Slacker

Well its been ages since I've posted anything here.

I've even had lots and lots of things to blog about!

My biggest problem these days is I simply don't have enough time to do all the things I want. I've been learning lots and lots, reading lots and lots, and thinking lots and lots!

and of course, the more I learn the dumber I feel!

Thinking Christianity?

a blog site where anyone can submit a post about their thoughts about christianity. It's for both believers and non believers.

Moving House this weekend...

Ouch, I hate moving....

am going to living in this area.

Apparently its one of the first villas in the area, absoloutely stunning place with great ocean views.

And, more importantly, it can get broadband :-)

Abortion and belief

Franks post on pro life seemed to spawn lots of discussion!

I had a search around the net for various discussion on abortion, seems like theres HUGE amounts of information from all kinds of angles.

The problem is....

If you think people are killing humans, you really do need to say something! "For evil to prevail requires good men do nothing"

If you get really serious about it, you take serious action.

I wonder if terrorists tend to have the same mentality? They are convinced that they are preventing evil and are driven to extreme action.

This, of course, can cause a MASSIVE problem. I'm a little lost to how we solve it.

perhaps empathic thinking and debate amoungst a diverse range of people will give a more rounded perspective. Or perhaps, conflict is a natural consequence of human society, there is no happy medium.

Praying makes no difference

from scientific american...

a Praying study

Interesting way to spend $2.4 million.

Not so boring

Today I signed up with technorati and found the blogs linked to this one.... There is one called Red Confectionery which I have no idea how I got linked in, but I am. Anyways, this post was marked as boring. I don't think so :-)

Fatherhood

Frank said he'd be interested in my thoughts on this...

One thing that struck me about becoming father for the first time was "fear". This was oddly surprising. When you realise this new baby is your responsibility, that they can't fend for themselves, that there are LOTS of things that could go wrong and you only have limited control on preventing some of the things that can go wrong. You realise you need to provide, protect, and nurture. I had to love this kid, in the verb sense. It's not enough to feel love for your kid, but you have to actively love your kid, demonstrate love, etc. For me this was a big learning process. This all hit me in the face as a "realisation" when my first child was born. I "knew" these things in someway before my son was born but it really hits home when the reality was there. Basically I became a lot more vulnerable than I was previously comfortable with and that was scary. I realised I lost some of my independence.

When my second child arrived, the big thing that shocked me is that I had to suddenly share my love with my son and my new daughter. This felt a bit like cheating on my son. But it didnt take too long to adjust.

Now I pretty much feel, whatever happens, it is most important to make the most of the time you have with your kids, love them as much as you can, share as much of yourself with them as possible, and enjoy them. You have to remind yourself, there are ups and downs, you'll make mistakes, you can't be the perfect parent, you shouldn't even try to be, you should be yourself.

World science community speaks out against creationisim

This is interesting, considering the HUGE number of national science acadamies it represents! This includes New Zealands RSNZ ( http://www.rsnz.org/members/academy/ )

http://www.interacademies.net/CMS/6159.aspx

and the pdf statement

I hope this encourages christians who believe in creationisim to re-evaluate that their faith is not tied to the creation story. That the bible needs to be read in different ways depending on the book of the bible. However, I pretty much figure many will try to dig in deeper and hold on to the creation story as literal fact. I also figure there will be many people that will pander to this audience with vauge theories and books.

If your smart enough, making a million dollars is easy

Getting a little bored of suduko? Want to get paid for your problem solving skills?

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

if you are going to have a crack at one, please do "P vs NP", and if you are going to solve it, make sure P=NP

Thanks :-)

Who are you?

This question came up at my philosophy group this evening, I thought I'd jot down my answer.

I am a result of my physical constitution and the physical effects that act upon my physical being. My mind is an emergent phenomenon due to the complex physical makeup of my brain. What is perceived as a soul is a function of this emergent phenomenon.

This mainly represents my current thinking, I don't think its the final answer. But the question is quite good because it gives you a pretty good idea what kind of metaphysics I believe in. One of the things I'm interested in is finding questions that require me to further define my existence or completely redefine my existence. What I like about this answer is that as you go through the consequences of this answer it quite elegantly explains all religion, customs, myths, social structures, etc. What it doesn’t answer is "where do we come from?" or "why do we exist?". But nothing I've come across seems to answer these questions particularly well. For example, if you introduce a god, it simply shifts the question to "where does god come from?" "why does god exist?". There is a good chance that its quite impossible for us to explain the reason for our existence.

Mind Bender

I went to my philosophy group this evening... The topic was quantum physics and its relationship with reality and the various ways we can interpret what quantum physics is telling us.

