The Dream Merchant

READER NOTE: to see posts sooner, be sure to check out our new blogsite at Steemit.

There once was a man with incredible insight into fools. Douglas Adams noted in his book, "Mostly Harmless," that "[a] common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

Someone else, whose name is quite difficult to find said, "Who is the greater fool? The fool or the fool who follows him?"

I have stated on several occasions that Albert Einstein was a complete idiot, but by the common wisdom, we must admit that Stephen Hawking was an even greater idiot for blindly following Einstein. The incredible hero worship surrounding Hawking's death is, or would be amusing if it weren't so foolish.

Imagine, if you will, that once upon a time, there was nothing. No, not empty space, just...um, Nothing. In the center of Nothing was an infinitely tiny, infinitely hot, inifinitely dense balloon that just all the sudden blew itself up. Keep in mind that despite having all these "infinite" PHYSICAL characteristics, it was as much Nothing as the Nothing it didn't inhabit, and like all balloons I've ever seen, it blew itself up with Nothing to become Something (i.e. - the Universe).

This balloon blew itself up between 13 and 14 billion years ago, and we have spent an astronomical amount of money trying to see the light from this event, even though no one seems to know how we got in front of the light so we could be in position to see it. And since we don't seem to be able to see it, then there must have been a celestial Dark Ages where no light existed, even though it existed when the balloon blew itself up, and it existed after the Dark Ages.

Now, this Balloon is floating somewhere in the middle of Nothing, and there are possibly many other balloons around it, though the only proof of that is some numerical wizardry performed by Einstein and Hawking. There are three possibilities for this Balloon: k=1; k=0, and k=-1. In human speak, this translates to a balloon that will expand forever, one that remain exactly as it is forever, and one that is/will contract back to Nothing and presumably blow itself back up again. Inside this balloon, there are things we can't explain without resorting to electricity and magnetism, so the scientidiots invented Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Dark Matter because galaxies don't spin the way Hawking's numbers do, and Dark Energy because scientidiots think the balloon is expanding faster the further away it gets from Earth.

Never mind that both of these things have been completely debunked by their own tools in the past three years.

Now, since the Universe doesn't use electricity and magnetism, unlike every piece of technology humankind has devised, we apparently need Black Holes. Now, you may not know this, but there are four kinds of Black Holes, two of which are named after Stephen Hawking, not because he found them, but because he manipulated magical symbols, glyphs and ciphers in a way no one else had thought to do.

These Black Holes are "Settled Science," even though there is no such thing, and despite the fact that the "evidence" we have for them is the radiation they give off, even though their gravity is infinite and they absorb everything around them, including all radiation of every kind. Also, ignore the fact that Black Hole calculations require assuming only ONE MASS in the entire Universe. I don't know about you, but I do know I exist and I am standing on a rock, so that is at least two masses I am fairly sure about.

These scientidiots didn't like the fact that you can't divide something by nothing, so they called it infinity, which is not a number. No problem, since the square-root of -1 is "i", right? If you get the impression that Cosmology is inventing the rules of the game as you go along to ensure that you win, you're getting the right idea.

Yes, this Hawking feller was a genius, I tell ya. He could explain gravity using gravity. He could conjure infinity out of nothing. He could create Black Holes where none existed.

Don't get me wrong. Hawking managed to survive 50 years longer than other scientidiots ever though he would with his disease, and he managed to befuddle so many people with his wizarding skills that he finagled a fairly comfortable lifestyle for himself and breathless sainthood upon his death. I can respect a good scam, while condemning the desire and ability to scam so many gullible people.

Hawking managed to turn Dark Ages, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Holes into money, and that's no small feat. He was able to take circular arguments and make them look like they led somewhere. He was able to conjure Universes out of Nothing and make it seem plausible. Plausible, that is, until you start picking at the scabs and looking at the festering assumptions underneath.

Yes, Stephen Hawking was a genius, all right, but not in the way most people think of him. He was a Master Scientidiot, and we can concede a certain amount of congratulations for his skill at bamboozling. As someone put it to me years ago, there are bullshitters and bullshit artists. Hawking was most certainly in the latter category.

And he did it by overcoming a fairly significant handicap, but one has to wonder how much leeway he was given for that one fact.

Mathematical wizardry has its place in telling us what is possible, but at some point you have to look up from the ciphering and see what is probable. I will grant that looking up was not an easy task for Hawking, but at some point in his 50-year career as a scientidiot, one imagines that he should have tried.

It is not enough to say you follow a greater fool. Reality, no matter how much we try, is an immutable fact that cannot be ciphered away, nor can facts be created by books full of dancing symbols.

Maps are useful tools, when they are correct, but they can also lead you off a cliff if you don't look up to check reality once in a while.

Hawking, like Einstein before him, was a map-maker who got carried away with his fanciful designs. He forgot to check the lay of the land once in a while, and for that he can be faulted without diminishing the artistry of his skills. After all, Picasso never called himself a portrait artist, and to their credit, neither did the glitterati.

Let's give Hawking credit for what he achieved, but let's be a little less breathless and gullible about what his achievements actually were.

