The Morality of Socialism

For some reason in the news recently there has been a great deal of discussion about socialism, most often with respect to the Obama health care plan. Before I start ripping into socialism as an idea, I think it’s important for me to point out that I see virtually nothing in any Obama policy that smacks of socialism.

Socialism as a theoretical framework is quite simple to disprove on moral grounds- by any classical argument in favor of the inalienable right of property. However, the people who advocate for welfare programs tend to disagree on the grounds that property is not an inalienable right. Moreover, they will argue that there are people who need help, who are unable to help themselves, and that the agency to help them may as well be the government. Especially since the government is in the business of taking responsibility for its citizens. So the issue is not as clear-cut as many conservatives will claim it is. In fact, I would say pretty much everything is more complex and nuanced than any conservative in the media has the neurons to understand. On the other hand, conservatives do tend to be conservative because deductions from moral frameworks make sense to them, where a liberal instead prefers arguments from emotion, relativism, and pragmatism in chaos. This is not to say that the political strategies they use reflects these paradigms, in fact it tends to be the opposite, where conservatives use smear campaigns, evocative language, and outright lies, and liberals use deliberate logical arguments from effect, which are principally arguments from pragmatism. It is somewhat sad that nobody seems able to reconcile theory with pragmatism- it’s not terribly difficult as long as the theory is sufficiently complete and the points where it is flexible are known.

Anyway, modern “socialism” is really a question of whether liberal democratic welfare programs are morally justified. The conservatives throw hissy fits and cry socialism, and the liberals claim it will address the issues. The conservatives claim the government is going to increase taxes to finance wasteful programs, the liberals claim big business is screwing everyone over and Big Daddy government must step in to save us.

First of all, I would like to point out that both sides of the argument are intrinsically linked, like two sides of a coin. Capitalism allows for owners and shareholders to profit from their businesses and holdings, which can through some wrangling be framed as waste. Conversely, the government can take some of the money in circulation through commerce and salary in sales and income tax, and that can be framed as a waste. There is a finite amount of money in circulation, and claiming that it is a waste when party :X acquires it is erroneous. My reason for this is that it is the nature of money to be spent. Government taxes, in large part, recirculate back into the economy because the government pays for services, in very large part to parties in their own country. Similarly, big business takes its money and either reinvests into itself, pays off its suppliers, or ends up in its employees and executives’ bank accounts. It could be said that overseas commerce and outsourcing “leaks” money, but that is absurd. In the act of paying for labor, a service or act of production is purchased in return, which presumably is worth more than the cost of the labor or it wouldn’t be worth making. If this product is then sold, a profit is made, and also the worker now has a little cash to spend which will recirculate. This process in economics is called the multiplier effect, where one dollar actually does a great deal more than one dollar’s work in the course of a year because it changes hands many times. So this issue of “it’s a waste if X acquires money” is really a question over who has control of that money. The one who controls that money has just that measure of extra power. So, which entity would you vest that power in? This is the fundamental question of welfare programs.

Now, as much as it pains the anarcho-capitalist in me to say this, you don’t necessarily want a company as they exist today to handle some concerns. Development of civilization proceeds in many dimensions, not just technological. The invention of the check caused a revolution of the “web of trust” between people and financial institutions. Before that network existed, credit as we know it was inconceivable. It was a recipe for being ripped off, and the economy was locked into a coin-or-barter mode, except between friends. In truth, it’s not as clean as the development of a technology, for example laws against usury and distrust of Jews and all this nonsense. Anyway, my point is that social development of society allows things which could not have happened before in a similar way that technological development does, it’s just as absolute as “the invention of the airplane- 1904- now we can fly!” It is my belief that government is one of those features that has been evolved over time, and whose evolution is not yet finished. At some time in the future we will not need it anymore, but given our current level of societal development and technological capability, it is most likely a necessary evil. This is not to say we should not try to develop past it as quickly as possible.

Karl Marx was unquestionably a brilliant man, although his theories are not exactly the font of human social development. Nevertheless I think he may have contributed at least one very important idea to the body of human knowledge. When the power of production drastically outstrips the wants and needs of an entire society, then we will have a utopia, materially at least, where everyone has everything they want. The social side is a separate issue, and is in my opinion infinitely more important to creating the sort of utopia that all theoretical political science is predicated upon producing. Now the question is, what is the best method of reaching a stage when we have that sort of productive power at our fingertips? Is it welfare programs, or by technological innovation? My favorite new and upcoming technology is rapid prototyping- check out RepRap. This one technology has the power to obviate material products at a stroke, by having a ubiquitous machine that can produce nearly anything. More advanced later versions will follow quickly, using that very device, and we may well have a true make-anything-machine very soon after that. Now, Marx believed that this world would be Communist in nature. I would react that communism is essentially capitalism where money is no longer relevant in day-to-day life. The best explanation for this is that goods and services change hands so easily that the monetary system is not worth its upkeep.

Those who argue that there are people who are poor and destitute need to be helped by the government providing welfare programs are reacting instinctively, their conscience is grating against the injustice. To some extent that’s fine, although it gets a little out of hand when you see this righteous indignation that some people are fabulously wealthy while others are poor. In any reasonable world there will be a set of choices which anyone can choose from, some of which will result in poverty. I don’t mean to say that all poverty is controllable- there are many, many unfortunates who had no opportunity to do anything else. The mentally ill, the handicapped, the people saddled with medical bills unexpectedly, there are all kinds of possibilities for being poor beyond all control. One stance is that the problem then becomes to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving. My issue with this position is that any judgment on who is deserving and who is not is made by an agent who will lack a clear and objective metric. So whoever chooses to help one or more of these people is excluding others for subjective reasons. The only way this could possibly work is if it is entirely acceptable for those subjective reasons to be valid, and subjectivity is not something a government should EVER mix itself up in, because then corruption and misuse of public resources will run rampant. So private organizations should pick up the slack, offering resources where they can or choose to, and if they exclude someone for subjective or arbitrary or even completely bone-deep-corrupt reasons, it’s not morally nice but it is entirely within their purview. The government, on the other hand, by reserving the use of force restricts itself to a much higher moral standard that is virtually impossible to meet for beings with human-level intelligence, much less a conglomerate of them. A corruption of the use of force is a terrible, terrible moral crime, while a refusal to give alms to a beggar, however deserving, is not a big deal. Any policy the government might use to help the poor is subject to a host of issues stemming from this problem. But then, so does everything the government does, so it’s not like this will deter them.

My central point is that pragmatism at the expense of ethics is a bad idea in the long run, no matter how good your intentions. The poor and the underprivileged are much better served by advancing technology and social progress than by any attempt to simply hand them their daily bread. Now, I would be open to an argument that instituting government health care is itself a push towards social progress, but that is a very different type of argument than nearly all arguments being put forth in its defense, which tend to run something along the lines of “evil insurance companies! government good! Simple solution!” With the other side pretty much barking the reverse, and decrying that the solution is just as simple. It is not simple, and I hope to hear some real arguments for a change, instead of catering to the reptilian brain of people too stupid to think their way out of a wet cardboard box.

Psychic Phenomena

I am going to make some statements in this post that are going to shock most of my readership, but I expect that you’ll consider me sensible if you read it the rest of the way through. I believe that psychic phenomena are real. However, I do not believe that they are physical manifestations of any sort- they are purely in the minds of the people who “experience” them. It is important to note, however, that no other criterion is required to determine if these phenomena are real or not. Let’s say that someone believes they communicate with ghosts- they have what might be called visions and might be called visceral hallucinations. My question is, is there really a difference between these two phenomena or is it simply a matter of connotation of the words used to describe them? True, there is no “ghost” existing in objective reality, this much is obvious. However does it necessarily follow that hallucinations of this type indicate insanity?

Consider the emotions felt by normal, healthy people. An emotional reaction is a complex sequence of chemicals and neural firings to produce a sensation or a reaction, and the mechanisms used are significantly different from other systems in the brain such as those used for memory, spatial or linguistic manipulation, reasoning, and others. They are of course intimately linked because they’re all in the same brain. Consider the fact that there exist drugs that can be administered to produce a “religious experience” which is essentially a complex of emotions, sensations and thoughts that is more complicated but not fundamentally different from more primitive emotions like contentedness. Does this mean that religious experiences don’t exist? Of course not. Indeed I would say this is conclusive proof that religious experiences are a fact. Whether a religious experience means what most users of the idea think it does is a separate question entirely. The hardcore religious who passionately believe their religion because of a personal religious experience, perhaps of connecting with their god or something along those lines, are justified in their sensation, but fatally in error about what that sensation means. Their religion has told them that if certain protocols are followed, a certain religious euphoria will follow, and provided a very intricate framework of religious scripture and ideology which backs this up. When someone experiments in the religion, they might truly surrender to the experience or do whatever else is required and then when they get exactly the reaction promised to them, they take it as visceral emotional proof that everything else that they were told must be true as well. This is, when phrased this way in words, fairly obvious, but it’s actually a very easy mistake to make, even for the highly rational. There is a specific emotion that most people don’t name expressly which I call the “convincement” feeling. It’s that feeling you get when you read or hear something and become convinced by it. This can powerfully bias your view on the matter that convinced you, the author or speaker, and also your future thought on the subject. Indeed, I am actually in quite serious doubt over whether a significant body of my reasoning has been tainted by this “convincedness” on the subject of anarcho-capitalism, among other areas. It happens to me all the time reading articles on the internet but I’m well accustomed to dealing with such things- it just requires fact checking and appropriate degree of due process. The reason the “I’m convinced” feeling is so tricky is because it is the tool you use to gauge whether or not you actually are convinced. In the vast majority of situations, it’s an incredibly useful tool. However, when squared off against an act which is carefully designed to fire off that convinced feeling and thereby sway your reasoning, extra care must be taken. There should be a fancy Latin name for this fallacy, like “argumentum ad convincem” or something. Latin being a dead language, though, coining new Latin phrases is something of a pointless exercise. The point I want to communicate is that just because a reaction only exists in one person’s perceptions, that doesn’t make it non-real, only non-objective. What types of dreams someone has, what ghosts or voices they hear might be very useful for psychoanalyzing that person.

Instead of turning this on religious phenomena only, I want to discuss a broad range of paranormal issues. Those that are obviously nonexistent in reality, and are products of mere superstition, are relatively easy to pick on and done by many other thinkers to great effect. I propose a new category of paranormal phenomena that are real, but only because people experience them, and the fact that they are experienced is the totality of their existence. Psychokinesis is obviously impossible, but is telepathy possible by building on intuition and body language? Mind-to-mind communication is also obviously impossible, but consider the fact that you can look at someone’s face and identify their emotional state. To what degree is that communication, and to what degree is that divination of information that lies in the other person’s mind? A polygraph is a technological attempt to “mind read” using subtle cues. Is it feasible that one person might understand enough of someone else’s thoughts and mannerisms to deduce what they are thinking? To one degree this is a trivial question, people have been guessing what others have been thinking since time immemorial. My question is how much information is actually available, being broadcast continuously by each of us, and available for sufficiently observant people to effectively read our minds. Consider that poker players, especially very good ones, can often deduce exactly what hand the other player is holding. They aren’t using some sort of pineal gland to probe the other person’s brain- they’re studying the other person’s face and behavior, as well as the strategies that they choose to play, and have played in the past. Is this obvious, or is this telepathy? My argument is that the distinction between “duh” and telepathy is meaningless. The fact that it is easy for us to figure out what other people are thinking to some degree proves that “telepathic” phenomena are real, it’s just that it’s, well, normal. The reason why the idea of “super-telepathy” which allows complete observance of another person’s mind persists so strongly in culture is because it’s easy for us to extrapolate the abilities we have to their logical extremes. We can easily conceive of super-strong, super-intelligent, or super-anything people, and indeed all of these caricatures persist in culture as well. These characteristics are treated differently because less subtle human abilities are much easier to verify. If there was a super-strong human, we could just say “lift that bus.” A super-intelligent human should be able to perform similar feats, but of a mental nature. A flying (extrapolation of walking- additional freedom of motion into the 3rd terran dimension) human could just lift off. Abilities like telepathy are difficult to prove or disprove, and so someone could posit “hey, I can mind-read” and get some attention out of it. People like Uri Geller who claim to bend spoons have a carefully constructed magic trick to accompany their act, which in a way acts like the religious experience. Because he claims to bend spoons, and does so on film, therefore everything else he says about telepathy and such must be true as well. Fallacious on exactly the same grounds, but convincing to many.

Clairvoyance and precognition fall into exactly the same mold as telepathy. They can be treated in more or less exactly the same way. These are faculties that all humans have- the ability to deduce what is happening at a different location in space or time, respectively. When someone tells you that twenty minutes ago the lights were out, you can picture in your mind the room in exactly the same state, or with whatever other alterations are supplied to you or fabricated to order by your mind, with the lights off. This isn’t some superhuman power, although the ability to do it with impeccable accuracy is certainly superhuman. The fact that you can conceive of what winter in Russia might be like, even if you’ve never been there, is proof of the power of so-called “clairvoyance” although its accuracy is highly questionable, and you naturally treat it with the appropriate level of confidence (virtually zero). Truth be told, there are actually very few “new” superpowers being coined in a cultural sense, and all superpowers as we know them stem from some natural faculty, trait, or principle carried to a logical, or illogical, extreme. Even very weird powers such as being half-man half-something are formed in the same way by combining concepts of man and something else, usually an animal. The adventures of man-onion don’t sound particularly entertaining because the suite of powers available to an onion are hilarious but boring, and those available to a man, while tremendous, are common to everyone and are dismissed as merely normal.

