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I think most people who read the book would have probably expected much from the movie adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. However, there are some good parts, except maybe the only thing which is consistently good is Marvin's character (you know, the depressed android...)
at least, that's what I think of it... and maybe that is why:
------------------------------
Robot
You are 57% Rational, 28% Extroverted, 14% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant. |
You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit.
( Read more... )
| |
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actually, it's more an interest % test, but whatever...
-------------------------------------
Your brain: 40% interpersonal, 40% visual, 140% verbal, and 180% mathematical!
|
Congratulations on being 400% smart! Actually, on my test, everyone is. The above score breaks down what kind of thinking you most enjoy doing. A score above 100% means you use that kind of thinking more than average, and a score below 100% means you use it less. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how interested you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are different kinds of thinkers.
Matching Summary: Each of us has different tastes. Still, I offer the following advice, which I think is obvious:
- Don't date someone if your interpersonal percentages differ by more than 80%.
- Don't be friends with someone if your verbal percentages differ by more than 100%.
- Don't have sex with someone if their math percentage is over 200%.
|
 |
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 60% on interpersonal |
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You scored higher than 55% on visual |
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You scored higher than 94% on verbal |
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You scored higher than 90% on mathematical |
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first, I just saw that the "Current Mood" and "Current Music" things are customizable, so I changed it to "Currently Reading" and "Currently Writing", because well, I care more about what I write and read that what I listen to or what is my current mood.
but anyway, since LJ is so strange, now Currently Reading/Writing actually appears also on my FRIENDS list. this means that if anyone sees my entries on their friends list, they would have to consider "current mood" is "currently writing" and "current music" is "currently reading" for me, or of course it would make no sense... get it?
------------------------------------------
because U of O is also so strange, we've been having our spring reading (i.e. no class) week last week, while most of the people I know who are studying in Montreal or Quebec have it next week. not that I should complain, because at the point where I was before reading week (i.e. with my schedule planning close to collapse), I couldn't have wait for another week before the break.
and if the break week was next week, the Rideau Canal skateway would probably have half-melted or something.
and what was the good news of the week ? yes, Canada opted out of the missile defence project. that's great.
but also, OPIRG has the best black chocolate in town. well, maybe not, but it's close to campus. and it's fair trade chocolate, too!
----------------------------------
one thing that didn't help was the student federation elections, which were held just before reading week and in the middle of midterm season. and elections means a busy week for the student paper. so I might has well save some anecdotes from that Friday, Feb.18th day of work at La Rotonde, reviewing the results of the election.
1. first step, interview the winners. 4 of them could be contacted, but the elected v.p. finance was gone for reading week as soon as Friday morning (stupid election schedule, again). we didn't know her phone number there, but knowing she is from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which is not a big city, I have the (not) brilliant idea of using Canada411. result: 6 calls, 6 wrong numbers. oh well...
2. apparently, because of technical problems, they couldn't have an online list of who voted. so since there were 10 voting stations on campus, people could just go vote at multiple places and by the time the responsibles find out, the damage was done. some people voted up to 5 times. 25 extra votes were cast, but they didn't have any idea which ones they were.
now, in one of the most mathematically-deficient decisions I've witnessed, the SFUO decided to cancel 25 votes AT RANDOM. since the probability that they cancel the good ones is virtually 0, at best it won't change anything (the cancelled votes will be distributed like the rest), at worse it will bias the results further.
3. I didn't hear this, but according to the news editor at LR, someone on the elections committee honestly tried to explain the stupid decision above by saying : "you know, maybe they voted multiple times, for DIFFERENT people each time."
yes, sure. they voted once, felt bad about their choice, so they went to vote two more times for another candidate to cope for their error ?Currently writing: Column for March 7th's Rotonde Currently reading: Year 501: The conquest continues (N. Chomsky) |
|
List of the top 110 banned books worldwide. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of).
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keye |
|
I've been working at the student newspaper for four weeks now (although I was a volunteer for three semesters before), but still I feel like I just have to write so much (well, not that much, but two articles a week) that I have trouble focusing and doing my best on each one.
The facts are that deadlines are relatively strict, people are busy and one has to schedule interviews and more often that else you can just talk one time which each person, hoping to know enough on the subject to ask the relevant questions then.
moreover, even if you wish to get more sources, if you don't have the time to you do with what you have... I could actually cover subjects more in depth, but considering this is only a part-time job (with very-full-time physics-maths studies), I have just the time to do the weekly work.
which would be ok, in a sense, but being a perfectionist person and all, I always hope to be doing there for something else that for just saying I've worked in the student newspaper. I hope to have the time to be knowledgeable enough on an issue to feel at ease writing about it and for the article to be useful, which is far from being always the case.
--------------------------
still, despite the difficulties it is a great experience, at least just to start thinking, what is the more effective way to bring information to people.
my current idea is that any journalist should not consider what he writes as "self-sufficient" for the reader. for one thing, all readers have different level of knowledge on any issue. the goal of newspapers is to inform, yes, but not in the sense that you learn a lot from them, or that you think a lot thanks to them, either (you can't discuss a society-wide debate in 500 words).
the goal of newspapers is more like, to tell people what these people who watch on the news think is important for you to know. This power of the media to literally decide what's important in the current issues is huge. not only that, but they also form the first, superficial but wide link between the people who are involved on those issues, and the people who want to learn more or maybe get involved.
nowadays, the written press also serves as a convenient middle ground between the books, which are personal, one-to-one, intemporal and in depth, and the television, which shows to everyone the breaking news in short clips, just to catch your attention. |
| » Twenty-one, Montreal, recent readings et al. |
|---|
I didn't answer a single question right at Twenty-one (well, I got a lot right, but none when I was actually playing for real, I mean)... anyway, for those who want to try:
-----------------------------------
Category: Famous physicians for 11 points
The famous Canadian physician Norman Bethune, who worked during the Spanish civil war, was born in which year: 1880,1890,1900 or 1910 ?
Category: Mountains for 10 points
The Chocolate Mountains, found in the island of Bohol, are found in which country: Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand or Philippines?
Category: U.S. Presidents for 11 points
William Henry Harrison, who died early during his mandate, was president for: six days, one month, six months or a year?
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Still, I didn't waste my weekend in Montreal, as I had time to see again several friends, remember my numerous travels to Mtl last winter, etc.
