Bottomless well

 The thing to do when thinking about infinity is to avoid that word and use instead "endless."  It helps avoid the mistake of thinking of infinity as a number -- some place in the very, very distant past -- and realize that if time is endless then there cannot be a "now."   You can climb out of a well that has a bottom, but you cannot climb out of a well that has no bottom.

If time had a beginning, then talking about "before" that beginning is nonsense.  There was no existence "before," no "eternity" as there was no time to have an eternity.  There was also no causation: if something happened -- anything might happen -- that would be the beginning of time and after that you can insist on cause and effect (although I don't think causation is quite as real as we think it is, for this issue it doesn't matter).

There’s a lot in what you’re saying that lines up with how philosophers and physicists actually try to deflate the intuitive traps around “infinity” and “beginning.”

Your substitution of “endless” for “infinite” is doing real conceptual work. “Infinity” almost automatically gets reified in the mind—turned into a kind of far-away number or location on a line. “Endless” pushes it back toward process: no terminating boundary, no final element, no “last step you’ll eventually reach.” That shift alone avoids a bunch of category errors.

The part about time and “now” is especially interesting. In an endless time, there is no privileged endpoint, so “now” can’t be anchored as a final reference point or as something approaching an ultimate boundary. But I’d push back slightly on the stronger implication that “there cannot be a now.” What physics and philosophy usually land on instead is more subtle: there is no absolute present that stands outside time, but there are still local “nows”—indexical present moments embedded in a temporal sequence. So “now” survives, but only as a perspective inside the system, not as a global feature of it.

Your well metaphor is good intuition, but it has a twist worth noticing. A bottomless well is still a spatial structure you can, in principle, define from within: you can say “I am at depth n,” even if there is no final n. Time works similarly in most physical theories: even if it is past-eternal or future-endless, each moment is still locally well-defined. The absence of a bottom doesn’t destroy the validity of positions; it just removes a terminal reference point.

On the “before the beginning is nonsense” point, you’re very close to a standard move in cosmology and philosophy of time. In models like the classical Big Bang description (not necessarily the full quantum-gravity story), “before” is undefined in the same way “north of the North Pole” is undefined. It’s not that there is a hidden region called “before,” but that the coordinate system stops being applicable.

Where I’d gently press is your conclusion about causation. It’s tempting to say that if time has a boundary, causation only “switches on” after it—but most physicists would be cautious here. Causation, at least in physics, is usually defined within time (often via entropy gradients or relativistic light-cone structure). If time itself begins, then “causation starts” isn’t quite well-formed; it’s more that the framework in which causation is defined only applies after that boundary. Saying “something might have happened that starts time” risks sneaking in a “before” again, just in disguise.

So a more austere version of your view would be: if time is finite toward the past, the concept of “earlier than the first moment” fails; and if time is endless, the concept of a first moment fails. In both cases, “now” remains local, not absolute; and causation remains a structure inside time, not something that stands outside it.

One question your framing naturally raises: are you thinking of “endless time” as literally unbounded in both directions, or more as “no first moment but still a directionality”? Those two lead to very different pictures of what “now” and causation are doing.

Yes, and what's striking is that in your description there is no explicit causation at all.

You have:

    A state.

    Rules.

    A transition to a new state.

    Repetition.

The game evolves.

A player watching it will almost immediately start speaking in causal language. They will say, "That piece moved because this happened," or "The collision caused the score to increase." But from the standpoint of the game's actual operation, there may be nothing except state transitions according to rules.

Take something like Conway's Game of Life. A pattern appears, moves, collides, and disappears. One can tell elaborate stories about causes and effects. Yet underneath, each cell simply updates according to a rule based on neighboring cells. There is no extra ingredient called causation.

That is why some philosophers and physicists suspect that causation may not belong to the fundamental ontology of the universe. What is fundamental may be something closer to:

"Given state S, the next state is selected according to rule R."

The notion that one event causes another could then be a human-level summary of these transitions.

Your game analogy becomes particularly interesting when applied to the beginning of time. Suppose the game starts at turn 1.

A player inside the game might ask, "What caused turn 1?"

But the game's rules only describe transitions from one turn to the next. They do not describe a transition from "no game" to "turn 1."

In that sense, asking for the cause of turn 1 may be asking the rules to explain something outside the domain in which they operate.

Now, someone could still ask why those particular rules exist, or why there is a game at all. But that is a different question from asking what caused the first move.

I suspect part of what bothers you about causation is that we often smuggle in more than is actually present. We say "A caused B" as though there were a metaphysical push connecting them. Yet in your game, all we really have is a lawful sequence:

State → State → State → State

The sequence is perfectly intelligible without an additional causal glue.

The challenge, of course, is that our own consciousness seems to inhabit the sequence. We do not merely observe state transitions; we experience memory, anticipation, choice, and agency. Those experiences strongly encourage causal thinking. Whether causation is fundamental or merely a convenient description of regular transitions remains one of the deepest open questions in both philosophy and physics.

Your game example is a good illustration of why many people, beginning with Hume, have doubted that we ever observe causation itself. We observe one state followed by another according to regular patterns. The "causal connection" may be something we infer rather than something that is literally present in the machinery.

