http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/quantum-time-machine-lets-you-travel-past-without-fear-grandfather-paradox

From the comments:

The universe has a current 'information state'. This state evolves in what we call Time. In order to time travel, it implies that you are moving an object (let's say a person) from the current universal state to a past or future universal information state.

The problem is, where is the past information state being stored? Where is the future information state of the universe being stored?

You can dream up alternative universes and infinite dimensions to solve the problem, but that does not mean they exist.

If we are just evolutionary shimmers of self awareness, then why don't we act like it? Apparently evolution was smart enough to build in the ability to deny the blatantly obvious.

Some notes from last show:

1. The reoccurring theme that maybe we are just a wrong fork in the road. Like a species that failed to evolve, we are a civilization that is failing to evolve. As Grayson said, we can then fall back on "guilt free hedonism". It no longer matters.

2. Just because science and scientists explain something, doesn't mean anyone will understand it and/or care about it. We are not necessarily wired to understand science, we are wired to tell and hear stories.

3. Is science really making our lives better? Or does each new discovery overwhelm our already overwhelmed ability to deal with the new advances? And what is deciding what gets studied anyway? Capitalism. Which is a proven flawed model. It is easily to manipulate so that it doesn't serve the greatest good, it serves those who know how to manipulate it.

4. We realize we are limited beings, but we can imagine not being limited. In fact, the entertainment business feeds off of this. We have superheroes and action movies which give us the sense of being more then who we are. Do these distract us from dealing with the reality of what we can really do?

5. There aren't answers to the really big questions, there are new ways of looking at things that provide further insight. So unless you're willing to change the way you look at things, then you will never have the insight.

There are no superpowers, the range of human ability, we can only manipulate tools and each other.

A road says we like to travel.

We have narrow vision and strong emotions so our decision making is very poor.

I want to keep switching dimensions until I find the one where I am rich and popular.

We have technology and spirit. Technology we know works and will always grow, ESP, time travel, immortality all may be achieved through technology. The spirit makes us happy, this we know. We want it to provide all those other things, but it may not.

Best case scenario we find the right blend of the two, otherwise too much technology leads to alienation, too much spirit leads to primitive thinking.

But what of the big questions? Are we more or are we very little?

Science believes we are very little, spirit believes we are more. How do we investigate this further?

Top down, brutal organizational structures have been the predominate force throughout nature. They scale well unfortunately. Is this a flaw in human kind? Or what worked out through evolution to be the successful dynamic?

Its not always that things are complicated, but its that their admin utilities are not very easy to use. Anything can be made complicated or simple depending on how its presented.

A scientist needs to have a disciplined mind not to get stuck in his emotions or be human. There are no answers there.

Even though math is the true nature of the Universe, it provides no consolation to the human psyche. No one ever looked at a physics formula and felt better. I guess you could say theoretically that what comes out of physics formulas makes us feel better, but that's a weak argument. Technology does not solve our problems.

1. If we are illusions, then why isn't everything illusions? In other words, how can the illusions determine what the real things are? That's strange.

2. We are the same as everything else. Structured patterns of information. We are objects. Yet scientists will say we are different from inanimate objects and animals, yet we are not special. It is a weird in between state, we can do a neat trick in other words.

We don't know who we are:

1. We used to know and we've forgotten.

2. We've evolved to the point where we can know, but we need to figure it out.

3. We're not built to know this sort of thing, maybe not right now, maybe not ever.

I know no more about life at 40 then I did at 10. I've filled my head with a lot of knowledge, but very little of it resonates on an emotional level with why I am here.

Perhaps we are not built to understand ourselves. We are built to survive. Mathematics is a hack that we've created to manipulate the world around us, but it really doesn't solve the aching in our souls. So either it is the wrong tool, or we don't really have souls that ache. We just think we do.

I prefer the latter to the former. I believe that there are places the subjective mind can go that defy language, that defy rationality. They can only be felt. This is our default nature. This is who we are. Everything else is a distraction, a diversion.

