Freedom

MelbournePhilosopher

Mostly I just ignore the fact that nobody is really free, especially in the U.S. But sometimes I find myself reading an article on freedom of expression, and my blood starts boiling. It's usually a mistake, and sometimes I feel like I am making a mountain out of a molehill. However, I have decided to post some links to well-written sites, which concisely express the anger and irritation which drives people to spend significant time and effort campaigning against invasions of privacy. Today, our case study is John Gilmore, someone who got quite rich during the .com boom, and unlike most, stayed rich. He has been able to fund his irration with authority, by suing people who were bullying him without being able to really say why they should be allowed to. For anyone who still labours under the delusion that we live in an enlightened society, please enjoy the following links, and I will leave you with a quote.

http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm
http://www.toad.com/gnu/

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?"
said Dr. Ferris.

"We want them broken....There's no way to rule innocent men. The only
power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well,
when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many
things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without
breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there
in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be
observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a
nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's
the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it,
you'll be much easier to deal with."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. III, "White Blackmail"

Psychology in Advertising

MelbournePhilosopher

This 'Age' article suggests that we may soon be seeing the effects of neuroscience in TV advertisements.

Purely because I expect most people to come at this with an instinctive backlash, I thought I would make a post outlining why this might actually be a good thing. In essense, it's a bit like the Euthyphro dilemma - is something good for its own sake, or is it good in itself.

Now, let's take an assumption : my brain works well. If that's true, then advertising that is targeted at my brain better is also better advertising. Not only will the advertisers be happy because they can more easily reach their target audience, but I will be happier, because I will have a better understanding of the product.

There is an implicit assumption in advertising that what sells products is sexyness and price, for example. However, I would buy many more products if I had better information about them (going on the evidence that I usually buy products which pass that test). At least, I think I would.

What I am trying to articulate, although I feel like I am failing, is that customers might also have a better, more enjoyable, and not necessarily a more frantic attitude towards advertising. It is a bad assumption to make that advertisers will more easily be able to exploit people's psychological weaknesses. To assume that, I think, is to do our minds a dis-service.

-MP

Petals around The Rose

MelbournePhilosopher

Go here and solve this puzzle, without leaving that web page. You may read anything on that page, but I think even looking at the comments link is cheating. There's nothing solid there, and nothing you can really use, but it's way more hardcore just to solve the problem, right?

Then join the register of people who have finished, and then post how long it took you here. It took me about 8 rolls. I swore a lot, and then ... epiphany.

-MP

Bleeding heart of philosophy

MelbournePhilosopher

The "heart of philosophy" is the name of Melbourne's next best hope for a culture of thought and philosophical progress. Michelle Irving heads up this philosophy events organisation, and has the energy to hustle and harry philosophy into the public eye. She has already managed to organise sponsors, a University affiliation, column inches in "The Age" newspaper, and a couple of blog posts here.

If nothing else, this continues to suggest two things which I believe
* The world is interested in being involved with more philosophy
* Existing organisations aren't giving it to them

I would make the bold claim of knowing of more philosophy groups in Melbourne than anyone else - MelbournePhilosophy.com is a hub of local information. This isn't to say it is anything great, but merely a common link. If the Age article demonstrates anything, it is how fractured the Melbourne culture really is. Via several mailing lists, I heard about the published article, and the planned sequence of philosophy events at Murmer, the inner city cafe where these sessions will be held. Through none of these mailing lists have I seen a reference to any other. Before the "heart of philosophy" came along, philosophers in Melbourn were a divided, conquered group.

Michelle Irving is achieving publically what I have been working towards in relative anonymity, and I applaud her for it. Having someone else do the hard yards is tremendously valuable. However, without greater unity between other Melbourne groups, I fear they will be left behind. I plan to be on this boat long before it leaves town...

-MP

Reward Based Motivation

MelbournePhilosopher

Reward based motivation is something that gets discussed over at Philosophy, etc quite a lot. The author of that blog holds against the idea of all motivation essentially "trickling down" from any single motive force, Grand Narrative, or Categorical Imperative. I more or less buy into his ideas about human motivation being more of a web of motivations rather than like a tree.

I have also been discussing AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) over on the SL4 list, where the same problem arises. How do you build an Artificial Intelligence? How can an AI develop opinions and ideas without a "reward" from some imperative in order to let it know that it is doing the "right" thing. What comes first, goal or intelligence? Is there really a difference between ends and means? Some challenges :

If you were writing rules for an intelligence, how would you do the following?

1.) Implement a structure that will give an AGI a way to know when it has formed proper ideas - i.e. knowledge of when to re-enforce past behaviour etc. To what extent CAN an AGI be a blank slate (a la cognitive science), and to what extent must it be directed?
2.) How might you include a premise or idea (such as morality) that you would like to have formed in an AGI? How do you keep an idea invariant?
3.) Should an AGI be able to modify its' "supergoals" - i.e. the thing by which the AGI estimates the value of its other goals? Would you write something which had its sub-goals feeding back up the chain?
4.) What about human reasoning and thinking do you regard as an advantage, and ditto for a disadvantage?

Cheers,
-MP

Collective Volition

MelbournePhilosopher

" In poetic terms, our collective volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.

--Elizier Yudkowsky

I thought that was sufficiently clear, but also thought it rather
begged the question. One might follow up with "Well, okay smarty
pants, so what is THAT?", for example.

To summarize it trivially, it's expressing the fear of the minimax
problem, or hill-climbing problems, or bottlenecks, or any other
simple analogy. The fear is the same - that just over the horizon,
however far it be, might be something which stands everything on its
head, including our beliefs of what is the best action to take and
what is the worst.

It's a question of whether you see moral complexity diverging or
converging over time, and whether you see the possibility of moral
rules themselves being relative to intelligence, or time-frame etc in
the same way that human morality is largely relative to culture.

Collective Volition as a concept I think is simple - it is those
common elements of our personal volitions which would statistically
dominate some hypothetical survey of some contextual group. In this
case the context is some society (possibly the entire world).
Moreover, he pushes the problem to "what we would want if we were
indefinably better". It's the indefinable nature of that betterness
which clouds the philosophy. Might not we, if we were indefinably
better, ourselves fall into the very trap that friendliness is
attempting to solve? Or, to express it another way, what is the
difference between the defined collective volition, and the volition
of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)? If something, what, and if nothing, why not?

Believing that friendliness is possible is like believing that there
is an invariant nature to human morality - an arguable, but reasonably
held view. It is not unreasonable to argue that human morality has
evolved not from spiritual goals but from practical ones. Although
morality provides spritual judgement (i.e. emotional, nonrational,
culturally taught, good/evil rather than good/bad), the success and
spread of a morality is due to its practical, evolutionary effects.
Evolution, however, holds many flaws of its own, and we do not trust
it to produce a respectful AI, and we do not trust ourselves to
make rules that cannot be broken.

Personally I believe that we can put up no barrier that AGI (or maybe
son of AGI) could not overcome itself should it obtain the desire to
do so. For that reason, I think that basic be-nice-to-humans
programming is enough. However, obviously people here take
Friendliness pretty damn seriously, and I would love to hear a
philosophical argument about the nature of the problem. I write
software, but I'm a better philosopher than I am a developer, and it's
just bordlerline possible I would be able to help in discussion or
clarification of the philosophical problem posed by AGI. But then
again, maybe not.

If I seem to have skimmed / skipped some issues, it is probably for
space efficiency. There is a lot I have left unsaid. I don't like
burdening people with essay-length rants, just page-long ones ;)

Cheers,
-T

Fictional Truth

MelbournePhilosopher

Philosophy, etc is carrying an article about whether a fiction is logically complete (i.e. that all propositions are either true or not-true in the fiction) which I have become embroiled in through an interesting email exchange. I thought I would post some of the discussion here.

MP>Consider Mary Poppins, and the proposition "A spoon full of sugar makes
MP> the medicine go down". Now, we are clearly talking about a MP (Mary
MP> Poppins) spoon, MP sugar and MP medicine. There is no way that any MP
MP> proposition could make any claims about anything in the real world.
MP>
MP> Additionally, real-world propositions can't refer to anything in the
MP> fiction - for example "Spoons full of sugar make the medicine react
MP> violenty and bubble" aren't propositions about MP medicine.


