Dream world

One day I read “The Lion of Comarre” (I listened to it, I like audiobooks), it is a short story. It gave me a lot to think about.

There was a city where people could go and fall asleep and sleep until the end of their life but the dreams were created by a machine which designed their own paradise, based on preferences, wishes and hopes. Whatever gave them pleasure and made them happy was there, so it was a paradise. Moreover, it was very realistic, non-distinguishable from reality. Of course, they were kept alive by some means and they did not starve to death.

So, I asked myself the question, if I had the chance to dream my life away in a realistic paradise, would I do it? I realized quickly that I would not do it. The more complicated part was realizing why I would not do it. It seems that I am a reality addict, I believe that truth is important.

What is the difference between living your life in a dream world and taking drugs to feel better? I believe that they are very similar, they give happiness by taking you out of this reality and I decided some time ago that happiness is not one of my priorities, but I do understand that people want happiness.

So, would I choose a real hell over an unreal paradise? I probably would. I don't like this world and yet I'm not trying to find refuge in dreams or drugs. Maybe some books that I read provide that relief. I would rather live in the countryside than in big cities, but maybe nature is the reality and cities are places where we run away from the reality of nature.

But is this reality real or is it just another dream? I have no choice but to consider this reality real.

Probabilities

Imagine that you are at a table with me and some friends. I can raise my closed hand and say: I have a coin in my hand. What is the probability that I really have a coin in my hand? In fact, the probability would be rather high, because a coin can fit in my hand and there are lots of coins around. This probability depends on a lot of things, like my habit of telling lies or the truth. Without knowing my habits, you may reasonably say that there are 50% chances that I have a coin in my hand.

If I say that I have a rare coin in my hand, what is the probability then? Obviously, the probability drops, because the chances are lower if the object is rare. If I was a coin collector, there would be reasonable chances that I really have a rare coin in my hand. If I said that the coin I hold is a famous coin (not a copy) and everyone knows that the only such coin is kept in a museum, the chances would be far lower. You did not read in the newspaper that the coin was stolen. Maybe I'm an archeologist and found another one just like it but this would still be very improbable. So, the probability that I hold a famous rare coin is very low.

If I say that I have a real live horse in my hand, not those little toys, what would be the probability of that? As far as we know, a shrinking device does not exist yet, so the probability is very low. Plus, you have never seen a real live horse that can fit in your hand. It would be reasonable not to believe me. If a shrinking device did exist, the chances would be higher. What if horse sounds would be coming from my hand, would the probability increase? Not really, because a device that can fit in your hand can make those noises, and this alternative explanation is far more probable.

If I say that I have a pixie in my hand, one of those small magical creatures, what is the probability of that? The existence of pixies is not proven scientifically and just one such creature would revolutionize the world, because it would prove that magical creatures do exist. This discovery would be of great value. Yet, the fact that such a creature has never been observed by most of us or by scientists and their devices, makes their existence highly improbable. The fact that no magical creature has been proved to exist makes this point even stronger, for imagine that scientists discovered that ghosts exist, the probability that pixies exist would be higher.

So think about god (or gods), the soul, life after death, heaven and hell, angels and demons. What is the probability that such things exist? From my point of view, and from an objective point of view, the probability is very low indeed.

See this:
The dragon in my garage

The Universe

The Universe started with the Big Bang. There is a large amount of evidence for this. If the law of conservation of energy is correct and energy cannot be created or destroyed (it can only be transformed) then the Universe has always existed in one form or another.

It is said that in the beginning, the Universe was a very small, very dense and very hot "singularity". At this point, the laws of physics break down and the theory of relativity predicts infinities (infinite mass, infinite density, infinite temperature). The early Universe was governed by quantum physics, so we will probably know how the Universe started when there will be a quantum theory of everything.

A quantum fluctuation is the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. Physicists believe that this is how the Universe started, a big quantum fluctuation in which matter and antimatter were created and they annihilated each other but some matter remained by some strange process.

It may be that quantum fluctuations exist everywhere and that some quantum fluctuations give birth to Universes. Maybe the creation of a Universe is a local event, in a much larger picture. Maybe there are other universes, nobody really knows. I've heard that if a quantum fluctuation in our Universe gave birth to another Universe, it would look like a black hole to us, so, inside a black hole there might be another Universe.

The Universe may be an oscillating one, expanding and then contracting again, the final moments of contraction giving birth to the next expansion. The problem with the oscillating Universe is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy (disorder) must increase in a closed system, and the oscillating Universe does not have any proof, in fact, the current understanding suggests that the Universe will continue to expand forever.

I cannot believe that the singularity which created the Universe existed like that forever and just "decided" at one point to explode. I cannot believe that something appeared out of nothing. I believe that something has always existed, not a god, not an intelligent being, but something, I don't know what. It seems that nothingness cannot exist, it would violate the uncertainty principle, so, there is something everywhere.

The Universe does not have a center, as odd as it may seem. It can be compared with the surface of a balloon. A balloon does have a center but the surface of the balloon does not. It's difficult to imagine 3D space as the 2D surface of the balloon. The Universe is strange.

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." - J.B.S. Haldane

Before the formation of stars, the Universe was not very interesting, just scattered matter and energy. The first stars seem to have formed 400 million years after the Big Bang. Stars and galaxies exist because of irregularities in the distribution of matter. Where there was more matter, gravity caused it to collapse and form stars.

Those first stars were big and very hot and had short life spans, inside them fusion occurred, hydrogen fused into helium but, at the end of a star's life, helium fuses into heavier elements.

Stars attain an equilibrium between gravitational pull, which tends to compress the star and heat, which tends to expand the star. As a star compresses, it heats up, as it heats up, it expands. Most of the action happens in the core of the star, because there's the biggest pressure and the biggest temperature, atoms move very fast and they collide with each other and fuse into heavier atoms, releasing energy. As lighter atoms create heavier atoms, most heavier atoms remain in the core.

Of course, this process cannot go on forever and, at some point the core of the star cannot fuse anything anymore, so the heat stops abruptly, but heat was the only thing keeping gravity from compressing it. This is where the core collapses. The shock wave expels the outer layers into space and the core remains as an extremely dense body. The core can form a white dwarf, a neutron star or even a black hole if the star was massive enough. A teaspoon of material from a neutron star would weigh 10 million tons.

When a massive star explodes as a supernova, it ejects into space a lot of material, including heavy elements. These heavy elements can form planets like our own. Life is carbon based and this carbon was fused in the center of a star, we are made of stardust.

See this:
Supernova

Peak everything

Some people are talking about peak oil, that point after which the production of oil decreases, but everything has a peak, there's peak gas and coal, peak minerals, peak agriculture, etc. We have an ever growing consumption of the Earth's resources, this, of course, cannot go on forever. Nothing can increase forever, not on this planet, at least.

This planet is finite and so are the resources. Peak oil is the most talked about peak because our entire economy is based on oil. The demand for oil constantly increases but the production of oil has not increased for years, we have hit the top of production, it will only go down. The International Energy Agency predicts that production will decline 6.7% per year. This is huge.

Some people say that since 1950, we have consumed 50% of the world's resources: oil, gas, coal, minerals, etc. Others are saying that 2/3 of the Earth's resources have been "used up" (source).

We have become so addicted to oil that we cultivate crops for biofuels, meanwhile a billion people are starving. It seems that we need to drive our cars more than we need to feed hungry people.

This silly system does not stop. You will not hear politicians saying that we should stop buying cars, because we have passed peak oil. Actually, we are encouraged to continue to buy cars, to keep the economy from crashing but gasoline is becoming more and more expensive and people don't have the money to buy it.

The solution, of course, is to stop using our cars and stop buying cars. You may say: "oh, this is crazy, we cannot live without our cars". People have lived for thousands of years without cars and they were fine. We have a pretty good public transportation network and we can improve it, we can go anywhere we want without owning a car. In the current situation, I believe that buying a new car is stupid, as gasoline prices will continue to rise. Electric cars are not a solution either, not yet, because electricity is still produced mostly from fossil fuels.

