“If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
-Lao Tzu
This puzzling advice by the famous Chinese philosopher is perhaps the wisest words ever uttered. Can you figure out what it means?
My take on it: Don’t rely on outside influences promising to get rid of all your problems. You have to deal with it on your own. All the self-help books, motivational speakers, and religious promises are for the weak. And they don’t work. The only person that can solve all of your problems right now is you. Lao Tzu is telling us that when we run across these “Buddahs” in life, it’s better to kill them than to risk being swindled by their schemes that don’t work.
This is what I meant when I said “Religion promises false hope” couple of posts back. Any mode of thinking that believes your life can be improved by superstitious and supernatural beliefs (including prayer, divine beings, and miracles) has to be utterly worthless, not to mention duplicitous. Because we know (to the most practical and rational way that we can) that supernatural things do not exist. So if religion, or anything else, promises things in the name of supernatural beliefs, it is false hope. How can we be so sure that supernatural things do not exist? After all, there is always some slight possibility? Of course, but there is always a slight possibility for anything. For all we know, Santa Claus and the Toothfairy might still exist. Science can’t disprove that these things exist. But it doesn’t make it rational to believe in them.
I suppose what religion has to offer is very attractive. After all, how wonderful would it be if there was a divine creator who cares for us, and who rights all the wrongs. Believe me, I would want to live in a universe like that. Unfortunately, all the evidence is to the contrary. And this is the most striking part about this conversation: many people say they believe in God because they wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t one. But this isn’t even an argument. What you want the world to be and how the world actually is are two completely separate things.
The fact that that you believe in a God is NOT an opinion. It is either right or wrong. It is either fact or fiction. Yes, one is entitled to their own opinions. But one is not entitled to their own reality. We call these people delusional or crazy. As far as we know, there is an objective reality. One is not entitled to believe that he himself is Napoleon if he is not Napoleon. Likewise, one is not entitled to believe in the supernatural if there aren’t any. Religion is not a matter of taste or preference. It is a matter of truth.
Lao Tzu was truly a smart man.
Astronomers and cosmologists have been pondering for decades just how unique intelligent life is in the universe. While there may be other planets (possibly thousands) that are hospitable to some form of self-organizing matter, evolving intelligence is another issue. Coupled with this question is just how to define intelligence. Even more perplexing, how do you test intelligence? Suppose an alien race landed on Earth. They seem to be pretty sophisticated, because they built an UFO aircraft to travel millions of light-years. But does this mean they are intelligent? Perhaps they have evolved without consciousness, and are more like very complicated and sophisticated robots.
I was thinking about this for a while, and I came to the conclusion that human intelligence is most probably unique in the universe. First, it seems to me that our form of intelligence is pretty useless when it comes to evolution. If humans had evolved to be highly sophisticated machines, programmed to reproduce, eat, and nurture our offspring, we may have faired much better (by evolutionary standards, that is). But instead we have gained consciousness, and we have to deal with emotional and intellectual baggage. Now one might argue that this baggage, in the end, helped us develop technology which, in turn, made us “win” the evolutionary war. This might be true, but this goes against evolutionary principles. Evolution does now “plan ahead”. If a newly evolved feature has no instant advantage, it dies out. We seek meaning and purpose. What other life form may do that, anywhere in the universe? Meaning and purpose may also be unique in the universe.
I suppose it is a little grim to say that there is no ultimate meaning in the universe, but that’s what the sciences seem to be telling us. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot create our own meaning in life. While Dawin may tell us the ultimate purpose of organisms is to reproduce, humans can do better. Because we have been endowed by evolution (perhaps accidentally) with emotion, intellect, and purpose-seeking, we ought to take advantage of it. We have superseeded evolution and the immutable laws of the universe (in some sense). When the human race is gone, there just may be no meaning left in the universe at all.
About three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, according to a recent Gallup survey. The most popular is extrasensory perception (ESP), mentioned by 41%, followed closely by belief in haunted houses (37%).
THREE IN FOUR AMERICANS? I was very shocked to find this result, which is only from a year ago. It is simply unacceptable that in this day in age, more than 75% of people in the most industrialized nation in the world believe in paranormal crap. We live in a world where almost all natural phenomena are explained by scientific principles, and we enjoy the products of technological innovations grounded in scientific knowledge. All one needs to do is employ some common sense and see the world as it is – there are no paranormal phenomena!
I suppose the 41% of Americans who supposedly belive in ESP are the ones driving the psychic industry in this country. What a disappointment. The US government should have prosecuted these people by now for false advertising and the failure to deliver promised services.
