3 things I learnt while my plane crashed

Krishnamurti and David Bohm – The Future of Humanity

Talk between Krishnamurti and David Bohm about The Future of Humanity

David Bohm

Jiddu Krishnamurti

It starts slowly but it gets more and more interesting

Krishnamurti

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said, “Truth is a pathless land”. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity. So he is not an individual. Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind. Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

Polemic post!!

Just look at this correlation analysis between religion and poverty

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/religions-correlation-with-poverty/

I wouldn’t say that there is a high correlation just looking at the picture (in fact there is no % for the correlation), but in any case, it is quite interesting…!

Book: Quantum enigma – when science encounters conciousness

A very readable book about quantum physics: its main ideas and the philosophic implications. There are no mathematical formulas in this book. It’s just about concepts

In starts with a description of classical physics, then moves to relativity theory and ends up in Quantum theory. Nothing too complex. We cang grasp the basic concepts. Once the authors have presented the quantum concepts, they start to explore the philosophical implications of this strange theory that presents a Universe completely different to that of our senses

According to the authors.. “Quantum theory … tells us that observing an object to be someplace ’causes’ it to be there. … [A]ccording to quantum theory, an object can be in two, or many, places at once — even far distant places. Its existence at the particular place it happens to be found becomes an actuality only upon its (conscious) observation. … This seems to deny the existence of a physically real world independent of our observation of it.”

So basically, nothing exists until we observe it. There is not an object. There is only a probability to find the object in a place. The object only becomes “real” when we decide to find it, to look at it. Before there is only probability, there is no object per se, there is only what physicist call the “wavefunction”

And, according to physics, this does not only apply to small things, like atoms, photons, etc, but also to big things.

And if we get into far reaching phylosophical questions… basically, the world didn’t exist until there was an observer. An  observer in a non-existent world? So, if we need an  observer to create the universe, how the  observer was created without the universe? The egg and chicken question.

Thinking a bit you get to this conclusion, that is basically stated in the book… but I think you should read the book. If not, you will not understand anything)

Maybe one solution for the above-mentioned question, would be something like this..  the universe was also in a wave-function state, and collapsed to one of the possible solutions where there was life capable of collapsing the wave-function of the universe. Something like …the Universe as a wave-function had to collapse only in some solutions where there are observers, and that wave function contained solutions with observers, and so, becuase there were solutions with observers, just the existence of those solutions, and potential observers, made the wavefunction of the universe to collapse.

Easy, isn’t it? I recommend you to read this book. They are much better than me at explaining the quantum enigma. And of course, it gives not only one interpretation of the quantum enigma, but several interpretations

Para partirse de risa un buen rato

Os recomiendo este libro que me acabo de leer: “El catolicismo explicado a las ovejas” de Juan Eslava Galán. Vamos, te tronchas de la risa con su crítica irónica a la la religión católica, iglesia incluida. Os paso un link con una descripción del libro:

http://franciscogalvan.blogspot.com/2009/04/el-catolicismo-explicado-las-ovejas.html

Tanto si sois creyentes como no, hay algunas frases irónicas que son para no perderselas

Y bueno, ya si os gustan estos temas, os recomiendo otro libro (este no de risa), “History of god” de Karen Armstrong

Galileo face to face to the HC&AC

Just look at how Galileo had to act in front of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church … what would they (the HC&AC) do if there would be any other discovery that threatens their power? I’m not saying that nowdays the HC&AC does not have a good role in society, but its doctrines, beliefs, and most of all, its personal god is not helpful for humankind

“I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, being 70 years old… swear that I have always believed, believe now and, with God’s help, will in the future believe all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach and teach. But since, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same and that it moves, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatsoever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, I wrote and published a book in which I treat this condemned doctrine and bring forward very persuasive arguments in its favor without answering them: I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is of having held and believed that the Sun is at the center of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not at the center and that it moves. Therefore, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith these errors and heresies, and I curse and detest them as well as any other error, heresy or sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I shall neither say nor assert orally or in writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicions; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place in which I may be.”
– Galileo, recanting his scientific beliefs before the Inquistion, 1633.

Quote

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there’s any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism….”

Albert Einstein
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: The Human Side.

Book reading: The Intelligent Universe

I just re-read the book: The Intelligent Universe by James Gardner, and I find it a quite interesting book to read, if you haven’t read other book or the previous Biocosm book from the same author:

The Intelligent Universe  tries to answer what Brian Greene has called the biggest of the big questions: Why is the universe life-friendly? What is life?

Gardner gives his answer in this book. His solution is the Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis. The central claim is “that the ongoing process of biological and technological emergence, governed by still largely unknown laws of complexity, could function as a von Neumann controller, and that a cosmologically extended biosphere could serve as a von Neumann duplicating machine in a conjectured process of cosmological replication.”

In other words, THE UNIVERSE COMES TO LIFE and then reproduces itself through the creation of other universes

The Universe starts as a baby universe and evolves into further complexity and intelligence when it can reproduce itself. So the goal of the Universe is to become increasingly more complex and intelligent, and we are part of this process

This is something he already stated in his previous book. In this book he goes through a list of theories and citations to make his point:

- Cellular Automata (Stephen Wolfram): “Nature, it seems, is doing something that looks suspiciously similar to computation”

- Edward Fredking (Digital Physics):  “Fredkin believes that the Universe is very literally a computer that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good news/ bad news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places”

- Seth Lloyd (Cosmos as Quantum Computer): “The Universe computes itself… As soon as the universe began, it began computing. At first the patterns it produced were simple, comprising elementary particles and establishing the fundamental laws of physics. I time, as it processed more… information, the universe spun out…more… complex patterns, including galaxies, stars, and planets. Life, language, human beings, society, culture- all owe their existence to the intrinsic ability of matter and energy to process information” ” The computational ability of the universe explains one of the great mysteries of nature: how complex systems such as living creatures can arise from…simple physical laws… The digital revolution under way today is…the latest in a..line of information-processing revolutions stretching back…to the beginning of the universe itself. Each revolution has laid the groundwork for the next, and all information-processing revolutions since the Big Bang stem from the intrinsic information-processing ability of the universe. The computational universe necesssarily generates complexity. Life, sex, the brain, and human civilization did not come about by mere accident”

- The intriguing idea that life is not only a product of the pre-biotic evolution of increasingly complicated networks of organic macromelecules (a straighforward notion shared by mainstream biological theorists suchs as the Sante Fe Institute’s complexologist Stuart Kauffman) but, in some mysterious sense, is one and the same as the evolutionary process itsels is potentially revolutionary. An idea that Gardner explores in this book

- Mark Bedau: What is life? An automated and continaully creative evolutionary process of adapting to changing environments is the primary form of life. “Probably the most controversial feature of my theory of life is the claim that supple addaptation does not merely produce living entities. The primary forms of life are none other than the supplely adpating systems themselves. Other living entities are alive by virtue of bearing an appropriate relationship to a supplely adapting system; they are secondary forms of life. Different kinds of living entities (organisms, orgnas, cell, etc.) stadn in different kinds of relationships to the supplely adapting system from which their life ultimately derives. in general, theses relationships are ways in which the entity is created and sustained by the supplely adapting system

- According to Gardner, Bedau’s vision has two dramatic implications: (1) it implies that there is no sharp disctinction between prebiotic chemical evolution on the anient Earth and the subsequent phenomenon of the emergence of evolving life as we know it today; and (2) it implies that the evolvving biosphere is the primary manifestations of living matter and that the individual elements of the biosphere are socondary phenomena, analogous to the cells that constitute our bodies or the mitochondria conatined withing those cells. In additions, it suggests that the most important feature of future evolution will be its collective character

- John Von Neumann on accelarating technology: “One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”

- I. J. Good.: “Let an untraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectaul activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make”

- Ray Kurzweil: “The intelligence that will emerge (post-Singularity) will continue to represent the human civulization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift… Most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological. By the end of this century, it will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than (unenchanced) human intelligence” “In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation…to spread out from its origin on Earth… (The) dumb matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence”

- Why is the Universe life-friendly?: Simon Conway Morris notes: “On a cosmic scale, it is now widely appreciated that even trivial differences in the starting conditions (of the cosmos) would lead to an unrecognizable and uninhabitable universe”

