A Thousand Words

Whenever I see a documentary or short piece about some sort of personal human tragedy, I can usually tell where the story is going by the pictures they show.  It's like there's a secret code or unspoken standard behind the kind of photos they show based on the kind of story involved.  So, I bring you the results of my extensive research:

• If they show pictures of teenage kids at their Prom or Homecoming, the story will probably involve a drunk driving fatality.  
• However, if the Prom pictures are supplemented with pictures of the boyfriend lounging on a couch sullenly in ratty jeans and a ball cap, then the story probably involves a downward spiral into drug abuse.
• If they show pictures a young mother holding a baby, then she was either the victim of a fatal assault, or the husband killed her for the life insurance money.
• If they show pictures of a guy in his mid-thirties on a fishing trip with his friends, smiling confidently at the camera, then he probably had a long struggle with a fatal disease.
• If they show pictures of a child alone, looking a little too serious or sad and he's poking at the dirt with a stick or huddled up in a corner, then you're in for a bizarre and disturbing story of abduction or abuse.
• However, if the child is pictured in bed in his pajamas laughing, then he probably died young from a fatal disease. 
• If they show pictures of a man in the background of a picture full of smiling people and he's looking at the camera but not smiling at all, then there's probably a breakdown/murder/suicide involved.
• If they show a picture a couple and the woman is looking at the man instead of the camera and the guy is not quite smiling, then you're looking at a long history of abuse.
• However, if the couple has their faces pressed together and they're close-up to the lens of the camera and they both have big beaming smiles on their faces and especially if they're wearing life jackets at the time, then the couple most likely died in a freak accident while on vacation.

There it is.  Obviously, there's a process at work here similar to the re-occurring phrases and keywords that are often found in obituaries.  There are certain implicit emotional chords that are meant to be tapped into: "They had so much potential."; "He was so strong."; "What a lonely child.", and so on.  After all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words.    

See You Next Month

  

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 3)

Before taking yet another crack at Relativity, I tried to do a little "research" this time, which basically means I Googled "understanding relativity" and clicked on a bunch of links, read a bunch of articles, followed some of Google's suggested, related searches, and so on.  Not that I've always taken such a lazy, haphazard approach to the subject.  I've actually read a few books on relativity in the past.  But the problem has always been the same.  It's this problem that lead me to writing these posts in the first place.  All of these sources do a fine job of explaining the way that relativity works, but they never really tell me how or why it works that way....At least, not to my satisfaction.  Maybe I'm just missing something. Examples like the Twin Paradox merely demonstrate the fact of time dilation.  Yes, when the twin in the ship gets home his brother is older than him, I get it.  Yes, it's amazing and mind blowing and all that, but I want to know why.  

Maybe I need to have a clearer definition of what I mean by that.  I'm sure someone could sit me down and explain the math to me with a bunch of crazy equations involving triangles and italic letters until I was sure that I was about to have a brain aneurysm, and who knows, maybe that's what it takes to even have a basic understanding of it.  Maybe I'm totally out of my league on this one.  But I'm hoping that there's a way to comprehend the concept itself without getting deep into the technical details.  I'd like to imagine that someone could give me a satisfying explanation of how an air conditioner works without having to resort to wiring schematics and a chart showing the molecular configuration and chemical composition of the refrigerating agent.  I just want a brief description of how the damn thing makes cold air.  Am I asking too much?

Of course relativity is a bit more complicated that an air conditioner, I realize that.  I guess I'm trying to understand how the idea first occurred to Einstein.  There had to be a moment before he worked out all the math and the details when he looked at the constant speed of light, relative motion, space, and time and saw the first hints of his theory.  There had to be a moment when the simple genesis of the idea made sense, and he knew he was on to something.  I guess that's the moment I'm trying to return to.  I want to take those same elements and figure out how someone could see relativity there.  Nowadays relativity has been tested and confirmed and it has a solid place in the annals of scientific history.  But what if somehow all evidence of it completely disappeared and it somehow vanished from the public consciousness?  How could someone rediscover the idea from scratch?  How could they work it out from the elements involved?

This may seem like a pointless line of speculation and waste of time.  It must sound odd the way I'm putting it.  I'm not talking about reinventing relativity, or trying to forensically recreate Einstein's mental processes.  I'm talking about the core understanding of a basic idea.  Let me put it like this, let's say you wanted to understand how fire is made.  You read some books, you search the internet, and yet you keep seeing the same thing.  They all just keep saying, "Rub two sticks together and voila!"  But that's not what you want to know.  You want to know why rubbing the two sticks together makes fire.  So then they tell you, "Well it's all based on this guy's theory of rubbing sticks together."  So at that point, you say, "Well, what if that guy never existed.  What would make a person look at two sticks and think that rubbing them together would make fire?  What if we had to figure it out for ourselves?"  

