It's Gonna Rain

Today's Weather Report - Foggy - Really Foggy. Why do some people not think they need lights on days like this? There were loads of white vans suddenly appearing out of the gloom like mobile buildings. Yuk!

Today's Soundtrack - Reich Remixed - Steve Reich and oh other people like Tranquillity Base, Coldcut and Howie B.

Look for the risk in everything. You get people who complain that police should be out catching real criminals when they are stopped for speeding or bad driving. Now when one of those drivers kills someone, who is the criminal? Even if they don't mean to kill someone, there is still Manslaughter or Murder of a certain degree. They have still killed someone. I would suspect that like for like there is far more risk of killing someone with a car than by breaking into his or her house. Obviously you could analyse this into the ground (Reductio ad absurdum?) and come out with all sorts of reasons for the police to concentrate on either. However when I read things like the letter sent into our local (very looooocaaaal) newspaper in which someone complained about the wear and tear on her car caused by the breaking and acceleration due to speed humps, I despair. It seems that people think that such things are put there specifically to annoy them rather than to slow them down. Our road is quite quiet but it is used as a cut-through by a few people at rush hour, which is quite annoying. It is one way but as far as I am concerned it should be blocked off at one end. My application to become a citizen of Tunbridge Wells is in the post and WILL be accepted I am sure.

I have just read this article (Where Bob? Where?) regarding the six degrees of freedom theory applying to email as well as other more physical relationships. I was thinking that maybe we could use this linkage which is defined in address books, as some form of gigantic computer. The links are like neurones and so this fits nicely with what I was talking about yesterday. The email network would become one giant neural net. How would you program it? This reminds me of another article about a soupy collection of rat neurones used to control a robotic drawing arm many thousands of Kilometres away. The rat brain is no longer conscious but it is organised in a way that produces information like a computer would.

There is so much for a person to do out there. My daughter keeps asking me if I know everything which is flattering for a few seconds until you realise that you have to dispel this idea and say something along the lines of no one person can know any more than a fraction of everything there is to know. Anyway, how do you define what is everything? Do you include the positions of all particles in the Universe like the great clockwork. Quantum reality means that physically knowing that is impossible. Is it the ability to answer every possible meaningful question? Does that refer to the past, present and future? Remove the Future, as that is always unknowable. You see that it is impossible to know even what knowing everything actually means. I know that is semantics but it is frightening to realise that it is impossible to even know something like exactly how many people were born on this planet yesterday.

The gradual realisation of the complexity of the world as you grow up is one of the most disheartening things there is. Young children think that the world is defined and that everything in their experience and that of the people closest to them is knowable. I think it is useful to keep some of that childish desire to understand everything or at least think that it is possible to understand everything if you want to. My daughter is reading the first Mary Poppins book at the moment (Stemming from an obsession with Dick Van Dyke - more on that later) and the chapter we have just read is one about how the baby Twins, John and Barbara, are able to talk to the wind and the sunlight and animals just as Mary Poppins herself is able to. I felt quite sad at the end when the twins grew up and forgot all this after having denied fiercely that they would ever forget. It seems to stir something as if we all have a residual memory either of ourselves as children and having a real connections with the natural world or through some genetic memory of a time when we were closer to the natural world. Of course this suggests that we are a special species, the summit of evolution, where in reality we are simply the biggest beneficiaries of a series of lucky accidents to this planet which evolution takes advantage of.

But are we not all connected in one long line of descent back to the slightly complicated chemicals, which combines all those millions of years ago? There is a double episode of Star Trek (TNG) which explains why all the various species scattered around the galaxy are of the same basic plan. It involved some ancient race that spread their own DNA around resulting in Humans, Cardassians, Vulcans etc. It was obviously simply a way of removing some of the more glaring inconsistencies of the show and hence getting rid of the need to create really strange species like super intelligent shades of the colour blue or the giant intelligent mould in the Rama books. The Star Trek plot actually had an intelligent species being the agents for the spread of their own patterns through space. Now I am not completely ruling this out; we may do this ourselves one day, but the fact that life has evolved on its own on this planet and has so many different forms, means that you could get the same result without any big co-ordinated effort. In fact, that is more likely. Deus Ex Machina indeed.

This was where I came in yesterday but could not remember all the stuff in my head. Something has triggered all this off. All this complexity, the imagination, the industry the ability to write Mary Poppins books is simply amazing. Even without any intelligent life or even matter in the Universe, there would be maths and this exists by default as it were. If you suddenly removed all matter from this universe maths would still be there. A single God-like observer would be able to determine the maths from first principles. I can't imagine a universe where 2 + 2 does not equal 4. It may be possible but we will never know. There you go; an unknowable thing. Does 2 + 2 equal 4 everywhere? This sounds dangerously like the mutual exclusivity of The Answer and The Question in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The signalling of which I think suggests it is time to stop. And you thought all I was going to write about was the weather.