I took several long Myers-Briggs personality tests and the result was always the same:  I am definitely an INTJ.  However, on one exam I came awfully close to an INTP.  They gave a percentage indicator for each letter, and on that particular exam I was like 60% Judgement, 40% Perceptual.   Apparently we’re the most rare personality type only constituting 1-4% of the population.   I’m not going to spend much time talking about INTJ’s on here because there’s already loads of information out there about us.  But if you are interested by chance, you can read about the INTJ personality type here.

Earlier today my grandfather passed away.  It’s put me in a rather gloomy mood.  Whenever I reflect on death I get really depressed.  We live incredibly short lives.  There’s never any guarantee of tomorrow.

Many years ago I spent a lot of time reading philosophy.  I spend most of my time with science these days, but I used to read a lot of philosophy related to life, morals, and the mind.  I always best related to existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Satre.  They don’t really try to offer an explanation for evil, nor all the terrible things that happen in this life.  I don’t think there is any meaning in such events.  Absurd things happen.  Terrible things happen.  Sad things happen.  It’s just the way life is, and assuming we don’t work to change the world, things will stay that way.

Existentialists have a doctrine they call “absurdism”.  I’m not a huge fan of using “isms”, but I went with the term anyway.  I was trying to think about how best to define it, so I just looked it up on Wikipedia and liked their definition:

Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information, including the vast unknown, makes certainty impossible.

- Wikipedia, Absurdism

The only tool us humans have available to use against this cold heartless universe is our powers of reason, but reason is very limited.  Our brains forget the things we learn, never seem to have enough information, and can only process so much at a time.  This leaves us vulnerable to all life’s complexities.  We have to try to figure things out and adjust our actions in such a way as to produce the best outcomes both for ourselves and to those around us.  However, the world is brutal, heartless, and near boundless in cruelty.  We’re stuck with absurdity.   I don’t think us humans will ever reach a level of absolute certainty, but things can be made better.

What does this have to do with death?  Well, death is absurd, as are many things in life.  We never know when or how we’re going to die.  We never know when or how our loved ones will die.  We never know when or how our friends will die.  But they will die, I assure you.  They’ll all die, and you will too.  I’m not the harbinger of pessimism, this is reality.

I’ve always have liked Albert Camus, an existentialist author.  He prescribed that we cope as best we can with all life’s absurdities.

… a person can choose to embrace his or her own absurd condition. According to Camus, one’s freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. “To live without appeal,” as he puts it, is a philosophical move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The freedom of humans is thus established in a human’s natural ability and opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, as he or she represents a set of unique ideals which can be characterized as an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.

- Wikipedia, Absurdism

None of this makes me feel any better about death, but I don’t think there’s anything cheerful about it.  Grandpa’s dead and I won’t ever get to see him again.  From time to time I still find solace reading my Bible, though I’m not a religious person.  I find Solomon, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, to have been a wise man.  Take this passage:

I also said to myself, “As for humans, [ ... ] they are like the animals.  Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.  All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?

- The Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes Ch 3

Solomon gave the best advice as to how to live our lives during this stay on this planet:

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, [ ... ].  Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.  Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

- The Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes Ch 9

I had planned to write about my experiences with grandpa during my life, but I ended up writing about the thoughts bouncing around in my head as I’ve been out for my walks. Forgive me, I’m not really in a cheerful mood right now.

I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I love to take long walks at late hours.  As I was out tonight, I realized that after around 30 minutes or so, I enter into a trance.  Maybe trance isn’t the right word.  Maybe a state of intense concentration and focus?  I’m only half-conscious as to what’s going on around me.  During these walks, I’m in a state of half-daydream, half-reality.

Tonight I was reflecting on how the sky is like a giant canopy which only opens up at night.  Though I find the daytime sky majestic, especially in the evenings, it also obscures the view of the vast universe of which we’re a part.

It’s best to find yourself a long winding country-road which leads out into the middle of nowhere.  On a clear night when it’s nice out, just walk down that road and keep going.  Hopefully you won’t encounter any cars and you can just keep walking and walking.  Within a half-hour or so your eyes will adjust and become extremely sensitive to light.  That’s when the sky above you will come alive.  Stars will start to appear, one by one, until eventually the giant dome is filled with them.  They’re everywhere and you’ll find it puzzling that you didn’t see them earlier.  It’s not like they weren’t there before – you just didn’t see them.  I don’t know why everyone goes to sleep when all of this becomes visible.  It’s a shame.  Too many people fail to remember that we live on a tiny mote of dust spiraling around just a single star in a universe of unfathomable proportion.

I think I realize what I love about the darkness:  it’s a blank canvas to be painted on.  My mind starts imagining all sorts of things and I soon lose myself.  It’s the same reason I love writing simulations.  I start with a blank canvas – a blank computer screen – and begin painting colors into forms, drawing whatever I can imagine.  Unlike a painter, who is limited to a single canvas and does not have to worry about the rules behind the picture’s generation, I get full control over a fully interactive canvas.  You can move through a virtual world and I control every parameter, painting countless pictures in succession, just like the real world does.

As I traversed the winding roads, I pondered my ideal universe and the rules behind beautiful forms.  How could I create a virtual heaven?  I always find myself inadequate for the task.  For example, ask yourself whether or not you can even imagine a  sky more beautiful than our own?  I mean honestly, how can you find fault in this?

You know what’s best about the sky?  It’s blue, my favorite color.  I’m very fortunate in that outdoor scenery is painted in all my favorite colors.  Greens, browns, grays, oranges, and blues.  During the day the giant dome is sky blue, which is my second favorite color, next to navy blue.  These beautiful fluid clouds float about, slowly twisting and flowing onward, like giant cotton balls suspended overhead.  It’s different every single day, yet it’s still blue skies and white poofy clouds.

White is such a rich color.  The sky looks pure and clean.  I just want to get up there and fly around in those clouds, with my arms outstretched, breathing in that clean air.  Pilots talk about how wonderful it is to fly small aircraft way up in the clouds.  I’ve seen videos on youtube and it doesn’t even seem real.

Autumn is hard to beat too.  As I walked, the leaves were shuffling about, many of them being lifted up into the air, twirling around in erratic, unpredictable patterns, carried by small gusts of wind.  I had never noticed it before, but dead leaves can be scattered all over the ground and still look beautiful.  They look like they belong there, blending wonderfully with the grass and small sticks on the ground.  But you throw a small piece of litter beside them and it looks terrible, even if it’s the same color as the leaves.  There’s more to a leaf’s perfection than its color.  They’re not little brown pieces of paper.  There’s little bends and curves in them, there’s veins running throughout them, and they have a beautiful fractal like symmetry, which matches the pattern of the trees.  Nature has attention to detail.  Your unconscious mind feels it and notices it, even if you’re not consciously able to identify exactly what it is you’re feeling with words.

I think I’ve been spending too much time looking at pictures created with Terragen.  Have any of you heard of it?  It’s a software program where you can build outdoor environments and render them.  The images created are photo-realistic.  They have a huge library of plant, tree, and flower models, as well as algorithms to produce rocks, canyons, mountains, weathering, erosion, flowing water, and so forth.  This is the very sort of thing I imagine when I think about the future of virtual reality combined with advanced AI.  We’ll each be given a huge portion of memory and computing power, and then be able to store whatever we want on it.  In that space we’ll be able to create our own ideal home — our own personal universe.  You can see pictures created with it here.  Here’s an example of one picture created with it.

Take a look at this picture of a sky, created completely with software.

I love this form of digital art.  Artists take 3d models of environments and mountains, and using these software tools, they create photo-realistic images of utopian worlds. When I’m walking in the darkness, the dark silhouettes of tree lines are filled in with flowers and grazing animals, peacefully meandering about in the fields dotted with color roses, carnations, and tulips.  Castles appear off in the distance and beams of colored light penetrate the imagined foliage canopy.

My mind often drifts between what’s possible and what really is.  I start to think about future generations a few hundred years from now, flying around in virtual reality, telling a super-advanced AI system, “I want to build an island here.  I want these sorts of flowers, these sorts of trees.”  The AI system replies, “As you command.”  An island appears and then the person walks around it, “No.  Change these purple flowers to red ones.  I don’t like conifer trees.  I want oak trees.  Wait, show me all sorts of different trees.”  A myriad of different trees start flashing before the person.  “Eh’, I’ll go with that and some of those.”  After finishing the outdoor environment, the person says, “I want to build a mansion over there.  I’m looking for something similar to the Royal Pavillion.  You know, Oriental style.”  Then this structure appears in the flower garden.

It doesn’t seem real to me that future generations will experience that.  Their brains may be removed from their bodies as young children and they may never know what it’s like to have a “normal” human body.  If they interact with the real world, they “possess” advanced prosthetic bodies that feel just as real as ours but without all the pain and suffering.  They may never know pain.  Neural implants may keep them from ever experiencing loneliness or depression to any significant degree.  They won’t have to learn from books, but will just download information into their brains.  They’ll be able to race cars, fly any type of aircraft, immerse themselves in elaborate virtual adventures, bonding with one another.  To them, after living in VR for hundreds of years, I don’t think they’ll even think in terms of what’s “real” and what’s “virtual”.  An experience is an experience and they’ll be able to control their experiences to a degree far beyond what we can.

AI, neuroscience, quantum physics, software simulations, and virtual reality… Think about all of that too long and this is what happens to your brain: you get a strange man like me wandering down a country road at 2:00 AM, staring up at the stars, walking right past you, completely lost in thought, not even noticing you’re there.

