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Consider answering following questions about time (Do not just read these questions, but think about them for a little bit). I call them mind-benders.

• Can every moment in time of the past exists somewhere?
• Does past actually exists somewhere? If it does, Is it than stored somewhere?
• How about the future or present? Can future and present exist somewhere?
• Can you define present? How long does the present lasts?
• If you think that present exists, then where is it? If you think that past exists, then where is it?

When you really think about it answer is so simple that even child could understand it, so we conclude following: no past, present and future can exists without violating at least dozens of physics and logical laws; which in turn would imply that time does not exists.
Passage of time is just an illusion we made up to cope and measure the change. No more and no less; Everything else in between is work of our imagination, science-fiction writers and physicist with too much time on their hands. That is essentially what this article will be about. Just a thought exercise to see if we can have a logical world with no time existing.

Let’s first start with the quote:

” A famous philosophical argument says that, if the future were real, then it would be fixed now, and we would not have the freedom to affect that future. Since we do have that freedom, the future can’t be real”

What this quote is essentially saying is that predetermined future cannot exists because we’re the ones that are making it it as we go along. If that kind of future did exist somewhere, than we would not be able to affect it with our own actions. So no matter what I did, my future would always remain the same.

We all know stories and science fiction novels about traveling back to in time and further into the future. We also know about time travel paradoxes. Most famous being grandfather paradox. It goes like this:
If you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not exists since he would not be able to have children of his own. He would be dead and you would’ve never been born. But, if you weren’t born you would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place since you didn’t exist, but obviously you do exist and you did go back in time and you did kill your grandfather. This creates a logical paradox and big inconsistency in logical thinking. But we’ll come back to this later in the article.
There’s another paradox which physicist don’t talk about, but to me it seams like even stranger paradox than the grandfather one. I’m sure someone else though of this but I’ll just state it. It goes like this:
Today is 2008, and let’s suppose you go back to 2006 and meet yourself. Now there’s two of you. How would that be possible without violating Conservation of Energy Law, which states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. Obviously since there’s two of you occupying same space and time, one of you was created. Either that or you are leaving copies of yourself on every instance (frame) in time which would violate the law even further.

Another example: Imagine taking the whole earth back with you to only yesterday. You would now have two earths in the same orbit! You would have increase in mass and God knows how would that affect the space in our Solar System. You might try to counter this argument by saying that it would not be possible to take anything with you back in time; But with that logic you wouldn’t be able to take yourself back in time either, so time travel would still not be possible.

Let’s take that little further and say that from 2006 you wanted to jump to 2000 and look up yourself there too. Now there’s three copies of you. Two copies of you exist in the year 2000 and one that you left in 2006. Or would that 2006 copy of you just disappear? How would that actually work?
It gets even more complex and illogical if one wants to define instance. What’s one instance? What is NOW? Is it one second? One microsecond? Nanosecond? How about picosecond? You can pretty much go to infinite regression and make no progress of defining NOW.
It seems that we’re creating problems that don’t really exists, and and then trying to find a solution for it.

Einstein wrote extensively in his papers about time. The whole premise of General Theory Of Relativity revolves around time. However, Einstein did claim that traveling to past is not going to be possible. I happen to agree with that, but for different reasons. Einstein’s relativity claims time is directly correlated to mass, speed of light and energy (E=MC2) and that nothing could travel faster than light. Faster you go (higher your velocity), slower the time passes for you.
If you were to ever reach speed of light you would have to become one dimensional and would have no mass. Like photon particles. Time would then stop for you. You would not be affected by time. Just like light is not affected by time. It is the only constant in universe. But you would never be able to catch up with the light anyway.
If you would to travel along side of light; It would not matter how fast you were going; from your perspective light would still be going 186,000 miles per second. For example: If you were to travel close to the speed of light (185,000 miles per second lets say), light would still be going 186,000 miles per second respective to you. Not only you would never be able to catch up with it, but it would look as if you were just standing still and light is just zipping by you regardless of your speed.
Now, in order to go back in time you would have to travel faster than the speed of light and have negative mass. Einstein believed that is not possible.

