Thought Experiments

Article – Thought Experiment – At This Very Moment

At this very moment somewhere…

…Someone is born

…Someone dies

…Someone is in anguish

…Someone is in ecstasy

…Someone grieves

…Someone celebrates

…Someone is loved

…Someone is lonely

…Someone is engrossed

…Someone is bored

…Someone does themselves proud

…Someone fails miserably

…Someone’s life collapses

…Someone starts life anew

…Someone steps into a new world

…Someone leaves an old world behind

…Someone realises they love somebody

…Someone realises they don’t any more

…Someone misses somebody

…Someone is missed

…Someone climaxes

…Someone doesn’t

…Someone cowers

…Someone stands tall

…Someone screams

…Someone sits, surrounded by perfect silence

…Someone realises the futility of it all

…Someone realises the magnificence of it all

…Someone considers what someone else is doing.

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: July 12th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – Time’s Arrow

“This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down…”

- J.R.R Tolkien – The Hobbit

It is good to start any thought experiment with pictures of Hobbits smoking pipes.

Forget that you know about physics for a while and lets try to think about time objectively (which is probably a bit hard – but bear with me).

Where is the empirical proof of time?

It is true, that we feel something pass every day. Or at least we see evidence something passing; stuff getting on, stuff falling apart. Progress..

But is time change? (Put another way, is the motion of time’s arrow evidence enough for time?)

Crux of the argument:

How can we empirically observe time if we are forever trapped within it?

What can we measure time against? entropy; is that the corollary value?

Can we have entropy without time? It seems not…

When we ‘do science’ our method often is to look empirically at something from a detached position, that we may learn about it.

Except, you can’t look at time from a distance, because you are always ‘inside’ it. Relativistically speaking you are trapped in the reference frame.

Within time where are our reference points? We use times and dates, right? But they are all relative to each other, not measured against some universal standard.

There is not a detached position to calibrate all of time’s progress to.

If someone moves one goalpost, you’ll notice. If someone moves both goal posts, you’ll probably notice. If someone moves the entire field and you with it, would you notice?

Relativity:

How would we know if time’s progress rate has changed, if all the clocks had calibrated to keep to this new rate of passage?

It’d be like travelling in a car that accelerates, yet with the dial remaining constant despite of speed changes. In this car you can’t see properly out the windows because it is terribly dark. How would you know that the car were speeding up, slowing down or even moving at all, if your senses and your instruments were deceiving you?

You couldn’t get out and verify if the car was moving, relative to the ground. You can’t get ‘out’ of time to see what it is moving relative to. So, similarly, how would we know that time were changing? How would we even know that it ‘was’?

Is there a spoon?

Consider the importance of relativity…what is relative to time? Everything?

What would a being outside of time experience?

Perhaps considering what it would be like to exist without time will help us better think about its ubiquitous nature.

If time where plotted as a fourth dimension, what would a being that where outside of time perceive, if it could observe time discretely?

The First idea is that it’d see everything will have happened all at once, the Second idea is it will have seen that nothing will have happened at all.

If the first case, how would it differentiate discrete events? It’d just be like a long exposure photograph that’d merged into a mass of undifferentiated information. If it were able to interact with the universe, maybe it’d be stuck in the mass!

If the second case, surely the being couldn’t exist without time. Because in this instance time is only present when things happen, and therefore since nothing could have happened there could have been no time and no being.

If you took time away as a value (as in you removed the fourth dimension), what would happen? Would the nature of everything fall apart? Can time stop?

Why does anyone care anyway?

Because every scientific measurement we take, or observation we make happens within time. It constrains everything.

Everything we do in our lives happens within the boundaries of time. We only exist within a certain set of temporal and spatial co ordinates. Put another way, you cannot be located at any point without a time and a place to find you.

We take time for granted as we have always experienced it, yet what we really know (in the personal sense) of time is felt subjectively.

We put faith in the existence of time. An eternity for the fruit fly is a day in the human life. There’s the relativity again, except it is more perceptive.

