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. 

Knox Cartoons

Behold! The artwork I created at high school to vent about my horrible time there: