The Ontological Argument in One Easy Step

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I was watching an interview with Colin McGinn where he said that he thought the ontological argument is interesting because nobody's ever managed to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with it even though it's wholly unconvincing to everybody who hears it. There are lots of ways to show it's absurd (e.g. Guanilo's Island), but none are concise and direct enough to seem like the problem with it.

Well, a line of reasoning recently occurred to me that I'd like to put forth as the problem with the ontological argument. The normal version goes something like this:

1. God is defined as the most perfect being conceivable.
2. If he didn't exist, he would be less perfect than a being who did exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

I think there's a two-part gimmick in the argument, and that I can simplify it down without losing any of the meaning:

1. God is defined as a being who exists.
2. Therefore God exists.

The trick is in confusing the levels, and losing the difference between a definition and reality. If you dream that you woke up, it doesn't mean you're awake. By the same token, a being that's defined to exist doesn't necessarily exist (nor a being that's defined as "a being defined to exist"). The part about "what it means to be perfect" just acts as misdirection from the meat of the argument enough to block your common sense.

There's no contradiction whatsoever within the definition, nothing wrong with it even, but every definition is a hypothetical of sorts, just a label to tell me what you mean when you use the word.

I did happen to notice that Kant looks to have proposed almost the same counterargument, but his version seems wordier and was one of four bullet points in his argument. I wonder if Colin McGinn is familiar with Kant's refutation...

What's in a Vote?

I'm not happy about several aspects of the way voting has been working in our country. I hate all the mudslinging, I'm irritated with all the manipulation and confusion, and I feel very powerless as an individual voter. I think there are some small steps we the people could take that could unlock the full power of our voting system in subtle ways, and stop people hijacking our intentions.

It's All About Hate
I've had to give up the TV and radio because the ads have become nothing but smear campaign after smear campaign. I've seen candidates lumped in with child molesters, all kinds of insane, childish accusations, and I'm seeing and hearing the people around me spout off outrageous insults in all directions. And you know what? I think the politicians love it.

It's hard to impress people with your diplomatic skill, and nobody pats you on the back for making the tough decisions. On the other hand, nothing could be simpler than tearing down your opponent, attacking their character, and trying to come out of the whole mess with the least stink on yourself. You'd think if all the candidates looked bad, then we'd start widening our selection, but ironically, all the mudslinging seems to rally people all the more strongly around the candidates in front of us. I think that hatred keeps us firmly entrenched in a two-party system, and I also wonder if a viable third or fourth candidate might make it less cost-effective to trash your opponent than to promote yourself.

My suggestion is to just take a deep breath, try to temper your enthusiasm, and remember that most of the insults you throw around will end up hitting someone you care about. It also wouldn't hurt to commit to explicitly dock your candidates points for mudslinging, and keep an eye out to reward other candidates politely waiting on the sidelines while their opponents behave like children.

It's Not a Game
I think "strategic voting" is one of the dumbest ideas ever. We think we're being clever and maximizing the power of our votes, but I find it about as empowering as having your tongue cut out. It makes the voting public inflexible, easy to manipulate, and doesn't really stretch your vote all that far either. (Do you really think your second-choice candidate is going to win or lose depending on your vote?) I think it's a debasement of the democratic process and we're all selling ourselves out, voting for what we think someone else wants, and afraid to be the first one to stick our neck out.

I have two suggestions:
First, notice how much your vote is actually worth. Is it really "throwing your vote away" to send a message that we're not playing games anymore, that the fuse is lit and we're ready to blow away this tired dominion of "good ol' boys"? I for one am committed to voting for the candidate I like best and letting my vote mean something, rather than betting on the off chance that my vote will be the deciding factor between bad and worse.

Second, instant runoff voting. Seriously, why aren't we doing this already? Barack Obama and McCain support it, so I doubt it's a partisan thing. So it's going to cost a little to set up. Why not start it with local elections and work our way up the chain? I'm convinced it would level the playing field and weaken the two-party stronghold, and that all voters will benefit at the expense of career politicians.

Let's Get Started
I think it's self-defeating to be encouraging everyone to get out and vote but be too lazy to fix the system and make our votes count for all they're worth.

