Rationality

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“Vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody”

There may come a week when I will start the work week of blog posts off without mentioning that the day is Monday.  But it is not this week.

And yes, indeed, it is now Monday, the beginning of another “traditional” work week, and I am writing my first blog post of the week, and I have no idea what I’m going to write other than that I knew I would almost certainly mention the fact that it is Monday.  For future reference, this particular Monday is September 8, 2025 (AD or CE) and is thus the second Monday in September.  Isn’t that all just riveting information?

Well, it’s not much, but it may very well be the best I have for you—and it may not even get this good again for the rest of the post.  Then again, maybe I’ll come up with something brilliant or at least amusing before the end of the next several hundred words.  And that will have made it all worthwhile, you wagering your precious, irreplaceable time on this blog post being interesting, let alone informative.  I’d advise against you wagering a lot of money on it, but you do you, as they say nowadays*.

What else should I talk** about now?  I don’t really know.  I don’t think I have anything interesting to say.  Nothing new or interesting has happened in my life, nor would any such thing be expected to happen.  I was in too much pain even to go for much of a walk on either Saturday or Sunday—just a half-mile stroll to the local convenience store.

I’ve tried mainly to rest and watch interesting and occasionally even educational videos on YouTube, and to read a little bit here and there.  On Sunday afternoon I started watching a bit of football (after I did my laundry), but I lost interest in that pretty quickly.  Really, the only good thing about this weekend, other than getting some rest, was that I had a nice phone conversation with my sister.

Of course, there are certainly things going on in the nation and in the world that could be discussed, but there are plenty of other people discussing those things, and they tend to stress me out too much; it’s sometimes hard to accept the flagrant stupidity of so many members of the human race.  But then I recall that they are all just naked house apes, only a tiny fraction of whom ever truly rise above their broad primate natures, bringing other apes along for the ride.

But, hey, being called a primate is not an insult (and if it is, too bad for you, because odds are you are one).  They’re some of the smartest creatures on this planet.  They also have the capacity to work together in immense and intricate ways in order to survive and thrive, to help each other, to defend each other against the elements and predators and all sorts of other things.

On the other hand, they can also be a#sholes sometimes.  Humans have the disadvantage that their relative competence gives them the power to do great damage when they’re being as#holes—often largely to themselves,  both personally and collectively.  It’s certainly rare when someone does damage that doesn’t at least partly damage them, though the damage may be of a sort that they disdain, not knowing how it will impair them in the future, and possibly—often—not even recognizing, when it becomes clear that the damage has consequences, that it is of their own making.

What the hell am I talking about?  I’m not thinking of any specific cases or examples here, just in case you were wondering if I was.  I’m actually thinking of this in an abstract, almost mathematical way:  a formula, the characteristics of which one can see even when there are multiple unknowns.  It’s hard to say how generalizable the formula might be, and of course details would remain unknown until the thing is actually worked out.  Nevertheless, patterns can be seen ahead of time to some degree.

Jeez Louise, I’m kind of all over the place and still going nowhere right now, am I not?  I don’t know what to do but apologize.  So, here goes:  I’m sorry this post is incoherent and without any point.  I wish I had some brilliant thoughts and insights to share, but genius is as genius does, and by that measure, I am certainly no genius.

I wish I could become some kind of Surak for the human race, to help engender the worldwide embrace of and commitment to rationalism, to reason, to “logic”.  Alas, I doubt that I have it in me to be such a benefactor.  My natural inclination has always been to be a malefactor, but reason tells me I have no right to do harm to innocent people and things.

I wish I felt like writing fiction.  I can channel my dark self in fiction.  And it would be nice, so to speak, to finish telling the story of Timothy Outlaw, most of which is unknown to anyone but me, and some of which would be a revelation even to me if I were to continue to write it.  And that’s just one of several stories that lie fallow in my mind.

Oh, well.  None of it matters, anyway.  Still, I hope you all have a good day, one that presages a very good week.

*And they don’t even mean it as a clever euphemism for “go f#ck yourself”!

**I am using the term “talk” rather than “write” here deliberately, though pedants might insist that what I am doing now is not talking.  I disagree with such people, plainly, and if they say that writing on a word processor is not talking, then what about a nonverbal person who has only that means by which to communicate?  Are they not talking when they do their written communication?