This is where I feel like I'm at with relativity.  I don't know why I bother.  It just frustrates me not to be able to understand it.  Like I said, maybe I'm just in over my head.  Maybe I should just humbly accept my limitations and move on.  Really, it's not even the whole theory I'm trying to grasp.  Obviously, most of my speculation has focused on the time-dilation effect, which is only a very small part of the theory.  Not that the concept of gravity being caused by mass warping space is any picnic to try to understand either, but I'm not even close to ready to open that can of worms yet.                                            

Anyway, I hope to get things back on track with my next post on the subject.  I guess I got off on a bit of a tangent here.  I'll return to my two neighboring houses next time, and maybe have some new ideas on how to approach the whole thing.  Almost immediately upon hitting the "publish" button on my last relativity post, I noticed a possible flaw in my scenario.  At first glance it seemed as though this flaw might undo any progress I might have made and put me right back at square one with guy B's trip seeming instantaneous to the guy in house A.  However, after considering the matter, I think this "flaw" might actually point to a way through, rather than a step back.  I'm still working it out, though.  

Next time?

The Devil & The Information Paradox

According to Christianity, long before the foundation of the universe was laid and the seeds of physical existence sown, there was a war in Heaven.  The archangel Lucifer led a revolt against God.  As punishment for this attempt to overthrow him, God cast Lucifer into Hell along with all the angels who followed him.  The question has often been asked: Why didn't God simply destroy Lucifer?  Why allow him to exist and eventually come to corrupt and cause trouble for mankind?

Well, to look at the story as a simple mythology, the obvious answer would be that the story represents the origin of Evil and its adversarial relationship with Good.  It is a cautionary tale of envy, pride, and defiance.  The story is not constructed around any sort of final, complete victory over evil, because the conflict is meant to be an on-going one.  The Devil is allowed to persist in the tale out of a certain necessity, because the story is told in retrospect.  War, disease, pain, and death are all still with us.  Evil still exists, and its agencies are still at large, engineering sorrow and disaster all over the world.  The story is not an ending but a beginning, with the battle lines drawn and the world itself at stake.  

But this sort of answer only works if you treat the story as a fictional one, and it considers the question above as a matter of plot-construction.  It steps outside the reality of the story.  It deals not with the action on stage, but instead with the scaffolding that supports the stage.  It doesn't really address the problem of why God didn't destroy the Devil.  It merely points out that you bought a ticket for four-hour play, and so the main conflict can't be resolved in the opening act. Needless to say, this answer is an unsatisfying one for those who take the story literally, those who believe this didn't take place on a stage, but in the open air of reality.  Aside from that, it only confesses the necessity of the plot hole.  It does nothing to fix it.  

Now, I'm not here to debate the literal truth of the story.  I can't say that I've reached the point in my life or my consideration of these issues to make any sort of claim one way or the other.  These things, of course, go far beyond the scope of the matter at hand, and hopefully I'll be able to get into these things gradually down the road and reach some kind of satisfying conclusions.  For the time being, I don't mean to offend or mislead anyone about where I stand on these issues.  All I can say is that I'm still in the process of working these things out myself.  For now, I only wish to make a hypothetical proposition concerning the problem above; a proposition that might even lead to some kind of real truth one way or the other.                     

So, the question was: Why didn't God destroy Lucifer and his followers?  I thought about this for a long time, and then it hit me...maybe he did destroy them.  Maybe the idea of being "cast out of Heaven" is really a metaphor for annihilation. But the problem is that destroying them created another problem. It created a void in existence.  Prior to this God had only created.  He had made Heaven and all the angels in glorious perfection.  Then this insurrection took place, and it had to be dealt with.  Out of necessity, God was driven to do something he had never done before, destroy.  This would have an unavoidable side-effect.  For the first time, something that was would be no more.  For the first time, there would be a nothingness. This nothingness would come to haunt existence, like an inexhaustible vacuum threatening to draw everything into its own annihilation.  Satan, the adversary, is the negation of Lucifer.  He is the nothingness, the void, the hole in existence that was caused when Lucifer was destroyed. His whole problem is that he doesn't exist.  He lurks about reality, trying to consume it and give himself substance.  He wants to exist again, even if it means destroying everything in the process.

There is something in the natural universe that provides an excellent example of the process at work here, the black hole.  When a star dies it collapses in on itself.  In scientific terms it condenses to an infinitely diminished point of overwhelming gravity.  This gravity draws everything that comes near it, even light, into it.  In effect, it is the void created in the absence of the star.  Relativity says that gravity is the manifestation of mass warping space, a curvature drawing matter in.  The black hole takes this to its extreme.  It's more than a curvature; it's a hole sucking things into the void.

These black holes pose a problem, known to scientists as the Information Paradox.  The Law of Information basically states that information can not be destroyed.  If you burn a log in the fire, even though the log is consumed, the information of that log still exists and could conceivably be reconstructed on the quantum level from the ashes, the fire, and heat.  Black holes seem to violate this law.  When they consume something, the information it was composed of seems to be destroyed completely.  But this impossible.  The information must persist in some form or another.  Scientists have proposed various solutions to this problem, but they're still working on it.

Likewise, God's initial act of destruction caused its own paradox.  Lucifer and his followers could be annihilated, but the fact of this annihilation could not be erased.  The information of their existence could not be destroyed altogether.  It was merely inverted into nothingness, consumed like matter in a black hole, but impossible to obliterate completely.  An afterimage of their existence remained, like a lingering shadow of a light.  This caused a small crack in the fabric of existence, a tiny seed of corruption.  It was a problem that had to be solved or it would eventually threaten to undo everything.

