Sunday, March 26, 2006

V for Vendetta

Last night I went and saw V is for Vendetta. I had no idea what to expects (part of the joy of being TV'less.. I never see spoilers, and can watch most movies with a clear mind.)

I must say, I was very impressed, and enjoyed many aspects of the movie. This is one of those rare jems that I think successfully introduced a philosphy. The main idea tossed about was what is an idea, and what is a person; or better said, the difference between the two. This is something that I heard mentioned by Dawkins. He gives ideas the same basic principles as a biological body. Where a person has their biological design in their genes, an idea is made out of memes. I belive this is in his book The River out of Eden.

This goes well with a good deal of personal ideas that I have had in a similar direction about what is a culture. I belive that it is a being.. in the same way that an animal is made up of many living cells, a culture is made up of cells that can be though of as people, or groups of people.

Tara's blemished, but still smiling face
Buda de Ensenada

This is for another post, so I will go on quickly with a little local note. We finnally made our way this weekend to the buda that is in Ensenada. In the morning we spent there we were able to pick up all the garbage (about 6 bag worth) and put in some new plants to make the park look better. I do hope that some other people want to come and work with us, but it was a very nice feeling to clean something up. There is much more graffity, but this is something out of our control.. I can only hope that this mentality is slowly dieing away as people are more educated.. but only time can show.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

where is consciousness?

A quick addition to the last post. I wrote to Jay Ingram's podcast with a few ideas that I have been working on for a while.. so I will put here my letter as well.

Hi Jay and David:

My name is Rodger and I am a physicist (Canadian) living and working in a center of excellence (government research) Ensenada México. While my research is not related directly to consciousness study, this has been an area of intense interest for many years.



While listening to another podcast (Zencast) and an idea was formed in my mind when the presenter asked "where is thought?". This problem is mentioned many times in other forms (on one of you previous podcasts as well.) For the answer I would draw on several types of thought. The first is a Quantum physics approach. That all we have are experiences. That is, the entirety of "reality" that we see is made up of a limited number of experiences. So that we can only really talk in terms of these experiences. So then "reality" can be thought of as the accumulation (or combination) of these experiences? (to measure something we cannot directly sense, we need something to change this even to a sensory even, i.e. a voltage into a picture on a screen.)

So the mind has these inputs of sensations and from this makes an idea of reality. In other words, we make a virtual model of what is outside of us, inside our minds. It is like a computer, if I were to place several cameras onto my computer, and have it look at the room, I would then write a program to interpret the images seen to make a model of the room inside the computer. This can be why new things take more time to see, because we don't have an object of this thing in our mind, so we need to look at it for a long time, and program it in. But when I see my girlfriend, I have a well made model of her, and don't need to look as intently. All I need to do is clarify which model in my mind is this person.

With out going into more detail, I would then say, that our "reality" exists as a construct inside out mind, so that our consciousness, our thoughts are actually all around this reality, or more such, outside of this reality. You can almost think of the Russian doll: the outside doll is what "really exists". The next doll is the "mind" which is inside a black box with very few sensors sticking out. Inside the shell of the mind is the virtual reality that we form, and this is the "perceived reality". Most of us then try to project our mind as coming from the model of ourselves in this last doll, thus making another doll.

As an extra note, you can then say why the ego is false, or doesn't exist by stating that the projected mind into our virtual reality is the ego, and as already noted, doesn't really exist.

I hope this makes sense, and I look forward to you comments on this. I've put in a pdf to express the idea..

Theatre of the mind

On a new binge of podcast additions I came across (with the help of Alex.. thanks) Jay Ingram's "Theatre of the Mind". I remember him from the discovery channel when I was in Toronto (I don't have a TV anymore.. thank god..)



The podcast is mainly for his new book (or maybe that is how it started) but it seems to have grown to a nice ling format with some useful/interesting information. The main topic is consciousness. On his website he has much more info.. a good read. The stuff on the homunculus is very interesting.. mainly these links good pic, wikipedia

But he is a little off on one thing. He said that no one had seen the classical homunculus (the small man in sperm), but there was one person who thought he saw it in the beggining of microscopes. Apparently he found a way to get very good magnufication, and wrote a paper detailing this little man. I can't remember his name, but this is well talked about in Bill Bryson's "A Short history of nearly everything." That book is a great read.. well.. actally I got the audio book, and I enjoyed all of it, and keep it in my iTunes library so that I have a chapter spliced in with my usual music..