The Nature of Creativity

Yesterday I got into a discussion with somebody about teaching creativity. She supposed, as most people do, that creativity cannot be taught. I decided to play devil’s advocate (surprise, surprise) and argue that it might well be teachable. The thing was, as we were arguing, I got to seriously thinking about it and realised that that might actually be true.

Conventional wisdom has us believe that creativity is something that is innate and inborn. Some people have it, others don’t and that’s all there is too it. To try and teach somebody creativity is a little like trying to teach them to have blond hair.

But is that true? I mean, I’ll immediately accept that creativity does seem to run in families. Often children (or grand children) of creatives often demonstrate creative traits themselves. My own family is the perfect example, with playwrights, composers, musicians, actors, chefs and painters galore in the last three generations alone. Since I haven’t done any research into this, I assume that part of this is hereditary and part of this is a history of creativity within the family (with exposure provoking creativity).

Still, that said, though I accept that some families are more creative and others less so, I don’t feel that some races (i.e. Asians) are more creative than others. Yet almost everybody will accept that some places seem to produce more artists than other places. Some places have had a great deal of art come out of them (like Italy during the renaissance), while other areas seem to have less creativity (like Singapore since its independence).

If that isn’t because of race, then that must be because of culture and culture, as we all know, is taught.

Now I’m not suggesting that creativity can be memorised like mathematics, or grammar, but I do think people can have their creativity stoked. A class that exposes people to creative endeavours and helps inspire them to do creative work might well improve the creative output and quality of the students that take the class.

So, in that sense, creativity can be taught.

More Free Will

I read back my last post and realised that I barely understood it. Since that’s the case, I thought to myself, how can I expect anybody else to understand it? So, for that reason, I’ve decided to expand on my previous post a little, in the hopes of enlightening (corrupting?) a few more souls.

First, let me reiterate why classical physics suggests that there is no Free Will. Classical physics suggests that every single particle in this universe has a set place, direction and velocity. Many classical physicists argued that, despite Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, this was still the case. Heisenberg’s principle just meant that we could never know everything.

If a particle has a set speed, direction and location then that means that its path is set. At this point it will hit this particle and bounce off in this direction, with that much velocity. This can be extrapolated for each and every particle in the universe.

Since particles are dumb and have no will of their own (I hope we all accept this?) that means that if we knew every particles vectors we would then be able to predict the future. What is more, there could only be one future, since everything was set exactly as it is.

If there is only one possible route that the universe can follow, then there can be no such thing as Free Will. Everything and everywhen, though not preordained (as that would require an intelligence to decide what will happen) is certainly going to follow the path set before it.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, helps refute this. According to quantum physics no particle has a preset location, velocity or direction. On that scale, things don’t work that way. Rather than having one set place, particles instead have a probability – or a likelihood – of being somewhere. This is not just because we don’t have the tools to find out exactly where a particle is, but it’s actually because particles are somehow capable of having a probability of existing simultaneously in multiple locations.

No, you’re not supposed to understand it, nobody does. The world of the very small just doesn’t work in the same way as the world of what we consider normal. This means that our natural intuition just isn’t applicable and, in fact, gets in the way.

When particles have many possible places they can exist (and, in fact, do partially exist) then that makes it possible for two situations that are exactly identical, in all ways, to still have two different outcomes. From there it isn’t such a big leap (though admittedly still a leap) to suppose that we might be able to influence those probabilities and thereby alter the path before us. That, for all intended purposes, is Free Will.

Reviving Free Will

If I understand Quantum Mechanics correctly (which, I immediately admit, is highly unlikely) then there is hope for Free Will yet. A few weeks ago I argued that both science and religion lead irrevocably to no Free Will. Now, it turns out, that at least in the case of science this might not be the case.

According to classical physics, ever particle had a place and a velocity, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle just saying that it was impossible for us to know this place and velocity simultaneously, due to the nature of observation (with everything that is observed being affected by the act of observation). This is what Einstein believed until the day he died.

But, apparently, this is wrong. According to a great deal of research that has been done into the smallest possible particles we can still observe, it is not necessarily the case that any particle absolutely occupies one point in space. Instead, it seems, that it can simultaneously exist in multiple spaces at the same time.

There is no absolute, there is only probability.

What is more, as a quick aside, these particles can somehow ‘borrow’ and ‘return’ energy to the universe at large, thereby making the amount of energy they have at any one particular time both immeasurable and highly erratic. Interestingly enough, this means that a particle can actually leap through other particles (something that is called tunnelling). What is more, many particles can apparently do this simultaneously (though it is highly unlikely) allowing you to theoretically walk through walls. I wouldn’t suggest trying it though, as the likelihood of success if you tried it once every second since the beginning of the big bang it would still be negligible.

Now, let’s go back to the no absolute, only probability statement. What this means is that the future is, in no way, fixed. Each future simply has a probability of existing. In fact, objects that we see around us, actually are ‘blurred’ across space/time, with the object we see just being the remaining probability after all other probabilities have cancelled each other out.

This gives a great boost to the existence of Free Will, as it may mean that what we possess is the ability to choose the probabilities that we prefer. If we can constantly adjust the future, by way of choice, then that would constitute Free Will in every sense of the phrase.

The moment we can accept there are multiple futures that can (and possibly do) exist, we’ve escaped from the trap of determinism. Free Will doesn’t demand that the future isn’t written, it just demands that there are alternative endings.

Freakenomics inspired thoughts

Sat down and finished ‘Freakenomics’, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, yesterday. Somebody talked about it on Saturday night, so I was interested to see what it was about. It wasn’t bad, but I was expecting more. It had been pumped up a great deal by the different writers I’d come across. I guess you can’t expect too much, though. After all, the book is quite short.

The case studies are definitely quite interesting and the book does make some good observations, above all about such things as conventional wisdom and a lack of rigorous thinking. It shows how some things that we think are correlated, aren’t really. While things that we didn’t realise had anything to do with each other, do.

Basically, it asks you to reassess your held beliefs and not just take things that others say at face value. They, too, are human and they, too, have vested interests in the things they say.