As far as mudslinging goes, I'm thinking about starting a wiki over at Wikia to help keep track of smear campaigns and make it easier to vote on the platform of "no mudslinging" (once again I'll mention I don't think there's any such thing as "throwing away your vote"). I'm not 100% sure what the next step is for IRV, but first off you can visit FairVote.org and find out how to push for it, or strike up a conversation about it with somebody.

Wikipedia

I've had a lot of random thoughts about Wikipedia stewing for a while. It's finally time for me to get them out, and hopefully some interesting discussion will come out of it.

A Little History

One of the most interesting aspects of Wikipedia's history, to me, is that its creators initially didn't think it would work. It was a lark.

Before Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanders worked on a project called "Nupedia", which was a free online encyclopedia project, but was not a wiki and was not open for everyone to freely contribute. It had an extensive peer-review process that made it awkward for people to add content. Jimmy and Larry were trying to figure out how to make it easier for users to contribute, and they heard about the WikiWikiWeb project (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), the world's first wiki. They were short on cash and it was cheap and easy to set up a wiki, so they decided to give it shot and see how badly it would fail. It didn't, and Wikipedia was born.

See Larry Sander's article about it for more details.

What It's For

Wikipedia is a pretty reliable and extensive source of facts. Not all information belongs on Wikipedia (see "What Wikipedia Isn't" in "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual"), but there are several companion sites to fill some of those gaps (e.g., Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikia; EDIT: see Wikipedia:Alternative outlets for more), and what is on Wikipedia is extremely useful. And if something isn't useful, you can fix it, without even having to register!

I've heard a lot of complaints, mostly from English teachers, about how you can't trust Wikipedia because "anyone can say anything" on it. There are statistics showing that Wikipedia is (gasp!) slightly less reliable than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and for some reason people think that's a big deal. And, by the way, it makes perfect sense you can't cite Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, because it's just plain lazy. Every claim that's cited on Wikipedia directs you straight to the source(s), and anything that isn't cited doesn't belong in a research paper because you have no idea who said it ("Yes I do! 78.133.30.247 said it.").

Who Creates It?

I've been surprised talking to people around me by how few of them feel competent to edit Wikipedia. I ran across a pretty interesting article from 2006 analyzing how "clustered" the editing of Wikipedia is. At the time, Jimmy Wales had stated that .7% of the users (524) were responsible for 50% of the edits. The author of the article uses a different measurement on a few arbitrarily selected articles (how many letters from the current version were typed by which users), and finds a much different picture, but then there are some big weaknesses in that approach, too (deleting and rearranging blocks of text can improve an article substantially).

My background with Wikipedia is that I've done a lot of reading and a little writing. I've made a few small edits, just little things that bugged me, and I guess it just seemed natural to me since I'm a programmer and I'm used to collaborating online. I've found the Wikipedia community to be very friendly and cooperative. There are vandals and lots of opinionated people who barely speak English making edits, the Wikipedians are used to it, so it's not some pristine, elite community you're imposing on. You really are welcome to edit, and you don't have to apologize for being inexperienced. If there's something clearly wrong with your changes, they'll fix it without batting an eye, and usually they'll explain what they don't like about it.

There's also a "discussion" page attached to each regular page. Scanning through the discussion pages is a great way to learn about how Wikipedia works. If you're not sure about an edit you're making, or it's a big change, just add a section on the discussion page and describe what you're doing and why. And even though it's called a "discussion" page, I don't think you're necessarily expected to check back for responses to your questions and explanations, so there's no reason to shy away thinking it'll be a big commitment.

I really think everyone should try editing Wikipedia at least once (there's a guide with lots of links if you want help getting started), just so you understand the process and are comfortable with it. If I were an English teacher, I think I'd make an assignment of making one edit on some page somewhere on Wikipedia so the students understand where the content comes from, and get some hands-on experience supporting their claims.