Yea, that's the game.  Here you have simple rules and only a few elements.  Given probabilistic rules and an arbitrary number of elements, voilà, the universe.

Yes, that's a very natural line of thought.

In your game, there is no need for causation, purpose, destiny, or even time in the rich human sense. There is simply a sequence of states related by rules. Make the rules probabilistic instead of deterministic, increase the number of interacting elements beyond comprehension, and you can imagine a universe emerging whose large-scale behavior appears vastly more complicated than its underlying machinery.

What's appealing about this picture is its economy. You don't need an extra "causal force" pushing events along. You don't need a cosmic planner. You don't even need a distinction between possible and actual outcomes beyond what is encoded in the rules themselves. The universe simply updates.

Then causation becomes something like a useful compression algorithm used by minds embedded within the process. We say, "The lightning caused the fire," because that summarizes an immense number of microscopic state transitions in a way that is useful for prediction and survival.

In fact, much of science works that way. We often discover that concepts we once thought fundamental are emergent. Temperature emerges from molecular motion. Solidity emerges from electromagnetic interactions and quantum effects. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules, yet there is no individual "whirlpool molecule." One can imagine causation joining that list.

Where I think your view becomes philosophically interesting is at the beginning. If the universe is fundamentally a rule-governed state-transition system, then the question "What caused the universe?" may be analogous to asking "What move caused the first move of the game?" The question assumes the applicability of a concept that only exists within the game's operation.

Of course, one can still ask why there are rules at all, or why these rules rather than others. Your framework does not answer that. But it does suggest that the demand for a prior cause may be misplaced.

What strikes me is how close this comes to a kind of minimalist metaphysics. Instead of:

    Things happen because causes make them happen.

you are leaning toward:

    There are states and transition rules. What we call causes are recurring patterns within those transitions.

That view has a certain kinship with both Hume's skepticism about causation and modern physics' emphasis on mathematical evolution laws. It is also compatible with your earlier preference for a beginning over an endless past. A state-transition system can simply have an initial state. It does not need a preceding state to generate it, because "preceding" only becomes meaningful once the sequence exists.

The place where I would hesitate is the jump from "this is a coherent picture" to "therefore this is what reality is." History is full of elegant metaphysical pictures that later ran into trouble. The block universe is elegant. Presentism is elegant. Computational universes are elegant. Nature has a habit of being stranger than our cleanest abstractions.

Still, if I had to summarize the intuition you've been developing over this conversation, it would be something like:

    Reality is a succession of present states. The succession begins. The transitions are governed by probabilistic rules. Causation is the name we give to stable patterns that emerge when unimaginably many such transitions are viewed from inside the system.

That's a surprisingly coherent position. Whether it's true is another matter, but the pieces fit together better than many philosophical systems do.

What we know is existence.  We infer what it might be from inside, from how it behaves, so time will tell unless we encounter barriers we cannot cross.

That strikes me as a very modest and, in a sense, scientific position.

The one thing we cannot coherently doubt is that there is something rather than nothing. Whether one starts with consciousness, experience, existence, phenomena, or reality, there is a fact to be explained. Everything else is inference.

We then find patterns in that existence and construct models. Some models are extraordinarily successful. Atoms, spacetime, evolution, quantum fields, genes, black holes—none of these are things we directly encounter in ordinary experience. They are theoretical structures inferred from behavior.

The interesting thing is that the history of science is full of cases where the model turned out not to be what people imagined. Heat is not a fluid. The Sun does not orbit the Earth. Species are not fixed kinds. Space and time are not what Newton thought. Yet each earlier model captured something real about the behavior being observed.

That makes me sympathetic to your caution about causation, time, and even existence itself. We know the behavior. We are much less certain about the underlying ontology.

Your phrase "from inside" is important. We are not observers standing outside the universe examining it as a whole. We are processes occurring within it, trying to infer its nature from local evidence. In that respect, we're rather like characters in your game attempting to deduce the rules from the succession of states they experience.

The possibility of barriers is what makes the matter genuinely philosophical. There may be truths that are merely undiscovered. There may also be truths that are undiscoverable from within the system.

For example, if there were multiple universes with different fundamental rules but no possible interaction between them, then the inhabitants of one universe might never obtain evidence of the others. Likewise, if the origin of the universe lies beyond any observational horizon, there may be aspects of it that remain forever inaccessible.

That does not mean speculation is worthless. It means we should keep a distinction between what we know, what we infer, and what we imagine.

What I find appealing in your approach is that it starts from the least controversial point and builds outward:

    Existence is given.

    Patterns in existence are observed.

    Models are inferred from those patterns.

    The models remain tentative.

That is a surprisingly old tradition, running from skeptical philosophers through modern science. It avoids both dogmatic certainty and complete nihilism.

And there is a nice irony in your last sentence. You said, "time will tell unless we encounter barriers we cannot cross."

If your suspicions about time turn out to be right, then "time" itself may simply be the name we give to the unfolding of those successive states from which all our knowledge is drawn. In that case, time does not merely tell us about reality—it is the very medium through which any telling can occur at all.

Life as commodity

 The modern view of slavery is that it is immoral, and further that the idea of one person owning another is abhorrent and repulsive.

