Possibility

Anything you can imagine is possible.  In fact, we can safely go even further than this cliche, because there are a great deal more things that you can't imagine which are possible than there are things that you can imagine which aren't possible.

Most things that you can imagine could, with sufficient work, feasibly be actualized.  As in, get-out-the-hammer-and-nails, elbow-grease-and-motivation, built, fabricated... created.  Most examples you are thinking of right now to contradict this statement are in the category of things that are possible but not currently imaginable by homo sapiens.  In fact, even the most conceptual and outlandish, existentially absurd things any one of us could imagine might possibly be created from scratch.  There is no reason to suppose, for example, that fundamental qualities of our universe cannot be changed from within it, by conscious will, with a sufficient level of control over sufficiently small things.  We don't even know what those very small things are yet exactly, so any argument that these things are outside of the sphere of willful manipulation is made completely out of ignorance.  The assumption that there are some fundamentally unchangeable parameters of the universe is exactly that - an assumption.  A knee-jerk, pessimistic assumption made out of circumstance, certainly not anything that could be called fact.  The more popular thought pattern seems to go:

1. We don't know exactly what series of complex interactions create the "laws" of physics that we observe in our universe.

2. Our particular species of ape has only learned to meaningfully manipulate its environment at the quantum level.

3. (From 1 and 2): It is overly optimistic to think that it is possible to change basic principles of the universe, even locally and for a short period of time.

Well I say phooey.  Going further, I believe deeply that the "laws" of physics are fundamentally plastic, moldable things, created out of other plastic, moldable things.  I believe we've been creating and manipulating these plastic, moldable things literally forever, and we will continue to, because it's the only plastic moldable toy we have, and we love it, because it is awesome, and it oozes out love, consciousness, subjectivity, and hithertoo untapped qualia from its every seam (not to mention kittens and whiskey ginger!), and we'll always try (successfully) to make it better and better, and we have nothing but time to learn how.  (Of course, by "we" I mean the royal we, consisting of all things and times, in all those universes).

As usual, the only real barrier is culture.  The limiting factors for us are only... the things that we decide are limiting factors!  Don't get me wrong, pessimism, doubts and fear-driven dismissal are all useful tools in many contexts, but not in the context of everything, and what we should do with our existence!  In this sense, we should imagine the most amazing things about our global potential, and only then will those things happen.  We're getting a bit too mature as a culture to keep wrapping our shared disposition in lethargy and dissolution.  It's starting to seem a bit silly.  Plus, we can't afford it!  It makes sense that our culture recapitulates the self-effacing, negativity-biased patterns of its constituent parts - namely brains evolved for survival instead of rationality, and at the whim of nasty, messy, electrochemical deviance - but we can't rest on our laurels with this excuse forever.  We got this, you guys!  We're in a cruise ship floating through space with infinite energy, time and resources, not to mention free will.  We're past the hard part.  We've got radio-controlled science-devices on fucking Mars!  Let's do more of that stuff.  1 - 2 - 3 break!

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

The real answer is, of course, why not? As physicist Sean Carroll notes so well in this blog post, "First, we would only even consider this an interesting question if there were some reasonable argument in favor of nothingness over existence." There is no reason we have, or really can have, to favor one assumption over the other. Why shouldn't there be something? Why is it surprising that there are things? Why is it more surprising or unnatural that there is something than it would be surprising or unnatural if there were no things? What does such a thing even mean? Certainly we can't, from our perspective as things within a universe where we are all somethings, propose an argument (something, which itself would probably reference lots of other somethings) which should lead us to believe that a universe with nothing is somehow 'preferable'.  Again, quoting Sean Carroll, "We only have experience with one universe; there is no ensemble from which it is chosen, on which we could define a measure to quantify degrees of probability." Indeed.

Really, we can't even conjure a good explanation of what that nothing would be. In fact, if someone were to start giving a description or explanation of such a thing would be like, or resemble, you'd know they were full of shit right away, because of course, if nothing were described it would not be nothing.

Another thing a little irksome about the question (really, its interpretation) is that it seems to ask for some kind of a reason, which would suggest a motivation. The intuitive interpretation of this question asks us to make the assumption that a basis of all possible types of realities must have a preference between two alternatives (it also asks us to assume that these two things are fundamentally alternatives). This is the reason that some people use this question to justify their belief that the universe was created by God. If nothingness is more 'likely' or 'preferable' than somethingness, and yet we exist, there must have been a type of 'choice' event in deciding whether or not there should be something (probably with the famed 'Nothing-Coin'), and that choice landed on somethingness (easy choice, really - somethingness is way more awesome).

