Altruism

This post is intended to mutilate the view that there is no such thing as “true” altruism, that however noble our actions are, our true motives are always selfish.

First, the two main versions of this faulty view: The first is that whatever we do for others, we do because we expect something from others in return. The second, more subtle version is that whatever we do, we do because it makes us feel good, and we don’t really do for others, but for this good feeling.

The general refutation will, I hope, lay to rest both forms of the view, but I’ll make this one point regarding the first: Even if we fully expect reciprocal (material or social) reward for what we do for others, there is no reason to think that that is the only, or even the main motive for what we do. When we say someone has “mixed motives”, we mean just that – part of the person’s motive is benevolent, part is selfish. If so, then there are benevolent motives, even if most of the time one is only partially motivated by them.


Now the main argument: Some people get pleasure from doing for others, and some people get pleasure from doing for self. Similarly, one’s conscience can cause one pain in the plight of others, a spring to action, or one can become so dissociated from one’s conscience as not to detect its call and command. One can train oneself, even if one doesn’t have the natural inclination, to take pleasure in the flourishing of others, and to be pained by their distresses (except in certain pathological cases). And if one can, I think you’ll agree, one ought to.

Now both the person who takes pleasure in altruism and the person who takes pleasure in self-indulgence take pleasure in what they do. But they are not equivalent – they are not both selfish. Thus we can distinguish between selfish pleasure, and altruistic pleasure. It is in the definition of the refined character that one take pleasure in the good of others. The naturally altruistic person will have an easier job of it, though will still have to combat the temptation to selfishness from time to time. The naturally selfish person who wishes to refine his or her character must take pains in order to develop this attitude.

In the end it will be worth it for the person, as excessive concern for the self naturally leads to a terribly stifling way of life, and the pleasure that can be taken in altruism is genuine.

Our opponent will then respond: “I am confirmed. I told you that we do everything for pleasure, and therefore even when one acts for others, one really has only one’s self-interest in mind. It may be, as you say, that the pleasure one gets in acting for others is better and deeper than the pleasure one gets in acting for oneself. That just means that if someone is really self-interested, it is in his or her own best interest be concerned for others.”

I have already partially dealt with this point, having argued that people may be willing to experience pain in order to develop a benevolent attitude. But it is still valid to press the case that one does this in calculation that overall this will result in greater personal pleasure, (notwithstanding the fact that many people who make the decision to develop morally often don't think they're doing so for this reason.)

The more profound point is this: Why do people take pleasure in being good to others in the first place? (The neurological explanation is informative, but trivial.) People take pleasure in being good. To feel good is not the same as to feel good about yourself. One feels good about oneself when one does the right thing. This has nothing to do with satisfying one’s libidos or gaining social status, etc. Sometimes, in order to be good, one must forget about oneself and surrender to more important things. A good person can only be happy when he or she does good actions. Paradoxically, then, the confirmation of self sometimes requires an absolution of self. This is hardly the same as mere indulgence in pleasure.

If the pleasure that comes from the recognition of the moral good doesn’t have a different metaphysical source than selfish pleasure, though I think it does, it certainly has a different psychological source.

People judge altruism to be a masked form of self indulgence in order to advance a certain amoral philosophy. But what is often forgotten is that the correct ordering and control of one’s appetites is a crucial part of the development of a moral character. One’s observance of morality is what determines whether a person is good or bad Therefore a morally sensitive person will take pleasure in being good and will feel pain when moral flaw is recognized, and work to regulate one’s attitudes in accordance with one’s principles. The amoral person will not regard the morality of one’s actions as valuable in determining which pleasures are to be prioritized, but only how good they feel.

If one takes pleasure in altruism, then that person deserves our highest respect, and we shouldn't think that our respect is a necessary motivator for that person, or a condition of his or her happiness.

Good = The Will of God?

This is an adaptation and extension of an argument by Plato, in the dialogue Euthyphro.

Let us say, as many do, that the definition of The Good is nothing more and nothing less than the Will of God. That would mean that whatever world God creates would be, by definition, perfectly good. Our world, then, is not the best world God could have created – any world must, by definition, be perfectly good. That means that a world far more miserable than ours, e.g., one where suffering is not justified, one in which there is no prospect of salvation, must be equally good as ours, if God were to decide to create such a world. Equally, for those who believe that all morality requires God as moral arbiter, then whatever morality God decides is objectively moral, even if it were the opposite of justice and morality in our world, even if it would promote dishonesty, selfishness, unjust privelege and liability, etc.