Minerals are also exploited mindlessly and they will run out. We produce all kinds of gadgets using rare minerals and we should recycle as much as possible. Everything should be designed to be recyclable and durable. We are creating so much trash that the future presented in the movie Wall-E, where the planet is covered in trash, may not be impossible.

Also, agriculture will decline as topsoil erosion increases. Maybe we will find solutions in hydroponics and aeroponics. We will also have problems with fresh water.

The fishing industry has also declined since the 1980's and will continue to decline, industrial fishing is just not sustainable, over fishing is a big problem.

Some of these peaks have already happened, the others will happen very soon. The future will be very dark if we continue like this. One thing is clear, we cannot continue to do things as we are currently doing. We must change the way we interact with the planet, we must take care of our precious resources.

See this:
Peak everything
8 things we are running out of

Uniting the world

People are different from each other but the differences are insignificant in comparison to the similarities. People are being separated by labels. We have created walls and fences instead of bridges.

Groups of people have started wars because of imagined differences, like religion, ethnicity, skin colour, etc. A genocide occurred in Rwanda because of two imaginary ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu. There was little difference between the two groups, both had the same language, the same religion, the same skin colour, the same traditions. A mother from one ethnic group could have a child belonging to the other ethnic group, so small were the differences, and yet people committed genocide for this imagined difference, 1 million people were killed.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they were amazed to find that the native people did not know anything about Jesus or the Bible, they even wondered if these people had souls. Of course, these imagined differences helped them rationalize the genocide that followed.

Religious wars have been constant. Even now religious wars are being fought. Religion has been the greatest creator of conflict in history, its divisive power is unequaled by anything else.

We are being taught as children that there are divisions, like, we are Christians, they are Muslims, although children are no more capable of having a religion than having political or philosophical orientations. This, of course, maintains the groups and these divisions often create conflicts.

People are conditioned to feel that they are a part of the society they live in and to feel separated from the rest of the world. This is nationalism and it is another divisive force and it has also created conflicts. A lot of people really feel that their country is their home. Of course, this is helped by the fact that different countries usually have different languages or accents, different customs and traditions.

This tendency of classifying things and finding differences rather than similarities may be something natural to us, as Richard Dawkins called it: "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind".

I believe that we need to feel as a part of the global community in order to have peace on this planet. We need to communicate more, to travel more, to mix people. This way, they can see that people outside their group are not so bad.

Will we ever give up our divisions and embrace the global community? I don't know, but I sure hope so. This has already begun, it's called globalization, but will we be able to live in peace and harmony or will we keep creating imaginary divisions? The future will tell.

"My country is the world and my religion is to do good." - Thomas Paine

Evolution

In school, nobody told me about evolution. I find it odd that a lot of people learn biology without studying the theory of evolution.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." - Theodosius Dobzhansky

I like to know how things work and why they are the way they are. So, asking why do trees exist, most people would answer: "because God created them". If I asked: "why did God create trees as they are?", the answer would be: "misterious are the ways of our Lord". Or, maybe, their answer would be: "trees exist to climb them" or "trees exist to have wood for fire, or to build houses". Of course, all this is childish, but I think there is no such thing as stupid questions.

The evolutionary reason why trees exist is that plants compete for sunlight, so being tall gives you an advantage over other plants.

I've read a lot of books about evolution and they always amaze me. Of course, I still can't explain everything about life, but I understand it much better. I still have questions about things but I never try to explain them by supernatural means, because supernatural answers are no answers at all.

A few days ago I was wondering how could evolution create hollow teeth in venomous snakes, which are similar to hypodermic needles, so they can inject the victim with venom. As anyone knows, evolution is gradual, but a half hallow tooth would not help at all, as far as I can tell. I did encounter a solution to this problem. A fossil was discovered which had teeth with grooves. Evolution made the groove deeper and closed it to form hollow teeth. So I did find an answer to this rather difficult problem. If you search hard enough, a lot of questions can be answered.

The way eyes or wings evolved is amazing. You might think that half an eye is no good, but half an eye is better than no eye at all. You might think that half a wing is no good, but there are gliding animals and that seems to be better than no wings. Bats have evolved from creatures similar to gliding squirrels.

What always made me laugh is "unintelligent design", like birds with wings which cannot fly or eyes that cannot see in the case of cave dwelling animals. Even our eyes, which are extraordinary complex organs, are pretty badly made. No smart designer would put the cables between the sensors and light source, yet this is exactly how eyes are, the nerves cross the surface of the retina and gather in the blind spot. We are not aware of our blind spot because the brain does a good job of cleaning the image.

A funny example of "unintelligent design" is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which makes a detour before arriving at the destination, in the case of the giraffe, that detour is 20 meters. It should go from the brain to the larynx, but the detour is near the heart.

With evolution you can understand why the repartition of animals on continents is the way it is, why there are no frogs on islands (they can't survive in salt water, so they can't travel through the ocean). We can understand why the fossils show increasing complexity in organisms over millions of years, we can understand why diseases exist. To think that God created diseases because two people ate a fruit is silly.

We have many examples of evolution in our own yard. The apples you buy are very different from wild apples. Dogs are different from wolves and when you see a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard side by side and you know they have a common ancestor, how can you still doubt evolution? All domestic animals and plants have evolved (by artificial selection) from wild varieties and they have been drastically modified.

Destroying ourselves

We are destroying ourselves. A lot of us already know this. Every natural system is in decline. We are polluting the air, water, soil, everything. Scientists are talking about the hole in the ozone layer, about global warming, about the oil spill catastrophes and peak oil, about top soil erosion, about the mass extinction we are currently causing, and they are suggesting ways in which to combat these problems.

What scientists don't see is that all these problems are caused by this system, the consumerist society we have created, where we exploit finite resources in an insane way. We are not thinking about the future. We are brainwashing each other to consume more to keep this system going, even if we don't need most of these things. We are blinded by material goods so we don't really think about the world, about nature. We have created huge trash piles, just for the sake of consumerism, it is extremely wasteful.

If we are stupid enough to destroy ourselves, we deserve our fate. I'm ashamed to be a human. There is more poverty now than there has ever been. More people are starving than there ever have. This system is killing more people than Hitler or Stalin ever did, it's killing more people than the Second World War did, even if this system caused it (indirectly) by the Great Depression. People in poor countries are poor because they don't have money, not because there are not enough resources on this Earth for them to live decently. Money, this coloured paper, this religion we have created, is destroying so much, so many lives. Why can't we see this?

We will all die eventually, one by one or all at once. Does it matter how it happens? I believe it does. If there is only a slight chance to destroy ourselves, we should change the system. We should live in a world where nuclear war is impossible, where terrorism and murder and violence don't exist. We can create that world, we really can, but we don't seem to want it enough to do something about it.

We can't really destroy the world, we can only destroy ourselves. We don't have the technology to disintegrate the whole planet. We might get it to the point where it's not suitable for most life, but life will find a way, some bacteria and some insects will thrive even on a world that's toxic for us and most life, and even radioactive. Some people jokingly say the cockroaches will inherit the world in the eventuality of nuclear war. They might be right in a way. There are lots of life forms that are very resistant to radiation. So, we may console ourselves with the thought that life will survive.

Some people are eagerly awaiting the end of the world because they have some religious notions about this. They have been brainwashed by religion to believe that paradise awaits them after death. A religious ruler of a technologically developed country can try to provoke the end of the world because of religious reasons.

The end will come, sooner or later, but it matters if it will be caused by us or by natural phenomena. There is a difference between destroying ourselves out of ignorance or stupidity and being destroyed by a natural event. This is our choice.

I am amused by movies in which aliens come to destroy us or robots destroy us. We don't need such things, we are doing a good job ourselves.

The Venus Project

I find the Venus Project very good. It's a rational project in an irrational world. We may not be ready for it, we may not be ready to become civilized, not yet, at least. The Venus Project advocates a highly egalitarian world, without money and property, upgrading the world to the current state of technology and helping everyone reach their highest potential. All this is great, I agree with them.

I don't agree when they say they can provide global abundance. If we are capable to build a rocket to go to Mars, not everyone will be able to go, at least, not until the technology evolves. There will always be this kind of situations. So there will be some privileged people who will go to Mars. The solution to this is to select the best candidates by objective criteria.

Also, the Venus Project does not take into account population control, which I believe to be important. They say that in a civilized world, people would control their reproduction, which is basically correct. In developed countries we don't have the problem of demographic explosion. There will always be groups who will multiply exponentially, like some religious sects where contraception is forbidden and other groups or individuals. That is enough for another demographic explosion. Religion may never disappear, no matter how much we try. Of course, population control does not mean the killing of anyone but it does have bad connotations.

A resource based economy simply means that we need to take into account the Earth’s resources. Of course, this is not only absolutely logical, but it's necessary. The current system is absurd, it doesn’t take into account the Earth’s resources or its carrying capacity. This system takes into account only money. Money makes us blind to reality. The reality is that we need to live in harmony with nature, the alternative is to die, because we cannot live outside nature, we are a part of it, whether we like it or not.

We are like a car going full speed towards the end of the road and we are too busy doing other stuff to notice.

improving the world

Why do scientists never get together and come up with ideas to make the world better? Why isn’t there a Manhattan Project to create a better society?

So much is wasted, so many resources, so much work, so many human lives and for what? It’s only for the benefit of few wealthy people.

This world doesn’t even have a purpose, we just go ahead blindly. What if the world’s purpose was “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”? The world would be a much better place with that purpose in mind.

What if the world’s purpose was to advance technology or to colonize other planets? Again, this would change the world dramatically. Countries usually have a purpose, that is economic growth. It doesn’t matter how that economic growth is achieved, it can even affect the environment or the quality of life of the population. Indeed, it’s easy to turn disasters into profits.

For example, war is a very profitable business, so basing our society on profit can be disastrous.

Most people want to be rich, to have everything they want. It is similar to what happened during the Middle Ages, where there were a few rich people and most people dreamed of being a prince or a princess. A lot of stories and movies are based on this. It seems that the average person’s life was not interesting enough to survive in the tales. Still, a lot of children dream to be princes and princesses. I think we should not encourage this dream of being rich and famous. Maybe we should transmit other values to our children, like empathy and kindness, curiosity and knowledge.

Maybe, just maybe, we should give up all this superficiality because there are real problems in the world, not only are they real, but they are deadly.

The only way to improve the world is to employ reason, to be rational.

Euthanasia

Some people want to die (most of them are in horrible pain, in the last stages of terminal diseases) but we don’t want to help them die decently, because human euthanasia is illegal in most countries, which is silly. We have that law because of religion, which makes it even sillier, as most countries claim to be secular. It’s even more absurd when we think about the fact that people who don’t want to die, die from famine, dirty water, treatable diseases, etc. So, not only we don’t help people live decently, but we don’t help people die decently.

Freedom of action

What freedoms should we have?

Should we have the freedom to kill another being? You may say that, yes, we should have the freedom to kill other animals, but not humans.

I believe that we should be free to do anything as long as we don’t affect other people, or other animals. Should we have the freedom to have children we can’t raise decently? I believe we should not have that freedom, because it affects other beings, namely, the children. So, basically, I’m saying that we should not have reproductive freedom, but that it should be controlled. As I said before, having children should be a priviledge, not a right.

Maybe this should be the only law: anyone is free to do anything as long as he does not affect other humans or other animals. Maybe you are wondering why I’m not adding plants to this law. We’ve got to eat something in order to live. We should not cut down the forests, obviously, but by doing that we affect not only plants, but other humans and other animals too.

Well, let’s face it, we need to affect other animals, most people eat meat and (obviously) it comes from animals. We should control pest populations, which is usually done by killing them, I’m talking about mice/rats, crows, mosquitos, etc. I do believe that, if we need to kill other animals, we should do it as humanely as possible. We should not provoke needless suffering, we should not be cruel.

Abortion

I find it funny that people talk about abortion (and I’m talking about it now). I don’t think there’s much to talk about. I don’t think we should have an opinion on it. The real question is: should women have the right to do whatever they see fit with their bodies? It’s their decision, each pregnant woman’s decision. Will she give birth or will she have an abortion? Again, it’s her decision only, as it’s still her body.

I’m not for abortion, on the contrary, I believe that there are far better methods of birth control. Abortion is unpleasant for everyone, but, as a last resort, it is a solution. If population was controlled, we would not have this problem. Every healthy woman should be allowed to have a certain number of children, after that, compulsory sterilization (for her or her partner).

Dissecting God

How would God know anything if there was nothing to learn?
How would God function?
Why would God create anything?
How would God decide what is good and what is evil?

Of course, any intelligent being must be highly organized, very complex. An intelligent being cannot be like a boulder. In fact, God should be infinitely complex. The chances for a being of infinite complexity to arise by chance, or to exist forever by chance, is infinitely small, that is zero. So, the chances for God to exist by chance are zero. This argument has been called by Dawkins “the ultimate Boeing 747 argument”. 

What are the options? The only other options that I know of are evolution and creation. An intelligent being can arise by evolution, we are a good example. God, if he exists, can have arisen by evolution, but only if there was a “supernatural selection”, with supernatural organisms struggling for supernatural life.

If God was created, his creator has to face the same “dissection” as he does, so this answer would not explain anything, as the concept of God does not explain anything.

How could a perfect being create something imperfect or even evil? Logically, a perfect being cannot create something imperfect, so the Universe was not created by a perfect being, as the Universe is not perfect, we are not perfect, the world is not perfect. Imperfection cannot arise from perfection.

I never understood the concept of Satan either. Why would he be bad? Of course, my argument that people are the way they are because of heredity and environment stands for Satan too. I see no logic for Satan to torture bad people, in fact, I think that, logically, Satan would treat nicely bad people and torture only the eventual good people who arrive in hell.

The argument from the existence of evil is very powerful. You know how it goes: if God is good and all-powerful, evil should not exist.

"Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" - Epicurus

Another interesting thing is that all supernatural beings hide from us, which should seem highly suspicious to everyone. The answer is simple, supernatural beings don’t exist, that is why they seem to be hiding from us.

Afterlife

I don’t believe there is an afterlife. If it exists, it’s relatively easy to prove. Someone from the afterlife can come to tell us that there is one. I know that there have been “after death experiences” but I don’t think they can be trusted, because the brain acts peculiarly in those moments. Plus, it seems that preconceived ideas have a big role in what those experiences portray. A Christian will have different experiences than a Hindu or people of any other religion. This seems odd, as most people think that their religion is right and other religions are wrong.

Just imagine that, one day, a ghost appears and tells us that there is an afterlife. Rationally, it’s difficult for ghosts to speak because sounds are vibrations of air, so they would have to interact with matter to be able to speak and they would need to have a body for that. Passing over these minor details, it would be easy to convince people that there is an afterlife, if there really was one. Well, it’s easy to convince people there is an afterlife even if there isn’t one, that’s wishful thinking.

Talking about ghosts, if they exist, why don’t they appear in daylight and just be there for anyone to see? Taking into account the number of dead people, there should be ghosts everywhere. And why would only people have ghosts? Why not other animals? Some would say that only humans have souls and some would even argue that not all humans have souls. How do they decide, I have no idea, but they usually say that serial killers have no souls. Well, mosquito ghosts would be pretty annoying, even more than real ones. Obviously, the world would be full of ghosts if every animal became a ghost after death.

Heaven and hell seem absurd to me. They are described as places of infinite happiness (heaven) or infinite suffering (hell). To me, they seem like places of infinite boredom and it’s only natural. Intelligent beings get bored eventually by the same things, over and over again. I think that if heaven exists, people would want to visit hell after a while, just to get out of the monotony of eternal life. Eternal life would probably be a hell any way you look at it and they say you can’t die in eternal life. The first billion years might be interesting but it just can’t go on forever.