Lets now see solution for all these inconsistencies and paradoxes. New speculative-theory which states that time does not exists solves this and many other problems. It states that time is just an arbitrary concept we made up and it’s only a measurement of change. Nothing more. Every kind of change for that matter. Just like mile is a measurement of distance. Mile doesn’t really physically exists. Same thing with time. Time as a physical or multidimensional entity doesn’t really exists. We use concept of time to measures changes in our body, motion, aging etc. Nothing more.
Without time there’s no grandfather paradox. Here’s how:
You would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather because your grandfather is here! There is no such a thing as “before”. Maybe your grandfather is not alive right now, but in whichever form, he is definitely here. Yes he was alive 20 years ago, but right now he is physically HERE, in a different form, made of different particles, but that doesn’t mean that there’s another copy of your grandfather existing back in 1950’s or 1968 or any year you happen to pick.
The only proof of your grandfather existing in the past you have is memories of him. Having memories of your grandfather don’t mean he still exists in the past. If you for example look at a photograph of your grandfather to remind you of him; would that mean that your grandpa from the photograph still exists somewhere? And if he does exists somewhere in time; that would mean that every other instance of your life also exists somewhere in time.
Here’s another example with photograph: Lets say you pick up the photograph of yourself, and in that photograph you have a black eye. That black eye has healed so far. But does it mean that your black eye from the photograph still exists somewhere? I think we can see false logic here. Your black eye cannot exists because the eye you’re reading this text with now, and the black eye from the past are actually the same eye. The only difference is in change. Black eye has healed (dead cells got replaced by healthy ones etc…) and turned into normal healthy eye, but it’s the same eye.
We created paradoxes like “grandfather’s paradox” only because we assume that there are multiple copies of your grandfather you can go back to. I think it is more natural to assume that time as a physical entity does not really exists, and that the only way to go back in time is to UNDO the changes that affect you and your surroundings. That would mean to put everything (and I mean everything) back the way it was let’s say 20 minutes ago. You might as well say “going back in change” instead of “going back in time”.
I will give you analogy for this example but before I do that let’s define what it means “to age”. To age simply means cell death. Your cells are dying and getting weaker and weaker so you have sense of aging. That’s it. Time has nothing to do with it. Time as a physically (or logical) entity cannot make you age. Change is the only thing that takes place. The only reason you feel weaker as you age is because of billions and billions of your cells are dying ever day but they don’t get replaced by the same amount. Remember this since you will need it for the next experiment.

Going 20 minutes back in “time” in a world with no “time” experiment

I have been thinking of an analogy to use here to accurately describe what happens in a world with no time so hopefully following analogy will explain it well. As you read following scenario please try to visualize events happening.

Imagine yourself siting in the middle of a small room on a wooden chair.
There’s nothing in the room but you, four walls, ceiling, floor and that wooden chair.
You absolutely are not doing anything but motionlessly stare at the wall.
It seems that nothing is happening and that time is standing still. But that is not true. Atoms in your body as well as atoms and molecules in walls around you and chair underneath you, are in constant motion and are changing constantly. Even the air around you is in constant motion.
After 20 minutes, wooden chair breaks and you fall and bruise your butt. The act of chair breaking is the only thing you’ve been aware of in those 20 minutes. If chair did not break you would not be able to tell the difference between minute 2 from minute 5 lets say, but since now you have a reference point (chair breaking), it seems like some time did pass and you would be able to pin point differences between minute 2 and 5. It would be easy because you would use breaking of a chair as a reference point. Keep with me here, we’re almost done.
Now ask yourself: What would it take for you to go back in time when chair was whole and your butt was bruisless? Can you guess by now? No, not a time machine or a worm hole.
To truly go back in time, all you would have to do is to revert changes back to way they were 20 minutes ago. And that includes everything: the chair, your body, floor, ceiling, air molecules and four walls around you.

• That would mean putting back and re-arranging every molecule back where it was.
• Every atom in that broken chair would have to be repaired and reassembled the way it was 20 minutes ago.
• That would also mean you would have to cure your cells from aging and revert them to state they were in 20 minutes ago. Cells don’t just disappear after they die. They turn into energy, so you would also need to convert some of the lost energy back into cells. That would also cure your bruise.
• You would have to rearrange your neurons in your brain to reflect original state which was 20 minutes ago, which would in turn erase your current memories.
• Every molecule and atom in the walls, ceiling, floor and air around you would have to be rearranged, converted and reverted back to the 20 minutes ago.

Once everything is done, you could say that you truly went back in time without time. Then there would be no difference between you (and the room) right now and you 20 minutes ago. None whatsoever. You went beck in time without time really existing. But that would only apply to you. Outside world would still be unaffected by your molecule rearrangements and would continue aging and changing, but you would be 20 minutes younger.
Of course in current practice all this is impossible and irreversible without using up godly amount of energy. Just imagine the feat of trying to revert changes just for the room example!
That is exactly why we have grandfather’s paradox. If your grandfather is dead right now, the only way to see him alive is not go back in 1950’s but to revert changes that lead to his death. And that includes everything. Going back in time with a time machine would created logical paradox which doesn’t make any sense since it would require multiple copies of grandfathers to exists which violates not just logic but our fundamental laws of physics. We only have illusion that time exists because we use it to measure the actual change. It’s simple as that.

I realize that some of these examples are really simple and maybe point of view a true realist would have, but sometimes in order to see the truth, we need to oversimplify things to get past the clutter and fog.