In such a case, though we may be beholden to God and subject to His reward and punishment, there is nothing “good” about the world or about moral behavior as dictated by the command of God. That is to say, though perhaps we would be grateful that God created us at all, we should not be grateful that He created a world for us that is good. Any world God would create is good by definition.

But the faithful believe that not only is God the creator, not only does He write the rules of the game, but that the rules are fair, just, and good.

Conclusion: There is a criterion for what counts as good independent of God and God’s will. Thus, if God is truly good, He is good according to a criterion He does not Himself create.

Can a Computer Be a Composer?

I wrote this a little while ago for school. I lost the footnotes and am too lazy to find them now, but if you ask me for them, I'll go look them up

Can a Computer Be a Composer?
An Essay by David Lampert
Touro College, DMX
April 2007

The composition of music is a mental feat of remarkable intricacy. While it is not overtly obvious, musical composition is a number game. It has been long known, since at least Pythagoras in the second century B.C.E., probably longer, that the essence of the musical scale is the numerical relationships between the degrees of the scale. Theories of melody, harmony, structure, rhythm obviously, all of these components of music can be analyzed as numerical permutations. And no one is better at number permutations than a computer.

Can a computer, then, be a composer?

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that if a computer can produce a response indistinguishable from a human response, then the computer exhibits humanlike intelligence. If a computer can produce music that is indistinguishable from humanly composed music, according to this diagnostic, then the computer is a composer.


There are no more than three possible ways for causation to occur in the world: By predetermination (natural or otherwise), by randomness, or by free choice. It is debatable whether all three actually exist as causal agencies in the world, and if they do not, which one(s) do(es).

Nature produces sounds: The rolling of the river, the songs of the birds and insects, the rustling of the leaves. These sounds are often beautiful. They are produced and arranged by randomness. Is the forest a composer of music? If the answer is no, which I suspect is the case, then to be a composer is not merely to run a process and end up with beautiful sound.

But computations are not merely random events. Computer programs are forms, and though they do not predict or anticipate the content they will have to process (input from the user, for example), the processes they undergo to deal with the content are predictable. Music is methodical, and for a computer to compose music, it needs a method. However, music cannot be strictly predetermined either, because if so then the same program will always produce the same piece of music, which renders the programmer the composer and not the computer. In all music composition programs, there is a randomization factor, (based on the computer’s clock usually.)

“In 1787 Mozart composed the Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game). This composition was a series of precomposed measures arranged in random eight-bar phrases to build the composition. Each throw of a pair of dice represented an individual measure, so after eight throws the first phrase was determined.”

I am compelled to determine that Mozart, the programmer, and not the dice or computer, is the composer of any piece of music composed by this sort of method. First, all the phrases are pre-composed. Thus, they are already composed by the composer before they were fed to the computer. Thus, the computer does not compose them. Second, if the phrases go together musically, they were pre-composed to go together musically. However, a program with a hundred thousand phrases to choose from will have to have rules built in to determine which phrases (parts, chord progressions, key changes, etc.) go together. But might such a program be capable of generating good original music?

At the time of this writing, my opinion is no. A most important factor will be missing.


Another set of music generating programs use “evolutionary methods”, where the computer attempts multiple solutions to musical problems, which are controlled by a selection factor. Suitable solutions are reinforced, made to repeat in subsequent projects, while unsuitable ones are cut. However, who determines which solutions are suitable and which ones aren’t? “The results of the process are supervised by the critic, a vital part of the algorithm controlling the quality of created compositions”

Third, then, and of utmost importance: Computers have no taste. Mozart’s dice game doubtless produced some musical pieces that were better than others. However, which pieces those were were not determined at all by the process that produced them, but by the human listeners. Occasionally, perhaps frequently, a computer program will come up with a good piece of music, but as long as the piece follows the rules of music – nay, as long as the piece follows the rules of the program, the computer will not be able to determine whether it has produced a piece of music worthy of the name.