And if you are one of the three in four people who still believe that there are paranormal pheonomena, consider this: a world in which these inexplicable events occured would be one that is profoundly different from a world where everything happened via scientific principles. And especially given the power of the Internet and other modern innovations, statistics tells us that we should be seeing these events captured on tape, film, or audio all the time.
The mathematician J.E. Littlewood has calculated the probability that a “miracle” would occur to a person given that there are no paranormal pheonoma. Taking into account the world population and assuming that a “miracle” is any event that only has one in a million chance of occuring, Littlewood has calculated that an average person can expect to experience about one miracle a month. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law) Remember, this is assuming that there are no paranormal phenomena. If there were indeed paranormal phenomena, we can expect that this proability would rise dramatically.
But what we observe in reality is that the so-called psychic pheonomena are extremely rare. So, based purely on the immutable laws of probability, we must conclude that there are no paranomal phenomena. And if you are going to question mathematics (not Science, by the way), then you must realize that all of mathematics is based on pure logic. And if you question logic, you have just shot your own foot.
There will always be stupid people in the world, but three in four is way too many. This suggests to me that something is missing from how we educate people. We tend to agree that patience, love, forgiveness and the like are virtues. We emphasize them in grade school and every parent teaches them to their kids. But what about skepticism, the virtue of requiring evidence before belief? This should be a very important virtue, but is rather passed off as a negative trait in the minds of most people. For some inexplicable reason, faith, which is belief without evidence, has been accepted as a virtue. America needs to wake up. Faith is dangerous. Skepticism is on par with forgiveness and patience.
 Believe in
 %
Extrasensory perception, or ESP
 41
That houses can be haunted
 37
Ghosts/that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places/situations
 32
Telepathy/communication between minds without using traditional senses
 31
Clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future
 26
Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives
 25
That people can communicate mentally with someone who has died
 21
Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death
 20
from http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/logic/gallup.html
The newest particle accelerator at CERN, the LHC, has been put on delay again. The problem is a magnet that apparently wasn’t being cooled fast enough. During a high-pressure test, the part collapsed and is now being fixed. While the accelerator was planned to launch in November, it may not be running until next year. This just demonstrates what a tremendously complicated project the LHC is. You have to bring together engineers and physicists and make both understand each others’ worlds. The engineer has to understand particle physics somewhat to know how to implement designs, and the physicist has to know some engineering to know what is feasible. For something this complicated and large scale, it would be a surprising if some type of a failure didn’t occur.
I am also highly dubious about this approach to doing physics. One only needs to look to history to see that the major revolutions in science came from theoretical insight, not some gigantic experiment that produced unexpected data to be analyzed. All the major developments, Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, and Einstein’s GR, were developed from theoretical insights and philosophical motivation. Not ONE of them were trying to explain some sort of puzzling data. Even for Quantum Mechanics, it took a little experimental surprises to jump start, but once it was off it was developed entirely theoretically. Schrodinger didn’t sit in a lab trying to empirically come up with the Schrodinger equation.
So to be spending this much money, time, and resources “just to see what happens” is wrong. One should have a theoretical prediction to go and test, not the other way around. Indeed, I fully believe that particle physics and the problem between GR and Quantum won’t be solved by these particle accelerators. I believe that someone smart will come along and come up with a new theory from amazing insight. This is the way physics has progressed for a while.
I find it very disturbing that physicists, and politicians convinced by physicists, are willing to spend the money and the resources to build something like this when it is likely that we will observe nothing new. We should at least have some theory to test, some reason for building the accelerator.
Now, I might be wrong. We may find unexpected data at CERN. But this won’t help in the least. Someone motivated enough might come up with some empirical equation that fits the data, but this is not progress. Physics needs unifying principles, philosophical ideas, that drive a theory to its inevitable conclusion. While new data may tell us that we are missing something, it can never tell us what is missing. And we already know that something is missing. There already are plenty of data unexplained. So why build another accelerator? At worst, it produces nothing. At best, it produces just another set of data we need to explain.
Where is the next Einstein?
In this week’s issue of The Phoenix, Swarthmore College’s weekly newspaper, the editorial writer Nathaiel Peters responded to the Virginia Tech tragedies by claiming that if we are to condemn such atrocities and have a rational ground to stand on in declaring what is right and wrong, an absolute system of morality is needed. In other words, culturally determined morality is not strong enough. Peters has been sort-of an evangelist, writing about how great Christianity is in his columns for the past semester. My criticisms at his arguments have been printed in The Pheonix twice in the past. If you have read those, you know that I find Peters’s arguments to be entirely wrong.