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Rockin’, rockin’ and rollin’. Down to the train I’m strollin’.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Yippee.  I’m writing this post on my “smartphone”* today because I didn’t feel like taking my miniature laptop computer with me when I left the office on Friday.  Perhaps that was shortsighted of me, but hopefully at least this way I will avoid writing too much today.

Of course, as usual, I have no particular subject or topic to address with this blog post.  I just started writing and, well, we’ll all find out what comes forth, won’t we?  It may be a lame-ass way to run a blog, but whataya gonna do?

I did walk to the train this morning, five miles (the same distance as before, of course‒it would be weird if the distance changed from day to day).  It was, perhaps, slightly easier than the last time, which is good.  It would be troubling if it were getting harder every time, though blisters can sometimes make that happen.

I rode my new bike around on Saturday and on Sunday, but I didn’t have the heart to try to ride it this morning.  For one thing, riding it is still just exhausting relative to walking or to riding my other bike.  Also, I cannot help but fear getting a flat tire while on the way to the train (or on the way back), and that possibility makes me too nervous to want to use it.

If I get a flat on the weekend, then I merely need to walk the bike back to the house‒or to a bicycle repair shop, if there’s one nearby, which there pretty much isn’t.  But if I get a flat on the way to the train, then I have to deal with a bike with a flat and with getting to work.

Perhaps I’m just a wimp for not wanting to deal with such things, but I have only so many “spoons” to go around, and they get used up by so many little things throughout every single work day (and other days as well) that I don’t feel that I have any reserves.  For many years now, I’ve felt that I’m in imminent danger of complete collapse; I still feel that way.

One of these times, I’ll be correct in that estimate, but that’s a bit of a cop-out.  It’s like someone stating that the world will end tomorrow, then when it doesn’t (if it doesn’t) they just roll it over to the next day.  Sooner or later, they will be right.  It may take over a trillion tries‒let’s imagine they’re immortal as well as absurdly bloody-minded‒but they will eventually be correct.

Anyway, though, for me it’s not the fact of getting flat tires that’s the exhausting part (though it is exhausting when it happens).  It is, rather, the tension of worrying about it every single time I ride.  You might say that I simply shouldn’t let myself worry about it, should not let that imagined possibility interfere with the “now”.  To which I might reply that you shouldn’t fear cancer and/or heart disease and/or Alzheimer’s, etc., because sooner or later something is going to get you, and your fear is just causing you stress in the here and now.

Or perhaps it would be better, or more analogous, to tell you that you shouldn’t fear running across a busy road, because either a car will hit you or it won’t, and you won’t change that by worrying.  Except, of course, you can change that by worrying, if you act on your worry and therefore don’t recklessly run into the street.

I know, I’m being fairly silly.  I’m not trying very hard to be rigorous right now, so some of my logic may be strained.  But I hope I’m not being fundamentally or thoroughly irrational.  I don’t think I am, but just as it’s not up to you whether or not you’re appropriately considered an asshole, it’s not necessarily reliable for me to judge my own rationality.  I do judge myself, and I am fairly harsh about it, but if I were to start losing my mind, I would be an unreliable witness to what was happening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if that’s even possible.

Oh, and by the way, though I have not set up a Patreon or anything, if any of you would like to request that I write a post about some specific subject or topic, by all means, please let me know in the comments.  I don’t promise to fulfill any and/or all such requests, but I do promise to read and consider them.

In the meanwhile, please have a good day.

*I don’t mean to denigrate the phone by putting that term in scare quotes.  It’s a fine piece of technology, and for the most part, it does what it’s meant to do.  I just think the expression “smartphone” is a poor term.  It’s mainly a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “gluten free” and “non-GMO”:  designed to lure in the insecure and get them to buy particular products to try to counter their…I don’t know, their existential angst or summat.

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You flocks, you shoals, you fine emergent things

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m feeling a bit beat up and wrung out from yesterday, which was an extremely bad day, pain wise.  I really felt quite stiff and sore all day, and I couldn’t help walking with a limp.  It’s quite frustrating.  I do have potential assistance of a kind coming today, and hopefully that might make a difference.  We shall see.  I’ll tell you more when I have more information.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life.  I still haven’t done any work on new song lyrics, nor have I played the guitar or keyboard at all, nor sang.  I don’t even know what kind of shape my voice might be in at this point, but it’s probably pretty rough.

