There was one scientist called Mr. Lorenz quite a while ago. He was a peaceful man and naturalist, one of the founders of behaviourist theory for which he was awarded a noble (The Nobel?) prize. He studied birds’ and animals’ behaviour and discovered imprints, or programmed patterns which all of us follow.
Illustration 1: portrait of programmed chicken
In one of his famous experiments he separated ducks from their eggs. He fed and took care of the new born ducks. They accepted him as a mother duck and after they grew up even tried to copulate with his shoes. Red wellington boots, named after an English aristocrat with a surname starting with a capital W, not the ducks of other sex were the object of their lust. I know what you are probably thinking about. No, I am not going in that direction. I am not going to make a parallel with “as seen on TV” culture, e.g a pair of trainers, named after Greek goddess of victory. I will not bore you with my thoughts on how Goddess Nike became Nike TM. I will not spoil your pleasure of coming up with allegories yourself. I will merely stick to the subject of this post, which is memory.
Continue reading ‘An illustrated post, regarding Dr.Lorenz, animal behaviour and choices we make’
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Many times I was about to sit and write a very personal memory: about my father; but every time something stopped me from doing that.
Death underlines life. If life is the sum of our memories and experiencies, where should be total. My first teacher taught me how to do it in primary school. Write numbers you want to add right under each other. When you put them all, draw a line and add numbers in each column. Under the line there will be one number, “total”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do when it comes to a life of somebody you know well. It’s amazing, actually, how scarce my memories are. He was a very kind and simple man. What I remember is just little things: my father caught just in his underwear on his way to toilet late in the night; his shaking hands when he hold my newborn son for the first time; he is sleeping on a sofa in living room, covering his face with a newspaper. Little, random and unsignificant memories. I remember him reading me his poems impromptu, or running around our house in a search for a pen. He would write his poems on anything: old receipts, shits of paper, newspaper clippings… he would leave them anywhere: you could find them in the kitchen, in the toilet, under the bed, on TV, on the floor, between book pages… He was a hardworking man, killing himself with a hell of a job (that was my first impression of it, when he took me there: hell, as he worked on a metal plant. Fumes, dirt, unbearable heat and red liquid metall running under the overpass he had to stay on long shifts). But he would always say: I’m a poet. Indeed, he was. I never was fond of his poems and everybody in my family annoyed by them, though. He, probably, didn’t have a talent, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. He stuffed with his poems a pillow case, and then few shoeboxes, and then plastic shopping bags when he ran out of boxes. Nobody wanted to listen to him. Continue reading ‘Father’
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In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which laid the foundation of determinism. Through Newton’s ideas in what we call now the Age of Reason, rose the idea of ”clockwork universe”, generally stating that by measuring things as they are, we can accurately explain all the Nature’s phenomenae and predict the future using the laws of science.
One probably could wonder, what does Newton’s work has to do with my memories. Though I haven’t read the original and was born nearly 300 years later, it had a certain impact on me. As a matter of fact, we perceive reality and interpret it through the prism of our cultural and educational background. It’s never “as it is”, but as worthy as it’s description. My father was a strong believer in science, and wanted me to be a mathematician, a kind of a weird wish keeping in mind he was a poet himself. I remember him trying to come up with a precise word, which could describe what he felt at the moment best. He often felt stressed about it as he couldn’t. I guess he thought it is easier to operate with numbers rather than words. I remember refusing going to my 1st grade in school: I demanded science. I wanted to study physics and maths, I wanted to understand the mechanics of existence. That’s why my parents have sent me to a school with advanced maths and science programs, and determinism was what they taught in school too.
My belief in numbers was ruined after I’ve read at the age of 12 some popular books on astronomy and quantum mechanics: it turned out that, with the course of time any system behaviour starts to “fluctuate” and become disordered, behaving randomly. Even orbits of planets, massive bodies, never quite follow the same path. We live in a universe which is rather chaotic, then orderly. Our brain waves, or the pattern of it’s electric impulses, is also being chaotic. This could be the origin of consciousness , free will and creativity. Our mind is ruled rather by Chaos, then Order. Continue reading ‘Feeling of being human’
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(Note this is a repost from my own blog)
I had the thought that time doesn’t really exist if you think about it hard enough. People look at time and space as a three dimensional environment, space goes in all directions and time goes in another direction entirely keeping a track of its own. Well my thought is that time doesn’t go in a different direction or the same direction or any direction at all. As far as I’m concerned time doesn’t exist, its a figment of the collective consciousness, a little trinket created by man to keep our lives in order. Rotations and revolutions of planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and universes aren’t recorded and set by some big dimensional clock, the only things in existence capable of keeping time are sentient beings, like humans and any possible extra terrestrials.
This brings me to another theory/idea that I have which I will explain backwards to forwards to make it most clear to everybody.
When you look at the matter of existence you usually end up with a few options for how it all came to be. If your into the whole religion thing you are usually pretty sure that there is a “God” somewhere out there that created the whole ..everything. For most rational beings this draws you to the question of who or what created god, and then who or what created the who or what that created god, and so on and so forth into complete oblivion. That however is more plausible than the next option of everything ever spontaneously popping into existence without reason. From nothing for no reason is just not a viable answer to anything. I can agree with any people who want to argue god over this point, they are quite right thinking that this is the answer to the big why is completely ridiculous. I wouldn’t have a problem however arguing for the matter that everything has always existed. There was never a point when there was nothing, no time when everything was made. You know why there was never such a time, well for one because time doesn’t exist. For another its the fact that things cannot possibly be made from nothing, its just rather impossible in matter concerning mathematics. There might have been have been a time when nothing living existed, or everything in the universe was all clumped together in some gigantic ball of mass, or it might have been gas or particles or who knows a gigantic friggin star, that exploded and sent its parts all over everything. If thats the case though it would like like everything comes from a gigantic star which explodes and turns into what we have now which expands to a certain point and eventually starts to collapse into itself and turn back into a star. After that the whole thing starts all over again repeated on a time scale which isn’t even comprehendable and I don’t want to think about.
So yes this has been my big rambling ramble about everything and nothing and the non existence of time.
Dalarius
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