High Tech Looms

How about throwing it all in and going off and being the warden on an island somewhere? Bardsey would be nice and not too far away though not always as sunny as in this picture. My problem at the moment is too much worry. Having said that, over the last few days some form has calm has returned, almost like the heady days just after I started work here all those years ago. I never really worried about anything other than little local difficulties. The recent philosophical attitude of mine may be due to an increase in the amount of work I have to do but it could just be acceptance that I can't do anything about the things which I worry over and hence there is no point in worrying about them. Zen Hey!

I heard that live recordings of public Classical Music are now virtually impossible because of the almost continuous sound of mobile phones ringing in the auditoria. Is that sad. Nothing was said about the fact that the performance is actually spoiled for the majority of the audience who have switched off their phones. Someone will invent a machine to filter out these sounds. Actually, the processing power is probably already available. In fact I did read about a fantastic new device which can listen in on a hubbub (lovely word) of conversation and pick up each individual speaker and transcribe the speech. Sounds a little fantastic to me. There is a problem these days in that technology does so many fantastic things these days that is is almost impossible to determine the border between what is and is not possible with the technology. This border is not a smooth transition. Some fields advance far ahead of others and not usually because of any technical issue, but because the people working on the various fields are pushed by more down-to-earth reasons, usually of economy or military need. The average person, told that a spy Satellite can be contacted via the web and instructed to point a camera at them to check what they were reading and that it could do it even though they were in a house with the curtains drawn, would probably believe it. This is not to say it can't be done. If I stick my neck out here and say that it is currently impossible to do this, then I am opening myself up to being proved wrong possibly because it can already be done. I don't think it can but I am ready to be proved wrong. Within ten years I think it will be possible to do this and to have a computer which will simulate the entire world to a level where you can walk through a photo-realistic version of it and interact with 'intelligences' within it. I am sure that small portions of the world are already modelled like this. Yes! I know about 'The Matrix'. This has reminded me of a story in Fortean Times which said that some people believed that we were all intelligences in giant game. Some philosophers believe similar things regarding us being pure thoughts in the mind of God. It could be that only one of us exists as an entity with full intelligence in the mind of God. All other entities are purely sensory input to that one entity. In that case, which one of us is it? It is me of course unless God has put these words into your sensory perception and the one true entity is you. What happens if this idea is propagated through the mind of God in the manner of a meme? If the idea becomes popular with many people, then it can be propagated to the one true entity through its myriad sensory interactions. God does not have to think of a lot of things if there is only one True entity. Only the things which affect that one true entity need to be thought about in the mind of God. If the OTE is me, then I cannot be in all places in the world at once. I can go to weird places on a whim and having previously read about them and seen pictures of them, God only has to 'flesh out' these places to make them real and to fit with my ideas of what they should be like. Actually, He doesn't even have to get it 100% correct. How many times has a place not met with your expectations of it when you get there. It only has to fit a basic description, and even some plainly wrong things can be explained away as Deja Vu or other such weird mind tricks. The world is consistent as far as I can see. I never see things which make me think that someone is controlling me. There are the occasional odd things where something you have just thought about for the first time appears in print soon afterwards, but with the world so complex, and with so many interactions, this sort of co-incidence is bound to happen (Sorry Bro. There is no such thing as synchronicity). Does it not amaze you what you can actually think about? The Universe is complex and yet the mind, your mind, my mind, is created in a physical object which constitutes only a tiny part of the whole universe. We can create worlds as different from the real one as possible but they will be just as complex if not more complex because we can imagine whole things in simple concepts. I know what the Universe looks like, out as far as the furthest stars that exist 'now' (now as near as we can define it) and as far back as the earliest possible things which happened and before that. Even if there was nothing before the Big Bang ( and that is now not clear because of 'brane theory), I can still pretend in my head that there was. Can it not be true that we can be our own gods and have our own universes. Just because I sit here and can quite clearly feel certain that my mind is situated in my brain behind my eyes, does not mean that I am a physical person. I can write a computer program which simulates a tiny part of intelligence and for that program I can tell it that it is a person within the confines of what it knows about its world. Could we not just be the same only to a much higher degree? We get into recursion then. I could write a program which I make believe has written a program which it makes believe has written a program and so on.

I suspect that this comes across as self-indulgent sophistry though if you look I have not said that anything above is true. The problem is that physics suggest that at small scales, the Universe behaves in mysterious ways as staggeringly complex as anything I have said above. Could it not be true that we believe that our existence to be normal and un-mysterious as we do because it is familiar? The Universe is complex and set in the realms of equations but it is still fantasic and beautiful. I think this leads on to Unweaving the Rainbow doesn't it?

Think complexity and you will find complexity. Think Simplicity and you will find yourself.