Reflections after watching OBLIVION

Elements to make for a thoughtful and interesting show

1) What makes us HUMAN and what constitutes an IDENTITY? (Are the Jack clones really Jack? And what does it mean to one Jack if there are multiple Jacks out there with similar memories?)

2) What is a LIFE WORTH LIVING? (How and why do we choose to die? How do we choose to live: in the harsh light of reality or in the comfort of a lie?)

3) What is AUTHORITY? (Why should we obey? Why do we often not ask questions -> how does authority keep us in place? Are those who are higher up in the hierarchy (in this case, Vicki) less likely to question and what are their reasons for doing so?)

4) Good VS Evil (in this case, it is a usual but highly effective theme that sets up all humanity to unite: Alien invaders VS Humanity)

6. On the Soul (Bruce Hood: The illusion of the self)

This post is a continuation of my investigation into the concept of the soul. Evolutionary biology, psychology and neuroscience have answered most if not all of my questions about the soul. Ultimately, as Jon and me agree: we will never know if a soul truly exists until we pass away.

This post helps shed more light on what I previously termed as a combination of the witness-consciousness and the self in the spheres of A and B. (More neuroscience and psychology to the rescue to teach us humility through being critical about ourselves and our thoughts.)

The sense of our "self" is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body.

The “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.

I is constructed from a multitude of unconscious mechanisms and processes. Me is similarly constructed, though we may be more aware of the events that have shaped it over our lifetime. But neither is cast in stone and both are open to all manner of reinterpretation. As artists, illusionists, movie makers, and more recently experimental psychologists have repeatedly shown, conscious experience is highly manipulatable and context dependent. Our memories are also largely abstracted reinterpretations of events – we all hold distorted memories of past experiences.

We certainly have more choices today to do things that are not in accord with our biology, and it may be true that we should talk about free will in a meaningful way, as Dennett has argued, but that seems irrelevant to the central problem of positing an entity that can make choices independently of the multitude of factors that control a decision. To me, the problem of free will is a logical impasse – we cannot choose the factors that ultimately influence what we do and think. That does not mean that we throw away the social, moral, and legal rulebooks, but we need to be vigilant about the way our attitudes about individuals will be challenged as we come to understand the factors (both material and psychological) that control our behaviors when it comes to attributing praise and blame

The self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.

HIGGS Boson found! (with 99.9999% confidence, within 5 standard deviations)

Standard model of particle physics could not explain why matter had mass.

Matter is largely made up of empty space so where does its mass come from?

The Higgs Boson was found by CERN after 40 years! The detection of the boson is a very rare event – it takes around 1 trillion (1012) proton-proton collisions for each observed event.

The Higgs Boson is an excitation of the Higgs field. In quantum mechanics an excited state of a system (such as an atom, molecule or nucleus) is any quantum state of the system that has a higher energy than the ground state (its absolute minimum). The lifetime of this excited state is usually short. Shortly after the system is promoted to the excited state, it returns to its ground state. This return is often loosely described as decay.

The Higgs field is what "gives" matter mass. Once the field has endowed a formerly massless particle (through interactions), it slows down because it has become heavier, therefore giving other particles the chance to latch onto it using the electromagnetic force. Matter with greater mass interacts with the Higgs field more. Matter with lesser mass interacts with the Higgs field less.

Matter with mass have the 'luxury' of staying still through its interaction with the Higgs field but cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Conversely, matter without mass have no choice but to travel at the speed of light. Therefore we have to thank the Higgs field for being able to sit still...imagine daily routines (like trying to fall asleep, eating etc) whilst travelling at the speed of light!