This is the point where you ask: “What about relativity? If there’s no time, how come that we’ve observed that time does slows down for a person in motion?” Good question, but that’s illusion too. Person’s perception of time slows down because everything in his/hers body slows down as they go faster and faster. That includes: heart rate, brain neurons, cell division, cell death, protein forming and the whole enchilada. At this stage person’s perception of everything slows down. Relativity also treats time as one and the same entity as space. If there’s no space there would be no time; so “no time” theory would not affect relativity at all. Think about it. If there’s no space than it would be impossible for matter to exists. If there’s no matter and space, there would no occurrence of any changes taking place and time would still not exists.
The fact is that time still remains more of philosophical question than anything else.

I am going to try to explain basic differences between scientific theory, law, facts and hypothesis. There are lot of misconceptions about these so I thought I’d try to explain it as best I can.
I am no scientist but I do have friends (from both sides of Atlantic) that are so I pick their brains every once in a while. Also, I still remember this from the science class when I went to school and I did great deal of researching about the subject through out the years.
Amazingly, scientific theory is something all scientists agree on, with no exception regardless of geographical location. So this article will not be me speculating. These are coming from the actual scientists themselves.
We all heard following phrase: “Oh it’s just a theory and not a fact.”
Theory in every day life is indeed just a speculation, but in scientific world theory is something totally different as we will see from the following article.

It’s important for a somewhat educated person living in 21st century to know what scientific theory is and be able to name basic differences between Law and Theory. This is elementary knowledge but people forget these things quickly. That’s why “Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader” show works so well.

Lets take matters from the beginning and see how scientists form theories.

Chronological step by step:

1. Observational Facts - Are collection of data through observation methods. If I drop the ball from my hand it will fall to the ground. If I repeat this many times, I will get same results over and over. Ball will fall to the ground every time. This is an observational fact. Some more observational facts: Rivers running in certain direction, bees pollinating flowers, etc..
2. Law - Getting back to ball fall. if I get same results with other objects after repeated experiments, I can form some kind of law with probable certainty. This is Newton’s Law of Gravity. However, this law does not explains why did ball drop on the floor. It just describes the event. That’s it. There’s not much difference between law and observational facts. You could in a sense say that Scientific Law is just body of predictable observational facts. Nothing more.
3. Hypothesis - After the law is formed, scientist will try to explain it by observation and repeated experiments. Eventually they will form different hypothesis. Hypothesis are ideas that could be falsified, changed and modeled as the new evidence comes in. Does the ball falls because earth is bigger than the ball? Does the ball falls because there’s an invisible force that is attracting the ball towards the earth? Will the ball fall at the same speed in vacuum? Etc… Scientists will continue to hypothesize until there’s no new evidence to dispute their hypothesis. But they’re not done yet. Hypothesis has to pass scrutiny of grueling tests under different conditions and repeated experiments. All of those experiments has to conform to their proposed hypothesis every time. If they don’t, hypothesis is thrown away and the scientist moves on.
4. Scientific Theory comes the last. Only if hypothesis passes all of the above stages, it can be formed into Scientific Theory. Scientific Theory is crowning achievement in science. In science, there’s nothing higher than theory. It’s Creme De La Cream. You can describe Scientific Theory as following: Theory is a comprehensive explanation of natural world that is supported by factual observations, independently testable and repeated experiments. Theory is explanation. So theory contains facts and laws. Laws and facts are part of the theory.

But it doesn’t end there. Theory then has to be peer reviewed. It will be bombarded by skepticism from other scientists with their own hypothesis and theories from same field of studies.
Who do you think is the major debunker of scientific theory? It’s other scientists. They will try to debunk and disprove new theories and replace them with theories of their own all the time. It’s a constant battle.
Every scientist wants to get recognized and possibly get Nobel Prize, but you don’t get Noble Prize by just confirming already established theory. You want to debunk it and replace it with better theory or at least make a noticeable correction (like Einstein did with Newton’s) worth the Noble Prize.
Scientific theories are constantly evaluated, peer reviewed, bombarded and critically examined by other scientist. That’s how we get well established theories. Just imagine scientific theory that passed all that scrutiny and criticism for hundred years. It’s the closest thing to the truth and explanation of natural world as we know it. That’s why all well established theories are almost unshakable and last for long time. Theory of Evolution and Cell Theory are one of them. Plate tectonics, General Relativity, Atomic Theory are all examples of well established theories.

Theory Of Evolution (by Natural Selection) being the most criticized and attacked, withstood test of time for 150 years! That is more testing, evaluating, examining, collecting evidence than any other well established theory we have.
The fact that some us (who don’t practice science professionally 14 hours or so a day, every day!) just don’t believe part (or whole) of it has nothing to do with theory being true or not. As long as it’s accepted within scientific community (you know… people who dedicated their whole lives to theories like these) theory will remain true. Public should be educated of course, but if you as a non-scientist want and try to debunk or argue some theory and you think you have the knowledge, roll the dice, write the paper and see if your thesis withstands same scrutiny as the theory you’re trying to debunk.
I cannot just tell to the carpenter how to make a table. Especially If I have never picked up a wood saw in my life.

