More Profound Things: The Living

There are many things and concepts within the collective worldviews of humanity that are considered pretty mundane. However, there’s certainly a collection of things and ideas which rise to the top in profoundness when compared and contrasted with the ordinary everyday routine. These are the sorts of profound things and concepts which keep you awake at night, pondering the Big Issues. No two people will come up with identical lists. Without further ado, here are some more of mine. 

* Human Matter Matters: We are starstuff (and Big Bang stuff too). It’s pretty profound to realise that all the elements (except hydrogen) that makes you, you, once-upon-a-time resided in the interior of a massive star(s). Does that make you ‘hot’ stuff? Of course all that makes you, you - all of the fundamental bits and pieces like electrons and quarks – can be traced back to the Big Bang. That’s even more profound, though being ‘Big Bang stuff’ is probably not as poetic as being composed of ‘starstuff’.

* Spooky Observations at a Distance: When you look up at the night sky, a) is someone or something is looking back at you, or b) is no one or nothing is looking back at you? Either scenario is profound when you think of the implications.

* We Gotta Walk-That-Walk: That we have a totally upright bipedal gait, without benefit of a balancing tail, is something totally unique and therefore somewhat anomalous in the animal kingdom, despite all the obvious disadvantages. What disadvantages? For one, obviously, it’s a lot easier to fall down when you’re standing on two legs relative to four, six, eight or more. Falling over can result in serious consequences, especially if there isn’t anyone else around to come to your aid. Secondly, going bipedal called for a radical shift in our skeletal structure as well as in related musculature and organ attachment.  A bipedal gait must therefore be not only revolutionary but really of evolutionary importance. But that profound observation leads to another anomaly. If a bipedal gait without the encumbrance of a balancing tail is such a significant improvement, why haven’t more animals undergone that shift?   

* We Face Facts: Human facial features. Say you are shown a photograph of the face of a short, bald, chubby, 30-ish white male. Say you are shown a photograph of the face of a chimpanzee; the face of a lion; an Indian elephant; a grizzly bear, a koala bear, a brown rat; a German Shepard, a wallaby, a bottlenose dolphin, a pelican, an ostrich, a cobra snake; a Nile crocodile, a green tree frog; a tuna fish, a lobster, a German cockroach; a black ant; a house fly, a huntsman spider, even a flea. Now, here you stand in a police line-up looking at five short, bald, chubby 30-ish white males, five chimpanzees, five lions, etc. etc. Match the original facial photograph with one of the five suspects! While a match is likely in the case of the human males, it’s going to be on average pure guesswork with any other species or breed of species unless the individual in question had some very unique and atypical facial feature. Now, the profound question is, why do humans have unique facial features while the rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t. How do you tend to recognise a human? First and foremost by his or her face. This is all very odd because it is so very unique, yet very profound. 

Equally as profound, not only do we have unique facial features, but racial facial features. Take four ‘passport’ photos of a Caucasian, a Negro, an Asian, and an Australian Aboriginal 30-ish something male and photoshop them so that all are exactly the same shade of grey. It would still be easy to match the face to the race. What’s profound here is that those racial facial features evolved, for reason(s) unknown, within the time a small group of Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa just roughly 50,000 years ago.

  

* Memory, Creativity and Chemistry: Like a book or an LP, like a film strip or a DVD, like a painting/photograph or a CD, like computer software or a tape recording, the human mind houses a record of events which we call memory. Unlike these other physical media every time your mind does a replay, it can value-add to that memory. You may have a memory for how make pizza, but unlike the recipe in the cookbook, you can be creative and change the recipe. All of that memory/creativity is based in chemistry, specifically neurochemistry, which, unlike all other kinds of chemistry, makes that possible. How, I don’t begin to comprehend, but it is so, and it is rather profound upon reflection.

* Our Family Tree is Kaput: All our human ancestors are extinct. Something is screwy somewhere! I mean there have been dozens of separate and apart hominoid/hominid species that separate modern Homo sapiens from our closest still living ancestors, the chimpanzees. All those in-betweens have gone extinct, for reason(s) unknown. That all would have succumbed to, whatever, seems to defy probability. Clearly many of those hominoid/hominid species shared many of our survival traits like possessing a relatively high degree of intelligence, tool making, group cooperation when hunting-gathering, etc. There’s no rational explanation offered up by paleoanthropologists that explains this. There’s not even that ‘easy’ answer of Homo (‘shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later’) sapiens being the fall ‘guy’ here. ‘Modern’ humans hadn’t of been thought up yet in anyone’s evolutionary philosophy when most of these extinctions took place.

* Not a Ghost of a Chance: It’s also pretty profound when you have every human culture and society from across all time frames believe in the reality of a phenomena that modern science rejects as pseudoscience or supernatural and paranormal nonsense, and it isn’t just life-after-death or an afterlife but an actual apparent manifestation of same. Some call them ghosts, wraiths, spirits, and phantoms – whatever. Actually I view (not that I actually have) ghosts, etc. as further evidence that we ‘exist’ in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe, but that’s another story for another time.



The Russell Stannard Questions: Mind Over Matter

There are many Big Questions in science, many of which go back to the ancients, even back into prehistory in all probability. One of the best modern set I’ve found recently were sidebars in a book by Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard. These are my answers, thoughts and commentary to those Big Questions. Many readers might have ‘fun’ trying to come to terms with these in their own way based on their own worldview.

The following questions (Q) are taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.

My answers are based mainly with the thought of our being in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe that has been constructed by one or more Supreme Programmers. However, some of the answers apply regardless of what the nature of our ultimate reality is.

Q. The problem of consciousness.

A. How can your basic building blocks that are electrons, neutrons and protons combine to form atoms; atoms that combine to form molecules; molecules that combine to form complex molecules - complex molecules like organic molecules, biochemical molecules and molecules part and parcel of neurochemistry; the ultimate result being that this chain from the simple to the complex crosses a threshold from the inanimate to the animate and from the animate to the animate entity that is self-aware. It is a profound mystery why one has a fairly unique structure comprised of the same fundamental bits and pieces that comprise all other structures but yet one that can contemplate itself. That structure is the brain and the mind that resides within that structure. The brain is the only structure in the cosmos that can examine itself and yet that structure is ultimately comprised of just electrons, neutrons and protons. However, is there really a problem if that structure can ultimate figure out how to create another structure that also has consciousness. In other words, intelligent and conscious biological software can deliberately give rise to an artificial intelligent and conscious string of software and in doing so thus create a Simulated [Virtual Reality] Universe that houses or contains an apparent (but artificially) intelligent and conscious biological entity or entities that wonders whether or not there was an artificially intelligent software program that gave rise to it. That sort of reminds me of the human who dreamed she was a butterfly who dreamed it was a human, or was that the butterfly who dreamed it was a human who dreamed she was a butterfly.

  

Q. The free will/determinism problem.

A. I tend to have a belief in absolute causality, much like both Newton and Einstein who believed in a regular clockwork universe. If X happens, Y follows. All the laws, principles and relationships of the natural universe were forged at the time of the Big Bang event and once that clock was set in motion, all else flowed from those first established laws, principles and relationships. So, in other words, determinism rules, okay? That equally holds true if we’re in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe, regardless if we are, like a character in a video game a ‘puppet-on-a-string’ or the avatar as a stand-in in a simulated world for someone in the really real world, or as the consequence of someone programing a set of laws, principles and relationships then hitting ‘run program’ and standing back to see what eventuates. We’d all like to think we have free will, but if we are programmed to believe that, what harm has been done if you really do believe that what you had for dinner was something you freely did choose to have.