I have listened to a number of computer composed pieces of music (some are linked to Wikipedia’s article “Algorithmic Composition”). They suck. Many of them are pretty, to be sure. For example, the most common genre of computer composition I have encountered consists of forever-meandering, new agey, structureless soundscapes. But we have determined, as regarding the sounds of nature, that mere prettiness of sound is not sufficient to qualify as music. Random sounds can be pretty, especially to one who is open-minded to it. And, if occasionally such processes do result in compelling musical ideas, that is not to the computer’s credit at all, because the computer cannot distinguish worthy musical ideas from unworthy ones.

Also, to be fair, my listening did not qualify as a Turing test, because I already knew that I was listening to computer generated music. I think I’m open-minded, but I am not immune to bias. Even the most human of them sounded mechanical to me.

It is interesting, however, that the names of the pieces are always listed with the names of the human composers. Interesting, because if the computers are the composers, the humans don’t deserve credit. Perhaps it is egotism on the part of the composers, but I think it is a tacit acknowledgement that whatever technology used as tools, it is the human being alone that composes.



 

Voting: Meaningless or Downright Wrong

If the election is won by a landslide, then your one vote and all of your friends' 50 votes, are meaningless. Every vote counts? Nice dream, but this is a game of numbers and those kinds of numbers don't make a difference.

The only way your vote has any chance at all to count is if the race is neck to neck. And in that case the vote does NOT REPRESENT WHAT AMERICANS WANT; it means that ALMOST HALF of the nation is getting screwed. In a landslide, where your own vote doesn't count, at least the election as a whole vaguely represents what the people want. If the race is close, then, perhaps your vote does count, but it means that the system is not accomplishing what it set out to do, to represent the American People.

So you have your choice.

"On Election Day, I stayed home. And I did essentially what you did. The only difference is that, when I got finished masturbating, I had a little something to show for it."
-George Carlin

Does God Really Care About Me?

This essay is a response to the faulty argument that the universe is so vast and the human being so small, his action so inconsequential, that God would not devote much attention to him.



Aristotle argued thus: We explain phenomena by referring to other phenomena. For example, we explain the rain by reference to clouds, the clouds by reference to temperature, temperature by reference to particle movement, and so on. If so, then the explanation has to end somewhere, because if not, either the series of explanations goes in a circle or goes on forever, in either which case we understand nothing. For Aristotle, this somewhere is God. But this God is very different from the God of the Theistic religions.

The word “God”– and it is only a word – has developed connotations consistent with its use. In a Western world with Christianity as the dominant world religion, people think of God (vis. God the Father) as an invisible tough-loving bearded man in the sky. The more philosophically minded tend to think of God as a more abstract kind of being, one unsusceptible to such simple, or perhaps any, description. This abstracting is a depersonalizing of God, and it places Him at a distance from human consciousness and concern. But the Theist, even the philosophical Theist, will insist that in some sense God cares about human beings, their welfare and their behavior.

The atmosphere in which modern science finds its roots, in 16^th century Europe, was one deeply entrenched in religious thinking. For the masses, God was the invisible Superman; for the well educated, God was the abstract, incomprehensible super-unity of Maimonides and Aquinas. The Being of God was “known” from philosophy, His Nature “known” by revelation. When the first modern scientists began their work, the assumption was that God certainly exists, and that He is eminently rational. Therefore the universe, the physical world, is rationally constructed, and susceptible to understanding by way of rationality. Though we may never understand God, we might understand something of His “mind” by understanding his creation.

Without the conviction that there is a unitary basis for reality, the task of science would never have gotten started, because if we don't assume that the world is rational, then the quest for rational understanding of the world is a misbegotten one.

Scientists don't typically think they are seeking "God", because they are not seeking the invisible man in the sky. They do typically seek the God of Aristotle, though, even though they call Him by a different name: The “Grand Unified Theory” (GUT). Science, (and the quest for understanding generally) seeks that one principle that is not explained in terms of other principles, and which stands as the ground for all the rest. The reasoning process demands the assumption of a unity on the far end of it. In Big-Bang cosmology, we seek to apprehend to conditions of a world absolutely unified in a superdense chunk of matter, and to extrapolate from those conditions the unfolding of the world to the state we find it today, in all its variety.