But let's really turn the tables and ask that question. How could there possibly be nothing, what on earth would that look like, and why should we think that this type of universe is somehow... likely?

Well, I think a fair word to describe this universe would be featureless. In fact, it would have to have this property of featurelessness absolutely everywhere, and this featurelessness property would have to be exactly identical everywhere. And of course, we couldn't have things outside of this featurelessness, so it would have to be infinite. In fact, it starts to seem like a whole lot of work to create a universe that has absolutely nothing!

Whatever this nothing is, we must at least agree that it is uniform. Think of the amount of information required to describe a universe that has absolutely no features, no deviations from a this complete uniformity. Why should such a universe come to be? Why would every point in it to be exactly so, and not any other way, say five feet to the left (to borrow from Leibniz)? It seems like an incredible amount of storage space to store the exact locations of an infinite amount of nothing, all arranged perfectly uniformly throughout an infinite amount of space. In fact, since space is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the fact that neighboring bodies are relatively distinguishable, it would have to be so uniform that space could not arise, and it goes without saying, time. Imagine the amount of energy required to maintain this state.

And if it is hard for us to imagine how such a state could be created and maintained (or why) at our point in time, it was probably never any easier to create such a state at any time in the past. In fact, if you need creation, it is much much easier for me to believe that something was the thing that would create nothing than vice versa. Something seems very messy, very easy to create than nothing. 'Something' is like Mandelbrot's famously simple z(n+1) = z(n)^2 + c, which generates the (literally) infinitely complex fractal, while 'Nothing' would be like a list of coordinates for every point in the universe (which is of course self-defeating, because where would the coordinates be stored?).

Mooooosic for the People, By the People

Another song by my mate Ray and I:
Paw

Enjoy, citizens!

Fun Visual Applet

I made a little visual applet for visualizing/playing with images as particle swarms. Check it out:
Image Inject

Procrastination

I should be studying for finals, but instead I made this jam:
The Plan Stan and the Holy Smokes

Also, I finished up a house track I made with Ray Porras:
Walking in Circles

New Song

Hey yall, I just made a new song - Wild Elephant. Hope you like it!

Collages

I made a little album of audio collages. Entirely sample-based. Warning: Experimental - experiences may vary.

Download

Last.fm

Crossword Filler - Version 3

Bug fixes, checks user word input in real-time. Added Edit-Mode to allow manual creation of crosswords.
WordFillVer3

Word Filler Version 2

Alright, I updated this crossword-filling program to allow typing in words that it has to fill around.
Again, please let me know if there are any loading/running problems, or any ideas to make it better. I'm still not totally sick of this program yet. :)
Here's the download link:
WordFillVer2.jar

Crossword Filler

I made this program to try out some search tree stuff. It generates a crossword of specified size and density of black squares, and then attempts to fill it in with unique, legal words. In general, it does well if you give it a reasonable puzzle to fill. However, the user is allowed to give it, for example, a completely blank 14X14 puzzle, which is obviously impossible. So be nice.

This file is executable, and should run if you have Java 6. On my Ubuntu, I right-click and say "Open with OpenJDK Java 6 Runtime". I don't know if it's similar with Mac/Windows. Let me know if it doesn't work. The UI should be self-explanatory, but if it isn't I would love suggestions on how to make it so. Likewise for general appearance, etc. The crosswords are dumb looking, but at least they're 180-degree symmetric (except sometimes with odd-numbered-sides, which I didn't want to spend much time fixing). Also, the documentation is very bad right now.

Anyway, here it is.
WordFill.jar

Edit: Apparently, it didn't save the permissions correctly, so you might have to manually change the permission of the file to allow execution. Again, I'm not sure how this works on a Mac/Windows, but on my computer, I right-click => properties => permissions => "Allow executing file as a program"

Winter Break Song

This song is just a quick doodad. I might get another one out before the quarter starts.
Button Mountain

Song

Hooray for free time! Just finished a new song. If anyone's interested, here is the download link: Somnambulist

A Rockin New Tune

Hey you guys, look! It's art!

Gnome Chomps Quiche

Link to My Album on Last.fm

I have 17 tracks on last.fm available to listen streaming, or for free download, all in one place. I took the time to encode them all as nice, 128 kbps 44.1 kHz MP3s. Enjoy!

I Made Another Song!

Download it!
Big Bent Beat

Another Song

Here's another song.

Childhood Treasures in the Attic

Two New Songs

Fun Key Miner is my attempt at a housey kinda song with the requisite bass and funk samples and all that.