Now on to UFO encounters. First off, I am quite possibly the most convinced human being on the planet about the existence of extraterrestrials. The Drake Equation is a tough argument to beat. However, the reason why the Drake Equation is so powerful is because space is BIG. As a result, the odds that the aliens are anywhere within a million light years of earth is… extremely small, let’s just leave it at that. Also, the odds are dramatically in favor of alien sea sponges as opposed to interstellar civilizations (and finding sea sponges, or even xenophilic bacteria would be badass). Even in the event that they developed some form of faster-than-light or warp travel, why would aliens have any interest in a society as primitive as ours, relative to their own? Human civilization is at a sub Class-I state. We haven’t even gained control over the energy of our home planet yet, much less our home system. A civilization with both the capability and the need to build an interstellar drive would dramatically outstrip our own in terms of size, population, resources available, culture, etc. etc. Plus, such a society would necessarily have evolved a very intricate social form as well, in a similar way that human societies have evolved modern governments and social conventions to better preserve human life, well-being, property, industry, self-esteem, etc. Iain Banks’ Culture novels present an amazingly accurate view of the type of interactions interstellar civilizations might have (I’ve only read The Player of Games, but it was awesome on so many levels). Such a society “studying” us would be somewhat like humans studying an ant colony. There are plenty of methods by which they would never need interfere in any detectable way, and there are a plethora of methods by which they just step in full-force and there’s not a bloody thing the ants can do about it. Anyway, enough of my geek-out analysis of why the picture painted by UFO fanatics is absurd. The ultimate proof is that there has been no objective verification of claims made on objective reality- namely, the detection of UFO’s. This isn’t strictly true because UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and there have been many, many incidences of objects detected on radar which could not be identified, perhaps by refusal to transmit or lack of IFF or digital uplink technologies. Enemy planes aren’t going to identify themselves, perhaps buying a few seconds before the interceptors are scrambled to engage them. Proposing the existence of aliens in flying saucers is completely apart from the UFO case, even though for some reason they have become synonymous. Show me a crashed UFO, wreckage of a self-destructed one, conclusive photos, or a depth of proof sufficient to confirm the existence of a new species of monkey, and I’ll believe you.

Now, faith healing is an issue I have a very hard time with because the weird thing is that it works. Of course, placebos also work, and it is quite obviously the same principle at work in both faith healing and placebos. Considering that sugar pills are cheaper than real drugs I can imagine a great value to being able to identify where a placebo is sufficient, and where real medication is required. Now, sugar pills are dirt cheap so whether faith healing is cheaper is doubtful. However faith healing does obviate the medical issue with giving out dud medicine. In order for the placebo to work, it is necessary that the patient not be aware that it is a placebo, and this type of treatment is totally unworkable for a reasonably managed medical establishment. One case of prescribing a placebo and having it fail will draw malpractice flak like a giant kite carrying a metal box and trailing a NUKE sign in enemy airspace. A doctor could refer a patient to a faith healer and avoid this type of legal insanity because the faith healer is a separate agent who a pissed off patient could sue independent of the original doctor. Using faith healers as a litigation scarecrow is actually quite an elegant solution to both the overly litiginous medical establishment and also puts people’s ridiculous beliefs to good use, quite neatly killing two birds with one stone. Interesting saying because I would be quite content to kill one bird with one stone- it’s just a rock after all, and reusable at that, but I digress. Faith healing is sticky because while it is totally bogus, it actually does work, and verifiably so. I am amazed at the amount of garbage they can churn out, take a look at homeopathy- it’s just water. Nevertheless people swear by it, citing some assumption about a new property of water which is totally unsupported by chemistry. Damn good thing too, because the water that’s in your body has probably been in contact with all kinds of stuff, and I find it rather comforting that water is just water, no complications- it’s just H2O regardless of history.

There are a lot of gullible people out there. They’re gullible because they want to believe in something, or there’s an engine of social acceptance or consistency behind the choice to “believe” which drives them into accepting irrational precepts without looking at them too closely. This is the secret of getting anyone to believe anything- provide an incentive for them to agree with you that is irrespective of the argument at hand. Then, get them to publicly confirm their belief to someone else, or even just say it aloud, and then a commitment to consistency or self-simplification will push them to actually fully accept and integrate it, a process which when divorced from its rationale is known as cognitive dissonance. Cults use very extreme persuasion and conditioning tactics, and it’s part of the structure of cults to hit each member as hard as their “belief” can handle. To acquire new members, use subtle tricks which appear reasonable. If they accept those, move on to more intensive material. The more extreme and unreasonable the material that they can make that individual confirm to themselves and others, the more deeply ingrained the ideology of the cult becomes, allowing even more extreme material to be put to them. Scientology is remarkable because it has such a rigorous methodology for maximum conversion effectiveness, even going so far as to explicitly call them “levels.” They need to keep their higher-level material secret because if it leaks (as it has) it exposes them as ridiculous frauds spouting utter insanity. If we only knew their outermost material, designed to pull in the unwary using relatively reasonable methods, we might suppose them an acceptable religion. I have a lot to talk about on this subject and I intend to go over it some other time, particularly as it relates to social conditioning by degrees. I bring it up here because psychic phenomena function in the same way. Small topics like palmistry or graphology lead up to more intensive phenomena like full-blown astral phenomena and UFO sightings. Because there is no centralized purveyor of material, there is no controlling agent to make sure that each person receives only material they are ready for, but the sheer volume of information acts like a smokescreen instead. As a result, only people actively searching for a certain subset of information are going to discover a full set of details. The rest of us are left with a stereotypical picture which we recognize as clearly simplified and inaccurate. This means that if at some point we become activated to seek out such phenomena, we can uncover additional information and naturally “refine” our perceptions with the new information, resulting in a new convert to paranormal phenomena. Effectively, you persuade yourself when you are ready to find out. Once again, there is no authority that causes this, there is no conspiracy theory, this just happens. Fiction writers make extensive use of this faculty, particularly science fiction and fantasy writers. They can easily concoct an alternate explanation which is equally fictitious but fulfills the same criteria for “why I used to think that” as the explanation that the true believers of the real-world phenomena ascribe to. For example, a writer about a common myth such as vampires or dragons has a well-known set of properties to address such as blood-drinking or fire-breathing, and these act as an interface that any science fiction or fantasy writer can implement with whatever explanation they like. Myths like this are so powerful because the explanation can be easily adapted with new information or discoveries. Note that the explanation can actually short-circuit the properties of the myth as long as it produces a “common misconception” situation. For example, maybe vampires can go out in the sunlight if the writer desires, but there has to be a reason why everyone thinks they shrivel up in the sun. Writers like Terry Pratchett are so good because they can create a compelling and internally consistent world, and this same principle applies to the real world. People will believe models of the real world that are compelling and internally consistent relative to their own framework. Note that a model can be internally consistent and be fraught with contradiction. A contradiction in such a case is a result of an external inconsistency and can be resolved by placing the model above the actual world, as is commonly done with the Bible. If the real world and the Bible disagree, people so conditioned will side with the Bible because otherwise their world won’t make any sense, which can be why such evangelicals are impossible to convince with reason. They have bitten off so much of the religious conditioning and publicly acknowledged it that they base their identity on it so much they cannot stop. A religion is simply taking the most potent aspects of a collection of stories, myths, phenomena, etc. etc., often based on what phenomena people believed a long time ago, and crafting it into one grand model which can be passed out in pieces the way Scientology does to maximize communicability. The Ten Commandments are an excellent example. Due to the decentralized nature of paranormal beliefs, they aren’t a “real religion,” they’re piecemeal. People who use it as their only belief system are “pagans.” There are no Ten Commandments of UFO sightings because such a centralized and widely agreed-upon document cannot be agreed upon, or even created in the first place.

Creationism and Logic

Watch this creationist if you can handle the stupid.

Quite simply the most disgusting display of the stupid virus I’ve seen in a long, long time.  I’m not going to even attempt to address her because it will degenerate into a litany of how incredibly stupid this woman is, such as how Charles Darwin didn’t use no scientific method, or how the entire world appeared fully formed billions of years ago, and how (irony!) unlikely it is for the world to just pop into existence complete with plants, animals, and people.  I will instead try to present a more rational discussion of the argument between atheism and creationism so that both sides can understand why A) 99.9% of creationists have got the stupid virus.  Some of them have it BAD, like this young lady.  B)  Atheism and evolution are not synonymous, but I would venture to bet that all atheists credit evolution with the status as by far the most probable explanation for the origin of life on earth.  C)  Evolution is not a theory of metaphysics, and D) It is possible to have an argument for God that is not dripping with the stupid virus, but it doesn’t look even remotely like the arguments fielded by creationists and religious people today because, as I said earlier, the vast majority of them are outrightly stupid and proud of it.

Firstly, the video link above doesn’t even make a reasonable attempt to represent any of the arguments it claims to attack.  If there was such a person who created an argument along the lines of the one she is outlining, atheists would line up to take a whack at them.  Perhaps because the argument she outlines looks EXACTLY like the creationist argument, only it occurs much earlier chronologically, and there’s no god.  In order to have a reasonable debate, you first have to understand the argument you are taking a stance against.  The only thing worse than a straw man argument is a straw man argument by someone who honestly doesn’t understand that they’re knocking down a straw man.  Then they proudly look to their authority figures like a child who just built a sandcastle.  That wasn’t an argument, that was you creating an argument that has even fewer legs to stand on than your own, and then proceeding to bash it to bits with crummy logic, however the starting proposition was so ridiculous that the audience doesn’t even need the explanation.  The explanation becomes little more than theatre, as priests and missionaries will understand thoroughly if they’re any good at their jobs.  This is not how scientists think, though.  For scientists, there exists some truth which they can find, and which other scientists can similarly find independently.  As a result, as the number of scientists increases, the reliability of their findings as a community will (hopefully) improve as well.  This of course falls flat if there is not an assumption of universality and of equality of function between humans.  By contrast, if the Pope has a direct line to God and everybody else has to talk up the chain of command, the Pope could theoretically run very different experiments than anyone else could to determine the structure of the universe.

Now on to some more substantive concepts.  Atheism is not the same thing as evolution, not by a long chalk.  Atheism is the belief that there is no god.  I suppose atheism could qualify as a theory considering any tests you run for the existence of god return negative, which count as positive proof for the reciprocal argument, but its label is irrelevant.  Atheism is a theological statement.  Evolution is the theory of biology, not theology or metaphysics.  It is the logical result of three factors: 1) a population with differing properties between its constituents, 2) a method for increasing the quantity of that population which draws upon its current members (in most biologies, sex- sometimes asexual), and 3) a method for altering the properties of the population between generations.  This role is also filled by sex, but mutations also have a marginal effect.  If you accept that those three things exist, then evolution as a theory is already a given.  The Bible itself contains enough evidence for evolution in the bloodlines it describes where one family member inherits properties of another.  That’s it, the chicken’s done.  We have evolution.  Evolution as a broader theory explains the immense diversity of life based on small changes in individual species over large timescales which eventually stack up to create significantly different species.  All this bullshit about how “my granddaddy wasn’t no monkey” is A) wrong because whatever ancestor we both inherit from probably looked very different from modern monkeys, B) wrong because such a creature would be a different species entirely from humans, most likely, meaning in the context of the human species identity we are no longer related, and C) wrong because this basically constitutes a failure to accept obvious proof on the grounds that it might discredit you or your family or be otherwise uncomfortable.  This woman is attacking her straw doppelgangers of evolution and atheism like they are synonymous, which is itself an absurd proposition.  Now, atheists being atheists and failing to accept the assertion that God exists because there’s no evidence for it, are shall we say rather likely to also support the theory of evolution considering the immense amount of evidence backing it.  Moreover, religion will oppose evolution because it is a viable and self-sufficient alternative to religion.  Evolution requires no help from God or some other agent to explain the nature of the world, in a similar way that the Big Bang theory requires no God in order to explain the nature of the cosmos.  In similar fashion, the idea that the earth isn’t the center of the universe is, well, was jarring to the religious because it detracts from the earth’s special status as God’s chosen planet.  Even the most stupid-virus afflicted creationist has gotten the picture on that score, however.  Although perhaps I shouldn’t speak so soon because you can find someone prepared to believe anything these days.  Well, if you don’t believe the earth is round and orbits the sun, you are beyond fucking help pal.  The fact that you can’t actually be packed off to an asylum on “religious” grounds I find highly amusing, though.  But if you try anything really psycho with me or mine, expect to get hurt, badly, because I am far smarter than you.

Evolution’s lack of metaphysical explanation is something most creationists cannot understand.  By creationist ideology, ANY assertion about the world must be metaphysical.  Metaphysics has its place, but in day-to-day affairs, metaphysics really doesn’t do much, usually.  This is one of the reasons why creationism can grab people so powerfully, because any assertion about the world at all will require challenging that person’s most basic presuppositions about the world.  By “going to root” immediately, the amount of work required to even consider the thought of a slightly different world is much greater than for a scientifically-minded individual.  A scientist can easily conceive of one specific piece of errata being wrong, while the entire model as a whole being functional. It is entirely possible for us to be wrong about, or flatly not know exactly how every animal evolved from every ancient creature in all of history, but still accept the theory of evolution. For religion, however, any given single aspect of errata must be correct.  Therefore, challenging that single piece of errata will resolve to a challenge of that person’s metaphysics and most basic ideology.  People have died over whether the bread and water taken at communion is the body of christ, or whether it is, metaphorically, the body of christ.  Because challenging any assertion in a religion constitutes a challenge of the fundamental truth of the religion.  In the case of the people who accept the fundamental truth unconditionally, this means only shaking their most deeply-held roots will convince them of even the smallest thing, and such a shaking will likely be effective at completely changing their entire ideology.  This also serves to help a religion by preserving homogeneity among its believers, which is a powerful tool for social pressure based conversions.  The religions that people practiced because they were pleasant and easygoing have all gone the way of the Quakers.  I bring up the Quakers frequently because I think that they are memetically very interesting because they didn’t use the most effective and widely used today methods to acquire converts, and they’re all but extinct now. However, I’m not going into that for now.

Lastly, and this is the topic I intend to focus the most on, is it possible to have an argument for the existence of God that is actually intelligent and reasonable?  Right off, I’m going to say that most of the people who want to prove the Bible and common creationism or most religions that I know of, no.  It is impossible to make a case for a particular religion which includes a text of stories such as the Bible.  Invariably, they are filled to a comic level with contradiction, which by definition cannot exist in reality, among other reasons.  However it is possible to have an intelligent philosophical argument about whether or not there is a God, or even many Gods.  What is a god, and what properties must such a being necessarily have to constitute a god?  If there was a god, how would that change the metaphysics of the world as we know it?  What broad categories of metaphysics require, make possible, or render impossible the existence of a God or gods?

My favorite argument for the existence of God is called the ontological argument, because it’s just fun.  Basically, it goes like this: can you conceive of a being that is all-perfect?  Yes.  Ergo, there exists a God.

