What could Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov and Claude Shannon have with some guy who takes notes while sat on the floor of an early morning train.

“Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.” Carl Sagan

?Dawn trip

Every working day I take the 5am train. At this hour it’s not usually crowded; there are no benches available to sit on, but there is always a place beside the door on the corner of a bench to sit on the floor, which is forbidden, but the pain on my back that awoke me on bed some minutes ago pokes me again, the door at this side only opens near my destination and I have to read, I have to check, I have to note down. These first hours are when I feel my brain more active, books and articles look more insightful to me by the morning.

Some days ago, while still in the train, experimenting that time dilating sensation that can only be caused by some dense information flow, like, in this case, the reading of “What is life”, from Erwin Schr?dinger, I started following his effort to translate into intuitive terms the concept of the DNA molecule as an aperiodic crystal. I was astonished by the way he describes it, it was more beautiful when so passionately delineated by him, so after a little thought frenzy, a door alarm sounded and I came to. I looked up and around from my peculiar point of view and saw, as usual, people looking at the phone, people talking, sleeping, reading, looking at the window, or through the window — it was hard to define by the look on their faces. At first it got disturbing: during a fraction of second, it was like plummetting on a solid ground, I almost lost those powerful thoughts. But I took some notes, and at the end of the trip I got suddenly comforted by the idea of how profoundly entangled I and all those people are; inside of each one of our trillions of cells a complex code defies most of our exclusivity assumptions and prejudices, and if the power of our brains will move our bodies towards multiple places and activities, at the end it wouldn’t matter by what name we call our physical destinations, occupations and activities, our goals or tasks. Both sets of informational tools, both levels of complexity: our genetic (and epigenetic) code and our center of memory and decision would have to cooperate so we could have all these so meaningful and individual thoughts and wills, and at the same time these so profoundly intertwined pathways to follow despite the very similar necessities, roughly the same ones that our differently colored and shaped bodies have. It forcibly suggests to us that there has to be an objective, a point, a reason, a meaning. But what would it be?

Calm down, I do not intend to try to answer that question in this article. As most, it is about the right to ask and the value of learning different ways for asking.

I had for some time avoided to focus my mind seriously on this kind of problem. I built some vague and flexible assumptions to go through the adult life, chose some ethical references, passionately struggled and am still struggling for the things I know, believe and dream for, and for the changes I want to the world, but assumed at some undefinable point that this kind of question should be left to another set of people, who certainly wouldn’t be so “dumb in math”, for instance.

Thought pathway sharing

I am sharing below, after some minutes of a bit more stories, my current learning pathway: it is not about what I know, it is about what I am learning at my own pace. What sets of scientific, technological and social problems I decided to think about, what method I decided to use to do this, as well as what set of main and background knowledge I chose to improve my abilities in order to try to make my conjectures more robust and consistent.

I think this is how it would feel to find myself naked on a public square, but I am voluntarily doing it as a personal manifesto, because I noticed that maybe it is not about me. Take some minutes to try to get to know me a bit, before you get inside the brain of this metro worker.

The universe is learning. Sat on the floor of some train or in the most different and effectively even much more uncomfortable situations, people like me are learning and thinking, all around the world.

Today I think I got lucky. Some irresistible curiosity about the way things work have led me through life in some very peculiar ways, from Protestant theologian to orthodox Trotskyist in different moments, for instance.

But essentially, in addition to a probably controversial bachelor’s degree, I have been self-educated in recent years and built a diverse body of personal knowledges, but that doesn’t mean anything directly to academia, as all my unfinished graduations don’t.

Besides, I never published anything so I could say “look, i have a Lattes”, didn’t yet have a means to organize and explain my ideas, and every time I reached an apparently satisfying conclusion, after not so much time I found out that there was a gap, so or the entire idea was doomed, or if a part of the idea was good, which fortunately happened often enough, that automatically meant that there was more to understand before showing that to someone, because a lot of really smart people had already written and said a lot of things about this.