I kind of forgot how much of a Mind Bender quantum mechanics is to someone who hasnt really come across it before.

Paradigm Shift

Been a while since I've posted anything :-) I've been busy thinking about other stuff, however tonight I went along to a "philosophical study" group. Its organised by a couple of people I used to go to a regular philosophy night with. The study group is organised around a study guide and based on the movie "What the bleep?" (which I havent actually seen yet...). Anyways, the first session was on paradigm shifts.

A few things were interesting to me, I was the only person who was pure atheist / non dualist / no afterlife type person. The others has some concept of an afterlife and spirituality but none were christian. I spent some time listening to others conceptual model of "life" and a few things occured to me....

I think people are often more concerned that their "paradigm" suits who they are rather than whether it is valid or not. This is not too surprising since the validity of ones conceptual model dosn't stop one living life and experiencing valid thoughts and emotions.

People often prefer to re-interpret their paradigm than shift paradigms.

People need some kind of paradigm in order to think. Which may seem obvious, but I think some people don't really understand their paradigm and tend to be a bit all over the place with their thinking.

Often those people who do shift paradigm tend to have some very clear thinking about their current paradigm

It surprises me that people often don't feel the need for a meta paradigm, a paradigm that encompasses all paradigms. Rather, people prefer to say that other paradigms are "wrong" or that they simply are "alternative" without explanation to why all these altnerative paradigms exist.

so, is it more important to live a happy life or is it more important to live a life knowing truth? (which of course most belief systems would claim that their truth is happiness, how could a non truth possibly make you happy?? but, what if thats just a delusion?)

Abortion in the Greenroom

The greenroom tonight asked if there are any situations that abortion is justified? I thought the show went quite well given the nature of the topic. It quickly brought out the "judging" christians who classed abortion as murder. Then it moved into various peoples experiences and then slowly talked more in terms of the human issues of supporting people who have to make those choices.

I noted that people threw the words "human life" around without much thought to what that means. Perhaps its just assumed that it means a "human person". But, that debate is pretty old..... what interests me more is the theological implications of some of what was discussed. For instance, rape. For a christian they have to be pretty happy with the concept that someones start in life is as a rapists child. That god intended them to be. Or are we completely random and god just loves whoever comes along?

Also, what of the babies that are aborted? or die at birth? Given that these babies are human then they have just got a free pass to heaven. They dont have to endure the pain and suffering of human life, they dont have to make choices or face temptation. Yet those of us who do get to grow up will get judged and either go to heaven or hell.... How's this fair? Why would any christians have children?

I also heard people talking about people who got medical advice to abort because they thought the child might be born with no head, the people prayed, went ahead, and the kid was fine. This is great, but I think its dangerous to assume god getting one over "medical science". It dosnt erase the fact there are lots of deformed babies, babies with complications, babies that kill their mothers, etc etc. Children of god.

To me this starts coming close to *one* of the *various* reasons why I dont believe in god. That it all seems more like survival of the fittest, genes trying to propagate from one generation to another with various levels of success. That human life is no more special than any other lifeform other than we got brains big enough to become self aware. There dosnt seem to be any divine influence.

Enjoying Thinking

I've recently been having some really cool clarifying thoughts about software design. Not that I want to go into it on this blog but I more just wanted to comment on how cool it is to think lots on things and then have nice clarifying type thoughts.

So my next step is going to write down my thoughts which should also help sharpen my thinking and then I'll present them to a bunch of fellow software designers (Myself and a couple of others run an industry based group related to software development which is a great forum for presenting this kind of stuff).

But heres the kicker, the more you learn the more you realise there is to learn. There seems to be infinite ever increasing circles of understanding we go through. The consequence of that is we must always be in a state of "learning" and we need to question carefully the "truths" that we have learnt so far. One more circle of understanding could tear down those "truths" and open up new interpretations of everything we have learnt so far.

Rooting our self worth.

In problem solving you often want to find the root cause. One technique for doing that is using the "5 Whys" technique. This is a technique from lean manufacturing from toyota in the 70s, and more relevant to myself agile software development. However the technique is applicable everywhere....ask a question for which you want to find the root cause. Then keeping asking why till a root cause comes out. Sometimes you have to be a little smart in the "why" question but its mostly striaghtforward you may also need to ask "what caused that problem". Sometimes you may require more than 5 question, sometimes maybe less.

Anyways, one problem I see all the time is one of self worth. I'd be curiuos if people can introspectively do the 5 whys and find the root cause. And if not, what is the hardest part of the self reflection.

So :-

If you have no/little self worth, 5 whys?

If you have strong sense of self worth, 5 whys?

If people do this, and put their thinking on the comment system then i'll share my thoughts :-)

Welfare or not?

I've often pondered whether social welfare is a good thing or not and how far we should go in either direction. I'll try and explain what I think are two good arguments for and against.

On the "against" side is the concept of personal liberty/rights and responsibility. This is the idea of freedom. Most people think freedom is a good thing. But if people were truly free then we wouldnt enforce taking money off someone to give to someone else (tax). It should be the choice of the indvidual whether they wish to help their fellow man or not. We shouldnt bleed the wealth creators of what they create, we should take responsibility to create our own wealth and trade with others. Being someone who pays more tax than many people earn I have an empathy for this position. Why shouldn't my trip around the sun cost the same as someone elses? One of the "thought experiments" I've heard for this is the concept of a bunch of people going for a meal. Normally everyone would think its fair everyone pays the same amount for their meal. But, lets imagine everyone had to pay based on their ability to pay. If we represented the entire country as 10 people going to this meal we would find that 1 person is compensating everyone elses meal (if not paying for other peoples entire meal). We also find that the 9 other people have a majority say in how much the 1 person has to pay to compensate their meal. This dosnt sound very fair. The danger is if the "1" person deciedes to go dine somewhere else then it will pretty much screw the 9 others who expect that 1 person to comepensate them so they don't have to pay the full cost for their own meals.

Now the argument "for". Capitlisim pretty much creates a bunch of unemployed people. It is bad for an economy to have 100% employment since then there won't be a labout market. No labour market pushes up costs of business (no competition causes people to ask more and more for their services) and then businesses collapse. So we can pretty much expect there are going to be people who won't be able to earn money. So our best bet is to look after the people who arn't working. We should provide as much education as possible so that we have a fantastic labour market providing us with the best possible people. We should make sure we look after the health of everyone to also protect the labour market. If we dont do this we wont be competitive as a whole and hence it will make it harder for everyone to create wealth. Pretty dry stuff huh? Or another angle, generally people are completely apathetic and while might have the best intentions to help their fellow man will never actually do it so if someone forces them to pay they might grizzle a little but generally wont mind unless it severly impacts their life.

*phew* what a waffle. So whats the answer to all this? Don't know...I suspect it might be along the lines from game "theory" (and the movie a beautiful mind) where we have Nash's Equilibrium theory. This basically states that we have equlibrium when all parties can't increase their benefit without decreasing the benefit to the other parties. Or basically that everyone wins. This does mean that some might not win as well as they could have, but it would of been at the cost of a loss for someone else.

Evolution / Creation - HIV

Tonight the Greenroom (a Christian talkback radio show) was quite interesting. Frank was discussing creation/evolution and how people came to their point of view and he was discussing the rise of HIV in NZ. Now what was interesting to me was how people rationalized the problems. I quite like Frank because he quickly tends to weed out the people who haven’t really thought enough about the problem by asking some brutal questions that often stop people in their tracks. Nice. Anyways, heres some of the interesting reasoning influenced by my bias :)

HIV is declining in Africa, and increasing in NZ, In Africa they preach ABC which stands for Abstinence, B (can't remember, but basically being faithful to one person), and Condoms. Here in NZ the message seems to Condoms, One person, and maybe abstinence....perhaps there’s some kind of link between these two things? Or perhaps comparing the statistics of NZ and Africa is completely flawed? In NZ the rise in HIV is mainly in Gay males meeting online…Perhaps there’s a rise in Gay males getting HIV in Africa that’s completely dwarfed by a huge amount of heterosexuals not getting HIV? Also, I’d like to know what the reason is for HIV reducing in Africa, is it ABC? Or is it Education? Or Condoms? Or something else? While we are on the subject, its also quite interesting that its actually a lot harder for heterosexuals to get HIV through conventional sex. Also men are 50,000 times less likely than women to get HIV from conventional sex. Not that that means a lot, but it was an interesting thing I read about a while back in “Time”? (I think).

Evolution / Creation – This topic seems to always get a great response! Mainly it was 6 day creation vs Evolution. Some odd stuff came up….

“If you believe in evolution you can’t be a Christian because god designed everything for a purpose”. Yet everything that evolved has features designed for a particular purpose!

“We can’t of evolved from monkeys because they would of evolved too and wouldn’t be around any more, something else would be around”. The monkeys we have today are also evolved from previous monkey / ape like creatures. There aren’t many animals that haven’t evolved over the last million or so years. Crocodiles and sharks I think have mainly stayed constant.


“6 days…..well day could be mean 10000 years because elsewhere in the bible it says a day is like 10000 years”. The universe is probably around 14-15 billion years old.

“day in the creation story could mean an indefinite amount of time”. Possibly, but still, the order of creation doesn’t seem to match science.

