Court to decide if Jesus existed

Court to decide if Jesus existed

Well, here's a story to follow. While philosophers talk about standards of proof, there's no more practical standard of proof than the acceptance of a court of law.

While MP can see no outcome other than a compromise coming from this, it certainly is interesting to see it appearing in a non-U.S. court.

Cheers,
-MP

Philosophy on iTunes

Well, philosophy is coming into the digital age. Sure, I was clamouring for this years ago, but I'm not about to complain now that quality content is now being delivered properly.

What am I yammering about? e-Philosophy -- lectures and other rich content available on the internet for free exchange. My (defunct) website, MelbournePhilosophy, had some apologetic nods towards a digital database, but it never lived up to my ideals.

Firstly, here is a story about the philosophy lecture series "Introduction to Logic" being available via iTunes.

Secondly, here is the Stanford University iTunes server, with free academic content. Many of the offerings here seem to be "opinion pieces", but that is no smear. In fact, it's wonderful (to me) seeing such freedom of information.

Hopefully, as more and more philosophy gets recorded digitally, it will be similarly shared.

Cheers,
-MP

Python XML implementation flaw -- whitespace and wholeText

MelbournePhilosopher

I place this non-philosophical note into the blogosphere in the hope that Google will pick it up and do society some good.

If you are useing the xml.dom.minidom implementation, and are dealing with minidom.Text nodes, the following stupid behaviour occurs:

When you call node.replaceWholeText in order to, well, replace the text contained inside the node, don't try to put an empty string in. I was formatting the text content of nodes, and was using strip() to remove whitespace from around the edges. Unfortunately, calling strip() on a whitespace string results in the empty string.

The practical effect was major breakage. With no errors, warnings, or readily apparent cause, the entire XML document became corrupted. Not only corrupted, but empty. My entire XML document was Fubar. Fortunately, this was version 0, so I wasn't saving my changes back to disk, so I didn't lose any information permanently, but I lost a full day (arrive 10am, swear constantly, find solution at 4pm) on this stupid, undocumented, and brain-bending behaviour.

My dummy is spat.

Cheers,
-MP

The meaning of trust

It occurs to me that there are two ways to think about trust. Let's suppose that X is some person or system whom you are considering trusting. They might be a wife, father, a legal process, journalists or some other person or group.

I think there are two ways to approach this. The first is to understand their character -- their tendencies and your expectations relating to those. I might trust X once I understand their character, even if I believe they will in many ways undermine my own goals. For example, one might learn to trust an enemy to behave in a certain way once you understand their character.

On the other hand, one might consider trust to be submitting ones goal system to that of another. For example, I might trust that my partner is doing the best thing even though their actions are in contradiction with my own goals -- my own estimation of what the best thing is.

I would say I primarily involve myself with the first kind of trust -- relying on people to act as I expect. I trust some of my work colleagues do some kinds of tasks, but not others. I regard this kind of trust to be of a different character to the second.

However, with people that I love, I would say I involve a mixture of trusts. I submit my goal systems to those of (for example) my partner, my parents and my much-loved friends.

In a sense it's the difference between a tool and team-mate. I would say these are two distinct kinds of trust, which do not bleed into eachother. To some extent, I regard my loved ones as tools also.

Some of them are good at responding to emails, some are bad. It would be silly for me to expect some of them to organise an important event, etc. On the other hand, some are excellent. Insofar as I am trying to achieve particular goals, I must consider them as tools.

On the other hand, I also regard them as team-mates. This is to say that I trust not only their behaviours, but their goals.

I'm not sure that I've captured the thought precisely, but hopefully I've gotten the nub of it.

Cheers,
-MP

Does Searle Beg the Question?

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/Searle/searle_response_3.htm

Ray Kurzweil says yes. His response, available at the URL above, is essentially that cricitism.

What is it about Searle's argument that can seem convincing? It is convincing because he places a human -- someone who for all that it contributes to the question might as well be ourselves -- at the centre of his example.

If you, personally, could not be regarded as "understanding chinese", the argument is that nobody and nothing could. The example is posed in such a way that the primary agent within the computer -- you -- is effectively failing to comprehend the meaning of the exchanges carried out. As a real computer is driven not by an agent, but by physical interactions only, it seems no more likely to be a conscious system than the hypothetical Chinese room.

Kurzweil effectively argues from a position which I myself adopt -- that the brain is demonstrably a machine, and it is absurd to argue that a brain cannot understand language.

However, it seems obvious that in the Chinese room example, the human agent genuinely fails to understand Chinese. Is the same thing true for the overall system? Is it a problem of design rather than necessity? What, then, is it that makes the Chinese room brain an uncomprehending system, but the human brain so wonderful?

Kurzweil offers no direct answers, other than to suggest that the problem is not a logical one (i.e. some contradiction in the very concept of a conscious computer) but an in-the-world one -- i.e. a problem with particular computers.

His argument is, I think, interesting. It seems to me to be useful in refuting the supposed logic of Searle's Chinese room.