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Now, I wished to talk about the books I've read recently, but thinking about it I might only have something to say about two of them:
Startide Rising by David Brin (novel): Almost as good as Glory Season, a must if you want a story featuring speaking genetically-modified dolphins! (haha) what I might prefer in Brin's novels than in other sci-fi stories is that his futurist/extraterrestrial societies are actually believable to an extent... I mean, they are structured in a reasonable way, but it still looks "alien", not merely "humans-in-an-alien-disguise".
The End of Physics by David Lindler (essay): with a title like that, I guess I had to read it. I would recommend it, because even if many books can vulgarize modern physics, Lindler's is one of the rare ones who dare critic (or maybe more precisely, question) the way science is done now... experiments have become so difficult and expensive that theorists tend to make up large abstract models with little to no evidence of their existence, except their own internal self-consistency...
-----------------------------
oh well, who knows what the future holds ? in several years, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will give results, and it's maybe the particle physicists' last hope (as far as particle accelerators go) of seeing those strange particles they imagined to make their models work.
so hopefully, these people will discover some things and by the time I finish my studies there will be a new boost in physics research, and I will be able to get a job WITHOUT working for the military.
Jan. 23rd, 2005 @ 09:35 pm
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| » lying game answers! |
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basically, rinku and konami each had 2 correct guesses, and ash wins with 3.
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1. I've met in person 3 or more people on my LJ friends list.
TRUE - The question includes people I knew in person BEFORE they were on my list. This includes my brother kazurasama obviously, but also friends candyash and th3k1d.
2. My LiveJournal title was originally the title of a video game I planned but never made.
TRUE - Day-Dream Echoes, which I talked about briefly two years ago when I was making it for the 2nd human day contest.
3. The place I've visited farthest from home is Florida.
FALSE - British Columbia, where I went for the undergrad physics conference in November, is more than 4000 km from here. Florida is about 2500 km from here.
4. I often read science-fiction and spy novels.
TRUE - As LJ entries about books I've read show.
5. My full name is identical to the one of a former French Minister of Interior Affairs.
TRUE - As can be found in the first links given by typing "Philippe Marchand" in Google.
6. I once composed music that was called similar to the "shrieks of rats being barbecued".
TRUE - For SpellBind, reviewed on the old RPG Online.
7. The political philosophy closest to my ideas is some form of anarchy.
TRUE - Meaning that I don't think any form of hierarchy of power (but not hierarchy of function, that's different) will survive in the long run.
8. I've read more of Noam Chomsky's books than of Ayn Rand's.
FALSE - As I've mentioned recently, I think, the only book by Chomsky I read was Manufacturing Consent. I read two novels and some non-fiction by Ayn Rand.
9. If I don't like being a physicist, the 2nd career I'll consider is politician.
FALSE - Everyone guessed this correctly, I'd rather be a journalist than a politician (and besides, considering my quasi-anarchist philosophy, the latter would be too ironic).
10. After this (winter) semester, my two first years of University will total for 82 credits.
TRUE - Although I might put this down to 79... I had my first General Relativity class today and the teacher seems to have trouble with a lot of things (saying a white dwarf and neutron star are the same thing, that particles with mass can travel at the speed of light, etc.). but maybe it's just because it was the first class.
11. I still have wisdom teeth.
FALSE - I know, this was a difficult one, but I'm quite sure I told many people when I got them removed last year.
12. I never broke any of my bones.
TRUE - Although orthodontic treatments probably moved and/or deformed some bones, that doesn't really count as broken.
13. I like trivia games.
TRUE - Obvious enough.
14. I am quite convinced global warming is a scientific fraud.
FALSE - I never actually had the science background to judge that and seen actual data that shows this.
15. I am quite convinced the Ballistic Missile Defence program is a scientific fraud.
TRUE - I spoke about that often enough here and at school.
Jan. 5th, 2005 @ 06:42 pm
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| » lying game! |
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taken from konami and rinku.... guess which 5 of the 15 following statements about myself are lies:
1. I've met in person 3 or more people on my LJ friends list.
2. My LiveJournal title was originally the title of a video game I planned but never made.
3. The place I've visited farthest from home is Florida.
4. I often read science-fiction and spy novels.
5. My full name is identical to the one of a former French Minister of Interior Affairs.
6. I once composed music that was called similar to the "shrieks of rats being barbecued".
7. The political philosophy closest to my ideas is some form of anarchy.
8. I've read more of Noam Chomsky's books than of Ayn Rand's.
9. If I don't like being a physicist, the 2nd career I'll consider is politician.
10. After this (winter) semester, my two first years of University will total for 82 credits.
11. I still have wisdom teeth.
12. I never broke any of my bones.
13. I like trivia games.14. I am quite convinced global warming is a scientific fraud.
15. I am quite convinced the Ballistic Missile Defence program is a scientific fraud.
Jan. 3rd, 2005 @ 08:57 am
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| » Happy Christmas ! |
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I wish a happy holiday season to all of you, including great successes and moments of joy for the upcoming year of 2005.
and since I thought I might actually do something constructive with that digital camera I received at Christmas last year, I created an account on deviantART (http://quazlat.deviantart.com)
Dec. 26th, 2004 @ 01:41 am
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| » there's still some hope in Canada |
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1. they still haven't approved Ballistic missile defense... however, it doesn't look good on that point.
2. today the Supreme Court said that outlawing gay marriage was against the Charter of Rights, and that churches still have the choice to not marry gay couples.
it actually makes sense. but as my brother said : "isn't that obvious ?" which makes you wonder why it took them so much time to figure that out.
besides, heterosexual love doesn't really make more sense that homosexual love. so much for the "sacred traditional marriage".
Dec. 9th, 2004 @ 06:36 pm
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| » Almost over, but... |
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The last 5 or 6 weeks have been crazy, I've probably spent over 50h a week at the University (I have 20 hours of class a week). Still, now this semester is almost over and looking backwards, it seems great:
- Kept six classes, including two in English (but it's mostly math, so the language barrier is not so bad... haha!). I predict a minimum of 3 A+'s.
- Went to Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference !! Took the plane for the first time, to the most western location I've ever been to (Victoria, B.C.).
- Managed to write in the student newspaper every week, except when I went to CUPC. Was able to work more independently than the other semesters I volunteered (mostly because of my new participation in U of O activism).
- With All for what ?, Alternative Voices Series, Global Peace Coalition, OPIRG, etc., was able to get aware of most of the activism on campus. And I volunteered in several projects, including the ballistic missile defence opposition.
