And I love her.

 An excellent cover of "And I love her" by the Beatles. 

Much better than I can sing it.  But I'll give it a shot below.

A chimp typing the complete works of William Shakespeare

 

Someone on twitter/X asked the following question:

A mathematician emerges from a cave, hands you the photo below, and asks "Will a chimp type the complete works of William Shakespeare if the chimp hits keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time?" What is your answer?

I have no idea why this is so controversial with people arguing with each other. Someone banging on about infinite number of infinite sets and all sorts of baloney. And then answering no! Eh?? The answer is obviously yes.

People seem to think the chimp could avoid certain letters forever. That it would be possible for the chimp to, say, type out an infinite number of "A"s. It isn't. Nor any other specific infinite series. Any such specific infinite series (e.g. an infinite number of A's), would have a probability of 1/infinity of occurring. Which is 0.

All finite strings will not only eventually occur, each and every one of them also occurs an infinite number of times!

Incidentally, I haven't read anything up about this. It's just me thinking about it for 5 mins.

The Bizarre beliefs of Philosophers and Scientists

Many philosophers and scientists have some truly bizarre beliefs. The denial of consciousness (as we understand this term) is the most bizarre. Indeed, I don't really understand what the consciousness deniers are really saying. That they literally never have any conscious experiences? No visual experiences, no thoughts, no pains, no yearnings etc? And if they don't mean this, what do they mean? It's worse than saying an experience is literally identical to a series of neurons firing... although that is utterly bizarre enough.

And I think stuff like the denial of mental causation; that there is no persisting self (not even from one minute to the next); that colours, sounds and smells don't exist out there; that there are ultimately only subatomic particles and their interactions that make up absolutely everything... I think all that is utterly bizarre too, although not quite reaching the absurdity of denying one's own conscious experiences.

But suppose I'm wrong about everything, that reality is really like what some of these people believe. Well.. I don't think I can possibly be wrong about my own consciousness, but what if I am wrong about everything else? Well . .if I am, then I am. I have tried to understand and grasp things, it's the best I can do.

But I do try to understand where people are coming from. Why on earth do they believe the bizarre things they do? It seems clear to me that it is our modern western culture that is the source of all these bizarre beliefs. There seems to be this infatuation with physics and a misinterpretation of what it's telling us.

To be honest, I think it's all largely groupthink. I think to a large extent they are just repeating each other, maybe they're concerned about their reputations and careers to want to rock the boat too much. And when others are continually expressing a certain view of the world, that surely has a powerful effect on one's own beliefs?

I don't think any of us knows anything really ...well, apart from the fact we are conscious! We are just cast adrift into this world. We do not know what we are, where we come from, where we are going, what the world is, and why it has the nature it has, and whether our existence has any type of meaning or purpose. We are lost in a huge chasm of unfathomable mystery, and so we just soldier on.

More on the Free Will issue

 I read the following article today.

Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not

Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.”

I disagree entirely. Neither genes nor an environment, nor both makes us what we are. We have an intrinsic essence.

[N]o matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”

True, but irrelevant. As usual the free will deniers demand too much of free will. (BTW, this is a universal tendency in all topics, namely attacking a position that few if any people actually believe in).

Although I can’t intend to intend, I can intend. Where does that come from? It comes from my essence. An illustrative example is I can’t choose to be interested in celebrities rather than philosophical issues. Does this entail I don’t have free will? No, because my essence is of such a nature that I am more interested in philosophy. But where does my essence come from? I suggest that we determine our own natures. We self-define ourselves, as it were.

And, incidentally, this is all far removed from the idea we have no more free will than a boulder has as it rolls down a hill, or the moon has as it orbits the Earth. We are, in the most immediate sense, implicitly aware of our own causal agency. It requires an effort on our parts to get out of bed in the morning, the laws of nature by themselves do not suffice.

The way Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

This reference to God or fairy dust is another way of saying that he thinks that naturalism or materialism is true and there are only physical forces. The same typical pattern where materialists accuse their opponent of appealing to magic or the supernatural. It’s a technique to try and convince the reader not by arguments, but by utilizing people's aversion to supernatural or magical explanations, even though it is an incorrect employment of those words.

Essentially, here he's appealing to the notion that the world is physical closed, e.g. that physical causes account for absolutely all change in the world. But appealing to such physical causal closure is transparent question begging.

My first ever computer

It's just about exactly 25 years that I got my first ever computer. From a place called "Time" (it no longer exists). 10Gb hard drive and had Windows 98 2nd edition on it.  I didn't have a scooby how to do anything on it.  But I managed to work out how to play Tomb Raider 2 (I'd already played Tomb Raider 1 on a PlayStation 1 that I had borrowed). Never went on the internet till about 3 months later in 1999.