• Let's start from the beginning. My first obsession was Gravity. My biggest obsession is still Gravity. We need to "hold" objects otherwise they fall. We invented pockets, tables and bookcases because otherwise objects would fall. We unconsciously spend our life fighting gravity, trying to exorcise the curse of gravity. We all fail. As a child, i asked the question: "why do objects fall"? As an adult, i still don't know the answer. I know what Newton and Einsteain found out. I can even follow and understand the mathematical foundations of their theories. Nonetheless, my repulsion for gravity has inspired a great deal of my life.
• It sounds totally unrelated, but it turned out to be a piece of the same puzzle. I was always fascinated by Zeno's paradoxes. Zeno showed that, if there is an infinite number of points between two any points (in space and time), then nothing can happen. An arrow will never reach the other side because it first has to reach half way, and one fourth of the way, and one eight of the way, and so on forever. The fastest runner will never pass a turtle if the turtle gets a headstart because by the time the runner reaches the initial position of the turtle, the turtle has already moved ahead, and by the time the runner reaches the new position of the turtle, the turtle has moved further ahead, and so on forever. Zeno's reasoning is obviously correct. Generations of mathematicians have tried to concoct convoluted proofs that Zeno was wrong, but i always felt that Zeno was fundamentally right. If space and time are made of an infinite number of infinitely small points (if any segment, no matter how small, can still be divided in two), then nothing can happen. The whole universe is impossible.
• Albert Einstein's General Relativity is a relatively simple idea. There is spacetime, which is a continuum of infinitely small points. There are masses that are unevenly distributed over this continuum. Each mass is also energy. Masses warp spacetime. All masses would simply move in a straight line at a constant speed if spacetime were "flat". Because it is warped by masses, masses move in all sorts of convoluted trajectories. The route of each mass through spacetime is determined by all the other masses of the universe. The actual details of the route depend on the observer. Everything is relative to the observer. Each observer is witness to a somewhat different history of the universe.
• In my opinion, the ultimate meaning of Relativity lies in the relationship between an observer and her own mass-energy.
• Reality is different for each observer, and it happens all the time, whether observers exist or not.
• The only cognitive limit for an observer is the speed of light: an observer can only perceive that portion of spacetime that can be reached by light during the observer's lifetime. Light has a special role in the unfolding of reality. Sometimes i feel that light is all that exists.
• Note that the observer exists only insofar as there are irregularities in the universe. If mass were distributed uniformly across the universe, there would be no history of the universe and no observer to observe it.
• Quantum Theory provides an alternative way to look at nature. There is a limit to how small things can be, to how close things can be, to how small a chunk of energy they can exchange, and so forth. These limits are expressed as multiples of the Planck constant. There is also a limit to how small a piece of space can be. "Points" are not infinitely small: there is a finite number of points in any given segment of space. In other words, everything is discrete, not continuous (digital, not analogue). Spacetime is a (four-dimensional) grid, not a jelly. In this "discrete" world the law of causality is not quite what it used to be. An action can have many consequences. There is an equation, Schroedinger's equation, that predicts the set of possible consequences (which is actually a wave of sorts). Each is likely to occur with a certain probability. Schroedinger's equation can predict all possible histories of the universe given the current state of the universe, but cannot predict which one will actually take place for real. Once we observe that one of those possible consequences has indeed happened, it turns out to be one of the possibilities predicted by Schroedinger's equation. But we know that this is "the one" (out of all the ones contemplated by Schroedinger's equation) only "after the fact".
• Schroedinger's equation does not predict reality. Reality happens only when someone observes the universe. If nobody observed the universe, maybe there would be no "reality". It appears that the observer creates reality. Once an observer has "collapsed" the wave of probabilities into a specific event, all observers observe the same event. Reality is the same for each observer, and it happens only when an observer checks it out. There is, however, a limit to how much of reality an observer can "collapse" into reality: the Heisenberg principle states that some entities cannot be measured when some other entities are measured.
• In my opinion, the ultimate meaning of Qauntum Theory lies in the relationship between an observer and her own observations (which then become reality for her and everybody else).
• The cognitive limit for an observer is represented by the "wave": the observer cannot know reality until it is actually observed, and Heisenberg's principle (not the observer's lifetime) limits what can be observed.
• Relativity and Quantum theories are clearly very different descriptions of the universe. They provide different models of the universe (one is continuous and the other is discrete) and different roles for the observer (one creates reality only for herlsef, the other creates reality for everybody). More importantly, Relativity Theory does not put any limit to the knowledge of the observer. A community of eternal observers could potentially "learn" the entire universe. Quantum Theory puts a limit to what the observers can know, no matter how long the observers live.
• When i focus on the two theories, i see a difference mainly in the "level" at which they operate. Relativity Theory is about the universe, about the dimensions of existence. Quantum Theory is about the human world of objects, about the world of "sizes".
• My favorite metaphor to describe the two theories is of an observer causing ripples in an ocean. Relativistic spacetime is the equivalent of an ocean, and quantum values are the equivalent of the ripples caused by an object moving through the ocean of spacetime. Relativity is the theory about the ocean, and Quantum Theory is the theory about the ripples. Relativity describes the continuous ocean, while Quantum Theory describes a discrete world of ripples. Quantum Theory describes the ripples caused by the observer while she moves through spacetime. Einstein's equation describe how spacetime is warped because of matter from the viewpoint of an observer. Schroedinger's equation describe the ripples caused by such observer moving through spacetime.
• The spacetime in which we live (the "ripples") has an atomic structure itself, just like matter. There are indivisible units of spacetime, atoms of space and time. It is not true that one can divide any segment in two: there is a limit to how small one can go. This removes once for all Zero's paradoxes: the universe that we inhabit is possible.
• Gravity is a daily reminder that we are merely observers, and very imperfect observers, not creators, of reality.

• I had been searching for the topology of spacetime under the assumption that spacetime is discrete (and not a continuum). While traveling in Africa, where buses tend to be in terrible conditions and an intact windshield is a rarity, it occurred to me that a cracked windshield invariably displays the same pattern that a spider uses to create its web. What do a cracked windshield and a spiderweb have in common?
• I am still trying to articulate the answer, but i realized that the spiderweb was the topology that i was looking for, and a rather simple one (concentric circles intersected by straight lines at different angles). The spacetime of each observer is a spiderweb.
• The spiderweb also works well as a metaphor for what the observer is doing: trying to capture the horizon of other observers.

• I believe in the existence of a common underlying principle that governs inanimate matter (the one studied by Physical Science), living matter (the one studied by Biological Science) and consciousness (studied by Cognitive Science).
• The world of living beings is a "Darwinian" system: mutation, competition, survival of the fittest, evolution, etc. The immune system is a Darwinian system. The brain is a Darwinian system too, in which the principles of natural selection apply to neural connections. It is intuitive that memory is a Darwinian system: we remember the notions that we use frequently, while we forget notions that we never use. I think that thinking as a whole is a Darwinian system as well: thoughts are subject to mutation, competition, survival of the fittest and evolution. The Darwinian system recurs at different levels of organization.
• Biology and Physics offer us different theories of Nature. Physics' view is "reductionist": the universe is made of galaxies, which are made of stars, which are made of particles. By studying the forces that operate on particles, a Physicist derives the universe. Biology's view is Darwinian: systems evolve. A Biologist understands a system as a successor or a predecessor to another system, under the general guiding principle of "survival of the fittest". The two views can be reconciled if one assumes that the Darwinian approach is universal: it applies to every system in the universe, not only to biological systems. Every system in the universe evolves, including the universe as a whole.
• "Ex nihilo nihil fit": nothing comes from nothing. Life does not arise by magic: it must come from properties of matter. Ditto for cognition. Ditto for consciousness. Many scenarios have been proposed to explain how life and consciousness may be "created" from inanimate and unconscious matter, how a completely new property can arise from other properties. I don't believe this is the case. Both life and consciousness are ultimately natural phenomena that originate from other natural phenomena, just like television programs and the motion of stars.
• Life seems to be a consequence of a universe in which energy flows. As energy flows, it creates order. That order is capable of self-configuring so as to survive and acquire even more order from energy flows. Thus simple systems "evolve" into complex systems. Living organisms are the outcome of this process of constant non-equilibrium. On one hand, living organisms seem to be an inevitable consequence of the universe. On the other hand, living organisms cannot live in isolation: they depend on the environment. The "individual" is an oxymoron.
• Life is about maintaining itself through a process of interacting with an environment via exchanges of energy/matter. Life is constant non-equilibrium.
• Equilibrium means death. Equilibrium (no more flows of energy) kills.
• I believe that the substance of the brain and the substance of consciousness are the same. Brain processes and thoughts arise from different properties of the same matter, just like a piece of matter exhibits, for example, both gravitational and electrical features. The feature that gives rise to consciousness is present in every particle of the universe, just like the features that give rise to electricity and gravity.
• Cognition is a feature of all matter, whether living or not: degrees of remembering, learning and communicating are ubiquitous in all natural systems. If we bend a piece of paper several times, it will tend to stay bent. That is equivalent to our brain memorizing something. If we leave it alone, the piece of paper will tend to resume its flat position. That is equivalent to our brain forgetting some information that is no longer used.
• The issue, therefore, is not of what is conscious and what is not, of what is cognitive and what is not: the issue is the "degree" to which a system is conscious or cognitive. My degree of consciousness and of cognition are (presumably) different from those of a stone, of a cat, of a plant.
• A plausible explanation of consciousness requires the introduction of a new feature of matter, which must be present even in the most fundamental building blocks of the universe. I believe that proto-consciousness is pervasive. Every piece of matter, down to the elementary constituents, is proto-conscious. The reason we "feel" is that each atom of our body "feels" (to some extent). Consciousness was there from the beginning.
• Each neuron, and each atom of each neuron, is "proto-conscious". And each atom of every object is proto-conscious. The reason we are conscious is similar to the reason that some bodies are electrical conductors: each single particle of the universe has an electrical charge, and in some configurations that property yields conductivity.
• By the same token, each single particle of the universe has a proto-conscious quality, and in some configurations (for example, the human brain) that property yields consciousness.
• Just like electricity and liquidity are macroscopic properties that are caused by microscopic properties of the constituents, so consciousness is a macroscopic property of our brain that is caused by a microscopic "mental" property of its constituents.
• I have an idea of how the human mind evolved. If consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, then it must have been there, in some primitive form, since the very beginnings of life, and it must have evolved with life. It became more and more complex as organisms became more and more complex. Early hominids were conscious, and their consciousness, while much more sophisticated than the consciousness of bacteria, was still rather basic, probably limited to fear, pain, pleasure, etc. Early hominids had a way to express through sounds their emotions of fear and pain and pleasure.
• Consciousness was a skill that helped in natural selection. "Minds" were always busy thinking in very basic terms about survival, e.g. about how to avoid danger and how to create opportunities for food.
• What set hominids apart from other mammals was the ability to manufacture tools. We can walk and we can use our hands in ways that no other animal can. The use of tools (weapons, clothes, houses, fire) relieved us from a lot of the daily processing that animals use their minds for. Our minds could afford to "relax". Instead of constantly monitoring the environment for preys and predators, our minds could afford to become "lazy". Out of that laziness modern consciousness was born. As the human mind had fewer and fewer practical chores, it could afford to do its own "gymnastics", rehearsing emotions, and constructing more and more complex ones. As more complex emotions helped cope with life, individuals who could generate and deal with them were rewarded by natural selection. Emotions underwent a Darwinian evolution of their own.
• That process is still occurring today. Most animals cannot afford to spend much time philosophizing: their minds are constantly working to help them survive in their environment. Since tools were doing most of the job for us, our minds could afford the luxury of philosophizing, which is really mental gymnastics (to keep the mind in good shape).
• In turn, this led to more and more efficient tools, to more and more mental gymnastics. As emotions grew more complex, sounds to express them grew more complex. It is not true that other animals cannot produce complex sounds. They have sounds that express the emotions they feel. Human language developed to express more and more complex flows of emotion. The quantity and quality of sounds kept increasing. Language trailed consciousness. At the same time, it helped consciousness evolve by improving the "mental gymnastics".
• Ideas, or "memes", created (or "discovered") by that mental gymnastics, underwent Darwinian evolution as well, spreading like viruses from mind to mind, and continuously changing in order to adapt to new degrees of consciousness.
• The history of consciousness is the history of the parallel and interacting evolution of: tools, language, memes, emotions and the brain itself. Each evolved and fostered the evolution of the others. The co-evolution of these "components" led to our current mental life. The human mind is the product of the co-evolution of memes, language, tools, emotions and brains.
• This process continues today, and will continue for as long as tools lend our minds more time for thinking. The more "spare time" that tools allow us, the more thinking we can do. We are more conscious than past generations in virtue of having more time to think. Consciousness is a product of having nothing better to do with our brain.
• I also believe that a scientific theory of consciousness will be possible only when a fundamental flaw of Physics is remedied. The two great theories of the universe that we have today, Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory, are incompatible. I believe that once we replace them with one unified theory that is equally successful in explaining both the cosmological realm and the subatomic realm, consciousness will be revealed to be a somewhat trivial effect. And I believe that this unified theory will be a "Theory of the Observer", not a theory of matter (as all science has traditionally been).

• Cognitive Science usually tries to explain how the mind works. But i feel that another way to find out who we are is to look at what minds do. The behavior of any animal is a clue to how its mind works. If i catalog the things that an ant does, i obtain a good base to understand how an ant's mind works.
• One cannot understand organisms (and even less super-organisms) apart from the structures that their genetic program compels them to create.
• What do human minds do? Ultimately they have created civilizations.
• The human mind may have developed for the purpose of "survival of the fittest" but at some point the human mind started doing something that no other mind had done before: building civilizations.
• It is surprising that most scientists of the mind do not spend more time studying civilizations. I feel that we can understand the human mind only when we analyze many civilizations, both ancient and modern.

Like many before me i find that the philosophical schools of China and India are useful metaphors to discuss Physics.
• The atman of Buddhism well represents the spacetime events of Relativity but fails to capture the nature of the observer of Quantum Physics (who causes the existence of objects by the act of observing them). Buddism is about the object, not the subject. By definition, there is no subject in Buddhism.
• To me Daoism is thus complimentary because it focuses on the conscious "observer" and its relationship with the world of objects.
• I don't think the world "is": the world is always and only perceived. The sound of a tree that falls in the forest does not exist if no conscious being is listening. In fact, neither the tree nor the forest exist if no conscious being is perceiving them. Matter without a conscious perceiver is only a shapeless, colorless, soundless amalgam of particles, waves, fields and who knows what. It is the perceiver who creates the world of trees, forests and sounds.
• If i had to improve Quantum Physics, i would generalize the "observer" as a "perceiver". There is more to our perception of the world than just vision.
• A popular paradigm in Biology is that the interaction of organisms with their environment is about picking up information from the environment. Perceiving is actually "recognizing", which in turn is the essence of reasoning, which in turn entails action. They (perceiving, reasoning, acting) are all facets of the same process, which is, ultimately, living.
• The dao is the way of the world, the inherent harmony of nature. However, that is the world of the perceiver.
• Therefore there must appear a different world to each different "perceiver".
• In the case of human perceivers, we can assume that the differences are minimal: that one may see red a little brighter and hear a sound a little louder, but that ultimately we all can see that color and hear that sound if the appropriate organs are working.
• I wonder about other animals, though. They too have organs to perceive the environment, except that those organs (notably the brain) are significantly different from ours. They presumably perceive a different world. Some animals perceive a world with no sound. Some animals perceive a world with no light. Some animals perceive a world in two dimensions.
• Hence: what is the dao of an ant?
• And is there a dao of all daos?

