Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine asked me a hypothetical question:

I have a daughter with leukemia; The doctors say she might not pull through. Will you pray for her?

Well, as an atheist this puts me in a difficult position. I have several options available, none of which are particularly enticing. But before we get to my response I’d like to explain about my position on religion in general, and my objections to prayer in particular.

I dislike religion because it encourages magical thinking over scientific rationality. Because it can encourage bigotry and strife. Because it can be used in incredibly destructive ways. Because people appeal to their religion as a rationalization of their personal hatred and pettiness, as an escape from personal responsibility, and as a means of dehumanizing or demonizing others. And finally because it does not encourage questioning investigation or skepticism of claims made in the name of the Almighty, let alone the physical universe, rather, it encourages mob mentality.

I object to prayer specifically, because it can easily be used as a psychological crutch to avoid personal responsibility. How many have to die from faith-healing for us to learn that it doesn’t work? Instead of seeking known secular options that have been proven to work, some people are tempted to talk to their all-powerful imaginary friend. The worst part about the horrific outcome of these cases is that it only reinforces their belief system (aka, the True Believer syndrome). I object to prayer used in this manner because it’s worse than pointless; it’s actively destructive.

I have enough trust in my friend that he’s tried all the scientific options available (and is not using prayer as a substitute for actual medical attention), that he knows I think praying in this fashion is pointless (and has considered not asking so as not to put me in a difficult situation), and that humoring his beliefs won’t cause any physical harm. Based on these assumptions my options are:

1. Tell him I won’t do it.

Though it’s strictly logical to take this position, it’s not a very nice thing to do. My friend has come to me in a time of need; asking for prayer is actually a veiled question. Really, he’s asking, in terms of his own world view, for me to express consolation towards his predicament. It would be rather unkind of me not to comply with the request simply because we have different beliefs about how the world works.

2. Tell him I will pray, then not do it.

It’s virtually impossible that my friend would figure out I’d lied. (But then I don’t really have any practice lying, so maybe he would). I could convince him I’d pray and then just not do it, and answer any unlikely follow up discussions with details about what I actually didn’t do. But I’d also have to live with the fact that I lied to a friend about something which meant a lot to him; not exactly good for the self-image.

3. Tell him I will pray, and actually do it.

Really, what does it cost an atheist to pray? It’s simply wasted verbiage, at most a few wasted minutes of my life. I’ve spent many minutes doing much less. It doesn’t hurt my philosophical outlook to engage in the motions of a prayer, it doesn’t even hurt me and my atheism if I break down for a minute and actually mean it. I’d have a lower opinion of myself if I selfishly refused to devote a few minutes of my personal life as an outreach to my friend.

In reality I’m somewhere between 2. and 3. That is, I’d certainly tell my friend I’d pray, I’d even intend to carry it out. Wether I actually would, I don’t know. I might try, and then find myself incapable, or I might forget (unlikely), or I might postpone by waiting until I felt in the appropriate mood (which would invariably never strike). But, though I can certainly be called upon to pray, I can’t be called upon to believe that it’s actually gonna do any good. And I’ll only do it if I’m fairly certain that my actions won’t encourage any of the undesirable psychological behaviors that make me adverse to it in the first place.

Sometimes being an atheist humanitarian is difficult.

From Reasonable Deviations:
MIT has done a course titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. Video lectures are available through OCW.

So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that when I get stuck thinking about a problem, I’ll endlessly repeat, in my head, the knowledge and reasons surrounding the problem until the solution/new path/new thought occurs to me. It’s not me that’s doing the thinking here, rather It’s me that the thought occurs to, which explains the phrase, “It occurred to me that…”). So our Ego has the mistaken opinion that it’s the originator of all the thought in the mind, while all the time it’s more the receiver of the thoughts which occur in the brain.

But if this is true, then what is it that makes one person smarter than another? It must be that more thoughts (maybe of different character) occur to the smarter person. But then how does one make themselves smarter? One probable method would be to do daily exercises in logic puzzles and brain teasers, on the presumption that it will exercise and stimulate some parts of the brain from latent dormancy into activity, and that this sort of change in brain activity will be of general use in life’s daily problems. I’m not a psychologist, and have no data on the efficacy of this approach, but it seems plausible. More helpful, would be a correlation between specific types of problems and wether experience in solving particular instances of that type will extend to an increased ability to solve all problems in that class.

Yet the revered smarts of Einstein and Leibniz isn’t that they were particularly good at solving instances of know problems, computers can do that better than any human, it’s that they saw connections and aspects of unsolved problems that then allowed those problems to be solved. What brain calisthenics would help you to answer the currently unanswered questions? Here I draw a blank and even have a difficult time speculating. History is replete with anecdotes about flashes of insight that answer the prepared mind (penicillin was found in dirty dishes, structure of benzene revealed in a dream of snakes, gravity with the fall of an apple, etc). But beyond extended concentration on a given problem to prepare the mind, none of these tales suggest a general approach for encouraging the frothy bubbling of thoughts that the brain must present to the consciousness trying to solve the problem. Intelligence then will vary as a result of the computational structure in underlying medium (neural brain) that supports thought.