I think maybe I should drink more coffee during the day.  I used to drink it regularly when I was up north, but I’ve fallen off a lot since coming to Florida.  A big part of that is just that coffee is a hot drink, and hot drinks in Florida can be quite unpleasant.

But also, if I can reevaluate my own internal workings and decision-making memory‒which I can‒I tried to cut back on caffeine because I feared it was a major contributor to my tension and hostility and anxiety.  Well, you’ve read my blogs before (unless this is your first time), so it should be fairly clear that that particular intervention was not fit for purpose.  And one thing coffee has always done for me has been to be something to put in my mouth and stomach other than food.  That’s certainly worth a lot in my case.

Anyway, in the new office we have two refrigerators‒the boss brought in one from his garage that was not being used much‒and though neither has an ice maker, ice trays are easy.  So I can make iced coffee to take the sting off coffee’s hot nature.  I can’t directly take the sting off Florida’s hot and muggy nature, of course, but it’s bearable most of the time.

And in the long run, who knows how Florida’s specific climate will alter as the world’s overall surface temperature increases?  One might assume it will just get hotter and more humid*, but it’s best not to jump to conclusions.  Weather patterns are the archetypal chaotic system, and though climate and weather are not synonyms, there is a relation.

Many things interact to maintain specific local climates.  For instance, the Gulf Stream keeps the British Isles much warmer than they would be otherwise, being so far north, but it is not a fixed pattern in the Atlantic, but a product of confluences of various forces and feedback loops (as well as probably feed-sideways paths).  It has not existed forever.  It just feels like it has because human lives are so short, and human minds tend to be woefully parochial and provincial.  This is a source of so many human problems, not least the failure to learn obvious lessons from history.

But I guess there’s not much point in moaning about that lamentable fact right now.  I try to do my little part by writing about what I think are occasionally interesting and thought-provoking ideas, and by trying to learn about all sorts of things myself, from history and philosophy to biology and physics and mathematics‒and, of course, I’m technically an expert on medicine.  It’s as if I hope that by increasing my own knowledge about as many things as I can, I’ll be able to bring up the average and perhaps have some magical diffusion effect.

I don’t actually think that, of course, nor is that really my motivation for learning about various things and stuff.  I just like to understand and know things, to the degree possible, and I enjoy the process of learning them.  Physics is the most interesting subject to me in many ways because it is the study of the workings out of physical reality.  Everything else that happens is “simply” chaotic, emergent murmurations that happen on the surface of the underlying processes.

There is a question whether mathematics is even more fundamental than physics or is rather an invention of humans to describe and work with the patterns that are happening that are not guided by mathematics, perhaps, but simply produce it as an epiphenomenon.

I think Stephen Wolfram proposed something along those lines, based on “cellular automata”**, but though I have his book A New Kind of Science, I have not read it, because I have the Kindle edition.  It’s not really formatted for Kindle, so it’s basically just a PDF of the original book, and that can make it very difficult to read on one’s smartphone.

Such thoughts are quite entertaining and they can sometimes be productive.  I often wish more people were interested in them rather than, for instance, what some particular celebrity did to some other celebrity, or whether some particular advertisement can, with tortured logic, be “judged” to be inherently offensive and even evil, or just how horrifically to punish someone who agrees with only 99% of the things you believe, but disagrees on 1%.

Okay, I need to avoid getting started on that train of thought.  So, I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, by tomorrow I will have some relatively better news than I’ve had recently.  If so, I will probably share it with you.  In the meantime, try your best to have a good day.

*Particularly if sea level rises enough for a lot of the state to become submarine‒now that would be high humidity.

**The most well-known case probably being John Conway’s Game of Life, which is a “game” on a 2-dimensional grid of squares, with particular, simple rules about what happens to any given square depending on whether its neighbors are empty or not.  Remarkable, self-sustaining, and even traveling patterns form from these basic notions, similar to the way the flocking*** behavior of birds can be described with a few basic rules followed by each bird individually, requiring no communications other than just seeing where one’s nearest neighborings are.

***That sound like an epithet, does it not?

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This tue, tue sullied (or solid) day

Tuesday or not Tuesday?  That is the question.  And the answer, for today at least, is that today is Tuesday.

