And now for something completely different
When I was a kid, I had a hard time conceptualizing independent probability. I could get the idea that each coin flip was it’s own thing, but I also knew that a run of five flips was unlikely to be all tails, so it seemed like there had to be some kind of magical force at work, raising or lowering the probability of the next flip.
When I was in high school, I had a hard time conceptualizing entropy. If all those gaseous atoms in the box were moving about carrying heat, but entropy wasn’t heat (or even “disorder”), then it seemed like there had to be some magical “something else” passed in the collisions.
When I was in college, I had a hard time conceptualizing qualia. I understood the philosophical difference between primary and secondary qualities, but qualia were supposed to be something other than mere color. But color was all I could perceive. What was this other thing?
As an adult, I had trouble conceptualizing nothing. I would sometimes look at the night sky and wonder why there was something rather than nothing at all, but I could only hold a sense of that question for a moment before it slipped out of my conscious mind like a wriggling fish.
In middle age, I still can’t conceptualize the different kinds of infinities.
I’m constantly amazed that people think a 400-year-old point of view is still the latest, greatest, most sophisticated and progressive possible. There is matter and energy, atoms and the void, and that’s it. To speculate otherwise is to give in to superstition.
Consciousness is a brain state, or an illusion, or whatever, but it is absolutely not a thing, even though you’re experiencing it now, and if you wonder what it might mean for an immaterial thing to exist, you’re practically burning witches.
There is nothing left to discover. We will unite gravity with quantum mechanics and that will be it. The grand project will be over. The end. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Bullshit.
Every time we think we’ve figured it out, the universe gets stranger, almost as if it’s inviting us to approach it with wonder.
When did the hall monitors get control of everything? So someone somewhere believes something silly, or wrong. When was that not the case? They’re not the ones holding us back. How will we move forward if we can’t grope about in the dark?
Bring back wonder. Bring back daring. Bring back adventure and experimentation and failure and forgiveness. Bring back tolerance—real tolerance—and openness and playfulness and joy.
Forget 400-year-old dogmas. Let’s do something new.
I asked Stable Diffusion for some covers to textbooks of Occult Physics and Quantum Psychology.
