Yet another sad story

Bill and Bob were best of friends, at least until that fateful day Bob won first prize in the asparagus sorting contest and Bill didn't even make the top ten. While Bob was giving his acceptance speech, Bill jumped up on the stage and pointed a revolver almost directly at Bob's heart. "I hereby declare my intention to kill you," he declared in front of the audience of thousands. He fired and Bob fell, the bullet having nicked his heart. In the confusion, Bill somehow managed to escape and was never found. Fortunately, doctors were able to save Bob's life, and he lived for many years, healthy though saddened by the betrayal of his best friend. Then came the day that Bob, now an old man, passed away peacefully in his sleep, his heart at last stopped for good. At his funeral, there was a surprise guest: Bill, reappeared after so many years in hiding. The statute of limitations for attempted murder had long since passed in this jurisdiction, so he was surprised when he was suddenly surrounded by police. It turns out that the nick that Bill had given Bob's heart so many years ago had been determined, beyond a reasonable doubt, to have been a necessary condition for Bob's cardiac arrest, and there is no statute of limitations for murder.

Free energy

First, make an audio recording of something really loud, and save it to an MP3 file. Since it's so loud, you don't need to turn up the volume on the MP3 player in order to make it play back at the same loudness as the original sound. Like, if the original loudness was 10, you could play it back at volume setting 1 and it'll still sound like 10, in other words, the same as playing back a file with loudness 1 at volume setting 10. But the first case uses only 1/10th the energy (e.g. the MP3 player's battery usage) compared with the second case, see? This implies that the extra energy is somehow STORED IN THE MP3 FILE ITSELF. Like, if instead of hooking the MP3 player to speaker, you hooked it up to a motor, the motor would run just as fast as if the original sound was quiet (then boosted by the MP3 player) as if the original sound was loud (so it didn't have to be boosted by the MP3 player). So all you have to do is post this MP3 file online so lots of copies can be downloaded and played on separate MP3 players across the world. Copying files uses some energy, but not much compared to the original loud sound, surely. So if you play back all of the files at the same time, each using volume setting 1, you'll still get 10 times more energy out than each MP3 player is contributing, just from that one copied file, but now the total quantity of energy is ENORMOUS, enough to run a small submarine or a large hot dog stand.

Think about it.

Apologia

Post-post-posting, I found that I am not the first person ever to interpret the stone soup story in a religious context. In fact, it seems to be a relatively common metaphor for social generosity, with the stone being seen as the religious catalyst. Thus I have failed in my duty to make this blog a true content provider; despite my best intentions, it turns out that in this case I have merely regenerated pre-existing content.

That's my first apology.

Though in my defense, for me the stone soup metaphor still does imply that the townsfolk were fooled, or were at least fooling themselves. The story wouldn't be any fun if the guy had used a magic potato - it's crucial that the stone be obviously doing nothing except fooling people into doing what they should have been doing in the first place. Maybe a thoughtful religious person could recognize this aspect but still see it as making a positive point about religion anyway, namely, that due to some quirk of human nature, people only due the right thing when magic is involved. Many atheists, though, would see the same story as revealing an embarrassingly inefficient system, and hope that the townsfolk could be educated not to need the stone at all, like the vagabond character (and atheist hero) .

Hm, I guess it's this ambiguity that makes this metaphor so thought-provoking (albeit apparently only unoriginal thoughts).

My second apology is for searching the web for other people using stone soup metaphors. I can't be doing this with every post, or I'll get discouraged at how unoriginal I am. Who knows, I might even stop posting for a while!

Or maybe - just maybe - this blog is the stone, and the townsfolk are all those other things I've heard or read before, and nobody is really ever totally original, but that's OK because....

The famous stone soup metaphor

Stone soup only tastes good because of all the other things the villagers allowed the vagabond guy in the story to put in there (carrots and stuff), but they wouldn't have put anything in at all if the guy hadn't said that stone was the main ingredient.

I think it's a shame that this story is usually told merely as a "smart guy outsmarts the not-smarties" story, when it seems to have a lot more metaphorical potential than that.

For me, the story is really about how the good things in society come about through shared beliefs that aren't actually doing very much by themselves. Yes, like religious beliefs. The goodness of Christians, say, doesn't come from Christ, but from what Christians give of themselves.

So what role does the clever vagabond play in this metaphor? The cynical priest? Not really, since everybody wins in the end, and he never really lied about the stone being essential, since without it no soup could have been made at all. Maybe he's more like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a metaphor of the self-emergent catalyst.

The qualia of lust

I don't know if this is original (a defining feature of this blog, besides utter neglect, is the ban on links and references - this being a content provider, not a content repeater), but I think it's odd that evolution has to bribe people to have sex. Reproduction is supposed to be the thing that evolution cares about more than anything else - sexual animals and plants should just have sex without thinking about it, or more importantly for this post, without feeling about it. So why does sex have to feel fun? Obviously the plan is to motivate people, or whatever other animals (or plants) have lustful qualia, into having sex voluntarily.

