"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Monday, October 30, 2017

Lucid Sententia XX

A finite length of time, no matter how great, pales in comparison with infinitude. Seconds are in the same class as centuries. In this sense each moment is like an entire lifetime.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

LETHAL SPELL ABILITY thought experiment.

I had thought of this interesting hypothetical scenario recently, which could easily be extended to a thought experiment. Imagine that each person, over the age of, say, 16 was given the magical ability of having another person drop dead by thought alone, e.g. 'Adolf!', and Adolf drops dead. The ability would entail perfect concealment of he act, i.e. it would be impossible to know who had cast the deadly spell. This part is important, so those exercising this magical power would do so with full knowledge of its effectiveness, and impunity. Moreover, I believe that to many, only the presence of such anonymity would be a necessary condition for casting the spell at all.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. I wonder how many people would go ahead and actually use the spell? Also, suppose the version of the magic ability such that the total number of spells was unlimited, with perhaps some daily limit. And that each spell would have to be cast at an individual, e.g. general spells like "may all people above 6 feet drop dead" would be disallowed, which doesn't mean that one couldn't find out who the people like this are and cast the spell on them. At what rate and in what sorts of patterns would people start dropping dead? 


I have been thinking about this, and wondering what kind of people would jump at the opportunity of exercising such power.


For example, suppose that in the original scenario (of having a single spell only), we let the time to cast the spell last for a month. The point being that existing grudges, prejudices, and feelings of hate would be sorted out right away, so to speak, instead of having the scenario allow to wait for a time when an otherwise unwilling to use the spell person would be forced to do so in self defense. 

So suppose a month goes by and all the spells had been cast. It follows that we're left with a population that is at most smaller than before by the whole number of people (magicians) who were endowed with the ability to cast the spell (the case when no magicians are killed before casting their own spell), and roughly (±1) at least smaller than before by half the number of magicians (the case when half the magicians are killed before casting their spell).

Now imagine 2 alternative outcome-worlds:

--world 1 consisting of all the spell casters and the remaining youth under 16. So this world is left with those that though it to be better to cleanse it one way or another. And those who got eliminated no longer exist.
--world 2 consisting of all the spell victims, and all of the under 16 that were present before any spell was cast, i.e. the original, under 16 population. So basically this world consists of everyone minus the spell-casters.

I wonder how those worlds would evolve in time. World 1 has less people remaining, but let's suppose the populations to be sufficiently large, as not to be in danger of extinction after the cleansing process. I wonder how those worlds would differ, given what kind of people occupy it.


I also wonder if people would just annihilate themselves into extinction, on the version of the scenario where there would be no limit on the number of lethal spells. It would be like giving anyone access today to the current nuclear arsenal deployment.


I'm sure there are other aspects of this thought experiment that I haven't raised, and which could be quite interesting. I'm thinking of writing a short story based on this scenario as the underlying premise. No prizes for guessing that Borges and Lem are among my inspirations! 



Thursday, September 14, 2017

I've identified an interesting semi-group in Australian slang ;)

(G, * )


G  = {yeah, nah}

Closure
yeah nah = nah
nah yeah = yeah
nah nah = nah
yeah yeah = yeah

Associativity

(yeah nah) yeah = yeah
yeah (nah yeah) = yeah

(yeah yeah) nah = nah

yeah (yeah nah) = nah

(nah yeah) nah = nah

nah (yeah nah) = nah

(nah nah) yeah = yeah

nah (nah yeah) = yeah


The above structure can be extended to a monoid, if we add the empty word as the identity element.


Sunday, June 4, 2017

ALOSZA I DRZWI

Mój szczur po prostu nie radzi sobie z pojęciem drzwi. Jak są zamknięte to je obwąchuje z ewidentną ciekawością. Gdy drzwi są otwarte to jego zdziwienie wcale nie ustaje---obwąchuje próg i framugę z zaciekawieniem; rozgląda się z widocznym osłupieniem: jak to może być, że perspektywa wcześniej nie widoczna, nagle się ujawnia? Nagła zmiana w topologii podłogi musi robić wrażenie. Ale, mimo trudności z ogarnięciem swoim szczurzym umysłem pojęcia drzwi, trzeba temu ciekawskiemu gryzoniowi przyznać godną pochwały wytrwałość.



Tuesday, May 23, 2017

MAJOWY WIECZÓR

W lipowym zagajniku, z nad usłanej puszystyą bielą trawy unoszą swoje główki delikatne dmuchawce, jakby chciały odgadnąć które to gwiazdy wskazują skierowane ku niebu stożkowe kandelabry kwiatów samotnego kasztanowca.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Asortyment Nieskończoności

Jest to prezentacja Powerpoint, prelekcji której udzieliłem w Otwartej Kolonii (filii Wolskiego Centrum Kultury) 20 kwietnia. Ten wykład to krótka historia pojęcia niskończoności, oraz wstęp do arytmetyki liczb kardynalnych poprzez prezentację dowodów Cantora na równoliczność zbiorów nieskończonych. Poniższa prezentacja zawiera trochę definicji oraz pomocy ilustracyjnych, ale oczywiście brakuje jej niezbędnej narracji która wyjaśnia wszystkie pojęcia oraz ich relacje.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Lucid Sententia XIX

Out of the septillions of living organisms coming in and out of existence in the history of life on Earth, only a tiny fraction are those with whom we have the privilege to coexist. They are special. We are special, as a kind of temporal family.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

APP IDEAS. App idea #1: musical piece search based on crude "singing" input.

I'll start a new series of posts, where I describe various app ideas. This should be a fun exercise and it's probably a good idea to publish---the hope being that it may inspire someone. I'll begin enumerating with #1 as an indicator when I started posting those ideas---this is not meant to interpreted that #1 indicates the first app idea I've had.

App idea #1: musical piece search based on crude "singing" input.



Consider an app whereby the software recognizes the music piece from a crude rendition---sung or hummed---of one of it's fragments. I have noticed this to be most useful in the case of classical music---we often recognize the melody, but are at a loss of who composed it or what the title is. It should be useful when we want to share the piece with someone but don't know what to type into the search app. So how about just having a search app that takes crude renditions as input? There's some promising speech-recognition software out there, so perhaps implementing this idea could make us of it. 

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Ad hoc theory of one of the reasons why time appears to flow faster in dreams.

A perplexing yet strangely familiar experience to anyone who has ever dreamed, would undoubtedly have been making the occasional observation that much more seems to occur in our dreams than the duration of our sleep alone can account for. After a night of intense dreaming we often remember the equivalent of much a longer time period then we had actually spent sleeping (which is generally much longer than the time spent dreaming). Or when we take a short nap during the day, we're often surprised to learn upon waking that only a few minutes have past after what had seemed like an epic adventure. 
So apparently there's a clear subjective disconnect between dream state and waking state with regard how we perceive the flow of time. I make the assumption that time doesn't actually undergo some substantial warping in our heads in a way that would account for this phenomenon.

Since we're under the impression that more has happened during our dream than the time being asleep can account for, there seem to be a few possibilities as to why that may be. I should mention that I'm writing this blog post without having consulted any particular, specialist literature on the matter, hence the post title. 

One possibility is that our brain processes inner-conjured dream-films with a higher temporal resolution. That is, the dream-films are presented to us with increased speed, but we perceive them as normal, since within our dream state there's no other reference frame other than the dream itself. This hypothesis appears to be amiable to empirical exploration.

The other possibility, which occurred to me recently, is closely related with how our memory works. So the following explanation requires both some assumptions about the mechanics of our memory, but also some assumptions about the actual content of dream-films. The vast majority of us, whenever recollecting some series of events---say our last birthday party, or the recent trip to the countryside---tends to recall vivid snapshots of the more intense impressions, which are more or less arranged in chronological order. The point is that most of us don't remember the entire experiencial continuum, but rater a collection of short vivid fragments. Now, if we think about it, this is how dreams often seem to manifest---in a bunch of , more or less, disconnected situations combined into one weird stream.

Of course when I talk about this, I have only my memory to rely on, so if our memory indeed works as I just have outlined, then I cannot justifiably rely on it to speak of the character of the dream-films. But the point is that it is possible that dreams may be arranged and have the actual content analogous to the way our memory works. That is, dreams may consist of vivid fragments connected haphazardly with a vague chronological cause-effect narrative sense, like a movie trailer. But because our memory also works, as assumed earlier, such that we tend to only recall movie-trailer-like imagery, and only infer all the in-between events that must have occurred, when presented with the dream-film trailer, we inflate its content by inferring that there must have been intervals in-between.

For example, in real life, when recalling our plane journey from one city to another, we may only vividly recall say, the departure and arrival, plus a few more interesting cloud formations viewed through the window on the way, but that doesn't mean that the journey only consisted of those few intervals (the sum of which may consist of less than a minute of vivid mnemonic imagery), because as a matter of fact the journey is much longer (say, a few hours) than the sum of our recollected and vivid fragments---we infer that there must have been in-between intervals, other than those that we can vividly access.




But it's possible that my dream of a similar flight would be a kind of film trailer actually consisting of only the vivid fragments of the departure, a view of the more interesting cloud formations, and the arrival, arranged in a sequence of one vivid fragment occurring immediately after the previous one, without any intervals in-between at all. However upon recalling this 3-scene act when we wake up, it seems much longer because our memory mechanism inflates this vividly dreamed sequence by filling it with inferential content, i.e. a journey like that must have lasted a few hours (there must have been many more scenes in this act).


So the ad hoc explanation of why time appears to flow faster in dreams is that dreams are much like film trailers, but because of how our memory works, we tend to have the impression that we've watched the entire film.

I've also written about about how our memory works in a recent post, and a short story written years ago.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Group memory quality as a function of group size and interaction---an explanation.

