Library of Gödel

What Good This Deafness? - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

2012-02-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to post a song to think about in a week.

[From the shadows a beautiful spirit, Fate, and her deformed dwarf son, Twist, emerge to inform Beethoven of what he has already deeply suspected, that this is to be his last night on earth. They are accompanied by numerous spirits and ghosts from his past.]

[With each successive crack of lightning the spirits move closer and eventually Beethoven finds their distraction unbearable.]

Beethoven:
What good this deafness, when my whole life I have dread?
What good this deafness, with these voices in my head?
What good this deafness, when this prattle I must hear?
If I were blind, I'm sure they wouldn't disappear!

Twist:
Do you really want to believe what you're saying?
Do you really want to be here alone?
Have I interrupted a moment of praying?
While your life's decaying -
Your sins, are they weighing?
While you've been carving your stone...
All on your own?

Do you really want to sit here in silence?
Could it be that brooding is... part of your art?
Is it an extension of artistic license?
A moving defiance,
Of all of life's tyrants!
While you've been searching your heart...
...Alone? :)
...With us. :D
...In the dark! 8D

[Beethoven implores the spirits to leave him alone, but Twist tells him that as shadows they only exist by the light that Beethoven's life has cast and as that light is fading, it is only natural that they should cling to its last moments of illumination. As the clock strikes midnight their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Mephistopheles. His presence causes all the other spirits to shrink silently back to the corners of the room...]

Versus Society

2012-02-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, I've had very little time to continue my posts lately and this may continue into next week. In lieu of a proper post, I'd like to leave you with some examples of what I mentioned briefly last time.
Here are some historical instances when a behaviour was diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder based principally on the Deviance criteria, of whether an individual behaves in accordance with their society. Most of these have either been formally overturned by the DSM or ICD or both, or are controversial while they remain documented.

Hysteria
Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopica
Sluggish Schizophrenia, which I learned of recently in The Secret History of Moscow, a fascinating urban fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia. (Also refer to Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union.)
Hospitalism, in which the deaths of infants due to the failures of hospital care were essentially attributed to suicidal depression in the infant
Imbecility
General Paresis
Homosexuality
Excited Delirium
Neurasthenia

And yes, it is possible that such disorders continue to exist as defined by modern psychiatry as well. It's worth thinking about the various personality disorders, which are essentially various personality types which the patient extends to the point of disorder; or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which if it were regularly diagnosed in adults and not just children could easily be abused for political purposes. It's also worth considering whether this may be the case for many other more stereotypical and more 'obvious' mental ailments for which deviance is the most prominent diagnostic criterion.

The Psychology of the Mundane

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

Congratulations. You are, most likely, not crazy.

The reason I feel comfortable stating this is simple. Insanity is, ultimately, a (non-quantitative) measure of normalcy based around how well a person is able to interact with other people around them. It can have a variety of causes, ranging from the individual's genetic heritage to chemical imbalances derived from their environment, to how they understand and behave toward their own personal history. Psychopathologists and abnormal psychologists have developed a variety of approaches to studying, explaining, and treating such problems, appropriate to the individual problems as they are discovered and recognized, but because of the diversity of the field and the nature of the problem it's difficult to speak of as a whole. How do you distinguish someone with actual mental problems from someone

To address this issue, four basic questions are used to determine whether a person is insane:

Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

The vast majority of humanity is self-organized into social groups that promote their own utility and well-being, and most of those people who aren't have physical conditions or circumstances that prevent them from doing so. Therefore, most human beings are, by definition, not crazy. That probably includes you, no matter how really angry or lonely or loopy or rebellious or unsympathetic you've felt recently - if the biggest obstacle to obtaining everything you want in life is the unfair perversity of the cosmos, you're not insane.

So, if you're one of those people, congratulations. You're adapted to society. You're normal enough to get by. You're not less special. You're better off.

Okay. Now flip the coin over and stare at the other side.

If insanity doesn't mean a lot of things you thought it did, the same is true of sanity. Sanity doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Sanity doesn't mean your beliefs and thought processes are true to reality. Sanity doesn't mean you're rational. Sanity doesn't mean you understand. Sanity means you're adapted to society and you're normal enough to get by.

Society is a vast and amorphous beast, a picture puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving and being joined to other pieces and all kinds of different pictures can be created from largely the same pieces... a piece that is considered insane in one particular subset of society may be perfectly well-adjusted to another. And then we could consider phenomena like hallucinations in the sane which 10% of healthy, sane individuals will experience at least once in their lifetimes, despite being almost universally associate with insanity in the popular mindset.

But more importantly than any of that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sticky ethical morass of whether being well-adjusted to human society is in itself a good thing. There is a long, long list of psychological observations demonstrating that human beings do not think clearly or reasonably, do not understand the world around them, do not understand each other, and even do not understand themselves... when you think you have a pretty good understanding of it all, and so does everyone else. It's called cognitive bias.

The Road Goes On - The Lord of the Rings

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

There's a Road, calling you to stray
Step by step, pulling you away
Under Moon and Star - Take the Road, no matter how far!
Where it leads, no-one ever knows
Don't look back, follow where it goes
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road, wherever it runs!

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Hill by hill
Mile by mile
Field by field
Stile by stile
The Road goes on, ever ever on

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

One more mile, then it's time to eat
Pick some pears, succulent and sweet
To the farthest shore - Take the Road a hundred miles more!
Sweet pink trout, tickled from a stream
Milk a goat, churn it into cream
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road wherever it runs.

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Moor by moor
Glen by glen
Vale by vale
Fen by fen
The Road goes on, ever ever on

See the Road run past your doorstep
Calling for your feet to stray
Like a deep and rolling river
It will sweep them far away
Just beyond the far horizon
Lies a waiting world unknown
Like the dawn its beauty beckons
With a wonder all its own!

Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Hilya! Hilya! Auta. Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

The Colour of Insanity

2012-01-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

Two excellent writers I follow have been independently writing on the same subject: Kyle (A Deeper, Darker Ocean Green), in Psychopath, and Nixie (Musings from the Well), in an entire series (!) called Disturbing the Disturbed. Both would like you to know that you are not a psychologist, you don't actually know what the signs of mental illness are because everything you've heard about them is the second-hand grossly-oversimplified theme park version, and, basically, you just don't know enough facts yet for your self-diagnosis to be worth sixpence.

Go on, go and read. They are fascinating. Detailed. And right.

Don't fret, though. You're not less special because you're not crazy. In fact, you already have enough of your own psychological problems to get in the way of accurately understanding yourself and the world around you without having to claim psychological and emotional disorders as well!

So, next week, we get to talk about normal psychology and cognitive biases.

The Storm - Blackmore's Night

2012-01-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

A timeless and forgotten place,
The moon and sun in endless chase;
Each in quiet surrender, while the other reigns the sky...
The midnight hour begins to laugh -
A summer evening's epitaph -
The winds are getting crazy, as the storm begins to rise...

...

Wild were the winds that came,
In the thunder and the rain!
Nothing ever could contain the rising of the storm!
In the wings of ebony,
Darkened waves fill the trees
Wild winds of warning echo through the air!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

It seems to come from everywhere -
Welcome to the Dragon's Lair!
Fingers running through your hair, she asks you out to play!
For all of Nature's sorcery,
The most bewitching entity -
Heaven hath no fury like the rising of the storm!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

Meet the New Year!

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

...same as the Old Year!

I want to start taking advantage of the fact that there is more than one day per week. Sunday will be a day for sharing music, and possibly other art, that I find worthy of reflection. This category will be denoted with the tag "Selah".

Poets of the Fall - War

Do you remember standing on a broken field,
White crippled wings beating the sky?
The harbingers of war, with their nature revealed,
And our chances flowing by

If I can let the memory heal,
I will remember you with me on that field...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me a reason to try

Turn the page - I need to see something new -
For now, my innocence is torn
We cannot linger on this stunted view,
Like rabid dogs of war

I will let the memory heal
I will remember you with me on that field

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

With no-one wearing their real face,
It's a whiteout of emotion,
And I've only got my brittle bones to break the fall

When the love in letters fade,
It's like moving in slow motion
And we're already too late if we arrive at all

And then we're caught up in the arms race -
An involuntary addiction -
And we're shedding every value our mothers taught

So will you please show me your real face,
Draw the line in the horizon?
'Cause I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

Can someone explain this?

2011-12-29T00:00:00.001-08:00

Psychology and sociology experiments are unique among the sciences in that the test subjects who volunteer for them are generally capable of understanding the implications of the experiments' results. If the premise of the experiment requires deceiving the test subject in some way - as must be done sometimes, in order to simulate a situation for the test subject to act in - it may be that upon full disclosure of the experiment and its results, the test subject's reactions at the time may be cast in an entirely new light. This phenomenon is known as inflicted insight, and experiments which may cause it are strongly discouraged if not outright forbidden by ethics committees.

My question is - why?

What inflicted insight basically amounts to is exposing the less savoury or comfortable facets of a person's own psyche and forcing them to confront them. How could this be considered an undesirable result? The test subject believes something about himself or herself that is wrong, and the researcher is not only helping him or her to Know Thyself - in the best possible circumstance I can think of, I might add - but also preparing evidence that this problem is possible, for the scientific community, to better help other people who may have a similar reaction but were not fortunate enough to participate in the experiment personally.

Here's an example. The Milgram experiment is a famous one in which the unknowing test subject is asked to help with a simple negative feedback test for a 'slow learner'. Whenever the 'slow learner' - portrayed by an actor - gives an incorrect answer, the test subject is to press a button which, they are told, will deliver the learner a 15V electric shock that increases by 15V every time the button is pressed. The test continues until either (a) the test subject refuses to continue a total of five times (a list of four specific responses for the experimenter to use are prepared beforehand; after the experimenter has used all of them and the test subject still refuses, the test ends) or (b) the test subject uses the highest possible setting - 450V.

The hypothesized percentage of test subjects who would complete the test was 1.2% (with a range of 0% to 3%). While every test subject questioned the experiment at some point, 65% of them administered the final 450V shock rather than give up, and of the 35% who gave up none of them went to check the health of the learner or insisted that the experiments cease entirely with other test subjects. (They were informed of the true nature of the experiment afterwards during debriefing.)

Other variations on the experiment demonstrated that there was no significant difference behaviourally between male and female subjects, though female subjects reported higher levels of stress, and indeed there were only three factors that seemed to influence the outcome: compliance decreased when the subject and researcher communicated by phone (greater separation), when the experiment was conducted by an unknown institute rather than Yale (though the difference was not statistically appreciable), and when the subject interacted more directly with the victim. Experiments were also conducted in which the button was real and connected to a puppy, to eliminate the possibility that the subjects in earlier tests were subconsciously picking up that the button did nothing, with no change.

Such experiments would not be permitted today due to reasons of inflicted insight - taking the form in this case of "Here, mate, you just proved you would have electrocuted someone with a learning disorder because an authority figure told you to. And so did most of the other people who signed up to do this. Don't you think there might be something wrong with that?"

There is a coda to this story: a later survey conducted revealed that 84% of responding test subjects were 'glad' or 'very glad' to have participated, and 15% were neutral. Many in fact wrote letters expressing thanks.

Visual imagery

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

This is just something interesting I ran across.

You've probably heard of the notion that human beings were 'created in the image of God'. Biblically, the concept originates from Genesis, where the exact words used are tzelem elohim. 'Tzelem' means image, shape, form, &c; 'Elohim' is one of the titles of God (since calling him by name is grammatically verboten).

This may shed a new light on one of the other places where tzelem is used - in the second commandment "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below". Here, tzelem is translated as 'idol' (in other translations, 'graven image').

In my experience this commandment has been the subject of confusion among Christians I've known, including pastors and teachers, since on the surface it seems to be a restatement of 'you shall have no other gods before me', so this connection was something of a minor epiphany for me. God is specifically forbidding depictions of himself for worship, in any form - no balls of fire, no golden calves, no Nehushtan - follow that link, it's a really interesting one - possibly not even the crucifixes and nativity scenes we're all so accustomed to, though I'm not nearly qualified enough as a theologian to say that with any certainty yea or nay.

Why this unique ban? Because God makes his own idols, from clay, that no human artisan can reproduce, and one of them is you. I don't recommend worshiping them - that would violate the preceding commandment - but loving them, on the other hand, is specifically encouraged. :)

I don't know, what do you think?

2011-11-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

The chief drives of the human-being-as-biological-organism are supposed to be food and sex.

Most of the modern world's social ailments, though, can be linked to a surplus or shortage of one or both of these - obesity, anorexia, health fads, body-image disorders, divorce, infidelity, depopulation, and infanticide all come to mind.

This thought is incomplete. The existence of a connection is self-evident, but I'm not sure what it might be or whether it's even significant.

I am, however, reminded of the two injunctions carved over the Oracle at Delphi, as recorded by Socrates through Plato. I spend a lot of time thinking about Know Thyself; this seems to be an apt reminder (and, personally, rather a needed one) of the necessity of Moderation in All Things.

Happy Thanksgiving.

ARGLE BARGLE

2011-10-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

A four-month gap before another post appears, in the middle of a series, no less. How excruciatingly embarrassing.

Even more so when the post of my return is merely to say 'no, I haven't completely forgotten about this yet, I can't finish it just now but we'll see about next week', without providing anything much in the way of content or food for thought.

(I suppose I should be thankful that it's in front of fewer than ten people.)

...

Separate note. I've had a couple of people tell me that they really enjoyed what I had to say in Moment of clarity. Is this something I should be aiming for more often? I mean stylistically, with the overflowing slightly-edited stream-of-consciousness rambling-to-myself approach. (Scheduling regular weekly epiphanies would be lovely, but I'm not sure I can arrange that.)

...an Eternal Golden Braid

2011-06-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Continued from last week, when we were discussing strange loops!

Quick review: a strange loop is anything that linearly relates to itself - if you pick some one action to perform on it, you'll eventually return to exactly where you were when you began.

Now - per the last example last post, human consciousness is itself a strange loop, as shown whenever you think about thinking, or think about why you think or feel the things that you do. So it should be no surprise that philosophy, psychology, mathematics, art, and so on can all be shown to be complex, tangled hierarchies full of strange, looping structures. Here's a couple more examples, for fun:

Storytelling. Structures which return the characters to the place they started from at the beginning - physically, mentally, emotionally - are common throughout great literature. The Hero's Journey is a perfect example - albeit an overly specific, misleading, and rigidly stratified one. In the Iliad, the Greeks go to war; in the Odyssey, the last of them finally comes home. (In the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus almost gets home but fails.) There and Back Again. Don Quixote. The answers are always in the place you started, but you need the intervening book in order to recognize them.
Feynman diagrams. Antimatter and matter are always created together in nature, and annihilate each other when they converge again. Feynman diagrams are just how scientists keep track of their interactions. Particle creation and annihilation is happening constantly, everywhere, and usually the two particles that formed together also destroy each other shortly thereafter - the diagram looks like this (incoming energy waves convert into two particles with mass, which move apart, collide again, and re-release the energy). You'll notice, though, that the regular particle is marked with a forwards arrow, and the antiparticle is marked with a backwards arrow - because one possible interpretation of the math is that there is only one particle and it appears to sometimes be an antiparticle because at that point it has begun moving backwards in time. In other words, the particle is 'creating' and 'destroying' itself, in a single infinitesimal moment, forever.
Fractals. You can zoom in indefinitely and get the same image you started with, yes? Well, not for all fractals - the famous Mandelbrot Set, for instance, is unimaginably more complex than that.
Let's talk (briefly) about the Mandelbrot Set. Do you know the coordinate plane? With an origin and a defined axis, you can locate any point P(x, y), x units left or right and y units up or down. One of the many, many things we can do with this is to apply a formula to P to define a second point - call it P1. Let's say that if P is x units right and y units up, we'll start at the origin, and move (x squared minus y squared) units right, and (twice x times y) units up. Then, we'll move it x more units right, and y more units up, and call that P1. X and Y can be absolutely anything, and we'll always get another point... so let's say that we take what we just did to turn P into P1, and do it to P1 to get P2, then P3, P4... and so on. We'll do it forever. (Mathematicians have sneaky tricks to find out what happens if you keep doing something forever.) If we keep going forever, we'll find that either our point is now racing toward the edge of the coordinate plane, an infinite distance away - or it's still meandering about, passing by our original point P every so often. Every point that hangs about when you do this is part of the Mandelbrot Set; in this picture, these are the points in black (the non-black points are coloured based on how quickly they run for the horizon). But if the point keeps doubling back on itself when we keep doing the same thing... the Mandelbrot Set consists of all of the points that generate strange loops from a given formula. Awesome? Awesome.

Moving on.

Strange loops can be bewildering at times because our minds are adapted to a conventionally categorical, hierarchical way of thinking - the classic riddle of shallow philosophy, "the chicken or the egg", writ large. The two hands cannot actually be drawing each other, after all! That looping sort of cause and effect makes no sense to our ordinary perception.

So it's very helpful that Hofstadter addresses this. None of the loops we've discussed, he points out, are actually self-sustaining or self-perpetuating. Rather, we can restore part of our usual understanding of things by noticing that every point of the loop has both an internal cause - somewhere else in the loop - as well as an external cause, generally one single one for the loop as a whole. You stand on any step of the Penrose staircase by climbing there from a lower step - and because Penrose conceived of the staircase. Characters reach the fulfilment of their stories with the unnoticed aid of their author. A quine is produced by being run, but only because it was first run on a computer. (The bits that make up computer memory are also strange loops, tiny tiny circuit segments that continuously feed themselves their own voltage as new input.) The trigonometric functions, and fractals, and especially the Mandelbrot Set, were discovered by expanding upon math that was already known. Particle-antiparticle pairs form from errant energy waves nearby in the universe. The Liar Paradox needs someone to say it or there is no "I" to be lying and not lying.

You'll notice I skipped humans, because the human mind is more complex than any of these - it is a self-modifying strange loop. In this sentence, I am now making you aware of the fact that you are thinking about strange loops, such as this sentence and your thoughts. You've just added an additional metarecursion onto that cycle, and you can keep doing that to potentially infinite degrees, limited only by your boredom! But for the moment I'm going to tie whatever cycle you're currently on back to this sentence by noting that by thinking about that uppermost layer and the process by which your mind reflects on itself you've constructed a strange loop of strange loops. With my help, of course. This blog post provides initial external instigation. ;)

My point is, though, that your mind doesn't necessarily need the external instigation. I have no idea how many strange loops that cycle in the last paragraph, for instance, and you might have easily realised the loop of loops without my assistance. This is because your mind is a more complicated, tangled, crazy, and wonderful place than you may have ever realised before! :D

I'm not going to be able to finish this in only two posts. Next time: we have to go deeper.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

2011-06-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

I just realized I've never actually discussed Gödel, Escher, Bach in detail here before, and then I went and made reference to it in my last post. Shame on me. It's awesome.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, whose subject cannot be really concisely explained. It's about everything. At it's core, you could say it's mostly about human consciousness. And music. And math. And art. (Kind of as implied by the title. You remember Kurt Gödel, right?) And puns, and palindromes, and Möbius strips, and vinyl records that destroy the record players that play them, and the holism/reductionism dichotomy, and computer programming, and artificial intelligence, and Charles Babbage's parable of Achilles and the Tortoise, and... and, it's amazing and you should go read it. Skim the parts that are too jargony for you, if you must, but keep going through it.