The reason the massacre at Virigina Tech is morally wrong is because it killed people. Killing people brings harm and suffering to not only the killed but their loved ones. What firmer rational stance do you need to judge whether certain actions are moral or not? At best, biblical morality is superfluous.
The most striking part about this conversation is that many people, even those who who are agnostic, seem to believe that without religion, morality could not exist. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, religion has been commiting some of the most atrocious violations when it comes to moral standards. Consider, for example, preaching that contraceptions are immoral to use in Sub-Saharan Africa when millions are dying of AIDS and other STDs. Condoms have been proven to be effective in preventing STDs. By preaching that these are wrong to use, Christians are in essence allowing people to die when they can be saved. What could be more immoral than that?
Moral philosophy have existed for millenia before the rise of religion. One only has to look to the Greeks for such moral systems. And morality have been evolving for decades, independent of what the Bible says. If the only source of morality was the Bible, morality would be the same now as it was thousands of years ago. But we know better now. We know that slavery is bad and that interractial marriage is ok. And we are still making progress on other issues like sexual orientation.
Of course there are those that claim that although parts of the Bible advocate slavery, genocide, and almost every other agregious crimes against humanity you can think of, other parts advocate love and harmony. But then I would say, how do you know which parts of the Bible are good and which parts are bad? Clearly, that sense of moral judgement comes from our society -something that is available to any rational person. So in that sense, Biblical morality is superfluous. We ALL know what is right and wrong. You don’t need God to tell you that muder is a bad thing.
It is time for our society to move beyond superstition. Religion not only advocates false-hope and irrationality, but also legitimizes immoral acts in the name of God. Why are the religious Right associated in politics with “values” anyway? They seem to have the least sophisticated idea about what morality is. We need to claim ethics back to the side of rationality and reason.
I recently discovered a wonderful website: http://www.metamath.org
The website is a project to derive all of math from set theory (The ZFC axioms to be more precise). Of course, formalists have been espousing the view that all of math is essentially a game of logic since the beginning. While this view is held “in principle”, an attempt to actually carry through with this seemingly ginormous task has been largely ignored since Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Of course the Principia is a bit outdated, and doesn’t explicity use the ZFC axioms. Hence, this web project is a long-needed one in my opinion. In addition, the database uses symbolic logic exclusively, hence the rigor of the approach is never in question. Plus, this allows anyone who has looked at the ZFC axioms to understand the proofs (actually parsing out what the proof and the theorem mean is entirely another matter).
Another cool thing about this project is that a computer program has been written that checks the proofs automatically! Of course automated theorem proving is something that has divided mathematicians. Some claim it removes the beauty and the “Art” of mathematics while others see it as the only way to do truly rigorous math.
A fun thing to do is to just browse the various theorems that are in the site’s archives. Some of them are extremely interesting. For example, there is a proof for the principal of equality (that x=x). While many think this is an axiom (the axiom of equality), it can actually be derived from the ZFC axioms, which do not include the equality principle. I think this is completely mind-blowing. Something as seemingly trivial as equality can actually be proven rigorously!
If I had more time, I might want to work on becoming conversant in symbolic logic so I can actually read this stuff.
In physics and intro calculus courses, the symbol dx is taught to be a literal infitesimal value. Hence, the derivative, dy/dx is considered literally to be a ratio of infitessimal values. The integral, with a dx at the end, is thought to be highly analagous to the summation, with the infitesimal term simply serving as another factor in the “infinite summation”. This sort of thing can be taken to the extreme: to calculate the derivative of a function, simply plug in x+dx into f(x) and do some algebra, keeping in mind that dx^2=0 but dx itself is not zero! Surprisingly, that gives you the right derivative! Of course all this is not rigorous at all. Doing algebra with infitessimals is problematic on many levels. There are many problems both mathematically and philosophically, not the least of which is the law of excluded middle.
But the fact that infitessimal algebra “works” suggests that it should be possible to make it rigorous. And indeed, this has been done by many mathemticians. One example is called Non-Standard Analysis, where the Real Numbers are extended to the Hyper-Real Numbers, where infitessimal values are added to the Real Numbers. Apparently, you need to deny the law of excluded to make this work though. Many mathematicians are also somewhat skeptical of the topic. Some have critisized that the theory suffers from ontological problems.
What is more interesting is that when Newton and/or Leibniz first invented calculus, they did so mostly using an algebra of infitessimals. Hence, their invention was not so rigorous or well-defined. It took work by many other mathematicians years later to do the “cleaning work”. Now, it is possible to make sense of infitessimal algebra without a rigorous theory if you make some ad-hoc arguments, and I suppose this is why it continues to be used in classes. I don’t think I have a problem with this, as long as some of the flaws are pointed out as well. If some mindless high school teacher is teaching calculus without all the philosophical implications of infitessimal algebra, it’s a shame.
Translation: “You’ll eat with pleasure, and without fatigue. The good sausages of the BOUNTEOUS PIG! Sausages from Auvergne. Absolute alimentary purity.”
This poster is absolutely brilliant. It manages to provoke disgust and laughter at the same time. I don’t know what is scarier: the fact that the pig is standing on his feet, his evil and/or innocent smile, the grip with which the pig holds the knife, the surgical and clean cut of the knife, or the patterns on the meat that look like your mom’s meatloaf.
The more perplexing question is, is the pig cutting himself to please you or horrify you? And which is more disturbing? That the pig would suffer that much pain and torment just to please you, or just to disgust you?Â
And is the poster actually trying to sell ham? Or is it vegetarian propaganda? All these questions seem to be converging to create an aura that is distinctive for this poster. And while we’re on the subject of self-mutilating pigs, how about this one?:
Wow, I need to get more sleep. This week’s been rough.
First, let me be clear. The massacre at Virginia Tech by the gunman who later shot himself is a big tragedy. I also sympathize with the sadness of many of the deads’ family members and friends.
That being sad, I am also pissed off by the amount of superficial attention this story is getting. First, there are the news networks covering it ad nauseum. But I’ve lost faith in the news networks long time ago -they’ll do anything for ratings. But what about the call by my college’s president for a moment of silence at 2 PM today? Does this moment of silence do anything? If anything, it is a self-congratulatory event put together to make ourselves feel better by fooling ourselves into thinking that we actually do care. Let’s face it – most people don’t genuinely care, they just want to look like they care. When people say “Did you hear about that?” “Yeh, it’s so sad..” What a load of pretentious bull shit. It’s worse than gossip.
Do people know how many people are killed everyday in Iraq? Darfur? 30 people getting popped off in America is nothing. It’s a tragedy but there are worse tragedies happening around the world every day. Why don’t Americans hold moment of silences for hundreds of innocent Iraqis and American Troops getting killed each day? Let the community of Virginia Tech mourn and grieve. Leave them alone. It’s nobody else’s business.
So please, for the sake of all of us, stop making facebook groups. Stop making murals. Stop talking about it. Stop saying “I’m so sad.” If you really do care about atrocities, you might as well fly over to Darfur and try to stop the much bigger tragedy going on there. If I find another pretentious nuthead spewing superficial maudlin crap I am going to throw up.
I am playing the harpsichord in a baroque trio this semester, and we are currently working on a cello sonata by Bononcini. Of course, this is the first time that I have even heard of this composer. But I am growing to love the music more and more. Some parts are very Vivaldi-like, riffing repeated sixteenth note arpeggios. I love these parts because I can really rock-and-roll on the harpsichord. But other parts are just really funky in a way that only Baroque music can get away with! Of course, this is why I love barouqe music in the first place: the music sometimes tends to do really unexpected and even modern-sounding things.
But there is one measure in the opening Adagio movement that is perhaps the funkiest I’ve heard. The cello line does an unexpected turn into a chord that no body expects to be there. The overall effect is very emotional and jazzy. Maybe this is why Bononcini never got famous in his day, but it is totally awesome by today’s aesthetic tastes! In some sense, the piece is very progressive rock. At the end of the piece, the cello and the harpsichord cadences together, than the cello does two bars of solo arpeggios. It sounded so out of place that the cello player thought she was a measure behind the first time we played through it!
Playing this piece got me thinking about our conceptions of period music in general. Both in repertoire and studying music history, we tend to focus on the famous composers. And that surely has an effect on our perception of a period or a genre. The most obvious effect is that we tend to think all of classical music is expertly-crafted and masterful. But without the filter of history, there must have been more crappy music than good music, just like today. And the crappy composers probably wrote music that sound wildly different from what we consider to be “normal” classical music from a certain period. More uncommon is like with Bononcini, where the style of a relativiely unknown composer may sound totally awesome by today’s standards. I just wonder how much good music we are all missing out on?