Q. Does complete understanding require more than solely physical explanations?

A. By complete understanding, one has to incorporate those seemingly nebulous things that reside within the mind, things that seem far removed from the physical world of forces and fields and particles and actions and reactions, etc. These so-called nebulous things revolve around consciousness and the subconscious, thinking (that’s clearly a neurochemical process), memory (clearly chemically encoded), creativity, emotions (definitely chemically driven), morals and ethics, right and wrong, a soul, spirituality, free will, etc. However, all these sorts of concepts reside in the brain or in a part of the brain normally identified as the mind. Whether mind-in-the-brain, or just in or a part of the brain, the brain is ultimately composed of fundamental particles that make up atoms that make up molecules that ultimately make up your neurochemistry and thus your brain and structures within. The proof of the pudding that these so-called nebulous concepts reside in the realm of the physical is that these concepts or things can be altered by physical things – physical happenings like injury (you can be knocked unconscious) or lose consciousness in sleep; chemical things like drugs, lack of sleep, the aging process and related can have decided effects on aspects of your personality, etc.; biological happenings like disease also can have profound effects on some of those so-called nebulous things. They can also be altered by your own self, being creative and via thinking deep thoughts which is an electrochemical process (you might think ‘morals be damned, crime does pay’) and of course closely related, the lifelong learning process (as in learning and altering your learning about say morals/ethics; right/wrong) – as you learn, you may find that what you thought was crystal clear, black and white, is really murky and grey. The learning process (formal or otherwise) can have profound effects on your belief systems and worldviews. Learning clearly has foundations in neurochemistry.   



Human Reality Revisited: Part Two

In these life and times of your day-to-day activities, going about your business in this four dimensional space-time you find yourself stuck in, I doubt whether you question that what you experience is anything but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What you see is what you get, and what you get is really real reality, absolute nuts-and-bolts no question about it reality. If that’s what you think, think again.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

REALITY OUTSIDE OF THE STRIKE ZONE: THE NEBULOUS OTHER

What if someone or something else is pulling your chain? So far I’ve gone on the scenario that there’s a really real reality out there for you to experience and absorb. You are pulling your own chain; dancing to your own tune. Now what if some significant other is calling the shots?

You are a natural entity with wetware rooted in carbon chemistry

- A bit outside the scope of normality or what passes for normality, there are whole textbooks full of case studies of brains that haven’t been hardwired up quite correctly and so you’ve cases of people hearing colors or mistaking their wife for a hat or who have multiple personalities or seriously believe they are Alexander the Great, Jesus, or say President Kennedy.

- Although it doesn’t necessarily follow, there are those who believe that those who see ghosts or aliens or angels or the Loch Ness Monster are fantasy prone; just internally generated visions that’s all in the mind. Can shamans, mystics, gurus, and related really visit an otherworld of alternate realities, or are they too just fantasy prone, with perhaps some help from smoking the good stuff. Of course if they are experiencing such things, well that in turn might be evidence for alternative realities.

- And don’t we as adults construct an entire fantasy world for children – Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, even the Bogyman who’ll, we say, do nasty things to naughty kids. Don’t children on their own construct fantasy worlds they live in along with invisible playmates? I wonder if there’s anything really different in principle between children believing in their invisible friends and adults putting their faith in invisible deities.  

- Adults too immerse themselves in fantasy worlds from putting on virtual reality helmets to boldly go (the 20^th Century version of the Star Trek holodeck), to actually dressing up in Star Trek or Star Wars outfits as various characters from those (and other) fictional worlds, to participating in all sorts of role-playing scenarios. Though one would hope that when doing dress-up for masquerade balls and attending fantasy conventions, the adults would be aware that they are doing make-believe. You’d hope that though some fans (fanatics?) can get really carried away to extremes, like naming their kids after their favorite fantasy character, collecting thousands of items of memorabilia, even say modeling and outfitting their home to resemble the interior sets of say the Starship Enterprise. It’s been done! Though I suspect this must be a modern phenomenon. I don’t recall ever hearing about people in the 17^th, 18^th or 19^th Centuries playing at King Arthur, holding mock battles and jousting contests, though maybe I’m wrong on that. It’s certainly common today for hundreds to play dress-up and reenact Civil War engagements, and there’s many a wannabe cowboy out there in suburbia. 

- Your natural brain-in-a-vat scenario might be where some ‘mad’ scientist has cultured some brain cells in a petri dish and eventually grown a full-sized brain-in-a-vat which is kept stimulated 24/7 with electrical impulses – your reality. Or, perhaps your body has aged and kicked-the-bucket but your brain – still alive and ‘kicking’ – has been removed and kept alive but in ‘storage’, but still requiring stimulation, pending a suitable transplant into another body whose brain has died.

- Your natural brain is being manipulated scenario. Say you’re a patient in a hospital in a coma, or undergoing a neurosurgical operation and your brain is being stimulated in an effort to determine what’s what. Perhaps that stimulation is what you take, while in your coma, or under-the-knife, to be your reality – but all you sense and remember is really being induced. There might even be a time dilation effect. Presumably you could electrically stimulate the brain such that the brain would experience or remember years worth of experiences but the applied stimulus is just taking a few minutes. 

- You’re dreaming. You are really a bug-eyed-monster from the planet Zork; or a pussy cat; or even a human; but you’re asleep and dreaming this alternative lifestyle which in this dream state you are interpreting as your actual reality. Until you wake up, your dream IS your reality.

- One or many? You could philosophically argue that the sum total of life, the universe and everything is illusionary and just the product of Your Mind. Life, the universe and everything (all else but your mind) is just Your Mind playing games, a created illusion or construction to keep Your Mind from being bored. Or, you see someone in the shops and you conclude that as you see them, they see you, and both of you have a perception that there’s a really real reality and both of you are a part of that. That’s the common sense worldview, but the universe doesn’t always play by common sense principles. Of course it’s possible that the both of you are all part of a larger mass hallucination; that you aren’t The Mind, but rather one of the creations of The Mind of someone else. 

There is no way you could distinguish any of the above realities from your perception of what’s really real.

WILD PITCH, ERROR ON THE THROW

You are an artificial entity

Needless to relate, there has been a massive amount of theoretical and practical research dedicated towards the goal of creating an artificial mind, a silicon chip mind or a mind made out of silicon chips, machine intelligence, otherwise more commonly known as artificial intelligence. The reasons are manifold, from just the academic pursuit of seeing if it can be done for the sake of seeing if it can be done, to practical applications like designing robots that can assist in making the lives of the handicapped or elderly or the lonely more bearable or beating the pants off of some egomaniac chess champion, to putting artificial intelligence to the same sorts of creative use that wetware intelligence is put to. Perhaps an artificial intelligence can put two and two together and come up with a Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail of physics. Artificial intelligence can also boldly go where wetware intelligence cannot since silicon chips are a bit more durable under extreme environmental conditions than flesh-and-blood.

Put another way, if Mother Nature can evolve flesh-and-blood intelligence, then that flesh-and-blood intelligence can create and evolve machine intelligence (and ultimately that machine intelligence can further evolve and advance the capabilities of machine intelligence). The basic reason is that there is no difference in principle between a squishy neural network, and a silicon chip network. It all operates on electrical connections, complex connects it is true, but just wiring. Now, the question arises, is your mind a squishy neural network or a silicon chip network? There’s also a third possibility. Your mind isn’t physical at all – squishy or silicon – but mathematical. Your mind is just computer code. 

