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.
17 March 2011
07 October 2010
A Most Ingenious Solution
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
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
30 September 2010
A Most Ingenious Paradox
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!
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!
16 September 2010
Utopianism
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?
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?
02 September 2010
A proof about hypocrisy.
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.
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.
26 August 2010
I am a hypocrite.
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.
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.
10 June 2010
The Mousetrap
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.
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.
03 June 2010
Use the force
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.
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.
20 May 2010
Worldbuilding Worldview
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.
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.
06 May 2010
Something quick to catch up
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?
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?
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