The Carbon Tax

This blog entry is a bit 'off topic' to my other posts but I thought to include it as it's a pretty big issue right now and is something I feel strongly about. For those that don't know, I wrote my final year project at RMIT University back in '08 about the impact an Emissions Trading Scheme on the Aviation industry in Australia.

Here is a summary of the relevant conclusions that I made;

"There is enough scientific evidence to conclude that there is a steady increase in global temperatures as a result of global warming. This global warming has been linked with greenhouse gases, mainly man-made carbon emissions. Countries, mainly from Europe, have committed resources to reduce these man-made carbon emissions in order to stop the rise of global warming. This was the main purpose behind the Kyoto Protocol, to bring understanding and action towards climate change on an international scale."

• It is still being debated whether man-made carbon emissions have much impact on global warming at all. Either way, I would still prefer to live in a world with clean air, wouldn't you?

"One of the first items that the new Rudd Government addressed once taking office was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is because Australia will be one of the most effected countries if average global temperatures were to rise. The IPCC estimated that by 2070 these temperatures could rise by 5 degrees but also estimated that a rise of 3 degrees would greatly damage Australia’s natural ecosystems and ultimately Australia’s industries. Australia is highly dependent on natural resources and any impact on them would greatly influence the industries, mostly the agricultural industry. This is because as temperatures rise there is less rainfall, meaning that farm land becomes drier and more difficult to cultivate crops and raise livestock. Australia is a large exporter and any dramatic decrease in the availability of these goods and services would deeply affect the nation's economic growth" 

• All the people complaining about the rise in prices of goods because of a carbon tax really need to take a step back and think about the bigger picture here. With or without a carbon tax, these prices are going to increase regardless, especially food, as supply decreases because of availability of these resources, demand increases and so does the price. It's basic economics.

"An Emissions Trading Scheme should be operating along side other similar systems worldwide. The criticism to this is that when other countries like the United States and Japan implement their own Emissions Trading Scheme that it will still come short of half of global emissions, while countries without such a system will continue to increase their emissions. This is why it is important that Australia adopt an Emissions Trading Scheme in order to help positively influence other countries in the Asian region such as China and India, some of the world’s largest polluters."

• There are a lot of people out there arguing that Australia cutting down its carbon emissions will not reduce the overall carbon emissions of the planet significantly enough to warrant a carbon tax. Yes, Australia only produces a small percentage of the world's carbon emissions but if we start thinking outside our borders and take take steps to 'positively influence' those big polluting countries. Just think of our international standing if we are at the forefront of green energy solutions, and selling these new technologies to these other countries.

There are too many people seeing this carbon tax as just another tax. I do believe that an Emissions Trading Scheme would be more beneficial economically (and I do believe the Government's plan is to eventually switch to an ETS in the future) and remove the word "tax" that so many people hate. It should be viewed more as a tool to change the population's mind set. Unlike most other taxes, it's not there to increase the Government's revenue but to help people save money and make them more aware of energy consumption. If the cost of your electricity bill goes up, find ways of using less power in your home.

There is a financial incentive for companies there too. If two companies have two identical products and use the same amount of carbon emissions to produce them, then the cost of both products will increase. This creates a sort of "game theory" situation. However, if one of those companies finds a 'greener' way of producing that product, their production costs will decrease, and decrease the cost of the product to the consumer. When the consumer walks into the store and sees two identical products but one is cheaper, which one do you think the consumer will buy? This will give the company an advantage over it's competitor in terms of a larger market share.

It has also been argued that taxing companies more as a result of their carbon emissions will force them to reduce their costs which will result in job losses. This might be true, but as long as the Government encourages the pursuit of green energy, this will actually create more jobs in an entirely new sector of the economy.

People are too quick to dismiss the carbon tax before it even begins. Let's try it out, see how it goes. From what I have been reading, those households that it will affect, can expect an increase of around $400 a year. Yes, that seems a lot, but that's just over only $1 a day. And if you find ways of decreasing your household energy consumption, the actual real effect it will have on you will be next to nothing. I, for one, am more than happy to pay this extra cost in living, as the consequences of ever increasing man-made carbon emissions and inevitable global warming is just unacceptable.

