Life, colors and consciousness
Illusions of existence.
It feels good to be able to focus. Today, I created some music, made significant progress on the robot code, worked out, and ate fairly well. That is a good day.
I need to keep reminding myself that I am writing this blog for myself. When I believe that I am writing for an audience, I lose interest because it is no longer attached to me. I am simply trying to maximize the value someone else gets out of my writing, and not my own enjoyment of it.
Now that I think of it, most people optimize their lives for exactly that—the enjoyment of an audience. To impress a parent, or to make other people like you. Life ultimately is a giant optimization problem. You start out with a set of resources and finite time, and you must use those resources optimally in order to achieve your goals. You can pick any goal you want, but not all of them will make you fulfilled. Some will argue that none of them will make you fulfilled, for true fulfillment is a state where you are not worried about goals or desires, where you have nothing to strive for, and nothing to be disappointed by.
There is a little truth in all of these statements. Life is beautiful because you can shape it into anything that you want. My happiness is different from your happiness. We are living in entirely different worlds. We think that we share definitions, but you cannot prove that. I don’t actually know whether the sensory experience of seeing the color green is the same for me as it is for you. For all I know, your green looks like my purple, but you have been trained your whole life to call it green, so for you, that sensory experience is green.
Certain people with tetrachromacy can see around 100 million colors, while normal people can only see 1 million. People with tetrachromacy can distinguish a pure orange from a mixture of red and green. They see colors that they could not describe to us if they tried. It is believed that 12 percent of women may be tetrachromats. It is more common in women as it is carried in the X chromosome. This statistic is amazing, and you would not expect it. People who you have known for your whole life may be seeing the world with 100 times the color resolution as you do, and yet we have all learned to distinguish our individual sensory experiences with common language, even though our actual experiences may not match.
Your conscious experience is filled with things that you cannot actually convey through language. No matter what words I use, I cannot make you feel exactly what I am feeling, and if I could, I would not be able to prove that I did. We are all living in our own sensory bubbles. You could be a brain in a vat, constantly fed with electrical signals that convey all of the experiences that you have. You cannot know. These indescribable experiences are known as qualia in philosophy, things have a certain quality that cannot be conveyed through anything other than direct experience. It is incredibly interesting to think about things that we take for granted such as our experiences. The reason why we have a conscious experience at all is still entirely unknown. from a physics perspective, everything in the universe may be conscious to some degree, a rock might have a form of primitive consciousness. A atom might feel a particular way. this is known as panpsychism. Logically it makes sense. You cannot separate yourself from your atoms. How could consciousness be seperate from the atoms that facilitate it?
The deeper you think about the reality that you somehow exist within, the more strange your conceptions become. Things are uncertain. We like to feel as though we know truth, but we are very far from truth. Any belief that states that we know something for certain is much more likely to be wrong than a humble belief that embraces how wrong we probably are. Stay curious and never believe that you are right. To be entirely right is to be perfect. Nobody is perfect.