What is this?  I haven’t posted anything on my blog for almost a month?!  How irresponsible of me.  If I said I’ve been too busy to post anything, I’d be lying.  Really I’ve been immersed in some personal projects.  Maybe I’ll talk with all of you about some of the things I’ve been up to.  So let’s get right to it.

As some of you probably already know, my passion is understanding the mind and our world, and as of the past few years, I’ve been researching how to build intelligent machines which understand space.  I want to better learn how our brain understands the world we see out of our eyes, and how it builds a model of the world.  What sort of data structures are used within the human brain to hold onto spatial and object information?  How is it accessed?  How is that information processed and changed?  How does our brain make predictions on what we will experience next, forming expectations of the world?  In other words, I want to build a machine that has two camera eyes and can understand the world it sees through those eyes.  I want it to be capable of driving or walking around, avoiding obstacles, identifying objects, having memories of past experiences with those objects, capable of predicting your next action, and so on.

I’ve been searching for algorithms that are modeled after the human brain, using simulated neurons and neural networks.  After searching online for months and months, and reading textbooks I acquired after checking out MIT open-courseware’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences program (I bought the same textbooks they use for their neuroscience degree program at MIT, and have been reading them),  eventually I found a jewel.  Jeff Hawkins, president of a company called Numenta, and founder of Palm computing, has been traveling around the country giving introductory lectures on building intelligent machines and simulating the brain in computers.  He’s developed an algorithm which he’s modeled after the neocortex.  He calls it Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTMs).  It’s the exact sort of thing I’ve been searching for.  So how does it work?

Let’s first pose a difficult question.  How does your brain identify objects, say, a cat?  Think of how different each cat or dog you see is from each other.  One cat may be skinny, another fat.  One may be white, another brown, while another black with white spots.  One dog may be a beagle, while another is a golden retriever.  Even so, you’re able to notice that they’re all dogs and easily can identify them as such.  Small children simply look at a few pictures of dogs in a picture book and can then easily identify the animals they see in real life.  How can the brain do things like that?  Or better yet, how can I build a computer program that can look at a video feed and watch hours and hours of footage and then identify a particular type of animal when it comes on screen?

For example, when I was watching David Attenborough’s films, in the behind the scenes footage I saw their team having to stake out a bird’s nest for days, filming and filming, waiting for the bird to come back.  Imagine if they could just leave their camera there, hidden in the brush, and film all the footage, and then have a computer “watch” all of that film, identifying the moments in time when the animal came back to the nest.  AI could track the bird, moving the electronic tripod to keep the bird in view.  That way the researchers wouldn’t have to sit and watch hours and hours and hours of footage.

Or say you wanted to make Youtube and Google far more intelligent.  Instead of just applying intelligent machines to just visual information, say we applied it to audio information as well.  Say you are wondering about the positions of a political candidate in an upcoming election.  Has that candidate ever stated their position on such and such an issue?  You could ask, “What does Ron Paul think of Medicare and Social Security?”  And then AI algorithms would search Youtube and find particular clips of Ron Paul stating his positions on those topics.  It could cut out small portions of much longer clips and bring them up to you for viewing.

Sounds neat doesn’t it?  Well that’s what’s currently being developed these days and it’s amazing technology.  That’s the sort of thing Jeff and his colleagues at Numenta are working on.  But how does it work?  First off, you can read their research papers here.

I was particularly drawn to them because I have always wondered how abstract thought took place within the human brain.  I always wondered how the brain stored information about a generic “cat”.  How would I write an algorithm that could identify a cat?  I had no idea how the brain did that.  But now I think I get it.  Take a look at this picture below.  This is the idea behind HTMs.

If you look at your brain’s neocortex, which is where this sort of thing happens, you’ll see that it is structured in layers.  Though this is a gross simplification, the sensory organs, such as your eyes, feed into the bottom layers, which then process the information upward to higher and higher layers.  Higher layers also feed back down to lower layers, but we’ll talk about that in a second.  So what’s going on there?

Basically the brain starts with simple patterns, such as a direct image input from your eyes.  The neurons then feed that information upward to the next layer up, which finds patterns in a small portion of the image.  You can see that in the HTM image above.  And then that feeds up to the next layer above it, which finds patterns in the patterns.  Then the next layer up finds patterns within the patterns, within the patterns.  And so on and so forth.  A common very simple pattern algorithm is run over and over and over, passing the results upward in a pyramid of pattern information.

The same idea applies to audio information coming into your ears.  You start with basic audio coming in from your left or right ear, which then feeds up to a higher level, and then another higher level.  Each layer looks for patterns within the layer below it, and you end up with patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns.

Going back to our cat example, the information “cat” would be a higher level concept in this pyramid, and if you traced “downward” in the pyramid you would come to individual experiences with particular cats you’ve had contact with.  So in one grand stroke, your brain is forming memories of the particular pet cat you’re playing with, but also forming generalized ideas about how cats behave in general, how they appear, and so forth.  Your brain then comes to an understand, “Ah, so this is what a cat is like.  This is how they behave.”  And then in the future your brain can identify cats and have expectations about how they behave.  For example, you’ll know to be careful when dangling your socks in front of their eyes as cats have an instinct to claw such interesting objects, possibly injuring your hand if you’re not paying attention.

Now let’s talk about the connections that feed downward.  Your brain doesn’t just passively observe the world around it – it tries to make predictions about what will happen in the future.  When I see my pet cat Meanus lying on my bed, I have had a lot of experiences with her.  I know what to expect and when I go to rub her belly, I know what she’s going to do.  My brain takes visual input from my eyes, which then triggers this pattern recognition process described above.  If finds patterns, and then patterns within the patterns, and then patterns within the patterns within the patterns, and then matches that up with, “Oh, that’s meanus!”  So those particular neurons fire and I become conscious of being in the room with my cat.  Now at the same time, my brain is constantly comparing my present experience with experiences I’ve had in the past.  Past memories of Meanus are being called up and accessed, being used to predict what she will do next.  That’s what the feed downward links do.  In particular they compare past experiences to the present, and if they’re not lining up the brain says, “Wooaaahhhh.  Something new is going on here.  Alert!  Attention, attention, focus attention on this!”

For example, if I was here typing on my computer and then Meanus stood on her hind legs and started audibly singing, “Fly me too the mooonnn, let me plaaayyyyy among the starrrssss…”  My head would spin, I’d be blown away, and then I’d think, “What the HELL IS GOING ON!”  I’d lose interest in everything else and watch in silence as Meanus crooned me a toon.  My brain would recognize the Meanus patterns but when it compared what Meanus is doing now to what she’s done in the past, it wouldn’t recognize the behavior, would consider it “weird” and out of the ordinary, and my attention would be drawn to it.  That’s because this would be violating my brain’s current mental model of the world.  Cats don’t sing!  My brain would then have to start rethinking Meanus, such as, “How is she able to sing?  Has she been possessed by spirits?  Is she being controlled by aliens?  How intelligent is she?  Am I dreaming?  Is this really happening?”  I’d have to then change my relationship to that object and how I plan to respond to it in the future.

Before going on, I’d like to bring up something which I found fascinating about all of this.  Many years ago I remember reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and he mistook this process for free will.  Or maybe this is what free will is?  He said we only notice our free will in action when our expectations are violated.  For example, we may will to place an object down on the kitchen table, but as we lay it down and let go of it, it starts to fall over and roll toward the edge of the table.  That’s when we scramble to grab it before it falls off and breaks.  Our free will decided to place the object the table, but that decision was violated by reality, and then we had to make a new decision to grab for the object.  Now, however, I understand that that’s just how the brain is structured to work — the HTM process.  It’s how that pyramid hierarchy of information processing works.  If something violates our expectations, attention is focused on that until the situation is brought under control.  Most of it is an unconscious process though, and I don’t think it explains free will.

Ok, so how does this tie to how I’ve been spending my time?  Well, first off, I’ve been studying neural computation, and how to model neural networks in software.  I want to implement something like Numenta’s HTMs and then rig a computer up to go around, processing information from cameras.  I want to store all the visual information in this HTM hierarchy and then train the system to identify objects.  Next, I want to be able to go into this huge multi-terabyte database of visual information and run a program on it which can go into that HTM database and pull out 3D spatial information.  I want to be able to say, “Computer, generate me a 3D model of my bedroom.”  It then searches its database, finds that tree of information, processes downward through it, and then builds a 3D model of my bedroom on my screen, rendered in OpenGL.  Then I can fly through it and look around.

I want to be able to walk around a place with a camera, filming things, and then show that film to my computer, let it parse in the video feeds, and build up an ever growing database of visual information.  I could show it a video clip of me walking around a college campus and then say, “Computer, build a 3D model of the buildings you saw in that video.”  It would then do so.

That’s the goal I’m working on.  I want to fully understand how our subjective sense of space works and how our brain works with space and numbers, and logic and everything else.  This HTM stuff is deeper than just space.   It’s how language and abstract thought work.  It’s how intelligence works.  This is what intelligence is.  It’s this process of finding patterns within patterns within patterns, and organizing them in a hierarchy, and making predictions with that information.  At least, that’s what I’m currently thinking intelligence is.

From what I gather, algorithms similar to this are what are being used to build intelligent computer chips.  Companies like IBM are wanting to build computer chips which process information in a way similar to these HTMs and then the computers can be intelligent.  This doesn’t get rid of normal processors, but by changing the way information is being processed, sensory type information, such as sight and sound, can be processed far more effectively and easily.

