What is the meaning of life?

The meaninglessness of life bestows us equally with personal freedom and the directionlessness that ultimately causes many to look for life's meaning. As if life might have a meaning above other concepts. What is the meaning of numbers? Animals? Our species' linguistic solitude? Beauty lies in this meaninglessness, for our personal freedom affords us the choice of our own purpose.

Why is Pain Painful For All of Us?

It seems stupendously meaningful that pain is painful for all of us.

Drifting back to an old point, there is [currently] no known way to determine whether the colours that I see are the same as the colours you see. When you and I look at an object that I think is red, do you see the same red? While this is an interesting question to play around with, I see little significance in whether we really do see the same colours. Indeed, the answer appears to be that the consistency between our visual experience is high, though it is shaped by many factors.

But what of emotion? When tennis doubles partners win a game together, is the happiness they feel the same happiness? Perhaps the happiness I feel is the same as the pain you feel and we respond in different ways.

Yet it seems strange that we should all have the same set of emotions and could feel differently from each other for any particular emotion. Moreover, in nature we tend to find that no matter where you are, given the same building blocks and environmental factors, the same result pops out. Would not a difference in emotional feeling be a difference in nature's solution, despite a utilisation of the same building blocks?

Of course it's undeniable that no two people put in the same situation will be emotionally affected in precicely the same way. It is also the case that no two people's brains will be structured identically on at least the neuronal level. Nor will the uptake of this chemical or that neurotransmitter be the same. This diversity leads to the complexity we see in human and animal behaviour as well as some of our own experience. But this is not what I am talking about.

I believe that if two people are equally happy, they must feel exceedingly similar. In reality, our emotions are not compartmentalised; stating that "I am happy" does not mean that I am experiencing only happiness. The dominant feeling of happiness that I am experiencing and paying attention to will be fringed with other emotions. This is comparable with the way we see: while we regularly engross in a single point of visual focus, throughout this time which we maintain a mild awareness of our fuzzy surroundings. Our experience consists of a range of seemingly continuous and very much intermingled emotion.

There must be an important point hidden somewhere in all this mess of thought - an idea that may shed some light upon the nature of consciousness.

What I draw from this is that there is something in the nature of emotional events that must have fundamentally, universally associated feelings. Or that feelings emerge as the result of some other fundamental process. I believe that if, hypothetically, you instantly switched some neurons involved in one person's sadness with the neurons of another's happiness, the individuals would experience no difference. (Ignoring the numerous flaws here and considering this conceptually.) It seems to me that experience is not coded in neuronal spiking or some such higher level process, though it may be more basic. It seems to me that conscious experience has something to do with information.

This post has been rather unclear and messy-minded. I hope to improve on it! An afterthought: do you think that it is possible to have a different set of feelings from those of our own?

The Other Problem with a Theory of Everything

Is semantics. In this context, what is meant by "everything"?

This theory of everything would be a theory that allowed the precise prediction of any result of any experiment (in principle or in practice) in known physics. Without proving that everything in known physics is all the physics there is, there is no justification for calling it a theory of everything. This would be a theory of everything we have discovered thus far. However, as physics has nothing to say about consciousness, we can clearly see that this isn't even a theory of everything discovered so far (despite how little we may know about consciousness).

Whether you think this distinction is important or not is another matter. Being a pedant, I think it is.

The Problem with a Theory of Everything

There is a quest in physics to produce a theory of everything, a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity. Put another way, this is a search for a theory that unifies quantum and classical physics. It is possible that there is a flaw in the current approach taken by those endeavouring to find this theory.

I've got it into my head that it would be beautiful and devilishly simple if the quantum world produced the classical world through a process of emergence. This may seem to be almost inconsequentially obvious, but let us take this thought a little further.

The state, at some given point in the future, of a system produced through emergent behaviour can be exceedingly hard to predict. With enough components some systems simply become impossible to predict. Often the only way to obtain the state at the required point in time is to compute each step of the system until the desired point in time is reached.

So let's assume that it is true that quantum behaviour produces classical behaviour through a process of emergence. Given that this system is exceedingly complex, it may be impossible to predict the state of a classical system when provided complete information about the quantum start state. It's worse than this though, we know from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that we cannot have complete information about the state of a quantum system. Without complete knowledge of the start state, it must therefore surely be impossible to predict any future state with 100% accuracy. Let us assume that it is indeed impossible. This implies that it would also be impossible to take the stochastic principles of quantum mechanics to form a coherent theory that can provide us with the classical determinism that is emerges from the quantum level. In other words, it would be impossible to unify quantum physics with classical physics to produce a theory of everything.

It seems to me that if our two assumptions really do hold true, a theory of everything really is impossible. Indeed we find that despite the attempts of many great minds, such a theory has not yet emerged. The problem could be sheer difficulty, but perhaps the problem with a theory of everything is that there isn't one.

An Introduction...

... Be it brief, I have a tendency to fill pages.


I would like to start by explaining what I shall not be putting in this blog. Perhaps that seems a rather negative beginning to this exposition, we shall see. Informing you of what I ate for breakfast today is not on my priority list, despite humanity's strange fascination with the lives of others I'm sure you're not interested and I know that I most certainly am not; oh, I haven't eaten a scrap so far today, thank evolution for lie-ins!

Evolution? Shouldn't that be "thank God for lie-ins"? I hope you've gleamed by now that my life won't be the feature story here, because I'm moving on. On to what I shall be discussing! I find writing one's thoughts down clears things up wonderfully, so it is my main aim of creating this blog to provide a canvas on which I can polish my thoughts. Which thoughts? To hammer in my earlier point, I hope you're not interested in the those so crucial mundane thoughts that are so dull to most of us. I like to think: to philosophise, to contemplate and to wonder. These thoughts are interesting! I hope you will find yourself agreeing.

My reason for the 'aforemention' of evolution should be obvious now: I've been thinking about it. It's something that I had accepted, but had questions about. Research over the last couple of weeks has answered those initial questions and really had an impact on me. Further, I've been endeavoring to extend my understanding of the impossible. Consciousness. Moreover, the link between consciousness and the biology and chemistry of the brain. More on these in later posts.

Of course this won't be the limit of the content here, I'm just giving you and idea of what might come later, and the sort of thing I've been thinking about of late. Who knows, I may touch on the purpose of life sooner or later!

You may be wondering what kind of introduction this is that spares the introduction of myself. But you see, it isn't important who I am, what I look like or what religion I follow (or not). From my words you will find yourself with a partial mental image of me, unless perhaps you're autistic or tending that way. I would like to keep it that way.

There, that seems about right!