Blah blah blah

So, first, I totally failed in regards to the whole "keeping up with this blog" thing. Obviously I tried to pretend that I wasn't failing by posting my papers from college, but...that's cheating. I know this now.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the following:

Understanding. I may end up doing my Div III (senior dissertation for all you non-Hampshire people) on it. Here's the problem: what does it mean to "understand" something? It is not an intentional state ("intentional state" is a fancy philosophical way of saying "thought", although it specifically refers to thoughts about things in the world: for example, when I think to myself "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" [as I am wont to do] the thought is about the Eiffel Tower. Beliefs are also intentional states, since if you believe something, you believe something about something [once again, my belief that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris is about the Eiffel Tower]), since it doesn't correspond to anything. I.e. when I say "I understand the theory of relativity" I'm not making a statement about anything out there in the world. So maybe "understanding" is a subjective sensation. But no! We can't be wrong about our subjective sensations. But we can be wrong as to whether we do, in fact, understand something, so it seems. We can think we've understood something without understanding it at all. And is the converse possible? Can we not think we understand something when in fact we do? Why is any of this important? Because it's at the core of almost all arguments. Namely, we have to understand something in order for it to mean anything.

Meat n' Stuff

So I was think about all the commercials for dog food where they're like "it's made with fresh ingredients" "you're dog knows it's delicious" etc. and they show beautiful images of fresh ingredients. I decided there should be a dog food brand called "Meat n' Stuff", which is exactly that: low quality meat and various nutrients that your dog needs to survive. Here are some slogans I came up with (NSFW):

Meat n' Stuff: because your dog doesn't give a fuck

Meat n' Stuff: because your dog is eating it, not you

Meat n' Stuff: for crying out loud, your dog likes to eat it's own shit

Why did I think this post was a good idea?

So I decided it would be worthwhile to check out the stats on my blog.

Search Keywords that got people here:

All Time

1. dervine7.blogspot.com
2. peter benzi
3. sandra pettinico
4. taliesin nyala
5. "richard wayne lee" or "lee, richard wayne" strained bedfellows
6. nvcc homeschool pdf connecticut
7. patricia pallis
8. peter benzi nvcc
9. petr benzi
10. "douglas hofstadter" utilitarianism

All pretty predicatble. Stuff I've mentioned in my posts (especially the teachers I mentioned in my commencement speech). It's mildly interesting that 2 people apparently got to my blog looking for the article by Richard Wayne Lee that I cited. But who is this Taliesin Nyala? Turns out that she's an Alum of Hampshire, and she shows up on my page because I follow the Culture, Brain, and Development blog. Which makes these next keyword stats very confusing...

Past Month

1. dervine7.blogspot.com
2. "taliesin nyala"
3. agent hujinikabolokov
4. religious humanism strained bedfellows pagans
5. taliesin nyala how pleasure works
6. taliesin nyala naked
7. taliesin nyala sex

Your guess is as good as mine. Especially as if you search those last two the only website you get that has ALL those words in it is mine! ("naked" appears in my blog post about the sayings of Jesus, and "sex" appears in my favorite quotations)

(By the way, Agent Hujinikabolokov is from Sleep Talkin' Man.)

Referring Sites

Actually, never mind. This wasn't a terribly interesting blog post to begin with and now it's 2:24AM. Except for uupdates.net and Facebook, the referring sites just a bunch of referral spam (I'm guessing porn), which is mildly depressing. From Russia, it seems. Although I have been getting a lot more views from Facebook recently, which means my friends are looking at this blog, which is cool! Speaking of Russia, that spam makes it so that they are one of the top countries to view this blog. So there you go.

Doodled this during a class...

CONTROVERSY TIME: Abortion

Alright, so obviously, I am writing a blog post when I promised I wouldn't. So the deal is now: no Free Will Part 2 until someone makes a comment that get's discussion going.

There was a poll on FB that went like this:
When does a human's life actually begin? When should someone be considered a human being and enjoy the rights, freedoms and privileges as other humans?
- At the moment of conception
- At the moment the pregnancy is detected
- At the end of the 1st trimester
- Once brain activity has been detected
- At the end of the 2nd trimester
- Once survival outside the womb is viable
- Within one month of expected delivery date
- After the entire body is outside vaginal canal
- After the cord is severed and baby survives
So I was thinking of responding, but I realized my views were much too nuanced.
The question isn't when life begins, but when it is that that life assumes worth. Quite obviously a fetus is alive, as is bacteria. And we don't worry about killing bacteria.
Even with this distinction, I don't think a clear line can be easily drawn. The most I feel I can say with certainty is this:
At the moment of conception, the life has no particular worth;
Near birth, the life does have worth
In between the distinctions are very fuzzy.