• As i travel around the world, i try to imagine the impact that the sounds of a place have on people. Each region of the world has different sounds. Some cities in the developing world are extremely noisy. The noise of both modern traffic and traditional markets contribute to the cacophony. Some cities in the West are dominated by the sounds of public transportation. If you only take the subway every day, you may be more exposed to the underground sounds than to the sounds of your own neighborhood. Many suburban neighborhoods in the USA are actually very quiet, with the occasional sounds of a car or children. There are extremely crowded places in the world in which the main sound is still the voices of thousands of people shouting at each other. Those sounds must have an effect on the people who live there.
• I started wondering about the past. What sounds did people hear in Mexico in 1600? or in London in 1800? or in Rome in 300? or in Moscow in 1700? or in Angkor in 1300? Those sounds shaped their psyche, the psyche of entire nations. There must have been times when the main noise in some cities was the noise of people walking in the streets, the sounds of horses and carriages. There were times when the main sounds were sounds of cannons and gunfire. There is a town in Tamil Nadu, India, in which the main sound all day long is the sound of artisans sculpting stone. In a town in Ethiopia one can still hear the sounds of animals being kept in the houses. In ancient times many towns were like these two towns. In medieval Europe and, in general, in times of war, people must have been used to the sounds of raiding armies, that were different in different ages.
• These sounds may be more important for the history of humankind than the actions of men and women whose psychology had been shaped by those sounds. Different regions developed different psychologies because they were exposed to different sounds.
• We have a record (called "books") of the words that shaped human cognition over the centuries. We also have a record of images that shaped the minds of people over the centuries. Unfortunately, we don't have a record of the sounds that people heard in past ages. This is a part of the human experience that historians have always neglected.
• When we analyze the work of an artist (whether a writer or a painter or an architect or even a composer), we tend to focus on the visual aspect of the artist's life: how the landscape and the people looked like. We rarely analyze the sounds that the artist was hearing and that probably contributed as much as the looks to the art. The reason is very simple: we have a record of how the world and how the people looked like in the old days, whereas we don't have a record of how the world and the people "sounded" like before the invention of recording. Nonetheless, i suspect that even a painting was influenced by the sounds that the painter was hearing.
• The sounds that we hear on a daily basis shape our cognitive growth. In a sense, you are not only what you eat but also what you hear.
• Each age has been shaped by ordinary, daily sounds as much as by great ideas and terrible wars. The sounds of carriages, tools, animals and rivers have been replaced by the noise of alarm clocks, computer keyboards, videogames, phone ring tones, car keys. Each appliance in the house makes its own noises.
• Today we are constantly enveloped in a jungle of electrical, electronic and digital noises. Most of us wake up to one of those noises.
• The familiar voices of one's family and neighbors are being replaced by the cacophony of the strangers who surround us at work and in the streets. The cacophony of the town market has been replaced by the cold announcements of the supermarket.
• The sound of the live human voice that would read a book or recite a poem (in the days when very few people could read, back when most people were listeners and not readers) has been replaced by the silence of reading in private (a book or an email or a webpage).
• I believe that this change in the sounds that surround our existence has caused a corresponding change in the way brains work. We are shaped by the sounds that we perceive. Every age has perceived a different sets of sounds. Therefore the minds of each age have worked differently.
• When one replaces the pervasive sounds of nature of the old world with the pervasive noise of appliances of the new world, one does something very powerful to the human brain.
• I wonder about the future: what sounds will future generations hear? As the world becomes more and more homogeneous thanks to globalization, will people all over the world hear the same sounds and therefore become more similar to each other?
• I also wonder if the sounds of the weather are the only connection that we modern selves still maintain with our ancient selves. What else is left of the ancient world other than thunder and raindrops?

• For thousands of years the human mind has created objects by imitating Nature. Cars have four wheels because mammals have four legs. Planes have two wings because birds have two wings.
• During the 20th century the human race transitioned into the age of abstraction. Nature is no longer the model. Quantum Theory, Relativity, abstract painting, avantgarde music, the computer, the Internet are not modeled after Nature.
• They represent a new stage of the human mind, as it emancipates itself from Nature.

• The temporal dimension is usually related to "change". Things change, and thefore we perceive the "passing" of time.
• Change for humans has usually meant more than just "aging". In particular, the journey of a person requires "time". So does the "journey" of information from one person to another. These processes of physical or virtual movement are particularly powerful in delivering the sense of time because they embody "mini-lives": it's the passing of time at a microscale (compared with the macroscale of the universe).
• Another powerful contribution to the sense of time comes, of course, from memory, and especially from the fact that memories fade away with the passing of time.
• These three dimensions of time (transportation, communication and memory) have been dramatically altered in the 20th century. Transportation has become faster and smoother thanks to airplanes, trains and cars. Communication has become almost instantaneous thanks to the telegraph, the radio, the television and email. And memory has improved by orders of magnitude because of the invention of recording devices (cameras, music and video recorders, digital storage).
• The passing of time used to be tied to a specific location, where time was "paced" by natural phenomena (e.g., the seasons). Transportation has altered the physical dimension of time: the passing of time is paced less by the seasons than by the number of trips.
• Communication has entangled us in a wave just like the quantum wave function entangles all the particle of a system. We are immediately affected by something that happens far away, and we can affect the others the same way. All we have to do is pick up the telephone, and we can change the life of a friend or a relative in a few seconds.
• We can "memorize" the sound, the look and the data of a civilization for future generations. The "legendary" dimension of the past is gone. Recording equipment demistifies the past. It makes the past less "past" than it used to be. It becomes more obvious that those places and those people are still around, are still with us.
• The dimension of time is splitting and being replaced by a number of dimensions. There used to be only one tool to transport, communicate and record: our body. And there used to be one dimension associated with that tool, that we called "time". The new tools that have replaced the body are creating new unnamed dimensions.

• Having "pets" means taming and domesticating animals so that they will need to be assisted throughout the rest of their lives because they would not survive in the unnatural environment where we are forcing them to live.
• "Pets" then become dependent on their owner's willingness to feed them and treat them decently.
• I am generally opposed to pets because we force them to live a life that goes counter to their nature and presumably causes them a "psychological" trauma that i do not wish someone would do to me. I'd rather die than being kept as a pet for my entire life.
• However, i wonder if it is only animals that we keep as pets. Aren't children "trained" (just like we trains pets) when they are given a strict schedule of activities (that mostly go counter to the human nature)? Don't we force humans throughout their lives to live in an unnatural way? We don't walk: we drive cars. We eat supermarket food, not vegetables. We watch television not starry skies. We read books instead of following animal tracks in the forest. We are limited at what age we can have sex and with whom. That we destroy our environment might be in our genes (we are not the only animal to do it) but that we destroy our environment to build factories, roads and shopping malls is beginning to look unnatural.
• In fact, most of us did not choose this artificial world of factories, roads and shopping malls: we were thrown into it and told that these are the rules; which is precisely what pet owners do to their pets.
• The rules were made by some other humans whom too were thrown into it.
• Humans treat younger generations of humans like pets who need to be tamed, domesticated, and then assisted throughout their lives because they would not survive in the unnatural environment where we force them to live.

