ePinions

I really enjoyed reading your last post "A Puff of Logic". It put into words something i've been deeply thinking recently with some a-class examples of your own.

Namely, where do you personally think morals come from? I had a large heated discussion with a religious friend where he said that morals can only come from the words of God and the teachings of the Bible. I disagreed, putting forward the point that morals come from within, to benefit overall human survival i.e we feel wrong to kill because it is against our instincts to be counter-productive against human survival, something perhaps stemmed from the savages we all once were, rather than being taught that killing is wrong from a passage in a book.

But what do you believe. What makes a good person, good?

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:34:00 +0200

Hi, thanks for your kind words. I really appreciate it.

In regards to your last question: I think it lies in a combination of genes and environment. I think initially the genes decide, but that environment can enhance or in some cases change what the genes have defined.

I believe true universal morality is something that can be discovered via scientific methods. It is defined by what benefits humanity, both physically (like keeping someone alive), and mentally (what keeps us happy and productive). I think we are in a pretty organic fashion converging on a functioning universal morality - but it’s being pushed in various directions by the various religions in the world. Until we can take a wholly rational approach I think we’ll continue to have conflicting ideas of what constitutes morality, and thus continue to have violence and crimes on a grand scale.

Like everything in history, all this swings back and forth a little like a pendulum - and like a pendulum, we’ll eventually end up in the middle.

A Puff of Logic

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:42:00 +0200

The following is mostly written in order to put my thoughts about this matter into words. A lot of people think about this stuff quite a bit though, so I thought I’d share it just in case anyone found it interesting.

—

I tried. I really did.

I grew up in a christian home and had christian friends all my life. I went to church on Sundays and camps in the summers. I went to Bible groups, and eventually even to Bible college and got an under graduate degree in Christianity. I tried hard to believe it all, but I mostly just blindly trusted what the various religious leaders told me and tried to make sense of it and apply it to my life. However, I never really bought it. Not really. There were always way too many questions in the back of my mind that kept nagging at me. For the longest time I just dismissed it as Evil trying to tempt me or something.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a magnificent youth (and hey, I’m still young). I honestly believe I’ve had the privilege of growing up in one of the very best families this world had to offer. I have truly amazing friends. Most of whom are Christian. A few are muslim, and quite a few are atheist. I know one or two New Age buffs too.

However, I’m pretty sure none of the great people in my life are great people because of their religious beliefs. I’ve come to the conclusion that religious beliefs have very little impact on what kind of person you are. It’s what kind of person you are that decides how you use your religious beliefs. If you’re a narcissistic megalomaniac you’ll find some way to exert excessive power over other people to serve your own selfish desires whether you’re a priest, an imam, a scientist, or the guy behind the counter at your local 7-Eleven. If you’re an unselfish person always eager and willing to help others, you’ll do so no matter what your religious beliefs or vocation. It can’t be denied though, that the characteristics of large congregations of religious people present a very potent channel for maximizing a person’s megalomaniacal tendencies. It’s so potent that it naturally attracts the kind of people who wish to exploit it. Certain religions are quite simply incompatible, and that combined with the fact that they require their followers to try to convert everyone else to their religion has caused much of the grand-scale suffering throughout history. That, and the various interpretations of how far one can/should go to achieve this goal of course.

A few years ago I decided to stop going to church to get some distance in order to think this religion thing through more clearly. I’ve concluded that my thoughts on the matter can actually be summed up relatively succinctly:

Religion is used to explain how and why we exist and things happen. However, we now find ourselves at a point in history in which science has much better explanations for all the hows religion has ever attempted to answer, and then some. Science still can’t answer the why, but I actually don’t think religion can either.

To elaborate:

Science’s explanations make a whole lot more sense than the ones found in various religions, in no small part due to the fact that they’re backed by empirical evidence. The latter aren’t backed by any evidence other than simple observations followed by the use of a vivid imagination by a person or group either not capable of, or unwilling to, think the problem through to the end, and/or with a significant lack of logical reasoning abilities. The only thing science can’t explain, at least not yet (and maybe never - but never say never (oops)), are the whys. At least for the really big questions. However, like I said, I don’t really think religion can either. Religion explains why we exist in the same way a Calvin and Hobbes comic explains what tigers are like. Evidence, combined with reason, strongly suggest that God, the gods, Heaven, Hell, Nirvana - whatever - are simply human created concepts designed to explain certain phenomena and control certain groups of people (admittedly, sometimes for their benefit). At the very least, there’s no way to separate the belief that Jesus Christ is God from the belief that thunder is a sign that Zeus is angry by the way of evidence of any kind. Given the large number of religions, many of which have a long and rich history, and the fact that none of them are based on any evidence, the likelihood that any particular belief is the correct one isn’t very high. That, and the large amounts of contradictions found in the various holy texts, don’t make for a particularly strong case.