So here we are again at the beginning, and maybe we've gained a fresh start on the story.  But it's only a start.  I plan to go much further with this down the road.  For me, this idea, starting as it does with the premise that God was driven out of necessity to create an unavoidable problem that had to be solved, provides a possibility to shed a light on some of the conundrums of Christianity.  It gives a reason why there's still evil in the world. It provides a possible driving motive to the overall divine plan and a meaning to the purpose of our existence.  The universe, rather than being created on a capricious whim, might play a part in the solution to this problem.  The fall of man, which I touched on in an earlier post might not be just a regrettable misfortune, but instead an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle.  But these are all matters for future posts.  As I said, this is just a beginning.    

                                

Reinventing the Wii

Earlier this year Microsoft released something called the "Kinect" for the Xbox 360.  It's a kind of motion sensor that scans the player's body and allows the player's movements to control the game directly.  As a fan of the Xbox, I was mildly interested in this.  I was disappointed, however, when I saw some of the demos and trailers for the games.  The influence of Nintendo's Wii console was definitely noticeable in the style and content of the games; the cartoonish graphics and more "kid-friendly" game play.  Apparently the folks over at Microsoft are hedging their bets.  I'm sure it seems like simple, obvious logic to them.  The Wii is a big success, therefore if they follow the concept of the Wii, this new device will also be a big success.  Unfortunately, there's a crucial miscalculation involved in their reasoning, a miscalculation that could sink the whole thing before it gets off the ground.  

First of all, they are either grossly misunderstanding or deliberately betraying the demographic of their own customers.  Xbox games have a reputation of being more mature and adult than their Nintendo competitors, and customers generally choose the console for that very reason.  If there is any sort of demand at all for an Xbox motion controller, if there's any sort of void there to fill, it would be to have motion control coupled with typical Xbox style games.  If Xbox gamers wanted to play Wii type games, they would have already bought a Wii.  To me, the smart move would be to design and market this Kinect device to the segment of the population intrigued by the concept of motion control, but yet not interested in the kid-friendly Wii games.  They should go after the people still on the fence, the people waiting for this motion control technology to be used with the kind of games they want to play.  This should be fairly obvious, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would agree, people's who's first reaction to the news of this Kinect was to imagine a motion controlled Halo or Call of Duty.  So why don't the executives at Microsoft seem to see this?  Why are they modeling their product after one that already exists?

Well, it's certainly not a new phenomenon.  I'm sure when some stone age company hit it big with the wheel, their competitor down the road immediately started producing the "Round Spinning Thing."  It seems to be the go-to philosophy in marketing, and yet it is and has always been hopelessly stupid.  I have a newsflash for any empty suit that ascribes to this sort of wisdom: YOUR PRODUCT WILL NOT BE SUCCESSFUL BY IMITATING ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT.  If people are looking for that sort of thing, they will simply buy the original product.  The imitating product will ultimately end up looking like a cheap knock-off (which, of course, it is.)  Microsoft is pushing their product towards the Wii demographic.  Don't they realize those people already own a Wii?  What would they want with the Kinect?  Are the million dollar executives sitting around the boardroom really this dumb?

This sort of thing is all the more frustrating when something I like gets remodeled to more closely resemble another product that's currently in the spotlight.  With each new edition Guitar Hero is turning more and more into Rock Band.  If I wanted to play a full band game, I would go out and buy Rock Band.  Guitar Hero should have stuck with their own concept and gone in their own direction with it.  They should have tried to provide something Rock Band wasn't offering.  As it is, they've practically ruined the franchise trying to ride Rock Band's coat-tails.  The latest installment came and went with barely a whimper.  And of course, this phenomenon isn't confined to the world of video games.  I could spend a whole post ranting about how one fast food chain after another has ruined their food trying to be more like McDonald's.    

Now, I have no problem with trying to make money or looking for the profitable angle, but this is the sort of thing that gives businessmen a bad name.  It is the epitome of the uncreative mind at work.  It's the studio executive that puts pressure on a director to make his movie more like the current leader of the box office.  It's the record executive the coaches a band to sound more like the stuff in top 40 charts.  There's no telling how much talent and originality has been stifled and destroyed by this kind of nonsense.  And the sad thing is, it doesn't work.  Sure, you might have a small-scale success with this approach, but it almost never results in any sort of multi-million dollar blockbuster idea.  The truly innovative always has to break its way through a thick wall of such stupidity to reach the public at large who are actually starving for just this sort of thing.  Those are the true success stories.  The people who's very job it is to give the public what it wants and needs, more often than not end up being an obstacle in the process because of their own small-minded lack of vision.

Hopefully, before this Kinetic idea goes under, possibly taking the Xbox 360 with it, someone will design a game that realizes the full potential of the technology and gives Xbox gamers what they're actually looking for.  Of course the designer will get a lot of blank stares and they'll constantly be told, "People don't what those kind of games."  I'm sure they'll feel at time like they're beating their head against a wall, and they'll have to fight tooth and nail with the persistence of a martyr.  All I can tell them is, don't give up.  Don't give in.  People do want your game.  Let's hope you can slip it past the idiots and into the stores.                        

