Zombie Crossing

19 year old Franz Schopenhauer of Jacksonville, Florida was sentenced today to five years of federal imprisonment for hacking into a construction sign on Hwy 17 and displaying the message, "Caution: Zombie crossing ahead". While departing the courtroom, he was heard to proclaim, " If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary!"

Meaningless Entertainment

Is meaningless entertainment meaningless and oxymoronic?

Is entertainment meaningless? Not if it is entertaining - otherwise it would evoke no feeling or emotion, and would therefore go unnoticed. Is all entertainment the same? No. Entertainment that increases one's ability to be entertained rather than dulling the senses like a drug that requires higher and higher doses seems, in my way of thinking, to be a superior form of entertainment. A fine wine, for instance, is crap - you are thereafter unable to enjoy "lesser" wines. Fine literature, on the other hand, is more complicated: it can make you more appreciative of everyday life, and it can make you reject more poorly written works.

I believe Steven Pinker said something along the lines that music is cheesecake for the ears - extremely satisfying to certain senses that did not evolve for enjoying cheesecake. From an ignorant perspective, I am inclined to disagree with Pinker, thinking that heartbeats, walking
footfalls, and the universality of music in other cultures is a little too convincing to disregard so easily. I also believe music is sexy - a dynamic of sexual selection, like birds singing; it is an indication of reproductive fitness.

Sounds of Falling Trees

We are not alone in the universe! Radio astronomers have detected faint signals of intelligence from a star system 3000 light years away. This civilization was emitting radio signals at least 3000 years ago. Our signals will not reach them for another 2900 years.


Ok, what now? Has anything changed? Well, yes - we went from thinking there was a probability to being told by experts that it is a certainty.


Unfortunately, this is a fiction - as far as I know, we haven't detected any signals of intelligent origin, and we probably won't. Why not? Because the universe it very old, we haven't heard anything yet, there is no reason intelligence on other planets should develop anywhere close to our timeline, and there is no reason for intelligence to develop.


Why is there no reason for intelligence to develop? Because it is about as accidentally meaningless as peacock feathers. Intelligence is little more than a fitness display that got caught up in a process of runaway sexual selection. Oops, boom, brains develop to the point that birth is dangerous, metabolism is heavily taxed, and the kludge design is constantly breaking down.

All of this, I am just parroting from others. My question, in the end, boils down to why so many secular people seem to believe intelligence is an end-goal of the evolution of the universe. It seems a bit self-aggrandizing to me, but then again, what is reality without consciousness? And what is consciousness without intelligence?  The idea behind these questions has been around for a while: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

But the end-goal question... 

1000 x 1000

It should be obvious, but while zeros written on the end of a number look linear in print, it is a logarithmic increase in the value of the number.

The difference between 100 and 1000 is much less than the difference between 1,000 and 10,000.  

When numbers start getting large, I, for one, struggle to keep in mind that a million is a 1000 a thousand times.

betterexplained.com

Unified, there is only one top

It is fairly common for people to speak highly of a future where all countries are unified such as the European Union. But what of the adage of not keeping all your eggs in one basket? What if everyone thought the same,
went to the same schools, aspired to the same professions, and watched the same movies? Not only would this be boring, it would also dangerous and hopeless. It would be boring because of the monotony, but dangerous because any systemic weakness or shock would affect the entire system and hopeless because... how many winners can there be in a playing field of 7 billion? 

Some friends and I rode mountain bikes and, once a year, participated in a 24-hour relay race. (This is great fun if you enjoy exhausting yourself with four or five one hour bursts of hard riding separated by four hours of rest.) However, because it is a popular race with thousands of contestants, we would finish in the middle of the pack. Someone suggested that we form a Clydesdale division (average weight over 200 lbs) and suddenly we won (our
division) three years in a row. Similarly, how many writers, artists, musicians, or brand names could rise to the top if there is only one unified top?

Mathematical Filter

Why is the universe the way it is? 

Isn't it amazing that so many variables are precisely what they need to be to allow other variables to work? 

Well,imagine that there are an infinite numbers of universes, each with slightly different variables - which universes would exist? 

Simple answer: The ones where all the variables work out, like a giant math problem... If you wanted to sound funny, you could say Reality is mathematically filtered possibilities. 

Myth of Progress

Probably because I read Straw Dogs a couple of years ago, the idea of the Myth of Progress was probably already in my head, but I was surprised to find that John Gray has a new book out that directly addresses this idea. 

Notes from reviews of The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
by John Gray

• The chief tenet of the Enlightenment is that the growth of knowledge is the key to human emancipation.
• Modern societies ... abound in new, short-lived religions, "flickering and fading", as J G Ballard has put it, "like off-peak commercials".
• We can't renounce technology, and the idea that we can is just hubris in another guise. 
• There is no power in the world that can ensure that technology is used only for benign purposes. Partly this is because we cannot agree on what such purposes are. Partly it is because even when enough people are agreed there is no power that can enforce the consensus.
• "Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science."
• "The power of myth," Gray writes, "is in making meaning from the wreckage of meaning."
• As Gray insists, we are going precisely nowhere – and a good thing, too. The world is not a teleology, there is no grand end in view, just round the next revolutionary corner, just over the next mound of heaped-up corpses.

*

Straw Dogs is one of my favourite books, but I must admit, this review from the Guardian is not far from the truth:

His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope.