Odds of Determinism Redux

Picture it, Detroit 1932, something peculiar happened to one Joseph Figlock, who up until that point didn’t think he was the type of person peculiar things happened to.
Especially not the types of things that if one were to come across them in fiction would cause an outburst of ‘that couldn’t happens.’
After all, he was just a street sweeper.
Undoubtedly, during the course of his duties, Joseph Figlock had to have come across a few oddities, things people toss out, things people didn’t want anymore, but that was probably the extent of his encounters with the abstract concepts of probability.
Perhaps it had something to do with exactly that.
Something to do with Joseph Figlock’s constant interaction with things discarded that resulted in it happening the first time.
However, two weeks later when it happened a second time, chances are Joseph Figlock began to seriously question likelihoods and probable events.

The standard definition of probability tells us it is the extent to which an event is likely to occur.
A philosopher would tell us that all things are probable given the unlimited space the Universe provides for us to drift about in.
Quantum Physics tells us it is probable that one day all of my electrons will suddenly jump from where I am to somewhere I’m not, providing I live for billions of years.
When faced with this possibility knowing I won’t live for a billion is a relief, as I’m already something of a nervous person and I don’t want to have to walk around dreading the possibility that I’ll somehow teleport to the Ice Capades.

I know, I know, I’m talking theoretical probability, the analysis of random phenomena, but that’s exactly what happened, so let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

I am not Winston Churchill; you are not Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This is something we can be certain of.
There is no chance the opposite is, or can ever be, true, unless you actually are the Broadway composer in question and you are undercover collecting material for "Blog: The Musical," in which case you can go ahead and ignore this example since it is meant for people who are supposed to not be you).

I cannot become the first Queen of America.
There is no chance of that happening.
Strangely enough, there is a larger chance of my becoming the first Queen of America than of you being Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Granted, my becoming the Queen of anything would be curious circumstances indeed.
These are large enough odds, big clunky examples, that, when questioned, the answer becomes obvious.
Odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are better or worse than Nicholas Cage playing Harry Potter in the next film?
When do chances become less defined?
When do the odds become uncertain?
Is there a way to start with the large and obvious odds and work our down to predicting the smaller stuff such as when we can expect a baby to fall on top of us, which is exactly what happened to Joseph Figlock, twice.
All parties involved survived to tell the tale.

It seems the more we can perceive, or the more we know the less something becomes a probability and the more something becomes certain, which is important for predicting coin tosses and when it’s our turn to have a baby dropped on us.

Time Kills All Its Pupils

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
-Isaac Asimov


Thoughts from the Epicureans:
Suppose we do not survive our deaths. We as individuals have become extinct.
No prolongation of life can reduce the amount of time spent dead.
Some see an infinite lifespan being no better than a finite one, and some would see it as worse (I'm not quite sure how to process this but I'll try).
Obviously we will not be around to experience being dead and therefore cannot be unhappy, harmed, nor can we yearn for life and the the opportunities we are being deprived of after death.

The question is, "Can anything be bad for someone without being positively unpleasant?"

Is there any reasonable basis for caring more about the possibilities we will miss after death rather than the ones we have already missed before birth?

If death really is our exiting existence in its entirety when would we suffer this?


"There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven."
-Isaac Asimov

If Then Do Emotions

(1) Why do humans have emotions? What evolutionary advantage did/does it give us, if any?

"We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation. At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity and so on."
-Albert Einstein, 1950

The origin and advantages of human emotion –biologically, neurologically and evolutionary- is an undeniably longer and more complex explanation than the simplified interpretation I can give here, however, I will do my best to sum up with a few of the more amusing examples I could find by people who know more than I do.

Our emotions give us the ability to think in a certain way, while ignoring facts that might otherwise prevent us from executing a task.

Minsky makes some keen observations on love/infatuation:

"Hear our friend Charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.

"I've just fallen in love with a wonderful person. I scarcely can think about anything else. My sweetheart is unbelievably perfect — of indescribable beauty, flawless character, and incredible intelligence. There is nothing i would not do for her."

On the surface such statements seem positive; they're all composed of superlatives. But note that there's something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like "un," "less," and "in" — which show that they really are negative statements describing the person who's saying them!

Wonderful. Indescribable.
— (I can't figure out what attracts me to her.)
I scarcely can think of anything else.
— (Most of my mind has stopped working.)
Unbelievably perfect. Incredible.
— (No sensible person believes such things.)
She has a flawless character.
— (I've abandoned my critical faculties.)
There is nothing i would not do for her.
— (I've forsaken most of my usual goals.)"