But, consistent with the standard position of scientific inquiry today, scientists only consider the physical component of reality. They seek to explain the material conditions and physical laws of today by understanding a unified material body and its unified physical law. All the physical matter, its configuration and behavior, all is included in the primordial and prime matter. But there is more to reality than materiality alone; at very least there is consciousness. The GUT, which proposes to explain everything, a law which is supposed to contain within it every other law, is not complete until it integrates into itself the ideas of psychology as well.

God is the physical law that contains within It every physical law, indeed, every physical event. But God is also the consciousness that contains within it every consciousness. One pithy way of putting it is, every thought in every mind is also a thought in God's mind.

And one of the phenomena of consciousness that must be included in the principle that contains all consciousness is concern for the self. In my first consciousness, I am the most important thing in the world. My survival, my well being, my satisfaction in life, my conscience, these things are very important to me. These same thoughts and feelings - with their same intensity - are also thought and felt by God.

If the argument stands, I am in God's auspices, the most important person in the world, and so are you and so is everyone else.

Some reflections on time

This is a highly speculative essay.

Two questions to begin with: Can God stop time, and, can God change the past? Note, the same question can be asked as: Can time stop, and, can the past change? These are not questions about the nature of God, but about the nature of Time. The reason I introduce God is as a mechanism for these processes, i.e., what could possibly manipulate time in this manner but God?

The answer to the first question is no, which will require a slight discussion, since, well, can’t God do anything? This is an important point in general discussions of God, which this is not, so I’m only going to speak briefly on it. God cannot do the logically impossible. For example, God cannot make a married bachelor or a living corpse, or a square circle, not because He lacks the materials, skills, and power to do so, but because it is nonsense even to speak of such things. If we demand that God create such a non-thing, the problem is in the demand – in that it doesn’t ask God to do anything that makes any kind of sense – and not in the Power of God.

So, can God stop time? Let me ask it this way: Can God stop time for an hour? See the absurdity? If time were to stop, it would have to stop for a period of time. Therefore, it is nonsense to think time is the kind of thing that can stop. Stopping is an event that only makes sense within the context of time. God may be able to stop all events in time, but if anything is stopped, then by definition time is still passing.

How about the second question: Can God change the past? This one is more complicated. On the surface the answer seems to be no. The past is defined as what has already happened. The future is open to many possibilities, based on the choices of God, Man, and any other being that might be that can choose. But that’s because it hasn’t happened yet. There is only one past.

We must distinguish between two ways of looking at time: Physical time and Experiential time. To accomplish this end, we get to talk about a time traveler. Looking out of the window of his time machine, he sees the movements of the physical objects around him slow down, stop, and then reverse. The sun goes from west to east, tidal waves build coastal towns before being released into the ocean, and life ends with the sexual act. Think of a video playing in reverse (not that last one). No logical contradiction in that. But for the time traveler, these events are happening in forward time. Though time in the world around him stops, reverses, his past is still the events leading up to this quest; his present experience is progressing forward while nothing around him is progressing forward; and his future is still unwritten, even though it occurs in “the past”. Time as it is experienced is unidirectional. There is no contradiction in things moving backward and forward in physical time. Experiential time, however, is a matter of experience building upon experience. To go backward in experiential time is to forget your experiences.

(There are other paradoxes of time travel that don’t directly bear on this so I don’t deal with them here)

But what this means is that if experiential time did reverse alongside physical time, we systematically wouldn’t know it happened. We would just go back to the point of divergence as if all the intervening time never happened, and pick up from there with new choices and experiences. But if such is the case then it is possible that it happens. And, though the basic idea doesn’t require God, the reversal of time and the changing of the past are logically possible. If there is a God, this adds another dimension to his power.

So the answer to the second question, can the past change, can God change the past, turns out to be yes. Now the speculative part: Say this actually happens, through God or through one of nature’s countless unexplained forces: Perhaps this has some role to play in our ability to anticipate the future, or in a theory of volition.

Debating For Girls

A girl told me the other night that she finds it very attractive when men fight. Especially if she is already attracted to one of the contenders. And not necessarily only when they’re fighting over her.

This shouldn’t have come to me as a surprise. Throughout the animal kingdom, males fight. And females watch. And the champions get the girls. In winning the fight, the male displays that he is strong. The female wants a strong male, so she watches and enjoys, dare I say, even gets turned on. From an evolutionary perspective it’s because the fact that he’s strong indicates he’s got good genes, and better genes in the parents means better genes in the offspring. But for female animals it is visceral and not based on any intellectual calculation like this.

