The Thursday Thought - Reality: an illusion?

We have 5 senses …as I hope you all know. There would be sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing. All the things we can do ..live through ..just think about it for a minuet the feeling of standing next to a waterfall …the sound of the water rushing past you and crashing together at the bottom, the feel of it rushing past you at a dizzying speed, the water spraying against your face, the beauty of the light hitting the water and making light dace everywhere you seem to finally really understand the smallness of yourself next to something so grand and full of an incomparable energy.

But also everyday things need to be mentioned just the pure fun of relaxing and watching the television while eating some crisps. The feeling of just relaxing onto the couch, the taste of the crisps with a hint of spicy sauce, the funny jokes that are tolled with such sarcasm in the voice of the speaker, the gestures and brilliant colours all of this are things that we seam to have gotten so used to that we hardly even take notice of half of them anymore. Which of you would mention the sound of someone’s voice when telling someone about a movie?

We hardly take notice of all the things that happen and go on around us. The things that we do notice though ...how do we know that they are really there? By our 5 Senses I guess but how precise are they? how much do they tell us "the truth"? Take the telly for example when watching it ..what do you see? A bunch of different pictures flickering? no? well that's what a dog would see just a bunch of flickering and random pics not the flowing "normal" movements you see. That's because your brain processes a lot fewer pics per second then that of a dog. Dogs evolved from wolves and so the skills needed for hunting are still present (for example the ability to see a fast moving object) but lets go on to a few different examples (just too prove my point).

Have you ever seen a bright violate colour on the edges of flowers even if the flowers 'real' colour is red (or some other colour where one shouldn't see the colour violate) or in a green field? A violate that seams to glow. No? Well bees and birds do, they see ultra violate. Our brain however has decided that we dont need to se ultra violate and so we dont, our brain has decided that we dont need to "hear" eccolations and so we dont, our brain has decided that we dont need to see things that move quickly and so we dont.... so we dont see the 'reality' but much more what ever our brain wants us to see.

I quite possibly believe too much that things are connected but ... how much else is only a product of something our brain (or we, ourselves) want to see? would we even be able to see 'reality' if I wanted to?. ...would it be possible to really want to see reality and not have a little hope for how it should really look?

The Thursday Thought - Bike Riding

Bike Riding

There’s something different about bike riding that singles it out as being such good fun. I really enjoy taking my bike out for a little run on a weekends’ afternoon, as long as it’s dry at the time, and pedalling off into the not so distant distance. Nothing fancy, just a trip down the old railway tracks to Monton and back. Not too far either, I can’t remember how far exactly, but I average out at an hour. And with my bike computer getting fixed soon, I’ll be able to clock my stats over the same run again and again.

But yeah, back to my cycling trips. This is the time of year when it gets really, really good. It’s spring, so all the trees are in bud, blossom everywhere, new fresh bright green leaves beginning to sprout as if by magic from the barren branches of the past few months. It’s so pure, so genuine, so natural. Ok, the track itself isn’t quite so, a strip of pathway, made of sand, stones and mud changing every so often, but it beats the cold feel of tarmac against my tyres. It’s a different sound, after all, the one of wheel on tarmac, smooth and non-changing, and then the sound of wheel on sand and stone, grating, changing pitch all the time, there’s nothing quite like it.

I suppose the great thing about bike riding is the feeling of pure control. You are very much in the driver’s seat (or saddle at least) and everything that bike does is down to you. You are the one to peddle away to build up speed, brake to slow down, brake hard to come to a stupidly fast stop. You are the one to know how hard or fast to turn the handlebars, with a direct result from even the slightest twitch, and you are the one to feel the result as a force on your body. The wind rushing past you, whistling at your ears, the sights flashing by the corners or your eyes as you tear past the scenery, the sudden sharp turns to avoid bricks on the path – there are no rules on where to ride like on the road, it’s all up to you! – the people you get to fly by, the puddles you get to run through and splatter all over your bike, clothes and face. Everything you do, has a direct on your path, on your speed, on the sounds of the wheels, on the whistling of the wind, and that just can’t be recreated anywhere. It’s a direct input to output that can’t be shown elsewhere. I guess it could be that.

