Interesting article from The Wall Street Journal, “Man vs. God” which talks about science and religion:

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the “God beyond God.” The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

[...]

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Reminds me of another quote…

Continue reading this post…

My blind faith in Catholicism, Jesus, God, etc went out the window right around the time that I found out Santa and The Easter Bunny weren’t real. I’ve spent the majority of my life without any sort of religion, and contrary to what zealots would have you believe, I haven’t spent the last decade or so cheating, killing, and fucking livestock. The idea that there’s someone watching our every move to make sure we’re ”good” is extremely juvenile, IMHO. Continue reading this post…

(random piece I wrote for an assignment)

What is the significance of a single human being amongst all human beings in the world? As a race we claim to reign supreme over all living organisms on Earth, but what is Earth in relation to the other eight planets in our solar system, the other solar systems in our galaxy, the other galaxies within the boundless stretches of the universe? The human body alone is made up of muscles, organs, and bones that function in tandem to sustain it, each of those being made up of cells that have more specific functions. Even individual cells, small enough to be invisible without the aid of a microscope, are composed of molecules, atoms, and DNA. What role, then, does one strand of DNA, one single cell, one human being have in the grand scheme of things?
Continue reading this post…

I’m currently enrolled in a course called Nature Writing.  No, we don’t just write about how the environment is dying and that we need to stop global warming, but rather it is a class that encourages us to ask thought provoking questions and reflect on them.  In our first class we were made aware of a couple named Helen and Scott Nearing and enlightened of their philosophy to living a good life.  I will share the major points we discussed:

A life should be grounded in ideas, people, nature… not things.  Here are some ideas that the couple embraced:

Continue reading this post…

From the article Beauty and the brain, women use more than men:

“It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks,” said researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. “However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?”

The answer seems to be that when women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object, Cela-Conde said in an interview by e-mail.

He noted, however, that this doesn’t explain why — and how — the human capacity to appreciate beauty evolved.

Pretty interesting. I definately don’t think of “words” when I look at art. I usually “mentally deconstruct” it, sort of like if I were looking at a time-lapse video of the art.

What do you guys think of?

There was a real interesting article on CNN.com a while ago. I forgot about it until recently, but here it is:

Why so many minds think alike

A theory is presented: when an individual is surrounded by people who hold a different opinion, that individual will tend to shift their opinion towards the majority. Basically, it’s a theory on peer pressure.

What’s interesting is that the article presents brain patterns when this incident occurs. An excerpt:

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the “oops area” becomes extra active, while the “reward area” slows down, making us think we are too different.

“We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Then the article lists examples of other experiments: Asch Conformity Experiments and the more controversial Milgram Experiments. The article actually lists a link to another CNN article on the Milgram Experiments, should you wish to check it out.

Here’s a link if you wish to look up more on the Asch or Milgram experiments from other sources though. And here’s one for psychological conformity.

I have always been a firm believer that the government which governs least governs best. Unencumbered by restrictions or the licensing of activities, people are more productive…but I will not make the case for liberty an economic one; to me, freedom is a moral issue. No man or government should have the ability to deprive another of certain rights. Call me old fashioned, but I think ”life, liberty, and property” is a pretty solid definition for a vague term like “rights”.

You all know the classical liberal argument…as long as you are not depriving anyone else of their rights, you should be able to do whatever you want. I won’t waste our time repeating the greatest minds of the last several hundred years. My opinions may be those of wide-eyed-idealism, but I live in the same world as you. We may not live in a free society, but we can live as free people. Here’s how… Continue reading this post…

We’ve all seen genies in popular culture. You rub their lamp or bottle and they are required to grant you three wishes. Remember the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin? What a great character, one of Robin Williams’ best. Genies’ powers vary in the way they are portrayed but there’s one common cliche in genie stories: wishes can always go wrong.  Hence the cliche title of this article.

Eliezer Yudkowski establishes that there are three kinds of genies:

1. Genies to whom you can safely say “I wish for you to do what I should wish for”
2. Genies for which no wish is safe
3. Genies that aren’t very powerful or intelligent

Then he pointed to an actual forum called the Open Source Wish Project, which is a collaborative effort to word wishes in such a way that they are immune to a type II genie, and therefore guarantee the desired outcome of the wisher.  They basically try to anticipate ways the genie could undesirably grant the wish or misinterpret the wish, and adjust the wording accordingly.  The wishes become more and more detailed throughout the discussion.  Take the wish for immortatlity for example.  What if the genie lets you live forever but leaves you to suffer eternity in solitude or disease?  Here is the current version 1.1 of the wish projects wish for immortality:

I wish to live in the locations of my choice, in a physically healthy, uninjured, and apparently normal version of my current body containing my current mental state, a body which will heal from all injuries at a rate three sigmas faster than the average given the medical technology available to me, and which will be protected from any diseases, injuries or illnesses causing disability, pain, or degraded functionality or any sense, organ, or bodily function for more than ten days consecutively or fifteen days in any year; at any time I may rejuvenate my body to a younger age, by saying a phrase matching this pattern five times without interruption, and with conscious intent: ‘I wish to be age,’ followed by a number between one and two hundred, followed by ‘years old,’ at which point the pattern ends - after saying a phrase matching that pattern, my body will revert to an age matching the number of years I started and I will commence to age normally from that stage, with all of my memories intact; at any time I may die, by saying five times without interruption, and with conscious intent, ‘I wish to be dead’; the terms ‘year’ and ‘day’ in this wish shall be interpreted as the ISO standard definitions of the Earth year and day as of 2006.

 This thought exeriment blows my mind.  Even after all this, the forum continues to find loopholes.  I think I agree with Yudkowski’s conclusion that these guys are on a futile quest.  A type I genie would have to share your absolute morals and values to the point that wishing is superfluous.  Do you think its possible, with the limitation of language, to present a wish in full confidence to a type II genie which would make them act like a type I genie?  If you’re curious to or want to contribute (fake edit: have too much time on your hands) to the Open Source Wish Project, you can find it here.

This post comes to me from The hidden complexity of wishes, a discussion by the wild philosophers at the Overcoming Bias blog/forum.