Dreaming about the Universe

Science!

So tonight was an exceptionally productive night of dreamthinking. Well the "thinking" part really comes in those moments in between sleep and awake - right when you start to come back to reality and lay in bed letting your mind drift down into the different alleys of your conscious mind. As far as I know dreaming is just a regenerative patterned firing of neurons that your mind struggles to interpret as sensory, thus producing the images and other perceptions that occur as dreams, therefore it would be impossible to really consciously "think" in your sleep. Well tonight, or rather this morning, I had a particular image come to mind after dreamthinking about the universe.

I was wondering about the expansion of the universe in combination with "phantom forces" associated with inertial frames when I had an idea - or rather an idea had me. What you're looking at, I suppose, is a 2-dimensional interpretation of the 3-dimensional universe being accelerated due to being wrapped around the "surface" of an expanding 4-dimensional "sphere".

It is known that the further away a galaxy is to our own the faster it seems to accelerate away from us. From my understanding this is interpreted using redshift, which is a measurement of the extent of light being either compressed or stretched (if you think of a spring) in the magnetic spectrum by the acceleration of the source of the light moving towards or away from us.

So I decided to do a little experiment to see what surface expansions actually looks like. So I took a balloon, inflated it just enough for it to stretch a little and have a round lateral circumference, and marked off three points on the surface of the balloon as shown (marked 1-3 from left to right).

It should be the case that after I inflate the balloon that all points should move away from one another. In fact the distances between points 1 and 2 (length=A) and points 1 and 3 (length = B) doubled. However f you were to imagine standing on the leftmost point of the balloon and watching points 2 and 3 from t=0 to t=1 you would notice that point 3 was moving relatively faster away from you than point 2 (it would be covering more distance in the same time). Therefore spherical expansion can at least adequately explain why galaxies further away from our own seem to be moving faster than closer galaxies as measured by redshift.

But of course there must be more to know about the universe! Just because a spherical expansion model satisfies only two of the experimentally observable criteria (and the only two I really know about) doesn't mean I've done anything particularly special. Scientists well before me have done similar models (you may know the raisin bread model) and yet are unable to explain some of the observable phenomenon of the universe.

At any rate I hope you enjoyed reading about my dreamthoughts and personal discoveries.

Cheers,

LORD RAVEN,
LORD OF THE SKIES

Apples and Organisms

Well here's something I've been thinking about for a few days now.

Think of an apple resting alone in front of you. It's a relatively medium size object. You begin to perceive it easily with your senses. It has little brown spots that are almost unseen due to the overwhelming redness of it. You recognize the shape, with broadened shoulders, a dimpled neck, and a narrowed waist with little lumps for legs supporting it upright. The stem leans outwards from the top at a predictable yet iconic angle.

Your mind begins to think beyond the skin and sees into the watery yellowed insides. You think of the firmness and crunchiness of the fleshy sweetness that is hidden behind the coat of red. Even deeper inside the color tints to green as the textures become thicker and structural. At the core you now perceive the seeds laid out around the core surrounded by the thick layer of delicious sugars and nutrients.

Apples present their treats and treasures to the wilds of nature at a great cost but for the ultimate reward. Those organisms that would consume the apple for nutrition uncover and disperse the hidden purpose of the apple - the seeds.

Why do apples exist? How can nature account for spending so much energy and resources creating a fruit? The answer is found in the true purpose of the apple - the seeds. Everything depends on the seeds.

I find myself thinking very much about apples.

It seems to me that all organisms are much like apples carrying the seeds of our genetic material. The complexity of all that life and all the intricacies and luxuries of our bodies are all just a vessel for our genetic material. We are just living vehicles piloted by the seeds from which we came. From a single celled organism to the complex assemblage of cells and organisms that account for human beings - all life is just fleshy packets of incentives for dispersing genetic material. More easily can seeds disperse if apples had flagella, eye spots, fins, legs, wings, sailboats, or jet planes.

Truly amazing are these seeds!

Why do apples exist? Seeds of course - the creators and cause of all apples!

Why do seeds exist? Why does DNA and RNA and genetic ancestors exist? Why did the origin of all life on Earth come to be? The answer to why comes from an elaborate, accurate, and exhaustive how.

Cheers,

LORD RAVEN
LORD OF THE SKIES

FCID - MAPPING OUT FRANKLIN COLLEGE

GREETINGS NOBODY

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HERE IS THE MAP I CREATED OF ALL THE DEPARTMENTS/MAJORS IN FRANKLIN COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES.

