At its most fundamental, reality is subjective. While it appears obvious that a tree is a tree to everyone observing a tree, reality has other ideas, negating an objective perspective, and with it reality itself. What’s more weird is the fact that in spite of the consensus of reality, there are multiple such realities, and we drift between them, often without realising.

The realities of nature itself

If I were giving a talk, the audience would see me stood or moving around on a stage — animated perhaps as I often am — explaining things both prosaic and profound. On the face of it, everyone would be seeing the same thing, but the reality of it is, this objective perspective wouldn’t be valid.

In ancient Greece there were a number of theories of vision, one of them — Emission theory, as espoused by Plato — was that the our eyes were emitting visual rays, and that these rays combined with the luminous rays from our environment and the Sun, giving the appearance of the things before us. As theories go, it wasn’t unreasonable, given that the Sun and other such sources of light would illuminate various objects, so it must have seemed obvious that our eyes did the same.

The fact is, the light of the Sun or sources of artificial light bathe our environment and everything in it with countless trillions of photons, the essential particles that are the source of the light we see (and also of what we do not see, since the portion of the visible spectrum is the merest slither of the whole thing).

So when the audience perceives me on the stage, I’m but a figment to them, one of countless instances of me — or at least, instances of the myriad photons that have reflected from the various surfaces of me, travelling at the speed of light, such as skin, hair, clothes and so on. Each person would be perceiving a different assortment of light that is nothing more than a representation of what it is that I am and where I was at a specific moment, when in fact the true nature of reality remains unknown.

Since each person in the audience would be seeing a different instance of me, each person would then be experiencing a subjective reality, similar but different to that of everyone else.

At the macroscopic scale, the differences are so trivial as to be imperceptible, giving the appearance of an object reality that everyone is able to agree on. But at microscopic and astronomical scales, the differences could — and sometimes do — have profound consequences.

I could be a tree.

But the strangeness does not end there.

American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler — who counted the father of Many-Worlds Interpretation, Hugh Everett, among his students — conjured up a profound thought experiment:

Most of us have heard of the famous double-slit experiment. Usually it’s played out in a lab in seconds. But there’s one version, dreamt up by physicist John Archibald Wheeler, that can be played out over much of the galaxy, over millions of years. His thought experiment suggests that we could retroactively determine the fate of ancient photons.

Nature itself is not as absolute as we imagine it to be.

Realities of the mind

Take the Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Aztecs, Purépechas, Toltecs, and perhaps the Mayans, who made human sacrifices to their gods, and that — to them — was a time-honoured custom.

The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. The keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts and blood.

Of course, like so much of religion in general, such beliefs are a contrivance and a nonsense to everyone else who does not consider themselves to be an adherent to those beliefs, where each adherent of one religion dismisses the one before it — so on and so forth. Mesoamerican civilizations, for centuries, believed the sacrifice of human life to be essential, and the numbers of those slain is perhaps in the tens of thousands.

Although this practice shocked the Conquistadores who witnessed it, they would weaponize their own religion and use it as a justification to almost wipe out those same civilizations.

Religion is a furious maelstrom of ignorant and violent realities.

While across the Pacific Ocean in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, cannibalism was common, not out of a bestial need for food, but as an act of inconsolable grief:

In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief.

However, this custom was not without its problems, and it gave rise to a terrible disease known as kuru by the people of the highlands, and it was often fatal.

Our knowledge of the Romans is somewhat mixed: on the one hand, a huge, advanced, and sophisticated empire that bestrode significant portions of the ancient world for several centuries; while on the other, the endemic use of slaves, and a predilection for warfare and conquest. But our understanding of ancient cultures has revealed customs that to us are sometimes shocking and horrific, and the Romans are no exception.

While excavating what was thought to be a brothel at the site of a Roman villa in the Thames Valley, Buckinghamshire, England, archeologists found the remains of human infants:

Archaeological records suggest infants were not considered to be “full” human beings until about the age of two, said Dr Eyers.

Since this was a brothel, unwanted births would have been an unavoidable consequence of the sex trade:

Children any younger than that age were not buried in cemeteries. As a result, infant burials tended to be at domestic sites in the Roman era.

Physical realities

So far, we’ve learned of the realities of the mind that manifest as customs and rituals, but what of physical realities?

