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Name: Alias
Country: United States
Gender: Male
Interests: America's preeminent poet and unsurpassed prevaricator.
Expertise: Logorrhea and sciolism.
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
8/10/2004
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| The following is easier to relate to if you've experienced the true terror of existential doubt. But, whatevs.
Learning is a funny thing. You grow up, knowing little, yet are pushed onward, instinctively desiring to acquire more knowledge. And so you accumulate facts and methods of the world - this is an X, that is how you do Y. Underlying all this is an objective Truth - that what you sense and think are in relation to a True, Unshakable thing, and that through more study you will get ever closer to that ideal. People you disagree with are in error (or maybe, you admit, you are in error), but through honest effort and learning, the Truth will be illuminated and one of you will be Right.
Then one day you encounter ideas that are irreconcilable, yet supported by equally strong arguments. What to believe? Surely, you think, this can be overcome as well. Appealing to authority/axiom no longer works (and is the method you used to settle things up until this point, you now realize), so the only way forward must be to cultivate superior reasoning skills. How to create such a machine? Where do you find absolutely unshakeable foundations, from which you can irrefutably derive correct conclusions? An alternative path is to finally ecounter some intellectual construction that you cannot comprehend - and thus you seek a superior way of thinking, a way to change your very process of generating thoughts.
So you start searching. And searching. And searching. You did this once, as a child - asking "why?" to every answer until an exasperated parent says "Because!" This time, being much further developed, you decide not to settle for "Because." This self-examination and effort to obtain absolute certainty soon finds you alongside a terrible monster - Doubt. Thus unleashed, Doubt starts to eat everything it sees. Why do I believe this? For what reason? For what reason those reasons? You find yourself always terminating with unanswerable questions, and in terror that nothing that follows is rational. The fear of error grows larger and larger, to the point that error is all you see in yourself and others. Final barriers fall - how does my brain map language to the world, and how do I know that is valid? What if I am wrong? And once you lose language, the assumption that it conveys meaning through a common understanding, game is lost, and so are you.
For some individuals, this legitimately leads into madness. Perversely, towering giants of Logic have been slain by the same search. For myself, (and I claim no position within even 10 leagues of those individuals) it has led to years of wasted time, lost to doubt. The past few (and scant) entries have always been about this theme, and I really hated myself for being unable to shake it. But, I slowly emerged through work, distraction, and just living life with a wonderful woman. Over time, you try and let the anxieties fade, and to a large part they do. Pragmatism.
Humorously enough, I found parallels of my personal problems in a comic book - Logicomix. This comic book summarizes the lives of mathematics and logic superheros: Bertrand Russell, Georg cantor, Gottlob Frege, Kurt Godel, David Hilbert, Henri Poncaire, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a way that is rife with "historical license", I'm sure, but is still massively entertaining and relateable. And, I want to say educational, but will not for fear of getting ripped apart as an idiot by some anonymous netizen. Nevertheless, I like it, a lot. If Russell and Whitehead can spend 10 years and 362 pages in an effort to prove "1 + 1 = 2" with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, and yet still reject their work later, I don't feel nearly as bad. The quest has defeated the best humanity has to offer.
And so it's funny, to come all the way back to the lessons of childhood. Some things are because they are. Language is a model of reality. Labels, meaning, and usage shift. But that's life - messy and imprecise.
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So, where am I now? Here are my current conclusions, where conclusion is understood simply as a place where the questions stop:
These are the primitives of the world: There are
(1)States (ex: beliefs), and (2)Transitions between states. Humans are animals that create (3)Mappings between ideas and sensations. Their mind is a mental state, but it's always transitioning. What drives these changes? Sensations and personality. But what is personality and how does it do the driving? Besides a purely physical explanation (genetics, input/output), you'll find a self-referential, circular logic hole.
Life is like a owning a limited financial portfolio - you aim to maximize return, with limited mental, physical, and financial resources. What you decide to categorize as desirable, or Good, vs undesirable, or Bad, is a mapping that is largely driven by biological sensation.
