Lucent's Essays

The Simple Atheist

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:23:11 GMT

Atheism is an absence of certain widely held unprovable beliefs. It is not constructed by subtracting religion from a religious worldview. It is what you get when you never consider religion at all. It's quite perplexing that the term atheism even exists. After all, a-aetherism and a-geocentrism aren't used to describe those who subscribe to modern physics. Yet a-aetherists are all around us. And so are atheists. Most rarely make noise because they've done some simple risk assessment and decided it's not worth offending their grandmother or jeopardizing a promotion in order to publicize a null belief.

The militant or New Atheists' mission is to convince these quiet atheists that their assessment lacks the correct inputs. Religion is so damaging that they must take a stand against it. It is worth weirding out your sister-in-law to renounce such a dangerous evil. While this is likely true, atheism may be better served by the noisy atheists taking the unspoken advice of the quiet ones.

Right now, there are two dominant types of noisemakers. The club atheist is the gentler of the two. You'll find them at meet-ups, free thought clubs, and conferences—always diplomatic and ever ready to arrange interfaith discussions. They have the utmost respect for religious beliefs. Status in the club may even be tied to how much concession one can offer. Highest honors for acknowledging that without the philosophy of science, scientific realism is no truer an explanation for reality than god.

Militant atheism seems like club atheism's antithesis. Militants don't just lack respect for religious beliefs; they are openly disrespectful. While this seems like a major difference, the effects of these opposing attitudes are quite similar. And it is their similarity which will keep atheism from reaching primetime.

Both are equally likely to call believers small minded—in different ways. Militant atheists are quite enthusiastic about being insulting. Club types are more subtle about it, suggesting in a roundabout way that atheism may not be the best choice for "certain" people. Either way, believers are put down. The problem is that to put down others, atheists must elevate themselves. It requires more brilliance, more rigor. With atheism being a much more likely conversion target than source, this is a mistake easily made.

Does atheism really require more intelligence? Take a moment to forget all the elaborate arguments used to poke holes in the worldviews of the various theists and deists. They are far too complex for the stupefying simplicity of the fact that there is no magical anything out there. Your certainty of this is akin to the certainty that fruit flies don't magically appear out of old bananas. There are detailed arguments against spontaneous generation, but these are not the reason it is obviously false to you. The societal background noise from living in a modern scientific world is sufficient for this to be obvious even to a child.

You're no intellectual giant for realizing the obvious, nor do you deserve to co-opt words like Bright to describe yourself. The knowledge required to understand how existence reached this point may be highly elitist, but the break-even point occurred over a hundred years ago. It has been simpler and more reasonable to ignore this god nonsense than accept it since the nineteenth century.

Religion isn't your average nonsense, though. It's a special kind of nonsense. It's more like Time Cube than Mad Libs. To intelligently argue such an inconsistent system, an atheist's opponent must be many times smarter than him. Atheists only have such an elaborate library of arguments and seem to fall short so frequently because they have no qualms with arguing on the terms and turf of their opponents. A religious person arguing on an atheist's terms is inconceivable. We don't even doubt our beliefs in the same way the religious do. Atheists can no more doubt there is no god than they could doubt David Blaine is just doing tricks.

However, in atheism's current elitist position, this is not something we can civilly confront others about or even respond to confrontation. If we are to turn more invisibles into noisemakers, we must make it socially acceptable to make noise. Right now, we are elitists looking down our noses at our lesser. As a result, noisemakers are going to either be those with limited social inhibition, limited social interaction, or those who travel exclusively among atheists. None of these is well-positioned to help us break through to the average person.

To engage in confrontation and even a little ridicule, we must take the elitism out of atheism. The ability to cast shame on others' beliefs in a socially acceptable manner comes not from being above them but being beneath them. Atheism must be seen as the acknowledgeable default for not just the average person, but more importantly, the least interested. Like the militants, we want it to be a dishonor, an embarrassment to admit to religious belief. The way to do this, however, is not to put down the religious but to elevate them above us.

Atheists need to be able to seriously imply, "You really read all that stuff and reimagined the whole world in terms of it, even as every fact, every experiment ever done shows no evidence of it? What kind of convolutedly creative mind do you possess?" They must find the religious incredulous in the same way they would someone who'd read a book on plumbing and carefully reimagined reality in terms of microscopic, magical water pipes. "You're one of those plumbing nuts? I wouldn't go spreading that around."

Nonbelievers must show embarrassment at how long it took them to reach the default position, not pride in their intellectual achievement. They must be astounded by the religious' capacity for believing such carefully constructed nonsense. Not the New Atheist's astonishment at how far beneath them the believer is and how worthy of contempt he is, but the astonishment a woodsman has for a big city architect who wants to build a ridiculous structure when a log cabin would house him just fine. We atheists are the simpletons, not them, and it's time we acknowledged this.

Rite of Regression

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 21:07:42 GMT

When it comes to wine, there are two camps in the battle of one-upmanship. Either it's all the same, or the more expensive product really does taste that different. Depending on how you frame your identity, and perhaps more on how much money you make, you select one and claim it's the optimal viewpoint.

Not particularly interesting. The same strategy is used to qualify one's personality as optimal for any number of attributes. Anyone braver than you is a reckless idiot; anyone less so is a coward. What is interesting, however, is that this is a novel framing for wine enthusiasts.

Historically, a penchant for fine wines reflected a cultured upbringing and disposable wealth. It said, "I have enough money and taste not to mind spending ten times the money for ten percent better taste." Fine wine reflected the buyer's accomplishment in other areas of life to a greater degree than his exposure to nice things. That it offered so little bang for the buck was the root of its placement as a status symbol.

In an argument with a modern day wine snob, you'd find something inexplicably different. His love of expensive wines would not tread on his sense of value. The argument would outlandishly invoke a dubious dollar per palate cost-benefit analysis in which the claim was made that a $200 bottle actually tastes ten times better than a $20 bottle.

Certainly, one may be cultured enough to appreciate the differences others may not. But a claim of an order of magnitude of difference is outlandish. It is a qualitatively different argument. No longer is one drinking fine wines because he can afford to, but because his taste buds are fundamentally different. Taste moves from a statement of decadence or accomplishment to actual genetic superiority.

Any other culture in any other era would find this downright laughable. Why we entertain it may have to do with a fiction devised to deal with adolescence. To temper the frustration of feeling we're falling apart while seeing others largely composed, we posit that our experiences and emotions are unique. My life feels so uniquely difficult because it actually is.

As far as coping mechanisms go, this one is rather benign, especially when used to simply weather adolescence. However, we may be seeing it transform into an externally consistent subculture which, at the moment, goes under the name emo. Like its antecedents, emo is based on two precepts. First, the universe enforces a conservation of feelings in much the same way as it does mass or energy. Suffering can be noble, and if not karmically returned, can at least be exchanged for respect in its description. Second, and more relevant to our discussion, is that some are truly able to experience life differently. An emo has no reservations asserting a postmodern disconnect from the universal human aesthetic. He can see beauty others cannot, whether in an off-color playground Polaroid or a windswept garbage bag.

In this framework, one does not acquire a taste for fine wines through a lifetime of exposure but simply by being special. The real riddle here is why adults are allowing themselves to treat a childish coping mechanism as if it had substance in the physical world. Or, more to the point, can someone even know when he has reached adulthood and should put away childish things.

Without a coming of age rite to demarcate the nearly instantaneous biological and psychological transition into adulthood, nouvelle wine snobbery is the least of our societal concerns. In an attempt to extend childhood, we act perplexed when children mysteriously lose interest in school and copying their parents around eighth grade. We force them to continue to live as children as long as possible, labeling their dissatisfaction with this arrangement “teenage rebellion,” a newly invented stage between adolescence and adulthood where there was previously only adulthood. With no clear boundary between childhood and adulthood, we should be no more perplexed when adults do childish things as when children do grown up things.

Face the Music

Fri, 11 May 2007 07:18:25 GMT

What if an an experiment on recognizing musical greatness said more about us as the musician than us as the audience?