In the Kanyemba region of Zimbabwe you’d find the Vadoma people who are afflicted with a genetic condition known as ectrodactyly or lobster claw syndrome, which results in the absence of one or more fingers or toes, and in the case of the Vadoma tribe, they have but two toes.

As a people, the Vadoma tribe share in this physical trait, which — to them — is normal, and perhaps advantageous to climbing trees, as some have speculated.

Realities of perception

What of our perception, and would that give rise to alternate realities?

William Gladstone, a British Prime Minister from over a hundred years ago, had a fascination with the work of the Greek poet Homer, but took a specific interest in a colour, though not because of the excess of it, but its complete absence:

Gladstone used examples of things we know to be blue to work out the Greek term for the color.

Gladstone reported that Homer used the word “iron” and the word “copper” to describe the sky. The adjective employed in the Iliad to describe the sea is even more puzzling – “οἶνοψ πόντος” (oinops pontos), literally “wine-face sea”. Gladstone interpreted this as “wine-dark” in color. Others have since seen it as “wine-like”, suggesting that it might have to do with the sloshing of wine similar to the rough sea, rather than the color.

How could the people of the Hellenic Republic — a culture, and once a significant civilization that influenced the Roman Empire that would in time subsume it, surrounded by the azure of the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the skies — have no understanding of the colour blue?

Amongst the loss or lack of senses, blindness has to be the most terrifying, leaving a person exposed and isolated in a world designed for those that see. But this isolation — an individual reality, shared by millions around the world — is one that, for a time, is conquered by those who choose to participate in the game of football for the blind or those with impaired vision, a sport that becomes a new reality by consensus, and a measure of fitness and fun!

Individual realities

A while ago, I happened to share the conclusion that reality is a consensus, and in spite of these instances, someone decided I was wrong. The simple fact is, if reality wasn’t a consensus then we would have no basic — or basis — for a common rule of law.

You’re not convinced?

Imagine a consensus doesn’t emerge, and chaos ensues. Out of this chaos, a bunch of people decide murder is on the table of possibilities, proceeding to enact their intentions. Spot the problem? Should but two people decide murder is a good idea, their realities would begin to coalesce, as would the realities of those opposing them.

We shape reality by actions that emanate from our minds.

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay.

While reading an article about the possible switch to memristors to help make neural networks more efficient, I come across a staggering fact:

Existing AI is extremely energy-intensive—training one AI model can generate 284 tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the lifetime emissions of five cars.

While on Reddit, in r/energy, someone shared an article discussing the environmental implications of global bitcoin mining:

A study from the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance released on Monday estimates that the global bitcoin mining industry uses 7.46 GW, equivalent to around 63.32 terawatt-hours of energy consumption. The study also notes that miners are paying around $0.03 to $0.05 per kWh this year.

… and I was prompted to share a thought I’d had:

Are the innovations emerging from machine learning sufficient to offset its own cost to the environment? It’s an interesting question when we take into account the fact that the fossil fuel sector is using algorithms derived from artificial intelligence to seek out new sources.

We know that the fossil fuel sector has been on the take for such a long time, it’s almost been forgotten … almost:

Fossil fuel companies are benefiting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.

Compounding the possible positive impact of machine learning is the lack of interest in the real world impact it could have on the part of the researchers:

If the community feels that aiming to solve high-impact real-world problems with machine learning is of limited significance, then what are we trying to achieve?

In time, I believe machine learning and artificial intelligence in general are going to make significant contributions to almost everything, but the big questions is whether we’re going to see anything significant in the short-term to make a difference.

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

Researchers at the University of Maryland have re-designed the material to make it entirely impervious to visible light, while only absorbing the slightest levels of near-infrared light.

Treehugger

That kind of strength, in addition to the insulation factor, could make the new wood a solid candidate for transforming the concrete and steel jungle of a city into something closer to a real jungle.

Treehugger

Replacing concrete from a standing start is going to be a major challenge, given how versatile concrete is, but the environment benefits here would significant — concrete has an enormous carbon footprint.

When I think of life, I think of something that’s hard-wired into the fabric of the Universe itself, as fundamental as the laws of physics — emerging from them, like pi, the golden ratio, or prime numbers.

But when most people think of life in the Universe, I imagine their minds swinging hard towards intelligent life, something I believe is rare. If you’re familiar with the Drake equation and the various filters that winnow the progress of life, then intelligent life would be rarest type of life, if not the rarest thing in the Universe.

Consider human life on Earth, weighing in at a mere 0.06 gigaton of carbon, compared to the heft of bacteria at 70 gigaton, or the staggering bulk of plants at 450 gigaton. I think we could expect these ratios to be similar to the ratios of the types of life in the Universe.

While bacteria and its cousin archaea are among the simplest — and, therefore among the first — life on Earth, plants are complex multicellular life, like humans, but could also be rare. While the eye, as complex as it is, evolved 40 or more times, photosynthesis evolved once, not surprising, given its deep reliance on quantum mechanics.

But, in spite of everything, that intelligent life could be so rare, knowing that life itself could be abundant makes me feel somewhat satisfied that somewhere, life goes on. Yes, I am that certain, for no other reason than — again — a look at the numbers.

Of the galaxies, our Milky Way is somewhat average, but it is still home to some 250 billion stars, and there are billions of galaxies out there, with more emerging each week, as the distant light from them reaches Earth. So to think of that of the quadrillions of stars and the incalculable number of planets, there is but one of them that hosts life is so far beyond improbable as to be laughable.

Why aliens won’t invade Earth

In the last few months, the Pentagon have been drip-feeding the public with declassified documents from their extensive files compiled after decades of studying the phenomena of Unidentified Aerial Vehicles, and much of these disclosures have done little more than confirm what some have thought to have been the case for a long time, that intelligence life has traversed the cosmos to visit Earth — but I’m not convinced it’s that simple.

In the 2011 science fiction novella, Earth Day, I explored an apparent alien invasion but from a different perspective, and while I’d love to explain more, I’d rather not spoil things and reveal too much! However, I shall reveal a little regarding the thinking at work. The alien invasion trope is commonplace, but it’s also misplaced, and makes little practical sense. For what possible reason would an alien intelligence travel here, to Earth?

Plundering our resources

As an example, should an alien invasion fleet travel into our Solar System, then they’d first have to pass the vast sphere of the Oort cloud, the colossal Kuiper belt, and that’s long before arriving at outer and inner asteroid belts, brimming with natural resources that would be far easier to access, and — given their sheer abundance — much more rewarding.

It’s possible that aliens could be using our Solar System as a refueling point (water as ice is abund at the furthest edges of the Solar System, and hydrogen is the principle ingredient in a fusion reactor) as they tour interstellar space, and we would never know.

Dominion of the human race

If it’s dominion of the human race via war or some other method, then we would have been annihilated centuries ago. Unlike the movies, an alien race capable of interstellar or perhaps intergalactic travel would be equipped with a knowledge of science that would to us make a possible conflict short and indistinguishable from something out of the Old Testament, such would be their command of the nature, turning the Earth against us.

But don’t we have some evidence, from the wreckage of their spacecraft? I have to question the idea that whatever evidence we have is from a legitimate crash — think of it, travelling hundreds or thousands of lightyears to Earth, to then go and crash here, and leave the evidence behind for us to find? No, if we have anything, it’s evidence of a puzzle…

Guinea pigs in our own private zoological experiment

So if not us or our resources, then what? Consider our own desire to learn more about life here on Earth, and how we choose to experiment with apes, cetaceans (whales and dolphins), cephalopoda (squid and octopus), and corvids (crows and jackdaws), with intriguing puzzles designed to reveal their thinking. Yes, we have our flaws, but we humans do — on the whole — love to explore, experiment, and learn! I believe a keen, intrinsic desire to learn is a prerequisite for intelligent life to lift itself from the bonds and comforts of a home world, to then venture out into the expanse.

If the Pentagon, or their defence partners (often private companies, allowing them to side-step the usual rules of government committee’s, and their powers of investigation) have evidence, then these artefacts are to humans what a long stick, a narrow tube, and a morsel of food at the end of it are to the inquisitive Caledonian crow — an alluring prize, hidden within a puzzle, designed to reveal our thinking, and in so doing our scientific and technological capabilities.

If this is the case, then there are much more pragmatic considerations on the minds of these aliens. It would be obvious to our alien visitors that we are not a united people, and in spite of our understanding of nature, we have demonstrated little regard for it, imperiling our own existence in addition to whole corpus of life on Earth. If I were an alien, I’d want to know more about these humans and their intentions, when — as is now evident — they (we humans) move further into space. We humans could be the ones taking war and conflict into the void.

Some of the materials described by the defence partners hint at unusual characteristics, with “game changing” potential for aerospace applications. If I were an alien, I would design the experiment such that the humans could use the artefacts:

1. to revolutionize energy production on a global scale, negating the need for the extraction and use of fossil fuels;
2. or to weaponize it, and use it as a threat, or against their enemies.

In the 2016 movie, Arrival, an advanced intelligence arrives here on Earth to conduct a similar experiment to the one I’d imagined as the background to a novel connected to Earth Day, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover others of a similar mind.

How we humans were to respond to such an experiment would give the aliens the clearest understanding of what do with us, if anything. Perhaps there is a third reason for the aliens to scrutinize us? Should we pose a continued threat to life on Earth, it’s feasible their goal would be diminish us, plunging our entire civilization into Dark Ages once again, so that life could again flourish during the term of our weakened state.

However, this is — like most things here on Blah — pure speculation, but interesting speculation nonetheless!

We humans are at a turning point, and regardless of aliens and their imagined experiments on us, we have important choices to make that have the potential to shape the future for millennia to come.

By way of a continuation of my previous thoughts on 3d printing, in so far as regulations — or the lack thereof — Google Glass is already causing a stir in restaurants, where patrons wearing the aforementioned device are being asked to remove it / them or leave. While the patron makes a half decent argument for the defense by pointing out the inconsistencies in policy, common sense is always a solid guide … which most people routinely ignore:

“One could argue, however, that wearing Google Glass carries with it no greater threat than, say, holding one’s phone up in the air and pretending to surf the Web when one’s actually taking a clandestine photograph of another patron. Same principle. Perhaps a smartphone is just a bit easier to notice?”

So, this is the here and now, but how does the situation improve over time? If we choose the 3d printing omnishambles as our starting point, then things only worsen. Presently, we have people wearing a device that — while discrete — is obviously some kind of recording device. What happens when ocular prosthetics meets cybernetics, or when Google Glass makes the leap to technology that resembles a contact lense? Oh yes, I’m sure the privacy advocates should begin to pay attention by then.

But what if the NSA / CIA / MI6 are already using this kind of technology? Welcome to the future, and a brave new world!

Only within the last week or so have the legislators finally realised the problems they’re faced with. It’s too late, because the moment the plans for a 3d printed gun found their way onto the web, the genie was out of the bottle and in the wind.

Do you know what my second thought was? Drugs. Today, 3d printing is quite sophisticated, and there’s no reason to suppose it’s going to become less so. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, you’re looking for more efficient and cost-effective ways of synthesising drugs. If you’re a drug cartel in Mexico, you’re faced with the same challenge. At some point, the accuracy of 3d printing is going to shift to the molecular level, and then the problems really begin.

No export costs. No translation costs. No export taxes that I’m aware of. So why the massive mark up in price? I thought we’d done with these highly dubious practices? Obviously not.

A lack of choice is an argument / complaint / criticism that Apple are continually accused of,  yet they march on down that road to success unhindered. It’s a subject that came up yet again over on Business Insider, covering an interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, to which I just had to comment:

One choice it may be, but it’s the only choice for a lot of people out there.

Bill Gates once said much the same about the iPod, but made the argument that by having only one choice, people had no choice at all. Steve Jobs replied by saying that people have a choice, but it’s just not the choice Bill wants to see people making.

Fundamentally, this perceived lack of choice is precisely why the iPhone is such a success. Anyone who walks into a phone store is bedazzled by the array of options, even if they walk into a store for Samsung, or Sony. Walk into an Apple store, and your options are far fewer, and arguably less of a hassle.

Apple understand the power of this, while the other guys cite it as a negative, simply because they don’t understand the processes involved.

I suppose, in a sense, Apple have slaked themselves drunk from the fountain of KISS; Keep It Simple, Stupid.

While I’m sure many will be quick to champion Android, I’m not one of them. Personally, I don’t see any reason for me to use an Android-powered mobile device, which isn’t to say I’m recommending you don’t, because I’ve never even used one, aside from attempting to navigate my girlfriend’s phone once or twice. But my suspicions of the Android have been born out more completely recently, but have been coming to fruition for several months, if truth be told.