- Participated in the (now traditional) CEGEP improv marathon, two trivia tournaments in Ottawa.
- And among all this, lots of great conversations with the few great people I am lucky to know.
Ok, there's some problems: 1. Lack of exercise, 2. Lack of sleep (5 hours a day in the last week).
But still, isn't it crazy how things change in a few months ? Isn't life amazing ? (Hint: yes, it is)
Nov. 26th, 2004 @ 11:40 pm
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| » Why RPG worlds are donuts...or maybe not |
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For some reason, I was thinking today about how to visualize a four-dimensional surface, and it let me to the analogy of a tridimensional surface (like the surface of a sphere) represented in 2-D... like the map of a RPG (Final Fantasy, etc.) that warps at the edges.
However, thinking of it, those warping maps cannot represent a sphere. Compare with a Earth world map... if you go past the North Pole, you don't end up in the South Pole, you just end up at the North Pole, but on the other edge of the map (on our maps, the North and South Poles become a "line". Whatever other way you can find to show the surface of a sphere in 3D, it will never warp like in Final Fantasy.
To imagine what a RPG world map (i.e. one in which the left line warps to the right line, and the top to the bottom) would look like, take a rectangle of paper, and bring the top and bottom sides together... now you have a cylinder. How can you then make the left and right side connect ? you have to put the two circles at each end together, stretching the paper (!) and making... a donut!
Obviously, it is unlikely that RPG worlds can really be donuts, for two reasons:
- The "inside" of the donut has a shorter circumference that the outside, obviously. This means that the 2D-map should either be narrow in the middle and large at the ends, or vice-versa, and not really a rectangle.
- It can't be close to a square like the 2D-maps in RPG are, because obviously the length in one dimension (the circumference of the whole donut) has to be bigger than the length in the other one (the circumference of donut "tube").
- No one has flew high enough in an airship to "hit" the other side of the "inside" of the donut.
Oct. 7th, 2004 @ 09:15 pm
|
| » since I was talking about war... |
|---|
while everyone agrees about how war is a terrible thing, it's curious that so much rationalization happens all the time to justify it. interestingly, all the justifications for war revolve around two "arguments", and it happens that they represent the traditional two opposing ideas on ethics.
the deontology or a priori:
"They started it."
the teleology or a posteriori:
"We won."
Aug. 23rd, 2004 @ 08:30 pm
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| » ideology as eternal refutation |
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imagine a scientist who has constructed a theory about a particular phenomenon. now, if this person were to start, from this point on of her life, to only write reviews of other theories showing their flaws, she would surely help the progress of science in some ways, but would SHE be doing science herself ? I think not. surely not, if she doesn't produce/discover more knowledge from this point on. surely not also, if she reviews only the worst of the other theories to secure her position.
but what if that attitude was precisely that of philosophers, politicians, an any common person suscribing to an "ideology" nowadays ? these people seem to have understood that "attack is the best defense", so they keep attacking straw men, i.e. either modified version of opponent ideologies, either the worst version of the opponent ideologies.
this attitude is analogous to "attack the enemy's weaknesses". it is a WAR attitude. so now, where do so much people enter in ideological war mode relatively in their life ? peoples enter wars when they see a threat. this is probably the same thing here. however, even if some sort of threats exist anytime, you can't be fighting wars anytime: war is unproductive.
any resources used towards war are lost; weapons are made to be destroyed. many countries, even the USA, have a constantly war-based economy. many people have a constantly war-based mode of thinking, where the priority is to attack the opponents' ideas. this could explain why free speech is insufficient to raise "intellectual productivity".
this analogy breaks down on at least one point. in physical wars, the threat is towards one's life, which is a given and automatic value. you don't need to "make sure" your live is valuable. on ideological wars, the threat is towards one's ideas... but the value of these ideas depend on how much they represent the truth, and to figure that out requires time and energy; which is not done when this time and this energy is used in attack against rival ideologies.
moreover, "attacking one's weaknesses" is good strategically, but in ideologies, it has a psychological impact if one is not careful: attacking straw men leads people to believe these straw men, i.e. weak ideas is the only opposition, the only alternative which exists. this illusion is dangerous, both strategically and in personal long-term development.
Aug. 23rd, 2004 @ 09:50 am
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| » olympic debate |
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since it is in the news and I think the answer is not so obvious, I'm inviting anyone reading this and having questions or comments on the matter to reply:
are performance-enhancing drugs a bad thing ? should they be forbidden in sports competitions (or any competition... for example if mind-enhancing drugs also exist) ?
to my knowledge, most of these drugs have bad effects on the athlete's health in the long run. so using these would be immoral and self-destructive, sure. however, if that's the only objection, that would mean a performance-enhancing drug has no reason to be forbidden, and that it's up to individual athletes (if they are adults, obviously) to judge whether the possible negative secondary effects are important or not.
so another reason is one of "fairness". but why is it more unfair to play against someone who used those drugs, than to play against someone who had a genetic advantage for example ?
maybe the deeper reason is that sport competitions, especially the Olympics, are made for spectators, and it doesn't "look good" to have "artificially-enhanced" athletes. that the people who watch will be more impressed, more proud of the athletes who won it "by themselves, without technological assistance"... obviously it is a myth, since even without the drugs, technology helps the athletes break records. but whatever good and rational reasons exist for individual athletes deciding to not use the drugs, the debate for their "illicitness" is more an emotional one.
Aug. 18th, 2004 @ 09:57 am
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| » activist discount / Newton and religion |
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very funny news item I read on anarchists LJ community; apparently, peaceful protesters in NYC (during the Republican convention) will receive discounts: http://www.nycvisit.com/content/index.cfm?pagepkey=1270
I wonder if that will apply to the counter-protest also ?
I still think the idea is somewhat strange, I think it's part of the fact that everything is recuperated by marketing agencies nowadays, especially the so-called "counter-culture".
anyway, I don't think something like this will be offered in Ottawa any soon...haha! also, I don't go to protests. actually, I've went to one against the war on Afghanistan (yes, I said Afghanistan, not Iraq) and in the near future another protest-worthy item might be the missile-defense program (the fact that our government in Canada wants to collaborate to this costly hopeless venture).
----------------------------
I'm reading a biography of Newton, and one of the things I was surprised with is how much Newton was a religious person and how it affected his work; even more than Descartes, actually. the book says that according to Newton, any serious theory about the physical world should imply that God is omnipresent and continuously acting in its creation (this goes against deists, for example, for whom God just "set up" the universe as a machine that keeps working by itself afterwards... according to the book, Descartes also believed a variant of that). Newton believed God continuously creates matter, so that the Universe is infinite.
this is one of the reasons why Newton advocated "forces" (gravity, inertia, etc.) as fundamental components of the understanding of nature, while many atheists believed that movements are just consequences of previous movements, not independent forces. so interestingly, Newton, from which the mechanistic philosophy drew much of its inspiration, was never a "mechanist" himself.
Aug. 18th, 2004 @ 09:40 am
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| » a different view on thinking vs. feeling, rational vs. emotive |
|---|
it is true that if someone conceives emotive people has having strongs feelings and weak ideas, and rational people as the opposite, it leads to a lot of misconceptions such as that rational people are unsensitive, etc.
the problem, maybe, is that the distinction isn't in the "strength" or emotions and thoughts, but rather to their evolution. what I mean by that:
- the "rational" types tend to focus much of their introspection on their thoughts and question them, having a lot of internal debates, etc., so that their ideas will evolve very fast... rational people usually change their minds often in analysis-based debates, as each time they think it a bit deeper, it changes the whole picture.
but the emotional responses of a rational person can be as high as anyone else. what is likely to happen, though, is that as the rational investigate less his/her emotions, this emotional response will be relatively constant in time, they will tend to keep the same motivation/desires.
- the "emotional" type is the opposite, of course: focusing one's introspection on motivations, desires, tastes, etc. these will evolve very fast. they will change their minds often in desire-based questions, which include caeer choices and personal relationships (although in both cases, there are good motivations also to keep the same career or relationship for some time).
however, emotional people are not immune to ideologies and to have "principles". actually, as they don't spend as much time questioning these, it is very probable that these people will be "stuck" in some ideological framework, at least until this framework will clash with their emotions.
-------------------------
the obvious limit to this analysis, of course, is that at the fundamental level, and in the long run, emotional motivations and rational thoughts are interrelated in a sort of feedback cycle. however, this cycle is much longer than the daily decision processes, so they can be good "archetypes" for relatively short term situations.
Aug. 10th, 2004 @ 12:05 pm
|
| » Robert Jensen talk at Ottawa U |
|---|
as a side note, I went to the conference by Robert Jensen yesterday, which was relatively interesting considering I didn't really like the subject at first ("Dismantling the empire from within"). but it did echo some of the things I commented on the American left in an earlier entry.
Jensen mentioned how much the anti-war movement or the "popular left" is so much focused and motivated by Bush-hatred (Fahrenheit 911 and the response it's got definitively shows this). one could say the REAL left would not like a Kerry victory. all those people who got the mainstream message (i.e. Moore's and company) will just say : "ok, Bush's gone, now everything's fine". it's not very productive to have a (little bit) better government if it revives the political apathy of the population.
Aug. 7th, 2004 @ 06:53 pm
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| » why focusing on the objective reality is more open-minded |
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it's true that open-minded is not an expression for which I have a clear definition (well, not as clear as I want), but at that point, the rough popular idea of it will do.
what I want to point out now, is that contrary to the widespread belief that people who are more "rational" tend to not care about other people. however, I noticed more and more that people who focus too much about emotive personal experience, that care most about the subjective that objective approach to reality, tend to judge every other people by the way in which they bring them happiness or pain, etc.
sure, these judgements are done by everyone, but I highly doubt they are the basis for any sane human relations and of any concept of rights. the feeling I have is that people who acknowledge the primacy of an objective reality, have an intrisic feeling that other humans are just like them, persons, not mere tools to achieve their whims.
I also thought of this while reading in my friends page a recent entry by wynand. to paraphrase one sentence of this entry, he does mention that it could not be right to say empathy is merely the act of associating what others live to one's own personal experience of pain.
personnally, I'm inclined to believe empathy (or more generally, respect) is just that, simply that rational identification that all people are humans and they must feel similar things as I do in similar circumstances. I don't think it's necessary for an understanding empathy to imagine it's linked to some emotion such as a kind of "unconditional love"... mostly because people who seem to advocate it are always very conditional about it (see how Christianity was corrupted)
emotions do exist and shouldn't be ignored. it's normal to wish good to people whose presence you like. however, basing broad value-judgements primarily on this subjective experience of reality leads to only treating as "humans" those who contribute to your happiness. love and friendship should be conditional, sure... but not respect, not human rights. they are based on the objective reality of the human condition.
Aug. 7th, 2004 @ 06:32 pm
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| » information and energy, part 1 |
|---|
I started reading "La nouvelle grille" by Henri Laborit, and in the first chapters he makes a precise distinction between energy and information, using an example which is simple enough: a message is sent by telegraph. if the sender would exchange the order of the letters, sending the message would require the same amount of energy, but the information would be lost.
in a broader sense, Laborit presents the definition of information as the set of relations between things, whose support is matter and energy, but which cannot be reduced to matter and energy alone. interesting that this meaning was already contained in the etymology...inFORMATION. although here it isn't limited to spatial relationships (formation, shape)... else if is was just spatial, the universe would be mechanistic ? ok, I'll elaborate on that in the next entry.
Laborit cites information theory and cybernetics about that... it looks like an interesting subject, I'll try to read about it soon. He also thinks this distinction is the starting point to link natural sciences and humanities, as it prevents a "reductionist" (i.e. materialistic) approach.
-----------------------------
I'm not sure yet if it would be accurate to say the relation between mind and body is similar or even an example of this relation between information and energy. (the mind can't exist without a material support, but it isn't the matter & energy itself...). in that way "materialism" could designate the belief that both the mind and the information can be "reduced" to the brain or the energy-matter, respectively.
Aug. 4th, 2004 @ 06:24 pm
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| » ARF on pollution and rights |
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arg, another political entry, but I wanted to save this for future reference
--------------------------
I left community/aynrandforum and joined community/aynrandgroup instead some weeks ago. I was getting tired of the ARF people who always bring the same points and start their posts with things like "you believe A is not-A" or "you're denying reality".
moreover, the last example with that is a debate with baikonour over pollution and rights (I can't find the thread, that's mainly why I stopped replying). he was probably thinking that I was advocating the idea that clean air/water should be a right or a property in the objectivist sense, which is clearly impossible in practice, I agree. actually, I didn't advocate any solution yet, I was still debating that usual objectivist/capitalist premises conflict when you consider the problem of pollution. and I don't think the solution is to say that pollution isn't a problem. THAT would be denying reality in favor or a priori principles.
(also, ironically, Ayn Rand clearly said there's no a priori principles in politics; that they are derived from reason, ethics, etc. why many objectivists put political ideas as axioms is beyond me)
-------------------------
but for the record, many people still believe that rational people in a free market would obviously spend their money on non-polluting alternatives. which is all but obvious. sure, pollution, a priori, affects everyone in the same way, since everything travelling in air, water, and even the soil will tend to diffuse. still, it is not an advantage for everyone to counter it.
the usual free market hypothesis is that people making rational choices would take the option that induces the highest marginal benefit, or lowest marginal cost. now, despite the fact that the pollution is the same experienced by everyone, the costs differ.
a relatively poor person is not likely to buy an SUV. nor are they likely to have shares in oil companies. if they choose the option to consume less polluting goods, they wouldn't have to abandon much (relatively, compared to the rich), since they don't benefit much from any polluting goods already. now, if they choose the option to keep polluting goods and spend money on any "cleaning technology", the cost to them will be great, and some may be unable to afford it.
at the opposite, people who are consuming more (by having an higher income) are likely to lose more by the first option. however, the second one, investing in cleaning technology or buying bottled air/water or whatever, is more affordable for them.
anyway, I don't have to elaborate that much on this point, which is clear enough. what would happen exactly in a huge market is hard to tell, because it would depend of the details of the production, consumption and wealth repartition. however, it is clear that the rich people who consume the most have the most "weight" in the outcome, so that it is fair to predict that with the premises of capitalist economy, a free market will favor globally less-polluting alternatives only when the cost of depolluting will be too high for its richest people.
I don't provide any solutions there, so that might sound like easy criticism... however, I think before anything can be done, it is important to break the myth that rational free market decisions will naturally and instantly favor environment-friendly options.
Aug. 4th, 2004 @ 08:08 am
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| » and to close my recent series of political entries |
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I think I've finally been able to define clearly what I want to mean by "propaganda". I do use the word in a negative sense and as an example of intellectual dishonesty. so my current idea on it is:
the goal of propaganda : to promote opinions or actions whose rational reason are based on an ideology and principles the target people don't directly agree with.
so propaganda is : justifying the opinion or action described above without invoking the ideological principles behind it. instead, a less abstract and less ideological justification (which more people are likely to agree with) is found out. this justification can be judge to be made-up and irrational, as if often falsifies facts or at least uses double standards* in their analysis.
*by double standard, I mean that the made-up justification is applied only to some cases and not to other equivalent ones. of course, the cases wouldn't be "equivalent" if one would apply the ideological principles, but the point is precisely that the propaganda tries to do the work without them.
-----------------------
ok, this might seem really straightforward, but I did have a lot of trouble in recent years to precise this concept, which as you know people use all the them without really making its meaning clear. btw, this was inspired by the fact that I'm reading Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent. however, they don't define propaganda directly, and it's possible that my definition isn't the same they had in mind. what I mean by "inspire" is that reading the book make me think : "Do I consider that propaganda ? if so, why?"
Jul. 30th, 2004 @ 11:25 am
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| » I don't want to sound anti-American, but still... |
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the electoral options seem so boring for Americans in the next election that I almost feel like the Canadian ones were not...haha
first, is there any leftist candidate ? Nader is running with support from the Reform party... weren't these people archaic right-wing ? or maybe I'm wrong.
but don't start saying something about Michael Moore. if Moore is the leading figure for the left in America, then you're seriously in trouble. although most Democrats are probably no better, seeing how they support him (actually, maybe Kucinich or whatever he's named is a real leftist, but he got so little support it's not really worth considering).
Moore is not an advocate of social-democratic values, let alone environmentalism or other left ideologies. he's mostly a common guy frustrated by the Republican administration. and sure it's great that people can express their frustration considering the bad record of the Bush administration, but being "anti-Republican" or even pro-Democrat doesn't mean being "pro-left" or anything. the USA were not more "socialist" under Clinton and Carter and Kennedy. actually, Bush might have done more AGAINST individual freedom (with the Patriot act) that in favor.
Jul. 29th, 2004 @ 09:44 am
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| » indifference to the truth (continued) |
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also, what I forgot to add in the previous entry... these two ideas :
1) that when inaccurate facts are corrected in the media, it doesn't get as much attention as the first rumor.
2) people don't really care as whether the alleged fact is true or not, they just consider it "convenient argument" for their position.
form a kind of vicious circle. if the media becomes more about rumor and spin that analysis and research, if "fast thinking" comes before "thorough thinking", then people will get used to this irrational information and will demand it more... thus the media will have commercial interest in spreading even more rumors.
more generally, I think the following could be an important pillar of "intellectual honesty" : the main factual arguments I bring forward in favor of my position on a issue, should be the facts that, if proven inaccurate, will make me change this position. this guideline also helps having debates which are useful and beneficient to the debaters. I am also confident that ultimately, this kind of honesty beneficiates is greatly beneficial to the person who practices it.
Jul. 28th, 2004 @ 08:49 am
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| » Lies and the "indifference to truth" |
|---|
At a conference by Pr. David Noble at the university, which I've attended in May, he mentioned that in his opinion, most public relation people don't "lie" in the sense of saying something while knowing that it's false. rather, many of them are simply "indifferent to the truth" i.e. they just supply information without caring to check whether it's accurate or not, because the accurate-ness is irrelevant.
now, I think this could be applied so something broader than public relations. what is frightening is how much people can tell absurdities in the media and getting away with it. some people might argue the fact that they get away with it is because:
1) the dubious information makes the front page, and when much later it is proven inaccurate, the correction is almost never a big headline.
2) when it is found inaccurate, the people who did the mistake at first act like they "never meant that at first"... this is what we associate with totalitarian states usually (i.e. Stalin making dissenters like Trotsky "disappear" from the party archives, so that it appears these people have always been "enemies), but surely a milder form of it still exists. consider how quickly the official discourse on WMD in Iraq changed from "they are hiding WMDs" to "they have the capacity to produce them" when the weapons were not found.
(there was some mistakes that were admitted and not hidden, as with the CIA/Tenet case on Niger uranium)
-----------------------------
however, even when officials frankly tell they were wrong at first, even if the correction to the former information is quite visible, many people don't consider it. which leads me to think "indifference to the truth" is a very common attitude...
let's take a case, for example the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gases. the main reason why it got so much support (it occupied almost all of the environmental mainstream attention for some time) is the global warming scenario, and the alleged fact that the prescribed reductions in the gas emissions would change this scenario.
