Philosophy of the Void

I had an interesting conversation this weekend about visual
illusions.  First, my friends and I were on a beach and we started
talking about what you can see when you stare at a bright sky. 
One of my friends mentioned that the big, floating spots you can see
are impurities in your retina.  These are the things that seem
suspended in your eyes and tend to float around when you move your
eyes.  Apparently, they are called floaters.

I then pointed out that you can also see little white spots spinning
around very quickly when you look at the bright sky.  My friend
had never noticed these before and we couldn’t figure out what they
were.  I did a google search and it turns out this is called the
“entopic phenomenon.”  It’s caused by white blood cells moving
through the capillaries in your retina.  That’s sort of amazing
that you can actually observe your own white blood cells in motion
without any magnification.  Here’s a link with more details.

Finally, my dad mentioned there was one visual illusion he’d never
figured out: when you stare at an accelerating, spinning wheel (i.e. on
a car), the spinning motion appears to reverse at a certain
point.  We all agreed that this is weird and there is no obvious
explanation for it.  Turns out the scientific community hasn’t
figured it out either.  One theory
suggests that the eye sees the world in discrete snapshots like a movie
camera.  When the wheel spins really fast, the snapshots don’t
keep up with the motion.  Therefore, the wheel can turn almost all
the way around between snapshots, and your mind interprets those
successive snapshots as backward motion.  Another theory focuses
on “perceptual rivalry.” 
This is a little bit more complicated, but basically your brain
incorrectly interprets the motion it sees due to occasional stimulation
of reverse-motion detectors. 

If you’ve never experienced these illusions before, try them sometime.  They’re really cool.

Across the world, fertility rates are falling.  Wealthy places
like Japan and Western Europe have the most serious problems.  I
wonder if this is due to a failure of specialization.  Human
society is increasingly specialized.  Instead of growing our own
food and making our own tools, we engage in a specific occupation -
computer programming, research, accounting, etc. - and delegate other
tasks to strangers.  In societies with very high levels of
specialization, perhaps it is unnatural for each unit to bear
children.  Ants and bees delegate the task of bearing progeny to
one member of their society.  A specialized group rears the
younglings.  Will our society eventually move in this
direction?  Schooling, nannies, and surrogate pregnancy might be
elements of this.  What will our society look like if we go all
the way?  Will the family go the way of the family farm? 
Will we construct centralized facilities to develop children?  I
wonder what it would be like to live in a society like that.  It
all seems so repugnant and alien today.  Then again, I suppose
every generation feels that way.  Maybe I’m the grumpy old man of
tomorrow, reminiscing about the good old days before they’ve come to an
end.

I’ve come to think that fear of death is nothing more than a biological
mechanism that evolved to keep us alive.  None of us has any
recollection of the situation before birth.  I have yet to meet
anybody who feels traumatized by the state of affairs before they came
to exist.  If existence is far superior to non-existence, we
should have negative reactions to non-existence regardless of whether
it occurs before or after our lives.  

I wonder if this relates to why we value life so much more when it
already exists.  Killing someone is a heinous crime.  Denying
birth is a trivial affair.  The debate over abortion is all about
whether or not abortion constitutes murder, not about the wrongs of
denying birth.  After all, abstinence is also a form of denying
birth.  

Which brings me to a question: would you prefer to die tomorrow or never have existed?