I don’t know when you’re reading this, though.  Odds are, if you aren’t reading this on the day I publish it, that you are not reading it on a Tuesday.  In fact, once we get out past the rest of this week* there should only be a roughly 1 in 7 chance that you are reading this on a Tuesday.

That’s probably pretty obvious, huh?  Still, it can be useful to be in the habit of thinking in terms of probability and statistics, since that’s the way nature sorts itself out, right on down to the level of quantum mechanics, to the best of our understanding.  If people had a better understanding of the nature of probability, many things in the world would run far better, or so I suspect.

I have written at least one previous post (on Iterations of Zero) about how I think probability and statistics should be emphasized far more in general math education at the secondary school level (even for non-college-prep students).

Imagine a world in which most people had grown up learning about the nature of probability with reasonable rigor.  There would be fewer headline-based scares about things that are unlikely enough to be irrelevant‒e.g., plane crashes‒and more appropriate understanding about things like vaccination and disease prevention of various kinds, among numerous other matters.

Imagine if the people of the world really understood the difference between absolute risk and relative risk, and if they grasped the difference between sensitivity and specificity for medical tests.  Heck, imagine if the public at large had a decent elementary grasp of Bayesian probability.  Bayes’s Theorem is not really all that difficult, when you get right down to it.  Veritasium did a nice video about it**.

Of course, as I’ve said before, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit, whereas that’s only figuratively the case as it is.  But it would be nice if politicians and other people with undue influence had to deal with a general public that was savvy about the legitimate use of statistics and why (and how) they are fundamental to a thorough understanding of the world itself.  It’s not an accident nor a mistake that Jaynes named his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

And science is not an esoteric thing.  It is not a high-falutin’ mode of thought that doesn’t pertain to the average person.  It comes from the Latin scire, meaning to know.  It is fundamental to the nature of our epistemology, to not just what we know about the world but how we come to know it, how complete and how incomplete is our understanding and what the nature of the world really is at deepest and broadest and finest and coarsest levels.

So, it’s fairly pertinent to everyone, really.  After all, if you want to win a game (or get your best score or whatever) you’re best off understanding the rules as well as you can.  A true novice is unlikely to win a game of chess, or of Go, or even of Mario Kart against someone who knows what they are doing.

Now, nature isn’t our adversary per se‒if it were, we would all be long gone‒but it “knows” its rules and always and only plays by those rules, by definition.  In fact, if you come upon a place where you think nature has broken its rules***, what’s really happened is that you’ve come to a place where you don’t understand the rules.  Nature cannot be “wrong”.  There is no such thing as the “supernatural” in reality, because anything that actually happens, that actually exists, is part of nature.

Even if you discovered that you were in a situation such as that described by Descartes or The Matrix, in which the reality you think you know is an illusion, that is simply a newly discovered fact about the nature of reality, and it raises**** the question of what is the nature of that illusion, what is behind it, and by what laws of physics do those entities operate?

So, anyway, it’s good to learn about how reality works if you want your best chance (never a guarantee) of doing what you want successfully and getting what you desire from life.  No one here gets out alive (at least it’s very unlikely) but you might as well make the game as rewarding as you can in the meantime.

*Which I suspect would be when most non-same-day readers would read this.

**He also did a really nice one about the logistic map and chaos and the Mandelbrot Set that will blow your mind if you haven’t thought about it before.

***I’m thinking of those stories with submoronic headlines such as “New discovery breaks physics!” which don’t make sense to anyone who knows anything, and which should embarrass those who write them.

****It does not beg the question.  To beg a question is not to raise the question, but rather to proceed as if it had already been asked and answered in a way that you’re presuming it to be answered.  It is a way of skirting fundamental issues and avoiding having to prove a case.  In other words, it is willfully or accidentally disingenuous.

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I well believe thou wilt not blog what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee.

Hello and, of course, good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you may have savvily guessed‒you are a clever one‒from the fact that I started the post with a variation of “Hello and good morning”.  Also, you’ve probably seen that the title above is some modified Shakespearean quote, though as I write this, I have no idea what that quote will be, other than that it will, with very high probability, be a quote from Shakespeare.

Not much new has happened since yesterday’s post‒not for me, anyway.  There’s plenty of material out there for those who wish to comment on what’s happening in the naked house ape world (said apes sometimes imagine that their “world” is of cosmic importance, but it’s actually not even a flash in the pan as far as the universe is concerned) but I try to avoid commenting on such things here, except to note that, boy, humans can be remarkably stupid.

