Admiring the Moon, Thinking About the Meaning of Life

I was taking a nice evening walk the other day, you should too (unless you're situated in a place that would make that dangerous for you, in which case you probably shouldn't). On my merry way I took some nice pictures of the moon. I'll show you.

After a while, what you do will influence your personal philosophy deeply. You will be forever tainted.

Last I blabbered on, I discussed about space, time and compression. I suppose one thread there was really about "how to make sense of religion in the context of information", even though I never said anything in quite those terms. I believe that philosophers and the like have meandered around similar topics for at least hundreds of years. And indeed, if you read philosophy from different times, you should, in my opinion, get the impression that every major philosopher has realized the exact same things, but they have different styles for articulating about those, as well as slightly different focus points. As a teen, I used to think that philosophy was essentially the practice of discovering something you don't know, and then forming opinions about it. Then, you'd publish your thoughts because societies tend to reward that kind of silly behavior, and it's indeed pretty much guaranteed that nobody knows enough to state the contrary anyway, unless they're into philosophy as well. And even then, the best you could do would be to form your criticisms around the identification of the things that each particular philosophy failed to address. Or, failed to address in your opinion, leading into endless debates that have conveniently lasted for a very long time.

So here's something you don't know. In my last writing I mentioned that if you think of everything as one single pattern or a message that you receive, it's then impossible to say whether the entire universe is a message in and of itself, sent by someone or something, rather than it being there in some more literal, naïve sense. So, in essence there's this blind spot there in that you don't know whether the outside world is really sent to you (and all of us) by an entity, or multiple entities, or if everything is exactly as it seems to be on the surface. This time, I thought I'd talk about the other interesting blind spot, which is you yourself.

It's a funny thing, but the same things apply to you that also apply to the outside of you. Namely, you don't know what it is inside you that receives the message of the outside world, so to speak. It could be a single entity, hidden behind those smoldering eyes, or there could be multiple entities there, or things could in fact be exactly as they appear, in which case the only real measure of you is your physical appearance, your body. It's rather interesting to note that you don't even know whether your thoughts are really of you or of the outside world.

So, what's infinitely interesting to me is this notion that there is a connection there. The connection is this pattern that you can perceive: there is a blind spot regarding the outside and there is a blind spot regarding the inside. You can't tell what's there, and you can't tell whether the two are connected in any other way except by information.

To me, this seems to leave plenty to work with. It's like a staging ground for all the major religions, and the one thing that connects philosophy with religion.

So, if you think that there is in fact just one reality, one substance, one universe, or whatever singular concept you'd like, really, in existence, then what is the conclusion that you will be forced to make?

The remarkable thing, in my opinion, about this whole notion is that I still remain a single pattern that exists in unit time. What I mean by unit time is that the mind makes it so that everything seems to happen now, and in some cases even the things that occur at different times seem to occur simultaneously. That is, sometimes the mind composes many things into a single thing just so we can say that some singular thing happened at a particular time, you see.

So it's like this: sometimes the future moves towards the now, and sometimes the past moves towards the now. And I'm not talking about memories per se.

But, what this means, then, is that it is beside the point whether a visual sighting, a mathematical proof, a sound, or really anything bridges the gap. There are no disparate things in reality. And why should there be? Because, after all, what is there must not only make sense but also be consistent enough to be observable in unit time.

Of course, the mind could just as easily conflate things over time as well as space, both of which you can demonstrate simply by watching a digital video stream, for example. It's kind of mysterious that the frequency over either time or space has to be just so for your mind to make many things into a single thing – because the frequency varies depending on circumstances, such as whether you are tracking an object with your eyes or not. And so, it's to some degree questionable whether day-to-day naïve wallclock time is a good measure for unit time.

So things are actually pretty bad for us humans, because we don't really know why some things happen later and some things happen now. The mind only shows us however much we can take now, as though there were a maximum capacity for this, and leaves the rest for later. Or, if you think of time as space, so to speak, things are arranged for us in space so that they're bite-sized and we aren't overwhelmed, because that would be impossible, you see. Everything needs to fit in unit time, or it doesn't exist (for you).

