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Death - the ultimate pleasure

November 28th, 2008 by miro @ 1:43 am

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Sand fun

So, do you want to live forever? - You will…

Do you believe that we are getting reborn? - Yes, we are, in a way…

The human body is built by atoms and molecules and it is held together by nothing but atomic forces. There is no magic and no divine force. Our body consist of mostly water - 60% or so. We are water.

So when we die all the chemical elements which we called ‘our body’ before are floating away to become again part of stones, trees, flowers, water and somebody else’s body. In the same way they were part of somebody or something else before they were ‘us’. Some of the atoms in your and mine bodies were part of the nebula that formed the solar system billions of years ago. Some of our atoms were part of William Shakespeare, or Mozart, or even Jesus if he ever existed.

We are nothing but sand sculptures built sand grain by sand grain and washed away one day, so the sand grains can become another sculpture. We are nothing but imperfect iterations of a process which we do not  seem to be able to comprehend.

So, there is no need to fear death, for death do not exist!

When we die, the system which we call our body is not losing any matter  The system just transforms - into water, or somebody else. More like Lego bricks, you destroy one figure and use the bricks to create something new.

What is the driving force behind life? Is there driving force at all or we are just advanced stones…

Spinoza says: to be able to exist is power…

According to Nietzsche: “Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is overcome.” - that resistance in Physics is called Entropy. “A measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work.” It is also a measure of disorder; the higher the entropy the greater the disorder.

Lets look at Freud’s ‘dead drive’ - “The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state.” (Freud).

According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives (noise, anxiety), conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death. (quote from wikipedia)

So; to be able to exist is power (Spinoza), happiness is the feeling that power increases (Nietzsche) and ultimate pleasure is zero stimulus, or death (Freud). Then happiness and pleasure are completely different things. In fact they are exact opposite.

Think about this: Somewhere in the future you have only 5 minutes left to live… you are about to die. If you have the chance to get back in time, say at the time you read this blog, what would you do in a different way?

Make you life count, that’s all….

The design of the universe

November 22nd, 2008 by miro @ 1:20 pm

I just saw this interesting TED talk by George Smoot discussing some of the amazing design ‘patterns’ on which the universe is based. It is a very good talk and has some nice illustrations of the space-time machine we are part of.

They had to use super computer for a month to render some of the videos. Note that the pattern  when  looked at large scale is very very similar to the pattern you will see if you look at the neurons structure in a human (or animal) brain!

Mouse brain neuron and the universe

Amazing… this comparison should make any theologian and physicist to take a deep breath and  drink a glass of cold water.

It makes you wonder what actually is life. Is the universe… alive? Maybe life is just not that different than non-life.

Time - Just a touch away

November 18th, 2008 by miro @ 1:17 am

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A Pool of Distant Galaxies – the deepest ultraviolet image of the Universe yet

What do you do when you want to see back in time? You look at the sky…

Sometimes it takes billions of years for the light from far objects to reach Earth. The light from some of the blinking dots you see in the sky has left them when there was no life on Earth. So, many years later you look at the sky and it is a window to the past. The scale of the universe and the time it takes for the light to travel so far makes me think that something with our perception of what time is, is terribly wrong. It feels like what we call time is actually a manifestation of something else.

I came across this image of deep space, released by ESA (European Space Agency). It is the deepest ground-based Ultraviolet image of the Universe ever obtained! Wow!

To get the photo, they had to pick a very dark area of the sky - where there are no closer object to interfere. It was a black spot.

Just look at the image - the place is full of ‘life’… or rather was. The Universe was just 2 billion years old when the light has left these stars and galaxies on its way to Earth. The estimated age of the universe is ~14 billion years. The solar system was formed ~5 billion years ago. So, we see how those galaxies looked when our solar system was just a nebula, a cloud of dust in space.

It looks like we live in a bubble of present time ‘reality’ and everything else around us is the past. The farther you look from this bubble, further back in time you see. The only factor in this ‘time machine’ is the size of the space. So, size does matter after all. It matters so much that we can see 12 billion years back in time.

If we go just little further (2 b. years more) we will reach an event horizon of the observable universe. The light from those objects is still traveling towards Earth, so there will not be much to see - another bubble this time of the observable universe.

Our fundamental laws of physics are based on observation and the presumption that an object is were it seems to be. For most of our daily life on Earth that is correct, not so on cosmic scale. The real universe is probably very different place now.

The human life is so short compared to the age of the universe we are not even on the radar. We are within the margins of the statistical error. We are lost in time.

Our life is an illusion - just a touch away…