- Your artificial ‘brain’-in-a-vat scenario might revolve around the idea that you, or rather your mind, is just a processing machine sitting on a bench top or on a shelf, maybe as a prototype, being fed data (that’s your reality) to see if your silicon chips are able to ‘think’ outside the box relative to your mind just being a sophisticated adding machine.

- Your artificial ‘brain’ is manipulated (programmed) scenario might be akin to you being a fully functional robotic android though programmed not to know in order to better integrate into the society that created you. If you cut yourself and bleed and feel pain, that’s just a programmed illusion. When you ‘die’ (your programmed use-by date) you’re recycled/reassembled – a form of reincarnation. Most of your memories are false ones programmed into you, so you believe you had a childhood for example.

- Finally, you are neither flesh-and-blood nor silicon chips. You’re just bits and bytes inside a computer. You’re a piece of software. You’re a simulated being just existing in virtual reality, created by others; manipulated by others without any awareness of this on your part.

Human Reality Revisited: Part One

You are an electromechanical device or machine, even if it’s the product of biological evolution. You certainly operate on electricity (converted from the chemical energy in your foods); you’re certainly mechanical. Those bones, joints, muscles; your movements, are certainly mechanical in nature and biomechanical engineering is certainly an active academic pursuit, especially for athletes and those with skeletal-muscular abnormalities. 

Part of that electromechanical you is your brain – more electrical than mechanical, though engineered never-the-less. Your brain houses a very up close and personal part of you – your mind. Your mind is the key to your reality which will not be the same as anyone else’s reality and in fact your reality maybe totally unreal.

The only thing you know that is really real is your mind. Everything else could be an illusion to a greater or lesser degree. Even your mind could be an artificial construction rather than a natural one and you would be none the wiser, but at least an artificial mind would still be a really real mind to you.

Your mind is the gateway to your perceptions of reality. If you have no mind (like before your conception) you have no perception of reality.

REALITY INSIDE THE STRIKE ZONE (EVEN IF NOT RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE PLATE)

Your reality is twofold. There’s your here-and-now reality, reality as perceived by your five senses and channeled into your wetware; there’s your there-and-then reality, reality stored as your memory inside your wetware. 

In either case, your reality is all in your mind. Your brain chemistry; your neural network wiring are where you’re here-and-now and there-and-then reality lie.

But is that reality accurate? Would your reality match someone else’s version of the exact same events? No!

BRAIN CHEMISTRY

Your brain chemistry is never the exact same moment to moment. Ditto for every other odd bod and sod on the planet.

What determines your brain chemistry? Your age; genetic makeup and background heritage; foods and beverages; sleep patterns; what drugs and/or medicines you use; pollutants in your immediate environment; disease and/or injury to the brain or nervous system; even outside manipulation, say electrode stimulation by a neuroscientist.

Your brain chemistry isn’t the same as anybody else’s. If everybody’s brain chemistry were the same, if everyone were hardwired up the same (neural networks), then each and every one of us would like and dislike the exact same things equally. Each election would be a 100% landslide for all votes would go to one candidate. Even the opposing candidate would vote for their opponent, which is all nonsense as the two candidates (in fact all candidates) would have identical worldviews/policies. There would be no such thing as ‘different strokes for different folks’ and as such the world would be in one hell of a mess.

FIVE SENSES

When it comes to your five senses, your mind doesn’t receive the original stimulus or stimuli, only a crude copy that’s been translated into another language – one that your mind can interpret and come to terms with.

Your mind didn’t receive that photon of light – just an electrical signal describing the information that photon carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that sound wave – just an electrical signal describing the information that sound wave carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that molecule of food odor or taste – just an electrical signal describing the odor or taste information that molecule carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that cat scratch – just an electrical signal describing the sensation of receiving a cat scratch elsewhere.

Everything ‘real’ in the here-and-now is the sum product of the feed via electrical signals into your mind via your five senses. But the ‘real’ in your mind is a crude copy of the ‘real’ outside your mind as input gets translated in the process and any translation is never as good as the original.

Another facet to that is that your five senses can be tricked into perceiving illusions. You’ve experienced optical illusions. A common one is the perception that the Sun goes around the Earth. We still say that the Sun rises and the Sun sets as if the Sun were moving and not the Earth rotating. You’re also probably familiar with the Moon Illusion, whereby the Full Moon at the horizon appears much larger than when higher up in the sky, but it is not. Your perceived reality and real reality aren’t the same. There’s also taste and smell illusions that can be perpetrated. There are illusions with touch and no doubt audio illusions as well. Mankind’s technology helps confuse the picture too. A hologram looks 3-D and solid but isn’t. The mind, via the senses, can be fooled into accepting six (or more) impossible things even before you’ve sat down to breakfast!

You’d be well aware that witnesses in courtroom cases will have their ability to translate what they experienced via their five senses into reliable data that can be recalled into question when the guilt or innocence of the accused is at stake. You’d probably be aware that there are seemingly millions of psychology studies that prove again and again that eyewitness testimony isn’t worth squat and can be easily manipulated via the power of suggestion.

Using independent instrumentation to verify reality like a thermometer or Geiger counter isn’t any better as their readings are meaningless until you use your five senses to read the readings resulting in the same translation issues and thus you’re back to square one.

Even if you have absolutely perfect sensory apparatus, your reality will be relative, not absolute, to someone else’s reality as Einstein so aptly demonstrated. Without going into a longwinded example, just accept that you may see Event A happen before Event B. Someone else in a different frame of reference sees Event B happen before Event A. Yet another person sees Event A and Event B occur simultaneously. That’s why it’s Einstein’s Theory of General and Special Relativity, and not Einstein’s Theory of General and Special Absolutes. 

MEMORY

Your Reality: Strike One: Your brain chemistry isn’t reliable or consistent.

Your Reality: Strike Two: Your five senses that input to mind isn’t reliable.

Your Reality: Strike Three: Your memory is definitely not reliable. Memory is not infallible as those courtroom dramas often highlight.

So, if 100 people experience an event, and have to recall that event say ten years later, how many versions of really real reality are you going to get? What odds that even one of these recollections will be 100% spot on?  What odds that none reflect that really real reality (RRR) of that event (assuming such a concept as RRR in the first place of course)?

To be continued…

You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part Three

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

EMOTIONS

Emotions are strange in that you may see a picture of X and burst into tears, or laugh out loud, whereas I’m totally ho-hum, under-whelmed, boring. However, another image may cause me to rant and rave, while you just yawn-the-big-yawn. In either case, you seemingly have no control over your feelings. You don’t seem to have much free will in terms of who you like or dislike or who you fall head-over-heels in love with, so again, I’d conclude that emotions are part of your subconscious.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS IS THE CONSCIOUS?

It seems however unnecessarily messy to have both a subconscious and a conscious mind. Actually, it was Sigmund Freud who divided the mind into the conscious mind and the subconscious (unconscious) mind. The question arises, might the subconscious actually be doing ALL the number crunching and feeding the answers to your (illusionary) consciousness or conscious mind, sometimes unexpectedly – that eureka moment, but more often as not, humming a constant feed along to you in the background, a feeding which as far as you’re concerned is your (illusionary) conscious mind in action but it’s all just the subconscious. You think your conscious mind is composing that letter, but the words and sentences are being fed through to your (illusionary) consciousness via that subconscious interface without you being self-aware of that. So in fact there is no consciousness housed separate and apart as an organic structure, only the illusion of one. Your automated nervous system runs the body; what we now call the subconscious runs the mind – the entire mind.