Your aim should be to minimize Error, not eliminate it. A funny thing is though, that Error, being discerned by you, is imprecise and thus your determination of it will likely have error also. But oh well, what you can you do.
Many things in life are accomplished through force of will and reputation, and nothing else.
Beliefs of the world are all you have. Beliefs of goodness and of badness, of understanding. You are an instinctual animal that places things into these categories, and these determinations largely comes from social influence (upbringing and peers). For many people, the BELIEF in the truth of their statements is sufficient to assume the PRESENCE of truth. Myself included. Belief drives your internal standards of proof and truth. Some people require more than others. Seen this way, ironically, logic ultimately(?) serves human psychology.
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Addendum (tangentially related ideas)
It's funny, when I first started writing Xanga entries, a part of me liked the attention. "Here I am, writing what I think are cool things! Look at me!" Who doesn't write, feeling that? But now, with Facebook and Twitter, I know that I write in the exurbs of the digital chatter, in relative obscurity. And I like that.
http://www.xkcd.com/635/
One last example: All those crazy quants, creating valuations that precisely measure the price of a stock/option…we've seen the refutation of that. In "When Genius Failed." In Warren Buffett's quote: "Beware of geeks bearing formulas." And all those equations obscure this truth (with a lower case t!) about prices:
Adam Smith, talking about the activity of pricing goods and services:
"But it is not easy to find any accurate measure either of hardship or ingenuity (which he claims is the real price of something, and which its nominal price is derived from). In exchanging, indeed, the different productions of different sorts of labour for one another, some allowance is commonly made for both. It is adjusted, however, not by any accurate measure, but by the higgling and bargaining of the market, according to that sort of rough equilty which, though not exact, is sufficient for carrying on the business of common life."
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| You can't know everything. Man, that's liberating!
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| There are too many things in this world to know and not enough brain space to keep it all.
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| Imagine you own a black box that produces all sorts of marvelous things. You accept it, unquestioningly and happily, as every day it makes something new and pleasing. Then one day it's not good enough. Production is too slow, the trinkets it produces are odd or unsatisfactory, and you suspect that it might be outright broken. You lose confidence in it and want to fix and upgrade it. How do you go about doing so? You know nothing of its internal mechanisms, so you can't really proceed in any logical manner. You might start by breaking it open, asking friends, or search the internet for information. And that might get you somewhere.
Now imagine that black box is your mind. Now what? Now the black box is trying to fix itself, but the whole endeaver is swamped in uncertainty. What do you do?
That is the strange journey I've been on for the past two and a half years.
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| I realized how scarce good ideas are. Most are mediocre, unoriginal, and derivative...I need to fill my head with good ideas again. So I've decided to read good books again and do mini-book reviews; I haven't done book reviews since like junior high (I'm not counting research/critical papers from the years after)!
Recently finished "Dreams From My Father" by Barack Obama. Pretty good.
On substance:
Very much a book about family, community and identity. Talks about his cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic childhood in Hawaii with his white parents and grandparents, his struggle with reconciling his dual racial background with his classmates, his eventual self-identification with the history and struggle of black America and his efforts to better their situation in Chicago, and his Roots-like travel and discovery (do NOT mean to sound flippant) in Kenya.
From a nerdy perspective, I wish he spent more time talking about this studies at Columbia and Harvard! Obama just never talks about his time at the two institutions - probably to avoid getting hit with the elitist tag and all that, but still, I'd like to know about his time there. Just in the same way I might read a biography about Warren Buffett and be like "O_O this guy is so smart and awesome," I kinda wish he had that in there so I could know his achievements. But it would be difficult to make those chapters fit with the themes of the book, and maybe make it less palatable for most people. He underplays his intelligence, and I wish he didn't.
On style:
Written very thoughtfully, yet simply, in a friendly, welcoming tone. Very similar to his speech style, although less inspirational and more frank.
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