Hi.
I should have probably started blogging long ago, but I hope it's not too late... I'm doing this mainly for myself, or rather for the version of me that lives 5, 15 or 50 years from now. I just want to log my thoughts, and therefore maybe forget fewer of them.
I've recently read Dawkin's The God Delusion and The End of Faith by Sam Harris and spent a lot of time thinking about them. I think The God Delusion is very refreshing and probably one of my favorite books. I really want to read a few more books (almost ordered them from Amazon yesterday, but I don't know if I have the time...): Letter to a Christian Nation (Sam Harris), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit), and The Cosmic Landscape and The Holographic Universe (Leonard Susskind). Too much, but I can't wait to read each one of them...
One interesting idea the Dawkins reminded me of is the apparent "fine tuning" of physical "parameters" to facilitate life. It's really a mystery to me. I can't think of too many options: If the values of these "parameters" are inevitable - they must be such in order for the physics to be consistent - then why is it that these values are also favorable to life? Too unlikely. A designer? Needs more explanation than the "explanation" it provides. Maybe the values aren't that special after all? Or maybe all options are "there" somehow, and by the Anthropic Principle the universe is such that we are able to see it? Nothing seems very appealing.
Ray Kurzweil's predictions looked awfully odd when I first read them, but he is very convincing. He has a bet on Long Bets that a computer will have passed the Turing Test by 2029! It's just around the corner, and I just can't imagine how that can possible happen. Not to mention all his "Singularity" stuff and the living forever...