So I had this feeling that what I knew was never enough, someone probably could do it better, so what I did, or even the method or process I used, wouldn’t be worth spreading or sharing. I lost a lot of time.

Nobody is normal when seen from up close

The study of Formal Logic was the truth that most profoundly set me free when I ended up swapping from theology and the Methodist church to social studies and politics, back in 2000, and after considering Liberation Theology as the last try to give my vocation, my call some meaning, it didn’t make sense anymore, as well.

Some months after graduating on theology I was signing up to a Trotskyist party.

“…If i had to begin all over again, I would, of course, try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent; indeed, it is firmer today than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

That guy and the passion for changing the world for good, expressed on his testament, really had got me a year before that, and I dedicated more than 10 years to the militancy, learning about and struggling against social and racial injustice and inequality. After that, I still admire Trotsky, but with rare few exceptions I’m really disappointed with the incapacity of Trotskyists to politically answer to a fast changing time.

However, I am not sure about how a poor guy like me could learn as much as I learned through those years, with the militancy and 6 years working with social care as a social educator.

A downside may be that I restricted my usage of Logic to the space of dialectical materialism and my usage of statistics to the domains of social theories and politics, and more lately, geography. The ontological issues became superfluous.

“Arbeit…” my ass

I gave up trying to make my professional experience fit in a Curriculum Vitae years ago. When you look at what I did through my life displayed on a list, it may look like just a bunch of disconnected stuff.

I have worked since I was 9, and I am now 38: Electronic technician apprentice, cobbler apprentice (Learned how to change heels, soles, half soles, shaping sandals, measuring, cutting, and sewing cap balls. And I still can do it). Typing and calculating machine technician assistant, wall painter, electrician, teacher, salesman and more.

Meanwhile since eighteen, if a computer was malfunctioning, I could usually fix it or say for sure why couldn’t be fixed.

You have probably noticed that entrepreneurship wasn’t among my most developed abilities, and by saying this I am certainly being at least euphemistic. But I just had to work.

Work to learn, after that work to be more autonomous, then work to pay the bills, then work to build a family, work to raise a child and then there is the work that becomes raising a child in this society, by itself.

“Arbeit macht frei”. Work sets you free, they said once.

Well, nowadays I start at work at 6, when I have to put my e-reader and my notes in my backpack, my backpack inside my cabinet and dress up in grey pants and a blue/white stripes shirt uniform. Yes, those are the colors of the shirt, what a joke, isn’t it? It is like if a good song was always interrupted on its climax.

I work at the subway company, they need me to sell tickets, explain people the way to get to their destinations, allow or deny the passage through the ticket gate, offer help if necessary, and explain why they shall never sit on the floor of a train. And despite loving trains and also enjoying observing the flow of people and interacting with this diverse community that wander around on a metropolis like S?o Paulo, most of those fascinating people obviously just need to go from one place to another, so I sell them tickets, and I swipe the card, and I open the gate, and I close the gate.

Taking notes of ideas changes everything. Our brains in general aren’t reliable when it’s about storing relations between abstract and concrete ideas, especially when you have a short interval to eat, talk to your colleagues and study a bit, before going back to the ticket-open-close routine.

Learning and realizing things can set us free, work should be just a way through.

Ideas cannot be stopped

I go home during a counterflow, so I can sit on a bench, and most of the times, I sleep. Usually at 4pm I am at home, so I have some hours in the afternoon to study, some days 4, some days 5, it depends on whether it’s my turn to make dinner or not.

But the days off… ah, the days off are for thinking, for having fun, of course, and for loving. But mostly for thinking. Ana, my daughter, and Vania, my current life and love partner, would certainly prefer if the division was different, sometimes I would too.

I developed some habits in order to control my own procrastinating tendencies. Apparently is working, because if you are reading this, you are reading the most hard and self-exposing text I wrote so far. I postponed it a lot, for years I could say.