Harmony of the Spheres

Pythagoras is mostly known for his contribution to mathematics and science but he was also a very religious and spiritual philosopher. Although none of his original writings have survived, what we do know about him comes from his disciples and his ideas went on to strongly influence other well-known philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. It was his belief that through mathematics, one can gain an insight in the workings of the mind of God so many of his mathematical and scientific discoveries, he attributed to his pursuit of finding God.

He believed that certain shapes made up the Universe, where the circle best represents God; singular, perfectly shaped, symmetrical and with no visible start or end. Any two objects, no matter where they are placed, can be connected to form a circle, where the distance between the two objects forms the diameter. To Pythagoras, this represented man's connection with God.

He also believed that on a more spiritual level, the Universe was made up of triangles, where even a triangle can form a circle. The most basic example of this is in trigonometry, when calculating the tangent, sin or cosine of a triangle.

Circles can also be used to create an equilateral triangle (a triangle with equal side lengths and equal angles of 60° each) by joining the two circles together so that one circle's centre touches the other circle's circumference and vice versa.

The "vesica pisces" was derived from these two circles by Pythagoras, to create the fish symbol that was later adopted by the Christians.

Pythagoras and the vesica pisces even make their way into the Bible. In the Gospel of John (21:11), Jesus is said to have caught 153 fish, which to many may have no significant meaning and almost seems like a random number. But Pythagoras had calculated the length and width ratio of the fish shape to be 265:153, which is also an approximation of the square root of 3.

Here's another interesting trick. If you take any number that is divisible by 3 (15, 18 ,21 etc) and add the cube of each digit, you will eventually get the number 153.

For example, the number 18:
(1x1x1) + (8x8x8) = 513, then
(5x5x5) + (1x1x1) + (3x3x3) = 153

Pythagoras believed that the Universe was made up of numbers using circles and triangles and that each number had its own spiritual and mystical meaning. These numbers can be found using the same circle technique.

The Monad - represents the number 1 and also God, the first being

The Dyad - represents the number 2 and the individual and diversity

The Triad - represents the number 3 and harmony, justice and perfection

The Tetrad - represents the number 4 and the four elements

The Pentrad - represents the number 5 and the soul

The Decad - represents the number 10 and the Universe, heaven and Earth and is the perfect number

All of these shapes can be formed to create the Tetractys, which represent different planes and also forms an equilateral triangle, and is the founding idea of the decimal system (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10)

- The first line or plane contains just the one dot. This represents the Monad, or God.

- The second plane contains two dots. This represents the Dyad the man and the woman, harmony and diversity

- The third plane contains three dots. This represents the Triad (justice), the Pentad (life) and the Hexad (psyche)

- The fourth plane contains four dots. This represents the four elements.

Pythagoras attempted to apply this idea of "perfection" to explain the workings of the Universe. He even tried to apply it to the movement of the Sun, the Earth and the planets. Pythagoras was also a musician and he believed that the distance between the "heavenly bodies" and the Earth and themselves, corresponded with a particular harmonic lengths and intervals, which if could be heard, would create a musical harmony. This is known as the "Harmony of the Spheres"

Going back to trigonometry briefly, the sine and cosine of a triangle can be drawn graphically as a wave, much like the wave of light or sound.

So theoretically, all circles, and spheres for that matter, can be drawn graphically as shown above, where a larger sphere would have a larger amplitude and therefore would produce a much lower pitched sound, or note, whereas a smaller sphere would create a smaller amplitude and cycle and would have a much higher pitch.

It was Pythagoras' idea that when all the celestial bodies of the solar system would be able to produce their own unique tune depending on their size, together creating a sort of song, all in perfect harmony with each other. Of course, he never intended for this idea to be taken literally.

But what if the planets and stars could be heard? Have you ever wondered where the static noise of an untuned radio or television comes from? It comes from space. It's called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and is the remnants of the Big Bang. So, is what we're listening to when we hear this static just random chaos or is it the Universe's own unique song we are yet to fully understand?

Philosophy of Ignorance

Science versus religion is always going to lead to heated debates, particularly when it involves people either side of the fence who are very passionate about their beliefs.

But throughout history, even though there is such a divide today, science and religion were closely linked. In fact, many of the great mathematicians and scientists attributed their discoveries to understanding God, and that to understand mathematics was to understand the mind of God.

The following video clip is, once again, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking about "Intelligent Design". If you have a spare 30mins to watch it, I do recommend it, but I will break it down to the main points here.



One of his main points that I really like, is his idea that religion is just a philosophy of ignorance, that it's not necessarily strictly "science versus religion" but they both make up a certain percentage of our understanding of the universe. At the point where our knowledge stops, that's where we attribute those things that we don't understand to God, and most of the great minds of the past two thousand years have done the same.

There are some points that Dr Tyson does not cover in this lecture, so I'm going to start back in Ancient Greece. The scientists of the day were not anti-religious, in fact they were very devoted followers and their pursuit of understanding was their way of getting closer to God. Their understanding was that God is rational and perfect in every way, and so the universe too must be both rational and perfect.

Two very important philosophers in Ancient Greece that begun this trend of thinking was Socrates and his student Plato. It was Plato that believed that to study mathematics was to study the mind of God, because mathematics had order, was always consistent and was completely independent of other influences.

This is a time when the Pythagorean Paradigm was a large contributing factor to the progress of science, essentially the idea of common sense and understanding the universe through precise observations. This meant that it was generally believed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the sun, moon and planets had perfectly circular orbits and perfectly uniform speeds, because after all, if God is perfect, why would he not create a perfect universe?

Their reasoning behind these thoughts came from the idea that Earth is separate from the Heavens, that the stars, the forever bright lights in the sky, never changed while the Earth is made of rock, sand and soil and was always undergoing change. Logic also told them that the Earth could not be moving as birds in the sky, along with other objects, were not left behind as the Earth moved through space.

I don't really want to talk too much about the different models of the solar system used throughout history, as that is not really my point of this post. Basically, following Socrates and Plato came Aristotle and then Ptoelmy as they continued to try to explain the workings of the universe using geocentric (Earth-centred) universe, with each of them adding an increased understanding on top of previous ideas.

It wasn't until the 16th century, at the time of the Renaissance, that these ideas began to change. Nicolaus Copernicus believed that Ptolemy's model of the solar system was too complicated, something God would not allow. He also believed that the Sun is essentially God, the creator of life in the solar system, and so should be placed at the centre (heliocentric model).

Interestingly, another scientist and astronomer at this time, Tycho Brahe, believed that Copernicus was wrong because with the Sun at the centre, he calculated that the stars would have to be 700 times further away from Saturn than Saturn is from the Sun, and he believed that God would not waste so much space. It is now known that distance from Saturn to the nearest star is in fact 28,500 time further away than Saturn is from the Sun.

Then Galileo came along with his telescope and made some significant discoveries, including the four moons orbiting Jupiter, which proved that not every object in the sky orbits around Earth, and that Venus does orbit around the Sun. Obviously, this idea of a heliocentric universe went against the Church and its teachings. That is not to say that Galileo did not believe in God, in fact he was very religious, but his reasoning was that he believed his ideas gave a better understanding on how God worked and he wanted to help more common people understand how the universe, and thus God, worked.

Johaness Kepler then came along and, using Copernicus' heliocentric model, discovered the laws of planetary motion, i.e. the orbits of the planet around the sun.

Essentially, Dr Tyson's main argument here is that after a certain level of discovery and understanding, there comes a point where we can't explain the universe anymore and that's when people, including the more scientifically aware, begin turning to a more "faith-based" approach. All of these "great minds" eventually, after reaching the limit of their knowledge, turn to Intelligent Design to explain the unexplainable. That is until someone else comes along and decides that it isn't unexplainable and without taking the easy way out by invoking God, sits down to solve the problem, which progresses our understanding of the universe.

