Questions

A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine, the one and only Colin Groneman.  After a hard day's work in Chemistry, we sat down and decided to talk about anything that confused or intrigued us.  Here are some of our topics:

  - Try to think of a new color.  Not a mix of colors you already know.  Not a new shade of an old color.  A brand new, never-before-seen color.  What would it look like?  Of course, we quickly came to the conclusion that new colors cannot be conceived because humans can only see waves that exist in the visible spectrum of light.  There are a finite number of different wavelengths of light, so we can only see or even imagine certain colors - the spectrum of visible light cannot be expanded. 

  - What if colors are not definite?  What if they are subjective?  What if what I call orange is your purple?  This was soon dropped, as it didn't really lead to anything else interesting.

  - Where and what are thoughts?  I could tell you as easily as the next guy that thoughts are caused by the firing of synapses in neurons in the brain.  I also know that the firing of a single synapse cannot form a thought.  So at what point does the firing of synapses lead to the formation of thought?  At what point does the whole (a thought) become greater than the sum of the parts (a single synapse firing)? And where does the thought reside?  In the brain, surely, but that's rather vague.  Perhaps a thought just exists as an overall state of the brain, sort of like an emotion. 

  - Then I told Colin about one of my favorite things to try to do: think about what you are currently thinking about, really evaluate your thoughts.  When you start to think about your previous thoughts, though, you stop thinking what you were just thinking.  It's confusing.  For a split second, though, I find myself able to step outside of my thoughts and observe them, even commenting on how intelligent they are.

  - Why can't we bring people back to life?  The medical technology exists that allows us to pump a heart artificially, make people breathe artificially, even stimulate certain areas of the brain to make them move or act in certain ways.  So why can't we combine these to re-create life?  What is missing from that equation?  A soul, perhaps, or merely a combination of complex biological factors that cannot all be remedied?

  - Double negatives do not exactly cancel each other out.  This is sort of a theory of mine.  People often use double negatives in a way that suggests that their presence cancels out.  If you really think about it, though, I'm not sure if they do.  If, for example, I say that you are not not smart, I am not really saying that you are smart.  I'm saying that you are not "not smart," or that you are not stupid.  But if you are not stupid, you certainly are not necessarily smart.  Oh yeah, loophole.

  - Where is Waldo?

  - "Sometimes I just lie in bed at night and just think about infinity" - Mr. Maas.  This famous Mr. Maas quote also intrigues me.  The concept of infinity, when you really think about it, is quite unfathomable.  Try to imagine the biggest number possible.  I can add one to that.  Try to imagine an infinite number of anything.  You can't.

This is just a small sampling of our musings.  Now, with complete creative freedom in my blog, I have decided to just write about whatever pops into my head.  As you can see, it gets pretty abstract.