However, during the past week or so I’ve had a long diversion from my research.  I was a little burnt out from my brain research and had just taken two exams in class – math and physics.  I wanted a break and needed some time to work on something different.  It’s nice to do that here and there.  I have just acquired a new development IDE and was reading through some programming books to learn the new features.  That was nice.  I was writing some “goof off” programs to test how things work.  I ended up making a really stupid program with a paintbox which drew random lines within it.  Once I finished that I leaned back in my chair, yawned, and went for a walk.  It was a good day.

Once I got back from my walk I got to looking through my bookshelf and saw an old classic I hadn’t read in ages.  It’s called The Black Art of 3D Game Programming:  Writing Your own High-Speed 3D Polygon Video Games in C.  Now there’s a gem for you!  It was written in the early 90s and shows you how to write 3D games in DOS!  Epic!  Beyond Epic!  Why is that?  This is before the days of Windows, and DirectX, and OpenGL.  This is back when you had to write directly to your video card’s memory buffer, writing your pixels for each dot on your screen.  Memory address (X,Y) on your 320×200 screen set to some RGB value.  I was thinking, “Ah, I remember this book.  I love this book.”  Then I got to reading the section on 3D game programming, the mathematics involved, the matrices, the vector mathematics to calculate collisions, and so forth.  Then I got a wild idea.  What if I wrote a 3D engine over the weekend, rendering to Windows paintbox?  LOL.  Software rendered 3D graphics engine using the code from this ancient book.  So, that’s what I did!

I got to cranking and then made a simple Doom like game, where I was running around in 3D world.  I wrote the code to render the picture, pixel by pixel.  I had to write code to draw individual lines, to draw polygons and triangles, and to do lighting effects.  LOL.  I didn’t use any libraries of any kind.  No help.  I did it all from scratch.  I coded my 3D points in 1 by 4 matrices, which I then multiplied by rotation and translation matrices, rotating my scene relative to the camera.  I’d swing my mouse around and change my camera’s direction cosine angles and rotate my scene.  That was cool.

I logged into MSN messenger and told one of my old friends how my Saturday had been one of the best days of my life.  He didn’t seem to understand why writing a 3D graphics engine from scratch into a Windows paintbox was anything to be happy about.  But to me, I went under the hood into how virtual reality and video games work, understanding how all the fancy 3D graphics and video games of today work.  How do they render the walls, the textures, the lighting, and all of that?  How do they make it look so real?   Well, I know how it works, all the way down to drawing each individual pixel to the screen.  That’s why it cool.  I like knowing how stuff works.  I especially like programming simulations.

In the video above, you find a ray tracer, which I would like to eventually find time to program. I programmed something similar, but much more simplistic. Mine also used complete software rendering, without using any libraries. That way I had full control over how things were rendered, the physics used, and so forth. In their simulation, they blast billions of light rays into a scene, which then bounce around, physics calculates how the light bends and reflects, and then it collides with the camera. It works how reality works. My simulation I wrote over the weekend uses a series of tricks and rotations, similar to how 3D games programmed today work. Ray tracing requires too much CPU power to handle in games today, but in 20 years, I guess it will be the norm as to how games are rendered. It produces photo-realistic graphics, as you can see.

I like video games and virtual reality in particular because in that world you’re God.  Think of it this way — say you were made God for a day.  You could change anything, and make anything work however you wanted.  You could build your own world from scratch, to your every specification.  How would your world work?  Well, when you write your own video games, that’s essentially what you’re doing.  You can make any experience for the player you can imagine.  The real test is how creative you can be.  When I’m out for walks, I try to notice every little detail of this world.  I look at things both from the angle of the physicist, where everything is ordered and following laws, to the emotional and graphical, such as an artist’s perspective.  I look at the sky, with the blues and oranges and reds, or the stars flickering in the sky.  I notice specular highlights from the lights in the room shining on reflective objects, and light and soft shadows being cast from multiple light sources in the kitchen.  I think to myself, “If I were God of my own virtual reality experience, how would I program my reality to work?  What good things from my world would I keep, and what things would I change? What would people in my world experience?”  I find that doing such an exercise makes me extremely happy because it makes me focus on everything that’s awesome about this world, and learn how those things work.  Then I try to program those things into a computer, and I come to a very deep understanding of the things I love most. Also, when undergoing this process, I also have to search and find ways to bring those experiences to other people.

Richard Feynman once said, “What I cannot create I do not understand.” If you can’t create your own virtual reality similar to our own, you don’t understand the world you live in.

Oh yeah, and before I forget, you may have noticed that comments are closed.  I started getting like 500 spam comments a day from bots.  I got tired of cleaning them up.  I don’t know how to stop them, so I just closed comments down entirely.  I’ll try to work on fixing that sometime.  The internet is such a sleazy place.  Bots go around trying to create links to people’s sites, creating false sites full of viruses and spyware, all to help push some crappy website’s page ranking up in Google’s search results.  Losers.  Try writing real content and having a real website, and then maybe people would come to view your site without having to resort to tricks and lies.  You’re like Newt Gingrich, hiring companies to make millions of fake twitter followers.

I’ve spent the past few days watching a series of documentaries and mini-series, and it all has left me thinking about life’s big picture.  The first series I watched was Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: Is The West History?  Later I decided to watch Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, and have just finished watching Michio Kaku’s BBC series Time.  Watching all of these things got me in the mood to read some history, so I’ve taken a break from my normal cognitive psychology/physics studies, and thought about some other things for a while.

When you stop and think about life on rather large scale, say the past few thousand years, and look at how people in our modern society act, it’s not only comical, but sad.  They’re spoiled rotten and their expectations about what life should be and what they’re entitled to is completely out of proportion.  Life for mankind for near all of human history has been, to use Thomas Hobbes words, “nasty, brutish, and short”.  Their lives were filled with war, famine, starvation, disease, and every misery you can imagine.  They lived in fear and complete ignorance as they roamed about through the forests and the fields, trying to scrape by a meal.  They had to hunt using primitive equipment made from sticks and chipped stones, and frequently were badly injured during the process by the wild animals.  When archeologists dig up their bones which are found in caves all around the world, you see how they were maimed and injured in every conceivable fashion – broken legs, missing fingers, disfigured rib cages, and so the list goes on.  I can imagine a young man of around twenty-one years of age, out with his tribe hunting wild antelope, and as they’re surrounding one, the herd turns around and stampedes.  He watches his best friend get trampled to death and he ends up being impaled through his arm by one of those long horns.  He runs off in terror and crawls into that cave where he bleeds to death, his wife and small children wailing in tears.  Their average life expectancy was under 30, if that says anything.

Last night, after I was feeling pretty tired from studying and reading, I decided to watch a program called How TV Ruined Your Life, as it seemed to be pretty interesting.  Though the presenter is far too pessimistic for my taste, I found it fascinating to watch him give a broad overview of the types of programs on TV today.  I haven’t watched television in probably 15 years, and what little shows I watch is from the internet.  I had no idea how bad normal cable television had become.  I sat back in amazement thinking, “No way.  There’s no way people watch this…”  But they do!  You can watch it yourself if you want.

I absolutely loved the introduction to that show, so much so that I want to quote it.

“We’re living in a world where everyone expects the best of everything, with the unhinged sense of entitlement that used to be the sole reserve of insane Roman emperors…”

- Charlie Brooker, How TV Ruined Your Life – Aspiration

The question of human civilization goes something like this, “Life used to be so miserable and toilsome, but now human beings dominate the Earth and live relatively comfortably.  How did this change take place?”   What struck me was that so many things the television promotes and injects into our mind runs counter to the trends which have made great civilizations.  I’ve known for a long time that television is pretty mindless, but I never considered it harmful and evil until I really started thinking about it.  Just as Charlie Brooker said, television ruins our lives in so many ways.

One episode of Brooker’s series focuses on fear, and how the television is always drumming up fear.  When I heard that I immediately thought of a comment made by Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation series.   He showed the prows of various Viking ships and how they were intended to instill terror and apprehension in all who saw them.  They were marauders who floated up and down the rivers and sailed the oceans plundering and looting societies around them.   He then compared that to the head of a famous Greek sculpture – Apollo of the Belvedere.

“The Viking prow is a powerful work of art, more moving than this Roman head and yet this is from the figure that was once the most admired piece of sculpture in the world – the Apollo of the Belvedere.  Well, whatever its merits as a work of art, the Apollo surely embodies a higher state of civilization than the Viking prow.  The northern imagination takes shape in an image of fear and darkness, the Hellenistic imagination in an image of harmonized proportion and human reason.”

- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

Clark pointed out that a civilization requires hope and stability in order to progress to any great height.  People must have firm ground beneath their feet in order to pursue long term goals and do great things.  Anything which destroys that hope, stability and security is an evil against human progress.  He talked about the Roman empire and showed their great aqueducts, which are still around even to this day, thousands of years later.  Those things took forever to build but the people constructed them because they believed their society would be around for a long time.  They built those for us and our children.  To build things with future generations in mind, thousands of years from now, that’s just beautiful to me.   What was also fascinating to me was that the barbarians tried to destroy those aqueducts but were too primitive to even know how take down such a massive structure.