Let's talk about a construct that Hofstadter introduces, called a "strange loop". It's a shorthand way to talk about things that linearly relate to themselves. It'll probably be clearer if I discuss examples instead of trying to define it:

You've seen M. C. Escher's lithograph of the endless stairs? (The artwork is called 'Ascending and Descending', by the way. The structure itself is called a Penrose staircase, after the fellow who actually invented it - if you can tell me who famously used the correct name, you get an imaginary cookie.) That's a strange loop. You start anywhere on the stairs, and do nothing but walk up - linearly, one direction - and you still return to the point you started from.
A quine is a computer program that, with no input, produces its own exact source code as output. This is a strange loop - you proceed linearly down the generations of output, and each one is still the same code with which you began.
The trigonometric functions are a strange loop. For the function y = sin(x), the rate at which y changes with respect to x changing is y' = cos(x). The rate at which y' changes is y'' = -sin(x). The rate at which y'' changes is y''' = -cos(x), and the rate at which y''' changes is y'''' = sin(x) = y. Applying one procedure over and over takes you back to the original result.
The Liar Paradox - "I am lying right now" - is a strange loop. The thought process goes, if you are lying, then that statement is a lie, so it must not be true that you are lying right now, so you must not be lying. But if you're not really lying, then when you say you are lying you must be telling the truth, in which case you really are lying. Paradox.
The way your mind itself works is a strange loop. This is the process called introspection - you are able to recognize that your brain is producing thoughts, and this recognition is itself one of those thoughts.

People tend to think of strange loops as tricksy, exotic, complicated, mind-blowing things, but in reality, they're everywhere. People just tend not to notice them, or to think too hard about them, when they encounter them in real life. It's both frustrating, and depressing.

I'll elaborate on the significance of this next week, but in the meantime, you can go to another fantastic strange loop by following this elegant and finely-crafted link.

Moment of clarity, possibly?

2011-06-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished 'I Don't Want To Kill You', by Dan Wells. Brilliant, but mostly unrelated. Now I'm thinking about why I find mentally-ill people so sympathetic; it's apparently a bit unusual. Mom, at least, has never hesitated to give voice to the fact that she finds it disturbing and wishes I wouldn't; I don't find it disturbing at all, and unlike some of the other things I enjoy or at least don't mind, I'm not even entirely sure why it might be seen as disturbing. Sociopaths, schizophrenics, malignant narcissists, what-have-you are all in basically the same position as the rest of fallen man but even worse off, because their suffering is, I don't know, an intrinsic part of who they are? (This is kind of a part I can't express well, but it gets down to the idea that personality disorders are harder to treat than broken bones.) It frustrates me to have Mom worry that this kind of concern is itself psychologically unhealthy. (Of course this may all just be justificationary reaction on my part, but I'm increasingly unconfident in that and will continue so until I know otherwise.)

This leads me back around to "I Don't Want To Kill You", because of why I love John Cleaver so much as a protagonist. Not only is he suffering from sociopathy, but he is consciously aware of, and fighting, it. Self-awareness is key. It's a meta-recursive strange-loop thingy, which as I concluded from Godel, Escher, Bach is both an intrinsic component of the human intellect and even more intrinsically a divine attribute, and therefore a part of how man is made in God's image. It is, consequently, absolutely and totally mind-boggling to me in a violently facepalming why would you do that screaming kind of way why anyone would consciously do that, yet circumstantial, testimonial, and, yes, internal evidence suggests that it happens all the time. Forgetfulness and apathy, mostly. But even that aside, it often seems people don't even try. Or think that they're already doing it - I know I'm not the only one who's noticed this. This empathy business doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be, frankly. Can't people honestly examine and question themselves? Why is 'DOUBT' such a scary word?

This is where my chain of reasoning breaks down, because the moment of clarity has passed, I am falling asleep, and my attention and thoughts have been drifting into other places even since I started writing this. But, it seems to me, I can try to bring this to peoples' attention. Help to complete that particular strange loop, raise self-awareness, whatever. I'm sure conscious rejection is possible, if inexplicable, but I can help prove the choice to more fully resemble the image of God. I need to write about it, because that's what I can do and what I seem to be decent at. And that comes back to casting traditional 'them's in a different light, playing Devil's Advocate in person, writing stories that enable readers to question whether that are themselves mad, or villainous, or absolutely in the right. Pride is pervasive and in need of deflating.

This moment of clarity, of course, is foremost just a restatement of what I already believe, albeit one that has seen multiple pieces of that net suddenly 'click' together, as well as one that demands rather more action from me than I usually give it. (Sloth is definitely my worst vice.) It's not really all that clear, even, considering how often I point out I'm unsure of some bit, which rather lends support to the idea that this is just a rationalization of my own preexisting behavior. That said, I can not think of a single thing that would contradict this and show why it might be wrong, but, of course, "the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it", &c. (Side-question: does the darkness understand the darkness? The light presumably understands both...) ...and there I go fixating on meta-recursion again. Plus I've implied a distinction between those who are self-aware and those who are not, which given my loathing for "Us-vs-Them" categories makes me quite a hypocrite. And that sentence establishes me as a self-aware hypocrite trying not to be, which I happen to think is the best kind of hypocrite to be, placing me back in the "good-guy" slot in my own mind... though the fact that I feel wrong considering myself a "good-guy" could just be showcasing a symptom of depression that I should be trying to avoid... but that statement is itself just a rejection of responsibility on my part...

Given that entire last paragraph, I'm really praying that this note at least started out on the right track.

A comment on God...

2011-05-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Really, God is basically the Eldritch Abomination to end all. Unimaginably vast? Check. Entirely not-of-this-world, existing in forms and places we can't imagine? Check. Not to be looked at directly lest you Go Mad From The Revelation? Check. Gets around that by manifesting in metaphorical images that may suggest to outsiders that you might be mad anyway? Check. Not to be named because no one knows how to pronounce it? Yay verily, and more! Thinks and acts in ways that the human mind cannot comprehend? Check. Likely to cause the end of everything if it pokes reality the wrong way? Check. What is NOT bloody freaking AWESOME about this picture?

And now you're going to tell me your hero doesn't like that and is going to kill him by poking him with an exceptionally shiny stick. And then insinuate that my problem is lack of creativity and imagination and zeal for the new and unfamiliar. Right.

Wiki Walk With Me

2011-04-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

- Each article can suck you in. Octopus.
- Once you read one article, you have to read another. Dominoes.
- All the articles are linked to each other. Spiderweb.

Therefore, based on everything I've heard from Cold War rhetoric, wikis are communist.

Defending the Arts

2011-03-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote this essay some time ago after being invited to watch Come What May, a film from a private Christian production team, with my sister's NCFCA Apologetics group. Their main reason for this is that many of the actors, writers, and various other members of the production team are homeschoolers and NCFCA alumni; my main reason was, frankly, free pizza. I've cut out the bits which deal directly with that film itself, since it obviously has not won fame and renown and so I should not need to caution anyone against seeing it; what remains are some of my thoughts on contemporary Christian art in general.

To begin with, "contemporary Christian art" is notoriously poor. This is more than a simple application of Sturgeon's Revelation ("90% of everything is crap"); music groups - the most common example - as well as game producers and such are considered extremely derivative, mostly due to the popular practice of marketing their work as "the Christian version of [insert secular example here]". In the arts that encompass works of fiction, including film, literature, and the very late, 'bout time you showed up forays into the realm of comics and graphic novels that have more recently come to attention, such plagiarism is frowned upon; but there are other commonalities that I think tend to diminish these works and continue to reflect poorly on their fellows.
(1) Moral conflict is oversimplified and waved at the reader with Aesopian fury.
(2) Every protagonist either begins as a Christian or converts by the end of the story (generally, to the denomination espoused by the author). Every villain is actively opposed to the same to at least some degree (because everyone who isn't a Christian themselves is a godslaying sociopath, of course).
(3) The plot itself favors the heroes, leaving the villains in a position in which they themselves would be obviously better off abandoning their villainy, begging the question of what their motives were to begin with. (There is also a corollary, in that the hero - the person whom the audience is meant to support - is always the protagonist - the person through whom the audience experiences the story. There is a common root here, in which the author feels that the audience must give all of their sympathy to the hero without allowing any to the villain, which would happen naturally if the villain was allowed to provide a point of view.)

Though they are thankfully anything but universal, these seem to be widespread enough for commentary. (I would dearly love to know that I am wrong about this, so by all means, bring forth counterarguments and counterexamples!)

I can imagine two main defenses of this list - that these are hardly unique to Christian fiction, and more significantly, that these are necessary elements of any story that claims to have a basis in Christianity. My response to the first is that, beyond being a mere tu quoque, the stories that succumb to these patterns are usually propaganda, allegory, or children's stories, anything but great literature. "Secular" stories - a misnomer that deserves a post of its own - that possess these same characteristics but still win acclaim do so in spite of these properties, not because of them. These intentions have a place - in basic education and in parables, for physical and spiritual children - but as Christians we have a calling to make art that is more than just a reflection of ourselves and our culture. As in any other work, we are to glorify God, which means striving for anything merely mediocre is unacceptable! "Imitators of God", "Imago Dei", "sub-creators" all speak to human creativity as a divine attribute of the Holy Spirit, and anyone called to create should likewise be ready to say of their work that it is good.

This, of course, is what makes the second argument so potent.
Mustn't any work calling itself Christian art either uphold or permit Christian ethics or worldview, in the plot, the world, the story created?? Mustn't we do our best to affirm and communicate whatever is true, good, noble? Doesn't this place utmost importance on (1) absolute distinctions between good and evil, (2) clear lines between right and wrong, and (3) heroes like Christ and villains like Satan?

Yes! Yes! and NO, NO, NOOOOO!

Fiction fits in an awkward space between that which we hold to be true, and that which we believe to be false. It is unreal in that none of it ever has taken place, or (as you walk along the genre pier towards speculative fictions and fantasies) ever could have taken place; but it is nevertheless true in that the best fiction is internally sound, containing people who act and think like people, concepts and ideas that are comprehensible, events that cause and effect one another as events we experience actually do. The author writes his story with both absolute knowledge and power over its events, godlike in omniscience and omnipotence, but the reader is not, nor ought to be, nor can be placed, in the same position. (I imagine this is part of the reason why the first-person and third-person omniscient are considered so difficult to write well.) The reader is brought into the story through one or more of the characters and knows only what the author tells him. The author has privileged him to enter his world almost as a created being, more a ghost than an incarnation, to leave only when he decides this world is not to his liking (either because it does not contain things that interest him, or because it was crudely assembled) or when the author brings his visit to a close.
This means that to be an effective story, the reader must perceive it in the same way as he perceives the world. I affirm that good and evil both exist, while cautioning that if distinguishing between them were easy, or good was always rewarded, no one would ever choose evil. I affirm that reality is impervious to personal preference and that true and false are mutually incompatible, while knowing that only God has absolute certainty about which is which. I affirm that on at least one key point of conflict a hero must be good and a villain must be evil, while begging you to remember both that pure good and sheer evil do not exist in the created world and any work in which these are invoked is an allegory by default!

