Problems with utilitarianism

Sam Harris, a hero of mine, argues that maximising well being is objectively moral. While I don't fully agree with this, in the sense that it's objectively true, I've previously said that humanity should DEFINE maximising well being as a fundamental value.

But I forsee problems with this form of utilitarianism. In fact, I can forsee 4 problems:

1) The genocide problem
2) The altering of our genome probem
3) The drug paradise problem
4) The scaling problem
5) The measurement problem

perhaps no need for a strict definition? Arfitical learning

1)
What if maximising well being is most easily and reliably accomplished by painlessly murdering depressed people? This would push the average up. Why not kill every human on the planet except for the happiest, most well tallented one? Assuming that the last person on earth would somehow be unaffected, then won't this maximise well being? Perhaps you could wiggle your way out of this by maximising total wellbeing instead of average wellbeing - where wellbeing can only be measured as a positive value (just like degrees kelvin). Or perhaps you could resovle it by applying a few constraints to the optimization problem. But, then we're getting to a point where these additional rules are starting to feel arbitrary. If we start to patch up a rule such that it's inline with our moral intuition, then you might as well avoid the rule alltogehter.

2 & 3)
With advances in technologies like CRISPR, perhaps it may be possilbe one day to design our bodies such that we feel unparalleled bliss, no matter what we do. Maybe it might also be possible to design a side effect free drug which makes us feel unparalleled bliss. If this were the case, then we could all live completely isolated, unacomplished lives and still feel overwhelming happy. By our definition of moral, does this mean that this is a good thing? Ambiguity in the term "wellbeing" is now significant. Perhaps we could tighten the definition of wellbeing in such a way that it incorporates human connection, getting a job etc etc. But this is starting to feel arbitrary once again. Perhaps a drug induced bliss is reaching maximum wellbeing, and maybe I've just developed some misleading intuitions because of my anti-drug upbringing. I'm unsure.

4)
Do we just want to maximise the wellbeing of humans? Surely Apes and Chimps feel suffereing, so they should be incorperated into the equation somehow. What about ants and mosquitos? I previously thought you could solve this by applying a weighted sum of wellbeing. So since ants (presumably) don't experience a wide spectrum of suffereing / joy, we won't need to care too much about an ant verses the wellbeing of a dog for example. But what if we're wrong about the nature of experience of ants? Or what if the trillions of ants collectively still have a large influcne on the total or averaged wellbeing?  Likewise, would it be a good idea to force mosquitos into extinction, even under the assumption that there are adverse affects regarding the food chain etc? If so, why would the 'no genocide constraint' be applied to humans, but not mosquitos? These are all highly theoretical considerations. On a practical level, it would be naive to think that human bais's won't leak into this equation somewhere. Humans value the life of a dog, far more than that of a dung beatle because we've evolved to feel empathy / compassion for mamals that have morally irrelevant features: cute ears, wide eyes etc.

5)
Lastly, and most obviously, how do we precisely measure wellbeing? Even if neuroscience develops to the point that we can understand subjective experience at the level of individual neurons, we will still need to rigerously define what outputs we desire. For example, even if we know deterministically that chemical A used on a patient causes output B, how do we convert that to a wellbeing score? A definition will still need to be made, and it can only be informed by our biology, not determined by it. But maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, the original definition of temperature was amazingly crude - it was defined as the volume of mercury in a glass tube. Then as more theoretical models were made which were informed by data, the definition of temperature changed to one that was more precise. Perhaps the lesson learned here is that a crude definition of wellbeing is ok to begin with. Maybe a definition of wellbeing could initially be "everyone should have enough food to eat proportional to each beings body size". Then, as a socieity grows and gets more complex, theoretical models involving wellbeing could be made which could help inform new refinements to the definition. Perhaps iteration is the key?

All in all, i'm still very confused. I'm convinced I live on a small spinning rock, hurtling though space, where nothing really matters. Maybe trying to force order out of pure indifference is a fools errand. Maybe I should only define what's moral for myself? I'm not sure.

Suspension of belief 2

I've talked briefly about suspension of belief before. In it, I briefly argued that the confidence of a belief should be roughly proportional to the evidence you have to support that belief. I thought I'd flesh that idea out a bit more:

1) Let's say you have a hypothesis about the world, H (example: H = spiders have 8 legs)
2) Let's say you experiment and find n data points (you find n = 300 spiders and count their legs)
3) Then the confidence you can have that H is true should increase with more data. It will always approach, but never reach 100% (because even after finding 99999999999 spiders, it's always possible that the next spider could have 7 legs).

I suspect this is what the graph should look like:

I'm sure statisticians can flesh this idea out more, but the essence is here. Notice, when you have no data, you should have no confidence in your belief - this is what I would call suspension of belief. So far this seems pretty simple, but wait for it becasue it gets contravercial.

Some atheists argue that they believe God doesn't exist because there is no evidence to prove his existance. I think this is a mistake - without evidence you should suspend judgement entirely and be completely impartial as to whether a God exists or not. It should go without saying I'm refering to a generic diety, not the Christian God which supposedly affects the world (ie something we can observe to be true or not).

But what about Bertrand Russell's tea pot? Our technology can't conclusively prove there isn't a tea pot orbiting around Mars.  In the absence of data, should we still suspend opinion? Of course not. The analogy is flawed. Intuitively, we all know that tea pots are made of ceramics which require careful manufacturing on Earth, so we actually do have some data! 

To throw confusion into the mix, consider two addititional ideas. 1) occam's razor: the claim that the the simplist idea is likely the correct one, and 2) The person making a claim has the peronal responsibility to back up that claim. I disagree with idea 1) because some things whcih are true are extreemly complicated. Is it simpler to believe the ISS is held into orbit using a giant thin rope? Nonetheless I agree that most true ideas seem simple, but I believe this is only the case because most phenomina with large data sets appear simple (ie sun rising every day). The other idea 2) seems wrong to me as well. I concede that this is a good rule of thumb in a practical sense; after all, if your flatmate claims that the broken sink was caused by polar bears, you would hope he backs it up before you need to call the plummer. But from a strict rational point of view, the Universe doesn't care about personal responsibility - so if you care about truth, you should want to find as much data as you can to prove any hypothesis true/fase. Obviously humans are not timeless truth seeking machines though, so at some point we should stop looking for evidence of polar bears to focus on other more pressing matters. 

What about mathematics? Mathematics doesn't require data, right? Wrong! It requires the most amount of data, and it gets it in an entirely different way! Consider the derivation for the quadratic formula: x = -b +- sqrt(b^2-4ac)/2a. This formula has been derived with generic variables (a, b, c). The reason we know this proof is correct is because the variables could be (1,1,1) or (1,1,2) or (1,1,3) etc etc. We've effectively observed an infinite number of data points for which this formula will work! This means on our graph above, we actually reach 100%.  Now at a very deep level, it's not actually at 100% because there will always be some uncertainty in whether we've done the algebra correctly. Likewise, how can we really know the axioms of mathematics are true (A = A, 1+1 =2 etc)? Some people have tried to prove some of these things using set theory, but how do we know the axioms of set theory hold? The rabbit hold must go on forever or intersect itself - both are problems for the rationalists. I suspect that even the most fundamental statements (1+1=2, A=A, "I think therefore I am" etc) all fundamentally depend on observation. This makes the shining beacon of mathematics fall in the unclean realm of observational science. 

A few additional things I wanted to say are about AI, and causality. But this post has already gone on for long enough. In short 1) I believe to learn is to generalize, and 2) causality doesn't exist - it's a flawed way to simplfy a complicated phenominon that is a function of many variables. I'll talk about this in a future blog with an example of a spring mass damper.

Last day in the Netherlands

For the last 2 years I’ve been studying at TU Delft, Netherlands. Now that I've earned my slip of paper, my time has come to fly back to Australia via Malaysia.

I was expecting the feeling of departing the Netherlands to be much harder than it actually was. I have made a lot of good friends here, adjusted to the bike culture, and have developed a pretty severe addiction to chocolate croissants. But to my surprise, the departure was simple and easy.

Perhaps what made the departure so easy was the interaction I had with a lowlife at the train station on my way to the airport. I was walking through the gate with my luggage, and a guy in his mid 20’s squeezed in right behind me to avoid paying for a ticket. Partially out of surprise, and partially out of a burning sense of injustice, I tried to block the guy by propping up my luggage. It didn’t work though; he simply clambered around me. As he passed me he shouted in a Dutch accent “Why you block me, man?! Next time, I’ll cut you!” and made stabbing gesture. The Dutch really are direct.

My flight was at 8:55am so I had to wake up at 4:50am in order to get me there 2 hours beforehand. I would rather sacrifice an hour of sleep and walk 3km with luggage, than spend 3 euros for a quick and simple tram ride to Delft station.

Netherlands, you've been fantastic. In particular, I love your biking culture and the friendliness of the people - although, this doesn't apply to customer service - you can improve a bit on that front. 

Even though I feel just as unprepared for the industry as when I first entered Delft, I'm slightly optimistic that I can now get a job that will utilize my theoretical knowledge. Watch out world! Here I come! I may stumble, slip and fall, but dammit I'm going to move forward. 

England day 3

Today I dragged my throbbing head out of bed and into the shower in a futile attempt to null the pain of my hangover. It didn't work.

Shortly afterwards, Mark and I hoppped in the Porche to drive to Bermingham. The weather was forcasted to be horrible, but it turned out to be OK. I pressured Mark to allow me to drive, and he reluctantly agreed. After about 30 minutes of testing the speed limits, I could tell I was making Mark uncomfortable, so I decided to let him drive the rest of the way.

Bermingham was a surprise to me. Based off my Dads stories, I had pictured a beaten down empty city filled with homeless people and closed stores. To my surprise, the heart of Bermingham was busy and vibrant. I visited my Dads university and was quite impressed at how beautiful it looked. I toured the Engineering and Physics department and got to see some of the lecture halls. The small staircases and cramped study areas reminded me of hogwarts from Harry Potter.

Im glad to say that I overheard a proper Bermingham accent while touring the city. It wasn't as pronounced as the accents from the TV show Peaky Blinders, but was still almost incomprehensible.

We also toured my Dads old house and got to see the guarage his Dad had built. It was nice hearing Mark reflecting on his chidhood as we drove around the neighborhood.

We went via Oxford on our way back to London. We got to visit Cathy and Scott and their adorable puppy Milo. Mark also got to show me more of Oxford.

On arriving back in London, we had dinner prepared for us. Marcus also joined in. :)

Germany day 3 and England day 1 & 2

Eeep, getting behind on this blog.

My flight out of Germany (which I purchased for 13 Euros) was in Memmingen. John and I toured the town for a little while, and waddled around the fair.

When I arrived in England, I took a coach from London Stansted airport to Victoria station, and walked all the way to Marks appartment in Chelsea. Claire and Mark had prepared a huge dinner since Laura and Jake decided to come too. It was very interesting to see how the family communicates with each other - it's totally different to my family. Once the subject of Brexit got brought up, the conversation turned turbulent and emotional; similar to how I expect a lower income Italian family would behave. It was interesting, but I couldn't contribute much to the conversation because I was very ignorent of the details of Brexit.

The following day Mark took me on perhaps the worst bike ride of my life around London. There are still no designated bike lanes around London, so we were swerving onto pedestrian lanes, avoiding huge piles of rubbish and stopping frequently to avoid hitting parked cars. We eventually gave up on the bikes and entered a few museums. Mark was kind enough to take me to the science museum, which despite being swarmed by large groups of children, was a pretty educational experience. I was very impressed with Marks knowledge of Engines and WW2 history. It's always a pleasure to talk to Mark about history and machines - it's just important not to derail the conversation to a topic about taxes or unions.

In the evening I met up with Daniel Chee, a friend of mine from highschool. He's been living in the UK for about 2 years now and doing extreemly well. In good ol' British style we had a few too many pints far too quickly.

Germany day 2

Today we took a break from driving and decided to turn into a bit of a sports day. We went bouldering at a local gym which was great, and then followed it up with a 10km run around the park in Augsburg. To celebreate we decided to go to a local brewery to have some traditional German food and beer. Once again, I'm proud to say German food is my alltime favorite.

I also purchased a bottle of Rose and some flowers for Johns mum for all of her hospitality.

Germany day 1

I awoke to the small of white sausage, pretzels and wheat beer. Johns mum had a prepared an amazing traditional breakfast.

Today we drove to Neuschwanstein castle in the very south east of Germany. Aparently it's the same castle which the disney opening cinematic is based on. John and I toured the place and did a hike on a nearby mountain.

We were pretty sweaty after this so we decided to stop by a 'crystal spa' and relax. It was awesome. They had pools which had so much salt in them you could almost Jesus it from one side of the pool to the other. They also had a sauna section which was for both genders and required (yes, required) nudity. The pain of seeing so many old male and female naked bodies was nothing in comparison to the bliss of the sauna. It was great!

Italy day 5

This was my last day in Italy. We decided to visit Lake Braies in the morning and drop Federico at a train station in the afternoon. We shared a final meal together at a restaurant, and got to enjoy the perks of a menu that was both Italian and German.

On the way back to Germany, we drove via Innsbruck. Unfortunately we couldn't do much because it was getting dark, so we decided to go to the famous olympic bergisel ski jump. It was even larger than I thought. It was this large artifical totum sticking out of the ground, shadowing the city below. The gates were closed so we decided to tresspass. It was worth it. The views were spectacular and the sense of scale of this behemoth could only be properly appreciated by climbing to the top step by step. We must have sent off a silent alarm at one point, because we saw a guard park his car to check things out. Fortunately years of playing Splinter Cell prepared me for this moment, allowing me to dissapear in the darkness and escape safely.

After our close encounter, we decided to flee the country and head towards John's house in Augsburg. John's mother, who works as a nightshift nurse, prepared a dinner for us upon arriving. She is really a super woman.

Italy day 4

Today was the day. We woke up at the crack of 10am to make our way to the Dolomites. We parked our crumpled car at the foot of the mountains and began our adventure. The views were spectacular. Giant pillars of rock jut out of the ground, giving it an almost unnatural feel. There were a lot of tourists, but we managed to solve that problem by taking one of the more difficult tracks around the Tre Cime.

There were a few paths that were dedicated ‘via ferrata’ tracks. We didn’t have the necessary equipment, but it was very easy and simple, so we decided to do it anyway. The views were worth it.

About 4 hours into the hike, John decided to take off his shoes and climb around the side of the mountain. This wasn’t part of the path. There was a solid 800m drop below him as he climbed vertically around the loose limestone. It was terrifying knowing that one small slip could be the end of a friend of mine. As he did it, a crowd of about 50 Italians stopped to witness the horrifying event. I was furious; I had begged him several times not to do it – it wasn’t worth the risk for an Instagram photo. Needless to say, he made it back in one piece, but the mood had changed slightly. A pure sense of tranquillity had been replaced with a nervous energy for a few hours.

However, once things had calmed down a bit, I started appreciating nature in all of its beauty again. We took a long path back and got back to the car just as it started to get dark. Federico purchased us drinks, and we got to see a sunset on the top of the world while sipping on a few beers.

Italy day 3

Today we had our sights set for the Dolomites! Our plan was to 1) drive from Lecco (where Federico lives) to a lake called “Lago di Braies”, 2) Swim and eat a late lunch at the lake, 3) Make our way to our AirBnB near Sexten.

