Quintessential Sorbet's blog

Quintessential goes 3-d

2011-06-10T02:13:00.000-07:00

SL in 3 dimensions? Is that possible, does it really work?
Yes it does! The new Kirsten’s viewer offers 3-d option!!!
I have been neglecting my second life pretty badly recently. There has been so many things going on in parallel worlds, but this I had to try out.

The latest Kirsten’s viewer supports 3-d viewing with red-blue “anaglyph” glasses like these.

So far my favourite SL viewer has been Imprudence (and still is for normal use), which you can get from http://blog.kokuaviewer.org/ . But the newest S21 version of Kirsten’s viewer is a very interesting initiative. S21 is also stable unlike than previous versions, even though it is using the infamous 2.x based viewer and UI, which earlier really didn’t work on my laptop at all. But now I recommend to try out Kirsten’s 3-D experience, it does really work. Kirsten’s website is here http://www.kirstensviewer.com/

Slow Life

2010-05-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

The volcanic ash cloud over Europe in April slowed down people’s lives for one whole week. Or at least it slowed down their traveling. Of course it was a disaster for the airlines and many travel agencies and some holiday destinations suffered losses, too, but other than that the businesses everywhere seemed to work pretty much as usual. Actually I heard many people to express a sort of relief for the slowdown of travel. There were many, who said that the ash cloud reminded them to appreciate the “forgotten” means of transportation such as trains and buses and motivated them to spend effort learning the collaborative internet tools for communication instead of initiating business travel. To be honest, some people even confessed that it was only good that the ash cloud provided an excuse to cancel useless business trips that their organization was expecting them to do…

I, too, was stuck in Germany, when the ash cloud arrived to Sweden on a thursday afternoon. My 1.5 hour flight was changed to a 12 hour train travel. But I didn’t feel too bad about it. I took a night train and didn’t loose effectively any work time. Actually, even though the flight time was only 1.5 hours, the travel to the airports had been another 30-45 mins in each direction plus the waiting time at the airport would have been at least an hour – assuming the flight had been on time. So even in the best case the air travel had taken me about 4 hours during the best work hours, and since it would have been mostly moving from one line to another, I would have only small pieces of time to do anything useful or interesting with my laptop. My mind is so slow that getting properly concentrated on any more serious issue (booting my brain to focus) takes at least 15-20 mins, so out of that 4 hours, I might have been able to use effectively only like maybe half an hour. Calculating it that way, I could claim that taking the train was actually more efficient from a productivity point of view than the original plan to use the plane.

In general I like long distance train travel. It offers an escape from unnecessary office discussions and the train takes you conveniently from one city center to another. In Europe the city structure supports train travel excellently and a train-bicyle combination can be a great way for commuting or medium distance travelling. Yet many people even in Europe seem to prefer driving to the airports in traffic jams and taking planes even when the time saving was just an hour or two. But I think the ash cloud made more and more people conscious about the alternatives.

Train and bus travel as a way for a Slow Travel is just one aspect of the Slow Life movement that has become a hot topic recently. At least in where I live you can hear about Slow life ideology more and more everywhere. Besides Slow Travel there are Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Design, Slow Art, Slow Media, Slow Parenting, Slow Architecture, Alow Reading, Slow Shopping, Slow Sex and Cittaslow…
all of which have sort of independent origins, but share the general idea that life is today getting more and more hectic, and that people will not be happy unless there is going to be more time to really think what really matters personally, in grass root level and locally and how can we promote the well being of our environment in general.

For a general motivation for the Slow Life, wikipedia entry about Slow Movement[1] cites Guttorm Fløistad, A Professor of philosophy in the Oslo Universitet: Fløistad summarizes the philosophy [of Slow Movement], stating: The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.
But what is that drives the world to become faster? In other words why does the pace of change seem to accelerate a decade after decade? Carl Honore, the writer of In Praise of Slow [2] thinks that we (in the western world) are hung up with the notion that being busy and trying to do things fast is a value in itself. He says [3]

It [Slow Movement] is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.

Also Honore says that Slow Movement is not about being “anti-speed”: I love speed. I like my Internet connection to be fast and I play two of the fastest sports around, ice-hockey and squash, in my spare time. I live in London, which is a city of volcanic energy, and I enjoy working to deadlines. Speed has its place in the modern world. Often you have to move quickly, particularly at work. The problem is that speed has become a way of life. We do everything in a rush. We are stuck in fast forward and that is unhealthy.

I have been noticing the existence of slow movements maybe a couple of years now. And for me it would be very easy to agree with the citations in the above. I feel often that the values of the professional people that I see around me are so often more about saving time, not savoring it, (like the example about air vs. train travel). I studied a little more what the different slow subcultures mean and I liked particularly Slow Design, which means [4]:
- Longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests and fine tuning.
- Design for manufacturing with local/regional materials and technologies or Design that supports local industries, workshops and craftspeople.
- Design that takes into account local/regional culture both as a source of inspiration and as an important consideration for the design outcome.
- Design that studies the concept of natural timecycles and incorporates them into design and manufacturing processes.
- Design that looks at longer cycles of human behavior and sustainability.

and Slow money [5]:
Slow Money is a movement to organize investors and donors to steer new sources of capital to small food enterprises, organic farms, and local food systems. Slow Money takes its name from the Slow Food movement. Slow Money aims to develop the relationship between capital markets and place, including social capital and soil fertility. Slow Money is supporting the grass-roots mobilization through network building, convening, publishing, and incubating intermediary strategies and structures of funding.

(….I know, I know… quoting directly from wikipedia might not make much of a blog article, but I think the summaries there were good and the wiki pages had also good references for anyone interested to study further.)

So The Slow movements looked very good and healthy ideas to at first sight. But are they really applicable everywhere? Would it be just something too far fetched to be applied in real life? Something for the middle-aged western urban well-to-do professionals to play with to think that they are doing something to improve the quality of life and environment?

There might be a little of that, who knows. For example I would wonder
- What about young people, who are just entering professional life and starting their careers. Usually they are hungry to become busy and important first, before they have any need for a slower lifestyle
- Same with retired people. Many people who retire seem to be a bit at loss, once the business goes away
- By far the most of people in development countries are not busy out of choice, but out of a clear necessity. Can the Slow Movement offer anything to them for improving the quality of life?
- In many cultures, the time and the importance of tight schedules is not perceived the same way everywhere. For example some African writers have coined a term “Africa time” to describe the disregard of punctuality. But does it lead to a greater happiness?

But even if the Slow movement would be something mainly for the upper middle classes, Honore is making the point that practically all cultural revolutions (or evolutions) have become reality only when the middle class has taken the values, represented by the change, to it’s own. I could add that in my opinion something similar would be actually true for any change in any organization. There are management theories (which my own experience strongly supports) that suggest, that any true change in a behaviour of people can happen only through the change of the cultural values of the people who are in gatekeeper positions how the work is really done. In other words the change occurs only through the change of cultural values of the middle level (class) people who define the work (lifestyle) of how things are run in an organization (society)….So if any societal change is to be pursued, it needs to offer something for the middle class, who actually concretely runs the businesses.

It is also easy to be cynical and dismiss Slow movement as something unimportant or economically marginal. On the other hand, the same was said originally about organic food movement which is related to Slow Food ideologies. Yet today over 4 % of all food production in EU is produced with highly regulated and supervised organic food principles and it’s relative share of the production is growing. In Austria over 10% of all food is already organically produced. Not economically insignificant I would say! The same is true for Fair Trade, which is already over 4 billion US$ business - quite big business for the poorest countries. Not to mention about Green technologies, such as Recycling, Sewage and waste management, renewable energies, Air and water purification….The countries all around the world are already investing over 2 trillion $ in green technologies so it would appear already to be a bigger business than the worldwide arms industry (~1.5 trillion $). Compared to the 1960s the arms industry spending was probably several tens of times bigger business than green industries, but not any more. The world has changed really radically thanks to the change of our attitudes towards environmental sustainability. Why couldn’t it change also in respect of preserving our own lives and ridding ourselves from the culture of speed?

Does that make sense? Looks good, but....
I need to ask second opinions so I hope be able post an interview or two sometime soon :-)

Cheers
Quin

[1] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement ,
[2] Honore, C. “In praise of Slow: How a Woldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed”, Orion Books, London UK, 2004
[3] Internet page on May 5th, 2010, http://www.carlhonore.com/?page_id=6
[4] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_design
[5] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Money
[6] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_time

More about Philo activities in SL

2010-02-03T04:26:00.000-08:00

I decided to make a quick update to the last blog. Two months is a long time in SL and a lot has happened since. The most important event has been the creation of a new Philosophy Island (PI), a whole sim dedicated to discussions and debating. PI sim was originally created by Lokifluff, but now it is administered by a council of it's residents, who have rented maybe 70 % of the area and and an elected "senate" which oversees the common areas and the activities there. I don't remember the slurl address, but you can find PI easily by typing Philosophy island in the SL map search.

Philosophy Island's common area has camp fire (much like in PH) for ongoing discussions, and there are also lots of scheduled and moderated presentations and speeches. The scheduled events have covered a very wide range of topics, such as Wittgenstein's views on dualism, moral realism, the usefulness of meme hypothesis, Rawl's theory of justice or even the benefits and threats of natiolism and patriotism. Go check the weekly program of events. It can be acquired close to the PI campfire, located roughly at the center of the island.

It will be interesting to see how the activities in PI will develop. Namely one of the big challenges in anonymous discussion forums has been the moderation policy. I have been planning to write an essay about my experiences about hanging in various philosophy discussion forums in the internet and SL since summer 2000 (10 years this summer!). I have noticed that all anonymous philosophy/politics/religion forums tend to undergo a similar kind of evolution from the initial enthusiasm and idealism after the founding of the forum to flame wars and when the interesting discussions bring traffic, to the unavoidable attacks of malicious trolls, spammers and abusive griefers. Then follow the neverending metadisucssion and whining about moderation policy (or the lack of it) and finally the decay of the forum to a boring socializing chat forum, where any attempt to discuss philosophy will be considered as snobbery... It's funny how all the unmoderated or "lightly" moderated forums tend to follow the same phases of evolution. It would seem that the life span of an unmoderated or lightly moderated philo discussion forum is about 2-3 years from the initial enthusiasm, where people spend a lot of time in preparing their contributions to make a serious and interesting discussion to a silly chat room, where the average length of replies is 3-4 words.

Of course the forums with a very tight moderation keep griefers away and the discussions stay focused on the topics that the forum was founded for, but it tends to happen at the cost of livelyhood or the playfulness of the atmostphere. And a tight moderation will definetely consume a lot of resources for the administrator of the site. So in some ways the "heaviness" of moderation will be a choice between quantity of traffic and quality of discussions. Some moderation is usually always needed, because if the atmosphere is let to be too abusive and rotten for too long time, it will lead to all the serious contributors (who I think are the interesting ones) to abandon the forum for good.

Some people are concerned that any moderation whatsoever would restrict the freedom of expression and somehow hinder innovation. That is a of course a valid concern....yet according to my experience from over 10 years in several (officially politically neutral) forums, I cannot say that I had ever encountered a moderation decision where the decision had been based on the political or philosophical content of the opinions that someone has expressed. The moderation decisions have practically always been caused by spamming, verbal abuse or personal attacks that do not relate to the discussions. In practise, the true restricitions to people's freedom to have a conversation with each other have been caused by self centered spammers or hostile trolls.

I do think though that sometimes the moderators have not been fully up to their task. People are very sensitive about the equal treatment and the consistency of the moderation policy. I have seen cases, where a moderator might have favored some type of humor over something else, or given some people special privileges for example in a way that someone's abusive behavior has been overlooked because the person has been a regular for so long, or she/he is moderator's friend. Sometimes there has been even cases where it has looked as if the moderator had wanted to create drama on purpose...A manipulative moderator, yikes!

Usually all the moderators have been appointed by the administrator of the forum, (in SL, by the owner of the sim). However in Philosophy Island the common discussion areas are governed by a senate, which is elected by the members of the PI group, so that the governance would be a representative democracy, with elections every 3 month. It will be interesting to see, how this system will affect the evolution of the discussions and atmosphere! Will the PI common area general discussions follow the same path of evolution than the forums I have seen before, or does the democracy bring different dynamics.

In summary, my experience is that although a clear moderation policy is crucial for a discussion forum to be a hospitable place for people to hang, it almost doesn't matter what type of a moderation there will be, as long as it's logical and consisten. I would even say that when it comes to the freedom of expression, moderation policy has been factually almost a non-issue. Out of all the metadiscussion about moderation, that I have encountered, perhaps 98 % has been nothing but clueless whining and creating drama out of nothing just to annoy the other forum regulars. Not that the remaining 2% hadn't been real issues, but endless whining about moderation has spoiled the atmosphere in so many forums and caused mass escape of everyone who actually wants to discuss about something of substance.

Discussion forums are not about moderation policies, but rather about the people who want spend their time there and the expectations of the administrator: what are the topics she hopes the people would be talking about; is the forum meant for discussion about philosophy, science, knitting, food recipes or mercedes-benz spare parts, or is the purpose of the forum to create a lively theater for drama, abuse noobs and innocent bypassers or facilitate social chit chat...the moderation policy can then be chosen accordingly. Freedom of expression is hardly limited in any case, since the internet is still full of forums where to express any serious opinion whatsoever under a pseudonym. Or with an established SL identity that can be used also out of SL (like in my case). And if the moderation policy of any of the myriad existing forums is still not to one's liking, it's always possible to setup a new one in 5 minutes!

However, now there are true and serious threats to the freedom of expression in SL! Please do take a look at this blog http://whenitchanged.blogspot.com/2010/01/privacy-is-my-right-message-to-linden.html Lauren Jones has been able to point out the hazards of Linden Labs and facebook co-operation better than I could ever have been able.

If we are to be ripped away our anonymity and the possibility to create avatar identities, separate from our "meatspace avatars", it means that our meatspace dependencies will start to affect our ability to express experimental thoughts, innovative ideas not to mention making provocations in search of the hidden truths. If you have seen the trouble to read this writing all the way down here, please do check out Lauren's blog, it's really important for anyone who takes an SL identity even slightly seriously!!!

QS

PS: Lauren is talking about an SL persona that is promoting the full integration of RL and SL personas, with an obvious goal to make money...
Any PI regular reading this: Doesn't this sound a bit familiar ? =)

Q

Philo and Economics activites in SL during spring 2010

2009-11-30T11:32:00.000-08:00

Hi!
I have been spending a great deal of my SL time in Philosophy House (PH) camp fire. Usually the discussion there is just general chit chat, sometimes not too interesting at all, but every now and then a good philosophy topic comes up and then the conversation can be engaging. But the main attraction of PH has been that there is always people, pretty much 24/7. A problem from a discussion point of view is that the chat format tends to limit how much "room" there is in the local chat window to justify your arguments. If you are not a really fast typist, the topic often tends to fade away, before you have time to get all your ideas visible - or like in my case, I come up with the all the best replies only too late, after the topic has changed already =). Of course at the same time, that is the appeal of chatting as well: The fast pace of interaction, makes it feel like a real life conversation except the strength with the text format can temporarily support several parallel threads going on at the same time.

So now there are a couple of web forums associated to PH or the crowd that comes there regularly. The idea is to offer a forum for a more slow paced discussion. Brinn Bedlam started a "traditional" internet discussion forum for PH in http://www.thephilosophyhouse.com where the idea is to allow people to write longer posts. Many of the PH regulars, that I recognize, seem to have made posts there already.

I have been planning to go even further and start an internet journal for longer article-like essays, like the some of the posts I have had in this blog. The PH journal is not officially public yet, but you can take a sneak preview at http://phjournal.ning.com. In order for PH Journal to be a real philosophical journal, there is an editorial policy. Even though there are no strict guidelines for format, the expectation is that the citations would be referenced and arguments justified. If you take a look, I'd be grateful for all feedback how you think it looks like through the phjournal mail.

