Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Mageth · 03-02-2005, 10:25 AM

Here's another thought experiment, related somewhat to the Library of Babel.

Suppose there is a screen, like a computer monitor. Now imagine that this monitor can display some number of pixels. The monitor I'm working on is currently set to a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. That's a lot of pixels. But you can increase that number if you wish to give higher resolution. Make it a million by a million pixels if you wish. But at some point you'd exceed the capacity or "configuration space" of the human brain to visualize images, so there is a limit on increasing resolution to improve the quality of the images.

Now, each pixel can display a discrete number of colors. My monitor is set to "True Color (32 bit)". So my monitor is capable of displaying millions of colors at any one pixel. More colors than my human brain can distinguish.

Given such a monitor, one can conceive that any image that it is possible to photograph can be displayed in quite good detail on the monitor.

Now, suppose that you could cycle that monitor through every possible permutation of colors at each pixel. Start off with all black, and then change the first pixel by one bit, and so on. You eventually would cycle through all possible images that could possibly be displayed on that monitor. A very large number of images, needless to say, but a finite number of images. And note that most of them would be so similar as to be indistinguishable to a human. But still, if one sat and watched, one would see a very large number of distingushably different images, but still a finite number of images.

Now, think about this. One would eventually see everything that it is possible for a human to see. One would see an image representing every photo it is possible to take. Any image conceivable in this universe would be displayed for you. You'd see, for example, detailed images of each planet, asteroid, and moon in this solar system, from a tiny dot, zooming in to the planet from every angle, and zooming in down to the tiniest detail, to a blow-up of each grain of dust on each body in the solar system. You'd see images of every human that has ever existed, or that could exist, from every possible angle, in every possible setting. Given infinite time, you would eventually see an image of everything there is to see. But you would still be left with infinite time before you.

You might object: "What about motion?" A valid objection. So we now imagine that we have a set of "movies" or "videos", each composed of some number of frames per second (say, 30), and each of a set length. Two hours is the standard time for movies, I suppose, but what the hell? Make each 100 years long. Two hours wold work, though, because one could view 100 years' worth of two hour movies strung together to view a 100-year movie. And the set of 100-year movies would include every permutation of strung-together 2-hour movies.

Take all those images that can be perceived by humans on the hypothetical monitor and insert them into movies in every possible permutation. You end up with a very large number, a seemingly infinite, but actually finite, number of movies - most of which would be, well, uninteresting, essentially "noise"; some would include bits and pieces that made a bit of sense among all the noise, and the occasional movie that would actually seem significant rather than simply noise (though most of these would include various spots which were out of sync, which were "noise"). One movie in there would include a movie of your life, as experienced through your eyes. Others would show variations on your life. One would show your life in reverse.

You could throw out all the "noise" movies and keep all the ones that seemed to make some kind of sense, if you wish. You'd still be left with a seemingly infinite, but actually finite, number of movies.

Given infinite time, one could view all those 100-year-long movies - and still have infinite time left over. All, or just the ones that seem significant. (Extending this, given infinite time, one could live the experiences depicted in all of those movies - in a finite amount of time.)

The same applies to sound - one could add all possible permutations of soundtracks (made up of the finite number of sounds that the human ear is able to distinguish) to all those movies. A very large number of soundtracks, but a finite number nonetheless. And again, most would be just "noise".

All of the above is meant to illustrate that there are a finite number of stimuli which the human brain is able to distinguish. Those stimuli form a finite configuration space of permutations, or states. You can't make an infinity out of a finite configuration space. The possible permutations are stupendously huge, large enough to seem infinite to us. But there are not an infinite number of permutations in that configuration space. You could conceivably experience "novelty" for a helluva long time (though the majority of it would be "uninteresting", I suppose), but not for infinity.

The notion of "infinite time", if you really think about it, swallows any notion that it is possible to have "infinite novelty", and doesn't even burp.

mirage · 03-02-2005, 10:54 AM

Nice analogy Mageth.

I'm not convinced by the "but I'm all about curiosity" defence against eternal bliss.