As a major parallel project, I’ve been working on a reproducible Lab model, specially designed to be shared by different types of communities. It is now advanced, we are creating a Non Profit Organization and the first Lab will be ready for preliminary testing soon. A friend is now on it with me, a dozen of people are actively supporting, and if I just may look at the world as a scientist and a politician, my friend has the brain of an organizer and entrepreneur, and got the whole central idea since the first talk we had about it.

So when I get stuck on one thing, I have some pendant notes about the other one with tasks to do. I like both, both challenge me, I just get tired and stuck, so I swap. But nowadays I think both things, the studying problem and the designing problem, are more connected than I could ever suppose.

Rollercoaster

In 2012 I had a turning point, a separation after a 9-year-long relationship and the possibility of a major change on my life. I got accepted to geography at USP in 2013 and, in order to be able to pay the bills and help take care of Ana, I signed up to a public contest to the state subway company and got accepted. A reasonable wage, health insurance for Ana and myself, and some other benefits, starting in 2014.

Almost three years ago, my body imposed me a pause on working, and after a spinal surgery I’d have 3 months entirely dedicated to studying. I got prepared with an arsenal, spent my USP 2-year book scholarship with all that I dreamed of in philosophy, history, economy, but most of all geography.

I couldn’t remember when I had that much time to think before. I was received at the house of an immigrant friend who knows how to welcome someone who needs care to recover. She has a very rare library, made me comfortable, and I had prepared myself properly too.

I grew and specialized my own library. Ana was frequently around. It was in a beautiful house with comfortable rooms, lighted gardens, friends visiting almost daily for some hours, and I had a TV with webcasting.

It was fine. After a few weeks spent alternating between good books and the worst of Pseudoscience on YouTube, at some point, among my video suggestions, the Cosmos show, with Carl Sagan popped up. I remembered having seen some episodes and the wonder it had caused when I was a kid.

It was like a bomb had been detonated. I revised and redirected my entire studying plan, chose books, texts, films and videos focused on the problems that I wanted to think about.

I read the whole bibliography of Sagan, then started to read and note down Mario Bunge, Bertrand Russell, Paul MacLean, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, following the paths of the bibliographies on my booklets. In addition to the books, I set out for the articles.

The research lessons with the Professor of Scientific Research Methodology, Esequiel, at the time of the theology course were precious, and at the same time, I started to get in touch with some modern productivity tools.

At some point I got into a major personal crisis, faced a situation that really tested my capacity of finding the best on myself and on other people. I’m still not in condition to go back to the university so far, but since them i have a new and concrete learning pathway to follow.

Science, technology and society

Geography still fascinates me, of course. It offers a dazzling and efficient set of thinking tools and some readings on Milton Santos, David Harvey and Yves Lacoste are like those intellectual events that rearrange and reshape the mind. But the guys on the headline of this text, especially the first one, guided me through a studying detour and I ended up stumbling upon logic and statistics again. But now I am different, as are the logic studies and the tools and resources around to think on it and ask questions. My problem with fundamental math was made much simpler with a calculator. Excel was great and helped a lot too. But I had a glimpse of what I could do even with the basics of the new computer languages and tools, like GeoGebra.

Computers understand the arithmetics, I just need to understand computers; and the better they get, and the better as I get, the easier gets the conversation. I’d like to know people to ask for help when it’s too hard for me to understand and they can.

After my back and muscles got better, I got back to work at the subway, but a lot of things were different. Of course to face personally an illness, a benign tumor, just in a bad place, caused an effect on me. I used to hardly ever get sick, and now I was seeing the capacity of my body being suddenly reduced. So maybe part of it was some kind of middle age crisis. Anyway, I had discovered another meaning to the phrase “I can learn anything.”

It’s working for me and it’s working for millions of people around the world, apparently, but pure math is definitely not my environment, I feel. Now, what about logic? Or cosmology?