Imagine how you'd perceive time if you could perceive more numerous and extensive patterns all at once than what you currently can. Notice how problems, then, cease to be problems, because you can apprehend everything at once, and so "solving a problem" effectively becomes "describing what is immediately apparent to you".

I've often thought about mathematical proofs and about what makes a proof a proof, since a proof is really just stating the exact same thing in a different way. I believe that the answer lies in what I just said: I believe a proof is a proof if every pattern in it is apprehendable within your limited capacity in unit time. Of course, what this entails is that you need to provide for clues about where to go look for the rest of it, if the entire proof cannot fit in all at once. And so, every proof is really just a data structure (for us foolish humans at least).

It looks to me as though the same kind of chunking mechanism works for any pattern, because patterns are really all that's perceivable – or perceptible, there is really no difference between the two; it's just the misguidedness of the English language, don't you worry.

No but seriously, why would you believe that the senses are dealing in anything but the abstract, despite the fact that you're able to slap on some categories? At what point does the neural signal sent by the eye become an abstract thought, as opposed to something that's concretely real? The thing to notice is that you could make this into a real problem for yourself, but don't really need to. And so, what's in fact way more interesting is to ask: "why would you want to make this a problem for anybody?"

Isn't it curious that, according to this thinking, where everything is information and there is neither something "more abstract" nor "more concrete", there merely exist ways in which you are allowed to experience things and ways in which you are not allowed? And what's really interesting is how you can't tell whether the reason for being allowed to or not is within you or outside of you. And so, some people blame the outside world while some blame themselves whenever the mood strikes them.

Personally, I find it perfectly compelling that absolutely everything is information, as simplistic as that appears to be. Even if you had an opposing viewpoint, you'd be effectively making the claim that you possess information according to which everything cannot be information, and you sincerely hope that I'll bite and accept that. Furthermore, it isn't as though everything being information meant that there was nothing outside of it, rendering it meaningless. It's just that you cannot perceive anything else – it's a figure of speech, that's all.

Indeed to me, science and philosophy are really about looking for patterns, loving them, writing stories about them, and hopefully, being published or recognized in some way. It's all social activity. And lots of people are pouring immeasurable amounts of money and time into it. Because it's important, you see.

And it's the same with politics, as well. It's about looking for a particular pattern, loving that pattern, and striving very hard so that you can say "it really happened". Ironically enough, it need not to have actually happened.

But I suppose that I should distinguish between at least two different ways to think about meaning, as well, just to wrap things up again. The obvious way is to think that meaning is found in the patterns that your mind is able to recognize and react to. So, meaning is a kind of potential that's there, for certain patterns, given you. But a different way to think about meaning, I believe, is that you feel intensely about something.

It's perfectly obvious that sometimes patterns seem to form these great big hierarchies, where one pattern is composed of multiple smaller ones. For example, insert any sociological phenomenon. The really curious thing is that people might find themselves a part of some greater pattern while not really being able to explicate what that larger pattern is. And so, it's that either things take hold of you or you take hold of them, you see. And you can see that, obviously, if those so-called smaller patterns really don't fit together, the larger one dissolves – literally so. And therefore, it's about connecting to other sufficiently similar things in such a way that, from the individual parts' perspective, it's impossible to tell whether it's really about them or that larger pattern.

Now, here's something peculiar. Notice how all I've described here are certain familiar, stereotypical thinking patterns. According to one, meaning is found in the things themselves in a rather direct and blunt way – because observable patterns must mean something in order to be recognized as such – and according to the other, meaning is about being connected to a larger whole, a kind of entity that comprises smaller, less expansive entities, and feeling very strongly about that. As far as I can tell, there are no other kinds of meanings.

And so, in my opinion, it would be misguided to think that things are somehow different from people, or that strong feelings regarding connection can only be applied towards living things. Because what is life anyway? You can tell that Theseus's paradox really is one of my favorites, can't you?

However, you and I of course *know* that a computer can't truly experience things like a human can. But there's no way to test for that, unless you can somehow plug one into your unit time – and who's to say whether you would then be you any longer at all, if you managed to do that.

*I* really like the moon. Here's another picture: