2007-07-17 - 10:47 a.m.
Okay, so this and my previous entry have been about physics, and were anyone to read it and to criticize my ideas for being wrong or fantasized or bloated, I ask you to please consider that I am just writing down what is in my head, and I am teaching myself brand new stuff without a teacher, a guided direction and without destination. I'm only recording down ideas and connections of thoughts.
In studying a little more (ref: previous entry) of the physics stuff, I automatically ran across an inevitable coincidence. The whole idea of spacetime and existence and changes in matter and energy leads to the idea of "causality". When I read this, the automatic connection was to the movie Matrix Reloaded, and the Merovingian French dude who kept blabbering about cause and effect, and the Keanu Reeves characted kept interfering with "choice" and the idea of choice undoing the principal of causality and the existence of a perfect system. This realization automatically makes Matrix Reloaded a much better movie for me than Matrix 1. The difference would be that the idea of human choice and the effects we can have on causality is a much better idea than human minds being trapped in a computer generated matrix with our bodies being somewhere else. That and Matrix Reloaded was a much more action-packed movie than Matrix 1.
So my point in this is that I think I get it now. Maybe from a different perspective than the movie intended, but I get it. The paradox would stem from the principle of physics that causality can predict absolutely everything that will happen in the future and what has happened in the past if a single instant in the existence of a certain system can be known 100% completely. Newtonian physics says every action has an equal but opposite reaction, and in that, we can decipher how the particles in the universe have always been predictable and always will be, if the whole system can be known at the same time for one moment. So if I pause time and learn the exact position and interaction of everything in the universe at that moment, I can extrapolate backwards and forwards the exact past and future of everything that has come to create that moment, anywhere in the universe. As the Merovingian guy would say, cause and effect. The problem of choice, then, would be that as humans, we think and we have choices and we affect the universe with our decisions, and our choices always have various ways they can go. Or so we assume. Remember, the interactions of the particles of the universe have always been predictable due to the principles explained by Newton and Einstein and other brilliant physicists. Causality says everything can be extrapolated backwards and forwards. So our decisions have already been predetermined, and the idea of choice is only our perception of what we are doing with the causal effectors of our past. So the "mother" of the Matrix was correct. We already made the choices in our future. It just takes an incredibly sophisticated mind to try and grasp every effect of the universe on a single decision to do what neo did, which was to understand it.
If our actions were truly "choice" and not predetermined effects of causality, then the idea of a perfect universe would be skewed. Our conscious actions would be anamolous within our universe. The problem is that it is hard to correlate particle physics and Newtonian laws of physical interaction (and true causality) with biological interactions that give rise to thoughts and consciousness. Particle interactions DO take place in neurons, and memory and action potentials are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, but is there an inherent ability within each of us to guide those particles one way or another in contradiction to what causality would predict to be the predetermined effect in the future, relative to a choice being made? Do we have the capability (and are we practicing it every day) to alter our microcosm in the universe by actually practicing choice? Does this make us "special" in any way, or are we contributing to a natural, and temporally restricted, function of the universe with such an ability? Or maybe the "mother" in the matrix was correct, and our choices are really not choices, but the carrying out of what the causes of the past are inevitably going to make us effect in our future. Not a hard concept to grasp, but a mind-bender to think about.
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