I have also been active in pursuing the investigation of "Quantum theory of Economics" (QTE) in SL workshop and I have had some amazing contributors this year. During the workshop it turned out rather soon, that the idea wasn't quite so radical than I had thought in my blog in March =) It appears that there are quite many research groups working with more or less similar kind of ideas already. However applying quantum formalism to macroscopic interactions is still a very fresh approach and the field is very open for all new mathematical and formally sound theories. A new workshop around QTE, business interactions and microeconomics will now start within Tothica SL group (see for example http://www.tothicasl.net). The idea is to discuss qualitatively microeconomics and specifically how business comes into being as a result of human interactions and external circumstances (QTE apporach) and how that creates economy in general. The workshop will also have a Ning forum at http://qteconomics.ning.com, where I will gradually copy all the material from the previous QTE workshop in SL. The moderated discussions will be held in the Library of Clemson University Dev sim. For notices of exact location and time of the workshop's SL session, join the Tothica group. They have great Philo discussions and other meetings, too...and costs nothing to join!

Hope to see you not just inworld but also at all the new and fancy associated web 2.0 Ning forums!

Merry approaching christmas season
Quin

From Political Correctness to Quantum Gender

2009-10-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

In her book "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" [1] Karen Barad discusses how it is physically impossible to separate matter from meaning in practise. She is working towards a theory which she calls agential realism. It is based on the idea that the meanings the conscious agents making the observation have in their mind are conceptually inseparable from the object they are investigating. She says that this would be a generalization of the classical Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She quotes Niels Bohr and says: Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that “concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement” [Bohr]. That is theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. [1].

To me it seems that Barad’s ideas would somehow touch on something about the connection between matter and discourse that the existentialists and postmodernists have tried to intuitively grasp have for the last 50 decades. But unlike postmodernists in the average, Barad actually knows what she is talking about when she refers to mathematics and QM. Using the agential realism approach she discusses how we could analyze ethics, metaphysics, “topologies of power” and other branches of applied philosophy. Most concrete she gets when she applies agental realistic analysis to “technoscientific practises” and gender roles. In my (not very) humble opinion that analysis raises her in to the front row of contemporary feminist theorists. She also naturally continues from the observations of Judith Butler since I think Barad’s treatment kind of paves a QM theoretical background to Butler’s realization that even sexes, not just gender roles, are fundamentally pejorative: Sexes are in practise created by actions and interactions rather than being a preassigned property of humans.

At this point I need to remind that of course Butler, too, is not denying the existence of biological sexes, but she is making an argument that fundamentally sexes come into being through our actions and interactions. Butler does not want to separate gender roles and sexes in a same way that the traditional 2nd and 3rd generation of feministic theory [2] has usually done, since she is making a convincing argument that there is no reason to do it. And as a bonus it becomes much easier to construct a credible “queer theory”, because after all the lesbians and gays seem to fall into the middle in all classical feminist theories. I am not really an expert on queer theories….but Butler is! If Butler interests you, you must read “Gender trouble” [3]

Now in my previous blog I was making an argument that the progress of equality development has stopped in many fields in western countries, despite the legislation everywhere in west should in principle support it by now. Yet there are many unresolved issues. In many - if not even the most - of disciplines in science and business women (or sometimes men) are underrepresented, in OECD countries women get paid only 70-80 % of what men do in average and very often the fitting of everyday family live and work career is seeing as the problem for women only!!! My claim was that this can be seen as a failure for feministic movement and that it could be because the contemporary feministic theory does yet not give all the building blocks to make further progress from where we are now. Of course there are movements that try to free themselves from the obvious limiting dogmas of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism and call themselves post feministic, but I do not see any whatsoever reason to give up feminism and go post feministic quite yet – we are definetely not there yet! I would rather promote investigating new approaches based on Barad’s and Butler’s ideas. And I have already a cool term to describe this study: Quantum Gender.

So what would it mean in practise? With the title “from political correctness to quantum gender” I meant we need to move on from just being politically correct to something more. Because the legislative means used to achieve the goals of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism are not enough to break the glass ceilings that still hinder people to obtain the same opportunities in work life and society regardless what type of sex organs they have been born with.

If we take Barad’s quantum physical approach, Quantum Gender would mean that our gender (and sex too like Butler suggests) becomes into existence only as a consequence of and with the meaning that an active agent observing the sex gives to it. In work life and professional world it should entail a principle that if we are looking people to perform specific functions, we should not define people in advance based on what irrelevant properties (sex organs, skin color, ethnic background etc) they might have, but only what a person is expected to do. If we assign people irrelevant properties in advance, it affects also the outcome of our judgement. Now that is of course common sense and that’s’ what the equal opportunity legislation in western world tries to achieve anyway, but in practise it’s not enough as we have seen. In the previous blog I gave examples how people still treat exactly similar job applications differently depending whether the applicant’s name is male or female. So I fear the glass ceilings will not get broken by the legislative actions alone.

I suspect that there are very few jobs anymore in the post-industrialized world where biological sex really has any relevance. In fact hardly any work (if any other than being a prostitute) requires specific sex organs to do the job. It may even be sex organs might have relevance only in activities what they are good for, namely reproduction and sexual recreational pleasure. So with the Quantum Gender approach our sex should not come into being at all when we define ourselves as professionals. Of course that has been the goal for feminism at all times, but since the feministic theory has been so far based on the dichotomies, sex has still been a predefined property of individuals. It means that feminism so far has been saying: Let’s be Politically Correct (statement PC)
PC: We are men and women – but hey, it is forbidden treat us such when it doesn’t count
Whereas the Quantum Gender proposal (statement QG) would be more like
QG: We are people - and when we want to think about having sex, let’s observe our sexes then

I think QG approach would make a more easy path to break the glass ceilings in the long run. Firstly I hear a lot of the people complain about political correctness. I think it is because some feel the PC statement is fundamentally saying “We have sexes, but let’s not think about it” and it becomes a bit like saying “Don’t think about a pink elephant” - and of course you end up doing just that. My observation is that for the more simple minded people the PC statement seems to be stressful ;-) Secondly QG should be good also in sense that it should free ourselves from gender role expectations as careerists, household keepers, parental roles…(and anywhere outside bed room activities =) If we assume that there are no sexes, where they don’t count, there should not be any pressure on expectations either. But in order to get there the QG idea should be part of our culture.

Changing culture towards QG makes sense in my opinion. Us humans are self aware intelligent creatures and we have adapted our culture many times to support the life conditions we have lived in. Today we don’t live in caves any longer and in modern information society advancing equality should benefit both the common good and individual happiness by allowing us to use our abilities and properties in ways that are relevant to what we want to do. Not by labelling us in advance according to our sex organs.

Of course I am not saying that legislation everywhere in the western world or OECD countries is fully compliant to move to QG yet. Particularly in terms of maternity leave compensation there is still a lot to do in many countries, although I think EU is in average more progressive than US at the moment. However, I think QG could be the next step…but how to get there?

I don’t have any program how we could move from PC to QG yet. I do not suggest that governements should start tuning their legislations right this instance just because I wrote this blog =)…. But I would rather challenge people to start thinking of the next generation of feministic movement by investigating Barad and Butler seriously, thinking about what differenc QG could make, research what the implementation of Barak’s and Butler’s ideas would mean in practise and how this implementation could be done with concrete actions.

I know also that when I am saying that 3rd gen feminism is promoting PC, I am not giving enough credit to all contemporary feministic studies. There are of course a lot of woman studies scholars that are basically saying essentially the same thing as I outline here as a QG principle. However, oftentimes they reject being called feminists, and that I don’t agree with. I think as long as we are not people first and men and women only where it counts…there is no reason to give up feministic movements. And we are not there yet.

I see the equality train slowing down in the west and I fear it is in a jeopardy of stopping altogether before reaching the station unless it is fuelled with new ideas.

[1] Barad, Karen “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning”, Duke Unoversity Press

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism

[3] Butler, Judith “Gender Trouble”, Routledge, 1989

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Phew…it has been a really busy fall. I haven’t had much time do blogging even though the world is no less full of topics to rant about than before =). Cheers to anyone dropping by here!

Status update on patriarchy / Feminism in a standstill

2009-08-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

Ann Gallagher and James C. Kaufmann conclude in their book “Gender differences in mathematics” [1] that It has simply never been established that there is any meaningful and substantial sex differences in mathematics ability that is not massively confounded with factors related to individual experience. Therefore researchers whose goals are to are to understand the biological basis of behaviour still need even to produce data that suggest that there is that there is any sex difference that can be even partly explained by biological factors.

There is a huge amount of research on the subtleties of differences between female and male cognition, but all research indicates that whatever differences there are (for example in problem solving strategies) based on the current data, it is practically impossible to unambiguously separate biological factors from what is caused by gender roles and individuals' personal histories of learning. There seems to be more variance in intellectual performance within a group consisting solely of men than a group of women. In other words the Gaussian distribution seems to be more spread out of a fully male group in terms all types of intellectual performance (not just mathematical) than with a fully female group. But this too, could be just a reaction to how the school systems and teachers have reflected to gender role based behaviours and expectations [2].

The history of science and philosophy has truly been “His Story” since other than a very few exceptions, women have been banned to participate higher education up until about 100 years ago. The most courageous and eager of women did however make themselves heard in science, but they had to usually do it either anonymously or using their husbands name to be able to get their thoughts published.

For exemple Marie-Sophie Germain, who was the first woman to get a seat in the French academy of science, had to first pretend to be man, “monsier LeBlanc”, in order to be taken seriously and to establish the correspondence with her first mentor Friedrich Gauss, the most prominent mathematician of the time. Here is how she eventually revealed herself to Gauss in 1807 [4]:

But how to describe to you my admiration and astonishment at seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur Le Blanc metamorphose himself into this illustrious personage who gives such a brilliant example of what I would find it difficult to believe. A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius. Indeed nothing could prove to me in so flattering and less equivocal manner that the attractions of this science, which has enriched my life with so many joys, are not chimerical, [than] the predilection with which you have honored it.

There are many sad stories during the 19th centuries how brilliant women were simply prohibited attending universities, especially in mathematics and philosophy, but that was then. Today the situation is of course different at least in western societies…or is it?

Namely there are still amazingly few women in science and technology and even philosophy, much less than you would expect now that there should not be any more legal restrictions for women doing science (in western world). I claim that it is largely because the old gender role based patriarchy is still there between our ears. I think such strong cultural traditions don’t completely disappear in 100 years, in just a few generations.

From my own personal experience I can say that I have several times run into attitudes and heard many men claim that women are somehow less capable to succeed in mathematics, philosophy, technology or Information technology, because their problem solving strategies are somehow more “conservative” or “less creative” or whatever. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. There are a lot of studies showing that in IT business and engineering, exactly similar job applications get a less favourable review, if the applicant has a female name than a male name [5]. Interestingly I remember reading a study that showed that if a male job application reviewer had a women engineer in his family, he would rate female engineering job applicants more favourably than men who have no experience about woman engineers…The prejudices seem to go away with experience.

In fact I have met some young male “hero” SW developers that have been quite convinced that women are up to no good particularly as programmers. Well I myself am not up to any good...that's true... but I wonder if these guys are aware that many of the modern programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are based on the theoretical findings of this year’s Turing price winner (most esteemed recognition in computing) Barbara Liskov’s work on data abstraction and programming language development [6] (thanks Strider). So dear boys before you judge all the woman programmers beforehand, remember that the tools you use might have a solid female touch in them ;-)

During the 10 years I have hung out in the internet participating philosophy discussions I have met even admitted misogynists, who think that women just make too much noise about themselves. I don’t agree they do since I dare to suspect that practically every women over the age of 35 has some experiences how the patriarchy's attitudes have surfaced in some instance in a way that it has had a disruptive effect in some serious work at hand, whether it be in business or academia. Glass ceilings are still there in many places! When you are younger, you don’t care so much about individual incidents, at least if they don’t occur everyday, or if you are of the more naive sort, you might not even understand some of the underlying innuendos to connect the dots. But when you start approaching middle age, at some point you will start to notice that patriarchy and sexism are still alive and an undercurrent in many places that matter.

And in fact the patriarchy is not in the business of going away at the moment. The statistics show that women’s share of the traditionally male dominated businesses has not increased significantly during the last 20-30 years in the western countries and women still earn smaller salaries with same ratio that they did a few decades back. I think this is a major failure for the feministic movement.

I will not accuse men…or let me take that back... yes I do accuse some men. The kind of men who have made a hasty conclusion that all feminism in general is useless or unnecessary, without acknowledging that our western societies are still far from being equal, or men who think the equality has just come automatically, without knowing all the work that was done by feminist movements before women got to vote, go to school or even go to work in any society today. Or the kind of men who use constantly sexist argumentation just out of mean sexist attitudes (disguised sometimes as humor), fear of women or plain stupidity, or the men who outright hate women and see it acceptable to spread hatred. Of course there can be man hating women too and they would be equally harmful, but according to my experience these men (or women) are just the-not-so-smart people among us, who are afraid of loosing their identity if they do not maintain an illusion being superior just because of their sex. I personally believe that with proper understanding of gender roles and how they work in a society, the reasons to be afraid would in general diminish in the long run. There would be less reasons to be afraid of loosing "manhood" (or womanhood for that matter).

But I think discussing how feminism and feministic theory should evolve is important. I suspect that feministic or gender theories are in a standstill, because they seem not being able to analyse the gender questions further in a way that would explain satisfactorily why equality among sexes does not seem to be making progress at the moment.

- - - - - -

My original plan was to write more about the gender theories, especially refer to Judith Butler and Karen Barad, since I think they have very original ideas that could open new ways by challenging the traditional dichotomies... but I ran out of time now :-( I hope to be able to continue soon, since I already had a cool title for that writing: Quantum gender !!!
- of course :D

Q

[1] Gallagher, A. and Kaufmann, J. “Gender differences in mathematics”, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[2] McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. and De Lisi R. Biology, “Society and Behavior, The Development of Sex differences in cognition”, Ablex publishing, 2002
[3] http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/germain.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
[5] Wilson, F.M. “Organizational behaviour and gender”, Ashgate publishing, 2003
[6] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/

Loki the Liger

2009-05-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

One day my roommate at our Heffalump (!) apartement, Lokifluff Clarity, was wearing a Liger avatar. I guess a Liger is taxonomically somewhere between a Tiger and a Lion. Doesn't it look amazing? By clicking the picture you can see it in full screen size :

Here is another shot. The kitty on the floor was the package for the liger Avi.

The liger could roar and jump and do all the things a real life liger would do...if only it existed

Aww...isn't it cute!!!

smiles
Q

Q&A about Dar Innis's metaphysics

2009-05-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

I managed to get Dar here on my blog and he was kind to do a Q&A session about his metaphysics essay:

QS: Hi Dar and welcome! I’m very glad that you got the time to visit my blog, how have you been?

DI: I've been doing well, thanks.

QS: Thanks for letting me publish your thoughts about “Being Is Not Relative, And Perspectives Of Being Are Relative”. I was very impressed when I read it. I think that although your basic idea is deceptively simple, it is at the same time extremely clever! But first could you clarify more why did you choose to use the word “Being” rather than “exist”?

DI: It's not really my idea. It's Parmenides idea. I simply take it a step further than he was able to. I actually used to refer to that which I here call Being as existence. Existence didn't work so well as I want to talk about what unconditionally is, and I found that people strongly associate the word existence with things that conditionally are. Being also suffers this problem, but people seem more willing to get beyond that with 'capital B Being'. I personally prefer the word truth, next I prefer 'capital T Truth'; yet, with the word truth I have to clarify that I am not speaking of propositional truth and the like. I've even tried making a new word: isness. Lao-tzu made a good point in the Tao Te Ching when he referred to this subject as unnamable. Yet, we have to refer to it in some way. He went with the Tao. Currently I favor 'capital B Being'.

QS: One of the reasons I personally liked your writing is that it seemed to suit my personal views on metaphysics. According to your definition, it is not only physically directly observable things that can exhibit Being, but anything that can be stated in some form including things like logical truths, fictitious statements or even dreams. But do you think it would be still possible to categorize the different types of being in some more “fundamental” levels of existences? For example, it seems to me that many physicists seem to rank the being of physically observable things more “real” than our thoughts, even if the thoughts were about what we make of our observations. I, on the contrary, have always thought that logical truths are somehow more fundamental than physical observations =).

DI: I do not think it useful to regard any real thing as any more real than any other real thing. Everything that is, is. There is not anything that is in a way that is more or less than anything else is. In understanding how different things relate, I would agree that logical truths are more fundamental than physical truths. I think physical truths are a manifestation of logical truths. However, I also think that thinking and the development of logic depend upon having something like a brain which depends upon physical truths.

QS: You make a separation between perspectives of being and being itself. Being exists in every way it is possible for it to exists, allowing different perspectives. But aren’t the perspectives themselves some sort of beings? Like the notion “A is shorter than B” is a sentence that is being, at the same time it is a perspective to the being of A. Do you see any contradiction that a thing is at the same time being and a description of a perspective?

DI: This is really an excellent question. Being itself is sort of it's own universe of discourse, and it cannot be related to anything else. Perspectives of Being constitute another universe of discourse. All perspectives of Being are Being, but no single perspective of Being is Being itself. Sort of like A is a letter of the alphabet without being the alphabet itself, or a circle is geometrical without being Geometry itself. No, I do not see it as a contradiction for a sentence to both be and to be a description of a perspective.

QS: Ok, so perspectives are something that get shape through our cognition, right?

DI: No, these perspectives I am talking about are not shaped through our cognition. Being itself seems to have a crude awareness of itself. From this awareness arise the singular and continuum perspectives of Being. Betwixt these two extremes there lies a continuum of intermediate perspectives where the singular and continuum perspectives relate with each other. It is this relativity of perspectives that give rise to physical phenomena and the complexity necessary for human cognition.

I realize it seems odd to consider non-human perspective, or that Being itself has a crude sort of awareness. This is likely the most fantastical seeming aspect of this metaphysic. If being did not have some sort of awareness of itself, the perspectives of Being would not arise. If the perspectives of Being did not arise, nothing resembling us or the world in which we live would arise. At least, that is the case if this metaphysic is correct. I suspect that human awareness is like a spike in the crude awareness of Being itself. Augmented by sense organs and a brain for memory and computation, our awareness is much more advanced than the crude baseline awareness Being as of itself.

As for actual Beings, I do not think there are any such things. Being is indivisible, singular. It cannot be separated into Beings. There does not be such a thing that is other than Being by which Being could be divided.

I'm much more in line with the Buddhist view of the world. We would not consider the blinking of an eye as a Being. The blinking of an eye has no independent being or substance of its own. The blinking of an eye arises, occurs, then ceases, so is impermanent. The blinking of an eye only is while the eye blinks, so is dependent upon and conditioned by the eye blinker. The blinking of an eye is an act, and we consider the blinker of the eye to have a greater claim to be a Being than the blinking of an eye.

Well, I am an act done by organs. Organs are acts done by tissues. Tissues are acts done by cells. Cells are acts done by organelles. Organelles are acts done by molecules. Molecules are acts done by atoms. Atoms are acts done by subatomic phenomena. Some subatomic phenomena are acts done by other subatomic phenomena. Other subatomic phenomena seem elemental. We do not know what does these elemental subatomic phenomena. We do know that these elemental subatomic phenomena are 'quanta of energy'. Quanta of energy is a scientific way of saying 'discrete packets with measurable activity'. Discrete packets of with measurable activity is a verbose way of saying 'acts'. We are acts, just like the blinking of an eye is an act. I may occur longer than the blinking of an eye, but this makes me no less empty, impermanent, or conditioned than the blinking of an eye. It would be inconsistent for me to regard myself a Being so long as I do not consider the blinking of an eye a Being. Furthermore, I have yet to encounter anything else that I could consistently regard as a Being. The Buddha speaking of things in the phenomenal world would say 'All is Dhukkha'. I would say, also regarding the phenomenal world, 'All is activity'.

QS: I see! But the “act” that we call our cognition does seems anyway to interact with other cognitions through language , so could it be said that the relationship between “universe of discourse (about perspectives)” and “universe of actual Beings” is in some way similar to relationship of language and the true essence of perspectives of beings, that Wittgenstein, existentialists and others have been trying to study?

DI: Our language developed in response to the world as we had to engage it. Rarely did we have time to consider the nature of things. Things like mountains, people, and hammers seem to long endure. From a practical perspective likening them to acts such as the blinking of an eye seems absurd.

I think that existentialist projects have a great deal going for them; however, I do think that many existentialists confuse their primarily epistemological projects with metaphysics, or think that they allow them to make proclamations about metaphysics that I would classify as categorical errors. I covered one such instance when I spoke of Heidegger's lecture, 'What is Metaphysics'. I certainly do not think metaphysics is a linguistic confusion as some would suggest. If it were, it should be much easier to find the right words to express metaphysical claims.

I haven't explored existential philosophy perhaps as much as I should. To me, its enough that I experience anything at all to know that it is Being that I experience something, and that it is not Being that I do not experience something to establish that there is Being.

QS: What do you think is the implication of your metaphysics to the definition to causality? If Beings of things are not related to each other, they probably can’t be causes to each other? So is causality also all about perspectives, too?

DI: What I mean by Being is quite different than what we mean by the being of a thing. In perspectives where there are many things, these things can relate with other such things. Perspective does seem to me to be close to the root of causality though. The crude physical theory this metaphysic lead to uses the two basic perspectives of Being, and the need to make them consistent with each other in intermediate perspectives, as its basis. As for Being itself, that is beyond causality.

QS: In light of your metaphysics, do you think that the lack of something, or the not-being of a thing, can cause a perception of something else being? So that that not-being could be cause of something (even a perception?)

DI: If a thing is not, it is not even a thing. A thing cannot not be. The basic perspectives of Being might seem a sort of nothing, but they are still perspectives of Being, and that is not nothing. I called an earlier form of this metaphysic 'Nothing and the Void', as a point without anything beyond it would seem like a sort of nothing, and an undifferentiated infinite continuum would seem like an endless void.

QS: You made nicely provocative statements that your metaphysics would make quantum mechanics less unintuitive….here is what came into my mind: When you say things are either Being or not, they become being only when they get some sort of stated form. And stating how things are Being needs someone to do it, there must be someone doing it. I understood the analogy to quantum mechanics, so that we know that physical things exists only when by observing them, but the observation is always part of the interpretation of a specific consciousness. We don’t know about the Being of things unless there is a conscious observer…or how would you describe the analogy?

DI: Well, perspective is the most mysterious aspect of this theory to me. For there to be the basic perspectives, and for them to interact, there must be some sort of awareness to in some way perceive them. For there to be motion at the speed of light or gravity or electromagnetism, according to this metaphysic, there must be some sort of awareness. I do not want to suggest this awareness is anything like human awareness. In the case of the basic perspectives, there does not exist enough complexity for even a crude half baked notion, no less self reflection, in either one of them. To get to the aspects of quantum strangeness this metaphysic seems to help resolve, I'd need to go into more detail on the crude scientific theory this metaphysic leads to. Some of it comes down to how the basic perspectives must interact in the intermediate perspectives. Some of it will come down to how different perspectives become more or less significant in determining how phenomena unfold. When we make an observation, we alter that dynamic.

QS: What about the concept of emergence? Does it become useless in light of your metaphysics? Since beings of things are not related, the whole question of reductionism vs. holism is only about perspectives?

DI: Well, the way the perspectives must interact in order to remain consistent causes all sorts of things to emerge. I guess you could put me more on the holism side. I think that awareness is inherent in Being, which enables Being to perceive itself in different ways. I tend to think of human awareness as sort of spikes in this awareness, where our physical bodies have enabled more detailed sensing with organs and an ability to record, organize, and ponder what is sensed with brains. Sometimes I like to think of consciousness and life as Being seeking to take a more active role with itself. I do not believe in disembodied thought, even if I think Being itself has some sort of crude inherent awareness.

QS: What do you plan to do next? Are you planning studying specific applications?

DI: I'm still working on expressing this understanding better, and I need to work on expressing the scientific theory it leads to better. Trying to pummel it into words is not easy for me, and most of my attempts seem to fall short. I need to get it polished to a point where it falls short slightly less so.

QS: Thank you!

Strider Villota discusses SL applications

2009-05-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Strider Villota is my friend from Education Island. Since he has lectured to business people in SL, I was eager to hear his opinion about the thoughts I wrote in “what did Rosedale really say”. I knew he had a lot of great insight in how SL is actually perceived today so I had to ask for an interview for the blog and he was very kind to go for it, so here it is!

QS: Welcome to my blog Strider. It’s a privilege to have you here!

SV: Thank you very much, Quintessential. I am very happy to be part of your blog. Though, according to some of the studies in your happiness articles, it is not my being here that makes me happy. I guess it is in my DNA… but I digress. I enjoy the variety of topics explored in your blog and I am honored that you asked for my opinion on SL.

QS: You have been following SL for quite a while and even lecturing here to information management professionals. What is your feeling, is SL still a hot topic or do you see the interest fading or changing now?

SV: I think the interest is changing, but it depends on the group. In general, I believe SL has followed the classic Gartner Hype Cycle (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). In this model, the interest in a new technology climbs until it reaches a point of “inflated expectations”, disappointment follows and the hype decreases until it reaches a “trough of disillusionment”, and then the hype increase again through a gradual “slope of enlighten.” Judging by the recent press as mentioned in your earlier article, I think we are probably close to the trough of disillusionment.

QS: You have lectured both to industry CIOs (Chief Information Officers) as well as to University information system administrators. Were there any differences in their interest in SL, and if there was, why?

SV: Yes, I have talked about SL with industry CIOs and other high level managers in IS, as well as people associated with universities. From my experience, there has always been a different level of interest between the groups. In a presentation I made in 2007, I had both groups in the audience. SL was receiving a lot of press at the time. The university administrators were very enthusiastic about the possibilities. They asked many questions about using SL for recruiting students, teaching, alumni relations, and creating a social network among students. During the presentation, my colleague passed me a note to pay attention to the industry representatives. When I focused on this group, I found that they were extremely bored. Through my questioning, I discovered that they found little or no value in SL. They could not see how to attract customers with SL (in fact, they didn’t think universities could either), saw some minor possibilities for training, and felt there were much better 3D modelling tools to illustrate their products on their web sites. The industry representatives were also concerned about adult content in SL.

QS: What do you think were the initial expectations about SL in professional use? Do you think
SL has lived up to those expectations so far?

SV: While some companies have experimented in SL, most of the companies I talked with (with a few exceptions) were never interested. The few that were interested saw it as a possible vehicle for training. Some, though, were just experimenting with such things as virtual offices. I don’t know that the expectations were ever that high in the first place. A few years ago when companies had budgets to experiment, some would try new things like SL to see if they could discover a use. Judging by the number of companies that have left SL, I think most companies have not really found a use. In addition, although there are some interesting stories about university use, on the whole it has not really taken off in that market either.

QS: How do you see the future, how could SL offer the best value as an extension to RL business communications?

SV: Wow, this is a tough question. I think it probably depends on the industry. In general, I have difficulty seeing where SL might be a leading platform to support RL business communication. Usually, voice, text, charts, and tables are fine to support business communication. Where video is important, Skype or similar products that are not based on avatars would work better. The SL world allows activity in addition to communication. I think its unique feature is that it supports virtual physical interaction. That is why universities see it as a possible place for teaching and some businesses see possibilities for training. I’ve talked with some businesses that are interested in developing better robots in SL. I think they are interested in this because it would support controlled training exercises. I think there might also be some opportunities in SL for companies to offer activities like virtual social gatherings for customer groups. They could sponsor a band and a dance, for example, as a way to promote customer relations (this might be a bit farfetched). On the other hand, people at Philosophy House seem to like to sit around and talk. So, you never know how the desires of different groups may evolve.

QS: What about the technology? Do you think SL software supports the HW used in PCs (like graphics cards) efficiently or do you see room for development?

SV: One of the biggest problems I face with SL is that it runs best on only certain graphics cards. The Intel cards that come with many laptops these days are not supported. Although the laptops can sometimes run SL, SL frequently runs poorly (e.g., grind to a halt when there are many avatars or sculpted prims in the area). Consequently, it is difficult to hold a class or develop a training exercise when most of your students have laptops that do not run SL at least moderately well. Most students are only thinking about running word processing, presentation, and web browsing software when they buy their laptops…not SL.

QS: SL has several groups talking about metaverse, which I believe means the interoperability between different virtual worlds (besides SL I know of Open sim at least). There is even a discipline called metanomics! Do you think there exists any actual use of metaverse applications yet? What could be the benefits in the long run?

SV: I have not followed the discussion on metaverse applications, so my answer will be somewhat general. Normally, in IT interoperability is a good thing. One reason the web became so successful is that the user could jump from site to site regardless of the web server used and the information being displayed. If you needed a different browser for different web servers or different types of information, the web would be very difficult to use. Following that line of thought, it would be very convenient to easily jump from one virtual world to another. Ideally, you could do this with the same avatar and have some of the same features (inventory) of that avatar also work in the other world. In this case, different companies might create different specialized worlds. Some worlds could be geared toward gaming and others geared towards RL real estate, for example. Of course, SL may like it if it is all done through them, but different companies may evolve the technology in different directions.

QS: I understood you were slightly sceptical about my argument that anonymity would be one of the main benefits in SL communications (at least for people working in private companies). Could you tell what do you think would be the main benefit for NOT being anonymous in SL? If your avi just represents your RL self on-to-one, why would SL be preferential to an existing RL on-line communication system like Adobe connect Pro, or Skype even

SV: First, I think you do have a valid argument about anonymity. Even within a company, a discussion where participants are anonymous could generate more effective brainstorming. There are technologies that support that now, though, so you don’t necessarily need SL for that. My point on the anonymity feature of SL is that it seems to be counter to the way the world is moving. Teenagers, young adults, and even older adults seem to want the opposite of anonymity. That is, though cell phones, Twitter, and Facebook, people like to share information about their real life self. From a practical standpoint, as a teacher I would prefer to see my students’ real names in SL. As another example, if you were to hold an alumni event in SL, it would be much more fun to spot a RL friend by their RL name. I think SL does not offer an advantage over Skype of Adobe connect when the focus is primarily a business meeting. However, I don’t believe that you can hug a friend, dance, ski, or enjoy a virtual drink together while watching the same TV show on these other platforms.

QS: You mentioned to me about an idea connecting SL to RL social networking systems like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. How would that work in practise? What would be the benefit?
SV: Seamless integration, on the technology side, may be somewhat difficult to implement. So, skimming over the technical problems, let’s just focus on the functionality. It is possible that the future Internet will be a highly connected social network. That is, it will be easy for an individual user or a group to move from one Internet application to another with ease. In a way, SL is at its infancy at doing this. Currently, you can jump from a website to a SL location through a SLurl and it is easy to jump from SL to a website. However, the transition is not very smooth. It takes awhile for SL or the browser to open. You can also play YouTube videos (thanks for showing me that, by the way), through a SL TV. Based on this idea, it would seem like a natural step for friends visiting in Facebook, for example, to quickly move to SL, Skype, or a virtual game. Imagine visiting a friend’s Facebook page, reading about their recent life, and maybe even chatting with them through IM. Then you click a button and travel to their SL apartment where you can also see family pictures and, if they are in world, you visit with them, give them a hug, and perhaps play a 3D game. You could crudely do this now through a SLurl, but good integration would make it even easier. Perhaps a mini SL window would open inside of Facebook or the Facebook page could be wallpaper on the SL apartment. Of course, SL would not be the only thing connected. If you wanted to see the RL person and just converse, the click of a different button would give the friend a Skype call.

QS. Interesting ideas! But based on your experiences and the feedback you have received by lecturing to business information management professionals, how do you think SL itself will evolve?

SV: It seems that technology predictions are frequently wrong. So, I’m not confident in my answer at all. One possibility is that SL will continue to cater to those really seeking a second life, where anonymity is important. SL may have enough of a user base to continue to be a viable fairly small player on the Internet, in the scheme of things. Another possibility is that Linden Labs could start to segment their market. One segment would cater to the social networking arena. In this arena, anonymity would not be a sales feature. A second segment would cater to business training. LL would develop features in SL that make it easy to develop teamwork exercises, etc. A third segment could focus on professional level 3D models. These are just ideas. The advantage of the segments is that LL could experiment a bit to see if any of the ideas take off.

QS: Strider, what do you personally expect to get out of SL professionally in the future?

SV: Gosh, I don’t have high expectations for myself. I originally entered SL because I thought my students would be more interested in animated simulated worlds then the boring text based simulations that are used in higher education. For example, you might be able to teach entrepreneurship in SL by constructing a SL business. As another example, you could potentially teach project management by building something in SL, developing a schedule and budget, and then hiring SL firms to do the job. I’m still hopeful to do that someday if I can find the time.

QS That was great, thank you Strider!

It’s been a great spring for me in SL. And with the top class contributor’s I have managed to persuade to participate in this blog, I can start to be actually really proud of it!

Q

Dar Innis about the essence of being

2009-04-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

And now something completely different.

Dar Innis is my friend from Philosophy House. One day we were chatting about the existence, and it became clear to me that Dar was no stranger to the topic…in fact I found out that he was quite a metaphyscist with original ideas about the essence of existence. After a little persuasion he gave me notes about his ideas and how he had worked definitions and a new approach to “Being of things” that could open ways for a new kind of metaphysics.

After reading the writing twice, I was very impressed!

I intuitively feel that although he was quite provocative in suggesting that his approach in defining being would open up ways to build a new kind of metaphysics that would make quantum weirdness more understandable….there actually could be something in it!

Dar wanted to emphasize that this writing is only on a very draft level, but he allowed me to publish it anyway, since I think his basic idea of the nature of being is presented there already so clearly. The ideas and argumentation are deceptively simple, yet intriguing and makes one want to develop the connections further as well as challenge some of the assumption....all characteristic to an exceptionally interesting work in my opinion. Also the responses to Parmenides and Heidegger are very interesting - check it out!

---------------------------------------------------------------

Dar Innis:
Being Is Not Relative, And Perspectives Of Being Are Relative

Introduction

I have come to an understanding of being, and I want to share it. I hope this account of being helps you to come to a better understanding of being.

The title of this work sums up this account of being. Being is not relative, and perspectives of being are relative.

During the 6th Century BCE in what is currently Italy, Parmenides of Elea discovered the non-relativity of being. Parmenides did the best a man of his time and culture could do to understand what the non-relativity of being meant, but he fell short. With the benefit of over two and a half thousand years of philosophic and scientific advancement since, I have managed to succeed where Parmenides failed.

However, this victory is far from final. This rational account of being, or metaphysic, lays a foundation for a scientific theory that I am not qualified to develop or test. With this metaphysic, I understand why space and time dilate due to relative motion and about masses, as it does in Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity. With this metaphysic, I can even begin to understand why the phenomena explored by Quantum Physics behave in such unintuitive ways. Yet, that is as far as I have managed to push it.

I must leave it to other seekers of truth to succeed where I have failed. I hope by sharing my successes and failures that I may in some way contribute to the endeavor to understand being.

What Is Being?

What is being? The simple answer is that everything is being. Whatever one can consistently state to in any way be is being. It is being that one plus one equals two. It is being that we have observed bodies in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. It is being that George Washington was the first president of the United States of America. It is being that Odysseus outwitted a cyclops in the Odyssey. Anything that is, whether abstract, physical, non-fictional, fictional, or in whatever other way that a thing can consistently be considered to be, is being.

It is that it is the case that it is the truth that it is being that we have many synonyms for being. Parmenides called it 'what is' or 'that which is'. Whatever is the case is being, and being itself could be considered the totality of the case or the case itself. That which true propositions accurately state is being, or we could even call it truth.

All fields of investigation are attempts to understand being. I do not believe it any wonder that sciences such as physics and chemistry explore being. However, even humanities such as art and literature are explorations of being.

Metaphysics, as I use the word, is the rational examination not of what is being, but of being itself. As this account of being is a metaphysic, let us proceed to examine being itself.

There is not being anything that is not being.

There is not being anything that is not being. A thing must be being to be being. A thing that is not being, is not being. A thing that is not being cannot even be consistently thought to be a thing. A thing that is not being cannot have any properties or do anything whatsoever.

I realize this seems inane. Well, it is. It is a tautology, like T=T, not(T)=not(T), and not(T=not(T)).

Unfortunately, there are being some people who maintain that there is being such a thing that is not being. Continental philosophy following Heidegger maintains the contradiction that T=not(T) and T. This is why Continental philosophy does not rely on logic. It views logic as a mistake, and instead appeals to narrative satisfaction, or story logic.

In Heidegger's inaugural lecture, 'What is metaphysics', he asserts that science defines itself as the study of being, and not anything else. Heidegger emphasizes this 'not anything else', or nothing, and claims that science cannot define itself without it. Heidegger rejects that 'nothing' is a null result obtained by negating the totality of all being by asserting that negation depends upon experience of this 'nothing' before we can use it in the first place. Heidegger then claims to find an experience of this nothing withdrawing into itself and away from all things in the experience of angst. This, for him, is enough evidence to prove his assertion that an experience of 'nothing' is required for the act of cognitive negation. He concludes that logic is a mistake and all science that follows the rejection of this 'nothing' is a mistake.

Heidegger is mistaken.

Science does not have to appeal to 'nothing' in order to define itself. Science is the empirical examination of being. Adding that science does not examine what is not being, while consistent, is hardly necessary.

'Nothing' is the null result obtained when one considers the negation of the totality of being. Negation does not depend upon an experience of 'nothing'. All that is necessary for understanding negation is an experience of some difference. Negation is simply the cognitive recognition of difference. This is not that. Red is not blue. You are not me.

Heidegger may genuinely find something that seems to withdraws in itself and away from beings in the experience of angst; however, 'nothing' is not something, and cannot be or do anything whatsoever. As this 'something' he finds withdrawing into itself and away from beings is not 'nothing', he is mistaken in identifying it as such, and anything that follows from this acceptance of contradiction is built upon a mistake.

Those who follow in this mistake are equally mistaken. This is not to say there is no value in their work. There is value in phenomenology. However, by identifying something experienced phenomenologically with a concept developed rationally they are making a categorical mistake. This mistake seems to me to be motivated by the desire to promote phenomenology by denying rationality.

In any case, science is not mistaken in examining what is being and not bothering with an examination of what is not being. Heidegger failed to demonstrate that there is being such a thing that is not being, and so has everyone else.

I lament how common it is in philosophy for a philosopher to declare all that preceded them was a mistake, and that only their new novel way of thinking can rescue us from this mistake. Heidegger was not the first, and shall not be the last, to make this ridiculous claim. Despite this major point of difference, I think Heidegger does make some valuable insights. I especially like his emphasis on experiential knowledge obtained by doing.

I apologize for the diversion. Allow me to get back to the point of this section. It is a mistake to consider that there is being such a thing that is not being. A thing that is being is being. A thing that is not being is not being, and cannot even be considered a thing. Thinking that there is being such a thing that is not being, and that this thing somehow is or plays some role in what is being is a mistake. It is the exact same thing a statement which mixes truth and falsehood. When a statement mixes truth and falsehood, the statement fails to state truth. If we mix being and nothing in an understanding, the result is not an accurate understanding of being.

If a thing cannot participate in any relationship, that thing is not relative.

For a thing to be relative, that thing must be able to participate in some relationship. If a thing cannot participate in some relationship, that thing is not relative.

I hope you find these two statements uncontroversial.

For a thing, If there is not any thing that is not the thing with which the thing can relate, the thing cannot participate in any relationship.

For a thing to participate in any relationship, there must be some thing that is not that thing with which the thing can relate. If there is not any thing that is not the thing with which the thing can relate, the thing cannot participate in any relationship.

Again, I hope you find these two statements uncontroversial.

I have run into some opposition on this point though. There are being some people who consider it possible for a thing to relate with itself. I do not consider such self associations as relations. I consider them identities. So, if you consider such self associations as relations, keep in mind that I do not.

Being is not relative.

For being to be relative, being must be able to participate is some relationship. If being cannot participate in any relationship, being is not relative.

For being to be able to participate in any relationship, there must be some thing that is not being with which being can relate. If there is not any thing that is not being, being cannot participate in any relationship.

There is not any thing that is not being. Being cannot participate in any relationship. Being is not relative.

On the non-relativity of being.

We generally understand things by their relationships. For instance, we could understand a Louisville Slugger baseball bat as a wood club made by the Louisville Slugger Company for batting in the game of baseball. This baseball bat does not compose itself, but is composed of something that is not itself: wood. This baseball bat is not itself a club-like form, but has been shaped into the form of a club. The baseball bat itself is not the Louisville Slugger Company, but was manufactured by the Louisville Slugger Company. The baseball bat is not itself batting in the game of baseball, but is used for batting in the game of baseball. We could go beyond these four basic relationships and explore further. One who is not born into a culture where the game of baseball is played would not even be able to identify the baseball bat as a baseball bat. The baseball bat's meaning as a baseball bat depends upon an incredibly complex web of relationships.

As being is not relative, being is not and has no substantial, efficient, or final principles that we could use to understand being. There is not anything to compose being, nor could being compose anything. There is not anything that could have produced being, nor is there anything that being could produce. There is not some purpose that being could seek, nor is there anything that is not being that could seek being.

The formal principle includes many different relationships.

Being cannot change. A change of being would require that it is being that being is being, and it is being that being is not being. Whether you place being first or second in the sequence of this change, being is still being on both ends, and no change has actually been described.

Being cannot move. Motion is a relationship of positional change with some reference. There is not being any reference with which being's position could change.

Being does not have anything beyond it in any way. There is not anything that could be above, below, left of, right of, ahead of, behind, before, after, or in any other way outside of being. There is not anything that could be in any way inside of being.

Being cannot separate anything as space separates the stars. Being cannot be separated by anything as stars are separated by space. For this reason we can state that being must be altogether, continuous, and one in number.

Being cannot vary in density. Being cannot be thicker here and thinner there, as there is not anything to thin being as water thins wine. For this reason we can state that being must be everywhere full of only itself, without any variation.

The form of being seems elusive as there is not being anything with which we could in any way contrast with being. This did not stop everyone from trying to solve the form of being. Both Parmenides of Elea and Melissus of Samas tried.

Parmenides concluded that being possessed finite spatial extent, and no temporal extent. While Parmenides discovered the non-relativity of being and made the first deductive argument, not all of his arguments were as grand. Living west of Greece during the 6th Century BCE, Parmenides had no concept of zero distinct from nothing. Since Being cannot be not, he naturally concluded that being could not possess no extent, as that would amount to the contradiction of being not being. Today, we are more prepared to consider a thing with zero length, even if we still consider a quantity of zero as no real quantity.

Parmenides also argued that the infinite was in need of all things, and that being is in need of no thing, so he would not allow himself to think that being extended infinitely. This argument against the infinite is weak, and I suspect Parmenides motive was to avoid having his conception of being associated with the theory of Anaximander, who considered the material of all things as Apeiron, without limit, or the infinite.

This left Parmenides with only one option for the spatial extent of being, some finite extent. Seeing as being possessed a limit, and that there is not anything beyond being to impede being, being must extend equally in all directions forming a spatially extended sphere.

Curiously, Parmenides had no difficulty doing away with time: “Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one.”

Melissus of Samos later sought to correct these inconsistencies. He felt that Parmenides had been unjust in treating space differently than time. Furthermore, Melissus was not biased against infinite extent, and saw the weakness of Parmenides argument against the infinite. While Melissus did not state his case as well as Parmenides, the solution of Melissus is more consistent. Melissus concluded that being ever was, and ever shall be, infinite with both space and time. However, this infinite being still did not permit for any variation or change.

Melissus was correct in considering the dimensions of space and the dimension of time as dimensions and treating them the same. Without any higher maths available, Melissus had no reason to consider the possibility of more dimensions. In his time, stating that being possessed infinite extent with both space and time amounted to stating that being possessed infinite extent with all dimensions. So, with that minor adjustment, the solution of Melissus is logically consistent. Being could, with logical consistency, form a completely unvarying continuum with infinite extent in all dimensions.

Parmenides solution was inconsistent. A finite extent is necessarily relative. If there is some finite extent, it has a limit, one naturally asks: what lies beyond the limit? Furthermore, any finite form has internal complexity. As Plato had Parmenides say in 'The Parmenides', the center of a sphere differs from the surface of a sphere, as well as other points within the sphere. A finitely extended being is simply inconsistent with the non-relativity of being.

Had Parmenides treated space as he treated time, he could have arrived at a logically consistent solution. Being could, with logical consistency, form an point, without anything beyond it: a singularity with zero extent with any dimension.

Even with the correction to Parmenides solution, both of these solutions suffer a fatal defect. Neither solution allows for any sort of variation or change. We live in a world full of variation and change. We cannot accept either solution without denying ourselves and the world in which we live. This is what both Parmenides and Melissus seemed to do. Both considered the world presented to us by sense as somehow mistaken or illusory. Even if I were to concede that the world in which we live is an illusion, by what mechanism could either of these solutions to the form of being possibly produce this illusion? I cannot consistently accept either solution.

Where does this leave us? Being could form a singularity or a flat continuum. Neither solution can permit the world of variation in which we live. Short of conceding that being has no form, we have only one more alternative to consider. If being could form a singularity or a flat continuum, and being does not form either a singularity or a flat continuum, perhaps we are dealing with an inclusive or, and being forms both a singularity and a flat continuum.

Perspectives of being are relative.

How could this one being form two such different forms? These two different forms are simple solutions to the form of being. We can synthesize these simple forms into a single complex form. Topologically, the two forms are identical. After all, it is topological considerations that led us to them. In both cases, the forms possess no sides, internally or externally. We are dealing with one form, a topology, with at least two ways of looking at it, or with at least two perspectives.

With at least two ways of perceiving being, we have enough difference to build up a theory of relativity. Not difference of being itself, but difference in the way being is perceived.

This brings us to a tricky question: What perceives these different solutions so that relativity can arise? The solution is rather simple, if a bit astonishing. There is not being anything that is not being to perceive these different solutions to the form of being. Only being itself could perceive these different solutions to the form of being. What is it like for being to be being? If being can be being in more than one way, being would have to be being in all the ways that it can be being.

This forces us to consider the rather bizarre notion that some sort of primordial form of awareness is inherent in being itself. Only with such an awareness could being perceive itself in many ways, and only in perceiving itself in many ways can being give rise to the relativity of perspectives that leads to perspectives of being like our universe.

Then I would have to go into my crude dynamics and it becomes more of a crude scientific theory touching on general relativity, black holes, photons, and a bit of quantum strangeness based on this metaphysic.

What did Rosedale really say?

2009-04-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

Little over a month ago Loki (Lokifluff Clarity) and I were listening to Philip Rosedale’s (SL name Philip Linden) presentation. Rosedale is the founder and former CEO of Linden Labs. He was talking about what Second life could offer for corporate customers. It appears that LL has decided to start marketing SL more to corporate customers from now on. But after listening to Rosedale I was rather puzzled, how does LL intend to actually approach companies? Does SL have anything to offer to the RL companies? I thought I have to write down some of my thoughts, beacuse it was so confusing.

It seems that I’m not the only one wondering the same question. Christiana Zenovka gave me at PH a link to an article, discussing how corporations are actually abandoning second life today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/technology/5078444/Second-Lifes-span-is-virtually-over-as-firms-decide-to-get-real.html . Here is also another article discussing the same thing http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10217315-36.html and google found many more. The corporate exodus seems to be really happening… and I think it’s easy to understand why: If you are a second life citizen, how much time do you spend in some dull corporate sims that promote their boring products. I have visited Gibson guitar company sim once and collected a bunch of freebie guitar imitations there (very nice looking btw), but that’s about it.

Now LL’s new approach is to offer SL as a platform for corporate communications, and that’s what Rosedale seemed to be talking about, too. You can actually check it out yourself, since I found out that his talk is available at http://blip.tv/file/1853232 . If you look at 27:30, the camera turns so that you can see me and Loki in the front row! There are also records of the talkback in local chat at http://www.gronstedtgroup.com/pdf/philip%20linden%20talk%20-%20back%20chat%20-%20Notepad.pdf . If you search for me or Lokifluff there, you can find our questions. Unfortunately Rosedale did not answer either of us :-(

I and Loki listening to Rosedale (Philip Linden). The picture doesn't show it, but we had our GMT now! group tags on us :-)

Now what did Rosedale offer to companies? Not much (if anything) I would say. On the contrary, I would criticize his presentation in many ways:

- He was mostly talking about the user experience; SL would supposedly be great for corporate use because it allows the participants to have a visual interaction. Visual interaction would make it more engaging for brains compared to normal teleconferences (….sounded a bit weird to me, but Loki said that in principle he was making kind of sense)…. But hold on! I have every now and then video-conferences and I use MS-netmeeting to share presentations. And I don’t really need anything more remarkable than a camera and skype to establish that. So there is quite enough visual connection and it would be with rl personas rather than avatars. When I am dealing with rl businesses, it would seem even preferable for a serious person like me (…..awww don’t laugh!), so I wasn’t impressed by Rosedale's claims.

- Security is of course a main concern for companies. Without some kind of a guaranteed security and advanced VPN system there is hardly any chance to make a company to discuss it’s internal businesses in SL. And what if someone is able to spy anyway, who will be responsible? I wasn’t sure from Rosedale’s speech whether VPN works already in SL or are they only planning for it. But I think that if LL wants to promote SL as a communication platform for internal meetings, it cannot tolerate one single industrial espionage incident, or it will be abandoned by everyone immediately. Does this sound like a lucrative prospect from LL's point of view? Is internal corporate communication really that interesting business, that it would be worth the risk and investment?

- Rosedale was making also some very soft arguments about how internal promoters of SL, working inside companies could plead to CEO’s “vanity” in making her/his company to be one of the pilot users of SL. Come on Philip, don’t be childish! Even the most vain CEOs will always want to have a good financial justification why would they invest in something risky and new like SL still is. If you are not able to show where the value is in terms of hard cash calculations and what is the return on investment and that there aren’t risks….I doubt it is very hard to get any CEO to signoff for an SL type of an experiment, especially these days when cost control is everywhere tighter than ever. To be honest, I would personally advice LL to cut that kind of cheap sales talk completely when talking to actual business people working in actual corporations, since although some well presented but silly nonsense might sell to VCs (= vulture capitalists known also as venture capitalists) that are specialized in buying and selling “visionary” start-up stories, real world business people will always want to look at the substance, too. LL need to be able to show clearly what is the expected ROI, show successful case studies or a clear demonstrations of getting measurable strategic value, like getting ahead of competition. I would think that soft sales talk, like pleading CEO’s vanity, would only scare away corporate people.

- I was actually very surpised that Rosedale didn’t tell any concrete success stories about how SL has been used in business. I mean although there aren’t probably very many such stories yet, there must be some at least. For example, I heard from Nirak Treschichot at PH how SL has been used to test the functionality of hospital designs by creating making 3-D models in SL and then making avatars to use it as if it was in actual hospital use. Why did Rosedale not refer to any such cases? There must be other successes, too? If LL does not use successful cases as examples in their marketing towards corporate world, I find it very unlikely that they actually win any new corporate customers. I think that this was a big flaw in Rosedale’s presentation. If I was LL, I would collect a portfolio of success stories and use it as the key marketing collateral when approaching actual companies.

- I was also somewhat put off by the format of the event. Although there was obviously a humorous quirk in how Rosedale’s avatar Philip Linden was in the spotlights, like some kind of a messias bringing the joyous message of SL and tens of “fanboys” (Smoke Wijaya’s expression) cheering every word, I think it was somewhat tacky. The fanboys spammed so much that I didn’t notice any critical or more interesting question to get an answer really. Not good enough Philip! If you want to get serious with corporations….get serious first, answer also the difficult questions.

So based on that presentation, I didn’t get at all convinced that LL will make any progress with the corporate world, at least with the approaches they seemed to have today in selling SL to companies. On the contrary, I got the impression that they have run out of ideas… which I think is a pity! Although I am not planning to use SL for anything else but for socializing, I’m still very interested in how it could be used for business purposes, too. There is something magical with SL, as all of us SL citizens know. We love it and we hang in there an unbelievable amount of time…so I think we all would like to see SL grow and flourish.

But could it be that LL is going astray when trying to to win the RL corporate world? I think they might be. Although I’m sure that the LL management talks about this daily and like in most US companies have zillions of time wasting and badly conducted strategy meetings, where people come unprepared and talk mostly off agenda, …ooops, sorry…. hem….*calm down Q* … they should ask once more if the RL corporate scene is really worth the effort, with things like visual skype as a competitor? Where is the business model for avatar based visual corporate communication, really? SL as a marketing scene by making boring business sims has been proven to fail already.

And then there is the question of the sex scene in SL. Most RL corporations don’t want to be associated with the adult scene….since you never know that if you setup a serious corporate sim serving a conservative clientele, that suddenly there wouldn’t be a porn sim right next to your location =). So now LL is planning to move all adult content to a separate continent, where the users would need to show age verification. Perhaps that would be a good idea in principle, but it should have been realized at the beginning of SL. Pushing the separate continent idea at this point will certainly not get through without huge protests. And what’s the worst, the protesters would likely be among the oldest and probably the best paying customers from LL point of view. So if I was an LL business planner, my first reaction would be to be very cautious throwing away the old customers, before there is a clear concept how you are going to attract the new ones….but based on what I have seen so far there doesn’t seem to be much on the table when RL corporations are concerned.

The second point I think LL seems to be missing with it’s new strategy, is that the main attraction for many is that SL can be a true Second life! It allows a person to have a second identity that is not connected directly to the responsibilities of the first one. For example I, Quintessential Sorbet, can be much more straightforward with many issues related to corporate world than my counterpart in meatspace. She needs to think what her employer might think of her activities as an economical columnist, and she has so many personal boundary conditions here and there….poor girl =). I think that the concept of a concrete Second personality was on of the key elements in the original vision when SL was created. I would not abandon that vision for the sakes of hypotethical RL corporate customers, especially when given the competition from skype and other netconferencing systems, the opportunity seems very questionable. Why not rely on the original SL vision, allow people to develop their second identities and build SL businesses that are truly derived from the platform’s opportunities. Phil Ember had found me a link about an SL clothing factory http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/at-sundance-a-second-life-sweatshop-is-art/ whics seems almost like a sweat shop, actual people slaving on a moving belt, creating IP for the company. Check it out, it’s pretty amazing!

Cheers
Quin

I added Christiana's original link. Thanks for finding it for me Loki!

What’s wrong with the contemporary economics, Part II: Futility of utility

2009-04-08T04:30:00.000-07:00

Most of the contemporary microeconomic theories rely one way or the other on the concept of utility. Wikipedia defines utility as a measure of the relative satisfaction from, or desirability of, consumption of various goods and services. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility [1].

My original plan was to write about how difficult the concept of utility is from a practical economics point of view. I have not seen “utility” booked in any balance sheet, written in any law that governs commerce in any country or written in any real life contract. Utility is obviously a purely theoretical concept, but is it useful for anything, or can it even be well defined? I (among many others) doubt that it can.

But it turned out that there was already so much material on the internet about the criticism of the use of utility that I think it’s ok just to refer to [1] for the most part, becuase criticism was based partly on what someone had wrote there: Another criticism [about utility] come from the assertion that neither cardinal nor ordinary utility are empirically observable in the real world. In case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the level of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consume/purchase an apple. In case of ordinal utility, it is impossible to determine what choice were made when someone purchase an orange. Any act would involve preference over infinite possibility of set choices such as (apple, orange juice, other vegetable, vitamin C tablets, exercise, not purchasing, etc),
where cardinal utility is the magnitude of utility differences as an ethically or behaviorally significant quantity and ordinal utility describes just ranking and not strength of preferences.

Now maybe utility would have some use in philosophy, sociology or behavioral science, (…I don’t know…). But in economics it just seems like a messy concept. People have tried to quantify utility so that it could be used in economics by postulating an expected utility hypothesis, which defines utility as a function of expected return on investment (ROI), risks, and personal preferences….sounds rather good at first hearing, doesn’t it? But it has been shown to lead to a several paradoxes like St Petersburg paradox [2], Allais paradox [3] or Ellsberg paradox [4] for starters.

And what’s worse, people just don’t think in terms of utility in practice. On the other hand concepts like (expected) ROI, risks and personal or strategic preferences are real things that people use in their decision-making. So why would it be so difficult to postulate a utility function that would work as a “preference relation” over a set of possible decisions? In fact making such a relation in theory is not so hard. The great mathematician John von Neumann together with economist Oskar Morgenstern already did it (see for example [5]…although there are surely easier to read references somewhere, too =), and their theory looks quite convincing at the first glance….but is it really of any use? I think not, because
a) the concept of “utility” is still messy. Although people do take into account ROIs, risks, and personal preference, I think it is hard to think of a universal relation that would apply to all people in the same way.
b) In order for the expected utility theory to truly describe real life, people are expected to make decisions always rationally….but in practice they do not. People act also “irrationally” or unpredictably, even in corporate decision-making.
c) Making decisions in business is never dependent on one party alone. In order for commerce to take place, you need at least two parties in each individual transaction (see my quantum theory of economics :-)). Thus there is always also the element of negotiation present in every transaction.
d) Even if we would not care about a)-c) the paradoxes of [2]-[4] would still be there. That alone should be a logical proof that an expected utility function is not a satisfactory concept to derive higher level economic theories. Logically one should scrap it!

So why do we use Utility at all? Wouldn’t it be ok just to operate with more easily definable entities like ROI, risks, personal preferences, reference valuations, negotiation strategies, etc….? I think yes it would be and that’s just what is happening in practice too. For example, if you go to Nasdaq internet pages, and take a financial analysis of any given company, you can see the quarterly balance sheet valuations, ROI, risk and other analyses and make your own judgments based on that. But utility has been hypothesized in order to get started with a theory, that would enable a way to connect theories in a vertical dimension, from the micro to macro level. But perhaps there is also something in the rigidity in the ways we like to think. To me it seems that in the history of thought we have had a tendency to create unnecessary concepts like “god” or “space-time ether” or “utility”, that would explain the behavior of the world around us, even if the concept used in the explanation would be fictitious or a fallacy ;-)

So I would propose to free our minds and get rid of the concept of utility in making economic theory. I propose to view this as an analogy to the development of physics theory since wouldn’t it be a little similar to getting rid of the ether hypothesis a hundred years ago? As it turned out there was no need for a universal space-time ether or universal co-ordinates, and in the same way I think there is no need for a universal expected utility function.

Well, maybe the space-time ether analogy is disputable, but I would still like to comment one statement when comparing physics and economics that I have heard many times both in rl and sl, namely the claim that economics would be somehow more difficult to model than physics… but is it really?

If you take the microscopic “quantum” approach to economy, I think the processes in economics are very well defined, because they are defined in the law! The laws governing individual transactions are usually reasonably unambiguous whereas I think the physical theories are constantly challenged. Namely how well are the elementary interactions between elementary particles known really? Aren’t they actually under continuous study in particle colliders and nuclear physics? Perhaps one could claim that the mechanisms of economic interactions are even better known, since they are defined in writing!

Of course the operators in economics are people, who are complicated creatures, but on the other hand, if you think about how the natural science experiments are interpreted...isn’t it also people who operate as cognitive processors making observations, interpreting results and making judgments? And if we talk about technology, isn’t it the often irrational people who design the various gizmos for different purposes, and these purposes are defined by human imagination…sounds rather complicated to me!!!I have not thought very thoroughly how good these analogies to physics really are (or if the analogies actually serve any purpose for that matter) but intuitively it would seem to me that there are grounds to challenge the statement “economics is harder to model than natural sciences”. I think there are good arguments to claim the opposite!

Ursäkta om jag verkade lite provokativt den här gången, men det var bara ivrigheten att få dessa idéer utskriven nånstans =).
Hälsningar till alla SL vänner!

Quin

References:

[1] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility, April 6th 2009
[2] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox, April 6th 2009
[3] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox, April 6th 2009
[4] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox, April 6th 2009
[5] internet page http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/uncert/vnmaxioms.htm, April 6th 2009

thanks again for help Strider

What’s wrong with the contemporary economics, Part I: Models are bad

2009-03-30T13:41:00.000-07:00

The quantum theory of economics (QTE) seems to have provoked people (because I provoked them lol) . So I need to explain what motivated me to work on QTE, and why in my opinion contemporary microeconomic models are not working.

Well..it’s a long story…because they are wrong in so many ways!

But let me start first with other testimonials. I’m far from being alone in thinking that current economic theories are poorly created. Besides having met several natural scientists who mock economics as a pseudoscience, many economists themselves are skeptical about the predicting power of today's theories. Every year the Swedish academy of Science hands out a Nobel prize in economics, indicating that it should be as much a science as physics or medicine. Yet Noble laureates of economics are never invited together with the other Nobel prize winners to the annually televised discussions about humankind’s future, opened by the king of Sweden, …and I used to wonder why that was so. As a young business student I was rather annoyed about it.

Of course the Nobel prize in economics is not an actual Nobel prize, since it is funded by the National bank of Sweden (and not the Nobel foundation) and it is actually called Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne, but on the other hand it is decided by the same academy that makes decisions about the other prizes. So you would expect that it would have the same prestige. Yet many have opposed it, like the famous Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal or the long time Swedish minister of finance Kjell-Olof Feldt. Even one of the Nobel prize winners, Friedrich Hayek, said in his acceptance speech that if he had been asked whether there should have been a Nobel prize in economics at all, he would have voted against it, because he didn’t think economics was a ”proper science”.

Well distinguished gentlemen...I am sorry to say, but I think you are wrong! There definitely should be an award for economics similar to those for physics or medicine. Economics is a huge part of our lives and defines, just as well as the natural sciences or medicine, how our societies and wellbeing work. I would just like to see them fund their particle colliders or neurosurgical equipment without some economic apparatus working in the society that enabled them to build their gizmos in the first place. So the study of economics is a science...or it should be at least.

But I can understand why they were critical. Both the macroeconomic and microeconomic models are so far from reality that for many they seem completely useless. Like to me for instance. I participate in business life on a daily basis and need to deal with prices, valuations and how they are being calculated in real life. I never use any microeconomic models, couldn’t use them because they model something that isn’t real or useful for me. They deal with ”rational agents” playing ”utility” games in a more or less linear world and the agents usually have no feedback between each other and with the system itself. But in real world where actual people negotiate or try to beat ”the system”, emotional as much as rational agents are interacting with each other and the environment to make individual deals.

Yet all sorts of microeconomic models are used everyday to create convincing predictions about the future valuations of all sorts of things…and not the least about stocks and other investment instruments. But they work really poorly. For example, NY Times organized the famous experiment with a chimpanzee as a stock analyst in the early 90s (I remember reading about it then and being tremendously impressed – it might even have affected my career choice). The chimp was blindfolded and made to "invest money" by choosing a portfolio of stocks by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal’s list of stocks. Then the reporters asked several tens of financial analytic companies and financial advisors to recommend a portfolio, using the same amount of money. It turned out that the chimp had beaten 40 % of the professional analysts who were using the latest software based on the latest numerical models. I remember thinking: wow! There is something interesting going on here :-)

That was of course almost 20 years ago, but I doubt the models have gotten essentially any better. They are still faulty in the same ways. They model only hypothetical laboratory cases, which do not apply to the real world.. Of course one could suspect that the same should be true for physical models, but I don’t think so. I very much doubt that anyone builds technology with a physical model that is already known in advance to be insufficient or outright faulty! I would guess that rather than go straight ahead building quantitative numerical models and equations, a natural scientist would spend her time tuning the qualitative description of the model until she believes that it is taking all the phenomena, which she knows the system should exhibit, into account satisfactorily. Of course this might not be true every time a natural science theory is created, but as far as I have understood, that’s how it should go in principle. A natural scientist tries to understand the qualities of the system first, then build the model accordingly, and then test it. And if the empirical results don’t match, the description of the model is revised first and only after that the quantitative numerical model fixed.

But in economics it doesn’t seem work like that in practice. Economic models are typically polynomials of the form: Property (for example price) P = A + Bx + Cx2 +.. Then if the model does not work at some point, an economist just changes the values of coefficients A,B,C... or adds higher order terms (eg. Dx3) If the economist has read more mathematics, she might get fancy and use polynomials with differentials of the variable x instead…but it wouldn’t make the process methodologically any better. Adding coefficients just fix the previous erratic model by adding new terms based on experience, that is based on “knowledge” which is acquired fundamentally by induction, without necessarily understanding what is truly happening in the system. She would not really understand how the system should be actually described qualitatively and then using deduction what could happen within the boundary conditions the system has in real life.
What if after time T the system’s equilibrium changes so that the whole variable x gets thrown out of the window…there would be no way of knowing what will happen to property P, and what’s worse, even the whole system change would not be predicted by the model…and that’s exactly what happens practically all the time and everywhere current economic models are being used in practice.

Physicists and technologists usually are not caught that easily I think. That’s because their method is to try to build knowledge about their system by understanding everything that happens qualitatively in the system. Then through deduction and by understanding boundary conditions, make the model. Only after the model is made would they then make decisions about which details are essential and which details can be left out to simplify the numerical model, especially if it turns out to be too complicated to solve.

I’m not sure if I am able to convey my idea or if I am too idealistic about how physical modeling is used today in practice…but I’m convinced that the people creating technology would never approve the same inaccuracy and lack of realism in their physical models when they are designing their gadgets and gizmos, in the same way that financial analysts approve known unrealistic assumptions in their economic models. I have referred previously to Nicholas Nassim Taleb and his works….I recommend him again. He makes the same point much more eloquently than I ever could. I think Robert Lucas was also an early critic of the same fallacy of creating “knowledge” and economic models through induction (but he was talking about macroeconomics only) [1].

I also think that a "quantitative model driven" way of creating theory leads to a funny phenomena, that quantitative models create qualitative concepts! Since many of the economic models are created by first building polynomials based on inductive experience, the coefficients N of the new terms Nxn that are added in order to “improve” the model, are given attributes like “utility” or “indifference” or “intrinsic economic value”. Of course the attributes need to be credible sounding enough so that the users of economic models could justify their fallacy ;-) But more often than not, I am unable to relate them at all to real life business practices. And at the end the day it is in these practices that prices and economic valuations are formed in real life, isn't it?

So why do we do it?! How can we be so mistaken and let ourselves create fantasy (imaginary properties in microeconomics) from models rather than create models that would try to imitate reality? Taleb or Lucas were not at all the first ones to notice this error. For example philosopher/mathematician and the other writer of Principia Mathematica, A.N. Whitehead noticed:

It is very arguable that the science of political economy, as studied in its first period after the death of Adam Smith (1790) did more harm than good. It destroyed many economic fallacies, and taught how to think about the economic revolution then in progress. But it riveted on men a certain set of abstractions which were disastrous in their effect on the modern mentality. It dehumanized industry. There is only one good example of a general danger inherent in modern science. Its methodological procedure is exclusive and intolerant, and rightly so. It fixes attention on a definite group of abstractions, neglects everything else, and elicits every scrap of information and theory which is relevant to what has remained. The method is triumphant provided that the abstractions are judicious. But however triumphant, the triumph is within limits. The neglect of these limits leads to disastrous oversights… The methodology of reasoning requires the limitations involved in the abstract. Accordingly, the true rationalism must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration. A self satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. [2]

Well…that’s quite a mouthful =). I got this quote actually from Seneca Quandry and he kindly popularized it a bit:

We commit the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ when we treat our models as more real than the phenomena they are intended to represent. When natural resources don’t appear in economic models (sometimes they don’t, sometimes they do) economists may be tempted to ignore their significance. When economists do this, they are committing Whitehead’s fallacy. [3]

--- So that’s why I came up with QTE. It would an attempt to build abstractions to economy from phenomenology and empiria rather than fall too much in love with our computer models.
If I get around to it, I would also like to study the concept of “utility” in more detail. For some reason I like it even less than many other dubious concepts in economic theories. I think the invention of utility is often accredited to philosopher John Stuart Mills, but I think it is probably mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, who used it first in order to find a solution to the St Petersburg paradox. I think he failed at it though, and so has the whole concept of utility failed, at least in economic theory….but that’s another story...to be titled "What’s wrong with the contemporary economics, Part II" ;-)

Cheers for now
Quintessential

References:
[1] internet page March 30th 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique and the references therein
[2] Whitehead, A.N. 1929. Process and Reality. New York: Harper Brothers.
[3] Quandry, S. March 26th 2009, private communication

PS As before I publish this a way too prematurely, as an almost unreadable draft….but again I’m too eager to wait the 10 proof reads that I need to do always! So sorry for that.Q

PPS Edits done on April 2nd. Million thanks to Elia Scribe for help!Q

Quantum theory of economics

2009-03-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Pretty neat title huh? :-)

I had in mind that naming this theory as a "quantum theory" would reflect a quest for a new micro- or even microscopic economic theory based on discrete individual events. Referring to the previous writing, “what’s the right value” (see the blog below), I just think a new economic theory is needed...

Without further ado let’s start:
I would first propose to empty your minds from all of the previous economic theories, all postulates about intrinsic values, laws of demand and supply or concepts for market value, since when an individual transaction occurs I think none of those really matter…except only as mental reference points in the minds of the buyer and the seller.

Let’s just look at what happens in the real world when a “thing” T = goods, service, user right, option or whatever a person or an organization can legally own, changes ownership that is a transaction occurs. Let’s also assume that the ownership is defined legally unambiguously and both the buyer and the seller have enough credibility in each other's minds so that they trust each other to keep their end of the contract and that they in fact are worth the trust.

A transaction takes place if
1) Buyer B and Seller S agree on the price P of T.
2) B will pay the agreed price P as cash equivalents and S gets T or whatever documentation assigns the ownership of T to her possession
I suppose that’s enough, don’t you think?

In order to study when does the first condition 1) get satisfied, we should investigate what are the things that actually affect S’s and B’s opinions about the right value for P when they negotiate the deal? In the order of importance imo, For S there should be at least
- The need or wish to sell. What is S’s negotiation target price M and what is it based on? Would S be ready to give T away for free in some cases, or would she be very unwilling to sell even double the expectation for whatever is quoted as market price?
- B's ability to negotiate the cheapest possible price that makes S to sell T to B
- External valuation factors that affect S's opinion about the value of M, such as
o Reference prices from previous similar type of deals
o The projected market price based on expected future availability and valuation of T
o In case it would be possible to earn money with T, the expected future income enabled with T
o Any goodwill (such as strategic value) S thinks B should assign to T
o Aesthetic or emotional values that S has assigned to T
o …what else?

Similarly for B it should hold
- The need or want to buy. What is B’s negotiation target price N and what is it based on? How much would B be ready to pay (Nothing or all of his money or perhaps even borrow some more?)
- S's ability to negotiate the highest possible price that B is willing to pay for T
- External valuation factors that affect N, such as
o Reference prices from previous similar type of deals
o The projected market price based on expected future valuation and availability of T
o In case it would be possible to earn money with T, the expected future income enabled with T
o Any goodwill (such as strategic value) B holds for T
o Aesthetic or emotional values that B holds for T
o …what else?

By now it seems to get rather complicated doesn’t it? But the bottom line is that unless the price is strictly regulated by some authority - which it never can be, since as you know, even in the most regulated economies there is always black market valuation – the actualized prices are always a subjective agreement between the seller and the buyer.

But in order for the transaction to get completed by the satisfying the condition 2) there is also an upper limit on how much the buyer can afford. The transaction does not occur if T costs more than what B is able to pay. Let’s denote that value as A. But defining A is not simple either. One could think that B has only as much money that he has liquid assets, but of course he could also borrow more. And since the amount that B can get in debt is again based on the subjective valuation of her credit and other assets or even future looking commitments there is in principle no upper limit for A. But since, of course, the higher the price (P), the more improbable it becomes that B is able to raise all the money and in practice A should be finite. At least it can’t be more than all the resources in the world that can be assigned an ownership legally.

Now here is my quantum theory based on the individual deals Q as discrete quantums of economy:

I claim that a Market value V(T) for a thing T is the expected value calculated over the sum of all the prices, P, of all the possible individual deals, Q, between Buyers, B, and Sellers, S, that could commence and consequently produce a sets of individual deals Qi with prices Pi. it would be a “quantum theory” since individual deals are discrete, and the term the deals Qi would be the “quantum” incidents of economy that you could correspond to the quantums in physics terminology.

So in order to calculate V(T), I should be able to write a sum/integral over the probability distribution for individual deals, Qi, so that the V(T) is an integral over all possible transactions over pricse P(Qi) = Pi. Individual Pi's in turn are defined as P(Qi) = P(MN), where M and N are the probability distributions or “wave functions” representing buyer’s and seller’s negotiation prices. If M = N then the Price P = M =N, but if they differ, price P(MN) will be an integral from 0 to A over the convolution (I guess :-)) of the probability functions M and N, where A is the maximum sum of money a buyer can get.

Or something of the sort =)

Unfortunately I have no integral sign or a summing sigma available for this blog so I have a good excuse not to write down the equations! But I would think that the people skilled in the art of dealing with probability spaces or better yet the quantum mechanical formalism should be able to get the idea. Thus I would leave it as homework to write down the equations (…and then solve them for a case of European car industry! Lol)

But hand waving theorizing does not end here!…to further continue the analogy to physical quantum mechanics, the equation for Price as P(Qi) = Pi(MN) could perhaps be understood as a Hamilton function or something like that. Wouldn’t it then be possible to use also statistical mechanics to calculate macroeconomic values based on the market values for V(T) ?

Well...if given something close to an infinite amount of time, I might perhaps be able to device some credible looking equations with a standard mathematical notation used in probability theory. Mathematicians are interested usually only about the theoretical description of things and proving them. Once I had written down the statements and equations and checked that they are formally right…I would be done. But physicists have the apparatus to actually calculate something with actual concrete numbers (which unfortunately I don’t). So in order to use the quantum mechanical tools, I would need to ask help from physicists…as bitter as it might be =) And with physicists helping I might get easier acceptance for the cool title “quantum theory of economics”.

One more addition: Wouldn’t it be cool if it were possible to use Feynman graphs to describe the interaction between Buyer and Seller. One could use the solid lines for things and wavy lines for money maybe. Think about it!

I don’t think I am even close to being the first to take the microscopic approach and propose a theory based on integrating over individual deals, yet I might be the first who is arrogant enough to call it a quantum theory and draw parallels to the physical theories as carelessly, even in a tongue-on-cheek blog… but it’s intriguing isn’t it? Unfortunately making a proper theory is way beyond me. Both in terms of my time and capacity as a mathematician….so I would plead for help: If there are people who are interested in this, let me know. I spend an unbelievable amount of time in SL and PH so finding me or someone who knows me shouldn’t be that hard. In fact I have thought of proposing a collaborative effort around this. It would be a very interdisciplinary study, since our M and N “wave functions” would be based on individual people’s wants, needs, valuations, credit limits and every human aspect that makes them buy or sell things.

That’s all for now
*winks*
Q

PS This whole thing is not very thoroughly proofread yet, so I might correct small obvious errors and make the writing more readable afterwards. But the idea should be there already.

PPS first corrective edition done on March 17th

PPS Second revision, March 27th (thanks Strider!!!)

What's the right value

2009-03-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

Now that the value of world economy is shrinking, the valuation of things has been a topic of discussion in PH, too - what is the economic value of goods, services and even money itself actually based on? Do things have some fundamental intrinsinc economic value or are all values defined by the markets? Adam Smith and Anders Chydenius where the first to understand that demand and availability create an equation, that define a value in general market, but then you could ask, what is demand and availability based on int turn? Karl Marx was looking at the availability side of things and thought that the producing goods has always some properties that are intrinsinc in terms of value, such as the amount of work put in producing things and raw material cost. That idea might have worked in stable demand conditions and assuming the products will always remain the same (In Marx’s time during early industrialization it might have appeared that way) but Marx did not really properly take into account the development of needs and wants and thus development of markets. And production cost and material cost are always based on market value, too, so the intrinsinc value theories are really hard to defend.

One approach is that Economic value would somehow tie with our basic needs and other values in life, such as aesthetic values or the kind of experiences we appreciate. Mao in China tried a system where he tried to ban the appreciation of any individual values of life and allowed individual people to satisfy only the needs that they need for sustaining life, like basic food and clothing. But that kind of life didn’t seem to be very fulfilling in most people’s opinion. Now I think many contemporary theorists, such as Broome (thanks Seneca!) have tried to theorize links how it would be quantitatively possible to assess an economic value of things in respect to our life values. Currently there seems to be many contemporary economic value theories, that are typically formulated so that there is a long differential equation, that has a series of terms that should somehow take into account of the effects of presumed market conditions, individual valuations, market conditions and risks.

When assessing a value of company one usually needs to take into account also the company's ability to produce future income. Then you expected value based on some discounted income from the future. From an accounting point of view, a company has substance value, which is the value of all assets that should realistically reflect the true market value if the assets were sold right away so then the company’s expectation value should be substance value + the expected future income. But a company can also have a “goodwill” value, which can be based on some strategic expectations like removing competition or getting new technology, skills or contacts that has value only from the buyer's point of view. These type of valuation’s should somehow be linked to what is the “correct” value of a company also in the stock market, but but….

I have started to doubt that none of the contemporary economic theories give sufficent picture about what’s going on in real life. They are at best very crude approximations - but too crude in my opinion. I doubt that anyone who has been following economic news for some time can list several examples, where the price of a transaction event has been completely disconnected from any valuation principle that the classical or even contemporary theories would suggest should have been the correct value. I could list probably a few hundred such cases, but I just mention three here, because when I read about them, they stopped me to think that our economic valuation theories really don’t tell anything what could happen in real life.

Case 1) Malevich’s black square

Russian Avantgarde painter Kasimir Malevich made a series of four completely black paintings, that were roughly the size of a m2 square. He painted them in early 20s during the first years after Russian revolution. (In that time he could still do that kind of decadent bourgeois formalist art without being sent immediately to labor camps). The paintings went missing for several decades after Stalin tightened his power but they surfaced again in the 90s when Sovietunion collapsed. I remembered reading in a newspaper (perhaps Financial Times or something) in Milan airport that now one of the paintings was for sale for 50 Million US$! The state of Russia was asking that price and some people were obviously considering buying…can you imagine?! An old canvas, painted completely black. How can that kind of an asset be valuated to 50 MUS$? Certainly the materals or amount of labor don’t justify that kind of value. Black paint can’t have been that expensive even in the soviet of the 20s - Since Malevich made even 4 paintings, I rather doubt that black paint must have been on sale – neither can it be based on the amount of labor. Malevich can’t possible have worked more than one hour on each black painting. Probably 10 mins would have been enough….ok then there are of course other things that create value. Aesthetic value, rarity, etc…but even those are kind of hard to understand. A completely black painting! Come on….

Example 2) Boo.com Internet clothing shop

During the techno bubble of the late 90s on of the most gross examples of unjustified valuation imo was the internet clothing shop Boo.com in Sweden, that advertised that they have new fancy "technology" that helps the customer to see how clothes look like using a 3-d modelling system. A little like what you can do in Sl, but with real clothes that you could then buy. The customer was supposed to be able to get a better view how the clothes look like and then make the purchase via internet. This was in the late 90s when Amazon was already established and worked well, but most internet services were rather dysfunctional…(surely you remember those times?) Well, the internet clothing shop was particularly non-funfunctional. It basically worked somehow (very slowly) with a very high speed connection, but at that time most people were still using modems. In fact only a few had satisfactory connections to really open the pages. let alone do any actual shopping there…yet the company was at some point valuated up to several million US$ by some investors, including big investment banks!!! Think about that, a service that no one could use, which had not particularly original technology and no own products or anything…just promises and rhetoric. Well of course it went bankrupt as soon as the investor's cash was used and the value of the company went down to zero. Now in this case one could hardly talk about any aesthetic value or rarity value. The valuation was most likely based on nice presentation about expected income values, discounted back to present from some future reference point…but even then it should have been clear to any sane person the fairy tale stories that any expected future value could have possibly be based on.

Case 3) Berlin wall vs. World Trade Center

Berlin wall collapsed in November 1989. Since then people have collected scrap pieces of the wall and there are still pieces for sale even today in the internet: http://www.berlin-wall.net/orderform.htm . A 2x3 inch piece seems to cost 55$ and 3x4 inch piece even 275 $!!! The pieces are obviously just pieces of concrete that you could find in any construction site for free, but of course they are from Berlin wall, a scene of a historical event.

But the collapse of World trade center in 2001 was a historical event too. And the twin towers were historically significant constructions, some of the best known buildings in the world history probably. Yet the scrap remnants of those buildings have not been valuated to anything. On the contrary the cleanup has probably cost a lot of money. I remeber reading that the scrap was shipped to Chennai in India, where the metals were separated manually from the rest of the debris, so the total value of the scrap has been only the selling price of the metals that were recycled to the world market. The glass and concrete scrap was probably costly rather than valuable. Kind of surprising, isn’t it? Of course you can create the stories around the pieces of scrap and that obviously the story around a concrete brick from Berlin wall is probably millions of times more valuable than the story around an equivalent concrete brick from World trade Center. But then in order to find out what’s going on here you would need to analyse, what is it in the Berlin wall story that makes exactly similar practically worhless material from recycling point of view to have a market value difference that is in the order of millions if not billions?

I think it is the microscopic angle that is wrong with value theories today. The economic models are all more or less macroscopic theories, describing economic valuations from top down. But in fact the actual value of a thing is always defined in individual transactions and regardless what the “market expects", the value of each transaction is ultimately based on the subjective valuation that both the buyer and seller have in mind. If they agree on the value the transaction will take place, and the the target of the exchange will get it’s historical value, which then can be used as a reference for accounting purposes... Because that’s what we should be looking after. One of the ultimate questions in the "economic theory of everything" is how do we assign values in accounting so that our balance sheets and future looking budgets reflect “reality” as well as possible. I think this is a huge issue, since all of our societal planning is based on these valuations.
Of course there are game theoretical approaches, which do look transactions and pricing from microscopic point of view. But as far as I know they are all still based on the presupposition of a “rational agent”. But when us people value things we are oftentimes far from rational. We might even end up buying things more expensively if we just happen to “like” the seller. Negotiation theories make a bit more compelling case in my mind based on the idea that in practise you get the price that you can negotiate. I think taking that subjective element into account is a key factor to any valuation theory that tries to realistically model what’s going on in real life.

I have been thinking about some ideas about hown to postulate a microscopic theory around this which I will post here soon.
...to be continued

Cheers
Q

Happiness Part 2. Discussion with Lokifluff Clarity

2009-03-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

Quintessential Sorbet: Hi Loki and welcome to my blog!

Lokifluff Clarity: Thank you Quin, delighted to be here and I must say I like how you have decorated the place. These orange headers on a white background really do work. The orange reminds me of your hair. Not sure about the shade of blue at the top though...

QS: I’m really grateful that you found the time for this interview. Our last discussion in PH gave me a lot of perspective about the things that bothered me with the movie “how happy can you be”. But at the same time it made me think even more questions. As a psychotherapy professional let me start first asking you, how would you define happiness.

LC: Nice to see you start with an easy one then! Happiness is... erm... um... (twirls with her hair and looks vague). This is really not easy. There is happiness the concept, which is used a lot when we talk about happiness, and happiness the emotion, which is something experienced, in a moment and in context. There is also contentment, which many also call happiness. There is also... (is this a PG rated blog?!)

QS: Happy people perform better I have heard people say. Do you think it’s true? Are there other benefits for trying to be happy?

LC: Well I guess if you are entirely unhappy and considering slitting your wrists then sure, there would be a benefit to being happy... living for example might count as one. As for drawbacks... well if you are really happy you might not notice if someone else is slitting your wrists.

QS: Can a pursuit of constant happiness be harmful or even dangerous in some respects?

LC: Absolutely. To pursue constant happiness is an illusion. An impossibility. A futility even! If you experienced nothing but happiness, then how would you know you are happy? You need something other than ‘happy’ to be able to compare ‘happy’ to in order to know that you are indeed ‘happy’. Happy?

QS: The film made several claims about how we could increase our happiness. You recognized quite rightly that the claims are based on the paradigms of positive psychology movement. What is your view about that movement?

LC: Pleads the fifth.

QS: I see people in business building careers and striving for different things. Oftentimes these things are something that should change their life circumstances, but according to the filmthis would not be actually very efficiently spent time in order to become happier…so are many, perhaps most of us in fact living our lives totally wrongly? Being busy with things that actually contribute very little to our happiness?

LC: It depends on how you see it. If you gain your happiness from the journey, from the struggle, from the sense of mucking in and doing things, then the happiness you will experience will be a result of the journey rather than the destination. If you are only focussed on the goal as your source of happiness and not the journey then you are constantly in a state of unhappiness, because you are not where you want to be! However, if you struggle through something (which makes you decidedly unhappy) there is a sense of joy and happiness associated with coming out of it the other side. The point here though, is that happiness occurs in a moment, at particular points in time, not as a constant throughout. Also, to peg one’s happiness in such a way as “I will only be happy if...” means that you will always be unhappy.

QS: I must say that one thing that came into my mind is that since “happiness” should make us more productive and efficient, it occurred to me that the positive psychology movement might have ideological connections. Not necessarily to any specific political movement, but in general to things like consumerism or progressing economical activity just for it’s own sake. What do you think, could there be parallels or is this an overinterpretation ?

LC: Pleads the fifth again. However, what I will say, is that consumerism these days taps into the ‘wants’ of humanity. This has occurred in part because of the contributions of people such as Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew, PR/advertising guru) who managed to change the way products are sold into something that is less concerned with what we ‘need’ and more concerned with what we ‘want’. Adam Curtis in his documentary “The Century of the Self” highlighted how this has meant that what is desirous in itself has also been changed (as advertising changed and sold us stuff that fits in with a concept of a lifestyle and also possible lifestyles we might desire that advertising products would match). So, returning to your question, if we have a vision of what our ‘happy’ lifestyle looks like, is that something that we have bought into because an advertising guru has devised it or because it holds true with our own personal values? I.e. are we trying to get others to like us because of a particular lifestyle we are working towards (which thinking positively can help us achieve) or are we associating with people who like us for who we are (warts and all)? Is the point of us all being here to be ‘productive and efficient’ for the ‘economy’ or someone else?

QS: One thing that bothered me a lot in the film was that couldn’t unhappiness be also a motivating force. Or at least a force that forces us to take a realistic view on how things should be developed. In business I see often too optimistic thinking to make people to belittle risks and underestimate the time and resource requirements, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. And if business goes badly, shouldn’t people in fact feel unhappy ..in order to work getting things on the right track again. I would assume same applies in people’s personal lives too?

I’m kind of trying to outline an idea that wouldn’t unhappiness be a necessary feeling to be able to reflect with correct feedback from the environment?

LC: We’re in a car... it is heading down a hill at full throttle towards a cliff that is looming up in the distance... the brakes are gone... but hey! Let’s think positively about this...! One needs to be realistic when it comes to happiness I think. And I agree with you, unhappiness can be a great informer of things that are or are about to go wrong. Unhappiness sounds useful to me. What is the point of discarding it? Is it really possible to discard it? I think not.

QS: Another thing that bothered me even more in the film is that is it actually ok to try to actively remember just positive things and forget unpleasant ones? What if we have some unresolved knots in our personality? Problems that we have not dealt with…it does not seem right to me that we should just try to ignore the bad things that have happened to us and try to forget them by being overly active in order to pursue a constant day to day happiness?

LC: I cannot remember that time when I was an absolute git on vodka. I am going to repeatedly drink vodka as a result of this because I think when I have vodka I am wonderful. My friends don’t seem to agree with me and now I have no friends. Oh well... let’s forget about friends then. Where does it stop? We learn from our mistakes, trials and tribulations. Integrating them, owning them, and using them, is a fundamental part of being human.

QS: I suppose happiness should contribute to having a “good life”, but what else is there? Or in other words, when can we say we have had a fulfilling life, is being happy enough?

LC: A good life is something you look back on, not something you can see moving forward. As for the goal of life being a good life? I am not convinced. Goals change all the time throughout life and I believe this reflects how we change ourselves. What is good when you are twenty does not seem so good when you are eighty. With whose eyes are you looking forward to when you imagine a ‘good life’? The eyes of the 20 year old or the eyes of the 80 year old?

QS: I have to ask this…Do you think happy people irritate other less happy people and why? And if so, should we hide our happiness in order not to make others even more miserable :-)

LC: Depends on what time of the month it is.

Happiness Part 1. How happy can you be?

2009-03-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

Norwegian filmmaker Line Hatland made a movie “How happy can you be” (original title in Norwegian: Hvor lykkelig kan du bli). It is science documentary about happiness and things that should make us happy. Hatland had interviewed a big number of professors and researchers [1], [2] who discussed the most recent studies and speculated what to make of them. I remember some fantastic statistics from that film, even though it has been a while ago since I saw it. For example:
- The experts claimed that 50 % of our happiness is “in our genes”. So that no matter what we do, 50 % of our happiness is already defined regardless of what we do. Consequently some people are just naturally happier than others and that’s it.
- Surprisingly only 10 % of happiness is defined by circumstances. That means that regardless how we arrange our life, the circumstances affect only a little to our overall happiness. The film claimed that this is because we are adaptable, we get used to our circumstances whether we are rich or poor, married or unmarried, kids or no kids etc… Wow!
- But most interestingly, 40 % of our happiness should be defined by how we act and react in our everyday life and what kind of attitudes we have. I understood it to mean that we should think positively, “glass is half full” rather than “half empty” kind of thinking. Just reacting positively and acting proactively would make us happier. Dwelling in self pity and accusing circumstances would be the worst thing to do.

Ok. All that sounds fine to a laywoman in psychology like me. Somewhat surprising perhaps, but if the scientists so say, why not. But the film moved then to concluding that that you get a better return (in terms of becoming happier) by investing your time in changing your attitudes and reacting positively to whatever happens to you rather than struggling to change your life’s circumstances. Of course, positive thinking and changing circumstances are not directly contradictory, you can change your attitudes and be positive all the time and still act to make changes to your environment and lifestyle, why not? I just started to doubt that what if you always try to react positively even if the things that happen to you worsen your circumstances. Can that make sense?

The film continued to list several techniques how you should think and act in everyday situations in order to be happier. It’s been a while since I saw the film so I don’t actually remember any of the tips any more, but I remember that for the most part they sounded like common sense to become more positive. Rules how to react in different situations and thinking patterns how to make your attitude to be more positive.

But then the program went on concluding that since in order to be happy in the present, you need to avoid dwelling in problems and that in turn would be best achieved by not thinking unpleasant things and remember only the happy things in your past. It was said that people who remember their past as happy times are also happier in the present time and that all of us have in fact a very selective memory. We create ourselves a kind of history we like it to be. I think the film claimed that it is never too late to get a happy childhood – just forget the unhappy memories and remember good ones. At that point I remember that the whole thing started to bother me more seriously for some reason. Now that happiness popped up in discussions in PH, I started to process what was it that made me so confused then.

Looking back I think it is that the whole thing started to sound like some sort of “life management” coaching, which is probably fine if you have to motivate yourself to accomplish specific tasks, let’s say in a business assignment where you need to execute specific tasks at your peak performance and not get too philosophical about questioning the deeper meaning of the whole strategy… that’s fine.

But is the meaning of our life to be as happy as we can? Are we really motivated to make changes in our life or environment if we are just happy to the things as they are? Isn’t that a bit too fatalistic attitude? Can it be even hurtful to start managing your lifestyle and create own life history too much? Shouldn’t we remember also mistakes and learn from them? ….I started to wonder shouldn’t there be more to having a good life than just trying to be happy all the time. I think the program “how happy can I be” did ask these questions a little bit, but not very much if I remember correctly. If you got interested, I found that there is also a critic about the program published in “Journal of Happiness studies” [3]. There is likely more discussion about the validity of the program’s conclusions.

Just some days ago I told about this program in PH and we had chat with Loki and Sophia about it. I was awed about the good insight girls had that indeed pursuit of constant happiness (whatever it is) cannot be the sole meaning of our life. Since Loki as a professional in psychotherapy immediately recognized that the theses presented in the program are probably based on the paradigms of a “positive psychology movement” (as I later found to be case according to [1]) , I decided to ask Loki if I could interview her more in detail for my blog, and to my great delight she accepted!!!

I think this whole topic is really important….should we try to be happier or is it ok just to be miserable. Should we try to accomplish something or is it wasted time since we can be happy more easily, were all the claims and recommendations in the program actually true…

See Happiness part 2. for Loki’s interview!

Q

References
[1] internet page, feb 26th 2009 http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/show.html?id=605
[2] internet page, feb 26th 2009 http://icarusfilms.com/new2006/hhap.html
[3] internet page, feb 26th 2009 http://www.springerlink.com/content/g3u37tr415854750/

US is a presentationcracy

2009-02-17T06:33:00.000-08:00

GW Bush decided to attack Irak because he claimed there were weapons of mass destruction. Later it turned out to be false and then Bush defended himself that the presentations he got from his intelligence people claimed that there should have been....

Well, I guess it’s up to each and every one of us to decide, whether we believe that Bush told the whole story when saying that, but I believe it could have been a truth. Namely that is how leaders all over the world make decisions: They make judgements based on the presentations that the people make for them. Then you could say that it is the presentations that have the power to lead decision making to this or that direction...it is the presentations and consequently the people who make them, who are in charge.

So that means then that our organizations are in fact managed and even led by making presentations. Sounds possible, doesn’t it...but hold on. Shouldn’t organizations be run based on facts?!! I think that yes, of course they should be. Mere presentations can lack or belittle critical and relevant factual information. A good example is the story about how the explosion of space shuttle Columbia is said to have happened because some crucial points had been missing in a ppt presentation that was done for NASA managers. The Washington Post article about it [1] seems to blame mostly the practise of using .ppt as a presentation media, but I claim that the problem is much bigger and deeper. I think the problem is the fact that the everywhere the world is more and more operating based on presentations and presentations alone.

As a European dealing with organizations and management practises both US, Europe and previously even Asia, I can tell that many here in Europe often think that the management US businesses often revolves around making convincing presentations rather than good presentations (we don’t tell this out loud to US colleagues in order not to offend them, because they wouldn’t understand anyway). With this distinction I mean that a convincing presentation is something that makes the listeners convinced, but a good presentation is such that it covers all the relevant facts as thoroughly as possible. A bit similar distinction is used in organizational behaviour literature to separate between successful managers and good managers. Successful managers make career and look good within the organization and the good ones make things really work...and oftentimes the succesfull and good managers are not the same people! (More about this for example in a great basic text book [2]). What makes things tricky is that in order to be convincing (or successful) there always needs to be at least some substance and facts - but not necessarily everything that is critical to make the right decision. A convincing but not very good presentation can also be biased or drive hidden agendas... so oftentimes in practise it is hard to separate beforehand a truly good presentation from a convincing one. But there are telltales of course….

I think that for the overall good of the organization, we should strive for making good presentations. Yet in practise it is the convincing presentations that usually get rewarded and lead the decision making. But in the long term doesn’t this build bubbles inside the organization? Relevant information gets missing because of the presentations are convincing rather than good? Risky and sometimes even false proposals get accepted - like in the shuttle case, or perhaps even Irak war case? I think it very much does, and I even suspect that this could be one of the very fundamental reasons why we see our economical structures collapse right now. So much air and risk has been built within our system because of the last 20-30 decades of mismanagement embracing convincing presentations instead of good presentations. It’s not just subprimes….it’s everywhere!

Related to this, I must refer to a book, which I read just recently, namely ”Black Swan” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb [3], . Taleb makes good job in proving that indeed we do have a tendency to love convincing narrative rather than assess facts and risks objectively. I think he is talking about the same phenomena as I that we love convincing presentations to a point that we often blind ourselves from risks. And that this trend has now become vastly emphasized in the global economy and politics as a result of faster technology, networking, globalization, and all. Taleb makes nice analysis how us in general and many scholars in economic sciences in particular tend to base our thinking in ”platonized” (as he expresses) models and induction. Taleb goes also rather philosophical with many of the cases he discusses, and even though I 'm not sure if I would sign all of his ideas, I think he has broken important ground to really critically rethink how we manage organizations today. My view is more narrowly from practical office life. I see everyday how everything is managed based on presentations – and presentations alone.

The power of presentations goes so deep into both the public sector and business life that I would call our current western societies with a name presentationcracy...In a presentationcracy it is the presentations which rule the world and hence the power is held by the people with presentation skills instead of the people who have the best ideas or most knowledge. Not a new idea I think, but it still gives you the creeps if you think how pervasive this phenomena is down to the grass root level, even when people decide about small municipal issues or minute company spending or risk taking.

Ok. But why do I title this rant that it is specifically US that is the presentationcracy? Aren’t all nations? Yes, I think so, all are, but US is leading. I think it is perhaps because we in Europe and Asia have been usually slower to develop our market economy (because we are so culturally brainwashed to respect unconditionally our bureaucracy and governement led ”official” knowledge) we have not fully given up ”the other information” namely top-down dictated unquestionable wisdom that our national states and the official school system has taught us. So besides the information that the ”presentationcracy” produces we have had also some other kind of "true" information available that has been (at least sometimes) produced by different kind of logic.... yet I’m not saying at all that this often nationalistic official wisdom’s had in general been any better for decision making, (usually on the contrary), but perhaps it has given the decision makers perspective, another way to look at things, at least on the grass root level.