There cannot be eternal happiness or eternal suffering because we adapt to our states and they become neutral.What brings suffering to someone may bring happiness to someone else. It has to do with what we're used to.

What would you do in heaven and hell, if they existed? Some people describe heaven as a place to worship God, and they are preparing thoroughly in this life to do exactly that, to worship. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy being a slave for eternity, not even for a little while.

People should not be punished because they did something wrong (this is revenge) but because they should not do it again. If a child does something that's undesirable, you may punish him so he may be deterred from doing that again. Hell does not punish to correct an undesired behaviour, it punishes as mindless revenge. This is one more reason why hell is absurd.

If any scientist arrived in heaven, he would probably try to understand how God works (at least I would try to).

Eternal life is just an expression of human greed in the context of the survival instinct.

Happiness

It seems that everyone wants to be happy, or almost everyone. What makes us happy? Is pleasure the same thing as happiness? If not, does pleasure make us happy? Is ignorance bliss? Does religion make us happy?

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." - George Bernard Shaw

Einstein said: "If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things." Epicurus believed that the recipe for happiness is having friends, freedom and time to think. In Buddhism, the path to achieving happiness is by giving up cravings, thus ending suffering. Some people say that the secret to happiness is having low expectations.

People tend to fall back to a neutral state after they get the thing that makes them happy. For example, if you buy a new car, you might be happy for a while but after some months, happiness fades and is eventually taken over by neutrality. So, if you want to be happy continually, should you buy a new thing continually? I think not. I don't believe that possessions make us happy. We are conditioned by society to believe that.

The odd thing is that choice actually makes us unhappy. When we buy something and we choose from a lot of products, we tend to ask ourselves: have we bought the best one? What if the other one was better? This makes us more unhappy with the product we bought.

We have the capacity to synthesize happiness. It's all in our mind.
"I am the happiest man alive, I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity and I am more invulnerable than Achilles, fortune hath not one place to hit me." - Sir Thomas Browne

See this:
Why are we happy?
A guide to happiness.
The paradox of choice.

one world, one language

What is language?
Language is a set of arbitrary symbols (spoken or written) representing real or imagined things. Practically, you can invent an unlimited number of symbols for the same object. This means you can invent an unlimited number of languages.

How useful is a language?
Language is an important tool for communication. It's usefulness depends on how many people speak a language. For example, if you were the only person on Earth who knows a particular language, that particular language is useless, you can't communicate with it. The more people know and speak a language, the more useful that language is.

Are languages becoming a barrier?
Multiple languages are a normal consequence of the fact that groups of people were separated in ancient times. Now the world has changed, we can communicate instantly with people from all over the world, we can travel almost anywhere on Earth. Languages, which were created to connect people, are now barriers because, if people speak different languages, communication is hindered.

Martin Luther King said:
"Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated."

What do we need?
We need one language all over the world. This is a necessity, it's not some whim. I believe it's obvious that, if we want to communicate, we need to speak the same language.

Which language?
I believe that we should choose English for the world language, because it's the most practical choice. My native language is not English, so I don't think I'm biased towards it.

What can we do?
I believe that we can change the world for the better. The world has always changed and will continue to change as long as it exists. Languages change too, some languages even die, like Latin. I believe we should start promoting a world language. We can do that by starting to speak the world language as often as we can, with friends, with family.

This should be an international project, with people all over the world supporting it. This can even be a reason to socialize, there could be "one world, one language" parties, in which people would speak English, especially in non-English countries.

This is the first step in uniting the world.

totalitarianism vs anarchy

I know that these are extremes and there are middle paths but I want to say a few words about them.

Totalitarianism has usually created tyrants. It seems that humans cannot be entrusted with power, because "power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" (John Dalberg-Acton). I believe that most deaths attributed to communism were caused by totalitarianism. Of course, totalitarianism caused a lot of deaths in other systems too, such as in absolute monarchy. This does not mean that all kings were evil, some were decent and there were benevolent dictators too but the risk is too high for a tyrant to develop. I don't believe that anyone should be entrusted with so much power.

Anarchy is the opposite of totalitarianism, because nobody has power, nobody rules. Some years ago I was naive enough to think that people can behave decently in anarchy. One day I read an article about a police strike in Montreal and in the chaos that followed six banks were robbed and more than 100 shops were looted. (the article) After I read that article, my opinion on anarchy changed considerably.

This reminds me of a quote from H L Mencken: "People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police." Also, Einstein said that: " If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

So we are a sorry lot indeed, because, without police, without fear of punishment, we behave worse than other animals.

There are some intelligent people out there who advocate anarchy. There are whole books dedicated to this. There are multiple forms of anarchy, but the most popular nowadays are anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism. I don't really know if they would work.

There are a few examples of anarcho-communism which seemed to work. Primitive hunter-gatherer societies were probably anarcho-communist, nobody ruled them and they shared food and other things, they were highly egalitarian. Early Christian communities seem to have been anarcho-communist.

There were some anarcho-communist territories during the Spanish Revolution and during the Russian Revolution. "The Spanish example, in which high levels of mobilization and swift improvements to production were implemented by anarchists, is often cited as an example of an anarchist-communist society which saw rapid improvements to both industrial and scientific output." (source)

Wikipedia and the Free Software movement are examples of anarcho-communist organizations.

I could not find examples of anarcho-capitalist territories. I would be interested to see how it works out, although I think it would degenerate rapidly. One example of an anarcho-capitalist sector is the software industry. I believe that the software industry is horrible. Just think about operating systems, where Windows has a monopoly, although in my opinion Linux distributions are much better. Proprietary software is wasteful because people always reinvent the wheel. Software patents are even worse because they hinder innovation.

I believe that capitalism is a self-destructive system and the only thing that keeps it from destructing itself is the government, which applies rules to the otherwise ruthless system. Capitalism is like a jungle and it's every man for himself (and every woman for herself).

Every time that capitalism is on the path to self-destruction (depressions), governments scramble to find solutions to save the dying system, so I believe that without governments, capitalism would long be dead and buried.

I'm trying to imagine an anarcho-capitalist society. If people payed the police to protect them, wouldn't there be people who would not want to pay? In fact, this could be the case with every social service. You would have the choice to pay a police company, a justice company to give laws, education companies, etc. Everything would be payed.

I'm amused by the idea of multiple justice companies, each having different laws. You could start a justice company in which killing is legal. Or imagine utility companies competing, you would have lots of water pipes and power cables. There would be a mess and a lot of waste.

Of course, you would have to pay for education too and some people wouldn't have the money to send their children to school, so illiteracy would increase. Unemployment being a constant in capitalism, wages would drop because desperate people are willing to work for less and with no minimum wage imposed by the government, it would drop as low as possible and the gap between rich and poor would increase even more.

I'm trying to imagine a company which cuts down the forests, being stopped by the police. The company spokesman would say: we have subscribed to a justice company which allows the cutting of the forests. And the police would answer: oh, that's all right, then.

War is also a highly profitable business and who would stop this business in anarchy?

Also, there would be nothing to stop monopolies from forming. If a company produces a lot, there is more efficiency and more profit, it can expand and invest in innovation, thus growing at the expense of others.

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It may seem that I'm biased towards anarcho-communism but I'm not. I don't believe that anarchy would work. Usually, anarchic territories have been quickly taken over by governments. Totalitarianism is not a solution either, as it breeds tyrants.

good vs evil

One day my mother was watching the news and there was a story about some people who tried to steal petroleum from a pipeline in Mexico and the petroleum gushed out and flowed through a village, catching fire, burning everything, including people (they were asleep, it was nighttime). (the piece of news)

My mother said: "those oil thieves (and people like them) should be shot".
I asked her: "why do you think they did it?"
She didn't know what to answer so I told her that they probably wanted to sell the oil. They wanted the money to buy things (that's what money is for). So, actually, they wanted or needed some things and they found this solution, to steal oil. Maybe they didn't have a job, maybe their families were in poverty. Are they evil people? I don't think so.

Of course, good and evil are just labels we put on people and their actions. There is no such thing as good and evil, it's all about perception. A muslim killing jews is seen as an evil thing by jews and as a good thing by muslims. It's just an example, but it shows us that our beliefs influence what we perceive as good and evil.

Of course, yet again, evolution has a word to say on this subject. To kill someone (of the same species) is generally seen as an evil thing to do. This is because humans are social animals and most part of human evolution people lived in small tribes, where they were closely related to each other, so they were more likely to share a lot of genes. From the perspective of the selfish gene, it is better not to kill other humans and even to be altruistic towards people with whom you share a lot of genes. From this perspective, you should be more altruistic to closer relatives, for example, you should be more altruistic towards your children than towards your cousins, because you share more genes with your children (not in adoption, evolution can be tricked, but not for long).

Stealing is also seen as evil by most cultures. I believe that's natural. Think about a lion who catches a gazelle, would he be happy if hyenas came to steal his prey? He would definitely not be happy about it. Usually, what creates anger or sadness is seen as bad or evil. Stealing makes us angry, so we consider it evil.

Just imagine that lions were happy when other animals (like hyenas) stole their prey. They would surely have less chances of survival. If you say "yeah, take my food, I'm so happy that I'll starve to death", this would not be good for your survival and evolution would not encourage it.

Adultery is also seen as evil. The evolutionary reason is that it's bad for your genes if you raise the child of another person, if you invest energy and time in genes other than your own. This is why jealousy exists.

Humans also have a high capacity for empathy, which is to put yourself in another one's place, be it a human or any other animal. This is why a lot of us feel that it is evil to provoke unnecessary pain and suffering to other beings, we would not like it if we were in their place.

Having children is usually considered as being a good thing, it's very easy to see the evolutionary reason for this.

I believe that people are the way they are because of heredity and environment. We have certain natural tendencies but the environment really sculptures us. Human cultures are very diverse, they have a lot of differences but they also have a lot of similarities. I believe that the similarities are influenced (or caused) by heredity and the differences are influenced (or caused) by the environment.

If people are the products of their heredity and environment, can they be good or evil? I don't think so. I don't believe that humans are good or evil, they are the way they are mostly because of what life has made them into. This society, this system creates evil and those who oppose evil are seen as good. I'm pretty sure that if Hitler had lived in a peaceful, prosperous society, he would have been much different.

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The only person who reads this blog does not agree with my conclusion and she told me that some people are just evil. She gave me the example of two brothers living in the same conditions, one being good, the other one being evil. This is true, I've seen it too, but there are situations where good people do evil things and evil people do good things. I believe that in a healthy society, evil people and violence would be almost nonexistent.

There are violent societies and peaceful societies. The Tibetans seem to have a very peaceful society, so do the Amish and many others. I think that a very violent civilization was that of the Aztecs. Also, the Arabs seem to have a violent society.

Violent societies don't have a genetic predisposition towards violence, those people are not born evil, their culture makes them evil, this is what I believe.

In fact, I don't think that anyone is born evil. Some people are born with a predisposition towards violence. The same is true for other animals. For example, a wild wolf would not make a good pet, even if you raised it since it was a cub. A dog is much better, because dogs were selected for their docility.

I think that people who have a predisposition towards violence can behave very well if you educate them properly. An angry person can use his anger for constructive purposes or destructive ones. If you take up boxing lessons to relieve your anger, I see this as constructive, if you go and beat someone up, I see this as destructive.

Freedom

What is freedom?
Is freedom the ability to do anything you want? Would this mean that people who want nothing are as free as they can be? They would be free from desire, that's for sure.

When you own something, is it really you who own it or does it own you? Maybe the things we cling to are reducing our freedom.

I believe that true freedom and free will are illusions. Maybe, the sooner we realize that they are illusions, the sooner we will try to obtain more freedom than we have (if we have any).

Free will is defined as the ability to make choices without constraints. Free will is in opposition to determinism, which states that everything that happens is determined by a cause. In determinism, your choices are illusory.

When people make choices, they are influenced by past experiences, by feelings and by reason, so, choices have causes, therefore, they are (at least partially) determined. If choices have influences, there is no free will. You can call it "influenced will" at the least.

I believe that we can get as close to free will as possible if we are rational. Of course, we can never be 100% rational, we are only human. We can never have free will, but some are more imprisoned than others.

To me, feelings are a sign of imprisonment, we are programed by nature to feel some things in certain circumstances, so being rational frees us from this natural programming. Feelings are not a choice, we don't choose to like some things, to hate others, to fear something, to be attracted by someone. There's no rational reason why you would feel more attracted to a beautiful man/woman than to a tree. Even judgement of beauty is programed, because, as you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is no such thing as objective beauty.

To me, freedom is more than free will, more than the ability to make choices without constraints. To me, freedom is the lack of dependencies, the lack of addictions. Of course, all of us have dependencies and most of us have addictions. Our dependencies are food, water, air, etc. Our addictions are more diversified, some are addicted to shopping, some to games, some to drugs, etc.

Of course, we can never be truly free, because we will always have some dependencies but if we get rid of addictions and every possible dependency, if we are as rational as possible, then we can be as free as possible but do we want to be free?

History of life

Imagine you were outside the Earth but you were able to observe everything that has happened on it since its beginning.

At first, the Earth was a blazing hell, there wasn't even a crust and there was a constant shower of meteorites. When the Earth cooled down, it formed a crust and oceans and life appeared. When I say "life", I'm referring to very simple life forms, they were able just to replicate. When the right conditions occur, life arises easily, I say this because life appeared soon after conditions were met.

Life is just a natural phenomena, like rain and lightning and rainbows. Life has no equivalent really, although it has some similarities with fire, which also replicates, but without heredity.

There were lots of organic compounds on the Earth, in the oceans. Organisms are composed of organic compounds (carbon based).

The first life forms even replicated badly, which is the only thing they could do, really. They could not even move by themselves. The only thing that mattered was replicating before being destroyed. Some, of course, did better than others and soon the oceans were full of primitive life forms. When they used most of the organic compounds around, competition arose, very primitive competition, but competition nonetheless. They even started to "steal" organic compounds from each other.

Don't imagine that competition and "stealing" were the way modern organisms do. It's similar to how magnets attract iron. You don't need a good magnet to attract iron but a better magnet will attract more. Also, a good magnet can "steal" iron from a worse one. The better was a life form at attracting organic compounds and using them for replication, the better it did.

You can already see that life has a tendency to become better and better at what it does. Evolution is like a ladder, once you climbed the first step, you can climb the second one and so on, increasing in complexity.

An interesting episode in life's existence is the "oxygen catastrophe". One of the most important events in the history of life was the discovery of photosynthesis. It was also one of the deadliest, because it provoked the largest extinction in the history of life. Free oxygen (O₂) did not exist in the atmosphere in the first 2 billion years of Earth's existence. When it appeared, it was deadly for those anaerobic microorganisms. The "oxygen catastrophe" also provoked a "snowball Earth" event, called "the Huronian glaciation", which lasted 300 million years and the whole Earth was covered in ice.

I think we should learn something from this event, that is: life can destroy itself. Also, every end is a new beginning. Humans can provoke a worldwide catastrophe, just as cyanobacteria did back then. Cyanobacteria didn't know what they were doing, they were not aware of the consequences. We know what we are doing but we choose to ignore the consequences.

Most of history, life forms were very simple by our standards, but even the simplest bacteria is much more complex than the first life forms.

Life adapted itself to the oxygen in the atmosphere and even started to use it, most animals need oxygen to survive (including humans).

Life forms were not very interesting (to us) until the "Cambrian explosion", around 530 million years ago. If life appeared almost 4 billion years ago, the first 3 billion years were not interesting, because there were no animals or plants. The Cambrian explosion was indeed an explosion on the timescale of the Earth, because it lasted only tens of millions of years. This may seem a lot to us, but comparing them to the 3 billion years when nothing interesting happened, it is an explosion.

The Cambrian explosion can be compared to the industrial revolution. Technological progress was very slow until then. We have invented in 200 years more than in all the previous millenniums, ever since the early stone tools, 2 million years ago. What happened in both situations? I believe that something extraordinary was discovered, like the steam engine in the case of the industrial revolution.

So, we have:

• 600 million years of simple animals
  
• 500 million years of fish
  
• 475 million years of land plants
  
• 400 million years of insects
  
• 360 million years of amphibians
  
• 300 million years of reptiles
  
• 200 million years of mammals
• 150 million years of birds
• 130 million years of flowers
• 200 thousand years since humans started to look like they do today

These are approximate dates and, of course, they all looked very different in the beginning. In evolution everything is continuous, it's like a flow. You can't really say: here is where mammals appeared. It goes like this: reptiles -> mammal-like reptiles -> reptile-like mammals -> mammals. Everything is like that but we like to classify things, we don't like continuous things.

So, as the observer of the Earth during this long history of 4,6 billion years, what would you see? You would first see simple replicating structures that by competing become better at what they do and acquire new functions, which help them in their survival and reproduction. At one point, you observe that life forms start to produce their own organic compounds from CO_2, water, and sunlight, you observe mass extinctions, most created by natural disasters, some created by life itself. After mass extinctions life starts again to grow and cover the Earth. This is what you would see, life becoming more and more complex, with some mass extinctions along the way but the game stays the same.

The constant is competition. Competition has driven progress in life forms from those simple beginnings to the modern complex organisms we see today. If resources were infinite, competition would not exist and evolution would not have taken place. We are competing for the same resources: organic compounds. Plants compete for light, which helps them create organic compounds from water and CO₂.

See this:
The Origin of Life
Timeline of Evolution

Communism

I don't really know how communism should be but I have some idea how it was in this country. I was born in a communist country, but the revolution came when I was just a child.

Communism was bad but capitalism is worse, at least in this country.

In communism everyone had a home, unemployment did not exist and nobody was starving. Nowadays, I'm just tired of seeing people beg and searching through trash for something to eat.

My mother says that people were nicer to each other in communism because nobody had anything to gain by cheating others. People had enough money to go on vacations every year to the seaside or to the mountains.

There were dark sides to communism, of course. There was a dictator. Sadly, communism has always gone hand in hand with totalitarianism. There was a secret police. There was no freedom of speech. If you were caught saying anything bad about the system or the ruler, you were thrown in jail.

Contraception and abortion were restricted at one point, they wanted to increase the population. This led to abortions in precarious conditions and by dubious people.

It was very difficult to leave the country.

My aunt says that communism was great for a while but in the '80s, the ruler became simultaneously obsessed with repaying external debts and building himself a huge palace. Severe austerity measures were introduced, including food rationing, electricity rationing, gasoline rationing, etc. Most food was exported and what could not be exported remained for consumption. Not only was the food bad at the end of the regime but it was scarce and people queued up to buy it.

While nobody starved, people were not happy and this led to a revolution that ended the system.

Television broadcast was terrible, it was reduced to only 2 hours per day (austerity measures) and only one channel. I remember how people had antennas on buildings and we were trying to catch some russian TV channels to watch some cartoons.

The economy of ex-communist countries crashed alongside communism itself. After the regime ended, everyone took whatever they could, almost everything was dismantled, sold, almost nothing remained. Whatever survived was not competitive with capitalist products.

After the end of the regime, there was a mass flood to the country side. People were given land and they worked it with primitive means. Today agriculture is still mostly of subsistence in this country. During communism, agriculture was intensive, with irrigation systems and modern equipment. Even the irrigation canals were destroyed after the fall of the regime. Industry also collapsed.

The good part is that after the revolution we had no external debt, we've managed to pay it all. Oddly enough, the debt was payed off entirely just before the revolution. Since then, we have managed to gather more and more external debt but our situation has not improved.

Some people laughingly say: "during communism, people had enough money but there was nothing to buy; nowadays, you can find anything but you don't have money to buy it".

My mother says that work in communism is different than in capitalism. In capitalism work is more stressful, the employer exploits you as much as possible. In communism people had a certain amount of work to do every day, they had a norm. Maybe this is one reason why capitalism has been more successful, because it exploits you more than communism. I'm amazed to see that most people work over 8 hours per day, some people have 2 jobs, some people work over 12 hours per day. This is insane! In communism nobody worked more than 8 hours per day.

Nowadays people take loans from banks to buy an apartment and they struggle to pay it back. In communism they gave you a home, just like that, and a job too.

I don't really know how communism should be like. I don't really think that communism has ever existed the way Marx imagined it. I will read more about it and I'll come back to it to make the necessary adjustments. For the record, I'm not for any political doctrine. I just believe that everything should be done rationally, wisely. I believe that the current system is absurd. I also believe that communism (as it was) was absurd.

Inequality

Inequality leads to a lot of problems (source).
More unequal countries have:

• worse physical health
  
• worse mental health
• more drug abuse
• more school abandonment
  
• more imprisonment
  
• more obesity
• less social mobility
• less trust
• more violence
• more teenage births
  

It's ironical that the rich live with the fear of losing what they have, the fear of violence against them (for their money). The poor live with the uncertainty of tomorrow, if they will have the basic necessities of life.

10% of people own 85% of the world's wealth, so 90% of people own only 15% of the world's wealth. (source)

To only way to get rid of inequality is to get rid of money and property, because, if they exist, inevitably some people will have more than others.

A lot of people go on with their daily lives, shopping happily in malls, never thinking that there are people who are starving at that moment. Even people who care don't have real solutions to these problems.

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There are inequalities between countries too. I was reading one day how, on an island (Svalbard), there was a Russian mine and a Norwegian mine, only kilometers apart from each other and the Norwegian workers were earning ten times more than the Russian workers. The Russians were OK with this because they still earned more than they did at home.

In the current system, this inequality is normal. The inequalities between countries are normal and poor countries can't develop in this system.

A poor African country does not have the money to buy equipment to start modern agriculture. So, we are basing ourselves on foreign investment, which means that some very rich people have to go there, buy land and exploit it with modern means. This seems logical, right? Well, it's not. If someone did that, who would they sell the food to? The people from that country don't have the money to buy that food. The reason they don't have money is that they don't produce other things to trade for food (money is just a trading tool).

So, the rich guy can just export the food to other countries. This is not very efficient, because transportation is expensive and food can get spoiled. Not only is it not efficient but it's evil to export food from a starving country.

Primitive agriculture and industry can't compete with modern ones, so they just stagnate.

If we can't start with agriculture, maybe we can start with modern industry in poor countries. This has been done a lot. China and India are good examples. Factories have been built there because the workforce is cheap and qualified. In Africa people are not educated and are not qualified to work in factories. A lot of them can't even read. So, we need to educate them first, before we can employ them but if they are qualified and there are no factories there, it's still in vain.

So, in the current system, I see no solution for them. If you can't make money from improving the world, the world will not be improved. This is the current system.

Needs

We need:

• a home, food, clean water, clean air, warmth
  
• education
• healthcare
• peace
• freedom
• to live sustainably
• to protect nature
• to control the population growth
• modern agriculture all over the Earth (where there is arable land)
• to upgrade the entire world to our current technological progress
• an equal society because inequalities lead to problems (details)
  
• to reach our highest potential
• free access to ALL information

It seems odd that nowhere did I say that we need money or property.

How do we fulfill those needs?
We bring together smart people and we find solutions. When I say smart people, I'm referring to the best in their fields, scientists, university professors, engineers, people with high achievements in science and technology because our problems are technological. Politicians, lawyers, bankers and other parasitic life forms should not have a place there.

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We don't need:

• to multiply like mice
• to destroy nature
• poverty
• trash
• violence
• inequality
  
• pollution
• religion
• politics
• anarchy
• prisons
• slavery
  
• junk food
• drugs (alcohol, cigarettes, heroin etc)
• money
• property
• copyright

Human habitat

Humans have created large cities, with skyscrapers, with millions of people, where little life grows, except for themselves. We have created artificial environments, we have become more separated from nature.