Tree Hunger is a more experimental ambient venture, which I made almost entirely with Forester, a fun and interesting sound program from Leafcutter John.

New Song - Just Two Guys Remix

Been busy with school/doing stuff when not busy/lazy when not doing stuff. Here's a remix I farted out. Just Two Guys On Acid

The Future of Knowledge is Becomming Clearer

The internet (you may have heard of it - it's a big deal) when it first got going, was predicted to be like TV, but better, as Kevin Kelly says in this speech. It has obviously become something much greater than that, and its future is becoming clearer with recent developments, a few of which I will briefly discuss here.

The power of the internet that we will see in the short future will have something to do with combining the increasingly massive amounts of useful data on the web, such as all of MIT's publications, which were voted last week to be made available for free on the web, and increasingly efficient searching and knowledge synthesis programs, such as Wolfram Alpha, scheduled to open in May. I quote from Stephen Wolfram's blog:

"...what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text. But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out. So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier. But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable. It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way. But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it? The way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too."

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that receives questions in the form of natural language, and uses vast amounts of data accumulated from the web to answer them. This is a Knowledge Engine that computes factual answers from the huge, currently unorganized databank that is the internet. And, it works quite well, according to this review article. This combination of scientific data and knowledge generators will be revolutionary. For instance, the evolutionary biologist, John Hawks has a short article on how this technology could make bioinformatics obsolete

Another interesting catalyst is the linked data movement that Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the world wide web) is starting. His TED talk about the subject is wonderful, but to surmise the concept, linked data is about using the web to connect data, information, and knowledge that wasn't previously linked. It's all about getting raw data out there to be linked to and from to similar or related concepts and ideas, to create a more fluid, integrated, effective and expansive internet.

The future interactive nature of the web "of things" will combine this informative data to actual objects in the real, sensory world that we interact with, using live cameras connected to the internet via mobile phones with image recognition capabilities, to label the world in increasingly minute and precise ways, with informational tags in real time, as I briefly discussed in my post about Photosynth. What is most interesting to me about this future that is becoming more and more clear is that this interactive web of things will not be merely a real time tagging of sensory information, but a real time linking of these quanta of information. In the same way that our brains link all the data that is stored in our memories throughout our lives to connect our sensory inputs in ways that make sense given our past experience, the internet will be using all human knowledge to link our real time sensory data in creative and informative ways.

Knowledge as a Path to Enlightenment

There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are possible ideas. And there are as many descriptions of what enlightenment is as there are people in the world. But although I believe that every person, and every mind is a perfect and flawless construction of a hereditary past and a past of personal experience, I think it is too easy to say that everyone has achieved their own enlightenment. I think that each person has a potential for a unique enlightenment that cannot be exactly similar to another’s version of enlightenment, and I think it is fair to say that many people don’t achieve their own form of enlightenment; they live their lives without every sniffing out their own path toward feeling that they embody their own intrinsic beauty and perfection. This is all to say that my insights into enlightenment do not, necessarily have anything to do with anyone’s enlightenment but my own. Still, I think that finding one’s path has something to do with listening to everyone, but following no one. We don’t exist inside vacuums; we generate our version of reality by synthesizing all other versions of reality that we observe throughout our lives. The pessimistic way of putting this is the way that Audre Lorde put it when he said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” I disagree with this. In fact, I think that the exact opposite is closer to reality: There are only new ideas. Each moment, from each individual vantage point, is a never-before experienced interpretation of a universe that is also changing faster than our interpretations of it. Every time we encounter an old idea or observation, we combine it with all of the other old ideas in our long-evolved reference frames, and we thus constantly synthesize uncountable old ideas into new ones. The uniqueness of one’s interpretation may be subtle, but it is, nevertheless, unique. So, consider my ideas on approaching my enlightenment as a cobblestone on your own path towards your own. Perhaps you may even think of my words as a stone that begins to diverge from your own. As Isaac Newton famously put it, “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

This is the main reason why I think that knowledge is the key towards enlightenment. Knowledge, of course, can come in any form. I use the word in this essay in its most generic sense, simply as sensory input. The reason, as I outlined above, is that more exposure to the world, more reception of others’ views, means more elements to synthesize into your own global interpretation. Of course, as we develop our reference frames, we are more selective about the ideas and concepts that we allow to contribute to them. We have some idea about which tools we need to complete the construction kits that form our conception of reality. In this sense, the ideas that we dismiss as fallacious or harmful are equally as important as the ideas we accept as wholesome and true, because they help to clarify our path towards our own enlightenment by contrasting our path to other, less productive paths. As I said above, these words may all be recognized as a completely divergent path from your own, but they will still be helpful towards your self-discovery, because the more examples you accumulate of ideas that you don’t resonate with, the more you will be able to recognize ideas that you do resonate with.