Clogs in the System

There are some sorts of "traffic jams" that crop up a lot on Wikipedia. One is that most or all of the content on  math-related articles is incomprehensible, and I think I've figured out why. When you see content that's written in poor English, and you can't understand any of it, you'll usually be pretty quick to delete it or criticize it. But if it's heady and academic-sounding and you don't understand any of it, you'll usually assume they must know what they're talking about, that it's helpful to other people but not you, and then leave it where it is. I think there's a sort of "natural selection" for confusing academic content on Wikipedia, where it's relatively easy to create and difficult to delete. You'll find the same thing in a lot of philosophy-related articles.

I think it's a sort of benign tumor that Wikipedia would do well to excise wherever possible. My stance is that long mathematical proofs and derivations don't belong on Wikipedia any more than extensive plot summaries of books and movies do. They're not citable claims, even if they're useful information. For these, Wikipedia articles should just summarize the proofs and derivations, and provide excellent links to further information (like math.wikia.com or Wolfram MathWorld), just the way any other citation works on Wikipedia.

Another little bug for me is that it would be nice to be able to collect pronunciation information for the names of famous people and places on Wikipedia, but it's very hard to find citable references. There is an "International Phonetic Alphabet" that they use to annotate pronunciations, but it's very hard to find textual evidence of a certain pronunciation in the real world, and it's also hard finding public domain audio or video evidence.

The good news is there are people actively strategizing and cleaning up issues. In addition to the paid staff working on improving the Wikipedia system in general, I recently discovered there are groups called WikiProjects that set out to assess and improve the quality of articles in different subject areas of Wikipedia.

The Future

Wikipedia has a lot of happy users and quite a few active editors, and honestly I think they'd be doing just fine to maintain their current growth for the foreseeable future. I can't imagine it being replaced or obsoleted. But there are several ways I could imagine it being even better.

One feature I can't believe they haven't implemented yet is a common feature in software development tools called "blame" or "annotate". They already have a history for each page that shows all the versions there have ever been of that page, through time. You can select any two dates and see a neat comparison or "diff" of what text was added, deleted, or otherwise changed in between. An "annotate" view turns that feature on its head. It shows, next to each line, the date when that line was last modified. This is very helpful for tracking down long-standing vandalism, for instance. There is a prototype of that feature here, but it's still just a prototype.

On another note, Wikipedia naturally has two tiers of content, cited and uncited, and I love that I can see both on one site. But sometimes there are claims that are too relevant to delete from an article and surprisingly hard to verify from an independent source, that just seem doomed to linger uncited. If you search the internet for sources, a lot of times you'll only turn up people who have copied and pasted that very article from Wikipedia, often without even mentioning where it came from. I've been wondering, as time goes on, will these citation problems stabilize and decrease, or will they only get worse as Wikipedia grows?

You've probably seen the "citation needed" tags floating around for stuff like that, but sometimes I wish the difference between them was a bit more obvious. As it is, a lot of people don't even notice the difference, and just repeat everything they read on Wikipedia as fact. Even the uncited material on Wikipedia is somewhat reliable, because if it can be easily disproven, someone will probably delete it before too long. But I've been wondering how it would look if the uncited content, instead of being marked with "citation needed" tags everywhere, was marked with a very light pale yellow background, so that you could easily scan it and see exactly which part of the content was less reliable.

One final thing I think the future will hold for Wikipedia: more non-human readers. That's right, I'm talking about learning AI systems. It will certainly be a good source of raw knowledge for certain types of software projects once we get some more tools to extract semantic information from it, but I think it's also worth noting that those tools will help us in improving Wikipedia, too: automatically finding weak claims, directing Wikipedia editors straight to possible sources across the internet for specific claims, and possibly doing active editing to clean up problem areas. It's a thought, anyway.

Netflix on the Wii

After 5 months with Netflix's Instant Streaming disc for the Wii, I've got some observations to share.

The Good

For one thing, the disc is free! All you need is a Netflix account and a Wii. Order the disc, and it'll come in the mail in 1-2 business days. Pop it in your Wii, connect your Wii to your account, and you're good to go with your queue and everything.