Niall Ferguson’s Civilization sets out to answer a question that he identifies as the “most interesting” facing historians of the modern era: “Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”  He wants to explain the origins behind western power.  He identifies six core factors behind our civilization’s success:  1)  Competition, 2) Science, 3) Private Property & Democracy, 4) Medicine, 5) Consumerism, and 6) Work Ethic.

To summarize it as quickly as I can: 1) Competition: you have to have a constant flow of new ideas about every aspect of society, all competing with one another.  People must be free to think about every aspect of their lives and how they want to live.  Alternatives must be set in front of them and they must be free to choose how they wish to live.  2) Science: understanding the world is the main driver of progress because it allows human beings to flow with the world around them, mold it how they wish, and live in harmony with and dominate the forces around them.  3) A private property owning democracy:  everyone must have some stake in the action and a say in how things are being run.  Home ownership is the most important.  Ferguson directs us to John Locke’s vision for Carolina, where near every citizen was a significant property owner and everyone had a vote — the American Dream.  4) Medicine:  Diseases and plagues are always ravaging mankind so medicine must be a central focus, being continually improved and researched through science, and made readily available to all citizens so their lives aren’t wasted by an early death or some debilitating handicap.  5) Consumerism:  this basically amounts to the free market determining, at least to a large extent, what that society produces.  This allows people to enjoy the comforts and joys of their labor, and for factories to produce what people really want, not what a government bureaucrat thinks people want.  It’s a form of freedom just as important as the vote.  6) Work ethic:  the society must encourage and also reward people for their hard work.  A solid work ethic must be placed into the hearts and minds of the people, with an unwavering belief that they can and will build a better world not only for themselves but for their posterity as well.

When I watched Brooker’s program on television, I saw that the “idiot box” fills people’s minds with vacuous empty content, devoid of science and an understanding of the universe, and props up false expectations of what life should be.  It puts us in competition with one another, but not the right type of competition.  True economic competition is about trying to create new products and technologies, your best ideas against other people’s.  Competition is like AMD vs Intel to make the best computer processing technology.  Television promotes a sort of inane consumerism totally geared to emotion and ego.  It focuses on making you the most beautiful, desired and revered person in the room, instead of being a truly valuable and knowledgeable human being.  It’s empty.  Today’s reality shows promote success and fortunes without doing anything for society.  You’re famous for being famous.  And when you look at the newspaper, who is being promoted and featured?  Lindsay Lohan, big brother police state, mindless comical videos of cats, and other inane things, never promoting work ethic, science, freedom, history, economics, or any of the things which make a society successful.

When we read the newspaper, why aren’t we focusing around architecture?  Why don’t we feature scientific discoveries?  Why don’t we feature medical breakthroughs? We don’t because we’re not civilized.

Have you guys ever thought about the future of mankind, or even advanced alien species?  We picture these great beings with huge heads filled with vast knowledge of the universe.  We even speculate about such great beings in sci-fis like Star Trek, searching for great civilizations.  Can you imagine finding such a species on a distant planet, with super technology, with the ability to manipulate their own genetics to make themselves into whatever they want to be, transporters to take them anywhere in the cosmos they wish to visit, the ability to turn raw energy to any form of matter they wish — and they’re sitting at their kitchen table reading celebrity gossip, psychological studies about why they feel empty and depressed, looking at ads for beauty cream for their face, all while entertaining shallow propaganda for why they should invade poorer, less technologically advanced nations, killing hundreds of thousands of their citizens.  That is not civilization.

I woke up this morning, lying in bed, and I sat wondering how I wanted to spend my summer. Mostly I want to do research in various areas, which I’ve talked about in previous posts. I also slightly considered a Youtube channel, but decided it wasn’t that great of an idea. But today I think I just came up with an awesome idea. One thing I’ve been worried about is that if I were to die tomorrow, most of the thoughts running through my head would die with me. I don’t like that idea. Sometimes I blog about the basics of things I work on and research, but since I try to make the posts self-contained and rather short, I end up covering most of the topics only superficially at a very basic level. This got me thinking.

Then a sudden insight came to mind. I thought about creating one or two new sections to my site which would link to my “life work”. What does that mean? Here’s the gist of what I want to do. I want to create a new section along the top bar of my website. It will be called “Space-Time and the Mind”. When you click that section, you’ll be directed to a sort of “table of contents” – a “book” of mine that I never finish writing. It just keeps getting better and more detailed as my life goes on. I just keep adding to it maybe twice a week as I learn more and more. As I research out a topic in depth, I’ll take time and write out detailed thoughts on the topics, tying it together with everything else I know, all organized in this “table of contents” of links, with a paragraph describing it and how it ties into the “big picture”. Instead of blogging like I do now, my posts will be sections of this “super book”, section by section, chapter by chapter. They’ll be very detailed and won’t be self contained. Sure, I’ll keep a normal blog, and from time to time write about life and other thoughts. But I want to be able to write posts that are very detailed yet people won’t feel lost reading them. Those posts won’t be self-contained in themselves, but the “book” as a whole will be self-contained.

Another awesome thing this does for me is give me a direction for my posts and how I spend my time. My posts won’t be random, based on some news article I just read, and then ranting about it. They will all flow and connect together, constantly building this ever-growing masterwork on space, time, the universe, the mind/brain, and physics. I’ve been wanting my website to be more focused, and I think this will do the trick. When I think what I have to share that is truly valuable, it’s insights related to how the brain functions, mental operations, philosophy of mind, reflections on space and time, and things of that sort. At the end of the day, those are the things which interest me most of all as well.

When you click that “Space-Time and the Mind” link, you’ll notice that table of contents page ever growing, being filled in with new topics and links. Today I’m going to start working on a detailed outline of everything I’m wanting to put in there, but here’s a short gist of what I came up with while lying in bed.

The main idea behind this is to leave a “trail” for people so that they can understand my thoughts and why I’m doing what I’m doing. The first thing that needs to be discussed relates to past philosophers and their thoughts on space, time, and mental operation. I want to overview the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Satre, William James, and some others, highlighting their contributions and reflections, giving you all the “gist” and direction. I want to talk about “ideas”, “mind”, space, time, consciousness, change, motion, eternity, the nature of numbers, how numbers can be assigned to space to form coordinate systems, and so on. After that, I want to offer my own perspective on these things, which will be the next area. It will be a subjective perspective which will be a combination of a computational perspective and modern neuroscience, going into detail of various brain areas, patient case studies, computer vision research (robotic vision), and so on. It will try to teach you what your brain is doing, how it gives a subjective sense of space/time, and how far we’ve been able to emulate these brain operations with things like computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Next I want to tie this in with modern physics, which will be somewhere in this outline eventually. Though I’m fairly comfortable with Einstein’s relativity, quantum mechanics is still puzzling to me. I want to try to give people a detailed discussion of these things. I want to show a physicist’s conception of space and time, and show what relativity theory, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory are saying about what space and time are. I’ll start with Newton, showing what insights he gave us. Next I’ll go to Einstein and his special and general theory of relativity. Then I’ll move to Bohr, Dirac, Schrodinger and other quantum physicists, telling about the strange problems we encounter once we move into the world of the very small, trying to give insights into how strange it all becomes and where the problems arise.

That’s the general idea anyway. I’m really liking this. It sounds like a huge project, but if I write one article/post for this book per week, over the period of five or six years I’ll have a HUGE book there. Then physicists and other scientists beginning the subject, searching the internet and such, will find that section and have a fantastic resource that not only offers original perspectives, but a great overview of everything. I’ll have a paved super-highway for them, showing how all of this stuff ties together and why it’s so interesting.

That also got me thinking that it’s about time to do a slight redesign of my website, as it hasn’t been updated since like 2006. I wanted to make a new graphic for the top which focused on physics, space, time, and the mind. I have some neat ideas for that, but I’ll have to surprise you all with it! Right now it shows a few of my favorite philosophers – Jean Paul Satre, Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, and Sigmund Freud. It’s not a bad graphic, but I think it would be good to change it.

I’ve been hard pressed to determine how I want to spend my summer. I thought about doing Physics research, but I decided I wanted to take some time and research some things on my own. That brings me to everything I’ve been wanting to study and learn. I have a huge pile of books here to read, and I’m going to go through some of them over the summer. Most of them are related to neuroscience and the mind. They’re detailed looks into how the brain processes different types of information and represents things. Also, I plan to spend a lot of hours studying quantum mechanics, which I still feel I don’t fully understand – and who knows if I ever will. But there’s been some technological innovations which have been … well, distracting me!

One of my dreams has been to reverse translate 2D images into their corresponding 3D environments. For example, I’d love to build a little robot which has two camera eyes, and is able to know that it’s in a 3D environment, be aware of what’s around it, how those things are moving, and successfully drive around without bumping into anything. I used to spend my time thinking about how that process of going from 2D images to 3D geometry would work, and I found it immensely difficult. In fact, the greatest minds and philosophers have been working on the problem for a very very long time (hundreds of years). Well, about a year and a half or so ago I discovered Vision Science, and later, Computer Vision.

I’ve acquired a small little library of computer vision books and have been trying to find time to study through them. Now I’m finding out that developers have released open source libraries of computer vision technology which do exactly what I want! Just last night I downloaded OpenCV (Open Computer Vision) and installed it on my computer. I developed a few simple applications with it using Visual Studio including an application that supported facial recognition. I integrated it with my webcam and it identified my face as I moved about on the screen. I was practically screaming out, “Yes! This is what I’ve wanted for ages!”