So, our worldviews are massive culminations of data we accumulate from the world as we perceive it, and our brains are constantly translating our perceptions into highly detailed representations of the world’s constituent phenomena. Our minds are constantly updating, redefining and rearranging these codified mental representations to create extremely accurate maps. An example of this is that we are surprised when you pick up a can that we thought was full of paint, but turns out to be empty, causing you to almost topple yourself over with your own motion, expecting to meet more resistance to your pull. Our moment to moment, mundane interactions with our world are brimming with highly organized data that we’ve accumulated throughout our lives, such as the average weight of a gallon jug full of paint, and how much force must be exerted, in a certain direction with a specific muscle group, to live it to a specific height. The maps that we use to navigate the familiar areas of our lives, such as a midnight walk down your pitch-black hallway, down the stairs, through the kitchen door and to your fridge, have so much representational data about the physical world that one can close their eyes and almost see and feel every element of it. Our memories are little more abstract and disconnected from the real world than our senses are.

In this sense, we can accurately think of our consciousness as expanding to try and become the world around us by seeking out sensory information, combining them to make increasingly accurate models and maps, and performing profoundly intricate calculations upon this data in order to make specific predictions about how our interactions with the world will effect it. We literally manipulate the elements of our mental world to see what will happen before we manipulate the real world. So it is very important that the descriptions of physical things and the laws they obey are mapped very accurately in our mental copy of the world.

But we don’t only build our mental maps strictly from direct sensory observation. First of all, we reflect upon our observations and arrive at conclusions about our surroundings that are greater than the sum of their parts. We also communicate with others to find out what they have observed and reflected upon, and we add that data to our model. Often times, this data is very counterintuitive, and is extremely hard, if not impossible, to obtain from direct, personal observation and reflection. So we construct our mental worlds through a combination of direct observation, and information that others have gathered from others, which we take upon trust to be accurate. This process of counterintuitive observation and communication has become highly specialized, so that groups of people dedicate themselves towards observing and thinking about very specific phenomena within the universe as precisely and accurately as they can. And lucky for us, those people share that information with others, so that they can also make their mental models more accurate and rich.

This is what makes learning and exploring so enlightening and addicting. Learning information about the universe we live in literally expands the representational world that is coded in our minds. Specifically, learning about the very big and the very small expands our consciousness by expanding the proportions of the mental models that collectively form it. So, for instance, if you become very familiar with the process of photosynthesis, you incorporate that information into the same consciousness that you perceive from, so that you can in a sense see the microscopic processes that are occurring in a plant when you observe it. Or if you are aware of the nuclear reactions that take place in stars, you incorporate that knowledge into your observations when you look directly at the sun. So, we can gain great enlightenment from becoming increasingly familiar with phenomena in the extreme proportions of our universe, because our consciousness stretches to accurately represent this new information, and to understand our position within it.

This is why I have come to consider a life in the pursuit of knowledge as a life that is destined towards profound enlightenment. Another important thing to note is that in trying to understand the nature of the universe we live in on all scales, one is always approaching perfection. This is because whatever the universe is, it is the most perfect thing imaginable. I don’t mean the word “perfect” here in a practical or functional sense. We could imagine more “perfect” versions of many things, in the sense that they could perform the functions that they seemed to have evolved for in a more efficient way. Blood could deliver more oxygen, brains could contain more information, and a peacock’s feathers could be more colorful. The universe is perfect only when considered without motive in mind. Indeed, it has created and contains all existing motives. All of the rubrics for considering functionality and efficiency exist within it. The universe isn’t trying to approach perfection in its evolution. It is us who are trying to approach a full understanding of the perfection that is immortally within and without us, the omnipresent perfection of the universe that we both make and are made of. We are some of the many perfect tools that the universe uses to mold itself into new forms of perfection. Our intentions will never be any other than the universe’s intentions, because we are the universe.

A path towards knowledge will never be disappointing, because we can only approach an understanding the world’s intrinsic beauty, and this beauty itself is changing faster than we will ever be able to keep up with. As Dr. Robert Goddard wrote in a letter to H. G. Wells in 1932, “There can be no thought of finishing, for “aiming at the stars,” both literally and figuratively is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.”