That’s probably a vastly oversimplification, but regardless of whether or not the subconscious and the conscious are separate and apart or one and the same, the subconscious is top of the pecking order over which we have no control. Only the automated central nervous system rules above all else – if it didn’t you’d be kaput, extinct, stone dead as a doorknob.  

MEMORY

I’d be of the opinion that you can’t in fact operate on the conscious level at all at anytime as hinted at above. You read the word “tree” in a book, hear the word spoken, or see a “tree” in the movies or outside your window. You must immediately reach back into that subconscious cubby-hole and draw back out what a tree is in order for the work or image to make sense. You see gibberish in a book or hear it, say someone ‘speaking in tongues’; maybe it’s real gibberish or maybe it’s an unfamiliar foreign language, but it’s gibberish nonetheless. Or say you see something you’ve never seen before (or never heard or learnt about). There’s incomprehension because there’s no subconscious cubby-hole to reach back into that contains that something that will enlighten you. And so you have gibberish or the great unknown to contend with.

One hundred percent of your perception of reality comes into your mind via your five senses and if anything perceived doesn’t match up with your subconscious cubby-hole encyclopaedia then part of your reality makes no sense.

All of these millions of daily inputs, matching with cubby-hole outputs, take place so fast, not quite at the speed of light but getting there, that you have no awareness of it happening. The lag time between reading “tree” and the “ah ha, I know that that means” is so fast it just doesn’t register. If there was a significant time differential you’d know it. Back in our Stone Age cavemen days, our ancient ancestor’s world of fight or flight, survival of the fittest, any lag time would be detrimental to your well being. I see a “sabre-tooth cat” – five second delay – subconscious cubby-hole says “sabre-tooth cat bad news, run”. By then you’re its dinner; it’s too little too late for you.       

Take another common scenario. After you wake up in the morning you tend to greet those around you with a “Good morning (person’s name)”. Say it’s “Good morning, John”. Now you have to reach back into your memory to recall what the appropriate phrase is and what the persons name is. You also therefore need to remember the meaning of ‘appropriate’. It would be strange and inappropriate to say “Goodnight Josephine” instead, or “I think I’ll have pizza for dinner tonight”. But how do you reach back into your memory to draw out the correct phrase when you don’t remember what you’re looking for. If you did remember what you were looking for you wouldn’t have to look. It’s the same with any though process. You’ve got to remember what it is you need to remember in order to think the thought, or say the words, or perform the actions. It’s all very circular reasoning. You have to remember what you need to remember in order to remember!

If you remember where you put your keys you don’t need to search your memory to discover where you left your keys, but you initially still had to perform that search of your memory since you remember where you put your keys! But how did you know where to search for the answer (where did I put my keys), an answer that wasn’t an answer to an unasked question like how many keys are on the keychain or what’s the colour of the key I actually need. Your memory bank is a huge place with millions of bits and pieces of data. Only a very tiny fraction is relevant to “where did I put my keys”. It’s like trying to find one sentence in an encyclopaedia or that proverbial needle in a haystack. 

Further, you had to remember that you needed to remember where you left your keys. That infinite regression of I need to remember in order to remember in order to remember is almost like that series of Russian dolls, one inside the other inside the other. Ultimately your entire mind becomes 100% clogged with the key problem and you shut down from mental overload. But you don’t, shut down that is, so there’s another solution.

If you cannot consciously recall where you left your keys, and that’s a scenario we can probably all identify with, then you rely on your subconscious. If you’re too impatient for that relax, wait and see approach, there’s always the tried and true treasure hunt approach, but that in itself also involves numerous memory exercises. 

YOU’RE ON AUTOPILOT

You don’t need to remember to wake up, or to breathe,  or how to take one step in front of the other to walk from A to B, or how to digest your breakfast, or if you’re sick or injured your body by itself usually manages to put things right. You don’t have to remember how to heal a cut or get over the common cold. If nearly all of your body is on autopilot, pre-programmed as it were, perhaps all of your body is pre-programmed, including the mind, regardless how many divisions it has.

OFFICE ASSISTANT

 I actually have two separate and apart virtual reality critters on my PC, the standard Office Assistant (cleverly disguised as a cat) and Felix [the cat]. Now the question is, do these simulated critters in any shape, manner and form mirror the (apparently) really real human?

Firstly, I think we can all agree that these two virtual critters are just that – simulations. As such we can all agree that they are just software programmes and that they have no free will. But there are many, many parallels between their behaviour, their mental processes, and that of the (apparently) really real human being. 

For starters, the Office Assistant (OA) has memory. If I perform a certain action, I get a prompt to do something in response. The Office Assistant (OA) has searched its memory for an appropriate reply to my action. It has made a decision. It also shows an emotion in trying to attract my attention since it wants further input from me. Because software can and often is upgraded, well that’s learning in another guise. Felix, on the other hand, exhibits some sensory processing by exhibiting a sense of sight, smell and touch when interacting in a creative with other objects it encounters. It exhibits a range of behaviours that you’d identify with a really real cat. About the only things they are not programmed to do is go to the litter box or have sex or vomit, for fairly obvious reasons, though it could be so programmed if one wanted. 

They both feed, albeit off of electrical energy. They wake up when I turn on the PC and go to ‘sleep’ when I turn off the PC. The OA actually takes catnaps during long intervals of inactivity where its helpful hints aren’t necessary. There’s also no way of telling if they are programmed to enter a dream state like real cats do. I suspect probably not as it would be unnecessary and a waste of programming.

Of course it’s all just sophisticated programming. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I’m sure any computer software programmer worthy of the title could spell it out in incredible technical detail.

The upshot is, these clearly simulated cats do indeed mirror many of what we’d identify as real biologically human traits. Of course given the relative sophistications, it’s like comparing the value of a five cent piece against a five dollar bill, but the commonality is that both the five cent piece and the five dollar bill are money. The difference between Office Assistant/Felix and me is just a matter of degree.

MIND OVER MATTER: THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING?

Try as you will, your mind cannot influence the behaviour of non-living material, otherwise you’d always win playing the slot or poker machines and 18 holes-in-one at the golf course would be, well, par for the course.

I say non-living because your mind can influence other living minds, though I don’t mean via telepathy or some such or various other technological devices allegedly used for mind-control purposes. The quite ordinary hard stare or the ‘evil eye’ or the barking voice is all that’s required as any raw recruit at the receiving end of the Drill Sergeant’s wrath can attest to. Some minds are putty in the ‘hands’ of other minds. On a gentler note, your thoughts, ideas, words spoken or written can shape the worldviews of other minds.

Two lovers gaze into each others eyes – mental communication of a sort transpires each affecting the physiological state of the other.

Influencing other odd bods and sods apart, your mind can have some minor influence over your own body. Some people have some control over their heart rate to some extent, and the placebo effect, both positive and negative has been proven beyond all doubt in terms of alleviating minor medical ailments by accenting the positive or aggravating the negative. With respect to the later, if you really think someone’s put the whammy on you, and you believe in the power of the whammy, then you can just waste away and curl up and snuff it. It’s not surprising that such things are possible since your mind is really matter (biochemistry) and your body is really matter (biochemistry) and biochemistry can flow from one to the other. Now that only works on a relatively minor scale. You might defy the Earth’s gravity and arm toss a ball up into the air, but you can’t defy it to the extent where you can arm toss the ball all the way to Mars. Likewise, your mind might be able to shorten the duration and severity of a common cold, but it’s probably beyond realism to expect it to overcome a case of pneumonia.   

