Thursday, August 07, 2003

Welcome to the ICA

As a country we are supposed to have the hottest day ever but here in Liverpool we have sea-mists and even rolling fog. The temperature is consequently not much above 22 c.

So having got the weather out of the way what else can I write about?

I had one of those rare moments (rare for me anyway) when the complexity of the world got the better of my rationality and I began to think about how all that complexity got created. I hate going into this in any detail because it goes against most of what I believe and it is very difficult to put into words. It is one of those things that your brain 'understands' in one of its many non-verbal modes but is impossible to write down.

I got the latest News letter from Simon Singh today. The first entry had a link to an article he had written to the Telegraph regarding Derren Brown. Click here to read the article which I agree with quite strongly. There was a magic revealed program on TV this weekend and I am sure that the magicians were bluffing with their revelations. The solutions seemed in-elegant and although I couldn't think of possible alternative methods in all cases, you know that ALL magic is simply conjuring so there must be a way to do it. It has just struck me now that all of the mysteriousness behind all this means nothing against the amazing things that exist as part of nature anyway. The creation of the complexity of all living things is magic when compared to our general experience of the world. We accept that our own minds can carry out tasks of extreme complexity simply because they can rather than because we understand how they do them. As I have said before, consciousness is not yet fully understood in terms of the way the chemical side of things interacts with the physical aspects of the brain and yet it must work because we exist and carry out these tasks. This of course denies the existence of any super-natural machinery at the level of the soul but even without a full scientific explanation it still works using simple components put together to form implied complexity. Like they used to say at the beginning of the Six-Million-Dollar Man, the existence of the human arm is proof that a properly constructed mechanical version of the arm will work. The key being the words "Properly constructed".

What if there is a soul? Maybe it is a sort of mathematical concept that fits into the real-world spaces created by the mess of neurons in the brain. Maybe in this version of math which exists in this universe, some form of intelligence is inevitable. It would be like a meaningful text falling out of a mathematical formula. Well that does occur doesn't it? Somewhere in the digits of Pi is my Phone Number or if you like and can be bothered to convert Pi in to letters, there is my thesis or maybe you would like music, there is a Mozart piece, all Mozart pieces, all Pieces, all the knowledge and intelligence of mankind. Funny that.

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