“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”[1]”

“ “Culture does leave its signature in the circuitry of the individual brain. If you were to examine an acorn by itself, it could tell you a great deal about its surroundings – from moisture to microbes to the sunlight conditions of the larger forest. By analogy, an individual brain reflects its culture. Our opinions on normality, custom, dress codes and local superstitions are absorbed into our neural circuitry from the social forest around us. To a surprising extent, one can glimpse a culture by studying a brain. Moral attitudes toward cows, pigs, crosses and burkas can be read from the physiological responses of brains in different cultures. (…)”

“A multiverse, either in the form of a landscape of universes existing in a host of extra dimensions, or in the form of a possibly infinitely replicating set of universes in a three dimensional space as in the case of eternal inflation, changes the playing field when we think about the creation of our own universe and the conditions that may be required for that to happen. In the first place, the question of what determined the laws of nature that allowed our universe to form and evolve now becomes less significant. If the laws of nature are themselves stochastic and random, then there is no prescribed ‘cause’ for our universe. Under the general principle that anything that is not forbidden is allowed, then we would be guaranteed, in such a picture, that some universe would arise with the laws that we have discovered. No mechanism and no entity is required to fix the laws of nature to be what they are. They could be almost anything. Since we don’t currently have a fundamental theory that explains the detailed character of the landscape of a multiverse, we cannot say. (Although to be fair, to make any scientific progress in calculating possibilities, we generally assume that certain properties, like quantum mechanics permeate all possibilities. I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with, or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.) In fact there may be no fundamental theory at all — although I became a physicist because I hoped there was such as theory, and because I hoped that I might one day help contribute to discovering it, this hope may be misplaced. Nothing and something One can carry the argument further and in a different direction. In a multiverse there could be an infinite number of regions, potentially infinitely big or infinitesimally small, in which there is simply ‘nothing’ and there could be regions where there is ‘something’. In this case, the response to why there is something rather than nothing becomes almost trite: there is something simply because if there were nothing, we wouldn’t find ourselves living there! I recognise the frustration inherent in such a trivial response to what has seemed such a profound question throughout the ages. But science has told us that anything profound or trivial can be dramatically different from what we might suppose at first glance. The universe is far stranger and far richer — more wonderously strange — than our meagre human imaginations can anticipate. Modern cosmology has driven us to consider ideas that could not even have been formulated a century ago. The great discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries have not only changed the world in which we operate, they have revolutionised our understanding of the world - or worlds - that exist, or may exist, just under our noses: the reality that lies hidden until we are brave enough to search for it. This is why philosophy and theology are ultimately incapable of addressing by themselves the truly fundamental questions that perplex us about our existence. Until we open our eyes and let nature call the shots, we are bound to wallow in myopia.”

“[The robot] thought, ‘If I control that, I control reality. My subjective reality…but that’s all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of multitude of subjective realities.’” - PKD, The Electric Ant”

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Today’s Must read..

Wish you were better/smarter/stronger/faster? Sure, hard work helps, but the truth is, your self perception may be getting in the way. We all form our own realities, and those realities aren’t perfect. Your self perception can be very limiting, and shaking up your notion of the world can do wonders for your productivity, creativity, and happiness. Here’s how to recalibrate your reality.