• I see two instincts in nature. On one hand there is "imitation": each living being tends to imitate what other living beings are doing. This is a widespread instinct, and i have come to believe that this is the fundamental "social instinct". It is pervasive in nature. It is pervasive in human society. A biologist can probably explain the instict of "imitation" as a consequence of sharing the same genes. A physicist might explain it as a consequence of the universal laws. People who imitate are considered "nice". They behave in a way that conforms to what society expects from its members.
• Innovation, on the other hand, is not something that we find in nature. Innovation is a risk. Animals "innovate" when there is a genetic mistake. In most cases those animals die. In rare cases they survive. They might generate a new species. They cause instability in the existing ecosystem. Innovation is rare and, when it survives, often catastrophic. "Innovation" in the planet's climate causes the extinction of thousands of species.
• Innovation in human society is rarely welcomed. It is most often met with skepticism, hostility and plain accusations of hereticism or madness. It is correctly perceived as a threat to the established order. In a sense, society is right to put innovators in madhouses: innovation is the social equivalent of a genetic mistake. It takes time for society to accept it for what it is: an innovation, that changed the established order and created a new order. Basically, people recognize it as "innovation" when they start imitating it. The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.
• Innovation is about knowledge. There is a body of knowledge that is shared by society. Innovation is when a piece of knowledge is added that dramatically changes the way that knowledge looks like: it causes a paradigm shift.
• A formal system is a set of facts and rules. The rules can be used to deduct more facts from the existing facts, but this does not add any amount of "truth": it simply makes it explicit. In order to increase the amount of "truth", one needs to add a statement that cannot be deduced from the existing facts.
• Innovation, creativity and knowledge are different ways to look at the same phenomenon.
• Innovation requires creativity. Creativity can come from a genetic mistake or from a "malfunctioning" brain. I fail to see the difference between creativity and madness. Artists and scientists are mad to the extent that they "create" something innovative. The more innovative/creative, the more insane.

• The human mind grasps more easily the concept of the infinite than the concept of the finite. We had no problem accepting that the universe is infinite, but now we have trouble accepting that it may be finite.
• It is natural for humans to ask "if it is finite, then what lies beyond it?", i.e. we want to make it infinite. If there is no god, then what was there before the universe was born?
• The human brain seems to be programmed to deal with infinite space and infinite time. Despite the fact that our daily lives deal with finite objects and finite lives, finite concepts are harder to accept than infinite ones.

• To some extent, every human activity is a form of Art. Then we have to decide to what degree it is "artistic". Every human action can be viewed as an act of creation. With its every action the human mind tries to recreate the world in her/his image. Each mind does it differently because each mind is different.
• Needless to say, the existence of millions of different views of the world would make life very difficult. No surprise then that society has actually evolved away from the arts and towards a uniform view of the world. Children have a very hard time abandoning their egocentric view of the world. Society forces them, and keeps forcing daily every adult, to accept a universal view of the world that we can share and use. No wonder that we have separated the arts from the sciences: the arts are an obstacle to that process of social coexistence. Art is the process of creating a very personal view of the world. Science is the process of creating a very impersonal view of the world. The latter has helped create more and more complex forms of society. The price that society had to pay was to marginalize and isolate the arts.
• Art is ubiquitous in Nature, whether a beaver's dam or a spider web. We doubt that other animals meant to produce the Art that they produced, and that is the fundamental difference between our Art and their Art. They (presumably) don't perceive what they do as Art. We assume that an alpine lake or the mountain ridges that create it do not perceive themselves, therefore they are not "artists". A spider cannot appreciate the quality of the web it has just woven, a beaver cannot appreciate the quality of the "dam" that it has just built across a creek. However, whether animals can perceive beauty or not, their activities look "artistic" too. Thus, in the end, "art" is simply a different name for... life.
• A skeptical physicist asked me "what do Art and Science have in common?" My answer: "They both come from the same mind". I actually believe that Art came first: Science is an evolution of Art.
• There is a reason if humans engage in artistic activities. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (if the development of the individual from childhood to adulthood mirrors the progression of the human species through ancestral stages), then children hold the answer. Children play. Most adults stop playing because they were told to stop playing. Art might be a way to keep playing even after we are told to stop playing. Children are genetically programmed to play, and the act of playing might be a way to learn the environment and to be creative about it. Humans may just be genetically programmed to be creative. Art might just be a way to map the environment in a creative way. Being creative about interacting with the environment yields several evolutionary benefits: 1. you learn more about the environment, 2. you simulate a variety of strategies, 3. you are better prepared to cope with frequently changing conditions.
• Mapping the territory is a precondition for surviving its challenges, but it wouldn't be enough to yield solutions to unpredictable problems. To deal with the unpredictable, we need more than just a map. Over the centuries this continuous training in creativity has led to the creation of entire civilizations (science, technology, engineering). And to the history of Art.
• The impact on society of Art is that art educates people to be creative. Art creates new paradigms of thought. When Art and Science do not interact, every new generation is more similar to specialized robots than to sentient beings.
• The benefit for Science of an integration with the arts is that Art can help usher in a paradigm shift. Major scientific revolutions have usually coincided with major artistic periods. Today science tends to be "evolution", not "revolution", perhaps because it has been decoupled from the arts.
• The fictitious separation of Art and Technology/Science is a recent phenomenon. It was not obvious to the Sumerians that the ziggurat was only art, or to the Egyptians that the pyramid was only art, or to the Romans that the equestrian statue was only art. They had, first and foremost, a practical purpose. Given that purpose, a technology was employed to achieve it. Art and Science have shifted so far apart in the 21st century because we live in the age of specialization. Specialization as we know it today started in the European Middle Ages and picked up speed with the Industrial Revolution. Specialization is, quite simply, a very efficient way to organize society. Therefore specializations multiplied. Today we are not only keeping Art and Science separated: we are maintaining countless specializations within the arts and within the sciences.
• The language of Science has become more and more difficult because it has been left largely to scientists to talk about Science. The more isolated Science is, the more difficult its language becomes for non-scientists. The more difficult the language, the more isolated Science becomes.
• The consequences of the separation of Art and Science are sometimes subtle but widespread. For example, environmental fundamentalists oppose any alteration of Nature. Implicitly, they assume that humans cannot improve over Nature. This idea would have been ridiculous in ancient times, when human alterations of Nature were almost always greeted as positive improvements to the landscape. Even the staunchest environmentalists would probably refrain from destroying the pyramids or the ziggurats or the Acropolis of Athens to restore the stones to the mountains where they were taken, and would probably refrain from demolishing Michelangelo's statues to return the marble to Carrara's mountain. However, the environmental fundamentalist of the 21st century assumes that Nature is the supreme artist, and humans should not alter whatever Nature has produced. If Michelangelo and Leonardo were reborn today and submitted a plan to build a fantastic freeway through a national park, they would be banned. (Ironically, the same environmental fundamentalists who oppose bridges and tunnels take pictures precisely of bridges and tunnels when they vacation in Switzerland). This was clearly not the case centuries ago, when great minds were specifically hired to alter the environment. What has changed is the view that human work is beautiful. The demise of this view is a consequence of having decoupled Art and Science. The 21st century does not perceive a scientific, technological, engineering project as beautiful. It perceives it as a threat to (natural) beauty.
• The separation of Art and Science was part of a broader trend away from unification and towards specialization. Not only did Science and Art progressively move apart, but disciplines within them kept moving apart from each other. For example, each scientific discipline became more and more specialized. A continuum of knowledge and of human activity was broken down into a set of discrete units, each neatly separated from its neighbors. This happened for a simple reason: it worked. Humans were able to build large-scale societies thanks to the partitioning of labor and of knowledge. As knowledge grew, it would have been impossible to maintain the ancient continuum of knowledge. It was feasible, on the other hand, to muster the increasing amount of knowledge once it was broken down into discrete units and handed down to "specialists". The gap between Art and Science, and the gaps between all artistic and scientific disciplines, kept increasing for the simple reason that the discrete space of specialized disciplines was more manageable than the old continuum of total knowledge.
• The digital age is providing us with an opportunity to rebuild the continuum: the world-wide web, digital media and communications have enabled an unprecedented degree of exchange, interaction, integration, convergence and blending. We are finally able again to see the continuum again and not just the discrete space. The new continuum, though, bears little resemblance to the old one, in that its context is a knowledge-intensive society that is the exact opposite of the knowledge-deprived society of the ancient continuum.

