mahiwaga

I am, ultimately, an idealist. However, I can understand that there are limits to trying to achieve utopia. There are physical laws—thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics—that make certain things impossible. But when someone tells me that something is impossible because of the recalcitrance of human nature, I call bullshit.

Human nature can be educated. If human nature was not malleable, we’d all be sitting up in trees fearing the lions roaming the savannahs and picking lice off each other. If human nature was not changeable, we would still commonly practice such barbaric acts like slavery and human sacrifices. The progression of history proves that human nature can evolve positively. Human nature cannot be what limits the attainment of utopia. Anyone who says otherwise is probably evil.

From the New York Times regarding the Alan Moore, the artist of the comics from which the movie “V for Vendetta” is based:

Mr. Moore found the accusations deeply insulting, and the 10 hours of testimony he was compelled to give, via video link, even more so. “If I had raped and murdered a schoolbus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,” he said, “I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for 10 hours.”

The vagaries of consciousness? Or quantum mechanical effects?

From Boingboing, this article discusses a neat trick of being able to slow down or stop the second hand outright. The question is: is this just a glitch in the core visual systems of the human brain? Or is this quantum uncertainty acting in a macroscopic context?

Coincidentally, I am reading Chronos by Etienne Klein (who is, however, no relation to Felix Klein, the inventor of the Klein Bottle, nor to Oscar Klein, the co-creator of Kaluza-Klein Theory.) which discusses this very thing—whether our experiences of time—subjective time—are merely artifacts of our cognitive hardware, or whether the weirdness we sense is really our interaction with quantum mechanics and in fact reflects physical time. Is our role as the quantum mechanical Observer what creates time? Are we the actual “engines of time”? Would time not exist if there were no Observer? (Although, I suppose, nothing would exist if there were no Observer.)

With these thoughts at hand, I thought I would add a snippet of lyrics from the Police: