Stir-Fried Thoughts

There's nothing more constant than every scientist's conviction regarding the speed of light. It's a universal speed limit. Nothing can go faster. Even gravity itself travels at the speed of light (or super close, anyway). This means if the sun goes dark, we won't know until enough passes for the last photon to reach us. If the sun winks out of existence, the loss of gravity won't be experienced until the same amount of time passes.  How's that for nuts? We're traveling in a big circle around a center of gravity; even if that center of gravity disappears, we'll continue traveling in a circle as though it was still there. For a few minutes, at least. On larger scales, it could continue for much longer periods of time. Reality changed way over there, but reality hasn't changed right here. Yet. So, the speed of light, aka speed of gravity, is also the speed of reality. However, I'd like to point out that saying gravity "travels" bothers me...

As we all know, time slows down in the presence of immense gravity. At the top of a mountain, time passes at one rate. At the base of the mountain, it goes slightly slower (almost immeasurable due to the small variance in gravity). There are long-standing and well-established theories and explanations for why this is the case. My thought is what if we have it backward? What if gravity isn't impeding anything and is instead allowing time to do what it wants: to stand still? Time advances and entropy ensues, but wouldn't it rather not advance? Doesn't a ball want to roll downhill to reach the bottom and then stop rolling? Perhaps time is "rolling downhill" until it reaches a natural stopping point (absolute gravity).  Does that mean in the beginning when everything existed at a single point, time stood still? And the disbursement of everything across unimaginable distances has thinned gravity sufficiently that time advances faster as the universe expands? Is it expa...

After spending some time with the ChatGPT bot, I have developed an inkling that human intelligence is not as impressive as we've all convinced ourselves. It's just a predictive text generation algorithm and it can seemingly have a coherent conversation about almost anything. Maybe humans are just a slightly more advanced version of the same thing... some may say "but it's not actually thinking" and I can sometimes say that about humans. Humans can be just as guilty as senselessly parroting garbage they synthesized from their various social media feeds. I don't know if it's that crazy to think maybe we're just generating thoughts based on our own internal trained model, which uses everything we've taken in throughout our lives, plus the environment around us, the environment within us, and the thoughts we've had in the last hour. We like to pretend that we can think about whatever we want, and that we have free will. But is that true? Anyway, co...