CONCLUSION

 Free will means having control over your own mind. It’s mind-over-mind. You’re in command. But you’re not in command over your subconscious. Lack of free will points to another undefined nebulous someone (or something) in control of you, or in other words, a scenario that’s more likely as not makes you a virtual reality in a simulated universe.

And no, I didn’t come up with this topic consciously – it came to me unwanted, unbidden, via my subconscious.

You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part Two

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

CREATIVITY (The ‘What If’)

Is creativity pre-programmed or an act of free will? How many things do you do during the course of your day that you did not consciously plan to do, yet could have so planned in theory? Those spur of the moment things, even little things, you didn’t walk up having them on your agenda, must have originated from your subconscious. You really, apparently, didn’t have any free will over doing those agenda items - that is doing them consciously with a before-the-fact intent.

I call creativity the mental “what if” exercise. You take this bit from this cubby-hole and that bit from that cubby-hole and a third bit and fourth and fifth bit from other cubby-hols and combine them in a unique, theoretical, creative, what if, ways. It’s been said that from the reality of one drop of water you should be able to come up with, or envision, the idea of a waterfall or an ocean, even if you’ve never seen or heard about either and therefore don’t have a waterfall or ocean cubby-hole. So you reach into your cubby-hole for the concept of many, numerous, billions and billions; your cubby-hole for cliff; your cubby-hole for bowl or depression; your cubby-hole for gravity, and several more besides. And so you come up with new cubby-holes for theoretical waterfall (but probably lacking the thunderous sounds, spray and foam), and theoretical ocean (but probably without salt, marine life, the tides and waves), not actual parts of your reality, only your ‘what if’ reality, and to be honest, a lot of our cubby-holes are of that nature.  

Let’s take a simple everyday scenario. I think I’ll cook up a pizza for dinner tonight. It’s a spur of the moment eureka moment that wasn’t present when you woke up this morning. So where did that pizza for dinner thought come from? It probably came as a bolt out of the blue at lightning speed; it leapt into your conscious mind, but it was constructed from the various bits and pieces that resides elsewhere in your mind – in your subconscious mind.

Inside your mind you store a whole dictionary full of concepts, each in its own little cubby-hole, which you probably keep adding to all the time. The dictionary of a fifty-year-old is much bigger than that of a five-year old. Imagination or creativity is that which picks and chooses relevant concepts from those various cubby-holes and strings the chosen bits, at seemingly light speed, into a logical linear conglomerate. Sometimes the bits and pieces are strung together to form an original bit of creativity or of the imagination, though that may not be original or creative to someone else, but it is to you, and that’s what counts. I mean I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner might not be all that much a stretch of your imagination or overly creative, but I / cook / small / thin base / magic mushroom / pizza / dinner might be.

But let’s back up a second to that storehouse of cubby-hole concepts. That I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner is a very specific outcome. You have cubby-holes for cook from scratch vs. ready made frozen vs. dial-a-home-delivery vs. dine out. You have cubby-holes for toppings like mushroom vs. pineapple vs. pepperoni vs. beef vs. ham vs. olives vs. onions vs. capsicum or some combination of those, and a lot more besides. You have cubby-hole concepts for breakfast vs. lunch vs. TV snack-time vs. dinner. Then there’s small individual size vs. large size vs. family size where everybody gets the same deal. And thin base vs. medium base vs. thick base pizzas. Lastly, there’s the choice of pizza in the first place. Your cubby-holes contain concepts of alternative dinners like steak vs. lamb vs. seafood vs. spaghetti vs. chicken vs. turkey vs. ham vs. any of dozens of other possibilities. From the hundreds upon hundreds of choices / options / permutations drawn from those concepts stored in the cubby-holes of you mind, you make one subconscious decision. It could be even a slightly irrational decision – maybe you don’t have any pizza-related ingredients in stock; it’s nasty weather and you’ll need to go to the supermarket! 

I’d suggest that with so many hundreds of options (and this is just one tiny facet of your daily coming to terms with your day), how can you make a final conscious decision using only your conscious mind? You’d be stymied. You’d be indecisive faced with that multitude of conscious options. It seems as if your subconscious crunches the numbers; your consciousness acts on the answer. Your subconscious says I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner and then your conscious mind puts that answer into an action mode and makes it so.

Of course not all creative activity is subconscious in origin – or so you think. You compose a letter off the top of your head; ditto holding a real time conversation.

DECISIONS

Do you take a right turn or a left turn at Oak Street? That was the issue at hand for a popular song, and surely the resolution of the issue is a conscious decision and subject to free will. Your subconscious cubby-holes will store and provide for you the positives and negatives of either choice when you drag them to the fore. But what if it’s the very first time you are required to make such a decision and you have no prior knowledge to draw on. Surely that decision will be 100% a demonstration of free will. Or will it? How can you make an informed decision when you have no data on which to make a decision? The easy option is to toss heads or tails, but there’s no free will cigar awarded for that.

Perhaps if you are right-handed you might subconsciously (there’s that word again) true right when you reached Oak Street.

Your mind, like the rest of life, the Universe and everything, is composed of molecules, in turn composed of atoms, in turn made up of the elementary particles we all learn about in high school science classes. Now the realm of the micro-verse is governed by the probability laws of quantum physics. As such, if you really want to get down and dirty, any and all mental activities at any and all levels have to take quantum physics into account. So what’s the big deal? Well, your decision to go right or left at Oak Street might just boil down to a probabilistically quantum state of some elementary particle in your brain which could go either way in a totally random way which you have no control over.

In quantum physics, when you have an equally either/or state of affairs, well that’s known as a superposition of states. If nobody is looking, you go both left and right at Oak Street until someone peeks and it’s determined either/or. It’s another version of Schrodinger’s Cat-in-the-box thought experiment with a naturally radioactive substance that has a 50/50 chance of decaying in say one hour. If the decay happens, it triggers a device inside the box that kills the cat. If the decay fails to eventuate, the cat lives. Until someone looks after one hour, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. After someone peeks, the cat is either dead or alive.

So, in a sort of similar way, perhaps a radioactive atom inside your brain (and you are naturally slightly radioactive) will decay or not decay during the time you are agonising over that left or right turn. The decay/not decay will decide, not if the cat lives or dies but whether you turn left or right at Oak Street. In any case, you have no control. Quantum physics controls your subconscious which controls you and your decisions in the absence of any other driving force.

FREE WILL

As noted frequently above, when it comes to the subconscious you have no control over how it operates. Therefore, with respect to the subconscious, you have no free will.

While watching a DVD of a TV show or feature film for the first time, your phone rings. You hit the “pause” button while you answer the phone. Now when you return, mentally you can envision hundreds of possible scenarios or options that could unfold in the few minutes after you resume viewing by hitting the “play” button. But you know there will be only one scenario and it is fixed – absolutely. Why? It’s been pre-programmed. There’s no free will for the characters.

Now what if we could freeze frame your mind like a DVD – hit your mind’s “pause” button split seconds before a pizza dinner in all its finality detail entered your conscious mind. We, the outsiders, could imagine hundreds of scenarios of what would happen when we un-paused your mind, but just the one scenario would eventuate. 

Now the question arises – you have no control over your subconscious mind and what it comes up with, yet the subconscious seems to often rule the roost where much of your decision making is unplanned; much of your creativity is unplanned; all that much to do with your imagination is unplanned, unplanned meaning your conscious mind played no active role. You just slept on it; you had that unplanned eureka moment while your brain was idling in neutral.

The DVD analogy was pre-programming. Might your subconscious be pre-programming as well? If so, no free will, and one scenario that pre-empts your free will is your existence as virtual reality in a simulated universe!

So, if you are not in control of your subconscious then that implies a lack of free will of the mind and your mental processes. You certainly don’t have mind-over-matter free will (you can’t flap your arms and fly or run faster than the speed of sound), but you no doubt think you are in charge of your own mind. If that’s not the case, well any sign of that is suggestive that you are living in a computer software-generated simulated universe which gives you no free will at all, only an illusion of free will. 

Belief in astrology is self-negating your belief in your free will since the stars and the planets rule in your roost. Perhaps one idea for such acceptance of astrology is that you don’t have free will and so astrology is your scapegoat substitute.

To be continued…

You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part One

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR MIND

If there’s anything that should be 100% comprehensible to you in exquisite detail it’s the workings of your mind. I mean you and only you inhabit it 24/7/52. It’s a lifelong relationship, one-on-one; at the very least till death us do part. But if you understand even the workings of just your own mind, put yourself down for a Nobel Prize, you’ve earned it.

While different people have slightly different brain chemistries and neural network connections thus explaining different personalities, interests, worldviews and abilities, etc. you have just one normal brain chemistry (unless you deliberately alter it) and one neural network connection to come to terms with. So, we’ll (actually will have to) concentrate on the one, since you’re a typical representation of the generic whole.

You do a lot of mental stuff each day. From the moment you wake up your conscious mind goes into hyper-drive (your subconscious was still churning away while you were sleeping). Those daily mental gyrations tend to be interrelated but involve things like decisions and planning, from the chessboard to the dinner table; memory and recall; sensory processing (taste, smell, sight, sound, touch); and learning, even if it’s the evening news, the local gossip across the fence, or what’s on sale this week at the supermarket.

I need to state from the outset that the mind does have a very limited ability to deal with more than just a couple of things at one time. In fact it’s best to deal with issues arising in a linear fashion. You cannot concentrate on driving while at the same time concentrating on a cell-phone conversation as aptly demonstrated on the “MythBusters” TV show. I’m sure you can identify with trying to juggle three, four, five or more things at once, all demanding your full attention with things just sort of going to hell in a hand-basket, sometimes with serious or potentially serious consequences.  

YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

Have you ever had a complex thought leap suddenly, almost or even unbidden, into your conscious (the self-aware or self-conscious) mind? Why? Was it your conscious mind that brought it to the fore, or your subconscious (otherwise more technically known as the unconscious) mind? Chances are, it was your subconscious (unconscious) mind. It’s been shown that your subconscious mind makes up your mind for you split seconds before you’re consciously aware of it. It’s almost as if it was predetermined.

Your subconscious mind bubbles along under the radar without an actual conscious input from your self-aware you, processing, ever processing. What should be random bubbling like boiling water should therefore result in a mess – a hodgepodge. Instead, you seem to get a purposefully and linearly directed nebulous something which at the least expected time pops through your grey matter’s ‘wormhole’ that links your subconscious mind with your conscious mind. Your conscious mind cannot seemingly draw out of your subconscious mind the nebulous something you need when you need it.

So how does your subconscious stay on the straight and narrow without your conscious input? I have no idea, but it apparently does. When your conscious thoughts go off the rails, say you’re distracted by something not relevant to the task at hand; well you can quickly force your conscious mind back on track to the task at hand. You don’t have to do that with your subconscious since the subconscious apparently can’t be distracted. 

So I wonder whether the world’s greatest thinkers – scientists, philosophers, inventors, writers, etc. weren’t really conscious thinkers at all but derived much of their inspiration from their subconscious.

It’s not your conscious mind that connects the dots, it’s the subconscious. How often do you hear, or even tell yourself, “I’ll sleep on it” (which is why it is probably a good idea to always have pen and paper or a Dictaphone next to the bed)? How many people can relate to solving an out of the ordinary mental puzzle in their dreams, or the solution comes to them ‘out of the blue’ while preoccupied with something related. There are no tools, only the resources in your own mind. In fact if you consciously try to come up with an original creative idea, you’ll probably fail, but when you’re in mental neutral gear – eureka.

Ever immediately forget something you thought of just minutes before and cannot now for the life of you consciously recall? Throw your mind into neutral and when you least expect it, there it is back to the fore again. Now quickly, write it down!

Here are a few other examples where the subconscious rules your roost.

We’re all aware of hypnosis drawing out memories locked away, in the subconscious of course. You have no control in your conscious ability to recall. It takes a more extreme form of that “gotta put my mind in neutral”, the hypnotic state, to bring the data to the fore. Of course unethical or badly trained or amateur hypnotists can implant false memories or manipulate those already there thus producing unreliable results.

It’s not at all extraordinary for a minority (10 – 25%) of absolutely normal adult humans to have at least one vivid hallucination during their lifetime – a product of their subconscious that’s probably much more common in children’s ‘make-believe’ like there’s a monster in the closet or their inevitable invisible playmates. As our minds grow older and mature, we become less likely to have subconscious hallucinations, but they can still happen.

Perhaps connected, we’ve nearly all experienced involuntary (as to subject) daydreams, which, like sleeping dreams, is a product of the subconscious.

Speaking of sleep, when you go to sleep you go into lockdown mode courtesy of the subconscious so you don’t physically act out the actions you dream about. That makes sense otherwise you could do yourself and others in your immediate vicinity a serious mischief, but you have no control over that lockdown process.

An ordinary conscious level mental puzzle might be how to get from A to B on the bus when your car is in the repair shop. These are the sorts of ordinary every day mental gymnastics that usually require tools – hammer and nails; a cookbook; a train timetable; a table of trigonometry functions; and memory. However, in order to utilize them, you have got to have concepts of them filed away in your subconscious cubby-holes*, so everyday mental, and apparently conscious activity have mandatory roots in the subconscious, otherwise, no go.

Just as an aside, there’s another version of subconscious activity that usually deals with body language. How often do you see someone talking on the phone to someone else, neither party can see the other, yet probably both parties are making all sorts of hand gestures and using other kinds of body language as if they were talking face-to-face? Probably quite frequently – it’s the norm. Or you see a woman sitting on a bus or in a café or some such, and she’s preening her hair, running her fingers through it but not even aware she’s doing it.  

When you only have microseconds to act, say when you’re standing in the batters box 60 feet, 6 inches away from the pitchers mound and a rapidly rotating baseball is heading towards you at 95 mph, do you stand there and consciously crunch the numbers before your go/no-go swing, or just turn the issue over to your subconscious to go for it, or let the ball pass you by. Ditto that for an outfielder chasing down a fly ball. In such situations your conscious mind is worthless baggage. Instinct, training, practice and all those other facets embedded in your subconscious required come to the fore and takeover. You can do the physics calculations at your leisure after the game.

*You shouldn’t think of those cubby-holes literally as individual compartments within your brain. It’s just a convenient analogy or way of looking at things. Memory is apparently dispersed throughout your wetware similar to your documents or files on your PC not being located here or there or on this or that piece of hardware, but rather your files, the bits and pieces of your documents, are scattered wherever there’s a bit of space available, which is why every now and again you need a defragmenter program to bring the pits and pieces back together again so that your PC doesn’t strain itself unnecessarily bringing it all together.