If you don’t sound confident when you say something, nobody will listen to you. That means that often people try to sound confident, even when they really aren’t. People use speech that sounds definite, while really they should be hedging their bets. That’s the way society has developed, with nobody really wanting to deal with probabilities, just absolutes.

It is difficult, though. Since we can’t learn and understand everything individually anymore (there is just too much information), we need to rely on experts for certain information. Yet it is really easy to say you’re an expert and, if you’re convincing enough, other people will often believe it. It’s also really valuable to call yourself an expert. After all, people are willing to pay experts a great deal of money to make decisions for them that they don’t feel they know enough to make themselves.

I can see why it would be inviting to pretend you understand a great deal more than you do. Only other experts (or wannabes) are really likely to call you on it and by then you might have already made your millions.

The only way to counteract that, is by establishing institutions that can vet and verify experts, based on their actual knowledge and ability. We used to have those institutions, they were called universities. Unfortunately, recently their reputation has taken a bit of a nose dive. Everybody can get a university to give them a degree now. They can even buy them over the internet.

We basically need another vet and verifying group to judge the universities. Of course, such groups actually exist, but their purpose is largely defeated because so few people actually listen to them (or know where to find them in the first place).

Beyond us

There are six billion of us running around on this little globe in the corner of the Milky Way, six billion human beings who are all unique. This seems incredibly paradoxical to most people. Six billion is such an unimaginably large number for us that we have real trouble grasping the idea that each and every single one of those could be unique, different and original.

The thing is, six billion isn’t actually all that big of a number in the grand scheme of things. There are probably more than a hundred billion (that’s 100,000,000,000) galaxies in the universe. Each of those galaxies, in turn, will hold many millions of stars. Each human body is made up of somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred trillion cells. The age of the universe is guessed to be somewhere in the vicinity of 13 billion years and each of those years, we can be pretty sure, was very unique. The period at the end of this sentence holds somewhere around 500 billion protons.

Six billion is puny compared to most of those numbers. The reason we see it as big is simply because we lack the imagination to really grasp any number bigger than a few thousand. For almost our entire existence we’ve only ever had to work with numbers in the tens, hundred or (in extremes) thousands.

Six billion isn’t that big, we’re just not built to understand it.

This is a real shortcoming. It is what leads to our inability, for instance, to think outside of our immediate environment. Most of us will only ever be interested in our direct surroundings, because we just cannot grasp the true size of the world or humanity.

Joseph Stalin famously said ‘one death is tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ He is right. Even if we look at a page with a million dots, we still can’t fully grasp what that means. When I looked at it I just scrolled left and right, with my eyes glazing over slightly.

Yet we can’t blame ourselves for this. It is simply how we’ve come to be. Thousands upon millions of years of evolution were spent with everything that mattered under a hundred. Now we’re suddenly expected to understand things thousands upon millions of times bigger.

So what does that mean? It means we must accept that we can’t fully understand our world anymore, it has outgrown us. The thing is, that simply because we can’t fully grasp it, that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or think that our limited ability to understand means we don’t have to try. It is important for us to understand that while we will only ever be able to really grasp a few hundred we must still learn to care care about relatively small few billion.

Plague

I just finished Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ and heartily advise it to everybody. The book is concerned with the history or science and gives a good, concise description of most of the scientific achievements and discoveries up to 2003 (which was the year the book was published).

Of course, that means there is a large gap of four years that it doesn’t cover, but nonetheless it’s well worth the time and effort. The thing is, it wasn’t actually an effort. Bill Bryson has a gift for writing and manages to entertain and excite with facts that in almost any normal academic’s hands would most certainly bore. Of course, I’ve already talked about the need for academics to write and speak more clearly a few entries ago, so I won’t get into it here.

Of all the chapters, the one that really got to me was the last one, in which he talks about the immense amount of damage that we’re doing to our planet, in terms of the number of species that we’re driving to extinction, both in terms of flora and fauna.

He points out that before we came along with our destructive ways there was basically an extinction every four years, or so. Now that number is 120,000 times as high.

If we’re the chosen people than why do we choose to destroy?

I still remember that scene from Matrix oh so well, where Mr. Smith is talking with Morpheus and tells Morpheus that humanity isn’t a normal organism, but a plague, a disease. That thought never left me, because it seems to ring so true. Our intelligence has given us a disproportionate ability to affect our surroundings. Though in terms of bio mass we make up a tiny percentage, in terms of our ability to use and abuse there is nothing comparable.

And every species we drive to extinction makes our world’s ecosystem that bit weaker, as there is just that little bit less biodiversity to survive the next cataclysm when (not if) it happens. Heck, maybe we’re even the next cataclysm.

Of course, our world will survive. It has survived this way, with life on it, for billions of years. We’re just a small statistical anomaly that is very actively trying to correct itself. I just believe that we have so much more potential then we’re currently displaying. We always have these alien races that we depict in our movies and series, which are backwards and warlike, but it seems to me that if any alien species were to stumble across us they would directly hit reverse and clear out.

It seems to me that we’re the violent ones, we just don’t know any better because we have nothing to compare ourselves to. Of course we do have something to compare ourselves to, namely our ideals. It would just be nice if those ideals would have just a bit more preservation and a little less desecration.

But then preservation doesn’t really seem to fit in our model of survival of the fittest.

Movies

I thought I’d make a short summary of some of the more interesting movies I’ve seen in the last few months. I’ve seen a great deal more, but I won’t bore you with the mediocre and the bad.

Children of Men: This was a very interesting movie, with as the central premise the idea that somewhere in our near future we stop having children and the impact that that will have on humanity as a whole. The movie is British (I think) which directly gives it a very different feel from most Hollywood flicks. Well worth your time, don’t miss this one.

Next: Interesting premise (a man that can see two minutes into the future) not terribly well executed. Though some of the graphics in the movie were well thought out and the movie was entertaining, I did feel that the story could have been done better than it was. It was an attempt to marry an intriguing concept with an action flick mentality, which is a strange choice. Still, not bad.