Smiling now.  It’s an amazing argument isn’t it?  Short, sweet, and to the point.  Now, it happens to be sound but in a very interesting way.  Basically, on a deeper level the argument is that a perfect being would be more perfect if it exists.  Therefore, an all-perfect being must exist because you can conceive of a being that is all-perfect.  I think this argument is philosophically interesting, but of zero metaphysical consequence, and doesn’t actually prove that there is a god.  It’s pretty easy to poke fun at this argument by parodying it with a pair of children, “Can you think of a big-huge candy bar?”  “Yeah?!?”  “Well, wouldn’t it be even better if it existed?”  “Yeah!”  “Therefore, there exists a big-huge candy bar.”  A fun argument because even atheists who are experienced at arguing against the existence of God will be completely stumped.  Well-read atheists will of course have heard of it and probably be able to call you on using the ontological argument by name.  Now, there are as many writings on why the argument is valid or absurd as there are philosophers, but I think that it’s wrong because it uses a premise-truth paradox.  This is an extremely rare form of paradox whereby the premise creates a paradox whereby if it is true then it must necessarily be true, and if it is false then it must necessarily be false, and there is no other criteria by which you can judge the truth or falsehood of the premise.  So, can you conceive of a being that is all-perfect?  I would say the answer is probably not.  You can create a generic entity and slap the label “all-perfect” on it, but that doesn’t count.

An argument similar to the ontological argument whose name I can’t remember for the moment stems from an interesting application of modal logic, using possible worlds.  Basically, any logician would give you as axiomatic that there exists at least one possible world where some form of something that could be called a God exists.  Jumping from there to conclude that God must therefore exist in all possible worlds because God is omnipresent and all-powerful is one tactic you might use to throw an atheist.  With a little logical discipline they will quickly understand how you’ve cheated them.  Basically, they gave you that there exists some possible world on the grounds that, and this is of course exactly how modal logic is created, that these worlds are global-strength containers that nothing within them can possibly escape from or otherwise influence other possible worlds.  Taking advantage of their generosity in giving you “some form of something that is God” in one possible world to say that because it is omnipresent, it therefore exists in all possible worlds is to cheat on the application of modal logic by putting God in some world that contains all possible worlds, axiomatically, and without the consent of the person you’re arguing with.  Don’t use this, please.  An atheist who doesn’t figure that one out might want to take a class on logic to make their thinking a bit more rigorous.

These are canonical examples of arguments for God.  They aren’t perfect, but I am an atheist exactly because I can’t think of a good argument for why God exists.  That’s where you come in.  If you are religious, come up with a well-reasoned, solid argument for why God exists.  If you can’t do it, hen you should be an atheist too because you don’t believe God exists either.  If you can, however, tell it to atheists.  If it really is a good argument, and they’re really atheists for the right reasons, they will actually believe you.  If I were presented with such an argument that was sufficiently good that it outperformed the default position of atheism, and also explained all the observable phenomena of the world without contradiction, I might even believe you.  Do not, however, even attempt to push Christianity or other religions as-is on me because it’s frankly not worth my time anymore.  If you’re interested in atheism there are resources all over the internet.  They don’t really exist offline, which is fascinating if you ask me.  Atheists correlate with the tech-savvy young?  Cool.  We’re going to win.  Even if we can’t convince you, we’re young.  You’re going to go first.

Not considering the idea of immortality in digital form, which of course is out of the question for the religious.  So atheists still win.  The atheists shall outnumber the hordes of the faceless dead, such shall be the glory of their technology.

On Antisocial Stoics

I would like to address a claim that is sometimes made against stoics, particularly against some of the ideas of Marcus Aurelius, who said, among other things, “Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own, and nothing to grow upon you that will give you agony when it is torn away.”  Given the extremely elevated status of friends and interpersonal relationships in our society, this concept doesn’t jive well with the idea that we all have to form deep bonds with one another.  The idea of being stoic and of suppressing your emotions as subservient to your mind seems to conflict with the idea that we’re supposed to share our feelings with others.  Why the belief is that if someone else is aware of the factual state of your existence creates a bond is beyond me, but it is implicitly assumed in our interactions with one another.  The most canonical example is when you encounter someone you know and ask them how they’re doing, what’s going on with them, or the like.  Both of you probably know, if you thought about it, that the other person’s answer is irrelevant.  Neither of you could give a damn.  But it’s the greeting you use because it is a sharing of information of a moderately personal nature, or at least it’s a question requesting that information which implies a certain closeness.  Whether you’re doing it to provoke that sense of intimacy in the other person, in the impressions of people listening in, or to convince yourself, I don’t know.  However I do know that very little of what is commonly thought of as conversation is an actual sharing of empathic significance or deep thoughts.  What is commonly accepted as “small talk” is the norm of human interaction, and it is accepted as having zero functionality.

Now, I am of course being a little over-literal here.  The purpose of small talk is that it is talk where everyone concerned might be uncomfortable in having a real conversation, it fills up the time and allows people to get comfortable with one another.  However it is not and will never be the goal or endpoint.  It is vital that just “being with” other people is never something you’re setting out to do, because standing next to other humanoid figures and flapping your vocal folds is, in and of itself, not really a worthwhile activity.  If you’re interacting on an empathic, mental, philosophical, or whatever medium in a way that gives you genuine enjoyment such that you would actively choose to enjoy that person’s presence in favor of some other activity you enjoy then of course it’s a good thing- that’s just a basic pursuit of your own satisfaction.  This is obvious and a trivial proof, but I think I need to inject it here so I’m not scaring off exactly the people who need to hear this.

The best corollary to this whole mess is our modern conception of sex, especially among men.  Men tend to be in a position of weakness and insecurity due to having conflicting internal models and programming and all manner of other nonsense going on in their heads leaving them a little lost and confused.  One of the dominant themes that result is a pursuit of sex that is driven more by social power than actual personal satisfaction.  Many men are more gratified by the fact that they are having sex than they are enjoying the sex itself.  They’ll brag to their buddies about it and allow themselves that extra iota of self-respect because they “got laid.”  The self-destructive side of this thinking is that they honestly believe they aren’t worth anything unless they can convince a woman that they are worthwhile enough to sleep with.  I am unsure of how many women have this problem, but it is widespread among men.  I suspect that because women are dealing with this population of men, they live in sexual abundance and don’t develop the same complex- attractive women at least if not all women.  I am speculating now, but I find it probable that women have a similar complex revolving around marriage, gratified more by the fact of being married than they enjoy the marriage itself, resulting in the “must get married” effect at a certain age.  Many, many people of both sexes are gratified more by the presence of other people than they are actually enjoying being with them.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you go out seeking deep bonds, what you will find is the most superficial of relations with people as desperate for companionship as yourself.  Deep bonds, described as such, actually don’t exist as we conceive of them.  It’s not that you spend a lot of time with someone or that you have known them for a long time, or even that you know a great deal about them and their personal preferences such as their favorite flavor of ice cream.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that knowing a huge amount about their preferential minutiae actually subtracts significantly from the goal that most people are seeking.  If there’s a woman I like, I could care less what her favorite flavor of ice cream is.  The question is whether or not she is fun to be around.  If I was to feverishly try to get her to like me or memorize her personal preferences, that’s work.  Stupid, counterproductive, and manipulative work, at that.  That’s all.  Perhaps we have deep empathy, perhaps we’re alike, maybe we have good discussions or great sex, it makes no difference (OK, I lie) the question is only if she’s a positive presence in some- preferably many- ways.

Part of the problem is the widespread perspective of the “personality.”  And for the love of life NEVER evaluate someone’s “personality” as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’  Both those words are the most abused semantic identities ever created, and they both can mean nearly anything while being very specific about one thing and one thing only- and by hiding the implementation of that judgment there is no way to argue with it.  There is no such thing as a personality- a person is composed of the sum of their mind and actions derived from it.  There is no way that you can ascribe someone a personality which if they do something that is “not like them” then they’re being fake or somehow not being themselves.  Whatever the circumstances, they are merely exhibiting a decision-making pattern you haven’t previously observed or were otherwise unaware of.  It is the same person, ergo they are the same person.  This idea that we can understand someone else, ascribe them a simplified model that will predict their behavior and then expect that behavior from them is disgusting.  People are very complex- one person is far more complex than the sum of all of their understandings of other people, much less someone else’s understanding of them.  It can’t be your personality that you like coffee, and that you’re doing something bad when you don’t drink coffee.  The drive to be consistent is not a natural one- it’s a societal stamp mark on the inside of your brain that tells you to be simple so that others can understand you better.  But who gives a flying shit about whether other people understand you?  Do what you want!  If you wake up and wonder if eggs scrambled with cocoa and baking soda tastes good with ketchup, then go right ahead and try it!  It doesn’t have to be your personality that you eat weird things- it’s just something you want to do, so you do it.  That’s a bit of a weird example, but it holds.  Why we don’t expect one another to do what we want is just beyond me, especially in our day and age with so many options available.  There are all manner of stigma against jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, sluts, you name it, there’s a stereotype that someone wants to slot you into.  So, how about, just to screw with them, completely break their model of the world by totally not fitting into the model they would like you to.  Just for fun.

So here’s the question.  “Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own, and nothing to grow upon you that will give you agony when it is torn away.”  The idea here is that you are your own pursuits and not permitting external people or objects to influence you or your goals.  This is both a warning against addictions of all forms, perhaps especially social ones, and a caveat emptor for everything you allow into your life.  You control your personal sphere- to the best of your ability at least.  It is your responsibility and nobody else’s to make sure that only elements you want are a part of your life, and it’s your duty to yourself to safeguard the vaults against the thieves that would seek to plunder your wealth.

I have something to say about victimization here.  Blaming the victim for a crime committed against them is the original scam.  It is the classical attempt to cheat and then get away with it, and the more serious the crime, the more potent a tactic it becomes.  The idea that you control your person means that yes, to a degree, you are responsible if something bad happens to you.  There are precautions you could have taken, etc. etc.  No matter the event, there are always choices you could have made to avoid that outcome you deem makes you a victim.  However part of the idea of being actually in control means that you are never a “victim” of other people’s choices or actions, because the very idea implies that you aren’t actually in control.  So you are only actually a victim when the aggressor has actively applied intelligence to disable, short-circuit, or otherwise evade whatever defenses or precautions you have taken against being taken advantage of.  Think of it like this: if you’re on a desert island and a bear comes and steals your food, then you’re a victim.  But you could have done any number of things to prevent your food from being stolen, such as hanging your food from a tree, out of reach.  The bear is fundamentally at fault here (I don’t believe the conventional idea of “blame” either, so this explanation might be a little awkward without a background but I’ll have to go on anyway) but that doesn’t mean you can sit there and rage about how that damn bear has made you a victim.  Your actions, to the degree that you invested resources to prevent an undesirable outcome, resulted in some probability of that undesirable outcome occurring- a risk.  Now, there are obviously far too many *possible* risks to address, but we can exercise our reason to determine which ones we need to address, which ones are worthwhile to address, and which ones we can safely ignore.  If you ignore a risk you should not have, then you are responsible for that mistake, even if you aren’t the acting agent of the aggression committed.  A bear is too animate.  Let’s go with physics.  You leave your food outside for a long time, and it rots.  Well?  You are responsible because you misjudged the risk of it rotting, didn’t take sufficient precautions, and now your food is gone.  In this case, there is no aggressor at all- it’s you against the laws of physics, but the situation is exactly identical.  You can mope around claiming to be a victim, perhaps go to the government and demand that your food be replaced…  yada yada.  Now, I absolutely do not want this concept of judgment and addressing of risk to be confused with actually blaming the victim as the active agent in their own victimization.  These are completely different concepts entirely.  An agent acting in a way that is exploitative of another agent is doing so because their incentives line up appropriately to make that a course of action they find acceptable.  The idea of punishing them is to tip these scales enough that it is no longer economical to exploit others.  There is of course the problem of giving the power of retribution to who, exactly, which I won’t go into here because this isn’t a post about anarchism.  The reason why you can’t have the punishment be equal to the crime (remove connotations of law or government) committed is that the risk of capture is never 100%.  Let’s say a thief steals purses.  If he gets caught 50% of the time, but each time he’s caught he only has to return the amount he stole, then it doesn’t really change the thief’s decision-making circumstances that much.  However, if the cost is losing a hand then the thief will think twice before stealing that purse because there would need to be a lot of money in there to justify a 50% chance, or even a 1% chance, of losing a hand.  Now, the funny thing about punishment is that you also have to account for a certain probability of false positives.  So if an innocent man is accused of stealing that purse and gets his hand cut off, well that’s pretty damn unjust, isn’t it?  So we have to scale back the punishment until it is enough to stop thieves while being acceptable to the innocents based on the risk of being hit with that false positive.  Keeping in mind that we are assuming the populace has a say in what the punishments are.  If you’re a totalitarian government, you could give a damn what the civvies say, and drastic punishments make sense because it’s less crime you have to deal with, freeing up resources for you to put towards your own ends.  Draconian methods of control are, pound for pound, more efficient in terms of resources spent versus results achieved.  Their main problem, in fact, is that they are so efficient that it makes life a living hell for nearly everyone.