I quote Alan Watts; who I believe is possibly the wisest person I have ever heard – “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”

jack xij oughton article alan watts and zen image 001 300x279 Thought Experiment Times Arrow

Alan Watts: fountain of wisdom and philosopher of no philosophy.

So are the timepieces in a way, reinforcing an illusion? A clock just measures time; it is not proof of time, just as a ruler does not prove that an inch exists.

But; Space: Evidence for time?

Evidence for time seems to come from the idea that you and I can occupy the same space because time exists. For example (disregarding the motion of the earth through the solar system, the solar system through the galaxy, and the galaxy through the universe), if you have been to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, you have occupied the same space I have at some point. It therefore follows that, obviously, time can put a distance between things happening at a single point in space. If it didn’t I might walk into a dinosaur or a Cro-Magnon villager in Croydon, which is where I live and where they will have once lived.

So, I suppose, it follows that for things to change, time must pass.

But is this evidence enough for you? I’m not sure we’re seeing the whole picture on time, or we are using it as a conceptual placeholder for something much more complicated. Maybe time is an illusion or a simplification.

I wish my brain had more computing power.

jack xij oughton article curved time space graph 300x236 Thought Experiment Times Arrow

One way to think of time within a curved universe

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: June 20th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Article – On The Unshackling Of Information

This article is aimed at people who sell bits and bytes and wonder why people don’t always pay for them. Drawn from my experience of time amongst the digital natives.

Later it speculates into what would happen if the same lossless duplication and abundance that digital information offers us where to be applied to physical goods, which could happen in the future…

Digital Revolution – it’s still happening:

At risk of pointing out the obvious; digital information does wonderful things for art and culture because it is both abundant and egalitarian. Once something goes digital; it can be copied indefinitely and shared with anybody who has access. It allows the unlimited distribution of old songs, books, films and things previously no longer available to the world.

It is also insurance for our older treasured cultural works threatened by physical degeneration. Consider Google’s ‘liberation’ of books to the public domain through its meticulous program of scanning and uploading lots of very old texts. It is nice to think that they are now available to everybody without charge, and easily accessible. As they should be. You could think of it doing backups on historical data.

An old hacker maxim says Information wants to be free. In the physical, and on a large commercial scale (think Google’s servers), the cost of information storage is now so low as to be worth (in economic terms) almost zero. Its price continues falling, as technology improves and hosting moves to the cloud. The buyer has the choice to pay, so can we really expect everybody to willingly give their hand earned money away for our bits and bytes?

Point I am making: In this instance we must not mistake pay for with value. If I love your music, adore you as an artist but don’t pay for it, I maybe incongruent in how I value you (maybe I’m ripping you off?). However, I clearly value your work in some way, perhaps not monetarily.

Do you love your girlfriend less if you can’t afford to buy her a meal? What if you are too cheap? What if you steal the meal for her?

jack xij oughton article seagull stealing food 001 300x192 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

How much do you love?

Speaking Of Piracy:

And just because I download your album, doesn’t mean I don’t value your music. The loss of a physical sale is not so much a loss as a lesser gain; as not everyone who downloads something illegally would have purchased it with no other option. The free download option has given rise to a semi (emphasis on semi) honorary system dubbed ‘ try before buy ‘. It has been around in one form or another for many years now with the idea of ‘shareware’.

It appears that information starts to centralise as the efficiency of communication increases. A better network facilitates a faster diffusion of information. Think of examples from film or fiction where someone leaks a story to the press – information is very adept at duplicating itself. It starts off leaked from one source, and eventually winds it’s way back to the major (central) information outlets, CNN, BBC, Google News, so on.

jack xij oughton article Henry Wade press conference 001 300x202 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

It doesn’t take too long.

Music is a good example…

We can extend this metaphor of ‘diffusion’ to the distribution of music. New tracks, especially ones by artists who are well-known and highly commercial will be let released quickly as the insatiable demands for them can be fulfilled. This includes new channels such as peer-to-peer file sharing and digital distribution.

