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Archive for the ‘whatis’ Category

The Afterlife

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

The best thing about the afterlife is that you can’t reason about it, because life after death is not pertinent to our domain of knowledge. Any “existence” after life would not be existence as we know it, and we wouldn’t be able to define it because it occupies a different realm (not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense of a knowledge base).

When we die, our physical manifestations – what we call our bodies (the physical medium that contains our consciousness and the vehicle that we can most precisely control) – cease to exist. The body disintegrates, and our earthly consciousness — which, I’m beginning to believe more and more strongly, is the recallable continuity of our interaction with the world that surrounds us — ends as well because we are no longer capable of interacting with the world or creating memories. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there is nothing after death. We just can’t define what it is.

The way I like to think about the afterlife is an extrapolation of a feeling that sometimes overcomes me, a feeling so immense that I momentarily forget what I am supposed to be doing, where I am, even who I am. It’s just a flash, but in that moment I am pure existence.

How to Measure Intelligence?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

How should we measure intelligence? Or, in general, how should we measure a quality that doesn’t really have a good definition (the ability to apply knowledge to deal with new or trying situations?)? If the quality has the property that those that possess it are capable of judging who possesses it better than those who don’t, and if there is a lot of subjects in our environment, we could try an iterative algorithm.

Ask every subject to assess everyone they know in some way. Extract the first iteration of the measure of the quality for everyone. Then extract the second iteration by computing the weighed average of the assessments, weighed by the quality itself. Continue until convergence is achieved.

For example, we could ask everyone to provide the IQ of everyone else. No definition necessary — just provide a number. The resulting IQ of everyone would be, at first, the average of everyone’s rating of them. Now that we have the initial IQ, we use it to weigh the calculations of a more accurate IQ. We keep doing it until a subsequent iteration doesn’t alter the IQ calculations in a meaningful way.

It’s a wonderful way to come up with a tangible rating for something that’s undefinable, based simply on the easy to accept assumptions that a large number of people will together come up with the right answer, and that people who have been judged more highly should have more to say.

What’s more interesting, though, are the specifics around how exactly to do the assessment.

  • Asking everyone for a number suffers from the problem of unclear scale — one person’s 100 will not be the same as another person’s 100. A clever variation on the above is to ask people to compare others as opposed to rating them, because while we have a hard time quantifying things, we find it rather easy to compare options (an evolutionary ability?). In fact, if a measure doesn’t have any other meaning other than comparative, it probably should remain comparative only rather than quantitative (i.e. if a score of 100 doesn’t mean anything, why should we use scores). So, I will provide a ranked list of people, without much consideration for how much better the fifth person is from the sixth (they may even be just as good). We can then combine all such rankings into one global ranking with a simple rule: if person A is consistently above person B in individual rankings, person A should be above person B in the resulting ranking. In other words, for every pair of people, determine whether (A>B) occurs more often than (B>A) and place A above or below B, appropriately. There will no doubt be conflicts (e.g. A>B, B>C, C>A) which should be resolved in a way that violates the fewest individual inequalities. In such a case, the weighing can still be done by assigning some score to the resulting order, and maybe by taking into account how many conflicts I am contributing to (if many, my weight should be lower).
  • Asking everyone for one number suffers from the problem of confidence. I may be highly confident of one assessment and not at all confident of the other. Including a confidence rating (e.g. provide a score that you think is most likely to be true, but also scores on either side that you think are as likely as they are not to be true) may provide more information.

To See the Future

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

If you could see the future, how would such an ability manifest itself? How would you describe “seeing” the future, especially given that the future is much less one image as a superposition of an infinite number of probable images? How do we take into account the “observer” effect — where the future of some events drastically depends on what the one seeing it decides to do in the next few seconds?

I imagine that seeing the future would be just like seeing in a classical sense, with a few exceptions. First, you could focus on some time in the future (just like you focus on a particular element in your field of vision) and that would reveal the state of reality in that point in the future. It would be pinpoint-, but not distance-accurate (just like focusing is): you can focus on a particular existing element well and almost instantaneously, no matter how close or far it is, but you couldn’t focus on an element at a particular distance. Similarly, when seeing the future, you would be able to focus on a particular event, but not necessarily on a particular point in time (and you would only know by and large what time this event is going to happen).

Moreover–and more importantly–possibilities in the future would manifest themselves as blurry spots. If something was a certainty, you would see it as sharp and distinct. If something was a possibility, it would blur with the other possible outcomes. For example, the sun rising tomorrow is a certainty so as you focus on the event of the run rising tomorrow you would see it sharp and distinct. But, say, your dog might be hit by a car in a week so it would appear in your visions of the subsequent future as blurry. The further out you “focus”, the more blurry it will be.

This model comes to a beautiful conclusion in the case of the above mentioned “observer” effect. As you focus on the future event that depends heavily on a decision you make, the details in the event will shift from blurry to more defined as you think more or less heavily of making one decision relative to the other. In a way, you will be able to “focus” your vision of the future by committing to certain decisions.