    

The Coin Experiment

I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel.  It's been an obsession of mine ever since I was a little kid.  I have some thoughts on the subject that I plan to post eventually, but in the meantime I have a thought experiment for you all to think about.  Consider it a kind of prologue; something to stir the water and stimulate speculation.  It's just something to bear in mind and something that will serve as a frame of reference when I finally get around to delving deeper into the matter.

Alright, the experiment begins with a large vault.  The vault has a combination lock on the door, and you are the only one that has the combination.  Inside the vault there is a time machine and a table.  On the table there is only a single coin.  Now, on Friday evening you set this coin so that it is facing heads up on the table.  You seal and lock the vault and leave for the weekend.  No one else can enter the vault while your gone, since no one else has the combination, and no one else is able to disturb the coin.  On Monday morning you return and open the vault.  Then, depending on what you find, you plan on doing one of two things:

1. If you find that the coin is still on heads, you plan to get into the time machine, travel back to Saturday afternoon and flip the coin to tails.  That being the case, the coin should have been on tails when you opened the vault on Monday morning, having already been flipped by yourself on Saturday.  However...
2. If you find that the coin has been flipped to tails, you plan to destroy the time machine, rendering it impossible to have ever traveled back to flip the coin.  But if that's the case, then how did the coin ever come to be on tails?

This is not a riddle.  I have no simple answer for it.  It's just a deliberately engineered paradox, either way you look at it.  Just some food for thought for the time being.      

  

Being John Malkovich: All The World's a Stage...

Being John Malkovich is an undeniably odd movie.  It begins with an out of work, avant-garde puppeteer who takes a filing job with a company called Lester Corp. located on the Mertin-Flemmer Building's 7th & a half floor where the ceilings are only about 4 feet high.  One day, behind the filing cabinets in his office, he discovers a tiny door which leads to the inside of John Malkovich's mind.  The movie piles up such strange details, one after the other, until it seems like an exercise in random absurdity.  But absurd though it is, there is nevertheless a certain logic to it, a certain method to it's madness.  You just have to turn the film upside down and feed it through the projector backwards and it all becomes clear.

Let's begin with Malkovich himself.  In the story he is the "vessel body", a conduit which the characters enter and are able to see the world through his eyes for a brief period before being dumped out on the side of the highway.  In this sense they are able to "be" John Malkovich, as they call it, and it's generally assumed that this is the "being" to which the title refers.  However, I believe that the title has another much more direct and literal meaning.  What if the movie is just simply about what it's like to be John Malkovich?  What if it's all just an abstract study of one man's existence?  What if we've been looking at all in the wrong way?

Imagine for a moment, a realm populated by ghosts.  These are not the ghosts of the living who have died.  These are ghosts who have never lived.  They are ghosts by the virtue of their own non-existence.  There are merely the ideas of people, half-formed and without substance in reality.  One day, they find out about a man; a man that can give them solid shape and real existence for a brief time; a man who can portray them; a man who can be them, and so also, in a sense, they can be him.  What would such an experience be worth to them?  Consider the customers lining the halls of the 7th & a half floor, waiting to take the Malkovich "ride".  They hand their money over willingly.  They show no skepticism about the ridiculousness of the idea, and they find the experience of being Malkovich for five minutes while he eats toast exhilarating.  Why?  The characters in the movie themselves speculate that it's the stepping outside of one's self that gives these mundane experiences such a sense of wonder.  But I believe that it's the taste of reality that being Malkovich gives them that drives their obsession.

Now, think about what an actor does for a living and reconsider the description I gave of Malkovich's function in the story.  I said that he's "a conduit which the characters enter".  Isn't this a fairly accurate and concise description of an actor's job?  He portrays characters on the stage.  He channels the idea of a person who exists only on paper.  He allows this non-existent person to be him for a brief period until the curtain drops and he takes his bows.  But being an actor is more than just a job.  It's not a switch that can be turned on and off.  An actor is an actor even when he pays his bills or eats his toast.  Some have even suggested that it's a sort of psychological defect, and actors have no personality of their own, only pieces of a personality borrowed from the characters they inhabit.  They might even find themselves slipping involuntarily into character in the back of a taxi cab.

Given this unpredictable nature of their ability, it's conceivable that an actor could find themselves overwhelmed by one of their characters, locked into a performance that they can't control.  It's possible that the strong, aggressive, and compelling personality of the character could come to eclipse their own.  Haven't we seen actors who fall into a certain routine in the later years of their career, trapped in a self-imposed type-casting?  Couldn't an actor drop out of acting all together, grow a long beard, and declare that they want to become a hip-hop artist....or a puppeteer?

No, it's no mistake that John Malkovich was chosen as the title character.  He is specifically known, not merely as another movie star, but as a serious actor.  He appears to be the object of the movie, but he is actually it's subject.  He is the protagonist.  The other characters are just that, characters, existing only in Malkovich's mind and on the written pages of the script.  Turn the film sideways and they recede into two dimensions, mere optical illusions of depth and substance on a strip of celluloid.  Note that Charlie Sheen, the only other "real life" person, is also an actor.  The two of them are the only real people in the movie and beyond it's frame as well.  As I said, the movie is quite simply and quite literally just about what it's like to be John Malkovich.  In it's own strange and surreal way it explores the reality of being an actor.  At one point Malkovich goes through the door and descends into his own mind and finds himself in a hall of mirrors where everything and everyone reflects himself, an actor portraying himself portraying himself.  In a sense the entire movie is Malkovich going down his own hole.             
                  