Scientific Theories are less certain than laws. That’s true, but that’s only because law is just bunch of observational facts. Nothing else. It’s meaningless without the theory. It doesn’t provide any explanation. Theory of Evolution for example can never be a fact since it’s comprised of many facts and biological laws. It’s like a deck of cards. Theory Of Evolution being the deck and cards being the facts. It would make no sense to call the whole deck “a card”.

As the new evidence comes in theory will get tweaked and improved. But that’s the beauty of it. It will get modeled into comprehensive set of explanations of our natural world.
Think about this. Even if you see, with your own eyes, something that contradicts well established theory, it would not mean much. Eyes can deceive and we all know that brain is the best 3D software there is. Schizophrenics for example see and hear voices that ARE real to THEM. That doesn’t make it real. Scientific method is the only and the best way we know how to explain actual reality since it requires independent testing under different conditions regardless if public agrees with it or not. It’s up to science and teachers to explain their theories so we can understand them well. I agree that is something scientists and teachers have not been doing a great job at, but that’s for the whole new article.

New one from Pat. Probably his most brutal on Islam so far.

That was pretty embarrassing. Note how commentators did not comment on booing, but they’ve actually commented on how he threw great pitch.

Life could indeed be beautiful and just a thought of dying could be enough to put you in a temporary state of depression. Most of us like to live. We love life and want more of it, but at the same time we’re all aware that one day we’re all going to die. Every human on this planet knows, that one day they will too cease to exist. Some people are terrified by this, but some just accept it and are fine with it, while on the other hand majority of us wants and needs to know if there’s life after.

Let’s first look at the facts and what we DO know about death:

1. Heart stops and cells get deprived from oxygen so cells start irreversible process of dying
2. Lungs cease to function and person stops breathing
3. If CPR is not administered within 6 minutes brain starts to die from lack of oxygen.
4. After 10 minutes brain damage is certain and irreversible
5. Muscles starts to stiffen and body begins to cool down
6. Skin and bone cells die latest and could survive up to 36 hours without oxygen
7. After 36 hours (and extensive tests) person is pronounced brain dead and there’s nothing that could be done for him/her anymore.
8. No one has ever came back after 72 hours of his/hers heart stopping.
9. Your body decompose and you eventually cease to exists
10. Your molecules and atoms become part of the soil and eventually end up in rivers, water air and perhaps some other person’s or animals body.

To describe the process medically we use fancy latin names like following:

• Pallor mortis, paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death)
• Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature
• Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate
• Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body
• Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter

Doctors use instruments like Electroencephalography (EEG) or intracranial EEG (icEEG) to determine that there’s no electrical activity in the brain before they pronounce person brain dead or dead. Once these devices stop detecting brain activity, that’s it. Person is dead, and the process is irreversible.

You might say that this applies only to the body itself and not the soul. Well, neither me or you nor anyone else knows what the soul is. Let alone if it exists, so like I said let’s stick with what we DO know.
As you know it, your body (matter) cannot just disappear (second law of thermodynamics prevents that), but it can turn into energy or some other form of matter. If you consider this kind of energy to be soul then so be it, but that’s not really living after death and it will not be point of this article. I am assuming that when majority of people are talking about life after death, they’re talking about consciousness living. In other words, they would be aware they’re alive.

Sometimes belief in life after death could be overwhelming that it would be hard to put it in words. I’m sure we all had following conversation with our parents, friends or just acquaintances. I will describe brief dialog between myself and my mom:

Mom: ” So you believe that after we die we just go into the ground, decompose and eventually disappear.”
Me: “I really don’t know but yes, based on what we do know today that is what happens.”
Mom: We don’t feel anything and nothing happens afterwards?
Me: “Yes”
Mom: “But that cannot be”
Me: “why not?”
Mom: ” Because it cannot”
Me: “Why do you think that cannot be?”
Mom: “There has to be something.”
Me: “What?”
Mom: “Something. There’s just has to be.”
Me: “But what?”
Mom: “I don’t know what, but I cannot just go into the ground and just seize to exist. Something has to happen. There has to be something more.”
And goes on and on…

Now, I consider my mom to be very rational person of above average intelligence and well read. She is not the only one who talks and thinks like that in conversation like these. We’re just terrified of loosing someone or leaving the loved ones behind. Sometime we want something so bad that it’s hard to put it in thoughts. Let alone words.

Now, consider following quote which comes from one of our greatest thinkers. Mark Twain:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

Can you remember time of the Napoleon or Roman empire? How about dinosaurs? Of course you cannot, because you did not exist back then. You also did not feel, taste, see or sense back then. You just weren’t here. You have no consciousness recollection on any of those events and you’re not bothered by it.
Mark Twain implies that you will experience same thing after you die. Nothing. For lots of people that is truly terrifying, but there’s something very comforting about what Mark is saying. To me this seems a lot more comforting then wandering around as a ghost, spirit or some kind of non-physical entity. Same thing goes for being stuck in some kind of purgatory or heaven and hell for eternity. Just think about it little further. Doing anything (no matter how beautiful and great) for eternity seems like a torture to me.
Let me give you personal example. I really love playing guitar. I can play guitar for hours, but after six or seven hours it becomes boring and then pure torture. Imagine doing it for eternity! Even something as good as sex will get boring and eventually become true torture. Literary. Think about it. Physically burning in hell will eventually will be equal to having sex. That’s something I never though will hear myself say.

Good number of scientists and theologians believe that we cannot fully answer question life after death without fully explaining the consciousness. So far good number of tests and experiments are conducted and most of them point to conscientiousness being tied directly to brain functions. For example: reason why you cannot remember when you were one year old is because your brain wasn’t fully developed. Basically you weren’t conscious back then. Another example would be that if I would to hit you in the head you would loose conscientiousness and would not remember anything at all while unconscious. Yet, another even more convincing example is that it is the known fact that brain damage could change person’s personality. All of these point to the brain.

Can consciousness survive death? If consciousness is indeed just a brain function then no, it cannot survive death, but If consciousness is more than brain function then where would this consciousness reside? Is consciousness nothing more then our neurons firing at the certain order? Consciousnesses could also just be a measure to describe brain activity. Just like a meter is measurement of distance. You cannot touch or feel meter. Truth is, we really don’t know but lot of smart people are working on it.

I will leave you with little excerpt of Jesse Bering:

“Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce.”

What do I think?

We really have no examples of consciousness existing outside of the brain, so why anyone would want to suppose such a thing in a first place. I think fear of unknown plays a huge part in this. Also, not all of us are equipped to deal with harsh realities in same way. Some of us cope with the unknown in totally different ways. Let me name some of them: resurrection, reincarnation, incarnation, heaven and hell, ghosts, NDE (Near Death experiences), 72 virgins (I am being serious here), zombies and probably hundreds of other interesting and inventive ways of surviving death. It became pretty much cultural. Different cultures have their own way of dealing with loss, grief and fear of the unknown.
My personal opinion is that if we (regular schmo’s) worry too much about all possible things that might come after we die, we will miss out on all of the good things in the only life we do know. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to live your life trying to conform to something you have no way of knowing exists. Sometimes it’s ok to say “I just don’t know”, and get on with your current life. The only thing that is going to be left behind you that we DO know is your legacy and deeds you did in this life.

Here’s the excerpt from todays’ CNN article:

Just 31 percent of Americans approve of how President Bush is handling his job, according to a poll released Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.
A new poll out Wednesday finds that 67 percent of those surveyed disapprove of President Bush.

Full article here: Poll: Bush’s approval hits new low
There’s something terribly wrong here. If you don’t know what that is, I will tell you. It’s that number 31% that it’s bothering me. Article says ONLY 31% support president. ONLY?! Are you fucking kidding me? I would’ve guessed much, much lower. The real questions is not the other 67% who don’t support the president, but I am wondering who are those 31% of mongoloids that do. In any normal and healthy society this number could not reach 1% but statistical chance alone dictates that you will always have certain percentage of retards and chimp monks supporting this guy so 4% will probably be a closest number, but 31%. Come on. Who’re we kidding.

One of the most confusing arguments today is fine-tuning argument. How is it that the universe is so finely tuned to support life? Everything is at the right distance from everything or nothing would work. Psychical constants are so tight that any variation would bring chaos. Earth is exactly the right distance from the sun so it doesn’t get burned or cooled. If for example nuclear force was only few percent different, it would alter configuration of the stars which in turn would not be able to support the life as we know it. If expansion rate of the universe is larger: no galaxies would form if smaller: universe would collapse, even before stars formed.
There are hundreds of examples like this, and at the first look it does look amazing and impossible. That’s because it is impossible. Chances that the Universe fine tuned itself for our existence is highly improbable and it’s bordering on fantastical improbability.

