Le Repteux

As I said, it is not memory that would be random, it is imagination. By random I mean unpredictable. Humans are said unpredictable: where does that expression come if not from the way we change? To better cope with them, we try to predict others behavior, and we do that all the time, no? To me, memory is about our automatisms, and imagination is about changing them. A specie is not able to change by itself, it needs a random process to do so. If, as I think, our ideas are neither able to change by themselves, they would also need a random process to do so. If you could imagine that idea, we could try to carry it a bit further, but since it takes chance to change our own ideas, it should take you some more time to understand what I mean. Yes, but since biologic memories are also about genes, I also meant that it helped the survival of a specie, what is also about continuity of life.

Yes it can, but if it does, it might be no use to us, and if it is, then it means that building up counter facts and remembering them is sometimes helpful. It seems to me that biologic memories always serve the same purpose: continuity of life. Don't you think so?

Yes, the same kind of coding is able to reproduce different organisms, but it can also reproduce quite precisely a particular specie. The memory of one individual also contain different ideas which are remembered the same way, but it can also focus on one of them for a certain time. A river is not meant to survive the same way we are, but nevertheless, it does what it needs to do to bring its water down the slope. A memory has to serve a purpose: ours is meant for us to survive facing things that don't change, and we have our imagination to help us survive facing things that change. With the analogy of the random process, I try to understand the way mind faces change with ideas that are not meant to do so.

I think that animals' minds might also be subjected to random processes, but in a different way than us. We notice things that can be important to us, but we never notice what we know since we already know how to deal with it. Our memory is also a kind of record, no? The link with the scientific method is the essay and error process. If we could demonstrate that our brain uses this process to make any improvement to its ideas, it would mean that scientific method uses it too. Memory becomes less precise with time, and we can add to it imaginary facts, but its duty is to keep still as long as it can, because this is the only way we can improve our knowledge. To help it, we have invented writing, and lately, computers. Nevertheless, we still have to cope with imaginary stuff on the net, and with the degradation of information with time.

Exact: we remember our failures and genetic code is not supposed to. For us, an essay that hurts has almost the same meaning than one that succeeds, but its only because we can try again another way around later, which is almost the same way mutations work, except that many mutations can happen at the same time for a specie, whereas we can only execute one idea at a time. This is one of the main differences between mutations and intuitions, another is the rate at which they happen: do you see more differences?

Knowledge is only memory from success, as it is for genes, but I admit that the two mutation processes cannot be exactly the same, and the two selection processes neither. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the analogy makes sense. I sure will do if Johnesteixeira or anybody complains. Are you complaining? As I said, as it is written, the signification of the topic fits exactly my needs. I started with attributing some kind of randomness to different evolutionary processes, but not to memory since, by definition, memories should not change. Memory is about what does not change with time, no? In our mind, some things change and some don't. The ones that do not change are called memories, and the ones that change are called imagination. With the evolutionary analogy, I am trying to link memories with imagination: how change is related to continuity.

I am proposing a random process able to change our ideas Ten, not our DNA, and I add that this process would affect any brain. If you had seen something new going to work, don't you think that you would have remembered it? Don't you remember happy things that happened to you by chance? Don't you agree that, for the species, their genetic code constitute a kind of memory?

We do remember random phenomenon if they were useful to us, no? And we also remember accidents to avoid to reproduce the same behavior, no? Then what if our mind could produce a random behavior that, by chance, could be useful to us? Wouldn't it be the same process as the mutation/selection one? And wouldn't we remember that behavior?

To me, any change is about motion. The process of change in an organism is made of the changes that happen to molecules, and these have to move to execute a change or to keep it alive. Perception of motion is about change, and perception of evolution too. To perceive a body's motion, we have to remember its precedent position, and the delay of that perception depends of the time it takes for the information to get to our mind. A body that moves too fast cannot be perceived, but a body that moves too slow neither, unless we take note of its position and come back later, which is a kind of long term memory. It takes memory to observe a change, and the longer the change, the longer the memory has to be. The memory of a specie is registered in its genes, a long time memory, and to change these informations, it takes a random process. How could our own memory change without a random process to change its informations? How could we change our mind about anything without a random process to help us?

Observations are about motion, but when a motion is too slow, we call it an evolution. I think that if we had a way to link different kinds of evolution, it might help us to better understand motion. Sorry, I mislead you a bit. No, intellectual evolution is not about biologics, it is about ideas, and social evolution too. These two happen too slowly for us to be able to observe them: we know that our ideas change when we remember our own past, and we know that societies change when we study history, but without memory, we would not know. Without a physical way to explain these changes, we get caught in the same loop as with biological evolution: intelligent design. But if we add a random process to any kind of evolution, there is no more loop, which means that the link between any kind of physical change could be the random process happening between two different scales of motion.

You are Strange , you seem to think that you know where you are going! But how could it be? If we are the product of mutations and natural selection, how could we predict our own evolution? A hundred years ago, who could tell what was going to happen to us? Do you think that it will be different a hundred years from now? Considering that this kind of social future is unpredictable, could the scientific method be a kind of a lure? Why are we able to attribute a random process to evolution of species and not to our intellectual evolution? Isn't this dichotomy a bit subjective and anthropocentric?

Hi everybody, The topic was about the process of evolution being a scientific method, but the real questioning was about the theory of evolution being a scientific method. I find the topic interesting as it is, so I risk a question about it even if it is a bit off topic, and you tell me if I should start a new one. Evolution is a trial and error process, and to me, scientific method too, otherwise, we would not be natural, because we would be able to predict any future, thus to predict our own evolution, and to drive it the way we want. If, like me, you think that we are not, why are we making a fundamental difference between the scientific evolution process and any other evolution process, like the mind evolution process of each individual for instance, or the social evolution process?