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Here is my outline from class on Thursday. I ordered them from fundamental to incidental such that mathematics is the language of the universe and physics is the realization of fundamental laws of the universe - together which form the foundation of knowledge. The tree then continues through the core sciences into three major branches. Science then yields the social sciences which depart into philosophy, the arts which end in religion, and then the humanities thus ending in history. Ultimately history and religion come together into philosophy as well which offers a language to describe the universe through the lens of the human perspective. Note that the philosophy department and philosophy major are not the same as true philosophy.

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IDEALLY THE MAP WOULD BE MUCH SIMPLER, AND SO THE CLASS WAS ASKED THIS QUESTION:

What is the ideal map of Franklin College of Arts and Sciences? What majors seem unnecessary or less important and/or what majors seem to be left out? How ought this college be divided?

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LORD RAVEN

LORD OF THE SKIES

FCID - DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Here are some of the major questions posed in todays class. Some are from the instructor, others from student discussion, and even some from my own introspection.

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1. Are social sciences 'true' science? What constitutes a 'true' science? Does a lack of a strict experimental methodology produce varied and imprecise results?

2. Is the mind either material or immaterial? Can evolution explain the development of man's immaterial mind?

3. Is mathematics the fundamental and irreducible language of the universe? Can all sciences be reduced to mathematical models? Can humanities/arts be reduced to mathematical models? Can humanities/arts be reduced to sciences?

4. What defines consciousness? How can we distinguish the consciousness of the human species from animal consciousness? Can the "uniqueness of consciousness" be explained?

5. What does the question "why" mean? Ought we search for a purpose or a process? Ought we look up (religion) or look down (physics) to find the answers?

6. Can the laws of physics be imagined differently to produce a conceptually varied pool of possible universes? Is the concept of such an omniverse a function of science or philosophy?

7. Under science what is the conceptual relation between theory, computation, and observation?

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Feel free to comment on any of these HUGE questions especially if you didn't get a chance to voice your opinion in class today.

Cheers,

LORD RAVEN

LORD OF THE SKIES

THE RAVEN NESTS IN BOOKS

School and distractions have prevented me from posting philosophically natured conversations these past months, but here and now LORD RAVEN guarantees more content and more updates in the future! Weekly posts will accommodate the coming of next semester, SPRING 2011.

For all of you on the brink of graduating college just remember that these are not just the best times of our lives, but if we have learned anything at all, we ought to know it will be getting better every day.

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DO SOMETHING ELSE

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LORD RAVEN,

LORD OF THE SKIES

CHAPTER LOVE: PART 1

So to recap we have introduced in the last post the question: what is love?

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Let me just make this though – I do not personally hold the belief that love is sex. I utilize that argument to get people to philosophically think about romantic love – and better yet it makes for some entertaining and interesting conversations. If you want to know what I personally believe on the topic of love then you should ask me in person and start this conversation. If you are looking for refutations for the argument from last post then you should come up with your own and post them to get a response - no handouts!

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Personally I have recently spent three to four weeks intensely meditating on this question. I researched articles online, read various philosophical texts on the subject, looked back on previous relationships, and asked friends who have been in love. After all these investigations I then began to engage in time-consuming and fascinating conversations with friends around me to find out what people really thought about this thing called love. I’ve discovered in my weeks of dedicated searching some really compelling answers to the question and have come away with many different ways of looking at what we call romantic love.

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What sparked this journey is another story altogether. The bottom line is that love certainly seems to be an incredibly significant focus of our lives and so we ought not to be ignorant about the subject of such things.

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So I will post sections of conversations to represent my journey investigating romantic love.

This is the essential outline for the conversations that took place during these weeks:

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Every conversation I started began with these three question:

1. Have you ever been in love?
2. Do you know what love is?
3. What is love?

Questions one and two are set up in a way to make my conversation partner consistent with his or her beliefs in a subtle way. If you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the first question then you must necessarily know what love is to some extent in order to know that you have or have not been in love. If you answer ‘I don’t know’ then the conversation takes a completely different turn. It is as if I asked “have you ever eaten an apple?” - It must necessarily be the case that to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with certainty you must know what an apple is.

At the turn of question three I suggest that in forming answers we ought not to go about our discussion describing what love is like, or how it feels, or the process that happens between people in love, or even just talking about how good or important love is, or even the proper way of acting in a relationship, I direct the conversation to a definition of what it is that we are talking about. This is absolutely crucial for understanding each other when we use the word love – to prevent making equivocations. I suggest we come to define love as a genus and species.