Minsky's observations explain how emotions shape Ways to think by either adding or taking away mental critics. Without certain critics being shut off finding a mate would become even more of a challenge than it already is.
Also of note is how this emotional state coincides with the way popular locations for courtship include low lighting and alcohol.
Minsky is aware of, but doesn't mention norepinephrine, the hormone that produces the excitement that comes during the first states of love, because in doing so he would have to leave the structural understanding and begin a new chapter to explain the biological origins of emotion.
Humans developed emotions in order to distinguish situations and prepare ways to react to or think about what mood is demanded by or would best fit those situations.
Is this a predator? Is this a mate? Will watching Faux News make me angry?
When anger and fear shut off the critics that recognize another person as “human” we get results like the one seen in the Critical Mass video.
The amygdala perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events such as these, which leads us into the debate on whether or not robots will develop this type of response.

(2) Is it not possible/probable that robotic lifeforms will also develop emotions as their complexity develops? In other words, could not emotion be a inexorable byproduct of--or necessary component of-- abstract reasoning and creativity?

I’ve already taken up enough of your time, so I will try to keep this short.
Robots/AI do not have hormones, amygdala, limbic systems and other hardware the brain uses to process emotions. Instead a series of programs and sensors are used to interpret the world logically.
How would you explain to a robot what "cool" is?
Machines have a predisposition to logic but not necessarily common sense, and because I don’t believe in the ‘ghost in the machine’ I would have to assume that if emotions were to develop in Robots/AI it would be through complex programming, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
I would agree that emotions have a hand in creativity and imagination.
For instance, say someone was working late on a term paper and begins to fall asleep. This person might imagine a scenario where the class would have to be repeated due to the failing mark of an unfinished paper. The abstract thinking will stir emotion which will help keep this person awake.
A robot would recognize the low power level and simply plug into the wall.
Unique results in creativity and imagination don't necessarily come from emotion as much as they come from, to put it plainly, insanity:
Taking objects, ideas, scenarios, stories, and reconfiguring them, mashing them together, inverting them, and so on.
This behaviour is part chaos and random and part order, and also can presumably be replicated through complex programming.

Locked In My Mind

"How 'bout the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away...
with mind bullets! That's telekinesis, Kyle."
-Tenacious D

Ever since I first read about presbycusis, testing myself with The Mosquito Tone Audibility Test on my birthday has become something of a tradition.

I'm not exactly worried about getting older as much as I'm worried about my mind and body decomposing while I'm still using them. An inevitable fact I like to ignore by setting these benchmarks.
The day these frequencies no longer register, I will be forced to admit to myself that I have begun to breakdown into simpler constituents.

And apparently this decline is certain become inescapable in another way at age 40, when the myelin -your brain's bandwidth according to Dr. George Bartzokis- begins to unravel and is no longer repaired as often as is should (or could) be, thus bringing us forward into the years of a mental dial-up connection.

Meanwhile, as much as I like to capriciously complain about personal decay, there are other people with real problems that overcome them in the most technologically fascinating and inspirational ways.

Neuroscientist Scott Mackler discovered, at the age of 40, he had ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease.
This did not stop him.
Despite being trapped in his body, he is able to continue to communicate and work via telekinesis (via computers). Personally, I imagine using the absolute deficiency in controlling any of my body's appendages whatsoever as an excuse to never have to work again, however this man is bloody determined.

There's a 60 minutes video here that covers just how amazing his situation has turned out.

On a sci-fi note, we're one step closer to robot bodies or uploading our consciousness into computers.

Points Lost for Humanity

A Man wants to marry an anime character
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?Man_wants_to_marry_cartoon_character&in_article_id=380269&in_page_id=2

Proposition 8 set passed in California
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gaymarriage5-2008nov05,0,1545381.story

Young woman stoned to death by 50 men
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7708169.stm

Future Forecasts of the Future

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!"
-George Bernard Shaw

And now, here are the top ten futurist forecasts for 2009 and beyond:
http://www.wfs.org/Sept-Oct08/Nov-Dec%20FUTURIST/topTen.htm

The most frightening and dubiously obvious forecast was made by Gene Stephens in "Cybercrime in the Year 2025," where he writes, "Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030."

Are we already seeing the beginning stages of this in social networking sites and items like digital dog tags?

There seems to be a fine line between safety and invasion of privacy.

Perhaps in the future, with "Access to electricity reaching 83% and Urbanization hitting 60% of the world by 2030," people can dispense with the literal witch hunts.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/3407882/Child-witches-of-Nigeria-seek-refuge.html

Positive Distractions

I’m frightfully good at procrastinating, and after reading an article on ‘how distractions can facilitate creative problem solving’ I feel as though I ought to employ the technique more often.

http://www.physorg.com/news142012820.html

Sometimes I use absurdly cosmic events to procrastinate or simply be lazy. Most times it happens when I’m faced with everyday chores or simple maintenance.
For instance, when it has reached approx. 2am – I’m still editing but at this point falling asleep in front of the computer– and it is clearly time to retire, I use the inevitable destruction of the Earth by the Sun (http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4031) as an excuse to skip brushing my teeth until the morning.
Then I wake up the next day and ask myself, “Why should I continue this project if the entire galaxy will inevitably be sucked into the giant black hole at its center?”
So then I find other things to do, like go out to buy an envelope and…
“...have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
There is of course an obvious danger in too much of this sort of thinking.

Season of Conviction

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -H.P. Lovecraft

Belief can alter observations, sometimes to the point where evidence to the contrary will reinforce one's belief.
For instance, people who continue to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon after it has been proven false, even by the author of the event, will mutate the proof into something that further verifies their belief.
What's most curious is that the evidence isn't being denied, it's being accepted but mentally designated to another part of the brain.
How does this happen?

Q. When was the earth created?
A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.

Q. What about oil and coal, which seem to have been generated from ancient forests millions of years ago?
A. They are evidence of a Great Flood about 4,400 years ago, which laid down all the layers of sediment at once. They are nowhere near as old as evolutionists and archeologists say. A fossil claimed to be 200 million years old, found in Nevada in 1917, shows a shoe print.

Read more here:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080921/COMMENTARY/809219997/-1/RSS

I think this type of mental gymnastics is the result of age and our brains decaying.
How many people do you think would believe in Santa Claus if they weren't told he didn't exist until 30?
When someone is still young it is easier for authority figures to tell blatant lies and get away with it. The same authority figures are also the only ones that can undo the lie, but not without tarnishing their credibility.
After someone has aged they become the authority on certain aspects of their life, mainly their beliefs, and no longer allow those they consider equal or beneath them to influence these beliefs.
Conveniently, anyone who doesn't share their beliefs is automatically beneath them.

"We must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself."

Double-Think

Making an informed decision is one of the more difficult tasks a person will encounter in life, especially if it is an informed decision about death, since that appears to be where the choices cease to happen.
I would like to purpose a thought experiment.
The world is maddeningly filled with Religions to believe in:
Abrahamic, Indian, Iranic, Taoic/Far Eastern/East Asain, African diasporic, “Pagan” Historical Polytheism/Indigenous/Traditional, Nonsectarian and Trans-sectarian, Spiritual movements, each with its own fascinating and dubious history and each including a considerable variety of subcategories to choose from.
In addition to the traditional religions we have the new religious movements to consider as well.
At this point I think it’s safe to say we have established the entire spiritual catalog, each with its own thick tome to sift through and aide in the decision making process.
One difficulty with making a decision on a religion is that it seems so final, you only get to choose one.
Except for the Jubu who have combined two major religions into one amalgamation of what was previously thought to be conflicting faiths (and they are not the only ones).
This brings us around to the final series of questions in the thought experiment.
Some of the religions listed in the “new religious movements” are the result of combining separate belief systems. How many religions do you suppose one can combine before there are too many structural conflicts?
The dictionary defines faith as: A belief that is not based on evidence.
Without evidence every possibility becomes an option therefore one's beliefs becomes limitless.
Would it then be possible, with all the conflicting beliefs found in each individual religion, to have faith in them all at the same time (including atheism and agnosticism)?

Hobson's Choice

After very little consideration on what I thought to be my only two choices in the matter, I had decided on cremation over burial. The deciding factor was an effort to not take up any more space and resources than I have already (plus movies make the spreading of my ashes look like cathartic fun for family and friends).
I have now changed my mind and will instead help further scientific research.

A friend, knowing my interests in what I suppose could be categorized under morbid, loaned me the book “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” by Mary Roach.
Absolutely fascinating read, it brought to light the many options one has upon meeting up with the indisputably inevitable. For some reason I had overlooked donating my body to science as an option.

You could save the life of a patient by helping future surgeons study anatomy, or you could help solve a murder by assisting the ORNL study rates of decay, or you could become a crash-test-cadaver and come to the aid of everyone who will ride in a car after you have departed.

It baffles me that I could have easily died and become a costly burden without benefiting anyone or anything.
I know, I know, call me frugal.

Some institutions will even cremate your remains at their expense and give your ashes back to your loved ones… after the body has been studied of course.
They may use "tissue digestion" or "water reduction" as an alternative to cremating the remains, since it is more environmentally friendly.

Should I never achieve anything in life, make no considerable contribution to the progress of information or science, I can at least rest assured that my corpse will (unless I'm so unlucky that my body falls off the cadaver truck or something equally silly).

Uninformed Conclusions

I believe random behavior or free will to be conclusions processed and arrived at by an uninformed brain.