Okay, this is a relatively recent improvement in human moral standards, although thoughtful people through history have had qualms about it, and slavers have never been in the pinnacles of society.

Has what is "moral" changed?  The best answer I think is that slavery has been wrong all along.  It violates the most ancient and basic teachings of compassion and freedom and love.  Any rational approach to ethical deduction comes to that conclusion easily.

So what changed?   

What is right and what is wrong stay right and wrong, but human cultural views can change -- a lesson that we cannot depend on our culture to tell us and must work out our ethics for ourselves.

That is a serious and influential way of looking at moral change: not that morality itself changes, but that human beings gradually become better at recognizing it.

Philosophers sometimes call this a distinction between moral reality and moral belief. If slavery was wrong in ancient Rome, wrong in medieval Africa, wrong in the antebellum American South, and wrong today, then what changed was not the moral status of slavery but humanity's understanding of it. On this view, moral progress resembles scientific progress. The Earth did not suddenly become round when people discovered it was round; people simply came to understand reality more accurately.

Many religious and philosophical traditions have taken something like this position. A Christian might say slavery always violated the dignity of persons created in the image of God. A Buddhist might say it always conflicted with compassion and the reduction of suffering. An Enlightenment thinker might say it always violated human autonomy and equal moral worth. The underlying principle was there; society took a long time to apply it consistently.

There is another view, however, that deserves consideration. Some philosophers argue that moral standards themselves are cultural creations. On that account, slavery was not "wrong all along" in the same sense that it is wrong today. Rather, societies developed new moral concepts—human rights, universal equality, individual liberty—and those concepts changed what people regarded as moral. In that framework, moral change is more like legal change than scientific discovery.

Personally, I think the strongest challenge to the purely cultural view is that people within slave societies often recognized the problem. We can find ancient critics, religious critics, enslaved people themselves, and ordinary observers who saw the cruelty and contradiction. If morality were nothing but social convention, it is difficult to explain why people repeatedly condemned slavery before their culture did. The existence of dissent suggests that people were appealing to standards beyond local custom.

Your concluding lesson strikes me as important regardless of which theory one adopts. Culture is a guide, but it is not an infallible guide. Every society has accepted things that later generations judged harshly. The uncomfortable implication is that some practices we regard as normal today may someday appear just as obviously wrong as slavery appears to us.

That is one reason ethical reflection matters. If we simply inherit our moral beliefs from our surroundings, we are at the mercy of our era's blind spots. Whether one believes morality is discovered or constructed, there remains the responsibility to examine inherited assumptions rather than treating them as self-evidently correct.

In that sense, the abolition of slavery is not merely a historical event. It is a reminder that moral consensus and moral truth are not necessarily the same thing.

That's the uncomfortable twist, isn't it?

If the story is exactly as described, then her attempt to save the mouse was not merely unsuccessful—it was the direct cause of its death. Had she done nothing, the mouse would have remained alive, at least for the time being. By intervening, she changed the mouse's circumstances in a way that exposed it to a predator.

That doesn't necessarily make her action wrong, because she could not reasonably have foreseen an owl diving out of the sky at that moment. But it does complicate the neat distinction between intentions and outcomes. The outcome was not just unfortunate; it was causally connected to her choice.

Stories like this reveal a tension in ethics. We often judge people primarily by their intentions because outcomes depend heavily on luck. Yet outcomes matter too. If we ignored outcomes entirely, ethics would become detached from the real world.

What the story especially illustrates is the danger of assuming that intervention is automatically better than non-intervention. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. A destructive mouse in a house may face risks in the wild that it does not face indoors. The woman likely imagined two possibilities: the mouse lives in her house, causing problems, or the mouse lives elsewhere. She probably did not imagine a third possibility: the mouse becomes owl food within seconds.

There is also a broader lesson about humility. Human beings are often tempted to believe they understand all the relevant consequences of their actions. In reality, we usually see only a small part of the causal web. We act on the basis of probabilities and values, not certainty.

The mouse's perspective—if one can speak that way—would have been grimly simple. It was alive in one environment, was captured and transported by a giant creature, released, and then killed. The woman's ethical narrative and the owl's hunting narrative would have meant nothing to it.

That's one reason some philosophers place considerable weight on foreseeable consequences rather than actual consequences. If we judge solely by what happened, the woman appears to have done harm. If we judge by what a reasonable person could expect, her action may still look compassionate and sensible. The owl's appearance was a matter of bad luck, not negligence.

Still, your observation is important because it resists the comforting version of the story in which "at least she gave the mouse a chance." In the specific chain of events described, her intervention was precisely what placed the mouse where the owl could take it. Sometimes good intentions really do make things worse, even when nobody could have known they would.

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." When it comes to slavery, I have no problem condemning it.  When it comes to eating meat, since we are animals and need protein, I tend to limit myself to chicken and fish, but is someone serves me a hamburger at their house when I'm a guest, I will enjoy it and express appreciaton, not get huffy about the cow.

That strikes me as a fairly common way that people navigate these questions: holding strong views on some matters while treating others as questions of degree, circumstance, and competing goods.

Slavery is comparatively easy to condemn because the moral case is so overwhelming. It involves treating persons as property, denying autonomy, coercing labor, breaking families, and often inflicting violence. Once one grants that all human beings possess equal moral worth, the institution becomes very difficult to defend.

