Sunday, February 13, 2005
Fantasies and Illusions
I was just having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today, and the topic was the usual one about God. Well, actually, I shouldn't call it usual since he just recently converted to christianity and I haven't had much chance to talk in depth about it with him yet. However, its a long story in itself. So, I guess we can just pass that by for now.
Point is, most religious conversations revolve, sometimes, around the question of the existence of God. This, of course, is highly debatable in many many ways, but here, I'll just present my view of it from a fairly strange perspective. Personally, I cannot say I completely believe in God as a being, but rather I believe it as a concept. There is not enough evidence to push the argument either way, but the one and only conclusion would be that God, if he/she exists, would be an omnipotent being. Along that line of thought, I do not agree in the protrayal of God in human form. Anthropomorphic views on dieties is just proof of self-centered egoism that the human race posesses, in my opinion. Some may argue that the bible states that God created humans in his image, but I say that that statement can be pushed in many ways. When God created humans in his image, did he create humans to "look" like him physically, or did he create humans based on an image that he/she/it had? Also, I'd like to point out the gender bias of referring to God as "he" where in reality, if God were male, then how did "he" create women if he created humans in his image!? Some might say that I'm nitpicking at technicalities, but the issue is that no one ever turned to question what was written in the bible. The Bible may contain "God's words" but it is written in an imperfect human language. Ok, I'm swaying off the point I started out with.
One way people argue the existence of God is through the many "miracles" that are witnessed by believers. However, non-believers have a tendency to brush it off as just being a coincidence. On the other hand, in my opinion and opinions of others, there are no coincidences in this world. There is no such thing as true randomness, which means that there is no coincidence. Everything has a specific set of cause and effects, its just that sometimes the causes are too complicated for us to predict the effect. In many cases, its just that we don't know all the causes. Is a coin flip random? We were taught it was random, but in reality, if you knew every single variable involved, the strength of the flip, the weight of the coin, air resistance, rotational force, etc. you can predict a coin flips outcome. A psychologist too this further into a mental exercise where instead of a coin, we "flip" a human. Given enough information about a person, technically, it is possible to predict every single reaction to any stimulus we might throw him or her. So, the question in real life is not whether something is random, but what are the rules governing the behavior.
For those who still remember some physics, we all remember that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle implied that we can't really accurately meassure anything at the subatomic level, since everything is probabilistic. Einstein didn't believe that and simple said "God does not play dice." And it has been shown that Einstein was right and God does not play dice. Particles at the subatomic level have behaviors that can be accurately predicted, but its just very complicated.
There's a field of research in mathematics called Chaos Theory, popularized in the movie Jurassic Park. However, its mainly called chaos theory because its too difficult to isolate and comprehend all variables involved in whatever phenomenon being observed. Thus, it is chaos to the human mind.
My point being that whoever created this world also laid down a set of rules. Like any game we play, there are rules and bounds we work within and there's a playing field. God created a playing field and laid down a set of rules, and we are all within that "game." To a certain extent, God cannot make exceptions to the rules or alter them in fear of causing the game to become unstable. The world isn't just a simple game, its a complete game of checks and balances. Just like Newton's second law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, any change in this world may have dramatic effects of everything else. Some call this the Butterfly effect. In truth, if God really cannot do more than work within the set of rules that he has laid down for this game he created, then what are miracles? I believe miracles are coincidences and they are random events. We say something is a miracle because it is surprising and defies all logic and understanding. However, given all the arguments above, a miracle is really just something we cannot comprehend the cause and effect to. This implies that what we call "miracles" are actually legal results of playing the system. We view them as unexpected because we don't understand the system.
For every game we learn to play ever since we were kids, we've known that there are rules to follow and that to win, you must play within the rules. However, we also learn to look for loopholes in the rules to give ourselves an advantageous edge in the game. Thus, the tighter the set of rules, the harder it is for us to exploit possible vulnerability. Thus, a miracle is no more than an unexpected outcome of the given set of rules that govern life as we know it. Thus divine intervention is no more than God exploiting holes in his own set of rules to produce a specific outsome. Let's not call them "holes," its more like new interpretations.
However, do miracles really show that God exists? If there is a preset system and rules that are constantly operating, then does God need to do anything but watch? The world is pretty much a self-sustained system that just keeps running. So, does God really have to be involved in the operation of the world? That may end up being a even longer answer.
