Pigs might fry.

I'm vegetarian. I find it amusing and irking that many meat-eaters are squeamish about where their food comes from. How about this for an idea:

Imagine a pig that has electrodes connected permanently to the pleasure centres in its brain. It is regularly - perhaps constantly - zapped in these centres to create a state of constant bliss. At the same time it is given a permanent local anaesthetic to its behind from where slices of flesh can be taken. Over time these wounds would heal and allow for a rotation of slices of flesh to be taken. To go further than taking slices of flesh, e.g. taking off a limb, would be too far and would perhaps conflict with the amount of pleasure being fed artificially.

The outcome of this scenario is a blissfully happy pig that would die a "natural" death in due course and some tasty meat obtained without guilt. I don't see any logical problem with it although it does seem a little Frankensteinian.

Any meat eaters want to take that on?

Socrates is immortal yet how many photos of him are there on Facebook?

I hate all men; Socrates is a man; therefore I hate Socrates. I’m reading Bettany Hughes’s excellent book The Hemlock Cup at the moment and thoroughly enjoying it I am. It’s a wonderful portrayal of Athens and this period in Greek history as well as an overview of what we know about this important man. I get the impression I would not have liked Socrates too much, but there’s no taking away his impact and the differentness he exhibited that has made him one of the fathers of modern thought.

As is fairly normal for me I have been thinking quite philosophically recently. My latest theme has been the philosophy of numbers and whether our perception of what numbers are is just a representation of the world similar to our perception of light etc. The implication is that the universe doesn’t inherently adhere to mathematical principles (or to be more accurate the Universe isn’t described accurately by our concept of what we call Mathematics). It’s difficult to imagine a universe that doesn’t make the number one important – or even if there’s such a thing as a number one. Quantum Mechanics draws us nearer and nearer to the idea that nothing is “real” and only probabilistic representations make any sense to us as human beings. Our consciousnesses are hardwired to perceive the world in order to make the best chance of survival and procreation (according to our understanding of Evolution at least) so it wouldn’t make sense for us to see the world as it truly is if it didn’t help us survive. Perhaps at an early stage of evolution there were creatures that could perceive the world in a more true manner. They would soon be eaten by others though because they probably couldn’t see as well as others (see theory of Colour Constancy).

In my limited understanding (I haven’t even read this (link) yet!) we have a concept of One that’s a mathematical notion. Another concept of One is a categorical One. If I say that there’s “one book on the table” I’m not expressing a mathematical truth, but simply that I construct the idea that there’s One thing on the table and it happens to be a book. This categorical One still fails in the light of Quantum Mechanics however since that book doesn’t really exist either. The atoms at the edges of the book are interacting with the table atoms and the air atoms never mind the fact that each atom has only a probability of existing in the first place. Of course this has no bearing on our understanding because we can hold the book and Count it and for practical purposes it can be said to be one book, however the idea of categorising something material ought to take into consideration the underlying “truth” of its existence, shouldn’t it? Is this another example of our Evolutionary-built perceptions “hiding” the true nature from us?

I’m sure I’m missing a lot with this amateurish analysis, but I do think there’s something to the idea that Maths might not undercut everything we perceive in the Universe. The Pythagoreans are a cultish group centered around the character (real or not) of Pythagoras and had a quite large influence on Plato and therefore the rest of Western Philosophy at some point. The idea of the importance of numbers was a key tenet of their beliefs (one that I shared until quite recently – vegetarianism being another one that I still do). But what if they were wrong? Has Philosophy been blind to the truth about numbers since antiquity?

These ideas fit in with my overall thought at the moment that humanity is on the cusp of a huge discovery in physics or maths that will undercut everything that has gone before (similar to Einstein, but even more fundamental). It’s quite likely that the majority of humans will simply not be able to understand the new ideas because the concepts will likely begin to chip away at the veneer of Evolutionary-built perception that humans have evolved over millions of years. I hope that I am alive to see the change whether I can understand it or not.

While we’re on the subject of numbers it was fascinating to me to discover today that there are approximately 36,000,000,000 photos uploaded to Facebook every month! This is simply staggering! Flickr only gets about 130,000,000 which is just insignificant in the shadow of Facebook’s quantity. Surely at some point Facebook’s data will become too large to manage? I know they have some very clever and nice architecture that’s scalable and flexible, but what is going to give first: the Internet’s architecture, Facebook’s ExaBytes of data or each individual’s ability to generate that much data!