There was a recent-ish Doctor Who episode in which the bad guy made every human on Earth feel absolutely convinced that they were right, about whatever opinions they might hold.  Predictably, this led to global chaos and destruction.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the opposite, or roughly so, to the whole of humanity?  I’m not talking about making people all believe they are wrong about everything; I don’t even know quite how that would manifest itself.  I just mean removing or strongly blunting the sense of feeling right about things.

It’s a reasonably well-attested fact* that people prone to depression, for instance, are not prone to rate their own skills and abilities as worse than they really are but instead are more realistic about them.  This is as opposed to the more “typical” people, not prone to depression, who overestimate their own capabilities, e.g., the notion that, say, ninety percent of people think their driving skills are above the median**.  So, though people who are prone to depression are, well, prone to depression, they are at least less prone to start wars and commit atrocities based on half-baked ideologies.

Oh, and by the way:  to a good first approximation, all ideologies are half-baked.  This isn’t to say that they all are completely wrong.  It’s merely to say that not one of them actually contains “everything you need to know about” whatever.  If they did, it would be painfully obvious to every intellectually honest person.  Intelligent, well-meaning, non-delusional people would be convinced by the ideas as soon as they understood them.  People prone to depression might find consolation and some degree of peace in them.  Atheists would be “converted”.

The notion that any self-contained set of ideas could hold the answers to “life, the universe, and everything” flies in the face of all logic (and few things are more annoying than flies in one’s face).  For crying out loud, it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to explain rigorously the nature and implications of classical motion, as in Newton’s “laws”, with subsequent improvements by Laplace and Lagrange and Hamilton and so on, and all that is only an approximation, at macroscopic scales, to our best understanding (which is known to be incomplete) of the physical nature of reality.  And that’s not counting electrodynamics and gravity, let alone getting into the strong force and the weak force and so on.

It’s a distressing tendency, this human desire to feel right, to want to think that they know the answers and so don’t have to think about things anymore.  It leads to so much more of the trouble in the world than “simple” evil does.

Psychopaths, I suspect, do far less harm overall than people with normal moral capacities‒good people, so to speak‒who believe that they are right.  “For the greater good” is the kind of sophistry that can, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, fumigate any atrocity, including the slaughter of a continent.

Of course, Rand-sensei fell prey to her own self-created dogma and the personality cult that had grown up around her, leading her to get stuck in some quite dubious conclusions.  This is despite her commendable starting points (i.e., metaphysics:  objective reality, and epistemology:  rational thought).  If only she hadn’t been so dead-set against humility.

Humility****, after all, is not really the belief that you are fundamentally worthless (though that may indeed be true on any sort of cosmic scale), but just the recognition that you are subject to error, like every finite being (and probably most “conceivable” infinite ones), and that, it being error, you will not necessarily know where it lies.  It is, after all, the place in which you are mistaken; if it were glaringly obvious, you might be expected to have noticed it already.  Being wrong feels the same as being right, at least until you realize that you are wrong.

There, I did some broad level commentary on the nature of at least some of the world’s problems.  Let this be my open warning against certainty, especially in the realm of morals, especially when you’re assessing other people.  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which you feel that the suffering and even death of other people is tolerable, or even desirable, in order to achieve some presumed better future world, you should stop and maybe induce a seizure so you can reset your brain.

On the other hand, if you just believe something so much that you’re willing to suffer and/or die yourself, and only yourself, well, that’s on you.  Knock yourself out.

TTFN

*I think this data has withstood the reproducibility crisis in psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong.

**I say median instead of “average” because the average is usually meant to refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is in principle entirely possible for ninety percent of people to be above the mean, but not for any more than fifty percent of people to be above the median, by definition***.

***This is one of those rare cases where it’s fully appropriate to say “by definition”, because it is not merely rhetoric but literally applies, the median being a mathematical term with rigorous meaning.

****I just recognized, while editing, that this is the subject/topic/trigger for what is to be my next song.

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“There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know…”

Since yesterday was Monday, the 30th of June, it’s almost inevitable that today would be Tuesday, the 1st of July.  And, in fact, that is the case, unless I am wildly mistaken.