Before I forget, I have to say one thing. The reason that I put "Fantases and Illusions" in the first line is because that those two words describe many of the things we believe to be truth. People have a bad tendency to build up their own illusions of what the world is like. It gives us a sense of security in thinking that we know what the world is like and what to expect. There's nothing bad about it. I've come to realize this quite a while back that I have my own illusions about this world. The thing is, illusions are not bad, since sometimes they are the driving forces that keep us going day in day out. We like to call them Hope, but in reality, they are nothing more than fantasies and illusions that make us feel better about ourselves, our world, or just plainly the environment around us. So, question, what's not to say that God is also one of these illusions we built ourselves to make us feel better about life in general and the world in general?
It really is impossible to decisively push the argument either way.
Those are my opinions and I'm sticking to them. :p
I was just having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today, and the topic was the usual one about God. Well, actually, I shouldn't call it usual since he just recently converted to christianity and I haven't had much chance to talk in depth about it with him yet. However, its a long story in itself. So, I guess we can just pass that by for now.
Point is, most religious conversations revolve, sometimes, around the question of the existence of God. This, of course, is highly debatable in many many ways, but here, I'll just present my view of it from a fairly strange perspective. Personally, I cannot say I completely believe in God as a being, but rather I believe it as a concept. There is not enough evidence to push the argument either way, but the one and only conclusion would be that God, if he/she exists, would be an omnipotent being. Along that line of thought, I do not agree in the protrayal of God in human form. Anthropomorphic views on dieties is just proof of self-centered egoism that the human race posesses, in my opinion. Some may argue that the bible states that God created humans in his image, but I say that that statement can be pushed in many ways. When God created humans in his image, did he create humans to "look" like him physically, or did he create humans based on an image that he/she/it had? Also, I'd like to point out the gender bias of referring to God as "he" where in reality, if God were male, then how did "he" create women if he created humans in his image!? Some might say that I'm nitpicking at technicalities, but the issue is that no one ever turned to question what was written in the bible. The Bible may contain "God's words" but it is written in an imperfect human language. Ok, I'm swaying off the point I started out with.
One way people argue the existence of God is through the many "miracles" that are witnessed by believers. However, non-believers have a tendency to brush it off as just being a coincidence. On the other hand, in my opinion and opinions of others, there are no coincidences in this world. There is no such thing as true randomness, which means that there is no coincidence. Everything has a specific set of cause and effects, its just that sometimes the causes are too complicated for us to predict the effect. In many cases, its just that we don't know all the causes. Is a coin flip random? We were taught it was random, but in reality, if you knew every single variable involved, the strength of the flip, the weight of the coin, air resistance, rotational force, etc. you can predict a coin flips outcome. A psychologist too this further into a mental exercise where instead of a coin, we "flip" a human. Given enough information about a person, technically, it is possible to predict every single reaction to any stimulus we might throw him or her. So, the question in real life is not whether something is random, but what are the rules governing the behavior.
For those who still remember some physics, we all remember that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle implied that we can't really accurately meassure anything at the subatomic level, since everything is probabilistic. Einstein didn't believe that and simple said "God does not play dice." And it has been shown that Einstein was right and God does not play dice. Particles at the subatomic level have behaviors that can be accurately predicted, but its just very complicated.
There's a field of research in mathematics called Chaos Theory, popularized in the movie Jurassic Park. However, its mainly called chaos theory because its too difficult to isolate and comprehend all variables involved in whatever phenomenon being observed. Thus, it is chaos to the human mind.
My point being that whoever created this world also laid down a set of rules. Like any game we play, there are rules and bounds we work within and there's a playing field. God created a playing field and laid down a set of rules, and we are all within that "game." To a certain extent, God cannot make exceptions to the rules or alter them in fear of causing the game to become unstable. The world isn't just a simple game, its a complete game of checks and balances. Just like Newton's second law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, any change in this world may have dramatic effects of everything else. Some call this the Butterfly effect. In truth, if God really cannot do more than work within the set of rules that he has laid down for this game he created, then what are miracles? I believe miracles are coincidences and they are random events. We say something is a miracle because it is surprising and defies all logic and understanding. However, given all the arguments above, a miracle is really just something we cannot comprehend the cause and effect to. This implies that what we call "miracles" are actually legal results of playing the system. We view them as unexpected because we don't understand the system.