For me, it's made Netflix's instant streaming usable again. I've used their PC client a few times, but it only supported Internet Explorer on Windows (blegh), and it's just too much of an investment to pull it up and sit at the computer for the hour or two it takes to watch a movie. You could also use a video-out cable to watch it on your TV, but it's a pain to set up every time; there are too many issues and quirks and popups for it to be a comfortable movie-watching experience

I haven't had any experience with Netflix's streaming on other platforms, like Xbox and PS3, but I'm sure they're a pretty similar experience, or better. I imagine the Wiimote might be more convenient than other systems' controllers, but it doesn't sound like a big issue either way. Lots of people complain that the Wii can't produce 1080p video output, which both other systems can. I don't have a big high-def TV and it doesn't bother me in the least, but if you care about that sort of thing you might want to try the Roku player instead, which has an HD version.

Finally, it's just great having something up and ready to go in your living room. It makes it less of an investment to watch something light while you're doing chores, and opens all kinds of watching options that just wouldn't be worth sitting down to otherwise. I've never had a DVR or pay-per-view or even cable, so it impresses me, but maybe it's nothing new for most other people.

The Bad

I do have a few gripes:

• The player makes you wait more than it should. Even if you just want to rewind it 2 seconds to hear something you missed, you have to wait the standard download time (10-30 sec. for me).
• There's absolutely no subtitle support.
• It always cuts off the last 2 seconds of audio, and that's surprisingly annoying on a lot of the content.
• There's no search for new titles. They have a lot of navigation categories that normally get the job done: a dozen or so of your typical genres, new arrivals for movies and TV shows, and lists of titles similar to each of 3 recently watched ones.
• You can rate titles and manage an "instant queue" straight from the player, but you can't reorder your queue, and it doesn't let you see or modify anything about your DVD queue. True, that's beyond the scope of a "streaming" disc, but it would be nice.
• No trailers. You just have to start watching the movie and see if you like it.
• It's a shame that it has to take up your disc slot, instead of just being a built-in "Netflix Channel". Every once in a while it gets to be a pain switching out discs to do something else. There's a video on how to use it disc-less, but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

Edit: I just got an email: "You no longer need the instant streaming disc to instantly watch with your Wii™ console. Simply download the Netflix channel from the Wii Shop Channel on your Wii™ console and follow the on-screen instructions." Nice!
Edit 2: And reading the press release, I noticed they've also enhanced the UI to support searching for content by name and viewing the subtitles and alternate audio they have available so far! My list of gripes is dwindling...

The Experience

Some things are better to watch on the Wii than others. The streaming selection is a bit limited: you're odds are better of finding it if it's independent or a few years old. There are supposedly about 28,000 titles available to watch instantly (as of Sept. 2010), and it keeps growing. I've heard Netflix's big challenge in getting more content is that they don't play the content providers' games to lock down the content; the film studios and TV stations prefer to deal with Hulu and others that let them micromanage the licensing, e.g., restricting your permissions to only play on a standard computer, and not other devices like game systems without an extra cost. But I digress...

The Wii player is great for watching documentaries, especially nature documentaries (or reality shows, if that's what you're into), in the background during the day. It's excellent for watching series, because it tracks your progress and lets you resume on the next episode. It got me to finally watch Firefly, which I would recommend without qualification to anyone, and which redefined my standard for great television. We've pulled our subscription down to one-movie-at-a-time and been watching a lot more on the Wii.

A side note: avoid anything with subtitles! They do sometimes have subtitles burned into the video stream, but more often they just have dubbed versions, and you don't get to pick. I would really like to watch some of the less well-known anime series they have available, but every one I've checked is dubbed, and since they're mostly not the award-winning international successes, all the dubbing I've heard is horrible. YMMV.

Another thing it's great for, in principle, is young children's shows. Kids like to watch the same movies over and over, and sometimes you need to keep them quiet for a little while so you can get housework done or just regain your sanity. You have all your selection right there on your Wii, with no commercials on the TV shows. My baby girl likes to watch Backyardigans and Pingu, and sometimes Arthur (which is an excellent, excellent children's show, by the way). I say it's great "in principle" because their selection still kinda sucks. No Disney classics, no Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, no educational titles like Baby Einstein and Here Come the ABC's. So it's convenient for what's available, but it's hard to find much variety that's not horribly annoying and not trash.

It's a little hard to keep track of what new titles are being added. There is an RSS feed, but the listing on the Wii player of new titles doesn't seem to show everything and doesn't show them in newest-first order. And, annoyingly, I've noticed some titles that have been pulled off of the streaming list: An American Tail, WALL-E, and soon Fried Green Tomatoes will be.

Now it might sound like I'm watching TV all the time now. Especially with putting the baby in front of the TV, you might think it's unnatural or unhealthy. I think there's a huge difference between TV with annoying, oppressive advertising, that just runs from one show to the next until you don't know where your day went; and commercial-less shows that play one-at-a-time and ask you explicitly if you want to watch something else. You can see your viewing history online, so you have some idea when you're watching too much TV. And I especially like having some of the cartoons we all enjoy, so we can sit down as a family and get snuggle time with the baby.

Overall, it's been really nice having Netflix streaming to the Wii, and I'm still hoping they'll keep making it better and beefing up their selection.

New Directions

Joshu asked Nansen, "What is the Way?"
"Ordinary mind is the Way," Nansen replied.—Kōan 19, Mumonkan

I'm thinking about mixing it up a bit and having more blog posts that don't require their own footnotes and citations. I thought about creating a separate blog for that, but a) then I'd have two blogs that rarely get updated, and b) I think this blog is too stuffy and could stand some fresh air once in a while. That will mean shorter posts, more variety, more content about me and my personal life, and quite possibly a little tech talk (seeing as I'm a software developer by day).

Feedback is welcome.

Souls, Pt. 2

The fire washes my soul clean
And what remains is a mouthful
of ashes—"Asche zu Asche", Rammstein (translated)

I've laid out in my previous post some of the reasons I'm not completely satisfied ruling out the idea of an immaterial soul. Now I want to paint a picture of why I'm not comfortable accepting the idea of souls wholesale. But first, I need to flesh things out a bit more...

If there must be something special called a soul, why would that be? I had said I just had a vague lingering doubt as to whether a perfect copy (and I mean perfect copy) would actually be me in every meaningful sense. I have a sense that I am, and have always been, one unique, individual, continuous consciousness, and my concern would be that that consciousness would be somehow interrupted in the copying process: either that it might be destroyed (and leave some sort of "zombie" behind that only appeared to be me), or that it might be replaced with some new thread of consciousness. So for me, invoking the idea of a soul would validate my experience of an individual consciousness, and give me a vehicle to reason about what would become of that consciousness in my "perfect copy" scenario.

It's not clear to me that a human built from scratch should "experience" anything, any more than a rock should. If he's wired up correctly, he should laugh, cry, respond appropriately to pain, be inspired by art, have unique individual tastes, even contemplate his own reality. From a behaviorist standpoint, there would be no reason to expect any difference whatsoever from a natural-born human, but I see no reason to expect that he would be "phenomenally conscious" (if such a concept even makes sense), or for that matter that any human would. (And how sure are we that conscious experience stops at the moment of death?) But I still can't completely shake the feeling that I am conscious in some special sense.

As a determinist, I believe any perfect physical copy of me would act identically to the original, that you could teleport them into separate identical universes (instead of destroying the original), and they would make exactly the same choices in every instance. Therefore, if the original expresses a deep conviction of subjective experience, the copy would, too. Therefore, either the copy has a "soul", the original doesn't, or souls can't explain any phenomena, not even my writing this blog post or any of the opinions I expressed in it! So determinism isn't compatible with the idea that you can make sense of consciousness by positing an immaterial soul.

One more alternative would be that it's fundamentally impossible to make a truly perfect copy of a human being for some special reason. That would resolve all the dilemmas I've mentioned and leave me with just the problem of how phenomenal consciousness, if it exists, could arise from entirely physical brains. But it seems kind of cheesy to me...

