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Here you can find: Senses, Dreams and Natrual laws.
What is the colour red? Silly question you may say. But is it?(1)
You can find the colour red anywhere. Blood, for a start, is red (unless you are one of those who have spent most of their lives inserting genes into each other's arms for fun). Bang your(or someone else's) head against the wall, and you should see plenty of red. The physics nerd next door tells me that red corresponds to light of a particular range of wavelengths. But is my idea of red-ness the same as the physics nerd's? Or for that matter anyone else's?
Well red is definitely different from blue, and mixing red and blue gives purple. Everyone knows that. But doesn't really answer the question. All I can conclude so far is that: 1. I can distinguish one colour from another. 2. two colours mixing together gives another colour. Suppose I have this amazing piece of technology that displays the image inside the physics nerd's mind of what he sees in the picture above to everyone else. Is it possible that the physics nerd sees a girl in green skin wearing pink bikini?
Why not? If I suppose that the picture doesn't "change" itself depending on who is looking at it, then the light reflected from the picture will still have to pass through his eyes, and then to be interpreted by the brain before he can "see" the picture. Surely there is no reason to presume all our brains interpret light in an universal way.
WTF?? I've run out of Carlsberg.......
What is the colour red? Silly question you may say. But is it? (2)
You may think what I said last time is nothing but 100% nonsense. But consider this: can a new born, perfectly normal (in the sense that if we can "see" what the baby sees, then when a baby sees what we consider as a red apple, we can recognise the image in his mind as a red apple) baby tells you (for the sake of argument we suppose he can speak) whether something is red or not?
No he can't. That's because no one has pointed to a red object and told the baby "This is red.". Until someone has done that, the baby can only at most realise a red object has colour (because he can see), or to put it another way, the baby cannot assign the word "red" to the colour of a red object because no one has given him the definition of red-ness. Therefore, if someone decides to point to a red apple and tell the baby "This is blue." then the baby will call what we consider as red, blue (again if we suppose that no one chooses to correct the baby's "mistake").
Now, that person decides to do the same with other colours as well and we have a baby whose ideas of red-ness,white-ness, etc. are completely different from ours. People will say the baby is wrong. The reason the baby is wrong is that the baby's labeling system of colours is different from ours. They may be right.
But it is not always that case that two wrongs don't make a right......
To be continued...
What is the colour red? Silly question you may say. But is it? (3)
Let's return to the physics nerd and his image of the picture. Before I observe his image of the picture using that piece of technology, I thought he shared the same idea of colour as me. From his image of the picture I "conclude" that the way his brain interpret light is different from mine. I'm also tempted to say his brain is "wrong" (I have a tendency of calling anything alien wrong). After observing his image, I show him what I consider as a red apple. He tells me, without hesitation, that it is a red apple. Right->Wrong->Right? WTF?
It may not seem so odd afterall, if I combine my conclusions from the previous two posts together. When the physics nerd "sees" a red apple, the image inside him is not red (eg his image "tells" him it's a purple apple) because the way his brain interprets lights received from his eyes is different from mine. The reason that he still tells me it is a red apple is, as in the baby's case, his system of labeling colour is again different from mine (otherwise he will tell me it's a purple apple).
Sounds reasonable? Or have you found so many holes in my arguments that you start to believe that I'm insane? Yes, there are many holes but I did leave out a few on purpose otherwise I'll end up confusing myself. True, what I say here may be complete bollocks, in that it is probably true that people interpret light and label colours in an universal way. I believe my arguments nonetheless show there are other possibilities.
Surely I can apply similar arguments to taste, noise and other stuff.... like Jennifer Lopez.....okay, may be not.
We dream a lot, eventhough we tend to forget the majority of them by the time we'll awake. In a way, dreams can be regarded as the alternative reality (ie different from the one we "live" in when we're "awake"), eventhough most of us tend not to use associate the word "reality" with dreams. How do we know when we're dreaming, and when we're not?
A common answer would be "pinch yourself and if it hurts then you're not dreaming." and most people will accept it as an adequate answer. But what if this dream you're having can give you a sensation (in this particular case, pain)? Surely then pain is no longer a valid indicator of showing whether you're dreaming or not. Now if the dream can give you more than just one sensation, say sight, smell, noise and so on (in fact, as many as the "reality", in the normal sense, will provide you), then is there any way you can tell if you're dreaming or not? Clearly there is no way you can do so.