- The essence of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the universe we inhabit is in the process of becoming pervaded with increasingly intelligent life – but not necessarily human, or even human-successor life. Under the theory, the emergence of life and increasingly competent intelligence are not meaningless accidents in a hostile, largely lifeless cosmos, but are at the very heart of the vast machinery of creation, cosmological evolution, and cosmic replication. The hypothesis implies that the capacity for the universe to generate life and to evolve ever more capable intelligence is encoded as a hidden subtext to the basic laws and constants of nature, stitched as thought it were the finest embroidery into the very fabric of our universe

- The universe is coming to life: Not generating living beings haphazardly as the result of a random toss of the chemical dice. Not transforming inert matter into a growing, evolving biosphere as the consequence of a spectacularly improbable cosmic accident that happened, against all odds (and perharps only once throughout all of space and time), on an ordinary plante orbiting an undistinguished star in the outer reaches of an ordinary galaxy. No, the universe is coming to life, purposely and in accordance with a finely tuned cosmic code taht is the precise functional equivalent of DNA in the terrestrial biosphere. The universe, under this interpretation, is a kind of vast emerging organism in the process of self-assemble and self-animation, endowed with the capacity to not only replicate itslef, but also to transmit heritable triats – the same cosmic code, consisting of the laws and constants of physics, which not only prescirbes an ontogenetic program but, again similar to DNA, furnishes a recipe for the self assemble of offsprings (so-called baby universes)

- Christian de Duve: “The universe is not the inert cosmos of the physicists, with a little life added for good measure. The universe is life, with the necessary infrastructure around it; consists foremost of trillions of biospheres generated and sustained by the rest of the universe”

- Steven Dick:”I adopt what I term the central principle of cultural evolution, which I refer to as the Intelligence Principle: the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation o knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and.. to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved… The Intelligence Principle implies that given the opportunity to increase intelligence (and thereby knowledge), whether through bio-technology, genetic engineering or AI, any society would do so, or fail to do so at its own peril”

- How did life and intelligence first become possible? How did the first universe become sentient adn thus capable of seeding its progeny with bio-friendly physical laws and constants?

- Richard Gott and Li-Xin Li: “In this paper, we consider… the notion that the Universe did not arise out of nothing, but rather created itself. One of the remarkable properties of the theory of general relativity is that in principle it allows solutions with CTCs (closed timelike curves). Why not apply this to the problem of the first-cause? Usaully the beginning of the universe is viewed like the south pole. Asking waht is before that is like asking what is south of the south pole, it is said. But as we have seen, there remain unresolved problems with this model. If instead there were a region of CTCs in the early universe, then asking what was the earliest point in the Universe would be like asking what is the eastermost point on the Earth. There is no easternmost point – you can continue going east around and around the Earth. Every point has points that are east of it. If the Universe contained an early region of CTCs, there would be no first-cause. Every event would have events to its past. Thus, one of the most remarkable propoerties of general relativity – the ability in principle to allow CTCs -would be called upon to solve one of the most perplexing problems in cosmology”

- Johhjoe McFadden (Quantum evolution): “If we go back far enough, right back to the Big Bang, then all particles in the universe have interacted. Every particle becomes connected to every other particle in a single massively entangld super-EPR quantum state. This stat will persist until measured. The Copenhagen interpretation is the stark – the world does not exist until we measure it. How real was the universe before consicuosness evolved? The physicist John Wheeler has taken the consciousness-dependent reality view to its logical conclusion, proposing that we live in a “participatory universe”, wherein the universe depends for its existence on conscious observers to make it real, not only today but retrospectively right back to the Big Bang! Wheeler suggest that the presence of observs imparts a “tangible reality” to the universe, not only now but back to the beginning”, by a kind of backward-acting wave function collapse. In this scenario, the universe existed in n undetermined ghost state until the first consicous being opened its eyes to collapse the wave funciton for the entire universe and bring into being its entire history, including the geological and fossil record recording its own evolution

Deepak Chopra en español (charla en 1995)

Intereting lecture

His new book:

http://www.chopra.com/reinventingthebody