Why wait for your CD to arrive if someone has already leaked the album onto a torrent, which will take you a few minutes to download for free? It’s probably unfair but humans often value utility over the relatively small ethical snags or guilt. This is especially when the implications of illegal downloading aren’t clear.

What is the Internet, asides from a conduit? It is a repository and a medium in which the majority of human information is being indexed. I think of it akin to a big hard drive with an ever-expending storage size that we haven’t properly mapped yet. You can find almost anything there, if you know what sectors to look in. Collectively, the internet doesn’t really follow an ethical code. Just because sharing pre releases of albums for free is illegal, doesn’t mean our giant hard drive (the net) won’t make that available to you. If you know the right search terms or places to go, it is all there waiting

If I download Rihanna’s new album, to me, that doesn’t seem to take anything away from her considerable wealth. But if I leak a pre-release of her album, I don’t necessarily see the damage that I’ve done to her sales. She looks rich and successful to me regardless, even if I do take a cut out of her figures. And if I am harming her business, can we quantify the damage I’ve done? It’s all a bit thorny and therefore easy for me as ‘Mr. Digital Native With BitTorrent’ to really not care that much.

jack xij oughton article rihanna neutral face 001 300x300 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

Does she feel a financial hit to her bottom line if I download her album for free? What about the mailroom guy at the record label she records for, do you think he feels it?

What am I getting at in all this? It’s that people, in their practical way, don’t see the consequences of these abstract laws they break. They don’t want shackles and limitations if they honestly believe that they are committing little or no wrong. And if they believe themselves to be anonymous (which is easier to be online), they are less afraid of legal ramifications.

We have an environment where everyone has the ability to share files at great speed, with negligible cost to both sender and receiver AND both are completely unconstrained by geography. It’s easy to see that your CD is going to get out there, whether you like it or not. There are people who ‘ crack ‘ software that they don’t use and share music that they don’t listen to. They do it just because they can, and they enjoy the challenge.

Don’t Fight The System, Change The System

Impose artificial scarcity on an essentially unlimited environment and the system will correct itself whether your ethical stance likes it or not. Digital natives cannot be told how to value things. Don’t stake your money on convincing them to. A couple of years of torrenting and 4chan and people get a sort of blasé approach to the whole thing.

As an artist you may do a limited press run of 100 CDs, but once someone has encoded that to an MP3 all the scarcity is gone, at least as far as the music is concerned. Perhaps the intrinsic scarcity (and value?) now shifts to the physical product…

You know as well as I do that people still like to appreciate and feel beautiful, tangible things. Give them a CD or DVD product with inherent physical value in related to your music and those buggers who pirate your sounds will have a hard time cracking and sharing that experience!

There are tangible and intangible things that are beyond piracy. Your brand and beautiful physical goods are amongst them.

jack xij oughton article pet sounds limited edition cd 001 300x300 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

An example, courtesy of the The Beach Boys.

Yet Another Thought Experiment – A World With No Scarcity

Here is a thought experiment for you to ponder.. (because I spend too much time in my own mind and so do you). If physical resources become susceptible to the same kind of abundance as digital information has, what happens to value? What happens to scarcity?

Theoretically matter equals frozen energy and matter can be described as resources. Maybe at some point in the future, if humanity will acquire the ability to harness immense amounts of energy (zero point, fusion? etc.) and the mechanism to ‘freeze’ this energy into things. Maybe we’ll be able to create abundant matter of any variety we like, and it therefore all experience no physical scarcity.

jack xij oughton article star trek replicator 001 300x229 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

In Star Trek, the devices that do this are called replicators. People use them to make coffee. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

At this point is what sort of economic system and would we be operating under?