He quotes a percentage that from a study that 85% of an "elite" scientists reject a personal god and thus Intelligent Design. But that still means 15% of our "great minds" TODAY still believe in a personal god. So what hope do the general public have?

But he doesn't argue that we should stop teaching the theory of Intelligent Design, in fact the opposite, as both science and religion, throughout history, go hand-in-hand, and what better way to understand the way the human brain works than to try and understand why some people believe in the things they do.

"I'm not going to say 'don't teach this' because it's real, it happened. So I don't want people to sweep it under the rug because if you do you're neglecting something fundamental that is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand"

It is the battle between ignorance and understanding that makes us human.

Relativity

This entry is a tangent to my last entry but I promise it won't be as mind boggling.

The main point I want to make here is that the concept of time is man-made. I ask you; do you know why there are 24 hours in a day? Why is one hour the length of time that it is, why don't we call 45 minutes as one hour? Who chose the units of measurements that we use to calculate time?

The human race is very much dependent on calculating time. We pretty much run our lives around the time on our clocks. We are the only species on this planet that can understand the concept of time and assign an individual unit to a period of time that has passed.

The reason we have 24 hours in a day has nothing to do with any scientific based method of dividing a day. Ancient Egyptian astronomers observed that there were 36 decan stars throughout the year. A decan is essentially a subdivision of an astrological sign, such as the Zodiac signs, with each sign having three divisions of 10 degrees. An interesting side note here; this is also why there is 360 degrees in a full circle (36 x 10 = 360). Later, a more simplified system was created, where there were only 24 decan stars used for calculating time, 12 observed during the night, the other 12 assigned during the day. Hence, why there is 24 hours in a day. This is also the reason why a year is divided into 12 months, there being 12 lunar cycles in a year. It was then later calculated there being 60 minutes within the hour and 60 seconds within each minute, or 3,600 seconds in each hour, again relating back to the 36 decan stars.

So, even if hours, minutes and seconds are all man-made inventions, created in order to run our lives more efficiently, what about days and nights and years? One revolution of the Earth on its axis creating one day or one Earth's orbit around the Sun creating one year. Not man-made at all. But then again, one could argue that one day or one year on any other planet would not be the same as Earth and that this measurement of time is all relative to us humans here on Earth.

Take Mars for example; each day lasts for approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes while a year lasts approximately 687 days. If we were living on Mars instead of Earth, our idea of how long a day/year lasts would be slightly different, and more so if living on, say, Mercury where one Mercury day lasts 176 Earth days and one Mercury year lasting 88 Earth days.

This is one particular thing that annoys me when watching most science fiction films or television shows. When humans are interacting with an alien species, they very casually talk about days or hours and these aliens know exactly what us humans are talking about. How? The alien species would have a completely different concept of how long an hour or day lasts. When we are talking about travelling faster than the speed of light, and through wormholes, this oversight could have huge devastating consequences to both ship and crew. Oh well, I guess it's just TV right?

That is not to say that all science fiction films do not take this into account. Take "Men In Black" for example; when the Arquillians threaten to destroy Earth if the galaxy is not returned to them and give Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) and Jay (Will Smith) one galactic standard week to return it, which turns out to be just one Earth hour.

Kay: Arquillian battle rules, kid: first we get an ultimatum, then a warning shot, then we have a galactic standard week to respond.

Jay: A galactic standard week? How the hell long is that?

Kay: One hour.

Jay: One hour...then what?

[the message translation flashes across the screen: "MIB, DELIVER THE GALAXY OR EARTH WILL BE DESTROYED"]

Jay: Oh, now that's bullshit!

Now I dig into Einstein's theory of relativity. As explained in my previous post, time is greatly affected by gravity, and the greater mass and gravity of an object, the more space-time will be affected. This essentially means, the CLOSER to a large body of mass you are, the SLOWER time will appear. This theory can even be proven here on Earth. If you had a pair of synchronised clocks and if someone was to hold one of those clocks on the surface of Earth and you were to take the other clock to the top of a skyscraper or on to an airplane, time will move quicker the higher up you go and the further you move away from Earth's gravitational pull.