For every game we learn to play ever since we were kids, we've known that there are rules to follow and that to win, you must play within the rules. However, we also learn to look for loopholes in the rules to give ourselves an advantageous edge in the game. Thus, the tighter the set of rules, the harder it is for us to exploit possible vulnerability. Thus, a miracle is no more than an unexpected outcome of the given set of rules that govern life as we know it. Thus divine intervention is no more than God exploiting holes in his own set of rules to produce a specific outsome. Let's not call them "holes," its more like new interpretations.
However, do miracles really show that God exists? If there is a preset system and rules that are constantly operating, then does God need to do anything but watch? The world is pretty much a self-sustained system that just keeps running. So, does God really have to be involved in the operation of the world? That may end up being a even longer answer.
Before I forget, I have to say one thing. The reason that I put "Fantases and Illusions" in the first line is because that those two words describe many of the things we believe to be truth. People have a bad tendency to build up their own illusions of what the world is like. It gives us a sense of security in thinking that we know what the world is like and what to expect. There's nothing bad about it. I've come to realize this quite a while back that I have my own illusions about this world. The thing is, illusions are not bad, since sometimes they are the driving forces that keep us going day in day out. We like to call them Hope, but in reality, they are nothing more than fantasies and illusions that make us feel better about ourselves, our world, or just plainly the environment around us. So, question, what's not to say that God is also one of these illusions we built ourselves to make us feel better about life in general and the world in general?
It really is impossible to decisively push the argument either way.
Those are my opinions and I'm sticking to them. :p
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Lost in Translation or just Lost between Generations?
Some have labelled the beginning of the 1990s as the start of the information age, as we saw the internet and world wide web start to take off. However, as we are flooded with more and more information every minute, hour, day, week, month, and even years of our lives, have we ever stopped and thought about our kids? Have we stopped and thought about the next generation? Some may think this is a rather weird question to be asking, since we were all kids once and we just sort of got along fine. However, things are different now, especially for the past 15 years.
I remember growing up, the two big sources of daily information was the evening news and the daily paper or other printed material. Those medias were nice and static and were easily monitored by parents who cared to. So, growing up wasn't too stressful. There was the usual peer pressure and the childish yearning for the new toy on the market. Then when we hit puberty, it was the curiosity about sexual material, and we all somehow got hold of some porn one way or another. You know what I'm talking about, especially you guys out there. There was really no feeling of being overwhelmed and life passed by like it should.
However, things are different and has been different. I grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s. I was pretty sure of what I wanted to do with my life by the time the full force of the information age dawned on me. But what about the kids that grew up during the peaks of the information age? The ones that are just starting to get into college now and maybe high school? Many of them took the full force of growing up in the information age. The playing field has been alterred drastically when the internet became popular. Some time around 1996, things really started to change. Everything started going online. And I have to admit, I loved it. The massive flow of information and availability of information at short time intervals. If something happened somewhere on the other side of the globe, one can know about it within minutes.
The web grew exponentially as the tsunami of information swept the world. This was a good thing, since all the information you thought you would ever need is at your fingertip. But there is a down side to all this...all this information can be overwhelming and may not be a good thing.....
Personally, I feel that for a developing personality to be flooded with so much information is not a good thing. You read, see, and hear all this information, but if you lack the capacity to properly filter and process it, then to a certain extent, it will overwhelm you. They say information is power, but that is only true when you can properly process the information. So, what has the information age created? A generation of kids that can find any information they need any time and feel that this "knowledge" empowers them.
For those of you who have read the book "Brave New World," you should remember that there's a section in there that says that you can only subliminally teach moral values, but not actually knowledge. For example, they can use subliminal learning to flood a child's mind with alot of information about, say, the Nile river in Egypt. The child could recite the information, but had no clue how to use it. And that's what I feel has happened. We have a generation of kids who feel empowered by the illusion of knowledge, when all they have is nothing but the ability to recite what they read and possible play with some of the wording. To say it bluntly, their knowledge is only skin deep.
Having skin deep knowledge is in no way bad, its the illusion that you know more than you really do that makes it bad. They acquire what they feel are "skills" and believe that that is it. Many then go out looking for high paying jobs with really nothing underneath their belts. The sad thing is, many don't realize they have nothing. They are the truely lost. The massive amount of information has caused them to lose sight of what reality is, or at least they have a warped concept of reality because of all the information that they obtained. So, I call them the "lost generation."
I know I'm a little bold in my statements, and that it may very well be from anecdotal experience with the current generation of kids around the age of 13 - 18, but this is pretty much how I feel.
As a programmer and an engineer to a certain extent, I really have to complain about a few things. It kind of ticks me off sometimes when I talk to kids that know how to create a webpage with frontpage or dreamweaver and feel that they know how to program. When has webpage development been elevated to the level of programming? You copy and paste a few javascripts and play with some values and you think you're a programmer? I really wish I can cram into their stubborn little heads that they are only able to do this because many "real" programmers threw in countless hours to create what they are using. Stepping on other peoples' shoulders and calling yourself the king of the world is a very dangerous thing.
There are also kids and teenagers that play with scripting languages and mod games. They think that's real programming and I say 50/50. A scripting language is a high level programming language, so I can let that slide. However, using prebuilt game and level editors IS NOT programming.
What I'm really afraid of is that we will end up having a society and half an industry of people who know how to use tools, but never question why the tools work. A generation that believe in the ends and the tools that help them meet it. It gets dangerous when the foundation changes. Its like being on the top of a human pyramid in the circus, when the people below you decide to change formations and move, you better know when that's going to happen or you're going to take a nasty fall.
The point after all that rambling is that many kids have become obsessed with the ends that they have forgotten the fundamentals. We praise our kids about their achievements, but we never really worry about their fundamentals. Only a solid foundation can make you a success in life. That's how successful got to where they are today. I think many kids, teenagers, and people have forgotten that.
So, this is my really long rambling and gripe about the "lost generation."
Some have labelled the beginning of the 1990s as the start of the information age, as we saw the internet and world wide web start to take off. However, as we are flooded with more and more information every minute, hour, day, week, month, and even years of our lives, have we ever stopped and thought about our kids? Have we stopped and thought about the next generation? Some may think this is a rather weird question to be asking, since we were all kids once and we just sort of got along fine. However, things are different now, especially for the past 15 years.
I remember growing up, the two big sources of daily information was the evening news and the daily paper or other printed material. Those medias were nice and static and were easily monitored by parents who cared to. So, growing up wasn't too stressful. There was the usual peer pressure and the childish yearning for the new toy on the market. Then when we hit puberty, it was the curiosity about sexual material, and we all somehow got hold of some porn one way or another. You know what I'm talking about, especially you guys out there. There was really no feeling of being overwhelmed and life passed by like it should.
However, things are different and has been different. I grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s. I was pretty sure of what I wanted to do with my life by the time the full force of the information age dawned on me. But what about the kids that grew up during the peaks of the information age? The ones that are just starting to get into college now and maybe high school? Many of them took the full force of growing up in the information age. The playing field has been alterred drastically when the internet became popular. Some time around 1996, things really started to change. Everything started going online. And I have to admit, I loved it. The massive flow of information and availability of information at short time intervals. If something happened somewhere on the other side of the globe, one can know about it within minutes.
The web grew exponentially as the tsunami of information swept the world. This was a good thing, since all the information you thought you would ever need is at your fingertip. But there is a down side to all this...all this information can be overwhelming and may not be a good thing.....
Personally, I feel that for a developing personality to be flooded with so much information is not a good thing. You read, see, and hear all this information, but if you lack the capacity to properly filter and process it, then to a certain extent, it will overwhelm you. They say information is power, but that is only true when you can properly process the information. So, what has the information age created? A generation of kids that can find any information they need any time and feel that this "knowledge" empowers them.
For those of you who have read the book "Brave New World," you should remember that there's a section in there that says that you can only subliminally teach moral values, but not actually knowledge. For example, they can use subliminal learning to flood a child's mind with alot of information about, say, the Nile river in Egypt. The child could recite the information, but had no clue how to use it. And that's what I feel has happened. We have a generation of kids who feel empowered by the illusion of knowledge, when all they have is nothing but the ability to recite what they read and possible play with some of the wording. To say it bluntly, their knowledge is only skin deep.
Having skin deep knowledge is in no way bad, its the illusion that you know more than you really do that makes it bad. They acquire what they feel are "skills" and believe that that is it. Many then go out looking for high paying jobs with really nothing underneath their belts. The sad thing is, many don't realize they have nothing. They are the truely lost. The massive amount of information has caused them to lose sight of what reality is, or at least they have a warped concept of reality because of all the information that they obtained. So, I call them the "lost generation."