It's all a matter of perspective. The Universe is filled with patterns of information. Many of these 'patterns', like a human being for instance, are capable of perceiving other patterns of information around them.

If you're a human, which I will assume you are, then you are very familiar with what the basic, default 'human' mode of perception consists of. There are an infinite amount of variations of the pattern, but in general, we all know what it is like to be self aware, to have emotions, to think, to use our senses, to feel our physical selves. To interact socially with others. All of this compacts down into one distinct 20th century human feeling.

What is possible though, is that we, as humans, can imagine other ways of perceiving information around us. We can explore different maps of ourselves and the worlds around us.

Is there anywhere to go, or are we just stuck in the maze of our own minds?

I like to feel good so doesn't it make sense the being enlightened would be the ultimate way to feel good? What if there were hedonistic cults dedicated to being enlightened, not for the spiritual sense, but purely for the 'feel good' sense?

Actually, I'll bet that already happens.

Odds seem to be directly tied to the timescale of the event occurring. If the odds of something happening are one in a billion, that seems like quite a long shot, but imagine that a billion permutations of that event can happen in the blink of an eye, suddenly that number isn't as daunting.

When we talk about ideas like having a 'soul', this really resonates with people. Now a scientist will tell you no such thing exists. Yet from a subjective standpoint, it 'feels' like this exists. And in fact believing that it exists may actually change your brain physically, so there is power in that idea.

So perhaps these ideas are really psychological reflections of ourselves, insight into the extremely complicated mechanisms of the software of the brain, revealing themselves in this particular way.

But science doesn't appreciate the anecdotal version of the information because it's too sloppy and difficult to work with. It isn't hard data, it isn't numbers, it's feelings. Now there are always brave individuals who attempt to create a translation table to turn those feelings into numbers, but they never seem to be that successful.

Science wants to be the cold hard reality outside of the human bubble. The place where objects bump into each other for no other reason then the simple physical laws that govern the Universe. What always makes me laugh though is that we would not be able to 'know' about any of this without the soft and gooey human ability to perceive.

The strength and weakness of humans is that we only care when we're in close proximity with each other. When we are separated from any actual events occurring, or ability to empthaize greatly decreases. This is why we are being devastated by the current 'corporate' culture. Responsibility and empathy for each other has been cut off.

Do you want to be right or seek the truth? These are not the same, at times they intersect, but often they do not.

Humans fool themselves that we are close to solving the riddle, that the answer to the mystery of life is just over the next hill, that we can see it in the distance. This is because we have safety mechanisms built in to us to make the world small and comprehensible, lest we lose our minds in the face of the incomprehensible infinity that expands around us. These bubbles exist on all levels of thinking, individual, family, community, country and global. While they help protect us, they are also a great hindrance to the search for truth.

The best we can do is recognize the patterns that repeat in the Universe we live in. This let's us, in an extremely rudimentary way, manipulate some of the world around us and, hopefully, make it a better place for everyone to live in. But the problem is, our ability to tinker far outpaces our ability to agree on what 'a better place to live in' means.

And most importantly, just because we have some understanding of the patterns we perceive around us here doesn't mean that a) these are all the patterns, our tools for perceiving are still quite crude and that b) we are just in one level of pattern creating, there could be different places that operate on completely different systems. To use the computer analogy, we could be stuck in the 'spreadsheet' application, but that doesn't mean other living things exist somewhere else in the 'photoshop' application where completely different rules apply.

We are scared of the next ten minutes, that is all. Our deaths will mean one of two things, both of which mean the same thing. We didn't have to be scared. Either we'll never know about anything because we cease to exist, or we'll know everything because we continue onwards, learning and seeking.

Apparently it isn't our default state to understand the Nature of the Universe, otherwise, why would we have to spend so much time trying to figure it out?

A group of people figure out that an external force is required to focus the energy of people on Earth to save themselves. So they create one. And it works. Until people stop believing in the external force, and then they start fighting again over whether the force is real or not.

