A Small Axe

I've just been to Wiki to explore one of philosophy's most tantalising questions:


""If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is a philosophical riddle that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality.
What is the difference between what something is, and how it appears? - e.g., "sound is the variation of pressure that propagates through matter as a wave"Perhaps the most important topic the riddle offers is the division between perception of an object and how an object really is. If the tree exists outside of perception (as common sense would dictate), then it will produce sound waves. However, these sound waves will not actually sound like anything. Sound as it is mechanically understood will occur, but sound as it is understood by sensation will not occur. "


Sound is a form of energy, just like electricity and light. Sound is made when air molecules vibrate and move in a pattern called waves or sound waves. An action (such as our falling tree) produces soundwaves which travel to the ears and then relayed into signals inside the brain.Like touch, audition requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation. It basically amounts to the idea that if no-one were around to listen to the falling tree, it would not make a sound, you would just have vibrating molecules. Vibrating molecules do not make a sound until they are emitted by the brain. Is this suggesting then that the Universe is indeed silent, and that the only sound which takes place is inside our minds? If this is the case, then it stands to reason that each and every sound that we have ever percieved is actually a part of our brains. The brain thus presents itself as somekind of cosmic hammond organ.

This of course must stand the same for touch, for an object is neither inherently rough or smooth, but simply a message relayed to my brain from my skin. If an object possesses absolutely no qualities whatsever, then it can only be my mind which is creating all affirmations about it. The mechanosensation of hearing and touch open up any number of avenues about all that we thought we knew about memory. For we don't simply remember a sensation that we have felt - we are everything about the sensation, and all it encompasses.

451

I remember reading somewhere that Zen Buddhists would burn all their books on reaching enlightenment. This always puzzled me. Surely this wealth of knowledge about the human condition should have been shared, and then distributed to every man, woman, and child. It could serve as a manual to help them understand their own lives. But then again, who the hell wants a manual? Maybe these teachers understood that people don't need to understand their own lives to be happy. Maybe people would just simply prefer to be happy.

Everyman (and woman!) his own journey. His own journey everyman.

Do You Have A Strange Mind Too?

The following email has done the rounds for some time on the internet now, but its implications are impressive. Have a go at reading the paragraph below:

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too.I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm.Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh, and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Well, how did you do? Apparently, not everyone can reveal the above message, and indeed, you may need a strange mind to do so. There's no official line from Cambridge University regarding this research though and some think of it as a well informed internet stunt. Nevertheless, it illustrates beautifully the inner workings of the mind. By messing around with the arrangement of letters in words it reveals something remarkable in how the mind processes information. When we leave the first and last letters of a word but muddle all the others, we are still able to read the true meaning regardless of how the word looks, because the mind uses shortcuts to cognise words more rapidly. The brain therefore is not reading the actual written word that we are consciously aware of, but rather identifying it as a shape, which it then matches to something stored in memory.Every word, and every meaning to every word, is contained within the brain somewhere. This seems obvious as we search our minds for the words we need to write, but remains as something we are unaware of when we read. We don't simply pick a word up from the page, but rather open its door from our own memory banks.

The implications of this are monumental, not only in how we apply it to when we read words on paper but also how we see EVERYTHING in the Universe. When we read the words off a page we are playing a game of association with them, and comparing them to ones held within memory, but is this not also true for how we describe every day objects we come into contact with? Are we at last seeing proofs of Buddhist theology and their teachings on the emptiness of the Universe?

So where on earth do we store all these memories of not only words, but also potentially the meaning of EVERTHING in the Universe? Well it appears that the oldest part of our brains which we inherited from our reptilian ancestors, plays a much more active role in our perception than previouslty thought. The cerebellum takes up only 10% of total brain volume, but has over 50% of all the neurons of the brain. The cerebellum has long been thought as a motor control structure, but modern research is starting to reveal a broader role in a number of key cognitive functions, including attention and the processing of language , music, and other sensory temporal stimuli. This here's worth a glance .... http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/367

And for anyone interested in Buddhist teachings on emptiness... http://kwelos.tripod.com/sunyata.htm

The Elixir of Life?

The human mind has only the capacity for one thought at a time. We can carry out multiple tasks all at once where automatic processes run in parallel, but we will only ever hold one conscious thought at any given time. Our minds relentlessly produce conscious thoughts one after the other, and they cascade down like the ticking of a clock. Our thoughts regulate the passage of time, and we regulate time by our thoughts, and it gives the appearance that time is real. It creates the illusion that time is constant and invariable and outside ourselves, when it's actually perpetrated by our rate of perception. Our thoughts can often appear so concrete that our ideas of time are concrete too.

So what then is a thought? About 100 billion neurons, or brain cells, make up the average adult's brain. Each of these neurons is connected to between 5,000 and 200,000 other neurons, the number of ways that information flows among neurons in the brain is so large it is greater than the number of stars in the entire Universe. The function of a neuron is to recieve input 'information' from other neurons, to process that information, then to send 'information' as output to other neurons.The voltage that carries signals from one neuron to the other is determined primarily by the potassium and sodium ionic concentrations internal and external to the neuron. In 1/1000 of a second, the cell changes from a negative charge to a positive and then back again. In this way, nerve cells 'hum' with electricity. It is the pattern and speed of the hum which the brain transfers into data and creates thought. I found this site offers an excellent insight into what's happening under the bonnet:
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/neurons_intro.php

The electrical signals in the brain are travelling at a speed of 100 meters per second (or 200 miles an hour), along pathways reminiscent of a labyrinth. The appearance of a stimulus evokes neural responses that are related to the processing of this stimulus. The mediated response of the neo-cortex to stimuli generally occurs in about 50 ms. A simple movement such as raising a hand requires electrical signals from many regions of the brain. Every sight, sound, touch, emotion, reaction, every memory and every thought in the history of mankind is a result of these electrical signals. So I ask what would happen if we were able to somehow speed up the signals in the brain? If they are defining my rate of perception, then surely an increase in their speed would force reality to 'slow down'?

I'll leave you with this thought experiment. Imagine you and me are in the same room (don't get any ideas) and that I have been shrunk to a size so small that the distance between the neurones in my brain have halved, and so the speed of my thoughts are twice as fast as yours. In my mind it would appear that you were walking and talking at half your normal speed, while I would appear manic to you. But because inside each one of our minds we are still producing one thought at a time, our own rate of perception and therefore our concept of 'time' shall remain normal within our own personal experience. Does this experiment show that effectively 'time travel' is possible? If it is possible to slow down our experience of reality, are we then looking at a contender for the elixir of life?

The Illusion of Space and Time

Time is not inherent to the Universe. A detailed search of the Universe will reveal that there's no such thing as 'time', but only this moment... and this moment....and this moment. Some think of time as being one moment piled up ontop of another moment to create four dimensional space. You can imagine it a bit like a polaroid picture being taken of this present moment and then another being slapped on top, and then another, until eventually a worm-like structure appears. This idea of four dimensional space creates the illusion that time is real, and somehow tangible in the Universe, but it's not. The only place where four dimensional space exists is in the human mind. What really happens with that polaroid as it lands on top of the one below, is that the old picture disappears- it ceases to exist and it's replaced by this moment....and then this moment... For more details on fourth dimensional space you can go here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension

Over 99% of an atom is empty space. In-fact there is hardly any matter whatsoever. I like how this site illustrates just how empty an atom really is : http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/#electron

The electrons which orbit an atom spin so fast that it enables a mostly empty structure to appear solid to the observer. If we were to shrink ourselves and accelerate our speed of perception, the electrons of that atom would appear to slow down in their orbits. Eventually the atom would become more apparent for its empty space than its solidness, and I can't help but draw on an image of our own solar system to illustrate this (but perhaps another time). What this shows is an inextricable relationship between matter, time and our rate of perception. The rate at which we percieve the spin of an atom designates just how solid(or empty) matter appears to be. Matter is thus revealed as a function of time. Time is created by our rate of perception and is therefore personal to each observer. Time is the product of how we percieve the Universe, and not inherent to the Universe itself.

Time inside an atom is measured in attoseconds. One attosecond is one quillionth of a second. To try and give that some kind of perspective, one attosecond is to one second what one second is to the age of the Universe. One attosecond is the time it takes light to travel the length of 3 hydrogen atoms. 150 attoseconds is the time it takes for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. These speeds are unfathomably fast, but only in relation to our rate of perception which is measured in 'yawn' milliseconds. The earliest response to stimuli begins at the cerebellum within 2 ms, whilst the first response of the visual cortex is around 50-70 ms. A full state of arousal of the brain takes around 200 ms. So what we have is a vast, almost unthinkable difference in time scales : one millisecond is one thousandth of a second, but if an attosecond were stretched to the length of a full second, a second would last longer than 31 million years.

