black hole; that what we see is a simulated universe of a matrix universe; that the sky is a wall on which the image of the stars and galaxies are projected onto it (a universe as hologram); that the universe keeps changing every time we observe it…
Do you think that you might change your view if a theory (coming from an astrophysicist) impresses you?
The spontaneous suggestion is “why not ask a subject to tell his story before answering a questionnaire? At least we can have an original version, unbiased by constructed questionnaires.”
This suggestion is pertinent if it is feasible to nudge a subject to start telling a story without a prompt sheet containing the necessary lines of thoughts to guide the subject in the endeavor: The prompt sheet must be devoid of any biased suggestions.
In any case, I believe that devising such a prompt sheet is necessary, even if not applied in the experiment, in order to get the questionnaire developed and cleaned of idiosyncratic allusions and local imageries.
The experiment is complex and will need to be subdivided in meaningful stages of shorter experiments.
It is time intensive and for a long duration.
It requires training of large teams of researchers and experimenters. Preliminary experiments would show the best ways of experimenting piece meal this vast project.
Note 1: I tend to include materials we read and stories we heard as sensory inputs since they are processed by the brain, at various levels, as sensory observations.
Note 2: Many scholars present the view that what we actually sense are in fact “processed observations”, and not the raw sensed data, since all sensing observations are data processed by the brain at different levels of manipulations.
Good enough: We are dealing with what mankind is observing: That is what is available to forming a coherent structure of the universe and the environment we live into.
The follow-up lesson is: Other reasoning species must be viewing the universe differently since their senses have different capacities and limitations, and their brain structures are different from mankind.
Note 3: The essential question that the previous experiment might offer an answer to is: “If an individual is handicapped in one or more sensory organs then, by reading or listening to stories, can his brain re-establish what normal people comprehend of the universe?”
Note 4: I conjecture that all the facts, observations, experiments., philosophy… will Not tell us anything “sustainable” of what is life and the universe. What this experiment could boils down to is to “know”:
How the majority, in any ethnic group, likes to conceive the nature of Life and the Universe?
This is fundamental to to evaluate the evolution of human “Emotional Intelligence“
Life or the living? This charlatan of a magician
We want to believe we had a dream,
As a kid, reckless, careless, cheerful, forgetful
We must have had a dream, everybody says so…
We cling to that forgotten dream,
Gone with the wind for mysterious reasons.
Now adult and mad, for never recalling what was this beautiful dream
And we create another delusional dream,
Weaved out of and around the skills and talents we scrambled feverishly to acquire and boast of.
And we go crazy, seeing the world in black and white,
Struggling to be convinced that a dream must be an all-right world
Fighting the Great Evil, the Great Satan, master of all the wrong values
And we commit the most absurd acts of violence
On these criminal elements, poisoning our dream value system,
And we go on rampage, carrying banners of the most idiotic arbitrary concepts
Mid-age:
We blame our disillusion on these chaotic and vile realities that is life,
This “foul dust”
Fooling us on a full moonlight
Watching this staircase, a ladder to heaven,
Perched up high to suck on the pap of life
“Gulping down the incomparable milk of wonder…”
Along the way, we missed
These streaks of happy moments,
Failed to observe the real people
Characters rich in complex reality of life.
Along the way, we got lost, and we missed
To empathize with the pain, frustration of all the others’
Diverse dreamers of all kinds of “illusory dreams“,
Just like ours…
This foul dust amidst our chimeric failure,
To whatever we convinced ourselves we were after. for success and happiness
And we are getting old, really old,
And we reach this famous conclusion that
It was all illusion, a drama we played on this comical stage
As if we ever started with anything more than a delusional dream.
Loss of the illusion,
This heavy baggage grown-ups carry and nurse
To enjoy this acrid taste:
Licking our self-made wounds
The hero who wants to end a martyr
For all the dreamers of a better world…
And we missed the reveries, sources of our impossible imagination,
We missed the fact that the rock of our world
“Was and should be founded on a fairy’s wing”
Note: Borrowed a few sentences from Fitzgerald novels
What do I know about Universe or life? Let’s experiment
Note: A re-edit article of 2010 “Let’s experiment on: “What do I know about the universe and life?”
Whether we admit it or not, every person has constructed a mental model of how he views the universe and life.
For example, was the universe created, is it infinite, is it timeless…
And what is life, the purpose of life, what happens after death, is there a soul, what happens to the soul, is the soul individual or a collective soul…?
“If an individual is handicapped in one or more sensory organs then, by reading or listening stories, can his brain re-establish what normal people comprehend of the universe?”
Since antiquity, philosophers have been discussing and reasoning on the following matter:
“Do mankind enjoys an innate general spirit (regardless of ethnicity, culture, gender…) that expresses how he views the construct of the universe, or it is an individual learning process relevant to the manner the various sensory organs observe nature and people and organize the information”?