The classic conundrum is, if someone has a loved one die and goes to a psychic who tells them they communicated with that loved one and that they are happy, and this news makes the person happy and find closure, does it matter whether or not the psychic actually contacted the dead person?

True character is defined by making the right decisions in the absence of any external authority. To hold oneself completely and utterly accountable for their own actions is the starting point for a new generation.

Wanting something to be true is not the same as having it be true. As the quote goes, "The harder you believe in something does not make it more likely to be true."

There are many things I want to be true that aren't.

We're at this strange nexus right now where it feels like that when we wish for something we should get it. This is because we're creating this very realistic virtual platforms that are moving toward granting us this freedom, albeit in a digital manner. So perhaps this is feeding the fire for all the organic people who want to be able to do the same thing, but with their minds. And to an extent, we can, but only within our own minds. Its the crossing of the transom into other minds where things get stuck. Apparently there is no organic Internet right now. Its so tantalizingly close though, that people jump ahead and make it so.

With 6 billion on the people, thousands who die and are born every second, why is it that no one has definitively proven that there is life after death? Or that telepathy really does exist? It seems almost impossible that, if these things were the truth, they would have to seep through to the mainstream. The argument is that science is so close minded that they deny the evidence, they castigate those who seek proof. Even if that is true, and I believe to a certain extent it is, doesn't it seem that given the enormity of the discovery to made here and the consequences, that would overwhelm the disdain of skeptics?

Powerlessness can be very powerful in it's own twisted way.

Life is a great mystery and we are very limited in our ability to unravel that mystery, which may actually be the point. But there are some patterns we can recognize that seem to be 'laws' at least in our corner of the Universe. So we should respect that and work with it.

That doesn't mean we can't explore every mystery, but remember that there are some starting points.

Of the many things that is unknown about consciousness, the most fascinating is the scale of it. Is it large or small? In the scale of the Universe, are we barely able to perceive the size of atoms spinning? Can the scale of consciousness expand? This is why the idea of it being a force is so interesting, perhaps it can expand and contract based on what is hosting it.

Basically the way we think changes the wiring in our brain which becomes a feedback loop, we think more that way. So the challenge then in these times where there is so much negative thought happening is how to get people to embrace thinking differently because its not just ethereal thought we're talking about, its actually about changing their physical brain structure.

Just watched the season finale of Lost and got very emotional. They're all dead. This is the kind of story that strikes at the heart of so many things we don't talk about. We are all going to die and we wish it were going to be that happy. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, we just don't know.

Six Feet Under had a very similar (but not near as uplifting) ending. These are the stories that shape our relationship with death.

Everything is a distraction except recognizing that you exist.

The question is not whether we survive death or not. This assumes a very specific world view. The question is do we actually understand the true nature of reality? The answer is "no". So until we understand the true nature of reality, arguing about death is like ancient people arguing about whether the sun disappears after we stop seeing it at night. We're applying current models to systems we don't yet understand.

What really struck me the other day when listening to another debate about the whether there is life after death was the lack of imagination by both parties.

This seems to be a bigger issue overall with our race. We have enough imagination to get us into trouble, but not enough to really comprehend the bigger picture. So we're stuck in this weird in-between space, maybe it is a critical gap in our evolution where we make it or not.

I now have a better understanding of why faith is necessary. Life is very short, and if you're waiting for science to provide the answers as to how life really works, you're out of luck.

So you either choose a path that makes sense to you and pursue it, or you choose no path and wait to die.

The logical plan seems to be to figure out how our universe, and by extension, ourselves, work. Once we've mastered that, then we can control everything and live out our fantasies. Right?

This is a theme that surfaces all the time on the show. We're developing all sorts of cutting edge technology to make life easier, which we think means better. Yet we don't spend that much time trying to figure out what 'better' really entails. Faster? Smarter? Longer? More intense?

It seems our time would be better spent figuring out what 'better' means first, get on the same page with that, then apply the technology.

Maybe we have already come back from the future and have decided that this 'primitive' era of time is a great place to learn stuff, hang out and play games in.

