8/26-8/30:

Tuesday, August 27th marked the first thought experiment of the year, and the question was simple: If you and everyone you know was remembering the future and moving backwards in time, would you know the difference?. The crux of the argument is if there is anything that requires us to go in a specific direction in time. My opinion is, yes, we would know the difference, but for one very specific reason. From this vantage point, one could make the argument that our deaths are actually births, and that many important concepts are merely based on perception, and, because our perception of the world is based on moving through time in a singular direction, we would be unable to recognize it. That is, until we get to birth. The process of childbirth is messy and currently ranks as one of the most painful things a human can experience, alongside burning to death, being buried alive, and other such gruesome things. But if we were moving backwards in time and remembering what we interpret to be as the future, then the process of birth breaks down. Therefore, if we were moving backwards in time, then that would mean that, if we were going forwards in time, we would be forcibly going down to a single-celled organism after going through this sort of anti-birth, which simply does not make sense. In other words, the process of birth is decidedly one-way, so the reversal of it would make zero sense.

The last thought experiment of the week concerned the following problem: Is there anything in the world that cannot ultimately be boiled down to mathematics? The problem here is not so much a thought experiment but more a method to discover how you think about the world. The question’s goal was to simplify everything down to either biology, chemistry, or physics, as each ultimately boils down to math. For abstract concepts, such as art, religion, and philosophy, this is done through saying that our perceptions of them are based on electrical impulses between neurons, which is biology, and biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, and physics is, ultimately, math. But there are a few problems with this logical train, many of which can be explained away by our limited knowledge. The first, and perhaps greatest, issue with it comes in the form of abstract concepts that humans do not comprehend, most of which are found in philosophy in the form of the ideals of Truth, Freedom, Power, etc., but can also be found in the religion in terms of a self-contradictory deity. Such ideas are inherently beyond comprehension in many branches of thinking, and as such cannot be boiled down to math, but are riddled with the further problem of whether or not they exist. The belief in this also, therefore, professes a belief that not everything can be determined through rigorous scientific observation and/or mathematics, but this argument is, ultimately, a matter of opinion. The other viable counter-argument I have come across, and the reason I believe that some things cannot ultimately be boiled down to math, is human emotion. While we can simplify individual emotions down to a cause-and-effect relationship, both on the biological and sociological levels, we cannot simplify the shifts in emotions quite as well, especially when all of the emotions are tinged with a third, more powerful emotion, such as hate, lust, joy, or, in my opinion the most important, love. Furthermore, we are unable to say, on any level, why any singular person would fall in love with a singular, specific other person, as such a connection is (or so I’ve been told) special, and it one thing that I do not think can be boiled down to mathematics. While this is what I believe, I think that there is one argument that could be made against this perspective, which is that we don’t know the math yet, but I find this argument to be too much of a catch-all scenario.

9/2-9/6:

The thought experiment for Tuesday, September 3, was “Would you give up all of your negative memories in exchange for good ones?” To this, I would say no. Despite the fact that bad memories are painful, it is that pain that makes us who we are. We grow not through replacing the bad with the good, but from accepting what is bad and striving to do and be better in the future.

The last thought experiment of this week, given on Thursday, September 5, because several people asked me to be more whimsical, was “What is the ideal height for socks?” A simple question, courtesy of Susan Mosely. In my opinion, which is not shared by everyone, the ideal height would be about 2.5-3 inches above the ankle joint (the knob), because then you don’t get your ankle rubbing against the back of your shoe and you don’t have to worry about them falling down.