Tag: ideas

The Follies of Consciousness

June 10th, 2020
There will be people that can argue to a good point that human consciousness is a part of evolution, but my intuition says it just ain’t! Hence my title: The Follies of Consciousness. First, what is consciousness? Consciousness is the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. In shorter words; self-awareness. I am of the strong belief that human consciousness happened by mistake.

I think evolution, as a process barreling forward with whatever it got, sharpened our ancestors social game and mathematical problem solving to a point where we started knowing it was us in a river’s reflection. I think it happened as a side effect of making us so smart. What started with cognitive growth for survival’s sake, like the ability to plan for the future, morphed into contemplation about why we’re even here.

Here are some examples of follies of consciousness. 1) Suicide. Suicide does not help our survival, so clearly that wasn’t programmed into us by evolution. It’s a disorder of the mind when looking inward and forward, and not wanting to live anymore. 2) Obsession. Wouldn’t it be easier to distribute our DNA if we didn’t care about which mate we did it with? What about workaholics that literally work themselves to death from a lack of sleep and nutrition? Jealousy and fixation are another example of defects of consciousness that holds no survival advantage. Paying attention does but not at such high levels. And lastly 3) Religiosity. Fanatics do wacky shit. They’ll dance like they’re being possessed by the holy spirit just because some dude with a microphone is swinging his arms. Old people will stop taking their medication because some fraud said Jesus is with them and will heal them. Young virgin boys with rage issues get sucked into believing the end of the world is coming and join ISIS to partake in a holy war.

In general, depression and anxiety are like really crappy side effects of being smart. You get the best brains on Earth but it comes with this baggage. We can let it tear us down, or we can use these faults to excel us forward. That’s the great thing about where we’re at as a society now. 100 years ago if you wanted to talk about your anxiety you’d just be called weak. Now, we’ve done the research and realize it’s something we’re all going through and ought to help each other out with it to be our best selves. Being self-aware of the follies of being self-aware is a step in the right direction. It allows one to course correct whenever finding oneself descending into despair. It can be the thing we use as motivation to keep working, keep striving, and vent about on the weekends.

I’ve always been a palm-sweater, prone to silence in frantic situations. I clam up. But instead of me accepting or being owned by these defects, I learn what causes them and work on either avoiding those situations or teaching myself to lessen the impact it has on me. The fact that we are self-aware is the luckiest luck a living creature could hope to have on this planet, but it doesn’t come without cost. We must all learn to cope with our defects and continue to help each other out when needed. Thank you for reading dear viewers. I love you, and I’ll you next time.

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Time

May 13th, 2020
What is time? I’ll let you guys answer this one. For real, I’ll wait… and wait… and wait. Even if it takes a lifetime. Even when the stars burn out and matter is dissipated into a heat death of the universe. All will be dark, but you’ll still have time. Time is known to do things, like heal, be cruel, teach us lessons, and fade the past away. Time is fast when you want it to be slow, and slow when you want it to be fast. Time is a clock on the wall, and it is made up. Now you might say, ‘Made up, eh? What’re you talking about?’ Time, as a unit of measurement, is arbitrary! Seconds are just something we made up. If we wanted, tomorrow the UN could declare that one second will now be the length of two seconds, and nothing in the universe would change. We would all live with thirty-second minutes, that’s all.

Time as defined by Google is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. The truth about reality is in that PROGRESS bit. The motion of molecules are what we perceive as time. Time began at the Big Bang, according to the theory of the Big Bang. It leads one to wonder if maybe time needs matter to exist? Like time and matter are two sides to a coin; one cannot exist without the other. If we were to freeze time, we wouldn’t actually be able to gallivant around. There are examples in media of people doing this, like freezing time and stealing from banks, art museums, and such, but the movement of molecules are required for aspects like solid objects. If we stopped things from vibrating closely together, we’d fall through it. Or more so, we’d instantly die from the universe ending.

There is a temperature called ‘Absolute Zero.’ It is the lowest temperature that is theoretically possible, at which the motion of particles that constitutes heat would be minimal. It is zero on the Kelvin scale, equivalent to –273.15°C or –459.67°F. This temperature is out in space, and has been briefly reached in labs on Earth. Pluto is 44 Kelvin (-229 Celsius or -380 Fahrenheit) and is the coldest planet in our solar system. A reason science fiction stories in space have things like cryogenic chambers to hibernate its occupants is because of the real effects lower temperatures have on cellular motion. So, the reason I bring absolute zero up is because if such a temperature could either be found or created to DESCEND EVEN LOWER than absolute zero, would time stop? Would it collapse into a black hole? Who knows!

One thing we do know is that we can never go back in time. Forward, however, well, that’s relative. It has to do with gravity. The simplest example is this: Astronauts leaves Earth’s orbit, saying goodbye to their families and friends as they chart a course around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. The trip takes them one year. They enter the dense black hole’s orbit and circle it once before heading back to Earth. One year had passed for them, but upon returning to Earth, 100 years had passed. It’s a strange and phenomenal effect gravity has on matter. Not just matter actually, but also light. The heavier an object is, on the astronomical scale, the slower time moves. I’m hesitant to say that the molecules vibrate slower, because even if that is what they’re doing, it wouldn’t as simple as that. Cold temperature does that, but doesn’t seem to slow time down. I would simply say gravity works as a dial, like fancy light switches! The more you crank it, the slower things get.

A thought experiment the glorious Stephen Hawking had, regarding time, involved a futuristic train. He wondered, or proposed, that say there was a train humanity created that wrapped around the Earth and traveled at near the speed of light. Matter cannot go or surpass the speed of light, but this train was designed to go just under as fast. He then proposed that a girl in the train decided to run forward in it. Would the laws of physics break? Or would they correct the matter at hand and visibly slow the girl down, making sure not to allow her to pass the speed of light. Individuals sitting in the train would watch as she slowed down, making each stride and seemingly hover in the air as she leapt.