Or, could it be the feeling of being alone. There is no one with you on a ride like that, it’s just you and your thoughts. You get to think about what’s flashing past under your wheels, but also get a chance to escape from everything else and be alone, to have time with your thoughts, take in some clean, fresh air and think about them without being disturbed too much. I mean, what else is there to think about, apart from your route between the puddles of mud, the fallen branches, the twigs, the bricks, the odd shard of broken bottle to hinder your progress over the path and into the distance. Yeah, I think that’s the bit I like.

So, I urge you all to saddle up, water bottle filled and tyres pumped up. Turn off your phone, leave the MP3 player behind, go off into the distance and chase that horizon. You know it makes sense!

The Thursday Thought - Intelligence

There's soo much to say about the human brain and intelligence I hope you don't mind if I first off just tell you a few things about it that I find ...interesting and then I'll get to all the questions that you know I have sitting in my head just waiting to come out.

Intelligence. It’s something everyone seams to claim to have. …though really only the few odd ones do. Our brain is made up of some 3.000.000.000 cells, a whole network of nerves, in a constant flow of communication, sending and receiving impulses to and from your body. A woderus thing if you think about it. That soo many ..or so few (depending on the way you look at it) cells can make up that huge control panel sending information out at the very same minuet and yet you don’t get all jumbled up and start to taste what you heard or heard what you tasted or something totally different. By definition the brain that uses less energy to solve a question is the brighter brain. say for example Professor Paul's brain would only have a tiny bit of his brain showing up in red on a infa red camera (showing that there is little activity) to answer the question of what Q*Q is and Professor ****** (this name has been censured) would have two times as much activity showing up on the infa red camera (while answering the same question). Professor Paul's brain would then be considered the 'brighter' one.

If you place a child who is between 18 and 24 months old in front of a mirror then it will recognise it self in the mirror. The thing is though that most of them believe that there are two of themselves and if asked to look for the other will infact start a search for the other them. Two and a half year olds and three year olds no longer do this. From that we conclude that the self - identity (me viedo ergo sum) is then fully formed. But how would a child react who hasn't grown up with mirrors? Tests have shown that children approximately the same age react the same everywhere and no matter how often they had been able to see their own reflection. If however one were to place a child in front of a mirror who hasn't been raised with them and then places an object above their head, they will not realize that the object is indeed there. How can that possibly be? how would the child even know what they look like? not being blind or having been blind I doubt the child would be able to use their other senses (say touch) to try to work that out for themselves but never the less they know who they are. ...how?!!! how could that possibly be? and it obviously isn't because they comprehend the way a mirror works (for they did not identify the object as 'real').

Some doctors believe that we are only under the elusion of actually acting and reacting ourselves. In truth it is a "egoistical Gene" that controls us. What is meant is that we don’t control ourselves and that we, as in the matrix are moved and generally controlled by something else.
Benjamin Libet, a Neuropsychologist, did an experiment that underlines that theory. He told the volunteers to close their hands. When to do this however was left up to them. While they were doing this he measured the brain activity. He noticed and could show that at the moment where the test person had decided to close their hand the signal had already been sent out and was on it's way to their hand.

It's that simple to compare us to a machine ...and really where is the difference between us and a machine? We can make a computer talk. We could make a computer learn and that's something that we really believe makes humans special right, to learn and develop things at such speed (in comparison to other animals)? Yet a computer could do that. Could do quite a few things even faster infact. So who can prove to me that this computer doesn't live? and that in the exact same way as you and I? If you can make a computer act like a person …is it then only acting like a person, miming feelings or is it actually feeling them? What about us? Could it be possible that humans don’t actually ‘feel’ feelings but much more believe that they do?

o the questions that arise and all of them merely because of those few paragraphs.

Launch

The Thursday Thought

Welcome to yet another series of e-mails from the Paul Shepley Press.

After the success of the now writing Friday e-mail, I thought it was time to come up with something fresher, a little different to the rest. Yeah, I know the chances of you all reading this is pretty low, but still, it’s all in the name of fun.

For your very own unique and unrelated articles to be posted on this site, please e-mail them to thethursdaythought@hotmail.co.uk and we'll get them posted and ready for commenting on.