I think the main reason religion is still so prevalent is that our universe is so amazingly complex that most people don’t understand science’s explanations - and thus religion assumes its historical role of providing simple, albeit erroneous and illogical, explanations that these people accept in order not to have to think about them and simply go on with the business of living. Also, people are constantly looking for “some kind of meaning of it all”. That’s only natural, since we are beings who act with purpose, and therefore instinctively assume the universe we inhabit also acts with purpose. I think meaning is something each and every one of us need to find for ourselves - there’s no evidence of any universal purpose.

As you no doubt have guessed by now, I could ramble on and on and on about all this, and I’ve deliberately avoided talking about what made me jump off the Christianity band-wagon because I could probably go on for pages and pages. It starts with this: For religious people, their faith is so extremely important to them considering its consequences both in this life and beyond - so why in the world would they blindly agree to throw out the need for any evidence what so ever for religious matters when they require it for everything else in this world about which they want to know the truth? I’ll stop there and sum it all up with my answer to The Big Question:

Why are we here? Because it was inevitable.

It’s amazingly difficult to find a good christmas gift for...

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:24:00 +0100

It’s amazingly difficult to find a good christmas gift for grandparents who really aren’t all that concerned about material things. Since I’m a photographer I thought about making a big print of one of my better shots from this year, or maybe a photo book or a calendar, or something. But no, that would be too obvious, right? :P

A loooong time ago I studied music. But in the past 7 years or so I’ve hardly touched my guitar and the piano (since I don’t own one). So, I decided I’d give this music thing a try again. I really love music. Getting started again was lots of fun. However, seeing as I wasn’t ever all that great at it, a 7-year pause sure hasn’t helped the situation. So this little project took a lot more time than I had imagined. Also, there’s been a lot to do at work these past weeks, so I haven’t really had the time to work on this. But enough excuses… I finally managed to record a couple of my favorite Beatles songs. Here’s one of them. Accross the Universe.

Please don’t be afraid to tell me how much I suck, but if you do, please let me know why you think so, so that I can improve. I already have a long list of things I know I could have done a lot better - but this project had a rather tight and immovable deadline.

Go Crazy

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:24:01 +0100

If everyone hallucinated on average, say, two random people per week, mostly passers-by - would anyone ever notice? What if those we institutionalize simply have an above average amount of, or more consistent, delusions?

Have a great day!

The Monty Hall Problem - Am I stupid?

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 02:44:00 +0200

UPDATE: I get it now. Thanks to MHW, Jan-Helge and Wikipedia :O) I got way too hung up on isolating each choice. If the number of choices is expanded to, say, 1 million doors, then it’s easier to not overlook the probability of the first choice. If you have 1 million doors, there’s only a 1/1,000,000 chance of getting the right door the first time, and then the game show host removes all but 2 doors, so that makes it quite intuitive that changing doors gives you a good chance of choosing the right one. For some reason this is quite easy to overlook when there are only 3 doors in the first place. Some kind of mental misdirection going on there.

ORIGINAL POST:

The Monty Hall Problem is fascinating, and frustrating. I get the math, I just don’t agree that it solves the particular problem at hand. But I see that it actually does solve it. But it really doesn’t. Confused? Read on…

When presented with the option to switch doors, you have in practice re-started the game with two doors - one of which hides a car and one which hides a goat. This gives a 50/50 percent chance of choosing the door hiding the car.

I fail to see the practical relevance of whether the host (of the game show) knows which door the car is behind. No matter what happens, you end up with a choice between two doors, one of which hides a goat and one which hides a car. There is no other possible final choice in this “game”.

So, in practice, this is a simple probability without replacement problem. You have a jar with 2 white marbles and 1 black marble. The probability of choosing a white marble is 2/3 and 1/3 for a black marble. The host removes a white marble for you. You’re left with a 1/2 chance of a white marble and 1/2 chance of a black marble.

The Wikipedia article points out that it’s never disadvantageous for the player to switch, because the probability of getting the car is always at least 1/2. I simply mean to say that, as far as I can tell, the probability is always, in practice, exactly 1/2.