If I were to be wildly mistaken about such a thing, it’s rather interesting to consider just how I could come to be so wildly mistaken about something so prosaic and so reliably consistent.  It is from such speculations that—sometimes—ideas for stories begin.

This is not one of those times, however.  I’m not thinking about any kind of story related to that notion at all, though at times I might consider it an interesting takeoff for some supernatural horror tale.  If any of you find yourselves inspired to write a story—of any kind—based on my opening “question”, you should feel free to write that story.  I, at least, will give you no trouble.

These sorts of thoughts also remind me of a post that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, and which also appeared as a section in his book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  I won’t try to recapitulate his entire argument, since he does it quite well, but it was basically a response to someone who had said or written that, while they considered it reasonable to have an open mind, they couldn’t even imagine the sort of argument or situation that could convince them that 2 + 2 for instance was not 4 but was instead, say, 3.

Yudkowsky, however, said that it was quite straightforward what sort of evidence could make him believe that 2 + 2 = 3; it would be the same kind of evidence that had convinced him that 2 + 2 = 4.  In other words, if it began to be the case that, whenever he had two of a thing and added two more, and then he subsequently counted, and the total was always three, well, though he might be puzzled at first, after a while, assuming the change and all its consequences were consistent and consistent with all other forms of counting, he would eventually just internalize it.  He might wonder how he had been so obviously mistaken for so long with the whole “4” thing, but that would do it.

This argument makes sense, and it raises an important point related to what I said last week about dogmatic thinking.  One should always, at least in principle, be open to reexamining one’s conclusions, and even one’s convictions, if new evidence and/or reasoning comes to bear.

That doesn’t mean that all ideas are equally up for grabs.  As Jefferson pointed out about governments in the Declaration of Independence, things that are well established and which have endured successfully shouldn’t be cast aside for light or frivolous reasons.

So, for instance, if you’ve come to the moral conclusion that it’s not right to steal from other people, and you’re pretty comfortable with that conclusion, you don’t need to doubt yourself significantly anytime anyone tries to justify their own personal malfeasance.  Most such justifications will be little more than excuse making.  However, if one should  encounter a new argument or new data or what have you* that really seems to contradict your conclusion, it would be unreasonable not to examine one’s conclusions at least, and to try to do so rigorously and honestly.

There are certain purely logical conclusions that will be definitively true given the axioms of a particular system, such as “If A = B and B = C then A = C”, and these can be considered reasonably unassailable.  But it still wouldn’t be foolish to give ear if some reasonable and intelligent and appropriately skilled person says they think they have a disproof of even that.  They may be wrong, but as John Stuart Mill pointed out, listening to arguments against your beliefs is a good way to sharpen your own understanding of those beliefs.

For instance, how certain are you that the Earth is round, not flat?  How well do you know why the evidence is so conclusive?  Could you explain why even the ancient Greeks and their contemporaries all could already tell that the Earth was round?

How sure are you that your political “opponents” are incorrect in their ideas and ideals?  Have you considered their points of view in any form other than sound bites and tweets and memes shared on social media, usually by people with whom you already agree?  Can you consider your opponents’ points of view not merely with an eye to puncturing them, but with an eye to understanding them?

Even if there’s no real chance that you’ll agree with them, it’s fair to recognize that almost no one comes to their personal convictions for no reason whatsoever, or purely out of perversity or malice.  At the very least, compassion (which I also wrote a little bit about last week) should dictate at least trying to recognize and consider why other people think the way they do.

Sometimes, if for no other reasons, it is through understanding how someone comes to their personal beliefs that one can best see how to persuade them to change those beliefs (assuming you are not swayed by their point of view).

This is a high bar to set when it comes to public reasonableness, I know, but I think it’s worth seeking that level.  Why aim to be anything less than the best we can strive to be, as individuals and as societies?  We may never quite reach our ideals, but we may at least be able to approach them asymptotically.  It seems worth the effort.

But I could be wrong.

*I don’t have any idea what such an argument or such evidence would be, but that’s part of the point.  Presumably, if I were being intellectually honest, and someone raised such a new argument, I would recognize it for what it was.

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.

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Mind your vectors and terms of address

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again, because even though I find the extra weight of carrying it mildly annoying at the end of the day, at least sometimes the irritation of trying to write using my stupid smartphone is worse.