Say you are presented with two desserts, neither of which you have ever tasted.
Having no previous data on the desserts, your brain will begin to recognize patterns like typical dessert flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and so on. These and other patterns in the desserts will be processed for previous experience.

Eventually your brain will help you decide on the dessert with the most patterns recognized for having had a pleasurable outcome.
For me this would mean having both desserts.

The trouble with free will is that when you inform someone they don't have it they'll change their actions to prove to you that they do.

"If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?"
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain

In the above sentence resides a truth much more sinister than dessert.

Psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler tested this question by giving participants passages from "The Astonishing Hypothesis." One group received a passage that talked candidly about free will, the others did not.

Afterwards the participants filled out a survey on free will and were then told to complete 20 arithmetic problems. It was explained that when the question appeared on the computer they would need to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen too.

At this point it is safe to assume the results, since I wouldn't have brought up the topic and the article wouldn't have been published had the participants reacted differently.

There Will Come Soft Rains

I don't like the song "It's a small World."
Aside from it being an irritating assemblage of notes and high-pitched lyrics, it contains a message I don't necessarily agree with.
The surface area of the globe we cruise around the solar system on is 510,072,000 km² with 29.2% of that being land. Perhaps a more accurate lyric would be that 'it's a small percentage of land we humans can inhabit after all.'
So what's my problem?
When I drop my keys in a dark parking lot somehow the world seems like a rather large place… Or better, if I’m feeling lackadaisical on a day I run out of yogurt and have to make a trip to the store, the world once again feels like a very large place.
However, when I search the planet (and by "planet" I mean the Internet) for rationale thinking and signs of social improvement, suddenly the world starts to seem very, very small.
There’s book banning, albeit rather amusing in an ironic sense, censoring of comics, armed patrol keeping you in twos, seemingly harmless dubious behavior, and the obnoxiously extolled.

And leaving the planet isn't an option.

Now it's an old tale that the world isn’t perfect, and I’ll admit I prefer this time period to any of the previous ones, however, I have to wonder if this is the best humanity can be.

Near Misses and You

The Earth’s orbit intersects with the orbits of many asteroids. NASA estimates “many” to be about 1000 to 4000, that are bigger than half-mile across, which is when an asteroid begins to pose a threat to human civilization (as you may have learned from Armageddon).

Toutatis, an asteroid 2 miles in diameter, passed by Earth January 3, 1993 at approx 2 million miles away. Before Toutais, on March 23, 1989 an asteroid about half a mile across sauntered by at 0.7 million miles (Oh, and 'Guitar Hero' has sparked an 80's comeback).

Now, nearly everyone will agree that an asteroid (or comet) ended the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago with the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, while some will insist that there was no such period and the Earth was created 5000 years ago (or something equally silly).

250 million years ago Trilobites ruled the Earth, until a mass extinction wiped them all out, ending the Permian period.
Is that too far back to concern ourselves with?
How about the Eocene period at 35 million years ago, which ended with the mass extinction of many land mammals? (This just in, Court overturns fine on Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction')

Whenever I bring up these topics and ruin perfectly good dinner parties I’m always met with an obtuse skepticism, “Well, don’t you think the Universe has tired of these mass extinction antics by now?” or “Certainly humanity has reached a measure of intelligence where we can dispatch any cosmical threat” or there’s those responses I get back from the “5000 years ago” crowd.

I suppose those people are the worst of the bunch, since they have already reached the conclusion that everything is and will always be fine and dandy, that it’s all part of the plan, and communication comes to an abrupt stop (Kim Kardashian has been tapped as the latest celebrity to join the cast of Dancing With The Stars).

Fantastic Headline

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cloned Dog Owner Manacled Mormon for Sex

I have two favorite lines from this article, one is, "tumbling back to the dark days of early autumn, 1977."
Those were dark days indeed, ask Robert Smith, oh, and they were especially dark if you happened to find yourself in NYC during the month of July.
But July is not really in autumn now is it?
Maybe they were passing the darkness around and only NYC took it literally.

What does it take to assemble thoughts? How do some people reason themselves into what appears to be just terrible ideas on the level of common sense and assume a positive mental outcome?
Cognitive Dissonance, sure, but there are some extraordinary cases out there.

I believe the key to solving a part of this mystery, at least for this subject, is in observing sentence structure. Take for example my second favorite line, "I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

You can't send me your thought for tuna, instead you have to speak it or gesture it.
If words represent thoughts, then it would be safe to speculate that we could gather information on how she assembles thoughts from this one sample of her syntax (note: there's probably something out there like this already, I just don't know what it is).

Why a carnation and where did Mount Everest come from? These are seemingly unrelated items. And why do you think she was redundant when it came to specifying what she wouldn't be wearing?
I wonder what color the carnation is?