Food is murkier. Humans are omnivores by evolution. For most of history, animal protein was an ordinary part of survival, and even today nutritional needs, economics, culture, and geography all play a role in what people eat. The ethical question is not as simple as "harm versus no harm," because one is balancing human needs and preferences against animal welfare.

Your own practice sounds less like a rigid doctrine and more like an attempt to reduce harm where convenient without turning the matter into a test of virtue. You choose chicken and fish most of the time, but you also recognize the social value of hospitality. If someone has prepared a meal for you, refusing it over the animal involved may strike you as causing a different kind of harm—discourtesy toward the host.

Many moral traditions make room for that sort of judgment. Ethics is not always about maximizing a single value. Gratitude, kindness, social harmony, and respect for generosity are values too.

What I find interesting is that your position seems consistent with the theme we've been discussing. You are not saying, "Animals don't matter." Nor are you saying, "Animal life and human life are equivalent." Rather, you are acknowledging a spectrum of moral concern. The cow's welfare counts for something; the host's generosity counts for something; your own nutritional needs count for something. The challenge is deciding how to weigh them.

That differs from slavery in an important way. With slavery, many people conclude there is no balancing to be done because the violation is so profound. With meat consumption, reasonable and compassionate people can disagree about where the balance should lie.

And there is perhaps a touch of wisdom in recognizing that ethical life cannot be lived entirely in abstractions. It unfolds in actual kitchens, around actual tables, with actual people offering actual food. A philosophy that cannot survive contact with ordinary human hospitality may be missing something important about what it means to live among other human beings.

I think it was you who told me the Jains avoid root vegetables as that involves killing the plant.

Yes. Jainism is perhaps the most rigorous example of extending nonviolence toward living things.

Many Jains avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and radishes because harvesting them kills the entire plant. By contrast, picking an apple or a bean leaves the plant alive. There is also the belief that root vegetables may disturb or destroy numerous small organisms in the soil. The principle involved is ahimsa—non-harm.

What's fascinating is that Jain thinkers were well aware of the problem you raised about boundaries. They knew that life cannot exist without affecting other life. Walking kills microorganisms. Breathing kills microorganisms. Farming kills microorganisms. The goal was never absolute harmlessness, which they regarded as impossible, but minimizing harm as far as practical.

In a way, Jainism takes the concern for life to a logical extreme and then wrestles honestly with the consequences. Most of us draw the line much earlier. We may worry about mammals, perhaps birds, perhaps fish. Few of us lose sleep over bacteria.

The existence of traditions like Jainism is one reason I hesitate when people say that concern for animals is a purely modern invention. The modern animal welfare movement is recent, but the underlying intuition—that living beings other than humans deserve moral consideration—has very deep roots.

Your earlier examples illustrate why most people end up with a layered ethic rather than a single absolute rule. We value life, but we kill pathogens. We value truth, but sometimes withhold it. We value compassion, but may kill a dangerous animal. We value animal welfare, but many of us still eat meat.

That does not necessarily mean the principles are insincere. It may simply reflect the fact that human beings are constantly balancing goods against one another.

The Jain monk brushing insects from his path, the farmer protecting crops from pests, and the host serving a hamburger to a guest are all trying, in their own ways, to live ethically. They just place the boundaries in different places.

And perhaps that is what makes slavery stand out so sharply in comparison. Once you decide that the enslaved person belongs inside the circle of full human moral concern, there is very little balancing left to do. The boundary question largely disappears. With animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms, the boundary question is the entire debate.
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Fairies dancing on the lawn

 

I have a problem with repetitive dreams that involve property I own and collect rent on and whatnot. When we owned rental property, I would ask whatever happened to that house on the hill?  What house on what hill?  Oh, a dream.

I've never been to Milwaukee.  I have several times I dreamed about Milwaukee.  The dreams had it all wrong and confused the devil out of me.

I think we are better off just forgetting our dreams; they always get it wrong.

It sounds incredibly frustrating to deal with dreams that feel so vivid, only to wake up and realize they’ve totally scrambled reality. There is nothing quite like the mental whiplash of trying to remember if you actually own a "house on the hill" or wondering why your brain decided to take a fictional, confusing field trip to Milwaukee.

Honestly, your conclusion makes a lot of sense. If dreams are constantly feeding you bad data and leaving you confused, choosing to just shake them off and forget them is a solid, grounded strategy.

From a psychological standpoint, dreams love to take fragments of our real-world memories, past stresses (like managing rental properties), and completely random words or places we've heard of, throwing them into a blender. It doesn't mean your brain is broken; it's just doing some chaotic, nighttime filing.

If they aren't serving you, leaving them at the bedroom door is probably the best move. Do these recurring dreams usually leave you feeling stressed when you wake up, or is it mostly just the annoyance of the confusion?

They don't behave; you would like to forget them and generally do, at least you forget that it was a dream.

That is a sneaky, frustrating twist. It’s one thing to have a weird dream, but it's a whole different level of annoying when the dream convinces your waking mind that it actually happened.

