Why not everything is connected

My biggest opposition to statements like "everything is connected" is that they mean nothing. Actually, they have a potential to mean a lot, but while they don't, I just ignore it. (And the best way of ignoring something is writing a text about it, everybody knows.)

If everything is connected, how could I use that information? Would I read the position of the stars on the future just by looking at old umbrellas? Would I know the color of other people's underwear by examining a very colorful shell? Would I have luck on the casino just because, in the same day, a plane had to land in a different airport at the same city? Someone who knows what connected means please don't hesitate in clarify me. While it is just some abstract connection, that we are connected to each other and to the Mother Nature, I can't take it seriously.

about the opposition between science and mysticism

I almost don't care about religion itself, but I always get very annoyed when science is supposedly used to support it. This happens not only to religion, but also to what is called pseudoscience and some general mystical beliefs.

My main thesis today is that: science doesn't say anything except what it was researched. Way too abstract, but let me tell you the example that made me came to that statement. My friend was stating that some experiments with obscure results, with some unclear conclusions, pointed to the fact that there exist a "transcendental thing" and that "everything is connected" (I apologize for not understanding exactly what goes on in a mystic mind and use such general terms). One of the examples, which I didn't verify (doesn't matter because, as we'll see, even if it's true it doesn't apply anything he claimed), is about one experiment involving rats. According to the experiment, a rat tried many times to solve a maze to get food. After that, in other room, another rat was able to solve it in the first try. He cited another experiments (all in this line, of mysterious and unexplicable phenomena) that support the idea of a "transcendental reality" (again, the quotation marks mean I don't quite comprehend the ideas rather than his factual words). He turned all the phenomena into proofs for his beliefs, and claimed the science supported them. But the true is, or at least my thought is, that every conclusion drawn after a scientific experiment or fact is not scientific itself. It may be considered speculation of philosophy of science, but never a scientific fact itself. For each scientific truth (in the sense of what can be considered truth in science - there's a lot to write about that) there are a lot of interpretations, and they are not science. (We could consider it science, but the word science would lose a lot of strenght. In the same sense, we could call our grandmothers our second and third mothers, again weakening the meaning of the word.)

Another example of such interpretations is saying that the wormholes support the cristianism, because they are a scientific way of angels travel fast through space (so the modern science would be confirming the Bible). Analogously, the wormholes support the Dragon Ball theory.

The unique valid way of saying science supports a fact is testing the fact, with all anti-bias devices the scientific method provides. Just collecting supporting experiments doesn't take us anywhere. There is a very suitable comic for the moment (one specific about creationism):

Using my own example, I would ask to imagine how the mystic and the scientific approaches reacts to one experiment about whether or not peanuts are afrodisiac. The experiment is conducted, and two people out of a hundred are affected that way. According to the scientific approach, the data doesn't support the hypothesis. While that, the typical mystic is telling everyone two new anecdotes of a successful use of peanuts.

The influence of the past over the present

Having lived in a foreign country for a while now, and analyzed some behaviors from different cultures, I had some disgusting moments. In a first moment, I was inclined to think we are who we are, and we behave accordingly. But no, that was indulgent. We do hold responsibility for what we do and what we do. Each one's past can have some influence in tastes and habits, but not each one's actions (they may include the habits themselves). This holds not only for people from different regions, but also for anyone who thinks their past experiences justify their present behavior. No, they don't.

Just a quote about time.

According to a friend of mine (who partially motivated me to reborn this blog, with original posts), talking about perception of time, consciousness and stuff, "time is what connects us together". I think it makes absolutely no sense, but it was so incredible that has to be recorded in the internet, forever or while the servers allow.

A text to think

It draws my attention when I see (not very often anymore, since my e-mail blocks good part of this internet chains) messages "to think", videos "to think", story "to think". It looks like we are so idiots that we have to be given instructions about thinking or not when discovering something new. I don't know about you, but I don't need to be asked to absorb critically what is being transmitted and see how much do new ideas conflict with my previous knowledge.

Priority

Now that I'm in the United States of America, I'll give this blog priority over his twin brother. I'll try to express myself in English without previously writing in Portuguese. I know I'll find a bunch of obstacles when writing but I accept this challenge. Even so, don't expect me to post too much, since I have a lot of things to do, as everyone (says).

(Nothing that you don't already know.)

Going north

Hi everyone (equals nobody).

I'm experimenting a change of countries (the unusual word are on purpose) today. So I'll post majoritarily in English instead of Portuguese, eventually translating back (but not trust on this). So this will be my official blog.

You can find a bunch of old posts (in Portuguese) in Refração em Gotas.

[I artificially changed the date of the post.]

New knowledge, new horizons

I returned to thinking, maybe only for a few days (but we can't know now), that math can give new tools to the imagination (if you want to call wings, no problem). There was some mathematical structures I didn't know well. Thinking about I learn about vector fields (that happened mainly in this semester), I can make models for physical principles using math (more specifically, vector fields), and for me that is an enrichment of my world view. I know that is about things can be well defined (not for relationships, for example), but it's still an extra eye, an extra sense.

Traditionally I have the thought that the time in fact doesn't exist in the sense of "before" and "after" being specially important concepts. I'll explain by another way. For me, there is no meaning asking what there was before big0bang, for example. I can imagine that the particles, instead of time-dependent curves, are simply curves in a space (in a math meaning). Assuming there's only the gravitacional force and using the ideia (came from relativity) that every point moves with a constant speed c through all the dimensions (it's good to study a little before understand), we can make a vector field (say in R^8, so we have the three larger dimensions and the time, the position and the speed for each). One of these "dimensions" the humans (and the animals too) can measure, and describe the events from it. Probably there're laws restricting the particles movement, or we wouldn't observe them. Back: i can see the particle by a parametrization where the time always goes ahead or simply imagine it's a static curve in R^8, for example. So, the universe is well built and has its standards (or at least we think it has and we try foretell them using our rudiments of mathematics), and it's not something that evaluate through the time. Again, the universe is everything, including all times (or ages) of what we normally call universe.

With this (I know it's confusing, I formulated this a hour ago reading The Elegant Universe, book of Brian Greene), I could get a better background (a little improvement in knowledge) of static universe. I think if I understand better I can avoid formulate wrong questions, and even learn to change them so that they could be researched and answered!

Healing tea

There are some little stores on the turnpikes. One of these announce by some little billboards that it have the tea which heal rheumatism and column (I have to use: sic). Obvious these ills can't be healed by teas, but some people can try buy the mencioned tea. It's a case of quackery.
It's not a thing which doesn't matter; people can decide consume the tea and wait a little more to talk with a doctor, or even stop to take medication to drink the tea.
Not everytring from nature heals, not everything natural is good.

A new blog

Hello guys!
This is my first post in this blog. What?
This blog is an extention of the blog Refração em Gotas (refracaoemgotas.blogspot.com). I made it mainly with the intention of writing in english; I hope it'll be a good exercise. There's a chance some people read my post because they are in english, but isn't the first objective.
I'll translate (or at least try) all the posts from Refração em Gotas to here, the previous and the next ones. I'll begin, I promise! And I'll put the day/hour of the post equal to the original, because I want, uai. I think it's better.
If someone finds errors, talk to me, comment. It'll be good for my learning, which is the main objective, as I said.
And... let's go!