It arbitrarily defines some "essence" self which would be violated. Your reward centrers are there now. If they got stimulated you wouldn't give a toss about novelty. It would just be irrelevant. This wouldn't negate all your memories and opinions, they would just seem of no importance.

Exactly like Heaven is supposed to be. It's eternal bliss, why argue? It never promised a broad range of evening classes. What's the value of your curiosity? Or your self image as a curious person? Those are just secondary things that your value system links to your reward centre as things stand now. These things would not be changed, just bypasses and made irrelevant.

Mageth · 03-02-2005, 11:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mirage

Nice analogy Mageth.

I'm not convinced by the "but I'm all about curiosity" defence against eternal bliss.

It arbitrarily defines some "essence" self which would be violated. Your reward centrers are there now. If they got stimulated you wouldn't give a toss about novelty. It would just be irrelevant. This wouldn't negate all your memories and opinions, they would just seem of no importance.

Exactly like Heaven is supposed to be. It's eternal bliss, why argue? It never promised a broad range of evening classes. What's the value of your curiosity? Or your self image as a curious person? Those are just secondary things that your value system links to your reward centre as things stand now. These things would not be changed, just bypasses and made irrelevant.

Along those lines, I was talking about this to a friend at work (an atheist; he happens to be the person I got the "monitor" analogy from), and he half-jokingly suggested that the "boredom" center of our brain (whatever it is that generates the sensation of "boredom") could be short-circuited to the "pleasure" center of our brain, so that boredom would be pleasurable - perhaps the ultimate stimulation - in heaven.

Stephen T-B · 03-02-2005, 11:06 AM

So we'd be little glowing somethings, standing in a beam of love for all eternity and never asking "Why?"

Mageth · 03-02-2005, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephen T-B

So we'd be little glowing somethings, standing in a beam of love for all eternity and never asking "Why?"

Either that, or we'd be like we are now, but endlessly cycling through all the possible states of the finite "configuration space" of possible experiences for all eternity.

After the trillionth or so repetition of experiencing everything that it is possible for us to experience given a necessarily finite configuration space for what we can experience, and no matter how long it takes for us to get through one repetition, still leaving an infinite amount of time before us, I'm sure everything would begin to seem rather...absurd and pointless. Repetitive. Yes, boring. Assuming that we are humans like we are now. If we're something else, no longer identifiable as "human", then all bets are off.

mirage · 03-02-2005, 01:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephen T-B

So we'd be little glowing somethings, standing in a beam of love for all eternity and never asking "Why?"

Sounds cool. You better not ask why, coz there sure as hell can't be an answer!

Sarpedon · 03-02-2005, 04:11 PM

According to Dante, the contemplation and presence of God was enough to make each person as happy as they possibly could be.

Eldarion Lathria · 03-02-2005, 06:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarpedon

According to Dante, the contemplation and presence of God was enough to make each person as happy as they possibly could be.

Sounds like the ecstasy of a moron in the presence of a movie star. It's banal, but real.

Eldarion Lathria

Rational BAC · 03-02-2005, 07:12 PM

The problem we humans have is that----

We are bound by "finity" (probably not really a word, but I couldn't think of any other).

We are born and live all of our lives and die-------completely encompassed by the notion that there is a beginning, a middle and an end to all things.

There is a beginning, a middle and an end to every living form, every day, every year, every lunar period, every nation. There is a beginning, middle and end to every play or movie.

That is what we like, because that is what we are used to. That is what all of our finite surroundings teach us for all of our lives in everything we consider or contemplate or experience.

We think that this has to be normality. And we are afraid of abnormality. And so we have this strange idea that infinity would be boring--because it seems so abnormal.

And because people like what they are accustomed to------we tend to dislike anything outside of that custom. Find it annoying and fearsome to contemplate.

I think most all of this discussion proves, if it proves anything at all---------is that we just love the tiny little box of our perceived reality and the experiences we have had on this tiny little planet so much within the beginning middle and end of our lives. ---that it is impossible for most of us to consider anything outside of that box.

It is impossible for most of us to even begin to understand eternity.

We just might get bored-----What narrowness of vision that is.

Jobar · 03-02-2005, 09:08 PM

I wish that luvluv had addressed my post way back at the bottom of page 1.

