Thinking of brother Richard Ramirez since it's his birthday today, at the last one in 2012 he was still among us, even by then we were already out of contact though, having corresponded for a while previously. He was, and is, a brother in Satan, one of us.
I'll be passing up this year's FIBO, didn't find anyone to accompany me and I can't take my own photos since I won't have a hand free when climbing some ropes or something, and photos where I have my hands free would be boring, boring shit and I don't do those.
Instead I'll be riding to Amsterdam later in April, today I rode downtown to have my ticket printed out.
Right now it's still freezing although the days are getting noticeably longer already, and lots of spring flowers are already blooming despite the bitterly frosty nights, even daffodils.
Myself I still feel in hibernation mode though and haven't been doing much besides my obligatory workouts lately. And of course, still thinking about the same things, searching for answers at the frontlines of the unknown.
I came to talk about it with a guy at the gym lately and was shocked to find that he's in the materialist camp, shocked even more so since this gentleman is 70 years old, and he seriously believes after bodily death there will be nothing - how can he live with this?! We didn't get into this much further, and this may in part answer it - they avoid the subject. At least I got to tell him that each atom consists of 99.99% empty space.
Although he didn't seem to have trouble grasping this idea, apparently it meant nothing to him. He wasn't dull at all,he then even asked me about the size of the universe and I told him that it's unknown, that science can only talk about the known universe, because since the universe is about 13.7 billion years old the utmost distance we can see is 13.7 billion light years out, everything beyond that is shielded from us by a sort of event horizon because any light from further out can't have reached us yet. Not to mention that actually we can't even tell what's out there inside this event horizon, at least not what's there right now - we can only tell what was there in the past; in case of things near the event horizon what things looked like 13.7 billion years ago.
It is estimated that the entire (unknown) universe is many times larger than the known part.
It's sad that these things seem so off-putting to most people, even the brighter ones. Maybe they dislike having their minds boggled and prefer to move back to some down-to-earth topics instead.
I'm sure I've said this before, but even though I can acknowledge feeling helpless in the face of the overwhelmingly vast unknown that won't yield any answers, wrestling the unknowable and unimaginable without hope to pry any insights from it - isn't it still far worse to give up and resign to the idea that there can't be any answers and that whatever we do is, and has been from the moment of our birth, been doomed to be perfectly meaningless and in vain?!
I still remember a discussion I had with someone years ago when it puzzled me to no end that I couldn't make them understand what I meant by saying a person who could see only one color, say blue, would be unable to know the color blue. The guy I discussed with even got really upset about it and insisted it were like saying a blind person wouldn't know blindness.
Well, in fact the latter may even be true to some extent, at least if the person were blind from birth. They may know blindness in the sense that they'll be aware of lacking a certain ability that most people have to navigate through life. Through communication with those people, the blind person knows that these people can see while the person herself cannot - in this sense the person would know blindness to some extent, but not to the full extent a person who previously could see would know it!
And this is the crucial point: the person born blind wouldn't have known sight, and knowing sight is necessary to fully comprehend the meaning of blindness.
But in a person born blind, the brain regions normally used for processing vision don't develop to do just this since there's no input from the eyes, so the brain will use them for other things instead. I imagine it must be very much like we can't imagine the electromagnetic sense of a shark. A shark possesses organs called ampullae of Lorenzini, they are in little pores covering the shark's nose and face, and with these he can sense small electric fields generated by other animals' muscles and heartbeat. Yes, a shark can sense your heartbeat. I love sharks and I know a lot about them, but even I can't imagine what it would be like to actually perceive in this way, I'm lacking the organs for it.
Or think of the heat pits of a snake, another sense organ that humans don't have. The snake can sense the body heat of a warmblooded animal, which the snake uses to find prey. You may say, oh at least this we can easily simulate using a thermal camera that can see infrared - but no, that's not the same thing! Of course, everyone has seen those rainbow color images where reds and yellows indicate a warm body while the cooler surroundings are colored blue. But that's not what the snake "sees", because the snake doesn't "see" it at all! The snake has eyes to see, but what the heat pits do is something different than seeing.
Our specialized camera can translate this heat image for us into visible colors, so we can use our sense of vision for a sense that we lack. I'm sure the snake does not see the mouse in rainbow colors superimposed over his normal vision!
Back to my previous example of monochromatic vision. Here's a pic of me holding a little shark figure:
Now the same image in monochrome blue. You can see that in this one, the shark appears to have the same color as my hand.
Here it is once more in black and white, and below in four different monochrome versions.
Alright, now as you imagine you were able to see only the single color blue, no other colors, just as in the monochrome blue version - it's easy to see that all of the images above would appear perfectly identical to you! You could see no other color but blue, but you wouldn't know what blue is because you had no comparison. Seeing only one color would be the same as seeing none at all, i.e. seeing only black and white; with no other colors you'd have no concept of color at all. If I asked you which of these images is blue you wouldn't be able to tell because they'd look each the same to you!
