A mistake is a decision made incorrectly and inconsistently given one’s currently available resources and knowledge. It is *not* merely a regret, viewed from the vantage point of one now wiser having seen its outcome, but a decision which, acting rationally in the exact same scenario, with only the knowledge available to you then, would not be repeated.
This is pretty neat, and I’ve argued the same viewpoint in the past.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2009/07/07/joe-collier-in-defence-of-arrogance/
Many of the world’s religions, particularly the earlier ones, tend to have certain curious traditions which at one point made life possible. Failure to adhere to these traditions typically invited harm of a material rather than spiritual nature, supposedly brought upon by a deity in response to the transgression, but well within the purview of science now. For example, meat must be soaked and salted to be considered Kosher. The concept of a pathogen was unknown then, but it was probably observed that people who prepared their meat in that manner tended not to get as many foodborne illnesses, as the salt acted as an antiseptic. Thus the precaution became ingrained and the illness became a matter of divine retribution.
In this manner, religion has a beneficial effect and would be a supported trait through our evolution.
I’m reading about Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, and his position seems dualist: that will and consciousness are separable entities and that the will is a property independent of the mind.
But consider a hungry man at mealtime. His will (to live) compels him to eat. Now consider that same man but with a mild case of gastroenteritis. Only his body has changed – it would still be a rational objective response to eat, in order to acquire additional energy to fight off the illness and to remain hydrated. Any will existing outside of the body should take this into account.
And yet the man would lose his appetite. A change in the condition of his body has resulted in a change in his will. Thus the will must exist inside of the body.
Genius is merely the combination of original ideas and a level of skill sufficient to realize them.
There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.
Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:
The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.
But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?
This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.
All of human history is a battle between simplicity and complexity. It is reflected in our culture, our science, our philosophy, our governments, our conflicts, and our actions.
We constantly build large, intricate, complex systems, only to later knock them down and return to basics.
Within the context of my philosophy, I’ve begun to think of God as a more abstract omniscient agent rather than a deity; i.e., an entity with full unfettered knowledge of the universe, without any additional connotations.
There are some interesting attributes you can then ascribe to Him: for one, if the universe is truly deterministic on the subatomic level, it is only to Him that there would be any difference. The rest of us have incomplete knowledge of the world on this scale (even discounting the immense, effectively infinite, number of possibilities, there are problems such as the Uncertainty Principle to contend with) and will not be able to perceive the underlying determinism of the universe as it unfolds if the universe is in fact deterministic. (I call this effective nondeterminism). But an omniscient agent would have complete knowledge of the universe and would in fact be able to predict its course were it deterministic.
Another interesting tidbit relates to perception: as I argued in my last post, our own personal universes are colored by our perception. We may be able to reason that the objective universe is not in fact like that, but our senses will always tell us otherwise. One can think of it as performing astronomical study while there is dirt on the telescope lens.
Omniscience precludes such a filter. An omniscient agent does not rely on access to a particular “view” of the universe; the knowledge is direct, complete, and unaltered. Thus an omniscient agent can be used as a mechanism of exploring the objective side of the universe in the objective/subjective duality.
There is a technique in computer graphics, mostly in the context of gaming, known as “skyboxing”, where you simulate a sky by drawing a textured box around the player and moving it around as the player moves. The game universe is defined by the player’s perception – we see a sky and we don’t feel the need to ask questions about how that sky was rendered.
This got me thinking this morning about the “unfairness” of the universe. The objective, physical universe, of course, can care less about you or your well-being; it’s governed by intransigent laws, none of which take “is this a sentient being?” into account.
There is, however, one way the universe can be actively against you in a certain sense: if your body presents an additional struggle to overcome. Just as the skybox around the player *is* the sky in the game world, what we perceive within the real world defines our universe (despite the existence of objectivity given infinite knowledge of the world). If our perceptions are faulty, if our actions are limited, if our attention is constantly drawn away by pain or malaise, our universe has become more difficult to act within. Such a struggle is intrinsic to our own bodies, so it follows us everywhere. Like the sky, it has become a physical fact of our universe. It can thus be said that the universe is in fact working against us to the extent that our bodies are.
So many prospective college students exaggerate things on their applications… I’m listening to it happening right now, amidst sounds of a football game, on the very deadline for applications. I can’t help but think that such a person is not a fit college student. I don’t see why colleges don’t select for honesty. Force the applicants to justify their claims. Watch them all fall apart.