European ’soft socialist’ country spontaneously combusts (0)
Posted 24 September, 2007 in Politics
Via Tim Blair, it appears France is in a world of hurt:
France is bankrupt and can no longer afford to pay its workers generous salaries and subsidies, its prime minister has declared.
Francois Fillon made the undiplomatic outburst during a trip to the French island of Corsica, where farmers were demanding more government money.
“I am at the head of a state that is in a position of bankruptcy,” he said.
“I am at the head of a state that for 15 years has been in chronic deficit. I am at the head of a state that has not once passed a balanced budget in 25 years. This can’t go on.”
Mr Fillon’s government is due to announce the 2008 budget this week with a deficit of €41.5billion (£29billion).
Will this stop the pinko swine from calling for socialist policies here? Of course not! Socialism has only failed everywhere it’s been implemented; so let’s give it one more chance!
The apathetic apostate (0)
Posted 19 September, 2007 in Philosophy, Diary
My journey to Objectivism from a Christian past is a curious thing. I never renounced God any more than I renounced the tooth fairy. As my perception of reality developed she just took her appropriate place as a mythical being who served a purpose. Some years on He did as well. As time passed the Christian momentum diminished, as it didn’t explain anything or provide a useable moral framework anymore.
Not quite Jim Morrison screaming ‘cancel my subscription to the Resurrection’. I just simply didn’t feel motivated to reinvigorate it.
Questions questions questions……. (0)
Posted 12 September, 2007 in Philosophy
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” - Albert Einstein
In this post I wrote about the relationship between reason and creativity, and it’s still one question that I cannot put to bed. As our zany professor above implies, creativity is the be-all-and-end-all for civilised human beings. My problems with this statement are:
- We definitely haven’t got a society that honours the rational mind. Too many important decisions are made on some basis that is deemed, by the majority at least, to be more important than reason and this is the source of many of our problems. I would argue that honouring reason is still one hell of a worthwhile goal which we haven’t achieved. In fact, creativity is something that the mainstream affords some degree of awe and respect, but reason is often considered droll or base and certainly not something with which to formulate an important moral decision.
- The rational mind might be a faithful servant but surely it underpins the intuitive mind. I mean, if your intuitive mind comes up with a concept and then your rational mind examines it and decides it doesn’t adhere to reason then it’s probably best to throw that idea out!
- Creativity is certainly terrific and has taken us out of the dirt and into civilisation. But reason is still our primary means of survival as as species, so while it should always take the back seat to creativity we should never belittle it. The day will come again when, as a civilisation, it will almost certainly be the means by which we make the right decisions to prevent us falling into another Dark Ages. At this moment in human history we are currently witnessing such a decision point to some extent.
This still leaves me at my original position: that creativity is simply reason applied by the subconscious mind. Sometimes this is amazingly rapid, vigorous and wonderful, but it is still simply reason applied by the subconscious.
What is the nature of mathematics? (0)
Posted 12 September, 2007 in Philosophy
The nature of mathematics is something I’ve been pondering for years now. Particularly, what is it’s role in defining order in the universe? Is mathematics broader than the human mind can comprehend? And finally, does mathematics supersede the universe? In other words, if there was a parallel universe to ours, would it’s order have to be capable of being defined in some form of mathematics? (Which leads me back to the original question, what the hell is mathematics?!)
A book has been written on this subject: ‘Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being’ by George Lakoff & Rafael E. Núñez. I haven’t read it, and only stumbled across it while reading this Wikipedia article. Due to the fact that the book is written by a cognitive linguist and a psychologist I would expect it to concentrate on how humans conceive mathematics. However, based solely on the Wikpedia article this book appears to answer broader questions, but in doing this also receives some criticisms.
As quoted in Wikipedia, the book claims:
Mathematics makes up that part of the human conceptual system that is special in the following way:
“It is precise, consistent, stable across time and human communities, symbolizable, calculable, generalizable, universally available, consistent within each of its subject matters, and effective as a general tool for description, explanation, and prediction in a vast number of everyday activities, [ranging from] sports, to building, business, technology, and science.” - WMCF, pp. 50, 377
I don’t really have a problem with that. But I’m not sure this position is tenable:
WMCF emphatically reject the Platonistic philosophy of mathematics. They emphasize that all we know and can ever know is human mathematics, the mathematics arising from our brains. Whether a transcendent mathematics, independent of human thought, can be said to exist is an unanswerable and perhaps meaningless question.
I don’t claim to have any special ideas on whether a ‘transcedent mathematics’ can be conceptually held by a human being in any real form, but my intuition tends to suggest the human brain is quite good at formulating concepts and I, therefore, tend to err on this side of the argument:
“But their analysis leaves at least a couple of questions insufficiently answered. For one thing, the authors ignore the fact that brains not only observe nature, but also are part of nature. Perhaps the math that brains invent takes the form it does because math had a hand in forming the brains in the first place (through the operation of natural laws in constraining the evolution of life). Furthermore, it’s one thing to fit equations to aspects of reality that are already known. It’s something else for that math to tell of phenomena never previously suspected. When Paul Dirac’s equations describing electrons produced more than one solution, he surmised that nature must possess other particles, now known as antimatter. But scientists did not discover such particles until after Dirac’s math told him they must exist. If math is a human invention, nature seems to know what was going to be invented.” - Tom Siegfried, The Dallas Morning News, 3/5/2001
And this is pure geek humour:
“It’s difficult for me to conceive of a metaphor for a real number raised to a complex power, but if there is one, I’d sure like to see it.” - Joseph Auslander
Is privacy a basic right? (2)
Posted 5 September, 2007 in Philosophy
I’m still trying to work out if privacy is a basic right, like personal liberty or property rights. What gets referred to as a violation of privacy is often really just a database of information that is obtained legally, say, a database of products you’ve purchased from a particular store so you can be targeted for advertising. If you’ve purchased a series of products from a store then most people would expect that the store would keep a record of those purchases, at least for warranty purposes. What if they used that information to mail you specific advertising? What if they didn’t even contact you personally but used that information to determine an area where a bunch of people lived who were interested in a certain product, so the store put up a billboard in that area? Is any of that a violation of privacy?
It raises all sorts of questions. Another example: it’s not illegal to park your car on the street. What if you parked your car on the street and recorded the time another person left for work every morning? Let’s just say you kept a record but didn’t use this information for anything. Is that a violation of privacy?
Then there’s the flip side, which is illustrated very well in this short clip: http://aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf
What are the underlying first principles at play here?
If I could have any car as my daily driver this would be it (0)
Posted 3 September, 2007 in General
Cars generally don’t do it for me. I usually evaluate them in very cold engineering terms, being a trade off between performance, fuel economy, features, safety and value for money. However the Morgan Aeromax doesn’t get assessed on these terms! I absolutely love it’s retro look, quirkiness and peculiar beauty.