But this fine-tuning argument is so flawed and answer to me seems so simple that I am really puzzled how some people (including some scientists) do not see it. Answer is following:

It’s all matter of perspective. People who are amazed by this fine-tuning argument are looking at it from the opposite point of view. They’re assuming that we were already existed here and ready to go and universe just showed up and fine tuned itself around our existence so it could sustain us. Or that the Universe popped into existence with us humans in mind. That would indeed be amazing. Universe did not fine-tune itself for us, but it was the other way around. It was the opposite way. Universe was already here and we’re the ones who evolved to fit within that form. Not only us, but stars, galaxies and everything else. If universe was any different, we would’ve just evolved into something different or not exist at all. Galaxies would look different or would not exist. And it’s simple as that. Really. Change you perspective and everything drastically changes.
Another analogy might be in order.
Professor of physics used the firing squad analogy:

A man is due to be executed by firing squad.
No man in the squad has ever missed before.
However on this occasion they all do.
The condemned man is interviewed afterwards and is asked how he feels about this amazing coincidence that everyone in the firing squad has missed.
He replies:

“Of course they missed or I wouldn’t be here talking to you!”

You wake up one morning and walk over to your mail box. There’s a letter in the mail from a broker or brokerage house, lets call it Big Brother, predicting that S&P500 will go up in price this month. You trash the letter assuming it was spam. Within a month you get a second letter, again from Big Brother notifying you that S&P500 indeed went up and that you missed out on large gains if you had enrolled in their 24 month predictions program. Prediction fee is only $1,995 a year. Second letter also makes another prediction stating that S&P500 will still go up next month.
This catches your interest since they already correctly predicted the move one time but you discard the letter anyway thinking it could be just pure luck. Within a month you go online and check out the price of S&P500 now versus one month ago and indeed it went up again.
Next month you receive a third letter from the Big Brother notifying you of their next prediction that S&P500 will go down this month. Indeed, within a month SP&500 goes down. Three correct predictions in a row. Still could be luck so you discard the letter again but your interest increases exponentially, or at least you already starting to have naughty dreams about money.
You keep receiving these letters month after month correctly predicting what the market is going to do with terrifying precision. By the month five, I guarantee you already checking up your savings (or even a home mortgage) to see if you have some money you can spare to loose. By the month 6 or 7 you’re hooked. You cannot just sit and wait idly while all these wonderful opportunities are passing you by. You have signed and enrolled in their 24 month no refunds prediction program for $1,995 a year. You might think, that’s lot of money, but that’s a very small fee comparing what you will make within a year knowing a fricking direction of the market! You already have excel sheet showing all your debt paid off, travel plans and another sheet where you listed all relatives and friends to take care of once you get rich. Or not.

Here’s how the scam is done from Big Brother’s perspective:

Big Brother starts out with lets say 10,000 prediction letters and splits them into two groups of 5,000. First group (Let’s call it UP Group) of letters is predicting that markets will go UP while the second group (let’s call it DOWN Group) is predicting that markets will go DOWN. Big Brother then mails out all of those letters to different households.
Big Brother waits and see what the market is going to do and then mails out conformation letters ONLY to the correct group. For example if markets went UP, Big Brother mails out conformation letters only to the UP Group.
DOWN Group never hears from the Big Brother ever again!
Now they have 5,000 users believing that Big Brother predicted market direction this month.
That’s not enough predictions in a row to convince anyone,so they again split up that group in two. UP and DOWN again with 2,500 customers in each group and do the same thing over and over until some of them take the bait. 2,500 will be split into 1,250 and so on. Eventually they will end up with couple of hundred really trusty customers. If they can do this scam few times over, they can clear few millions of doallrs within two years easily. Interesting part is that some of the customers will actually make money by pure luck so they might sign a contract for another two years not knowing that they’re paying $1,995 a year for essentially a coin flip.

Huge volumes are written about investing and stock picking so my aim in this article is not to write an essay and be preachy, but just to give you something to think about when you investing and show you that lady luck actually plays enormous role even when professionals are playing with money. Especially your money.

Money Managers

Money Manager is a person that is in charge of buying and selling securities with other people’s money. Their client’s money that is. Money Manager can have hundreds of clients with each bringing more than million bucks. Sometimes combined poll of money can be in billions. Money managers invest that money or portion of that money to sell and buy stocks and other securities as they see fit. It’s in their interest to get a big return on investment since they’re usually take a cut in percentage of the total sum, or even have up front fees. We also all know that there’s some money managers out there that are really successful and have 5, 6 or more years winning streaks, but sooner or later (probably sooner) that winning streak will end, and money manager will start performing mediocre or even very poorly.

They will use best technology and information money can buy, but that will not help them. It’s like a clockwork. Check it out if you like. So what’s going on here? How come money manager who constantly made money 5 years in a row suddenly started performing so poorly? Did he get less skilled as years goes by? Or could it be that all those years he was more lucky than he wanted to admit? But how can it be luck, winning that many years in a row? It’s seems like a paradox. Here’s how it can be done just by chance alone.

Making ordinary people into market gurus

Let’s take a pool of 1,000,000 people (one million) that have no idea on how to invest money. Let alone manage someone else’s money. Those are going to be regular, hard working people with no interest in stocks or securities. Give them each certain sum of money to invest by picking stocks and securities they like for period of 12 months. After 12 months each will have to report their losses or earnings.