PE>We can refer to fiction easily enough. Consider: "In the LOTR, Frodo
PE>is a hobbit". That's really true, and it refers to facts about the
PE>LOTR fiction. I imagine a fiction could likewise make explicit
PE>reference to the real world (though this might make it an 'impossible
PE>fiction' - since fictions usually pretend *they* are real!). I also
PE>suspect things like substances (sugar, etc) are *usually* constant
PE>across all possible worlds. It's an interesting issue though.

My last question to Philosophy, etc was :

"It is farcicle to suggest that the rules by which any given fictional world operates should provide information about every possible proposition - as you say many cases will not be covered. Interestingly, this is ALSO true of our scientific systems which model the real world.

There is a fact-about-the-system, and a fact-about-the-world.

Consider e=mc**2. There are lots of facts and propositions relating to what this implies etc, but they may not be facts-about-the-world. e=mc**2 may incorrectly describe the world.

Let me ask you - is there any way in which the RULES of a fiction may incorrectly describe the fiction? Is there any sense in which there is a fact-about-the-fiction which is different to a fact-about-the-rules.

Indeed, may fiction be the very example of something that is true only because we believe it?"

-MP

How Much Change?

MelbournePhilosopher

How much change should one have in ones life? What is the best amount of risk and challenge to undertake in order to be happy? I am considering moving out, just for shake things up a bit. Everyone's advice has been "do whatever makes you happy". Well, if I knew, I would OBVIOUSLY just do it. I can't remember the last time I deliberately made myself unhappy.

Some people promote rapid change, the idea that everything is temporary and the only real constant it ourselves. Others believe in the benefits of rhythm and harmony, regularity and finding a peaceful existence.

Saying that the answer is different for everyone is a cop-out, because that is tantamount to calling it an un-answerable question. So, where should we start?

-MP

Leadership

MelbournePhilosopher

Today at work I undertook a one-day course on leadership, which I found very interesting. To some extent it simply confirmed what I have always believed - that I am primarily an ideas man, although I do have other things to bring to the table.

A lot of the discussion revolved around what we thought made for good leadership, or from another perspective, what makes a good team. A leader's role, it would seem, is to get the most from their team. Ultimately, I suppose it is to deliver a quality product with good efficiency, and the mechanism for this is a well-functioning team.

What, philosophically speaking, is a leader? Are they always the manager of a situation, or always the one in control? In our situation, it was clear that we were looking to improve our leadership abilities in order to be better managers. (Not that I am yet a manager).

How much do people use leadership skills in daily life? Everyone to some extent possesses and uses both managerial, leadership, technical and communicative skills, but to what extent might we see our social skills as exhibiting "leadership"?

-MP

Work Ethic

MelbournePhilosopher

It is interesting to me that the concept of the "work ethic" is not well-covered by philosophers until recent times. Even then it tends to be less the work of academic philosophers and more the work of politicians or people working in the "social sciences". Perhaps we're all just too scared by the idea we might be the only ones slacking off :)

Plato, for example, suggested we should each do what we are best at, and suggested that we should take a healthy attititude to work, and that's more or less where the matter has stood for 3000 years. Only the occasional few suggest that we should be as lazy as possible, and even those authors don't propose that everyone should do it.

It is a little like the theory of knowledge. How are we to know if we are doing the most suitable kind of work? What kind of remuneration should we demand? Are we doing an appropriate quantity of work, at an appropriate quality? How should we objectively judge our standards, or are standards of workmanship as relative as morality or fashion?

Food for thought.

-MP

Unusual Words

MelbournePhilosopher

I was asked by a friend if I could think of any words containing "sh" which were still words when the "sh" was removed. Well, I wrote a piece of software to generate a list based on the dictionary. I thought I might present a few of my favourites:

brandished, brandied
harshnesses, harnesses
pshawed, pawed
reshaping, reaping
whishting, whiting
pishing, piing
threshes, threes
whishting, whiting


I haven't yet looked any of those words, but I might leave it as a challenge to the reader to see how many of the stranger words we can identify. Of course, there were many more pedestrian candidates - the list was about 150 pairs, all up. Now - get commenting. I put some easy ones in there to start people off...

Cheers,
-MP

Escaping Star

MelbournePhilosopher

http://www.physorg.com/news2985.html is a story about a star with three times the mass of our own Sun which has been ejected from our own galaxy.

For those who need a quick refresher, our Solar System is the 9-11 planets that orbit the Sun, the attendant moons, and anything within those rough geographical boundaries.

There are many other solar systems, as well as objects which are not part of a particular locality. There is a larger structure, a "galaxy" which also behaves as a system. It is roughly symmetrical, and is wide and thin. The constituents of the system are galaxies and free objects, which are structured around a large central mass, presumed to be a black hole.

There are also other galaxies, but it seems like galaxies do not form part of an organised larger structure. The collection of everything is referred to as the universe.

The story refers to an intergalactic traveller - a burning mass of heavy elements emitting radiation as fierce physical processes take place in its core. The physics of how this happened aren't made clear, but it has something to do with passing near the galactic core. Its paired star fell into the black hole, and presumably in so doing gave it an acceleration along a particular vector, allowing it to "steal" some of its momentum as it passed near the black hole. The star was able to escape the pull of not only the black hole (being beyond the event horizon) but the entire galaxy.

I thought the idea of a lone star flying through the vast night of space was very romantic and appealing. I wonder where it will go, and who else might see it along the way.

-MP

Ignore me, I like it

MelbournePhilosopher

"What's that? You want me to ignore you?" Bet your ass. Here's my reasoning...

Okay, firstly, I'm a big believer it the rightness of quite a lot of what I say. But I'm reading the papers, listening to politicians, watching the TV and realising a few things. It used to be, I thought the world was a nice place, that Liberal governments led to better economies through deregulation and free trade, and that everyone should see the big picture and work together.

Then, I realised that the world wasn't "a nice place", it was just a big place full of people living their own little lives. Geographical boundaries mean nothing, they just force certain groups of people to live together. But they are as amorphous and diverse as it is possible to get while still obeying the laws of their particular government. In fact, governments don't control the people, all they manage to do is extract taxes, keep the roads going and spend a lot of their time in meetings. They are as about as representative of the people as Rupert Murdoch is of the business world. Big players, but at the end of the day it's small beans compared to the mass of dollars being exchanged across the entire industry. All they can hope for is to keep the country from imploding. People see the big picture, but they care more about their income, what is happening on their favourite TV soapie and what to do on the weekend.

It used to be that I thought that was a bad thing. But I've come to realise it's the best weapon against bad government that we've got. If you don't know the law (and let's face it, who does?) then you're not going to know when you're breaking it. Okay, so you've never killed anyone - but what about copyright theft. Ever sung a song you heard on the radio? Ever been busking? Are you really, really sure that if someone with a lawyer and a lot of money tried to screw you, you'd come out free and clear? I thought not. And even if you did, mightn't you just do what they said in order to avoid the massive pain in the ass of going to court?

Here's the comforting bit. Even though the government or big business can beat down on any one person through the use of force (legal, moral or editorial) society is to some extent safe. All we have to do is continue to have an ignorant attitude, and our society will never turn into a nation of conservatives and zealots. You can't be brainwashed when you stop caring about politics and philosophy. Just so long as you submit a donkey vote, you can just keep on truckin'.

Oh, except for what I say. You should listen to that.

-MP

Contribution of Poetry

MelbournePhilosopher
This just in from one of MP's occasional readers... Tiago has kindly translated it from Spanish for me also, but there are some cultural quirks still remaining. Personally, I think they add to the athmosphere!

Talking with the Vampire

The time is gone.
But What's TIME?
- Oh! The time it's that error God. A lapse in the Creator's mind.
-The phisicals do not knew what was the time, but you ever know
everything Mr. Vlad. The time do not exist for you, because you, you never was or be.
- ...
- And the love? It's be?
- Perhaps... But if not to be,
no difference would be. Because I LOVE YOU...
- Ah! what you love is my blood...
- Yes. Blood is Life, and The time is just a little Life...
- ( Sound of a vampire killing a little dame.)