Let's throw out one argument off the bat: the argument from potential. Often one will hear the argument "what if the child that's being aborted would've grown up to be Beethoven? Or Einstein?" Well, what if it had grown up to be Hitler or Stalin? Or for all we know it could've ended up being a miscarriage, or a stillbirth, in which case it wouldn't have grown up to be anything at all.
More fundamentally, this argument could easily be used to prove that it's wrong not to have sex when the woman has eggs ready to be fertilized. After all, if the eggs were fertilized, who knows what great things those children could accomplish? Ergo, by the reasoning used earlier, it is a disservice to humanity to not have sex. Reductio ad absurdum.
(If one brings in "God's will", it actually gets even more complicated, since then you have to bring in all the theological issues involving omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty.)

Therefore we can only reason in regards to what the embryo/fetus IS, not what it might be. And here is where the worth of it's life get's fuzzy. Because as I said before, we have no problem killing bacteria, which perform many lifelike functions that an embryo does not. And unless we're vegetarian, we're even willing to kill animals that have more sentient behavior than a newborn baby. Obviously the argument hinges on the fact that the embryo is "human", whereas the other things are not. Yet, this is not terribly different from one race of people saying it's OK to kill people of other races, but not members of their own race. Just as the color of one's skin is less important than their qualities of personality, so too whether one belong to the species of Homo Sapien is less important than their human-like qualities in determining whether their life has value (for the benefit of the doubt, I am making the assumption here that the value of life depends on humanness in some form--not necessarily a sound assumption [although I think it's necessary, more on that in another post]). For instance, if by some freak coincidence on genetics, if a chimpanzee was born with the mental abilities of an adult human, we would almost certainly say it deserved human rights, and also that it almost certainly had a soul. But then, how far do we have to go before we say it ceases to have these things? If it has the abilities of a teenager? A child? A toddler? A newborn? In fact, chimps do have abilities beyond those of a young toddler. Why, then, does the toddler have human rights, and a soul, and the chimp does not, even though their abilities are just as "human"? And why should we be concerned with the life of an embryo, but not a bacterium?

(This was written of the cuff, late at night, so I sort of rambled.)

Truth-An Idea

I talk about truth a lot. Yet, I am not sure what it means. However, a couple of days ago, I was debating with someone about politics. They came from a basically conservative point of view and were arguing on the basis of "absolute truths". I came up with the following towards the end of my argument:

Do I believe in complete moral relativism? No. Absolute truths necessarily
exist: the very statement "There is no absolute truth" is itself asserting an
absolute truth. What I DO believe is that these absolute truths are understood
relative to our viewpoints and ideas. For an admittedly bad analogy, consider a
screwdriver. The "screwdriver" in and of itself is imagined to be an "absolute
truth". However, depending on one's needs and cultural background, it is
something for driving screws, something to pry things with, a shovel, a symbol
or industry, maybe even something of sacred value (ala the Coke bottle in "The
Gods Must be Crazy!"), or a number of other things. (I know that's a horrible
analogy, and I use it because I have not yet worked out the problem of truth in
a satisfactory way.)

I'm not entirely sure where the screwdriver analogy came from, and I'm not terribly impressed by it in its current form, but it stuck with me and I continued to mull it over, with that sensation one gets occasionally when they know their on to something.
And this feeling didn't even come from the original purpose of the analogy. It came from my arbitrary choice of comparing truth to a screwdriver.
While truth is fundamentally undefinable, I think it's possible to make the analogy of truth as a tool. Truth is the tool by which one understands and manipulates ideas. The truth in and of itself is absolute, however how it is used depends on our needs and background, and it is useless if it cannot be adapted to suit varying needs. If a screwdriver was capable only of driving screws and nothing else, it would be useless if there was nothing to be screwed (...you with the dirty minds), yet its capability to perform other tasks makes it almost univerally useful. Or if a person with no concept of drving screws came across a screwdriver, they might decide that it is a toy.
So does anyone think I'm onto something?

