More empty promises about making this blog better

I have been reading back through some former posts as I try to get back into doing this thing in a serious way and I have noticed some bad habits. I am really all over the place with essentially no focus or follow up. Apparently a year ago I made a big deal about starting a long form paper on the subject of Schopenhauer's essay On Suicide, which to the best of my memory I never wrote a single word of... I do remember reading the essay though... so that is a step I suppose... but yeah I need to develop a structure for continuing work and organization... but at the same time maybe I need to stick with what I am doing now at least until I have proven myself of sticking with even that much easier thing, before trying to move on to more complicated commitments. So even though I am well aware no one else is looking at this I want to apologize to anyone who may one day see all of this for its complete lack of organization or follow up... Part of me feels like it would be best if no one saw this as it might come across as a crazy person's scribbling... but I also know that there is value here even if I will eventually have to go back through it all and dig it out at some point. I have tried to just do this and keep it all on my computer but I never seemed able to stick with it, not that I have proven I can stick with it doing it here either, but maybe making it theoretically public will give me a sense of responsibility to make it work...

Question regarding speed of light travel

I am going to do a little rambling and thinking with my fingers on the subject of light speed travel and its implications. I assume most of the questions I bring up here are already answered and hope to eventually learn those answers and understand them, but for the moment I have little more than a passing understanding of these issues...

If I were to travel to Alpha Centauri 4 light years away at the speed of light would I experience it as 4 years? How long would it be on earth? It seems like it should be 4 years on earth as if they sent a radio message to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light 4 years later they would say “ok it has reached its destination...” But in this case how would I traveling at the speed of light experience the journey? Possibly as instantaneous travel? It would make sense in that I would not perceive the ticking of the clock as the light which would carry the information to my eyes would never reach them... If I were to travel at 2x the speed of light it seems that I should experience that as taking 2 years to get to Alpha Centauri... What is the ratio of differentiation between the experience of time of the person on earth and the person traveling at light speed? No doubt this can be easily calculated with the correct set of equations.

Ok so now we hit on the interesting philosophical implication of these questions... If it is possible to calculated varying experiences of time of differing perspectives in relative motion to one another would it not be possible to establish a base perspective which could be chosen at random as long as it is agreed upon, and from this we could calculate time shifts to other perspectives to establish a universal time and simultaneity... One of the founding principles of relativity and perspectivism is the idea that there is no one correct perspective, but this gives rise to many problems of communication across equally valid perspectives. If we could built a socially constructed framework which does not blindly hold one perspective superior but rather provides a method for translation could we not solve many of these problems. Instead of looking for the non-existent ground we could collectively create our own ground upon which to build. In this way we might free ourselves from the error which has dominated philosophy, that of searching for external answers rather than creating them from within and more importantly collectively as a social and political act... There is objective truth in so far as there is collectively agreed upon universal, or near as possible to universal, subjective experience of objective reality. Where there is broad general consensus on the contents of reality we can consider that to be reality and focus our attention on the margin cases where consensus is not easily established...

See I knew this kind of rambling would eventually pay off with an interesting thought... And you thought it was pointless mental masturbation... OK that was me saying that... Though these are not thoughts I have not had before and I really should start to try to organize them and approach them in a more systematic fashion....

Cosmology Proposal part 1

The bold is new today...