Although, since those two versions of me exist at different times, it’s hard to weigh their degrees of perceived irritation against each other.  In the morning, if I’m using my thumbs to try to type on a diminutive screen in a fashion that could be easily predicted to lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury, its all too natural for the “me” of that moment to hate the “me” of the previous evening who elected not to bring the laptop computer back with him.

But the “me” of the evening, when faced with the minor extra effort of the mini laptop, can feel very much overwhelmed and exhausted and think that the “me” of the following morning won’t find the process of writing using the smartphone particularly difficult.

The human consciousness clearly doesn’t have one, singular, constant terminal drive or goal as an imagined artificial general intelligence might.  I suppose one might think that the drive “to stay alive” would count as an ironically designated terminal goal, but that’s clearly not an accurate interpretation of the situation.

Not only are some people quite self-destructive and even actively suicidal—which you might credibly dismiss as dysfunction, not the lack of a dedicated system, though I think that would be imprecise—but there’s no good way to think that such a specific drive could evolve.  Evolution is blind to “death” as a concept or force, except as a failure, an accident, a lack, whatever you want to call it.

Before humans, as far as we can tell, no creature on Earth had a concept of “death” as the cessation of the biological processes of an individual organism.  Instead, there are proxies, such as the drive to avoid pain, and the related strong sensation of fear relating to danger and so on.

Similarly, there is no drive “to reproduce” in human (or other animal) minds.  Teens going through puberty don’t start feeling the literal desire to replicate their DNA in other bodies.  Instead, proxies for reproduction evolved, urges and drives that tended to lead to increased chances of reproduction, such as dominance hierarchy drives and displays in social primates such as humans, sexual attraction, and—of course—the pleasure of sex itself, with the reward-based drive to have it as often as feasible (with other inputs adjusting the strength of that drive and causing it to manifest differently in the two biological sexes and at different times and places).

The human brain—like probably all the other adequately complex brains on Earth—is a mélange of modules, with varying drives and processes that have evolved in parallel and sometimes independently, and also developed ways of interacting with each other.  Of course, at the root are the automatic drives that are all but undeniable—the respiratory drive, the thermoregulation drive, and so on.

There are even drives that are neurological in a broad sense, but that are so fundamental that they cannot be interdicted by the rest of the nervous system, only adjusted—I’m thinking here mainly of the heartbeat, the driver of which is in the sino-atrial* node and the Purkinje system of the heart, which is sort of a cross between muscle and nerve tissue.

The upshot is, if you ever feel that you’re “of two minds” on some particular subject, you’re probably not just speaking metaphorically, whether you know it or not.  Your final actions are produced by what I see as the final vector sum (and it can be quite small in the end or it can be huge in magnitude and surprising in direction) of all the drives or “pressures” in the brain that have any effect on decisions about behavior.  Then the action caused by the final behavior feeds back on the system**, changing the lengths and directions of some (perhaps sometimes all) of the contributing vectors, causing changes in the inputs and thus changes in the final vector sum of behavior.  Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, ad nauseam if not actually ad infinitum.

Please don’t imagine this as the sum of physical vectors in real spacetime.  The number of possible dimensions of such mental/neurological vectors is huge.  For all I know, there might even be spinors and tensors and matrices involved, but I don’t think those are necessary for my vague model.  “Simple” higher dimensional vectors probably do the trick.

What a curious set of things about which to write that was!  I had originally intended to start this post with some version of The Simpsons’ “Hi, everybody!”  “Hi, Dr. Nick!” exchanges, perhaps then noting that I could change “Dr. Nick” to “Dr. Robert” and thus reference both The Simpsons and the Beatles at the same time.

But then I might have noted that, although the Beatles song is so titled, “Dr. Robert” is not the way anyone has ever referred to me in actual practice.  It would be, honestly, a little weird for someone to refer to their physician as, for instance, “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Judy” or whatever, certainly in our culture.

Mind you, there was that tendency for a while (it may still be prevalent) to have kids speak to adults such as teachers and daycare workers and people of that sort using their “title” and then their “given name”, such as “Miss Barbara” or “Mister Jimmy”.  I have always thought that was weird.  I mean, just imagine someone trying to address a certain prominent fictional character as “Dr. Hannibal”.

Alas, that all ended up being a discussion not worth having, except as an afterthought.  Though it’s debatable whether any discussion at all is actually worth having—including the discussion about whether any discussion is worth having.