You read the Post article about the world-class violinist who went unnoticed in the subway. Half a dozen people sent you the article, and you did your share of propagation. You even suffered through the drivel of commentary attached to the commentary, hoping to run across the magic sentence that would click the whole thing into place, but that you’re here reveals you did not find it. Problem is, you know what the magic sentence is. You may not be able to articulate it, but you’ll certainly recognize it.

You know you’re amazing. In your mind, through some convolution of lack of effort and untapped potential, you are the greatest on the planet. I can’t say specifically which crack in the sidewalk your ego has weaseled into, but I bet it’s certainly safe from the trampling of passersby, if not also directed attacks.

That’s not enough. Life seems to mock you. Here you are, greatest in the world, and your friends treat you just like anyone else. Girls don’t fall at your feet out of respect for what you are. It’s like you’re nobody at all. In your lower moments, your subconscious nags you, mocks you, poses questions you have no answer to. “If I am the greatest (and there can be only one greatest) how can I go unnoticed? How can people read a post or two in my blog and just leave?”

And then, someone conducts an experiment in recognizing greatness. A really good one, too. Even maximized the conditions. They didn’t take some pop musician who can be legitimately criticized or fool with fields where greatness is highly subjective like writing. They picked a genre with clear hierarchy, a guy who is near the top of it, and had him play unquestionably great pieces. There’s no room for argument there.

Would you have stopped? Does that even matter? The article is not about you, the music connoisseur. Nor is it about you, the appreciator of life who has not time to stop and smell the roses. You are the violinist in the story. It is your own greatness that goes unrecognized every day as you scuttle through life unappreciated.

Just Play Along

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 23:19:28 GMT

Being part of a story has the power to romanticize our successes and failures, weaving them together in a validating tapestry.

Are today's movies affecting us so deeply we want more to be part of a story than experience life?

A recent movie depicts a protagonist who finds his life the subject of a book. As the author writes, so he experiences. When this comes to light, the solution is not for the book to be scrapped so that he may live his life, which is finally becoming meaningful, but for the book to have a good ending, even if it’s at his expense.

Seem like a departure from the typical happy ending? It’s not sold as such. To our generation, this is a happy ending. We keep diaries not in private for ourselves, but in public for others, because the events of our lives are not meaningful in themselves, only in their retelling. We may even catch ourselves converting our own memories into story format, to enjoy them as we would a good movie.

When life finally does get the rare chance to hold a candle to the magnificent, devastating situations crafted by the best dramatists, it’s viewed through that lens. What good is a memory if, after careful reshaping, it couldn’t be made into an episode of one’s favorite show? More worryingly, what if something so fantastic transpires that it wouldn’t be considered believable in the context of a movie? Is the memory cast away like a poorly directed movie that proposed too many successive coincidences?

Is it that our experiences can’t compete with the perfect drama and safety of TV series and movies? Do we hide from a life that could potentially crush us—that we can’t withdraw from at a moment’s notice of emotional danger? That may be the force at work with TV series, but today’s movies offer something else entirely.

Being part of a story reframes one’s life. Without a central theme, life’s moments, regardless of how astounding or dire, are only that, moments. What we seek is a tapestry—a single thread to validate all our random success as part of something greater, and more importantly, romanticize our failures. Woven together with theme, every bullying, firing, and dumping are noble sufferings which only make our tragic hero’s triumphs sweeter.

Reframing one’s life must’ve had its allure since the first epics told around the fire. It’s nothing new. However, if catalyzed properly, a timeless desire like validation through story could resurface and deeply affect the way we think and respond. All we need is a reason to believe it possible. Befittingly, this reason can also be found in our movies.

TV and movies, by design, are escapism. Our TV series remain primarily escapist, the most successful creating entire artificial worlds while keeping our attention with many simultaneous stories. Movies lately, however, have been quite different. They spill over into the real world. You don’t leave the real world and return two hours later. You never return, forever changing your expectation of what life can be.

How many of your favorites involve either the protagonist being discovered (other characters get him to buy into the movie’s reality) or awakening (he buys into but overcomes the movie’s reality)? The Matrix is the preeminent example of both, to which it likely owes its success. A computer nerd is discovered in the fake world and finds he’s god in the real world. To achieve his destiny (awaken), he must suspend disbelief and play along with the seeming crazies who discover him.

Wait, isn’t suspension of disbelief our job? If these movies truly fell into the category of escapism, we’d be dropped right into their fully formed fantasy world, complete with characters ready to act out their given plot. Instead, they begin in what looks like our world. In no time at all, a deep disillusionment with life resembling our own encroaches and they either awaken or are saved. This creates a deeply personal experience shared with the main character which makes us wonder if the fantasy world they awake into could be achievable.

It’s easy to see how awakening (often from a mundane job as shown in Office Space, Fight Club, and American Beauty) and discovery (Amélie) are the central theme of an entire genre of our generation’s favorites. The distinction between the two is largely irrelevant; whether the character spends the movie being discovered or discovering himself makes little difference. If we see enough of this genre, do we start to wonder if we can awake from our own lives?

Is it possible an entire generation of movies has socialized us to prepare to be discovered? Do we sit around waiting to receive a letter from a future lover (The Lake House), or be rescued by Natalie Portman after waking from an antidepressant haze (Garden State)? Unlike the characters, we’re not going to make the plot-delaying mistake of being skeptical. This could be life-changing. We’re going to play along wholeheartedly and see where the stranger takes us, just like the characters in our favorite movies.

Borat was that stranger. He exploited a loophole placed in us by our movies of discovery and their personal journey of shared suspended belief and promise of validation. Filmed a generation ago, he likely would’ve received blank stares and cold shoulders rather than camraderous bigotry. All the quirky Kazakh reporter offered was to make us part of a story. You’ve always wanted to reframe your life. Maybe this is your chance. Your favorite characters knew better than to turn away being discovered, regardless of how preposterous it seemed at the time and look at their reward. Every triumph and failure in their lives was a required scene, validating their existence. Your life can be like that, too. Just play along.

Milgram's obedience experiment explains why Congress is corrupt

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:11:31 GMT

A classic experiment measuring obedience to authority may have little to do with either

In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted the first of a series of very famous psychological experiments to gauge people's level of obedience to authority. What happens when you pit someone's conscience against the orders of an authority figure? In his own words, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?"

The setup was simple. A study participant came in and was told chance would determine whether he was the "teacher" or "learner." The participant always ended up the teacher while an accomplice of the experimenter was the learner. The experimenter directed the teacher to deliver increasing electric shocks to the learner if he answered questions incorrectly. Surprisingly, two-thirds of participants are willing to deliver fatal 450-volt shocks, regardless of many other variables and in the face screaming, pleading, and even reference to a heart condition.

Why are people willing to nearly kill someone they just met because a guy in a lab coat tells them to? An explanation isn't even offered. Is this really something we're supposed to find obvious; people are just obedient to authority? Extraordinary results require an extraordinary explanation, and the nearly circular "authority is authoritative" is not satisfying.

Similarly perplexing is the extreme corruption of those few who have the power to do great good. Our elected officials, whom we vote for because their values match ours, are quite regularly convinced by lobbyists to go against these values. Why? It seems they're in the perfect position to take a stand. Could it be that those who seek to represent us are invariably bad, corrupt people? Unlikely; this also must have a more satisfying explanation.

What argument might persuade representatives to compromise their values in exchange for favors? Keep in mind that they are not the final say, but only one in a pool of people like them who will ultimately decide which laws are passed. This changes things significantly. A lobbyist may offer, "Vote this way on this issue that is important to me and I will return the favor." You may rebut that this is against your principles. The lobbyist comes back, "There are many others I can ask to do this. They will get the favor instead, which you may need to secure what you find important." "…if something evil will be done regardless of your participation and someone will get the reward for doing it, why not be that person and claim that reward?" You then quite logically, and perhaps even unconsciously conclude that if something evil will be done regardless of your participation and someone will get the reward for doing it, why not be that person and claim that reward?

This explanation treats people as rationally self-interested and invokes neither obedience nor authority. Still, how can we assume the participants believed themselves to be in a group that would get the job done without them? Study participants are fully aware of what a study is. A certain number of people are asked to do something. If someone fails to participate, another is brought in. When the experimenter asks you to shock someone, it's obviously going to be done whether you personally push the button. He could even do it himself if he were so disposed. But apparently he is not, and it will be done, so why not get credit for being the person to step up and do the dirty work, especially if your absolution of responsibility is assured? And be a good sport about it, too. In the exit interview, most participants stated they were glad to participate.

Since this new conclusion also supposes a new hypothesis, an experiment is easily designed around it. Create a situation in which the participants feel they have the power to decide whether an individual will be shocked or go home unharmed. An experimental setting with an authority figure who can clearly do the job himself does not suggest to participants that they are much in control of ultimate outcomes, regardless of whether they can choose not to push a button. Alternatively, we could ask participants in the original experiments how strong an effect they believe their individual vote has on the outcome of an election. Serious voters should be less obedient; they already believe their actions meaningful even in large groups.

If further experiments verify this new hypothesis, we're left with the crucial task of circumventing this feeling of powerless opportunism that allows people to do harm simply because others will. We now have a pool of elected officials who are effectively delivering the deadly 450-volt shock to us all in an obedience experiment conducted by lobbyists.

Overjustification Effect Explains Away Religious Morality

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:43:59 GMT

Your motivation to exercise evaporates for the same reason many believe morality has a religious basis

Motivation can be a quirky thing. It often comes out of nowhere and, much to our disappointment, evaporates just as capriciously.

How many exercise or weight loss regimens have you begun only to run out of steam a month or two down the line? Do you remember what went wrong?

You began for your own personal reasons with little thought of what you might get in exchange. The activity itself or satisfaction it created was its own reward.

Then, something happened. You started seeing results in the mirror or on the scale. Perhaps you decided to try for someone. Without realizing, your internal motivation was displaced. Now, you were working out to get the attention of that person or reduce the number on the scale. That wouldn't be a bad thing, but the human motivation system has a significant failing we rarely take into account.

In 1976, Greene, Sternberg, and Lepper captured and documented the precise cause of your workout failings by playing math games with children. At first, the kids seemed to like solving the problems on their own merit. Then came the money. Once experimenters stopped doling out tangible rewards, the children lost interest altogether.

The accepted interpretation is that external motivation easily displaces internal, regardless of the latter's strength. And once the external motivator stops giving feedback, the initial does not return. Money was able to "kick out" the children's initial internal desire to play the mathematical games—permanently.

Possibly of more contextual interest to the readers of this essay, this is also the mechanism that drives the eternal struggle of keeping a public diary—an obvious oxymoron to anyone unfamiliar with this web site. How does one write for oneself (internal motivation) while simultaneously making it available for public consumption (external motivation)? It is such a difficult task that diarists must regularly make "psych out" entries telling themselves that they truly are writing for themselves.

Oddly, the same phenomenon that thwarts your workout longevity, the aim of your online diary, and the children's love of math games is why many suggest religion is the basis of morality.

Evidence suggests those raised without religion are at least as moral as those with. They're incarcerated at a significantly lower ratio than their populations. However, the religious widely believe that without a magical list of don'ts backed by the threat of fire and brimstone from above, the populace would break down into violent chaos. Applying the template above, we can easily see how one reaches this conclusion.

The 10% of the world who do not believe in a higher power and so are not threatened by it do not seem to be causing even their share of trouble, strongly suggesting that there is a natural human penchant toward what the religious would call good. We'll call this the internal motivation to be good. The external is obviously the threat of hell or reward of heaven.

While this simply answers why the religious believe morality requires threat/reward—because their own internal motivation to be good has been displaced—a far more disturbing question is posed. Is it possible that religious morality's external threat can displace our own natural goodness permanently? If that is the case, religion behaves much like a lifelong poison. However, if the displacement is not permanent, under what conditions can our natural morality return and how can this be facilitated?

Memetics of the superiority bias

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 07:47:31 GMT

"Looters are shooting at rescue helicopters and ransacking hospitals!"

Expect to hear and read this falsehood often; its very nature encourages its propagation.

Memetics studies how and why ideas travel among people from an evolutionary perspective. Christianity, for example, is a hearty meme partially because it contains a reward for those who spread it. It's safe to assume that if a fallacious story is propagating rapidly and its correction is not, the falsehood is offering its propagators some reward.

Who is being rewarded by these horrible stories of looters? Remarkably, both the audience and the speaker. With gain all around, people long to take on both roles making them vehicles for the falsehood. I propose this "superiority bias" is causing the remarkable popularity of these looters gone wild rumors. Certainly, theft is occurring, but no helicopters have been fired on and no hospitals have been looted.

And the reward? Self satisfaction and honor. Upon hearing of Americans just like us only in a dire situation acting dishonorably, we're given a great opportunity to display our character. "Oh my, that's just horrible!" In other words, "I would never do such a thing. I'm such a good person it sickens me to even hear this." Surely more can be milked of this opportunity than impressing the storyteller. How about a retelling to collect some additional respect points? And this is almost local news, making it acceptable to randomly bring it up. Just start talking about it. Pretend your conversation partner has yet to hear it, even though we all know everyone has heard and blogged it by now. For additional points, suggest that football games should not be played in the wake of a disaster or that trivial things don't matter now, people are dying! These techniques can't be applied to ongoing violence problems in Colombia and South Africa; it would be far too obvious that a few vacuous words of disgust are only to put oneself above others.

More revealing is the tone of this disgust. There is one telltale sign that a person thinks he is superior to others: a lack of perplexity with their actions. If I believe someone to be my equal, I assume that like me, he does things for good reasons. If he does something extraordinarily puzzling like shooting at a rescue helicopter, I am extraordinarily confused and my imagination is stretched to figure out what situation would cause me to do this and why. However, if I believe myself fundamentally superior, I'm not at all confused by this. My lessers are just that, lessers. They don't do things for reasons like me; they're just mindlessly bad people. Why not pass on stories about their antics to up my social standing?

Space- and time-fractured identity disorders

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:14:07 GMT

What do chronic procrastination and a desire to travel have in common?

You have an identity disorder if who you think you are is at odds with who you actually are and as a result your functioning in society is impaired. Classified examples include multiple personality disorder, a brain containing two identities with each only knowing of itself, and gender identity disorder, someone who feels one gender but is the opposite sex. I would like to propose two more identity disorders which, while prevalent and seemingly distinct, are actually quite similar.

A primer on symbolism is required. Symbolism is simply representing non-physical entities with physical ones. It exists for two reasons: we are spatial animals and there aren't nearly as many spatial objects as abstract ones. Since half of our ancestors' brains were dedicated to representing and processing space, that's the only type of data our imagination can manipulate. Challenge yourself to imagine an object near another without seeing the image in your head of it physically positioned below, above, or beside. "Near," a pure concept with no information on relative position, can only be represented physically by the imagination with position. Or try to imagine justice or friendship without picturing a blinded statue or people holding hands.

We must store an enormous number of ideas and memories when we can only imagine a small number of physical objects. Not being able to imagine abstract concepts seems quite a handicap. Nevertheless, we've come up with an excellent solution. We store concepts behind a related physical object and manipulate that. Unlike concepts, objects can be categorized, sorted, and referenced by the spatial abilities of the imagination. Computer programmers have the same problem of storing a lot of input in a limited number of slots. Their solution is called hashing. Ours is called symbolism.

There is a serious flaw with this makeshift solution. In a very real way, our abstract thoughts are stored in the objects and environment around us. A classroom may store behind it a memory of failure. A crack in the sidewalk may store a frustrated opinion on city tax allocation. Though all these thoughts are stored in the brain, they are triggered when an object in the physical world is copied into the imagination.

This leads us to space-fractured identity disorder. When enough of one's identity is keyed on the objects and structures around him, can we consider his identity dissociated? What if moving or taking a vacation changes someone as fully as a lobotomy because it effectively is a lobotomy? What if moving or taking a vacation changes someone as fully as a lobotomy because it effectively is a lobotomy? If two identities in one brain constitute a disorder, surely one identity spread across more than a single brain qualifies as well.

But if someone's identity is spread beyond himself and he moves away trying to leave it behind, doesn't this show that his identity is what he thinks it is and he is implementing an effective solution? Not in the least. The disorder lies in thinking one's identity exists outside of oneself when it really doesn't. Traveling does not change a person's formation of memories, the amount he dwells on them, or his ability to deal with them. It merely makes it more difficult to access a set formed previously. This wisdom is succinctly contained in aphorisms like, "You can't run from yourself."

What other consequences arise from this disorder besides an overwhelming desire to escape? Perhaps those without it have a superior ability to store actual concepts rather than keying them on objects. It might allow people to fall in love online—something my ape brain finds incomprehensible without anything to see or touch. This disorder-free person may skip fewer classes, since he wouldn't need to actually see the classroom to imagine class taking place without him. "Out of sight, out of mind" is the credo of the space-fractured identity. Perhaps people with the disorder make more malicious financial and political leaders, unable to imagine the consequences of manipulating invisible currency or dropping bombs on places unseen.

If an identity can be dissociated through space, can it also be dissociated through time? Absolutely, time-fractured identity disorder is marked by belief that one's identity changes over time. It sounds odd, but if you're a procrastinator, this is what's going on in your head. Putting off a task that becomes more difficult over time is not something one would do if one believed himself to be exactly the same person in the future. When we procrastinate, we're asking a future self to do a task as if he were a different person. Why else would we punish ourselves? "I'll put off writing the paper until much later, backing the person that'll have to do it into a corner and forcing him to hurry." A reasonable statement…if that person isn't you.

This disorder has more serious consequences as well. While expecting space to change your identity merely causes you to travel a lot, expecting time to do the same can cause an indefinite stagnation. If you imagine some future you to be more assertive, successful, and ambitious simply because it is a future you, why take steps now to become that person? Eventually a combination of maturing and the right circumstances will change you into that person, right?

Only in properly defining and understanding these phenomena can we truly overcome them. An understanding of procrastination based simply on laziness suggests poor solutions which, even when they do work, are only patchwork and do not transform a procrastinator. They are treatments, not cures. Similarly, an understanding of a desire to travel or escape based on there being different "types" of people not only suggests no solution, it suggests no problem! Much as targeting the fever or dizziness of a bacterial disease does nothing to cure it, targeting the symptoms of these mental disorders is of no real help. I suggest the root cause of these disorders is a fractured identity and that the treatments, whatever they are, will involve reintegrating that identity.

Why does Terri inspire right-to-lifers?

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:08:58 GMT

The woman is a vegetable. The husband gets to decide whether to pull the plug. The religious right has seized this issue to appeal to its base. Only one interesting question remains worth inquiry. Why does this issue appeal to the conservative base? Why does it inspire them?

Like all reasonable people living in the 21st century, you know that the brain is a massively parallel computer made of trillions of neurons and connections between them. Thanks to magnetic, radioactive, and x-ray scans, it's rather obvious that the brain is a system of interconnected modules that do different things. Break one part or another, and an aspect of the person disappears. It is gone in the same way as the data on a magnetized hard drive.

A person possessing this obvious data sees a vegetative state as such. Enough of the individual subsystems that make up a person have been damaged or destroyed so that the person is reduced to the mental capacity of an animal or less. He or she no longer has an identity, cannot achieve goals, nor have any meaningful experiences. Rather simple.

Surprisingly, there is an alternative way of viewing the brain. I'm not sure of the technical details, since there probably are none, but the essence is that it is powered by some kind of "eternal soul." This soul is either there or it isn't. It arrives before birth, departs at death, and contains the entire individual.

A person using this model is stupefied by the vegetative state. Since the soul leaves at death, while the person is alive, it's fully intact. There are no degrees. Death is simply it going somewhere else. So what's up with this woman here who's not dead? She's smiling and moving and grunting. The soul must still be in there somewhere. It must be trapped! Maybe if we leave her hooked up longer science will figure out how to free it. We certainly can't kill her. That's not our right to send a soul up to heaven at our whim.

The Schiavo case mocks the fundamental beliefs of the religious. It asks them frightening questions. "What happens to the soul if the person doesn't die immediately and instead degrades? Is it still in there or did it already leave? If it left why is she still making faces? What if the 'soul' can be chipped away at to the point that its existence is irrelevant, as science says?"

Perhaps what truly threatens the religious is that if we are allowed to pull the plug, we assert that our answers to these questions are correct and that they are the answers that apply to everyone. They are universal, scientific answers.

The sciences string end-to-end nicely, explaining virtually everything we'd ever want to know. Only one large gap remains, between neurobiology and psychology. One describes what happens in a single neuron, the other, what happens when fifteen billion of them get together. Religion has always hid in the gaps of science, and this is its last bastion.

We may be witness to the first battle of religion's final war. Pulling the plug on any vegetative state implies that a scientific consciousness will eventually be understood and that souls are not only corporeal, but that they receive no special government protection when science deems them to be damaged beyond repair.

Schiavo's case threatens the existence of the eternal soul at the end of a person's life. Is there a similar issue that threatens its beginning? Yes, stem cell research. Surely the soul is infused into the person very early in their existence. If it's there so early, what happens if we take the stem cells, soul and all, and use them to repair someone else's spine? Since the soul doesn't get to form its own person, what happens to it? Is it forced to return to heaven?

Science's use of stem cells for research and decree that a vegetative person might as well be dead make an absolute mockery of the religious idea that our essence is eternal and simply visits the earth. Not only is it made irrelevant when the soul enters at the beginning of life if ever, it is irrelevant what becomes of it once the brain is permanently damaged. Should we really be surprised that such religious fervor accompanies these attempts by science to stomp religion out of its last stronghold?

Forcing access-based security with virtualization

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 11:40:55 GMT

The Internet Explorer security zones are useless. There aren't any sites I trust enough to let do things to my computer without prompting. Nor are there predetermined sites that I'm afraid of. Those, I generally stumble onto rather than prepare a list of, in which case it's already too late.

Surely the security zones can serve some purpose. How about this? Give the default zone the restricted permissions of the Restricted zone and give the Trusted zone the permissions of the default zone. Now the zones can be put to use. Instead of giving sites normal access by default and restricting them on a case-by-case basis, I distrust them all by default and selectively give normal access. My perversion later shipped with Windows 2003 under the name Enhanced Security Configuration (ESC) along with the ability to easily add sites to the Trusted zone. It's a bit of an annoyance, but the security is worth the inconvenience.

How about applying this security paradigm to the entire operating system? Currently, Windows is set up like IE's original security zones. Programs can mostly do whatever they want except for a list of restrictions. They can't access each other's memory (NT) or call certain APIs (XP SP2). Rather than being allowed to do respectable things, they're banned from doing forbidden things. It's not a difficult ban to evade in most cases. Denied access to a file? Access the raw bytes of the disk. Can't call a banned API? Use assembly. It's much like IE allowing web sites to execute JavaScript, but banning certain functions or methods. Clever exploits will always find ways around this. But what is the alternative? Much like sites that fail without JavaScript, old and poorly-written applications need machine access to function at all.

The current strategy is failing. More restrictions are added by the OS while an arms race occurs between viruses and antivirus software. Anti-spyware applications play on the same field as the programs they try to eliminate, watching for ShellExecute hooks by making the same type of hooks and watching for malicious startup applications by trying to place themselves before those applications in the same list. Restrictions simply breed more creative workarounds and we know that arms races cannot be "won" at all.

There is a complete solution. Dot NET with its high-level API, common namespace, and sandboxing are the opt-in part of this solution. They're analogous to the sites that get added to the Trusted zone and are allowed to do normal things in ESC. What about the malicious or poorly-written programs left in the Restricted zone that would've normally been allowed to execute? They are virtualized.

(Virtualization is like The Matrix. If you imagine your computer to be the real world, then a virtual machine is a Matrix inside that real world. Programs running in this Matrix think they have full access to a real computer and manipulate files and memory in it, but are unable to harm or even determine there is a "realer" computer.)

Virtualization is the second part of this security solution. If you're an old program or you don't want to play by the rules, your execution isn't thwarted by a watchful kernel or DEP. You can fully execute…on a phony machine. No real disk access. No painting regions of the real video memory. No executing assembly that modifies the registry or fetches spyware from the Internet. It is a performance hit, but not much of one since it's all x86 code. Perhaps there is one virtual machine for all untrusted applications or maybe one stripped-down machine for each untrusted application. Regardless, in the very worst imaginable case, a virtual machine can only destroy itself.

As the virtual machines are improved, they'll more tightly integrate with the real machine. Each will use whatever it wants to manipulate what it thinks is a real registry, file system, network, video memory, etc. The real machine will go in and extract keys, files, and memory regions to allowed locations in the real machine. In reality, the virtual machine's entire file system is just a single file on the real machine's hard disk. Virtual machines will have functionality that is only deliberately and carefully added to the real machine and nothing more. Since it takes a concerted effort to go into a virtual file system and remove files from its phony My Documents directory, there is little risk of security breach. When security is a result of adding functionality rather than removing it, it is always much more robust.

Our movie tickets buy more than 2 hours in front of a screen

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 21:57:06 GMT

Enjoy this lighthearted essay for the holidays mocking celebrities. Inspired by zedebsky.

Movie, television, and music celebrities are hounded relentlessly. Photographers follow them to the beach, supermarket, even while they're driving. Fans stalk them and demand autographs on the street, in airports, while attending a sporting event, anywhere. Tabloids publish the private details of their lives. Celebrities are people, too. Shouldn't we leave them their dignity and respect their privacy?

No. Normally when someone provides a service, they only provide it to a limited number of people and limited geographic area. They are accountable to their clients, whom can question the quality of their product, ask for support, repairs, follow-up, etc. Seems rather obvious that if you profit from a client, you and your product or service are accountable to him. For tangible products, this normally takes the form of a warranty and help desk.

These celebrities have tapped into a remarkable new medium in which the law of diminishing returns does not apply. Other industries are limited in their ability to profit from a large population because as they invest more capital to reach more people, profits do not increase proportionally. In the music, television, and movie industries, not only does diminishing returns not apply, returns are actually increasing. After the initial investment to produce the song or movie, an infinite number of duplicates of it can be created virtually for free and distributed the world over.

Celebrities have concocted a new market not governed by traditional economic laws in which they can take money from people across the planet without ever seeing them and having no accountability. They are swindlers of epic proportions of which no industry or business has ever fathomed could exist. Take my money and you will sign an autograph and pose for a photo. Take the money of millions of people and live like a king off their dollar and be ready to sign millions of autographs and pose for millions of photos.

Development of an individual's identity parallels recorded history

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 04:07:39 GMT

All people share a similar sense of the progression of their identity. Maturation feels like a slow, calm process in which good ideas replace bad. No one tells stories of when they were 12 and a bad idea permanently infected them and changed their life for the worse. Not unless that idea is now gone from them. There's another entity that claims to go through a similar progression: recorded history. It tells of a series of battles in which good defeats evil.

You may argue that recorded history does not show such a progression. Many "evil" empires prospered and defeated many good ones in history. This is true, but none considered evil are currently on top. Similarly, someone could acknowledge their bigotry, but only if they've now overcome it. None say it currently rules them.

We understand that history is strongly biased by it being written by the victors. Let's consider that our identity suffers from the same bias. Our mental development is similar in many ways to recorded history if we consider ourselves battlegrounds for ideas. The victorious ideas which we now possess write our own history for us. Each tells a story of how it beat an inferior idea for its spot.

What are the implications? One appears when we consider how history would look if Hitler had won. It would not read, "And the dark forces of evil marched all over the face of the earth." It would look very much as it does now, implying good defeated evil yet again. Who knows how many Hitlers won in our history. The Native Americans' history probably considers us to be one of them.

Similarly, who knows how many Hitler ideas each of us possess? How many snuck in by defeating better ideas and have drastically changed our lives for the worse? The point is that we could never know. Once these ideas get in using whatever methods necessary, they sit in judgment of whatever they conquered. Of course, judged by their own standards, they'll decide that they are better and you've improved.

We also notice that "Hitler ideas" seem to conquer individuals as an army. People don't possess a single damaging idea. They usually have many. Using history as a model for identity, it's easy to see how this could happen. Once one gets in the door, it is now poised to let all the others in through what is effectively an unguarded entrance into that person's mind. For example, if I let in the idea that one race is inferior, then that will have no problem letting in the generalization that many others also are, or even that another is superior. It only has to combine the simplest logic with the original idea to let all the others in.

The Only Purpose of Culture

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 07:21:04 GMT

An unspoken contempt of culture in general has grown throughout white America. All these silly rituals and specific foods and colorful garments and jewelry and ceremonies. Even most of the relativists have forgotten the purpose of culture and blindly dispense hollow respect for it. Sociology and anthropology texts imply it's just arbitrary stuff people come up with for the hell of it when they live near one another. With such an implication, it certainly seems a little silly in today's world.

Culture emerges in only one circumstance and serves only one purpose. When a group of people face the same adversity at the same time, they do better if they deal with it together. A people's collective solutions to adversity is their culture. If there's a limited supply of food, we'll get used to the same fruits and meats and use the same cooking techniques. If we live in the same climate and around the same building materials, we'll learn to build dwellings together. If we experience the same weather and live near cotton plants, we'll weave similar clothing. If we're confused by the same astronomical phenomenon or killed by the same unknown disease, we'll come up with myths together.

Without unified adversity, problems are fleeting. If I face hunger one month, infant mortality the next, and predators the third, and you face these things in the opposite order, we build no culture together. We're not going to hunt together or create a common death ritual or learn to build secure dwellings together. This is the only reason culture is geographically localized.

Now, many classes of people do not face any perceptible adversity that unification is a weapon against. A non-trivial percentage of the world who are of certain races, live in certain countries, and are born to affluent families no longer see problems in their lives that could be overcome if they just had the help of their fellow man. There is no hunger for them, no discrimination, no infant mortality, no predators, no droughts. As far as they know, their only enemy are the people around them competing for the same jobs, resources, and mates.

Genuine culture cannot emerge in these situations. Instead, we end up with something that looks a lot like culture—a common language, beliefs, some customs, ways of greeting and acceptable conversation. However, for these people, this commonality does not serve the purpose of culture. Instead, it's used only to smoothly interact with those in proximity. [T]his [phony] "culture" … leaves us feeling isolated and without purpose, something humanity has never really encountered on such a large scale until recently. Consequently, this "culture" does not offer any of the benefits of its real counterpart. It does not fulfill our innate desire to survive against the odds with the help of our tribe. Rather it leaves us feeling isolated and without purpose, something humanity has never really encountered on such a large scale until recently.

One way of dealing with this emptiness is through subculture. Subcultures create or aggrandize an adversity so that a small group may together rally against it. Of course, it's not often obvious that this is what subcultures do, just as it's not obvious that wearing similar clothing is a way of dealing with shared adversity. Some choose obscure types of music and imagine they are resisting popular music as if it were threatening their very identity. Coworkers at a fast food restaurant may form a bond based on shared hate of a boss. Hackers work together to defeat a system that denies them free exploration. Even people who support unpopular computer hardware and software form bonds as if Microsoft and Intel were threatening their personal survival.

Subcultures are generally harmless. They satisfy the human appetite for what is past without endangering the common good. Ideally, when the adversity is over, which it now is for several classes of people, culture is abandoned. It should be; it's a veritable weapon against adversity, and if that adversity is competition with others, a weapon against those people.

This may partially explain why Jews are hated by some. They used culture to overcome adversity, achieved equality, and are still using it to lobby and keep other cultures out of their country. When culture is used by a people who've achieved and surpassed equality, their actions are better described with words like ethnocentrism and racism. One could accuse racist whites and Zionist Jews of cheating the purpose of culture, using it beyond its design intent.

That's also why the powerful want America to be a melting pot. Melt away the minorities' culture, and along with it, their ability to coalesce and overcome oppression. Most of us take for granted that there's nothing wrong with an NAACP meeting but a KKK meeting is spooky. We already have an understanding of when it's appropriate to use culture. Blacks are a minority who do not yet enjoy equality. If they're congregating, it's to achieve this goal. Whites currently enjoy more than equality. Why are they congregating?

That true culture can only exist in negative circumstances is a damning proposition if true. Luckily for the middle and upper class, they still do have an enemy to unite against, even if that enemy is largely invisible to them: corporate greed. But that issue is better explained by essayists like Noam Chomsky.

Nice shirt, I have one just like it

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 09:50:47 GMT

Why do we need an "in" to start a friendship?

We're compatible with more people than we'd like to think

As a guy, whenever I see an attractive girl, I immediately start searching for an "in." I need a reason to talk to her. Is she talking to someone I know? Did she miss the same class I did and we both need to make something up? Did we meet at some random place far outside of campus? Same brand backpack? I'll take anything. Why go through this charade?

First, a note on boundaries. Sometimes we imagine a smooth transition where a boundary does exist. In India, castes are clearly defined and moving between them is difficult. Here, we pretend no such things exist and everyone is freely socially mobile despite strong evidence otherwise. Words like opportunity disguise these boundaries.

Conversely, we often imagine qualitative boundaries where none exist. Love is one of the best documented examples. We Westerners are baffled by the arranged marriage. Love is supposed to be this mystical force that draws random people together, yet Westerners would not want to accept that their marriages are often more arranged than their Eastern counterparts'. Westerners who marry often meet in high school, college, or work, meaning they already have a great deal in common as far as goals, timetables for those goals, positions in the social hierarchy, and socioeconomic status. To top it off, they're usually of the same race, family background, religion, and are equally attractive. Love is hardly a random force of nature, and all sociologists understand this.

The in is another such artificial boundary. We could probably become great friends with anyone in any of our school classes or even most of the people we run into on the subway, yet we don't talk to them without some catalyzing commonality. The excuse to chat won't be profound. It won't reflect some deep similarity. It won't be a good starting point in a relationship. It's merely an excuse. It allows us to think of friendship as a connecting force that flows through the universe, inviting already-compatible people to make acquaintance. [The "in"] allows us to think of friendship as a connecting force that flows through the universe, inviting already-compatible people to make acquaintance. Consider how you met your friends. You probably remember most meetings as lucky encounters in which you were statistically quite fortunate to meet someone so similar.

If we really could get along with such a large percentage of people, why the games and excuses? Consider you wish to purchase an expensive item that you believe to be very rare. You come across it at a garage sale you just happened to stop by. Without question, you'll buy it and take good care of it. However, if you learned it was mass produced and available anywhere, not only would you be less likely to purchase it, when you did, you'd probably be more careless with it.

This is the dilemma of human relationships. If we believe love and friendship are plentiful and easy to come by, we will not sufficiently value and invest in the relationships. If we believe love and friendship are plentiful and easy to come by, we will not sufficiently value and invest in the relationships. If after every argument with a current friend I thought about the hundreds of other potential friends I walked by every day, I'd very likely not expend the effort to work through it. Why not just try out a new one?

Because the survival value of friends lies largely in their persistence and less in the specific people selected for the role. It's more important that we have friends for a long time than we select through many people and abandon them as problems arise or better candidates come along. This is difficult to enforce sociobiologically. Luckily, our nature, or possibly our culture, has found a very clever way of doing so. The perceived randomness catalyzing relationships makes both parties feel the connection is more special and unique than it actually is. This vague belief feeds the relationship, encouraging both to expend more resources to strengthen it.

Since we only really have room for a limited number of friends, there's no real danger in believing we're only compatible with a small percentage of people so long as we have enough "chance encounters" to fill these roles. It does present other problems, however, especially in places with high population density. These situations are so random and diverse that they're nearly impenetrable to ins. It'd probably be very beneficial to randomly talk to people we sat next to on the subway. We could learn about each other and make valuable business or personal contacts with no danger or downside. Regardless, would we even consider doing such a thing? Even if we did, neither the initiator or receiver of the interaction would feel special or consider it could become a real friendship. I could've selected anyone to chat with and you could've been selected by anyone. Interacting with others without an in may only be a faux pas because if it works too often, our dream of a friend-aligning force would be dashed.

Why does a messy room so quickly become a disaster?

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 21:26:38 GMT

It's interesting how quickly a room can change from messy, just a few items strewn about, to a complete disaster. Common sense would dictate that the transition be much smoother than it is.

When a room is marginally messy, it's strewn about with non-garbage items. Maybe some clothes and books on the floor. When we look at it, we immediately recognize that all these items are simply in the wrong place and it could be brought back to neat in a few seconds.

Garbage, which I define as anything that would be thrown away when cleaning up, eventually makes it into the disorganization of the room. With small amounts of garbage, it's still visible that most items in the room are just misplaced and some of it can be thrown away. When garbage reaches a certain percentage of the items, say 20%, we can no longer glance at the room and differentiate non-garbage from garbage. The room looks like a disaster.

This theory sharpens the threshold by making the argument that increasing the small percentage of garbage from 15% to 20% "corrupts" the other 80% of non-garbage items in our mind. Without being able to glance at a room and determine which items can be quickly picked up and which can be thrown away, it looks like a confounding disaster.

The testable prediction this theory makes is that you can make your disaster of a room appear only slightly messy by simply indexing in your imagination the locations of all the garbage items. Or, if you're especially ambitious, disposing of some of the garbage.

By passing judgment on new items, news concedes to previous items' righteousness

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:30:03 GMT

The media has an incredible power to assist people in sliding along to an extreme. It doesn't come from its bias, either. It's just the nature of news media that includes judgments with its reports. (The British don't have this problem since their news doesn't decide for you. They just report.) To judge a newly reported item, it must be put into perspective and judged according to what's around it. And to judge something by its context, you must pretend the context is a constant and the item of topic is a variable. If news keeps coming about an unjust war, for example, the news must eventually "give up" and just report what's new. If it passes judgment on these new items, it has given a slight nod of acceptance to the previous circumstances that got it there. It's like being drawn onto someone's turf in an argument.

This one probably needs a few examples. If the news talks about Saddam's capture, no big deal. If the news attempts to pass judgment on it or query experts for whether he should be executed or detained, it's acknowledged that everything leading up to his capture was just. We're placated seeing these anchors and experts discuss the topic at hand as if everything that came before was nothing to get excited about. It'd get pretty old if every expert brought on the news answered, "We shouldn't even be here in the first place. This President shouldn't even be in office!" after every question about American troops being "ambushed" or Guantanamo Bay. They really should, though. We've slid pretty damn far.

The Downfall of Religion

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 22:43:56 GMT

Why religion will be quickly eliminated by the field of emergent systems

Religion is an institution that invokes unobservable and unprovable entities to explain the natural world. It provides a default explanation for anything not currently understood. Over the last few thousand years, the number of unknowns has exponentially decreased along with religion's monopoly on why and how. Now, religion is almost never invoked to interpret reality. When someone has a seizure, a hole isn't drilled in his head. When our children ask where AIDS or lightning comes from, we no longer answer "God."

We now have a wonderful array of social and natural sciences at our disposal. Sociology tells us why people behave seemingly oddly in groups. Psychology explains that people aren't strictly good or evil. Biochemistry shows us how the neurons in our brain work and even gives recipes for chemicals that make us happier and less anxious. Physics tells us how these molecules are bound together and how they can be split apart.

Each of the sciences is pretty confined to its scope. The pure sciences explain the simple in slightly simpler terms. The social sciences explain the complex in slightly less complex terms. However, they do string end-to-end very nicely, one picking up where the previous left off.

There does seem to be a large gap that is covered by no field at this time. That gap is between neurobiology and psychology. The first explains how each individual neuron operates. The second, what they do when about 15 billion of them get together. What happens in between that creates consciousness and apparent self-awareness? To many, it's obvious that this gap will be filled by another scientific field. However, to most of the world, this is the final unknown. Like the unknowns before it, it's filled by religion.

Nearly all current religious beliefs are concentrated around this remaining scientific gap. What are the most prevalent remaining religious beliefs? People no longer believe the earth is the center of the universe or disease is punishment from God. These contradict existing hard sciences. The remaining beliefs are those that fill in for this missing scientific field. The soul and the afterlife.

How are the soul and afterlife related to this missing field? The soul is a catch-all concept that substitutes for our lack of understanding of consciousness. Afterlife is recognition that because the mind (soul) is not understood, it is to be treated as a black box. The afterlife concept is a hopeful presupposition that because we do not know what goes on inside the black box, it may possess an ability to transcend its apparent cease of functioning.

The field that will connect neurobiology and psychology will be emergent systems. Emergence is the tendency of simple elements to organize themselves into a complex system. Emergent systems is a very real field that attempts to explain how an ant colony or an economy can be made of simple pieces with simple goals and achieve an incredible level of complexity. Coupled with our existing understanding of neural networking (a subset of computer science), this field will probably figure out consciousness in a few decades.

With the removal of the final discontinuity in our scientific view of reality, religion's remaining strongholds will disappear in a single generation. There will simply be no room for concepts like soul or afterlife in the mind of someone who grows up with knowledge of how consciousness emerges and why they perceive sensations like free will and self-awareness.

Perception of free will is a result of Gödel's incompleteness theorem

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 02:28:40 GMT

Why we feel as though we have free will in a clearly deterministic universe

Gödel's theorem prevents us from understanding our own thinking

Gödel's second incompleteness theorem states that any sufficiently strong consistent system cannot prove its own consistency. Basically, there's always some part of a system left that's not provable or disprovable. For example, if you write a paragraph about itself, there'll always be one sentence left that has to talk about itself or some codependency between sentences. Because of this, it cannot fully describe itself. Or, if you wish to measure everything in the universe, you're left with a measuring device that must measure itself. It's impossible for a complex system to be self-consistent. Even science is based on a few arbitrary statements that cannot be proven or disproven called the philosophy of science.

When an individual observes the universe, he can observe and conclude about nearly any part of it. However, the incompleteness theorem prevents him from making consistent conclusions about his own conclusion-making device, his brain, in the same way that a ruler can measure anything but itself.

Let's assume the ruler can be manipulated by the environment in the same way our brain can. If it's stretched or contracted through whatever interaction, it can't tell. As far as it knows, it's still 12 inches long. Instead, it would perceive every other object in the universe as changing in length.

Just like the ruler can't perceive its changing length because it's using itself to measure, we cannot perceive our own decision-making process because we're using that subsystem to come to conclusions about itself.

This is how we perceive the sensation of free will. The environment modifies our brain in a clearly deterministic manner, altering our neural network in ways we are totally unable to perceive. We go out to remeasure the world around us and see that everything has changed. What's going on? How can I stay constant while everything else changes radically?

This is exactly the mechanism at work when we misunderstand chaos. We think of the Butterfly Effect as giving us this incredible power over the universe¹. We think we can choose to move our hand and cause a tornado on another continent. We forget about the causality that shaped our brain and caused us to move our hand in that way. We no more caused the tornado by moving our hand than the formation of the earth caused it.

Because of the incompleteness theorem, our brains and the hypothetical ruler cannot perceive how they themselves are manipulated by the environment, but perceive radical change in the environment. We're left with a hole in our understanding. Why does causality seem to apply to a billiard table yet not ourselves? Let's bring the ruler back to simplify things once more. We concluded above that the ruler cannot detect when it's stretched or shortened. However, it does see that everything else gets proportionally larger and smaller. It therefore reasonably concludes that it can manipulate the universe to change the length of objects.

Analogously, the halting of causality we perceive in ourselves is resolved by the creation of an odd sensation that we can freely manipulate the environment independent of its effect on us.

¹Sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the Butterfly Effect) is an element of deterministic chaos. Chaos is simply a tendency of deterministic systems to diverge much sooner than would be expected even with greater precision. It is not a magical, unpredictable randomness that comes from the netherworld.

Stereotyping has gradually and will continue to become socially unacceptable

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 10:29:23 GMT

When we hear middle aged people make racist remarks, we quickly conclude that between their generation and ours exist a sharp division; they're racist and we're not. We weakly pretend to explain why with something like, "They grew up in a different time."

I argue that this is not the case at all. Stereotyping is gradually becoming less and less socially acceptable. Being at the cusp of this, we're not really aware of how often we all stereotype.

I suspect our children and grandchildren will be appalled by numerous things we say without thought. It may no longer be acceptable to point out that foreign food smells or accentuate the difference in physical features between races in drawings or cartoons. Gender-specific language such as stewardess may be intensely frowned upon. Stereotyping subcultures may also become unacceptable. You may go to a restaurant with your children some day and hear, "Dad, don't say 'nerds' or 'goths' in public! You're embarrassing me!"

We prioritize high-level interfacing because of limited intelligence

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 00:27:19 GMT

The more I think about greater-than-human intelligence, the sillier Star Trek seems. For example, since humans are so stupid, we put a high priority on interfacing with things at the highest level. Everything about our technology is based on building on increasing levels of complexity.

No one could write Windows in machine language. It'd be vastly superior, but no group could do it. Humans are just too stupid and slow by design. That's the only reason. A being of slightly higher intelligence than us, who actually understands the lowest-level workings of the universe and can manipulate them will not prioritize high-level interfacing. Why turn the steering wheel and push the accelerator of a car when it's just as easy and far more precise to grab the wheels and spin them?

If something has the technology to reach us, it's not going to talk to us and shake our hand. It's much more efficient to just probe our brains as it flies by. No reason to even land. Then again, there's no reason to even probe our brains. There's nothing we know that it can't figure out faster. We're a limited being capable of a limited number of thoughts.

Maybe they'd want to see our history—how we developed. Why? With minimal technology, they can randomize and run thousands of simulations of different possible histories our planet went through to reach this pathetic state. The previous sentence is what I understood and was trying to say in my first essay, "The Age of Curiosity" (26 Mar 2000).

A combination of desire to be effective and perception of optimal predisposes us to good

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 03:44:52 GMT

Hear a commercial saying to call in and vote for who should get married on a TV show. What if enough people called in to maliciously put people with the wrong person? I considered what stopped me from doing that. The first dozen reasons involve not being malicious and not wanting to participate in the silliness. When ignored, the reason is that I want to do something effective. How do I know which bad match to vote for out of many? I feel ineffective. However, if I were voting for an obvious best match, I'd feel effective because many others would also vote for it.

If kindness has one route and malice has a dozen and people want to be part of something effective, they're more likely to choose kindness. This is a very interesting find. How do the arbitrary boundaries of opposite feelings like helping and hurting affect our collective behavior? I feel like helping is one path and hurting can be many. This seems true for many behaviors. The positive offers one or very few choices and the negative offers countless. I can help a poor person by giving him money, or if I'm malicious, do any number of negative things to him, including torture and murder. The options to do something negative are innumerably overwhelming, so I may choose indifference.

One interesting question is why the positive seems to offer fewer choices. Is this something I've been taught? Something built into our psychology by evolution? Caused by the defining of the words that describe positive and negative action? Perhaps it's because we imagine an ideal world slightly better than the one we see, but do not imagine a worst possible world. Our desire to be effective and the only reasonable collective action being toward an achievable ideal may predispose us to positive action.

"Lost" is two concepts with one definition

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 08:18:50 GMT

One great abyss between men and women involves being lost navigationally. It always creates an uproar. I'm no different from the typical guy when it comes to asking for directions. I'd never do it.

I think the problem is that lost is two independent concepts that are represented by only one word. Interestingly, all men think lost means unable to find origin and all women think lost means unable to find destination. In the car, a woman says, "We're lost!" and the man says, "No we're not!" Both are correct. However, the meanings they're both using are similar, so they don't realize they're talking about different concepts.

Arguments can continue for a long time if neither party understands the other is using a different, similar word. A woman can suggest, "Let's stop and ask for directions!" and it be a reasonable suggestion for either definition of lost. I'd liken the conversation between a man and a women over whether they're lost to something like this.

"I can't stand poetry.": "How can you not like poultry? It's my favorite."
"It's just so tasteless.": "Not if you buy the right kind!"
"I'm not paying for poetry!": "What, you're going to produce your own?"
"Maybe I am!"