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So I suggest first of all, before we get to the definition, that love must be some kind of idea or concept such that we are even able to talk about it or bring it up in the first place, and that idea must be about something – the true nature of love. In the same way I can talk about the idea of an apple, but that idea is only referential to what apples really are – apples as they exist. The concept of love isn’t really what we are after, but obviously the true nature of love. This is a distinction for the purpose of narrowing the subject of the conversation, and I’m not really trying to make any broad metaphysical claims here.

Now before I give the conversation back over to my partner to answer question three I want to offer some examples of the kinds of things love might be so that we can get an idea what I mean when I ask for a genus – the first part of our definition. I suggest that love must be the kind of thing that exists with regards to us in some way or another – that love is available to us – that love happens to us - this is obviously the case. What I mean is that love must inhere in either our mind or our body (or our soul – that isn’t left out as a possibility). If it were the case that love happens only in the body then love must be something entirely physical, which doesn't seem to be the case. Love then must be available to our mind (or soul) or else love doesn't exist to us at all – love would be imperceptible. This is where we ought to begin in definition - where we should first begin looking for a genus.

What kinds of things are available to our mind? I offer some examples – these things which love may or may not be a kind: a state of mind, a feeling, an emotion, an action, a thought, a unity, a desire, a compulsion, a process, an ordering of the soul, an act of will, a connection, a collection of any of the above, etc. This is just a helpful starting point to understand the notion of genus as it pertains to the subject of our conversation.

So I ask again question three “What is love?” and suggest we begin with “What is the genus of love?”

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This is the very first stage of my conversations and so now I pose these very questions to you.

(to be continued)

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LORD RAVEN

LORD OF THE SKIES

AN INAPPROPRIATE CONCLUSION

Hello and welcome once again.

Here is an itinerary for posts to come concerned with but not limited to the following topics:

- Love

- Truth

- Happiness

- Virtue

- Wisdom

- Theoretical Physics

- The existence of God

- Metaphysics as the science of first principles

- How and why magnets work

- Solutions to abstract mathematical paradoxes

Of course that's just the easy stuff ...

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But why not kick this blog off with a little argument I love to deliver in conversation to answer a question near and dear to my heart (reason) - what is love?

What is it? Love is sex and sex is love. Bottom line.

To put it a bit more clearly, but not nearly as absurdly, is that the act of sex is the actualization of love and that the desire for or progress towards the act of sex is the potentiality of love. In other words the moment of sex is the moment of love, and all the other times you aren't having sex you are desiring to have sex, and that is being in love.

Let's draw this out further to some logical conclusions:

1. Rape is love

2. Casual sex doesn't exist (instead it is casual love)

3. Pornography is an encyclopedia of love

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Now you ought to be completely unconvinced that the conclusion is true.

This in fact probably seems so wrong that you don't even know how to begin to attack it - but that is exactly what I would like you to do - prove me wrong.

I've posed this question many times to friends in conversation, and most simply find it so absurd a claim that they simply object with the following:

"That's just not the case because it's so apparently not true. Love isn't just sex - you're a terrible person."

This just isn't a satisfactory refutation. I want to know why it is not true. Here is one strategy I have seen used to refute the claim.

Demonstrate that love can exist apart from sex and/or that sex can exist apart from love.

Well that's easy. You decide to demonstrate a situation where a person has casual sex without love or that an individual loves someone incapable of performing the sex act. Alright! The problem here is that we haven't exactly agreed on our terms. So I simply respond:

"That person who has casual sex was in love in those moments and just doesn't know it or won't admit it. The person who loves the individual who cannot have sex is stuck in the potentiality of love and can never truly actualize his love."

The problem of course is that I am convinced and dedicated to my definition of love and this opponent is arguing from his own definition of love. Therein I suggest you prove me wrong on my own terms with my own definition. Or you can just tell me what love really is, argue for that instead, and I might be convinced on your own terms.

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It may in fact be easier to refute if I put it together for premise-premise-conclusion. Here's a helpful logical form to understand the process better:

1. Love and sex are both desires towards action

2. Sex is (in part) the desire for pleasure from the act of reproduction

3. Love ultimately desires sex.

4. Love desires what sex desires - nothing more or nothing less

Therefore love is sex and sex is love.

Not the best formulation of the argument, but it highlights some big assumptions to my claim.

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This is pretty much where every conversation about this argument has ended so I might as well post it here to see what people have to offer.

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All the best,

LORD RAVEN

LORD OF THE SKIES