After that long digression, back to the main issue.  If you’re simply enjoying another person’s presence, then there’s no further expectation in the matter.  If they leave, you’re no longer enjoying their presence.  You start to run into problems when you ascribe ultimate value to people or objects, because you can’t unlink ultimate value as long as you actually perceive it as “the ultimate good in the whole universe.”  Now we run into a very controversial edge case when dealing with the loss of loved ones.  I say it’s an edge case because it doesn’t happen very often relative to our lifetimes.  We’re not losing loved ones every other week.  A model that was focused primarily on dealing with death of the most intimate friends (I will not say “and family” because if your family are not your close friends then why are you with them?).  You know what, I’m going to elaborate on that parenthetical thought.  Your family, especially your nuclear family such as parents and immediate siblings, are people.  You know them for longer, and have more opportunity to become very good friends with them, and when you’re a child there is a certain amount of not-having-a-choice in the matter that forces you to make friends or make war, and rational individuals choose the former in all but the most extreme circumstances.  So there’s just very close friends.  The fact that you’re biologically related is of no philosophical significance whatsoever.  Medical significance, yes, but only because knowledge of your family’s genes can be used to deduce your genes.  Social significance, of course not.  So I will treat death of family as the death of friends who were equally close as family members.  Now, to be honest, this is a topic that I’m reluctant to exercise my usual methods of beating to death because there may be readers who have such a powerful subjective experience of the matter that I will waste my time if I try to dismiss the bits that require dismissal, focus in on what is significant , and use it build up a new model that more accurately fits reality and rationality.  We have arrived at the idea that being with people is something you do for yourself, but it seems like lunacy to say that the death of a loved one shouldn’t hurt because you aren’t able to enjoy their presence any more.  That’s just not strong enough, right?  BUt isn’t that exactly what mourning is?  You won’t speak to that person again, or see them, or talk to them, or whatever else.  If you could do those things then you wouldn’t care if they were technically dead- that’s just a cessation of some bodily functions.  If they could die and leave the person intact, now wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing- you wouldn’t have to worry about death.  This is actually a fairly direct deduction for most people, but the idea that the physical death isn’t the source of their trouble, isn’t.  It is the result of the event of death that they’re mourning.  Many religions exploit this weakness in thinking to interject “But life does continue after death!” and then the explanations, the fairy tales, and the bullshit that follows.  They are careful, however, to always exclude the very functionality that death precludes because they are unable to provide it.  They can’t help you talk to your dead loved ones, so they hide them away somewhere as ghosts or in heaven where you will go, too, once you die.  The intuitive universality of the death process makes this nearly logical, except that a slight elaboration can add a significant degree of control over the behavior of the people who want to believe.  And some of the crueler religions take advantage of exactly these people, and make this death process conditional upon your life, and exactly prescribed behaviors.  The most common trick is to exploit vague semantic identities such as “good” and “bad” which enable retroactive changing of what exactly those conditions are for live updating of the behavior of the believers based on what is expedient at the time.  I’m always amazed and fascinated at the complexity of religion as an organism, and the huge potential that religion proves memes have as a life form.

I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t feel pain- what a ridiculous assertion for a stoic.  The idea is that pain, like other sensations or emotions, are there to help you, not govern you.  If you felt fear and were unable to do anything else but freeze up, curl up into the fetal position, and pray, then what use is that?  For animals like the possum, it is an irresistible instinctive reaction programmed into them because in 99% of cases (at least in the genes’ experience) this is an effective defense mechanism, and giving the possum control over the matter would just screw up the system.  This isn’t strictly accurate because possums evolved their primary featureset in the time before memetic delegation had been “invented” by evolutionary processes.  The application of reason is itself a major feature of humanity, and quite novel in genetic terms.  If you wanted to be truly biological about it, you can look at memetic evolution as the ultimate genetic trick, but the problem is that it is so effective it makes genes obsolete.  Also, intelligence is so effective that genetic evolution can’t keep up with the rate of change.  For the prurient example, we have invented cars and now they’re everywhere.  And now possums, with their very effective defense mechanism of freezing up when afraid, causes them to get run over by speeding cars, and the genes can’t un-wire that feature given the new environment because they aren’t able to perceive and judge.  I would like to say, though, that genes are definitely alive.  Not just in the sense that a person is alive, but the gene of HUMANS is alive in a strange information amalgamation of the genes in every person in a way that we really can’t quite comprehend because there’s too many people, too much noise, and too much uncertainty about genes themselves.  The day that we truly understand genes completely, we won’t need them anymore because we’ll be able to construct our own biological machines to any specification or design we like.  They’re just like any other machine, but far more complicated and sophisticated.  Especially the organic ability to reproduce.  Interestingly, though, the body is itself one of the few things that we are currently unable to separate our selves from.  Some can conceive of what that might be like, and most of them have it wrong (I guarantee that I do, but it’s more complete than most, at least).  Note that the objective is to separate your self from as much as possible of what you don’t want, of that which subtracts from your good or your happiness.  I would argue that, for as long as it works, your body adds immensely to that happiness.  And as far as it doesn’t, it subtracts immensely.  So an ability to perfectly fix the human body, a hypothetical perfect medicine, would obsolete the need for mechanical bodies unless their features were so far beyond those of a human body (which is the case) that you could get even more out of one.  Probably the main advantage is the ability to add processing power and memory, and the ability to have direct inputs.  Anyway, permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own.  I am not my body, but insofar as I use it, rely upon it, and wish to keep it, it is mine.

So if I don’t even value my own body enough to want to keep it, what does that mean?  Well, I never said that I didn’t value my body, just that the value it provides is of the material sort, similar to eating a burrito, except that instead of the satisfaction of the burrito, my body contains the hardware necessary to eat the burrito, and without it any sort of gustatory satisfaction would be impossible (not strictly true- a perfect simulation of the experience is an identity).  This is similar to having a computer.  The computer in and of itself doesn’t actually provide a whole lot of satisfaction, but the things you can do with it will.  Perhaps the computer hardware hobbyists who make it a point of pride to have the best possible machine wired up in the best possible configuration get significant enjoyment out of simply possessing the hardware itself.  However, even with that example, we see parallels with the human body, such as with fitness junkies who make it a point of pride to have bodies sculpted out of steel, and enjoy simply having it.  Important note: most of these “fitness junkies” are doing it because of other people, not because they genuinely enjoy it, or because they even want the results.  And they get further conflicted by the fact that they are causing a change, which might conflict with their perception of themselves, or with others’ perceptions, and for some reason they’re anxious to step outside of that box.

Anyway, my entire point is quite simple, as usual, but it’s dressed up with many trimmings like mirrors in every corner of the room to show off the gleam on the little gem in the middle.  The idea that you should be dependent on others, the idea that that constitutes good social practices, the concept of a social personality, all of these things are foisted upon us because others had them foisted upon them.  We are the monkeys conditioned not to reach for the bananas within our reach because someone, at some point in the past, was punished for trying.  So now we have to live with everyone else.  But the most vital point is this: they don’t matter.  If you want to reach for that banana, they could physically stop you, but if they do then you have a clear and objective obstacle in your way, which can be overcome, instead of the hazy, confusing aimlessness of contradiction.

Macroscopic Decoherence

Macroscopic decoherence is a fancy name for the theory in physics of “many worlds,” a resolution to the dilemma presented by quantum physics that, to some, makes a lot of sense.  Before I discuss what it is and what it means if it is true, first I’ll go over the more commonly accepted modern viewpoint more specifically its aspect labelled the Copenhagen interpretation.  OK, here’s the dilemma.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a verifiable precondition of any theory of quantum physics, states that you cannot determine both the position and the velocity of a particle.  The practical reason for this is that, for objects as small as particles, the act of measuring their properties has a significant effect in changing those properties.  For macroscopic objects such as a table, the photons bouncing off the table into our eyes don’t change the position or velocity of the table and therefore we can ascertain both.  However, there is no yet discovered tool which can be used to probe a particle without changing it in any respect, thus preserving its condition for a second measurement.  Hypothetically, I guess you could measure both properties simultaneously- within the exact same Planck time- but this is utterly impossible with current technology, totally incapable of operating on anything close to that time scale with simultaneity, and there may be other limitations I am not aware of.  Now, strictly speaking, this isn’t an accurate model of quantum decoherence.  Actually, particles behaving like waves exhibit a linear relationship of definition between variables such as, say, position and velocity.  This means that the more certain an agent is about one property, the correspondingly linked property can only be known with a correspondingly limited precision.  So it’s possible to have a continuum of accuracy about both properties.  This seems like a mad system, but this is due to the nature of waves.  I think I should stop and leave it at that before I get sidetracked from the main point- I haven’t even gotten to the standard model yet.
This gives modern physicists a dilemma- it would appear that our universe is a fickle beast.  Let’s say that we ascertain a given particle’s position with perfect accuracy- doesn’t that mean that it is categorically impossible for us to make any statements at all about its momentum, due to total uncertainty?  With the caveat that perfect accuracy is impossible, yes.  So what happens to the velocity?  Or, more importantly, what happens to all the other places it could have been if we hadn’t measured it?
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics claims that the other possibilities do not exist in any case.  This more closely parallels the way we think about the macroscopic world in practical terms because even if we don’t know where a table is, we know the table has a given location that is not subject to change unless someone or something moved it.  The act of measuring the position of the table only puts the information about the table’s position into our heads, and does not change any fundamental properties about the table.  So, the Copenhagen model concludes that the act of measuring where the particle is collapses its waveform into one possible state.  It actually changes the waveform by nailing down one of the variables to a certain degree, leaving the other one free to flap around in a similar degree.  This collapse model causes particles to behave similarly to macroscopic objects in one sense.  However, in order to reach this conclusion, the Copenhagen interpretation has to violate numerous major precepts of modern science- I won’t go into all of them, although it is a laundry list if you want to look it up, universality and objectivity of the universe for one.  The fact that there are observers begins to matter because it appears that we can change the fundamental nature of reality by observing it.  This raises the question of what exactly constitutes an observation, perhaps one particle bumping into another counts as an “observation”?  But relative to us, the uncertainty principle still stands relative to both particles, so there really is something intrinsically different about being an observer.  This is the most serious flaw in an otherwise excellent model, and it is to address this flaw that I add my thoughts to the camp of macroscopic decoherence- the other one being that this causes particles on a small scale to behave in a fundamentally different way than larger objects.

Macroscopic decoherence does not require a theoretically sticky collapse, hence its appeal.  Instead, the theory goes that the other possibilities exist too, in parallel universes.  Each possible position, momentum, etc. exists in an independent parallel universe.  Of course, due to the number of permutations for each particle, and the number of particles in the universe, this causes us to postulate the existence of an indescribably large number of infinities of universes.  Now, if you accept that postulate, it allows a theory that explains particles in the same terms as macroscopic objects, you only have to accept that this same permutation mechanism applies to any and all groupings of particles as well as individual particles.  So there exists a parallel universe for every possible version of you, every choice you have made, and so on into infinity.  This is something of a whopper to accept in common-sense terms, but it does create a more manageable theory, in theory.  The linchpin of the theory is that, rather than the act of observing causing the mystical destruction of the other probabilistic components of a particle’s waveform, it only pins down what those properties are relative to the observer in question.
In other words, the act of observing only tells the observer in which parallel world they happen to be.  Each parallel world has only one possible interpretation in physical terms- one position and velocity for every particle.  Unfortunately, there are an endless infinity of future parallel worlds, so you can’t pin down all properties of the universe, or a distinct set of physical laws would necessitate the existence of a single universe derived from that one.  The flaw in this theory is that this same approach can be taken to a variety of other phenomena, with silly results.  Basically, there is no reason to postulate the existence of parallel worlds beyond the beauty of the theory.  The same data explains both the Copenhagen interpretation and macroscopic decoherence, which is why the theories exist.  Both produce the same experimental predictions because they’re explaining the same phenomena in the first place.  We can’t go backwards into a parallel universe, and similarly we can’t go back in time and find information that has been destroyed by the act of observing the information we observed then.  It appears to me that, given current understanding, both theories are unfalsifiable relative to each other.  Overcoming Bias makes a fascinating case as to why decoherence should be testable using the general waveform equations, but the problem I see is that theoretically the Copenhagen model could follow the same rules.  True, it lends serious weight to macroscopic decoherence because it systemically requires those equations apply whereas it could incidentally apply to the Copenhagen model.  Or some souped-up version of the Copenhagen model could take this into account without serious revisions, it’s difficult to say.  I do disagree with the idea that macroscopic decoherence must be false because postulating the existence of multiple universes violates Occam’s Razor.  This is a misapplication of the razor.  Occam’s Razor doesn’t refer to the number of entities in question, but to the overall improbability by complexity of the concept or argument being considered.  It just so happens that you have two options- either there is some mechanism by which observers collapse a wave into only one possible result, or there exist many possibilities of which we are observing one.  It is not a question of “well, he’s postulating one function of collapse, versus the existence of an endless infinity of universes.  1 vs infinite infinities infinitely…  Occam’s razor says smaller is better so collapse is right.”  This is not correct by any stretch.  True, currently there is no way to verify which theory is correct, but a rational scientist should consider them equally probable and work towards whichever theory seems more testable.

Well, let’s consider the ramifications if this theory of macroscopic decoherence happens to be correct.  It means that every possible universe, ever, exists.  Every possible motion of every single particle.  According to quantum physics as we know it now, there exists some possibility that the statue of liberty will get up and take a stroll through New York.  It is a…  shall we say… exceedingly small… probability.  I won’t even attempt to calculate it, but I bet it would be a 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10…. so many times you couldn’t fit all the exponents into a book.  It could easily be improbable enough that you couldn’t write that many exponents on all the paper ever produced on Earth, but I won’t presume I have any goddamn clue.  However, according to macroscopic decoherence, there actually exist a very large number of infinities of universes where this occurs- one for each possible stroll, one for each particle’s individual motion inside the statue of liberty for each possible stroll, etc. etc. etc.  And this is for events that are truly so unlikely as to be totally impossible, let alone for events as likely as intelligent choices between reasonable alternatives, such as what to order at a restaurant, or what to say every time you open your mouth, and then every minor permutation of each…. gah!  Any attempt to describe how many possible universes there are is doomed to fail.  Trying to diagram the possible life courses on the grand scale that each person might make, I will leave to your imagination.

So now we get to the interesting bit- the reason why I am writing this post.  So in all of these parallel universes there exists a version of you that is doing all of these different things.  So the question I have is, are they really you?  Seriously, there are versions of you out there that are exactly, exactly the same in every respect and living exactly the same lives in exactly the same universes, with a single particle moving in an infinitely small way elsewhere in the universe in a way that does not and could not possibly affect you.  However, because of this schism of universes, you are separate consciousnesses inhabiting different parallel universes.  Now there is a high probability that these universes are not totally discrete- rather they inhabit a concept-space that, while isotropic, could be conceived of as having contours that describe the similarity of the universes, with very similar universes being close together and very different universes very far apart, in a space with an infinite infinity of dimensions.  As a result, even with respect to these parallel universes, these versions of you will be infinitely close to you and could be said to inhabit the exact same space, with versions splitting off into space while remaining identical, and other versions experiencing physical changes on the same spot (some of them infinitesimal, and others rather drastic, such as turning into a snake, a werewolf, or anything else you can conceive of).
So which of them is the “real” you?  Or have you figured out that the concept doesn’t have any significant meaning in this context?  If we narrow down this infinite schisming into a single binary split, then both sides can be said to be equally “original” based on the preceding frame.  By the same token, an exact copy of someone in the same universe should be treated as synonymous with the “original.”  Please note, those who are unfamiliar with this territory- I get this a lot.  I am NOT referring to cloning.  A clone is genetically the same, but so utterly disparate from its progenitor that this level of identity is not even approached.  I am referring to two entities that are so identical that there is no test you could perform to tell them apart.  Obviously, with any time spent in different physical locations in the universe they will diverge after their initial point of creation, but it is that critical instant of creation where the distinction matters.  If the two are synonymous, there is no “original” and a “copy”- indeed, the original is merely existing in two places at once.  If they could somehow be artificially kept identical by factoring out particle randomness and their environment then they would continue to act in perfect synchrony until something caused a change, such as a minute aspect of their environment or a tiny change in their body’s physical makeup, such as a nerve firing or even a single particle moving differently (although that probably wouldn’t change much, somewhere down the line it might due to chaos theory).
So now we get to the difficult bit.  What about alternate encodings of the same information, but represented in a different format?  Are the two synonymous?  I argue that it is, but only under certain circumstances.  1) Using a rigorous and perfectly accurate transcoding method to encode one into the other, 2) the timespan of the encoding must be fast enough that significant changes in the source material are minimized, if not completely eliminated, and 3) the encoding can, theoretically, be converted back into the original form with zero loss or error.  The first requirement is the only ironclad one- if you make an error in the encoding then the result will not be representative of the original.  The second and third are more complicated, but easy to assume in an ideal case.  The reason for this is that there is a continuum of identity, and a certain degree of change is acceptable and will produce results that are “similar enough” to meet identity criteria.  If it’s the “you” from a year ago, it’s still the you from a year ago even if it isn’t identical to you now.  So if the encoding takes a year then it does preserve identity, it just doesn’t preserve identity with changes into the future, which is an utterly impossible task because even a perfect copy will diverge into the future due to uncontrollable factors.  Thirdly, if there is no method to convert the new encoding back then it cannot be verified that it is indeed synonymous with the original.  It is possible to produce an identical representation without this clause, but if for some reason it is impossible to convert it back then you can’t know that it is indeed a perfect process that preserves material identity absolutely.  This is the test of a given process.  Now, for digital conversion, reconversion back into physical media is impossible, but simulation in a perfect physics simulation and producing the same results is synonymous with re-creation in the physical world.  I am aware that this appears to be a figure-eight argument, depending upon the identity of a simulation to prove the identity of digital simulation as a medium.  However, this is false because I am referring to a test of a specific conversion method.  In order to create a proven physics simulation, other provable methods might be used to compare the simulation’s results with the physical world.  Once the simulation has been proven to produce the same results as the physical world, given the same input, then a given instance of simulation can be added and compared with the exact same situation in the physical world, using the simulation as the calibrated meter stick by which to judge the newly simulated person or other digitized entity’s accuracy.

The Contradiction of Freedom

Freedom appears to be the favored subject among my readers, so here we go into greater detail.  First of all we need to establish what I mean when I use the word.  By “freedom” I am referring to unencumbrance in the transformation from desire to reality.  This is distinct from the idea of “liberty” or the fulfillment of all intrinsic rights to the satisfaction of the individual being considered.  I believe the issue of maintaining liberty to be a solved one- however, the issue of freedom certainly is not.  The fact that there are no slaves, no wanton executions in the developed world, etc. etc. indicate to me that the fulfillment of basic liberty is not even particularly difficult if the conditions are right.  Freedom, on the other hand, is more difficult to work with.  The reason for this is that reality itself necessarily impinges on our freedom.  I want to be able to fly around, but gravity says I am not free to do that.  In my common definition of “freedom” I don’t consider such possibilities on the grounds that they are physically impossible.  It is a childlike idea that we should have absolutely everything that we want in a direct transmission from wanting to having.  However, it is not at all a childish idea of freedom that you should be able to make any choice you wish, including both the costs and the gains from that choice.  For example, I could choose to invest millions of dollars in inventing a sleek, compact jetpack that would enable me to fly around to my satisfaction- there is a considerable cost to this venture, and no certainty of success (risk is itself a cost), but I am free to try and free to succeed if that’s how the dice fall.

In this line of thinking, a direct transition from desire to actualization should be the default state of reality.  If an item I want has a cost associated with it, then I can pay that cost and have it without qualms.  This is not the situation of “I want, therefore I should have”- I cannot stress this enough.  Too many people are walking around in that sort of entitlement-based fantasy world.  However, if the demand is reasonable and I am prepared to deal with whatever costs, risks, or other consequences that arise from my decision, then the only thing standing in my way is a bunch of unnecessary human barriers.  If I want an apple and am prepared to endure the cost, given the circumstances, then I should have one.  Now, the circumstances can cause the cost to vary tremendously.  If there’s a grocery store then I only have to pony up the dollar or so required to buy it.  However, if I’m in the middle of nowhere, then the desire to eat an apple requires a more complex plan involving obtaining an apple seed, growing the tree, and then harvesting the apple and eating it.  It just so happens that this is a great deal of cost and effort for quite a small reward, which is why it is much more efficient to have consolidated apple farms which grow apples efficiently in large numbers and sell them to distributors.  Rather than the large investment of personal energy to acquire a tree’s worth of apples, I only have to pay for a fraction of that effort due to the scale of apples being produced.  If I’m an apple grower, this system is also to my advantage because if I grow a lot of apples, each apple costs me less to produce, and because I make a profit on every apple (or else I wouldn’t sell them) then the more apples I sell the more money I make.

This is all fairly typical free-market capitalist thinking so far.  However, the crunch comes when we consider that the government must necessarily introduce barriers to this system in order to do, well, anything at all.  Let’s suppose the existence of a government that has no barrier-producing authority.  Nobody has to take it seriously because it has no money since it can’t institute taxes, and even if it did institute taxes, nobody has to pay them because it has no power to enforce compliance.  THe only type of action such an agency is useful for is advising, and concerned parties can listen and take its advice when it is to their advantage to do so.  If this government started a campaign using volunteers to spread awareness about brushing your teeth, and it worked because it demonstrably improves your dental hygiene and health, that’s all it’s good for.  However, my usual case is that this is all government should be good for, because this isn’t actually a government- it’s a very weak and ineffectual DRO choosing to occupy the nonprofit niche instead of actively pursuing customers.  The idea that government should somehow be fundamentally nonprofit is just laughable.  Most people say that if you have a for-profit government, well that’s just loosing the dogs for corruption the likes of which has never before been seen.  They actually have a point, but the tricky bit is- that’s my point.  No company has a police force with the authority to arrest you if you don’t comply with that company’s policy.  If they did, they would be in exactly the same position as any typical government, minus the checks and balances that most modern governments have.  However checks and balances are like band-aids on a gangrenous wound- government just fundamentally will not be ethical, non-corrupt, balanced, fair, what have you, because it has the authority to seize as much money and power as it can grab.  It may have to disguise its efforts, but under the guise of national security or some other necessity it will do what it pleases.

So now we arrive at the contradiction of freedom that political scientists agonize over so much.  People want freedom, but they appear to need a government to secure those freedoms.  At the same time, in the act of securing their freedoms, the government itself must necessarily impinge upon those freedoms.  I understand the difficulty of wrestling with such a dilemma, but you’re wasting your brain cycles.  What you’ve got there is a conundrum of the first order- totally unsolvable with the same type of thinking that created it.

Here is the logical analysis of the argument in question: 1) People want to be free.  2) Freedoms are insecure in a state of nature.  3) Governments secure freedoms.  Conclusion: We should have a government.  The solution is brutally simple: the premise that governments somehow reduce a state of nature, or that governments act to secure freedoms.  Indeed, governments have only ever acted to reduce the freedoms of individuals beneath them.  Perhaps at times those citizens were under the impression that they were being aided in some fashion, at times perhaps a large majority of them were so deceived.  However the simple fact of the matter is that if what a government offered was so valuable then rational individuals would sign up voluntarily.

The proof that individuals can create extremely complex systems that are able to fulfill their needs is evident in government itself.  Government’s methodology is fine, with the single vital exception that participation is mandatory, and will be backed up by force.  In return, however, the government promises not to take everything you have, only a fraction such as one quarter or one third, which will be put toward projects you have essentially no control over.  Once again, I have no issue with any of these projects in and of themselves.  There may even be circumstances where actions as severe as the war in Iraq become necessary (they definitely were not in this case, but government idiocy is a side effect of the fact that the government retains power no matter what, even if the parties in it change).  Governments should offer services at a fair price, in a manner that its citizens will be prepared to pay for them.  One possible strategy is to have a single subscription model, requiring a third of your income, to which you must subscribe in order to legally inhabit land that the government in question owns.  As a subset of this government’s ownership, it is possible to own land.  We are approaching a fixed model of the US government where it’s essentially the same, with the critical exception that participation is voluntary.  Granted, the costs involved depend on your circumstances.  If the (rather impractical) stance of having a subscribe-or-leave policy were instituted, then you would probably stay just to keep what property you have, such as a house.  However, this solution presumes the existence of a government with the power to simply lay claim to your property as desired, and can use that threat to coerce you to subscribe in one final death throb to stab its superior and would-be-ethical successor in the gut.

So we arrive at the same contradiction for iteration round two.  In order to create a free society it is necessary for people already living under governments to somehow act as though they were not, at exactly the same moment that the government decides to relieve itself of its coercive power in favor of a voluntary or contractual model.  This is never going to happen.  So, the statist theorizes, in order to make a free society, you have to use coercive force to make them free, yes?  So we need a government to, not secure our freedoms, but force us to participate in our free society.  No.  Absolutely, definitely not.

The whole issue here is the idea of power.  The idea that a problem requires power to solve it, or that power is ever a solution worth choosing.  I am referring to power as the exercise of coercive power.  This is to distinguish it from freedom, which is the ability, or the facility, to accomplish something.  Using the definition from earlier, technology very clearly extends our freedom by enabling new courses of action that were previously physically impossible.  However, actions are morally neutral.  By creating new actions that were previously physically impossible, new crimes and new options for the use of power exist as well.  This is a cliche, but the invention of the blade creates both kitchen knives and swords.  The same holds true for everything up to and including F-22’s, although it’s hard to see how some of the more elaborate and expensive pieces of military hardware have any use at all beyond blowing stuff up, if that.  I digress here, but I am actually referring to the fundamental technological components in each case.  Technologies such as avionics systems in advanced fighter jets can be used in civilian planes and other places as well.  Simply that the F-22 and civilian planes are superficially different is taking advantage of the fact that, unlike primitive tools like kitchen knives and swords, they look and act very differently.  Although, if you looked into it, you would likely find that the design of cookware and the blacksmithing of military edged weapons were, and are, extremely different, although the fundamental technologies were the same.  Anyway, my point is that an increased availability of facility and options doesn’t actually get you anywhere in terms of the freedom versus power conflict- it only allows the scale to tip farther in either direction, irrespective of which way it is currently tipping.

I am aware that framing the discussion as “freedom versus power” seems to present a foregone conclusion, but keep in mind that I am referring to freedom as the ability to do subjective work, whereas power is the ability to have others do subjective work on your behalf.  While it is highly likely that the subjective work you have them do will not serve their own interests, there is no reason why this could not be the case.  I believe the origin of centralized authority was in the fact that disparate forces united to a common purpose can accomplish far more than they could individually, even though this means a subsuming of the individual’s judgment to whatever authority is making the decision about what must be done.  So when the scale tips toward freedom, by this logic, it appears that we are being modest in our desires.  We can’t accomplish as much in total.  I suspect this is why, in times of distress such as World War II, nations bond together.  States tighten up and hunker down, and the civilians set to work for the greater good, for fear of annihilation due to defeat in global war, but still a unified and powerful force.  It appears to me that this outcome is simply a result of economy of scale.  The issue, though, is that people are not cogs in machines, and we don’t necessarily respond well to economy of scale on the human level.  We don’t all want to eat the same food, even though it would be most efficient in the grand scheme of things to consolidate all the vast sprawling food industries into a single entity (if we utterly disregard politicking, management inefficiency, balance in parallelism, competition, and a ridiculous number of other factors) and have everyone eat well-designed vitamin and carbohydrate supplements with tap water.  It would cost virtually nothing, and free up so much human capital, labor, and time to other pursuits.  Unfortunately, as a side effect, everyone would have to live on vitamins and carb pills, which is clearly an undesirable situation.  However, on the other side of power, it’s clear that if we consolidate power too much, then human error becomes magnified.  If we consolidate absolute power in one leader then there will be fluctuations not only in that leader’s mood and ability, but also in the variation between leaders, where one person’s thought and personality can have profoundly different effects than another.  We get the good-king bad-king effect, with the good kings working steadfastly for the good of the people, and the huge contrast with the bad kings merrily chopping everyone’s heads off, starting wars and economic crises, and putting a pall of fear over the whole country.  So we see a continuum between power creating efficiency in terms of economy of scale, but inefficiency in terms of the magnification of human error.  Freedom, by contrast, limits the absolute utility available to the sum of the group in question, but also limits the effects of human error to the bounds of the party concerned.  If you want to smoke crack until you overdose- feel free.  You’ll probably be dead, but that will be the total extent of the damage you cause.

The issue with this description is that it isn’t entirely accurate.  In the freedom scenario, people still form together in groups and organizations, they just do so voluntarily only.  As a result, people in control of those large groups might still have a significant amount of power to direct and affect a large number of people.  However, and here is the critical difference, every single one of those people is free to leave at any time.  As a result, we get both the benefits of applying centralized power, and the benefits of freedom’s damage control.  If the leader is being totally ridiculous and irrational, he will either be replaced by those sensible enough to recognize it or everyone the crazy bastard has power over will jump ship and do business with someone else.  This creates a huge incentive for leaders to be effective, but also limits the damage if they are not.  It is the judgment of each person with whom they become involved, and also who they permit to have power over them, and to what degree.