New Economies Of Lossless Replication:

So, perhaps these digital shenanigans are a preview of the coming new economics (given a few hundred years of technological advancement). Economics driven by a value system that does not incorporate scarcity any more. Maybe this marketplace’s values will be driven instead not by financial gain but by something higher, such as the need for self-actualisation, e.g. the need to express our creative selves and the altruistic urge to see people around us happier.

I and many others believe that the need to acquire is a phantom happiness that passes onto the next new, desirable thing that comes along. Perhaps when the need to desire material things is removed, the pursuit of happiness will be redirected toward immaterial things. Spiritual things. Maybe towards a more authentic pursuit of happiness, which comes from things we cannot sell each other, but give only freely. I say this with the caveat that we often tend not to value things we don’t work for.

jack xij oughton article Bugatti Veyron red 001 300x197 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

Yeah you’d probably get bored of this eventually.

How does this relate to the new digital economy? Perhaps it is a prototype of a system to come as our resources increase and marketplaces start to see less and less scarcity. A testing ground for us to see how we can make money out of things that are essentially free. Maybe a little paradoxical; what do we do with all the money then?

No Replicators Allowed

Think about it, if someone invented a replicator that was commercially viable for the general public, the damage that it would do to the marketplace would be almost unlimited. I wouldn’t be surprised if there where lawsuits to try and limit the distribution and usage of this hypothetical replicator. But think, we already have replicators that work losslessly with digital information. We call them computers! And they’re doing plenty of damage. What happens when people in the developing world get them? More replication!

It makes me think; money is an incentive and a way to systematize and control the exchange of goods and services. But if these goods and services arrive instantly and without effort, you don’t need to incentivize anybody. Money becomes redundant. The inequalities in power caused by an uneven distribution of resources go away. What then? Green uptopia? I wonder.

Pay What You Want – You Might Have To Eventually

Asking for people to ‘pay what they want’ for something could be the preview to a new economy. If you think of it as a continuum between price fixing and haggling, then this form of everyone individually valuing things is the ultimate form of liquidity.

[radiohead pay what you want] Radiohead offered pay what you want on their album “…”. This went very well. They later sold the album at full retail price, which also did well.

jack xij oughton article radiohead pay what you want 001 Article On The Unshackling Of Information

Radiohead offered pay what you want on their album “In Rainbows”. This went very well. They later sold the album at full retail price, which also made them a lot of money.l.

Such a society could be full of deeply spiritual and contented people. Alternatively it may come to grow lazy now that the impetus and motivation to ‘do’ anything was removed. If you had every material thing you ever wanted, what would you do?

You’d probably be forced to chase the intangible. And that can be the hardest thing to chase.

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: June 19th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – Imagining a Godlike Understanding

What is ‘godlike’ understanding?

Here I try to speculate at how omniscience and omnipotence might work or feel, logically. As far as I can see none of these ideas can prove or disprove the idea of a God.

As human knowledge has advanced, it appears that the causes of more and more phenomena are becoming clear to us.

If human understanding can be placed on a continuum where the value of 1 represents complete understanding of the cause of a thing, and 0 represents no understanding at all, maybe ‘randomness’ represents a value below 1. Randomness: the incomplete understanding of causal effects?

Let me elabourate..

In times past, humans used various ‘unscientific’ explanations to natural phenomena. Crops failed? Angry god. Comet? Angry god. Famine? Angry god. You get the picture..

jack xij oughton article thought experiment god closeup 001 224x300 Thought Experiment Imagining a Godlike Understanding

God. Original cause and solution to all your problems.

Where there have been things unexplainable through empirical observation or science, we have reverted to a supernatural explanation. Humans gotta know, right? However, now that science is advancing, the amount of supernatural explanations we use is decreasing. They are obsoleted by new discoveries. Some say that ‘The God Of The Gaps’ is shrinking.

As I understand it, randomness suggests an element of uncertainty, but can be accounted for and worked around. For example, we can leave space in our calculations to account for randomness and fully expect this will affect our final result. We can account for randomness but it means that the outcome can never be known with certainty.

Possibility of Random Outcome: uncertainty.