So lustful feelings only make sense if free will already exists (or co-evolved with the feelings). But isn't this pretty risky on evolution's part? If at some point in evolutionary history sex doesn't feel quite fun enough, a being with free will could just decide not to have it, and there goes the species. I guess this supports the co-evolution idea: if the being is already a stubborn free-willer before sex becomes fun, the species will die out, and there's no point in making sex fun if there's no free will involved. (Even nausea, another candidate for earliest qualia ever, provides a useful guide to behavior, if only to get you ready to set aside some alone time, maybe so you don't infect people - I dunno.)

Maybe that's why sex is so over-the-top fun (at least for many, maybe more males than females, since females can reproduce without having much fun at all). Lustful qualia is the result of an evolutionary arms race with free will, which maybe was becoming ever more aware how not-fun raising a baby can be. (Hm, but males don't help to raise the baby in all species - maybe in the species where they abandon the kids sex is less fun...?)

Lust doesn't seem to be a very sophisticated sort of qualia - the usual philosophical examples concern stuff like the "feeling of the color red" and such. So it should be relatively easy to trace the neurology, genetics, and evolutionary history of lustful feelings. This, in turn, might make it easier to trace the neurology, genetics, and evolutionary history of qualia more generally, and consciousness more generally than that.

There's one mystery solved. Don't say this blog doesn't give the public what it wants.

New post

For my fans!

A theory of religion

Languages often divide the world into first person (the speaker), second person (the listener), and third person (everything else). Maybe this implies a natural way the human mind likes to divide up the world too, each area treated as roughly equal in importance with the others. Thus the self is one area, just as important as all the rest of the folks we interact with, and each of those areas is no less important than the entire universe besides us and them.

Since religions apparently have a pretty natural appeal to all sorts of human minds, it's not surprising that they give roughly equal attention to just those three areas too. The first person part deals with the personal fate and well-being of the believer (religions make you happy and give your life purpose), the second person part deals with the believer's interactions with others (morality), and the third person part deals with claims about the universe (the existence of gods or the afterlife).

Religions tend to link the three areas into a single overarching theory, e.g. the fact that God or karma exists (third person) inspires us to be moral (second person), and if we're moral, we get rewarded (first person). However, these three areas are not inherently linked. The third and second person areas are divided by the famous is/ought distinction (we cannot derive morality from observations of the world alone), and neither one is linked directly to the first person area (knowledge and morality are not guaranteed to bring happiness).

Tensions over this mismatch between the unifying goal of religion and its ability to achieve it may help explain why there are so many different religions, each one responding to perceived flaws in the others, but just generating flaws of its own. The goal is hopeless; the three persons cannot be unified (those familiar with Christianity are probably thinking of the Mystery of the Trinity right now).

By contrast, science doesn't even bother; it sticks solely to the third person. More accurately, it does sometimes try to dabble in the first person (consciousness studies) or the second person (evolution of morality), but it's safe to say that both areas remain highly controversial. Yet since the human mind tends to think of the world of the third person as at best only 33% of what's interesting and important in life, it's easy to see why science doesn't satisfy most people.

Invention idea

There are these rides that don't actually go anywhere, so instead they simulate the visual experience with a big screen or maybe spectacles, and the auditory experience with speakers or headphones, and maybe they also blow wind on you or something. In all of these cases the stimuli are really simulated, just enough to activate the various sense organs. But when it comes to simulating the movement of the ride, they usually have to actually move your seat or cart around, which kind of ruins the purity of the fake. So I was thinking that one way to fix this problem would be to have people wear some kind of thing on their head that has magnets or something in it to directly stimulate the balance organs in your inner ear, so your brain feels like it's moving left or right or up or down or whatever. Of course the helmet thing wouldn't make your butt feel like it's getting pressed into the seat or almost flying out of it, but if magnets can influence your inner ear thingies, the same laws of physics could be applied to magnetize your butt tissues. The only real practical problem, besides the probable nonexistence of the necessary laws of physics, is that you might accidentally boil the liquid inside your inner ear, which may result in lawsuits. Also, and I just now thought of this, there is the problem of maximizing elegance, since if you're sending magic waves into the head anyway, why not just go all the way and magnetize your brain and bypass the sensory organs entirely. So I guess just forget it.

Page views

I am very honored with the success of my humble blog so far. Just look at all those page views! It seems that I am particularly popular in the United States. I am humbled, honored, and particular. Keep up the good work!

Hiatus

I'll soon be traveling, so I may not be able to update the blog as frequently as I have been. Please be patient and things will be back to normal again in a few weeks.