Sceadugenga

Sat - February 24, 2007

Sectoral Heterochromia

---this is my left eye. See the brown patch? It turns out that this striking state of affairs is called sectoral heterochromia, and Wikipedia naturally has all you need to know about it..but I see there is a need to start a new article on just the sectoral type.

..for a better illustration (as in, more aesthetically pleasing), this is actress Kate Bosworth's right eye.

Wed - February 21, 2007

Telling more than we can know

The paper telling more than we can know, written by Richard Nisbett and Timothy deCamp Wilson in 1977, deals with the question: when we introspect to find the reason for our beliefs or preferences or behaviors, just what are we doing? The "received" or naive view is that we are going into our memory or some other corner of our mind, and finding the right box (or calling the right bird to our hand), and reading out the contents; and the verbalization of these contents represents a fair, honest assessment of our real reasons and motivations. TMTWCK demolishes this view and puts in its place something that warms my cynical, robotic heart. Instead of introspection, the authors suggest, our ability is more accurately termed "creating an a priori causal theory" or making a "plausibility judgment". In other words, let's say someone asks you if you enjoyed last night's party, and you say yes; you are asked why you enjoyed it, and you avert your eyes and think for a second, perhaps while interjecting a "well..", and then you give the answer that the music was great, there were lots of interesting people there and you're going to meet a particular one of those people for a date in the coming days. Nisbett and Wilson report evidence from many studies that cast a humbling light on your answer. Instead of answering "why did I like the party?", they claim, what you have done is answered a different question, namely "why do people like parties?", in a way that does not obviously contradict your experience (you would not give this answer had you been turned down for the date). Of course, 30 years after this paper, many of us still give credence to polls that ask people why they prefer a particular political candidate, or chose their profession, or what brand of music player they enjoy, &c., but the wise student of humanity will benefit from taking a naturalistic stance toward these answers..

(Permanent Reference to the paper)

Tue - November 28, 2006

Measuring The Speed of Meme

The rationale of the experiment, copied from Acephalous:

"What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?" (yadda yadda.. just go read the original thing if you're interested.)

Well, I'm in. Go ahead and link to me if you want.

Here's what Acephalous wants you to do:

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)

2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I'm one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)

3. Ping Techorati.

Mon - July 31, 2006

"X exists"-space

Consider these propositions: "a bird exists."; "a Swinhoe's storm-petrel exists"; "the Roc from the Sinbad tales exists". The first two are true in our world, and the last is not, although it may have been true long ago (extremely large fossil birds, not to mention dinosaur fossils, are found everywhere.) We can assert the truth or falsity of these 3 propositions with great confidence, due to our breadth of knowledge of the world. If you don't know or have never seen a Swinhoe's storm-petrel, a quick internet search will convince you that they're the real deal; while the Roc would certainly be known to us by virtue of its voracious appetite and lack of natural predators. In other words, there is lots of evidence for the first two, while the complete lack of evidence for the last is more than enough reason for us to disbelieve in the Roc.

Now consider these propositions: "an asteroid whose surface has been etched by innumerable collisions with space debris into a perfect copy of the entire works of Robert Hooke (both published and unpublished) exists"; "a green ostrich-like bird with ten necks, each capped not with a head but with a different brand of MP3 player, exists"; "an all-powerful being who created the entire universe exists". None of these are true in our world; but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me say first that no one thinks that the first two are true in our world, while many people think that the last one is true. If we were to pile up the evidence for any of these three propositions, however, we would see that there is none that stands up to scrutiny.

Of course, these things might exist - after all, they don't contradict logic - so how should we decide? Maybe we need to get some idea of the a priori likelihood of anything existing. It is my contention that this likelihood is extremely low. Consider this picture:

This represents what I call "X exists"-space. The top hemisphere contains propositions of the form "X exists"; the bottom is the opposite of the top, containing the negated expression "X does not exist". By usual convention, red represents FALSE and green represents TRUE. The tiny green islands in the upper red sea represent our knowledge; the things that we can assert with some confidence. They have irregular shapes, as our knowledge grows in unpredictable ways. But they remain tiny. You can try it yourself: come up with some crazy entities like I did, and see if you have any reason to assert that it exists. Here's a hint: for every entity that does exist, we can construct many more that do not (the mp3 player trick works pretty well).