• Progress has clarified many of the mysteries that haunted the ancient world. Every generation has a few more explanations for a few more natural phenomena that the previous generation regarded as "mysterious". Scientific progress will keep clarifying many more aspects of the universe. However, i believe that every cognitive system (e.g., every living being) has a "cognitive closure": a limit to what it can know. A fly or a snake cannnot see the world the way we see it because they do not have the same visual system that humans have. In turn, we can never know how it feels to be a fly or a snake. A blind person can never know what "red" is even after studying everything that there is to be studied about it.
• I believe that each brain has a limit to what it can possibly think, understand, know. The human brain has a limit that will preclude humans from understanding some of the ultimate truths of the universe. These may include spacetime, the meaning of life, and consciousness itself.
• There is a limit to what we can be.
• There is a limit to what i can be. Maybe that is my ultimate identity. I am my limitations.
• I am not sure if we (humans) could build a cognitive system whose cognitive closure is larger than ours, i.e., a cognitive system that can "think" concepts that we cannot think.
• Sometimes i wonder if the relationship between humans and gods is exactly the opposite of what religion has traditionally assumed, if gods created humans to overcome their cognitive closure and therefore we humans are mentally superior to the gods that created us (we can think concepts that gods cannot think).

• Religion is about absolute certainty. Science is about relative uncertainty. Religious people feel that they are right. Scientists know that they are probably wrong (that future generations of scientists will formulate more accurate scientific theories). Religion is about certainty. Science is about doubt.
• Of course, spirituality draws most of its power from the fact that it cannot be proven false. Nobody can prove that a supernatural being does not exist, just like nobody can prove that elephants with wings do not exist.
• Ethics is largely founded on religion (whether your state is a theocracy or not). It would be interesting to build an ethics founded on knowledge instead of religion, so that people engage in endless studying instead of endless persecution.
• Spirituality and drugs were strictly related in many ancient civilizations. I have a simple theory of why. The mystical experience corresponds (roughly) to a paralysis of the neocortex. Both hallucinogenic drugs and collective hysteria cause a paralysis of the neocortex.
• The neocortex is the evolutionarily newer part of the brain, that is (mostly) unique to humans. The older part of the human brain is very similar to the brains of the other mammals, and the very old part of the human brain is still basically the same brain of reptiles. Thus a human brain whose neocortex is disabled behaves largely like the brain of a mammal. If that "is" the mystical experience, then the mystical experience must be widespread among animals, and, since there is no neocortex to balance it with a rational experience, it might fundamentally be the "only" state of their mind.
• Basically, not only do cats "experience god", but they do it all the time. They constantly live in an hallucinated present.
• The effect of the neocortex is to make sense of the mystical experience like it makes sense of everything else that happens. Thus humans create very complex rituals and religions, which other animals don't.

• Greed is unique to the human species: other animals content themselves with what they need in order to survive. Humans are never satiated. We work even if we already have enough food, clothing and housing.
• There is basically no end to human needs because the needs of a human being change as previous needs are satisfied, whereas animal needs are always the same.
• Marketing (the creation of new needs) makes sense only for the human species.
• A marketer is someone who tells you what you need even before you need it.
• Civilizations are the product of this endless quest for more. Greed is the fundamental force that set the human species apart from the other species.

• A civilization tends to call "barbaric" the civilization that is about to overthrow it.
• When the civilized world was Egypt and Mesopotamia, the new civilization was born in Greece, that at the time was hardly considered civilized and whose inhabitants were rather inept at the "civilized" rituals of the civilized world.
• When the civilized world was centered upon Greece and Achaemenian Persia, the new civilization was born in Rome, that was hardly civilized compared with Athens and Persepolis.
• When the civilized world was centered upon Rome and Sassanid Persia, the barbarians came from Arabia.
• Rome was destroyed by the Goths, that went on to build the Western European powers (Spain, France, Germany)
• The Arabs and Song China were overthrown by a people of the Steppes, the Mongols.
• The continental European powers (Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire) were eventually defeated by the least civilized of them, Britain.
• The British Empire and Germany (and, in general, Western Europe) were replaced by the USA (that many Europeans still consider as the barbarians of the contemporary world)
• New civilizations are born "at the edge of the world"; not at the edge of chaos but at the edge of order.
• Great civilizations are those that do not learn from the mistakes of past civilizations.

• Starting at least with the industrial revolution, "change" has become an inherent part of society. Every society lives in a world that is different from the world of the previous generation. Change has accelerated in the post-industrial society, triggered by the increased "productivity" of the digital devices.
• I feel that this "change" is largely the result of the forces of "marketing", not an inherent human instinct. We need to spend huge sums of money to convince people to adopt a new appliance or watch a new movie. The post-industrial world has created an addiction to novelty but has to be kept alive with a constant injection of marketing campaigns.
• However, there is also an undercurrent in human societies that pulls in the exact opposite direction. Humans have always been puzzled by change: everything changes all the time (matter), but something does not change (form). You never enter the same river twice.
• The evolution of human society from the caves of the stone age to today's apartments has been a project to reduce change. Life used to be unpredictable in the savannah. Life in the city is very predictable. Change meant danger. Reducing change makes life easier and safer.
• Human civilization is, ultimately, about things that do not change: building immortal things (whether a piece of furniture or a building or a road).
• Therefore, unlike natural environments, human civilization requires continuous maintenance.
• The ultimate products of human civilization, that defy change, are the cultural artifacts (books, photographs, films).
• Human civilization is a project to create a world in which nothing changes, neither form nor matter. At one level human society generates continuous change. At another level it is trying to abolish change: to create permanence.
• The opposition to "climate change" is simply an aspect of this process. Climate has changed for millions of years. We exist because of that climate change. I exist because countless events (including deforestation, irrigation, cities of concrete and asphalt) have devastated the environment and created the conditions for me to survive on this planet. Thus we implicitly assume that past climate change (the cooling and formation of the Earth, the end of the ice age, the events that caused the extinction of species that may have killed the human race) was good. However, we explicitly assume that future climate change is bad. Once we are born, we want no more change in the world.
• The truth is that, whatever we are, we owe it to previous "changes". If we think we are "superior", we owe that superiority to "change". By fighting against change, we are fighting against the possibility that a superior race appears on this planet.