This also means that the larger the mass and consequently the higher the gravitational pull, the slower time will appear to run. Taking the two clocks analogy again and keeping one on Earth and taking the other to Jupiter, the clock on Jupiter will tick slower than the clock on Earth. In fact, it is theorised that the person holding the clock on Jupiter will age slower than the person on Earth. I think I've just discovered the new anti-aging fad!

What makes this theory cool, or at least it does for me, is that if you have an object with an infinite gravitational pull, such as a black hole. One theory is that; the person holding the clock on Earth looking at someone holding the other clock entering a black hole, will appear to slow down as they enter the event horizon and if it were possible to see that person continue to fall into the black hole past the event horizon, then they would appear to almost freeze in time. AND for the person holding the clock, falling into the black hole and looking back out at the rest of the universe, because time is slowing down for them, it would appear that the time for the universe in SPEEDING UP! This would theoretically mean that the person falling into the black hole could witness the complete life cycle of the universe and its ultimate end within a few seconds!

Time is all relative.

Time Travel

I was watching the most recent episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which I had recorded on my iQ, when probably the coolest astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, came on as the guest. I mean come on, the guy looks like he's straight out of a Fresh Prince of Bel Air episode! He just makes science sound so gangsta! Check out the video below as he takes a swipe at religious fundamentalists and even classroom teachers...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEP50dxfRAw

Anyway, I remember seeing him on the Daily Show a couple of years ago and he was talking about black holes and such, which then reminded me of the TV series LOST. Ok, for those of you who never watched the show might not understand the link but all you need to know is that in season 2, they find an underground bunker which holds a great deal of electromagnetic properties where numbers must be entered into a computer to discharge the build up of the electromagnetism, in order to save the world. It seemed that during the show's lifespan, the tv viewing audience were always split into three groups. The first group, followed it religiously, the second had never seen a single episode, and the third watched maybe the first season but then got confused and disillusioned when the show's writers began introducing themes such as 'smoke monsters' and time travel. For me, this was one of the show's greatest hooks. Instead of getting annoyed and frustrated by the new themes set out to confuse the audience, I began doing some of my own research into the topics, one of them being time travel.

So how can you travel through time without building a time machine? I mean, H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" had a time machine and Back to the Future had the DeLorean, the time travelling car...



But how can you create a naturally occurring time machine? With a black hole (or wormhole) of course!

Now, I'm not an astrophysicist nor am I cool, black guy, but I will try to make as much sense of this as possible...

So let's start from the very beginning. Albert Einstein theorised that every object in space-time had an effect on the structure of space-time due to gravity. And the greater the mass of the object, the greater the effect. In astrophysics, the sun warps space-time more than the Earth. The pictures below give a basic example of this theory. Imagine space-time like a 2D piece of paper. Now let's say that if we were to put a weight on this piece paper, there would be a slight sinking effect towards the centre of the object. In the second picture, Earth is pulling and warping the fabric of space-time down due to its gravitational pull. Now let's replace the Earth with the Sun, which has 28 times the gravitational pull than that of Earth and imagine what would then happen to the piece of paper.

So what if we were to replace the Sun with an even larger star with much more mass and an infinite gravitational pull so huge that it ripped a hole through this piece of paper?

This is our black hole. When a star dies and implodes, as the nuclear reaction is finally exhausted and no longer strong enough to prevent the star's gravitational forces from collapsing in on itself, the star will dramatically change size and colour. The Sun, currently a Yellow Dwarf, will grow in size to a Red Giant, before imploding and turning into a White Dwarf.

So stars larger than the Sun will have greater gravitational forces acting upon it, which in turn can either turn the star into a neutron star or a black hole, where the gravitational force is infinite. That means that light itself, the fastest known 'object' cannot even escape it. The star is now a singularity at the centre of the black hole, surrounded by the event horizon, which gives the black hole its appearance.

But of course, how do you turn this black hole into a time machine? First you must make the black hole into a wormhole and how do you do that? By creating a second black hole at another point in space-time. Going back to the piece of paper analogy, what if we were to bend the piece of paper over so that the heavy object that has ripped through the top now rips through the bottom? This, in theory, is a wormhole.

