Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:
I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.
The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
An observer is not required for something to exist. You are misunderstanding. In quantum physics observers affect the thing they observe. That's it.
Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it's all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!
You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.
What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out
Just look up "The Game of Life." It's not really a spread sheet, that's simply how it's displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.
Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.
Heres another one. Michael behe's mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.
Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.
The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.
But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can't exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.
This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.
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