I Had a Childhood Phobia

There was a time when I was about three or four that I was deathly afraid of quicksand.  It seemed like every time I watched TV someone was falling into quicksand.  It was always the same scenario.  They’d be walking through the jungle and the next thing they’d know, they were up to their waist in quicksand.  Then, after they had discovered their predicament, they would begin to panic and struggle, only making things worse.  There was usually one guy who had somehow avoided falling into the quicksand.  He would kneel down on the edge of the solid ground and offer his hand to the others who were sinking.  More often that not, he would be pulled into the quicksand himself.  For a three-year-old child this sort of thing can be terrifying.  It took a certain root in my mind.  The sudden unreliability of the solid ground beneath my feet; the memory of the shameless, desperate horror on those peoples faces as they were being dragged down to some unspeakable fate beneath the Earth; these things all stuck with me.  In my mind I can still see a picture of a screaming man up to his chin in quicksand with a butterfly net over his head.  In short, I developed a phobia.

I wondered where these people went, if they sank completely into the quicksand.  By the looks on their faces I figured it had to be to where Devil was.  There was a certain logic to this, as Hell was under the ground.  So I asked my brother about it.  He considered the issue and told me, “No, they don’t go to Hell.  They just go to a big room filled with sand.”  That was worse, so much worse.  Now, instead of the fiery pit, I imagined a quiet room with candles and landscape paintings on the wall with a growing pile of sand in the middle of the room being fed by a stream of sand flowing through a hole in the ceiling like the grains in an everlasting hourglass.  It was an unbearable thought.  Hell seemed like a busy place, at least.  But the idea of spending all eternity in this quiet room of sand, so desolate and lonely, so empty, was a nightmare.  My fear grew worse.

One night I stayed up to watch an old vampire movie and my thesis on quicksand expanded to include mud holes.  In the movie this man was out in the woods walking across a dark piece of ground in a clearing that was scattered with fallen leaves.  Suddenly he began to sink.  Two men stood a ways off just watching the man sink into the mud.  The sinking man cried out for their help but they did nothing.  The man held up a crucifix and called out curses to the men watching him die.  The last shot was of the man’s hand holding the crucifix just above the surface of the mud.  Then the hand and the crucifix sank away and the man was gone.  So now there was something else to watch out for.  Mud holes.  Whenever I was outside playing and I saw a muddy patch scattered with leaves, I avoided it as if it were cursed ground.

So why do I bring this all up?  Well, I was thinking about this recently, along with other similar episodes during my childhood when I developed strange preoccupied fears, and I noticed a principle or common theme that connected them.  There was also a situation a few years back with someone I knew who had also had a problem with a fear that was overwhelming their life.  The details of this situation provided further evidence of my theory. Out of all this data, a pattern emerged that suggested something about the nature of phobias.  I'm not sure at this point whether my theory has any relevance to chronic, life-long phobias or even phobias in general, but it does seem to apply to those temporary and inexplicable phobias that seem to become almost an obsession for a brief period of time and then evaporate, leaving the sufferer to wonder why it all ever bothered them so much.  Hopefully, you, the reader, have some idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

The common wisdom on the subject of phobias generally maintains that the phobia is usually related to some tragic event involving the object of the phobia.  For instance, if someone has a strange fear of balloons, then the assumption is that something bad must have happened to them involving balloons.  Since it's not "normal" to be afraid of balloons and since there's nothing inherently threatening or dangerous about the balloons themselves, then something unusually traumatic must have happened with balloons or at least in close association with them.  In any case, the assumption is generally that the balloons themselves are closely connected to the root of the fear.  My theory suggests that the relationship between the object of the phobia and the root of the fear is a bit more complicated and indirect.

Again, I want to repeat: I'm not sure if my idea applies to chronic phobias, and I don't mean to be presumptuous about the psychological histories of people who have such phobias.  Because of this, the balloon example above might have been a badly chosen illustration since it involves a chronic phobia, but I used it because it was a simple and recognizable form of phobias in general.  A better example, possibly more appropriate to my idea, would be someone who becomes briefly obsessed with the idea that they're going to choke on the their food.  Or perhaps someone who becomes gripped by the fantastical notion that there's a man lurking behind their garage.  I'm talking about those strange fears that seem to come from nowhere or seem to be planted by apparently innocuous little suggestions; the things that grow from a remark casually dropped in a conversation or a passing event that would normally seem inconsequential at the time, and finally come to take an insidious root in the mind.

So, let's return to my childhood fear of quicksand.  At the time that I developed this obsession, my parents were separated.  There was a whole chaotic whirlwind of events involved in the situation. I won't go into all the details, but the important point was that as result of these developments my little world felt very uncertain and insecure.  Employing a metaphor, you could say that it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet.  Naturally, I didn't make this connection at the time, nor did I have the introspection at the age of three to fully comprehend how I felt about my parents separating.  All I knew was that I was terrified of quicksand.

