When A Leaf Turns » Mind

Change Blindness

Venture Free — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:44:52 +0000

One might be tempted to read more into this than can be legitimately claimed. I certainly am. Whatever you think, it is most definitely an interesting phenomenon.

More Scale

Venture Free — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:42:15 +0000

I’m not sure that this is related the way that I think it might be, but the latest Radio Lab Podcast had a segment on the fact that very young children think of numbers logarithmically. Perhaps our difficulties with scale and magnitude are a reflection of this natural understanding of numbers (rather than our “unnatural” understanding of numbers as serial).

Scale

Venture Free — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:07:11 +0000

I think people automatically think on a kind of logarithmic scale when contemplating extraordinary distances simply because the analogies used by our intuition cause magnitude to be lost. The moon orbiting the earth is roughly analogous to the earth orbiting the sun and so our minds map the moon to the earth and the earth to the sun, and the difference in magnitude is lost. We look at a galaxy and it appears roughly similar to the solar system. We can tell ourselves that the galaxy is incomprehensibly larger, but in our heads we see a solar system and the size difference is reduced to “It’s like this, but bigger.” We look at the universe, at all of the galaxies out there, and it appears roughly similar to the stars in our own galaxy. “It’s like our galaxy, but bigger.”

My hope is that these resources might help you get a grip on the actual sizes involved when thinking about the universe.

First, this website (http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/) shows the solar system to scale. According to the site: “This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here [approximately 6 inches]. The planets are shown in corresponding scale.”

Next a comparison of celestial bodies, including the planets and various types of stars.

Finally, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D.

All this really does for me in the end is highlight just how bad I am at imagining the sizes and distances involved in the universe. Even knowing it I find myself unable to do any better.

Agnosiophobia*

Venture Free — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:42:17 +0000

Roughly translated, agnosiophobia means “fear of not knowing” or “fear of a lack of knowledge”. Specifically this means the irrational fear of something not being known, not only personally but in general. This often results in an irrational assertion that in fact the thing being considered is actually known. When pressed the sufferer of this phobia will claim that they don’t have the knowledge themselves, but that they know where to get such knowledge. Most commonly this assertion refers to a deity of some sort, though in some cases the assertion that it is known is enough without also having to assert where and with whom such knowledge exists. In all cases contemplating the idea that the answer is not known by anyone is cause for great anxiety and is to be avoided at all cost.

_{*I “invented” this word, though I’m guessing it’s already been made up many times in the past already, so I make no actual claim of originality. A quick Google revealed the existence of the word (namely as a blog), but no concrete definition.}

Mind of the Internet

Venture Free — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:47:57 +0000

I’ve recently been interested in the idea that the internet is (not has) a mind of it’s own, and we are its neurons and axons. If thought is a pattern of activations in the neural network in your brain via both internal and external stimuli, then might that not be in some way mimicked by the mass “activation” of specific web sites and computers on the internet via internet traffic and real-world news (i.e. internal and external stimuli)?

I wonder what the internet thinks? I doubt that we could ever know, because the things we think about and act on, big and small, important and trivial all become single activations in its neural net. The things that we do affect the things that it thinks.

And if we were to determine that it thinks, could we communicate with it? Unfortunately I don’t think so. Again, the things that we do affect the things that it thinks. If we were to try and organize our actions so as to make ourselves known, the best we could hope for is to change it’s thoughts in some specific way. The problem is that it’s very likely to simply assume that whatever thought we end up creating occurred purely on it’s own. Think about it, have you ever had a thought that wasn’t your own? (What implications would the answer to the question of internet thought have on our understanding of some types of insanity?)