What do you think will happen here? You might think that they’re all destined to go broke within few months, but that will not happen. Statistical chance alone dictates that at least 10% (100,000 people) will just get lucky and make money regardless of their skills and experience.

Sure, probably 90% will fail and go broke before year is over, but those lucky 10% WILL make money just by pure luck. Remember: they had no skills or any knowledge of anything related to financial markets. Intuition might play some minor role here but it will be very small. That alone will not make them successful money managers who make profits year after year you might say. Well, we’re not done yet.

10% out of 1,000,000 people is 100,000.

Let’s take remaining 100,000 winners and have them invest for a second year. Again, just by pure luck 10% of those remaining 100,000 people will become successful.
10% out of 100,000 is 10,000. So right now we have 10,000 people that had success two years in a row already.

If you take remaining 10,000 winners and let them invest for a third year then you would have 1,000 successful money managers for three years in a row! 100 successful money manager 4^th year in a row and 10 really successful money manager for 5 years in a row. All of them armatures that never seen threshold of financial college.
And that’s how it can be done.

I am not saying that’s how’s done in a real word, but I think that luck plays a way bigger role than people are ready to accept. It’s not easy to detect if your stock picking is just luck or skill, but remember following quote:

“Don’t ever mistake bull market for a skill”

That means that everyone is lucky while investing while markets are going up. It’s not a skill, you just investing at the right time. True skills are seen in bear and stormy markets (like the one we’re in right now at the time of this writing). Just ask any of your friends if they’re making money in todays market or on their 401k plans. By the way 401k plans ARE managed by professional Money managers. To me, it is more important to look at the money manager’s performance during his/hers career then actual fund performance. There’s always a bull market somewhere and you’re depending on a money manager to find it.

Following article is just for mind and logic exercise purposes.
Debate over if we humans have free will at all is old and debated to a pulp, and trust me it will not get settled here in this article. However, following arguments will show you that the universe with omniscient and omnipotent being, call it God if you like, free will is highly improbable, by any standard of human logic we use in today’s world. I will use omnipotence and omniscience terms strictly taken from dictionary, but for the sake of abbreviation and familiarity I will call it God.
From dictionary:

omniscient all-knowing (possesed of universal or complete knowledge)
omnipotent all-powerful (an agency or force of unlimited power)

Since God is omniscient (all knowing) that would mean that He knows past, present and future. And not only that but He knows everything else, including where every atom, electron, neutron and proton is located in the universe at any time. He is also omnipotent. Which means that He can also create and manipulate all matter and energy at will. (Logicians would probably stop right here and close the book, but lets play along and see what comes out of this.)
With that in mind, lets explore Adolf Hitler for a moment.

In the beginning (no pun intended) God could’ve created a universe in which:

• Adolf Hitler was bad (causing millions of deaths) or
• Adolf Hitler was good (lets say he decided to become a ballerina).

Omnipotent being could create either one of those universes, or a million different ones for that matter. As we know now, God creates a world with bad Adolf Hitler. It looks like Adolf Hitler did not have any choice in his course of actions since God already made universe with bad Hitler in mind. Did Adolf Hitler really have any choice here?
Lets see counter-arguments first.

You might counter this argument with following:

“God did not cause Hitler to become bad, God only knew that Hitler was going to become bad”.

In other words, God knew what Hitler was going to do (since God is omniscient), but He did not cause him to do it, he just let it happen (there goes your all-loving argument too).
Fair enough, but this argument is flawed. Here’s how.
Not only that God KNEW, but He also CREATED the world with evil Hitler. Every action starting from the beginning of creation of the universe leading to Hitler being bad was set in motion and was predetermined by God at the beginning of creation. Remember this. In other words, God had to put things in motion at the beginning with evil Hitler in mind, which eventually led to Hitler becoming evil tyrant. It’s a simple law of cause-and-effect. Hitler did not have any choice whatsoever, because if Hitler did have any choice and lets say chose to be good, that would mean that God’s plan to create evil Hitler failed and therefore God is not omnipotent. God not only knew the future but actually placed things in motion. He caused it. He is the Creator after all. At best He made Hitler make bad choice.
You might try to counter this argument with weak analogies like: “I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I did not caused it to rise, nor can I prevent it from rising”.
Fallacies right from the start.
First, you do not have a power to create the sun or stop it from rising for that matter, and you’re not omniscient. Therefore you cannot use yourself in analogy. We’re talking about omniscient and omnipotent being. It’s logical fallacy to argue like that. You cannot use non-omniscient person to prove omniscient theory which contains omniscient entity. It doesn’t make any sense.
And more importantly you DO NOT know for a fact that sun will rise tomorrow (again since you’re not omniscient). It’s highly unlikely that sun will explode, gets swallowed by a black hole or that the earth will get knocked out of its orbit, but you really DO NOT know for a fact that sun will rise tomorrow, so you cannot use that argument.