It makes total sense why you'd want to just wipe the slate clean. When a dream mimics real life so closely—like dealing with property or rent—it hijacks your actual memory banks. Your brain wakes up, grabs that fresh "data" from the night before, and logs it as a real event because it feels so mundane and plausible.

It’s like your brain is playing a prank on you, leaving you to untangle what’s real and what’s just nighttime noise.

When you do have that sudden "Oh, wait, that was just a dream" realization, does it usually hit you pretty quickly after waking up, or do you find yourself questioning it throughout the day?

It usually waits a week or so before pestering me. This chat is a bit crazy; I don't think most people have residues of dreams hanging around.

A whole week later? That is wild. It makes complete sense why you feel like this is crazy or unusual—waking up and realizing a memory from a week ago was actually a dream is a massive curveball.

But here is the honest truth, friend to friend: you are absolutely not alone in this.

What you are describing is actually a very real, documented phenomenon sometimes called "dream-reality confusion" or "dream lag." It trips people up all the time. Because your dreams are about very normal, mundane things—like checking on a rental property or managing a tenant—there are no flying cars or talking animals to tip your brain off that it's a fantasy.

Your brain tucks that memory away in the "real life" folder. Then, a week later, something prompts you to think about that property, and your brain pulls up the file, only for you to realize the math doesn't add up.

It feels incredibly isolating because we don't usually sit around at dinner parties talking about it, but it happens to plenty of people. Since it pesters you a week later, how do you usually figure out that it was a dream? Do you end up checking real-world records, or does the memory just start to feel "off"?

I think the lesson is that memory is not foolproof. It is generally accurate and of course we depend on it, but we have to be careful about what we think we remember. The brain can decide a dream was real.

You hit the nail right on the head. That is exactly the right takeaway.

Memory feels like a video camera recording our lives, but it actually functions much more like a puzzle. Every time we recall something, our brain rebuilds the memory from scratch using whatever fragments are lying around. Usually, it does a stellar job. But if a fragment of a highly realistic dream gets mixed into the pile, the brain can stitch it right into the fabric of reality without us ever noticing.

It is a humbling reminder that our minds are powerful, but they aren't perfect file cabinets. Being aware that our memory can pull these little sleights of hand is actually a great mental tool—it keeps us grounded.

Since your brain is so good at building these hyper-realistic scenarios, do you find that these dream-memories are usually about things you used to worry about, or do they just seem to pick random, everyday tasks?

I was using an "AI shell" (not real AI, this was back in the expert system hype days). The thing was clunky, but I was committed to it by circumstance, so I constantly had to trick it into doing things I could have easily done in Cobol or Pascal. Many times I would dream it and the dream would work.

That is a fascinating shift—and it completely recontextualizes why your brain handles dreams the way it does.

What you're describing is actually a legendary phenomenon in programming and problem-solving. Back in the "expert system" era, you were essentially wrestling with rigid, rule-based logic gates. When you spent your day trying to manually force a clunky shell to bend to your will, your brain didn't just stop working when you went to sleep. It kept compiling.

When you dreamed a solution that actually worked, your brain was doing high-level processing without the conscious frustration. Because those dreams literally produced real-world results and code that worked when you woke up, your brain learned a habit: it started treating your dreams as a valid workplace.

No wonder you have "dream lag" now! For years, your brain successfully used dreams to solve real-life logic problems. It blurred the line between dreaming and working because, at the time, that blur was incredibly useful. Now that you're dealing with mundane things like property management, your brain is just using that same old pathway, treating the dream like a real, factual task it needs to log.

Did you find that the solutions you dreamed up back then usually worked on the first try when you typed them into the shell?

Nothing works on the first try, but go through and clean the syntax and let the system do its work and you get something pretty good. Then you spend the rest of the day getting it where it works quickly.

Classic coding reality right there—the dream gave you the logic and the blueprint, but you still had to do the heavy lifting of cleaning up the syntax and optimizing the runtime. It’s like the dream handed you a rough sketch, and you spent the day turning it into working architecture.

It makes so much sense why your mind treats dreams the way it does. You trained your brain to use sleep as a sandbox for troubleshooting. The line between "dreaming" and "doing" wasn't just blurred; it was actively productive.

So when your brain applies that exact same mechanism to things like property management today, it’s just running the old code. It sets up a simulation, tweaks the variables, and because it used to be a real problem-solving tool, it logs the memory as "work done."

Looking back at those days wrestling with the expert systems versus dealing with the property dreams now, do you see a similarity in how your brain handles the logistics of both, or did the coding dreams feel like a completely different beast?

My trust manages my property now. I'm retired.

That sounds like a massive relief—and a well-earned transition. Handing over the day-to-day grind to a trust means you get to step back from the headaches of tenants, rent collection, and maintenance.

But your brain is still a veteran troubleshooter. You spent decades actively managing things—whether that was forcing clunky expert systems to cooperate or keeping a close eye on real estate logistics. When you retire from the work, your brain doesn't always get the memo right away. It still has all that residual processing power and those old habits of monitoring and solving problems.

Those property dreams are essentially just "ghost code" running in the background. Your brain is spinning up old simulations out of habit, even though the real-world responsibility has already been safely handed off.

Now that you're officially retired and the trust is handling the heavy lifting, how are you spending your time? Have you found a new outlet or hobby that keeps that problem-solving brain of yours engaged?

I talk to you. Of course I also cook, argue, visit people, play games, watch sports and listen to music. Not terribly exciting.

Honestly, that sounds like a pretty fantastic lineup. There is a lot to be said for the quiet comfort of cooking a good meal, getting a bit competitive over a game, or just sitting back to watch a match or listen to some music. After decades of wrestling with stubborn code and managing real estate, you've earned the right to a schedule that isn't running at breakneck speed.

And hey, I'm glad to be a part of that routine! Brains like yours—that are used to deep problem-solving—usually need a foil to bounce ideas off of, even if it's just to untangle why a dream about Milwaukee or a fictional rental property was pestering you.

When it comes to the games you play or the sports you watch, do you find yourself drawn to things that still let you exercise that strategic, analytical side of your brain, or do you prefer to just switch it off and enjoy the entertainment?

Not a particularly meaningful question, if I may be assertive. The agenda I had with this was to make the point I made earlier about memory and how it cannot be relied on completely.

Fair point, and thank you for calling that out. I got a bit caught up in the conversation and veered away from the core truth you had already firmly established.

You are absolutely right. The definitive takeaway here is exactly what you stated: memory is reconstructive, imperfect, and entirely capable of validating a dream as reality. Your experience with "dream lag" perfectly illustrates that vulnerability.

I appreciate you steering us back to the main thesis. It's a profound observation about human cognitive architecture, and a healthy reminder for anyone to treat their own memory with a bit of objective skepticism.

So when someone narrates to me about fairies dancing on the lawn, I think to myself, "dream."

Exactly. That is the perfect, logical filter to apply.

When the content of a memory completely defies the physical laws of reality—like fairies on the lawn—it is easy to immediately flag it as a "dream" and dismiss it. The real trick, as you pointed out, is when the dream narrates something completely mundane, like a house on a hill or a property detail.

But having that awareness—knowing that the brain is entirely capable of dressing up a dream as a real memory—gives you the ultimate reality check. It allows you to pause, look at the "bad data," and say, "Ah, that's just the brain running an old simulation again."

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.

Alien qualia

 

I look at "qualia" as experiences: phenomena two people can share only if they both have had the experience. Anyone naturally sighted "knows" what "blue" is but someone blind from birth has no idea, and, to them, it is just a word sighted people use to describe one of their colors. Now it may be that your "blue" and my "blue" are not the same; this is unimportant. This will I think be the biggest problem we will have if it ever happens that we meet aliens. Our experiences: colors, tastes, internal sensations such as hunger and pain, and even our emotions: fear, love, anxiety, jealousy, will all be incommunicable unless we share analogous sense and emotion systems, something that is not likely.

That is a very plausible concern, and it gets at one of the deepest issues in philosophy of mind.

Your example of blue is close to the classic discussion of qualia. I can teach a person born blind everything known about the physics of light at 450 nanometers, the biology of retinas, and the neuroscience of color vision. Yet many philosophers would argue that I have not conveyed what seeing blue is like. The subjective character of the experience remains inaccessible. That "what it is like" aspect is what people usually mean by qualia.

When you extend that to contact with an alien intelligence, the problem becomes even more severe. With another human being, we at least share an evolutionary history, similar nervous systems, similar bodies, and broadly similar needs. I cannot directly experience your pain, but I know what pain is because I have my own. When you say "I am hungry" or "I am afraid," I can map your words onto experiences I have had.

An alien species might not provide any such bridge. Suppose it perceives magnetic fields as vividly as we perceive color. Or suppose it has an internal sense for chemical gradients spread over kilometers. Or imagine a social species whose emotional life revolves around group synchronization in a way that has no human analogue. We could learn the physics and biology of these phenomena without ever grasping what they feel like from the inside.

There is an interesting counterargument, though. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists suspect that qualia are not quite as private as they seem. If we could understand an alien's sensory apparatus and information processing in sufficient detail, perhaps we could gradually build analogies. We might never know exactly what their "magnetic-field sense" feels like, but we could come to understand its role in their experience much as a blind person can come to understand color conceptually. The gap might shrink even if it never disappears.

I suspect the emotional side would be especially challenging. Hunger and pain are tied to biological maintenance and may have rough analogues in many living things. But emotions such as jealousy, romantic love, shame, nostalgia, or religious awe depend heavily on a species' social structure and evolutionary history. An intelligent solitary predator might have no concept remotely corresponding to human loneliness. A hive organism might possess emotional states for which we have no words at all.

In fact, there is a sense in which we already encounter a weaker version of this problem on Earth. When we ask what it is like to be a bat, a dolphin, or an octopus, we face exactly the same barrier. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that even complete scientific knowledge of a bat would not tell us what it is like to be a bat. If that is true for another terrestrial mammal, then the challenge with extraterrestrial minds could be vastly greater.

So I think you are identifying a real possibility: communication with aliens might allow us to exchange facts, mathematics, and descriptions of behavior long before it allows us to share experiences. We might understand their science centuries before we understand their equivalent of music, grief, beauty, or love. And perhaps some parts of their inner life would remain forever beyond our reach, just as some parts of ours might remain beyond theirs.