This is the habitat of half the world's population: cement, pavement, steel and glass, where cars create smog, where there's a lot of dust and the air sometimes becomes unbreathable. People live in apartments like rabbits in storied cages. In cities diseases are more frequent and spread faster.

What is life like for a modern human?
They wake up in their cage, they go to work in another cage usually, come home and look at screens and are entertained. The next day they resume the cycle. This is what we've become. Do we see the Sun? Do we see the stars? Do we still look at bees flying from one flower to another? Do we still see the beauty in nature or are we so alienated from it that we can't appreciate it anymore?

Maybe this is why we are so careless with it, maybe this is why we destroy it as we do. We cannot live without nature, although many people believe they can.

For most of human history, humans have lived in close connection with nature. Was that so bad? Is our life better? They suffered from some diseases, from natural disasters but so do we. We have our own diseases and natural disasters still affect us. Human lifespan has grown but at what cost? Maybe we should understand that a longer life doesn't mean a better life.

I'm not saying that we should abandon our cities and move into caves but can't we reconcile nature with technology? I believe we can. Nature and technology are very important parts of human existence and we have no choice but to reconcile them.

Unity

Why am I here? Why am I not in some other country or even another planet?
Why am I here now? Why not in some other era?
Why am I a human? Why am I not some other animal or something else?
Why am I this human? Why not some other human?

We are biological machines and we have a natural programming. We are programed to feel separate, independent, autonomous. This is an illusion, because we depend on this planet for air, water, food, warmth. This planet can sustain life because of the Sun. The Sun is part of a galaxy, the galaxy is part of the Universe. We can live without an arm but we can't live without the Universe.

The Universe is the unity, we are part of it. We may feel separated but we are all one, not just humans, but other animals and plants, bacteria, even rocks and stars and planets. All that exists is part of the Universe.

There is no "I". I don't exist as a separate being, I am part of the whole, along with you and everyone else and everything else. We can't really destroy anything or create anything, this unity has always existed and will always exist in one form or another because energy can't be created, can't be destroyed, it can only be transformed. Matter is a condensed form of energy, so it too will exist forever in one form or another.

Our lives are a blink of an eye in the life of the Earth. The Earth is like a speck of dust in this enormous (maybe infinite) Universe.

If we are all one, why do we feel separated? Evolution favoured selfish genes. A brain that's aware of the unity has no survival advantage, on the contrary, it may even be fatal. When you know that nothing really matters, not life, nor death and this struggle is futile, the most important things in life become pointless. There's no point in struggling for survival if life and death are the same.

Memories help us form identities, if we lose our memories, our identities are also lost.

In many religions, through meditation, a communion with the Universe is achieved. This happens by deactivating a region of the brain. It seems that this region of the brain makes us feel separated.

Everything is an illusion, life and death, love and hate, pleasure and suffering, even reality. As Einstein said: "reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one".

Science tells us that all our atoms come from the center of a star, we are all made of star dust. We will live as long as the Universe, in one form or another. We are all one.

Economy

The economy is basically divided in 3 sectors (three-sector hypothesis):

1. the primary sector (agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining)
2. the secondary sector (manufacturing)
3. the tertiary sector (services)

Economic development has been divided into three phases:

First phase:
This phase corresponds to the Middle Ages and current developing countries, where the workforce is divided like this:

• primary sector: 70%
• secondary sector: 20%
• tertiary sector: 10%

Second phase:
This phase corresponds to industrializing nations. More machinery is deployed in the primary sector, which reduces the number of workers needed. As a result, the demand for machinery production in the secondary sector increases. The workforce is divided like this:

• primary sector: 20%
• secondary sector: 50%
• tertiary sector: 30%
  

Third phase:
This phase corresponds to developed countries. The primary and secondary sectors are increasingly dominated by automation, and the demand for workforce falls in these sectors. It is replaced by the growing demands of the tertiary sector. The workforce is divided like this:

• primary sector: 10%
• secondary sector: 20%
• tertiary sector: 70%

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You might see a pattern here, that is, employment in every sector grows at the beginning and after a while it starts to shrink, because of automation. Nowadays, a few percentages of the workforce can feed the entire world, because of modern agriculture. Industry needs fewer workers as technology advances because they are replaced by machines.

As the first two sectors shrink because of automation, only the third sector is left to absorb the workforce. The third sector has already started its automation.

My mother used to work in a bank and there were a lot of people employed there but one day they brought computers and a lot of people were laid off because of increased efficiency. This is technological unemployment, where technology makes you redundant.

In this sick society it is normal to fear technology because it can replace you. As the third sector becomes more efficient and it needs less workforce, what will happen?

In a sane world, people should rejoice when new technology is developed, because it should make life better and reduce the work hours for everyone. This does not happen. Indeed, the work hours seem to get longer and more stressful.

People fear losing their jobs to machines and to other people (there's always an army of unemployed waiting to take your job). In another interesting twist, people become xenophobic as foreigners are willing to work for less money and are more docile and subservient. Fear makes us lose our dignity. This society is a spineless society.

The current trend is to brainwash people so that they buy more things (which they don't need) so that they can keep this absurd system going. This is why a lot of companies spend more money on advertising than on actual production. This system creates the desire to want more, to want to be rich, to own as much as possible. Of course, as one man owns more, others own less, so, the system is encouraging selfishness. Is this the direction we want to go in?

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At one point the system will fail. That point will be reached when less and less workforce is needed for the three sectors. At that point, unemployment will rise sharply. As people don't have a job, they can't afford some things. The first sector to suffer will be the tertiary one, because people need food more than they need haircuts. They will go less to restaurants, restaurants will close and so on, this leading to rising unemployment and rising unemployment taking down the economy with it.

Employers want to have as few employees as possible, because they will have more profit. As technology will be able to replace more humans, employers will do just that, they will replace humans with machines. So people have to find new things to produce and convince the others that they need them, even if they don't really need them. This is already happening, as the market is full of stuff nobody really needs, but they are convinced they need them.

When supermarkets open, a lot of small shops close, because supermarkets are more efficient and need less workforce than those small shops put together.

The end of the system will be like this: few people will produce a lot but only they (who produce) will have money to buy what they produce, so it will be a closed circle. All the land, all the factories, everything will be owned by them, by those who produce. Nothing will be owned by the rest of the people. So those who produce nothing will try to do stuff for the producers in return for money. This leads to a continual depravation of society, where every service possible is sold for survival and every possible thing is produced and resources are exploited in vain, just to create more trash. Damn, we are here already. Everything can be bought.

Life

In nature, organisms are mostly concerned with finding food and reproducing. There is never enough food because life has the tendency to multiply exponentially. This leads to competition for food.

Even reproduction is a hassle, because you have to find a mate, rear offspring, find enough food for them also, not just for you. Also, offspring have to be protected from predators.

Even finding a mate is no easy task, because you need to like the individual. Liking is more complicated than it seems. Of course, females are more selective than males because they have the tough part, of rearing the offspring, so females need to find good genes so that their effort doesn't go to waste. This is why males compete for females. Males can waste lots of sperm, because there is a lot of it. Females need to be more careful with their reproduction. This is why we have so many examples of sexual selection, one of the best examples being the peacock.

Liking has a lot to do with the way an individual looks, if an individual looks healthy, well fed and strong, it has good genes, genes needed to survive in that environment, so females tend to like them. Scent is also important, pheromones transmitting signals. Females tend to like pheromones that signal that the male has different genes than hers, this is because inbreeding has negative effects on offspring (meeting of recessive genes).

Have you ever wondered what is sex good for? Probably not. I'm going to tell you anyway. Sexual reproduction is better than asexual reproduction (cloning) because beneficial mutations can be combined (from two individuals) and because of variability. Variability is good for evolution, because natural selection can choose from more diverse individuals. There's not much to choose in clones, they are all the same.

Asexual reproduction (cloning) leads to little variability because all the genome is transmitted to the offspring. In sexual reproduction, meiosis shuffles the genes and it leads to different combinations. This is why children (of the same parents) are different (except for identical twins, which are a sort of clones). In asexual reproduction all offspring are like identical twins and they are also identical to the parent.