Here’s a social situation I often find myself in: I’m at a conversation-friendly party or social gathering. On the chair next to mine is another guy, and sitting on the couch across from us are seated an indefinite number of attractive, available girls. The conversation is flowing and enjoyable. Speaking for myself and speculating educatedly for the other guy, we both want (at least one of) the girls to like us. Consequently, we both want to make conversation with the girl, where she participates as well. Well, as the eveng progresses, he expresses an opinion about something. I express to him a contrary opinion and offer a rationale. All of a sudden, I am debating with this guy, and the girls aren’t even participating. Now I enjoy debating, and with an intelligent interlocutor the conversation can become very rich in ideas and fascinating. But I always think to myself that we should either change the topic to something the girls can get in on, or include them even though the atmosphere of the debate is cross-fire.

When this girl told me that she enjoys watching men fight, it led me to thinking: Women enjoy displays of prowess. Perhaps when men debate and the girls are silent, they are watching with attraction – and the accompanying enjoyment. In which case it is not rude or exclusionary, but a complex social interaction that includes the males and the females in different ways each enjoyable in its way to its repective sex.

What do you think?

Stupidities of Science pt. 2; On positive and negative charge

It is extremely stupid that excess of electrons should be called negative charge and deficiency of them called positive charge in current scientific language. When they teach you about it in school they tell you, if they try to justify it at all, that because the mathematical and utilitarian results are the same when you're dealing with positive and negative numbers, it doesn't make a difference which you call which. They tell you that it's arbitrary. I disagree.  It does make a difference conceptually. It is not arbitrary that we associate the addition of something with positive numbers and the subtraction of something with negative numbers. That’s what’s happening, and the language in which it is described should reflect what’s happening. Science isn’t merely a tool for industry, it is supposed to be an accurate picture of what is going on, a picture that takes what’s happening in the world and represents it most accurately to the one kind of being to which pictures are significant: The mind. 

“But”, one may argue, “work for it for long enough, you conceptually get what’s going on anyway. Once you learn the language, even though it’s not intuitive, you get the picture. You see a positive as a deficiency of electrons even though the event that happens in nature is a subtraction.” When we’ve worked with it for a while we don’t have to do the extra step of reversing the signs in our heads to relate to the physical world with an accurate concept, but why should we have to do it while learning it? Or if we did not do it when we learned, and just studiously balanced the equations without regard for proper conceptualization, how well do we relate to the accurate picture even having worked with the conventional model long enough?

Same issue with the conventional representation of the flow of electrical current from positive to negative rather than the direction charge actually flows, from negative to positive. Now, in all the rest of physics energy does flow from point of excess to point of deficiency, as heat flows from high temperature to low temperature, as fluid flows from high pressure to low pressure, as water flows from high elevation (potential energy) to low. This is in fact the reason that conventional current is represented this way. The same early researchers that concluded that what we now call positive charge was an excess rather than a deficiency as it actually is, concluded that it flowed rather than being flowed into. So there is a point in representing electricity as flowing the wrong way: To use a flow from positive to negative is intuitive. But in light of what has been said above, it should be clear why this is wrong. If we regard the electron as the electrically positive charge then we can represent the actual flow of electrons from point of high concentration to low concentration and retain the intuitiveness of positive-to-negative in the numerical representation.

To me, this is obvious. I do not see how it is not obvious to anyone who has ever given it any thought viz. the scientists. I understand there are historical reasons why this convention has been used all the years, but there is no sufficient justification for its continued use given what we know today and have in fact known for quite some time.

When scientists decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore, they said so and within a week no one was fighting about it anymore. In the name of accuracy we change what we call things. I don’t think it will be hard to learn, even for people who have been working with the conventional model all their lives. In fact, I am confident that, once learned, the correct system will be easier to work with, for expert and beginner, (though even if it were decidedly harder, it would still be proper to use the more accurate models. It is harder to learn to solve gravity equations using Einstein's methods than Newtons, but we do it). Most of the people in the fields that have to think about this are pretty smart. Smart enough to learn to change the way they write things subtlely, and hopefully smart enough to see why it is sensible and correct to do so.