I think that since the days of Thatcher our stuffy European bureaucracy has been most often perceived as bad thing...and rightfully so I thinkm since the economic activity in Europe in the 70s was pretty constrained and my guess is that all businesses had been lost to Asia an US altogether if things hadn’t changed to be more market driven...but now I think it is US in turn, who is about to go bellyup with it’s purely business driven ethos. Recently most businesses seem to embrace shortsightedness, risk taking, opportunism over strategy and presentationcracy (and I’m far from being alone with this view). Look for example what all the business schools teach...and how! Lot of the business management teaching is driven by slogans like ”you deserve what you can negotiate”which encourages directly to make convincing presentations instead of good ones and in many places most management teaching is only case studies thus building ”inductive knowledge” from the convincing narrative of individual events. Since this is a blog and not a scientific article I happily go even further and claim that making things convincing instead if good has become a part of people’s values – in US particularly. Ok, making it convincing might be a good philosophy for sales people, but not for managers or leaders who should also try to protect owner’s money (or in public organizations people’s tax money) by assessing facts and risks realistically, too.

Well, based on the little I have heard mr. Obama talk, it might be that he indeed does have a clue...at least some of the way. But if you agree to what I just presented here even partly, you must realize that he has a much much more massive task ahead than just making some legislative hat tricks and spending money in dying industries ;-) He has to somehow adjust the whole culture how management is done in US. And not just at high govt or corporate level but everywhere.

I do hope Obama will succeed. I would be absolutetely horrified of the view that the world economy in general would slide back to a Sovietunion kind of a stagnation, where everything is measured only by it’s bureaucratic merits. The way I see for example how the EU administrative monster is currently being built with Lisbon treaty and all, I would say it doesn’t look too good... but that’s another story altogether =)))

So how would I myself fix things then? I think Obama and other leaders would need to think ways how the organizations woudl and could start rewarding good presentations rather than convincing ones. I could tell some ideas if you want to know how that could be accomplished, ....but then I would need to ask to make a consultancy agreement with me first :-)

references:
[1] Washington Post article, available in internet feb 17th: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html
[2] Robbins, S. and Judge, T. Organizational behavior, Pearson Education
[3] Taleb, N.T. Black Swan, Random House, April 17 2007

Probability of a deterministic world

2009-02-06T07:36:00.001-08:00

Every now and then the discussion at PH has turned to the question: Is our world deterministic or not? I say it is.... and at the same time it isn’t. I mean I find most compelling the kind of a model that determinism exists, but it is not necessary. Once in PH I boasted that I can ”mathematically” prove using David Lewis’s many worlds semantics that the probability for a ”fully determinismic” world is practically zero. Fully deterministic world means here a kind of world where every event is necessarily deterministically linked to each other... So in order not to loose face, I will put my proof here.

But before doing that, I suppose I should first define what I mean by determinism. I would use the definition from Wikipedia: Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences [1] [2]. I think it would be also important to note that with causation I mean here the philosophical causation, not just a logical causation. In my understanding the logical causation is limited just to formal logical language, which is made of statements like A entails B (A => B), which in words means that if A is true then B is true, when A and B are logical sentences, within the formal language of the logic. But philosophical causation is a more complex thing since A and B are not just sentences of a formal language, but events or states in an actual world (or universe). I have heard at least two kind of definitions for causal relation: B is causally dependent from A (A -> B) means either that
a) A and B are events in an actual world and If A occurs, then B occurs too
b) A and B are events in an actual world and If A doesn’t occur, then B doesn’t either

So now that we are proving something about our world, we would be obviously be talking about causation in a philosophical sense…but which variety a) or b) should we use? Both definitions have their proponents among philosophers... suspicion rises that something fishy is going on with causality….but I think I don’t necessarily need to go into more details about the differences of a) and b) type of causality for my proof (I might be wrong though =).

So here are my assumptions:
1) Only logically possible worlds can be actual worlds.
- It means that I assume that logical reasoning holds in any possible world that we can actually exist. Like 2+2=4 holds for all possible worlds
2) Indeterministic events are logically possible
- which I think entails that coincedental events should be assumed logically possible and we should use modal logic as our formal language

To help thinking how the probabilities could be calculated I hypothesize a kind of a Laplace’s demon (L-demon) that knows every event that has happened and is happening at the present moment in the universe and it has an unlimited, even unworldy, efficient calculation power to solve equations based on the initial conditions.

First let’s assume a “full indeterminism”. It would mean that none of the events A and B in the world are causally related. The fact that things are as they are at the present is just a huge coincidence. I would then say that it’s possible but the likelyhood is 1 / [the sum of all the individual events that have occurred and are occurring at the present], which is a very small number indeed. But if we assume that our actual universe has only a finite age (like for example big bang theory suggests) then there has been only a finite number of events so far and the likelyhood for full indeterminism with our present knowledge is > 0. Let’s denote that number as P[full indeterminism]. Now our L-demon would know what this number is….but since full indeterminism holds also to the future, L-demon cannot say anything about the future! Future is completely incalculably open and all futures are equally possible. Thus the number P[full indeterminism] at the present time is still a finite number. Future does not add anything to that

Secondly we could assume that there are both causally dependent events á la A -> B, which can form long chains A->… -> Z ->…. that coexist at the same time with smaller chains or even individual indeterministic events O that are not causally linked to any other events at all. I would imagine that these events O go actually completely unnoticed within the world, (except that our L-demon would know them). I would say that the likelyhood for the existence of all such worlds among all possible worlds is huge. It could contain an infinite amount of individual causally unrelated events O arranged different ways. the Causal chains could have been combined or separated in a myriad way during the history of universe, yet resulting to the exact state of affairs things are at the present time. The mechanism how the causal chains separate and combine is different depending which type of causality a) or b) you prefer to use, but regardless it is easy to think examples where different series of events lead to same states of affairs as end result (redundancy) or where one event kicks of several causal chains. (For a learned contemporary discussion about this I recommend [3]). So the probability for our actual world being one of such worlds where both determinism and indeterminism coexists is P[partial indeterminism] = (integral over causally linked chains + sum of all causally unrelated finite event chains and single events) – P[full indeterminism] – P[full determinism]. Seems like a huge number….our L-demon again would know what this number and it would be even able to make very good predictions to the future. Even deterministic chaos theory would not bother it’s calculations since it knows exactly all the initial conditions and has an infinite calculation power…but the indeterministic events future that will occur in the future would eventually destroy the accuracy of L-demon's predictions. Little by little the indeterministic events and even chains that pop up into the world will make the demon’s predictions only probabilistic and over time the prediction power will go to zero. Thus the causality holds only to one direction. Past is defined, but future is uncertain and an infinite number of possible futures exist also for all partially indeterministic worlds.

Thirdly how big is P[full determinism] then? As far as the past concerns the likelyhood should be the same as for full indeterminism, in other words 1 / [the sum of all the events that have occurred and are occurring at the present]. A small number, but finite….so far! But if full determinism holds it means that also all the future events are defined. Our L-demon can calculate the state of affairs in any given instance in the future, which means that only one future is possible. But then how to separate the arrow of causation? I doubt that it’s not possible, which would then imply that the probability P[full determinism] at the present moment should be multiplied also with a figure 1 / [integral over logically possible futures] which approaches infinity when time approaches infinity. Thus the probability for P[full determinism] at the present time and according to L-demons calculations should be 1 / ([the sum of all the events that have occurred and are occurring at the present] * [integral over logically possible futures] ….which approaches 0 if the future is infinitely long. Thus it’s even more unlikely than full indeterminism!!!

And I haven’t even treated possibilities that world is deterministic or indeterministic up to a certain time t and then changes….all combinations just push the likelyhood for full determinism further away….QED

[1] internet page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism , feb 6th 2009,
[2] Van Inwagen, Peter, 1983, An Essay on Free Will, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[3] Causation and Counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, L. A. Paul, MIT Press, 2004

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In fact I didn’t come up with the idea for a proof on my own, but it is probably been presented somewhere, since I have heard the elements of this general idea in a discussion….but I haven’t found it written down anywhere before….

Anyways, some say that fully deterministic world is intuitively right for them. But I don’t feel that way at all and I could make a long list of arguments based on our current knowledge of science and mathematics why I think assuming the existence of indeterministic events is far more intuitively appealing to me. Full determinism would imply to me that the whole existence of our actual world is actually only one event with fully determined past and predestined future. If even just one quantum at anytime over the whole lifetime of our world would appear spontaneously – or perhaps leak from another world, it would mean the destruction of the fully determined future for our world. Seems very unlikely to me….infinetely unlikely even!

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Sorry for typos and all….I will publish this already as a draft . So if you see changes later, it is not that I would like to change the content, but just make it more readable.

Quint

Pomo discussion with Franz Shippe: What did Prinn really say?

2009-02-05T04:55:00.001-08:00

One tuesday morning Linden time everyone in PH was using their Pomo generators. I and Franz couldn't quite agree how Prinn should be interpreted.....

[8:04] SeanBrian Flatley: However, the destruction/creation distinction intrinsic to Beverly Hills 90210 emerges again in Melrose Place. Bataille uses the term 'the capitalist paradigm of discourse' to denote the meaninglessness of precultural society. In a sense, the primary theme of the works of Spelling is the bridge between class and sexual identity. It could be said that Prinn [6]implies that we have to choose between Lacanist obscurity and neosemioticist objectivism.
[8:04] Quintessential Sorbet: oh I'm not sure...but why not
[8:04] Quintessential Sorbet: I have to study that in detail
[8:05] Franz Shippe: I am in awe, Sean!
[8:05] Quintessential Sorbet: I have to check the reference [6]
[8:05] SeanBrian Flatley: but if you want to step up a gear.... The main theme of Reicher's [9]analysis of conceptual dematerialism is not dematerialism, but neodematerialism. Thus, an abundance of desublimations concerning Lacanist obscurity may be revealed. Foucault's critique of capitalist materialism implies that the State is part of the absurdity of art, but only if culture is distinct from language; otherwise, we can assume that the raison d'etre of the observer is significant form. But the subject is contextualised into a pretextual theory that includes sexuality as a whole. The dialectic, and some would say the economy, of dialectic constructive theory depicted in JFK is also evident in Natural Born Killers.
[8:05] Quintessential Sorbet: I think Prinn did not imply what you said
[8:05] Spokesman Salomon: Speak properly Sean:
[8:06] Spokesman Salomon: there's a coflex accent on "etre".
[8:06] Quintessential Sorbet: AHHA....I cannot find Prinn's paper on that
[8:06] SeanBrian Flatley: it's a UK character set - proper etres are off - and so is the soup - loki burnt it
[8:06] Franz Shippe: LOL
[8:07] Dar Innis: Class is fundamentally impossible,” says Debord; however, according to la Fournier[1] , it is not so much class that is fundamentally impossible, but rather the paradigm, and therefore the economy, of class. In a sense, the dialectic of capitalist dematerialism depicted in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is also evident in The Moor’s Last Sigh, although in a more preconceptualist sense.
[8:07] SeanBrian Flatley: you got it dar
[8:07] Quintessential Sorbet: errr.....*trying to find La fournier's article [1]
[8:07] Dar Innis: The primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the observer as poet. Dialectic theory implies that the significance of the participant is social comment, given that Foucault’s essay on semantic capitalism is invalid. Thus, a number of theories concerning the difference between sexual identity and reality may be discovered.
[8:08] Quintessential Sorbet: here I have it...this is what Prinn truly said SB: Prinn[4] states that we have to choose between Batailleist `powerful communication’ and the predialectic paradigm of discourse. But Marx uses the term ‘the posttextual paradigm of reality’ to denote not, in fact, discourse, but subdiscourse.
[8:08] Dar Innis: Marx uses the term ‘neocultural discourse’ to denote the role of the artist as reader. Therefore, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie deconstructs the predeconstructive paradigm of reality; in The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, he affirms dialectic theory.
[8:09] Lokifluff Clarity: i have been inducted into communications from nowhere only today... 'tis genius
[8:09] SeanBrian Flatley: oh - and quint...6. Prinn, H. Y. ed. (1973) Lacanist obscurity and conceptual dematerialism.
And/Or Press
[8:09] Franz Shippe: Quint, I aver that your interpretation of Prinn has missed the central point about Batailleist communication theory. Your analysis appeals to the outdated pre-post-structuralist view of Deridavian semantic forms.
[8:10] Quintessential Sorbet: Nonsense franz!!!!!! Prinn clearly states that The premise of modernist precapitalist theory implies that consciousness may be used to marginalize the Other. But the example of the posttextual paradigm of reality prevalent in Madonna’s Material Girl emerges again in Sex, although in a more dialectic sense.
[8:13] Franz Shippe: Quint, in his well known unpublished works, available heretofor only to a select few, Prinn noted the exceptions to precapitalist semantic theories implied by the epistemic noosphere created by the internet. The assumption that language and culture can be analyzed independently of the psychoeconomic social structures implicit in......
[8:13] Quintessential Sorbet: oh!
[8:15] Quintessential Sorbet: I must confess that I'm getting a little annoyed you misquoting Prinn so constantly....no doubt to serve your own hidden agendas....namely Prinn said that If one examines semanticist desituationism, one is faced with a choice: either reject the posttextual paradigm of reality or conclude that government is capable of intention. Baudrillard promotes the use of Batailleist `powerful communication’ to attack hierarchy. Thus, a number of appropriations concerning a self-sufficient totality may be discovered
[8:18] Franz Shippe: Hidden agenda? But quint, you are evidently acquainted only with Prinn's early, and somewhat pedantic and puerile works. Had you taken the time to delve into his analysis of post capitalist semantic hierarchy theory, you would have found that the self- sufficient transcendental appropriations involved in posttextual choice are in fact merely desituated communications misappropriated by the capitalist forms, implied by the post-sexualized and sublimated works of Blerufarge.
[8:21] Quintessential Sorbet: aww Franz....I' think you are running the agenda of construction withou subconstruction without accepting the semiotic discourse....Prinn would never have accepted that...
[8:22] Quintessential Sorbet: aww...I have to go now...a teleconference....of meaty nature :-((
[8:22] Franz Shippe: So long, Quint.
[8:23] Quintessential Sorbet: bybyee.....talk to you later
[8:23] Franz Shippe: You might bone up on Prinn's later works, eh?

What do you think, which of us was right?

If you have difficulties with forming an opinion, you can get help here www.elsewhere.org/pomo

Thanks for the permission to publish this dialog Franz....if anyone of my friends likes to remove his/her part, just IM me.

Quint

My first blog

2008-11-17T02:54:00.000-08:00

Hi and welcome visitor !!!

This is my very first blog....and it is a little exciting to see how it will look like once I publish it :-)

If you have managed to find these pages, you probably have met either me or some of my friends in SL. The purpose of these blogs is to share my ideas or and reflections about life in SL, RL (or meatspace as many call it), philosophy, politics....topics that interest me. The idea is to create here be a public diary of my thoughts and impressions. My hope is that some day the blogs might amuse or in the best case even inspire others to spend time wondering the same things I'm interested in.

Well... Who am I, what is my background?
In order to find out that really I think you would need to meet me in SL. Like all of us, I have some context, experiences, principles, character...that influence my thinking. In order to give away something I would say that I am a

Philosophy discussion addict
- I have hung out in various philosophy discussion forums in the internet for almost 10 years. I have tried to quit several times since it's so time consuming but no success so far....I think I may be hooked for life =)

Feminist
- But what does "feminist" mean? After years of fruitless debating in philosophy forums with all sorts of sophists, who say "you can't properly define feminism", I state that the facts still remain: Despite of the equality ethos of the new legislation in most western countries during the last 20-30 years, the patriarchal attitudes are still the norm in many ways. And most of the women in the world live in societies where they never get even close to same chances as men do. But rather than blaming I would like to move forward....to understand and change the attitudes that fundamentally exist between our ears.

American roots music fan
- I got into this, when some of my friends asked me to accompany their group with a guitar....but more about that somewhere else

ooohh I run out of time now....but I continue with the actual blogs :-)
Just one more thing: English is not my native language, so I hope you can excuse the many mistakes ....and clumsy expressions =)

Thanks for dropping by and hope to see you later!
Quintessential