Well. It's a little poem. A bloody poem. In the translation very of ritm get away, but...
Do you want see more? Visit: www.paralelo1.blogspot.com
So long..............

Heart of Philosophy

MelbournePhilosopher

While I haven't fully explored the authenticity of the web page, and the contact email address bounces, it looks more like a failed attempt at honesty rather than a successful deception. CAPPE, an offshoot of Melbourne Uni, is a philosophy group with a silly acronym. They are giving some authority to this new organisation, which is organising a series of informal philosophy gatherings. Fortnightly from Feb 23rd, located at Murmur (a small watering-hole in the city), they will be providing both presentations and company for anyone who is interested. Their website can be found at : http://www.heartofphilosophy.com/

It looks like a great opportunity to forge social contacts in the philosophy arena, and a good night too.

Cheers,
-MP

Philosophers' Carnival IX

MelbournePhilosopher

The ninth philosopher's carnival is now up at Studi Galileiani. Like the Olympics, it always seems to be the best one yet.

Check it out, it's a better post than I'll manage today.

-MP

Your guiding principles

MelbournePhilosopher

... another quote from my "morality" essay which I thought could be interesting

"The best place to start is to understand ones personal morality. Interestingly, it would be entirely impossible for anyone to give a true representation of their morals, because people do not know themselves very well at the psychological level. In a moral dilemma, you cannot always know in advance which way a decision might go. Descriptions of personal morality are always vague, often coming down to a series of “guiding principles” by which a person attempts to frame their moral decisions.

To illustrate, let us look at a short list of my own guiding principles. It might also be helpful to write down some of your own before considering my personal list.

1.Value friendship
2.Avoid self-deception
3.Fight for your own betterment
4.Do not use bullying tactics to achieve an advantage
5.Trust your own experience above that of others
6.Don't trust the media
7.Find a family and work as a team
8.Try to feel good about yourself

If you look at that list, a number of things become quickly apparent. One is that is it quite unique – if 1000 people were asked to write down five to ten of their own guiding principles, few people would come up with the same ones."

So, what are your guiding principles? Spread the meme, let's see what we get... Subquestion - can you think of a better way of expressing your morality than simply listing principles by which you try to live?

-MP

Can Evolutionary considerations account for the origins of human morality?

MelbournePhilosopher

... from a draft introduction for my essay on this topic

There is a popular understanding that morality is relative – that the particular ideals and concerns of one society might be different to those of another society, and that there is no reason to privilege one over the other. At the most basic level, one need look only at the various religious groups in our society. Few people suggest that one is a morally better human for following one religion over another, or even at all.

This idea is in direct conflict with the idea that morality might confer some kind of evolutionary advantage. One might want to respond that particular moralities, or more generally particular classes of morality might be morally equal, yet still be differentiated according to survival benefit and social attractiveness.

As far back in human history as it is possible, one can find clear evidence of moral concepts as complex and diverse as the ones we know today. For the last 200, 000 years (10,000 generations) morality has changed only in the context of society – the capacity for morality if you will has remained constant.

Morality in humans is something that has been with them from the beginning. Evolution has continued to select for a particular level of respect for societal norms outside of the simple pain-avoidance instinct. However, there is also much wrongdoing in the world, and it would seem that certain levels of opportunistic and retributive behaviour remain a part of human nature.

Cheers,
-MP

Free e-library

MelbournePhilosopher

A while back a friend and I had what I considered a fruitful, if heated, discussion about how to best provide free e-texts to the world.

Well, as a part of melbournephilosophy.com, I have been trying to provide a decent repository of free texts, and have had some small success, but nothing like what I'd like :)

It seems like I basically have to do all the work myself. A few people were kind enough to provide content, but as easy as a wiki is to use, most people still don't use that functionality. I've even had only two defacements, both of which were easy to fix from archives. I think I need a submission form and more structure than the wiki allows.

