An early morning thunderstorm temporarily washes away the terrors of waking to an unfocused world. A tyranny of foxes.
Listening to the rain I think about two problems. Well trodden tracks, but still worth following.
1.
Imagine a single sphere spinning in an infinite space.
Would it be spinning if you were not observing it?
No. Motion only makes sense as something relative between points.
An observer is a point of reference.
A sphere has mass so is it moving relative to itself?
Even an imaginary sphere will have imaginary mass.
What if there are two infinite spaces each containing a rotating sphere?
Do they rotate relative to each other or is the idea of movement irrelevant?
Bishop Berkeley's tree. The tree must fall in relation to the other trees in the forest.
Without a conscious observer somewhere in the chain the idea of 'falling' is meaningless.
Yet the tree still falls because we infer other trees in the forest.
Dinosaurs did not die or live before there were conscious minds to use these terms. Yet clearly dinosaurs lived.
Consciousness pins down existence by setting it in a context of physical rules.
The sphere can only be said to spin if we observe it.
What would the Bishop make of quantum physics?
2.
I look at the chaos that is my bedroom.
There is an underlying order as these things have been placed that way and are soon to be packed up.
This is not the Cosmological argument.
A completely determined world seems to be instinctively true.
Free will seems instinctively true.
Acting as if there is choice is a mechanism for living in a fully determined world.
The enormous complexity within a single cell is determined.
The almost unimaginable complexity of assembled cells that form a body is determined.
Why stop there?
3. Are points one and two connected?
4. Who cares?
It is still raining and time for me to get up and pack my rucksack. I am going to Lancaster to see Kit and go out for a long walk if the weather still holds.
The virology lectures have become horribly complex and relly deserve hours of background reading. But skimming the surface is enough for me, so I shall carry on. Soon I will be off to Indonesia, so refreshing my Bahasa Indonesia is a priority and I will be listening to my tapes as I drive.
Thunder growls in the distance and it goes on raining.
PS. Do you know the Pandora virus?
http://www.nature.com/news/giant-viruses-open-pandora-s-box-1.13410