This whole thing comes down to how you define the problem. Yes, if you choose one door, then the host chooses another door, then you switch, there is a 2/3 chance that switching will get you the car - theoretically speaking, because you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) choose the door the host chose, and that door is still defined as being in the game. However, keeping the door the host chose in the game makes no sense precisely because it’s already opened to reveal a goat at the time you are to make your final choice and thus gives you 2/3 chance of getting the car if you don’t switch and a 2/3 chance if you do switch. That obviously doesn’t add up. So the game is, effectively, like I noted above, reset and becomes a new game with only two doors.

This is starting to look like one of those “magic” quantum theory things, where the right answer is that there is a 2/3 AND a 1/2 chance of getting the car (NOTE: I do realize this doesn’t actually have anything what-so-ever to do with quantum theory).

For fun I whipped together a little Java app to simulate 1 million rounds of this game, using the theoretical version, and sure enough, switching doors results in winning 2/3 of the time. So even though both definitions of the game, and their corresponding answers, can be said to be correct, it seems only the theoretical and least intuitive one is available to us in practice - which makes no sense to me.

Hey, I never promised you’d be less confused when done reading…

If you happen to know why my assertion that this problem can also correctly be defined as a simple probability without replacement problem is false, please feel free to explain it in the comment section below. Because that’s either the case, or this problem does indeed have two mutually exclusive correct answers - which, well, my rationality-loving mind would have a hard time accepting.

Why People Do Stupid Things

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:50:09 +0200

A friend of mine and me once talked briefly about the one time in our lives we’d been drunk (as teenagers), and we found ourselves wondering what in the world would make a person want to experience a hang-over more than once. He enjoys a glass of wine now and then, and I consume approximately 3-5 drinks per year - so we’re not anti-alcohol, but we’re of the opinion that getting drunk is just plain stupid.

The same day I read about Jarle Trå who at the time was hospitalized after managing to climb Mount Everest without extra oxygen. This short article about it (hard to find much about this in English) also mentions a few people who’ve died attempting to climb Mount Everest.

These things made me curious. Trying to climb Mount Everest is pretty stupid (extremely risky with absolutely no benefits for anyone, except bragging rights), doing it without oxygen is insane. Sky diving may be fun, but is, objectively speaking, stupid. Other things that are seen as fun, challenging, and entertaining, and still, yet again objectively speaking, really stupid are:

trying to become the Ultimate Fighting Champion
gambling with large sums of money
getting drunk/high
base jumping

And so on and so forth… People do stupid things all the time (yes, me too, though none of the things mentioned here).

Why?

The short answer is: Chemistry. Brain chemistry to be exact.

OK, not really news to anyone I hope - but I got curious, and wanted to know exactly how this works. It seems some people are natural thrill-seekers. The pleasure centers of their brains get a much stronger high from the release of dopamine than low thrill-seekers because their brains have fewer auto-receptors (cells that act as brakes to stop the release of dopamine). Since this high is so strong, these people are likely to do crazy things to make their brain release lots of dopamine. For the rest of us, it simply isn’t worth the risk because we don’t derive nearly as much pleasure from the experience.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying these people are stupid. They just do stupid things far more often than the rest of us do, and more extreme things. Of course, there are exceptions, like fire fighters who get the same high from rescuing someone from a burning building, all the while saving someone’s life. They don’t do it just for the high, of course, but I’m willing to bet (not money, that would be stupid) that the high is a big part of it. That’s fine. They’re taking huge risks, but the rewards are equally great. Sky diving for fun is only slightly more stupid than cutting yourself all over the place with a sharp knife and then going swimming with 50 hammerhead sharks ‘cause hey, at least the sharks get a good meal out of it.

If you’re getting the impression that I think doing something very risky, for nothing but a dopamine high, is selfish and stupid - then you’re spot on. But hey, it’s only human. We tend to have trouble with rationality from time to time. Also, once in a while an extraordinarily dedicated thrill-seeker will advance technology in order to get more out of the experience, and sometimes that advancement can be applied to other (useful) fields of study. So it’s not all bad all the time, just most of the time.

These thrill-seekers are, sadly, much more likely than the rest of us to use illegal drugs and to commit impulsive crimes. It’s not their fault, they’re wired that way. For them to stay on the right side of the law, a high degree of self-control and moral integrity is required. Most high thrill-seekers have adequate amounts of these personality traits to keep out of serious trouble, of course, but those who don’t often end up committing crimes that are seemingly without reward. Their reward is actually the high they get from trying not to get caught or killed. There are other, psychological, factors in play here too, as in all things human, but chemistry plays a significant role. Since a lot of these crimes are impulsive in nature, high thrill-seekers who tend to live in the grey (or black) areas of the law, should at the very least make sure they eat healthy to ensure a steady supply of serotonin, and in extreme cases might benefit from serotonin-enhancing medication, because it helps control our impulsivity and decision-making process.