(of course, there are other reasons for limiting the use of fossil fuels, such as the smog and the health impact it causes, but obviously here the global warming was allegedly the main one, just as the WMD-threat was the main one to justify the Iraq war.)
since so much arguments on both sides were using scientific researches on global warming, consider that a real consensus is made on this issue among the scientific community (note : it ISN'T the case now)... how much people do you think (outside of the scientifics) would change their mind on their previous opinion ? I'm afraid there won't be so many.
now, maybe they do have excellent reasons to keep their position outside of the scientific consensus on whether we can influence global warming significatively or not.
but the point I'm making is that all the media attention is concerned on several facts, but even if those facts were shown to be inaccurate, most of the people (especially the influent or determined ones) won't change their mind. so either the fact is not so important for all the attention it gets, or the people who stick to their position are "indifferent" to an important fact. either way, it isn't very good for the rational usefulness of the media.
Jul. 28th, 2004 @ 08:22 am
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| » misc. quotes I wanted to save |
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"actually, now that you mention it, i realize that the common-sense belief that most politicians are liars and power-hungry is completely wrong. most of them are in politics because they want to help people. and that's why they're bad politicians."
from rinku (comment on his own LiveJournal some days ago. I agree with the two last sentences. however, I don't see why this (wanting to help people) would make them any less liar or power-hungry (power in the sense on controlling other people's lifes, of course).
and two quotes from Le Mystère de la patience (a novel that looks like a philosopical tale, much in the same ways as The Alchemist or Le Petit Prince):
"La vie est une immense loterie où seuls les numéros gagnants sont visibles."
("Life is a giant lottery where only the winning numbers are visible.")
and another quote (can't remember the exact phrasing) mentions what I would call the "consciousness feedback effect": our brain is too complicated for us to understand them, but even if they would be simpler, we wouldn't think as well so we wouldn't understand it anyway!
Jul. 10th, 2004 @ 12:59 am
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| » essays on causality and chance in science |
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I've been able to find these two books recently at the university library :
- Causality and chance in modern physics by David Bohm
- Natural philosophy of cause and chance by Max Born
I read the first one and started the second. What's interesting in reading both is their different positions on modern physics.
David Bohm was a serious opponent to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) (which includes the idea that the uncertainty principle for example was an ultimate truth about nature). Bohm was also a student of Einstein at Princeton I think.
Max Born was the one who formulated the interpretation of the square of the Schrodinger wavefunction as a probability. he also clarified the formalism of QM at that time (with Dirac, I think).
---------------------------
so Bohm's approach on causality is what he calls the "qualitative infinity" of existence, and which I could summarize in the idea that everything which exists has an "underlying structure" which explains how it is the way it is.
the infinity comes from the fact that nothing in science can make us think we've found the most "fundamental" structure of things. so Bohm rejects both what he calls "determinist mechanism" (the idea that everything can be explained by the motion of fundamental, structureless particles - the billard ball idea if you know this metaphor) and "indeterminist mechanism". the latter is the popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e. that everything can be explained by fundamental probabilistic functions, while nothing deeper can explain where these probabilities come from.
from Bohm's point of view, since all our laws refer to some "system" which is never the whole universe, both causal laws and laws of chance (statistical laws) are useful. the former to explain the interactions within this system, and the latter to account for random fluctuations existing outside the system studied or in its "underlying structure".
also, Bohm says nothing about free will
---------------------------
in the beginning of Born's book, he defines right away a distinction between causality and determinism :
"Determinism postulates that events at different times are connected by laws in such a way that predictions of unknown situations (past or future) can be made."
(so determinism, from his definition, implies that one can reconstruct the past state of something from its current state... so said otherwise, determinism is the belief that if things are in some way now, they could only be in a certain way in the past and they can only be in a single way in the future.)
"Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurence of an entity A of another class, where the word "entity" means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect."
(note that this definition doesn't suppose the reversibility of time, like the definition of determinism. moreover, with the postulate of antecedence below, the irreversibility of time is necessary for causality to have meaning)
he then puts two intuitive principles which causality must respect:
"Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect"
"Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact."
to show an example, by these definitions, Newton's laws of motions are deterministic (time-reversible differential equations), but not really causal. it violates the postulate of antecedence, because time reversibility means one can't say whether the past causes the future or the opposite.
interesting so far, although I should read the rest of the book before judging.
Jul. 8th, 2004 @ 12:24 pm
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| » leaving a message board |
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I had been an active member on these message boards : http://www.cowboysfringants.com/forum for about a year, but I left last week, because the discussions were getting quite bad, with more insults than before and private threats and everything...
what doesn't help is that the forum administrators, despite being one of the best music bands in Quebec, got caught in that "moderating a forum is bad for free speech" dogma, so I expect the situation to get worse. that is why I left.
anyway, one of the comments of another user was quite surprising :
"intelectuellement parlant,tu es foutument supérieur a plusieurs forumeux,et ca cest chiant pour plusieurs,toi tu tente,involontairement,de les dominer avec tes arguments en béton,et ton cerveau est ton meilleur attribut,tu t'en sert sans honte,d'autres par contre n'ont pas se don de la nature,eux ils en ont un autre,le physique,ils tentent de s'imposer par la force,avec menaces,intimidations,insultes,provocations.
cest comme ca partout dans la société,a chacun ses armes,faut faire avec,ou perdre."
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approximate translation :
"intellectually speaking, you are definitely superior to most users of these boards, and this is annoying for many people; you are trying, without noticing it, to dominate them with your solid arguments. and your brain is your best attribute, you are using it without shame, others however don't have this gift of nature, they have another one, physical strength, and they try to rise by force, with threats, intimidations, insults, provocations.
it's like that everywhere in the world, to each one their weapons, they must do with them, or lose."
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I hope he's wrong in his first sentence, though, because I know my own intellect and if it's "definitely superior", then the others have to be pretty stupid...hehe
Jul. 7th, 2004 @ 02:38 pm
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| » election day in Canada / Noam Chomsky interviews |
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overall I would hope for a minority liberal or conservative government. basically, I think both have crazy ideas that need to be tempered.