But then we had the car crash...

Driving on the highway is pretty crazy in Italy. It's not uncommon to see cars zipping past at 160 km/hr on 110km/hr highways. Italians are also very agressive drivers, and try and squeeze their way through intersections. It's what I imagine Indonesian drivers would do if there was no traffic. 

Where was I? Oh yeah, the car crash. We were driving along the highway, jamming to the Pokemon theme song, when John (the driver) turned to face me (the front passenger) for a split second to request that I change the song. In that moment we had rapidly approached a stationary car in front of us. By the time John managed to slam the breaks it was too late. We hit the back of a big white car (I don't know cars that well), which caused a minor dent for them, but completely buckled the front of our car. Everyone was completely fine - no injuries. To my surprise, the suited Italian guy that got out of the car was remarkably calm and understanding. He even appologised to us briefly for coming to a stop so suddently. We exchanged insurance details and went our separate ways. This completely destroyed every agressive and argumentative Italian steriotype that I had in my mind. 

Unfortuantely, the radiator in the front of our car was badly damaged and was causing our engine to overheat, so we had to go to a mechanic to get it repaired. We stopped in the nearest city called Verona. While the car was being repaired, we walked around town and got to see how beautiful it was. We lazily waddled around town eating gelato and sight seeing colloseums and the famous Romeo and Julliet balcony. 5 hours and 750 Euros later we were back in the car driving towards our AirBnB. 

When we arrived we wolfed down some pasta and went to bed. 

Random side story: Italian news had reported that a hiker had died climbing to the top of Mt Resegone - the exact same hike we were doing yesterday. Apparently he had slipped on the ridge near the summit and fell to his death 300m below. We saw a rescue helecopter yesterday - now we know why.

Italy day 2

Today John and I woke up at 8am to begin our day long hike. I stuffed our bag with chocolate muffins, croissants, and cookies, whereas John, insited on packing German sausages, cheese, and water.

The hike was to Mt Resegone. It was beautiful. There were multiple tracks to the summit. One of them involved climing up a vertical cliff face using steel supports. You're required to climb with a via farata set due strong chance of death if you slipped. John tried to insist on climbing it anyway, but I chickened out. After a lot of delibration and awkward map reading, we found another track to the summit that didn't involve the high risk of death. The track was lovely and the views were divine.

At the summit we stopped by a hut to buy some water and beers. Once the locals discovered that we weren't Italian (which wasn't hard given my strong non Italian accent while speaking English), they ripped us off with blatantly fake prices. I didn't care too much - my good mood overcame my stingy inner self.

The long detour cost us plenty of time and made us arrive home at 8:40pm - well after dark. Fortunately we had flash lights to help us navigate our way down the mountain :)

Italy day 1

Background:
I'm planning a hike in the Dolomites with a German friend of mine, John, and an Italian friend Federico. After that, I'm traveling to the UK for a few days.

 I had booked a 10 euro flight from Eindhoven Netherlands, to Milan, Italy which arrived at 7:30pm. The 20 minute delay turned out to be perfect, because John, who was driving from Augsburg Germany, arrived at the airport literally 1 minute before I did. That's pretty impressive timing considering John drove 6 hours through 3 countires to meet me at the airport.

After an hour of crazy driving we met up with our friend Federico in the province of Lecco. Since he had a final exam tomorrow, we decided to stay in an bed and breakfast around the corner. The BnB is located right next to some beautiful mountains near the boarder of Switzerland, so John and I will hike those by ourselves, and meet up with Federico to celebrate the end of his exam in the evening.

Overall, it was a pleasure meeting up with these friends again. John brought several fantastic German beers with him, and Federico was very hospitable and used his impressive cooking skills to feed us in the evening. Somehow I'll need to use my Australian powers to offer something back - perhaps I'll teach them how to swear at minorities while struggling to keep balance on a bar stool.

Graduated!

On 30th September 2019 I graduated from Tu Delft with a degree in High Tech Engineering!!! Yay! It was a 2 year degree - 1 year for classwork, and 1 year for thesis. Both were very challenging in different ways.

The thesis title was "Hamaker constant and tip radius determination in dynamic atomic force microscopy". In short, it was about improving the way scientists can measure very small things. I got an 8.5 for my work, which I'm happy with.

Now that I've graduated I need to decide what to do with my life. Time to choose a direction.

On your marks...
Get set...
Go!

Narrator: Will Matthew choose the correct path? Will he use his degree to get a high paying Engineering job? Will he miss the opportunity and travel aimlessly around Europe? Will he find a discarded winning lottery ticket in a parking lot somewhere? Stay tuned to find out!

Thesiiiiiiis

Brace yourself, this is going to be one hell of a venting post.

So I'm 11.5 months into my 1 year thesis on Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). In short, I'm trying to measure something called the Hamaker constant (H) by generating Frequency Response Curves (FRC's). In the first 4 months of my thesis, I was zooming ahead - I'd derived from scratch an analytical approximation of the FRC - something no one else in the history of AFM had done before! And I had numerically proven that it works using a 1970's software called AUTO. I was getting increadibly optimistic about my Thesis and was even expecting to graduate very early! But alas, AFM is a cruel mistress.

My final task was to perform FRC's experimentally - a task that should really only take a week at most. It's been 7 months and I still haven't gotten any good results. The culprit? Bad equipment! Every time I set up my experiment, my results fall apart like an ice cream melting in the sun. At least for the last 4 months I've been meeting my professor weekly telling him about these difficulties, but I'm only met with a frustratingly optemesitc "just be patient and continue doing experiments". Why would such an intellegant professor be so closed minded? Because the student before me working on this AFM had produced stunning, amazing and beautiful FRC's using the exact same equipment. I gotta agree, they were very good... suspiciously good.

And so here I am, stuck on an endless loop to get empiracle data using a machine that won't work. I feel as helpless as the Russian scientist sent to the roof of the Chernobyl power plant.

When / if I graduate I will have to confidently take my next step. Is that into industry? PhD? Entreprenuship? No matter what the choice, I need to be clear, decisive and ambitious. My technique of waddling around this earth bumping into short term jobs just won't cut it anymore. I'm 29 years old. Why the fuck do I have no direction in life?

Japan 2019

So I got way too lazy to write up a day-by-day blog of all the things I got up to during my trip to Japan. I thought it would be easier to write up two blogs which summarise the most important things instead.

In order, the places we visited during our trip were:

Kyto
Yakushima
Hiroshima
Osaka
Takayama
Japanese Alps
Tokyo

We had purchased the 2 week JR train pass and had used it with maximum efficiency during our 3 week stay. This involved travelling a lot in the first 2 weeks, and basically staying in Tokyo for the last 5 days.

Hiroshima, famous for the atomic bomb blast, was chilling. It's a beautiful and sadly modern looking city with lovely park areas and steep hillsides only a few kilometres away from the city center. We walked around a lot and got to see how the bomb had devastated regions of Hiroshima differently. Most buildings were made out of wood, so the cement industrial hall (where the bomb exploded pretty much right on top of) was battered but still standing, whereas the wooden components of the castle a 1km away was completely demolished. We went to the museum nearby and got to see the stories of how the victims died. The most interesting thing I learned was that the nuclear radiation after the bombing left distinctive black spots on the gums of survivors days afterwards; apparently this was because the throat/mouth, gentiles and bone marrow are extremely prone to radiation. Hiroshima was also the place where we started to use air BnB accommodation. Sadly it was one of those really anti social, high profit, air BnB complexes where you never meet your host and are given a key via a code. I've written a separate blog post about this, and how I think think these super small, ultra efficient and anti social styles of living a very much the future. Despite this, our tiny independent accommodation turned out to be quite good for us. We got to cook our own food for a change and meet an elderly Japanese couple in the bar downstairs. The couple were super friendly, even though their English was pretty bad; in fact, I've consistently found over the course of this trip that the elderly Japanese are always WAY more social than the younger generation. We also tried Okonomiyaki, a famous Japanese savoury pancake, from a famous street stall in Hiroshima. To this day, it's the best food I've tried in Japan (and probably top 3 in my life). Holy shit, phenomenal.