Mandatory participation where each person has significant involvement and power, such as democracy in small communities, approaches this situation, but unlike mandatory democracy it scales to societies of any size.  With the possible exception of small groups in isolation.  However this is because it is assumed to be true in small groups in isolation, so the complex contracts are not worthwhile to make, resulting in stereotypical independence anarchy- the desert island scenario that statists like to employ so much.  However this fails too because the same system could be applied, and in fact would be if the situation became dire enough.  The Lord of the Flies scenario is unrealistic for rational beings (of course, there is some possibility that the circumstances caused them to become irrational) because when a problem arose, a solution, whether systemic or responsive, would be created even if there was only one individual to implement it.  This only fails when the rest of the group is behaving similarly, but treating each other as problems to be solved, resulting in never-ending conflict.  Eventually they’ll figure out how to trust one another, or kill one another first, just as barbarians of old did.  However the idea that appointing a leader prevents this type of worst-case scenario from playing out is shortsighted because the leader could easily be the cause if he tries to direct them in ways their own reason tells them are bad, and they have the independence to resist.  Anyway, this whole paragraph addresses an edge case which is increasingly rare in modern society, and irrelevant with regards to any community, city, state, national, or global scale.

Strategy, Tactics, and Games

First of all, read this post.  Now.  http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/09/24/strategy-tactics/  It is pure genius.

After you’ve done that, I have analysis to do.  I’m not going to regurgitate a single shred of the information in the above article because I have too much to say.

First of all, the author Venkatesh Rao is absolutely correct, and not only did this idea never occur to me, I never thought to question the idea that the fundamental assumptions used in the creation of strategies and tactics were fundamentally flawed- adding a level of meta-tactical formulation that is essentially lacking in most decision-making.  Now, more specifically, the idea that tactics are general and strategic thinking is unique to situations, while it appears to be generally true, and it’s a much better approximation than the old model that strategy is somehow more all-encompassing than tactics, it falls victim to the same thinking that the old model did.

What do I mean by this?  Well, strategy by this definition does actually include tactics necessarily.  Because it’s constructed for an individual circumstance it must necessarily be built up from the different tactical options available to the agent.  However, tactics do not necessarily have to be a part of a grander or lesser strategy.  A tactic can be described in pure game-theoretical terms without any real-world interaction.  This is accomplished by building a tactic up from axioms in a way that strategies derived from doctrines aren’t.  A doctrine is an assumption about the world for practical purposes and is therefore derived from experience in an inductive fashion- as a practical assumption which is most often true, or otherwise useful to assume.  Tactics derived from axioms are arrived at deductively.  For example, in a military situation, we know that we want to destroy as much enemy materiel as possible while incurring as few losses as we can.  This is not a doctrine- this is an axiom.  Similar axioms are such assumptions as “guns have range” or “guns are highly lethal to humans.”  So if we build up a number of axioms like this we can arrive at a situation where we have whatever weapons in whatever known situation, and we can compute tactics such as have troops use cover, use infantry with anti-armor weapons to engage enemy tanks, use tanks to engage enemy assault infantry, etc. etc.  So maybe we arrive at an effective tactic of creating a formation with the tanks in the front, and a large number of infantry in a supporting role, to be brought forward when the enemy fields their tanks.  It’s important to note that we can change these parameters however we like and we’ll arrive at different tactical results.  For example, if we changed the situation to include the axiom that all infantry are highly effective at killing tanks, then it may not be worthwhile to field tanks at all because they would be destroyed too easily, and it certainly wouldn’t be a good idea to have them go first if they were all you had.

In a strategic sense, we have a different way of looking at our available units.  We could talk about units in the same abstract sense as before and still come up with concepts of strategic interest, but in order to formulate a valid strategy we would really need to know the specifics of what we’re dealing with.  Do we have 122 tanks and 300,000 troops to call upon?  What’s the supply situation, what about morale, training, enemy targets available, etc. etc.  From this we might formulate a diverse array of potential strategies to maximize the effectiveness of the resources available.  However, in order to do that we need to have both good doctrine, or practical assumptions about the nature of the world, and good intel, or exact specifics about the situation at hand.  The difference is fairly easy to handle.  If we know that setting the tempo of the military engagement is critical, that’s a doctrine.  It has direct strategic significance by reducing the infinite field of possible strategies down to a more manageable number of probably useful ones very quickly.  Intel would be “the enemy has 513,889 soldiers located in that city” or “the enemy is going to attack in three days.”  Intel is necessary for making operational decisions, or low-level instance decisions.  I suppose it could be said that operations are simply a lower-level form of strategy, but they’re low enough level that it is practical to consider them fundamentally different.  Strategic thinking is necessary to make them work, as opposed to abstract tactical deduction, but the strategy selected is known and an implementation is all that is required.

Strategic thinking is not, as I and many others once thought, “higher level” than tactical thinking.  I would argue that it requires more experience and more intelligence to think strategically in a given field than to analyze it tactically.  With strategy, you are necessarily dealing with imperfect information and chance.  Chess is a game of pure tactics, with very little true strategy.  I would argue that more complex games like Go actually do include levels of strategic thinking because you have to address the board at hand and your opponent in a unique fashion.  However, in chess, you don’t care who your opponent is or what the individual situation is.  Given a sufficiently advanced derivational strategy you could compute the ideal move in a given situation.  The same thing could be said for Go, of course, but the computational capacity required is so immense that it is utterly impossible with the resources of a human brain.  However, chess masters make this sort of analysis when deciding what to do.  Ah, who cares about individual games.

Real time strategy games tend to contain strategy, with a fairly sparse diversity of individual tactics.  Some tactics that are generally common in all RTS games are things like rushing, turtling, spamming, and so on.  Strategically, however, you have to look at the terrain and what units your opponent is fielding and make a decision that will only hold for this specific situation.  One of the main flaws in RTS games in my book is that maps tend to play out the same way each time because the terrain has too little effect.  This sounds like I’ve got it backwards, but bear with me.  Two armies meeting in a field with no terrain at all have very few factors to make strategic decisions on.  Barring some really different logistical or technological factor, the battle will probably play out much the same way every time you ran such a simulation.  Now, if you added in a little terrain, just enough to create a few significant areas of strategic significance, then the nature of the game changes.  Both sides try to hold the same strategic areas, and succeed to the degree of the resources available and the ease with which they can hold a specific area (if it’s closer to them, etc).  However these battles will also play out the same way every time because there aren’t enough options.  If you’ve only got a few points of obvious interest to both sides then they’ll fight over them every time.  The tactics utilized to obtain them may be different, but the strategic objectives are not up for negotiation.  In order to have a strategically interesting game there must be a greater number of possible strategic choices than a given side can hope to capitalize on.  What do I mean by this?  If we increase the number of points of strategic significance, up to the point where it is no longer an option to simply take them all, then the game starts to become strategically interesting in the sense that different players will make different strategic choices on the grand scale.  Now, I have to mention here, that it is also important to have multiple dimensions of possible choice.  If you have a wide selection of areas which will all give you resources, then the strategy doesn’t actually change.  You just have to get as many of them as possible- and the order that you take them becomes the individual strategy and doesn’t make an interesting strategic setting.  Perhaps the best way to create strategic significance is to give the players the ability to create strategic weapons, and depending on where they place them, the course of the battle changes.  The issue with this method though is that a given setup will lend itself to specific places to put such weapons.  So if you put these choices in the players’ hands, they’ll quickly settle on where the best choice is and just repeatedly place there.

I am trying to bring to light the principle of strategic consolidation.  This is known in game theory as Nash equilibria.  Ideally, in order to create a strategically interesting situation, you would ideally make it so that there are no Nash equilibrium for your setup.  However this in almost an impossible task.  So instead you can set about creating as many of them in as complex a formulation as possible so that it doesn’t play out the same way too often.  I would posit that there must be a way to create a game which, from its fundamental structure, will be strategically interesting every time.

Now how would we go about doing this?  The first point is we must somehow factor in the right level of extra-structural and intra-structural factors.  Meaning, the map, player choices, and other circumstantial factors must have a variable level of influence, but not so variable that any one of them can ever break the game.  Of course, it would always be possible to create a map which breaks strategic interest, or for a player to be outright retarded.  However we as the hypothetical game designers get to put certain parameters on these things.  For example, maps should be between X and Y size with properties A, B, and C, yada yada yada.  We will only make a game that is always strategically interesting if our input parameters are followed.  We will also assume that all players will be trying to win, although we have to allow for disparate skill levels.  That said, because we’re trying to make a strategic game, if we’re doing our job right then better players will straight up destroy worse players.  This is acceptable because we can keep the game strategically interesting by always introducing a flaw in any given strategy chosen that the other player might exploit, except that they might not be skilled enough to.

Alright, now we begin in earnest.  Because we want our game to be strategically interesting, we need a large diversity of points of interest, which necessarily entails a map of a certain size.  As a result, we will have to scale our unit balance accordingly.  Ideally we would have bigger maps = better, but then we run into the issue of time limitations.  Games need to be limited to a certain time frame, or nobody will ever finish them and they won’t be fun.  We could get around this in a number of ways, such as having games run in phases or have a perpetual game, or maybe run it in turns, etc. etc.  However all of these will curtail the structure of the game in a significant way.  So instead we’re just not going to worry about time being an issue.  Our theoretical game won’t account for the players having fun in any realm outside of the actual strategy of the game.  For example, we will not concern ourselves with the processing power required to run it, the graphics, the cost of the computer, or the market share of people who might be interested in buying such a game.  So we will have maps that are exceedingly large with lots of different points of interest such as geographic features, resources, and perhaps even significant locations such as cities.  Regarding our resource model- we want it to be simple enough that the player doesn’t have to break their brain in order to get units to play around with, but we also need it to be extremely important.  The ability to reduce the opponent’s ability to fight is a fundamental and necessary strategic concern.  As an aside, in order to have a diverse array of points of interest, we might cheat and have a massive variety of resources.  This is effective to a point.  I don’t know what the ideal number would be, but certainly 100 is far too many.  I would be leery of anything upwards of 10 or 20, and in order to have numbers that high it would need to be necessary to be able to convert them conveniently (at a price, possibly substantial).  The other important issue is logistics.  Most modern strategy games ignore them because they are something of a pain.  However I am confident that it is possible to implement a logistics system that the player doesn’t have to worry about except in the sense that they keenly feel the need to protect it, and to attack the enemy’s.  The player should never have to give orders to manually maximize the efficiency of their logistics systems.  The player is for making strategic and tactical decisions, not daily maintenance.  If they were so inclined they should be able to change whatever they wanted, but a liberal dose of heavily customizable helper AI would do RTS games a great deal of good.  Similarly, the player should be in a position to decide what gets produced, but should not have to manually queue up individual buildings and units.  Using a flexible template system complemented with artificial intelligence would be fantastic.  The player can say “I want a firebase built here.” and the servitor AI summoned will see to it that the location in question has whatever buildings the player associated with a firebase are built there.

In a similar vein, the player should never be called upon to give orders to individual units.  This is a critical point.  The UI built on top of the basic unit level should be sophisticated enough that the player can quickly and easily pick out whatever units they want, organize them automatically into squads, order squads or companies, battalions, armies, whatever to be built and assembled automatically, and have those units automatically organized for them.  If iTunes can do it with massive libraries of mp3 files then an RTS game can do it with units.  Complex reports and commands should be routine.  The player should be able to get a complete breakdown of whatever subsection of units they like, according to whatever criteria they like.  For example, I might ask my war machine AI to give me a complete breakdown of my air force.  It will show me a page saying I have a total of 344,000 planes and then a breakdown by grouping, role, and further breakdown by type, with individual conditions and orders should I ask.  I should be able to look at a procedurally generated map showing what I have where and what they’re currently doing.  Regarding complex commands, it should be possible for the game to understand more complex elements than “move” and “fire.”  For example, if I want to mount a sustained bombing run on an enemy base, it’s not a complex task.  I just want to get a whole lot of bombers and have them kill everything in this here area while returning to base/aircraft carrier for fuel and ammo when necessary.  The player absolutely should not be required to designate every single target for every single bomber, and then manually order them to return.  It should definitely be an option to order specific units to destroy a specific target, but a more abstracted and powerful UI solution would be much better.  For example, I might designate a specific area as an enemy base which I label “southwestern air staging base” or whatever.  Having the game automatically divide the map into sectors would be handy too.  Being able to then draw symbols and regions on this fabric that you can order units around with would be fantastic.  Anyway, I can then designate specific enemy targets within that area with different values depending on how badly I want those targets destroyed.  I might even create an algorithm describing a way to automatically determine which targets I want destroyed more, such as always aiming for factories or artillery pieces or whatever else.  Then when I order a sustained bombing run, my bombers do what I want them to even when I didn’t specifically order them to.  I can go do something else without having to micromanage.  I guess that’s the whole point of this paragraph.  The age of micromanagement is over.  Hopefully future RTS games will realize this, and we will look back on the RTS games of today as basically RPG games with more units.

To go further into what abstraction might do for our strategy game, RTS games need to start having operations.  By operations, I mean a large, coordinated plan with many active elements all going together, which the player could give specific names if they wanted to.  Including specific objectives as conditionals would be fantastic.  For example, if a player defined an objective as “blow this up” then your AI will understand that if the offending enemy is destroyed, that statement will return true.  The player could then have a breakdown by operation to see how they’re going in all their operations at once.  Your operation readout might be:

Operation FIrestorm – In Progress
• 5:11 of planned 14 minutes elapsed.
• 4 of 11 objectives completed
• General force strength 87%”
- notes
• massed assault eastward on sectors B65 through B88
Operation Lightning Spear (covert) – In Progress
• Jammers operational
• Cloaking operational
• believed to be undetected
• 1:30 of planned 7 min 35 seconds elapsed
• 1 of 5 objectives completed
• 100% General force strength

I am aware that none of this seems like it has any bearing on how to make a game that stays strategically interesting.  It seems to me that the main stumbling block for RTS games today is the user interface.  They are just not suited to having a really strategy-oriented game.  The player has to do too much.  While this increases the twitch factor- not necessarily a bad thing, it detracts from the ability to create large and sweeping, grand strategies.  Using groupings to combine individuals into squads, squads into companies, companies into battalions, and battalions into armies would be a huge improvement.  Doing it atomically allows a computer to easily construct the desired units based on input from the player.  For example, I design a squad of 20 soldiers and give 2 of them machine guns and everyone has grenades.  I then say give me a company with 13 of those squads, 3 units of 3 tanks apiece, 1 unit of 3 anti-air vehicles, 2 units of snipers, and 1 command squad unit.  I’ll put 30 of those companies into a battalion, of which I would like you to build one at this base, one at this base way over here, and another at this third base.  Automation is the name of the game, to free the player up for making the decisions that really count.