• Change is the oldest of all philosophical topics
• Today "change" is often interpreted as "evolution".
• The discussions on evolution have tended to shift from understanding the past to understanding the future. The reason is that evolution has been recognized as a general principle that applies to all levels of organization in the universe (societies, economies, languages, ideas, galaxies). Therefore we are tempted to apply the paradigm of Physics: if we understand how it works, we can predict the future.
• The difference between change and evolution should be that evolution applies to populations over a period of time that is greater than the lifetime of any of its individuals. Therefore the growth of an individual is not "evolution" but merely "change", and the transformation of a nation is not "evolution" but merely "change", and the refining of somebody's idea is merely change and not evolution. The word "evolution" should apply to the changes that occur between one generation and another of individuals, or when nations rise and fall, or when ideas move from one mind to another.
• Alas, the definition of "individual" is not trivial. I am a body. But i am also a super-organism of limbs, which are super-organisms of cells, which are super-organisms of molecules, which are... At the same time i am also a part in a super-organism that is in turn part of a super-organism and so forth (society, the Earth, the Solar System and so forth).
• The word "evolution" (compared with "change") also carries the implicit notion that there is a "direction" in change, which most people like to identify with "progress". For example, most people think of "evolution" (in biology, society, technology, etc) as an increase both in rate of change and in complexity.
• However, this perception that we live in an age of rapid change and increasing complexity (and, generally speaking, of progress) is debatable, and mostly based on the fact that we know the present much better than we know the past.
• One century ago in a relatively short time the world adopted the car, the airplane, the telephone, the radio and the record, while at the same time the visual arts went through Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism, while at the same time Quantum Mechanics and Relativity happened in science. The years since World War II have witnessed a lot of innovation, but most of it has been gradual and incremental. We still drive cars and make phone calls. Cars still have four wheels and planes still have two wings. We still listen to the radio and watch television. While the Computer and Genetics have introduced powerful new concepts, and computers have certainly changed lifestyles, i wonder if any of these "changes" compare with the notion of humans flying in the sky and of humans located in different cities talking to each other. Every generation believes that they live in a unique era, but our era might be a lot less unique than some previous eras. There has been rapid and dramatic change before.
• The acceleration in complexity that we perceive might also be somewhat illusory, and therefore the "progress" that we take for granted might not be so true. One can argue that there is a lot of "regress", not "progress".
• In fact, the whole history of human civilization is a history of trying to reduce the complexity of the world. Civilization is about creating stable and simple lives in a stable and simple environment. By definition, what we call "progress" is a reduction in complexity, although to each generation it appears as an increase in complexity. Overall, living has become simpler (not more complicated) than it was in the stone age.
• At all levels of organization one can find evidence of regress. Bacteria seem to be more resilient than humans and much more likely to survive an environmental or nuclear catastrophe. Several authoritarian regimes are doing better than democracies. Social networking software can hardly be called "progress" over traditional face-to-face friendship. Does typing sentences create stronger friendship than hanging out together at the pub every other evening? Do on-line dating systems lead to stronger relationships than traditional multi-year courtships? Has the complexity increased or decreased for the man who will have 20 girlfriends over a lifetime instead of raising a family of five as he would have done a few generations ago? We listen to lo-fi music on computers and digital music players, as opposed to the expensive hi-fi stereos that were commonplace a generation ago. Mobile phone conversations are frequently of poor quality compared with the old land lines. Emails are mostly written in poor English compared with the old-fashioned letters on paper. Economies have become wildly unstable and opaque. Companies and governments have automated their customer-support services, but the result (the fact that we have to keep "pressing" digits in order to get to the information we need) is hardly "progress" over the old-fashioned operator who would give us the answer in a second. There are technological innovations that are puzzling at best: now that software requires a "mouse", we basically need three hands to work on a computer. Digital cameras allow us to take thousands of pictures that we don't need, but the high number of pictures is precisely the reason why nobody looks at other people's pictures anymore. There are actually fewer long-term pictures. The automation of cash registers has resulted in longer lines to pay: it basically takes longer to pay than to find the item you want to buy (and you cannot buy it at all if there is a power outage).
• What we are witnessing is a general regression in quality. The "acceleration" of complexity is in reality an acceleration of low quality. The complexity has not changed much. Having 200 friends on a social networking software is not necessarily more "complex" than having two really good friends: in fact, it is a simplification because we feel very little obligation towards those 200 "friends". Downloading 2,000 songs on a digital music player is hardly an increase in complexity if people have even less time than before to listen to that music, and if the music is crap. And i fail to see the acceleration in complexity in a biological world where the number of species is decreasing and the vast majority of big animals are domesticated or trapped in natural reserves, and smaller animals are routinely exterminated.
• In the early days of the Internet (1980s) it was not easy to use the available tools but any piece of information on the Internet was written by very competent people. Basically, the Internet only contained reliable information written by experts. Today there might be a lot more data available, but the vast majority of what travels on the internet is: a) disinformation, b) "spam" and c) commerce. It is not true that in the age of search engines it has become easier to search for information. Just the opposite: the huge amount of irrelevant and misleading data is making it more difficult to find the one webpage that has been written by the one great expert on the topic. In the old days his webpage was the only one that existed.
• It is not only the complexity of the "dataverse" that has increased: what has certainly increased and is accelerating is the noise.
• Last but not least, people are less and less capable of enjoying loneliness, silence, themselves. People are less and less comfortable alone with themselves.
• At every level or organization (biological, social, technological, political, economic) one can find evidence of "regress", although it is frequently marketed as "progress".

• I think the human race was not meant to have spare time: people don't know what to do with their spare time.
• People are afraid of not having anything to do.
• People are also afraid of being lonely because, ultimately, people are not comfortable with themselves.
• Therefore people try to structure their spare time into irrelevant activities that alleviate the burden of having nothing to do and, at the same time, avoid the dreadful state of being alone with their self.
• Their justification is that all of life is irrelevant. Basically, life is just passing time while waiting to die.
• As people were given more "spare time", they also started realizing that they don't really like their friends and relatives. They don't like other humans, in general.
• The ideal compromise between being alone and having friends is to have superficial relationships. People need other people, but don't really want to have to deal with their problems.
• Social networking software is ideal because it does not involve the obligation of cultivating a friendship over a long period of time. One can remain superficial and largely anonymous and still participate. Social networking software is the perfect product for people who don't know what to do with their spare time.
• The people who know what to do with their spare time (and never have enough) are usually the ones who change the world. However, one could argue that it is just as irrelevant.

• I believe that, besides the classical Darwinian rules of variation and selection, a crucial role in evolution was played by endosymbiosis. New organisms can be created by "merging" two existing organisms.
• If each organism is indeed made of smaller organisms, then it is not surprising that a Darwinian law governs each level of organization (immune system, brain, memory). Each component organism "was" a living organism, and, like all living systems, was designed to live and die and evolve according to the rules of Darwinian evolution.
• The organism that eventually arose through the progressive accretion of simpler organisms is a complex interplay of Darwinian systems.
• Muscles, memory, the immune system and the brain itself share the same "vital" principles. For example, they get stronger when used, weaker when not used.
• It is not only hair and nails that feel like independent organisms grafted on our body. Every organ in the body seems to be an independent living organism that has been connected to other living organisms to create a larger living organism.
• Our body is an intricate patchwork of biological clocks, each one controlling one of these "sub-organisms".
• If we are the result of the accretion of different organisms, we also are the sum of all those organisms' worldviews.

• The value of art depends on the values of the art critic.
• Most art is born as imitation, not innovation.
• The critic, not the artist, is the one who defines innovation, and rates it.
• The artist is merely a vehicle for the aesthetic/ideology of the critic.
• The critic is the real artist.

• 99% of the cells of your body change every year.
• This includes most of the neurons in your brain.
• The neural connections that define what you are (what you remember, how you think) change all the time. They are changing as you are reading these sentences.
• You and yourself as a child have physically nothing in common.
• Memory is "reconstructive". We do not remember things as they are: we store them in a convenient format and "reconstruct" them when we need them. For example, you don't remember a movie, scene by scene and word by word, although you "remember" what happened in the movie. What you remember is not the movie, but a "representation" of the movie. A computer can store an entire movie as it is. Human memory cannot. We store it in a format that will allow us to retrieve the essence of it, i.e. to "reconstruct" it. This also means that we create our past every time we remember it.
• Ecological systems are networks of living beings: every living being interacts with the environment, both determining it and being determined by it. We exist only insofar as we are part of an environment.
• In the quantum world it is the observer that "collapses" reality. There is no reality until someone observes it.
• Furthermore in the quantum world everything is connected with everything else, because each "wave" (that describes a system) is ultimately connected to all other waves (to all the other systems in the universe).
• There is an equivalence of sorts between General Relativity and psychology: every person "warps" the psychological universe of everybody else nearby. This is equivalent to saying that there is a universal psyche that is warped by individual selves, and this warping in turn affects the behavior of each individual self.
• From several different perspectives we obtain the same conclusion: the self does not exist alone. The self is a function of all other selves. Your identity fluctuates. You cannot be yourself twice no more than you can enter the same river twice.