At this point in the story, instead of agreeing with me, the world's population splits along some interesting lines; roughly, into theists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. To retain intellectual integrity, a theist must claim to possess some kind of evidence that a deity exists, which these days is usually either the design argument, or the argument from personal experience. I will not deal with these here; they were refuted long ago. A deist doesn't need to have evidence, but is also in danger of losing integrity unless they can come up with some sort of a priori argument why that last statement ("an all-powerful being who created the entire universe exists") should be true. An agnostic is in the same boat as the deist; they need to give a reason why the door should be even left open for the last statement, if it does not need to be left open to the first two. To my knowledge, no one has done this yet.

Tue - January 17, 2006

Collapse

•points Diamond does not delve into:

-the influence of religion on a society's tendency to waste their resources

Tue - January 3, 2006

Burton for Bloggers

"To this end I write, like them, saith Lucian, that recite to trees, and declaim to pillars for want of auditors: as Paulus Aegineta ingenuously confesseth, not that anything was unknown or omitted, but to exercise myself, which course if some took, I think it would be good for their bodies, and much better for their souls; or peradventure as others do, for fame, to show myself (Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter). I might be of Thucydides' opinion, to know a thing and not to express it, is all one as if he knew it not."

Ray Kurzweil on NPR

Things to check up on/write about:
•exponential increase, "doubling every year" -- is this accurate?
•his bizarre health claims.. what to make of it?
•avoiding the subject of the singularity, despite his book being called "The Singularity"
•philosophical topics brought up by immortality

First impression: to say that Kurzweil is just a hankerer after immortality, that beneath his fanciful ideas lies nothing more exotic than the all-too-human fear of death. While apparently true, this does not refute the idea that a technological singularity may come; if not in our lifetimes, then at least in the next millenium or two. We should be taking the idea seriously, just as we take seriously the idea that we may be wiped out by an asteroid in the distant future.

•Immortality: although it is hard to imagine what one would do with a greatly increased lifespan, wanting immortality is simply the logical continuation of this idea: right now you want to live for, say, at least 5 more years; and are also reasonably confident that at any time within the next 5 years, you would also say that you want to live for at least 5 more years. There's no a priori end to this, yet at the same time it's not clear to me that anyone would really want to live for ten thousand years, let alone ten billion. I suggest re-thinking the idea of an "I" that can live that long and remain "I".

•A caller proclaimed that Kurzweil's theories supported "intelligent design". Kurzweil did not berate the man but instead changed the subject.

•If we are grossly disturbed by the actions of people who are not afraid to die, what are we to do with people who think they will never die? Actually, mightn't Kurzweil's kind of transhumanism, even if mistaken in its reasons, be a force for good in the world?

Wed - December 28, 2005

Schönborn weighs in again

Christoph Schönborn here appears to be trying to distance himself from the Intelligent Design movement (a good thing, but then it's always a good idea to leap off of a burning, sinking rowboat if you find yourself in one), while at the same time showing that theologians really cannot make contentful statements about the world that do not tread on the 'magisterium' of science:

"If [the Darwinian biologist] takes a very narrow view of the supposedly random variation that meets his gaze, it may well be impossible to correlate it to anything interesting, and thus variation remains simply unintelligible. He then summarizes his ignorance of any pattern in variation by means of the rather respectable term “random.” But if he steps back and looks at the sweep of life, he sees an obvious, indeed an overwhelming pattern. The variation that actually occurred in the history of life was exactly the sort needed to bring about the complete set of plants and animals that exist today. In particular, it was exactly the variation needed to give rise to an upward sweep of evolution resulting in human beings. If that is not a powerful and relevant correlation, then I don’t know what could count as evidence against actual randomness in the mind of an observer."

We will ignore for a moment the fact that a man with no science training is claiming to be pointing out a real, observable pattern in biology that has eluded the myriads of hard-working biologists thus far, and just consider his argument. It was refuted long ago by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, with his example of a genetic algorithm that generates a sentence of Hamlet ("METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL"). Would Schönborn remark with holy awe that the variation generated by Dawkins's program was exactly the sort needed to create that sentence? Of course, the variation created by the program could have created any other sentence, but that's precisely the point: the variation is random, but the outcome is subject to selection. If you flipped a fair coin 20 times, and got the result "HTTTHHTTHHTTHTHHTTHH", would you think a divine hand had guided the result? After all, the coin flipped in exactly the right way to give you HTTTHHTTHHTTHTHHTTHH! There's no τελος in this sequence - but what makes him think there is a purpose for, say, moss? (Other than to make more moss).

Only his religion. It is unfortunate but unavoidable that Schönborn, one of the strongest intellects in the Catholic church (as his writing shows, I admit), can produce nothing but a question-begging argument here. Paraphrasing, it is this: "my religion says that humans are here as part of a purpose; therefore whatever steps led to human existence must have had purpose behind them." He fails to provide anything but handwaving arguments for his thesis that this purpose is observable by science reason and not faith alone - falling back on some lamentable rhetoric:

"[the modern biologist] is free to define his special science on terms as narrow as he finds useful for gaining a certain kind of knowledge. But he may not then turn around and demand that the rest of us, unrestricted by his methodological self-limitation, ignore obvious truths about reality, such as the clearly teleological nature of evolution."

Note to future cardinals: when you have to use "obvious" and "clearly" in the same sentence, and then cannot spell out anywhere in the rest of the essay what it is that is supposed to be clear and obvious, you may want to re-examine your thesis.

Sat - December 24, 2005

Four meme

Four
Jobs: Truck washer, tour agent, graduate student, postdoc
Movies (not favorite, but 'could watch over and over'): Big Trouble in Little China, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Trainspotting, The Day of the Jackal
Places I lived: Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, Tsurugashima JPN, Berkeley CA -- exhaustive!
TV Shows: Law & Order (original only), Simpsons, Buffy, The Prisoner
Vacation: Oban, Ljubljana, Death Valley, Lassen
Websites: Pharyngula, Kos, BoingBoing, Firedoglake
Foods: Pad Himapaan, Toast, Chili, Kimpira Gobou
Places I'd rather be: Seattle; Europa (the moon); 20,000 leagues under the sea; a free, non-unjust-fake-war-pursuing USA

Wed - December 21, 2005

Agnosticism Meta-Thread

AGNOSTICISM META-THREAD

There is a discussion at Majikthise about agnosticism (which I've discussed previously), and I thought I would write about it. Rather than weighing in at the site itself, I am going to try to analyze the discussion (i.e., start a metadiscussion -- most likely with myself, consdering the low rate of traffic here). The point is to try to understand what sorts of things people say, and why, when the topic is agnosticism versus atheism. I plan to analyze more such comment threads in the future, to see if any common patterns come up. (Of course, I'm only doing this because I've noticed common patterns in the past.)

I will state my biases first: I consider atheism a more rational position than agnosticism, because it is more consistent with our natural habit to disbelieve propositions for which we have zero evidence. (A "slogan" for this attitude could be: if you don't disbelieve that, then what do you disbelieve?) Also, to "leave the door open", as the agnostic does, strikes me as symptomatic of a kind of subconscious Pascal's wager, wherein the self-described agnostic just can't bring themself to close the door completely on the possibility of deities, an afterlife, etc.

So - what I take to be the thesis of Lindsay (the blog owner)'s post is: Even though one cannot prove the negative proposition "No deities exist", in the absence of any positive evidence the default position to take should be atheism and not agnosticism. The reason for this is that this is the default position we always take on other propositions that have the same amount of (i.e., zero) evidence. It is only in theological discussions that the option of "agnosticism" even comes up. This is expressed finely by Lindsay's last sentence:

"If we talk about belief in God the same way we talk about belief in other propositions, then it's perfectly natural to call yourself a non-believer."

So, to the comments.

•The blog entry dates from 11:36 PST, Sunday, Dec. 18 2005.
•As of Sunday night, 20:00 PST there were 52 comments. On average that's one post every 12 minutes, over a 10-hour period.

Some themes of discussion (which I seen many times when this subject has come up previously):
•"(some) Atheists are religious too" / "Atheism is as much a religion as theism" (Egarwaen, Aeolus, 1984_Was_not_a_shopping_list)
•Nitty-gritty details of how, exactly, agnosticism, atheism, etc., are defined (lack of belief in god? belief that there are no gods?) (Matt P., Patrick, bob koepp)
•Other creative "Russell's teapot" situations (phone company killing JFK) (Lindsay, David)
•"I've had mystical experiences"/"Mystical experiences are a good reason to hold out for belief in deities" (Mnemosyne, 1984_Was_not_a_shopping_list, dan)

Analysis of examples of give-and-take, excerpts:
(1) Matt P. --> "..[as] a person self-describing as agnostic does not hold such a belief [in a god] .. he or she seems to me to be clearly an atheist"
Egarwaen -->"Untrue. They can be unsure whether or not God exists... This is different from belief or disbelief."
Matt P. --> "I agree, that is different from belief or disbelief. The querent, however, in my experience tends to be asking only about belief or disbelief, not the reasoning the respondent used to arrive at that position."
(no further response from Egarwaen).

This excerpt illustrates the class of "nitpicking" exchanges; we'll see how often these come up later.

(2) Jesse M. "all minds that we know of are tied to physical structures like brains, and are a product of evolution, so the idea of an eternal disembodied mind is a radical departure from this."
1984: "But what about the example of the email packet being sent by wireless ... if these energy packets can be converted and transmitted, then, do they not exist independently of a physical body..."
Jesse M. "You are talking as though "energy" is somehow less physical than matter, which makes me think you are conflating "energy" in the sense used by scientists with some more spiritual usage of the word."
1984: "The "energy" I'm trying to isolate here is the energy of a hypothetical God's mind, which, you reliably inform us, is a physical item."
1984: "since thought itself is intangible and invisible, is it not conceivable that God's thought took a similarly alien form...?"
Jesse M.: "I don't see anything logically impossible about such a disembodied mind, and it's how most people think of God, but as I said there's no precedent for it in anything we've experienced."
1984:"Yet if energy is actually a physical thing, ... the thought energy of the mind _is_ such a physical substrate. I think that, rather than leading to a disembodied mind of God, it suggests that every mind _is_ a body."
Jesse M.: "but why call such an entity "God" rather than, say, "an alien superintelligence"? "
(after several further posts bringing up other topics:)
1984: "OK, I'm going to ruminate on that last one."

This excerpt illustrates the class of "One guy trying to shoehorn his admittedly poor understanding of physics into a framework that legitimizes his favorite beliefs; and another guy patiently going along with it". It is characterized by goalpost shifting -- note how Jesse M. raises many points that 1984 does not consider (points which are indeed germane to the original blog post); 1984 prefers instead to talk about thought energy and god's brain. Significantly, 1984 accomodates a complete reversal in a position which he had held to be important (at first, minds are nonphysical; then Jesse convinces 1984 that they are in fact physical) yet 1984's overall outlook does not change.

Some miscellaneous numbers:
Number of 'nonserious' posts (jokes, platitudes, rants): 7/52
Number of posts mentioning the Holocaust: 2/52
Number of posts mentioning Richard Dawkins: 8/52
Number of posts in which a person changes their opinion as a result of being convinced by another post: 1/52

Concluding remarks:
First, it should be remarked that the comments on a blog can in no way reflect poorly on the blog itself; however, they can reflect well upon it, as good minds are a scarce commodity. These comments do reflect well on this blog, since there is little or no sign of flame-war. However, it is not my goal to be critical or praiseworthy about any particular blog, but rather to try and study the way in which people talk about a particular narrow subject. This first excursion has been entirely subjective; I would like to write some small programs to do some more objective analysis (i.e., how soon is Dawkins mentioned; what percentage of the posts refer to personal mystical experiences, etc.)

Wed - December 14, 2005

Anatomy of Melancholy

A simply extraordinary book; I've just started reading an edited (to 1/4th its size!) version from the library, which I will later supplement with the full version when I can find a nice copy in an old, musty bookstore somewhere. I'm also writing this to test the new computer, so.. not much else here.

Fri - October 28, 2005

Fitzmas night book club

(read from 10/23 to 10/26, mostly on BART)

There are several currents running through The End of Faith, many of which I agree with enthusiastically, some of which I regard with caution, and one or two that I find so strange as to wonder whether Harris wrote the last few chapters while in too.. contemplative a state, as he might say. This post will be a summary of the currents, some eddies of which I'd like to isolate and discuss in later posts.

First, some easy floating down the river. Where does your support for the following graded series fall off? (1) Religious scriptures shouldn't be taken literally. (2) No one knows if there's a god or not. (3) No reasonable person could believe in anything supernatural. (4) Religious beliefs should not be accorded "respect".

If you are still nodding after (4), you agree with Harris (and incidentally, me) on the main thesis of his book. It has been pointed out for a long time now that religious ideas uniquely get a free pass in modern discourse. Guests on a Sunday morning talk show may strenuously disagree with each other over taxes, who should be president, or which sports team is better, but to say "Bringing up that god of yours again, eh? How can you believe in that stuff, anyway?" is just not done. You can get away with almost any behavior or opinion if you raise your eyes heavenward and state that it's a matter of faith. Like many others before him, Harris points out the absurdity and arbitrariness of this situation, and argues that it should change. Religious beliefs should be attacked like other irrationalities; religious stories should not be talked about as if they were true by people who know they could not possibly be true; religion should not shield anyone from criticism. What is new in this book are two arguments that would raise the stakes. First, rather than patiently waiting for atheism to gain footing in the world, the ascendancy of Islamist power and the machinations of the Christian right make it an urgent matter. Second, religious moderates should be chastened as enablers of fundamentalism. Harris states "Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed". So far, so good.

We soon approach some rapids -- Harris sets out on some heavy philosophical terrain about free will and ethics in his trumping up of Islamist terrorism as a force that should command our greateset attention. I don't think he lacks the ability to engage with these subjects deeply, but he doesn't go deep enough in this book. In many places there is too much reliance on the readers' imaginations to fill in details (about surveys, what people would do with a "perfect weapon", what Muslims think about the 9/11 attacks) his research couldn't supply, and not enough exercise of the same imaginations to find flaws with his thesis that religious motives, rather than nationalist, ethnic, or political ones, are the most salient feature of modern terrorism.

And, at the end of the river, our little raft finds itself in a Shambhala bookstore. Somehow we have gone from demanding the End of Faith to claiming that medieval Tibetan mystics had very useful things to say about the human mind. Perhaps they do, but from what I've seen, it is very low signal to noise. After seeing the word "contemplative" used as a noun for the 10th or 11th time, seeing Padmasambhava trotted out as if he were chairing a neurobiology session, and watching the language melt from the hard-nosed "is" and "is not" to the mealymouthed "seems to" and "suggests that", I began to suspect I was dealing with a manifestation of a Žižekian fetish. The last 2 chapters of the book simply do not belong with the rest. Should I conclude this post with a paragraph about butterflies? No, that would be silly.