Mageth, several years back I posted a very long talk given by Alan Watts, who was giving a speech at the opening of a Zen Buddhism Center in California. The final part of that talk sounded amazingly like your pixel analogy- I'm repeating the relevant section here:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alan Watts

Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There's a Zen poem which says
A sudden crash of thunder. The mind doors burst open,
and there sits the ordinary old man.
See? There's a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It's just little you, you know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you've missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see aureoles around buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante's 'Paradiso.' Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond light, it's so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandela appearing, this great sun, and beyond the violet, there's black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the _yang_ comes from the _yin_, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been watching a kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says, 'you know, this isn't all I can do,' and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you've been looking at this as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it says, 'well, that's just the beginning!' Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little subfigures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities of sound all over the place, and this thing's going, going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into... Why, us, sitting around here.
Thank you very much.
Scribbled down by Alan Seaver: [email protected]
Alan Watts

In eternity, we could experience not just every potential twist our own life might take, all the myriad ways our lives might have followed in every possible alternate universe. Infinite existence would mean that the life of every possible human being could be experienced in this way! In the pantheistic view- which Watts explicates better than any other philosopher I've seen- this is in fact what's happening right now, to us. The Buddha mind is our everyday minds; our consciousnesses are the laser beams playing an infinite DVD, you might say.

Hindu mythology is full of infinite images- the classic one is the Ever-Opening Flower, unfolding new experiences throughout infinity. Our languages aren't really able to express this, and our temporally limited minds aren't able to comprehend it, any more than an ant can comprehend a galaxy.

______________________________________

As I pointed out back on page 1, and Mageth has also mentioned, our brains have a maximum capacity. Seems that I have read (Arthur C. Clarke's 3001) that it's something like an exabyte- a billion gigabytes, IIRC. Since there exists far more information than this on Earth today, even if we were physically immortal we still would never get bored- because we would have to forget things at the same pace we learned new ones! Barring some way to link our minds with some sort of vast computer memory, boredom wouldn't be a problem even if we were immortal, I think.

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03-02-2005, 10:25 AM	#131
Mageth Contributor Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Deep in the heart of mother-lovin' Texas Posts: 29,689	Here's another thought experiment, related somewhat to the Library of Babel. Suppose there is a screen, like a computer monitor. Now imagine that this monitor can display some number of pixels. The monitor I'm working on is currently set to a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. That's a lot of pixels. But you can increase that number if you wish to give higher resolution. Make it a million by a million pixels if you wish. But at some point you'd exceed the capacity or "configuration space" of the human brain to visualize images, so there is a limit on increasing resolution to improve the quality of the images. Now, each pixel can display a discrete number of colors. My monitor is set to "True Color (32 bit)". So my monitor is capable of displaying millions of colors at any one pixel. More colors than my human brain can distinguish. Given such a monitor, one can conceive that any image that it is possible to photograph can be displayed in quite good detail on the monitor. Now, suppose that you could cycle that monitor through every possible permutation of colors at each pixel. Start off with all black, and then change the first pixel by one bit, and so on. You eventually would cycle through all possible images that could possibly be displayed on that monitor. A very large number of images, needless to say, but a finite number of images. And note that most of them would be so similar as to be indistinguishable to a human. But still, if one sat and watched, one would see a very large number of distingushably different images, but still a finite number of images. Now, think about this. One would eventually see everything that it is possible for a human to see. One would see an image representing every photo it is possible to take. Any image conceivable in this universe would be displayed for you. You'd see, for example, detailed images of each planet, asteroid, and moon in this solar system, from a tiny dot, zooming in to the planet from every angle, and zooming in down to the tiniest detail, to a blow-up of each grain of dust on each body in the solar system. You'd see images of every human that has ever existed, or that could exist, from every possible angle, in every possible setting. Given infinite time, you would eventually see an image of everything there is to see. But you would still be left with infinite time before you. You might object: "What about motion?" A valid objection. So we now imagine that we have a set of "movies" or "videos", each composed of some number of frames per second (say, 30), and each of a set length. Two hours is the standard time for movies, I suppose, but what the hell? Make each 100 years long. Two hours wold work, though, because one could view 100 years' worth of two hour movies strung together to view a 100-year movie. And the set of 100-year movies would include every permutation of strung-together 2-hour movies. Take all those images that can be perceived by humans on the hypothetical monitor and insert them into movies in every possible permutation. You end up with a very large number, a seemingly infinite, but actually finite, number of movies - most of which would be, well, uninteresting, essentially "noise"; some would include bits and pieces that made a bit of sense among all the noise, and the occasional movie that would actually seem significant rather than simply noise (though most of these would include various spots which were out of sync, which were "noise"). One movie in there would include a movie of your life, as experienced through your eyes. Others would show variations on your life. One would show your life in reverse. You could throw out all the "noise" movies and keep all the ones that seemed to make some kind of sense, if you wish. You'd still be left with a seemingly infinite, but actually finite, number of movies. Given infinite time, one could view all those 100-year-long movies - and still have infinite time left over. All, or just the ones that seem significant. (Extending this, given infinite time, one could live the experiences depicted in all of those movies - in a finite amount of time.) The same applies to sound - one could add all possible permutations of soundtracks (made up of the finite number of sounds that the human ear is able to distinguish) to all those movies. A very large number of soundtracks, but a finite number nonetheless. And again, most would be just "noise". All of the above is meant to illustrate that there are a finite number of stimuli which the human brain is able to distinguish. Those stimuli form a finite configuration space of permutations, or states. You can't make an infinity out of a finite configuration space. The possible permutations are stupendously huge, large enough to seem infinite to us. But there are not an infinite number of permutations in that configuration space. You could conceivably experience "novelty" for a helluva long time (though the majority of it would be "uninteresting", I suppose), but not for infinity. The notion of "infinite time", if you really think about it, swallows any notion that it is possible to have "infinite novelty", and doesn't even burp.