I read somewhere, years ago, that species of birds that live in flocks tend to display better group-memory. I don't remember (pun intended) how that was measured, but have observed this to be also true of human interactions. Aside from mere cognitive stimulation---in a group we also tend to interact more, so there's a greater chance of certain facts being continually refreshed---I believe that there's more to what enhances group memory. That is, I think that there's another factor that influences group-memory, not by virtue of cognitive stimulation alone, but the kind of stimulation that has greater likelihood of occurring as the group size increases.



It has to do with both the abilities and limitations of each individual, and the fact (conjecture) that those abilities/limitations vary significantly among individuals. The hypothesis underlining this idea is simple---it's very plausible that given that we've been a social species for most of our evolutionary history, it would appear to be an adaptive trait to distribute cognitive abilities related to memory and recollection over the entire group. In particular, there may be a significant variation of the temporal ranges that individuals are capable of recollecting proficiently. That is some people would be better are remembering recent events, with high fidelity, whereas other's mid-term or long-term memory may be much better. After all it's the sum of all memories, fed into the social collective that counts, so it needn't be preserved by each individual---that would be an unnecessary over investment of neural-power.



From careful observation of my family and friends I have noticed that some of us display great proficiency in recollecting great amount of detailed information of current affairs, i.e. information gathered in the recent days or weeks, but may struggle holding that detail for a long period of time, and their memory of current affairs progressively fades over time. Others, on the other hand, display much better long term memory than others.

Perhaps such traits can be shown to be more generally diversified with respect to temporal ranges of optimal recollection. Moreover, there may be variance regarding the kind of of information that is remembered---some people may be better at remembering how to perform certain actions, others at phenomena that occurs in the surrounding environment, and others still may be really good at keeping a moral tally of group members, i.e. those displaying altruistic actions and those that exploit the benefits offered by the group. Combining those individual abilities in a social group would obviously enhance the group memory, simply by virtue of mutual compensation of individual limitations. So, such a social mnemonic mechanism would result in the group super-organism as a whole displaying much better memory than each of its members alone, on the condition that information flow is unhindered.

Those ruminations on the nature of memory are an unintended interest of mine. I just can't help but make conjectures about it. I've explored this subject matter before, via a short story---in particular how perception influences our memory and recollection.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Generating fiction from fantastic hypotheses (counterfactuals) & thought experiments.

I've been carrying a couple of ideas for a while now, but have never had the patience to expand on them. Each could easily suffice for at least an idea for a short story, however aside from entertaining some implications of those fictional and fantastic scenarios, I have neither had the time nor the patience to develop them further in writing. Perhaps one day. I suppose this entry is a small step in that direction. Recently I realized that they're related, yet capable of standing alone as seeds to a good story or even some philosophical speculations. I doubt that those scenarios are completely original, but are worth analyzing nevertheless.



The hypothetical premise of the first idea is a simple one: imagine a world, much like ours, where people live a fixed number of years, say a hundred, but are otherwise immortal up to that point. That is, in that world all humans have a determined lifespan. The details of how they maintain their longevity are irrelevant at this point, but could be expanded on. However, since human nature is assumed to be the same the same otherwise, it's doubtful that this scenario would lead to a peaceful utopia. With greed, fear, and stupidity still in place, it would be naive to suppose that things would be altogether different in that regard. The world would merely differ in details---of how our wicked human nature would manifest---corresponding to its stipulated peculiarity.
Surely in this scenario warfare would have a completely different form, as killing would be impossible. Also, capital punishment would be impossible. However, given this single restriction, it seems that youth would be a universal commodity, e.g. young people would have a higher potential energy output, to be utilized one way or another. This wouldn't be that much different from how things actually are, so it's quite likely that warfare would resort to fighting for that resource, and protecting it. Moreover humans would still be free agents, and arguably could be persuaded to join any side more effectively than via brute force coercion. So it's possible that ideological wars for the youth's minds would still persist. 

The second scenario/thought-experiment assumes the capacity of every human to annihilate another human by a single thought, in a way that it wold be impossible to trace. That is, person X merely thinks 'I wish Y to die', and Y dies. Now, each human would be aware of this ability, and could perform it with some limited frequency. This would be really an interesting scenario to consider. What kind of people would be most willing to use this ability indiscriminately? We could even not focus on criminals, and terrorists, but on "ordinary folks" in our investigations. Is there a monster lurking in all of us, which given the right opportunity would pounce with a lethal strike? Surely, guaranteed effectiveness plus impunity appears to be a set-up that offers precisely this kind of opportunity. Perhaps ordinary criminals, psychopaths, and terrorists are just either stupid, unaware of the immediate repercussions, or desperate in their actions, and that's why they're caught. Perhaps if the conditions for killing others were greatly facilitated, and the burden of responsibility completely eliminated, we'd realize that a lot more of us are potential killers in disguise? Or perhaps it would become evident that we're capable of doing great evils in moments of emotional upheaval and fury? I mean, what if every-time entertaining a thought 'I wish X were dead!', in a moment of rage, could actually make X drop dead? Would people be dropping like flies? Would this ability inevitably lead to extinction of the human species?