Sat - October 22, 2005

The End of Faith

From skimming through the book at the new Cody's in San Francisco -- the book is apparently a strong new argument against tolerance of religion. The idea it argues against is one held by most thinking people of the left and right -- that religious fundamentalism is to be opposed, while moderate religion is to be tolerated, respected, perhaps encouraged. Harris argues that, no, supernaturalism in all its forms should be opposed, precisely because the stakes are much higher now than they were in the past. Tolerance for moderate religion, though it is the polite and easy thing to do in our society, helps foster the environment in which dangerous fundamentalism can go unchallenged.

Quote from page one:
"To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance."

It's about time, I think - religious tolerance in the social sphere can certainly go on, of course (we tolerate all sorts of differences of taste, after all), but I agree that in the intellectual sphere it's out of place.

As I continued to skim the book, I found a strange final chapter, laden with quotes from translations of Buddhist canons, one apparently from Padmasambhava. Harris apparently found it wonderfully eye-opening, but it read like so much new age gibberish to me. That strange dissonance, and large sections apparently devoted to consciousness (another topic I love to blather about), made me think that I could actually read this book without simply being a member of a preached-to choir.

So - these are my first impressions; we will see how they change.

Right, then. See you later.

..

(/looks left, then right)

Yeah, okay, so it's been 3 months since I wrote anything here. New place, new job, etc. Oh well.

Tue - August 2, 2005

What could be more ridiculous

..than Bush's endorsement of "intelligent design" creationism? I'll tell you what: we scientist-types should petition high schools to teach the controversy over the heliocentric "theory". But do it seriously, without ever admitting that it's an agenda. Say that the geocentric model deserves equal time. Really, we should do it! We could even ask the Discovery Institute for help.

And I have a question. Why are we blogging, instead of marching?

Sun - July 3, 2005

Duplication

There has been a lot of interesting discussion on the everything-list, an email list I'm a semi-regular member of, concerning personal identity in a multiverse. The approach taken recently has been to create thought experiments using duplication in a single universe to shed light on the harder question of massive duplication in a plenitude (a multiverse where everything exists).

Example: you are in a chamber from which there is no escape. There's a button on the wall which, if you press it, will create a living, breathing, atom-for-atom copy of you outside the chamber. It will also, at the same moment, instantly vaporize everything inside the chamber. Would you push the button?

This is the basic setup, and I think anyone who's watched Star Trek would have no problem with pushing the button. But by twiddling the knobs on this thought experiment*, we can provoke some very strange intuitions.

What if instead of being instantly vaporized inside the chamber, the chamber is instead flooded with a pain-inducing nerve gas that leads to days of torment followed by death? What if nothing happens inside the chamber at all - one copy is left inside, and the one outside is just free to go? What if you get to press the button an unlimited number of times? What if you had the choice between paying $100 to exit the chamber, or pressing the button? What amount of money, and what conditions of duplication, would incite you to push the button, and why?

I think investigations along these lines have the potential to illuminate questions of personal identity in general - what do we mean when we use the word "I"? How far can the concept of "I" be stretched, and what happens when it gets stretched too far?

The one thing I can think of saying so far is -- our desire for our own continued existence is just a special case of desire for any object's continued existence. Therefore, these questions can be approached from a third person point of view, and doing so is very helpful. Replace "I" and "you" with "person A" and "person B", etc., and the problems do not seem so hard anymore.

Mum on the Designer?

On the emptiness of "Intelligent Design" creationism

A new logo for the Discovery Institute

Pinker and Spelke Debate

Give 'em Hell, Pedro

Google as Plato's Aviary

On Ruse

LaTeX or however the hell you say/capitalize/render it

Why 'Pages' is a terrible name

If you still need a reason to give up Microsoft..

Center for Naturalism

13 Boring Things

Conway and Free Will, Continued

John Conway and the "Free Will Theorem"

Don't think of an elephant