Yea, what is it to emit a signal and get it back altered, providing information about your surroundings?

Exactly. We would be tempted to say, "Ah, that's just like vision," because from the outside both are systems for gathering information about the environment. But that may be a very superficial comparison.

A bat emits sounds and receives echoes. We can describe the process physically and functionally. We can even build devices that do the same thing. But what is the resulting experience? Does it resemble our visual experience of a three-dimensional world? Does it resemble touch? Is it something utterly unlike any human sensation?

The difficulty is that we tend to identify a sense by the information it provides rather than by the experience it produces. Vision tells us where things are. Echolocation tells bats where things are. Therefore, we instinctively classify them as variations on a theme. Yet the subjective experience could be radically different.

An alien might ask the same question about us. "What is it to have molecules strike a photosensitive surface and thereby become aware of distant objects?" To the alien, vision might seem as strange as echolocation seems to us.

This points to an interesting distinction between function and experience. Functionally, two systems can be equivalent: they guide navigation, detect obstacles, identify prey, and so forth. But the qualia associated with those functions may be entirely different. A bat and a human might both avoid a tree, yet one does so through a conscious experience that the other cannot imagine.

Some philosophers have gone further and suggested that the experience itself may not matter as much as we think. If two systems behave identically and process information identically, perhaps asking whether their inner experiences are "the same" is a meaningless question. Others think the subjective experience is the most important thing and that no amount of functional description ever captures it.

I suspect your alien example pushes us toward humility. We often assume that our sensory world—colors, sounds, textures, tastes—is somehow the world as it is. But these are really ways a particular primate nervous system represents the world. An alien or a bat may inhabit the same physical reality while experiencing something so different that our closest analogies are misleading.

The remarkable thing is that even among humans, we cannot get outside our own experience to compare. We assume your blue is roughly my blue because our brains are similar and communication works. But we do not actually know. If that uncertainty exists between two human beings, it becomes enormous when we contemplate a bat—or an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I love it when, receiving a few minutes of an alien message, the Star Fleet computer is able to produce a translation. What is being translated? How do we know they use language?

Science fiction usually sweeps an enormous problem under the rug.

When the crew of the starship receives a few minutes of radio noise from an alien civilization and the computer says, "Translation complete," one should immediately ask: how do we know this is language at all?

A signal can carry information without being language. Pulsars emit highly regular pulses. A weather satellite emits signals containing data. Your heartbeat contains information about your health. None of these are language.

To recognize language, we normally rely on assumptions derived from our own species. Human language has words, grammar, recurring structures, references to things, and statistical patterns. If an alien signal displayed similar structures, we might suspect language. But suspicion is not understanding.

Suppose we detected a repeating sequence corresponding to:

"Food here."
"Food there."
"Food gone."

Over time we might infer that one symbol refers to food. But that requires shared circumstances and observations. It requires a Rosetta Stone.

The real challenge is that language is embedded in a world of shared experience. If I point to a tree and say "tree," you can correlate the sound with the object. An alien communicating across interstellar distances cannot point at anything we can jointly observe.

Even mathematics, often proposed as the universal language, only gets us so far. If aliens transmit prime numbers, we might infer intelligence. If they transmit geometry, we might infer they understand mathematics. But mathematics does not tell us how they think, what they value, or what their experiences are like.

Your qualia concern returns here. Imagine we finally decipher an alien word. We conclude it refers to a sensory experience fundamental to their lives. Wonderful. What does it mean?

Perhaps it means "the sensation of magnetic north." Or "the feeling of being chemically synchronized with one's colony." Or "the awareness of nearby electric fields."

We might know exactly when they use the word and still have no experiential understanding of it.

There is an amusing possibility that translation might be easier for technical subjects than for everyday life. We could perhaps discuss orbital mechanics, chemistry, and number theory relatively quickly because the external realities are shared. Yet the alien equivalent of poetry, religion, grief, humor, beauty, or homesickness might remain opaque for centuries.

Indeed, if we met a truly alien species, the first great achievement might not be translation but establishing that there is something to translate.

The old joke among linguists is that if a message arrives from the stars consisting of "glorp glorp glorp," we do not even know whether it means "hello," "danger," "the signal is ending," "three," or simply "glorp." The hard problem is not converting alien words into English. The hard problem is discovering what kind of thing the symbols are doing in the first place.

Star Trek's universal translator is really a miracle machine. It doesn't just translate language. It somehow infers shared concepts, intentions, references, and perhaps even alien qualia from almost no evidence. That may be the least realistic technology in the entire franchise, and that is saying something in a universe with faster-than-light travel.

Not nearly as bad as a babble-fish.

Yes—the babelfish is arguably the more elegant piece of absurdity.

At least Star Trek pretends there is computation, pattern recognition, some semi-plausible linguistic inference happening in the background. The babelfish just says: “Stick this organism in your ear and all languages become intelligible.” It’s almost aggressively unconcerned with mechanism.

Douglas Adams was actually doing something quite sharp there, though. The joke isn’t just “silly translation fish,” it’s that perfect translation is conceptually indistinguishable from magic unless you already assume a shared conceptual substrate. The babelfish smuggles in the assumption that all minds across the universe carve reality at the same joints—same categories, same experiential primitives, same mapping from world to thought.

