The Colour Blue

Are you blue?  Or are you red?  

Physicists have over the past four hundred years or so formulated a very convincing basis for our visual perception of colour being around the 400-700 nm wavelength range of electromagnetic waves.  What most folks call “blue” is typically around a 450-495 nm range, and what most folks call “red” is around the 620-740 nm range.  Note that the colour “blue” in ordinary parlance is a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a vague range of perceived concepts.  It is not, and I repeat not, a reflection of one unique absolutely special single wavelength number for “blue”.  Again I repeat, in ordinary parlance it is a blanket statement for the purposes of communicating a range of perceived concepts.

What’s your favourite musical note? 

Vibrations in the air (then in the ear) are audible in typically the 12 Hz to 20 kHz range.  Music theory nowadays labels the pitch of sounds with common names based on the first seven letters of the Roman alphabet.  The “A” above middle C is particularly special.  1955 marks the official date that 440 Hz was adopted as the official international standard for this particular “A”.  However, the common folks’ idea of this note is of a range around 440 Hz, and for the more tone-deaf folks, it’s quite a large range.  About this “A”, or the particular number 440, there’s nothing absolutely special about it.  Musical notes are again, convenient blanket statements for the purposes of communicating with other people a range of perceived concepts.

Are you a religious person believing in a “single thing”?

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define the scope of monotheistic religion to be a belief in a “single thing” which gives wise advice and asks that religious followers follow a set of rules.  This “single thing”, and here’s another contentious area to be contented, is typically accepted to be an omnipotent omniscient benevolent single thing.  Say if it were not an omnipotent omniscient benevolent single thing, it would be pretty chaotic for some folks, same as trying to divide by zero.  However, as all you calculus-loving maths and engineering folks know, dividing by zero without actually dividing by zero is a pretty damn useful thing to do for real-life calculations to solve some very special problems.  But for now, let’s get back to the “single” status and “thing” status of this “single thing”.  To understand this simply, I ask you a question about your existence that you should be able to answer quite easily:

Are you a “single thing”?

Let’s cut to the chase.  “Single thing” is a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a range of perceived concepts.  Physically, “you” consist of cells, the cells consist of molecules, the molecules consist of atoms (and so on and so forth), and these various components form a whole system by their interaction with each other and their surroundings.  Interactions between components known as cells in your brain are the basis of your conscious experience and your conscious and unconscious processing of the incoming sensory data from transducers which convert electromagnetic waves, mechanical waves, thermal gradients, the binding of molecules to cell receptors into electrical and chemical stimuli, and this processing of these stimuli is responsible for your perception of colour, sound, pressure, temperature, taste, smell of your surroundings.  “You” are an emergent behaviour of a system, existing due to the interactions between your components.  To say that you are a single stand-alone thing is merely a convenient blanket statement for the purposes of communicating with other people a vague range of perceived concepts.  Physically you consist of more than one component, whose interactions with each other and the surroundings typically (there are exceptions) gives rise to a system which perceives itself as one individual “you”.

Then similarly, you might call the interacting behaviour of the components of your physical surroundings and yourself a “single thing” (system) which you name “the world”.   

Some people go one step further and assume (due to a variety of reasons) that there are also non-physical components acting as another “single thing” (system) which can not only perceive all the interactions going on between the physical components of our physical world (omniscience), but can also control the interactions between physical components and control the existence of physical components (omnipotence).  In addition, it happens to have the best interests of “the people” at its heart (benevolence).  It gives wise advice due to its omniscience and benevolence, and has a set of rules to follow as part of this wise advice.  If you follow it, it will omnipotently apply its benevolence and on rare cases it will guarantee “your” continued eternal existence.

About the continued eternal existence, I think that also sounds a bit too good to be true in many ways.  The only way I see it working out is with guaranteeing the continued eternal existence of some components of the system I perceive as “me” such as my values, my personality, my genes, by passing them on to others.  The physical components in their current configuration certainly will not exist unchanging.  But then that begs the question:

Are you the same person you were one moment ago?  If not, what aspects of you are continuous?

As you may have heard, you are what you eat.  The atoms which constitute the system known as “you” at one particular instance are often not the same atoms at another particular instance.  Today’s vegetarian salad could have been yesteryear’s T-rex coprolite.  Over time, if the interactions between components constituting the self-aware system “you” that you consider yourself do not depend on the internal detail of the components, consider yourself continuous.  If you value most dearly only such things as can be passed on to other people, and people continue to exist eternally, you may then consider not yourself, but your will eternal.

Do you strive for an eternal will?

By Andi Liu (1992-) of Palmerston North, New Zealand.  2012-10-08