What I’m thinking of doing for my personal robot is first make the simplest robot possible. I’ll attach two webcams to a laptop and I’ll walk around the house with it and see if it successfully builds a 3D environment, properly separating objects one from one another. For example, it will build an environment of my kitchen, with the chairs, table, and so on, all located in the proper locations and orientations. Next I want to make sure that it separates the objects properly, knowing that the chairs are separate from the table, and so forth.

Then I will next program in a simple sort of mind, where I link words to these “objects” and it will be capable of identifying what it’s looking at. I will be able to stand in front of it and it will say, “Oh, that’s Jason!”

After that I want to try to program in some physics and intelligence into it. For example, I want to spin a swivel chair in front it and it to know that it’s a spinning chair, know it’s velocity information, angular momentum, and so forth. That way it will have a basic ability to anticipate what will happen in various situations. I don’t know to what degree OpenCV supports this sort of thing. I’ll have to research that out.

So as I thought about all of this, I decided to do more research over the weekend and see what else I could find. It turns out that the same group which supports OpenCV just late last year started a new open-source framework called OpenNI (Open Natural Interaction).  I don’t know all that much about it yet, but from what I’ve read, it’s all about capturing your body movements.  Check it out.

Using this I could not only identify human beings who are standing in front of the robot, but also highly anticipate their movements and behavior. Maybe I could even hook two little robotic arms to the robot and it could swing at anyone near it! (or at least anyone on my enemy list). That’d be really neat to construct.

Here’s another video of OpenNI in action.

That is just too cool! I thought about starting a YouTube channel, and I would do various videos where I talk about the same sorts of things I blog about, and other philosophical questions on my mind. I thought about using ARToolkit in conjunction with this other stuff and having dialogs with little 3D animated models on my desk. The computer vision toolkit could be reprogrammed to track something far less conspicuous. Probably I’d have it track a little … oh, what are they called – they’re little mats you have on your desk which, if you had say a cup of iced tea, you’d place the glass on top of it. I’d use that as the “platform” for my little 3D people who would show up. I could have a whole little gang of animated characters who would show up from time to time and have discussions with me. I could download 3D models online and then animate them using OpenNI, so I wouldn’t have to mess with any 3D studio Max and other complex video effects. All of this would be very time consuming, however. I don’t know if I’d have enough time to work on all of that AND do my physics research.

One such character would be a reverend. If I started talking about evolution, or arguments against God, he’d pop out and start preaching to me. “That’s the path of the devil son! Just listen to yourself!” Another character would be an evil mad scientist who pops up from time to time, who would be my “dark side”. He’d always offer a confused perspective lacking all ethical considerations. I’d also love to have a little Gary Coleman who pops out from time to time to say, “Whatchu talkin’ about?”

When I’d relate an embarassing story that happened to me, I’d first tell the story in a way that tries to “save face”. Then he’d pop up on my cup holder and say, “Whatchu talking about? You CAN’T be serious. Ya’ll, let me telling you what really happened to Jason…” Then he’d retell the same story in a way that makes me look pathetic and ridiculous, with a delivery tone similar to this clip.

I’d have the time of my life making something like that. It’d be hilarious too, but I’d need help making all of it. Like I said, it’d be VERY time consuming. Using OpenCV and ARToolkit, I could place small little markers around the hallways and be able to transform the house into literally any 3D environment. I could walk around my bedroom and it appear as if I was on the deck of the Death Star. The problem is I’d be completely reliant on 3D models others have created. I don’t have any artistic skills making 3D models or environments. I know how to render them though, and place them anywhere I want, even my own house!

I wouldn’t mind writing the scripts for a YouTube program like this, but it’s the video editing, splicing, uploading to YouTube, and all of that which I don’t have time for. Though in other ways it would save me time because I could talk about the brain and whip out a physical model for everyone to look at, show which areas are doing what, and it’d be easier to communicate all I want to communicate that way. It opens up a new window of ways I could communicate with people.

There’s one central problem to all of this — it takes time away from my research. When I think about what I want to do with my physics degree once I actually get it, I think I’m going to do work with holograms. That involves light and lasers, space, and combining images from multiple angles using tools like computer vision. It’s right up my alley and ties in with everything I’m interested in. I need to find out which universities have the best hologram research programs and start moving in that direction.

As for the YouTube program, I’d love to show, step by step, how a robot starts from a 2D image camera, analyzes it in amazing ways, and then is able to know what it’s looking at. Using OpenCV, I could show you guys, step by step how all that works. Sometimes I try to do so with words, but it’d be more awesome to show you guys the algorithms, step by step, and explain it to you. You’d watch it step by step on the screen. After the explanation I could show you the brain areas in your own mind which perform similar functions!

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I think my passion lies in understanding how the brain works, and the how the “virtual model” of reality we experience consciously differs from the deeper reality that is actually out there. I used to spend many hours and long walks contemplating how the brain stores objects and identifies them from the raw signals coming in from the eyes. Now with vision science and computer vision, I’m actually seeing how that works, which is really exciting to me. The brain probably doesn’t use the exact same algorithms that say OpenCV uses, but it likely performs something very similar. The overall idea that our subjective sense of space and identification of objects is an information processing task is probably true. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that that is the case. When I’m studying neuroscience, I find out which areas of the brain are doing these information processing tasks, and I just feel like I’ve finally found out what I am as a human being. I think, “Yes. This is what the human brain does. This is what it means to be a human being.” Of course, our brain does a lot more than just build up a concept of space and identify objects – it also has a sort of “intuitive physics” where it anticipates what objects will do in various situations, it’s able to think about objects and categorize them, produces emotions, and so on – but I’ve came to a deeper understanding of myself from all of this.

Some of those books in my “to read” list over this summer include books on how the mind represents numbers. That’s something I don’t understand. I don’t know what a number is. I was watching the videos on the edge.org website and saw Dr. Stanislas Debaene lecture on consciousness and found out that he wrote a book on just this. It’s called Number Sense: How The Mind Creates Mathematics.  I’m really looking forward to reading it.  Hopefully I’ll understand numbers after reading it.

I also don’t understand the object categorization process the brain uses. Sure, I’ve read books, such as my textbook on Vision Science, which speculate on what the brain might be doing, but I don’t feel confident in any of them. I spent several hours yesterday thinking about that problem, but no matter how much time I spend on it, I never seem to make any progress.  Unfortunately I don’t know of any detailed books on this subject, so I’m forced to think it all out for myself.  That’s a very slow process.

I have a few books on the mind by Steven Pinker which I still haven’t read.   I still haven’t read his book The Stuff Of Thought.  I plan to do so this summer.

Ugh, I never can decide what to do with myself.  I have like 100 different things I want to do at any given moment, and there’s not enough time for any of them.   I’ll have to prioritize all of this and decide how to spend my summer most effectively.

I recently finished reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography.   I can remember picking it off my shelf many times and reading the preface, thinking to myself, “This has to be good.”

What I have Lived For …
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that the saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and thought it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography Of Bertrand Russell

I’m going to try to write out some of my thoughts from reading the book, but you’ll have to bear with me since I’m writing all of this from the top of my head.  There were many things which caught my attention throughout the book.

I enjoyed reading his letters and journal entries from his youth.  I’ve always felt alienated my entire life because I have been unable to talk with anyone about the things I think about.  He had a very similar experience.  My family members are all fundamentalist Christians and they’re not open minded at all.  I remember vividly my father coming into my room and looking at my books, telling me, “Grandma only read the Bible and that’s all she needed.  The reading of many books wearies the mind.”  Other times my mother and father would tell me that the devil worked through education, warping the mind.  Needless to say, I grew up in an environment which was far from intellectually conducive.  Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandmother and she was similar in many ways.  When he wrote home talking about his work in mathematical philosophy, his grandmother had little to no interest.

Russell’s childhood was happy but when he became a teenager he felt very alone.  If he brought up any of the things he was thinking about, his family members would grow angry and disappointed in him.  He developed a defensive wall which he struggled with his entire life to bring down.  He said that when people entered the room he would always close his book, and oftentimes hide the cover from them.  Growing up he never could let his grandmother or others see what he was reading.  In my late teens I always had to do the same thing.

I was particularly interested to read the Cambridge chapter, which told of his time there as a student.  It’s interesting that he never discussed any of his professors or his classes.  None of that seemed to be of any importance to him.  From how it sounded, he learned very little from class.  Of what he did learn, he said he had to unlearn a lot of it because it was wrong.  The entire Cambridge chapter was dedicated to a student society of which he became a member.  I can’t remember the name of it now.  His adviser, who I believe was Alfred North Whitehead, recommended he become a member of this group which consisted of the brightest members of the university.  Russell was surprised to find people he could talk to about his thoughts and who responded positively to the things he said.  He spent most of his time on walks with these members, discussing philosophy, economics, politics, and mathematics.

Russell spoke about his first time falling in love, which was interesting.  He was around my age when that happened.  Her name was Alys.  She was a Puritan/Quaker, but shortly after their marriage she gave up her religious beliefs because of discussions with him.  He said they rarely had sex, though this didn’t seem to didn’t bother him all that much.  She had beliefs stemming back from her religious days that sex was an evil thing only to be done for procreation.  He was happy with her for many years and she lifted him from the rather deep depressive feelings he had been having.

I was surprised at how he lost his feelings for her.  He was on a bike ride one afternoon and then realized that he no longer had feelings for Alys.  He hated Alys’ mother, and he started to notice those traits in her.  He told about his change in feelings, and though it caused a spat between them, he stayed married to her for a long time afterwards.  Something like nine years?  He slept in a separate room and grew more and more distant from her.