And then it dawned on me. If time travel does exist, then why wouldn't we have come back from the future to help those who are suffering now? Possible options:

1. Time travel doesn't exist.

2. We can't mess with this past because it leads to time travel existing in the future.

3. Every possible version of reality exists, in the one we're living in now, no one came back from the future.

4. In the future we don't care about the past.

Watching this Bill And Ted's Big Adventure clip is what triggered this thread.

"A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists. Each of the chemical elements is a pattern integrity. Each individual is a pattern integrity. The pattern integrity of the human individual is evolutionary and not static."

Found this quote from Buckminster Fuller on But Does It Float site. Which led me to more of his quotes. Great stuff.

"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it."

Exactly.

Which way does it go? Is the Universe all perfectly ordered and we, as humans, are messy. Or is the Universe messy and we, as humans, can't figure it out. Or both?

And by messy I mean, is there a Universal order to things, is there an underlying principle that rules everything? But humans, due to emotional interference and limited intelligence, can't pick up on it. Which is why we build computers. I think most of us assume that there is Universal order.

Is it possible though that in fact there is no underlying principle, that there are no rules, that in fact chaos is the fabric of the Universe? That is a scary thought.

On a side note, if you Google 'universal order', you end up in some pretty weird places. Not what I was expecting at all.

While working on something else yesterday, I had this thought, "We don't choose life, life chooses us." A very materialist approach, I'd imagine someone who believed in reincarnation would beg to differ.

Consciousness is such a strange beast. We haven't found it anywhere else in the Universe, apparently only humans have it (I don't agree with this, but it is one theory). When we're born we have some version of it, as we age, it becomes more and more focused until some point we're at our 'most' conscious. Then, as old age sets in, we lose our faculties and often times some level of our consciousness.

Now the mistake I may be making here is confusing, "self awareness" with "consciousness". Perhaps we are all imbued with the same amount of "consciousness" but we achieve various levels of "self awareness". Consciousness being defined as built into the 'hardware' of the brain, 'self awareness' arising from the 'software' of thinking and self reflection. Very closely connected no doubt, but not the same.

In the same way we thought the Earth was the center of the Universe, we think our consciousness is the center of the Universe. When we stop believing this, we will discover new worlds.

I wholeheartedly believe that we can know more about how life works then we currently do. We think we know quite a bit about life because we're alive, but that just isn't true. Even if you're alive, which certainly helps, insight and wisdom are only gained through work.

Life really is short, the rumor is true. You have your time to add what you can to the mix. There is no right or wrong, do the best you can, that's all you can do.

"Historians of science wonder whether the ether that was loudly pushed out the front door of physics is quietly returning through the back door under the guise of "space". Quantum field theory provides especially fertile area for such speculation. Particles are created with the help of energy present in "vacuums". To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty." - From the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I keep asking this question. Can nothing be proved? Does nothing exist? Or is that a paradox? The famous quote goes "Something is the exception, nothing is the rule." But how do we know that?

Because it seems that once there is something, there will always be something. How does it go back to nothing?

Thoughts from last nights show. Technology is only as useful as the people who create and use it. While it may help us recognize patterns faster, it does not make us better as individuals or as a society. So we figure out live forever in a hard drive. That doesn't mean you won't be miserable for eternity.

"I now know that the purpose of my life is more than these stages. I have been married, had kids, then grandkids, written books, and traveled. I have loved and lost, and I am so much more than five stages. And so are you." - Elisabeth Kubler Ross from this excellent New Yorker article about her.

Jonah Lehrer has a nice essay in the latest issue of Wired (which is strangely not online) about how scientists miss the big picture. I've always thought this to be true, but never felt qualified enough to say it out loud.

"The mistake of science is to pretend everything is a clock when the world is more like a cloud."

There you go.

When I'm talking to you, I'm not talking to you, I'm trying to bypass your top level filters and tap into your mid and sub consciousness.

To follow up on my last thought. We are creating algorithms that can crunch massive data sets and tell us what the patterns mean (you still need humans, since a computer doesn't know meaning, yet).