Finally, I would like to point out once again that universally-lauded literature, Christian or non, does avoid those three tendencies. Consider The Brothers Karamazov, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, any others that may come to mind. Good literature can sometimes violate these rules within certain limits, such as being directed at a particular audience. True classics, however, do not.

What IS normal?

2011-03-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Who are these hypothetical normal people who behave in a manner that coincidentally harmonizes with the philosophy of your choice?

I've never met a normal person. That doesn't really prove anything, since the number of people I've met is statistically negligible compared to the number of people who have ever existed, and this is a bit of an abuse of the word "normal" anyway. So... what do people mean when they talk about "normal people"?

I don't know, no one's ever told me. Everyone fairly close to average? (Average what?) The majority of majorities? People who agree with the speaker? Maybe we could poll everyone and say whoever thinks she's normal is normal, and vice versa. If we ended up with considerably more people answering "yes" than "no", this might even seem to be a valid method of sorting them out. But I suspect the percentage of humanity everyone knows is fairly similar to mine, so the comparison that they're making is based on equally insufficient data.

Let's suppose we work out the core aspects of human personality, and can compare people in each aspects in a meaningful way. The most primitive models I can think of, the four humors, uses a pair of dichotomies (say, extroversion and introversion) and is not very accurate. Myers-Briggs uses, I think, four axes, one for each letter, and I can't honestly say every other INTJ would get along with me. The more accurate the model, the more axes are necessary - I know of one that uses sixteen, and I imagine there are plenty of holes in it as well.

Quite a lot of these models have axes that are non-coincident, which just increases the total number further. And we'll have to consider that people with similar personalities don't necessarily agree, and throw in some ideological axes - traditionalist versus neophilic, judicious versus merciful, jack-of-all-trades versus master-of-one, et cetera.

----

Now - it seems reasonable to expect a plot of where each person falls on each axis to be bell-curve-shaped. Fair enough. Let's say a person with a normal level of some trait is one who falls within a standard deviation of the peak of its graph. Take all of our plenty-seven axes and superimpose their zeroes to get an array of over six billion individuals each represented by a single point in plenty-seven-dimensional space.

I would be quite surprised (note - this is the most subjective bit) if the bell curves on all these axes coincided so smoothly as to leave the majority of all humans within one standard deviation of every single peak. If they don't, which seems most likely, then normalcy has no objective meaning, if there's anything remotely objective about this entire idea when all is said and done.

It's a big internet, so I doubt all is said and done.

A return to abnormalcy

2011-03-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

I seem to know a surprising number of Christians who are fascinated by things most people find repulsive - because they are disgusting, eerie, unusual, horrifying, creepy, what-have-you - and, conversely, a disproportionate number of people I know who enjoy these sorts of things are Christians. This is more than a matter of those being the sorts of people I tend to know, though that's certainly the obvious explanation; rather, when I meet people who like the macabre, as often as not they turn out to be Christian after-the-fact, and when I meet Christians I often eventually discover that they have this fascination.

It's hardly a universally ironclad rule, but it is an interesting recurring pattern. I wonder if there is causality involved somehow in this correlation? It does seem to me that once a person has accepted that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it's quite difficult to fear anything else.

A Most Ingenious Solution

2010-10-07T13:00:00.001-07:00

Answers to last week's conundrum!

Let's start where you probably started - with the simple probability that, with one opportunity to make the choice and four options to choose from, you have a 25% chance of picking any given option and therefore a 25% chance of picking the right one.

This falls apart as soon as you realize that there are two options marked 25%. Two correct options out of four gives a probability of 50%, so we'll pick that one...

...wait. There's only one answer of 50%, and one of four is 25%. Again.

This is probably where most people give up.

-----

Let's think about this a little more. Three out of our four answers are now in what amounts to a superposition of states - our argument proves that each of them is both true and false. This leaves us in a position of deciding what rule to use: either "all incompletely false statements are true" or "all incompletely true statements are false".

- If we go with the second, then we have eliminated three of the four options as acceptable answers and should default to the one remaining.
- If we go with the first, then since we have just judged that three of the four answers are true we have a 75% chance of selecting a correct answer at random.

In either case we ought to choose 75% as the correct answer!

If 75% is the correct answer, we have one chance out of four of choosing it correctly at random. Gotterdammerung!

-----

In fact, however, this is the key to solving this problem. By this chain of reasoning, we have constructed an argument that places all four answers in a superposition of states; and, depending on whether we choose "all incompletely false statements are true" or "all incompletely true statements are false", the solution is either 100% or 0%, respectively. And neither 0% or 100% is presented as a solution to choose from. This means that the best possible answer does not appear as one of our four choices, leaving us with no chance at all of choosing the correct answer! No chance at all is 0% - and so, finally, we have an answer that is permitted to be true without also being false.

Since this choice does not appear, we simply do not select any of the answers, and in so doing get the problem right.

-----

Final thought. Amidst all these convoluted circles of paradox in such a simple question, you may have forgotten that most people give up after discovering only the first circle. Having woven our way through the rest of the problem, we now learn that giving up is the best possible answer.

This means that, of all the people who ever encounter this question, most of them will answer it correctly - despite the fact that we just proved that each of them has no chance of choosing the right answer.

I'll leave you to think on that one for a while. :D

- Thursday

A Most Ingenious Paradox

2010-09-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

I received a most excellent riddle from my deranged friend Qwip yesterday, and present it to you here in modified form:

Multiple Choice: If you were to answer this question by random guessing, what is the probability that you would be correct?

(a) 25%
(b) 50%
(c) 75%
(d) 25%

Discuss!

Utopianism

2010-09-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Good day, there, sir, Mr. John Q. Pantisocrat! I hear you have a proposal for making the entire world a better and happier place! This sounds fantastic. I would love to be better and happier!

However, I've just spoken with a Mrs. Ida Mandonner, over there, and she says your proposal is vile and stupid and she and her compatriots will oppose it with every ounce of blood in their bodies. I don't think she likes your idea.

Oh, I see! Her "compatriots" are simply being misled by her self-serving propaganda and despotic egomania. That makes sense, lots of bad ideas have started that way. We certainly couldn't have that. How will you overcome her nefarious brainwashing to attract public support?

Educational initiatives? That sounds like a promising plan. I certainly agree that public instruction could be better than it is. Then, when everyone knows as much about the nature of things as your group does, it will be a simple matter to fix everything. If only the world agreed with you, it would be at peace!

That's funny, everyone else I've talked to says the same thing.

What if not everyone agrees with you? You wouldn't insist on coercing people against their will, would you? Mrs. Anna Domini said anyone who disagrees with her system can go to hell, which sounds mean, and Mr. Andy Quarian that everyone would be happier in his utopia whether they know it or not, which sounds worse, and Mr. Tim Spirit doesn't seem to have any plans but to kill anyone who lacks his followers' unanimity and willpower. Would you allow people who weren't sure where they were happier to come and go as they pleased?

Well, I don't think I'd call it "freedom of misery", exactly, but I see your point about brigands and freeloaders; very practical of you. Well, then, what's your solution?

Temporary freedom of misery. Hmmmm... Oh, well, that's true, most people would flock anywhere that is obviously better for them. So if that's true of your global forecast... everyone will just inevitably march towards it anyway! That's amazing!

But... well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Mssr. Paul LaTariat and Miss Eva Van Detta have been saying so for a while, and now Dr. A. I. Consciousness says he can prove it in his case with science! And, well... you can't ALL be right.

So... what's so special about you?

A proof about hypocrisy.

2010-09-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

I mentioned this in my last post and present it for you here. I stole it from Raymond Smullyan, a puzzle enthusiast and recreational mathematician, and the author of What is the name of this book?, The Riddle of Scheherezade, To Mock a Mockingbird, Alice in Puzzle-Land, and The Lady or the Tiger?, among others. (His version, incidentally, is a lot shorter than mine is, because I'd like you to absorb this and not simply treat it as an interesting game. And also I run off on weird tangents sometimes. If I were to simply cut and paste it, I would already be done by now.)

Let's start with our definition of hypocrisy, so we all know exactly what we're talking about.

1: Any person who does not believe what he claims to believe is a hypocrite.

Not a lot to build on, I admit. We'll need a premise that we can agree is true, to use as a basis.

2: Everyone believes things.

I hope this is something we can agree on! Even without getting into onerous philosophical questions, I'm sure you have certain beliefs about, oh, the shape of world, or the usual color of plants in the spring, or what you had for dinner last night, or whether you will still be alive tomorrow morning. Anytime you say "I think", "I feel", or "I know", you're expressing a belief you have.

3: Any given belief is either true or false.

I'm losing a bit of accuracy here for the sake of clarity, because if I sincerely believe that colorless green ideas sleep furiously we can argue for a long time about whether that is true, false, poorly defined, or even meaningful (and, if it's not meaningful can I really believe it?) - so for the sake of getting on with it we'll assume that all beliefs can be clearly expressed in a way that is either true or false, and if there are some that can't we don't care about them in this argument anyway, so there. :P

4: Each of your beliefs is either true or false.

This follows as a syllogism from 2 and 3, so hopefully there's no disputing it.

5: You believe each of your beliefs is true.

Does this seem obvious? It's not. There's a whole convoluted discussion over Moore's Paradox, addressing sentences like "It's raining, but I don't believe that it's raining." The statement seems absurd, but there's no reason that the two halves of the statement can't both be true - maybe it's raining outside, but you're indoors and away from the windows and can't hear the drops. Moreover, both placing the situation in the past tense ("It rained, but I did not believe that it rained") and shifting the subject ("It is raining, but you don't believe it is raining") result in perfectly reasonable statements!

