LIFE: Love Infinitely Furthers Evolution by Sander R.B.E. Beals (buy e reader TXT) 📕

I was sure my wife was pregnant after three dots on a temperature chart. (check)

I was sure our first child would be a girl. (check)

I was sure our second child would also be girl. (check)

I was sure my colleague at work would be leaving way before she said so. (check)

I was sure her refusing to let me take a photo of her (for my diary) at the last moment
would still lead to me having photos of her anyway. (check)

I am sure I will at least reach the age of 94. (still to be proven, unlike the above points)

All of these were cases where no amount of skepticism (just expressed by mr. Kitz in Contact) from those around me could possibly shift my faith! And Ellie's answer is another case of absolute faith in her experiences: even though she must admit that her evidence is totally inadequate, she simply cannot withdraw her statement for she absolutely knows it was real!

So yes, we need another SevenSphere to model our view of knowledge, or rather ideas: The blink of an eye that you readers experienced here was actually about seventeen minutes, give or take a few. But it isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it: just fill in the six concepts that feel most related to your central concept from the viewpoint you want to take. In fact, filling in from your feelings is similar to using your intuition, or your subconscious. Depending on your viewpoint the six satellite concepts may be different, like when you view a hostage situation from the hostage's side, that of the perpetrators, or that of the police. But given the differences, these SevenSpheres can also be combined again into more complex structures, just like we build sentences, and eventually stories....

Maybe you've heard of the fact that any given 3D form may be represented by a finite number of triangles. I'm not sure who actually discovered that, but today's video cards make perfect use of it. It might have something to do with a triangle being an implicitly stable form, whereas other forms are not. Because of this 'law' making objects appear on screen is a routine operation that computers can easily delegate to their video boards. In a similar fashion, research back when I was a kid showed that languages have a finite set of three letter 'syllables', that is typical for the language under observation.

Like the forms and languages, the SevenSphere is essentially a set of six triangles connecting the centres of the spheres, that work together to define concepts. Also, if we want, we can extend the structure in other directions than the plane we are now working on, just like we can form any 3D form with them. In our 3D object analogy, a given set of triangles would construct a stable form inside the language space, which we might well call an idea. There is a reason that the saying "All good things come in threes" is as true now as it was when it was first evolving. "Evolving?", you say? Yes, sayings and other concepts of our culture don't just start to exist in a single blink of an angels eye, but like Richard Dawkins claimed, ideas and thus sayings evolve over time, where the most succesful tend to stick to our common consciousness as they are used and reused (or even recycled or abused) again and again by all of us. Of course this retelling is not uniform, and some tell it differently than others, just like in the Miss Marple episode I watched during writing last night. I didn't realise it then, but the Agatha Christy mystery about the murder occurring in a darkened room full of people was highly illustrative of what I'm trying to express: all witnesses gave wildly different accounts of what happened, just like the three deaf, dumb and blind wise men about their experience with the elephant. The same goes for our experiences with our respective gods: we all see differently...

But let me go on and give an example of what I mean: at some point in the evolution of the Internet someone got the funny idea of using letters sideways to express emotions. It may even have occurred before the Internet, when people still used those monstrously heavy typewriters that had little arms battling to beat each other for access to the paper. But that's beside the point. On the other hand though, those typewriters were the cause of us now having completely messed up keyboards: because the arms with the letters on the ends tended to lock up when one typed too fast, the keys were rearranged in order to minimize the clashes. This also explains why keyboards differ from country to country, because of differences in language (the set of three letter combinations is different). But like I said, that was beside the point. We were on text smileys, as the idea that they are: at first there were only a few, but adaptive as the idea was, it soon blossomed into sets of various expressions, so varied that most of us do not know the complete set, if there even is such a concept. But try to imagine these smileys in the context of the everyday world around us:

Like I said, this isn't the total set by far. There is even one called cross-eyed (XD), which is a nice example of adapting: not only did the smiley adapt to our world, but in due time our world adapted to the smiley: if we now pass a car that has a license plate with the letter combination XD in it, we cannot do anything else but smile at the 'real' expression of that emotion, even though in our particular country the license plates are strictly non-personalised.

The scrambling of our keyboards is a somewhat different story of adaptation: it has been able to remain even during the development of the computer, because all of us already adapted to it after the old typewriter made it a 'necessity'. Now this survival may remain, but at the same time the move to other devices like smartphones or tablets is already reshaping the landscape for future input methods. Most of us simply call these trends, but personal experience with them shows us otherwise in the development of our smart phones: I don't know about you, but I've always had certain 'complaints' about my then current cell phone. Not enough to immediately go get a new one, but enough to mark the shortcoming as something worth improving on with the arrival of the next phone. Of course, once the time comes to get a new smartphone, we forget our complaints and choose mostly by feeling, or at least I know I do. Weird thing about it is that the small hindrances I saw in the previous one have also been fixed, or at least are mysteriously absent in the new model even though the specs said nothing about it! It is much like the phones evolve like we do, logical, since some of us are the people designing and making them. But given the second law of Creation, what is the difference? Is it the Incredible Machine that creates it for us, or is it any number of us (who are also the Incredible Machine), in a company called Nokia, Samsung, HTC, or any other smartphone manufacturer? And it is our love for them and the love of their manufacturers for their particular product that drives their evolution!

Darwin said it, the best adapters win. But we find this happens in everyday life: if I'm in the habit of drinking a certain brand of ice tea, and actually have a dislike for light products, I may be quite unhappy to find the store replacing my favorite brand with a light alternative. I can then go find it elsewhere, find another product in the same store, or go with the light version. Now initially I got the dislike for light stuff because Internet told me aspartame was harmful, and me experiencing a certain taste related to light products. The combination gave me the idea to avoid it, but the moment the ice tea in the store was changed, I still went for the easy way out: just take whatever the store was offering as a replacement, because that was the most adaptive choice for the moment. One swift decision, and we return to a life where light products are just like normal ones, because in fact, 'Light' is a ambivalent concept, which has multiple meanings. Light as opposed to Dark, Light as opposed to Heavy, and Light as opposed to non-Light products. Three pairs, ring a bell? So I chose light, only to find that three weeks later, the old brand had returned.....

Yep, the term 'Light' is a very tricky concept indeed. As we can see on the right, it has at least three often used meanings, none of which carry the same weight or even color. All the same though, they all have the same pronunciation, which makes it necessary to use the context of the word in order to determine its meaning.

Let's just start with the Light – Dark polarity. Although most of us know about dark being the absence of light, the next point of interest is far less known: Dark seems to imply absence of frequency, and thus absence of waves, while light implies that there are frequencies present, depending on the color of the light. No doubt I'm now displaying my dubious talent for pointing out the obvious, just like Jane Marple is doing on the screen to my right at this time, but sometimes pointing out the obvious is the way to go. So dark can only be particles, because frequencies and thus waves cannot be present. 'normal' Light on the other hand is generally just a narrow band of frequencies, as science defines it:

Now we see how Dark might still have a frequency: if it is outside the visible spectrum we wouldn't see it, but it could still have a wave and particle nature. And what's more, we wouldn't know whether its frequency was left or right on the scale, lower or higher...

But what indeed defines a wave to be 'Light'? Boundaries shift, and even though visible light is quite stationary in this picture, the radio frequencies aren't: where this image indicates radar, is where nowadays our cell phones operate. Even television is no longer where it used to be broadcast, but instead is being piped into our homes as digital information at 20 – 50 Mbps rates! That is just about in the 25 nm range, way on the other side of the visible spectrum.

And even in the visible range we see the same shift in usage: red LED's were used originally as signal indicators. Green ones followed quite quickly, and in recent years even the blue ones became commonplace. The latest in lighting after Edison's bulbs and fluorescent lights are the new bright white full spectrum LED's, which hardly use energy, and light up the entire room. So yes, as a culture, we are shifting up in frequency, at least in the frequencies we use!

The next is the Light – Heavy duality. This immediately makes us think of Gravity, which in my second novel I described as being zero in the center of celestial bodies (gravity pulls from all sides). Only later did I figure out why we normally don't think of it like that: deep sea pressure problems! We've all heard how it is difficult to travel underseas, because of the pressure. At first sight, we attribute this to gravity, and in a way it is, but what is the difference between the deep sea and some cavern going deep down in the Earth's crust? Easy: deep sea is a collection of water molecules which weigh down on one another, hence the high pressure. The cavern into the Earth's crust is stable, and as such does not weigh down on the lower parts of the structure in quite the same way. That implies no pressure increase, or at least one not so steep.

The third duality is the Light – Normal one, which is actually a bit more of a marketing strategy, but it shows our ascent into the Light as well: when I was in school, we were taught that sugar was most easily digested for a quick energy boost, but would turn into fat if the energy wasn't used in some way. Nowadays, we've seen the term 'Light' be used first to indicate no sugar, then to indicate no fat, and then as just a general concept of "It's better for you than normal products". In fact, this is just another facet to our free will, whether or