I’m at a loss when I try to conjure up a method by which we can transform my brain’s architecture so that it can better do my thinking for me. If Minsky is right (and I really think he is) then the solution must lie in the study of multi-agent systems and emergent behavior. Unfortunately, we are still developing the non-linear methods and mathematical tools that will help an understanding of such systems. But the research will be useful for much more than the study of thought, it applies to a very wide range of things found in nature (Economic behavior, Environment/Ecosystems, Evolution + Game Theory, etc.) and cuts across so many fields that it’s likely everyone has a roughly equal chance of contributing, wether they realize it or not. This really is the age of the multi-disciplined researcher.

Update: a Reasonable Deviations post about the Creativity Machine, which incorporates an apropos feedback mechanism, that readily models the difference between the consciousness which experiences thought and the separate generative mechanism of thought.

During my packing for a move to UCI, I’ve come across the following items (all covered in dust):

• A newspaper clipping titled The Surreal Life, about Mark Chorvinsky and his magazine, Strange.
• April 1987 issue of Computer magazine, with feature article No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks about ‘avoiding the horrors in the Software Engineering Process’

I’ve been watching the videos of last year’s Singularity Summit and noticed that, along with all other conferences I’ve watched, questions from the audience are completely inaudible to the sound recorder. There is a very simple solution that I haven’t seen anyone using: The parabolic dish and microphone set that makes such great spy equipment. Just have one of the A/V people point this at the audience member asking questions, and their question can be clearly recorded (and transferred to the PA system in larger halls), with the added convenience that nobody should have to shuffle and squirm all the way to audience-deployed microphones. Not only would it provide better quality recording, but it should also benefit audience-speaker interaction.

I was briefly reading Minsky’s Society of Mind and found these passages memorable.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek “the real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

The smaller two languages are the harder it will be to translate between them. This is not because there are too many meanings, but because there are too few. The fewer things an agent does, the less likely that what another agent does will correspond to any of those things. And if two agents have nothing in common, no translation is conceivable.

I’ve been sitting on this idea for at least a year, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t blogged about it yet. It turns out that car speedometers are not very accurate. In fact, they can be on the order of 10% wrong, with the error more prominent at higher speeds. Typically they work by counting the revolutions per unit time of the axle, and then some quick math involving π. The odometer is usually measured in a similar fashion. I think that this is a terrible way to measure speed and distance. A much better way would be to have a photo-detector scanning the surface of the wheel. The system would work on the same principles that enable optical mice to detect their motion. It would be more accurate because there’d be less variation in tire width, and error would not compound at higher speeds. The only real drawback is that mud or dirt might obscure the sensor (but then you can fall back on the existing methods).

I was chatting with one of my friends recently. He was telling me about a Markov chain program (I think 5^th order) that he had just finished. This gave me an interesting idea. Suppose that you were to measure the connectedness of the English Language as a Markov process. As you increased the order of the chain, what does that tell you about the information structure of the language? Would it be useful to display these as a histogram series, charting the probability of a word, in relation to other words, as a function of chain depth?

Coincidencedentally, Jeff Atwood, then wrote a post about Markov processes. His examples, which work on the letter level, show a remarkable qualitative change as the order of the chain is increased.

And just what happens if you train a Markov chain on Lewis Carrol?

Alright, So I’ve been thinking about keeping my home directory in git recently. I have a machine that I can dedicate to storing a ‘master copy’ and I’ve no problem with creating scripts and minor utils to help things along. I haven’t done it yet, but things have gotten to the point where I can’t function outside my environment. There are some relatively large hurdles that I’d have to mount before keeping my life in a version control system would work. The first is that my native environment is completely and totally useless on toy operating systems like Microshit Winblows. Honestly, I don’t see how anybody can function on a system that’s so user-friendly it does stuff on its own that you’d rather it didn’t. The second is that I touch type Dvorak, and hunt-n-peck Qwerty. The third is that I can only edit with Vim and can’t stand systems that ignore those keybindings that’ve now migrated to muscle memory.

So what is a *nix person to do in a world of windows? Taking my environment around just isn’t going to be enough. So let’s take a lesson from Portable Firefox. Some people are so addicted to their browsers, that they can’t stand to be without their carefully configured settings, sculpted behavior, long-gathered bookmarks, and specialty plugins. Indeed, once you’ve set up your browser, using someone else’s is neigh impossible. So, there’s now a way to take all that with you on a thumb drive everywhere you go.

With virtualization coming along at a very rapid pace, this should be doable with GNU/Linux. It shouldn’t be that hard. You get a big thumb drive and partition it with a FAT32 bootstrap partition, and a *nix partition. You put all the system files on the *nix partition, and run a pseudo-kernel underneath. Ideally, to minimize disk writes and extend the life of the thumb drive, the bootstrap mechanism will load as much as it can (as a continuous read into memory) and start executing from there. So you double-click, and viola! you’re in a window that has everything they way you’re used to it. Only the bootstrap mechanism and pseudo-kernel have to be host-system aware. And, It should not require the re-booting of the host system.

I’m thinking of something almost exactly like this.

Hardware fails from time to time. And, unlike software, it can’t be fixed by typing or scriptic incantation. One of the harddrives in my primary computer failed. Fortunately, I set up that machine with 2 500GB drives as a mirrored RAID. So, while replacing one of the drives is quite a hassle, nothing seems to have been lost.

Simultaneously, my Terastation seems to have malfunctioned. This is much more problematic. It’s got 4 250GB drives arranged as a RAID5. When I first got the machine, I spent quite some time hacking on it, so that it now has ssh. Good thing too, because that’s now the only way to talk to the machine during a 5 minute window before it automatically powers off. I’m going to punt solving this issue until I’m settled in at Irvine.