So here’s what I suggest. From now on, when you do chemistry homework or write chemistry papers and books and so on, write on the top or in the introduction that you’re using the more accurate conventions and leaving the old behind, stay consistent throughout your work, and let your teachers and students learn the new conventions on the fly, even become comfortable with them. Your answers and results are correct even if not stated in the conventional language and your teachers and students will have to acknowledge that. And in electricity classes, from basics onward - and if the basics have not been taught this way it can be introduced at any level; again we're dealing with smart people here - instead of teaching “conventional current flow” and incidentally showing “physical current flow” because that’s the way it really works, teach it the correct "physical" way and incidentally show the “conventional” way because your better students will have to deal with the historical conventions in historical texts.

Sex, and Why It's Bad For You.

"Sex without love is an empty experience. But as far as empty experiences go, it's one of the best"
-Woody Allen

In my opinion, it is not quite so innocuous as that. Casual sex, sex without personal and socially sanctioned commitment between the partners, can be dangerous and evil. This is true for many reasons, and here I present one:

Behavior is inertial; even if we don't make any choices or exert will, we still engage in behavior. If I'm hungry, it takes more effort, and is therefore more of an activity, to refrain from eating than to eat. In such a case non-behavior is more active than behavior. One's default behavior in a given class of circumstances is a habit. Habits can be changed by an experience or by thinking, but the most effective way to change one's habits is by willful action in opposition to the habit in the given circumstance-class. This will be called changing one's pattern of behavior.

For most people, whether by nature or nurture, sex is by default a powerful connective mechanism reinforcing a very close relationship. Even if this is not the only default position, I would argue that it is possible for the sexual relationship to have this effect, and one ought to still retain openness for it when possible. To lose this ability is a great loss.

Say I want to engage sexually with this woman with whom I do not hold a commited relationship. Either (1) I do not want a commited relationship with her, or (2) I do, but have not (yet) developed one.

If (1): Fine, we're two consenting adults, so what's the problem? Being that by default I should feel this close bond, if I am not to feel it - which is my intention in this case - I have to actively change my habit to this association. I have to dissociate in my mind and life the close tie between sex and commited love. The result is a change in my pattern of behavior. I slowly lose my habit for associating sex with love. The terrible consequence is that down the road it will be more difficult to create a good, real, meaningful, commited sexual relationship.

If (2): Either (A) I think it's appropriate to commit to her, or (B) I don't yet know if it is appropriate.

If (2-A): Then put your money where your mouth is and commit to her with the sanction of the law. Take the appropriate steps and you're in the clear. This argument only objects to casual sex.

If (2-B). then either

(I) It isn't an appropriate relationship. The sex will, by default we argue, make me like her and want to commit to her. If we stay together, then, we will be stuck in a bad relationship, and I'll find it out hard when the flourish fades. If we do not, then I am ever more likely to dissociate sex with commited love. 

(II) It is an appropriate relationship. These often don't work out either. If it does not, then if I had already been having sex with her, not only will that tend to the dissociation of sex with commited love, but probably more so than in any of the other cases, because it will advance a cynicism: "I though that this sex was a token of great love and commitment, but it's all loss and a waste of time."

If it does work out in (2-B-II), then what can I say? Lucky you.

Water is a Mineral

Well, more accurately, water is a lava, a magma when it's underground. In some parts of the Earth - in some times in Earth's history and destiny quite a lot of it - as in much of the rest of the universe, H2O is a kind of a rock. Water is thus molten rock - lava.

A geyser is literally a volcano.

In addition, geology divides rocks into basically three main classess: Igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Igneous rocks are rocks formed from frozen lava or magma. Rocks that form by pre-existing rock particles that get smashed or cemented together are sedimentary; rocks that get smashed together with so much intensity that they actually change their chemical structure are metamorphic. But if you think about it, all of the earth was molten once. All the rocks that form from lava that freezes are igneous rocks. The pre-existing material constituting sedimentary and metamorphic rocks are igneous rocks.

Thus, all rock is igneous rock.

Ice is also igneous rock, as water is lava. Thus, all the mineral part of Earth is Lava and the igneous rocks formed from it.

This message was brought to you by the Association for the Unification of All Things.