The world on a diet

The world is hardly a world without someone to call it such.

I'll totally sidestep the issue of society here-- while society certainly isn't moot, it is not what I wish to address here. We all know that we are connected to the world around us through our senses. So, we have nice little adjectives like round, green, smelly, etc. to describe the world around us. Lo and behold, combine those sensory inputs with higher cognitive functions and we have language. We have history. We have a structured way of looking at the world, identifying each part and taking note of how the parts fit together and how they change over time. We know that the sky is separate from the firmament, and that we are surrounded by air. We have even probed the smallest particles of matter. (Never mind that even with all our advanced technology, we still get hung up on silly things like race, gender and creed). We know the difference between two people.

Try to imagine not having any senses-- somehow or another, you can detect motion around you, the direction of your own locomotion, changes in energy in the environment, etc, without your five senses. How do all the parts appear to you now? You would have to do without the superficial identifying qualities like blue, soft, or hot. Limited to environmental properties such as location, energy levels (heat), velocity... you know, the properties identified in physics, you would not only lose the relative value system that your mind assesses your immediate environment with, you would also lose the notions of separateness and distinctiveness.

Go to the beach on a calm summer morning. Breath in the warm salty air. Watch the seagulls frolic about in the sun soaked blue sky. Hear the waves cresting and crashing on the shore. Then close your eyes and remove all the color from the scene in your mind's eye. See only shapes, and then erase the lines from the shapes. Turn the sounds into simple vibrations in the air around you, then remove the air and replace it with billions of complex particles that respond to the sound vibrations. Rid yourself of the smells and detect only the gaseous molecules carried to your nose from various sources.

Last but certainly not least, rid yourself of blue, sun, ocean, etc... words have no place here.

Just what is it you perceive after all this? The honest answer: nothing. But after training yourself for a while, you may just begin to come up with an approximate image. Mine is a near-blackness everywhere, with subtle and blurred shapes moving about. This world, without the filter of perception, has no distinct parts. The area to my left looks slightly different than the area to my right, but everything is all one large system, and nothing is separate. The seagull is not differentiated from the air; Mr. Bird is but a center of activity in the beach-air-sky system. The air and the seagull are not separate, just elements of a greater whole.

In short, the human tendency to name and categorize everything in the universe is an evolved quality. To really understand the real world, you have to strip away the colors and the smells and the words we have all grown accustomed to and take for granted.

Love and quantum entanglement

Okay, so I watched that movie "What the *Bleep* Do We Know" and I had some thoughts. Of those thoughts, I'll share an impression the film leaves regarding love.

The "experts" (they were sorta like narrators) in the film begin to shift more toward biological processes and the brain at one point. This makes its way into addiction and love, which, chemically, are quite similar. When one love, one experiences a pattern of chemical transactions in the brain that cognitively have an object (he/she whom one love). When one (the "lover") no longer gets what one needs from this person (the "lovee"), the patterns change. So love is actually a series of chemical reactions within a person; this means that when you fall in love with someone, you are really in love with how you feel when you love someone (see also addictions). Take that away, addiction's done, lovin's over.

I don't want to believe that. I mean, it makes total sense, as we are made of chemicals, and if there is a change in our bodies or minds, it must be chemical in nature. And what about that guy or girl whom you loved who left you? Or cheated? How do you feel then, when someone doesn't return your love? Do you still love that person if he or she gives you nothing? Is it really love if you expect something in return? Suffice to say, after asking myself these questions, I was down in the dumps.

But there was another portion of the film that talked more about the physics end of reality (if I have lost you, go watch the movie!), and since physics was my major in college, I was fully tuned. A particular bit was about quantum entanglement; I won't get into the nuts and bolts of all that (again, watch the movie), but the gist of it is that all matter in the universe is interconnected, responding to stimuli that other matter is subjected to...

Okay, okay, since you're twisting my arm now, I will clarify. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon we have seen in which two particles, let us say electrons for example, come in contact with each other somehow (maybe within an atom) and then move apart from each other. They can travel very far from each other, even millions of light years (a light year is the distance that light travels in a year); perform an action on one of the electrons. Its distant companion will respond.

(It may help some of you to read up on the spin antisymmetry of atomic electrons.)

Now, this change would be instantaneous, meaning that the information about the stimulus to one electron would travel many, many times the speed of light to the other electron. We could even assume that this information travels at infinite speed. This is a huge deal! Especially when you consider that during the Big Bang, all matter in the universe was connected together and in contact. So that means that all matter is entangled. And every human on the face of the Earth is connected to all the others (not to mention everything else, living or not).

We are all connected to each other. How's that for love? That idea is the one I embrace.