Possibility of Random Outcome: ever present.

Therefore, Uncertainty: Everpresent due to randomness.

Practical Impossibility

So, using statistics we can plot the probable outcomes of a situation. The more results we get from our uncertain situation, the closer we get to certainty in our predictions of how this situation may play out in future. But we don’t ever get to certainty. For example with a coin toss, the odds of getting heads 186,000 in a row are ridiculously small, and coin tosses tend to even out towards a 50/50 distribution in the extreme long run. Even so, we can’t be certain that it won’t happen to keep coming up with heads, no matter how ridiculously improbable, and therefore we do not have complete certainty. In the practical sense we can say it is almost impossible. But is anything really impossible?

Trying To Define And Comprehend ‘Godlike’

A godlike/limitless understanding would imply absolute certainty in all outcomes. Godlike power would mean that all endeavors set into motion would work out absolutely flawlessly. In prediction, there would be no randomness, as all outcomes would be known or controllable (there’s that godlike power again). In a real sense, things would be predestined because you’d know what they where before they happened .

Put another way, perhaps random things prevent destiny, unless there is some way of understanding so much that we could know the outcome of events that were previously deemed random. Thus; no more randomness. It’d be a bit crap though. Why would you play a game of chess if you knew the outcome of the game in advance and any move you made changed nothing?

I can imagine two Godlike perspectives:

1. Someone who knows the outcomes of everything yet is unable to interact in any way to alter the fixed path of events. Some sort of cosmic observer. Omnscient but not omnipotent. Perhaps the loving God who sees all of our suffering but can change nothing.

2. Someone who can change any single variable and know exactly what sort of limitless causal consequences this would take. This is closer to a Copenhagan interpretation of quantum mechanics. Such a creature would exist within each universe within the multiverse (and there would be an infinite number of them), and would probably see how ‘tweaking’ the effects in one environment caused cascade effects on all the others. Omnipotent and omniscient, and unable to act on anything apart from everything.

Such a being couldn’t be ‘disentangled’ from the multiverse, because as part of everything, it has to exist. Similarly, since every effect is in some way linked to everything else, every action it took would cause an infinite number of consequences.

I guess this is closer to the traditional monotheistic conception of an all-powerful deity. To say that this God was everything would be literally true, since this being would be tied into everything and every effect, which would be linked to everything else. Like a man in a room arranged with standing dominos everywhere!

I think I’ve said everything so many times it is starting to lose meaning!

jack xij oughton article thought experiment niels bohr 001 245x300 Thought Experiment Imagining a Godlike Understanding

Physicist Niels Bohr was at the head of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

Here’s my main point;

What if there is an ultimate destiny, and randomness is simply the symptom of a deficit of understanding? For example, we are uncertain of where a coin lands, as we haven’t quite grasped some bigger explanation that allows us to predict where coins land with complete certainty. Knowing every infitetesimmal variable (which is practically impossible) might allow us complete certainty in our predictions.

Another way to consider would be to think of the paradox of predicting the future, which is similar to the well-worn grandfather paradox of time travel; which applies to the past. To recap, you can’t go back in time to kill your granddad because if you did, you would not have ben born and therefore couldn’t go back to kill your granddad. Capiche? OK – now lets loosely apply this to predicting the future, thinking of how causality may disrupted by something else, namely observer affect. Or put another way;

jack xij oughton article thought experiment grandfather paradox Thought Experiment Imagining a Godlike Understanding

Protip: Don't go back in time to kill your grandad

Perhaps you can’t see the exact future, because by observing it, you change it.

And if that where the case what would that do to our hypothetical omniscient being?

TLDR/Summary:

Could randomness simply be a lack of understanding every single variable within a situation?
Therefore; would an all powerful being know so much that randomness was no longer a consideration?
But – is it possible to know every exact outcome, if your very observations affect what you are observing?
Could an omnipotent being take any single action without creating an infinite set of repercussions (butterfly theory)?
Would an all powerful being by it’s very nature be forced not to intervene in the nature of the universe to maintain free will?