That conjunction must be playing tricks, yes? Actually, to somewhat oversimplify the situation, it's in the word "belief". Someone who does not believe that it's raining cannot honestly claim that it is raining, and vice versa. If our supposed speaker says that it is raining, and believes it, then they are lying when they say they believe it is not - and, as a person who lies about what they believe, is therefore a hypocrite. On the other hand, though, if they say it is raining but are truthfully claiming they don't believe it, then even if it really is raining they are still lying about the situation as they understand it! In either case, the statement indicates that the speaker is not trustworthy, either by malice or simple stupidity, regardless of whether the statement as a whole is true or false.*

Alas, I digress. The only real explanation is to understand that, when you make a statement, you are implicitly claiming to believe that statement is true. All those beliefs you've stored up in your head can be brought out whenever you like, and whenever you do, you're making a truth claim. We could create a list of all your beliefs, to make this an actuality rather than just a potentiality, but that would take far too much time.

6: At least one of your beliefs is false.

Here we come to a bit of a potential impasse, because it is not possible to prove this, universally, without actually systematically running through a list of all your beliefs and verifying them one by one. So this claim is supported merely by probability and psychology.

If you take that theoretical list of your uncountably huge number of beliefs and approach it without prior judgment - how likely is it that every single one of those beliefs is true? You can think of it as flipping a coin for each statement, if you like - tails for true and heads for false. Or, if you think your system of generating beliefs is a little hardier than that, roll a hundred-sided die for each statement, and only mark it false if you roll a 1. Even if you use a dice with twice as many sides as there are beliefs on your list because your judgment is just that sound, the odds only go down to 50-50 that there are no false statements on that list whatsoever!

If you can honestly tell me, after all that, that you are utterly confident in the truth of every single belief on that list - well, I have to honestly tell you, that's not quite delusions of godhood, but it's pretty close. Even the Pope only claims infallibility in religious matters, you know.

Oh, oh, oh, but wait! If I've just persuaded you that one of your beliefs is false, then by statement #5 you must believe that one of your beliefs is false...

7. You do not believe what you claim to believe.

That list of all your beliefs has an error on it somewhere.

Nevertheless, you continue to believe them all.

You hypocrite.

Want to join the club? There's always room for one more. :)

* There is a mathematical field called intuitionistic logic designed to resolve complications like this, by only using operations that preserve justifiability, rather than truth as in classical logic. As a result (and despite the name), it's actually stricter about what conclusions you can make than classical logic is! Read up, 'tis fascinating.

I am a hypocrite.

2010-08-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay, the title makes it seem almost as if I forgot everything that I wrote in my last lengthy tirade during the month that I mysteriously vanished. I am hypocritical. Happy now?

Maybe not. Allow me to elaborate. This isn't about how I vowed not to be one of the people who get a blog, update it a few times, and then leave it to rot - even though it feels like that's what I've been doing, technically that just makes me an oathbreaker. (Aaaaaand that makes me kind of depressed. But I'm back now, and as long as I keep coming up with unusual information that ought to affect the philosophies we live by, I'll keep coming back. Right. Moving on...)

Hypocrisy can be briefly summarized as the "do as I say, not as I do" principle. There is a weak use of the term that can be applied any time someone says one thing and ends up doing another - for someone to promote wearing seat-belts, but to be so absent-minded that he forgets to don one whenever he actually gets in a car, for instance, is certainly saying one thing but doing another, and by this general definition he is certainly a hypocrite.

This use, however, broadens the term to the extent that it encompasses any failure whatsoever - an athlete who says he will become an Olympian but does not perform to standards, an advocate of celibacy who nevertheless succumbs to lust, a pathological kleptomaniac who nonetheless acknowledges that theft is wrong. I would be hard-pressed to place such people in the same category as, say, Anthony Comstock*, who happily drove fifteen people to suicide in the name of the morals of the young and innocent. Human failures are ubiquitous (I think I shall make a proof of this in my next post); by so broadening the definition of the term until it is all-encompassing, we make it impossible to discuss.

* For the sake of fair hearing, the link refers to an article with a mixture of praise and criticism, and excellent depth.

So - rather than discrepancy between a person's claims and actions, let us talk of hypocrisy as the discrepancy between a person's claims and beliefs - not only saying one thing and doing another, but believing one thing and saying another. This must be considerably trickier to discern - how else are we to know what's going on in a person's head unless he says?

"Out of the abundance of the heart..."

Oh, even better: "By their fruits you shall know them." I think the usual way this verse is expressed (it's Matthew 7:16-17, by the way) can lead us to miss something key. "A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit." Think about it. I don't know how it reads in the original Greek, but simply with regards to the agricultural analogy it seems it would be more accurate to say "A good tree is one that produces good fruit, and a bad tree is one that produces bad fruit." It agrees more with verse 16, too. Anyway, main point - regardless of what someone says, their actions will demonstrate where their true thoughts are.

And this - this is central.

I say I believe in free will. Very strongly (both the saying and the believing). Because it is inconceivable to me on the one hand that the thinking, perceiving, core that is me inside my head is just so much exhaust from the overcomplicated engine of my body that I can't in any way rely on what it tells me about the universe (as I conclude from various atheists), and simultaneously on the other hand that, awesome as it would be, a cosmos-sized Robinson/Goldberg machine is better suited than irreplicable free wills to glorify God (as I understand certain predeterminists).*

* I can build a Robinson/Goldberg machine - actually, I have built one. Building a cosmos-sized one would just require a cosmos-sized me, maybe not even that. Omnipotent God is infinitely more creative than a cosmos-sized me.

On the action end of thing... I have issues. I'd prefer not to elaborate, thanks very much, but suffice to say they are mainly psychological and neurological in nature, and I've made myself serious impediments to quite a lot of basic life, since graduation. I take medication, and it helps, to a noticeable extent, but quite a lot of it is simply bad habits. (Where did the good habits I used to have go? Excellent question. No idea.) And what I've done as regards this matter is... well, let's say that if we were to categorize my failures in terms of the cardinal sins, Sloth would be at the top of the list. And, this is the key part, basically all of my attempts to deal with these problems have involved modifications to my environment - working in a more conducive location, taking instructions from different people, spending less time on the computer, increasing my medication beyond its effectiveness, et cetera.

Since when is psychological behaviorism compatible with free will‽

(Notice my clever use of an interrobang there? I can't believe I finally remembered to do that!)

I feel like I'm going out of my way to validate the idea that the cognitive mind has little to no effect on the physical engine, which is not what I had in mind when I sought out this post.

I'm going to go disturb the universe now, 'kay? Back in a minute.

The Mousetrap

2010-06-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Because I have the end-of-quarter approaching, this post is brief and noticeably different from what passes for "the usual" on this blog.

I finished reading Agatha Christie's famous play, The Mousetrap, yesterday, and I'm not sure that it was worth the hype derived from its well-known resistance to exposing the ending. However, in the interest of furthering the joke, I will note that the following concerns the denouement and, thus, contains spoilers.

...

The female lead gets a nice hat, and the pie burns.

Use the force

2010-06-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

Take a slinky and stretch it out so that it's fairly taut - across a room, say. Wiggle one of the ends up and down. Notice how whenever you disturb part of it, the disturbance moves away down the length of the slinky?

This is what in physics we call a wave - a disturbance that moves. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that happens with it that you can play with (what happens when the disturbance reaches the end of the slinky? is a good place to start), but there's one thing in particular I want to draw your attention to.

Disturb the slinky again and pay close attention to the little loops that compose the spring. What you should notice is that while the disturbance as a whole travels away, the individual pieces of matter basically only move back and forth in line with however you disturbed it; up and down, side to side, whatever. This shouldn't be a huge surprise, right? It's not like you grabbed part of the slinky and threw it across the room or something. The particular loop of the slinky you disturbed just pulls on the neighboring loops, which pull on their neighbors, and so on; it's a function of the fact that the slinky is springy and tries to return to its original shape due to tension forces. The "wave" isn't an actual object, it's just a description of the process as a whole.

So then what happens if you set up something, like a domino chain or something, next to the far end of the slinky and then disturb the slinky sideways? You can try it if you like, though what happens is essentially what you'd expect - the wave propagates down the slinky and runs into the dominoes and knocks them over.

But we just said that the wave isn't a physical object. It's just a little disturbance in the force (heh heh); you just accomplished the same thing as if you'd thrown a baseball down to the other end of the room to knock the dominoes over, only the only thing that moved across the room is a mathematical description of the force and energy transference taking place in the slinky. No actual, physical object crossed the room at any point.

Of course, you could argue that the same thing happens if you just stretched out a chain of dominoes across the room to reach the domino on the other side, but each individual falling domino moves slightly towards the next one. There's a net motion involved in the right direction. But with the slinky, each little bit of matter only moves from side to side (if you were careful). Not only does no object cross the room, no object even moves in the right direction to cross the room.

Congratulations. You just affected an object a whole room away from you with nothing but the power of math.

Worldbuilding Worldview

2010-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

I like to write stuff.

Actually, strictly speaking, I don't like the actual act of putting words on paper so much as I like coming up with the things that can be turned into words on paper, but that's part of the reason I got this blog in the first place.

Anyway, in either case, this is probably not a huge surprise.

What I was doing recently, while I was writing - or, as the case may be, not writing - that's a well-worn joke by now, I'm sure - was designing a universe. Not from scratch, that's rather beyond me, but starting with our universe and... tweaking things about it. Adding new and interesting particle sets that act in unusual ways, making gravitational fields act perpendicularly to the movement of electrical charges, that sort of thing. But, since none of these worlds are particularly interesting without people in them, I get to worldbuild the people too - and, even more interestingly, how they think. This means some primitive sociology, since to understand how my fictional societies think I need to figure out how normal people think first. Tricky.

The modern world operates on what might simplistically be termed the scientific method - we try different approaches and use the ones that seem to work. Why is that, exactly? Well... we've tried it before, and it seemed to work, so we keep using it.

That's very intuitive, yes?

That's when it occurred to me that this is rather similar to the charge thrown at various religions by ardent scientific humanists - you know the one, that "you only believe that book because it tells you to!" This, in turn, led me to wonder what other kinds of worldviews I can self-justify in this way. Here's my list...

(*NOTE: This is a thinking exercise more than anything else, so it's okay if I'm reductive to absurd lengths.)