Stranger Than Fiction: I watched this one without any knowledge of its story before hand and found it very entertaining. Will Ferell finally showed me that he can actually act. It’s a great movie to watch if you don’t know anything about it. Very Charlie Kaufmanesque.

The Last King of Scotland: Excellent movie and Whitaker certainly deserved the Oscar he won. It was wonderful how the movie’s style slowly changes as the themes in it turn from light hearted youth to the horrors of genocide and madness. I personally thought it was much better than Blood Diamond.

The Blasphemy Challenge

I got an E-mail from a friend linking to something called ‘The Blasphemy Challenge’. The basic idea is that if you’re really convinced there is no God (i.e. you’re an Atheist) then you would have no trouble condemning your soul to hell. If you load up a short video to YouTube in which you announce your acceptance of eternal damnation then they will send you a free copy of the hit documentary ‘The God Who Wasn’t There’.

It’s a good documentary, for those of you who are interested in it. I managed to watch it at one point when it was making its rounds across the internet. Still, I won’t be sending any such damnation video to YouTube and you won’t hear me damning my soul to hell in person either.

Why?

There are two reasons. The first reason is that if you reach Atheism through logical deduction, you can never be certain that there is no God. You can accept it as the very likely theory, like we accept the Law of Relativity or Darwinian Evolution, but you can’t accept it as absolute truth.

The only people who can accept the non-existence of God as absolute truth are those that have made a leap of faith of their own. They suppose that because they have not felt God, there is no God. I personally actually find this bigger leap of faith than many religious people make.

Following that argument, damning your soul to a possible (though highly improbable) hell for the rest of eternity to get a DVD that costs a few bucks in the store seems like a bad gamble.

The second argument is that this doesn’t help the Atheist ‘cause’. All people will succeed in doing by posting videos of themselves damning their souls to hell is shocking and angering the religious. What we need right now is not fear and anger, what we need is debate and discussion.

If Atheism is actually better than religion, which is something that Atheists believe, then we should behave in better ways than the religious. We shouldn’t provoke disgust, we should provoke discussion. We shouldn’t set out to anger, but rather to enlighten the religious as to why what we believe and how we behave is better than what they believe and how they behave.

I mean, we think that many things that have been done in the name of religion are bad and evil, but there are many religious people who will actually believe that what is going on here is much worse. Let’s demonstrate that what we believe is right by acting right and avoid these types of provocations, as they will just demonise us further (literally, in their eyes).

Motivation

This might be overly simplistic, but I have a sense that there are two forms of motivation that give us our drive, positive and negative. Positive motivation turns around what we dream about, as in ‘if I do this then people will be really happy and I’ll get applause and acclaim’, while negative motivation turns around ‘if I don’t do this, then people will be angry with me and I will be booed and shamed’.

Though I think most people are motivated by a combination of both, they do tend more towards one or the other. So far the people around me have demonstrated a definite leaning towards negative motivation. They do what they do because otherwise others will be unhappy with them or, just as common, they will be unhappy with themselves. They do what they do out of a sense of guilt.

I know I definitely belong to this group. I am constantly afraid of wasting my time and it is this that motivates me to sit down to work everyday. I know that there is this theoretical dream of success and achievement somewhere down the road and I do dream of that, but it is ultimately more of a flight of fancy than a motivating force. No, it is the knowledge that if I don’t produce that I’ll hate myself for it that gets me to put pen to paper and thoughts to words every day.

Yet I really do think there might be people motivated largely by positive motivation. The question is, where are they? And, more importantly, how do they work different from people like me?

Is one form of motivation actually better than the other form, or do they come with different benefits? Maybe negative motivation makes you work all the harder when you’re on the brink of disaster, while positive motivation drives you to push your work from the good into the great.

Maybe negative motivation is better described as tenacity and positive motivation as aspiration.

All speculation, of course. I think I must first find a positively motivated person to get a better sense of the truth in this theory. If you know any (or are one yourself) please drop me a line.

Ivory Tower

I was starting to get worried that I was leaving my reading phase, seeing as how long it took me to finish Th!nk. Fortunately, I’ve found I’m not. I just picked up the ‘Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson and found myself speeding through it. Even with the little time I’ve had this week, I’ve still managed to get through the first quarter of this quite hefty tomb.

This just goes to prove how important it is to write well and write clearly. It seems to me that quite often academics choose to hide behind difficult language, be it through arrogance or through fear. Arrogance, in that they feel that ‘the unwashed masses’ shouldn’t have access to all information and fear that somebody might discover that their ideas are just so much horse piss.

This is truly unfortunate. As somebody said, after they had read the first few pages of ‘a short history’, “If my text books in university had actually been written like this, I might have enjoyed studying science”.

By making text inaccessible academics are making sure of two things. Firstly, that fewer people enter their academic field (which is good for the individual scientist, through less competition; but bad for the science as a whole, through less research) and that fewer people trust academics as a whole.

And believe me, the common man mistrusts the academics. They see them as elitist, arrogant and out of touch with reality. In many cases, they are right. For that reason academics only have advisory roles in the world at large. They are often consulted, but get no real say in the decision making process. That, instead, is left to politicians and bureaucrats. Now, I don’t have anything against politicians and bureaucrats (no, I’m not always completely honest), but I do think that people who make decisions based on gut feelings, red tape and polls aren't really the best decision makers available.

Academics, instead should base their decisions on painstaking research (yes, big should). If this is done properly (again, big if) then ultimately the answers they come up with should be far more valuable than any of the ideas by the politicians (which are ultimately populist) or the bureaucrats (which are ultimately consensus based).

What is more, the more the common man trusts the academic, the more funding academics will receive and the higher the salaries they can receive. From that, in turn, we can then extrapolate that better, more intelligent and more motivated individuals will enter the academic life. That, in the long run, can only be good for the world as a whole, as it is these academics that do most of the pure science research, as well as the teaching of the next generation of business leaders, politicians, bureaucrats and academics.

Preach!

