Sunday, September 19, 2004

How does the world work? When studying physics, one reaches a point when the textbooks confess that physics cannot explain why everything is so, but rather how everything is the way it is. Where, for instance, does the fact that positive and negative charges attract come from? God? Is this stored somewhere? Gah, the universe can't be one giant computer, with all its data being stored somewhere, can it?

What's also amazing is that we have so many concurrent lives that somehow seem to maintain consistent with each other. It's a fair bet that I will wake up tomorrow with the same face I have today, and that everything I remember from yesterday will still be remembered by whoever else was there to experience it. I have to wonder how things came to be this way.

A teacher once told me that all he wanted was to ask God why he made things the way they did (if memory serves, we were talking about the constant pi, and about how you had to go to the 3rd dimension to appreciate it). Ah, now that's a cause worth living for..

2 comments:

Jenny said...

does the world work?

if everything is stored somewhere, then where is that thing stored?

I think it would be quite strange if things that happened were remembered differently by different people. *pause* unfortunately this is apparently the case, if I am to take my cognition/memory lecturer seriously. false memories both scare me and comfort me. oh dear!

I think if I could ask God something, I'd ask him if he existed. *pause* nah, I'd ask him whether it mattered to individuals' lives whether he existed or not.

asking God stuff is a cause worth living for? ?.?

AKM said...

"if everything is stored somewhere, then where is that thing stored?"

Yeah, the idea of things being 'stored' somewhere is a bit strange, I don't know if that's the way it is. I guess the analogy of a computer is the only one that I can make, because it is an artificial construct that is able to simulate it's own form of reality.

So, if we scrap that idea, where does everything come from? I want to go deeper than the surface of quantum physics and the other strange high-level physics stuff and attempt to understand reality at a more fundamental level.

"I think it would be quite strange if things that happened were remembered differently by different people. *pause* unfortunately this is apparently the case, if I am to take my cognition/memory lecturer seriously"

I guess it depends on how we define reality or something. As in, how do we define that event X happened, and not event Y? Like you said, from two points of reference, if we rely on memory alone, we could get these 'false' memories that contradict each other. But there are at least four people who (assuming solipsism in false, and people aren't just drones) remember being an INFO lecture today. So did that not happen?

Which begs the question, is there a universal frame of reference? Would that be God? Interesting :)

"asking God stuff is a cause worth living for? ?.?"

Heh, I know, it doesn't make a lick of sense. I don't quite know what I was trying to get at with that remark, it was probably too close to bed-time for me!