- Scientific: Try everything and keep what works. We've done this before, and it seems to work.
- Post-modern: We took a poll among everybody, and we all agreed that we're mostly sane and have an accurate perception of reality. So if we ask each other, we've got a good chance of getting the right answer.
- Separatist: No need to bring in other people. I'M more usually right than wrong. Right? Right.
- Authoritarian: This guy here is really smart/enlightened/powerful/inspired, and he's right most of the time, which indicates a strong connection with the truth. So when he says we can trust him, it makes sense to believe him.
- Intuitive: My very existence can be described as "I am true". I have this in common with everything else that's true, a connection I should notice. The things I know best are those which are most familiar to me, so the things that feel most familiar are most likely to be true - actual familiarity as well as gut instincts, intuitions, and feelings of deja vu. It gets trickier if things don't seem familiar, so I should keep finding more information until it does connect with something familiar.
- Gnostic: Everything I encounter, true or false, has in common that I have encountered it, and is therefore connected to everything else I've encountered. By exploring this inner existence and finding what is true about myself, and following the connections from myself to the world, I can determine truths about the world. Deep inside, you know I'm right.

What this exercise is demonstrating to me, more than anything else, is the importance of paying attention, not to where your theory is right, but to where it is wrong. You can prove anything you like; but you can't disprove the truth, and if you succeed you obviously did something wrong.

Something quick to catch up

2010-05-06T13:00:00.001-07:00

Let's suppose you're thirsty, and the only convenient source of drink nearby is a vending machine, dispensing $1.25 drinks.

You have only $2.00 on you, in bills. The vending machine doesn't give change.

I happen to be walking by, though, and I have a couple of quarters on me. I'll give you my two quarters if you'll give me a dollar.

Alternatively, you could just put $2.00 in the machine and let it keep the change, which would cost you an extra $.25 than if you bought my quarters.

Or you could go without a drink, but you're really thirsty and don't want to do that.

So... How did my $.50 suddenly double in value?

Groups

2010-04-29T13:00:00.001-07:00

I am not a Christian.

There are lots of people who think that this term is used far too often, by people who call themselves this simply by habit, or preference, without actually understanding what it means and living it. These people tend to prefer to call themselves "believers" or "followers of Christ" or something equally ethereal and pleasant-sounding, to distinguish themselves from the petty heathen who have mistakenly confused their own beliefs for the perfect and life-changing doctrines espoused by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately for the proliferation of these terms, the people who use them almost never agree on the manner in which one's life should be changed, and consequently are as disunited amongst themselves as the remainder of the church that they criticize.

I am not a believer or follower of Christ.

In the common parlance, people tend to refer to the kind of people who believe that their beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong as "fundamentalists" (typically described as "taking the Bible literally"), because that is so mean to all the people who are wrong to actually tell them so, and it is wrong of you to do that! (And fundamentalists advocate, like, killing people who disagree with them, but we only mock them, so we must be better people than they are!)

I am not a fundamentalist.

In lieu of continuing this ridiculous pattern further than necessary, I will also proclaim the following: I am not an American. I am not a Caucasian. I am not a brunette. I am not a gentile. I am not a logician. I am not a scientist. I am not an artist. I am not a philosopher. I am not a body. I am not a soul. I am not a mind. I am not a human. I am not a person.

At least, not in the way you are probably thinking of any of those things.

The thing is, those things are all categories. Categorizing is a human and, you may be surprised to hear me say, good thing to do. We have to stick labels on things in order to make sense of the universe, and just because we label it doesn't mean that the label is arbitrary or wrong, like so many nominalists would have you believe. But, when we do this, we tend to assume that labeling something is like placing it into a file instead of a pasting a sticker on it. Truth is, if everything exists outside your own head, it has to be the latter.

If we describe something as a door, what we're really saying is that this thing can be opened and closed, and when it's open you can walk through it.

If we say something is an electron, we mean it's tiny thing possessing a certain amount of charge, and a certain amount of mass energy, and behaves like this in these situations.

If we say something is a fact, we mean that it's a statement about the universe (and usually, that it happens to be empirically true).

If we say it's a number, we mean it's a abstract object that can be counted or measured.

In fact, the only real noun in English, or any other language, is "thing". Every other noun just means "thing with descriptions X, Y, Z, etc", "thing with adjectives". Some of these properties are extremely complex, like for words like "human", but it can still come down to something like "thing that is alive, and as an adult is able to walk on two legs (things used for walking), manipulate things with two hands (things used for manipulating, that have smaller things on them that can grip other things), and talk, see, taste, smell, and hear with a head (thing attached to another thing that is able to react automatically and contemplatively in a lot of different ways to things around it) and performs abstract and conceptual thought and communication, OR is descended from another human".

All I'm saying is that you have an independent existence from any of these stickers, and if you and the sticker don't match, the sticker is wrong. Object-oriented linguistics, if you will. I think this is important, because being capable of abstract and conceptual thought means that we end up fixing or adjusting what each sticker means constantly, and a lot of the time something that the sticker used to accurately describe no longer does. Especially when we start referring to the collection of all objects with a particular sticker on it as part of some uniform whole, as if the sticker was there first. No, I'm not being a pedant about this whole thing.

But perhaps I'm being a little pedantic.

A puzzle

2010-04-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

You have a rectangular field containing an irregularly-shaped pond whose area you wish to know.

The tools you have at hand are the property deed for the field, a cannon, and an infinite number of cannonballs.

How do you find the area of the pond?

Test Yourself

2010-04-15T13:00:00.001-07:00

Please choose the best answer for each question.

Name:
Quest:
Favorite Color:

1) What is nescience?
(a) Orange
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know

2) What is veracity?
(a) Silver
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know

3) What is your favorite color?
(a) Blue
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

4) What is melange?
(a) Grey
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

5) What is contradictory?
(a) Vermilion
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

6) What is the capital of Assyria?
(a) Ashur
(b) Calah
(c) Khorsabad
(d) Nineveh
(e) None of the above

7) What is the maximum airborne velocity of an unladen swallow?
(a) 1 m/s
(b) 5 m/s
(c) 11 m/s
(d) 200 m/s
(e) 42

8) Is this a question where one of the possible answers goes "blam"?
(a) No.
(b) BLAM
(c) BLAM
(d) BLAM
(e) Actually, I think several of your possible answer make that noise.

9) Cake. - True/False

10) Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - True/False

11) This sentence no verb. - True/False

12) Think of a number, any number.

13) Where's Waldo?

14) Fill in the blank: __________

It's not Thursday yet, but this is just a tech update

2010-04-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've added the feedback bar thing. I had wanted a nice number of dichotomies so you could tell me that your impressions are that what I write is kind or cruel, true or false, beautiful or ugly, confusing or clear, justified or unjustified.

Unfortunately, I can fit all those into the little box but they'll only put up a few anyway. Foul technology, curse your surprising but inevitable betrayal!

So now there's just three options - good if you think I was persuasive, bad if you think I was unkind, and ugly if it's just too confusing to tell what just happened. (I expect this one to be quite popular.)

Also, I've gone back and added a bunch of links into Socrates Meets Malacoda for explaining what I had in mind with all the various philosophy/literary/science-y geeky references I made - maybe this will clear things up a bit?

Sparkling angels, come and see

2010-04-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

The idea of angels probably irritates me more than the idea of gods does. They're practically identical for all we know about them - they're supernatural and a Lot Better Than Mere Mortals, For Sure, but angels serve even higher beings and gods generally don't... but angels take the lead due to the outstanding problem that the book I've sworn to pledge as the truth, the important truth, and nothing but the truth, claims they exist and gives them fairly prominent roles in the story, and yet still manages to skimp on the details of what, exactly, they are, and how, exactly, they matter.

The details it does provide, however, are fairly clearly in direct contradiction to the average person's conception of them. If you manage to get a clear answer out of this hypothetical person on "such a religious question", she is likely to give you three images of what angels look like:

(a) A divinely cute infant or young child, but with wings.
(b) A divinely good-looking woman, but with wings.
(c) A divinely powerful knight, but with wings.
I suppose there's also (d) some combination of the above, usually (b) and (c) because both possible combinations ("female" plus "powerful", and "knight" plus "good-looking") are apparently synergistically attractive, and warrior children don't really seem like a very divine idea.

You may notice a couple of recurring elements, and oddly they're the only ones that come close to approximating biblical descriptions (which tends to multiply both the "divine" and "winged" aspects to redundancy and beyond). I can think of three good reasons the others are wrong:

First, a fact that I've heard circulated frequently and so I presume is fairly well-known, there are very few angels in the Bible who open their messages with a preamble of "Hey there!" It's generally closer to "Fear not". This would seem to rule out (a), for whom this would be unnecessary unless every biblical hero and heroine happened to have a horrible phobia of children with wings*, and (b), whom studies show should worry more about other emotions than fear getting in the way of the message. Similarly, I can't think of any explicitly described manifestations with more than a passing resemblance to a human being, barring when Raphael goes incognito for most of the Book of Tobit, which would seem to eliminate (c) and (d) as well.

* This isn't necessarily a bad assumption to make, but you do have to consider that among such heroines is Mary, who had very explicitly never had children before.

Second, whatever else angels may be, the Bible is fairly specific that humans alone are made in the image of God. If you believe this refers to physical structure, this should suffice; if a reference to God's triunity as mind, body, spirit - well, angels are obviously spiritual beings and occasionally rebellious, which would leave the body as the key difference.

Finally, outside of their allegiances demons and angels are fundamentally identical. There's no support for the notion that good is pretty and evil disgusting (or vice versa) other than peoples' astonishing tendency to merge goodness, truth, and beauty into a single axis; quite the contrary, metaphors involving demonic activity while "disguised as an angel of light" are common. If demons can be light and still evil, angels can be dark and still good.

This is all just a roundabout excuse for me to cite C. S. Lewis, who deals with this quite a lot in The Space Trilogy (another of the world's best stories nobody has ever read), especially because several of his "angels" are the personifications of planets rather than divine messengers. When two manifest near the end of Perelandra it takes them some time to figure out an appearance that won't cause the human protagonist to be physically ill; before they finally settle on sort of metallic colossi, some of their attempts are closer to vertiginous spaces swirling with geometric shapes than any real object. Lewis justified this elsewhere simply by pointing out that everyone expects the forces of evil to be terrible and threatening, and that's all very well, because you can always have faith that the forces of good will swoop in and save you. But when the same applies to the ones in which you trust for salvation... one way or another, you will have to undergo a very radical change of mind.

And when I am explicitly imperfect by nature, and wisdom begins with the perfect fear of an omnipotent God and ends with it being dispelled by his perfect love, that sounds far more real to me than any pretty fledged human.

And now for something hopefully more comprehensible

2010-04-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

I don't understand gods. When someone talks about advances in technology making humans as gods, or some fictional character believes that by doing some particular thing he or she will become godlike, I literally fail to see what the big deal is, and I'm convinced this is a terminology problem.

My beliefs are fairly straightforwardly monotheistic - I'm convinced that there is precisely one god. (Usually I'm going to capitalize this, as in God, not specifically for reverence - I can kind of see how "I consider God so important I'm willing to violate my otherwise-rigorous use of basic grammatical correctness for Him" makes sense, but considering how often "otherwise-rigorous" is a blatant falsehood I don't really buy it - but so that there's at least one visible difference between my use of the term and anyone else's.) More specifically, I believe in a God with the triple characteristics of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, which isn't really a word but I'm going to violate my otherwise-rigorous use of etymological yes I'm kind of being a hypocrite but it makes sense here, okay?

I think this means I use the same basic definition as the average atheistic person, and we just need to figure out whether such a God exists or not. That takes care of the first entry in Merriam-Webster. (I'm not sure what they mean by "supreme or ultimate reality" - it seems to imply that God is somehow more real than anything else, and I don't think I buy the concept of one person or object being more real than another one... is it possible to cite a dictionary for lacking rigor?)

Ignoring the mystical and arbitrary definitions, that leaves (2) - a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality. This is the definition that seems to permit polytheism (and any forms of monotheism that don't believe in an omnipotent god), and my problem with it is that it's merely descriptive - not explanatory, and not compelling. My reasons for this are based on the key lines "more than natural attributes and powers", and "requires human worship":

What do we mean by natural? In the past powers that would have been considered unnatural would include things like, oh, sending a message to the other side of the ocean instantly, or throwing rocks into the air and not having them fall immediately back down. This is where Clarke's Third Law - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - comes from. Taking that to its logical conclusion, if we're presented with some claimant to the title of a god we never have any good reason to believe any particular demonstration of powers is "more than natural"; sure, it looks like magic, but that's just because we don't know how to duplicate it. And since there's no real reason in theory that human understanding can't increase indefinitely (refer to the conclusion from my last post, that there's always more knowledge to know!), any power that's less than omnipotent can, and, probably, will be surpassed.

It doesn't make any more sense to worship Zeus than it does to worship your R&D department.

Now, there is a counterpoint to this, which is that it is right to pay more respect to more powerful people (which presumably means more respect for Zeus than for R&D, at least until the R&D chair is able to beat Zeus up). The problem with this is that it collapses into some form of might-makes-right (possibly bright-makes-right) scheme, which offers no grounds to argue with Zeus when he says to stop funneling so much of your budget into research and development, unless you resort to citing a higher authority than Zeus, and every possible higher authority can be answered this way... until you decide to cite an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving authority, who, funny thing, either exists or doesn't.

I have no issue in general with the existence of any sort of less-than-all-powerful being. But it's also entirely irrelevant to anything of more than temporary importance.

Waiting for Gödel

2010-03-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Continued!

This is the part where things start getting complicated, because set theory can, in fact, be defined in terms of itself. You see, any mathematical theory can be defined as a set of statements - some of which are unproven and assumed, and called axioms, and others of which are called theorems because they are implied by the axioms.

For example: The axioms of the basic arithmetic we all learn in school are as follows.
- Every number is equal to itself. If one number is equal to a second number, that number must be equal to the first. If a third number is equal to the second, it must also be equal to the first. But only a number can be equal to a number. (Equality defined!)
- 0 is a "natural" number, and adding one to any natural number yields another natural number. (Addition permitted!)
- If you have two numbers and add one to both of them, and get the same result, the two numbers must themselves be equal. (Subtraction permitted!)
- If you define some set of numbers such that if it contains some natural number then it must also contain that number plus one, and define it to contain 0, then that set contains all natural numbers. (The principle of induction!)

Arithmetic theorems include 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+2=4; and so on. It should be clear that there are an infinite number of these, even though there are some distinct limits - this arithmetic system doesn't even allow for multiplication yet, let alone fractions, irrational numbers, negatives, and more complicated ideas! But such concepts can be incorporated, by adding more axioms to get a larger system that still contains arithmetic.

For centuries, mathematicians have held two dreams. On the one hand, that it would be eventually possible to extend arithmetic logic - that is, the logic that underlies how we experience the universe on an everyday basis - to the point that it would contain all possible true statements. The day was dreamed of when two philosophers in a dispute would, instead of saying "let us argue", would say "let us calculate"; and then sit down and work out the equations underlying the properties of the soul, or the top quark, or God - a system both eminently powerful, and eminently practical.

On the other hand, there was the fear that mathematics is itself broken in some way, that one day someone would calculate some grotesque and immense equation, prove it true beyond all possible doubt or inherent limitation, and then realize that you could apply it in such away that 0=1. A waste of millennia of research and imagination and rigor, and the seed of a potential existential crisis among the entirety of the sciences and philosophies, which rely so heavily on the idea that human reason can understand the cosmos to begin with.

The dream and the nightmare are fundamentally in opposition to each other, and either would precipitate a tremendous shift in human understanding.
And Kurt Godel was the man who proved both were impossible.

The First Incompleteness Theorem: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

In simpler terms, any theory that includes the axioms discussed above - which we know to be true - either contains false statements, or it excludes true statements.

Let me repeat that. If a theory can be made to contain all truth, then it also contains at least one statement that's false. If you can fix it to kick out that one statement, you also have to kick out at least one statement that's true.

This is the strongest argument for agnosticism that could ever possibly be made, and it is provably true based on everything we understand about logic and mathematics. And if you think that's bad, it gets worse.

The Second Incompleteness Theorem: For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths, and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

That is, one of those statements you can never prove is that you're right. And if your theory can prove that all the statements it implies are true, they aren't.

Funny thing is, we can still define the "universal set" of all statements that are true. There's just no theory that can tell us what all those statements are. Sure, we can identify a "Godelian statement" for every theory we come up with, and add an axiom to the theory to account for it. We can splice a couple of mutually-cohesive theories together to cover even more ground. But these just make a bigger theory, and we already proved every consistent theory has a true statement outside it. We can make infinite theories, but the thing about eternity is, there's always more of it.

We can mark off a section of the Library of Babel that contains all the books we can prove to be true, but there's always another secret just beyond the horizon and we'll have to fight through a bunch of lies to get to it - and if you should find a lie in your own head, well, you'll have to throw it out, with all the ones relying on it that you thought you'd already proven.

Sound perilous? If you care about what you think, it's the only choice you've got. The quest for knowledge is an unending struggle against infinite odds. Besides, they say an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Bring me that horizon.

I am being lax

2010-03-25T13:35:00.001-07:00

At this rate, I might as well change my name to "Once a Month".

Not done explaining Godel yet, sorry. But I highly encourage you to go check out this essay, as it is pretty awesome.

Kurt Gödel

2010-02-21T16:17:00.001-08:00

I've been really bad about updating this - last week I was sick, but yesterday I was just lazy. Shame on me. But - I'm sworn not to become one of those people who starts a blog and never updates it, so.

Time to start talking about the other half of the title.

The Library of Babel, if you'll remember, is a metaphor for the inherent vagueness of truth and falsehood - you cannot know that a statement is true simply by looking at it. You have to compare it to itself, and to other statements that you know to be true... which you don't necessarily really know to be true, either.

So doubt everything. Test every book you read. Can it describe itself? Or does it rely on another book that can, or another book that relies on another book that relies on an entire series that can? If it can survive your earnest flame - and you must be in earnest to avoid deceiving yourself - you may trust it with your life. If not, it was not worth keeping to begin with, as useful to you as the belief that you can live without breathing.

And if you think that's no way to live... I have a bridge to sell you.

There's this construct called mathematics, which is basically the above taken to extremes. It's not just for numbers - that would be the subject known as arithmetic - but the rigorous calculation of fact. Set theory is probably one of the most general sub-categories, dealing with absolutely anything that can be grouped; but also predicate logic, with begins with tautologies like "if A is true, then A is true" and "either A is true or A is not true", and builds from there. Because of this, mathematical proofs are absolutely reliable... and this leads to problems.

Let's talk set theory. Any group that can be described constitutes a set - the set of all rational numbers, for instance, or its subset that contains only the numbers 4, 18, and 6... or the set of all the books in my library, or the set of everyone who has ever had the name "Julius Caesar". You can even define a set whose elements are {white, 14, Literacy, [you]}, as long as you don't include yourself (or literacy, or white, or 14) more than once.

There are also sets whose elements are other sets - the set of {white, 14, Literacy, the set of all the books in my library}, for instance. This is where a few important distinctions come in:

(1) 14 is not {14}. A set containing a single element is not the same as that element; saying {14} + {7} = {21} is like saying that {apple} + {orange} = {some bizarre sum equal to apple+orange}.

(2) {14} is a subset of {14, white} because all the elements of {14} are also elements of {14, white}. 14 is not a subset of {14, white} because it is not a set. More weirdly, 14 is an element of {14, {14, white}} and {14} is a subset, but {14} is an element of {{14}, {14, white}} but not a subset. The brackets are important!

(3) {14, white} and {white, 14} contain exactly the same elements (i.e. they're subsets of each other), which means they must be the same set. Order doesn't matter.

Confused yet? If you are, ask me and I'll try to explain better.

A thought about enlightened monarchy

2010-02-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

An enlightened monarch is one who embraces the principles of the Enlightenment and uses them to support his own reign; i.e. a ruler who does things like patronize the arts, improve his subjects' standard of living, etc, because if he fulfills his responsibilities and makes his people safe, free, and happy, they'll tend to prefer that he stay in power rather than rebel.