I might have voted for the NDP if they had a good candidate in Gatineau (such as the one in the neighboring riding of Hull-Aylmer). However, apart from the name of the said candidate, I never heard of her nor seen her participation in the local debates. So I'm voting for the Bloc Québécois, since I feel safe to approve both the party and the local candidate.
but Gatineau is a sort of liberal stronghold, not one of the 10 safest liberal seats in Quebec, but surely among the top 15. And it's dubious that the Bloc is going to sweep more than 80% of the province. the biggest sweep of this election would probably be a perfect 28 seats for the conservatives in Alberta... The Globe and Mail this weekend has one opinion article saying the liberals are hated so much in Western Canada (where conservatives gather much of the protest vote) than B.C. and Alberta separatists movements might rise if the liberals get another victory in the elections.
approximately :
- Liberal government = underrepresented Alberta/B.C. = angry citizens there.
- Conservative government = underrepresented Quebec = angry citizens there.
- in other words, as the Globe's commentator put it, the canadian unity looks in trouble either way.
---------------------------------
also, I finished reading a little book that consists of interviews with Noam Chomsky conducted by Normand Baillargeon (anarchist professor and activist from Quebec) and David Barsamian (alternative journalist from the USA).
what I like in Chomsky's commentaries is that he does comment what's important in the actual situation. what I mean is that while he has his ideology (anarcho-communism or somthing like that), he chooses his targets according to relevance in today's world rather than just ideological difference. most left or right intellectuals fail to do that.
for example, he is probably against laissez-faire capitalism, but he doesn't critic it that much in his interventions, since such a system doesn't exist in today's world and about nobody in the influent people believe in it. he appropriately targets the current US economical system, which is a sort of "state capitalism" or "corporatism", with corporate welfare etc.
Jun. 28th, 2004 @ 09:56 am
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| » Quote from René Thom's (French mathematician) "Paraboles et catastrophes" |
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"Ce qui limite le vrai, ce n'est pas le faux, mais l'insignifiant."
approximative translation : "The frontier of truth is not falsehood, but insignificance."
Jun. 24th, 2004 @ 06:42 pm
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| » Éloge de la fuite |
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Some words about this book by Henri Laborit (1914-1995, one of the pioneers of neuroscience in France), which I've read recently. Éloge de la fuite could be called a condensed form of Laborit's philosophy, since he published more detailed books like La nouvelle grille.
What I found particularly interesting, and which motivated my recent post in aynrandforum, is that the basis of Laborit's philosophy is very similar to "objectivism minus free will". in epistemology, he recognizes three main forms of knowledge (sensations, memory and imagination) which are close though somewhat different than the Randian categories (sensations, percepts, concepts). In ethics, he advocates a view of life as an end in itself, which he constrasts with the altruist idea of "duty", the latter being a tool of domination.
although it's true that I always believed most of objectivism didn't need free will and that this axiom was more something "ad hoc" that Rand introduced probably to valid something else (political ideas, maybe?) that was external to the central ideas of objectivism.
as for Laborit, his politics seem somewhat marxist, but without hegelian dialectics and the pretention to know how history 'works'. also, Laborit mentions that it's normal that a 'plus-value' exists, i.e. a part of the gross profit (production value - production costs) that isn't paid to the producers. at the opposite of Marx, he believes that this is not a 'theft', but it's linked to the idea that some energy and resources are needed to preserve society organization. put in another way, the standards that permit people to communicate, trade, protect their rights, etc., can't exist without putting some effort in it.
however, for a same quantity of effort, he argues there are many possible forms this organization can take. some that alienate*. humans and others which do not.
*it is interesting that both Laborit and Marx (and maybe Rousseau), who deny free will, use the idea of alienation, even if the sense is not exactly the same. for both, alienation means that the capacity of humans to do intelligent activities and change their environment to their benefit is attacked. in that sense, alienation is similar to a loss of internal determinism (one's own mind) to external determinism (the will of others, for example). becoming less alienated, for these authors, could be equated with increasing one's freedom.
Jun. 24th, 2004 @ 01:41 pm
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| » saving some of my comments on aynrandforum free will thread |
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http://www.livejournal.com/community/aynrandforum/63319.html
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first, a choice is not random. if our choices were random, there would be no such thing as a "will", even less a free one. so when we consciously decide to do something rather than something else, we do have a reasoning behind it. it is safe to assume this reasoning is a continuous process, and thus it would cause problem is choice were "instantaneous", because then the instant of choice would be a singularity in the process, they would be a break in the causal reasoning at that instant (just as singularities break causality and are in general considered "unphysical").
so at least I consider there's no basis in saying that the choice could have gone "either way" up to some moment and then *BANG* a decision is made. moreover, this is certainly not what we observe by introspection (I never pretended to ignore introspection during this debate). the causes of a choice are rooted in the past, in other decisions, and etc. if things were decided in an instant, without respect to the past state of mind, this would be no better than a roll of dice.
then, if you admit that choices are dependant on a reasoning which has its own history, you could have an infinite recursion to a "primary choice", but this again causes a problem.
if something has no cause, it means it did exist forever. this is precisely why objectivists consider the universe wasn't created, right ? however, supposing you reject biblical-type Creationism, human minds didn't exist forever. neither did life. each human mind is created or "built up" at some point (again, I'm not speculating on how it was created, I'm just taking for granted the fact that it didn't exist forever, that there's no such thing as an Holy Spirit).
again, saying that the initial state of the mind (and thus the "primary choice" if such thing exists) is "chosen" would create a singularity at the moment the mind was created, breaking causality with whatever existed before the mind.
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the idea is that you can't just conceptualize things as "choice" or "causality" for themselves. they have to fit in a model of the mind and a model of reality (which includes the mind, of course). both extrospection and introspection tell us that causality is based on a "continuity" of events in time (whether it is in physics or the way we think).
introspection and extrospection are not separate, also, because both influence our state of mind, and this state of mind influences future perceptions, internal or external. so I don't think you are right saying we can draw conclusions from each separately and not link them.
or, personally, I wouldn't do that. especially since free will is not essential to the objectivist epistemology, nor it is essential to the basis of objectivist ethics (human life as an end by itself).
---------------------------------
for the rest, I think it goes down to what rinku said : if you'd make a copy of the person before the decision, and of the external context, would the person make the same decision ?
let's suppose you answer 'no' to that. then you make a bunch of copies. some will choose action A, some will choose action B, etc., in the SAME context and with the same history and everything. even if this experiment is impossible, with your conception of free will that kind of outcome should make sense.
now, if you're an external observer, you can't predict in advance if one of the copies will choose A, B, C, etc. all the external and internal factors before decision are the same in each copy. now, if the same situation produces different results (different actions by the person) with no pattern (else it would be deterministic), how it is different (when looking from outside) from randomness ? how can you be sure the actions of the person were not random then (i.e. chosen arbitrarily among the physically possible actions, with no reasoning at all) ?