Osaka, the second largest city in Japan, was very overwhelming! We went to Dontonbori, an insanely over packed street filled with shops, restaurants, bars and strip clubs. It was an explosion to the senses seeing so many people and giant advertisements on buildings. But this turned out to be nothing compared to the casinos they have here. The Japanese love their casino's (which they call Pachinko's), and each one is just a giant room filled with slot machines, cigarette smoke and loud jingles. We've seen Pachinko's all over Japan - they're super popular. It's a bit sad to think of Japan, a very proud and traditional country, succumb to such petty forms of cheap entertainment. We also met up with Dan (a friend of Kaz's who works as an English teacher in Japan) over a very expensive 'catch you're own fish at eat it' dining experience.

Takayama was a very relaxed destination. Despite it's remote location near the Japanese alps it's a surprisingly large city with westerners everywhere. Kaz's birthday present to me was paying for our accommodation, which happened to be a very fancy resort with traditional Japanese rooms, free onsen service, and a breakfast buffet. We did a pretty chill hike around the shrines nearby and tried some traditional Japanese BBQ in the evening.

Japanese Alps
Next stop was the Japanese alps. We (ie kaz) perfectly timed our transport which involved Taxi --> Bus --> Train --> Bus to get to Nakabusa onsen. It's amazing how smoothly the trip sent considering we factored in 5 minutes rest between each mode of transport. The accommodation was just as remote and tranquil as I expected. The whole area was littered in natural hot springs; many of which were outside. The accommodation included breakfast and dinner which was perfect for us since we were low on cash. The next day we began our hike to Enzensou hut. It was the type of hike I love; extremely steep, good views, and featured changing terrain including patches of snow (for which crampons were extremely helpful). Kaz found the hike quite difficult which was a shame because it slowed us down a lot, but fortunately the distance wasn't too long and we easily made it to the top by 2pm. The views were stunning; I've never seen such a picturesque mountain before. My only regret is listening to the conservative online advice I got about the hike beforehand. Overall the hike was extremely easy and I think we could have easily planned a longer loop route. Lesson learned. At the top we met up with an extremly friendly Japanese couple in their 50's. Once again this reinforced our belief that the elderly Japanese are very social and talkative. Strangely it's the younger Japanese that seem to lack these skills.

Tokyo
Tokyo was our last stop. We met up with Paul Essing and his new girlfriend, Mimi, on our first evening at some very Japanese place. The Japanese place was made even even more Japanese when Mimi rocked up wearing full traditional atire, including wooden sandles, waist bows and make up. It's really cool how these types of traditions can harmoneously exist in super modern Tokyo. Everyone got a bit drunk on Sake and we ended up playing a fighting game at an old fashioned gaming arcade. In the following days we systematically ticked multiple destinations off our list including; the government building lookout, the national park, Tokyo Tower, One Peice museum (a tribute to a popular Anime show), studio Ghibli (a much better tribute to much better Anime), and a cinema where we got to see Godzilla - it just seemed like the right thing to do while in Tokyo. I also got to try my new favorate Japanese meal at a street corner in Shinjuku. Goodbye Katsudon, hello Udon Ramen with tempura and egg. Absolutely delicious.

As a final message of wisdom to all of those who still read this shitty blog; another way to say 'hello' in Japanese that isn't 'konichiwa' is by shouting out "Hai!"

Japan day 5 - Yakushima

Today we got our first proper sleep in. We technically got 10 hours of sleep, but somehow it still didn't feel like enough. Once we surfaced we devoured squid sushi we had purchased the day before at the super market (which was amazing by the way), then took a bus to the start of our hike.

The bus took us to Shiratanai Unsui Gorge where we started our hike for the day. Sadly Kaz's ankle had started hurting that morning (GRRRRR) so we had to take it quite slow at first. Fortunately it wasn't much of a problem because we were stuck behind the encumbered and over equipped Japanese tourists anyway. After about an hour of hobbling we were fully embedded in the forest. It was very pretty and tranquil. We had the intention of catching the 1:45pm bus back to the hostel, but one of us, not going to say who, was too slow and so we had to delay and catch the 4pm bus back. It turned out to be a good move anyway though, because it allowed us to walk around some more and enjoy the scenery for a bit longer.

In the evening we went to a restaurant called Shiosai which where I could try the closest thing possible to a Katsudon I could. It was divine. I had mackerel sushimi with the meal and it was phenomenal.

In the evening we met up and chatted with some more backpackers from Europe and Australia. A French guy claimed he was a cook worked in Tokyo for 6 months. He said the working hours were absolutely crazy as cooks and it's not unusual to work 75 hours in a 5 day week. Unbelievable.

Japan day 4 - Yakushima

We woke up at 6am to catch a shinkanzen all the way to the very bottom of the Japanese mainland, Kagoshima. We didn't have much time to travel around because we needed to board a ferry to Yakushima, but it looked like a surprisingly large city. I was expecting a small fishing town, but it looked as crowded and interconnected as Kyoto.

After a few stressful moments of navigating Japanese signs, we managed to board our ferry on time and travel to Yakushima island. I tried to sleep, but a Japanese game show on TV was echoing around every corner of the boat. It's a little bit disheartening to know that low quality slapstick style humour exists in literally every corner of the world.

Once we arrived we immediately went to our hostel, met and chatted to an interesting German couple, planned our following day and hit the bed.

Japan day 3 - Kyto

David designated himself as leader of the group and organised a very early tour around the bamboo Forrest. It was beautiful. The bamboo was smooth and well preserved. If I were blindfolded I would have guessed it was plastic. After the visit we stopped by a french themed bakery to grab some pastries. Don't get me wrong, the food was great and there was definitely a Japanese fusion with each pastry, but it felt strange to be enjoying such international foods in Japan. Not to worry, I guess I'll be indulging myself in Japanese food soon enough. Unfortunately after the meal I was so sleep depraved that I needed to travel back to the hotel to get a few more hours of beauty sleep.

After the small pit stop, Kaz and I decided to travel to travel to Ichiran Raman; a intentionally designed anti social restaurant where you make your order via vending machine. It was a fun gag and the food was phenomenal. We also had a small walk around the imperial palace too.

We rejoined David, Beck (Bek? Bec?) and Morgan at a restaurant where we enjoyed some homemade Japanese food (literally homemade, because this 'restaurant' was actually someones kitchen; I guess food serving laws in Japan are quite relaxed). The food was amazing and the service was super friendly.

Japan day 2 - Kyoto

Today was another big walking day around Kyto. We woke up and immediately headed towards the center of the city to do a free walking tour. On our way there we got attracted like magnets to a manga museum. Kaz unleashed the inner fan girl and drooled over every managa she could find.

Just when I managed to unstick Kaz from the manga, I found myself stuck to a sushi train. It was amazing! Expensive, but amazing.

Finally we got to the walking tour just in time. The guy touring us was an Aussie from Brisbane and was remarkably knowledgeable about Japanese culture. He told us about the geisha and maiko. Traditionally, women from poor families with no prospects could earn money from the age of 15 by training as a social entertainer. Women all begin as Maiko's and have to pay a huge amount of money upfront (or get it loaned) to buy all of their equipment. Then they dress up in traditional clothing and learn valuable social skills including how to dance traditionally and entertain business men with drinking games. Once they reach a certain age and are good enough at what they do, they become Geisha's and have more freedoms including where to travel - but not enough freedoms to have relationships - to do that they need to surrender their title of Geisha and get married. The Australian guy described everything in a very positive way, exclaiming that this profession had grown and become so well respected that even women from well off families considered it a privilege to train for years in this art.

I felt differently, however. Perhaps my feminist roots got in the way, but I couldn't help but feel that these poor women were victims of a very outdated tradition.

We also met Dave in the late afternoon and enjoyed some curry (yes, Indian curry) with his girlfriend, Callum, Morgan and Ian Free. Good night :)

Japan Day 1 - Kyoto

On the 22nd of May 2019 I woke up at 6am to catch my flight to Japan. It involved a 4 hour layover in Munich and 3 amazing airplane meals.

At roughly midday on the 23rd May I ran into Kaz's arms romantically. She had arrived 5 hours earlier (ouch) and politely waited around in the airport for me. We were both jet lagged and hangred (hungry + angry + tired),  but very relieved to see each other.

We activated our JR pass and immediately took a monorail and train to a station in Tokyo called Shinigawa station where we took a bullet train to Kyoto. That's right, no time to explore Tokyo yet, we'll be doing that by the end of our trip.

I ticked off the two things on my list within an hour of landing in Japan. I purchased green tea from a vending machine and I used a Japanese toilet.

When we arrived in Kyoto, I forced Kaz to waddle through the streets with me to our accommodation; I was done with sitting down on public transport. The thing which strikes me most interesting about Japan is how clean it is. There wasn't a single piece of plastic floating around. All the streets were as small and cramped as Jakarta, yet as tidy and well kept as Delft. Every anime I had ever watched was right; each house was small and unique. Very nice :)

We rested up in our accommodation for a few hours after arriving, then hit the town to explore. We read on trip adviser that Ippudo was a fantastic restaurant to enjoy. I guess every one else had read that same trip adviser recommendation because there was a huge line filled with white people out the front. Undeterred we ate at the restaurant and met up with an American accountant from New York / Chicago called Ben. The company was great and the food was phenomenal - pork broth ramen with dumplings. The bar has been raised quite high. After the meal we walked around Kyoto for a bit longer with Ben. We got to see a few temples and a small district / ward famous for Geisha's (the Japanese women who dress entirely in white). We also walked past mini casino which had all the worst parts of a normal casino, and none of the good parts. The giant room will filled with small slot machines and were being used almost exclusively by the elderly and a few business men. Each slot machine blasted out memorable tunes and flashy lights and the whole place stank of cheap beer and cigarette smoke. It looks like the Japanese like to gamble.

The jet lag was hitting us (me) pretty hard so after that we ordered an icecream from a vending machine and marched our way back to the hotel to crash.

Freedom of Spe - (this title has been censored for your safety)

For those that know me, they'll know I value liberal freedoms very strongly. But for those who know me really well, they'll know I think there are limits to these values. In previous posts I've talked about freedom more generally. I've talked about how simply being empowered by technology to follow our desires can be catastrophic if there isn't a strong cultural guiding force. I've also talked about how some freedoms should be removed all together such that well-being is maximized. For example, I think providing unlimited dog food to a Labrador will only result in a painful and tragic death.

But this post will be a bit different. Here I want to talk about freedom of speech in the digital age, and specifically where I think a line should be drawn.

For the most part I believe freedom of speech is an incredibly powerful social tool. It allows us to articulate and spread ideas in non violent ways that can encourage positive change. I used to believe quite strongly that as long as there is no direct physical violence as a result of what someone is saying, then that person should be free to say it. I even held this view in light of the fact that 1) this could facilitate online bullying and 2) It allows members of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket funerals with anti gay rhetoric etc etc. The reason I defended freedom of speech so strongly is because it's used as the process by which we determine other values. Galileo had radical and offensive ideas about the sun being the center of the solar system, and if he was empowered with the freedom of speech the world would have been better of.

I've recently changed my view upon the realization that the power of conversation has been wildly exaggerated. I used to idealize freedom of speech as creating a space where turbulent ideas can mix together and battle for superiority - a kind of natural selection for good ideas. Now, due to the polarizing nature of the internet, I think this view was very naive. YouTube, for example, is filled to the brim with different political ideas from all across the spectrum, and this seems like a good thing because it creates a giant virtual space in which people can engage and learn from these ideas. I think the reality is very different. Instead, the YouTube recommendation algorithm manipulates this space and pumps confirmation bias into our brains with 21st century efficiency. Since most of us now live in largely virtual worlds, I don't think we can rely entirely on the ideal of freedom of speech to properly inform us or reform our societies.

So what's the solution? Surely, I'm not proposing some type of Government censorship, right? Wouldn't that be some slippery slope to some tyrant taking control and manipulating our decisions? Well, I have two proposals:

1) The internet needs a healthier virtual space to spread ideas. Basically a well developed forum with unlimited free access to the worlds information. I don't think this is as unrealistic as it sounds. Wikipedia is a perfect example of what can be done with donations. I envision a website which is a hybrid of Kialo & Wolfram Alpha. In principle, AI could also be used to fact check information as well.

2) I think social media companies need to be penalized for spreading false information in the same way sugar based products should be taxed for causing obesity. Admittedly, I'm unsure what the metric for false information should be, but I suspect it can be measured.

France Trip 12th April 2019

Heyo, so I just came back from France a week ago. I started writing content for my blog, but gave up after the first day. Here's what I wrote:

Achterlijk Netherlands, Bonjour France. On Friday (12th April) I woke up at 6am to travel to France with 6 friends of mine. They are all Indian so I was really the one rice crispy in a sea of cocopops. After a long but enjoyable flixbus ride via Belgium we arrived at Lille, France. Don't let the name fool you, it's actually a big city.

We walked around the city for a while seeing all the Lille statues and Lille museums. We even stopped by at a traditional Lille bar and enjoyed Lille espressos. 

In the evening I was pleasantly surprised with a deliciously large chocolate birthday cake. To top the day off we played a game of poker for a little bit of money. 

We were actually there for 3 days. The other days involved a lot more poker, museum tours and a quick visit to Dunkirk. Overall it was a nice experience and I enjoyed the company, but the whole trip seemed a bit dry. There wasn't much to do and there wasn't an exciting vibe about the city. The magic of France seemed to be pretty overshadowed by the homelessness problem. No stockpile of baguettes could outweigh the harassment we got from a beggar aggressively trying to steal our food. 

Subjectivity & Morality

I was having a dinner conversation with one of my flatmates the other day. He's a very environmentally conscious, vegetarian, Engineer that holds some very deep seated liberal values. We were talking about culture and he made the claim that no moral codes of a culture could ever be 'really wrong'.

He went on to explain that a culture criticizing another culture is arrogant because it doesn't account for the fact that the person making the criticism has been indoctrinated with moral ideas by his/her own culture. So for example, you may dislike the gender division culture in Saudi Arabia, but this is only because you have likely been indoctrinated in a progressive western culture where equality is the norm. There's nothing objectively wrong about gender division, it's just a difference between cultures which you mistakenly think is wrong because you've been indoctrinated into thinking your culture is objectively right.

I think this subjective moral philosophy is quite popular at the moment. In fact, I bet if you're reading this right now, you probably believe this is true too even if you haven't gone to deep into the philosophy of it all.

Well, I guess it comes as no surprise then, that I believe this view is not only wrong, but very very dangerous.

Before I let the dog off the leash, let me clarify that I largely respect the ideal of tolerating different cultures. I accept that all humans have a very deep xenophobic core and I think it's good that western societies remain open and tolerant, for the most part, of cultures that operate very differently.

Ok, now for the fun stuff. Let's take the moral subjectivity argument and take it to it's extremes. According to my Colombian ex flatmate, there is a micro culture of splashing acid in the faces of women adulterers. Now, you, as a Sydney resident may not like this, but who are you to say that this culture is 'really wrong'? What about throwing homosexuals off of roof tops? What about extremely strict internet censorship? When I bought these example up to my flatmate, he doubled down, and still claimed that there was nothing really wrong about these acts.

Now it's wroth mentioning that at an extremely deep level of philosophy, I actually agree with him. I don't think think any of these acts are 'really wrong' because I don't think an objective morality 'really exists'. But this is not the level of morality we're talking about. Ok, back to my flatmate.

I then proceeded to ask him about why he is vegetarian or why he is puts plastic in the plastic recycling multiple times per week. To me there was a glaring inconsistency in the way he thought about morality. It seemed like in his day to day life, his entire purpose would be to maximize wellbeing for himself and people around him, and yet when it came to this one specific moral issue about culture, he would switch gear and view morality in an entirely different way. How can you believe that no culture should be criticized on the basis of moral subjectivity, and yet simultaneously hold absolute conviction that your flatmate should pay an equal amount for the olive oil despite never using it.

This talk with my flatmate and several other friends of mine makes me realize that the vast majority of us are woefully unprepared to tackle the moral problems we will inevitably be facing in the near future. It terrifies me that very smart Engineers can maintain bat shit crazy moral ideas with enlightened-monk-level persistence.

Every day at University, I see science and technology reaching towards the stars and making discoveries that build on top of previous discoveries. Meanwhile, I see moral philosophy as a collection of creative lunatics with an annoyingly large vocabulary that are still struggling to even define what morality is.

Feminism & the Christchurch shooting

On the 15th March 2019, an Australian white supremacist murdered 50 innocent Muslims in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Shortly before the massacre he sent a manifesto to the Government detailing his racist motivations. Perhaps the most sickening part of the whole event is that he proudly filmed the whole event with a go pro and streamed it live in the hope that it will inspire multiple other white supremacists on the fence.

There's no doubt this man was corrupted by a dangerous and contagious ideology. I'd love to write about how young people now are especially prone to this sort of indoctrination because of the internet and lack of purpose in Western societies - but that's worth a separate blog post. In this blog post, I just want to write about the New Zealand PM's (Jacinda) response to the attack by wearing a hijab out of respect to the victims.

Ok, first, some background. Anyone that has spent 5 or more minutes with me will know I'm an atheist, which means I don't believe a God exists. Inadvertently, I think this has made me pretty critical of many religions. One of the religions I am most critical of at this moment is Islam. I'm critical of Islam because I think it's a contagious, misogynistic and intolerant religion that is incompatible with several western values. Consequently, I think Islam is an ideology that should be challenged in the same way that any other bad ideology should be challenged: through healthy intellectual dialog.

Notice this is obviously extremely different from saying that I'm intolerant of Muslims. This is certainly not the case. It's a shame I even need to clarify this when I talk with my friends about this topic. Many of my friends (especially my New Zealand friends) tend to group the two together with an emotional lasso, which makes them think that a criticism of a misogynistic verse in the Quran is synonymous with hating individual Muslims. I find it painfully ironic that most of my friends who believe this also happen to consider themselves hardcore feminists. My flatmate in New Zealand was one of these people and she would have no hesitation in socially shaming a man for the slightest microaggression, and yet would remain perfectly indifferent about the views on women in the Quran at the risk of being labelled racist. Fun fact, Islam isn't a race, it's a religious ideology, and the people who follow the religion (Muslims), aren't a race either.

This is where Jacinda Ardern comes in. I've got mixed feelings about her wearing the hijab. On one side, I think wearing the hijab was a very important political move to diffuse tensions and console the Muslim community. Great! On the other hand, I think the hijab is a symbol of female oppression, and I think wearing the hijab has just created a more dense emotional cloud protecting valuable criticism of Islam. Let me explain.

Why do I think the hijab is a symbol of female oppression? Well, contrary to what right wing nut-jobs think, I don't believe Muslim women in western countries are forced to wear hijabs, in fact, I'm sure if you asked a Muslim girl why she wears the veil, she'd probably tell you that she chose to do it because she wanted to wear it out of modesty. However, from a psychological standpoint, I think our desires are decided for us based on our biology, culture and environment. Because of this I think wellbeing needs to be viewed in a broader context. For example, women in the 1950's may have been so brainwashed by societal norms that many wanted to become nothing more than housewives with no career ambitions, yet this doesn't undermine the importance of liberating these women to experience greater wellbeing. How do you free a prisoner that doesn't know she's in jail?

Once again, I applaud Jacinda for her compassionate speeches following the attack that are helping to reunite a community. I'm just angered that now it's going to be increasingly more difficult to have a candid talk about the true nature of Islam.

Me 2012 with cousin Scott trying to feed cows grass in a field full of grass

Deleting more files and storing them somewhere

Japan 19th lunchtime Jan 2014

Still cleaning my computer. More memories of the family skiing trip in Japan

Molly

I needed to clear some files from my computer and I found this gem. Love you Santoh.

A refugee's story

One of my flatmates, Mees, volunteers at a refugee center in Rotterdam. I've heard many stories about refugees second hand from him, but until recently I hadn't heard a first hand account of what it's like to be Syrian refugee crossing into Europe. This is a story told to me in a bar by Mohammad, a Syrian refugee and civil Engineer, who spent about a year trying to make it into Western Europe.

1) He did not travel with his family. He made the journey by himself to cross the boarder into Turkey. He found smugglers who were willing to show weak points in the boarder where there was either no wall, or a very easily climbable wall. He made large parts of the journey by car, but near the boarder he had to walk for long distances and hide behind bushes whenever he would see Turkish boarder patrol. 

2) On his first attempt, he got caught by the police crossing the boarder into Turkey. Since he was not a smuggler there was no punishment or fine. The Turkish police simply put all the refugees in a bus and dropped them back on the Syrian side of the boarder.

3) He then tried crossing again (duh) and succeeded without getting caught. He got a lift all the way to Istanbul and stayed there for several months. He didn't like it there because there was no work and a large anti-Syrian aura about the city. 

4) He then decided to make the crossing into Greece. He hired a smuggler to personally escort him and a friend into Athens. Along the Greece boarder, an undercover cop tried to pull them over. The smuggler knew that if he got caught he would have to face 10+ years in jail, so left the car running in neutral and barrel rolled out of the car and into the nearby bushes. The police didn't chase the smuggler and instead tried to stop the moving car with Mohammad and his friend inside. Amazingly, since Mohammad had already crossed the boarder, they took him to Athens instead of dropping him back in Turkey. 

5) Mohammad described Athens as city destroyed by drug addiction and vacant homes everywhere. He was keen to get out to another part of Western Europe. He payed someone to create a fake passport for him so he could fly to a country in Western Europe. After being rejected on 9 separate occasions at the airport with 9 fake passports, one of his fake Dutch passports finally fooled immigration. 

6) On arrival in Amsterdam, Mohammad immediately went to the police station and honestly admitted he was an illegal immigrant with a fake Dutch passport. Rather than deport him, they took his passport and sent him to the refugee center in Rotterdam where he gets free housing, and learns Dutch culture. 

Mah Few Char part 1

This blog has been a long time coming. I have approximately 5 months left of my thesis, and it's time to start organizing myself for post graduation. All of my friends at Tu Delft are super optimistic and passionate about their post graduate life - they're looking way ahead and deciding what path they want to travel. I'm a bit different. So far my tactic of walking through life by staring at my feet has worked ok - I've walked a pretty chaotic path, falling down slopes and rising up others, but at least I've never had to tilt my head up 90 degrees to look at the ominous horizon filled with question marks.

Tu Delft has been a crazy challenging and amazing experience for me. I've learned a lot of theoretical concepts and I've created a base of some really good friends here. I have no regrets whatsoever. But if I'm honest with myself, I think part of the reason I applied to Tu Delft 2 years ago was so that I could delay the choice of which door to open. Coming out of my crippling failure at AECOM, I could see many doors begin to close around me; one door was going back into the industry, another was entrepreneurship, and the last one was academia. In the end, I chose to keep the academia door ajar with my foot. 

Wow, I just realized my metaphors in this post are pretty detailed. I hope anyone reading this can understand what I'm talking about...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm leaving Delft soon. Even though I've had a blast here and have learned a lot, I still consider myself no more prepared for the industry than when I started. It's kinda like I'm a caterpillar that has cocooned itself for 2 years expecting to burst out as a beautiful butterfly, but in the end, I disappointingly ooze out as the same caterpillar.  

This problem is compounded with my current long distance relationship. It's been exactly 2 years and 2 days since I started dating Karen Algeo (you may know her by "Kafu" or "Kaz"). She's the first woman I can say I love, and it pains me that my style of living, which is essentially no different to a jellyfish being pushed along by the current, is going to cause some severe problems for her. She's anchored to Australia with 2 dogs, a lease, a job and a solid network of friends and family. Even though she has bravely said she'd move countries for me (and even surrender the dogs!!!!), I'm still scared. Even if we both find a job in some country somewhere, I'm still very concerned that I'll be either blatantly incompetent at my job or hate it in some way. From my past experiences, absorbing failure isn't easy, but it's always been manageable - I could simply move countries and start again. Now the stakes are higher. If I fail again, I'll be transferring all those problems to Kaz and replacing them with a whopping hit of guilt. So, what's the best way a jellyfish and an anchor can coexist? The most obvious answer is to move back to Australia and stay there for a while until I learn to life better.

Stay tuned! No doubt I'll be writing more about this in the months to come. 

Cultural fluidity

Did ya see the title of this blog? You know it's going to be another rant about philosophical shit when it has smart sounding title like that, eh?

I don't think religions invent the moral messages embedded in their holy books, I think they preserve the moral views felt by the population at the time they were written. For example, I don't think Islam invented misogyny or crimes for apostasy, instead I suspect these were strongly held, non controversial views that were held by many people at the time.

The claim that religions help preserve culture is useful to an historian because it means a religion can act as a time machine to view a past culture. Even though religions evolve over time, they don't evolve fast enough to match the pace of technology now.

Religions are only a symptom of our flawed psychology, not the cause of it. So unsurprisingly, there are many other cultural norms that also cling us to certain ways of behaving. Our simple notions of justice, privacy, and property are also largely products of cultural norms that are preventing us from adapting to the speed of technology. The best example that illustrates this is music on YouTube. The law is a complicated mess of rules stating when you can upload a song, edit a song to make it a parody, or just upload a snippet of a song. In this case capitalism is the religion that has preserved our way of thinking.

I previously thought that the internet would be a facilitator in breaking down these cultural barriers. I thought the arbitrary worship of stereotypes, gender roles, traditions and even the nature of the 9-5 working week would all be highlighted and challenged by a new generation of people empowered and informed by the internet. I now have a much more pessimistic view. I think the internet can also be used as a echo chamber that pumps confirmation bias with 21st century efficiency. Sadly this means that cultural barriers can be reinforced with a thick layer of emotion. I can easily imagine a child growing up believing whole heatedly that she has the right to privacy in every meaning of the word, preventing her from rationally embracing the problems and benefits associated with data mining.

It's worth mentioning that in the book I'm reading now "homo deos", the author mentions that cultures are intrinsically turbulent. Meaning that they don't change just due to environmental effects, but also change due to inevitable self contradictions. While I think this is definitely true and very useful, I still think this form of natural cultural change can be counter balanced by the power of the internet, and can leave us stuck in some sub optimal condition.

The best case scenario is to have complete cultural fluidity. Where the traditions of one generation are quickly and easily broken down and replaced with other cultural norms of the following generation that are more in sync with the technology of the time.

Our moral beliefs need to be updated

Just a quick post before I zoom off to go Go-Karting.

I think our iron held moral beliefs in justice, equality and fairness needs to be updated in the 21st century. Just like how countries laws and tax systems are struggling to keep up with an increasingly technical, flexible and global economy, I think our moral beliefs will also come under pressure.

Consider a simple moral statement like 'everyone has the right to choose what they do with their body'. I suspect every non religious person would probably agree this is a sound moral value to live by. However, I think moral statements like this become increasingly more difficult to defend in light of technological advancements which will force us to come to grips with subtle contradictions. The most obvious challenge to this moral statement is vaccines. Individuals choosing not to vaccinate their children or themselves aren't just harming their children or themselves, they're harming others around them through the potential risk of spreading a contagious disease. The same goes with smoking, drugs, abortion etc. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the choice of what we do with our bodies will become more and more the concern of humanity as a whole. This is a simple example, but I think the problem goes much deeper. What if a countries CO2 emissions disproportionately affect another countries weather? What if one country builds a dam blocking water used for agriculture in a neighboring country? These are problems we're already witnessing and trying to solve. The only solution is to completely do away with our old fashioned iron held moral beliefs and iterate to a new moral code built on maximizing well being. And once technology shows problems with the new moral code, then we will have to iterate once more. I'm worried that if we don't precisely engineer how these moral values change, then they will be changed for us by the invisible hand of capitalism.

Coding pain

Is it possible to hard code a computer to feel pain? It seems like the answer is no. Even if we manage to develop super realistic robots, it seems we could only ever make them mimic the experience of feeling pain. After all, pain is a property only conscious creatures can experience, and a complicated entanglement of wires and silicon boards could never experience consciousness, right?

I don't know the answer to this question, and it may be true that the analogy between computing and the human brain could turn out to be quite simple and misleading. After all, Freud based a lot of his models of how the brain works on the steam engine. None the less, I've got a few pieces together which I think can help solve this problem.

1) Consciousness is not binary, it comes in a spectrum.  Bacteria --> Jellyfish --> Sheep --> Humans all have increasing consciousness, and sure, we can artificially draw a line somewhere, but it would be somewhat arbitrary especially since consciousness isn't rigorously defined.

2) It's tempting to think robots can only mimic the experience of pain - you could code the robot to quickly move its robotic hand from fire, despite it not experiencing the subjective experience of pain. But how can we be sure robots don't experience pain? It's a purely subjective experience that we can't measure with physical tools. It really bugs me to admit there might be some ethereal world of subjective experience caused by, but above the physical world.

What evidence would it take for me to believe in God?

I've had the view for a long time that I won't believe in God until I find sufficient evidence for his/it's existence. This begs the question: "what evidence would it take for me to believe in God"?

The obvious candidate is a miracle. It's tempting to think something old testament level, like the seas parting or the clouds separating by a shining light would be enough to convince me. But thinking a bit deeper, it's also possible that a very simple miracle like this could also be the result of an hallucination or a well orchestrated magic trick. Sure, the odds of it all being an hallucination or a magic trick are astronomically small, but we know it's possible because we've all been duped by visual illusions and TV shows of David Blaine before. In comparison, a miracle has exactly 0% chance of happening by definition - it's a suspension of natural laws (whether we know them or not) that can't happen, and yet happens anyway. So to be rational, I would need to convince myself that the very obvious miracle being witnessed is somehow not a supernatural event. It's worth noting that in practice, if I saw something like this in real life, I would probably be so overcome with awe that I would end up believing in the closest God I could peg the miracle to. But this doesn't mean it's rational for me to believe, it just means I was manipulated by a serge of my own emotion.