Past, Present, and Future

Another random idea and off-the-cuff post...
There seems to be divide in human thought between past, present, and future. By past, present, and future, I mean not only their meaning in time but also ideas associated with each of them. For instance

Past: experience, ideals, tradition, security

Present: sensation, pragmatism, pleasure

Future: imagination, ideals, innovation, revolution

(Present is probably the category with the most diversity: pragmatism and pleasure, for instance, might very well be opposed to eachother)

Here's how I would categorize some philosophies, mind-sets, and types of people according to the past/present/future distinction:

Past: conservatism, fundamentalism, respect for elders/ancestors, Confucionism, literalism, "conservative" intellectuals, reactionaries, Guardians

Present: some elements of conservatism, libertarianism, hedonism, empiricism, Zen, artists, hippies, thrill seekers, "down-to-earth", "do what needs to be done", Artisans

Future: liberalism, "the children are our future", Western Thought in general, some elements of Randian philosophy, inventors, artists, philosophers, radicals, Idealists, Rationals

(it should be obvious that, just because two things are in the same category, doesn't mean they are compatible: "down to earth" people and hippies probably would not get along very well, for instance. They are however both focused on the present.)

Metaphysics

This is something my brain started throwing at me while I was walking, I haven't taken the time to go over it thoroughly, so it's probably a bit sketchy, but interesting nonetheless.
We have a problem with metaphysics. The problem is that the only language we have to talk about it is a language that is ill-equipped to talk about it. Our language is terribly imprecise, filled with hidden assumptions, limited, parochial, inherently worldly, and a host of other things. When you try to translate from one language to another, as we do if we try to discuss, say, Greek philosophy, or Biblical doctrine, there is meaning that is lost: how, indeed, can we be sure that the meaning we give the translation is anything like the meaning the ancient Greeks had in mind?
We then try to take this unwieldy language and use it to talk about things that are entirely out of it's league: is there a self? Is there a soul? What is a soul? Is there free will? Is there a god? Do things really exist? What does it mean to "exist"? What does "meaning" mean? It just gets worse and worse!
Not only that, but these aren't pointless questions: some of them are of vital importance! What then do we do?
For ideas, let's consider a way of describing the world that's a little more down-to-earth: regular Physics. Now, when you think about it, physics is also impossible to describe with language. Sure, you can say that "gravity makes objects attract each other, etc.", but you'd be missing a whole bunch of meaning and nuance, and once you described gravity this way, you'd be stuck: no new discoveries could be made. Your description would also be terribly imprecise and would run into problems of translation to other languages.
That's not the hardest physics to describe with language, though. What about Quantum Physics: "well it's sort of a wave and sort of a particle but really it isn't either but sometimes it's both except when it interacts with something..." ugh! Or four dimensions, which are entirely impossible to characterize using human language except through analogy.
There is, however, a language which describes physics. And it is precise, with assumptions that are, for the most part, clearly defined, universal, and has no need to be translated from one language to another, since except perhaps for some differences in symbols, it is the same for everybody. Mathematics. And in mathematics, things like Quantum Physics, which are so impossible to describe in human language, are clearly defined, and four dimensions even more so.
So it seems to me what we need is language that is to Metaphysics what mathematics is to Physics. What it could be I don't know.
Regardless, I am going to continue to discuss metaphysics in regular, human language :)

Logic Idea (that someone probably already thought of)

I'm in the process of reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence", and it's gotten me all fired up so
Coming Soon! INTERESTING philosophical blog posts...

...

But UNTIL then I just wanted to share the fact that I think I may have come up with an expansion of logic that someone else has probably already thought of, and let me know if you know who has. Where it came from was in "Motorcycle Maintenence" there was discussed the concept of Mu, which is a concept in Zen meaning "No answer" "Neither" etc., as opposed to a definite "Yes" or "No". This led me to wonder whether a system of logic could be built using the "Mu" term.
Specifically, I was thinking about how you could incorporate the "Mu" concept into the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT, since by combining these operators, at least I've heard and been told, one can make any logical statement.
A lot of you probably don't know what AND, OR, and NOT mean. All of these operations do something to some statement or set of statements that are determined to be True or False. In doing so they also form a new statement which is True or False.
AND joins two statements and claims that these statements are both True. The English "and" sometimes serves this function, though not always: an example where it does is "He is wearing a hat and a jacket", in which you are claiming that the statements "He is wearing a hat" and "He is wearing a jacket" are both true. If either statement or both statements are False, then the joint statement is false, i.e. if he isn't wearing a hat then he can't be wearing "a hat and jacket", and if he's wearing neither...you get the idea.
OR joins two statements and claims that AT LEAST one of them is True. It's important to note that it's different from English "or" in that it also allows for both of the statements to be true: it's English equivalent is really "and/or" which is what I will use in the example. "He is wearing a hat and/or (OR) a jacket" is true if he's wearing both, if he's wearing one or the other, but not if he's wearing neither.
Finally NOT, which is really easy: it simply takes a statement and claims the opposite. We are at an advantage in that English "not" does exactly what logical NOT does. So in the statement "He is not wearing a coat" you are simply taking the statement "He is wearing a coat" and claiming that the opposite is true. (By the way, double NOTs cancel, so for instance the statement "He is not not wearing a coat" means he IS wearing a coat).
By the way, these operations can be combined in any number of ways.
It's useful to think of these operations in terms of truth tables, with T (or 1 or Yes or...) meaning "True" and F (or 0 or...) meaning "False". The left column(s) are the begining statements or input and the right column is the final statment or output. What you get is the following:

AND:
T|T|T
T|F|F
F|T|F
F|F|F

(If this table doesn't make sense:
T AND T=T
T AND F=F
F AND T=F
F AND F=F)

OR
T|T|T
T|F|T
F|T|T
F|F|F

NOT
T|F
F|T

(meaning "NOT T=F"; "NOT F=T")

So anyway, on to my idea! I quickly realized that tackling "Mu" was too much of a challenge, so I decided to approach the problem of using "Undetermined", which I'll call "U", instead. What would be the truth value of a statement such as "He is wearing a hat and a coat" if you're not sure whether he's wearing a coat? If he might be wearing a coat, but then again he might not be?
So here's the sort of truth table we'd like to draw for an operation such as AND


AND:
T|T|T
T|F|F
F|T|F
F|F|F
U|U|?
U|T|?
T|U|?
U|F|?
F|U|?

and just fill in the question marks, which is really quite easy. For each row you just assume that U could mean True, then assume that it could mean False, and see if all the answers you come up with are one or the other, and go from there.

So for the AND table:

U|U|?
If both Us are T then (T|T|T)
If one U is T and the other is F then (T|F|F) or F AND T=F (F|T|F)
If both Us are F then (F|F|F)
Some of the outputs are T, and some of them are F, which means you have no clue what your going to get so the end result is U|U|U.

U|T|? or T|U|?
If U is T then T|T|T
If U is F then F|T|F or T|F|F
Once again, some of the outputs are T, and some of them are F, etc. etc., so U|T|U and T|T|U.

U|F|? or F|U|?
If U is T then T|F|F or F|T|F
If U is F then F|F|F
Eureka! It turns out no matter what you get and F, so U|F|F and F|U|F

I'm not going to bother going through OR, but I did work it out as I did for AND, and NOT should be pretty obvious: if you don't know whether something is true or false, you can't know whether it isn't true or isn't false!
So for all the operations:

AND:
T|T|T
T|F|F
F|T|F
F|F|F
U|U|U
U|T|U
T|U|U
U|F|F
F|U|F

OR
T|T|T
T|F|T
F|T|T
F|F|F
U|U|U
U|T|T
T|U|T
U|F|U
F|U|U

NOT
T|F
F|T
U|U

and a new operation, named "MU" in honer of my original intention. It's english equivalents are words such as "possibly" or "might be, but I don't know for sure if", as in "He is possibly wearing a hat".

MU
T|U
F|U
U|U

As you can see, it just turns anything into a U.

So who already thought of this and is it useful in any way?

Old FaceBook Note: My crankpot theory

Terrible quality, but whatever; it's fun:

I was going to write a note with a list of crankpot scientific theories i had about the universe, but then something awesome happened: I got my Scientific American and it had an article about a new theory that's remarkable similar to mine.So this was my crankpot theory: that the ultimate theory of everything could have something to do with fractals. If you don't know what fractals are, look them up: they're awesome and also very pretty.Basically, a fractal is a geometrical object that looks the same no matter how far you zoom in on it.

A fractal.
My reasons for coming up with this theory:1: Fractals are cool2: Fractals are EVERYWHERE!!! For instance, mountains are like fractals: if you zoom in on a mountain, you get rocks; if you zoom in on rocks, they look like mountains. Broccoli is also like this (each little sprig [if that's what you call pieces of broccli) looks like the entire broccoli). As are rivers (you have the big river with little rivers splitting of from it, which have little rivers splitting off from them, etc.). Things that appear everywhere are good candidates for unified theories, at least in my opinion.

Broccoli that resembles a fractal.
3: My impression is that one of the problems with coming up with a quantum theory of gravity is that relativistic spacetime is smooth while in quantum physics space is rough. This made me think of the Koch Snowflake (which you can also look up), which is made up of a bunch of little jagged peices that create what appears to be a smooth line.

A Koch Snowflake.
4: Fractals do wonky things to the concept of dimensions. Since all the other hopeful ultimate theories do weird things to dimensions, this seemed like a good reason.Now none of these reasons seems to be the reason that fractals show up in the theory that Scientific American wrote about (which I won't elaborate on), but it's still cool when it seems someone else who is probably smarter than you is actually working on a similar idea to something you thought up.