My Meanderings

Monday, September 07, 2009

ala lang... hehehe

to be or not to be…
a question that has baffled humanity since the dawn of our sentience… where do we came from… what’s the purpose of our existence… why do we exist…as a matter fact… why do we bother asking those questions… the answer is simple… humanity has a overwhelming urge to put reason to anything… but so far… the answers we come up with tend to disagree more often than not… the disagreement comes from two school of thought… to the rationalist there are no other proof more undeniable than our very our existence… “cogito ergo sum” declares the empiricist who are not satisfied by this a posteriori argument… they demand a prior argument which is independent of experience… to the empiricist the truth should hold true with or without us observing it…

the tree that fell…
a tree falls in the middle of a forest… does it make a sound… the answer to this question depends whether you are a rationalist or an empiricist… to the rationalist it does not since no one was there to hear… the empiricist would say that every tree that falls makes a sound… so which was your answer… as for me… the tree made a sound whether or not the sound waves traveled far enough to reach an ear… sound waves are oscillations produced from any interaction of matter… the sound waves travels thru a medium and loses strength until finally it dissipates…

the anthropic principle…
it states that certain conditions/parameters must exist since the universe is what it is as we perceive it now… there must be dark matter or our milky way would have dispersed millions of years ago… there speed of inflation should be of this value… and the list goes on and on… this principle goes along the rationalist line of thought… to the empiricist this is quite narcissistic & provincial… the parable below best describes the empiricist point of view…

the parable of the fish philosophers…
deep in the ocean floor… at the depth more than 6000 meters… a group of fish were impressing each other with their insight & bioluminescence… one brilliant fish said that the water around them was homogeneous, symmetric, and just right pressure… just the right environment for them to survive & thrive… if the pressure were anything other than what they are right now… their bodies would explode or implode depending on which way the pressure deviated… then another fish supposed that the temperature is at it is or otherwise the they would be frozen or boiled… as the other added their own observations of their surroundings… finally one of them put all these observations together and called the “fishropic principle”… they floated around congratulating themselves intoxicated with their pride… not noticing a net closing in around themselves… it dragged them up to waters whose properties were totally alien… as the marine biologist hauled the net… he said to other scientist “we got a whole school of them”… “they must have been having a conference or something” added one of the scientist… there laughter was cut short as they notice bright lights appeared above… they were so enthralled that they didn’t notice that their boat was being lifted towards the lights…

and it goes on…
and as we dig deeper into the mystery of the our origin… shall we finally realize our reason for being… are we just deluded fish swimming around a very small part of the universe… or are we a creation of being beyond our comprehension… or maybe we are just batteries living in a simulated reality… or is this just one part of our journey to enlightenment… no matter what it is one thing is for… humanity will never stop asking questions… and maybe that’s just reason for our existence…