Cheers,
-MP

Melbourne Thinkers Week

MelbournePhilosopher is proud to support Melbourne Thinkers Week (MTW). My contribution has been doing the technical work on the website, including adapting the design, and assisting with some of the content. To tell you what MTW consists of, I quote from the homepage:

"Melbourne Thinkers Week is a Heart of Philosophy initiative celebrating ideas, creativity, discussion and debate about the big ideas and questions for modern life. Join us for debates and discussions with leading national and local thinkers at public lectures, philosophy cafes, corporate ethics events, book launches and a philosophy panel.

The 2006 lecture program includes speakers such as Dr Gilbert Burgh on A Philosophy of Democracy new trends in participatory democracy; Dr. Muhammad Kamal will explore The Meaning of Terrorist; a philosophical inquiry; Ethicist Dr Steve Curry will explore ideas Good and Evil @ the movies and Dr Matthew Sharpe will talk about The meaning of tragedy in today’s culture.

Our Philosophy Cafes with feature Dr Jessica Wolfendale on the Hardened Heart: The Moral Dangers of Not Forgiving; Dr Rob Sparrow takes on a magical journey with Robots and Aged Care and John Lenarcic on University in the Pub: Intelligent Design.

The festival will close with a thoughtful panel discussion on A philosophy for living: explorations of the good life with author John Armstrong, Socratic expert Stan Van Hooft and Graham Priest (Boyce Gibson Chair of Philosophy, Melbourne University)"

This is public philosophy at its best. Please, spread the word and help support this event. There is an opportunity here to build momentum for philosophy not only in Melbourne, but throughout Australia. This is a truly unique event, and I would encourage everyone to get along to some of the free events. Supporting the event by attending one of the paid events will help to cover costs, and thus support continuing efforts to bring philosophy from the academy to the demos.

Cheers,
-MP

The Philosophy of Winning

MelbournePhilosopher

I was watching tennis recently, and was struck by something. In order to be a great sportsman, you have to be hungry for the win. In sporting competitions, there is only one winner. Given that the cost of winning a tournament is that everyone else loses, the whole thing doesn't seem very virtuous.

If sporting attitude was carried across into, say, social justice, we would live in a fairly ugly world. I suppose in actuality, many of the top performers are adequetly paid for their skills, and they do contribute to our economy.

I was just struck by the idea of being driven by the desire for victory simpliciter over victory for the sake of other things.

I'm pretty sure Plato covered this already, now that I think about it, but it seems that the struggle for victory is in fact entertaining, and resonates with us, even though it is in itself a valueless end.

Cheers,
-MP

A Mathematical Postulate

This is probably covered elsewhere by better mathematicians than I, but it's something that I have come up with. I think that every infinite series (integers, reals, 2d co-ordinates, 3d-coordinates) can be mapped on a 1-to-1 basis with eachother. That is to say, I think there is a 1-1 mapping between the set of positive integers, and the set of positive reals.

Here is my proposed method. Let us suppose that real numbers are represented decimally, and that things like irrational numbers can be approximated with arbitrary precision decimally. That is to say, pi can be represented by 3.14159... to any accuracy.

Any decimal number can be represted uniquely by an integer.

Let every even digit count as the "whole number part" (in reverse order) and every odd digit count as the "fractional" part.

3.14159 would then be represented by 3104010509. 245.3 would be represented by 53402. 34.98765 would be represented by 4938070605.

In this way, you can see that there is a way to translate losslessly between these two number series.

However, in order to represent a decimal number to precision X, you need 2X integer digits. This number I shall call the "order" of the infinite set. The integers are order one, and the reals are order two.

Consider, then, a 2D co-ordinate system of infinite length along each axis. What you have then is an order 4 system. In order to "pack" the set into an integer mapping, you need every integer to map uniquely onto a pair of real numbers.

In this mapping, you would a sequence of four numbers. Let X and Y refer to the co-ordinate axes, wPart refer to whole number parts, fPart refer to fractional number parts, and n refer to the position along the number line.

The integer would then be a series of four-digit identifiers, like : )nXwPart, nXfPart, nYwPart, nYfPart)....

A philosophy lecturer of mine used a similar concept to try and prove that the reals were a *larger* set than the integers -- that is to say that there are *more* reals than integers. I would accept that the reals are a larger set in the sense that their "order" is greater, but I can't see that given one can find a 1-to-1 mapping between the reals and the integers, that there are truly any more of them.

Cheers,
-MP

Lightness

I have been reading "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", which is a book about the contradiction between an event meaning everything, and meaning nothing. Part of the contradiction is our poor understanding of "meaning", I would argue, but this doesn't detract from the very real mental effects.

Everyone, I might suggest, has at some point realised that things which are really terribly meaningful, like say the French revolution, just don't matter very much to them. They're not connected to them, and it's of no particular importance how history has unfolded. The suffering of thousands is reduced to a historical anecdote -- intellectually of some significance, but without real impact on each of us.

Similarly, our own lives are doomed to insignificance. What does it matter what we achieve?

For me the question is -- why does this bother some of us so much? Is it merely a frustrated desire for immortality? Is this why we are driven to concieve of fate, gods and eternal meaning? Why is the pleasure of life not enough? Why do we apply the term meaning to our lives, as though there were some greater arbiter of the meaning of things that our own collective consciousnesses?

Cheers,
-MP

Holidays and Laziness

MelbournePhilosopher

I'm on holidays. Laziness reigns.

-MP