Earlier this month, Google made an astonishing mess of paying their Android developers, providing them with a stock response and no actual details as to when they’re likely to be paid. Then, even more annoyingly, they then provide some limp support resources, which allude to nothing more than a broken link. As is customary with Google, there is almost no way of contacting them, which is bad enough normally, but for developers? This is just a shambles.

Next up, we have sponsored applications leaching battery life on Android and Windows devices, typically a problem associated with free applications. However, I must hasten to point out, this may also be a problem with Apple’s iOS devices, too, though my feeling is that it would be to a lesser extent, given their application development guidelines are seen by many as being much more stringent.

Sponsored? Advertisements. Yes, we all hate adverts, but now you have another reason to hate them, especially on your Android device, as they just became a massive vector for a potential wholesale privacy violation and possibly theft of many other resources you have on your device. This is the kind mess I’d have expected of Microsoft, circa 2001-2005, and not Google.

You have to wonder if Google is trading quality, security and community for market share. Assuming that Google are that stupid, expect more and worse missteps in the coming months and years.

In all, Google have — in my opinion — been in gradual qualitative decline for quite some time, and this simply more evidence of that funk. The fact of the matter is, perceived choice and reduced cost comes at a price — you get what you pay for…

I called Apple’s smooth search move out later in the month, what with everything else going on, I was late to the Siri party:

“You have to wonder how concerned Google are by Siri’s ability to grab the low hanging casual search fruit.”

So how concerned are Google? At the time, they played Siri down, which would be the right thing to do / say, be they concerned or not. After all, do you really expect Google to admit they’re worried about an idea, when such confirmation is as a good as a green light to anyone else with the same idea? Of course not.

Fast forward to a Forbes article quoting Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt’s response to the U.S. Senate antitrust committee, where he (and by extension Google) identify Apple’s voice-activated assistant as a threat to their search products. Why the change? Politics. Google need to appear the wounded party, or how else do they appease the politicians who, on a whim or word, could trim their commercial excess down to size?

But all these things are but a setting of the scene, because the real game changer isn’t Google’s search products, because they’re no longer bathing everyone in the afterglow of innovation. No, everyone expects the all-knowing Google to just keep on being Google.

But the problem is, Google are so tied to their search product, in the same way Microsoft are tethered between the twin pillars of Windows and Office, everything Google do, in so far as search, must be in some way an extension of their paid links franchise, and voice search just isn’t a snug enough fit. Let’s face it, when you’re on the move, who the hell wants to be hearing adverts being barked at them when they’re searching for the nearest Starbucks? That’s the Google dilemma. Apple have no such dilemma.

Trust in Apple technology

Apple like trust. Apple use their vast and ever-expanding walled garden to widen the horizon of their all-enveloping blanket of trust, through vetted applications, which is a fortress to Google’s picket fence approach to application security.

Apple have zero intention of allowing their customers access to untrusted sources via any search they perform via Siri, in so far as finding restaurants, hotels, cinemas, facts, figures et cetera. All of these sources are trusted sources, like WolframAlpha, and Wikipedia for example. Wikipedia, trusted? Do a search for the name of famous person on Google and the chances are you’ll see Wikipedia, or IMDb if they’re an actor, right at the top. That’s the level of trust Google bestow on Wikipedia, so who are Apple to do differently?

So when I say “casual search”, I’m talking about “What’s the weather going to be like later on?”, or “Where is Lake Garda?”, and not “Photos of Lindsay Lohan nude”, or “Cheats for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3”.

Apple are never going to compete with Google’s primary search product. The reason Google succeed is because their product and its agnosticism towards computing platforms; Google search works via the web, not the computer. Apple are for the most part tied to their own hardware, with the exception of Safari, QuitTime and iTunes, for example.

So don’t expect to see Siri appear on Google Android. Why? The deep integration between Siri and the swathe of resources on your iPhone is, most likely, impossible to replicate on Android, or destined to be but a poor imitation.

No, when I look at Siri, I see a proof of concept and a blueprint. I see a product useful for Apple in their desire to keep expanding their walled garden of trust. But I also see a whole population of computer engineers and scientists out there, all bent on replicating Siri and competing head-on with Google.

Apple didn’t change the game, they just helped re-write the rules of engagement. Expect a war of words and a breathless search for the next big thing in finding food, friends, fun and facts on the move…