Here's a recap of all the possible ways I've come up with to make sense of my conscious experience:

• The sense of phenomenal consciousness is a persistent illusion
• The universe is not deterministic: there are non-physical conditions that affect the physical universe
• A perfect reconstruction of a human being is not possible; there can be no copy good enough to be endowed with the same conscious mind as the original

Souls, Pt. 1

"Water, 35 litres. Carbon, 20kg. Ammonia, 4 litres. Lime, 1.5kg. Phosphorus, 800g. Salt, 250 g. Salt Peter, 100g. Sulphur, 80g. Fluorine, 7.5g. Iron, 5g. Silicon 3g. And trace amounts of fifteen other elements. Those are the elements to make an average adult human body. You can buy these elemental ingredients at the market with the pocket money of a child."—Fullmetal Alchemist

I've been thinking a lot about souls lately. I lean towards thinking there is no non-physical soul, but I don't think I would call my bluff by consenting to be disintegrated and rebuilt from exactly the same matter in exactly the same configuration. What am I worried about losing?

I don't think memory or personality would be in question. The mechanisms of memory are still a little mysterious, but nothing about storing and recalling memories suggests anything metaphysical to me. I also don't think there's any reason to suspect that we'd intrinsically know the difference between a "real" memory and a "false" memory, as you might intuitively expect at first. As for personality, I think pharmaceuticals and basic neurology show pretty clearly that most, if not all, personality comes from physical brain states. And your personality wouldn't even have to be identical, because people go through mood changes all the time, and personality changes as you get older, and you still identify yourself as the same person.

So with identical memories and the same basic personality, there's no reason to expect that this copy would feel like an imposter, or be in any way emotionally detached from their "original" self. But would there be something fundamentally, drastically different in the copy? Would they be a "philosophical zombie" going through the motions of being "truly human", but lacking any kind of subjective experience or consciousness of their own?

I'd probably say "no, there would be nothing lacking", but I'm uncomfortable ruling the possibility out entirely (hence, I wouldn't consent to be disintegrated and rebuilt).

I'm still not sure where that leaves me, but there's plenty more confusion to come at a later date!

Voices

Say this world is not so shallow

When you can't beg steal or borrow.

Save your breath your soul is hollow,

And it's all too much to swallow.—"The Remedy", Abandoned Pools

He with nothing to say shouts loudest. Or something like that. Think of politicians, picketers, and advertisers. Some of them might have something worthwhile to sell you, but not the ones that get your attention and flood the airways. Why is that?

Extremes Get Attention

There are always radicals and moderates, but do you hear much about the moderates? Moderates are easy to ignore because they don't seem to have much to say. Even if the radicals are a small minority, they dominate and set the tone for everyone.

It's Easier to Talk than to Do

This is the real reason for some of the most insistent, shrill-voiced dogmatists. They have to make huge changes, see it as life or death, and rightly notice that it's too big for one person to tackle. Then they wrongly deduce that it's everyone else's problem. And that if they just shriek loud enough, the whole world will eventually see the error of their ways, and change.

Take hardcore environmentalists for example. They believe we're destroying the world at breakneck speed, and if we would all just reduce-reuse-recycle, we can live sustainably for the foreseeable future. But in general, they don't see eco-friendly living as an opportunity for personal improvement, they see the alternative as a plague of rampant pollution that needs to be decried and regulated away. Their sense of urgency comes from the fact that I can undo all of their efforts thrice over without even trying.

In all likelihood, though, any extinction-scale dangers would be too sudden to avert. Real life isn't like the movies. I see reason to be at least a little skeptical of anyone who has a life-or-death message to sell me on.

Implications

So, if the voices you can hear are the ones worth ignoring, where does that leave you? It seems like a non-starter, but I think there are some insights to take away.

First off: shut up! If people who give unwelcome advice aren't worth listening to, and you notice yourself giving a lot of advice, what does that say about you? One of Douglas Adams' characters in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a theory about humans that "if they don't keep on exercising their lips, their brains start working".

Incidentally, that's part of the reason I haven't posted here in a long time (the other part being how long it takes to write anything worth reading). I get uncomfortable when I notice myself frequently using terms like "most people", "we tend to", and "too often". But I digress...

The other big insight is one of self-empowerment: trust yourself. Most of the things being pumped into your head from the outside are probably tainted, anyway, and the fact that other "smart people" have accepted them doesn't always mean that much. If someone wants you to change, the burden of proof is on them to convince you why. It's okay to be comfortable where you are, tune people out, and change slowly.

And yes, I notice both of those are "self-undermining" messages, but I'm comfortable with that...