After seeing many people fall in and out of love throughout my lifetime (though I myself have never done so), I suppose I’ll admit that I get pretty pessimistic when I look at love.  Basing your entire life around those sorts of feelings seems foolish to me.  One day as you’re out on a bike ride, you suddenly realize, “Huh.  I don’t feel those feelings anymore.  Time to find someone else.”  I understand that people find great joy and happiness in love, but as an outsider looking at it, at times it can look pretty ridiculous.  People are always having to start over, like hitting the reset button on their lives.  Over and over and over.

As time went on, Russell became more and more miserable.  He talked about going for walks and oftentimes thought of laying down on the train tracks to commit suicide.  He lost himself in his work writing Principia Mathematica, which he found intellectually exhausting.  If you’ve ever looked at (or possibly read) it, you’re sure to sympathize.   He said he always wanted to contribute something of true intellectual worth to humanity and felt he had finally done so when he completed that work.

If I remember correctly, he was trying to work out what was going on with what is now famously known as Russell’s paradox.  It seemed like a trivial problem to him.  Even so, he didn’t want to publish the work without figuring it out, but he felt that a grown man shouldn’t waste so much time on something so trivial.  He would go for long walks with a piece of paper in hand, telling himself, “Alright.  Today I’m going to figure out what’s going on here.”  He’d return with that same blank sheet of paper, making no progress at all.

He later had an affair with a married woman, but she was unwilling to leave her husband because he was financially well off, and she enjoyed the material comfort.  Eventually that relationship broke off and became simply platonic, owing to a dental problem.  One of his teeth was rotting out and it gave him disgusting breath.  He was unaware of it at the time but she couldn’t find a way to point it out to him.

Later, as Russell was teaching mathematical philosophy at a university ( I think ), he met a female student who he liked.  They decided that they would marry, but then Russell wanted to run for political office and thought it may cause a scandal.  I can’t remember all the details.  He said she had a sharp mind but had a dark side to her.  I think she went insane after the rejection and then committed suicide.  I feel pretty certain about the insanity, but can’t remember if she committed suicide or not, but I think she did.

I was relieved to find out that I’m not the only one who enjoys those with a dark side to them.  Russell tried to stay positive and admired those with a positive outlook for humanity, but he also found many things absurd.  He enjoyed joking about the absurdities in life.  He’d talk with others about God being a cruel sadistic tyrant, who seemed to enjoy the misery and suffering of human beings.  I myself share this sentiment, and I find countless things in this life to be completely absurd.

It reminds me a lot of a scene from the movie Se7en.  Morgan Freeman’s fellow detective, Brad Pitt, got deceived into buying a home that well, had a little surprise.  They wondered why the real estate agent only gave them a five minute tour.  It turns out that a train passed by every so often, sending the entire house into a loud vibrating rumble.

My reaction to that situation would be similar. I imagined Bertrand Russell being the same way with his friends, talking about the world around them.  The more intelligent you become, the more vivid all of the absurdities will come at you. You’ll see them more clearly each day.  I can have a very dark sense of humor but it only comes to light when I’m with the right people.

It’s getting late.  I’ll have to write more about his biography at another time.

Years ago I remember sending an email to a scientist friend of mine who, at the time, worked for Lockheed Boeing.  I asked him how he thought the brain processed the objects we see and handle.  I remember posing a dilemma I wasn’t able to figure out at the time — how did the brain know it was looking at the same object even though it rotated, changed sized, and even appearance?

The example I gave him was actually a tree stump out in the middle of a field.  At a distance the stump is just a brown and beige dot.  You can’t really make out any detail at all.  As you approach the stump, you start to see the bark and if you get even closer still, you start to see all the detailed fabric of the bark, the wood grain, and the tree rings.  In terms of retinal images on the eyeball, these are vastly different experiences.  If you were a painter, and you were to paint the stump at a distance and the stump up close, the painting would be completely different.  Yet somehow our brain  knows that the stump is the same stump.

You may think, “What’s the problem?”  Well, maybe I can pose this problem another way.  Sit down on a computer and imagine having a digital video clip of a person walking toward the stump.  Now you have to write a computer program that examines each image from the video, one by one, see how the colors change, analyze them in some complex way, and know that it’s looking at blades of grass in a field, that you’re an observer standing so many feet above the ground, and that you’re approaching a tree stump.  How would you store each blade of grass?  How would the algorithm know that the blade of grass in one image is the same blade of grass in the next?  How would it know about the tree stump?  What sort of storage mechanism would you use to store the information about the stump, the grass, and the spatial relations between everything?  How much detail would you keep? How would you relate them in a time sequence?

I pondered away at the problem for another two years and I slowly made some headway, but it was very difficult.  I can remember one evening going out to Lowes and buying a bunch of meter sticks and heading out to my backyard.  I sat out there for four hours staring at meter sticks laid out across the yard.  I walked toward them, away from them, and rotated them every which way.  After a while I thought to myself, “My God, the brain is simply amazing.  However it does manage to achieve this, it must be so complex that it’d take a lifetime to figure out.”

Though I didn’t know it at the time, it turns out that very smart people at M.I.T. and other universities had been working on this problem for decades with computer vision.  When I first figured out such a subject existed, I was like an elated school boy given a bowl of ice cream and chocolate milk.  It turned out that they have had algorithms since the late 1980s which could process objects and their orientation in space.  I was practically ripping the books open once they arrived from Amazon screaming in my head, “How did you guys do it!  How!”

I opened up David Marr’s book Vision and I was greeted with this introduction,

“What does it mean, to see?  The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s, too) would be, to know what is where by looking.  In other words, vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.

Vision is therefore, first and foremost, an information-processing task, but we cannot think of it just as a process.  For if we are capable of knowing what is where in the world, our brains must somehow be capable of representing this information – in all its profusion of color and form, beauty, motion, and detail.  The study of vision must therefore include not only the study of how to extract from images the various aspects of the world that are useful to us, but also an inquiry into the nature of the internal representations by which we capture this information and thus make it available as a basis for decisions about our thoughts and actions.  This duality — the representation and the processing of information — lies at the heart of most information-processing tasks and will profoundly shape our investigation of the particular problems posed by vision.”

Marr wrote this book before I was even born, but I believe he somehow was thinking of me.  Several hundred pages later, he had done just what he set out to do — give a series of algorithms and processes the brain might use to parse objects out of the images we see, and then store them in some usable format which we can use to make decisions.  It turns out I was correct about one thing — vision is practically a miracle.

Scientists from all over the world have been working on these issues and they’ve came up with so many clever ideas trying to reverse engineer what the brain is doing for us.  It turns out the problem I was thinking of has a fancy scientific name vision scientists use: the inverse problem.  Quoting from my other great book, Vision Science:  Photons To Phenomenology,

“1.2.3 Vision as an “Inverse” Problem

We have now described how light reflected from the 3-D world produces 2-D images at the back of the eye where vision begins.  This process of image formation is completely determined by the laws of optics, so for any given scene with well-specified lighting conditions and a point of observation, we can determine with great accuracy what image would be produced.  In fact, the field of computer graphics is concerned with exactly this problem:  how to render images on a computer display screen that realistically depict scenes of objects y modeling the process of image formation…”

Ah, computer graphics.  My love in life — programming computers to do fancy 3-D graphics, virtual environments, and simulations.  I was floating away as I read that.  I thought, “I’m right at home in this world.”  Vision Science continues,

“In effect, the program simulates the optical events of photon emission, reflection, transmission, and absorption to construct an image of a “virtual” environment that does not exist in the physical world.  Such programs allow the effects of different orders of light reflection to be illustrated (e.g., in Color Plate 1.1 A-D) because the program can be stopped after each cycle of simulated reflection to see what the image looks like.  This is not possible with real optical image formation.”

Mmmm.  Ray-tracing.  Reflective surfaces.  Specular highlights.  Dynamic lighting.  Mirrors. I can remember the first book I learned 3D graphics programming from.  It’s called The Black Art of 3D Game Programming, written by Andre LaMothe.  I still have it here.  It’s a gem.  It was one of the first books out on the subject.  It’s old school.  Real old school.  New books use OpenGL or DirectX to do all the rendering for you.  LaMothe does everything by scratch, rendering each line and polygon, pixel by pixel.  That’s how real programmers do it!  I can remember the early chapters on mathematics and line drawing.  He loads up the screen to 320×240 VGA, then he shows you how to draw a line from X1, Y1, to X2, Y2.  He writes directly to the video card’s memory buffer.  Next you establish your 256 color palette.  Yeah baby, those were the days!  Then you draw colored polygons, pixel by pixel.  Next up, matrices and transformations, camera positions and projections.  You scale and distort those polygons based on the observer’s position.  Then the later chapters he gets into lighting.  He gets into the physics of how surfaces reflect light and how you shade those polygons differently based on the relative positions of the light sources and the observer.  To save CPU cycles various optimizations, such as binary space partitions are introduced.  Visual illusions and effects, such as motion parallax are discussed… *Heart races… faints like a school girl meeting Justin Bieber*