I know I'm a little bold in my statements, and that it may very well be from anecdotal experience with the current generation of kids around the age of 13 - 18, but this is pretty much how I feel.
As a programmer and an engineer to a certain extent, I really have to complain about a few things. It kind of ticks me off sometimes when I talk to kids that know how to create a webpage with frontpage or dreamweaver and feel that they know how to program. When has webpage development been elevated to the level of programming? You copy and paste a few javascripts and play with some values and you think you're a programmer? I really wish I can cram into their stubborn little heads that they are only able to do this because many "real" programmers threw in countless hours to create what they are using. Stepping on other peoples' shoulders and calling yourself the king of the world is a very dangerous thing.
There are also kids and teenagers that play with scripting languages and mod games. They think that's real programming and I say 50/50. A scripting language is a high level programming language, so I can let that slide. However, using prebuilt game and level editors IS NOT programming.
What I'm really afraid of is that we will end up having a society and half an industry of people who know how to use tools, but never question why the tools work. A generation that believe in the ends and the tools that help them meet it. It gets dangerous when the foundation changes. Its like being on the top of a human pyramid in the circus, when the people below you decide to change formations and move, you better know when that's going to happen or you're going to take a nasty fall.
The point after all that rambling is that many kids have become obsessed with the ends that they have forgotten the fundamentals. We praise our kids about their achievements, but we never really worry about their fundamentals. Only a solid foundation can make you a success in life. That's how successful got to where they are today. I think many kids, teenagers, and people have forgotten that.
So, this is my really long rambling and gripe about the "lost generation."
Saturday, October 25, 2003
The other day, actually Thursday, I had a very interesting conversation, more like debate, with a friend about religion and science, over dinner. Of course, only on a full stomach can your brain work at full capacity, or that was what we thought. However, we weren't really in the mood of proving that for ourselves, since the subject matter was of something much more serious, the coexistance of science and religion.
I seem to have forgotten, why we started talking about the whole thing, but it seems that he believed that science and religion were two seperate things that should not intermingle. However, as debatable a person I am, I had to disagree. I believe science and religion go hand in hand, even though there are various cases in which science and religion do not agree, like evolution for example, which is completely taboo in some churches. I see nothing wrong with evolution. The fact that people "may" have evolved from monkeys is nothing to make a big deal about. The bible only said that God created people in his own image, but then the word "create" is arguable. Since, you really can't be sure whether it was direct influence or indirect influence. Now, what I'm trying to say is that a person can "help" create something through external influences, so there's nothing wrong in thinking that maybe humans were created through God's manipulation of the evolution process, which he may have created in the first place. Now nothing wrong with that. Of course, I can see how some people can find this disturbing, since people are egocentric beings after all. For the longest time, we believed we were the center of the universe for crying out loud. That really makes you wonder whether people were truly "created" in the "image" of God. We as a species have intelligence, which make us put more importance on ourselves than anything else. Now, if dogs also had the same intelligence as humans, would we still be keeping them as pets? Would we still feel just as unique in this world? Now, that's a question best left for philosopher, since I don't feel like killing a few brain cells just to try and solve it right now.
More to come.....
I seem to have forgotten, why we started talking about the whole thing, but it seems that he believed that science and religion were two seperate things that should not intermingle. However, as debatable a person I am, I had to disagree. I believe science and religion go hand in hand, even though there are various cases in which science and religion do not agree, like evolution for example, which is completely taboo in some churches. I see nothing wrong with evolution. The fact that people "may" have evolved from monkeys is nothing to make a big deal about. The bible only said that God created people in his own image, but then the word "create" is arguable. Since, you really can't be sure whether it was direct influence or indirect influence. Now, what I'm trying to say is that a person can "help" create something through external influences, so there's nothing wrong in thinking that maybe humans were created through God's manipulation of the evolution process, which he may have created in the first place. Now nothing wrong with that. Of course, I can see how some people can find this disturbing, since people are egocentric beings after all. For the longest time, we believed we were the center of the universe for crying out loud. That really makes you wonder whether people were truly "created" in the "image" of God. We as a species have intelligence, which make us put more importance on ourselves than anything else. Now, if dogs also had the same intelligence as humans, would we still be keeping them as pets? Would we still feel just as unique in this world? Now, that's a question best left for philosopher, since I don't feel like killing a few brain cells just to try and solve it right now.
More to come.....
Monday, October 20, 2003
This is where I post random thoughts for the day.....
