A place for me to dump my ideas. I'm not sure exactly what is going to end up here. But I promise it will be useless.
I saw a post the other day that was criticising
Character.AI-style romantic chatbots. Something like "wow, I
can't believe you love a bunch of linear algebra and
matrices." And I thought... there's no difference between
that and a human.
One of the formulations of Quantum Mechanics is Heisenberg's
Matrix Mechanics. Mathematically, the wavefunction of
quantum mechanics is equivalent to a vector in a vector
space. The different physical operators become matrices,
and the observed value becomes a matrix-vector
multiplication. The time propagator, that evolves the
quantum system forward in time, is also expressable as a
matrix. Therefore, the complete behaviour of any quantum
particle is able to be cast in terms of linear algebra and
matrices, which neccesarily also includes all particles in your
body and therefore your entire person. So yeah, we're all
linear algebra.
Note: vectors and matrices may be infinitely dimensional. Sorry
about it!
[tw: su*cide]
There's an old meme that floats around scientific circles. This
one hit me specifically, as I spent a good number of year
studying statistical mechanics. I have some ideas as to why
Boltzmann and Ehrenfest might have chosen to end it all, and
it's not the difficulty of the equations. You see, I've long
been interested in the origin of life. When I was a kid, I
intrinsically believed in dualism - I thought the living things
were made of cells and non-living things were made of
atoms. When we later learned that cells were also made of
atoms, this blew my mind completely and shattered my
worldview. I've since been haunted by the question of how
"dead" matter can spontaneously give rise to life. As such, I
majored in biochemistry, with a side of computer science just
for fun. This put me in a unique position to learn about a
computational chemistry technique called "molecular dynamics,"
which to me has major implications on the philosophy of mind.
Molecular Dynamics (MD) is a way to use computers to study how
atoms and molecules behave on the molecular level. It may
sound a bit familiar to anyone who's studied high school
physics. let's say we have thrown a ball and it's in
motion. Starting at some time t0, corresponding to some
position x0, and velocity v0, what will the position, x1, of the
ball be at some t1 = t0 + Δt?
First, we need the force on the ball. For earth's gravity, we
have F = m*g. Due to Newton's second law, we have F = m*a which
means that a = g (g is called acceleration due to gravity so
that checks out.)
then we can solve for the new position:
x1 = x0 + v0*Δt + 0.5*g*Δt^2
we can then repeat this process as many times as we like to see
where the ball will go as time drags on. The choice of Δt is
arbitrary, but at a small enough value, the path of the ball
will be physically accurate.
What does this have to do with molecules? It turns out that
atoms behave like balls, and atomic bonds behave like springs,
connecting them together. Using the same equations, we can
simulate a molecule jostling around in a bath of water for
essentially as long as we like. We can use this to study
any molecules we like, as long as we know their structure.
This includes all of the molecules that are in our cells, and MD
simulations of biomolecules such as proteins are used to find
new medicines.
Now, our computers are not powerful enough to study anything
bigger than a single virus particle, but the principle holds no
matter how big of a system you consider. In theory, if you
had a powerful enough computer, you could do a simulation of an
entire cell: the membranes, the proteins, the DNA, the RNA, all
of it. But, why stop there? In theory, if we had a
computer big enough, we could simulate an atom-perfect copy of
an entire human being, living in an entirely simulated
world. What does this mean?
I don't think I'm bold enough to propose that we are
currently living in a simulation, because that would take a mind
boggling amount of compute power. However, since there's
no difference in practice between the behaviour of matter in the
real world and the behaviour of matter in the simulation, and
since we're all just made of atoms, this simulated thing ought
to look and act just like a real person. And, crucially to me,
any actions that this person makes would be entirely determined
from the very start of the simulation. There's no way for
the person inside the simulation to "change" which way his atoms
are going to move, which will cause his neurons to fire, which
will cause his muscles to move, etc. It's all very much
like a movie.
To, the correspondence of these simulations to our real world
means that everything in this life is essentially the result of
a previous action. Just as a domino in a set of dominos
has no choice but to fall when it's hit, we to have no choice
but to act a certain way when certain conditions arise.
And yet.
Here I sit, as a fully-formed independent thinking thing,
having the feeling of complete determination over myself and my
actions, maybe even my thoughts on a good day. This seemly flies
in the face of what I know is happening inside my brain at this
very moment: light from my computer screen is passing into my
eye, through the lens, and into the cornea. Once there, it
is being absorbed by a tiny little molecule called Retinal
Upon absorption, Retinal changes shape. This acts like a
little switch, which then triggers a structural shift in the
protein Rhodopsin (this is observable in MD simulations).