Imagination was meant for physical purposes, otherwise it would be useless. It has evolved to imagine anything from what we know of, but it was also designed to test our ideas for the same reason. There is a large gap between curiosity and foolishness: if you try to fly out a cliff before testing it from a chair, you have a lot of imagination but a lack of prudence. Some crackpots lack that prudence, they make too big a step. Some like me proceed with small steps (plug), but it does not mean that they are right (plug again).

Is there any true things in this constantly changing world? I prefer not to think that what I think is true, but who knows if it won't become true for a while? I think that we can attribute the heart of what we think to our automatisms, which are effectively subconscious, and our vision of what we think to our imagination, which is about consciousness, but consciousness of what if not to some kind of change happening to our automatisms?

There is only two things in our brain, the ones that we are conscious of, and the ones that we are not. I assume that you attribute darkness to your subconsciousness, and lightness to your consciousness, do you?

I agree that our actions are mainly based on experience, our own one or others, but we sometimes take chances, and some of us do more often than others. Curiousness is about taking a chance in order to be able to learn about the world, or to learn about ourselves. Everybody has a bit of curiousness in one domain or another, even animals are curious. When something unknown happens, if we have time, we begin with studying the question, and if we decide that there is no danger and curiosity wins, which means that there might be benefits from taking a chance, then we usually do. To me, this behavior comes from the time/distance gap between things, which can never be perfetly filled at any scale. There is always a certain distance between the massive bodies, and their interactions cannot fulfill it to perfection. With time, these imperfections accumulate and produce chance. In the same way, the chances that we take consciously might come from the imperfections in our own brain. I think that the feeling that we imagine from an unknown action forces us to be curious a bit more than animals. I think that this anticipated feeling helps us to learn. Does that night feeling help you to learn or to discover new things Sleep?

Hey, you wear your name with perfection Sleep! It is less easy to circulate at night, and difficulties trigger our emotions, so they might effectively be more present at night. What has this consideration to do with our imagination?

To me, for the moon and the earth to be able to keep the right orbital trajectory, thus to respect the law of gravitation, means that they can anticipate what each other is going to do while using a late information, because it takes time for the information to travel back and forth between the two. Nevertheless, they still keep the right speed and the right direction for their trajectory to be stable. What do they do when meteors add mass to them? They change something in order to be able to stay in orbit, but they do so before this information has time to get to the other body, which reacts exactly the same way. This is exactly what we do when we meet other people: we change something in order to be able to cope with them, but we never know what to change because we cannot predict their reactions, so we go randomly until we find the right way, but since we all change constantly, we never see the end of it. If we can't see the end of it, why would the atoms or the galaxies be able to?

Hi Strange, From a human viewpoint, or at least from mine, random processes are those who affect us without us being able to anticipate them: whether they happen too fast or too slow, or whether there is too much complexity. Lately, we discovered that particles had random activities: is that randomness due to them being too fast for us to be able to anticipate their moves? Is it due to a complexity phenomenon? From their own viewpoint, are the atoms able to anticipate anything that happens around them? Small things, big things, complex things? Inversely, are all the galaxies able to anticipate what an atom is doing in one of them? Or to anticipate what far away galaxies are going to do?

Hi everybody, I think that imagination, which I link to consciousness, is the result of a random process going on endlessly in the mind, and if I apply that principle to matter, then yes, imagination is everywhere since random processes are everywhere.

Hey, I just saw that I had a vote! Does it mean that somebody understands what I am talking about? Come on, lets talk about it then!

For those who might not have understood yet the mechanism of the small steps, here is a mind experiment. - Imagine two cars at rest on the same straight road but one km away from one another and heading in the same direction. - There is an emitter and a receiver in each car and the signal exchanged between them is about the speed from their speedometer. - One of the cars accelerates and decelerates for 10 seconds, so a signal is emitted every fraction of second indicating the speed at which the car is going. - Lets us admit that the signal will take more time to travel one km than the time it takes for the car to accelerate and decelerate to rest. - When the signal will arrive at the second car, its receiver will indicate progressively the speed at which it has to accelerate and decelerate. - While it does, its own emitter will transmit the signal to the other car, which will repeat exactly the same move forward, and so on for the other car, indefinitely. If the energy to move the cars would be infinite and the signal absolutely precise, this slinky kind of motion would never end. For the atoms, the signal is given by the light pulses themselves, and the information on the speed is given by the doppler effect, thus by the distance between the pulses. The question that arose first here is about the capacity from atoms to exchange light pulses while forming a molecule. As we know, atoms already absorb and re-emit light pulses all the time, and they do not lose energy while doing so otherwise this process would not obey the conservation of energy law. But that law also applies to the energy they exchange when forming a molecule, the one that produces the small steps: if this energy is never lost, then the small steps would never end once they are initiated, which is exactly the way inertial motion principle works.

OK Swansont, I had time to heal a bit. This thread about mind is linked to the one on mass, which is about resistance to acceleration, thus if you deny me the right to make the analogy with resistance to change, you automatically deny me the right to talk about my ideas, and moreover, on the basis that I did not observe a rule on another topic. Its just as if a policeman would deny me the right to drive my car on any road because he gave me a ticket for speed on one of them. What other reason for acting like that than to keep me off road for good?

Wow, I just hit an invisible wall. I guess I'll take a break from the forum for a moment, its too much resistance for me. Thanks everybody! Take care! Ah, by the way Stantsont, you should trash the speculations' forum. Its too dangerous for accidents.

Hi Strange, The precedent argument was about brain waves, this one is about change and resisting to change. Are you going to resist to it or to avoid it?