The hypothesis is: Do people with sensory handicaps (blind, deaf…) extend the same kind of subjective understanding of the universe and life as “normal” people do, across all ethnic cultures with oral and written myths and traditions?
First, we need baseline stories on “What do I know about the universe and life?” from “normal” people with “normally” functioning sensory organs (vision, audition…).
The baseline stories should be captured from varieties of ethnic cultural entities in the all continents, “civilizations” that still privileging the oral cultures with no recognized written documents ,and also minority cultures with written cultures but Not disseminated universally.
The baseline stories must discriminate between genders (between group factors) and the ethnic stories within each gender groups.
The baseline stories must discriminate among the stage of maturity of the storyteller (young, adult, middle age, and older people).
The baseline stories must discriminate among the literacy levels of the subjects (such as they read and write in one language, read only, and only orally literate subjects). Thus, the team of experimenters must be trained to adequately record answers and stories in uniform fashion.
The next phase of the experiment is gathering stories of sensory handicapped people in the above ethnic and gender groups (blind, deaf…)
We may extend this experiment by artificially handicapping a normal subject by preventing him to see or to hear while resuming his “normal” live for a period.
Do you think that his mental model of the universe might be altered significantly?
Another extension may be involving normal sensory subjects but with different mental capabilities and limitations (over developed or under-developed brain powers).
This experiment would answer the question: “Are reading and listening to stories generate different types of observational data due to further brain processing mechanisms?”
The most essential preparation for the experiment is the designing of an exhaustive questionnaire with exhaustive options to educating the subjects on the varieties of viewpoints and myths.
For that purpose, the questionnaire will be tested on many preliminary samples of ethnic cultures in order to catch and collect the varieties of relevant options, sort of exhaustive compendium on the different myths and mental models.
I would recommend that the design requires every question to be answered. This means that those logical procedures of demanding the subject to skipping several questions, as in filling tax forms, be eliminated: We should not fall in the bias of enforcing our rational logic on oral culture ethnic groups and the illiterates.
It is advisable that follow-up oral stories accompany answering the questionnaire; then, another follow-up written story be attached to the oral story.
The written story would condense the individual story into a comprehensive and coherent story after the preceding two educational sessions.
The teams of trained experimenters would have to fill the initial questionnaire with the new information generated by the oral and written stories; missing information can be filled by default, using the original questionnaire for each subject. Thus, data analysis can be conducted on the two questionnaires: the before learning process and the after learning process of the mental models.
I find it interesting that, after the written story, the subject would give his opinion on the current theories of astrophysicists on the universe in order to checking the cohesion and compatibility of the subjects in their perception of the universe.
For example: what they think of the theory that this universe is the product of a collision between two universes; that a universe revolves around each black hole; that what we see is a simulated universe of a matrix universe; that the sky is a wall on which the image of the stars and galaxies are projected onto it (a universe as hologram); that the universe keeps changing every time we observe it…
Do you think that you might change your view if a theory (coming from an astrophysicist) impresses you?
The spontaneous suggestion is “why Not ask a subject to tell his story before answering a questionnaire? At least we can have an original version, unbiased by constructed questionnaires.”
This suggestion is pertinent if it is feasible to nudge a subject to start telling a story without a prompt sheet containing the necessary lines of thoughts to guiding the subject in the endeavor; the prompt sheet must be devoid of any biased suggestions.
In any case, I believe that devising such a prompt sheet is necessary, even if not applied in the experiment, in order to get the questionnaire developed and cleaned of idiosyncratic allusions and local imageries.
The experiment is complex and will need to be subdivided in meaningful stages of shorter experiments.
It is time intensive and for a long duration; it requires training of large teams of researchers and experimenters. Preliminary experiments would show the best ways of experimenting piece meal this vast project.
Note 1: I tend to include materials we read and stories we heard as sensory inputs since they are processed by the brain, at various levels, as sensory observations.
Note 2: Many scholars present the view that what we actually sense are in fact “processed observations”, and not the raw sensed data, since all sensing observations are data processed by the brain at different levels of manipulations.
Good enough: We are dealing with what mankind is observing; that is what is available to forming a coherent structure of the universe and the environment we live into.
The follow-up lesson is: Other reasoning species must be viewing the universe differently since their senses have different capacities and limitations and their brain structures are different from mankind.
Note 3: The essential question that the previous experiment might offer an answer to is: “If an individual is handicapped in one or more sensory organs then, by reading or listening stories, can his brain re-establish what normal people comprehend of the universe?”
Why does life exist?
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 4, 2016
Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.
But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.
Jeremy England, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.
The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that, under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”
His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he delivered at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.
England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.
“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”
Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.
England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”
At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.”
Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses.
Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.
Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out.
Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example.
As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.
Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.
Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.
This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.
Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.