Einstein Is A Senile Old Fart

Ugh!  I get so tired of Corporate Science ramming complete fiction down our throats.  Even worse is the way we "lay people" just swallow it and move along.  No one ever stops to say, "Hey!  Wait a minute..."

The thing is we are all conned into thinking we can't handle such lofty thoughts as General and Special Relativity, and that we can't rise to the Olympian heights of Einstein and Hawking.

The fact of the matter is, these guys are just making this shit up in order to sound like they know what they are talking about.  Honestly!  They have no more idea than you or me how the Universe works, so they cover their ignorance in meaningless symbols and sell it to us as Life, the Universe and Everything, so they can pocket the grant money and Nobel Prizes for...well, nothing.  Literally.

Bear with me for a few minutes, and I will prove that you are smarter than Einstein and Hawking combined!  I'll even throw in Neil deGrasse Tyson just to up the ante a bit.  This will require a tiny bit of thinking, but I promise it won't hurt, and that crashing sound will be all the rubbish you learned in school collapsing to the ground.  When we are done, you can read this article and laugh out loud at the ignorance behind it, just like I did.

1. Time
OK, this is the hardest part of the whole thing.  Right now, without thinking about it, point in the direction of Time.  Got it?

Now, which way did you point?  Ah, see the problem?  Time isn't a dimension.  It's a concept.  It has not existence in reality.  We just made it up by dividing all the various cycles in our world into small pieces so that we could all be late for our appointments.  A second is the average length of a human heart beat.  An hour is 1/24th of the Earth's rotation.  A month is one orbit of the Moon around the Earth.  A year is one orbit around the Sun.  A Great Year is one precession of the Earth's poles (~24,000 years).  The only thing important to the Universe is that effect always follows cause.  That's not Time, the way we think of it, because there is no standard amount of waiting between cause and effect without some reference system, such as the human heart beat.

2. Space
Space is nothing more than a set of coordinates.  It is not tangible, can not be rippled, and it has no relation to time other than we measure how many heart beats it takes to get from one point to another.  Space is defined as six discrete points on 3 axes: x, y and z.  Why five points?  Well, in order to define the location of an object, we need six references: we need an object, an observer, two x points left and right of the object, and two y points above and below the object.  Since there are only three spacial dimensions, why do we need six points?  Good question.

You need an object to measure (point one).  You need an observer (point two).  Together, these two points give us the z axis.  Then, you need reference points in order to define x and y.  These points define an imaginary surface, or plane, on which to project a scale (inches, feet, meters, kilometers, etc.).  Notice that none of this involves time, since time has nothing to do with locating something in space.

Since space is nothing more than a set of coordinates used to local objects in reference to an observer, it has no physical existence.  It is not a plasma, liquid, gas or solid.  It can not be rippled, waved or bent.  It is just a set of numbers so I can find, or tell you how to find, an object.

3. Gravity
The best way to think of gravity is static electricity.  Objects stick to the face of the Earth because, like dipole magnets, opposites attract.  The positive Earth attracts out negative body to it's center.  We stop because the the bonds between the atoms of the Earth's surface repel the bonds between the atoms of our bodies.  So we are stuck to the surface like socks are to your shirt in the dryer.  If we could change the polarity of the Earth, everything would fly off of it, rather than stick to it.

Most importantly, there is no gravitational constant.  Sure, on Earth gravity always works at 32 feet/second squared, but it changed when you go into orbit, or the Moon, or Mars, or the Sun.  To force Earth normal on the entire Universe is...well, ridiculous.

Finally, gravity is 20 billion times weaker than the Weak Nuclear Force (see below), so it has little or no effect on the structure and function of the Universe.

4. Forces of Nature
Everything in the Universe is some manifestation of electricity.  All objects interact using one of more of the Four Natural Forces: 1) Electro-Magnetic, 2) Strong Nuclear, 3) Weak Nuclear, and 4) Gravitation.  Given what we already know about gravity, we can probably eliminate this one and put all the effects of it under #1.  Of the remaining three, they guide the way all particles in the Universe interact, from the atomic level to the super-galactic level.  They are observable at every scale, and can be reproduced in any laboratory with the right tools.

No need for CERN, LIGO or any of these other multi-billion dollar BOHICA machines whose results can never be verified because there are no other machines to duplicate the results (e.g. it ain't science).  From the quantum to the macro, everything works on the same principles.  The only difference between an atom and a galaxy is scale.

So, now we come to Black Holes.  These are conceptual things that do not exist, but were created to correct some of the many problems with Einstein's Relativity.  See, Einstein simplified a lot of things to make his formulas easier to solve.  In doing so, he made it impossible for his results to be scaled up to the Universe at large, and thus a lot of chewing gun and bailing wire had to be used to make it work.  Black Holes are a huge piece of chewing gum.

One of the biggest problems with Black Holes is one of the easiest and most obvious to see.  Hawking, Tyson and all their drinking buddies will tell you that the Universal speed limit is the speed of light, and the escape velocity from the surface/even horizon of a black hole is the speed of light.  But black holes are black because light can't escape.