03-02-2005, 10:54 AM	#132
mirage Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: UK Posts: 8,524	Nice analogy Mageth. I'm not convinced by the "but I'm all about curiosity" defence against eternal bliss. It arbitrarily defines some "essence" self which would be violated. Your reward centrers are there now. If they got stimulated you wouldn't give a toss about novelty. It would just be irrelevant. This wouldn't negate all your memories and opinions, they would just seem of no importance. Exactly like Heaven is supposed to be. It's eternal bliss, why argue? It never promised a broad range of evening classes. What's the value of your curiosity? Or your self image as a curious person? Those are just secondary things that your value system links to your reward centre as things stand now. These things would not be changed, just bypasses and made irrelevant.

03-02-2005, 11:06 AM	#134
Stephen T-B Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Leeds, UK Posts: 5,878	So we'd be little glowing somethings, standing in a beam of love for all eternity and never asking "Why?"

03-02-2005, 04:11 PM	#137
Sarpedon Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Minnesota, the least controversial state in the le Posts: 8,446	According to Dante, the contemplation and presence of God was enough to make each person as happy as they possibly could be.

03-02-2005, 07:12 PM	#139
Rational BAC Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Tampa Bay area Posts: 3,471	The problem we humans have is that---- We are bound by "finity" (probably not really a word, but I couldn't think of any other). We are born and live all of our lives and die-------completely encompassed by the notion that there is a beginning, a middle and an end to all things. There is a beginning, a middle and an end to every living form, every day, every year, every lunar period, every nation. There is a beginning, middle and end to every play or movie. That is what we like, because that is what we are used to. That is what all of our finite surroundings teach us for all of our lives in everything we consider or contemplate or experience. We think that this has to be normality. And we are afraid of abnormality. And so we have this strange idea that infinity would be boring--because it seems so abnormal. And because people like what they are accustomed to------we tend to dislike anything outside of that custom. Find it annoying and fearsome to contemplate. I think most all of this discussion proves, if it proves anything at all---------is that we just love the tiny little box of our perceived reality and the experiences we have had on this tiny little planet so much within the beginning middle and end of our lives. ---that it is impossible for most of us to consider anything outside of that box. It is impossible for most of us to even begin to understand eternity. We just might get bored-----What narrowness of vision that is.

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