Progress and its Equilibrium

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

I see progress as the measure of our ability to solve the problems we encounter in our lives. As mankind learns to solve problems, we focus on the more complex ones (ones that are harder to solve, or those put in focus by the just-solved problems) — and this increasing complexity of the problems usually brings about the increased complexity of solutions (or the increased complexity of the research required to arrive at a solution).

Unsurprisingly, this is consistent with and deeply linked to the idea of increasing entropy. However, in my opinion continued progress is a state of unstable equilibrium — one between self-destruction and attrition. In the former, entropy gets a one-time boost followed by a lifetime of nil. In the latter, entropy increases at a decreasing rate thus proving the agents of progress (mankind) ineffective implementators of its underlying idea. It’s only that unstable equilibrium that fulfills entropy’s goal.

Mankind’s mission is therefore to maintain that unstable equilibrium.

What is Love

Monday, May 9th, 2011

The best definition I could think of is that love is the realization that the other person’s unhappiness makes us unhappy as well.

It’s not the linking of happiness, but unhappiness — it’s easy for our happiness to increase when others around us are happy, too — participation in one’s good fortune is just a regular, human thing. Love manifests itself when something is lost and we feel the loss also.

Using and Harnessing

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

The most impressive strides taken by mankind are intrinsically linked with our increasing ability to take advantage of the various forces in nature. I differentiate between two different kinds of such ability — the ability to use a particular force — something akin to free-riding that requires relatively little setup or knowlege of the force but is also much less rewarding — and the ability to harness it — which often requires us to know precisely how the force comes into being and requires more complex setup but also offers orders of magnitude more energy.

There are many examples of both uses and harnessing of various forces.

As a species, we learned pretty quickly how to use the gravitational force to our advantage — taking advantage of falling down water or pushing boulders on to large, slow prey — as well as the force of the energy-filled elements such as wind or fire. In contrast, after what may seem like a long hiatus, the nineteenth century saw the first truly comprehensive example of mankind harnessing a force — namely, electricity. In the 1940s, we made progress in using the nuclear forces, but we’re far away from harnessing them (through phenomena such as fusion which mankind is hoping to make sustainable within my or your lifetimes).

What’s next? And, specifically, when will we learn to harness the gravitational forces? What will that even look like?

What makes a Moment?

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

I look back and remember moments in my life — seemingly random, brief periods of time — which I somehow attach a high sentimental value to. In themselves they are irrelevant but they unlock my memory of a state of mind I was in during that moment. Those moments truly are arbitrary — for example, one of the strongest moments is linked to my memory of reading a local newspaper, sitting at a chair at my grandfather’s place. The moments are very distinctive and highly discrete.

I haven’t been able to figure out why this specific moment and not, say, the one that happened just after it, helps me unlock my memory. I did make two observations — that enough time must pass to make a moment (the most recent moment happened to me three years ago), and that the time early in my life comes with more moments than the time later in life. The former makes sense — enough time needs to have passed for the memory not to be fresh and easily recallable. As for the latter, I think it has to do with the fact that I perceived the world very differently, say, 20 years ago than I did 5 years ago, so it’s more likely for a moment that happened early in life to unlock a deeper set of memories which are so unrecognizable (since I had a very different personality then).

I wrote down the moments I could think of — there is a couple dozen of those — but I don’t like to go back to that list. There is something precious about “stumbling upon” these moments, as a chain of reasoning takes me back in time to ultimately land on one of those moments. Once I start thinking about the past, these special moments act as attractors — I’m more likely to converge my thinking on a moment than not.

It’s somewhat disappointing that the moments come at a decreasing rate. I really enjoy reminiscing about my state of mind and enriching the set of recollections like this would allow me to keep these memories fresh. Just like with a favorite song of yours, you can recall them too much and lose their magic.

The Puzzles of the Face

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

It’s remarkable how much better we are at recognizing faces and facial expressions at any other kind of patterns. On an evolutionary level this allows for the children to recognize their mother and other peoples’ intentions, which is beneficial to survival. Our ability to differentiate between different facial features (and the fact that there is no obvious metrics for which face we would find more aesthetically pleasing) allows for greater diversity and thus more efficient selection.

And what about our ability to determine with remarkably great precision when another individual’s eyes are pointed at us? How is that advantageous?

The Gift of Abstraction

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Our ability to generalize, think in terms of abstractions, gives us enormous power — even if it’s a virtual sort of power. With it, we can write books in which we create and destroy universes, which transcends the objects we control. We’re not bound by the rules of those universes.

What makes computers different from humans is that computers cannot conceptualize, and so they cannot conceptualize a force that transcends the framework to which they are confined.

What is a Nightmare

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

I had a nightmare a few weeks ago. It was a very strange dream. It was obviously surreal but at the time (as it always is the case for me) I didn’t realize I was dreaming. However, I felt that something frightening was going to happen. It seemed to me that the characters in the dream tried to catch me off guard and attack me in a way that usually makes me wake up sweating. I had a feeling of looming evil.

Eventually one of the characters in the dream did attack me; it filled me with a deeply unsettling feeling of fear and panic. It wasn’t physically scary; I didn’t even know what happened. All there was was that feeling of evil, and with it, my uneasiness, shock, fright. I woke up suddenly.

Is a nightmare an abstract manifestation of our fears?