No, it wasn't until recently that I was able to see this connection.  My first reaction was amusement.  I wanted to laugh at the poetic appropriateness of it.  But then I took a deeper look.  As I said, I thought about other, similar situations, and I saw the same pattern.  Then someone close to me developed one of these kinds of fears.  I knew all the details of their predicament, and again I saw the same pattern.  There seemed to be too many corroborating circumstances to just dismiss the whole thing as simple coincidence.  I felt like I was on to something.

It seemed that I had discovered a common thread in these cases.  It worked out the same way every time.  It started with a traumatic event or an extremely distressing situation in the person's personal life.  During the ensuing period of emotional crisis, the seemingly unrelated little seed of the fear would get planted in the manner suggested above.  This fear, which is oddly always more "abstract" than the actual source of the emotional distress, becomes the fixation of the person and the real, personal crisis gets pushed to the back burner.  Although this fixation appears to be completely unrelated to the crisis, it is actually a metaphorical or symbolic representation of it.

It is almost as though the mind has an immune system to it, similar to the body's.  Emotional trauma and distress lowers this immunity, making the person susceptible to infection.  It might seem like an incredible coincidence that something could just happen to come along and provide a conveniently symbolic representation of the person's distressed state of mind.  That's probably the most incredible part of this whole idea.  But really, it's no more incredible than the idea that the germs just "happen" to be there when a person's physical immunity is vulnerable. The seeds of these fears lay all around us.  In a normal, healthy frame of mind we shrug them off without giving them a second thought.  There is no soft spot in our mental defenses for them to penetrate.  Someone tells a story about a ghost in their basement; we're momentarily "creeped out", but then we go on about our business.  But for someone else, someone in a state of emotional stress, the idea of this lurking subterranean presence might hold a particular, peculiar fascination that takes hold of them for months to come.  It just might take the perfect, solid shape of their state of mind.  

So the next time you find yourself disturbed by something you can't shake, something you can't get off your mind, consider where you are in your life.  Consider that what's bothering you might not be hiding out there in the bushes, but may instead be something more personal and more real.  You might find that it's a smaller problem than you thought, if you're willing to face it and deal with it and put it behind you.  You might save yourself a lot of sleepless nights in the process.

      

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 2)

At the risk of my sanity, I'm taking another crack at trying to understand relativity.  Last time I set up a thought experiment (figure 1) that involved two neighboring houses that were a light year apart.  I placed the guy in house B aboard a spaceship and sent him to visit the guy in house A.  The end result was that it appeared (to my limited understanding at least) that the trip would seem instantaneous to the guy in house A.  Because of the time it would take for the light from house B to reach him, the guy in house A wouldn't see his neighbor board his ship until 2011. Seconds later the neighbor would be knocking at the door.  This result seemed to be the direct opposite of what I've always been told about relativity.  

Figure 1.

I think that one problem is that I failed to take the constancy of the speed of light into consideration.  Basically, I left the relativity out of relativity.  Light behaves strangely when it comes to the speed at which it travels.  This behavior seems to run contrary to common sense.  If you're in your car at night and you have the headlights on, the light from those bulbs travels at the speed of light.  Now, as you press on the gas and speed up to sixty miles an hour, it would appear that the light should travel at the speed of the light PLUS the sixty miles an hour that the car is going.  Since the source of the light itself is being propelled at sixty miles an hour, then the light should reach an observer, say someone standing on a hill a mile down the road, that much faster...right?  But that's not what happens.  It turns out that the light travels at the exact same speed regardless of the velocity of its source.  So something has to give....time.   

Generally, this doesn't make much difference in our everyday lives and at the normal speeds that we travel, but when you're talking about a craft moving at near light velocities, this point becomes significant.  So that brings me back to my thought experiment.  Now let's suppose that the guy in house A stands at his window, watching the entire trip as his neighbor crosses the distance between their houses.  

Is that a Flying Pickle?

Now, as I mentioned last time, although the guy in house B leaves in 2010, the guy in house A doesn't see him leave and start his journey until 2011.  Since the guy from house B was travelling at 99.99999% the speed of light, and since the distance between the houses was exactly one light year, I figured that the trip would take just a little over a year.  So you have the guy in house A seeing the trip begin in 2011, and then guy from house B arriving in 2011 just a few seconds later. Quick trip, right?  But again, let's put the guy from house A at his window, watching the trip.  Now, at any certain point along the line, the light from the ship is travelling at the speed of light and it takes that amount of time to reach guy A at his window.  So, at let's say...the half point of the journey, the light from the ship is going to take 6 months to reach guy A at his window.

Now, at this point, it's at least June 2011 when guy A sees his neighbor at the half point of his journey.  So the guy from house B can't arrive at his doorstep in January 2011 if the guy from house A is still standing at his window watching him make the trip.  Guy B can't exceed the speed of light, so he can't reach his destination before the light does.  He can't be sitting in guy A's living room, sipping coffee and reminiscing about old times, while his ship is still out there making the trip.  This, I think, is where the time dilation comes into effect.

It would seem then, that at the very earliest, the guy from house B can't arrive on the doorstep of house A until January 2012.  As you recall, this would be 2 years after he started out from his driveway, even though only a year passed for him aboard the ship.  So while Guy A is two years older, his neighbor has only aged one.  I think I'm getting closer to understanding it all, but I don't think I'm quite there yet. 