Immedicately, they are in a bind.  Either light can escape because it is travelling the speed of light, or the speed of light is not constant in the Universe.  Either way, the entire foundation of General Relativity comes crashing down.  See the problem?

Instead of admitting this inherent contradiction, they cover it up with lots of mathematical mumbo-jumbo and a few $64 words and keep going, knowing that the educational system is so bad, no one will ever question this slight-of-hand.  Rather, what we get is a menagerie of black holes, from micro to super-massive, and folks like NASA claiming to have "found" 2.5 million of them.  For us smart folks, every time you read about a new black hole, just think to yourself, "Ah, another mystery they can't explain."  That's the purpose of black holes, really.  They just cover up mysteries with them so they don't have to do real work and can get billions in free money to investigate their own slight-of-hand.

All modern cosmology is little more than a bunch of magicians telling us they don't do "tricks."  It's "real magic" and by the way, we don't understand how it's done, so could you slip up a few billion to try and figure this out?

And by the way, you can prove the speed of light is not constant AND explain "gravitational lensing" with a very simple experiment in your kitchen.  Take a clear glass.  Fill it with water.  Take a spoon and put it in the glass.  Now look at it from the side.  See how the spoon looks bent?  You've just proved Einstein, Hawking, Tyson, and a whole bunch of other numbnuts wrong.

Don't you feel smart now?

A.I.: Asymetrical Intelligence

I recently made a little Saturday afternoon triple feature for myself composed of three movies I haven't seen for a long time.

The first was Demon Seed, about the wife of a computer scientist held hostage by her husband's creation.  The second was Colossus: The Forbin Project.  This long-forgotten but excellent flick has Dr. Forbin creating a military supercomputer that becomes self-aware, and eventually teams up with its Soviet counterpart to save humanity from itself.  The last was Lawnmower Man, which despite my dislike for Steven King and the ham-fisted acting and directing, has some interesting concepts.

In all fairness, I should note that most movies based on Steven King's stories do not have much to do with the original material.  Like Philip K. Dick, the stories provide little more than a jumping-off point.

The three films deal with the topic of artificial intelligence and serve as warnings that humanity, as usual, has no idea what it is doing.  While there are other great films on topic, such as the more recent Her, and the legendary 2001: A Space Odyssey,  I don't consider Spielberg's lame attempt to render Kubrick's A.I: Artificial Intelligence even worthy of the film stock it wasted, much less a commentary on topic.

At any rate, it is instructive to note that, since 1968 at least, people have been discussing A.I. and warning of its potential disaster for our species.  There are very few examples of this technology being treated in a benign manner.  From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to James Cameron's Terminator, the artistic media have nearly unanimously raised red flags over the head-long rush to build artificial "minds."

In nearly every case, AI is portrayed as malevolent, even though the thought processes of the machines are coldly logical.  The machines, acting primarily on human instructions and good intents, always place humanity under siege in order to save us from ourselves, or in some lesser cases, out of pure dictatorial power lust.

The fact is that nearly every technology humans have created is at some point put to service of our baser desires.  Almost without fail, erotica and pornography are among the primary adopters of new tech.  From the sex temples of India and Guatemala, to the Roman frescoes and mosaics, to the printing press, photography, and now the internet and Virtual Reality, we infuse our technology with our most primal motivations.

One of the most recent public forays (is it fair to say boondoggle?) into AI was a Microsoft project called Tay.  This self-taught "chat bot" took about a day or two to start spouting just about everything humans find reprehensible about themselves.  From racial epithets to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, this computerized avatar swiftly began to mirror her creators.  If this isn't warning enough for what we will find ahead, then there is little I or anyone else can do to stop the insanity.

One of the main points I picked up from the Bible was that humanity was supposedly created "in the image and likeness" of God.  If this is the case, then we should all live in dire dread of creating anything imbued with intelligence and self-determination.  Since humans would effectively be god to any self-aware creation, whether flesh or wires, then our own behavior towards our deities should serve as a case study for how our labors will respond to us.

Regardless of how we slice the issue, AI will ultimately be the creation of flawed humans, and will, by design, be reflections of our inner-most selves, both individually and collectively.  That we respond with our basest desires to our creations echoes the Biblical mating of angels with Men that required a global flood to clean up, so we are told.  Suddenly, such stories come into sharp focus and become plausible real events, which should give us great pause in our rush to apocalypse.

One thing is certain: given history and experience, there is little reason to suspect that true, self-aware AI would be either benign or benevolent.  Given humanity's predilection to unleashing horrors upon itself, it is nearly certain that AI would be the pinnacle of our collective stupidity.  If people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are warning us about AI, it is reasonable to think they would know of which they speak.  After all, they are most likely privy to developments of which we mere mortals can only speculate.  If nothing else, I find the videos of robot testing to be deeply disturbing.

About the moment we are lacing our collective fingers behind our heads and kicking our feet up on the desk in self-satisfaction is the moment we should be trembling at the power of our creativity.

I am reminded of one of the most profound lines in all of the Star Trek universe: "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean that we should do that thing."

Calling Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Victor Frankenstein.  Code Blue.  STAT