The world as idea

It too easy to build castles of pure intellect with foundations on clouds.

A simulation can never be the truth. The truth is what hides that there is no truth indeed.

Reading a post from Nova Spivack, the creator or Twine, made me think for the first time about the possibility that consciousness was as much a fabrication, as space and time. This article triggered a cascade of thoughts in my self, mind, universe, you, ??? (Quantum physics theory makes sense here, it seems impossible to avoid the observer's influence over the phenomena).

I thought that consciousness as well as space and time could be thought as constructed frameworks, artificially generated contexts, and also as boundaries were existing entities can be identified. Actually one common definition of consciousness is a certain context or grouping of objects.

History shows us that the concepts about these fabrications varied among cultures. Greeks believed time was circular, not linear. Space's shape was thought to be of many different forms. Consciousness did not exist in some cultures, instead men thought they where automatically obeying the voices of god according to Julian Jaynes.

It looks like space, time and consciousness were conceived by men. We might have thought that by creating them we where building the firsts universals, but indeed what we were doing was setting the foundations for globalization.

According to Baudrillard the problem with global is that it brings along violence. Global can be characterized by technical efficiency, total organization, integral circulation and the equivalence of all exchanges; it is related to technology, the market, information and tourism. Contrary to it there is the concept of universalization that has to do with human rights, liberty and culture.

He leads us to understand that in a globalized word there are no real sacrifices, which leaves us just in the situation of receiving. Not from God or nature, but by a technological mechanism of generalized exchange and common gratification. Everything is given to us here; we have gained the right to all things. The problem is that eventually we start hating our excess of comfort, our definite accomplishment. It makes us desperate and hopeless because is indeed the result of the realization of our desires.

Introduction to time and origin of the universe

Nature of time

Time is the most fundamental aspect of our experience, and yet it remains mysterious in many ways. A longstanding problem is time's arrow – the directionality displayed by most physical processes, for example, clocks run down, organisms age, stars burn out. Ultimately that leads to cosmology (is study of the Universe in its totality). Most physicists are convinced that the origin of time’s arrow can be traced to the initial conditions of the universe, but the details depend on the specific cosmological model, and there is no agreed solution.

Another problem is the psychological perception of time, the feeling we all have that time is flowing or passing. Yet no such phenomenon is apparent in physics. So how does this impression of a moving present arise? Is it linked in some way to memory, or is there a deeper link – for example, between quantum mechanics (the study of matter and radiation at atomic level) and the observer – that plays a role?

Origin of physical laws

Science works because the universe is ordered in an intelligible way. The most refined manifestation of this order is to be found in the laws of physics, the fundamental mathematical rules that govern all natural phenomena. One of the biggest of the big questions of existence concerns the origin of those laws. Where do they come from, and why do they have the form that that they do?

Until recently, this problem was considered off-limits to science. The job of the scientist, it was maintained, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their form or origin. Now things had change one reason for this is the thrust toward a final unified theory of physics, sometimes called a “theory of everything,” that would encapsulate a complete description of nature in a single mathematical scheme.

A distinctive feature of the laws of physics is that (with one minor exception) they are symmetric in time, that is, they make no distinction between past and future. Yet the world about us has a definite temporal directionality, manifested for example in the way that the sun and stars are slowly and irreversibly burning up their fuel. The one-way slide towards degeneration, decay and entropy (degradation of matter) is often expressed by the so-called second law of thermodynamics. Just how a temporally asymmetric world has emerged from time–symmetric laws is a very old and still unsolved problem.

Origin of the universe

Most of the Cosmologists agree that the universe began with a big bang 13.72 billion years ago, but they disagree about some pretty basic questions, like:

• What happened before the big bang?
• Did time begin with the big bang?
• Are there other big bangs and other universes, and if so, will they be like ours or fundamentally different?
• Is it a lucky fluke that our universe is so well suited to life?
  

These issues relate to the nature of the laws of physics. What are they? Where do they come from? Why are they mathematical? Why do they permit universes that are comprehensible to sentient beings such as homo sapiens. Which leads in turn to the biggest question of all: What is the place of human beings in the great cosmic scheme?

Mental Models

Human perception is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture, and the interpretation of the perceived.
Two types of consciousness are considerable regarding perception: phenomenal (any occurrence that is observable) and psychological (not related to the external world).
Jay Wright Forrester defined mental model as: "The image of the world around us, which carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagin all over the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts and relationships between them and those used to represent the real system".

Two mythological beings
Condillac conceived a marble statue in the likeness of the human body and inhabited by a soul that had never perceived or thought. He begins by conferring on his statue a single sense, perhaps the least complex of all-that of smell. A whiff of jasmine is the start of the statue's biography; for one moment there is nothing but this odor in the whole universe-or, to be more accurate, this odor is the universe, which a moment later will be the odor of a rose, then of a carnation.
In the statue's consciousness, once there is a single odor we have attention; once an odor lasts after the stimulus has ceased we have memory; once a present and a past impression occupy the statue's attention we have the ability to compare once the statue perceives likeness and unlikeness we have judgment; once the ability to compare and judgment occur a second time we have reflection; once a pleasant memory is more vivid than an unpleasant impression we have imagination. Once the faculty of understanding is born, the faculty of the will will be born: love and hate (attraction and repulsion), hope and fear. The consciousness of having passed through many states of mind will give the statue the abstract notion of numbers; the consciousness of being the odor of carnation and of having been the odor of jasmine, the notion of the I.
The author will then endow his hypothetical man with hearing, taste, sight, and finally, touch. This last sense will reveal to him that space exists and that in space he exists in a body; sounds, smells, and colors had been to him, before this stage, mere variations or modifications of his consciousness.

The other creature raised by the problem of consciousness is the "hypothetical animal" of Lotze. This being has in its skin but one movable sensitive point-at the extremity of an antenna. Its structure denies it, as is obvious, more than one perception at a time. Lotze argues that the ability to retract or extend its sensitive antenna will enable this all but the animal to discover the external world and distinguish a stationary from a moving object.

I wonder what would be the main differences between the 3 mental models: the human one, the Lotze hypotetical animal one and the Candillac statue one?

Time

It is the invisible presence that governs your world. Trailing you like an unshakable shadow, it ticks and tocks incessantly - you can sense it in your heartbeat, in the rising and setting of the sun, and in your daily rush. It brings order to our lives through the categories of past, present and future.

There is nothing with which we are so familiar with and yet when you try to pin it down you find only a relentless torrent of questions. Why does time appear to flow? What makes it different from space? What is it?

Physicists have also struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. Some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artifact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physics without invoking time, If this approach is correct it reinforces the theory that time is an illusion, and that we may need to rethink how the universe works.

According to general relativity, time is stitched together with space to form four-dimensional space-time. The passage of time is not absolute; instead, time differs from one frame of reference to the next, and what one observer experiences as time, another might experience as a mixture of time and space.