What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?
What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?
For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
The concept of emergence blows my mind.
We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.
Nothing within a cell is "alive", it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.
The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.
Kinda ties into your example :)
Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
How little food intake is enough to sustain extensive (physical) activity.
The little birds running on the beach with every wave, eating mini things. How can those be enough to sustain that much running? And it'll have to sustain them when they're not eating too.
A human can not eat for several days and still stay active. An incredible adaptation. I food conversion, storage, and priority dissolution in a complex system.
thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can't, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it's very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
It would have to be Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Such a beautiful proof that shakes mathematics to its core.
The science communicator Veritasium made a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
I first learned about it in Douglas Hofstaedter's masterpiece Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would've and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and... you know... die...
Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.
The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester).
Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that's half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that's the one I like.
Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.
This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it 'blows' the general case of minds.
Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don't). Sleep tight!
Alan Watts contextualizes our daily lives as the outer, "fine spray" at the edge of the big bang --still exploding. Planets "people-ing" and your daily schedule, relationships, accuisition of goods, etc. is just the complex late stage of the big bang explosion. The explosion is chaos but as time goes by order slips in and creates "complexity". This is all still an explosion.
Black holes and the uncertainty of what lies behind the event horizon. The possibility that inside a black hole, a whole new universe could exist without us ever knowing. When tripping through life taught me one thing, it is that many things can be seen as part of a huge fractal, and that view fits right into the interpretation that black holes are nothing else than universes in universes. After all, our big bang might just be another ordinary black hole, reaching critical mass.
Of course I can not prove it, but I love thinking about it.
Anarchism based on mutual respect and aid. It's truly beautiful.
I am focusing on the "blow my mind" part, rather than the "beautiful" part of your question, but I am certain many philosophically-minded people would consider the following "beautiful".
Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)" that you and most everyone you know are probably immoral or evil and you don't even realize it. It really affected my ideas of how to strive to live.
Here is a good video explaining the idea in detail, worth 30m of your time.
Symbiosis in nature….it always brings up feelings of awe and wonder for me. Especially in forests. The "wood-wide web" or "mycorrhizal network" being my latest obsession . The fact that the fungi joins the trees together through the roots to allow for exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. And then there’s the forest canopy, and the role it plays in keeping the forest healthy.
Trees are awesome.
Noether's Theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/noether.html
Fundamentally, it allows us to logically infer the conservation laws from the laws of motion of a given physical system using relatively simple math. It always applies, no matter if we're talking about massive systems or quantum ones.
You should have a look at Sebastian Lague's programming videos on Youtube. He models various things (eg: predator/prey/ant colonies, slime growth) using a few very simple rules. They're just beautiful. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A
On the subject of Conway's Game of Life, one of the YouTube videos that I always have to go back to now and then is a narrated video of the game being built from the ground up in APL. It's so wild to see the guy start with a simple expression and the algorithm taking shape as he adds to it step by step. By the end it looks like some magical incantation lol
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You can design and order custom genes online to make e-coli do different things.
Adjacent xkcd Https://xkcd.com/350
Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it's all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!
Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.
Heres another one. Michael behe's mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.
Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.
The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.
But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can't exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.
This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.
Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:
- Chaos theory
- Higher dimensions (>4)
- The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
- The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)
I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.
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