My propositions is ridiculous? Possibly. But have you ever been in a dream where you feel you're seeing,or hearing, or smelling ,or touching something? I'm pretty sure you have. The point I'm trying to make here is that it's not as easy as we'd like to think , to be sure whether we're dreaming or not.
Is it possible that when you die in this "reality", you'll suddenly discover that your "previous" life is all but a dream and you'll have to get up, eat your breakfast and catch the 0845 train to work?
Dreams (2)
Do you think I was going a little too far with dreams (from the article below)? Well I'm going to push it even further this time. However I'll have to stress that I did not come up with the idea myself. What I'm about to say has been around for ages, if not centuries.
Remember my claim that all senses, say sight, taste, hearing etc. are basically stimulation of nerve cells? No? Don't worry, because I didn't make that claim before. But surely it is so intuitive that it doesn't require much thoughts to verify it. Biologically, stimulations of nerve cells are basically chemcial reactions at the ends of the cells. Therefore, it should be possible to use chemical reactions to replace all senses. For instance, sodium chloride (or salt) will be give you the salty taste on your taste buds when dissolved.
In other words, by applying appropiate chemical reactions on nerve cells, it
should be possible to create an illusion of a pizza on the table, or a bikini
girl lying on a bed like this:
when neither the pizza or the girl acutally exist. Now, if I can create one illusion, what can stop me from creating more? How about creating a complete world of illusions for a person such that the person doesn't realise it. What I mean is similar to those virtual reality stuff: you put on this headset and you "should" feel like you're living in another world (of course chances are you won't because the technology is still in its infancy, but you should get the general idea.).
What people in the past had suggested is that it is not entirely inconcievable that there is this "devil" who has the ability to create a world of illusion to us. Our bodies do not exist (possibly with the exception of our brains, soaked in some chemicals, just like in sci-fi (ok I made up the second bit)). In fact, it may even be the case that only one person (/brain) exists, since all knowlege of other people comes directly from senses, which can be manipulated by the devil. And the worst (?) thing about it is that the person will never know the existence of the devil and the truth about he being nothing more than a brain.
Scary huh?
Natural laws, or no natural laws Natural laws.
They are everywhere and we rely on them. With natural laws we can say, with confident, that if a ball is thrown up in the air, it will hit the ground. If we have further details, such as the mass of the ball, initial velocity, etc. we can say, with very good accuracy, where it will end up. A question has be asked though: Is it possible that natural laws do not exist?
I have a sequence of numbers, with the first 5 terms being: 1,1,1,1,1 . What is the next term? And the term after? I suspect all of you will say every term in the sequence is 1. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you're hopelessly wrong. The next two terms are 12314544555 and 7727056. Reason? Can't be more obvious. My sequence is "all terms are 1s, except the 6th, which is 12314544555 and the 7th, which is 7727056". Just because the first 5 (or for that matter, the first hundred, or the first trillion) terms are 1s, there is absolutely no reason to claim the rest will have to be 1s too.
The same line of arguments can be applied to the so-called natural laws. Just because force roughly equals to mass x acceleration in the past, it doesn't automatically imply it will be true next year, next day, or even the next second. Yeah, you may say that some natural laws can be derived from other laws. However, this only pushes the question further back without answering it. In short, our experience with the world alone is not sufficient to prove the truth, or the existence of natural laws.
I'll state an example. Back in the ancient time it was widely held (in fact people took it as part of natural laws) that Earth is the centre of the universe. People made calculations on how various heavenly bodies (eg Mars) move, and the results were shown to be accurate, eventhough the paths of these bodies would have to take seemed bizzare (They would advance for a while, then retreat and then advance again along some imaginery lines). Accurate predictions and repetitions are simply not good enough.
So should we reject the existence of natural laws altogether? I personally don't think so because chances are they do exist. The point I'm trying to make is that we should not take the existence of natural laws for granted. Now suppose they DO exist, how do we get to know them? My previous example has shown that experience is not a very reliable way of making sure our idea of any natural law is correct. In fact, if we return to the sequence I mentioned earlier, there are infintely many sequences that have its first 5 terms.