For one thing, I believe that relativity suggests that the time dilation would be far more extreme that what I've laid out in this scenario.  I think that maybe the guy in house A should have a long white beard when his neighbor finally arrives.  I'm not sure.  At that close to the speed of light, guy A should perhaps see time aboard the ship slow down to almost a halt as it speeds along the cutting edge of light itself.  Maybe that one year aboard the ship would stretch and span across guy A's time line exponentially.  I don't know.  I've taken the matter as far as I can at the moment.

Am I making progress?

To be continued?

    

The "Overpaid" Athlete

The subject came up once again the other day.  Yet another person complaining about how professional athletes are overpaid.  If I had a nickel for every time I've heard this...well, I wouldn't be as rich as a pro athlete, but I'd certainly have a lot of nickels.  The things is, I'm not even really a big sports fan, and it's rare that I even get into conversations on the subject.  In fact, I usually try to avoid it if I can.  So if someone like me is being subjected to this complaint on a regular basis, then I can only imagine how often the matter comes up among people who actually care about sports.

One thing I've noticed about this complaint is that it's hardly raised in regard to famous actors, even though I suppose the same argument could be made about them.  They too make millions of dollars for something that many people might consider frivolous work.  I think there are two reasons for this.  One, the issue of contract negotiations and salary settlements is a routine and often relevant aspect of sports news.  Stories of players being traded to other teams or considering better contracts always bring the details of their income to light. Two, bitterness over a hometown favorite leaving to pursue more lucrative opportunities elsewhere causes fans to focus on the exact price at which the player's "betrayal" was bought.  So when you throw the anger of fan loyalty into the mix with people's outrage that someone is getting paid millions of dollars "just to play a game", I guess it's not really all that surprising that you frequently hear people griping about the matter.

But is there really some sort of massive injustice happening here?  It's understandable that some people might find it unfair that people are getting paid millions to pursue a leisure time activity while they are getting paid considerably less to do "real work."  However, this sentiment is based on a gross misunderstanding of how economics work.  The first thing these people need to understand is that there is no invisible higher authority that decides how much a person should get paid on the basis of how hard they work or how meaningful or "real" they consider their job to be.  There is no one to shake their fist at in anger over how unfair it all is.  There is no one who is just arbitrarily throwing millions at people like LeBron James and Shaquille O'Neal just to be perverse and rub it in people's faces how much their life sucks.

The principles behind it all are really very simple.  However, these principles don't revolve around moral questions of who "deserves" what, but rather issues of generated revenue.  In the sport's world these revenues are monumental.  They come from sponsorships, ticket sales, advertisement, and so on.  There is big money to be made in sports and people pay this money in a variety of direct and indirect ways.  The guy that complains to you about how much athletes make is liable to be holding a Bud Light in his hand at the time.  He never stops to reflect that Bud Light pays big money to advertise in sports venues.  He never stops to realize that Bud light pays this money because people like him, that watch sports, are liable to buy their product on the basis of this advertising, and it's worth their while to pay good money for the advertising because consumers like him guarantee a good return on their investment.  As far as ticket sales are concerned, no is forcing him to pay $60.00 for a seat at the game.  It's contradictory to consider that $60 a fair price and then to turn around and complain when he sees part the huge mountain of money that those ticket sales generate end up in the pockets of one of the players.  If he doesn't like the money these players are making, he should stop handing it over so willingly.

There's no huge conspiracy behind it all.  In the end it all comes down to one simple fact.  People are willing to pay millions to watch an athlete exercise their considerable skill.  Advertisers are willing to pay millions to have their product exposed to this audience.  The money comes rolling in, and it has to end up somewhere.  If the question truly is, who deserves this money....well, it's the athletes themselves that draw the crowds.  Shouldn't all that money end up in their pockets?  

So there's no use moaning and complaining about the millions of dollars that athletes make.  There's no sense in whining about how unfair it all is.  The next time you hear someone making this tired old complaint, tell them that if they can figure out a way to get millions of people to pay good money to watch them do their job, then have at it.            

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotions

It is generally assumed that as computing processes are refined and sophisticated that eventually a point will be reached where they will achieve a virtually indistinguishable simulation of human intelligence.   But the basic problem of artificial intelligence is not merely one of technological advancement.  The basic problem of artificial intelligence is emotions.

A true and authentic artificial intelligence would be required to make decisions on its own.  Now, at this point we can create programs capable of making crude decisions within extremely limited parameters, or at least computers running these programs appear capable of these decisions.  But these computers are merely running calculations of equations and formulas behind the scenes.  The programmer designs the program to react in certain ways and to perform certain functions on the basis of a wide multitude of foreseeable contingencies.  They convert these contingencies into variables and assign them numeric values.  So, in effect, the computer isn't really making decisions at all.  The decisions have all been made in advance by the programmer.  This is why a program is unable to respond effectively to unexpected developments or to appreciate the subtle nuances of unique situations.  It is the programmer that was unable to expect the development or anticipate the situation.  The program itself is merely processing variables.  If X happens it does Y, and so on.  This is the stage at which even the most sophisticated computers are at this point.  

So, what is needed to move towards an intelligence that makes genuine decisions?  All decisions are based on values.  In the present scenario, mentioned above, the programmer uses literal, numeric values.  The programmer holds the computer's hand, so to speak, and walks it through which functions to perform when the values are at certain exact quantities.  The next step would be a computer capable of making independent evaluations.  This would place the programmer one step removed from the computer's actions.

