You know how teachers shifted from teaching rote memorization to teaching concepts sometime during the 19th or 20th century?  I think the Internet is causing me to shift in a similar way with regard to facts themselves.  I’m not sure if it’s all a good thing, but I just noticed for the first time that instead of thinking about facts, I tend to think about search terms.  In other words, my use of memory has been abstracted to a higher level: I don’t recall what I need to know, I recall what will lead me to what I need to know.

Posted via email from Duane’s Quick Posts

I was thinking about conspiracies the other day and kinda stumbled into the realization that the idea of a devil is probably the most widely adopted conspiracy theory in the history of the world.  Of course, not everyone is Christian, but the idea of personified evil was, as far as I understand it, first taught by the ancient Persian, Zoroaster (the father of Zoroastrianism) and later adopted by Christianity.

Update: I apologize if I offended anyone. This was an exercise in looking in at my own culture “from the outside” and I didn’t mean to be confrontational.

Bill Maher will be releasing his new documentary, Religulous, this Friday.  I was interested at first, but the more I saw, the less I wanted to see.  I think Bill, and other atheists like him such as Richard Dawkins who “go on the offense” are making a mistake for two reasons:

1. In centuries past, those who have sought freedom from religion have been persecuted for their lack of belief in God.  Bruno is perhaps the ultimate example.  If atheism has within its system a superior ethic for the treatment of other human beings, shouldn’t its proponents lead out?  The mockery and persecution of others for their beliefs is, in my view, the antithesis of ethical atheism.  Rational argument, tolerance, education, and uplifting humanism on the other hand, is what I see as the height of doubt.
2. Irrational belief is the “default setting” for human beings, and as long as our species has death and birth, irrational belief in something will always outpace the philosophy of doubt.  Since doubt requires considerable time and education, atheists—by mathematical constraint—will always be in the minority.  Mocking the religious, therefore, may be a grave tactical error in the fight for populous doubt: a short-term win may become the impetus for a long-term washout.  Supposing religious belief is ignorance, then the opposition need only reproduce faster to win; meanwhile, atheists need to both reproduce and educate their offspring.

Posted by email from Duane’s Quick Posts (posterous)

It is the yearning of almost all people to know the end from the beginning. And after a person knows it, as she (or he) supposes, her desire turns to securing a place for herself within that anticipated end.

But in a journey such as ours of unfathomable complexity and contingent duration, knowing the end without at times re-evaluating our view of it is a liability to the soul. Each of us has an outward-expanding capacity for growth that is fueled by curiosity and the frequent admission, “We can’t be sure, but this is what we think so far.” Complexity does not yield to preconception; rather, it reveals sublime patterns only to those who challenge their own notions.

A striving to believe is a necessary beginning to wisdom, since confidence in our own knowledge is gained by exploration. But an unyielding belief stands in the way of our systematic progress towards truth. Such a belief is tantamount to certainty, and in its worst incarnation becomes overconfidence and foolishness. I believe that balance of mind, or in other words, our best effort to see fairly, comes not by striving to believe in something, but by striving to unbelieve our own biases.

All beliefs must at some point be wrested from the lofty branches of certainty to be grafted with the humble beginnings of newer and more complete ideas. Progress toward truth makes no exceptions. The consequence of unbending faith in one’s original conception of things is ineluctable stagnation.

I hope to ever be one to challenge my ideas of the world, to see only as far as I can see and claim nothing more, and to re-evaluate the end from the beginning every once in a while.

In case there are any other Rubyists out there going to BYU, here’s a little script I wrote to turn BYU’s circa 1995 website into a circa 2008 iCal-jamming datasource. Copy-paste your schedule to the DATA section (after the __END__ marker) of the ruby script and it will turn your semester’s classes into a file ready to be added to your calendar.

Usage:
$ sudo gem install icalendar
$ # Copy paste your schedule to the DATA section
$ ruby byucal.rb

Enjoy the School.ics file that is produced!

I had a wonderful conversation this evening with a new friend, Steve in New York who has been kind enough to host me in his home for the time being. We were talking about meaning and purpose in life, and I learned something new.

In one of my science classes we had a guest lecturer (Dr. Hedengren) who taught us about a theory of meaning. He observed that meaning might not exist as some absolute quality of the universe, but that it is more likely a human construct. In other words, “to mean” is what humans do.

For a number of years now, I’ve come to value that observation as a liberating kind of theory. We are not trapped by an arbitrary assignment of meaning in our lives—for example, if you are a woman living inside a world where you are told that your purpose is to have children and that your value is in your ability to rear them, then to know that this assigned meaning is not absolute can actually be empowering. Or perhaps you feel like life has little meaning, and it is somewhat pointless—in that case, perhaps the idea of being able to create meaning in your life is a hopeful thought that leads to a better life.

In any case, what Steve taught me tonight is that meaning is also something that you discover. You interact with the world to find meaning. Again, this is not an absolute kind of meaning which exists independent of human thought, but it is an interactive, emergent meaning that comes through thinking and doing.