I'm sure many theologians would argue that miracles don't need to come in the form of huge spikes of disruption. I suspect many theologians would argue that miracles surround our ordinary lives in subtle forms of beauty. I don't follow this line of argument either mainly because I don't think beauty objectively exists. It's a hardwired response our brains we have evolved with for survival reasons. If you were to look at the Universe at a closer level (literally at the nano level for example) you would find that even the most elegant process of a flower opening or a bird singing can be described by boring meaningless chemical/mechanical processes. Secondly, the existence of subtle miracles like a cancer going into regression for example, seems to me to be a desperate attempt to avoid the fine resolution of the scientific microscope. I don't think it's any coincidence that as our ability to understand scientific processes continues to grow and our ability to accurately record history improves, we notice miracles become less and less miraculous. It's not that God favors healing patients with tumors more than healing amputees, it's that humans misattribute gaps in a complete scientific understanding to divine origin.

Lastly, I've met 'weak believers' who claim that the only miracle to have ever occurred was the creation of the Universe in the big bang. My first argument doesn't apply here because the whole natural world didn't exist before the big bang, so you can forget about analyzing probabilities! You'd be tempted to think that if the Universe couldn't come into existence naturally, then it must have been caused supernaturally. This is a tempting thought until you realize that logic, causality and rationality only products of the natural world (1+1 has no meaning without a Universe, so we can't say it's equal to 2). As I always say, 'to add, you must first invent the Universe'! To say that the Universe was caused by something also makes no sense, so sadly, this just means I need to suspend judgement here. Maybe God exists, maybe he doesn't... maybe he does and doesn't. After all, logic doesn't apply.

Ok, if miracles won't convince me to believe in God then what will? Well, Matt Dillahunty, an atheist talk show host that I used to listen to a lot in my mid teens (but now kinda dislike) argued an interesting point. He argued that even if he doesn't know what it'll take for him to believe in God, God knows what it'll take to convince him. I think this argument only holds up for Abrahamic religion like Gods that actually care about human actions like worship and belief. Of course it's possible a perverse God could simply be timeless and uncaring about whether I believe in him or not.

My hero, Carl Sagan, had an interesting approach to this. He argued that the only way a God would infiltrate his way into the Universe is though mathematics. In one of his books he argues that if one of the fundamental constants of the universe, Pi, developed a pattern (like an infinite string of 0's) then this would be proof of a divine architect shaping the world in the most fundamental way. Once again, I don't like this for two reasons 1) We can prove mathematically that this can't happen, and if it did happen, we can apply the same logic from the first paragraph, and claim that mathematicians must have made a mistake in the calculation somewhere. 2) Humans are infamously good at spotting patterns. So good that we see patterns when there actually are none! This is especially the case for recognizing faces in clouds or bushes for example. Because of this, I don't think there's anyway to know that a pattern in the numbers is actually a subtle message from God or not.

What about emotion? Why do we assume the belief in God has to be rational? I have no doubt that religious people 'feel' Gods presence, rather than rationalize about his existence, and there are hundreds of YouTube videos showing the pure emotive power of belief. The problem with believing in God based on emotion is that it takes away your only reliable tool for discerning what is true or not. You can believe anything! I think following emotion, no matter how convincing it appears to be, ultimately just facilitates belief in the cultural norms of the society you grow up in. After all, there are videos of both Christians and Hindus reaching divine like levels of emotive connection, and yet we know that the Christian God and Hindu Gods are incompatible. This means that extremely convincing emotive connections don't need to be divine in origin; they can be natural occurrences in our mind.

So there it is! At this point in my life nothing will make me believe in a God. Just typing that sentence makes me seem horribly stubborn and intellectually closed. Perhaps I've missed something, or maybe I'll change my mind about a few of my arguments in the future, because I really don't like the idea of appearing so closed minded. A few future avenues of exploration are
1) The existence of consciousness. After all, it seems like a completely non physical property.
2) The matrix possibility. This entertains the idea that my brain is in a vat being fed illusionary images about the world. This is an interesting idea because it means establishing probabilities, having a sense of time and maybe even basic logical constructs in the real world could be completely false.

Equality. Meritocracy or Affirmative action?

I just finished a 3 week vacation around Australia so I figured this blog should be about the philosophy of equality.

For a long time I've been struggling with the issue of equality. Is affirmative action a good thing or is it discriminatory? Should we value equal outcomes or equal opportunities? How should we treat people if certain groups of people have evolved differently?

For many years I've been a die hard fan of a meritocratic society. In a meritocracy, all citizens have the opportunity to be recognized and advanced in proportion to their abilities and accomplishments. In a nutshell this means you value equal opportunities, not necessarily equal outcomes. An example is Uber: to become an Uber driver, nobody looks at your race, gender or sexual orientation, instead all they look at is your ability to do the job, and the more lifts you provide, the more money you make. It's easy to see why I was such a fan of this form of functioning; it seems to avoid any form of discrimination and maximizes efficiency.

However, I've been trying to reconcile this with my mostly positive views on affirmative action. Affirmative action is the policy of awarding groups of people that have historically faced severe prejudice with additional education or employment benefits. There's no doubt that racism and sexism has existed and that it continues to exist in subtle ways. Perhaps affirmative action is an effective way to shock the system out of these cultural quagmires. A Meritocracy, by comparison, seems painfully slow in countering this problem, because even though it would be rational to hire the best person for the job, some employers will consciously or unconsciously lean on cultural stereotypes and avoid hiring blacks or women. Minor side note: It's not entirely irrational for employers to do this by the way! There is always going to be some uncertainty behind potential candidates (after all, your uni grade and a 10 minute interview can't give an employer complete knowledge about work ethic or how social you are), and in this void of uncertainty it would be rational for an employer to predict a candidates skill set according to stereotypes assuming those stereotypes are a statistical average of the group the candidate belongs to. I'm a fan of affirmative action for these types of causes, however, I can't help the obvious contradiction between affirmative action and a meritocracy. Affirmative action, no matter how well intentioned, involves treating groups differently, whereas a meritocracy avoids looking at groups all together.

So what's the solution? Perhaps use affirmative action for a fixed time until all the cultural problems have been ironed out, and then switch to a meritocracy? It seems like a good idea, but I don't think it'll work. And I think the main reason it won't work is because right now most people on this earth believe dogmatically that 'all humans are created equal'. Don't get me wrong, I liked Martin L King's speech, and I'm gonna let him finish, but from a Darwinian perspective, it can't be true. Humans, although very similar, have evolved with slightly different traits including intelligence - a highly prized employment skill. The problem of applying affirmative action until all the cultural problems are ironed out is that 1) Prejudice and stereotypes will never fully disappear so long as different groups exhibit average differences and 2) It's impossible to know when they've been ironed out since average genetic differences imply a natural split of gender in a particular field might not be 50 50. This means a temporary application of affirmative action in theory could turn out to be a perpetual form overbalance in practice.

To add more fuel to the fire, here are a bunch of other things to consider:
1) Should disabled people still be looked after in a meritocracy even though they can't contribute as much? Presumably yes, and if so, where do you draw the line?
2) Female only scholarships in Engineering are a clear case of affirmative action. Perhaps a much more subtle form of affirmative action is government drink driving ads targeting young males. Both are government payed incentives targeting groups. If you're against one, why aren't you against the other?
3) A meritocracy rewards the best worker regardless of group he/she belongs to. This seems fair because you can't choose the group you belong to, whereas you can choose work ethic. However, at a very deep philosophical level, your intelligence, personality and work ethic are actually determined by things external to you (see my previous posts about determinism), so the act of rewarding an individual based on merit becomes as arbitrary as rewarding an individual that belongs to a group.

In the end I think I figured out the solution! The solution is that neither meritocracy or affirmative action, or any combination of the two are fundamentally good. I know this is going to sound super dissatisfying, but at a fundamental level if we define good as whatever maximizes well being, then what is good may be a form of governance that is entirely different from anything we've mentioned. Maybe it's true that a meritocracy could be highly correlated with maximizing well being, but it's entirely possible, given the primal nature of our brains, that extreme inequality could also maximize well being.