We live in a world that follows rules. We don't know what most of those rules are; some of them, we understand a bit and can approximate to decent levels. Not knowing the rules, however, doesn't change the fact that the rules exist and are pretty consistent.
The more you know about the rules and about the world around you, the better off you'll be in trying to maneuver through life. To this end, the most important thing in life is the truth. If you don't have facts and real information, any decision you make is automatically flawed. Deteriming what is real - what is truth - is the most important act you will ever undertake.
What's more, you'll have to make that determination every moment of every day of your life. As I said, we only know approximations of some of the rules; the rest are either completely unknown or guesses at best. Sometimes we don't even know that a rule exists. So, every time you hear a statement or learn a fact, you need to be able to make a determination on the truth of that statement or fact.
The most obvious way to verify a statement is to see if it's consistent with what you can observe in the world around you. If someone tells you the sky is pink but you look up and see it's blue, you've just falsified that information. If someone tells you that "doing x will cause y", and you do "x" repeatedly but "y" doesn't happen, you've falsified that statement; if "y" *does* happen, you know that the statement has truth in it.
While it would be great to say that something is either true or false, we don't have a way to do so most of the time. The best we can sometimes do is approximations - deteriming whether something is likely true or likely false rather than absolutely true or false. Some statements are easily proven true but hard to falsify; for others, the reverse is true and it's easy to falisfy but hard to prove. There are also statements which can't be proven either way - sometimes because we don't have the ability right now, sometimes because we'll never have the ability.
The most important thing in any life is truth, and the most important skill you can hone is learning how to identify level of truth in a statement. Observable reality is the only measuring stick of value. If something doesn't match up with observable reality, it simply isn't true.
2010-10-13
2010-10-01
The map is not the territory.
Most people have no clue what that phrase means, but it's very important.
In a park near you, there is likely a tree of some sort. It doesn't matter if it's tall or short, evergreen or perennial, flowering or not. The tree exists.
You have an image of the tree, a concept of it, a description. You can reference it in conversations with others, or in poetry if the fancy takes you, because of this. But, and here is the tricky part, the concept you have of the tree is not the same thing as the tree itself.
The tree exists as a thing, whether you think of it or not, whether you name it or not, whether you comprehend it or not. The thing itself, the existence that is true even if there was nothing to observe it, is called a nuomenon. Your idea of the thing, your descriptions and memories and such, are called the phenomenon (which is "the thing as perceived"). The two are very distinct.
A single nuomenon can have multiple phenomena - in fact, there's at least one for every observer. Each person, animal, insect, or even bacteria experiences the tree separately and thus has a different, unique way of describing it. These phenomena can be related, shared between people (or other creatures) with words or sounds or scents.
The thing itself, though - the nuomenon - is singular. It exists independent of (and in fact outside) observation, and it cannot be related or experienced. In a sense, the phenomenon is the map of your neighborhood, while the nuomenon is the actual neighborhood itself. The map is useful, but it can't in any way represent the full reality of the neighborhood: the smells, the sights, the friendliness or animosity of neighbors, etc.
The point is, the two are separate. The description or experience of something, while useful, is not the thing itself. The map is not the territory.
The problem arises when people begin to think that the map is the territory: when they start to mentally think of their description of something as being equivalent to the thing itself. One very common but unfortunate example of this is stereotyping: someone recognizes a prominant characteristic of a group of people and then uses that characteristic (and usually whatever negative traits they associate with it) as the full description of anyone in the group. Individuals are, obviously, individuals, and usually differ drastically in many ways, but to the stereotyper, their description (the map) has become synonymous with the individual (the territory).
Other examples:
Sometimes, people try to confuse map and territory deliberately. A good example of this is the "Tea Party", which is trying to get people to see the entire party as only one aspect of the movement (the anti-government portion) and completely miss the full spectrum of what the movement is actually doing/vowing to do (to be fair, most political parties do this).
If you ever find yourself frustrated that something isn't behaving "as it should", this is almost always a sign that your map is faulty and needs to be adjusted: either your understanding is flawed or your information is incomplete (or both). The nuomenon is perfect (in the sense that it is entirely self-consistent), so any inconsistency has to be in the phenomenon (your understanding/experience of it).
Ignoring the realities of the territory and simply assuming the map is correct can lead you to walk off of cliffs, metaphorical or otherwise.
In a park near you, there is likely a tree of some sort. It doesn't matter if it's tall or short, evergreen or perennial, flowering or not. The tree exists.
You have an image of the tree, a concept of it, a description. You can reference it in conversations with others, or in poetry if the fancy takes you, because of this. But, and here is the tricky part, the concept you have of the tree is not the same thing as the tree itself.
The tree exists as a thing, whether you think of it or not, whether you name it or not, whether you comprehend it or not. The thing itself, the existence that is true even if there was nothing to observe it, is called a nuomenon. Your idea of the thing, your descriptions and memories and such, are called the phenomenon (which is "the thing as perceived"). The two are very distinct.
A single nuomenon can have multiple phenomena - in fact, there's at least one for every observer. Each person, animal, insect, or even bacteria experiences the tree separately and thus has a different, unique way of describing it. These phenomena can be related, shared between people (or other creatures) with words or sounds or scents.
The thing itself, though - the nuomenon - is singular. It exists independent of (and in fact outside) observation, and it cannot be related or experienced. In a sense, the phenomenon is the map of your neighborhood, while the nuomenon is the actual neighborhood itself. The map is useful, but it can't in any way represent the full reality of the neighborhood: the smells, the sights, the friendliness or animosity of neighbors, etc.
The point is, the two are separate. The description or experience of something, while useful, is not the thing itself. The map is not the territory.
The problem arises when people begin to think that the map is the territory: when they start to mentally think of their description of something as being equivalent to the thing itself. One very common but unfortunate example of this is stereotyping: someone recognizes a prominant characteristic of a group of people and then uses that characteristic (and usually whatever negative traits they associate with it) as the full description of anyone in the group. Individuals are, obviously, individuals, and usually differ drastically in many ways, but to the stereotyper, their description (the map) has become synonymous with the individual (the territory).
Other examples:
- In organizations, the tendancy over time is to being to treat the company like an org chart or process description with people merely filling in roles. This generally causes tension and discord, since organizations are living, fluid, dymanic systems.
- In science, many scientists who have worked with certain theories over time begin to think like the theory is reality, rather than just being a description of reality; this often leads to drama when data arises that doesn't fit the theory.
- In schools, grades have become the reason for the classes, rather than a method for demonstrating understanding of the content of the classes. A high test score is not equivalent to comprehension of the content.
Sometimes, people try to confuse map and territory deliberately. A good example of this is the "Tea Party", which is trying to get people to see the entire party as only one aspect of the movement (the anti-government portion) and completely miss the full spectrum of what the movement is actually doing/vowing to do (to be fair, most political parties do this).
Maps should be dynamic: they change as new information becomes available, just like Google updating their satellite photos. Too often, mistaking the map for the territory leads to undue dependency or emotional ties to a specific map. That makes it harder (if not impossible) for the individual to adapt as reality changes, and makes any decisions made based on the faulty map automatically suspect.
If you ever find yourself frustrated that something isn't behaving "as it should", this is almost always a sign that your map is faulty and needs to be adjusted: either your understanding is flawed or your information is incomplete (or both). The nuomenon is perfect (in the sense that it is entirely self-consistent), so any inconsistency has to be in the phenomenon (your understanding/experience of it).
Ignoring the realities of the territory and simply assuming the map is correct can lead you to walk off of cliffs, metaphorical or otherwise.
2010-09-20
|2b|
"It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle where you can change the shape of the pieces as well as their positions."
This is one man's description of what programming is like from the perspective of the programmer. From a comprehensibility standpoint, I think it's pretty good.