Just finished the book Th!nk, by Michael R. LeGault. It took me a long time. The book is concerned with the decline of Western country’s critical thinking abilities, why this is, what it means and what to do about it.

I felt that the overall tone of the book was preachy, largely unsubstantiated and overly verbose. Though he does do a great deal of referencing to other works, the parts he chooses to talk about seem only slightly relevant to what he’s talking about.

It’s not all bad. Some of the things he talks about are very thought provoking, even convincing and on quite a few things I agree with him. It’s just how he brings a lot of the arguments and his overarching opinions that often annoy and irritate. It’s funny, on a quite a few basic principles we hold the same views, but he has just decided to draw completely different conclusions from some of them.

I often found, as I read his work, that his convoluted writing style and ‘colourful’ word usage caused me to drift off. I’d be impressed if I even followed a quarter of his arguments at the end of his book, as often found his words just drifting around in my head, without connecting to anything. In fact, the only reason I finished the book at all was because of a sense of duty, not out of a sense of real interest.

Of course, that might be my own shortcoming. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough or not well read enough to follow everything he was talking about. Or maybe he just didn’t write very clearly, despite having written for the Washington Times (where clarity is desired, I expect).

One other thing that really got to me was his strident nationalism. On occasion you could almost hear the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background. I’m not saying you can’t be proud of your country, but have some humility. His constant insistence on the greatness of the US will not win him any friends among non-US citizens. It is, as a matter of fact, one of the things most disliked about Americans abroad. If they would just be a little more humble, then they would be a lot more liked.

All in all, I don’t advise this one. Though it is thought provoking, it is also annoying and difficult to read. Clarity is a prerequisite for any book directed at mainstream audiences and this book obviously wasn’t aimed at academia, with its lack of real facts and statistics and this book just was not clear. All I can hope is that somebody else will come forward and make similar arguments more capably and eloquently, because there is some truth to the things he says; not enough to buy the book, mind you, but some.

The Problem with Honesty

I was having a discussion a few days ago about a great number of subjects and the person I was speaking with brought up a question that initially had me in complete agreement. The question was:

‘Why don’t we accept that the races are different mentally? Most people are willing to accept that there are physical differences, such as black people’s general greater capacity at sports, so why can’t we accept that there are other differences? If we did, then we could do the tests and the experiments to find out who is better suited for what and where people could reach their fullest potential.’

What he said seemed sound. If no differences are found, well then the racists would finally be completely silenced. If some differences were found, however, then we could utilise those differences to do better overall.

When I thought about it some more, though, I realised the one great danger that lurked behind this open honesty and it was this: What if one group turned out to be intellectually weaker than another? What if tests reveal that one group, for example, is intellectually inferior to the others, or not as good at higher concept thinking?

Instead of crushing racism it would enflame it. Racism would explode, blossoming into a bloom of discrimination and violence. The other racial groups would consider themselves superior and especially the stupid and the dull minded (i.e. the truly inferior) would use this as an excuse to abuse people from a perceived inferior group. A gap of only a few points (it wouldn’t have to be big) would become an unbreachable chasm, with parents warning their children to stay away from ‘their lessers’.

No, even though the danger of one group being found out to be weaker than the others is relatively limited, if it were discovered it would open Pandora’s Box. I feel the danger would outweigh any potential gain from the differences we’d discover. Better to leave this sleeping dragon lie.

It isn't really that bad!

I’m not suggesting that everything about life is good. I just reject this premise that everything is going to shite. Yes, there are problems that need solving, yes there are things that need fixing and yes for some people life isn’t easy right now, but that has always been the case.

If life was so perfect at one point or another, why did people change it?

Obviously they believed that there was definite need for improvement then, as we do now.

Right now we’re in the middle of a revolution. Not of people, not of governments, not of ideology, but of economics and science. Revolutions shake up life and make a lot of people feel very uncomfortable and uncertain. They require a massive shift in mindsets and they drag everybody along with them, kicking and screaming, into the new paradigm. But when all is said and done, people always look back at revolutions and say ‘that must have been an amazing time to live’.

If you ask me, they are (will be?) right. This is an absolutely amazing time to live. The problem is that most of the people in the West are only seeing the downside. They can only see the increased insecurity, they risk and the change. You see, for most of them what the rest of the world is now getting they’ve already had for the most part for a long time. The jump doesn’t seem to be that big for them and they can’t believe that it’s causing such a big shake up.

They don’t understand that there are three billion people around this world who are being dragged hundreds of years into the future (our present) in the space of a few decades.

Those people that are pessimistic about this time and say that things are bad are rejecting, out of hand, the immense improvements going on in all these people’s lives. Don’t worry, though. The West has largely rejected most of these people out of hand for centuries, so it isn’t really that surprising that they continue to do so now.

Many of the problems arising right now are outmoded governmental and social models breaking apart as the world rides a tsunami which grows continuously stronger with each new earthquake of scientific and economic advancement.

That’s a good thing, though, as people rarely willingly change. You have to force them into a corner, where they really only have one way out. Then they will change and alter the status quo. Then they will make the sacrifices that future generations will thank them for.

You suggest life is so bad, I believe we’re in a new golden age. We’re just so busy being worried that we’re not taking the time to see the golden city rising all around us.

Is it really that bad?

I think we should define pessimism as an actual intellectual pastime, considering how many supposed educated people engage in it. ‘Things were better before’, ‘I remember when things were good’, ‘when I was a lad’ and so forth and so on. It has actually started to annoy me, off late. Are things really that bad? I don’t believe it, to be honest. Especially considering how one of the main constants of our existence as a species has been the doomsayers. They’ve always been there and they will always remain.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is a constant tendency to see the past through rose tinted glasses. The bad things are forgotten, while the good things become even better. Most people already do this in their own life time, oh, I remember when I was a child, life was so much better then. Was it? If you ask any child what they think, they generally can’t wait to grow up! They hate the disrespect, they hate not being listened to and they hate not having control over their lives. What we come to view as their innocence and freedom from responsibility in their lives, they see as a ball and chain.

In the same way we now idolize the fifties, sixties and seventies, yet it was those thirty years that spawned the biggest civic rebellion in the western world, in terms of the hippy movement. The hippy movement wasn’t just a rebellion against the war, it was a rebellion against the very norms and values that were held in such high esteem during those years.

I’m convinced that in a few decades from now we will look back at the 0s and say ‘now that was our golden age, I wish life were like it was then, during those years of unbridled expansion and unlimited possibilities’. People will forget restrictions of freedom, they will forget those that didn’t manage to get dragged along and they will forget the uncertainty everybody is now feeling about the future as we move from one system to another. Just like now we’re starting to forget about the racial riots, the cold war and inherent sexism that were all a part of those decades at the end of the 20^th century.

Yes, we’re in the middle of a new revolution. Yes, most of us have no idea about what we’ll be doing and where we’ll be even ten year from now and yes that is very stressful, but I think suggesting that we’re all doomed might be jumping the gun a bit. We seem to thrive when we think we’re at the brink of destruction. I think it’s only at this perceived brink that we can change our society for the better.

That’s why these doom sayers do it, they’re trying to change society, or maybe it’s better to say that they push society to renew itself. That’s a good thing and something that shouldn’t be discouraged. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t let yourself be fooled, most things now are better than they ever were before and getting better. Let’s keep changing, but lets also be proud of what we’ve already accomplished and be happy with where we are.

The Equality Illusion

We’ve got this thing in our modern day world, where we propose to all believe that all of us are equal. It’s one of the tenets on which a large chunk of the world’s political systems are based. Everybody is equal and therefore deserves an equal say in who rules them; everybody is also, according to western beliefs, equal before the law and, strangest of all, people say that everybody has an equal opportunity to make it big, if they work hard enough.

Yet, if we’re really honest with each other, we all know that we’re not. Men are different from women, Asians are different Africans, those born in developed nations are different from those born in developing and those born to rich parents are different from those born to poor. (for the record, some of these differences are genetic, while some are completely cultural and circumstantial)

Now some of these differences are only superficial, but some of these reasons are quite substantial. Men and women, for example, work in considerably different ways. Though it might not be PC to suggest it, their physiologies are substantially different. Where one gets a shot of testosterone, the other gets a shot of oestrogen, where one has been programmed to ‘go forth and procreate’, the other has been programmed to nurture. Of course, undoubtedly, many of these changes can be de or re programmed, but they are nonetheless there at the beginning.

To act as if these differences aren’t there would be to ignore the rather large elephant in the middle of the room.

Warning bells are probably now ringing in a great many minds. Across mental maps from America to Amsterdam and from Sydney to Singapore the words ‘Here there be dragons’ appear. I realise the perceived danger in what I suggest. If we start accepting some of the smaller differences then how long will it be before prejudice and discrimination rule our world?

The fear is that we A) won’t know where to stop (which is a slippery slope argument) and, for many people far more important, that B) it’s unethical to suggest that some people are just intrinsically ‘better’ than others. Because, of course, when you suggest people are not equal, then for most the automatic next step would be that one must then be better than the other.

The truth is, of course, that ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are concepts that only come about once you’ve first created a scale to measure with. Creating these scales seems, till now, to be a completely human past time, with no necessary grounding in reality.

So what does that mean? Only that that second step need not necessarily be taken and that there might be an alternate route that allows us to accept our differences, without embracing prejudice and discrimination.

I admit freely, that it might be a dangerous route, but I can’t help but think that the route we’ve tried so far hasn’t done a great job of eliminating the ‘isms’, to date. Why not try something new? Because, paradoxical though it seems to us, we’re all different - just like everybody else.

of Passion and Weakness

How ever much I might complain, I love being busy. I whinge and bitch, but in truth I enjoy every second of it. I love the exhaustion, I love the stress, I love the feeling that I’m actually doing something worthwhile.

No, my worst enemy is not doing too much, it is doing too little. The problem, I’m afraid, is that laziness often pushes me towards not doing enough. I’m quick to waste a few hours here, a bit of time there, even when I feel guilty as hell afterwards.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I’m getting over it. The laziness is in retreat. The computer games are a rare indulgence now, and often bore me within a few days. I’ve forced my sleep from the half day phenomenon from university down to about seven and a half, even on weekends, and I’ve thrown out the fantasy and trash fiction in favour of slightly sturdier reading (as you might have noticed). Still, there is a way to go.

I still remain far too reactive. How ever much I might expound the value of the proactive individual, I myself am not always active enough. I often mentally let things sit till just before their ‘expiry’ date (like my taxes), nor do I go out of my way to find work to keep me busy.

For example, I’ve been asked to send some work samples last Wednesday and I haven’t done it yet. True, this is the first moment I’ve actually had time to do anything of the sort, but instead of doing it I’m sitting here typing on my Blog.

I think of all my short comings – including my brusqueness, my pride, my judgemental nature, my inattention to details and my selfishness – my laziness is the one that holds me back the most. So that’s the one that I’m tackling. For those of you reading this, I’d appreciate it if you can give me a kick upside the ass, every so often, just to help me along. That’d be much appreciated.

Deluded

I think it’s about time that we all realise something very important, there is no such thing as pure thought. How ever much the philosophers of old might have praised it to the heavens as the only true tool of finding out how the world around us works, it doesn’t really exist, as such.

Pure thought is an impossibility for us, as we exist right now. The reason is quite simple, though we might think things can actually be separated in our brain, they can’t. Our emotions, desires, passions and thoughts are all interwoven into a tapestry that is us. Though we can sometimes rely more on one region, than another, it is impossible to rely upon one area alone.

You can see this back in the problems brain scanning teams have in defining the boundaries between one zone and another. The reason, in my opinion, is that there aren’t any. Yes, some areas seem to be more dedicated to one thing than another, but they meld into each other, just like almost everywhere else in nature.

Our desire to zone and create borders is just a tool that we use to define the world around us. With it we can react quickly enough to our changing surroundings to survive, without it we would constantly be stuck in a state of indecision, until finally we get eaten by one of those four legged things with fur, claws and big teeth that is generally carnivorous but sometimes does eat plants if there is no other choice.