Now I know what you're thinking...that looks exactly like that Simpson's episode that they did in 3D!

Sort of similar, but where Homer Simpson travelled through space, we want a wormhole that will allow us to travel through time.

When black holes were first theorised, they were only thought of in a stationary state. But as we know, most stars rotate, so that when a rotating star becomes a black hole, the black hole would also be rotating. This would then create what is known as an 'ergosphere' external to the event horizon, where anyone inside this area would experience 'frame-dragging' of space-time. Of course if you were to enter a stationary black hole (or wormhole), you would not survive as you reach the centre of the singularity, as the gravitational forces begin shredding you down into your molecular structure. With a rotating black hole, the singularity would also be rotating, creating a ring, which theoretically when passed through, could take you to another point in space-time.



The only problem with the wormhole now is that if you were to pass through the singularity, even at the speed of light, you would be crushed instantly. In order to hold the throat of the wormhole open, you must have enough 'negatively charged' energy (or 'exotic matter') to keep the wormhole open long enough to pass through. Such 'exotic matter' was thought to not exist until Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder discovered that two uncharged metallic plates in a vacuum produced negatively charged matter. This is known as the Casimir Effect.

Ok, so now that we have created a stable wormhole and are able to pass through it, how do we use it to travel through time? First we go back to Einstein again. He theorised that a clock in motion would move slower in time than a stationary one and the faster a clock travels, the slower it will tick.

Now here's the cool part. So, theoretically, if someone were to travel 99% the speed of light in one direction for 5 years and then turned around and travelled back to their starting point, travelling again at 99% the speed of light for a further 5 years, they would arrive home in 10 years but would find that time on Earth has progressed 40 years, and so the traveller has travelled to the FUTURE!

So let's say that we were able to make a wormhole the size of a TV and throw it onto a spaceship. This is what physicist Kip Thorne theorised would happen. Kip stays at home with one mouth of the wormhole and his wife Carolee, gets into a spaceship and travels for 6 hours, then turns around and returns home in another 6 hours, totalling a 12 hour journey. During this trip, they hold hands. After 12 hours have passed for Kip, he looks into the wormhole and sees his wife landing outside in the front yard. So he lets go of his wife’s hand, gets up and goes outside but his wife and the spaceship are not there! So he waits…for 10 years!

When she finally arrives, he goes outside to greet her. He opens the door of the spaceship and finds his wife not having aged more than 12 hours since her departure, with her hand still in the wormhole. He looks into the wormhole and sees himself 10 years ago holding hands with Carolee. The wormhole is now a time machine! Kip can step through the wormhole and go back as far as 10 years, to the creation of the time machine but no earlier. The Kip on the other end can also step through the wormhole and come forward 10 years!

So the real question is...what are they really doing with that Large Hadron Collider?

Perception

I just finished watching 'Inception' and that got me thinking...

How do you see the world? Is it the same way in which your mother or father see the world? Of course your parents will use past experiences to see the world in a different light, but I'm talking about physically seeing the world. In essence, what is reality?

No, I'm not talking about the Matrix. Although to a certain extent, the Matrix trilogy (or at least the first film), made the audience question their own reality. If I can see it and I can touch it, it must be real, right? But why must it be real, just because your brain is using sensory inputs such as sight, sound and touch, to create a picture of the world around you. As Morpheus says to Neo; "Your mind makes it real".

A perfect example is visual perception. When light enters the eye, the image that the retina picks up is up-side-down. But of course this is not what we see. Our brains use this information to flip the image back around to its correct position. So our brains are taking this sensory input and changing what we actually see.

So what part of our brains is responsible for interpreting all of this information? The Central Nervous System (CNS) is where all the information from the peripheral nervous system is received and processed. It is also responsible for controlling body movement and all biological processes through electrical signals.

Now, I'm not biochemistry major, but I'm going to try and explain this as easily as possible. Without going into too much detail, the nerve cells in the CNS have receptors, "protein molecules", that interact with other produced molecules within the CNS, such as other protein, neurotransmitters and hormone molecules, which can attach themselves to these receptors, causing specific biological activity in the human body.