You can also use my child argument which goes like this: “I’ve created my child, but it was his/hers choice to become a gangster. It was his/hers free will”.
For one, you did not create your child with him/her in mind of becoming a gangster. God DID create universe with bad Hitler in mind.
Secondly, you did not have any power or knowledge to create your child as a gangster ahead of time. God DID have power and knowledge ahead of time. So most of the arguments here are deeply flawed.

Or you can use something more logical like following argument (I’ve seen this one a lot):
“if I put a bowl of ice-cream and a bowl of cauliflower in front of my child, I know for a fact which one is chosen, the ice cream. My knowing it ahead of time does not restrict my child from making a free choice when the time comes. My child is free to make a choice and knowing the choice has no effect upon her when she makes it.”
Lets see if you can spot fallacy here. No?
He is right. Knowing that something is going to happen ahead of time doesn’t make it actually happen, but that does not apply if YOU were the cause of something happening. Like putting ice cream ball in front of your child! Just by putting an ice cream ball in front of your child, YOU caused your child to eat the ice cream. You were the cause. If you weren’t there, then you would not be able to put ice cream in front of her. But again, you’re not omniscient being and you don’t know what will happen in the future so you could not use that argument anyway. If you throw meat and candy in front of the lion, lion will eat meat. There’s no choice. All you did was fed meat to the lion. You did not gave it a choice. You’re the one that caused lion to eat meat.

You would have better argument if you said that you’ve placed a ball of ice cream of vanilla flavor and chocolate flavor in front of your child, and child picked vanilla based on her free will. But there’s no way of knowing what instrument (instinct, appetite, intuition, free will) child was using in picking vanilla over chocolate so you cannot use this argument to prove anything. I also cannot use it to disprove free will, and I am not. Remember what I said at the beginning: “following arguments will show you that the universe with omniscient and omnipotent being, call it God if you like, free will is highly improbable” Argument with ice cream does not assume there’s omniscient and omnipotent being present.
Another argument you might have is that God can know all your actions but chooses not to. If that’s the case then God is not omniscient since there’s something He doesn’t know.

Beside, no one chooses to be bad or evil. Just think of the absurdity in logic here. If I gave you two choices:

1. Be good and spend entire eternity in paradise or
2. Be bad and burn in Hell for eternity.

If you really think there’s choice here, you’re need to see a shrink. What do you think would be a percentage of people that chose number 2? Maybe few schizophrenics and some masochist, but it would be minimal. That’s certainly not the case when we see choices people make in everyday lives. It actually looks like they don’t have any choices. Otherwise we would see huge percentage of people choosing the right path. This of course is all assuming that omnipotent and omniscient being actually exists.

Yet another argument is: “God sees all the potential possibilities we could take, and we get to choose which path“. So essentially, God gives you lots of options and it’s up to you to choose whichever you want.
This is also flawed since God already started the universe He wanted (see evil Hitler argument) and all your choices are predetermined and known ahead of time. God does not only sees potential possibilities, He acts upon one of those possibilities by creating the world we live in right now.

Conclusion

Just looking at it logically, there cannot be all-knowing and all-powerful being in our universe with us humans having a free will at the same time. Not only that, but claiming that all-knowing and all-powerful entity is not being responsible for any of our actions would be logical contradiction of enormous proportions.
That would be the same as if I would to create faulty circuit which I know for sure would cause fire but created it anyway, and circuit indeed caused fire. And then later on blamed that circuit for the problem by invoking a free will. No logic in that at all. Circuit did not have any choice here.
Think of it in simpler terms: All-powerful God creates world knowing that there will be suffering and all other bad stuff but he does it anyway, and then blames objects of His creations (us) for something He started and had previous knowledge of what was going to happen.
Knowing His own future actions, as well as every future occurrence in His own creation, and then actually putting all that into motion effectively eliminates the existence of free will. Therefore you cannot have both: free will and all-knowing and all-powerful entity at the same time.
There’s really no way around this problem. The only way for free will to exists is if God is omnipotent but not omniscient or vica-versa. But then again problem of omniscient and omnipotent being itself is logical fallacy. Logic simply breaks down. At least logic in the world we occupy. Logic we as humans learned. But what other worlds or logic you going to use? This is all we know so we have to debate the issue with what we know and understand.
There are so many contradictions and logical fallacies in theories like these that it’s going to make your head spin, but if you do have a valid argument I would love to hear it. Before you do, please read the article one more time so you don’t present same arguments but in a different skin.
Question still remains. Do humans (or any other animals for that matter) have a true free will (not predetermined by anything internal like your genetics and external like God) or we’re all just driven by cause-and-effect i.e. our instincts, appetites, desires, ability to anticipate, genetics and external causes?