Time is a trip, to conclude this thought piece. We have no control over it. It goes up and down, shrinks and stretches, but never stops or reverses. We are a slave to time and we are freed by it. Time is us and we are time. Make what you will of your slice, and I’ll make mine. Thank for reading, and I’ll see you guys next time!
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Substance Abuse

May 9th, 2020
How does someone find themselves at the receiving end of a destructive habit? No one plans to live a life of degradation. It’s something that happens slowly, like a frog in boiling water. One doesn’t notice that certain actions have a predictive outcome of addiction until they reach that point down the line. It can start with partying on the weekends as a seventeen-year-old, to drinking alone every night ten years later.

Many variables lie under substance abuse, like a bastardized clandestine iceberg of submerged painful memories and torment. The most understood variables are loss, and lineage. Grief is the most painful emotional state in life. We as a society have seen countless people get swallowed by substance abuse to numb the pain, and have overall understood that standpoint. Not accept it, but understood it. Lineage is also easy to understand. If you have the blood of a drinker, you may have drinking problems. The actual science behind substance abuse says that genetic predisposition plays a role of fifty-percent to an individual developing a problem.

Other factors that are harder for people to understand are childhood traumas, and general stressors. The reason childhood trauma is hard for people to understand is because those people in the individual’s life were most likely there in their childhood, so it’s a matter of coming to terms with something they may have had a role in. The human mind is a survival mechanism. Children absorb experiences like a sponge so when something distressing happens, their mind will go to great lengths to bury the event in order to keep the lights on.

General stressors can be otherwise described as school, family life, friendships, or work. Coping with life’s hardships can be as easy as taking a hit. You may have started just once or twice, but soon fall into the habit of ritually needing the substance. It can get to a point where you’re blowing off your friends and other engagements so as to continue the ritual you’ve started one lonely night.

Homeless heroin addicts were once innocent children. But bit by bit, one event after another things kept going wrong and getting worse, pushing the person down the path to where they are now. Substance abuse isn’t the end of the road, though. One in the pit of their deepest hole might say it is, but so long as one is still alive, there is a chance to get out. An optimistic spin might be to say, ‘If you’re at your lowest, then you have nothing to lose.’ Dependency is a construct of the mind. It is a damn tight construct, but a construct none-the-less. Joggers talk about a mental wall they hit at a point of deep exhaustion. It’s a moment when your body, instincts, and soul scream for you to let go. To know what it is, and know you can say no allows you to break the impossible wall and push past it. Once you do, a weight is lifted and everything becomes lighter.

It’s a hard truth to face but the fact of the matter is that life is a constant struggle. It’s not easy, but like working out, it gets better if you put in the effort. Let daily pessimism die under the light of a hopeful mindset. Ring it out to let the sober winds of realism breeze your cheek, and stand tall to let a ray of optimism shine on you every now and then. I hope this helped anyone reading to better sympathize or understand that many things go into how someone can fall from grace. We are all in this thing called life together, and all need to help each other out. Thank you for being here, and I’ll see you guys next time.
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Dyson Spheres

April 28th, 2020
One one-billionth of the Sun’s total energy output actually reaches Earth. Of all the energy that does reach Earth, 34 percent is reflected back to space by clouds. The Earth itself reflects another 66 percent back to space. Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness even one percent of the Sun’s energy? That thought brings us to today’s topic, the idea of a Dyson Sphere. Not to be confused with Dyson vacuums, the definition of a Dyson Sphere is: a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. There are similar variations to this such as a Dyson Ring, Dyson Swarm, Dyson Bubble, and Dyson Shell. All these things would perform the same goal.

The original concept of the thought experiment was attributed to physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, though like most things, there was someone who thought of it first. It was surely unintentional but back 2 400 years ago, Plato the philosopher wrote about enormous subterranean tunnels both broad and narrow that made up the Earth’s interior. Later in the 17th century, the term Hollow Earth became a now debunked theory, claiming that there is indeed an inverted world inside our world, with it’s own light source! Such a thought experiment is not unlike a creative version of a Dyson Sphere. Its purpose ultimately being a power source which as we all know in a broad sense, our sun is. It gives us life! In vegetation and in vitamin D.

So the myth of Agartha, which is what some groups called the Hollow Earth, was really the first idea of a Dyson Sphere. But Freeman’s description of such a thing was humanity’s first good description of a truly conceivable version of it. To harness the sun in the palm of a species’ hands. It seems like pure theory now, that a race could build something so massive to wrap around the sun, a body in of itself that could fit over one million Earths in it, that it’ll never be possible. But ALREADY we have found anomalies through NASA’s Discovery Program of potential Dyson Spheres out in space made by advanced intelligent alien life.

Granted, reality is often disappointing and the anomaly these scientists are finding are most likely large planets obscuring the stars’ light, it’s still fun to think of the possibility. We often imagine aliens being almost just like us: bipedal, carbon-based lifeforms using air from their throats to communicate. If that is the case, it would take a civilization of China-levels of cooperation to construct such a device! But in a more creative sense, if alien life out there were something like silicon-based, or A.I. managed, construction of larger-than-star-sized devices could be a thing. Regardless, I just wanted to talk about this subject because things like this inspire my imagination, and if it could do the same to you, then the world would be a little brighter.

I love you all, and thanks for reading.
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Tag: ideas

The Follies of Consciousness

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Time

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Substance Abuse

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Dyson Spheres

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