Impulsiveness

Is impulsiveness a desirable characteristic?  I am the categorical thinker- I like to think about things before I do them.  However, as part of that thought process it’s important to be able to suspend thought when necessary.  As such, whether or not impulsiveness has a place in the repertoire of the contemporary rationalist is an interesting question.  Firstly, we need to look at where impulsiveness is typically used.  Impulsiveness is often associated with interpersonal exchanges, with social people and people who enjoy parties.  It is strongly disassociated with business or financial decisions, with some exceptions such as small purchases and gambling.  So while common sense thought acknowledges that impulsive action is improper for weighty decisions, for more trivial matters it helps a great deal.

Before we get into the topic, we need to make some distinctions.  There is impulsiveness and then there is recklessness.  The way I conceive of the terms, impulsiveness is thinking of an action and allowing it to proceed into reality without too much analysis.  Recklessness, on the other hand, implies a full knowledge of the action beforehand, but doing it in spite of your analysis that it is foolhardy.  I will talk about both, but first let’s cover the less complex issue of impulsiveness.  In social situations, impulsiveness is a great aid because you can’t think too much about what you’re going to say.  There are a large number of very smart people who have difficulty in social situations because they don’t realize that their strategy for dealing with reality is not universally applicable- it needs to be changed to fit their needs of the moment.  When I was a kid I was like this.  I have since learned to pragmatically and completely apply rationality and can piece together the solution to such puzzles.  Basically, if you think too much about what you’re going to say, you give an unnatural amount of weight to when you do speak.  So unless you’re able to spout endless amounts of deep, profound thoughts, invariably you’re going to be putting a lot of weight behind fairly trivial statements, and the inconsistency comes across as awkward.  Impulsiveness will decrease the weight of what you’re saying and give it a sort of throwaway characteristic which helps you in a number of ways.  Firstly, if it doesn’t work out, nobody really notices, and you can keep going with whatever suits you.  Secondly, it puts you in a more dominant position of just saying whatever you feel like saying.  You aren’t vetting your thoughts to check if the rest of the group will approve.  This brings us to the second flaw in the introverted thinker’s social rut, the fact that they are attempting to apply thought to the situation to do better and it shows very obviously to the rest of the group.  This is a complex point that I can’t encapsulate in one post, but basically any attempt to earn approval guarantees denial of it in direct proportion to the effort spent.  The introverted thinker’s goal is to earn approval, and his model for deciding what to say is, logically, fixed upon achieving that goal.  While their intentions are good their entire approach has so many incorrect assumptions they aren’t even capable of recognizing the fact that their whole paradigm is nonfunctional.  They just dive right back in with a “it must work” attitude instead of reworking from first principles.

Impulsiveness is also a pragmatic tool to be used liberally in situations of doubt.  When it is clear that hesitation will cost more than immediate action, you have to go.  When I was younger I had this model of “going for help” which essentially contained the idea that the concept of help was distant.  So “going for help” would take a long time, and there was a significant chance that the window would close for whatever the situation was.  So my primary course would have been to just go do it myself.  This is an incorrect application of impulsiveness because of incorrect information.  A proper application of impulsiveness might be, for example, you are handed a test with 100 4-answer multiple choice questions, you have 100 seconds.  Now there is no way you could conceivably cover 25% of the questions if you legitimately tried to answer them.  However, if you guess randomly you have a 1 in 4 chance on each question and so over 100 questions you should get 25 correct.  This is clearly your best strategy given the rules of the game.  You concluded that the best strategy is to suspend rational inquiry into each question because it is simply not worthwhile.  You wouldn’t work for an hour to earn a penny, and you wouldn’t think for X seconds per question.

The other fallacy that makes impulsiveness distasteful to many is the idea that the answer actually matters.  With our test example, you don’t actually care what the answer to any given question is, you have all the information needed to create a sufficient strategy.  For social impulsiveness, the simple fact of the matter is that your actions really don’t matter that much.  Provided you don’t do anything truly inappropriate, at least.  The, and I use this term very reluctantly, “antisocial nerds” ascribe a great deal of value to their interactions and to what each party says.  This is a misunderstanding of the nature of the communication.  The actual content is unimportant.  Nobody cares if you’re talking about the weather, cars, or anything else.  True, this doesn’t make logical sense, and in a perfect world people would communicate usefully instead of feeding their egos by the fact that they’re talking to people.  Most of the “extroverts” are pleased by the fact that they’re talking to people, and are anxious when seen by themselves- this mentality is communicated to introverts and affects them quite adversely because they prefer to be alone for some part of their day and they may believe that there is something wrong with them.  Don’t buy it, please.  The people who *need* to be around others to validate themselves are the unstable ones.  It’s similar to the way men and women treat sex.  Men are usually sexually insensitive and are more pleased the by fact that they are having sex than they are enjoying the sex itself.  They are usually seeking validation from society instead of their own enjoyment.  Of course, most women can pick this up immediately and they would prefer not to be some boy’s tool to self-validation.  Women, you aren’t off the hook, you do the same thing, but not with sex.  Instead, you get validation from men paying attention to you while others are watching.  Don’t get me wrong, it goes both ways.  Some women perceive that they get validation from having lots of sex, and some men get validation by attention from women, they’re just not as common as the other way around.  Impulsiveness as a concept is often bundled with these behaviors which, although nobody really knows why, are widely believed to be “creepy.”  That’s just not the case.

Now, recklessness is a whole ‘nother can of worms.  Doing something that you know to be crazy, or doing something because it’s crazy, has a completely different backing behind it.  Most reckless people do it because the cost of the reckless action is balanced or outweighed by the enjoyment or rush they get from it.  This is the same mechanism that makes skydiving fun, even though skydiving is actually reasonably safe.  If you had a significant chance of dying you wouldn’t be able to sell it to people as a recreational activity without some serious social pressure backing it up.  Ziplining is another example- there has only ever been one zipline death, and that was under suspicious circumstances.  But we perceive it to be dangerous and enjoy a rush from it.  There is, however, a time when outright reckless behavior can be a rational course of action.  Usually these circumstances fall into two categories though, 1) you’re trying to make other people/agents believe you’re reckless, or 2) direct and/or thought-out strategies can be expected or countered easily or are otherwise rendered ineffective.

Category 1 is the more common of the two and can potentially occur in any game or strategic situation.  Essentially your strategy is to do something stupid in the hope that your enemy will misjudge your tactics or your capabilities, enabling you to take greater advantage later on, or in the long run.  In poker, it is sometimes a good thing to get caught bluffing.  That way, next time you have a monster hand your opponent might believe you’re actually bluffing.  If you’ve never been caught bluffing before, they would be much more likely to believe you actually have a hand and fold.  Obviously, if you get caught bluffing enough times that it seriously impacts your pile of chips, you’re just bad at poker, but a single tactical loss can be later utilized to strategic advantage.

Category 2 is much more interesting.  Let’s take a game like Total Annihilation.  By the way, TA: Spring is totally free and open source, and it’s easily a contender for the greatest strategy game ever made.  Although it’s not fundamentally that complicated, there is no in-game help so it can be very confusing for new players.  Feel free to log in to the multiplayer server and just ask for a training game- after one or two you should be up to speed and ready to play for real.  Anyway, in Total Annihilation, at least the more standard-fare mods, there are dozens if not hundreds, there are huge weapons that deal death massively and can pose a serious threat in and of themselves to the opposition.  Things like nukes, long range artillery, giant experimental robots (and you can FPS any unit, bwahaha!!), etc. etc.  Anyway, the construction of one such piece can actually end the game if it stands uncountered or undestroyed for too long.  However each has a counter, which range in effectiveness.  For example, antinuke protects a fairly large area, but if you throw two nukes at it, it can only handle one.  Shields protect against long range artillery but they have a small area and cost a lot to run, and so on.  Now, a calculating player can probably figure out the ideal choice for the opponent in a given situation.  If he’s focusing all his stuff in one place, he may as well get both shields and anti-nuke, but the other player(s) could then steal the whole map.  If he goes for the whole map himself, the other player would probably get air units to attack his sparsely defended holdings.  If he consolidates in a few carefully chosen locations, nukes might be in order, and so on.

This is where we get to the recklessness-as-tool element.  Potentially the greatest advantage in complex games of strategy is surprise, or doing something that the enemy did not expect and must react to.  Ideally the enemy has limited ability to reorganize to counter the new threat.  This is true of real-world military action- there are issues with communication, chaos, and a host of others that make reacting quickly difficult.  The more resources sunk into the threat, the more resources that will be necessary to counter it (assuming that the attacker isn’t just stupid).  There would have been no point in the Manhattan Project, for example, if the enemy could put horseshoes on all their doors to render nuclear weapons impotent, and it would never have been started.  Now let’s say we have a game of TA where it would be obvious that hitting the enemy with a nuke would be the best course of action.  Of course, this same idea will have occurred to the person about to get nuked.  OK, so then big guns are the best strategy.  Except that your opponent can think of that, too, because he might guess you’re not going to use nukes because it’s too obvious.  And so on through all the possible options, whatever one can think of, the other can too.  Whatever strategy you might use to maximize your utility can be equally though of by the enemy.  We are dealing with a perfectly constrained system.

But what if we de-constrained the system just a little bit.  We remove the rule that says we must maximize value.  Now we could feasibly do anything up to and including nuking ourselves.  So we need a different rule in its place because now we’re working with a screwed up and dysfunctional model.  This is where the trick is.  Because you might still have a meta-model of maximizing value in your selection of an alternate strategy, meaning you will be just as predictable, albeit through the use of a much more complex algorithm.  No, you have to truly discard the maximizing value paradigm in order to get the additional value from surprise, and the trick is to not lose too much to put you behind after your surprise factor is added in.

My problem here is I’m trying to reduce a complex and multi-dimensional strategic game to a single aspect under consideration.  My other problem is that many of you will have never heard of Total Annihilation.  The same idea applies to more or less any other sufficiently complex game, such as Starcraft, but value is too directly transformed in most modern games to make such meta-strategies significant.  If you have more troops, or the right kind of troops, you win.  If you’re behind, you’re behind and there’s not a lot you can do about it other than try harder in doing what you were doing before.  So while surprise might give you some advantage, it’s probably not going to be worth enough to be behind to get it.  Careful application of force certainly helps, but it’s not as vital as in Supreme Commander or Total Annihilation.  No, I’m not harping on the games in question, I’m not demanding that you must play them, I’m just sharing my particular taste in video games.

Impulsiveness once again.  I seem to be digressing more and more these days.  Basically what I’m trying to communicate is that in some situations (games to use the theoretical term) the act of analysis must be take into consideration in your planning.  How much time can you spend analyzing, what should you be analyzing, how is the enemy thinking, etc. etc.  Once you bring the act of thinking into the purview of strategic considerations, impulsiveness is one option for a viable strategy that just does not occur to someone who cannot conceive of the act of thinking as a strategic concern.  They implicitly believe that life is a game of perfect information with unlimited time for a given move.  The truth is, you’re acting when you decide what to do, and that act will have an effect on the world and on the results you get.  There are lots of proverbs about hesitation, but they don’t seem to extend to when to think and when to just act.  On the whole, I think most people have an implicit understanding of this type of decision making- it comes pre-packaged with the HBrain OS, but they haven’t really considered exactly what it is they’re doing on a consistent basis.  I’m just here to point it out so those who haven’t can read about it and be provoked into it.

The St. Petersburg Paradox

I’m in more of a mathematical mood right now, so I’m going to cover a piece of abstract mathematics.  I want to talk about the St. Petersburg Paradox.  While a famous problem, you can wikipedia it for more information if you like, here’s a short summary.  Imagine we have a game of flipping a coin.  Starting at $1, every time the coin lands heads, you double that amount.  When it eventually lands tails you win however much you have earned so far.  How much should it cost to play?

Now I very much enjoy this problem in a pure mathematical sense, but Daniel Bernoulli, the man who invented it, apparently took the mathematics of this problem rather too far.  Bernoulli noticed, as the more astute among you probably either deduced, or probably already knew, that the game’s expected value is in fact infinite.  This means that no matter what the cost to play, you should always accept.  However most common people wouldn’t pay even $50 to play this game.  Bernoulli deduced from mathematical bases a utility function of the game which would explain this behavior using a logarithmic idea of value.  He supposed that people’s valuation of money decreases as the amount of money they possess increases, or to use another term, he proposed a diminishing marginal utility function for money.  While this approach, I guess, works, the even more astute among you will have noticed that this doesn’t actually solve the paradox.  You can just have a game’s payoff function that uses the inverse of whatever utility function and still end up with an infinite payoff that nobody will take.  Other mathematicians have wrestled with this problem, and so far the conclusion, as far as I am aware, is that utility must be bounded in order to resolve this type of paradox.

Now, I am not a professional mathematician, but I believe that I have solved this paradox.  SImply put, all these mathematicians have been assuming that people have the same conception of reality that they are working with; a mathematical one.  These mathematicians have assumed that people think of money as a number.  That seems obvious, right?  Money is measured numerically.  Well, yes, but the fact that different people have different ideas of what money or other commodities are valued at means that it isn’t a number.  Numbers are objective, inherently.  Two people must categorically agree that a 7 is a 7, it always was, is, and will be 7, and that 7 = 7, which also equals 6 + 1 and an infinitude of other identities.  However we all know that two people might have a differing opinion of various exchanges, such as $3 for a mango, for example.  Someone who loves mangoes might buy at that price, someone who doesn’t, won’t.  So we can’t say that $3 = 1 mango in the same way that we can say that 7 = 7, even if all mangoes in the world were always bought and sold for that price.

The issue here is that these mathematicians, while brilliant direct deductive thinkers, think of the universe in a flatly rational way.  While this is probably the best single perspective through which to view the universe, it fails when dealing with people that lack a similar rational strictness.  Have you ever been beaten by someone at a game you were clearly better at, simply because the other player just refused to play “properly”?  This happens all the time in poker and numerous gambling or card games.  In games like chess this rarely happens because in a game of perfect information, “proper” play can be categorically proven to be superior during the game itself.  If it would result in a bad situation, then it isn’t proper play.  Where information is limited, “proper” play might land you in situations you couldn’t predict or prevent.  Anyway, a more textured view of the perception of the universe would allow for nonlinear and unconventional conceptual modes for perceiving the universe.  For example, perhaps a certain subsection of people conceive of money like power.  The actual number isn’t as relevant as the power it holds to create exchanges.  The numbers are negotiable based on the situation and on the value sets of the parties involved  So the St. Petersburg Paradox could be equally resolved by saying that power doesn’t scale in the same way that money does.  If you offered someone a utility function of power, it would mean nothing.  Power is not infinitely reducible: the ability to do something doesn’t blend seamlessly into the ability to do something else.  The atomic unit of power is much larger than the infinitely fine divisions between any given numbers.  Having ten very small amounts of additional power is also not the same thing as one very large new executive power.