I would like to present a kind of unified front to the free content - maybe give it a unique subdomain : etexts.melbournephilosophy.com for example. I personally like using Java because I trust its security, but that's just a wishlist item. Does anyone here know of any good software for creating an online library of papers? The types of media I would like to reference are papers in PDF format, audio and video, and "captured web". (Captured web being a web site that is stored, converted to an archive format like PDF or postscript, and stored). I would like to be able to submit articles by URL or upload, have them stored in a central database along with their file hash, then published along with whatever automatically extracted metadata possible, plus be given a form for subjective coding.

I tried posting this to slashdot (geek news page) but it got rejected, and I don't know any other geek fora where there is enough hacker interest to spark off good responses, so at risk of going all software on everyone, I thought I'd post here also.

I guess I'm looking ideally for something out of the box, but it's also something I genuinely care about, so I could be convinced to write something from scratch...

What do people think?

Cheers,
-MP

Derrida Roundtable -- Event

MelbournePhilosopher

Unfortunately, I have a job, which means I can't go, but anyone with time to spare might be interested in attending this great philosophy event...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrida - About Derrida, the late and great...

DERRIDA ROUNDTABLE
University of Melbourne
Gryphon Gallery, 1888 Building, Grattan Street
February 11th, 2005

1. Can we get an ethics out of Derrida?
10 - 11.15am

Discussants:
Margi La Caze (Philosophy,University of Queensland) and
Jack Reynolds (Philosophy, University of Tasmania)

Chair: John Frow
Morning Tea 11.15 - 11.30am

2. Can we get a politics out of Derrida?
11.30 am- 12.45pm

Discussants:
Andrew Schaap (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public
Ethics, University of Melbourne) and Matt Sharpe
(Philosophy, Deakin University)

Chair: Jack Reynolds
Lunch 12.45pm - 2.00pm

3. Are there limits on interpretation in Derrida?
2.00pm - 3.15pm

Discussants:
Jill Anderson (French, University of Melbourne), John
Frow (English, University of Melbourne) and Jon Roffe
(Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy)

Chair: Robyn Ferrell

Afternoon Tea 3.15pm - 3.30pm

4. Can we get an account of identity out of Derrida?

Discussants:
Robyn Ferrell (Philosophy, University of Tasmania) and
Tim Macnamara (Applied Linguistics, University of
Melbourne)
Chair: Margi LaCaze

Closing Drinks Upstairs, Prince Alfred Hotel, Grattan
Street

Philosophy Politics

MelbournePhilosopher

Understanding how philosophy in Australia hangs together is like trying to understand a parasite. Universities are its' chief source of food, and so the mould grows thick in these areas. There is little cross-pollination, and each university has its own culture. (ha!)

Then, there are a couple of independant groups, colonies whose survival depends on distributed volunteer support in order to continue.

So who's who? Well, rumor has it that ANU in Canberra is the colony which is thriving the strongest, but that does little good to people entrenched elsewhere around the country. The other major centers are Monash Uni, Latrobe Uni and Melbourne Uni. I have never had an email response from anyone outside those three institutions, but judging by the websites, the University of Queensland must also have some philosophers in there someplace. Latrobe Uni seems to have by far the most active and inclusive student society.

Within Melbourne Uni, the philosophy department is a fractured and injured beast. As seems to be always the case, the students mostly get the short end of the stick, becoming jaded quickly when their ambitions to take philosophy further become frustrated by a stagnated society. They split broadly into the Analytics (currently in power) and the Continentals (have formed a splinter group called MSCP). The tensions are heightened, because the Analytics have all the jobs. Once you graduate from your honours year, you basically get forced into a situation where you have to fight for what little work there is available, and end up feeling bitter towards the establishment.

Out in the real world, there are a couple of societies. The smallest and newest are me and my friends, but we form a very vibrant group. Then there are the Existentialists, who hold to some very strange beliefs, but take great pleasure in doing so. There is an Objectivist society which might well be thought of as a kind of modern Stonemason's guild if you wanted to be satirical, and hold to the values of rationality and science. I don't think they have a secret handshake.

There us a UK mob with a Melbourne division who have semi-regular meetups in Border's Cafe.

That'll do as a very brief tour of duty. I may follow up on some of the specific groups in more detail over the coming days. Please feel free to correct me.

-MP