Programming, as a function, is something that mystifies the vast majority of the population; as a programmer, I think it's safe to say that even the majority of the people paid to program have no real idea what they're doing on the conceptual level. If you ask a bunch of programmers "what do programmers do?", you'll likely hear a range of replies from the uber-technical ("transliterate a requirement") to the basic ("implement a process") - and that's just on the actual work performed. If you ask a bunch of programmers *how* they do what they do, you likely won't get any really substantive answer at all.
It "should" be simple, really. All programming languages consist of a basic series of operations and relationships; such series are notably finite and often fairly short, when you actually look at the principles - offhand, I'd say there are less than 200 specific relators covering all programming languages (though syntax often varies wildly), and probably less than 20 if we are willing to use abstraction. All we're really doing when we program is combining various objects/concepts/"things" using these relators.
Of course, "all" a painter does is put pigment on canvas, and pianists only have 72 or so notes with which to play. The complexities of painting and composition come not from the tools or options but in how those tools and options are utilized. There's a creative step, an inuitive moment or leap that takes place. This leap generally takes things we understand or comprehend and presents them in ways we do not expect and is usually founded in describing the relationship between concepts that heretofor have not been understood as related. The photographer captures profound emotion in a simple flower; the painter portrays the subject from a prespective never before seen; the musician writes a motif that recalls a spring rain.
The fundamental principle here is an understanding - albeit usually subconsciously - of relationships. To quote Lewis Carroll, why is a raven like a writing desk? The first act of creation is in establishing the existence of the unknown - the fact that something is waiting to be created. Usually, this understanding then provides the context for creation - in essence, understanding what is missing gives us the first step in understanding what it is we want to create. We then have to frame that desire in the context of our medium - the semanitcs of creation are different for photography, music, painting and poetry.
We can formalize these steps as lack (or problem), desire, and semantics. What we usually think of as the "creative step" in the series is "desire": the conceptualization of what it is we're trying to achieve in some kind of workable or formal structure. This is the "hard part", as it requires both clarification of the problem as well as realizing the limits of the semantics even while we work separately from either.
And this is the step in programming that most people don't understand. Semantics, in programming, is merely the syntax of the language - something even text editors can manage, so obviously not a major issue intellectually. The "problem" is usually input from a client or customer, though oftentimes such individuals need help clarifying exactly what it is that is wrong; still, this is a piece that is easily managed through standard processes. It is the clarification and implementation of desire that requires abstraction and the mental jigsaw puzzle: figuring out how to fulfill the needs presented in the desire under the limitations of the semantics, when there are quite literally infinite potential solutions but only a few practical ones.
Programming is, for all its technical requirements, a creative act not terribly different from any other artistic pasttime. Just like other arts, the moment of inspiration in programming cannot be laid out in a procedure or taught in a classroom. One can teach someone to use a camera, but one cannot teach someone to take inspiring photographs; one can teach someone English, but one cannot teach them to write beautiful poetry. One can teach programming languages, syntax, and grammar, but one cannot teach effective programming.
Obviously, the better a person is a coder (or photographer, or linguist, or...), the wider the range of tools and options that are available to that person while programming (or photographing, or writing, or...) However, as artforms, all these rely on moments of inspiration. One can encourage the mindset needed to have such moments, and train oneself (or others) in the sorts of abstract daydreaming that forms the basis for them, but one cannot explicitly teach inspiration itself. It comes naturally or not at all.
This is one man's description of what programming is like from the perspective of the programmer. From a comprehensibility standpoint, I think it's pretty good.
Programming, as a function, is something that mystifies the vast majority of the population; as a programmer, I think it's safe to say that even the majority of the people paid to program have no real idea what they're doing on the conceptual level. If you ask a bunch of programmers "what do programmers do?", you'll likely hear a range of replies from the uber-technical ("transliterate a requirement") to the basic ("implement a process") - and that's just on the actual work performed. If you ask a bunch of programmers *how* they do what they do, you likely won't get any really substantive answer at all.
It "should" be simple, really. All programming languages consist of a basic series of operations and relationships; such series are notably finite and often fairly short, when you actually look at the principles - offhand, I'd say there are less than 200 specific relators covering all programming languages (though syntax often varies wildly), and probably less than 20 if we are willing to use abstraction. All we're really doing when we program is combining various objects/concepts/"things" using these relators.
Of course, "all" a painter does is put pigment on canvas, and pianists only have 72 or so notes with which to play. The complexities of painting and composition come not from the tools or options but in how those tools and options are utilized. There's a creative step, an inuitive moment or leap that takes place. This leap generally takes things we understand or comprehend and presents them in ways we do not expect and is usually founded in describing the relationship between concepts that heretofor have not been understood as related. The photographer captures profound emotion in a simple flower; the painter portrays the subject from a prespective never before seen; the musician writes a motif that recalls a spring rain.
The fundamental principle here is an understanding - albeit usually subconsciously - of relationships. To quote Lewis Carroll, why is a raven like a writing desk? The first act of creation is in establishing the existence of the unknown - the fact that something is waiting to be created. Usually, this understanding then provides the context for creation - in essence, understanding what is missing gives us the first step in understanding what it is we want to create. We then have to frame that desire in the context of our medium - the semanitcs of creation are different for photography, music, painting and poetry.
We can formalize these steps as lack (or problem), desire, and semantics. What we usually think of as the "creative step" in the series is "desire": the conceptualization of what it is we're trying to achieve in some kind of workable or formal structure. This is the "hard part", as it requires both clarification of the problem as well as realizing the limits of the semantics even while we work separately from either.
And this is the step in programming that most people don't understand. Semantics, in programming, is merely the syntax of the language - something even text editors can manage, so obviously not a major issue intellectually. The "problem" is usually input from a client or customer, though oftentimes such individuals need help clarifying exactly what it is that is wrong; still, this is a piece that is easily managed through standard processes. It is the clarification and implementation of desire that requires abstraction and the mental jigsaw puzzle: figuring out how to fulfill the needs presented in the desire under the limitations of the semantics, when there are quite literally infinite potential solutions but only a few practical ones.
Programming is, for all its technical requirements, a creative act not terribly different from any other artistic pasttime. Just like other arts, the moment of inspiration in programming cannot be laid out in a procedure or taught in a classroom. One can teach someone to use a camera, but one cannot teach someone to take inspiring photographs; one can teach someone English, but one cannot teach them to write beautiful poetry. One can teach programming languages, syntax, and grammar, but one cannot teach effective programming.
Obviously, the better a person is a coder (or photographer, or linguist, or...), the wider the range of tools and options that are available to that person while programming (or photographing, or writing, or...) However, as artforms, all these rely on moments of inspiration. One can encourage the mindset needed to have such moments, and train oneself (or others) in the sorts of abstract daydreaming that forms the basis for them, but one cannot explicitly teach inspiration itself. It comes naturally or not at all.
2010-06-27
Sometimes other people say it best
I am the outcome of a trillion coalescing possibilities...That's a quote from PZ Myers; go read the whole thing.
2010-06-03
Apples and protons
So here's the deal. This apple, the one we can't decide whether it's real or not, isn't just an apple. It's a proton - or electron, or neutron, or really any particle of matter in the universe.
Most people imagine particles as little tiny marbles - mainly because this is how they're presented in chemistry and physics classes. That's the old model, though, and even the "new" model - developed with the rise of quantum physics - is becoming more and more suspect.
You see, just like our first apple, particles don't really exist. They're not physically "there" with any exact properties we can determine. Everything we know about them we know indirectly by how they interact with other matter (of course), but since we don't know that the other matter exists either, we're in a bit of a conundrum.
We do know that the idea of little marbles doesn't work for a variety of reasons. Again, that's not new. One basic flaw is with the electron, which doesn't exist like a moon orbiting a planet but more like a shell of potentiation around the nucleus (and no, there's not really a simpler way of saying it). What we didn't know then that is rapidly being suspected now is that the nucleus is the same: a mass of potential rather than bunch of marbles stuck together. When we "knock a neutron out", it's more like the properties of a neutron being separated out of the miasma rather than a billiard-ball action.