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: June 19th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – A Sticker in Covent Garden

Sometimes you come up with the strangest realisations when you aren’t looking for them.

Whilst Out Walking..

I saw a sticker in Covent Garden with a two letter acronym I recognised.

I calculated the odds of my guessing what it stood for correctly as 26 (number of letters in alphabet) x 26 (number of letters) = 671 to 1

Then after that I thought what other factors could effect the probability I was right…?

I hadn’t considered the usage of other alphabets,

A bias on probability caused by more exposure to the service in London,

Other strange things about people’s preferences for putting stickers in certain places,

and so on..

Which brought me to the conclusion that it is extremely hard to know all the variables to any given situation or question and speak with absoloute certainty. You can never be completely right. Life is less certain than we’d like to think, and this was, relatively speaking, a simple guess that I was trying to make. What about predicting economic outcomes or conflict scenarios?

The Best Laid Plans

Think about it in your planning. You’ve probably had plans go wrong at some time in your life right, why?

Because…

a. a variable you had calculated for went awry

b. there was a variable you missed

You calculate from a nigh on infinite range of variables, which increases your odds of getting something right, but you won’t catch them all. There are always variables you miss.

You just need for things to be just right enough. And you decide when it is right enough. But they are never completely right; at least, not in the sense of absolute, utter certainty. Like so many things, we put our faith in statistics and probability.

Certainty Is A Mental Crutch..kinda

The implications in risk management are obvious. I guess you could say there’s always risk and there’s always unknowns. There is no insurance against whatever happens to you, perhaps apart from happiness. If you are supremely, intrinsically happy, you won’t care what happens anyway. I guess this is a goal of existential practice, and is a kind of spiritual invincibility. Yes, certainty is an illusion that makes us feel comfortable.

But what is so uncomfortable about embracing the reality of an unpredictable world?

I mean, apparantly the universe exploded out of a tiny dot in an endless void of nothing, and we went from total entropy to dogs driving cars in a few billion years.

Who could have predicted that?

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: June 14th, 2011
Discussion:: 3 Comments

Thought Experiment – Think Me

I want to think outside my thoughts

And stop thinking me

But if I do that, am I not me anymore?

I don’t care..

I want to think you

Or I want to think God, or everything

You can think me for a bit if you like

And we’ll revert back later…

And if you think me will you be me for a while?

And if you are me, then what am I?

And when you stop thinking me, will you be you again?

And if you are me, where will I go in the meantime?

Maybe one of us will die and we’ll merge

So; you become me, I stay as me, and the old you is gone.

But, what happens if we swap?

Am I now you, and you me?

Then surely, I’m you and you are me, but we aren’t the same.

And if so, what’s the point of identities anyway?

They just seem like words..

Are they there to keep me thinking me?

And to keep you thinking you?

Maybe I don’t want an identity anymore.

Maybe I want to be whatever I like…

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: June 12th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – Ranges

Thought Experiment – Ranges

Intellectual Abstraction Into What Data and the Physical World Represents

Disclaimer: Geology and the stock market are complicated. I don’t offend your intelligence by presuming differently, but I make some gross simplifications in the differences between them for the sake of metaphor. Thanks..

When you look at a volatile stock chart, you may notice that in some way it resembles a mountain range..

It has peaks and valleys, jagged edges and all the formations of a sharp area of the earth’s geography.

What does it represent? By design, it represents a consensus in value, as projected by humans and plotted over time.

You may see this same jagged formation on the surface of the earth. Certain mountain ranges have harsh jagged edges that resemble more volatile times in the history of the stock market. Other, more hilly ranges resemble times of less volatile mood.

jack xij oughton poem article mountain range 300x225 Thought Experiment Ranges

Note the jagged shape of a mountain range

The stochastic formations of the earth’s surface are the natural result of statistical probability. The values of the stock market are the same thing. The sum of sentiment makes the trendline of the market. The collective agents (such as the rock and material) which make up the structure of the earth’s surface, form the sum which resembles a trendline. The surface is the trendline.