Sorry, the sheer epicness of the subject matter being discussed made me faint.  I can’t stress how much fun it is to program simulators that say emulate mirrors, especially using OpenGL.  You use matrices and transformations to emulate them.  What you do is render your scene normally without the mirror.  Then you lay out a stencil over everywhere but the pixels where your mirror is located.  Then you get the mirror’s surface normal vector and render your scene again, but change your camera position as if you’re standing behind the mirror at just the right distance, aligned with the mirror’s surface normal.  So for every mirror in the scene you do multiple rendering passes.  It takes up a lot of CPU cycles and back when I was first programming these sorts of things computers weren’t near as powerful.  I think my first simulator which had a mirror in it was running on a Pentium II 450 Mhz, so I had to be careful not to overload it.  It’s not much of a simulator if it runs at 3 frames a second!  It was even more fun rending mirrors looking into mirrors.  Or even more fun, distortions caused by curved mirrors!  Back to Vision Science,

“The early stages of visual perception can be viewed as trying to solve what is often called the inverse problem: how to get from optical images of scenes back to knowledge of the objects that gave rise to them.  From this perspective, the most obvious solution is for vision to invert the process of image formation by undoing the optical transformations that happen during image formation.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this.  The difficulty is that the mathematical relation between the environment and its projective image is not symmetrical.  The projection from environment to image goes from three dimensions to two and so is a well-defined function:  Each point in environment maps into a unique point in the image.  The inverse mapping from image to environment goes from two dimensions to three, and this is not a well-defined function:  Each point in the image could map into an infinite number of points in the environment.  Therefore, logic dictates that for every 2-D image on the back of our eyes, there are infinitely many distinct 3-D environments that could have given rise to it.”

Ouch!  An infinite number of possible 3-D environments could give rise to each 2-D image.  No wonder I was having such difficulties figuring out how this worked!  But in comes Herman Helmholtz, one of the greatest physicists to ever live, and the founder of vision science.  He has a brilliant idea.  He theorizes that the brain makes certain assumptions about the environment, and those assumptions constrict those 3-D environmental possibilities.  These constrictions will allow the brain to construct, or at least estimate, a model of the environment by making educated guesses about what we might be looking at.  Keyword is MIGHT.  But what sorts of assumptions are we talking about?  Ah, here is where life gets interesting!

As you know, we humans evolved here on planet Earth, roaming about the fields under the sun and moonlight.  You find out that the assumptions mother nature filled our brains with are environmental conditions common to planet Earth.  For example, our brains unconsciously assume that light comes from above us.  Take a look at these images below.

You’ll notice that three of dents look like holes, whereas one looks like a bump.  That’s how your brain parses in the color shading and gives a spatial meaning to the picture.  The bottom left bump juts out whereas the other three are holes.  But what happens if I simply flip the image over?

Wild huh?  The three holes now become bumps, and the bump becomes a hole.  To those who don’t understand how the vision system works, these come across as party tricks and neat coincidences.  But this is no cheap trick.  This is very important.  Carefully examining the small and strange things in life oftentimes lead to the most important discoveries.  These sorts of things are key to understanding the very nature of how our brain gives a sense of space and time!  This is important — your brain builds a virtual model of space based on those 2D images on the back of retina, but it has to make certain assumptions about the environment in order to do so.  When those assumptions are not true for that instance, then we experience what we commonly call a “visual illusion.”

What you see is not necessarily what’s there.  Frankly, I’d argue that what we see in the virtual models in our heads is pretty far from what reality actually is.  For example, we see a stone as a solid object, whereas it’s actually mostly empty space.  We don’t see it moving, but actually the atoms of which it’s composed are vibrating and wiggling all over – not to even mention the strange quantum effects going on.  I don’t claim to fully understand the quantum effects yet, so I won’t even talk about them.

So how does the brain construct this model of 3D space?  And Jason, you’re saying space isn’t actually 3D?  Nope, it isn’t.  Einstein’s relativity tells us we live in something more akin to a 4-D space-time that curves and is very complicated.  Quantum mechanics tells us reality is even stranger.  But, probabilistically speaking, the photons that end up making it to our eyes have consistent enough probabilistic behavior to generate similar images each time and our brains have evolved to generate semi-accurate models or reality based on the most probable conditions and scenarios on the Earth.

Just to name a few factors the brain uses, it looks at shading (making assumptions about lighting), it parses out 2D contours and generates a sort of 2D line-drawing of each picture, then analyzes the angles and curves of those 2-D lines, building up objects and space.  It looks at shadows, it looks for horizon lines and uses a neat trigonometric relationship to establish depth, it looks for convergence in the 2-D lines which it parsed out and based on things like their slopes and where they intersect, generates surface normals and orientations.  It compares the images from both eyes and sees how much the images differ (binocular effects).  It builds up a gigantic database of objects which it is constantly comparing and analyzing and using in its calculations.  It looks at the textures of things, such as the statistical similarities in the colors of a field of green grass and it looks at how that texture pattern shrinks and blurs as it heads off into the distance and generates the depth of the surface from that.  It looks for a dulling of color, which happens for hills in the distant background as a lot of the light of lower-wavelengths is scattered as it travels toward you.

The 2-D line parsing system is pretty neat to understand.  Take a necker cube.  You’ve all seen it.

From the image you can see the necker cube, and the two possible ways your brain interprets it.  One of the things you learn in vision science is how these lines are parsed out and how say the vertex patterns are analyzed and interpreted.  It’s really neat stuff.  But sometimes the lines can play havoc with your brain, which tries to assemble the lines into surfaces and assemble the surfaces into space, but then finds it to be impossible.  Take the famous Penrose triangle.

Your brain starts to parse out the lines and form surfaces but then says, “Wait a minute.  This surface won’t go with this other surface.”  These are called impossible objects, but they are neat to look at and ponder.

Everything gets really complicated in vision science.  Different information starts to conflict.  The 2-D line contours which your brain parses out may say that space is doing one thing, but then the shading information may say another.  The brain has a whole complex system it uses to make the best guess as to which information source best represents what you’re looking at.

The brain also does more than this though.  We’ve just scratched the surface of all your brain is doing.  It also groups things together by their similarities in color, their similarities in size, similarities in orientation, similarities in “fate” (it calculates a trajectory of where an object is moving), it looks for parallel and symmetric patterns in the image, searches for continuities, and the list goes on.

I’ll have to write more on all of this at a later time.  What interests me about all of this is that the model our brain builds up is inaccurate and the assumptions it makes aren’t true all the time.  As Richard Dawkins points out in his books and many of his lectures, our brain assumes slow walking speeds and medium sized objects.  Our brain builds up a model that is intended to lug our big body around and help it walk from one place to another, and do common things like find something to eat.  But the world of much larger than our bodies, and much smaller than our bodies, follows different rules than the model in our head.  For example, if you accelerate up toward light speed the object shapes start to morph due to the Lorentz contraction.  Though your brain tells you, “This coffee mug has this cylindrical shape, with this circular bottom and open top, in reality the cup’s shape is much stranger.  If you were the lay that cup on your kitchen table and then zoom past it at near light speed, it would bend and morph and do all kinds of weird things.  There’s actually relativity simulators you can download for the computer.  One is called Real Time Relativity, which is neat to play around with.

If you’d rather just watch a video of optical relativistic effects, I found a video below.   In it, you can see how matter starts to behave at near light speeds.  You see that objects begin to bend in weird ways and their colors change.

It’s only weird to us though because we never see this happen.  Once again, our brain makes an assumption that we’ll never travel that fast, and so it makes assumptions about geometry and space which only hold up if we’re moving slowly.  I still haven’t mastered quantum mechanics, but from what I can tell, it seems our brain’s views on causality and time are flawed as well.  I’ll write about that when I feel more comfortable with quantum physics (if that ever happens).

Combine all this with neuroscience and how brain activity gives rise to consciousness, and you’re getting the gist of where my research takes me.  It’s nice to see that things I had no idea about just a few years ago are starting to make sense to me now.  I suppose that’s growth and development.

I can remember as a child always being bored.  Each year during summer vacation, I remember spending hours and hours just wandering around the neighborhood, riding my bicycle, bored out of my mind.  Nowadays I’m never bored.  I can’t really remember the last time I was bored.  Today, I have such a deep fascination with the universe and our world that there’s always something to study and figure out.

I think to be bored is to be disconnected from reality and our universe.  If you find life boring and mundane, I think you have no insight into what’s really going on in the world around you.  I simply find it impossible that someone who has realized the strangeness and beauty of the world around us can actually sit around and have nothing to do.  I have to assume that you’re living in a box reality, disconnected from everything around you.  I’m not picking on anybody though.  From what I observe, our world is filled with mental cages and their priests cajoling others to immerse their minds in fictional “bubble” realities.

The other day I attended a student laboratory session and two women were talking about physics.  One said, “Physics is counter-intuitive.  It’s so difficult to grasp.”  The other agreed.  They started talking about Newton’s three laws of motion and found it extraordinarily difficult.  They hated their physics classes.  I felt like jumping into their conversation but I stayed silent.  I did find their way of viewing things odd and “counter-intuitive”.  I wanted to ask them this, “Would the world be more interesting if it were simplistic or complicated?  Isn’t it better that the world is interesting and filled with mystery and wonder?”  The way they think about the world and understanding it robs them of the pleasures of finding things out.  They have a mindset that physics, mathematics and other sciences are boring and unnecessarily difficult.