I am going to start from a basic cosmology. What we perceive as both space and time are fields which interact with matter. There may or may not be several entities which resemble what we refer to as the universe, I would say that all these entities constitute one universe and that we need a new world to describe the entity we currently refer to as the universe but that is beside the point. Space and time by their nature must be infinite, otherwise the question of what lies beyond arises and clearly that is a question which cannot be answered within our current understanding or our ability to conceptualize any possible future understanding. Within this infinite space there is at least one area in which matter has arisen, our “universe” the concept of infinity would tell us that an infinite number of such areas must exist but that is something we can leave aside for now as they are at least at this moment inaccessible to us. There are two ways in which they might be inaccessible, firstly would be in terms of distance, they are simply so far away that the light and radiation they are putting out have not reached us, in this case they are not inaccessible, in that access is possible at some point in the future just not now... the other way in which access might be denied is if the light and radiation they give off cannot reach us. In order to understand how this might be the case we have to consider the interactions of space, time, and matter. Einstein showed that matter causes the curvature of space and time. When this curvature is significant enough, such as in the case of a black hole, light is unable to escape the curvature and loops back around upon itself. As light moves with the greatest possible velocity if it cannot escape the curvature of space than neither can anything else. This would occur if the mass in our region of space were so concentrated that it curved the space around it back in upon itself into an isolated bubble. Interestingly this would result in the region appearing as a black hole from the outside. Are the black holes we perceive entire universes unto themselves? Also as the matter in our universe has been shown to be expanding in all directions would this possibly lead to a change in the curvature of space such that it no longer folds in upon itself? Also if a region of space were to be self contained would that mean that light from an external source could not enter? Does that fact that the matter in our region of the universe is expanding imply that its mass is not sufficient to curve space in upon itself because it would make sense that if the mass were that great it would be sufficient to pull itself together and collapse into a singularity as the current understanding of black hole creation would imply. Are we essentially in the supernova phase of an explosion which will eventually collapse back in upon itself? This seems unlikely as I understand it because evidence shows that the expansion is accelerating... But it is also accelerating and expanding in all directions and not from a single central point. This could be interpreted as an expansion of the space between objects such that they are not so much moving away from each other as the space between them is expanding... Could this be an aspect of the changing curve of space and time as a result of a simultaneous movement of the matter? This is all possible in a universe formed by the sudden expansion of a region of unstable space in which energy ripples within the space/time field and with the sudden expansion the points of high energy convert into the building blocks of matter and begin to coalesce into matter, as more matter forms it gives stability to the energy which is constantly in a quantum state shifting between pure energy with out mass and the the subatomic particles which create mass. Possibly that is all the subatomic particles are is energy sans mass, and the sudden expansion gave rise to a Higgs field or itself was the Higgs field. As more energy converts to matter it stabilizes the Higgs field giving more stability to other energy to become more matter, etc. in a feedback loop, birthing the material universe as we know it.

The role of government in democracy and the use of technocracy....

     One of the problems facing the political discussion today is an insistence on using outmoded conceptions of Government. Many of our fundamental arguments about the role of government find their roots in arguments of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, a time when the Government was a separate and distinct entity from the people over who it governed. This is simply no longer the case. Democracy offers the idea of putting the governing power in the hands of the people in order that they by self-governing might cease to be governed at all. Government (in a democracy) is simply the mechanism by which society can set priorities for collective goals, and the use of collective resources. Government cannot be too big or too small, it only can fail to meet the goals it sets for itself, as the representative of the people who compose it. The function of a democratic government is to allow the people a structure through which they can debate the allocation of the shared resources of the community in order to reach shared goals. The current political debates in the United States ignore this aspect of government and instead attempt to frame things as a fundamental argument about government as if it is still a debate over the form of government rather than one within the already agreed upon structure of democratic debate. Instead of debating what the tax levels should be we need to be discussing what we want the country to look like, once we have agreed on those issues we will be able to move on to how to accomplish those goals in the most cost effective manner, and then how best to raise the resources necessary to reach those goals. It might very well be true that Americans cannot reach agreement on what it is we want our nation to look like... but I think much of the disagreement we see now is based on deeply entrenched misunderstandings of what would actually happen were we to pursue various policies. There is fear that such and such would take people's freedom away, but there seems little evidence to support any individual given claim. Democracy needs to find its natural partnership with Technocracy... Democratic decision making to set goals and a scientific evidenced based technocratic process to achieve those goals. Ideology cannot help us in deciding on methodology because it does not have a foundation from which to launch its criticisms. Either a method results in the desired outcome or it does not. I can see one of the main objections here would be the classic of whether the ends justify the means? And I would normally take the position that the ends do not generally speaking justify the means if that were not an ideological position such as the ones I have just now disavowed as having no valid place in such discussions... Possibly the solution would be to ask whether we would want our country to be the type of place that would use such and such means... but this again is opening the door to the exact same arguments I began by attempting to eliminate from our politics... now I need to take the time to reconcile these two conflicting opinions and redevelop this argument...

The replace-ability argument in Peter Singer' Practical Ethics

Can you sacrifice one being for another simply because the second would be happier?

The happiness of one being cannot be sufficient cause to kill another. Either it is acceptable to kill the being or not, the happiness of others is not a valid concern. The dead being cannot take part in the happiness created after and as a result of it's death and therefore cannot be expected to judge such pleasure/happiness as a valid justification or exchange for that death. Death can be validated be cessation of pain but not by the expectation of future pleasure.