Multiple pathways

I began to stumble upon some more and more difficult problems, and to get surprised to see that the solutions that I could find were matching with solutions found by a lot of researchers. At one point it was bothering me that every time I thought I was thinking about something that “ok, it’s a bit crazy, but why not, maybe it’s how it works and it would be worthwhile to write about,” I discovered that there were already a lot of really smart people thinking about it, and obviously, that there was so much more to know.

It is what happened with the concept of Technological Singularity, but I frankly got scared. It was also when I discovered the Dunning-Kruger effect, so I concluded that I was at the “wrong end” of it.

I assumed after some days depressed that if I had that much difficulty to understand some classic formulas in math and physics behind the fundamental concepts I was trying to figure out, such as the Planck units, the Heisenberg principle, and if I was confusing that much the characteristics and functions of some fundamental particles, so I was probably far away from science or philosophy. I could be cherry-picking or misunderstanding everything, deluding myself and messing around with much more complicated issues than I could even understand.

So those crazy ideas were just crazy ideas, and my conjectures were being built upon an empty base.

I was assuming, those days, essentially, that if the second thermodynamics law is right, if the Drake equation is at least a reasonable guess, if I was basically understanding the main approaches on the relations between entropy and enthalpy, as most of the physicists understand now, and if I had understood correctly the way the fundamental forces would interact, then there were just two possibilities to civilizations in the end, disregarding some even more controversial ideas.

Civilizations would destroy themselves or go through some kind of very deep transformation, because the result of the accumulation of information and the technological advances apparently would show a behavior whose dynamics could just be compared in power to the accumulation of critical mass before an atomic explosion, or a dwarf star right before its gravity overcomes Chandrasekar limits.

Through another optics, it appeared to me that there was no possibility of gradual advancing after some point, and the question should be, at any point, but especially at this very breakpoint, if it was true, about the capacity or not of reality to keep its integrity. It could explode or collapse over itself, but not keep the same language pattern, the same wave frequency pattern after some unavoidable breakpoint. It would have to get more complex in order to keep coherence.

The next step was to imagine what possible cosmologies could emerge from these eventual conclusions. So I freaked out.

I started to think that it was just crazy ideas, decided to move on. At that point I was devouring playlists of science and education over Youtube. Some good stuff: Vsauce, Veritasium, Fermilab, PBS and spending hours watching inspiring and insightful TED talks.

The problem, I thought, could be that I was choosing the wrong videos, or I was misunderstanding what they were telling, and in this case I could, at most, end up with some good science fiction.

So I watched a movie

It was the first time I was seeing the concept of Singularity so directly applied to something other than that I was feeling a bit more familiar with, the black hole, the big bang. Transcendence was the movie.

Watching it made me feel both excited and sad. Excited because I saw that even though I couldn’t understand the math most of the times, I was really correlating correctly the concepts I was learning about. I was identifying patterns, reaching conclusions by myself, and again, smart people were apparently reaching similar conclusions, so if I was wrong and crazy, at least I wasn’t alone.

But I also got a bit sad, because I was having that feeling that I was asking good questions on deep concepts, but without a degree, a title, my thoughts were just a matter of sci-fi. Can you imagine an ex-trotskyist theologian even dare to make questions so near the cutting line of Newton’s flaming sword?

And, even if I wasn’t deluding myself, if I was understanding correctly and those were good and valid questions to be made, how much time would be necessary to gather enough evidence to convince anyone to even help me try to test my conjectures? How much time to fulfill my gaps of education and learn more and to get more experienced with the harsher and more counter-intuitive concepts, and to speak fluently the language of math to translate the concepts I was dealing with in cosmological and logic terms? And how much time until I am able to formulate my questions coherently in logic notation terms? Should I just throw my ideas to the wind? Write anything without learning enough to feel safe? Publish where?

I’d have to get deeper on some issues, especially those that were harder to me, for sure. So I built a personal studying pathway flowchart that is helping me organize my scarce time since then according to the things I want and need to learn.

It is one of the things I’ve been scratching while sat on the floor of the train at a dawn. And now I am sharing it.