It gets "worse", though. Even a separate, distinct free-floating particle like a neutron isn't "whole" - it's made up of smaller particles, or seems to be. However, these particles - such as quarks - don't seem to be able to exist by themselves for any practical length of time. So, whether they really exist independently or are merely the "shards" of an "exploding" particle, we don't know.
And then we get into the matter/energy conundrum: how can two things with no common physicality be interchangeable? The answer, of course, is that they have to have some common physicality - some mechanism or particle or something - that is matter when grouped like this but energy when grouped like that. Such is part of the search for the mystical Theory of Everything, which is looking to be more and more mythical as time goes on.
So, we don't know what anything is, we can't fundamentally describe anything, and we're not even sure we'll ever be able to. Yet, matter exists (or seems to). How?
This is our second apple - the average, the concept, or in physics terms, the superposition of the combined wave functions. Detectable matter, to the best of our perception, only exists as an average - even on subatomic scales. We can categorize things loosely, describe fuzzy margins with inherent leeway, but we can never state exactly what something is or isn't. When we look for something, it seems to be there, but if we study its effects and and try to pinpoint it, we can't be sure.
Luckily, "fuzzy margins" are good enough to a lot of things - in fact for pretty much any applied science, such as engineering or nuclear physics. However, the fuzziness places an accuracy limit on what we can know at this point. Unless we can find some more fundamental principle that can eliminate the fuzziness, we're rapidly coming to a wall in our understanding of basic existence.
So, the next time you sit in a chair, try to understand that the only reason you don't fall to the floor is that the average of your existence can interact with the average of its existence. And the next time you eat an apple, try to picture it as a superposition of potentials, not just a piece of ripe fruit.
Most people imagine particles as little tiny marbles - mainly because this is how they're presented in chemistry and physics classes. That's the old model, though, and even the "new" model - developed with the rise of quantum physics - is becoming more and more suspect.
You see, just like our first apple, particles don't really exist. They're not physically "there" with any exact properties we can determine. Everything we know about them we know indirectly by how they interact with other matter (of course), but since we don't know that the other matter exists either, we're in a bit of a conundrum.
We do know that the idea of little marbles doesn't work for a variety of reasons. Again, that's not new. One basic flaw is with the electron, which doesn't exist like a moon orbiting a planet but more like a shell of potentiation around the nucleus (and no, there's not really a simpler way of saying it). What we didn't know then that is rapidly being suspected now is that the nucleus is the same: a mass of potential rather than bunch of marbles stuck together. When we "knock a neutron out", it's more like the properties of a neutron being separated out of the miasma rather than a billiard-ball action.
It gets "worse", though. Even a separate, distinct free-floating particle like a neutron isn't "whole" - it's made up of smaller particles, or seems to be. However, these particles - such as quarks - don't seem to be able to exist by themselves for any practical length of time. So, whether they really exist independently or are merely the "shards" of an "exploding" particle, we don't know.
And then we get into the matter/energy conundrum: how can two things with no common physicality be interchangeable? The answer, of course, is that they have to have some common physicality - some mechanism or particle or something - that is matter when grouped like this but energy when grouped like that. Such is part of the search for the mystical Theory of Everything, which is looking to be more and more mythical as time goes on.
So, we don't know what anything is, we can't fundamentally describe anything, and we're not even sure we'll ever be able to. Yet, matter exists (or seems to). How?
This is our second apple - the average, the concept, or in physics terms, the superposition of the combined wave functions. Detectable matter, to the best of our perception, only exists as an average - even on subatomic scales. We can categorize things loosely, describe fuzzy margins with inherent leeway, but we can never state exactly what something is or isn't. When we look for something, it seems to be there, but if we study its effects and and try to pinpoint it, we can't be sure.