The conundrum being, "the scientists have the answer, but do not know the question."

My question is, why do we not apply this same logic to the computer we already have? Which is our brain. Is it possible that our brains, our subconsciousness and so forth is also able to recognize deeply complex patterns but are current level of consciousness aren't able to recognize the meaning? And who would you trust more? Your brain or a computer?

The limit is not what can be created, the limit is what can be perceived.

While ruminating over Radiolab's last segment of their latest installment, "Limits", this (somewhat obvious) point really sunk in.

It doesn't just apply to computers and humans. It applies to the relationship between humans and the Universe. Mysteries are only things WE DON'T KNOW. I always think back to the greatest television marketing campaign of all time from NBC, "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you".

And it applies to humans and humans. There is a wealth of information out there that we do know and theoretically any human can know. But not everybody has the correct mind set up to absorb it all. Things like education, culture, time and so forth can limit people's ability to process information.

In the future, as we start to truly understand the nature of the universe, the mystics will be able to handle it, but the rationalists will require computers to help them maintain their sanity.

With iPad mania abounding, I found this great little post about the iPad and technology itself. It is evident, if you choose to take the long view, that technology is all about making the New Age dreams come true. To take what makes us so very human, being alone in this world, and eliminate it. Cel phones are really a very slow form of telepathic communication. The internet is a poor man's hive mind. With each turn of the wheel, processor speed becomes faster, and our dreams of becoming one with, I don't know what, come closer to being true. This quote, from the post, sums it up:

"I have loved you after my fashion, Ellen. I can tell you so because you can read it for yourself. But, Ellen, neither business nor society is possible without thoughts that are not disclosed. And marriage, above all things, is impossible without thoughts that are not disclosed. It is unthinkable, Ellen. And even if you find the holiest of men, don’t marry him as long as you can read his thoughts. A little illusion is the only bond between mortals that never breaks."

To follow up on the last note. I 'feel' like I'm living in some sort of 'virtual' reality, it's hard to describe exactly, but I have that foggy, everything at a distance sort of thing going on. This is mixed in with subtle hints of background paranoia and seeing things out of the corner of my eyes.

Now, scientists describe reality with a completely different set of tools. If their materialists, they'll tell you exactly how it works, but ultimately that is of no real help to me because I can only feel how things work. You can tell me a million times how they really work, but if my baseline feeling doesn't change, I'm probably going to stick with that.

The question isn't whether or not we're living in a 'virtual reality', but for me it's, "it sure does feel like we are." Since it probably never be proven whether we are or not and I feel like we are, that seems to give the edge to the virtual reality.

There are 6 billion people on the planet, alive right now. How many of those people do you think are having unique experiences that would blow your mind right now? How many know things that know one else knows?

Its hard to say because the only way we find these types of things out is through some sort of media transmission. And if those people aren't communicating their ideas, or the transmission isn't strong enough, we'll never hear about it.

So the question is, can really important things be kept a secret?

Found on a random blog: "When you are working, everybody is in your studio--the past, your friends, the art world, and above all your own ideas--all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave." Philip Guston via John Cage? No idea, but I like it.

Imagine you could experience anything you wanted to. Anything in the world, a full simulation as absolutely as real as the real thing. Wouldn't you want access to every situation possible? If you only had yourself to rely on, to create experience from your memories and knowledge, you'd be surprised at how limited your imagination is.

You'd want help from other people to show you things you had never imagined before. This is what we do in life, we seek out new experiences, new emotions, new sensations. Yet we don't realize how limited we are in contrast to how much there is to experience.

I was reading about 'mesofacts' the other day which is an interesting concept, it is the idea that some facts change slowly over the course of our lives. But I would argue what is more interesting is how entire cultural shifts happen over the course of our lives that we barely notice. We all know what they are and joke about them (what did we do before ATMs and email?).