Here is the Question:

We plot a graph of the stock market to represent the action of this market over time. In a way we know what it represents (well, we designed it after all!).

Perhaps, the shapes of solid things around can be thought of as graphs. Except instead of being plotted by man, they are plotted from the physical data going on in the background in our real world.

it is interesting to look at the shapes around us as plots of information. And if they are graphs, what is the data they represent?

Definately they dictate geological data. We can analyse, and using the mathematics that understands pressure formations, work backwards and plot their formulation. We can use mathematical models to plot geological changes and ‘growth’ of a mountain range. So, in a way, by representing them as 3d objects these mountains are ‘graphlike’ manifestations of the data used in our mathematical model.

3d>2d

Of course there are a few differences. On earth, all natural solids (graphs?) are plotted in 3d, which would lead us to think the graph has more variables (to account for an extra dimension), though the same jagged pattern is unmistakable. As far as data goes, plotting in 3 dimensions gives us a larger range of possible variables to work with, within the same space.

So what does nature plot?

Though conciously designed to plot stock market data, without any labelling, or prior knowledge of subject matter, a graph of the stock market may hold very little meaning for the reader. With no labels on the side to indicate what the values are, it just looks like a jagged line.

Nature’s Games

I think that the stock market is a ‘game’ environment. Here I define a game as an environment in which different agents play out under a certain set of environmental rules, and there of course is an element of chance. If there wasn’t any chance involved it wouldn’t be interesting, cos we’d know the outcome and would lose all novelty and sense of unpredictability. Just because it is a game, doesn’t mean that it is trivial. Ask any football fan if his game is trivial and you’ll see what I mean!

I look at life as a game, a very complicated game, with nearly infinite variables. Our mountain range is just part of the game.

OK so where am I going with this?

Look at the (3d) world around you. If it is some sort of graph, what data is it manifesting? If we work out what the data is that makes up the graph, can we work out what this data means?

How to ‘do’ this thought experiment..

Think of the physical universe as a big, dynamic graph, manifesting certain underlying physical data. If this is the case, what controls the variables in this underlying data? What put the data there? What happens if you change a value? How many values and variables could there be? Could it be derived from one equation?

TLDR: Think of the world as a big graph that represents some sort of underlying physical data. What does the chart mean and what are the variables?

I will probably lengthen this article over time the more I think about it.

jack xij oughton poem article oilfield jarring analysis Thought Experiment Ranges

On this oilfield analysis software, we have 3 dimensions worth of values.

jack xij oughton poem article dow jones industrial average 300x177 Thought Experiment Ranges

The Dow Jones Industrial Average - same jagged shape, 2 dimensions.

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: May 16th, 2011
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – Godhead, Bored…

Here’s an idea.

what if our experiences of individual consciousness are all pieces of an eternal, unified mind which has grown tired of its omniscience. It has chosen to forget everything it knows and experience again the joy of discovery.

With every new day you are remembering new things…

Consider how life would be if you had the kind of amnesia which destroyed your identity every time you slept and brought fresh novelties to every experience.

Perhaps stranger things have happened.

I know many will agree with me when I say that some of our memories are not worth the space they take up…

jack xij oughton poem article jai ganesh 001 216x300 Thought Experiment Godhead, Bored...

"In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play" - Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics / Image Credit: AlicePopkorn

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: September 22nd, 2010
Discussion:: No Comments

Thought Experiment – Man Hits Fly Hits Man

Man: You are walking along any place you choose.
Out of nowhere comes a loud buzzing, and a large and (obviously very stupid) fly collides with your cheek

Fly: You are flying, ruminating on where the next dog turd may be. Suddenly a giant, (and obviously very stupid) floating face collides with you.

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what a lovely face you have..