Still with me? One particular neurotransmitter molecule that is produced in the brain, as well as the stomach, is 'serotonin'. Now this biochemical is responsible for regulation of mood, appetite and sleep.

Of course, this is all natural biochemistry at work here. So what if, in one particular individual, the brain began producing an unknown chemical that attached and interacted with these receptors, causing information received by the CNS from the sensory inputs to be interpreted differently? Would this individual then begin to perceive the world differently, sound, touch, taste, sight, all because their brain began processing information differently?

This new 'unknown' chemical may be either activating this receptor (agonist) or blocking it (antagonist), altering the information it receives. Now, let's say this unknown chemical being produced, although physically and biochemically impossible, was lysergic acid diethylamide (or LSD for short) or at least something that produced the same affect on these receptors, by disrupting the interaction between the nerve cell and neurotransmitter, which specifically targets serotonin neurotransmitters.

Ok, I know what you're saying now. "But LSD is a man made, synthetic drug! Your brain can't just start producing acid and tripping out!" But the only point I'm trying to get across is; what is perception? What is reality? For someone who could produce LSD or other hallucinogens internally, which would in turn alter their perception of reality, would that not also be a certain, albeit different, reality? When your brain naturally increases its serotonin levels, which in turn makes you feel happier, is this not also altering your perception of reality to a certain degree. What if, in an alternative universe, all humans had evolved with such an 'ability', this state of mind would be the accepted common reality.

All I'm saying is that your perception of reality is what your mind makes of it.

Neo: I thought it wasn't real

Morpheus: Your mind makes it real

Neo: If you're killed in the matrix, you die here?

Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind

Metacognition

I have never written a blog before and I thought it was about time I used some of my down-time to start writing again. So here goes nothing...

I've named my blog "Deep Thought" for more reasons than one. Ironically, it didn't take too long to come up with the title. It seemed pretty obvious that people use blogs to write their own thoughts and feelings about certain events in their lives, so that is reason number one. This is somewhere where I can freely write whatever is on my mind. Reason number two; for those of you who are familiar with Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", you will know that 'Deep Thought' is the super computer created to answer the question to 'the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything'.

This then brings me to the title of my first post: Metacognition. I first heard the word back in highschool when my Psychology teacher, who also happened to be my English teacher, began talking about the concept. He summed it up by saying that metacognition was 'thinking about thinking'. At first I didn't quite understand what he was talking about but then that got me thinking more about it, which of course lead me to understand, as this very thought process was metacognition.

He then went to go on about how metacognition is what separates us humans from the animals, that our sapient brains have evolved over time in order for us to understand abstract concepts and be self-aware. So is metacognition something that defines intelligent life?

Probably not but it would be one of the criteria. Studies have shown that primates have metacognitive abilities while other animals such as birds do not. What is surprising is that recent studies have also shown that lab rats may be showing signs of metacognition. To cut a long experiment short, basically the rats were given a listening test. The rats were to determine whether the sound they heard was "long" or "short". If they answered correctly, they were rewarded with food. For an incorrect answer, they received nothing. However, they were also given the option to not answer at all, and receive a small portion of food. So in theory, the rats were able to think about their own thought processes and make judgements about their decisions.

Where there was an obvious and easy answer, such as a very short or very long sound, the rats had no problem answering the question and receiving their reward but with mid-ranged sounds, more often than not, the rats chose not to answer as they knew they didn't know the answer to begin with, deciding that a small portion of food was better than the chance of them getting the answer wrong and receiving nothing.

Again, all those Hitchhiker's fans out there would recognise the link here. Those responsible for the creation of Deep Thought were beings from another dimension, which in our dimension were seen as white mice.

So in the greater scheme of things, what does this mean? Does my dog understand his own thoughts and why he makes the decisions he does or does he just do those things out of instinct? Are we the only life form on this planet which is self-aware? Or is metacognition a dormant characteristic that can only be achieved upon reaching a certain level of evolution?