The question is then, at what pace does change have to occur so that it slowly becomes a part of our life and we never realize a change happened? Or is it that any change, whether quick or slow, is assimilated into our world view and we forget that change is happening all the time? I think its the latter. We are built to endure and absorb change at whatever speed it happens, which is good, since everything is changing, including ourselves. We are 'reality stabilizers', which keeps us from going crazy trying to absorb all the change.

For some reason the thought occurred to me this morning, "does nothing exist". This statement would seem to be a paradox. If nothing exists, then it isn't nothing, it's something. The question can also be stated, "why is there something instead of nothing?" Fair enough. I have posted on my wall the quote, "nothing is the rule, something is the exception." Which I guess means that there is nothing.

Started John Brockman's book, "This Will Change Everything" yesterday and what struck me most was that almost every essay was about artificial intelligence. It's interesting that we're so focused on external technology instead of working on our internal technology. Maybe that's what needs to change, we need to think of ourselves as technology, not meat. Instead of becoming cyborgs, maybe we need to use our brain more.

I imagine that when you die, it's a lot like being on the internet. If you're not focused, perhaps you didn't meditate and learn to control your mind, then you end up wandering around, browsing through all the different possibilities, but never really going anywhere.

We are systems within systems. Modules within modules. No matter how big you go, there is still a bigger module. A bigger system. And no matter how small you go, there are still smaller systems. Which begs the question, why does our consciousness only exist on one level of all of these systems and modules?

The sliding pyramid of knowledge states that any statement of knowledge should be able to be compressed into a very succinct message, like one sentence. But as that compression occurs of course, information is lossed (how much is lost depends on how well the message is compressed).

Conversely, and probably more importantly, whoever compresses the knowledge should be able to show they knew what they were doing by providing some level of 'decompression', or, all the steps they took to compress.

The common assumption is that there is a one to one relationship between the configuration of our brains and what we 'feel'. Meaning one day we'll be able to say, 'when the brain looks like this, you're feeling happy'.

Couldn't we already to this, but in the opposite direction? Haven't we mapped out, albeit in much less rigid, but no less creative, methods all the different combinations the brain can feel through language, art, film, etc.? Isn't everything we communicate with each other meant to elicit some sort of brain state in other people?

So what happens then, everything we experience in the external world is really a map of the brain.

Conventional wisdom says that just because you can imagine something, doesn't mean it exists. As I have stated earlier, I don't believe that to be true. The converse to that though, just because you CAN'T imagine something doesn't mean it does not exist, is far more pertinent.

It feels like we know everything there is to know, it is the trick of compression that our mind plays on us. The world feels small, finite and managable. Until we step out our front door and learn something new, then it dawns on us that perhaps we don't know so much. Then we unlock new pathways in our brain which open up new feelings and so forth.

One theory is that this is a protection mechanism. If we really could comprehend all we don't know, our brains might short circuit. Perhaps this is true.

Imagine that everything you can imagine exists somewhere. This is an infinite playing space world. Seriously, try it. Imagine everything you can. You'd be surprised at how little you can actually come up with (compared with everything that could be thought of). Now imagine the Earth and all the amazing things that are here. How much detail there is. Maybe the Earth thought itself into existence.

Think about all the crap man has made. All the thinking that goes into each piece of crap. That's a lot of real thinking. Thinking is power. Thinking bridges the gap between all those other worlds, and this world.

Since regular people (amateurs) don't have the time, money or ability to do real scientific testing (few scientists do either), its safe to say any theory about the world you come up with will not be proven true by you. Conversely that leaves anyone who asks, "where's the proof?" in a strong position.

So is the answer then that no one except highly qualified individuals with large college or corporate budgets be allowed to come up with theories? And for everyone else, will use the cheaper "Occam's Razor" to shred your ideas.

There will, in the foreseeable future at least, always be an upper limit to the amount of information a human is able to process. Even at the height of their power, geniuses are no match for computers, and their time on this Earth is limited anyway. So if we want to explore the Universe, we need machines. Machines to process information and machines to remember what we've learned. Of course once you go down this road, there is no end.