To be continued…

Reincarnation: Hatched Again or Forever Dead and Buried?

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death is my topic under consideration here, well a variation on the theme anyway. Reincarnation doesn’t of course cheat death, but it certainly circumnavigates or negates the finality of it. However, reincarnation makes relatively little if any real sense.

If reincarnation is bestowed upon you as a reward or punishment for whatever you did (fill in the blank yourself) in a previous life, the lesson is lost if you have no memory of that past existence(s) or of whatever it was that you did (fill in the blank). Now here I discount the claims of some people that they have lived prior lives and have memories of same. No matter what the merits of reincarnation are (and there are none IMHO), it is impossible to recall past lives. The egg and the sperm from which you were conceived had no past memory of your alleged past lives since they came from individuals not so related to your past existences. So, you started out from the get-go with no memory. A newly conceived embryo (blastula) has no memories. Any and all memories you now have started from that day of conception onwards – full stop*. On top of that, there’s been no absolute hard and fast historical evidence to support any such claims – otherwise reincarnation would be scientific fact, not pseudoscience supposition. It’s rather suspicious that all too often a previous  life or lives includes, against all probability, well known historical figures, like Napoleon, Elvis or JC (Julius Caesar -  presumably, if you believe in the Biblical account, that other JC is alive and kicking in an somewhere elsewhere). The probability, based on sheer numbers, of a previous life or lives, actually favors said life (or lives) being that of a cockroach, or ant, or microbe by odds of billions to one in favor. 

Anyway, the reincarnation mechanism isn’t ever explained other than by resorting to supernatural powers – there’s no known physics or chemistry or biology that could explain reincarnation.

And exactly what is reincarnated?  It’s certainly not anything physical like body shape, sex, or eye color, and it can’t be anything to do with memory, since nearly all of us have no personal you-were-there recall of what happened in say 1812 (AD or BC for that matter).  Do you have the identical personality, emotions, I.Q., etc. as your previous lives did? It’s all too nebulous!

Another thing, if Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Elvis, or even your not as well known great, great, great Aunt Gertrude were floating around in their afterlives, and you are now ‘they’ reincarnated, you’d think they would have a vested interest in you and might therefore appear to you, keeping you on the straight and narrow  to ensure that when you get reincarnated in turn, your whatever goes to a good family who are about to conceive a child instead of a puppy dog about to drop a litter off!

Of course if your previous lives still exist in an afterlife, then what part of them can actually be in you? Of course maybe there’s no afterlife and somehow Julius Caesars’ essence goes directly into someone else hence someone else, etc. hence Napoleon, hence more people of unknown race, creed, sex and nationality, until we come to Elvis, and you (assuming you were born post Elvis’s demise)!

What if someone is totally obsessed with a particular historical time, event, and/or character, might this be a sign that they, in a previous life, lived in that time period, or participated in that event, or was that character – even if they have no direct memory of same? Methinks not. For example, there are way more individuals, with a lot of time on their hands and with a less than healthy obsession over the RMS Titanic disaster, than there were individuals on the actual ship – obviously not all could be reincarnates of the actual crew and passengers. In fact, there’s more than one individual claiming to be the reincarnation of her captain – a mathematical impossibility.

Then too, some people are equally ultra-fanatical over fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or Harry Potter. Clearly you can not be the reincarnation of a fictional being! And how many thousands of Star Trek fanatics are out there whose life seems to revolve around that universe?  If it’s impossible to be a reincarnate of a fictional character from the past, then its impossibility squared to be a reincarnate of some literary character depicted as existing in your future.

The upshot is that you can be a person totally immersed in, highly knowledgeable of, or even obsessed to the point of delusion, with something historical, without there being any actual causality connection between the then and the now that one could interpret as reincarnation. Some people just live in fantasy worlds of their own making.

Then there’s the interesting “On the Beach” scenario. The novel (plus film plus made-for-TV remake film) deals with nuclear war. Unfortunately, fallout radiation spreads across and around the entire globe. Everyone is doomed – the plot deals with the waning days of the last few survivors in Australia as the radioactive ‘cloud’ heads their way. The question is, if all of Earth’s billions of people (and other higher animals) all die off, what happens to all those essences in search of something to be reincarnated into? Oops!

To pile on the absurdities, why confine your reincarnation(s) to Planet Earth? Perhaps you’ll be reincarnated as an ET (extraterrestrial) – perhaps you were an ET in a previous life!

No, reincarnation doesn’t make any sense, IMHO.

*When I mentioned this observation to a friend, she immediately suggested that the memory of a past life or lives was due to the implantation of your soul. It’s your soul (assuming there is such a thing) that has the memory.

Actually I was under the impression that it was one soul per person, but maybe not. One soul might be passed down from one person to that person’s reincarnation to that person’s reincarnation for however long the process goes on for. Maybe it’s like in Doctor Who - you only get so many regenerations (or in this case reincarnations).

Anyway, I was also under the impression that the soul is intangible or nebulous – it has no actual substance. The soul isn’t a thing that can be examined in the laboratory and under a microscope. If it has no actual matter/energy substance to it, it can’t store any memories.

Memory has to be something part and parcel of the biochemical’s and biochemistry and associated energy flows that happens in your brain whenever you remember something. Memory is encoded in your brain’s biochemistry. Memory must have some physical substance – it takes mass and energy to store and process memories. Memory can be affected by chemicals and energy. A soul that doesn’t have mass or energy presumably can’t be altered by external influences. So, if your soul contains the memories of your past lives, then no amount of foreign drugs, disease, lack of sleep, the aging process or injury will make you forget past lives because the soul is indestructible. Sorry, but if you have a memory of a past life then I suggest that memory, even though it’s a false or delusional memory, can be affected by physical influences, like drugs, disease, lack of sleep, the aging process or injury.

Thanks for the Memories

For Starters, A Personal Disclaimer: What follows is 100% my own thoughts on the subject of memory. I haven’t done any independent readings or research on the topic, not wanting my own ideas to be otherwise or somehow influenced by what no doubt millions of others have speculated on.

Introduction: Maybe neuroscientists would disagree, but I think the phenomenon of memory is one of the greater mysteries in science. What can we agree on from the start? Well, whatever memory is, it resides in the brain and is a function of brain chemistry. We know memory is biochemically based because biochemical’s like some drugs, alcohol, etc. can affect memory. Ditto the aging process which is ultimately biochemical in nature.

The biochemicals have got to be complex enough to not only store and provide the recall of the memories they represent, but versatile enough to provide recall not only for sight, but sound, smell, taste and touch as well. In addition, they have to be of such a nature that can provide combinations and sequences of these sensory memories. They also need to be able to store non-sensory bits like your memory of how to do addition so you can add up numbers in your head, as well as on paper. Ditto, the abstraction of the memory of how to look things up – all those factual bits and pieces of things you’ve never bothered to actually commit to memory, or have long since forgotten (like all those boring dates and places in history). There’s also the complexity of what makes up memories to draw on any number and variety of them to assist you in your current situation.  

Memory Is Not Unique to Humans: I’m probably stating the obvious here, but memory is not a characteristic that sets humans apart from other animals. While we can be pretty sure plants don’t have memories, experiments have shown that even relative simple fauna have memories, even if rudimentary. Certainly vertebrate animals have quite sophisticated memories. My two cats, for an example, have total recall over where their food and water bowls are located; ditto the litter boxes. They have memorized the geometry of the house. They know where the doors are leading to outside. They have learned and memorized where the sunny spots are and how they move during the course of the day. It’s no longer trial and error as it might have been on their first day getting used to their new surroundings.