Since the world was created through an unintelligent process called evolution, nobody ever sat down to categorise different things that were slowly coming about till after we came about.

In the same way our brain has evolved, with different zones being hijacked by different processes and then being taken over by something else, without anything ever being taken away. The flying spaghetti monster lives in our head (read the God Delusion if you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about).

We have to get past this notion that there are clearly defined zones in our head. It’s a former tool that has turned into a modern crutch. As long as we keep thinking that there is such a thing as pure emotion, pure thought and pure instinct we do not truly understand ourselves, or each other. Once we’ve accepted that they’re different dimensions of the same shape, then we can adapt our sciences and our philosophies to take this into account and we get tools better suited to what we are, rather than what we want to be.

Compared to what?

I’m currently reading the book Th!nk, by Michael R. LeGault. I’m not even 26 pages into it and I’m already getting annoyed with him. The premise of the book isn’t bad, it’s a rebuttal of the book ‘Blink’, which I discussed a couple of months ago. He believes that it’s terrible that people are relying too much on their intuition and not enough on their abilities of critical thought.

What really annoys me, though, is his negativity.

To take an example, he rips into modern media and accuses it of being low brow and stupid. As an example he names Reality TV and how it’s destroyed all the good and intelligent shows of the days of yore. Now, I admit freely that Reality TV isn’t the height of intelligent entertainment, but I’ve got to agree with the book ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’, by Steven Johnson, that most people that attack Reality TV are really comparing it to the wrong thing. Reality TV shouldn’t be compared to the serials of yore, no, instead it should be compared to the game shows of yore.

It isn’t serials that have died out at all, instead they are going as strong as ever and getting more and more complicated by the season (Deadwood, Heroes, Lost, Prison Break, etc.) with each one needing you to follow multiple stories and threads, as well as pay close attention, with innocent appearing moments from one episode suddenly coming back to haunt characters eight episodes later. Deep involved storylines certainly knock the socks off any of the older comparable series, such as Star Trek, Miami Vice or 21 Jump Street.

Game shoes, on the other hand, seem to be in drastic decline and that’s a good thing too. Though admittedly there were many that were intelligent enough, shows like ‘The Price is Right’ were certainly not great contributors to the average IQ. And among the Reality shows one can also argue there is an attempt to educate, with such shows as ‘the Amazing Race’ at least occasionally nods to local culture in the challenges that participants take part in.

There is still enough stupid garbage broadcasted worldwide, but people should really rethink this constant need to bash TV and its many relatives. In my opinion there is a real attempt among modern media outlets to not only play to the common denominator. 20 years ago, were there such things as Discovery, CNN, the BBC, National Geographic or the Science Channel? Did movies such as ‘Fahrenheit 911’ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ become international hits? I don’t think so.

So, I'll keep reading the book, but so far I'm not very impressed. For a book about critical thought, Mr. LeGault didn’t bother to think very critically.

What they deserve

Of the responses I’ve read to the entire salary debate in Singapore one argument keeps leaping to the forefront. ‘Why should Singaporean civil servants salary rise when so many people live off a salary one thousandth of what the ministers get?’

Let’s start with the simple answer, they deserve it.

Now for the long answer: Singapore is a capitalist society. The capitalist model has turned Singapore from a third world country into a first world country in 50 years. Not only is that an amazing feat, but anybody that would argue that it could have been achieved without capitalism is either dangerously idealistic or an idiot.

There have been few or no parallels in history to this small island model and other societies are now modelling themselves on Singapore, in order to achieve the same sort of growth. The Singaporean government didn’t model itself, however; instead they experimented, using economic concepts in practice that had only been theory up to that time. It worked beautifully.

No, I’m not arguing that they should therefore reap the benefits of what they’ve sown, though I certainly could, no my argument is a little more refined than that (I hope). Though the Singaporean government should certainly be proud of what they’ve achieved, this alone does not give them the right to ask the salaries they are asking.

The reason they are allowed to do that is because if Singapore is capitalist, than that capitalist model should be extended to the government. In other words, people should get paid according to what their services are worth to the population as a whole. A bloke working in a chicken rice stand in the heartlands gets paid $1,200 because he’s running a food stall and people believe his services are worth $1,200. Ministers should be paid $1.2 million because they are running an entire country and people believe (or should believe) that they deserve to be paid that much.

Under capitalism, you get people the most intelligent and educated people to do the most important work. In order to pull these intelligent and educated people away from other sectors you pay them a large amount of money.

The Singaporean government is in direct competition with the private sector. If they don’t pay an adequate salary they won’t attract candidates of an adequate skill level. Those people that they do draw deserve the salaries they are paid.

If you don’t agree with that, then you don’t agree with the entire Singapore model. That’s your choice, of course, but in that case you shouldn’t be attacking the Ministers for their salaries, but instead be attacking the model as a whole. You should try to turn Singapore socialist or, better yet, Marxist. Only then will people draw more average salaries.

Of course, if you do that there’s a good chance those salaries will be a great deal lower than they are now.

Pay them what they deserve, or you'll get what you deserve, namely a bad government.

of Bonuses and GDP

In the Singapore Government's continuing arguments about the salaries of civil servants the discussions have turned to a new system for bonuses. The suggested (implemented?) system for bonuses for civil servants is linked to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If the country’s GDP grows by more than 2% the civil servants get a several month bonus, the number of months is dependant on the amount the country’s GDP growth is above 2%. In this way, the argument goes, the government will be driven to make the country not just by some underlying moralistic urge, but also by a financial urge.

It’s not a bad idea, linking governmental officer’s pay to the country’s performance as a whole. The big question I have, just like many of the minsters in parliament, is whether it’s really a good idea to use GDP. Why are we so hung up on GDP? In most economic reviews and magazines they tout the GDP growth of countries and we all accept it blindly, but what is GDP really and is it really a good measure of how well we’re doing?

