analog vs. digital

Numbers... ugh... Now, I'm actually a mathematician, but the way people use numbers to try and explain what is REALLY going on frustrates me. As analogy of this situation, I will describe to you the difference between vinyl records and super high quality blu-ray digital sound. Vinyl records are old, man... out dated... they don't even use computers at all. There are no 0's and 1's to decode and transform into some great tune or beat. They actually work with magnets. Records have, literally inscribed on the surface of it, the sound wave in physical form. The needle works sort of like a microphone and just amplifies the sound that's there as the record turns. Digital music (ALL digital music, despite the quality) works sort of like movie frames. Each instant has a new "frame" of sound followed by a TINY break (too small of a break to ever hear it) then proceeds with the next instance of sound. These sound chunks are analyzed by putting 0's and 1's in a specific order. In other words, there will be a specified line between where the wave length ends and there is no longer sound. Going through the length of the song, this really isn't a very big deal. The difference comes from within the sound. Each sound has a wavelength, and each wavelength is continuous. This means that it isn't square, but rather curved. There isn't ever actually a line between where it ends and where the next begins. This is how a vinyl record works. It takes the actual shape of the wave and engraves it on the vinyl.

I challenge anyone who reads this to find access to a good surround sound system and play a song on vinyl at the same time as you play the same song with the highest quality digital speed that you can. Flip back and forth between the two. You'll never listen to digital music the same way again. You'll miss the continuous, smooth, clear sound you can only get from an analog source. That's not even taking into account the high ends and the low ends that get cut out with digital mixing. Seriously. Try it. After you do, sit down and think about what discreet numbers mean. What putting a fixed interval between values does to any system. Ask yourself if this is how reality works. Once you understand this, you'll realize that the universe is far stranger then you could have possibly imagined.

Propagating the Illusions

Everything is exactly what you think it is, depending, of course, on what you think you think it is...

Oh, tautology. The art of saying something that is necessarily true. Universally unconditioned truth. It is always valid. It can be used as a rhetorical device or as a logical threshold. For example: "Bob is sitting or he is not sitting" or "If I walk to the top of the hill, then I'll be at the top of the hill." This has to be true. It plays into binary logic. Binary logic is essentially that something is either true or false. Sort of how a computer works. The 0's and 1's in the binary language code indicate true and false, success and failure, yes and no. It's how numbers work. It's even how tautology works. (haha! Get it?!? Tautology is true because what is being said in a tautological way is true... Oh, using something to define itself within itself and using itself to do so is fun! :D )

So where am I going with this? Well, lets discuss some philosophy for a moment:

A man has the opportunity to ask God (whom we will assume is ALL powerful) to do anything as long as it won't affect the man himself. The man asks God to create a rock so enormous that He can't lift it. Being God, of course He was able to. Then the man asked Him to lift it. Being God, of course he could... but how did he do it? It was too big for him to lift, right? Well, presuming how God would do things would be very bold of you, indeed. We could speculate, however. AND WE SHALL! Suppose God then simply made himself stronger! That way He did, in fact, make a rock too big for Him to lift, then He did lift it.

Perhaps we should raise the stakes. The man asks God to create an immovable object. That is, an object that CANNOT be moved. Being God, of course he can. Then you ask him to move it. Being God, he would really have no problem moving it. But then wouldn't that make it something other then an immovable object? If He moves it, then it would be a movable object.

This creates a strange paradox, which is quite familiar to many people. It is the paradox of all power. The paradox of infinity.

We can try and get very technical. Let's say that God creates a deeper reference point then space. He attaches this object to this, then moves space. After this, He could delete the deeper reference point, thus putting the object into a new location. Oh.. wait... putting something into a new location is sort of the definition of moving it. This would mean that mean that He moved it, thus making it something other then an immovable object. God created this immovable object, so it must be truly an immovable object.

We can look at it from a relativistic standpoint. Through the laws of special relativity discovered by Einstein, we can look at the placement of said object is simply relative to other things. Through space-time we could map where it is as a proportional distance between itself and other objects. So I guess that God could simply add space around the object to "move" it, and you would never have changed it's location.

So... did we do it? Did we move an immovable object? Well... obviously not... if we had, then the object wouldn't have been immovable. You CAN'T move something that can't be moved. It's simply a fact. If there is a way to move it, then it wouldn't be immovable, because you could move it... So how would God move it? Simple. He would move it without moving it. This may seem like it's a rhetorical run around, but it's true. The only way to move something that cannot be moved is to move it without moving it. "BUT YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!" Some would say. Well, REALLY, it's impossible to have an immovable object in the universe we currently live in (as far as we understand it through science, philosophy, and common sense.) If you are going to assume the possibility of something impossible, then why not the next impossibility? The strange fact of the matter, is that binary logic takes upon many assumptions of it's own that don't truly make sense.

Reality is a fickle fickle mistress. It makes much less sense then we give it due credit. The only thing we can ever really know is that everything is exactly what we think it is. But, we might not completely know what we think. So I guess everything is what we think it is, depending, of course, on what we think it is... unless what we think is wrong... so I guess everything is exactly what we think it is, depending, of course, on what we think we think it is...

How it Started

I suppose I should introduce myself. However, I'm not going to. This isn't because I don't want people to know who I am, but rather because I think it will destroy some of the mystery. I can't give away the ending before it's even started.

It has started... NOW! Ok, I still can't REALLY introduce myself. Giving away the ending just as it's started would just be bad story telling.

"What is it all about?" you might ask. It's all about discovery, love, hope, death, but mostly Coca Cola and pot. The exciting life of such a person as I can scarcely be handled without a little aid from some kind of inebriation.

Let's more appropriately start with a story. This one time my girlfriend and I found a rock. Now, one may say that there are rocks EVERYWHERE, and they may just have a pretty good point. However, this was no ordinary rock... This was a ROCK. Given, we may have been on a slightly heavy dose of mushrooms in Las Vegas, walking along a path of near infinite splendor, lights, and falling trees. This is when we met this rock. We both literally stopped when we saw this rock. There was no doubt in either of our minds that it was, indeed, a rock. It was such a rock, in fact, that we both had definitive proof in our minds as to the absolute existence of rocks. Perhaps we saw the rock god. Who knows? The tricky part about this whole thing was that I was unaware of my deniability for such objects. I had no idea that I had never really seen what I would absolutely call 'a rock'. You can take my word for it, though. They do in fact exist. We saw one outside of the Luxor Hotel. I wish we would've got a name...