why my brain should have an off switch

[ithych]

Sometimes, late at night, I start thinking about how small atoms are, and how much space there is between them in most molecules, and how very small subatomic particles are, and how they really only take up a minuscule fraction of the available space. Then I start looking at things around me, things that look solid, feel very reliably solid, and I

Comments

[agnoster]

Man, that used to happen to me all the time when I was younger (minus the probability distribution part, I didn't know about it then - I thought at least atoms were solid, fool that I was) but I think the myth of solidity hasn't struck me as often as recently as the myth of... er, meaning, or something. Every single mundane thing is so... weird. When people talk, the process that's going on has so many *parts* to it, and so many steps that happened for it to work the way it does... I suppose this is what makes some people believe in God or intelligent design or something but for me it's just... supremely odd somehow.

Clearly it's a good thing you're not a physicist, so instead you can think about how weird endoskeletons are. (That still gets me :-P)

[ithych]

I think the myth of solidity hasn't struck me as often as recently as the myth of... er, meaning, or something.

I think the word you're looking for is "complexity." There's actually a new theory in biology called the Zero Force Evolutionary Law positing that, in the absence of other influences (selection, genetic drift, etc), both biological diversity and biological complexity* will tend to increase.

*complexity in the narrow, biological sense refers to physiological complexity of a particular organism, ie humans are more complex than protozoans because we have more specialized tissues/structures