If I was to speed up my rate of perception from milliseconds to attoseconds, then the rate at which I drop the next polaroid would slow down. If I increased it further, say the speed of light, then I would stop....everything would stop....but only in relation to me; in other words only my experience would have stopped. What's also interesting at this stage is the presence of consciousness and its role outside experience. As the rate of perception increases or decreases, consciousness will have remained invariably constant, and indeed, if my rate of perception were to run at the speed of light would we not find that the only thing to exist would be consciousness? Does this then confirm what the mystics and religion have told us for thousands of years - that it's all One, and that it's all God?

I found this on Wiki and I thought it poignant...

A further name for this irreducible, time-and-space-transcending mysterious Truth or Essence of Buddhic Reality is the Dharmakaya (Body of Truth). Of this the Zen master (Zen Buddhism is a Mahayana school), Sokei-An, says:[10]
... dharmakaya [is] the equivalent of God ... The Buddha also speaks of no time and no space, where if I make a sound there is in that single moment a million years. It is spaceless like radio waves, like electric space - intrinsic. The Buddha said that there is a mirror that reflects consciousness. In this electric space a million miles and a pinpoint - a million years and a moment - are exactly the same. It is pure essence ... We call it 'original consciousness' - 'original akasha' - perhaps God in the Christian sense. I am afraid of speaking about anything that is not familiar to me. No one can know what IT is ...

Mission: Impossible

The God Particle Is A Delusion

I hate to tell another man how to do his job, but I hope those scientists involved with this Large Hadron Collider know what the hell they are doing. They aim to recreate the conditions in the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang, and to finally expose an intriguing atomic particle which has thus far evaded them- the Higgs Boson, or 'God particle'. They want the Higgs Boson particle because theoretically it bestows mass on all other units in an atom, and they need it to unify gravity from Einstein's relativity model to the one that is supposed by quantum physics. Some are also thinking that they might find a little bit of God in there somewhere. But it's so obvious what's going to happen once they switch this thing on - it will smash these atoms only to find more stuff hanging-out in there. And what about God? What everyone appears to fail to notice is that God is already staring out at us.

The Temple of Jerusalem was an immense complex which was built up around one small, but very important room- the Holy of Holies (Kodesh Kodashim). Only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the high priest would enter this room and pray to God on Israel's behalf. It was in this very room that God was thought to reside, and it's interesting because the room was utterly bare. The Holy of Holies was empty.

In the five daily prayers, Muslims face the Kaaba in Mecca, Arabia. It is a cube-shaped stone structure that was originally built by Prophet Adam and later rebuilt by Prophet Abraham. Muslims believe that the Kaaba was the first house of worship on Earth dedicated to the worship of one god. Muslims do not worship the Kaaba. It serves as a central focal point for Muslims around the world, unifying them in worship and symbolizing their common belief, spiritual focus and direction. Interestingly, the inside of the Kaaba is empty.

The key concept of Zen is the 'emptiness' of Mahayana. A Zen Buddhist serves only to empty the self, so that a Great Union is formed with the emptiness of the Universe. This relationship exposes that which the mind percieves as empty is actually an empty awareness, or consciousness.

More than 99% of an atom is empty space, and less than 1% is actual matter. The atom looks solid because we are larger and percieve at a rate so slow that the atom appears to spin astronomically fast. It creates the illusion that objects (which are mostly an empty structure) appear solid to the observer. Perhaps science is making far too much importance of this tiny percentage of matter which we can see, but fails to acknowledge the implications of that emptiness which we cannot see; we dismiss it as 'nothing' because it is unquantifiable, but for this very same reason mystics throughout the centuries have beheld it as holy.

So maybe it's not another particle we need to explain the Universe to us. Is it possible that this empty awareness animates all relationships in the Universe from quarks all the way up to gravity on planets? It might pay for science to put down that hammer it wants to crack a walnut with, and start taking a better look at itself. The human mind is not infallible, it is a tool. Tools' sometimes get it wrong. I just want science to be sure of every possible outcome before they pull that lever and send protons whizzing round a ring at nearly the speed of light; if not just for those people of Geneva who are trying to sleep well at night but everybody on the planet.