Luxembourg trip

Day 1: 6th April

Kaz and I set off to Luxembourg for a much needed holiday. Luxembourg was the country of choice purely because of it's stance on Covid; it didn't have one. However, to drive to Luxembourg we needed to go through Germany or Belgium. If Luxembourg can be personified as a hippy preaching for free entry everywhere, Belgium and Germany can be viewed as bouncers to a fancy nightclub. Just to be on the safe side, I did my research, filled out the forms, and got tested for Covid. All of it turned out to be unnecessary in the end because there was no border patrol whatsoever. What was even more surprising is that there were hundreds of cars every second zipping across the border. It was pretty disheartening to see all of the isolation efforts by my friends be made almost completely redundant within a second. 

Three hours and one parking ticket later we were in Luxembourg. Even though the whole country is tiny, and even though there is a national language (it's called Luxembourgish, and yeah, I thought it sounded made up too), the dialect is noticeably different from region to region. As you get closer to the west it sounds more French, and as you get closer to the east it sounds more German. The houses are also very strange. Unlike the Netherlands, which consists of row after row of identical looking houses, Luxembourg has brightly colored houses popping out of the ground in all types of weird places and orientations. It looks like a child got frustrated placing in those rectangular leggo pieces and resorted to hammering them in instead. 

We arrived at our remotely located hotel and immediately decided to do a hike. It was only a 2 hour hike, but still very rewarding. 

Day 2: 7th April

We woke up at 7am to have breakfast and start our hike for the day. We ended up hiking to Echternach via some of the famous caves. It was lovely. Once we arrived, it started to snow down heavily so we decided to take cover in a restaurant by a lake. Luckily, today was the first day that restaurants and cafes were allowed to open. Unluckily, Covid restrictions still forced us to sit in the outdoor area. After the cold snap, Kaz and I decided to pack it in early and take a bus back to our hotel. We enjoyed a lovely hot tub, some Chinese food and got to bed early. 

Day 3: 8th April

We had a very lazy start to the day. We woke up late, enjoyed our free breakfast and drove to a castle in Bedorf. The castle was just like any other except for the torture area. There was a whole assortment of pully systems, cranks and spikes all used in creative ways to crush fingers, dislocate shoulders and severe tendons. It's crazy to think how unempathetic these people were. After the sobering visit to the castle, Kaz and I took a walk around the park, disconnected from reality for a while by catching pokemon, and checked into our new accommodation - a place in a prime location for additional hikes. We had a long conversation with the owner of the hotel who said that the hotel had been pretty much unused for the last 2 years. In 2018 they had a flood, and right after they did the renovations Covid hit in full force. The owner tried to hide her bitterness that the Luxembourg Government hadn't given her any support money due to the pandemic. 

In the evening Megan and Yesh, 2 of our South African friends finally arrived and we settled in for some more Chinese and drinking.

Day 4: 9th April

This was our big hiking day! We walked a full 20km around mostly Mullerthal trail 2. It was stunning. We passed the famous caves which got super narrow and pitch black. A very rewarding treat. After that we ordered in some Italian food, played Settlers of Catan and drank some more alcohol.

Day 5: 10th April

My birthday was delightful. My parents went through the effort of ordering Champaign and a snack platter for Kaz, Megan, Yesh and I. Kaz gave me a Strava subscription for a year along with some NASA fanboy gear. Megan & Yesh gave me a triathlon belt. The weather was not so rewarding so we decided not to hike today and tour Luxembourg city. However, due to a rapid series of fuckups, we ended up driving there in double the time of public transport (which is free, by the way), and with a speeding fine. Regardless the city was beautiful. There were lots of old forts and castles scattered throughout the center due to its history of being a punching bag between France and Spain.

Bulgaria hiking trip

 2 friends and I booked flights to Bulgaria to go hiking around Rila national park. We arrived in Sofia, the capital on the 31st of July, and immediately made our way to Borovits, a nearby skiing town. Borovits was a strange experience. It was hard to distinguish what was Bulgarian culture and what was clearly a touristy gimmick. British flags were attached to the front door of almost all restaurants, and English breakfasts were on almost every menu. Clearly, Brits must enjoy using Bulgaria as a cheap ski haven. 

In the morning we began our hike and made our way to Mt Musala - the highest point in Bulgaria. The hike was long, uphill, and exhausting: everything I've been longing for. When we arrived at our hut near the summit we met about 40 Czech people who were also staying there. They were super friendly, spoke excellent English, and drank crazy amounts of alcohol. I met a 70-year-old man who couldn't withstand bringing up the evils of communism at almost every opportunity. He told me about the difficulties of living in the Czech Republic 60's and 70's. The country was extremely poor and all the students were forced to learn Russian. 

The 2nd day of hiking was the hardest. A quick glance of the map had fooled us into thinking that Mt Musala to Ribini Erzo hut would be a simple hike along the ridgeline of the mountains. This was an underestimate. It was a long and challenging hike. Martin got altitude sickness, Victor got some severe blisters on his feet, and we all walked into a pack of ultra-aggressive dogs defending a group of cattle that had waddled their way onto our walking track. At one point I picked up a large rock to prepare for the worst. Don't worry though, we lived and no animals were hurt.

The 3rd day was by far the easiest. We hiked to Rila monastery - an extremely famous destination. I had no idea how big of a deal the monastery was until I arrived there. The religious paintings were amazing, they had nuns and priests doing religious ceremonies, and there were hundreds of pilgrims staying there. 

On the last day we hiked from Rila monastery to the famous 7 lakes. Confusingly, there were many more than 7, but that didn't take away from the moment. Victor unpacked his drone and got some jaw-dropping footage.

On our last full day, we traveled back to Sofia. We found an amazing Bulgarian restaurant. For 17 euros each we got to try some of the best meat I've ever tried with a full bottle of wine. It turns our the Bulgarian diet is almost exclusively meat-based; there were hardly any vegetables, just mouth-watering lamb, chicken, pork and beef with a heavy side of Avjar (a delicious tomato and capsicum paste).

The trip was great fun and a much-needed refresher. I'll be back soon, eastern Europe :)

Internet and democracy

There is a lot I want to say about this topic. This is just a taste test.

I remember when I watched curiosity, a NASA rover, land on Mars in 2012. I thought it was so cool that a machine built by fleshy humans was blasted from one tiny planet to another tiny planet. In my mind it was the perfect example of how humanity had adjusted it's focus, zooming out to see the infinitely complex and beautiful universe around us. That feeling was short lived. Shortly after the touch down was declared a success, a NASA employee was the focus of every news channel, YouTube video and Facebook post I could find. He had worn an inappropriate shirt with pictures of sexy women on it during an interview and was being accused of sexism. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember it devolving into a controversial issue, which generated & spread a lot of emotion around the internet. I remember feeling so disheartened that humanity had instantly snapped back to it's zoomed in view of the world. I also wondered whether the future would be any different.

Well here we are, 2020, literally 1 month until the launch of the next NASA rover, Perseverance. There are so many things to be excited about. For starters, this next mission will involve a land rover and a tiny helicopter called ingenuity. This is amazing! A helicopter flying on another planet that has almost no atmosphere! Yet a part of me is already disheartened. I'm bracing for the moment when humanity misses another chance to wake up and really open it's eyes. We're all so zoomed in. I see increasingly more of my friends take to social media to scream into a virtual whirlwind. We're all so opinionated about controversial moral subjects that have relatively negligible moral importance. There's a viscous part of 21st century technology that plays with our primitive psychology, perpetually distracting and polarizing us.

I'm bracing myself for the emotional shock of witnessing Ingenuity starting spinning it's blades for the first time, only for me to notice in my periphery that the following 15 recommended videos are about the TV host not being black.

New philosophy website: https://sites.google.com/view/mattsphilosophy/home

It's not complete:

https://sites.google.com/view/mattsphilosophy/home

Day 1

When it started it was loud. In every direction your senses were flooded with the deafening sound of people screaming and sirens bellowing. But as the virus spread it got quieter. Only the occasional faint crack of a gunshot in the distance could be heard. Now everything is completely silent. Even the wind dares not disturb the silence as it brushes its way over the thousands of corpses that litter the streets. My name is Matthew James, and this is how I survived the C19 apocalypse.

In the old word I was nothing special. I had an Engineering degree, a girlfriend, and a pet dog called Winry. I, like everyone else at that time, had been indoctrinated into the romantic view that a successful life was guaranteed provided you worked hard, had a fulfilling social life, and brushed your teeth twice per day. I was completely unprepared. When the first few people got sick, everyone cared so much. Scores of people would care around the clock for these people - there would be hugging, kissing, crying and laughter. Emotion is a luxury of the privileged, I guess. Little did these people know that their 'humanity' would only cause the virus to spread more. It spread so fast that by the time it was properly noticed, it was too late. I survived the initial wave of infections, not because I was prepared, but because of luck. I had spent the last few months cocooned in my bedroom playing game after game of Age of Empires, completely unaware of the events unfolding around me. Isn't it ironic that someone can be so distracted by creating a fictional empire, that they fail to even notice real empires beginning to crumble around them.  When I finally left my house to get more corn flakes and milk, the world I stepped into had already been scorched. It was at this moment I realized that I needed to uninstall the game and get supplies...

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.