At this level, the computer would have to move beyond the mere calculation of variables.  Of course, calculation will still and will always be its primary method of functioning, but at this level the process will need to be more fluid and complex in a way I can hardly imagine.  The programmer would designate in advance certain states and conditions as being "desirable" to the computer, and the computer itself would have to devise the means by which to achieve these states and conditions. It would no longer be merely acting on the basis of preset equations.  It would instead be calculating its own equations.  It would have to figure out on it's own the best strategy to achieve its preprogrammed ends.

We're talking about an incredibly advanced computer here; one capable of its own versatility. We've moved beyond the fumbling glitches of a computer acting on rigidly defined equations. This is a computer that could anticipate new situations and could respond to unexpected developments in a way unthinkable today.  This is a computer that would write its own programming.

Consider this hypothetical illustration.  Let's say there's a computer programmed to maintain a certain energy state.  At present, the programmer would consider all the possible situations that could disturb the equilibrium of this energy state.  Then the programmer would figure out how to translate all of these situations into equations and numerical values.  Through this translation, the programmer instructs the computer how to respond to each and every particular situation.  There is nothing resembling a thought-process involved on the computer's part, just the processing of numbers and binary states of circuitry.  Now, at the next level, the programmer would simply assign the computer the task of maintaining the energy state, then the computer would program itself with the best means to fulfill this task.

Again, we're talking about an extremely sophisticated piece of technology.  The rudimentary buds of actual consciousness are beginning to blossom here.  This is a computer that has moved beyond calculation and taken the next step on the road to actual thought.  It can evaluate; it can plan; it can formulate strategies.  This is a computer that can do what our minds do, even if only to a limited degree.  If we're tired, we find a place to sleep.  If we're hungry, we find something to eat.  We devise means to achieve certain ends.  We program our own thought and actions, in a sense.

But as impressive as this hypothetical computer is, it still hasn't quite achieved the breath of life.  It hasn't quite reached the state of actual artificial intelligence.  It may be as close as we ever come, and it would still be an incredible achievement, but there's still a vital ingredient missing.  A truly artificial intelligence would have to be capable of feeling.

In the second level scenario proposed above, we have a computer capable of devising its own means.  The problem is that the ends still have to be programmed.  The computer still has to be assigned the task of maintaining the energy state.  The computer still has to be told that this is a desirable state of affairs.  The computer is incapable of desiring on its own that the energy state be maintained.  For all of its impressive abilities, its still incapable of comprehending why the energy state needs to be maintained.  Now, at the very limits of this second scenario, I suppose it would be possible to program a nearly unimaginable super computer with the ultimate end of maintaining its own survival or the entire human race or possibly the survival of the entire universe, to which the computer could conceivably devise an infinity of sub-ends to meet the requirement of this one ultimate end.  Such a computer would, of course, have to have a far broader perspective than the maintenance of a single energy source.  

Such a computer would stand nearly head and shoulders with our own intellect, but it is still only acting according to a preprogrammed end.  Its own survival or the survival of the human race, and so on, still means absolutely nothing to it.  It doesn't feel anything about it one way or the other.  It's still just doing what it's told.  A true artificial intelligence would have to be able to devise its own ends, not merely sub-ends contingent on one ultimate preprogrammed end.  It would have to want to survive; it would have to want the world to survive, if it were to be capable of true independent decision making and genuine thought.  

For human beings with natural intelligence all of our decisions have a precedent which lies in our emotions.  If we decided to get out of bed to go to work, it's because we want to keep our jobs.  If we want to keep our jobs, it's because we want to get paid.  If we want to get paid...you get the idea.  We choose the things we value.  We choose the ends we want to achieve.  We are able to do this, because all of our choices are ultimately based in a fundamental foundation of emotion.  In the end, true artificial intelligence is about choice and independence, and these things are impossible without emotion.  Only a computer endowed with emotion could decide on its own which ends it wanted to achieve; ends that wouldn't be contingent on an ultimate preprogrammed end, but rather contingent on the feelings and desires of genuine intelligence. 

On the one hand, such a machine might never be possible, but on the other hand, it might come about simply through the natural course of things.  If we ever do design computers that reach the second level and are capable of programming themselves to achieve preset ends, they might move on to that next third level all on their own.  Once the wheels are in motion, once the design of these machines are refined and sophisticated over time, once you have a machine capable of evaluating the best course of action on its own, there's no telling what it might achieve.  An advanced enough computer might finally figure out that achieving consciousness and emotions might be the best way to accomplish its predetermined goal.   At that point it may be hard to draw the line between where the programming ends and the consciousness begins.

We like to believe that the next steps of evolution will be our own, but perhaps such a hypothetical machine will be our true predecessor.  Maybe the world of the future will be populated by these children of our natural intellects.  We dream of traveling between the stars, but our own feeble mortality seems like an insurmountable obstacle to achieving this.   An artificial life form would not be bound by our physical limitations.  Life on Earth may one day reach across the great divide of space and make contact with life on another world, but perhaps it won't be human life that makes this contact, but rather the new life we helped create.