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also, as a sidenote, it's funny that people often replied to that : the absence of free will would make us incapable of thinking, because we wouldn't control our mind. "you wouldn't control your mind ?" what is this "you" you're talking about ? why should there be "someone" outside of your mind to "control" it. isn't it easier to say the mind is a part of "you" and it controls itself ?
Jun. 24th, 2004 @ 07:26 am
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| » Io-thermal energy ? |
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http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/892.html
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June 9, 2004 — The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer Galileo, found volcanic hot spots with temperatures as high as 2,910 Fahrenheit (1,610 Celsius).
Io, Io, it's the hottest place to go. The satellite of Jupiter is the most volcanically active body, too. How hot is it? WUSTL planetary scientists have shown that Io is so hot its lavas are vaporizing sodium, potassium, silicon and iron gases into its atmosphere.
Now computer models of volcanic eruptions on Io performed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis show that the lavas are so hot that they are vaporizing sodium, potassium, silicon and iron and probably other gases as well into its atmosphere.
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Vaporizing IRON? The boiling point for iron is almost 3000 C (5000 F)! (see http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Fe/heat.html)
Makes one ponder... maybe even the Earth has more geothermal energy potential that we'd think. of course, the difficulty is probably to "control" the energy of things such as volcanoes.
Jun. 16th, 2004 @ 09:25 pm
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| » saving comments about books I've read in the last two months or so... |
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first, fiction:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
I've actually read the three first (of a series of 5 books), which are : The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe and Everything (the two others are So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless).
I have to agree with what Rinku already said about this; this guy is a talented author who has nothing to write about. however, I think this series is probably the best and most funny thing one could write about nothing at all. these books basically take any strange idea imagined by us (immortality, physics governed by probabilities, time travel, etc.), push it to its limit and bring it into the sci-fi "story".
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Le Bien des Autres - Jean-Jacques Pelletier
Literally "The Good of Others", this is the 3rd part of Pelletier's tetralogy Les Gestionnaires de l'Apocalypse. I read the 2nd part two years ago and the first part last year (http://www.livejournal.com/users/specplosive/47911.html). The 3rd part is another tremendous mystery novel (in 1400 pages split in two volumes), focusing mostly on mind control : politics, media, religion/sects, etc. I can't really say more, except repeat the comments from that other post. Pelletier is an incredible story designer!
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The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
A mystery novel set in the Middle Ages, in a background of theological/political clash among the different religious (catholic) orders of Europe. It's written at the first-person (the narrator is a young monk who is the equivalent of "Dr. Watson"; the equivalent of Holmes is William of Baskerville, a Franciscan priest whose mentors were the historical figures Roger Bacon and William of Occam) and the way it was written seems very realistic, one can imagine that was really how people were thinking about life and everything, at that time of history and in those places. It's also good at a mystery novel by itself, but it goes beyond this genre with its strong historical background and convincing characterization. I'll try to read more of Eco's works.
Jun. 16th, 2004 @ 05:02 pm
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| » the holographic paradigm |
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this is the title of a book I've read recently (see Bohm's quote in an earlier entry). it's basically a collection (under the direction of Ken Wilber) of texts by psychologists, physicists, mystics (?), about the "holographic paradigm". the idea came to scientists when studying the structure of memory in the brain; the idea that information is "spread" around and that damage to part of the brain doesn't cause the loss of some information, but a general weakness of memory as a whole. so there is a parallel between this and the information storage in a physical hologram.
but the holographic paradigm is also the idea that this holographic information is also the reality outside the brain. the physics part (due to Bohm) is not developed very well in this book, however it gets very weird because they try to derivate all sorts of mystical ideas from that (very much like the people who try to show the uncertainty principle has something to do with free will).
in one of the articles, Ken Wilber critics the paradigm on the ground that it tries to assimilate mysticism into science. however, one of the interesting things there (more maybe that the paradigm issue itself) is the debate between Wilber and the physicists David Bohm and Fritjof Capra, about the relation between physics and mysticism (or more generally, metaphysics).
according to Wilber, there are six spheres of existence that contain each other, which are physical matter, biological life, three levels of the spirit/soul (mind, subtle and causal) and finally the ultimate, basic principle. this view (i.e. that properties of life will never be understood by physical laws, that properties of the mind will never be reduced to biological interactions, etc.) could have the problem of necessitating the "emergence" of a property at a certain level. Wilber counters this by arguing than ultimately, it's from the first principle that the soul comes, and from the soul comes the mind, down to the life and to the matter. thus the "emergent" properties become "decaying" properties as this "involution" processes. for him, evolution is the process by which matter, then life returns to the unifying first principle.
however, one has to wonder why Ken Wilber, who advocates the end of dualisms in metaphysics, gives so much metaphysical existence to fields of knowledge (like physics and biology) that were delimitated that way in the course of human scientific pursuits and are not separated by a "mystical" barrier. Capra's view on the links between different sciences is particularly interesting.
Capra mentions, to start his example, that quantum mechanics is very precise to calculate the behavior of small groups of atoms. as more atoms come in, they trajectories become chaotic, but if you get a very big quantity of atoms, it becomes easy again, you can use statistical mechanics or thermodynamics. then, if two large amounts of atoms react, you can use chemistry... but chemistry becomes too complex when the numbers of molecules grow again, until you get cells... then it's biology. etc.
the "emergence" is not new laws of nature, but simply that the old laws, used in complex systems (relative to these laws) become inefficient for scientific predictions. then you have to use a different frame of analysis. it doesn't mean that the universe is divided that way metaphysically.
Jun. 15th, 2004 @ 09:20 pm
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| » Robert Jensen on critical thinking |
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"I press these points because we live in a culture in which the skills of intellectual and political engagement are atrophying. Students often equate “argument” with the inane shouting matches of pundits on television talk shows, rather than with the careful defense of a position and response to challenges. Too many students shrug off attempts at critical engagement with “Well, that’s just your opinion,” as if the fact that they hold a different opinion is adequate rebuttal."
from : http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/teachingstatement.htm
Jun. 7th, 2004 @ 10:49 am
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