Luckily, "fuzzy margins" are good enough to a lot of things - in fact for pretty much any applied science, such as engineering or nuclear physics. However, the fuzziness places an accuracy limit on what we can know at this point. Unless we can find some more fundamental principle that can eliminate the fuzziness, we're rapidly coming to a wall in our understanding of basic existence.
So, the next time you sit in a chair, try to understand that the only reason you don't fall to the floor is that the average of your existence can interact with the average of its existence. And the next time you eat an apple, try to picture it as a superposition of potentials, not just a piece of ripe fruit.
2010-06-02
Every apple is a real apple.
Take every apple that ever existed, whether real or imaginary. Combine them all into a single structure - not exactly by averaging, but by overlaying the different pieces of information together to get a cohesive whole. The result would be something that, basically, averages out to an apple in theory but doesn't necessarily resemble a physical apple.
That's okay, though, because we're not after a physical apple. We're after a potential apple - in essence, a kind of mathematical function that defines the limits within which "apple" exists. The limits are fuzzy, just like the edges of our structure: some characteristics don't start and stop so much as fade, and fractal math states that such edges must be infinite in gradiation. In linguistic sense, you're left with a bunch of traits that are "apple", a bunch that are "apple-ish", and some that "tend to be apple" at this end but gradually become less apple-y at the other.
Now, let's use that structure - that equation or description, however you want to think of it - as our definition of "apple". Suddenly, every apple is a real apple, because we're not looking for specifics so much as trends or patterns.
This is hard for a lot of people to grasp: we've traded something hard and explicit for something vague, but in doing so end up with a better definition and, in actual fact, a better understanding of that to which we're referring. Whereas before nothing could be said to be an apple (and thus the definition useless), we can now define with reasonable precision what is or isn't an apple and use that data for further explorations (such as defining what is or isn't an apple pie).
That's okay, though, because we're not after a physical apple. We're after a potential apple - in essence, a kind of mathematical function that defines the limits within which "apple" exists. The limits are fuzzy, just like the edges of our structure: some characteristics don't start and stop so much as fade, and fractal math states that such edges must be infinite in gradiation. In linguistic sense, you're left with a bunch of traits that are "apple", a bunch that are "apple-ish", and some that "tend to be apple" at this end but gradually become less apple-y at the other.
Now, let's use that structure - that equation or description, however you want to think of it - as our definition of "apple". Suddenly, every apple is a real apple, because we're not looking for specifics so much as trends or patterns.
This is hard for a lot of people to grasp: we've traded something hard and explicit for something vague, but in doing so end up with a better definition and, in actual fact, a better understanding of that to which we're referring. Whereas before nothing could be said to be an apple (and thus the definition useless), we can now define with reasonable precision what is or isn't an apple and use that data for further explorations (such as defining what is or isn't an apple pie).
2010-06-01
There's no such thing as a real apple.
Most of us had those silly kid's books with a picture for every letter of the alphabet; almost always, "A" is represented by "apple" - generally a picture of a bright red shiny apple, sometimes including a happy-faced worm poking out of it. That picture - or some other like it - became the foundation of the concept of "apple" we associate with the word "apple" for the rest of our lives. Over the years, we've added to it, modified it slightly. We've encountered real apples and other pictures, and so the mental image gets a little distorted from that original. However, when we think "apple", we see the picture.
The problem is, it doesn't exist. No apple ever looked like that. Even if your mental image is of the last physical apple you ate, your image is incomplete as well as tainted by other memories.
Simply put, the image in your head - the concept of a "real apple" - doesn't exist, and any real apple that does exist won't exactly match the image in your head. So, there's no such thing as a real apple - just the approximations of "apple" to varying degrees.
The problem is, it doesn't exist. No apple ever looked like that. Even if your mental image is of the last physical apple you ate, your image is incomplete as well as tainted by other memories.
Simply put, the image in your head - the concept of a "real apple" - doesn't exist, and any real apple that does exist won't exactly match the image in your head. So, there's no such thing as a real apple - just the approximations of "apple" to varying degrees.
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