Food for thought

The CABDYN seminar series most definitely deserves a blog entry on brainsplurge. The presentation on Physics and Complexity by Professor David Sherrington in particular stimulated the writing of this post. In fact it was one slide that really stuck in my head (which I'v been cheeky and copied).

First of all it seems physicists live in a weird and wonderful world. They are apparently searching for u = 0, a theory that defines everything, and have a license to think extremely big.

How I understand this slide is that if you're try solve a problem, and you have all the tools known to man at your fingertips, then you could say you're sitting on a optimisation curve where the green dot is on the graph. But, despite best efforts there might be a red point that is a far better solution to the problem, but with a huge branch of missing mathematics in the way.
Well, as I heard things, it seems physicists are happy to draw graphs that say that point red exists, and even assign a probability to its existence (second graphic).

Is this delving into cogntive science, and saying that mathematical truth is a function of cognition, and by optimising the problem solver, we can optimise the problem.

No idea how to conclude this blog post apart from giving my apologies to my undoubted mistranslation of a great talk on 'simulated annealing' in ferrous metals, the brain, and the stock market.

Laser's edge

The more you think through an idea, the closer it comes to a peak where it seems many answers are equally likely. I guess we can only think through an idea until we run out of information, so the process feels like we've reached a summit, but we've actually just arrived at the limit of our knowledge (or our ability to think).

This morning I was thinking:

(1) how convenient it is to be religious (believe in 'god'), because this helps people fail to recognise that their fate is in their hands, or instead for the religious people, its in the hands of the people that control them, (or brain-washed them in their youth). of course their is no such thing as a god helping us out, we shape our own lives, or it is shaped for us by our environment (including more rational people).

but this afternoon, this thought turned to:

(2) how necessary it is to believe in god, since we cannot know everything, and can never be in complete charge of our destiny, and if we try we'll become too tight in our thinking, so unhappy and unproductive.

these observations in themselves are moot, what is interesting is that a single belief (in god) can be arrived at for entirely different reasons. the ignorant and the learned will end up requiring faith, hope and all other human frailties to maintain their sanity.

of course there is a big difference between 1 and 2 in practical terms, 1 will not strive to understand why they need faith, they just do what they are told. 2 will walk a more painful and elegant path, but they will know why they ended up where they did.

i guess it all goes back to our animal ancestry, where we are constantly striving to spread our genes through shaping social structures around our own phenotypic needs. science is the new religious order, and tries to introduce a more egalitarian process to creating and analysing knowledge. before it was all about forcing people to memorise words, and live by them, now its about appreciating process and engaging in it.

there is one common theme, we create games (religions) to battle our egos from self-certainty and megalomania. its never healthy for self to become to sure. like mr Sidhartta and Pirsig said, zen and quality are only experienced when part of the flux (well they didn't use these words, but this is a brainsplurge). to look after our brains, so think, and be part of the global brain, this is how we have to live. and to complete an almost circular argument; it seems that we have to slow our brains down with illogical concepts to be part of the flow. we have to believe in faith and even god, even though we know this is nonsense, just to cope, because we are frail human beings.

but robots and genetic engineering are coming, maybe we can create a self that doesn't suffer so. but maybe there is no limit, and tomorrow's fundamentalists will be the people that say, even if you enhance you'll end up with the same issues: be back at point 1.

what will be next? is there any way to jump to another more satisfying train of though, an entirely different hillock?

How to be a customer

Capitalism is a beautiful system, but
Customers need education otherwise the average person is too easy to exploit,
Intelligent customers will shape a better market.