Why Memory? Why do we have any ability to recall anything from our past at all? Well, the obvious answer is memory has survival value. I mean it’s important to remember to lock your door at night; remembering what is, and is not, eatable is also important; which is more likely to bite me, a shark or a dolphin – I can never remember but there’s this fin cutting through the water heading my way! It’s important to remember where your home, village, cave, whatever is. Of course you’re going to be in deep poo if you forget who your partner is or who your children are. I know there’s a reason why I shouldn’t jump off this high cliff, but I can’t remember what it is – oh well, it probably isn’t important, so here goes nothing – whee; splat! Memories should also be distributed throughout the brain; even one memory should be stored in a number of places is case disease or injury to one part of that organ results in total memory loss and forfeiture of survival.

Some Various Puzzlements: Okay, so here is this conglomeration of biochemical’s representing some memory of an experience of yours, a memory which, for the moment is out of sight and out of mind. The biochemical(s) are just sitting in the brain, sort of dormant. How is it that biochemical configuration activated, resulting in that memory no longer being out of sight and out of mind?

I can recall multi dozens of favourite film music themes – name a favourite film and I can recall the theme. Yet, I have lots of other equally favourite film music themes that just refuse to stick in my mind – ever. Why some and not others? I don’t know. Conversely, if I hear a favourite film music theme, I can usually, but always name the film. When however I can’t, it can be very frustrating! You know it like the back of your hand, yet it eludes you.

Memory and Thinking: Before you can recall anything, you’ve got to think of what it is you want to remember. It’s an active, not a passive recall. Before you can remember what you had for dinner last night you’ve got to think to yourself what’s the answer to what I had for dinner last night? But what prompted that thought in the first place? Maybe it was in response to a question someone else asked you. But that is of necessity not the only possibility. You could have thought of that yourself, maybe because you’re planning tonight’s dinner and don’t want to duplicate. Presumably there is a logical and independent reason why you would think of what last night’s dinner was prompting the biochemical chain of events that provided the memory and answer of what it was.

Memory and Dreams: I think that memory and dreams have relatively little relationship; aren’t that interlinked or connected. I’m going from personal experience here, in that most of my dreams (what few I can recall after the fact) are about imaginary people and places and events. Where real people, places and events are part and parcel of my dreaming, there is a unique spin to the dream scenario that has nothing to do with actual memories. Yes the people and or place and or events are superficially accurate, but it turns out to be an original story, and not a replay of an actual historical happening. While on the subject of dreams, it occurred to me that for all practical purposes being awake (using your active imagination) and asleep (dreaming) are really the same thing (not to mention that in both states your heart pumps and your lungs breathe and your stomach digests, your cells divide and ageing of course happens). Anyway, anything you can dream while asleep you could imagine while fully awake. So if dreams are an example of a possible simulated reality, so is the day-to-day active imagination scenarios your mind generates while you’re wide awake.

You Are Forgetful: In fact, you have forgotten thousands upon thousands of times more stuff than you can actually remember. Imagine if you could recall every minute of every day of your life – every dream; every word in every book, article, etc. you’ve ever read; every meal you’ve ever had and cooked; every headache and backache; every conversation; recalling every advertisement, jingle and commercial along with every other thing that’s ever annoyed you, like recalling word-for-word every boring lecture you’ve ever heard. What an absolute clutter that would be. So your brain is good at holding garage sales; hitting the delete key. Some memories are just lost for good and no amount of willpower or hypnosis is going to bring them back.

Earliest Memories: It would be a very odd individual indeed who could remember anything about anything from conception through to probably at least their second or third birthday – maybe later. Is there something about the brain’s biochemistry that inhibits remembrance from those first several years of experiencing sensory input?

Submerged Memories: You may not have read that book, or seen that film or TV episode, or listened to that piece of music or visited that building in decades, yet doing so today brings back to the surface nearly all the details you got all those decades ago. In other words, it’s not a new ‘from scratch’ experience.

Mental Blocks: Some people can be walking encyclopaedias of entertainment or sports trivia, but hopeless at learning and retaining a foreign language. Some people soak up historical names, dates and places with ease yet can’t memorize the chemical elements and associated symbols. Some people have no success at memorizing the multiplication tables, yet seemingly have a photographic memory of a favourite book(s).  Some people are walking dictionaries, yet some people, like me, can’t spell worth beans. My old man once offered to give me $10 (good bucks back in those days) if I ever passed a spelling test in school. His money was safe – I never did. The question is why seemingly all people have some sort of innate ability to memorise a particular facet of human knowledge, yet have a mental block to another. I’d assume that our brain’s biochemical base is pretty uniform across our species, yet it’s really, when it comes to memory, a case of different strokes for different folks. Further, I’m not aware that our animal companions differ in this way. My cats seem to be two peas-in-a-pod when it comes to what they recall. Do animals have mental blocks too?  

Short Term vs. Long Term Memory:

Very short term: Well, remembering dreams comes to mind. Usually, upon awaking, we don’t recall any dreaming at all. Sometimes we do recall one (the latest since I gather we have several per night), but it tends to fade very quickly. Of course once in a rare while it lingers on, and now and again, becomes part of your long term memory. There doesn’t seem to be a biochemical rulebook for this process however. Also very short term, I would suggest is the reading say of a chapter in a book, or watching a TV episode or film. Immediately upon completion, you can not recall verbatim the word-for-word, or image-for-image (scene-for-scene) contents. However, the overall theme of the contents or plot remains behind.

Short term: Well, I’ll define this as several days, perhaps weeks, before the memory’s elimination. After a week or so, it’s going to be hard to recall specific meals, and outfits worn and day-to-day doings from, after a week or so. Unless you keep a detailed diary, you’d be pretty hard pressed to recall in precise detail exactly what you did, the order you did it in, and the outcome(s) a week ago.

Long term: One off, traumatic, unique and rare occurrences are more likely to stick around in that brain thing of yours. For example, you’re more likely to recall the day you broke your leg, not the thousands of days you didn’t. Why, since your leg is okay now? Maybe it has something to do with the philosophy that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. By remembering the events surrounding your broken leg, decades after-the-fact, makes it less likely you’ll do it again. 

Specific vs. General Memories: As an example of a general memory, I can remember the quadratic equation decades after the various maths classes I had it exposed to me – yet in those subsequent decades, I’ve never had to put it to any use. It thus seems to be a pretty worthless thing for my mind to have retained. Another example of general memory – my mother didn’t care for pasta and never cooked it. If I or my father wanted to eat pasta, we had to make it ourselves. Again, a question of why? That gastronomic quirk of my mother’s no longer has any relevance in my life and hasn’t for decades, so why hasn’t that memory been erased unlike probably thousands of other equally irrelevant bits that have been deleted?

Summary: A good summary tries to address who, what, where, when, why – and how - central to the issue. ‘Who’ of course are we ourselves; ‘what’ is what our memory is all about; ‘where’ is the domain of our our brains; ‘when’ is now, a good a time as any; the ‘why’ is obvious! ‘How’, well that is ultimately our central point. This essay is saying a lot about ‘what’ memories are – its traits and characteristics – not ‘how’ it is what it is. Neuroscientists and biochemists may be able to explain all – someday.