Here's some more thoughts on free will related to Dennet's book.
If the world is determined, but we don't know what the future is going to be, why don't we just act the way we think is useful and assume that's the way it's supposed to go.
It is meaningless to talk about freedom or life on the level of atoms. It is also meaningless to talk about those concepts at the astronomical scale. Planets and stars live and die and we're just a spec in the grand scheme of things. It is only "useful" to think about concepts such as life and decision at the medium, biological scale, or perhaps slightly higher at the level of the brain (which is still biology, but just more complex).
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Inflation vs. Unemployment
These days I've been thinking about what's going to happen to the world economy and western societies in the near future. This is just a stream of consciousness, so bear with me.
So what's worse inflation or unemployment, and what should we expect in the near future? I believe we can expect both, but while everyone is afraid of unemployment, and everyone knows its effects, people underestimate or don't appreciate the crippling power of inflation. Inflation is a very soft-sounding word, almost like it's describing a good thing. While it refers to inflation of prices, if you look at it in another way, it describes a devaluation of a currency's value.
Unemployment affects society in a very uneven way. People with jobs have a fundamentally different experience than the people without. There are the haves and the have-nots (for this example it's people who have an income, and those who don't). On the other hand, inflation is indiscriminant. Everyone is affected, people and businesses, public and private sector. High inflation affects society at its core, shaking its structural foundations.
It undermines trust in people and institutions, it dissolves lifetimes of savings, it creates a feeling of a shaky ground under your feet, like you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. The main side effect of high unemployment is increased levels of social unrest and crime. The main side effect of inflation? Not really sure, to be honest,
The stability of the money supply has been so essential to the functioning of the Western world, and we've learned to trust that component in our lives so much that we don't even think about it. Anyone born after World War II in Western Europe or America has not likely experienced inflation above 20%, and most of the time they have not seen inflation above 12-15%. (I'm making up these numbers, but I believe them to be ballpark-accurate). Thus very few people in this society are prepared to even imagine what would happen if the inflation broke thru the 20% ceiling. And yet that's very likely to happen, with Western governments borrowing without restraint for several decades, the currencies true value has been held up artificially high by further borrowing. Now the bubble is beginning to burst.
If inflation breaks thru 20%, which it very likely will do, people will start losing trust in money as a medium of exchange. Governments will start losing their ability to borrow at low rates, driving interest rates up. This is when the fosset dries up. Borrowing from banks or other individuals will completely change, if not be rendered completely useless. The rates charged by the lender have to be higher than inflation, which in times of crisis is not always predictable. Laws will have to be rewritten, enforcement of economic transactions will need to be reconsidered. A lot of things will fundamentally change. Chaos on the streets? Oh yes, very much so.
So what's worse inflation or unemployment, and what should we expect in the near future? I believe we can expect both, but while everyone is afraid of unemployment, and everyone knows its effects, people underestimate or don't appreciate the crippling power of inflation. Inflation is a very soft-sounding word, almost like it's describing a good thing. While it refers to inflation of prices, if you look at it in another way, it describes a devaluation of a currency's value.
Unemployment affects society in a very uneven way. People with jobs have a fundamentally different experience than the people without. There are the haves and the have-nots (for this example it's people who have an income, and those who don't). On the other hand, inflation is indiscriminant. Everyone is affected, people and businesses, public and private sector. High inflation affects society at its core, shaking its structural foundations.
It undermines trust in people and institutions, it dissolves lifetimes of savings, it creates a feeling of a shaky ground under your feet, like you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. The main side effect of high unemployment is increased levels of social unrest and crime. The main side effect of inflation? Not really sure, to be honest,
The stability of the money supply has been so essential to the functioning of the Western world, and we've learned to trust that component in our lives so much that we don't even think about it. Anyone born after World War II in Western Europe or America has not likely experienced inflation above 20%, and most of the time they have not seen inflation above 12-15%. (I'm making up these numbers, but I believe them to be ballpark-accurate). Thus very few people in this society are prepared to even imagine what would happen if the inflation broke thru the 20% ceiling. And yet that's very likely to happen, with Western governments borrowing without restraint for several decades, the currencies true value has been held up artificially high by further borrowing. Now the bubble is beginning to burst.
If inflation breaks thru 20%, which it very likely will do, people will start losing trust in money as a medium of exchange. Governments will start losing their ability to borrow at low rates, driving interest rates up. This is when the fosset dries up. Borrowing from banks or other individuals will completely change, if not be rendered completely useless. The rates charged by the lender have to be higher than inflation, which in times of crisis is not always predictable. Laws will have to be rewritten, enforcement of economic transactions will need to be reconsidered. A lot of things will fundamentally change. Chaos on the streets? Oh yes, very much so.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Free will vs. determinism
I'm reading another brilliant book. This time it's Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennet. It discusses a lot of important philosophical issue, and I don't have time to get into all of them here. But one of the most interesting points Dennet makes is that even if the world is entirely deterministic, the concept of free will is still relevant.
Let us suppose for a second that we live in a universe discretized in space and time where every next state of the physical world directly follows from the previous one. Then whatever we say or do, whichever way we move is going to happen no matter what, and the concept of making a decision is an illusion. We think we decided something, but in fact our whole being was set in motion from birth, and that birth itself was meant to be because of the birth of our parents, and so on and so forth back to the Big Bang itself.
Interestingly enough even if the world is entirely determined, there's one important detail: we still don't know what it's going to be, and even if we could find out, it may be too complex of a process. I.e. by the time you take all the variables into account (even if you had access to all of them), the action has already been taken.
So while from the point of view of an omnipresent being (who knows all the variables of the universe and can compute any combination of them instantaneously), this world may be determined, from the point of view of the agent doing the action, there's no reasonable way to either access all the variables or to compute the action based on them. The same goes for any non-omnipresent being (e.g. a human) observing the agent about to do the action. If this being has limited memory and limited processing power, he / she still may not be able to determine the action of a deterministic agent in a deterministic world due to
1) Limited access to information about previous states
2) Sheer complexity of the world
3) The complexity of the agent we're observing
Thus even in such a deterministic world, we can use the term "free will" or "decision-making" as a convenient tool for explaining our own actions or actions of others.
Let us suppose for a second that we live in a universe discretized in space and time where every next state of the physical world directly follows from the previous one. Then whatever we say or do, whichever way we move is going to happen no matter what, and the concept of making a decision is an illusion. We think we decided something, but in fact our whole being was set in motion from birth, and that birth itself was meant to be because of the birth of our parents, and so on and so forth back to the Big Bang itself.
Interestingly enough even if the world is entirely determined, there's one important detail: we still don't know what it's going to be, and even if we could find out, it may be too complex of a process. I.e. by the time you take all the variables into account (even if you had access to all of them), the action has already been taken.
So while from the point of view of an omnipresent being (who knows all the variables of the universe and can compute any combination of them instantaneously), this world may be determined, from the point of view of the agent doing the action, there's no reasonable way to either access all the variables or to compute the action based on them. The same goes for any non-omnipresent being (e.g. a human) observing the agent about to do the action. If this being has limited memory and limited processing power, he / she still may not be able to determine the action of a deterministic agent in a deterministic world due to
1) Limited access to information about previous states
2) Sheer complexity of the world
3) The complexity of the agent we're observing
Thus even in such a deterministic world, we can use the term "free will" or "decision-making" as a convenient tool for explaining our own actions or actions of others.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
The essence of computer science
Today I stumbled across this lecture series from Harold Abelson of MIT, who explains better than I ever could the difference between computer science and other engineering disciplines.
Computer science deals with idealized components. We know as much as we want about the [pieces] that we fit together. That means that in building a large program, there is not that much difference between what I can build and what I can imagine. So as opposed to other kinds of engineering, the constraints imposed on building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. In that sense computer science is an abstract form of engineering, where you ignore the constraints imposed by the physical world.
Of course this guy is coming from the perspective of an academic setting, and there are a few caveats that will easily be noticed by those in the industry. The constraints imposed by the physical world are still relevant to some degree. For example, we have the constraints of the computer hardware that we're working on, including memory and processor usage. In the web programming domain, you are constrained by the bandwidth of the network, etc. And, of course, in the end, the system has to "do the job" / "satisfy the customer", which is another constraint from the real world.
That said, I think his statement is still for the most part true, since the physical constraints apply to the system as a whole, but not necessarily the parts. For example a civil engineer has physical constraint on each bolt & screw, an electrical engineer has a physical constraint on each wire, each capacitor, each power supply, etc., an architect / building engineer has constraints on each concrete block he puts into the building. So for engineers in other disciplines both the parts and the whole are constrained. The computer scientist is only constrained in the end, while the intermediate processes and components have a tremendous amount of flexibility.
Computer science deals with idealized components. We know as much as we want about the [pieces] that we fit together. That means that in building a large program, there is not that much difference between what I can build and what I can imagine. So as opposed to other kinds of engineering, the constraints imposed on building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. In that sense computer science is an abstract form of engineering, where you ignore the constraints imposed by the physical world.
Of course this guy is coming from the perspective of an academic setting, and there are a few caveats that will easily be noticed by those in the industry. The constraints imposed by the physical world are still relevant to some degree. For example, we have the constraints of the computer hardware that we're working on, including memory and processor usage. In the web programming domain, you are constrained by the bandwidth of the network, etc. And, of course, in the end, the system has to "do the job" / "satisfy the customer", which is another constraint from the real world.
That said, I think his statement is still for the most part true, since the physical constraints apply to the system as a whole, but not necessarily the parts. For example a civil engineer has physical constraint on each bolt & screw, an electrical engineer has a physical constraint on each wire, each capacitor, each power supply, etc., an architect / building engineer has constraints on each concrete block he puts into the building. So for engineers in other disciplines both the parts and the whole are constrained. The computer scientist is only constrained in the end, while the intermediate processes and components have a tremendous amount of flexibility.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Richard Dawkins talk
On evolution of our brains as it relates to the scale of the universe at which our bodies reside.
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