It’s all about time

I feel desperate about what to do with so many notes and such a large list of texts and articles that I’ve already read, but I get really terrified by the other exponentially more numerous that I would need to read but I cannot.

The contact with the elaborations of Kurzweil, von Neumann, and others have suggested a line of inquiry and perhaps some good questions. I don’t know people who understand about these approaches, so some days it’s lonely again.

At this point, the YouTube channels and websites of scientific divulgation are still my preferred way to learn in some level as also to fixate concepts, but they are not enough. The available classes from some of the greatest universities from the world even make me cry some days.

I don’t know if I will be understood about this. There were some professors whose books and articles I read and I imagined that I would have to die and be born again as another person to be allowed to see a class from them. And now I watch them, leaning against the orthopedic triangle on the sofa at my living room, I write down notes, save them to the cloud and compare them by the morning sat on the floor of the train on my way to work.

About the Dunning-Kruger effect, I’m a bit calm right now.

I may certainly not to be a genius, I am not even sure that such a thing really exists, anymore. But learning is for anyone, or should be. I may not be a mathematician, or a physicist, but I can learn ways to formulate to them my best questions, as I can do to anyone from a different expertise area, as some people around are starting to do with me about cosmology and information theory, as they did about the Bible or racism, politics, social service or dialectics in other times. And I can put in the effort on finding ways to understand the meaning of the answers and to move on to the next level on the logic and the cosmological implications of the most probable conclusions. To an idea, to a person, to a company, to a human being, to a particle, to a bacteria, maybe even to our relationships. Getting more efficient to manage the resources implies getting more complex. It’s the only way to postpone decoherence, apparently.

Never crazy enough

Daring to make questions over complex topics, such as the tissue of spacetime and its continuum, information theory, or the events that happened during that first 10^–36 of a second after the Big Bang in order to try to formulate hypotheses on a cosmological model that can explain better how and why things really work takes us to uncommon places.

One particular night, I thought that information because of its role could only constitute a field itself. Crazy or not I went to search and found out I wasn’t alone. There were people making science about that too.

It was funny, on the way to strengthening my understanding about the more consolidated concept of field, I had to deepen my relationship with some people, like Mr. Feynman, who helped me to understand more deeply how reality is jiggling. And I learned a bit more about how could both Fourier’s Transform and Bayes Theory be powerful, as a side effect.

None of the attempts to refute the conclusions of those studies convinced me; on the contrary, there seems to be favorable supporting evidence, but I may be choosing just the ones I like most.

The logical consequences of these conclusions seem consistent with something similar to Platonic cosmology, which has come to have only symbolic value, but if research on the locality independent models continues to present consistent results it may also have been the most accurate guess in the history of mankind.

Our observations and the descriptions of these observations are consistent with an universe whose amount of stuff can be measured and we roughly described its main laws by already confirmed and re-confirmed equations, that physicists are testing and precising with the most advanced tools we can create now.

At this point I believe our universe may be explained by math, and logic, but the cosmos which contains it has to be explained by logic, information itself.

The math expressions we already figured out became stuck in the problem of the infinity by irrefutably proving its existence or the existence of something that from our perspective can’t be differentiated from it.

It’s apparently the limit to the math of the infinity, and likewise the limit to the probability theories is apparently the principle of uncertainty. So it’s a harsh time to mathematicians. Despite the power computers gave them until now, there is still a lot of hard and counterintuitive math to do. It is not enough to increase our computation capacity, it is necessary to formulate good questions in order to use this power to solve the hardest problems we can understand.

There are people around the world trying to figure out a new Physics, new Mathematics and technologies, and we need to have the right to make questions on what kind of behavior is more adequate to have success as a civilization under this set of laws. We certainly need new points of view and new approaches, and my learning pathway may not have made me know anything, but it is helping me to learn to formulate my questions. Maybe it can help someone else.

Grammar review: Jo?o Guilherme Viana

Isaac Asimov 80’s interview: A seminal thought.