• In 2008 researchers discovered that the more alcohol people drink on a regular basis, the lower their brain volume. People may lose up to 2% of their brain volume over the course of a lifetime. It doesn't sound like much, but consider that the difference between the human genome and the genome of the chimp is less than 1.5%.
• Throughout history the nations with high alcoholic consumption have usually been the most aggressive: Rome, the Mongols, the European colonial powers (France, Spain, Britain), Germany, Russia, Japan and now the USA. These countries conquered most of their world. Countries that did not consume much alcohol were less prone to invade other countries.
• There are exceptions, of course, the most notable being the Arabs.
• If one adds red meat to the equation, though, one gets an almost perfect correlation between diet and warfare. The nations that ruled the world have consistently been nations whose people drank a lot of alcohol and ate a lot of meat. In the 21st century the biggest consumers of alcohol and meat were the Soviet Union and the USA. The Arabs didn't drink alcohol but were and are among the biggest consumers of red meat in the world.
• I wonder what could be the cause for the correlation. If alcohol makes small brains and red meat makes big bodies, could it be that the combination of alcohol and red meat makes the perfect warrior society?

• The top of creativity is encountered in the slums and villages of the world. It is in the very poor neighborhoods that humans have to use their brain every single minute of heir life to come up with creative and non-orthodox solutions, solutions that nobody taught them to problems that nobody studied before. People manage to run businesses in places where there is no infrastructure, where at any time something unpredictable can (and will) happen. They manage to sell food without a store. They manage to trade without transportation. When they obtain a tool, they often use it not for the purpose for which it was originally designed but for some other purpose. They devise ever new ways to steal water, electricity, cable television and cellular phone service from public and private networks. They find ways to multiply and overlap the functions of structures (for example, a railway track also becomes a market and a police road-block becomes a snack stop). They help each other with informal safety networks that rival state bureaucracies (not in size or budget, but in effectiveness).
• The slums are veritable laboratories where almost every single individual (of a population of millions) is a living experiment (in finding new ways of surviving and prospering). There is no mercy for those who fail to create a new life every day: they stand no chance to "survive". This colossal "black" economy still employs the majority of the adult inhabitants of the planet. The slums of Mumbai cover a mere 6% of the city's territory, but they are home to 60% of the city's population.
• These highly creative people yearn for jobs in the "white" economy, the economy of the elite that lives outside the slums. For that "white" economy they perform trivial repetitive jobs (chaffeur, cashier, window washer); which means that they have to leave their creativity at home. The "white" economy has organized daily life in such a way ("routines") that everybody is guaranteed to at least "survive". This process results in a colossal waste of brainpower. The people of the slums use their brains only when they live and work in the slums. When they live or just work outside the slums, they are required to stop being creative and merely follow procedures (procedures devised by vastly less creative people who would probably not survive one day in the slums).
• Routines maximize productivity precisely by reducing human creativity. Someone else has created, and the worker only has to perform a series of predefined steps. The routine "amplifies" the effect of the innovation. The innovation can be very small and very infrequent, but the effect of the routine performed by many workers is to make that small innovation relevant for millions of individuals.
• The creativity of slums and villages, on the other hand, is constant, but, lacking the infrastructure to turn it into routine, ends up solving only a small problem for a few individuals.
• 1% of the world's population owns 40% of the world's wealth. But who owns 40% of the world's creativity?
• The slums are a colossal reservoir of creative energies that the world is wasting.

• Civilization is very much about making our life easier.
• Civilization is about structuring our life so that it is no longer a continuous struggle.
• A structured life, though, is not creative, by definition. The more structured our daily life is, the less creative we have to be in our daily life.
• We are even structuring entertainment (gyms, dance classes, movie theaters).
• We are just killing time while waiting to die.
• Creativity seems to require instability and discontinuity.
• Creativity's peaks seem to correspond with periods of great instability: classical Athens (at war 60% of the time), the Renaissance (Italy split in dozens of small states and engulfed in endemic warfare), the 20th century (two World Wars and a Cold War).
• Peace and wealth seem to yield structured, monotonous, predictable lives that depress creativity.
• Creativity seem to be proportional to competition. Cooperation amplifies it and spreads it, but also dampens it.
• 1% of the world's population owns 40% of the world's wealth, but who owns 40% of the world's creativity?
• And who owns 40% of the world's happiness? And who owns 40% of the world's morality? I have the feeling there are the same question.

• Human brains are equipped with the faculty to create a theory of mind.
• We can speculate on what another person is thinking, and in many case we get it right.
• That faculty is due to our brain's ability to expect and recognize patterns of behavior.
• We apply the same logic to "animate" objects, for example a tree that is swinging and making a sound because of the wind, or a thunder, or the moon. We assign them a mental life.
• That is the origin of the spirits that populated Nature in primitive societies.
• Our brain naturally tends to explain a pattern of movement as caused by a mind.
• We recognize things not as objects but as subjects.
• When we see the pattern but we don't see the "thing", we assign minds to invisible subjects, such as gods.
• Monotheism is the belief that the pattern of all patterns has a mind, is a subject.

• Life only happens at the edge of chaos. The difference between life and death is very small. It takes very little to kill a living being. Oxygen is one of the most toxic elements but without oxygen we do not survive more than a few minutes. We are made mostly of water but we drown at the rate of thousands of individuals a year. The temperature of our body has to stay within a narrow margin or we get "sick". The slightest defect in the food we eat causes us to get "poisoned". Life requires that a very high number of parameters remain within a narrow margin of values from birth to death.
• Generally speaking, biological organisms can exist only in very special climates. In fact, so far we have only found one planet where those conditions led to life as we know it.
• So does society. Societies that lose their cohesiveness decline and are conquered by more cohesive societies, no matter how much more powerful they were economically, technologically and militarily. Biology and politics share the same rule: both life and society have a narrow window of opportunity.
• In my opinion the most important factor leading to the decline of the Western world is the disintegration of Western society, and the new dominant nations will have more cohesive societies.
• The cohesiveness of a society mostly depends on how strong its "moral values" are, and that "strength" does not depend on how rational they are but preciselg on how irrationally they are upheld.
• The reason why Western society is disintegrating has mostly to do with rationality, the very essence of Western society of the last nine centuries (since the Scholastics). Rationality has led the Western world towards the refutation of superstition and of any stereotype that cannot be rationally proven true. Rationally speaking, there is no reason to have families with a father, a mother and children. Divorce is rationally plausible, and so is gay marriage and so are "broken" families and so are unmarried women who decide to have children through in-vitro procedures.
• None of this is acceptable in societies where rationality is weak. Their priority is not to justify rationally the rules of society but to maintain and if possible increase the cohesiveness of society. If the beliefs are irrational but help cement the bonds among individuals, let them be. "Primitive" (irrational) societies are inherently stronger than Western (rational) societies. Rationality weakens the bonds among individuals.
• As the individuals of a society become more and more rational, they also become more and more self-interested, less willing to sacrifice something (life or wealth or freedom) for the good of society. Humans seems to be genetically programmed to act both as rational self-interested agents and as irrational altruistic agents who build societies, and the successful "cohesive" society is due to a delicate balance between the two genetic pressures.
• This principle also explains why uncivilized and primitive "barbarians" so often managed to overthrow and replace much better armed empires: the Macedonians did it to the Persians and the Egyptians, the Romans did it to the Phoenicians and the Greeks, the Goths did it to the Romans, the Arabs did it to the Byzantines and the Persians, the Mongols did it to the Arabs and the Chinese, the Afghans did it to the Indians, the Turks did it to the Greeks and the Arabs, the Western Europeans did it to the Arabs and the Indians, and, last but not least, the USA did it to the Western Europeans. In each of these cases the emerging superpower was considered little more than a gang of barbarians by the existing superpowers.
• What worked in favor of the "barbarians" was not military or economic superiority (clearly, that was on the side of the empire) but their more cohesive society: they were literally willing to die for something that the citizens of the empire were not willing to die for. And that something was, precisely, domination. Empires tend to commit suicide, not to be murdered: they decline because of internal reasons, not because of external aggressors.
• In a sense the conservatives in India, in the Islamic world and in China who are resisting the Westernization of their moral values are fighting to make sure that their societies remain more cohesive than Western society so that some day they can overthrow Western domination. Those who want to adopt the Western manners are undermining their own societies.
• In the long run it is not technology or science or warships or nuclear weapons or disciplined armies or stock markets or multinational corporations that matter but how cohesive the family unit is, how cohesive the tribe is, how cohesive the nation is as a whole.