In the case of animals for food, it is not the happiness of the eater, or the happiness of the next animal who will be bred to replace this one that matters. It is a contract, (one which obviously the animal cannot be thought to have properly entered into but that is a different issue...) Exchanging the food shelter and care the animal has received for the life and meat that results. Obviously in the modern industrial agricultural system many animals are not provided with happy and fulfilling lives but this is a failure to fulfill the inherent terms of the exchange and not a justification of ending their lives in order to end their suffering. This is one of the great failures of the modern American food system, that we trade our moral responsibilities to the animals we use for food for lower costs and convenience. It is the responsibility of society to provide our livestock with the most pleasant and comfortable lives the healthiest feed and the greatest freedom possible in the time prior to their deaths. This goes not only for those animals we kill for their flesh but also for those we use for all purposes, eggs, milk, wool etc.

Abortion of the disabled fetus, it is not the replacement fetus that matters it is the removal of pain suffered by the disabled child and by the parents as well as the social cost of caring for the child etc. This of course does not make the decision about whether or not to abort a social decision, it remains a private decision to be reached by the parents of the child along with disinterested and honest medical advisers. The choice to abort a fetus cannot be made contingent on the ability, willingness, or intention to have another child to replace the lost fetus. This would present the potential to force a woman to have a disabled child for which she is unable to provide a replacement, or to have a child she does not wish to have merely to replace one she chose to abort due to disability. Women need to be made free to abort or keep a given fetus for whatever reasons she judges appropriate.

Core Assumptions and Principles: 24. All of our perceptions and experiences are filtered through our conceptualizations about the world.

500 words a day project

DAY 1:

Human beings experience the world around us through our senses but the senses only provide large amounts of raw stimuli to our brains. So must stimuli that it would be completely overwhelming and incomprehensible if it were not filtered and organized on a subconscious level. The unconscious mind filters the stimuli of the senses through the preconceptions and expectations of prior experience and logic in order to present the conscious mind with a comprehensible image of the external objective world. This of course simplifies our interactions with the world but it also has the potential to lead to mis-perceptions and misunderstandings as we perceive that which fits our preconceptions and expectations rather than that which is actually there. More than this though we fail to improve our understanding of the world because we do not allow ourselves to use new data to amend our existing conceptions and understanding. We miss the particulars of reality and experience things not as they are but only as we believe they should be.

Part of the reason for our conceptualization of the world around us, beyond the need to simplify our experiences, is the human development of language. Language connects words to objects and experiences which also furthers our ability to make connections and develop complex ideas which do not correspond to any external reality but only to the words used to derive them. This is of course incredibly positive but it also has negative effects... because we connect to the word rather than the actual object we frequently miss the truth contained in the object and in the direct experience of it. We live solely within our mental images alienated from the objective reality they represent.

But it is also important to recognize that the words we use and the conceptualizations to which they refer are not separate from the objective reality but are derived from it. Words and conceptions even when they are learned through abstract instruction or developed through abstract thought are originally founded in direct experience of the world around us. Everything no matter how synthetic or abstracted must find its original source in experience of the world outside of ourselves. We do not create anything entirely from within without deriving it from the source material of experience. First we must as babies accept the overwhelming constant stream of the world around us completely incomprehensible and frightening. But we are not completely without tools, we are not purely blank slates. Our brains come into the world with the necessary structures to allow us to begin to make connections and filter the information bombarding us into the first basic concepts and words which we eventually begin to use to communicate with those around us, and they in response communicate back to us and reenforce our practice of conceptualizing and begin to hand down to us their own conceptualizations. This is a necessary and natural practice, but it also contains the opportunity to do great harm, in the form of passing along the misconceptions which cripple generation after generation. We give to our children the necessary tools to understand and survive in the world that surrounds them, but we also give to them our mistakes and oversimplifications.

It is a necessary action to begin to de-conceptualize our experiences to free ourselves to access the direct experience of the world around us unmitigated by deep seated conceptualizations. We need to learn to experience the world as it is to reveal the truth free of received error.

500 words a day project

I am going to force myself to write at least 500 words everyday. They will be on whatever subject and hopefully will begin to connect together into longer pieces. I have no idea. I also want to try to write some fiction. But yeah the point is that my old way of not having any structure clearly was not working...

Also Retroactively Saturdays and Sundays are optional....