People can link together abstractions and concepts in many, many different ways.  For example, some successful investors say that instead of looking at your money like it’s your fruit, look at it like your bag of seed with which to grow more seeds.  True, you’re going to have to sell some of those seeds to get what you need, but its purpose is to grow.  As you accumulate more and more, the amount you can draw off increases while still maintaining useful volume.  This gives a completely different outlook on money, and will generate different decision behavior than looking at money as something to be spent as it is earned.  This same principle can apply anywhere at all, because in order for something to exist in your perceptual map, you have to think about it.  You might think of movies like books that have been converted, like picture books, like snatches of real-life experience, like a sequence of scenes strung together like string being tied together, or like a strip that runs through its full length in only one direction the same way every time.  There are other possibilities of course, but that’s as many as I could think of while I was in the process of typing this post.  This is only looking at a small slice of the possibilities of conceptual remapping (analogues and analogies, specifically) but other forms would require a great deal more explanation.  I think you get the point though.

Back to mathematicians and the St. Petersburg Paradox.  The paradox only exists if you look at utility in the mathematical sense.  There exist models, such as the one that “common sense” seems to indicate, that don’t see a paradox.  These models instead see a game that has a sliding scale of value and beyond a certain point the value is zero (or negligible).  This gradual fading of value is responsible for the probable effect of many people deciding to play the game at differing values.  I don’t think even the most hardcore mathematician would play the game for $1 million a round, even though it will eventually pay for itself.  The utility solution fails to take into account the common sense evaluation of time and effort as factors in any given activity.  You could factor in such an evaluation, but you would probably then be missing something else, and so on until you have built up a complete map of the common sense and shared perceptual map of the most common conceptual space.  But then you have duplicated the entire structure you’re attempting to model and created a simulation instead of a simplification.

On simulations and conventional models, we currently use both.  Our simulations, however, tend to be based in the real world, and we refer to them as experiments.  This is how we collect evidence.  The problem with the natural universe is that there is such an unimaginable profusion of activity and information that we can’t pick out any particular aspect to study.  An experiment is controlling all those other extraneous factors, or removing/minimizing them from a confusing universe so we can focus on a single test.  Once we have our results from that test we can move on to test another part of reality.  Eventually we will have built up a complete picture of what’s going on.  Simulations are data overkill from which we can draw inductive conclusions because we don’t understand all the underlying mechanics.  Models are streamlined flows, as simple and spare as possible, which we can use to draw deductive conclusions.  For example, the equation for displacement for a falling object [dp = v0*t + (1/2)a^2*t] is a simplified model, subtracting all other factors than the one being considered, allowing us to deductively conclude the displacement for any values of v0, t, and a.  Mathematical conclusions are a sequence of deductive operations, both to make mathematical proofs and to solve/apply any given instance of an equation/expression/situation/etc.

Our minds operate on the most basic level using models primarily, and simulations second.  This is because most of the time, a model is close enough.  You don’t need to include every factor in order to get an answer at sufficient precision.  You don’t have to factor in the time, the temperature, or the quantum wobble of each atom in a baseball to figure out where it’s going to land.  If you wanted a perfect answer you could simulate it, but you can get it to an extremely high level of precision by simply ignoring all those marginal factors.  They are not worth computing.  Now we are beginning to factor in the distinction I’ve brought up before between algorithms and heuristics.  Models are often heuristics, and simulations are often algorithms.  Models can include algorithms and simulations can include heuristics, but on the whole a simulation (given correct laws and good starting conditions) will algorithmically compute exactly what is going to happen.  A model, on the other hand, is a much more efficient process that throws away data in order to make calculation simpler.  Usually a lot simpler.

Now I am willing to bet that some readers will be confused.  I just said that simulations need the right laws and starting conditions- isn’t that the same thing as a deductive process needing the right logical framework and initial premises?  Well, yes.  That’s because a logical construct is a simulation.  However, it is a simulation constructed using information already stripped of extraneous information by creating a model of it.  The line between model and simulation is not black and white- they are simply approximate labels for the extremes of a spectrum, with conflicting ideals.  The perfect model is one law that determines everything.  The perfect simulation is a colossal, gigantically massive data stream that represents everything, down to the last spin on the last electron.  This is also where we get the fundamental distinction between philosophers: the conflict of rationalism versus empiricism.  The rationalists believe the model to be the “one true philosophical medium” and the empiricists believe it’s better to use simulations.  The tricky part is that in order to construct a simulation, you have to have models to run each of its laws and each of its elements.  In order to have a model, you have to have a simulation to draw patterns from.  So we have an infinite recursion where rationalists and empiricists are chasing one another’s coattails for all eternity.  Fortunately, most people who have thought about this much have come to more or less the same conclusion, and figured out that rationalism and empiricism go hand it hand quite nicely.  However there is still a preference for choosing to understand the world through one mode or the other.

How does all this apply to the original issue of the St. Petersburg Paradox?  So we have mathematicians who are definitely rationalists- I imagine there aren’t many professional mathematicians who are empiricists.  And these mathematicians construct a model that represents a certain behavioral set.  Their problem, however, is that reality doesn’t actually support the conclusion they are saying is the most rational.  So they change the model, as they should, to better reflect reality.  All well and good.  Their problem, though, is that they are actually doing their job backwards in one concealed respect.  Implicit in their model is the idea that it is the case in the simulation they are describing that the population they are describing has the same conceptual map that the people who created the model did.  I am aware that I could have simply said we have some ivory tower mathematicians who are out of touch with reality, but I wanted to cover in-depth what the disconnect with reality is.  They are correcting their model by making it better reflect empirical reality in one respect, but in so doing they are simultaneously doing the same in reverse by assuming things from their meta-models onto reality.  We have rationalism and empiricism, simulations and models, inductive and deductive thinking, all chasing their dance partner around.  But the most vital thought is that the process must only go one way.  You must always push forward by correcting both to better fit the other in reality, rather than working backwards and assuming things onto reality which are not the case.  If you do this, and then entrench your position with a rationale, you are screwing up your meta-model of reality.  And, like a monkey with its hand caught in a banana trap, the tighter you squeeze your fist the more surely you get stuck.  For every ratchet backwards on the progress ladder, you get more and more firmly stuck in place, and it even gets harder to continue to go backwards.  The wheel spins one way, it grinds to a halt in the other.

The Fundamentals of Reason

I realize that I talk about reason and rationality a great deal, but I haven’t done a great deal to explain exactly what I mean by those words.  In fact, through a great part of history it was perfectly acceptable to treat divine inspiration or the product of a drug-induced hallucination as a basis for decision-making.  However that is clearly not rational by today’s standards.  I want to try and stay away from the philosophy of science, though, since that sort of discussion will not have meaning for too many people.  What I want to get across is that we are all fundamentally rational beings because rationality is a prerequisite of survival.  If we did fundamentally insane things on a regular basis then our species would be long extinct to make room for those that react to reality instead of a fantasy world.

Everyone, even the craziest of the crazies, is fundamentally rational.  They know how rationality works, even if it hasn’t been formalized for them.  They know how to apply it to make the right decisions and to sort truth from falsehood.  The trouble comes because rationality is so flexible.  As a meta-rational strategy, it may be wise to ignore rationality.  It may be proper to do any conceivable action in the right circumstances.  If you live in a society where those who don’t jump up and down and make monkey sounds when the man in the absurdly tall green feathered hat says “mookly!” are killed, then you damn well better jump and make monkey sounds.  If you live in a society where your interests are served by neglecting strict basic rationality in favor of a unified community perspective, even if that perspective is clearly ridiculous, it may be a reasonable choice.  Rationality, for those who have experienced it in formal form, is a very seductive thing because it lets you know things.  Truly know, not just “think” or “suppose” but actually know, and prove to a specific and known degree of uncertainty and ambiguity.  The first step is to establish that all propositions may be false given certain future evidence.  If we discovered a rock that fell up, that’s a vital piece of information.  It doesn’t actually prove that gravity is false though, as the stereotypical example says.  Because clearly there’s some value in the model of gravity because it’s been right so often in the past.  If it needs to be extended to cover a more general field of circumstances, so much the better.  This is how knowledge is advanced.  Once you acknowledge that you can never be absolutely sure (and I mean in the sense of absolutes) of anything, there is a ceiling on the strength of propositions.  This ceiling is, put succinctly, “To the extent that it is possible to know anything, I know that ______”  Now, a lot of postmodernists take this to mean that nothing means anything.  Ridiculous!  What it means is that if you observe something, you don’t get to say “that didn’t just happen because I know X.”  Conversely, if you fail to observe something, you can’t say that “I know it is so anyway because X.”  This one is trickier because it may actually be valid in certain circumstances because you can put a weaker proposition in the position of being negatively tested against.

OK this is getting a little confusing.  I shall rephrase.  If a devout Christian fundamentalist who believes that the Bible is literally true, word for word, was presented with a real-life situation which clearly contradicted the Bible, and continued to believe in the Bible, that’s a problem.  The fundy is assuming that the Bible is true in absolute terms.  The contents of the Bible are so true that even reality cannot touch it.  This is, of course, living in a fantasy world.  However this is a common example of someone attributing far too much strength to a proposition- more confidence in a specific statement than you can possibly have while still keeping an objective view of the world.  For the fundy faced with a contradiction, they have basically two alternatives.  Firstly, they might conclude that the Bible isn’t literally true and that reality is, well, real.  Or, they can come up with an explanation of some kind that will explain why the contradiction can exist, explain how it isn’t really a contradiction after all, or shatter their thinking faculty by believing that contradictions are admissible in reality.  There is a fourth option: ignore the problem.  While there are countless problems that are given this treatment at any given time, the invasive nature of religion invariably fills the victim’s life and worldview until they are forced to take one of the aforementioned options.  Modern religions dislike dabblers- they prefer converts, and vector mechanics are selected for accordingly.

The second pillar of rationality is deduction.  The ability to conclude things.  Now, some would say that premises are more important than deductive ability, and while they would probably be right.  It is possible to be a hardcore rationalist operating from very bad premises, arriving at awe-inspiringly terrible conclusions with great certitude.  However, your premises are only subject to rational analysis once you have established the ability to measure them.  Which requires deductive, abstractive, and meta-analytical faculties.  So I place deduction higher.  Anyway, most people understand how this works.  Socrates is a man.  All men are mortal.  Therefore, Socrates is mortal.  Actually this is rather a more complex statement than necessary to prove deductive faculty.  7 = 7, and therefore 7 = 7 will do nicely.  The basic laws are available on Wikipedia, but the structure you use isn’t as important as the ability to follow one.  True, single-order binary logics using only true and false statements have very strict and well-understood laws for operating and maintaining truth values.  But what if you want a system with three states, or n states, or a paradigm specifically designed to deal with ethical choices?  The ability to understand, follow, manipulate, formulate, and eventually innovate in thought forms is important.

Thirdly, your premises.  This is where a lot of people screw up.  If you start from bad premises, there is nothing you can do to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, even if it is factually true.  In fact, it’s worse if you arrive at a conclusion that is correct through flawed reasoning because you will then apply that reasoning elsewhere with undeserved confidence.  This is how we get Creationists on TV talking about how the banana is perfectly shaped for the human hand, therefore there must be a God who designed both the banana and the human hand.  They are operating from some extremely bad premises, but actually, if you admit their premises for the sake of argument you arrive at a relatively strong hypothetical conclusion.  This type of thing happens a lot for religion.  It’s like a compression algorithm in the religion virus’ DNA that also increases its rate of spreading.  It reduces the amount of information that must be transferred (only the premises, not the whole structure), it makes it easier to bypass the natural pseudo-rational approximant functions naturally embedded in the brain, and also enables the subversion of those very faculties once the premises are accepted.  Religion is itself evolved to be an amazingly effective virus for transmission between minds.  It’s what makes discussion about it so fascinating; I’m always finding new things that the religion virus has capitalized upon and been selected for.  You see the same type of thing in a lot of famous books and movies- it appeals to a wide diversity of people and has been selected for among a large population.  The “classics” then provide the seeds upon which new diversity is created.  Of course, in this case the metric by which we measure the species’ utility is entirely subjective and changes with the times so it’s less of a purist evolutionary system, but still an interesting thought.  Also, it’s important to point out that each “species” has essentially one organism: the contents of the book.  In olden days this wasn’t so- every bard and performer had their own version which they performed for specific results.  This is probably why a lot of the very old tales, including fairy tales, have an almost mystical amount of power in them.  They have been naturally selected for in a much more proper fashion with more than a single set of genes in the pool.  Modern books are all carbon-copies of one another because we’re so precise in our exchange of their information contents.  Anyway, now that I’m thoroughly off topic from the basis of rationality, it’s time to return.  If you start from good premises, and use proper rational tools, then you must arrive at a valid solution.  Now it’s important to note that while at one point in time given a certain set of information, a set of premises may be proper and produce the right results.  However, later in time, you may encounter a result which contradicts your original construction.  This is OK, it just means that your premises weren’t perfect, they only covered certain cases.  In reality, it’s more or less impossible to create a model to cover all cases without creating a model as complex as reality itself, thus defeating the point of using a model in the first place.  This is the difference between a rational model and a pure simulation.  A pure simulation would duplicate exactly the information content of the subject matter being considered, and is not necessarily a tool or vessel of intelligence.  If it were, we could say the universe as a whole is a vast intelligent being because it has so many atoms that all can be represented as information patterns performing constant exchanges that we are contained within and thus may never understand.  The second we “understood” the picture, our minds contain a new piece of information which we haven’t accounted for, and so on forever in infinite recursion.

Anyway, I started this post off in fairly short and focused form, but now my mind is all over the place.  It’s a pleasant way to be, but it isn’t conducive to great writing in a linear mode like a text stream.  I hope I’ve given you some food for thought to chew on, and of course the basis for the tools to do it with.