When enough Rhodopson molecules shift, They bind together and
release a soup of signalling molecules into the cytoplasm of the
Rod cell they are found within. These signalling molecules
eventually make their way to the synaptic side of the Rod cell,
where they flood the synapse with neurotransmitter molecules,
triggering the neighbouring neuron to also signal it's
neighbouring neurons, and so forth. This signal eventually
reaches the brain, which is some kind of Rube Goldberg
contraption of signals bouncing around, and eventually a nerve
impulse travels down my arm to my finger, causing it to move to
the next key and contract, typing the next letter in this
post. From a physics point of view, this was a purely
mechanical process. If you were to expand a brain to the
size of a galaxy, you'd see quite a lot of stars and planets
(the atoms) orbiting around each other in complicated patterns,
but nothing that discernibly looked like thought.
The thought is enough to drive you mad.
If there is one message that I would like to seed throughout the internet, one insidious little self-replicating meme for the ages, it would be this: there are no garbage people.
You see, in today's online culture, once you commit one unacceptable act, or are found to have an unacceptable thought or point of view, that's it. You're done. You become a "garbage human being."
Maybe you're a racist. A homophobe. A transphobe. A TERF. A misogynist. A rape apologist. A colonialist settler. A billionaire.
Or maybe you're a Liberal. Or one of those alphabet people. Or a jew. Or a commie. A junkie An atheist.
It does not matter, because they all mean the same thing: You're evil. A scourge on society. You are irredeemable, evil, and need to be removed from society in order to make things right.
The problem is... none of that is really true. Everybody has the capacity for good and evil within them. We like to imagine ourselves as victims and the others as oppressors, but in reality we are all both.
(I mean really we have Hollywood and Disney and Marvel to blame. Always the "bad guys" versus the "good guys.")
I think in reality, we reject ourselves. We project all our
negative traits onto the other, and then banish them. In so
doing, we attempt to cleanse our own negative traits. But that
doesn't change anything
But if we can tolerate the other, then maybe we can accept ourselves.
I stand for love. For Call-In Culture, not Call-Out Culture. For reform. For hope.
For human recycling, not human garbage.
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There are people who will read this and decide that I am a garbage human being, or evil, or whatever because they don't agree with what I'm saying. Maybe they think it's harmful or it legitimizes violence.
Let's be clear, I am against violence. Far more than most of my peers, I'm sad to say.
Many marginalized groups today have been on the receiving end of a lot of violence and they feel like the revolution is coming and soon they'll have a chance to even the score. Eat the rich and all that.
But then what?
Violence only begets more violence.
I weep for the soul of our society.
You find yourself in a startlingly familiar position.
What could be more familiar than the grocery store?
As you lazily saunter through the
aisles,
a thought crosses your mind
"I should treat myself"
"Well sure," you respond
"That's what the cherries are going to be for."
But suddenly, the simple cherry doesn't sound so great
You feel a deep, painful, feeling starting to grow
Yeah, a box a crackers and a tub of cream cheese would be pretty great
But you told yourself you were going to eat healthier
And now you're stuck,
frozen in the middle of the grocery store
You know this feeling well, a constant companion
The inner pain bubbling up within
You know what it wants (FOOD)
You know that it only stops while you're eating
once you're done, it starts back up again
Night after night, the same battles waged and lost.
But today it finds you in the middle of a shopping trip
You empty your mind,
take a deep breath
1
2
3
4
exhale
the relief is fleeting.
You're starting to panic
"I thought I was going to face my demons"
but instead you find yourself facing a 50% off sale
A hand reaches out, and once the tub is in your grasp
all your worries melt away.
A great silence
You're going to treat yourself
tonight.
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I do blame myself for my eating
habits, of course. No one else could possibly be responsible.
Yet, I can't help but feel that we have constructed a society
where the masses (which apparently includes myself) are mined
for profit by large food corporations. To put it plainly, if I
was still a kid, there's no way I'd get away with eating half
the shit I do. My mom would keep me in line.
However, I am tragically in charge of feeding myself now.
There's just no way for natural food to compete with the
cornucopia o f factory-made delights flowing from the large
corporations. Hilariously, we sit here amidst an obesity
crisis, injecting ourselves with gila monster toxins, in order
to stave off the pounds. I can tell you that if all I
had available to eat was fresh, seasonal vegetables, fruits,
and whole grains then I would not have the cravings that I
deal with. But then again, maybe I'd be an alcoholic or
something. Who knows.