The combination of these two approaches to understanding meaning led me to realize that meaning is both created by us and discovered as well. To use an analogy from physics, we are point charges within a magnetic field of meaning—take us away and it’s impossible to know if the field really exists as an absolute quality of the universe. But let us interact inside the field, and we affect the field by our very motion. The field affects our trajectory just as our charge affects the field.

I just found out about this Gazelle service which takes your junk for you and responsibly disposes of it or resells it if possible. What’s more, they’ll pay you a little bit too, something like what you’d get at a garage or yard sale. I’ve left my “referral” account on the link above, so feel free to use that link if you’d like to share the proceeds. I’ll let you know what my experience with them is like soon.

My wife and I have had a ton of invitations to goodreads.com lately. Is it just our friend network that’s been “blessing” us, or is this going on everywhere?

One of my long time friends, Eric, and I had a fascinating conversation about will power the other day. We were looking at ways to improve ourselves and to become more consistent over time. One of the things that struck us was that “will power” is an oft-used idea that actually lends itself poorly to describing what this “power” actually is. In other words, the term provides no underlying model with which we can improve this personal trait, other than the idea that it can be “increased” or “decreased”, supposedly in an abstract dimension called “strength”.

One model that has worked well for me is to understand myself as a sort of melding of minds. Even though there is only one physical brain inside me, it seems that there are in fact, more than one mind vying for attention and trying to satisfy their needs.

I think of these kind of like a family: there is the father mind that wants to take charge of the others, and the mother mind that is more aware of the others’ needs. There is the older brother that acts seriously most of the time; the second child that just wants to have fun; the youngest daughter that’s kind of spoiled and but cute anyway.

There are a number of families that you could imagine, probably more like your own family than my description of a family above; but the point is that there are distinct minds up there in our heads that have different needs and wants, and that together they make us who we are. We experience times of weakness (disunity) and strength (consensus), for example. As we learn from the world, new information appeals to one “mind” more than the other, and perhaps persuades us to behave differently. The model starts to help us to become better people.

This playful model can also be extended to a broader context, and perhaps made a little more formal. I call the broader model the “Recursive Theory of Mind”, and it goes like this:

1. Society is a mind.
2. A mind consists of two or more minds that are less complex.

In other words, intelligence itself is a recursive construction, and our conscious state is attached at one particular level of recursion: there is a grander intelligence of which we are a part; and, our own intelligence consists of lesser intelligences (”minds”).

There are a number of interesting corollaries to this Recursive Theory of Mind, one of which is that it might be possible to “strengthen your will” if you treat yourself as a collection of minds vying for attention and self-fulfilled needs. The task then becomes one of understanding, logic, rhetoric, and persuasion rather than “increasing or decreasing the strength-of-will-o-meter.” In fact, it might be better to think of someone who is determined (i.e. “strong-willed”, in the good sense) as someone who has a sustained consensus among his or her various minds. Strengthening the will in the fullest sense, could be a matter of wide-spread appeal, not of single-mindedness.

For example, one mind may be more susceptible to logical persuasion while another is much more interested in pleasure and excitement. If you’re the kind of person who has been brought up thinking that pleasure and excitement are “bad” and that serious contemplation is “good”, then it might take some introspection and meditation to discover that there is this other, valid part of you that needs to be understood. In fact, it might surprise you to find out that you have these hard-wired requirements that you can’t suppress forever—with this discovery, then, you can learn to accommodate the needs of the fun-loving self and make appropriate changes so that what you thought of as “bad” is now just “you”.

Since the Recursive Theory of Mind applies at all levels of intelligence, I think it may be useful to apply our understanding of sociology to the problem of improving ourselves. For example, how will we govern our minds? Is it a democracy, or something else? Could it be that a strong-handed dictator deserves citizens (after years of repression) who rebel against him? Likewise, could a strong-handed “father” mind eventually undermine its own bid for stability by suppressing the other minds and requiring nothing but subjection? I think this could be an interesting way to think of “will power” and may forewarn us of the dangers of “willing ourselves” to do unbalanced things for an indefinite period—maybe at some point we’ll just snap.

One last thought regarding this “mind” that we are: since each of us us a part of a larger mind (i.e. “society”), we each have connections to one another, like our brains have dendrites and synapses. We learn from each other and improve our individual intelligence while also improving the overall intelligence of humanity. What an interesting thing it is to be a node in a network that spans both horizontally as well as vertically. What will we think of next?

P. S. I’ve left out some interesting thoughts from this discussion because I’m not knowledgeable enough in larger contexts to make anything useful of this model—nevertheless, it’s interesting to speculate about grander minds of which our society or humanity are a part. Is the universe intelligent? Does it have a mind? What is “mind”? Perhaps I’ll never know, but in the meantime, this Recursive Theory of Mind is a helpful working hypothesis for me.

UPDATE: I just read a fantastic article in the November 2008 edition of The Atlantic in which Paul Bloom outlines the current theories of “multiple selves”. I didn’t know “my” idea was so popular