“its just a theory….”. Mainstream scientific theories tend to have a huge mass of scientific data, huge amounts of research, experiments, etc. Generally they are a theory because no one can disprove the theory (yet cannot be proved as a law). Anyone can have a theory, but for it to become mainstream a lot of people are going to try and shoot it down. Those that don’t get shot down tend to get accepted as the best description we have about the way something works. To say its “just a theory” is dangerous ground, to be fair you should really have a competing theory that’s just as robust.

“everything cant just be random, there must be a god that has created all this”. This is a common way to answer questions we can’t answer. All this does is shift the question to “why is there a god?” did he randomly come about? Which of course…..”no no, gods always existed” so if your happy with that reasoning we can also reason…..so therefore whatever created the universe could of existed forever…..and in a “forever” or “infinite” the chance of anything happening is very likely. God is a good blurry thing…..because we can define him as unknowable, but in all reality I think the cause of this universe is probably unknowable whether there’s a god or not.

“I studied biology……in high school, and I think evolution is wrong”. I think a *little* more study is needed.

“I read something about guy X who said evolution can’t be because of Y”. Find out the other side of the story. Often there are many subtleties that you probably don’t appreciate and its relatively easy for smart people to come up with a convincing case that’s completely incorrect. Scrutiny by many many people is needed.

“The great flood flooded the world and mixed up all the sediment and the geology is now all false”. Nice. So this would mean that everywhere in the world we can detect the flood. We an explain what happened to all that water. And because of the nuclear energies god used some how all the carbon dating got a bit munted.

What worries me is all these Christians reasoning about creation in all kinds of odd ways and stating evolution didn’t happen. What happens when the evidence is so overwhelming for evolution (which I think it is now). Are they willing to give up their faith cause they got it wrong so are probably wrong about everything to do with god? Or they are happy being wrong and god letting them get it wrong? Also trying to introduce people to a faith where some loud mouths advocate something that’s wrong? Its not like Christianity needs the creation story of genesis, I think perhaps there are stronger messages. I think perhaps its more symbolic. Either way….My suggestion is that anyone who is really interested in all this should really read all about evolution, really get to grips with why people believe in. Perhaps then it will be easier to reconcile science and Faith. Remember, some of the worlds great scientists were men of Faith.

I just can't prove it all!

One of the most significant mathmaticians of the 20th centrury is a guy named Kurt Gödel'. What he's most famous for is his incpompleteness theorems. Now while a lot of what he talks about is in relation to systems that can describe numbers I think it holds true for trying to describe the universe also. I noticed a while back stephen hawkings was also considering this possibility (and his main focus is on a theory of everything).

Now, hopefully I haven't lost anyone yet :) Math is cool, its just most people don't study it long enough to find that out! anyways....

Taking a very simplistic look at the theory it basically states that given a set of "rules" that describe something then there is a true statement you can make thats not provable. You can add a new rule to prove the statement but that rule will just create another true statement thats not provable. (now this is very simplified and the rules must be capable of describing certain things....but...). I think this has interesting implications for philosophy. Namely, we can't come up with a philosophy thats completely provable!

Imagination or Reality?

Heres something to think about

How much of your experience is reality based? and how much is imagination based?

I have to clarify a bit here, I'm using the word imagination as "anything that the brain adds onto your interaction with the world"

To me....It seems that >95% of what we experience is purely in our heads. What would we expect to be the result of this?

A huge variety of ways of living life, belief systems, cultures, traditions. Only tempered by one set of ideas an beliefs dominanting another set into oblivion.

It means in many situations just by changing ones perception of a situation changes the entire experience of that situation.

It means we have to work really really hard to workout what is real.

It means reality is often less interesting than what we can imagine.

It means our experience of life is very controllable. By our selves or others.

meta blog creation

Over the weekend (being disconnected to the net) I sat down and started writing some blogs, then found I came up with lots of blog entries in lots of of different subject area but they all kind of tie into a theme of perhaps "atheist wisdom". Either way, I have quite a few blogs planned and I'm really enjoying fleshing some of them out a bit more. I have no idea whos really reading any of it (only a few people at this stage) but its really just place to write down various idle thoughts I've had over time. Anyways, if you do see anything that you think is wrong, do comment. Also I am noticing Im wanting to highlight technical ideas without exploring the technical parts so much, just trying to pick out the possible implications and what it might mean about the nature of things. Anyone find any of my blogs interesting from this poin of view should do their own investigation into the idea. Also, if anyone has any technical, philosophical or scientific concept they really dont get....or just simple want an overview.....just drop a comment and i'd be a happy to explore it more.