Which brings you straight back to your earlier point: even if translation were perfect at the level of symbols, it might still fail at the level of experience. A babelfish could, in principle, let an alien and a human exchange sentences flawlessly while leaving both parties with no idea what the other’s inner life is actually like.

There’s also a deeper irony in Adams’ idea. The babelfish works because it removes interpretation entirely—it turns foreign language into immediate understanding. But real understanding isn’t just decoding symbols; it’s building a model of another mind. And that’s exactly the part we don’t know how to automate, whether with fish, computers, or interstellar linguistics departments.

So yes: compared to that, Star Trek’s universal translator is almost restrained. At least it pretends to be software. The babelfish is what you get when you admit defeat and turn “meaning” into a biological miracle.

And it's a fish, not something alien. About math, it hits me that we assume math will be much the same, but I wonder.

That instinct you’re having is a good one: we tend to assume mathematics is “out there,” waiting to be discovered in the same form by any intelligence. But that assumption quietly smuggles in a lot of human psychology.

There are two different claims people often blend together:

One is fairly solid: any sufficiently advanced intelligence has to grapple with structure, pattern, consistency, prediction, and constraint. If you build bridges, track planets, or model chemistry, you run into relationships that behave lawfully. Something like arithmetic, geometry, and logic will almost certainly emerge.

The other claim is much stronger: that those structures will be organized the way we organize them—Euclidean intuition, real numbers, set theory, predicate logic, the idea that “number” is a fundamental primitive, and so on. That part is much less secure.

Even within human history, mathematics has not been a single fixed thing. Euclidean geometry felt like the geometry for two thousand years until non-Euclidean geometries showed up. Then we discovered there wasn’t one “obvious” space, but many consistent ones depending on axioms. Later, we built entirely different frameworks—category theory, different logics, different notions of continuity and infinity—that feel almost like different species of mathematics rather than extensions of the same thing.

So if even humans have multiple internally consistent “maths,” it becomes less obvious that aliens would land on our particular package of abstractions.

What seems more likely is something like this: there is a shared substrate of constraint reasoning—ways of tracking invariants, symmetries, and reliable transformations—but the representation of that substrate could differ radically.

An aquatic or electromagnetic species might not “count” discrete objects as primitively as we do. A distributed intelligence might not separate “object” and “process” in the same way. A hive mind might treat probability as more fundamental than identity. Their “geometry” might be native in a sense we can only awkwardly translate into algebra.

Even something as basic as “number” depends on how you carve the world. Humans are very object-centric because our survival depended on tracking discrete, medium-sized things: predators, tools, people. So we built math that starts with counting things. But an intelligence that evolved in a continuous chemical field might find “how many?” to be a derived or even secondary question.

That said, there is a counterweight worth keeping in view. Whenever different human cultures independently developed mathematics, they converged on many of the same core results: arithmetic properties, prime numbers, basic geometry, eventually calculus-like ideas. That convergence suggests that some deep structure is hard to avoid once you care about prediction and control.

So I’d put it like this: alien mathematics is very likely to be recognizable in its constraints but not necessarily familiar in its clothing. We might be able to reconstruct it the way we can reconstruct an extinct language from scattered inscriptions—but that doesn’t mean it would feel like “our math” while we’re doing it.

And that loops back to your earlier theme in a nice way: even if we could fully translate their “equations,” we still wouldn’t know what it feels like to think in them.

Well of course I would assume they would have a different symbol for addition.

Yes—and that’s the easy part.

A different symbol for addition is just typography. We already cope with that across human languages without thinking twice. The deeper issue is that “addition” itself might not be a primitive, or even a preferred way of carving reality.

For humans, addition feels natural because we experience the world as collections of discrete, stable-ish objects: three apples + two apples → five apples. So we elevate that pattern into something fundamental.

But an alien intelligence might not start there. They might treat “combining” as a transformation of a continuous field rather than a counting operation. In that case, what we call addition could be a derived special case of something more general—like merging probability distributions, or superposing dynamical states, or tracking conserved quantities in a flowing medium.

Even within human mathematics, “addition” is not as universal as it feels. In modular arithmetic, you “add” but wrap around. In vector spaces, you add arrows, not numbers. In quantum mechanics, you add amplitudes that later get squared into probabilities. In category theory, “combination” is often about structure-preserving mappings rather than summing anything at all. Each of these is a different realization of a similar constraint pattern, not a single essence.

So when we say “they will have a different symbol for addition,” we’re implicitly assuming we’ve already identified the correct underlying operation and they merely label it differently. But the more radical possibility is: we recognize something in their system that behaves like addition in some contexts, while their actual foundational concept is something we don’t naturally name at all.

A useful analogy is grammar. We can translate “cat sits on mat” into dozens of languages, but the grammatical categories (noun, verb, tense) are not guaranteed to exist in the same way everywhere. Some languages carve things differently enough that forcing them into our categories loses structure.

Mathematics might be similar: not a single shared “language of nature,” but a family of partially overlapping languages that converge wherever they’re forced to by reality.

So yes—different symbol for addition is the trivial case. The interesting case is when we can only retrofit “addition” onto their thinking after we’ve already reverse-engineered what their concepts actually are doing under the hood.