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If there was a new island and plants would start to grow on it, having been brought by wind, by waves or by birds (seeds in feces), there would be an untapped amount of food there. Of course, birds could eat some of it. Let's say that the island has a lot of grass growing on it. If we would bring a male and a female grazing animals (same species), they would multiply. The amount of grass on the island can sustain a certain number of grazing animals, because it is finite.

The grazing animals would multiply until they eat the grass faster than it grows. That's when the grass would not be able to sustain the population and a lot of them would starve.

So, you see, that's what life does. Even if that island is, at first, a paradise, life makes it a hell for itself. Evolution thrives in hell, it doesn't work in paradise.

Organisms don't agree to have a certain number of offspring, so that they could have a paradise, a sustainable environment, not exceeding the carrying capacity of the land.

Of course, I wish there would be heaven on Earth, but without suffering, without the constant struggle for survival and reproduction, life would not be where it is.

It's odd that some life forms have time to think about the meaning of life, not struggling for food and reproduction.

You should see this:
What is sex good for?

waves of spacetime

As far as I know, matter is a condensed form of energy. Einstein showed this through his famous equation, E=mc². What is energy, then? I think that energy is movement, or vibration. All matter exhibits both wave and particle properties, this is called wave-particle duality.

Matter and antimatter annihilate each other because they are opposite waves.

If energy is movement, movement in respect to what?
I think that these waves (of which everything is made of) are, in fact, waves of spacetime. Maybe spacetime is made of particles, like, "atoms of spacetime". This would mean that spacetime is all that exists, everything we experience is a consequence of waves in spacetime.

Maybe gravity is not matter affecting spacetime, but waves which affect the density of spacetime. Where there are waves of spacetime, there is more space, more time (or less, as we will see). Where there is more space, more waves can be there, they also increasing space and so on. This may be gravity. Also, if there is more time, time goes by slower.
There may be positive and negative waves of spacetime, positive waves increase the density of spacetime (matter), negative waves decrease the density of spacetime (antimatter). This would mean that antimatter is repulsive towards antimatter, a kind of antigravity. So, matter attracts matter, antimatter repulses antimatter and there's no attraction or repulsion between matter and antimatter.

Maybe there is exactly as much antimatter as matter in the universe, but antimatter is very scattered and we don't detect it. If antimatter repulses antimatter, it would not form stars or planets, or anything really. Maybe antimatter is the reason why the Universe is expanding, because of its antigravity.

Maybe the speed of light depends on the density of spacetime, just as the speed of sound depends on the density of air. This would mean that light travels faster in strong gravity than in no gravity.

I believe that finding out what exactly is spacetime will be the basis of the "theory of everything". I think the answers lie there.

These are just my ideas, maybe they are wrong, my knowledge and understanding of physics are weak.

healthcare vs evolution

Healthcare interferes with evolution by natural selection. In fact, I don't think we have any kind of selection in developed countries, I think we've entered some sort of genetic drift, so people with beneficial mutations aren't favoured in the detriment of those with harmful mutations.

Healthcare gives the chance to people with harmful mutations to live and have children of their own, thus transmitting their harmful genes to the next generation (50% chance per child).

There are far more harmful mutations than beneficial mutations, so the general state of health of the population should decline more and more after each generation, because harmful mutations accumulate.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against healthcare. I believe it's great that we have it but we need to be reasonable. We should not let people with genetic diseases have children just like that. It's irresponsible not only towards their children but towards the entire human species. We should only let them have children if we insure that their harmful mutations don't get passed on, by in vitro fertilization and checking their genes.

I once read an article about blind parents who had blind children. Their disease was genetic and it was passed on. I don't know about you, but I believe they should not have the right to do that.

I don't want natural selection to be back, I think that artificial selection is the only reasonable option we have, no selection is much worse than both, which is what we have now.

Spartans used to kill babies who were considered "puny or deformed". They had the right idea for their purpose, which was to have healthy and powerful soldiers. I don't believe there is any need for such inhumanity nowadays in order to have healthy, powerful, intelligent children or whatever trait we consider important.

Genetics is pretty advanced and we should take advantage of it in order to evolve in the desired direction. I believe that our aim should be health and intelligence in future generations.

pleasure vs pain

What is pleasure?
What is pain?
What is the difference between pleasure and pain?

I believe that pleasure and pain are very similar, they are both sensations, they are both interpretations of stimuli. The big difference between them is that one creates a reward response in the brain (pleasure), the other creates a punishment response in the brain (pain).

If they are both responses of the brain to stimuli, why do we perceive them as we do? I mean, why don't we like pain and dislike pleasure?

If we would like pain, our chances of killing ourselves would be bigger. For example, if we put a hand in fire and we like it, there is a bigger chance of keeping it there and provoking severe burns.

People who don't feel pain usually die young because they accumulate injuries and they don't feel diseases, so pain has a very important role in survival.

Thus, we are programed by evolution to interpret some stimuli as pain and others as pleasure. Objectively, there is no difference between pleasure and pain but subjectively there is a huge difference.

One man asked why do we feel pain as we do, why don't we see red lights and hear alarm sirens when we put a hand in the fire? A biologist answered that red lights and alarms are not as effective as pain at making us get away from danger, thus, saving our lives.

It's obvious that only beings that can move can be selected for pain. I'm pretty sure that plants don't feel pain, at least not the way we do. They may feel some sort or pleasure in the light and pain in the shadow, but I don't think a tree will feel pain as we chop it down, simply because trees which felt such pain did not have bigger chances of survival and reproduction.

Nature selects for survival, it doesn't care what you feel, it can't care. We feel pain and pleasure as we do because it's good for survival.

There will always be suffering in this world, not only human suffering, but other animals will suffer. As long as life exists, suffering will also exist. We may strive to reduce suffering as much as possible and this, I think, is a worthy gole. Suffering will end along with life itself, unless if you believe in eternal suffering in some hellish place (in the eventuality of afterlife).

Insignificance

The Universe is very big, maybe even infinite. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 100 billion stars. The observable Universe has about 100 billion galaxies. So, there are billions of billions of stars in the observable Universe, the number is just huge and I don't want to put here a number with over 20 zeros.

It is estimated that our galaxy has billions of planets. We have identified hundreds of extrasolar planets until now but that number is rapidly increasing as new planets are constantly discovered.

If the Sun was a 10 cm ball (in diameter), the Earth would be 10 m away from it and it would be 1 mm (in diameter). These are rough estimates, of course, but it shows us more realistically the size/distance ratios. I don't know about you, but when I made the calculations, they boggled my mind.

Our brains are not adequate to understand such things, evolution did not equip us for this, it did not have any survival benefits.

You can compare the Earth with a speck of dust. Of course, we (humans) are much smaller and more insignificant than that. It's pretty funny that humans have thought for most of history that the Universe was "created" for us. We are so small and yet we think we are so important.

Most of the Universe is uninhabited by life, because it is mostly unfit for it, so it is strange that many people believe that the Universe is "created" for life.

An atom is 99.9999999999999% empty space. The nucleus of the atom is like a fly on a stadium and the electrons are like tiny gnats circling the stadium. This means that anything composed of atoms is 99.9999999999999% empty space. This is a nice trick that reality plays on us, as everything seems so solid. A brick wall doesn't seem so empty when you crash into it, does it?

If the Earth disappeared, the Universe would carry on as if nothing happened. Energy can't be created or destroyed, so the Universe will follow its path, no matter what we do. It doesn't matter if we destroy ourselves or even if we destroy all other life on this planet.

If humans were more important than any other life form, they would not be killed by viruses. Nature does not discriminate because discrimination does not really exist, we are all life forms and it's the same if atoms are used to build a human or a dog or mosquitoes or even soil. You are not more important than a mosquito. The mosquito you are killing is you, now you are here, now you are not. It's just life fighting life, there is no you.

You should see this video:
Pale Blue Dot