We are no longer satisfied with being human when we see what the machines can do. The secret, which is not so secret, is that we dream of merging with the machines. Of taking whatever makes us human (our soul you could say, it is yet to be decided exactly what that is however) and twist it together with the machines to have the best of both worlds. The 'humanity' of being human meshed together with the processing power (and theoretical immortality) of the machines.

There are only two sides to the coin. If you believe death is the end of you, then you always have doubt in the back of your mind that maybe there is something more. Conversely, if you believe you do exist in some form, then the specter of nothingness lingers around the edges of your thoughts. Who has the advantage? I would say the latter personally, because we know that, in some manner, we exist, but we've never seen non-existence, we've only theorized about it. I've never seen a unicorn so I speculate they don't exist.

Some days it feels like you can just pull back the crack enough to see something else. But it takes so much energy, and then you fall back into the 'normal' mode.

I used to think I knew how it was all going to turn out, but now I have absolutely no idea.

The key to life is that we think we know how we work, but we don't. Until we fully admit that to ourselves, we can't make much progress.

"The question," Cope says, "isn't whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul." I love this quote, it sums up the whole dilemma in one fell swoop (although I would substitute 'consciousness' for 'soul'). The same applies to the discussion about whether animals have souls.

We put so much information into our black boxes and yet, we have no idea how it will all resurface.

We do a lot of stuff we don't know about about. A lot of stuff happens that we don't know about.

The thing about life that astounds me is that you have to learn to be human, it isn't built in. And the more you know, the more you learn that there is to know. Conversely, you can choose to know very little.

I explained to my some this evening that we live on the planet Earth and it blew my mind (hopefully it blew his). Then it truly dawned on me, here is a human brain that knows nothing about living on a planet. It's not in his DNA. It's something he learns. That is amazing.

Asking the question, 'what is the answer to life' is like asking, 'what is the answer to math' or 'what is the answer to a zoo'. There is none, it is a process. Ask, 'what is the meaning of life' and that is like asking, 'what is the meaning of the wind', it just is. Now the question, 'how does it all work', is a different question, this is something that can be explored although perhaps never fully answered (depending on who you talk to).

There is no answer, no final destination. That being said, don't think that you've experienced everything there is to experience in life, that this is it. Not even close. In fact, there is so much more to experience, you'll forget you were ever looking for an answer.

Took off in an airport into the thick fog today. It's an obvious metaphor for life, but it works none the less. When you're not paying attention in the moment, life becomes a fog where all the details blur into a thick white fuzz.

Read a crush of Artificial Intelligence articles today. The consensus is that within ten years we'll have computers powerful enough to recreate the human brain. Then what? We don't even know how are own brains work.

This evening my eyes got really dry and my contacts were blurry. I needed to read something small and I couldn't, and it dawned on me what it's like to be old. I would have thought it was a great feeling of loss, of all the things you couldn't do anymore. But I realized, you just get used to it, this is what your life is.

One way of looking at it is that we're all little recording machines, roaming around, sucking up data onto our hard drives and bumping into each other.

The hardest part about reading so many books is that the answer isn't in there, those are just tools to use in your search for the answer.

The hardest thing in the world to do is imagine something you've never thought of before, that you have no reference points for. Everything we think about is in terms of something else, and we assume that we can easily think of something new in the same way. But we can't. That is why our minds get blown.

What I really wonder about is are there people on Earth right now who really 'get it'. Are there pockets of intelligence that are not available to the public that know way more then everyone else. And I don't mean government secrets like what stock market is going to crash tomorrow, I mean bigger picture kind of stuff.

Thinking about the question does math exist or did we create it? Which circles around to my last thought, put another way, 'how can there be answers if there are no such thing as questions.' Beyond the human mind that is.

I started out with, if we stumbled upon the answers, what if we're not able to recognize them? Which led to 'what its not a matter of knowing what the answers are, but what the right questions are'. Which ultimately gave me 'The answer is that there is no question.'

Being alive sometimes feel like we're all a part of this huge supercomputer, but no one really knows how to use the damn thing.