Paul Davies: We are meant to be here

Paul Davies: We are meant to be here:

[If] you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life? Many scientists hate this idea -- what's often called "the anthropic principle." They suspect it's a trick to argue for a designer God. But more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear...

British-born cosmologist Paul Davies calls this cosmic fine-tuning the "Goldilocks Enigma." Like the porridge for the three bears, he says the universe is "just right" for life. Davies is an eminent physicist who's received numerous awards, including the Templeton Prize and the Faraday Prize from the Royal Society in London. His 1992 book "The Mind of God" has become a classic of popular science writing. But his new book, "The Cosmic Jackpot," will challenge even the most open-minded readers. Without ever invoking God, Davies argues for a grand cosmic plan. The universe, he believes, is filled with meaning and purpose.

(via)

Update:

Right. I'm not talking about time travel. This is just standard quantum physics. Standard quantum physics says that if you make an observation of something today -- it might just be the position of an atom -- then there's an uncertainty about what that atom is going to do in the future. And there's an uncertainty about what it's going to do in the past. That uncertainty means there's a type of linkage. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance."

Um, Einstien was referring to quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance", not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Philosophy, Science | id 8266

13:58 (utc-5)
edited: 14:12 (utc-5)

 

1,000,000 Monkeys Producing Shakespeare

People often use the proposition that "a million monkeys at a million typewriters will, if given long enough, eventually produce the works of Shakespeare" as a circumlocution for "random events will often produce meaningful output". But the works of Shakespeare as produced by monkeys are not the works of Shakespeare. Any meaning that the monkeys' version of the works of Shakespeare has is imparted to it by the reader. The letters themselves remain merely random arrangements of letters.

In fact, starting with monkeys typing letters begs the question because you're already beginning with atomic meaningful units. Why not start with words, sentences, or chapters?

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Philosophy | id 8218

14:33 (utc-5)
edited: 14:52 (utc-5)

 

Proving vs. convincing

I just read the statement "I don't think anyone can prove it to me." Proof is objective, whereas convincing is subjective. It makes no sense to say "prove it to me". What you really mean is "convince me". Something can be proved even if you're not convinced it was proved.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Philosophy | id 8175

12:48 (utc-6)

 

On Semantics

People like this commenter on Simon's blog drive me nuts enough to make me want to post about it.

you clearly do not understand the idea of a 'semantic' web. Using xml makes it possible to use that information on other places, you can include it in an xml document, like xhtml, using xlink to point to certain data elements. And another advantages: Your data is tagged. You have given it semantic meaning. [emphasis mine]

Please. As if <foo>bar</foo> has any more "semantic meaning" ^[1] than "foo": "bar". Symbols have meaning when some agent imparts meaning to them. I.e. something has meaning when some person or thing understands it to have a certain meaning. Just because something is "tagged" doesn't give that something any meaning. The tags have to be interpreted by some intelligence, that intelligence being either a person, or by proxy, code that a person has written to "understand" those tags by performing some action based on them. "foo":... can be interpreted just the same as <foo>...</foo> can. Get off your high horse.

(Incindentally, the epistemelogical need for unity of meaning, to me, is a very strong argument for God as the foundation of meaning. But that's a separate discussion.)

Footnotes:
[1]: this phrase irks the hell out of me as well. It's redundant. Only people who want to use more words to make themselves sound intelligent talk about "semantic meaning"

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Json, Philosophy, XML | id 8170

14:17 (utc-6)
edited: 14:32 (utc-6)

 

David Heinemeier Hansson on abstraction

David Heinemeier Hansson on abstraction:

The greater the versatility, the higher the abstraction, the less useful for the specifics.

That's an important metaphysical principle in general, and it's exactly the point I made at work on Friday regarding the system we're working on. Can't go "too meta" or you start not saying anything.

Incidentally, this is why I question whether these really expensive "enterprise" CRM systems or CMSs are actually a win for the organization. Whenever a company buys one of these systems, they're not really saving themselves from having to write such a system, they're buying an environment within which to program what they need. So, it's really not a case of "build vs buy", but rather "build vs buy and build".

Ultimately with these systems you wind up with something that's far more complex than your business needs alone dictate, and you have to work within the worldview of the company selling you the software rather than the worldview dictated by your business. Because that's the case, vendors make their systems as general as possible, but that necessarily brings added complexity. So, rather than building a simple system that grows as your business needs dictate, you continually require highly paid consultants (or if you're big enough, full time experts) to program around the system you just paid hundreds of thousands for. I question whether this is a net win.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Philosophy, Programming, Work | id 8009

12:26 (utc-6)
edited: 12:30 (utc-6)

 

Holy crap, Greg Bahnsen was so awesome. I just started on Side B of one of his tapes in his History of Western Philosophy: Modern series. The side started basically at the end of one of his arguments (since it's side B), but it stands on its own. I'll reproduce it here because it's so awesome:

"Alright, so survival of the fittest suffers from a similar defect, in that it proves not to be a testable hypothesis at all. Because it's just an outlook that says, "Well, the survivors must have been the fittest ones". Oh, and how do you know that? "Well, because they survived". So the circle's complete. It's nothing but an ideological tautology. It's a vision of the world. Alright? It's a certain conception of how the world works. But it's not a conception that's been built up from factual analysis, and it's not a conception that can be tested by empirical facts. And this is the philosophical refutation of evolution as a scientific view."

Keep in mind that he is not necessarily saying that natural selection doesn't happen. He is saying that evolutionary theory can't be claimed to be supported on a purely scientific basis.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Evolution, Philosophy | id 952

00:37 (utc-5)