• Metabolizing information is the real challenge for the individual of the digital age. The speed at which we can absorb information is much faster than the speed at which we can process it. The web browser (the person who browses the World-wide Web) is a massive consumer but a poor processor. The web browser mostly lets the random access to websites (frequently driven by search-engine rankings) shape the individual's understanding of the world, i.e. her/his identity. As a whole, society's psychology is shaped by the websites we access and the interactions that follow.
• We are approaching the day when we will simply download our life from the digital world just like today we download songs and films.
• When the USA opened new land to colonization, the goal of the individual was to get as large a piece of land as possible. In the digital age the goal of the individual is going to be popularity on the web. The race for geographical territory has been replaced by a race for attention.
• We still have to find meaning in the sciences. The cognitive sciences present the human body (notably, the brain) as an information-processing system. But where does wisdom come from? The biological sciences present the species as an information-processing system (notably, the genome). But where does identity come from? The physical sciences present the universe as a colossal machine. But where does consciousness come from? The digital sciences present the noosphere as a colossal web of interconnected pieces of information. But its main function so far has been to create a new battlefield for unbridled capitalism. The sciences are still unable to bridge the semantic gap. In fact, that gap between reality and meaning is increasing.

• The brain is not a machine. Human brains are not good at being precise. For example, no human can draw a perfect circle. No human can divide a line into perfectly equal segments. The human brain is not good at directing any regular motion, a fact that translates into the inability of the human body to perform uniform non-stop work. There is nothing in the muscles of the body that would prevent its limbs from performing uniform non-stop work: it's the brain that cannot coordinate that kind of regular, stable movement.
• The reason is that the brain, just like many other organs, is a nonlinear system, designed to "react" rapidly (if approximately) to continuous and unpredictable change in the surrounding environment. The way the brain works is inherently nonlinear. Therefore it is not surprising that the behavior driven by that system is also irregular, and that dividing a line into segments of equal length is just physically impossible for a body driven by such a brain.
• However, one day that brain invented machines. Machines are linear systems. They have numerous advantages over human bodies: they don't get sick, they work nonstop with no need for sleep or holidays, they don't complain or go on strike, and they can be much more powerful than a human worker. Their key advantage and difference, though, is that they are "precise", the one quality that humans lack. A machine can indeed draw a perfect circle and can indeed divide a line into equal segments.
• The advent of these linear systems literally changed the history of the human race, because it enabled the industrial revolution. A human worker (even the most skilled craftsman) would not be capable of making thousands of pieces of metal or wood of the exact same length, especially if they had to be very small.
• A nonlinear system like the brain, designed to perform nonlinear tasks, invented a linear system like the machine, whose main job is to dramatically alter the (nonlinear) environment in which the (nonlinear) brain has to operate. Machines are literally turning the environment into a linear, stable, predictable system.
• In a nonlinear world our brain looks for simple solutions to complex problems.
• In the long term we may create such a linear world that our nonlinear brains will not only become useless but even detrimental: they will look for complex solutions to simple problems.

• Physics has so far discovered four fundamental forces. The gravitation force (a simplification of Einstein's interaction between spacetime and mass) makes "masses" move. Masses are made of atoms. Atoms are held together by the electromagnetic force. The electromagnetic force binds electrons and nuclei to form atoms (and it binds excess particles and antiparticles to simply destroy each other). The strong force attracts the constituents of atomic nuclei, that are built out of quarks. Thus the electromagnetic and strong forces basically create and maintain matter. The weak force releases energy that would otherwise be trapped forever inside atoms. That energy eventually yields stars and living organisms.
• The formulas that describe the behavior of these forces are wildly different, except for the gravitational and electromagnetic forces that are described by similar formulas (in a flat spacetime). The distances at which they operate are also wildly different. The strong force gets stronger at larger distances, while the others get stronger at shorter distances.
• Each force is "mediated" by one or more "virtual" particles. Not surprisingly, the type and number of virtual particles varies wildly from force to force. Physics has so far discovered 60 particles: the world is made of six leptons (the family of the electron) and 18 quarks, with their antiparticles (a total of 48 "material" particles) plus the photon for the electromagnetic force, three "bosons" for the weak force and eight gluons for the strong force (a total of 12 "virtual" particles).
• These elementary particles have masses that vary wildly. It turns out that the masses of these particles measure their interaction with an all-pervasive Higgs field.
• There is nothing that a sensible person would call "symmetry" in this picture of the world. Gravitation is quite anomalous, in that there should be a virtual particle to mediate it (the "graviton") but nobody has found it. If found, it would bring to 61 the number of elementary particles. Physicists are also looking for the Higgs boson that bestows mass on particles. If found, it would be particle number 62. And several more particles are needed to satisfy this or that theory.
• There are many arbitrary "constants" in Physics, from the speed of light to the Planck constant to the gravitational constant to the mass of the electron; but everything pales compared with the chaos of elementary particles.
• I believe that most of the chaos is due to the transition from an old universe to the one in which we live. The "big bang" (or whatever started the new universe) did not completely annihilate the previous universe. Remnants of the old universe are still around. Physicists are trying to piece together fragments that actually belong to different puzzles, the same way that some genes in the human genome are remnants from previous stages of evolution.
• Physicist look for a unified theory of all forces and puzzle why particles are all different. Biologists are more tolerant of diversity. Physics abhors evolution, otherwise it would simply accept that what we observe today is the result of the evolution of previous universes (each with its own laws of Nature, most of which did not disappear but merged with others). Physics has been forced to accept the Big Bang but it fundamentally still believes in the static and perfectly symmetric universe of the ancients.
• Perfection does not exist. Physicists are looking for a perfect symmetry, for some beautiful array of forces and particles. However, this would be in stark contrast with the Nature that we observe: no two rivers are alike, no two lakes are alike, no two mountains are alike. Each has a shape that is very hard to represent geometrically. The genome of any animal is hardly an example of elegant mathematics, and its result (the body of an animal) is hardly a perfect geometrical shape (especially the internal organs). Nature is uglier than we make it to be. What is "beautiful" for us is the fact that this Nature brought us to life. But Nature itself has never displayed the mathematical beauty that scientists are searching for.
• The human mind invented perfection, i.e. Mathematics and the sciences that are based on it. However, the history of Science is largely an attempt by the human mind to prove that Nature cannot be inferior to an artifact of the human mind, that Nature beats the human mind at the game of imagining perfection.
• Humans will eventually have to accept that abstractions do not exist in nature: we invented them, and they only live in our minds. The first large geometric artifacts to appear in the universe were created by human minds (whether furniture or buildings or vehicles).
• It is surprising that something as un-geometric as the human brain is capable of perfectly geometrical abstractions. It is, however, a mistake to assume that this is also what Nature does. Elementary particles and elementary forces are an ugly mess for the simple fact that Nature mostly is an ugly mess. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the mind of the thinker.

INTERACTION

MEDIATOR

STRENGTH (gravity=1)

BEHAVIOR

RANGE (meters)

EFFECT

PARTICLES AFFECTEd

STRONG

GLUONS (8)

Creates nuclei

Quarks (36)

ELECTROMAGNETIC

PHOTON (1)

INFINITE

Creates atoms

Quarks (36) + Charged Leptons (6)

WEAK

W/Z BOSONS (3)

Transforms particles

GRAVITATION

?

1

INFINITE

Moves massemasses

Quarks (36) + Massive Leptons (6)