Gaia-Space

A Thought Experiment

“Horatio: Oh day and night: but this is wondrous strange.

Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger giue it welcome.
There are more things in Heauen and Earth, Horatio,
Then are dream't of in our Philosophy.” Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

“Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate nature. We need only list a few of the well-known thought experiments to be reminded of their enormous influence and importance in the sciences: Newton's bucket, Maxwell's demon, Einstein's elevator, Heisenberg's gamma-ray microscope, Schrödinger's cat. The 17th century saw some of its most brilliant practitioners in Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. And in our own time, the creation of quantum Mechanics and relativity are almost unthinkable without the crucial role played by thought experiments. Galileo and Einstein were, arguably, the most impressive thought experimenters, but they were by no means the first. Thought experiments existed throughout the middle ages, and can be found in antiquity, too.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/

Evolution can be applied in almost any system. It can be quite tricky. Byrd of the School of Biological Sciences University of Sussex and Layzell of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories describe in “The Evolved Radio and its Implications for Modelling the Evolution of Novel Sensors” at http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/bicas/pubs/pub-10.pdf an experiment where evolutionary algorithms were used to attempt to design an oscillator and resulted in the evolution of a radio receiver instead. When you simulate evolution, you discover that life is tricksy and has a mind of its own. You do not always get what you want or what you expect.

Let us perform a thought experiment. Imagine a set of 100 or so radio transmitter receivers. Imagine that they can be told to retransmit the signal they receive if such and such a variable occurs in that signal. Give them the ability also to randomly change the signal before evaluating it for commands. Then once a minute transmit a signal to them which does not trigger retransmission. Eventually one of them will randomly make the change which will cause it to retransmit that signal. This mutated signal will then be picked up and mutated and retransmitted by the other radios in range. It will behave like an electromagnetic form of life. This is an inevitable result given the conditions of the experiment.

http://mentor.lscf.ucsb.edu/course/winter/eemb139/lecture/20Electrorec.pdf contains a description of Electroreception. Electroreception is a sensory process where fish are known to receive and sometimes purposefully generate sensory data through electromagnetic fields. All vertebrate animal life are theoretically or possibly equivalent to the transmitter-receivers proposed in the thought experiment above. The thought experiment described above has been being repeated thousands of times a second for hundreds of millions of years. Ever since vertebrate life first evolved on Earth. The phenomenon does not appear to exist in invertebrates. It would appear to be impossible that some sort of electromagnetic life or self-replicating electromagnetic pattern has not evolved alongside and either symbiotic with or parasitic to biological life or both.

When you formulate the problem like this, what we know of science, life, and evolution makes the existence of some kind of ‘spiritual’ life almost inevitable. “Fairies exist!” J

The voltages involved are incredibly small, and how you would sort them out from background noise is difficult to imagine. This essay is not intended to ‘prove’ the existence of such life. It is intended to make people stop and think and possibly have an open mind about the unknown.

This is an important political issue. It has implications with regard to free practice of religion, ethical treatment of animals, concern for the environment, abortion, even the possible transmission of psychological trauma from slave times to the present in the Black community. Something to think about. It is not solid enough to be factored in at a definitive value, but it’s value as a consideration should be greater than zero. (It is also included because the author just thinks it is a tremendously clever way of playing mind games on his readers.) J