I mean, I know that GDP is the total value of goods and services produced by a nation and that it’s considered a very good measurement of how well the economy is doing. That’s not what I’m talking about, what I’m talking about is how valuable is it really to measure how much a country produces? Wouldn’t it be better to measure something else, like the average wages of the people in the economy, or the average happiness of individuals in that economy? Isn’t that a better measurement than how much extra the factories can produce?

For example, if a company automates its entire production line and becomes 20% more effective, while laying off half its staff, GDP goes up and the economy is supposedly better off, but the same can’t be said for those workers who’ve been laid off. No, I’m not touting protectionist or socialist principles here (I’m all for making production more efficient), what I’m questioning is this blind following of quantitative economic growth.

If civil servant’s find their salaries linked to GDP then they will obviously try their best to jack up GDP. In many ways this will be a good thing, but it will also have the effect that those same people will concentrate less on other things, such as social cohesion, wellbeing and satisfaction. For example, if a health minister has to choose between pumping money into researching drugs that boost productivity, or drugs that increase longevity, they will probably chose productivity. After all, this will boost GDP, while longer living people will probably have an adverse effect on the economy, as they will probably still retire around the same time.

What’s more, short term GDP boosting will be encouraged (a bonus this year is better than one next year) while long term GDP growth won’t be very interesting (as the civil servant might not even be working for the government then anymore). This will shift the focus in the wrong direction, away from the long term, towards the short term. We can see what effect that has in many countries around the world already (where ministers are afraid of getting voted out of office) and it’s not a good thing.

No I think this needs to be rethought. Normally I agree with the economic policies of the Singapore Government, but not today.

The Free Will Illusion 2: Responsibility

On the one hand you have God. God knows everything and is able to do everything. That is the point of omnipotence and omniscience. God created everything, including us, and then, the stories say, gave us free will. Now, there is a paradox in that. The concept of Free Will demands that we have the ability to make our own choices, but that’s impossible because God already knows exactly what those choices are going to be. What is more, he could have changed any of them simply by having things develop slightly differently right from the beginning. The moment he creates the initial starting conditions he knows exactly how everything will end, thereby undermining and concept of Free Will. This is called determinism and, within our logic system as it exists right now, is very difficult to refute.

On the other hand we have cold hard science, which won’t accept the existence of the soul unless it is proven. According to our current scientific models we are a series of chemical reactions and electronic impulses, which move and act according to what chemicals are predominant and which nerve endings are firing. Science also teaches us that any process, if all the variables are known, can be predicted. This means that according to science everything has also been predetermined, even if it remains beyond our ability to know what that path will be.

So, if you’re honest about it, both science and monotheistic religions do not accept the existence of Free Will. So what does that mean for us? The biggest problem with the absence of Free Will is that it means there is no longer any responsibility. It becomes very easy for anybody to say ‘yeah, but I didn’t have a choice, did I? Everything has already been decided.’

That’s a real pickle, because our entire law system as it exists right now is based on the principle of responsibility. If somebody isn’t responsible for his actions, well then they can’t be punished for them either. This is what the insanity defense is based on, as well as the reason that information acquired under coercion is not admissible in court (torture takes away choice from the tortured).

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out what to make of this. There is some vague notion running around in my head, at this point, about the Illusion of Free Will (i.e. the idea that we are incapable of predicting somebody’s choice, therefore they can be considered to have Free Will even when they don’t) being just as useful as actual Free Will (especially since it’s impossible for us to tell the difference), but the pieces haven’t quite clicked together yet. It still feels that if you take away Free Will then you take away responsibility.

Does anybody know any way out of this predicament?

Singapore Pays

I just heard on the BBC that there is a serious debate here in Singapore right now about a suggested hike of the salaries of senior civil servants, who are already some of the best paid civil servants in the world. The wage increase would be 25%, from 800k to one million dollars, though I’m not sure if that’s American or Singaporean.

Even if we ignore for the moment the fact that I’m obviously not keeping a very good eye on local news - seeing as I had to hear this bounced back from England - this still remains an interesting story. Apparently it has caused quite an uproar among Singaporeans, something that is quite out of the ordinary, in itself (though admittedly Singaporeans have become more outspoken over the last few years).

They feel that this is too much of a good thing and that the senior civil servants are taking advantage of the situation. Some complained that civil servants shouldn’t do it for the money, but for a desire to do good for the community, others felt that there was no correlation between salaries and corruption, the supposed reason for the hike.

Both admirable arguments I thought. Let’s look at the second one first. At lower levels the argument doesn’t hold true whatsoever of course, as even the best people will become corrupt if the only other choice is watching their families starve. I don’t think that was what the person bringing that argument forward meant, however, I think they were talking up at the higher levels. There the argument probably has more merit, as people quickly feel that they deserve what they are getting, if not more.

On the other hand, Singapore is a very clean city with a very low rate of corruption. That is quite admirable in Asia, where corruption is rampant. Part of the reason that this is the case is that they pay their civil servants well. There is less reason for these people to take bribes when they’ve already got a good income.

The first argument is, in my opinion, just fairy tale talk. Yes, in a perfect world the best people sacrifice themselves willingly for the good of everybody else, nobody spits on the street and we give half our meal to those less fortunate than ourselves willingly. This isn’t a perfect world though. The only way you get the best people is by paying them the best salary. This is also true for government.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Government is the most important ‘company’ in a country and its leaders should therefore be paid accordingly. It’s ridiculous that middle managers often earn more than country presidents. The best and brightest, instead of dedicating themselves to their countries, instead dedicate themselves to helping some company make billions.

I’m all for the moral argument. People should dedicate themselves to doing good and helping their fellow man, I just happen to believe that morality can go hand in hand with a good paycheck.

The Free Will Conundrum

The more I read the less place there seems to be left over for Free Will. A couple of months ago (in December or January, if I remember correctly) The Economist ran a story about neuroscience and the impact of recent advances in neuroscience on law, philosophy and society as a whole.