Just like two people can both dislike poetry and like poultry and argue, two people can clearly understand that they can find their origin but not their destination and still argue. Lost is a homophone that only has one definition listed in the dictionary.

It Was Just a Coincidence

Thu, 09 May 2002 00:40:19 GMT

Why Many Abandon Science for Pseudoscience

Warning: First Draft

Why do so many believe in pseudoscience? At least half of the public believes in the existence of extrasensory perception. Perhaps this is a result of observing or believing one has observed events too unlikely to occur in a universe which science currently describes as nothing more than an interaction of particles and forces. Four things, and more importantly, their interaction, cause otherwise reasonable people to abandon reasoning and place faith in unsubstantiated pseudoscience.

First, inability to calculate probability. Our interaction with the world is so incomprehensibly complex and continuous that it is very difficult to understand the probability of an event occurring. That is, we notice when something does happen, but we do not notice all the times it could have happened and did not. We may notice the three streetlights that turn off as we drive underneath them on the way to work, but we don’t notice the 200 that stayed lit. Nor do we notice that two of the three constantly flicker, giving the impression that since we take the same route to work every day, we have some magical aura that influences some of the lights. Regardless, there simply is not enough data to come to an outlandish conclusion as, "Magical waves emanate from me, affecting the filaments in nearby lightbulbs."

We often ignore the circumstances of a coincidence and assign it a lesser likelihood. We don’t recognize the convergent nature of many situations which actually makes them more likely to happen. Running into someone at a neurobiology conference and then at a brain science conference across the country isn’t very coincidental. Neither is driving behind someone for a long duration, exiting to refuel, and seeing them emerge from an exit 100 km later.

Further skewing our ability to calculate probability is the desire to assign every chance encounter “most amazing” status, refusing to recognize countless other outcomes which would’ve been equally amazing. “Can you believe the number he said to beware of was the actual flight number of my trip? Isn’t that amazing?” Reading the same number on a pill, friend’s house, stock price, license plate, or hotel room would’ve provoked an equally amazed reaction. How many numbers does one encounter in a day? This brings us to…

Second, the power of suggestion. Once someone mentions a number to beware or talks about being able to affect streetlights by driving under them, we look for the same thing to happen to us, and of course, find it. Since we've never noticed it before in the enormous slew of daily events, we assume it recently started happening, further skewing our ability to calculate its actual probability. Suggestion easily triggers the pattern recognition that is such a large part of how we think.

Third, using a neural network to think and observe. The brain is a type of computer specifically adept at looking for patterns. We do it constantly. It's how we're able to recognize objects and sounds. We look at clouds and see faces and shapes that don't exist. Since we understand that they're just localized concentrations of humidity, we're able to accept on some level that recognizing shapes is just something our wandering mind enjoys. We dismiss it. However, when we’re a part of the more complex situations encountered in hectic, daily life, it's difficult to realize that many of the patterns which appear to exist are just products of using a neural network to perceive the world.

Fourth, self-centeredness. This is the icing on the first three. We are all incredibly self-centered individuals. Everything is about us. We notice improbable things happening to us, and ignore how often it happens to others, a mistake in calculating probability. Are you certain the streetlight didn't go out when the person driving in front of you was under it? Further abstraction from understanding one’s brain is wired to recognize patterns, combined with his self-centered nature may result in paranoia. "Three people in suits just walked by. The government is after me."

The Next Thousand Years

Thu, 09 May 2002 00:28:05 GMT

Trends in Technological Development

Warning: First Draft

No automated systems of implanting knowledge will ever become remotely popular. As new knowledge is acquired, it must be compared against the current body for bias, validity, and even its impact on personality. This takes time. Learning is also cumulative—new knowledge builds on old—further iterating the process to a relative snail’s pace. This compounded with the native speed limitations of biological neural networks will prevent learning from any great advancement in optimization.
Valid timeframe: 50-500 years

As computing power increases, engineering with evolutionary methods (simulate an environment, randomly make changes to a design, update that design when changes move toward the desired result, repeat until satisfied) will become the most popular method of optimizing physical and mathematical models. This is an interim solution for coping with the extreme cost of intellectual resources required to design optimal algorithms that operate based on a concrete understanding of a physical model. For example, equations to minimize friction of airflow through an engine. Eventually sentient programs will use heuristic methods to generate concrete optimization algorithms at a minimal cost of time and resources.
Timeframe: 10-500 years

Technologies that owe their existence to friction will slowly disappear. Generally, friction can only be taken advantage of because of imperfections in manufacturing. Designs utilizing high friction surfaces purposefully will lose energy. Screws and nails will become obsolete. Automobiles based on friction between the ground and tires will too. Until then, the energy generated as a byproduct of uneliminable friction can be used as a limited power source.
Timeframe: 5-1000+ years

Look at massive university research projects that are currently preposterously unreasonable on any scale. These technologies will be commonplace and cheap tomorrow. Holographic storage, quantum and DNA computing, building atom-by-atom. Not because of nearly magical, unimaginable advancement, but precision refinement. Nearly all consumer electronics started with a simple concept that was refined: the cathode ray tube (some substances glow when struck with electrons), digital camera (light can be converted to electricity), optical and magnetic storage (a bunch of magnets/reflective pits can store information).
Time-independent concept

The Problem with Pixels

Thu, 09 May 2002 00:26:52 GMT

A Solution to Unreadable Pixel-Measured Fonts on the Web

Correcting Designers' Shortsightedness on the Client Side

Do you find yourself squinting to read bestbuy.com, netscape.com, go.com, hotmail.com, zdnet.com, or even Zeldman’s alistapart.com? It could be because their developers decided to set font sizes with a nonstandard unit, pixels.

In a perfect world, the operating system knows the exact number of pixels per inch for your display based on its physical size and resolution. In the Windows control panel’s display applet, this is set by dragging a displayed ruler to coincide with a physical ruler placed against the screen. The interface is then scaled to display at physical measurements rather than a certain number of pixels. Almost everyone using a given operating system has their scaling set to the same, likely incorrect default value, making the problems caused by setting font sizes in pixels invisible to the masses, for now.

As HTML has enhanced over the years, designers and developers have naturally gained more control over the presentation of content. This is safest from a usability standpoint when offset by an equivalent increase in control on the part of the user. For example, developers can control the size of text in a document through the deprecated FONT element. This element can select a relative size of text based on a median value determined by the user’s operating system, which takes into account the dpi of the display. Equivalently, users can alter the relative size of text with their browser’s font size setting (View | Text Size in Internet Explorer, View | Increase/Decrease font in Navigator).

One of the most interesting features of style sheets is the ability to control font sizes with pixel measurements. Pixel-based font sizes have very few redeeming qualities. The primary use of pixel font measurements today is to encourage lazy design. I have even succumbed to the temptation a few times to save effort. Why bother making a page reflow based on varying font sizes when one will know that all text will line up, or text won’t flow past a certain boundary or beyond an image. There may be occasions where pixel font measurements are a better choice, but from a usability standpoint, I have encountered none. If you are looking to control every pixel of your web document, perhaps the web is not your medium.

HTML and style sheet abuse is rampant, why the big fuss over pixel fonts? Pixel fonts represent a huge threat to usability because there is no comparable power afforded to users to offset the designer's control over layout. If someone with a high dpi display comes across one of the thousands of web sites that use a 12-pixel font rather than a relative font size, the document will be virtually or perhaps totally unreadable. There is nothing the user can do short of copying the page into a text editor. When text is too small, most of us reach for our browser’s relative font size setting. This setting does not affect pixel or point measurements.

Short of waiting for a huge backlash when high dpi displays are commonplace, one solution would be an option to make all font sizes of any unit controllable by the browser's font scaling setting (implemented by Mozilla). Even better would be for browser developers to give users the option to convert pixel measurements to point measurements, which are effectively pixel measurements corrected for display dpi.

With the widespread implementation of font-level style sheets, there now exists a huge gradient between the level of control afforded designers and users. It is up to browser developers to bridge this gap before the threat to usability becomes a major issue.