While reading up on all of this I had a thought: Could bungee-jumping, sky diving, or preferably something equally dopamine-generating but more useful, help keep some criminals from reoffending and drug addicts from relapsing? That combined with some courses on self-control and on-the-spot consequence analysis might do a lot of good. I’m quite sure I’m not the first person to think of this - so it’s good to know there is a viable treatment for these people to replace the in-and-out-of-jail loop.

This is all quite fascinating stuff, and if you’re interested I highly recommend this short article explaining the dopamine/auto-receptor thing, and this article on dopamine high in relation to gambling, and this article on the “Arousal Theory” of criminology.

Fascinating Outlets for Creativity

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:11:46 +0200

On Amazon.com there are over twelve hundred reviews of “Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz”. That might come as a shock to those who didn’t know Amazon sells groceries, but let me tell you straight away - there’s hardly anything Amazon doesn’t sell.

One might think there would be some kind of limit to what there is to say about any one type of milk, but as the internet shows us time and time again, there are no (known) limits to human creativity. It’s also true that limitation is the mother of creativity. Most of these milk reviews are incredibly creative and many are even, surprisingly, very interesting and/or funny. Like this one (click on it to open it in a new window/tab, so it’s easier to read):

or this one:

When you think about it, it’s actually the perfect way to hone your creative writing skills. Simply find a seemingly mundane object and do your best to incorporate it into a short-story which also serves as a review of the object. If you publish such writing on places like Amazon.com you could even be lucky enough to receive constructive criticism on your writing, and it could be seen by thousands of people.

This sort of thing makes me wonder what other hidden treasures can be found in the dark forgotten corners of the internet.

Tiny. Really, really tiny.

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:22:00 +0200

If you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself wondering “what’s out there?”, in the cosmic sense. I like thinking about things like that, because it really gives the imagination free reign. One of the main reasons I like science-fiction so much is that I find it fascinating to see what other people have imagined existing out there. It’s especially interesting when people imagine things that are quite a bit “outside the box”, like aliens who communicate not through speech, but through the projection of light at various frequencies, for example.

I find it odd that there are people who don’t believe in extra-terrestial intelligent life. Don’t they realize how mind-bogglingly tiny we are compared to the entire universe? It’s virtually impossible for anyone (except maybe for Stephen Hawking) to imagine how tiny we are without some kind of visual aide (like this). It’s completely impossible to calculate the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. That article says there’s a 0.01% probability of intelligent life evolving on any given earth-like planet. However, given the sheer amount of earth-like planets that most likely exist, the addition rule of probability would make the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe a virtual certainty.

How many earth-like planets exist? No one has the faintest idea, of course - but we know of about 418 exoplanets (as I write this), and it seems that approximately one third of those are likely to be earth-like. It’s not too far fetched to think that this statistic holds true for the rest of the universe, that is, if we keep to the usual practice of assuming things out there work like they do in “our neighborhood” - which is natural since it’s the only thing we have to go on.

Another thing I find strange is that most of the people talking about extra-terrestial intelligent life assume it can only exist on earth-like planets and that it must be similar to life on earth. I’ve always found the idea of intelligent life with sulfuric acid for “blood” (for example), breathing carbon monoxide (for example), to be quite intuitive. I mean, scientists have known about extremophiles for quite some time now, and still most people automatically assume intelligent extra-terrestial life must be similar to life on earth. People ARE writing about extremophiles and their extra-terrestial potential though, so lets hope more people discover this line of thought and take their blinders off when conducting research into these matters.

So, the universe is big. Really big. And thus intelligent life somewhere out there is actually probable.

The above mentioned visual aide does a darn good job of showing us how incredibly tiny we are, but if we assume the universe is infinite our mind just blacks out. First, try to imagine that our universe is not infinite. OK, so it has clearly defined boundaries. Now imagine that what we call our universe is the equivalent of an atom in a much bigger universe, and that an atom in our universe is an entire universe in itself. And so on and so forth in both directions… Add infinite parallel universes to that and you’re well on your way to conceptualizing an infinite universe. The Big Bang could simply be a reaction to something in this “super universe” that ours could be a part of.

I do realize that all this has really accomplished is moving the “where did we come from” pseudo-answer from one place to another. It is, sadly, a question that will never ever be answered - unless, of course, there is a God and he tells us at some point. In some ways though, I kind of prefer not knowing everything about all of existence since I like imagining how it all fits together. It gives us the option of imagining cool stuff like there being 10 dimensions.