“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better
Note: this article is lengthier, but you got the gist: You efficiently dissipate heat and energy and you are more likely to be a living entity and grow.
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Bye, bye Earth. It was okay to meeting with you
You should have realized by now that life is mainly a maintenance process, including procreation.
Life is basically learning how to survive, just to keep living as long as our physical potentials have not been exhausted.
What kind of maintenance tasks can you recall? Dusting, mopping, washing dishes, cooking, taking care of dirty children, gathering anything to eat, fetching water, bathing…
By the by, communities invented a fictitious splitting of tasks. Women were allocated the maintenance chores, by tradition and customs, while men went hunting and bragging about their prowess, including how much they could drink non-alcoholic beer.
By the by, communities were organized so that 95% of the people get engaged in the maintenance tasks, including the monotonous production and caring for the comfort of the other 5% who appointed themselves “above the fray”
By the by, a group of clergy was instituted to mind the soul and after life conditions of the people in the community, particularly initiating the community to the rituals and attending ceremonies according to rules and proper attitudes.
For example, you have priests who visit homes, sprinkle some water in all the room, and wait for a handsome bonus for his well-intentioned zeal and for remembering the needs of the households, and offering the prayer for the occasion.
The 5% were supposed to have plenty of time to reflect on:
1. the meaning of life
2. How happy the community can be if it obeyed their prescriptions and rules of conduct
3. What a waste that my talents are not appreciated to their true values
4. The hardship that I suffer for seeing my dream projects ignored
5. How it is boring that I achieved my project and have to restart this exhausting cycle of anxiety and endurance.
6. How my potentials are not taken seriously and how cruel it feels to be mocked…
7. What’s the point. After all the only certainties are death and taxes
Now and then people revolt and demand that these customs of separation of tasks be changed and “reformed”
It is not this 5% of mankind will make any substantial difference in diminishing the maintenance chores, due to their inability and lack of skills to making any significant difference in the oiling of the social mechanism, but it is a nice boost to the community morale.
A morale boost observing the 5% contributing their time and leftover energy getting on with the maintenance tasks of the living, of getting accustomed of what it takes to have the time to think and reflect properly.
Just a nice reprieve that the 5% will shut up for a while and desist sermonizing and complaining about the meaning of life.
And we end up food for the other species or dust for the vegetables.
And maybe, a billion year from now, we’ll be components of a lousy organic species, here on earth or somewhere in another planet.
As David Hume stated 3 centuries ago:
“Since reason is incapable of dispelling these perplexing philosophical clouds, nature suffices to that purpose and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium. Nature relaxes this bent of mind, or by some evocation and living impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeas”
Can we at least preserve nature?
Drama: Here are the Choices
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 8, 2009
Drama: Here are the Choices (March 9, 2009)
I forgot what the various definitions of Drama are. I am interested of stating mine; call it the Drama of Life or call it Adonis concept for Drama. Here it goes.
Step one: At every moment in life, you, the individual, regardless of race, origin, religious belief, or physical handicap, or mental handicap, or emotional handicap have alternatives.
At every instance you have got countable choices to select from. Some of you might create more than one, two or several choices to select from, depending on your potentials, hard work, reflection, and accumulated knowledge. You can opt to make life decisions as complex or as simple as you want; it is irrelevant to life; it goes on.
Step two: At every instance do not expect life to tell you the consequences of your choices.
Life is not interested in guiding your path, or taking you by the hand, or infusing knowledge to you, or answering your queries. If you cannot move or select unless you are fully aware of the consequences of your decisions, then you will be selecting default alternatives that you implicitly are inclined to follow.
Life does not care for your process of making decision; it goes on.
Life is telling you: You have got five senses, a brain, and alternatives to select from at every instance. Open your eyes and observe.
Clear your ears and listen. Smell, touch, and taste what nature is offering you. Discuss your head off or keep silent and listen it is your choice.
Reflect for yourself or follow instructions it is your choice. Read or let other read to you it is your choice. Learn or stay ignorant it is your choice. Venture, discover, investigate, or stay put on your land it is your choice. Whatever you do is totally irrelevant to me and it is of no concern to me.
Life is telling you: You were born with certain definite limitations structurally and genetically deal with it. You were born with much potential and capabilities deal with it.
At the end, whether you create binary alternatives, or several or none at every instance, the path you followed is unique and you are unique among the trillions of individual living or already dead.
Life is telling you: I have no instruction to give; I have no opinion to offer. Whatever set of values that are agreeable to you, implicitly or explicitly, it is your set of values and I am totally indifferent.
You may accept 100 values to select from, or fine tune every value and chose from a thousand values it is still completely none of my concern. You may agree with what your society pressure you or induce you to receive as the best set of moral values to guide you it is still your own choice; I am in no position to judge.
All that I know is that you were born unique and you will die unique; that is the best of recognition that I may lavish on you.