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: August 29th, 2010
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Thought Experiment – Predestined Giant Banana Transformations In The Multiverse

Could there be ever be an understanding complete enough that we could have complete certainty in every possible outcome?

As human knowledge has advanced, it appears that the causes of more and more phenomena are becoming clear to us.

if human understanding of a certain thing can be placed on a continuum where the value of 1 represents complete understanding of the cause of the thing, and 0 represents no understanding at all, maybe ‘randomness’ represents a value below 1. But, can we ever reach 1?

Let me elaborate for you..

In times past, humans used various ‘unscienitic’ reasons as explanations to natural phenomena. Crops failed? angry god. comet? angry god famine? angry god. Of course, you get the picture..

Constraints due to uncertainty

As i understand it, randomness suggests an element of uncertainty, but can be accounted for and worked around. For example, we can leave space in our calculations to excuse randomness and fully expect this will affect our final result. We can account for randomness but this means that the outcome can never be known with certainty.

As I understand it, using statistics we can plot the probable outcomes of an uncertain event. The more results we get from our uncertain situation, the closer we get to certainty on a result. For example, with a coin toss, the odds of getting heads 186,000 in a row are rather small, and things tend to even out towards a 50/50 distribution in the extreme long run. Even so, we can’t be certain that we won’t get these 186,000 heads in a row, no matter how improbable, and therefore we do not have complete certainty.

Similarly, in an infinite or long enough period of time, every event, no matter how statistically ridiculous, would happen. The sun makes a quantum leap an in an instant transitions into a giant banana. The moon also becomes a giant banana. You get the idea…

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You never know.. /Image credit: Jason Gulledge

A limitless understanding

A godlike/limitless understanding would imply absolute certainty in all outcomes. Godlike power would mean that all endeavours set into motion would work absolutely flawlessly, with nothing left to chance. Godlike power could result from knowing exactly what needed to be done to achieve certain outcomes. In prediction there would be no randomness, as all outcomes would be known or controllable (there’s that godlike power again). In a real sense, with all things known, all things would be predestined.

Put another way, random outcomes prevent destiny, unless there is some way of knowing enough that we can predict with certainty the outcome of events that were previously deemed random. Therefore, if we can have infinite understanding then predestination is inevitable. But, can we have an infinite understanding?

Here’s my main point; what if there is destiny, and randomness is simply the symptom of a deficit of understanding? For example, we are uncertain of where a coin lands as we haven’t quite grasped some bigger explanation that allows us to predict where coins land with complete certainty.

Statistically speaking we can know that the coin will end up at a value closer to 50/50 to some extent if we continue to repeat the coin toss over and over again, and placing our faith in statistics. But as I said before, this is not true certainty.

Of course we build upon this with the idea that for every point of multiple outcomes, the universe splits into all possible outcomes…

Seeing the sum of all possible outcomes..

A godlike understanding may allow us to connect in some way with a ‘place’ of infinite probabilities. In this place, the totality of all possible outcomes could be collected into a great sum of all, in where everything that can happen, has happened. This is everything..the Tao, the unmanifest/manifest field of probability, the multiverse, God, whatever. This is the ‘place’ of all places. If it could be visualised, what would that place look like? Another wall of solid white light? Perhaps it would look like nothing, the opposite of everything… With further inquiry, it could very well be a continuation of this thought experiment. Anyway..

One who sees with absolute certainty, would be able to walk through this miasmic place of infinites, and pick a path that best suited their fancy. If this powerful person wanted to win the lottery, he/she could simply follow one of the infinite paths through the field which leads to the desired outcome. This p ath would take them from the multiverse/sum off all/God/etc to a universe in which they had picked the correct number.

TLDR/Summary: could randomness simply be a lack of understanding a certain cause in it’s entirety? is it possible to know this much? if i become immortal can i watch the sun become a giant banana?

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and now..for a statistically improbable picture .. Image Credit Kila (kee-la)

Author name:: admin
Publish date:: August 28th, 2010
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