Friday, September 28, 2007

Hmmm?

Why does the world appear the way it does? Ah sure Descartes pondered
this one, and the Matrix took a stab at it, and so did a horde of
others, but lets take one more look at this age old problem shall we?
As far as I can tell there are essentially three only reasons this
could be so. 1. There is a God. From what I have heard he is a
benevolent god and he has created the world a certain way and him
being benevolent wants us to search and explore and enjoy this world.
Because he is benevolent he will not lie to us or deceive us. This
world really is how he created it. 2. There is a creator, but he is a
mischievous creator trying to trick and deceive us. The problem is if
we knew it was a trick we would stop believing and stop acting the way
he wanted us to. The third option is that there really is no God and
what we see is how the world really is. There are two facts that leave
me wondering about this. 1. 96% of the universe is dark matter--stuff
we can't even hope to see. It neither emits nor receives photons. In
other words dark matter doesn't interact with light. That means we
could not see it even if it were piled high smack dab in front of us.
So then the question then becomes why is the universe hiding most of
itself from us? Are we not ready for it? Is it just part of the
universe and as of yet are we still too stupid to figure out a way of
looking at it? Is this dark matter part of the world that evil creator
is hiding? That's the first evidence the second is here [Click
it, its trippy]. Since there are things in this world trying to trick
us clearly there must be an antibeneficial creator, because we cannot
trust our senses. [Actually we can trust our senses. They are seeing
what is, but we cannot trust our thinking center for it is within our
brain the miscommunication lies. It is within our processing center
that the data from our senses is interpreted.] Yet even with "tricked" senses we have still been able to develop advanced mathematics and complex physics. If all there were was a malefactor creator then we shouldn't be able to develop anything thing. For it seems to me that if one were trying to keep us confused why have anything work at all. If you were trying to spawn frustration, why allow success? Thus the world we see, we may assume is
real, at least the 4% we can see, as far as we can tell. But we have
no guarantee that the input on our senses is as we are interpreting
it.

However, let us also consider the abundance of these optical illusions. Dreams are real and fairly common, but often they are quickly forgotten, and also often they never to appear quite as life like as "actual sensory experience." So in most cases we have a way of telling them apart. With optical illusions we are often able to recognize what it is that is creating them. If they were the product of an evil trickster we shouldn't be able to recognize them. Moreover, optical illusions are really rather rare. In day to day life I am forced to trust what my senses are telling me (assuming 1 trust/sec) 86,400 times per day. I can go weeks, months or even years before I encounter things that make me call my senses into question. Moreover again most times when most people's senses are called into question is when they are doing things they shouldn't [drugs, alcohol, staying up much much longer than you should have] Most of the time, when you are doing the things you should your senses are behaving as you would expect. Therefore what if the things we call optical illusions are not the offspring of an all powerful evil trickster trying to deceive us but rather like a visual pun. 1 Sensory input with multiple interpretations. What if they are not "proof of something sinister," but rather a note for us to lighten up. Maybe they can be thought of as a coming from a mirthful God poking fun at our human frailties and of what we think we know is out there. But they most certainly cannot be from a crafty and malicious being because we are eventually let in on the trick--true deception it seems to me would not be so kind (unless of course all of it really is a trick and we won't be let in on it until the very end, but again why let us have so much order if that were so?). It may not actually be order, but it works, so we will roll with it and hope for the best. And maybe all that dark matter is not the sly villain concealing his plans from us, but the careful parent who doesn't teach their 2 year old about differential calculus before he knows trig, geometry, algebra, the ideas of numbers, adding subtracting, dividing, and multiplication first. I think for now I am inclined to support the later and watch the former on the Matrix.

3 comments:

Boom said...

Yeah! Thank you Syhalla. You might note I have not one but TWO uber spiffy links INSIDE my text. (No more of that whimpy mansy-pansy (which I think by the way I make a fine Mansy-pansy.)title linking. Yea!

Matthew Bohman said...

I think that this is the only spot on the net that alternates between random links, bad jokes, and deep philosophical discussions.

Boom said...

Ahh Thanks!