I’ve been wondering about what the meaning might be of second-order probabilistic statements like the following, which I hear quite often. I suspect they are nonsensical.
I probably might be able to find them.
It’s probably definitely going to happen
It’s probably not very likely
Mafia
The mafia is very much alive:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7057413.stm
Inverted Logic
On Wednesday, George Bush is due to attend a ceremony at the US Capitol where the Dalai Lama will receive a Congressional Gold Medal, a top US civilian award.
Tibet’s Communist Party Secretary of Tibet, Zhang Qingli, lambasted the exiled spiritual leader for trying to “split the motherland”.
“We are furious,” he said. “If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.”
Loonies…
Decimal time
I’ve often wondered whether anyone has looked at time decimalisation. I finally got around to searching for some initiatives.
Here’s one:
Reputation model
I’ve been working on reputation systems (security of) recently, which has got me thinking about the possibility of portable reputation. Here is a quick sketch of a reputation exchange format (and underlying model of reputation). I’d like to see something like this become the norm.
Download document
Any comments welcome. (No grammar nazis please.)
Funny
Living Zombies
I’ve noticed a proliferation of marketing slogans and brand names which are variations on the theme of Life, Alive, Live. E.g. Windows Live Messenger, Vodafone Live, and many more. Going on my theory that advertisers target things which people feel they lack (e.g. Freedom, Romance, security, spontinaeity, popularity ), regardless of the product they are trying to sell, this would appear to suggest that people are tending to feel more dead – i.e. they lack the spark of life. Feeling alive is an emotional thing, it’s not just about Mr Negri (Movement, Respiration, Nutrition, Excretion, Growth, Reproduction, Irritability) – one can have all these things and still feel dead inside. I think this trend in marketing is a definite sign of an increase in living zombies
Shared experiences
This point is very hard to explain so I’ll probably refine this post over time.
Shared experiences are not what they seem. When you think you are experiencing the same thing as someone else – e.g. staring at a sunset, this is not true. Even superficially speaking, you’re looking at it from a different angle, you may rub your eye and the colours may change, you may be wearing sunglasses. When the other person closes their eyes, you still see the scene.
But it’s more fundamental than that. Even if you were both at the same point in space or could somehow hook your optic nerves up to the same pair of eyes, the subjective experience would still be an exclusive one-man show.
How would you ever be able to talk about a comparison between subjective experiences? I can compare things within my experience. E.g. I can check for myself if the light from my computer screen is brighter than light from yours.
I can also check with someone else that agreed linguistic relationships are the same. E.g. I can ask some else if what he calls “sunlight” is what he calls “brighter yellow” than what he calls “urine”, but I still can’t compare experiences themselves. Why? If you think it’s possible, tell me an experiment which would be able to tell me if your experience of green is the same as my experience of green. Such an experiment would be able for example to tell me if your green was my red and vice versa. This is obviously not possible by asking questions, any kind of questions, because every time you say green, I would think of my green, and you would think of your green (red).
Compare it to a signalling system. Say Alice is communicating through an interpreter Ingrid to Bob and Carol. Bob can’t hear what Ingrid says to Bob and Carol, but he can see what they do. How could Alice test whether Ingrid is talking the same language to Bob and Carol? Not possible. Same with subjective experience. We can only communicate about it to each other through a shared language which has only a conventional relationship to the experience itself.
My feeling is when examining experience closely however, that my experience is unique to my consciousness. I can’t explain this but I can refute any possible proofs that experience is shared. No wonder we often feel so inexplicably lonely…
What is
The question “What is x” in an email reply has become more or less redundant now that Wikipaedia is so good.
The 5 senses
The idea that there are only 5 senses is completely wrong.
Here’s a quick count of the ones I can identify. They are all sources of experience/sensation. Seems to add up to between 8 and 11:
1. Smell
2. Touch
3. Hearing
4. Vision
5. Taste
6. Temperature
7. Kinaesthesia (knowing where your body parts are)
8. Balance (knowing your orientation WRT gravity)
9. Gravity/acceleration (astronauts report that this is a distinct sense which you only realise when you’re deprived of gravity)
Borderline:
———–
9. Thought
10. Pain
11. Bodily feelings which are neither touch, nor pressure, pain etc… (e.g. emotions)