With that in mind, that golden rule of compassion and self-giving, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you", seems more like enlightened selfishness.

If that's the case, what does selflessness look like?

Socrates meets Malacoda

2010-02-13T18:29:00.001-08:00

Inspired by Peter Kreeft's Socrates Meets... series, and Dante's Inferno.

-----

[Setting: A nondescript beach sloping down to the ocean on the right and steeply rising into a high row of rocks on the right. Between them, unhurriedly, paces Socrates, head in the clouds and lost in thought, wandering in no particular direction other than simply down the beach. In front of him and on top of an especially flat part of the rock wall crouches Malacoda, watching and smirking fiendishly. Socrates sees him, appears puzzled, and speaks.]

Socrates: Good day, sir. Where are we… and who are you?

Malacoda: That first is complicated. As for the second, you may call me Malacoda.

Socrates: That is your name?

Malacoda: Indeed.

Socrates: But who are you? That does not actually answer my question.

Malacoda: Hmm. I am generally considered a demon, but not in the way that you understand the term. Consider me one of a number of gods of the afterlife, if you would. A devil.

Socrates: Ah. So I am, in fact, dead, then. I had wondered. This place is part of the afterlife, then?

Malacoda: Quite true. In fact it is the entirety of the afterlife, and a bit more besides.

Socrates: I’m sorry? Could you possibly elaborate?

Malacoda: Certainly. This land, from the shore of the Dirac Sea beside you to infinity behind me is the space where things are kept that do not exist. It is the home of the library of unwritten books, it is where we keep Theseus’ ship now that he has replaced every plank, it is where we hide the square root of infinity, and it is where [picks up a candlestick and ignites it with his breath] the flame of a candle goes after it has been blown out. Some call it Tumbolia, some call it Super-Sargasso Space, but properly it is known as Potentia. Naturally, now that you have ceased to exist, you have arrived here.

Socrates: You have said something very interesting to me. It is my understanding that at death, the body and soul are separated and each goes its separate way. Am I correct so far?

Malacoda: Yesss…

Socrates: And the body slowly returns to the material world.

Malacoda: Yes.

Socrates: Now, it is my understanding that the soul, the essential I, moves onto the spiritual world. But you have just said that I cease to exist and therefore comes here.

Malacoda: You have said it, Socrates.

Socrates: I find there is a rather stark difference between these two statements.

Malacoda: Not really. Since this spiritual world of yours does not exist, either, your essential “you” does in fact go there – it is part of Potentia.

Socrates: I think you’re lying.

Malacoda: That’s possible. We devils do so frequently. Wherein lies the falsehood?

Socrates: If nothing here exists, then what of yourself?

Malacoda: Oh, I do not exist either. I was dreamed up by Dante Alighieri. I am a construct of his mind alone, I never have been real, and I never will be. Thus, I have been made responsible for supervising Potentia on Hell’s behalf.

Socrates: Literary characters are here, too?

Malacoda: Didn’t you know? You yourself are a character of Plato’s invention and have no proper existence either.

Socrates: Don’t be absurd. Of course I exist.

Malacoda: Yes, you exist in Potentia.

Socrates: Very funny. You give this place a sort of twisted sense but it so flagrantly violates basic logic it’s impossible to believe you.

Malacoda: I suppose you cannot really think through the entire thing clearly yet. What can I do to prove it to you?

Socrates: You are going to try to prove empirically that our current location is not empirical?

Malacoda: Very sensible for such a place, isn’t it?

Socrates: Not if the place itself is not very sensible.

Creon: That is the point, I think.

Socrates: Who are you?

Malacoda: My empirical evidence; allow me to present the fictitious Creon of Thebes.

Socrates: Where did you come from? How do you know what we are talking about?

Malacoda: Has he not been here all along?

Socrates: No!

Malacoda: Precisely.

Creon: I have to agree with Socrates.

Malacoda: What?

Creon: You’ve been talking solely about terms so far. That is fine as far as logic goes, but as you both have come close to pointing out, logic is not very practical for talking about inherently self-contradictory things. Well, as far as empirical evidence goes, I can tell that I am currently standing on this beach, and therefore both the beach and I exist.

Malacoda: But I can provide any number of objects that do not exist or cannot possibly exist. Would you like to see an anti-knot?

Creon: I could not say. What is it?

Malacoda: If you tie a knot in a rope, the anti-knot is the knot you'd tie to cancel out all the twists of the first without actually untying it - and, since neither of them exists after they cancel each other out, they end up here. Alternatively, look at this rope with three ends, or this seven-sided cube.

Creon: This is irrelevant. I’m holding it right now. As far as I’m concerned, it must exist and you’re just wrong about it being impossible.

Socrates: I don’t suppose I could trouble you with a few questions?

Malacoda: Oh, not at all. Be my guest.

Socrates: All right. Could I confirm something with you first? I just want to be sure that when I am speaking to you I am speaking.

Malacoda: …what?

Socrates: I am making statements, yes?

Malacoda: That seems to be trivially, even tautologically, the case.

Socrates: And these statements, they are meaningful?

Malacoda: I suppose. Although not very.

Socrates: But they do, in fact, possess meaning.

Malacoda: I am responding to you, am I not?

Socrates: Is that a yes or a no? If you do not exist then some would say you cannot respond.

Malacoda: Clever! But no, I may not exist, but my responses do.

Socrates: How is that possible?

Malacoda: Because someone who exists is recording them.

Socrates: …Oh. Well then, this place Potentia. It is where things are kept that do not exist?

Malacoda: Indeed.

Socrates: And only things that do not exist?

Malacoda: …yes…

Socrates: Do some things exist?

Malacoda: Excellent question. I shall not say.

Socrates: Well. Does Potentia exist?

Malacoda: Umm. Suppose I say yes?

Socrates: Then I ask you how a place can exist when none of its features do.

Malacoda: Then I say no.

Creon: So this place is a part of itself?

Malacoda: Yes. Is this somehow impossible? The place you call Earth contains the entirety of the Earth, doesn't it? Besides, even if you think that there is something inherently impossible with a space containing itself, being impossible is part of the nature of this particular space.

Socrates: Can you show me something that is both nonexistent and indescribable?

Malacoda: [produces such an object] Voila.

Socrates: Impressive.

Malacoda: Thank you.

Socrates: But unsuccessful.

Malacoda: What?

Socrates: That thing there can be described as “something both nonexistent and indescribable”. Since I just described it, it is not indescribable. Moreover, I can say that about anything that “only exists in Potentia” – so if it is indescribable, it cannot not exist.

Malacoda: So?

Socrates: If it does not not exist, then it must exist.

Malacoda: Well! I concede that some things exist, then.

Socrates: But by definition, something both nonexistent and indescribable cannot possibly exist. So now we have an object that neither exists, nor does not exist – a logical impossibility.

Creon: These are just word games. If he cannot produce it for you, then obviously it does not exist, and that’s the end of it.

Socrates: I don’t believe these he’s contributing anything to the discussion. Can we be rid of him?

Malacoda: Of course.

Socrates: How do you do that? Did you make him start existing?

Malacoda: Well, what if I did?

Socrates: Then you’re a creative being and certainly no devil, if as you said a devil is a god of death. It’s as I thought. You have been lying about this entire situation. Potentia cannot exist as such, and neither can any of the things – or people – you have attempted to use as proof. Well, this has been a fascinating diversion, but I have an afterlife to investigate, so if you’ll excuse me…

Malacoda: Sssss! Objective unreality defies your wordplay! Tell me. Did you ever meet Euthyphro?

Socrates: I… hmm. I do seem to recall conversing with him, but I could have sworn he was dead…

Malacoda: Exactly! You remember a fiction Plato wrote about you. You’re sufficiently nonexistent for me to keep you stuck here!

Socrates: Do you mean to say I’m a prisoner of a nonexistent being in an impossible place for no good reason?

Malacoda: Precisely!

Socrates: And, to be clear on this point, there is absolutely no way to escape?

Malacoda: None whatsoever!

Socrates: Ah. Well, if a way to escape doesn't exist, then I'll just go find it, won't I?

Malacoda: Wait, what? That's... umm...

Socrates: Goodbye.

"The universe, which others call the Library..."

2010-02-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges describing its own title. The Library is an entire world completely filled by hexagonal rooms of bookshelves, containing all the possible permutations of 25 symbols - 22 letters, plus the period, comma, and space - that could be contained in books that are precisely 410 pages long, 40 lines per page, 80 symbols per line. Every possible book that fits these parameters is somewhere in the Library, exactly once. Somewhere, there is a book containing nothing but four hundred and ten pages of MCVMCVMCV, but also the Encyclopedia Britannica, Shakespeare's First Folio, and a book that describes how to construct a perpetual-motion machine.

And, of course, a book whose title page is from the First Folio (by MCV), but the rest of which is from a faulty version of the Britannica that contains a description of a perpetual-motion machine. Thus, the Library contains all truth - but also all falsehood.

Obviously, somewhere, there is an index - a catalogue, explaining where all the books containing truth can be found, and one in every language, no less. But of course there are also a countless number of flawed indices, many of which have simply misplaced a period or substituted a word, but many of which are seemingly flawless except that where they say you should be able to find your own biography there is actually a copy of Finnegan's Wake. How, then, can you tell the true from the false?

You can start by picking an apparent index and looking it up in itself. If it's not there, you obviously can't trust it, because if it is true it should be listed in the book! Moreover, if it gives you a wrong location, you can't trust it, either. This is the easiest thing to begin with - any index which cannot account for itself is not a reliable index.

When you have an index that satisfies this basic condition, you can check the reliability of the rest of the list to make sure that all the books it contains are where it says they are. Then you must test the reliability of those books to make sure that they actually contain what they say they contain in the title; if any of these books are themselves indices (more than likely, for a library of this scope), this means testing a number of their contents for accuracy as well, ad infinitum if it goes that far.

Difficult, you say? Yes. Impossible? Necessary, if you wish to believe you know anything.

I hate hitting people with frying pans, but... if you haven't realized what this entire entry is a metaphor for yet, well, the majority of the rest of this blog is probably not for you.

As for Godel... he can wait until later.