But once again, why?  We don’t feel that way about the difficulties inherent in learning to play an instrument.  We don’t look at a guitar and say, “This guitar is too complicated.  Think of all the chords it can play and all the different musical styles it’s capable of emitting.  Who would want to learn all of that?”  So why say that about mathematics?  Mathematics is no different.  Mathematics can not only model every possible sound wave that guitar can generate, but it can tell you about tensions in each string, the average velocities of the air particles zipping around the room, different harmonics and why they work together, and the list goes on and on.

And you know, the more mathematics you do, the less intimidating it becomes.  Once you start getting over the first hurdles you begin to think of mathematics and physics more like the physicist Ernst Mach did.  He left us with a wonderful quote about mathematics.

“Strange as it may seem, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought, and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.”

- Ernest Mach

In different physical situations, understanding what objects will do is pretty much impossible without physics and mathematics.  Something with so many interrelated parts, all changing in varied ways, can be modeled very simply using equations and variables to represent each change.  You sum them up and lo and behold it all behaves just as the equations predict.  The fact that our universe can be understood at such a deep level by such simplistic equations that we can understand will baffle any thinking person.

But all of that aside, the universe of ours is not boring and understanding it is far from boring.  The most everyday “mundane” events in your life are more complicated than you’ll ever be able to imagine.  I could go into all the things your brain is doing, or talk about how crazy the light is which is bouncing around the room, but I don’t feel like talking about that.  I talk about those sorts of things all the time because that’s what I find most interesting.  There is so much more science and research going on to blow people’s minds.  I’m going to just start talking about kinds of things which should blow your mind if you just sit and think about them.

Everything around you is composed of atoms of different elemental types.  All that distinguishes one atom from another is the number of protons in its nucleus.  Inside those atoms are protons, electrons, and neutrons.  For now we’ll ignore talking about quarks which compose the protons and neutrons.  Try to wrap your brain around this:  Why is every electron identical to every other electron?  Why do all these protons and neutrons behave just like the others?  What makes them do so?  Why are they all clones, countless copies of these same physical entities? Is every universe like this?

Isn’t it just kind of weird that that’s the case?  You may say, “I don’t care”, but you know, you’re made of atoms.  The brain generating your consciousness is made of atoms.  They whiz around and do their thing and I suppose you can go about your life never thinking about how any of that works, but you know what?  It’s all there, even if you never take the time to think about it.  If you peel back the hood of this reality and stare closely at it, you’ll see it’s made of these tiny little atoms and they’re strange!

Have these atoms always existed?  Are they indestructible or can they be dissected?  How about the atomic parts?  Can they be taken apart?  Can I keep taking these things apart indefinitely?  Is an electron some infinitely complicated thing, composed of infinitely many parts, or is it some ultimately simple thing which can’t be dissected?

How about the space in which these atoms exist.  We walk across the room.  What’s so complicated about it?  Did you know that if you shoot off in a rocket ship at near light speed, make a short run around in space, and then loop around and return, while maybe six months may go by for you, thousands of years may have gone by for the rest of us on Earth.  I’m serious.  Just stop for a moment and think, “Is that real?  How does that work?  What does that even mean?  What is this world I live in?”  Take some time out of your busy life and learn about space-time.  You won’t regret it.  It’ll change how you see everything.

I personally love to study neuroscience and think about how brains work, both in us and in different animals.  I’m sure there’s millions of people who have sat back and thought, “I wonder what my cat is thinking.”  You should study neuroscience and figure out!  Learn and do experiments and figure out how much a cat really understands.  Learn how brains work and see the similarities between each species’ brain and how they differ.  You quickly start seeing patterns and evolutionary trends.  Then it dawns on you, “This cat of mine really sees me, just like I see it.  When I rub its belly, it feels me giving it a massage.  It’s conscious and alive.”  Then you pause, take a deep breath, and start thinking, “What else is conscious around me?”  You stare at a fly crawling about on your kitchen table.  Does it see and smell?  You’re telling me there’s consciousness operating inside that fly?  Probably so.

A lot of people won’t believe in evolution.  It’s a shame because it completely disconnects them from how life works.  Think about what’s in this next clip.

These aren’t party tricks.  If you research it out you find that a Bonobo understands language at about the same level as a child, say an eight year old.  Is it just a random coincidence that the Bonobo is very closely related to us genetically, has a body type almost identical to ours, comes from the same common ancestor, and understands language a lot like we do?  Is it just a coincidence that we can open up different ape and monkey skulls and see that their brain is laid out very similarly to ours?  In fact, many neuroscientists studying vision science do research on monkeys and their brains because they’re so similar.  None of this is coincidence.  They’re a closely related cousin, as are chimpanzees as well.

I’m convinced that monkeys and apes out in the forest see and feel just as we do.  They wake up in the forest and experience an entire life just as you’re experiencing yours.  They’re not soulless zombies.  Neither is your cat.  Our belief systems, such as our religions, have disconnected us from these sorts of truths.  We think, “Well does my cat go to heaven?”  There is no heaven.  Get out of your religious bubble.  None of it makes sense because it was all made up in the first place.  Life is much deeper in complexity.

Without thought we destroy animal habitats not even thinking about the torture we’re causing conscious beings of all sorts.  Most of the time it’s hard enough to get people to consider the feelings of other human beings, much less other living creatures.  We’re finally starting to get animal rights for dogs and cats but animal rights need to be extended to more and more species, including cows and pigs whose treatment in animal farms is abhorrent.  And if we can’t support our population without torturing and destroying all the other life around us, then we need to decrease our population and be more considerate.

My personal journey trying to figure this world out has led me to such strange things.  It’s made life so much more fascinating and interesting.  Richard Dawkins gave an entire lecture on this subject.  I can tell his life has been a similar sort of journey.  The way he vividly describes the problems shows how much he’s thought about it all.

And I’m sure you’ve looked in the mirror and asked yourself, “What am I?”  You had to have.  I do all the time.  You’ll probably think, “Oh, I’m this physical body.  That’s what I am.”  And people even seem to think that scientists think this.  They claim that those who believe in evolution think we’re nothing but this physical body.  That’s not what I read or hear.  Listen to Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist talk about the virtual world we live within in our heads.  He talks about how we’re NOT our physical bodies; the physical matter of which our body is composed changes all the time.  We’re constantly losing material, cells die and are rebuilt and so on.  That’s why we’re always needing to eat new food and get our vitamins.

To quote Richard Dawkins himself from this lecture,

“Steve Grand points out that you and I are more like a wave than a permanent thing.  He invites us to think of an experience from your childhood.  Something you remember clearly.  Something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there.  After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you?  How else would you remember it?  But here is the bombshell, you weren’t there.  Not a single atom that is within your body today was there when that event took place.  Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you.  Whatever you are therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.  If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does because it is important.”

- Richard Dawkins

I’ve said before that I feel strongly that the evidence suggests that matter temporarily forms into various patterns generating waves which then somehow generate consciousness in us – possibly in a spirit of some sort.  I normally use “spirit” as a sort of container word to the receiver of these waves, the impressions on which give us conscious experience.  That’s not to say our spirit is anything like our physical body – they have nothing in common.  When you die, your memories, thoughts, and experiences all die with you.  But, that’s not to say you won’t “wake up” as something else after you die, when matter once again starts transmitting the proper waves which your spirit then receives.  I don’t see any reason to fear death, or even that absolute death exists.  Matter is never destroyed, the energy only changes forms.  And what’s stopping the matter from once again coming into the patterns of my current brain and me living my entire life over again?  I’m not a skilled enough physicist to say on that matter, but I don’t think we die and I’m feel pretty certain we aren’t sent to hell or even heaven.

There seems to be a constant struggle for different forms to keep their existence within this world where matter is ever flowing from place to place.  With life on planet Earth, these self-replicating cells, using DNA, build up these complicated bodies (which is what we currently are), which then hold onto their form for a brief time before returning to the dust.  Then those components are all reused for different life-forms.  Your rotting body may then be used by a tree, your atoms essentially becoming tree leaves.

I find it pointless to desire “eternal life”.  Why won’t you move on to what’s next?  Why do you cling to your human form and wish to be it for all eternity?  Everything points toward our universe being infinite.  Who knows what else the universe has in store for all of us.  Move on and bravely step into the void to what’s next.

I find this worldview wonderful, and not only that, the evidence seems to suggest it as true.  There’s no reason to regret ever having made mistakes.  It’s not the end of the world, as they say.  Maybe I’ll get the chance to relive this same life an infinite number of times.  If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is true, all possibilities exist and have always existed.  Somehow our consciousness is moving through various possibilities and giving us different experiences.  I have a very strong hunch that even though things are always changing, in another sense, every possibility, including the past I remember, will continue to exist in some way, either as a possibility or actually existing in some parallel dimension of some sort.

I hope one day we can come a deeper understanding of this problem and prove for certain something like this.  I wish people would let go of that idea that, “This is my one life.  I better live it to the fullest.”  Then once life doesn’t seem to give them everything they think it should they start stepping on everyone around them, climbing to the top of the greasy pole.  If this worldview I’m advocating is true, then life isn’t unfair.  You’re currently experiencing something different FOR NOW, but that’s not to say you won’t experience all the other things as well.  This view gets rid of envy and jealousy, and worry about all those sorts of things in this life.  But then again, maybe someone would argue that I created this worldview to comfort myself because not everything in my life has played out like I’ve wanted it to.  *Shrugs*  I’ll be studying more quantum mechanics and physics and seeing where that all leads me, but from what I can tell, this worldview has a pretty strong backing with the evidence.

There’s a lot more I want to say but this entry is getting long enough as it is.