One of the stories they talked about was of a very ordinary man who suddenly started displaying paedophilic tendencies. He was caught with a large amount of kiddie porn on his computer and was then prosecuted. While this was going on he went to the hospital and had a brain scan done. A large tumour was found in his head. When they cut it away, the paedophilic tendencies suddenly disappeared. Later, when he noticed that they were returning, they scanned again and, lo and behold, the tumour was growing again. He wasn’t prosecuted for his behaviour, seeing as he had no control over his actions.

Not a bad story, right? Well, not if you’re a judge who strongly believes that people should be held responsible for their actions, or a philosopher who strongly believes in the precepts of free will. When tumours can influence how we behave, then what does that mean for our law system? After all, our entire law model is built on the idea that a person is in control of his or her actions, that’s why we have the insanity defence; if people are insane and not in control of their actions, they are not considered criminals but instead as suffering from an illness.

Other stories talk about a family that has a genetic propensity for violence (making it very hard to hold them responsible for their behaviour), as well as numerous studies that are slowly revealing which substances in the brain are responsible for what types of behaviour (including substances which block out common sense in times of extreme excitement). We already have some legal and medical recourse for these things, such as ‘crimes of passion’ arguments, but are they really enough?

And what about Free Will itself? As we understand the brain more and more, what room will be left for our ability to choose? This becomes even more difficult when you no longer believe in the existence of a soul (like me), though I think I prefer my position to the unenviable one of later on finding a new place for the soul to reside, if – when we’ve fully mapped the brain – no connection is found between the brain and ‘something else’.

The problem is that when you see the brain as purely chemical, it becomes very hard to find any process for making choice. You see, all chemical processes can in theory be predicted. Yes, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does eventually lead us down a street where we can no longer predict what is going to happen, but simply because we are incapable of predicting it doesn’t mean it isn’t still predictable.

Choice isn’t logical. Choice means that even when a set of circumstances is exactly the same (in every single way) twice over, a different outcome might still happen. That’s the principle of free will. Chemicals don’t work that way, if you have exactly the same circumstances a billion times over, you will get the exact same result a billion times over (yes, we can’t do it; but again, just because we can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done).

Even with the utmost complexity of our brain, the underlying chemical reactions can in theory still be predicted and built upon to show us how the complex decision making processes in our brain will work. Not being able to make those predictions doesn’t mean we have Free Will, it just means we’ve got the Illusion of Free Will.

I really wonder if we have choice, or just the illusion of choice, much like very advanced computer AIs in computer games that seem to react intelligently, but in truth are just following a very complex program. And no, an extremely complex program that mimics free will in every way is still not the same, conceptually, as Free Will itself.

Though admittedly we might never be able to tell the difference.

The Value of Capitalism

There is an interesting trend taking place in many modern books (or maybe it’s been there all along, but I just haven’t noticed) about what is really wrong with the capitalist model and it goes a little something like this: capitalism is efficient, but it isn’t very compassionate.

I’ve come to realise that I’ve started falling into a trap. I’ve let the capitalist model prove its value mainly on the basis of capitalist values. I’ve argued that capitalism is the best because it brings the greatest economic gains, causes the greatest growth in personal wealth over the entire population and leads the largest productivity gains. Other systems, in comparison, haven’t done very favourably.

What I’ve come to believe is that economic growth, personal wealth and high productivity shouldn’t be goals in themselves. It’s a bit like that age old one about some people making money just for the sake of making money, with the original reasons for making money having long since fallen by the wayside.

I’m afraid many of us have fallen into the same trap with capitalism. When we started capitalism was all about generating a way out of absolute poverty towards some imagined better state. It was thought for a very long time that as wealth would increase, so would happiness. It has become clear, however, that this isn’t actually what is happening. Beyond that most basic jump from not being able to survive without help to getting by happiness doesn’t actually increase at all.

For the last fifty years in Japan they’ve been measuring the happiness of the population, as they went from an economy that had been smashed into little bits by the war to the powerhouse that they are today and though individual (and nation wide) wealth increased dramatically, happiness didn’t shift even a millimetre on any of the scales. Further studies have shown that those communities that are the happiest in the world are actually often ones that are the poorest.

Now, I’m not sure whether it is individual wealth, individual happiness, or something else entirely that we should be pursuing, but I do feel that it might be a good idea to explore the value of capitalism more closely, to make sure that we’re on the right path. This doesn’t mean I’m rejecting capitalism, mind you, it just means I’ll be taking a closer look at the tenets that underlie it.

If I seriously question the existence of God, then I should certainly do the same with things that are further down the scale, don’t you agree?

The Nature - Nurture Argument

I’ve almost finished the book ‘Social Intelligence’ by Daniel Goleman. It took me a bleedin’ long time, actually. I’ve been hammering (shying?) away at it pretty much ever since I posted about the book Blink, on February 15^th. For the record, it didn’t take that long because the book isn’t good, it is. I was just occupied with other things.

Social Intelligence is a quite meaty book about a great deal of neurological research into our social side. It discusses a plethora of different social interactions, starting from the emotional/ intellectual divide and then diving into child rearing, racism, health care and many other areas.

I’m sure it will come up frequently enough in the next couple of weeks in my posts.

What I want to talk about today is an interesting section where Goleman discusses the nature – nurture argument. For those people unfamiliar with it, the nature – nurture argument is basically about what has shaped us, our genes or our surroundings (eg. our parents). Some people believe that almost everything is pre-decided by our genes, while others argue that a person is largely free to be shaped by his upbringing.

In Social Intelligence Goleman says that it’s actually a third option, that hadn’t really been considered by the general public, namely that genes predict the path our lives will take, but our surroundings influence which genes will be active and which will be dormant.

When we interact with each other we secrete huge amounts of substances, from serotonin when we’re happy, to testosterone when we’re angry and cortisol when we’re stressed or afraid. Each of these has a huge impact on which genes are active and how our body develops. So our genes, therefore, influence our surroundings (by influencing us) and our surroundings in turn influence us. Arguing about which is more important and more significant is like arguing whether hardware or software is the most important part of a computer.

With this argument sorted out we can now move onto more important things, like how to use both sides of this argument to make life better for all of us.