You all can discuss that if you want; feel free to use the comments below, and to share this post to your social media platforms or what have you.  When you do discuss it, remember to define your terms ahead of time, and stick to them rigorously—i.e., the meaning of “discussion”, and of “worth”, and so on—so that you decrease your chances of getting involved in semantic games and misunderstandings and sophistry.

Whatever you choose to do, please try to have a good day.

*The “sino* in that term relates to its location in what’s called the sinus of the heart, and the “i” in it is a long “i”; it has nothing to do with China, though an identical prefix is sometimes used to mean “related to China”, but in this case with a sort of short “i” sound…or, really, a long “e” sound.

**And there are surely numerous other feedback loops all along the way affecting many, or perhaps all, of the vectors.

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That one might read the blog of fate, and see the revolution of the times

Hello and good morning.  This is my Thursday blog post.  There are many other blogs out there, but this one is mine.

That’s about all I have to say about that, honestly.  I don’t have any other clue.  If anyone has seen a stylized cartoon paw print anywhere, please let me know*.

I don’t know.  What should I write?  I don’t really want to deal with politics right now‒not even political philosophy, which I sometimes find quite interesting.  But watching the world now, it just seems clear that humans are pathetic and, at least when two or more are gathered together in the name of something, their net IQ seems to be the lowest one of all those present divided by the number of people present.

That’s probably harsher than reality‒by that measure, two people each with an IQ of 150 would together have an IQ of 75.  But I don’t have the patience to work out some more likely formula, which would probably involve natural logarithms and the like.  And how would one test such a thing?  The point is, as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men In Black pointed out, a person can be smart, but people are stupid.

If humans destroy themselves (whether or not they take the rest of the world with them) it will be a well and truly earned destruction.  It will be a shame, of course, since there is also great potential there.  But then again, in all the hydrogen atoms of the universe there lies the potential for fusion into larger elements and then the creation of beings and civilizations and technology and art and love and even the capacity to produce civilizations that could not only last well into the livable duration of the cosmos but could possibly even alter or steer the fate of the universe itself, doing cosmic engineering.

But of course, almost no hydrogen atoms will ever be part of such a thing.  Perhaps none of them will be.  Certainly, if humans survive and eventually become cosmically relevant, it will be entirely because of luck.  It will not be deserved.

Actually, I’m not even sure what “deserve” really means most of the time.  When people say things like “you deserve love” or “you deserve to be happy” I don’t see the logic**.  How does one come to deserve love or happiness?  Does one come to deserve them just by being born?

That may be a nice idea, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  How can one earn some reward by doing nothing?  One can have rights of course, but most real rights are rights not to have others interfere with you.  If you can be said to have a right to something that is in limited supply and to which there is no possible guarantee, then that “right” is pointless.  I might as well say that each person has a right to two unicorns and a wyvern.

All that aside, I suspect that the vast majority of humans are literally no more likely to make any significant contribution to becoming a cosmically relevant civilization than are typical nematodes.  The current (and past) political climate of the world provides strong evidence for that much.

And now that we have thoroughly unqualified public appointees calling for registries of the disabled‒very much like the governments of certain well known and rightly despised 20th century regimes did‒I return to thoughts that “neurodivergent” people should take a Magneto/brotherhood of mutants approach to things and rise up and throw off the control of the so-called neurotypical people.

Neurodivergent people are far less likely‒or so it certainly seems‒to succumb to mob mentality and populism.  I suspect they (we) are far more likely to make a cosmically relevant civilization than the troglodytes are.

As I’ve said before‒in some recent post on this blog, I think‒neurodivergent people are more like Vulcans, and the rest of humanity is like the Romulans.  Whom would you rather have guiding the future of your civilization?

Well, that’s all extremely nerdy and probably silly, but it’s nevertheless probably not wrong.  Maybe we can convince most of the morons to refuse to be vaccinated, and then encourage them all to live close together so they’re not “contaminated” by people who have been vaccinated, and then let the viruses fall where they may.

Whatever.  This is all stupid.  Everything is stupid.  Everyone is uncountably infinitely stupid.  And I am surely among the stupidest of all for even bothering, for even trying to do anything.

TTFN

*This is a reference to the kids’ show Blue’s Clues, which my kids (and I) really enjoyed when they were little.

**Probably because there is none.