So, I’ll leave it at this, I think. Enjoy!

PS: I was going to write another article about time, but, well, I didn't have the time to write a fresh one today, so here's my original and first one about communications. Enjoy!

Paul

The Thursday Thought - Communications

Communications in the 21st Century

I write this now, an e-mail no less, in such a form to communicate easily to the masses about modern communications. Why? Well, why not?

The need to socialise is something which remains deep in the roots of our society, and most other societies in the natural world, with groups of animals being able to communicate very well between each other but not necessarily between different species. Either way, it happens and it’s been happening for much longer than we could quite imagine or picture properly.

Communication, the exchange of words used to be such a simple thing, as one could only talk to people they met face to face, be it on the street, shop owners, friends from the pub or social club or simply a neighbour. Gossip was as rife then as it is now, but it was harder to keep a good social life going.

Then came the invention of the telephone, revolutionising the way we talked. These heavy, chunky pieces of machinery altered everything, as every house in the country soon had one to use, be it a street phone or a personal phone. Wired into the house, these allowed conversations to be held without actually seeing the person in question, but there was always the option of turning it off, or leaving the house so you couldn’t hear it ring and answer it. A problem which was solved by the brilliant answering machine, as short messages could be taken in your absence from not answering the telephone personally.

Things held stable, but things were to take one major step before reaching what they are now. The Internet and the mobile phone suddenly sprang into existence at much the same time, and in our society now, are integral parts of how we work and what we do. Signs have appeared, laws put into place about not using your mobile phone, restrictions put on the Internet, etc. but what have been the effects?

The mobile phone has made a massive impact on how things are today, and the world without them is almost unimaginable. Starting off as phones that could be used anywhere, be it for safety or for works purposes, they have spiralled into texting machines, cameras, MP3 players, radios, game machines, and so much more. The younger generations are now reachable essentially anywhere and everywhere with their mobile phone, and the government can easily track you by following your phone signal across the networks. Text messaging has taken over from voice calls though, removing a certain part of the art of conversation from life, and the price of characters has given birth to a whole new segment of language. Txt spk. Missing vowels, numbers as letters, gross contractions and misspelling are common place, with no punctuation necessary.

The Internet has made this sort of speaking in text even more common place, offering free services to talk to friends or family or complete strangers in simple plain text, with no elegance or beauty, just simple functionality. Gone are the days of writing a letter, sending a card, now its e-mail and e-cards, again removing the human element of communication slightly further still. Suddenly, talking to people face to face becomes so much harder, so much trickier that some struggle to keep a conversation going with others.

But, is it all a bad thing? I mean, the mobile phone had made us all reachable from everyone everywhere, to the point of extreme annoyance, but, it’s given birth to a whole new realm of communications. As cities get bigger and friends living further away, the night time text conversation is like the over-the-garden-fence conversations of old. We’ve gotten a whole lot closer, and saying more to each other than what we might be doing without the mobile phone. And, it still allows phone calls, but with 3G coming into play now across all the major networks at long last the face to face conversation, albeit through a camera, is being updated for the 21st Century. This has to be classed as progress, as it brings so many people together with such ease.

The Internet has also brought some good with it, as far as communications go. As instant messenger conversations allow people to stay at home yet still talk to their friends as if they were together, not as slow as a text conversation but without the ‘pressures’ of an actual phone call, we’re all talking more to those people whom we might be scared to actually phone or talk to face to face from fear of nerves. It’s also made the prospect of long-distance friendships possible, allowing simple and effective conversations to take place from different parts of the country and even the world. E-mail has given us all a cheap way of writing to one another, with more efficiency, speed and guarantee than letters have.

Inevitably, this all has to come at a price, and person to person skills involving face to face presentations have suffered, with small slides in quality of English to boot. Is it justified by the advantages though? Does the bringing together of so many millions of people in one huge forum far outweigh what has been lost compared to 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago?

I am undecided. There are persuasive arguments for both sides of the argument, but which one comes out on top? I can’t say.


Join the debate (No, this isn’t a Times advert!)and don’t be afraid to have your say!