The fine-tuning of the Universe

Suppose someone -- let's call him Peter -- were kidnapped, and the kidnapper is a psychopath and sets up some explosion device that is tied to Peter. The device is programmed to shortly generate 10 random numbers from 0 to 9. If the numbers so generated are anything apart from 10 zeros, it will instantaneously explode, and hence kill Peter.

So Peter thinks, well this is it then. The chance of me surviving is 1/10^10 or 1 in 10 billion. Astonishingly though, much to his delight, the contraption duly displays the 10 zeros!

So he says to the psychopath "you had me worried there, you must have programmed it to display 10 zeros!"

The psychopath responds, "no, no, not at all! It was completely random and you're just incredibly lucky. Don't forget, if it had been any other combination of numbers, you would be dead and wouldn't be here to think about it. You can only live in a world, and hence contemplate your situation, where 10 zeros come up.

Of course, this sounds preposterous, and we would surely conclude the psychopath is lying. But does his argument have merit?

This is not just an idle question. It has direct applicability to the fine-tuning of the physical constants of our Universe. Or indeed the fact we were actually born, rather than any of the countless potential human beings that could have been born in our place. Or the fact that the human race came into being due to all the improbable events that were required, e.g. the meteor impact 66 million years ago etc.

A spiffing idea for a novel

I think a spiffing idea for a novel would be if a group of people want back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, say about 80 million years BC. Talk about their survival, building a shelter etc. Then eventually they discover intelligent dinosaurs walking on their hind legs approximately the size of us humans that communicate with speech to each other! The humans eventually end up getting captured, and the dinosaurs don't initially believe that the humans are intelligent. Until they discover that the humans communicate with speech, and they have strange devices on them, and formidable weapons.

I'd write it myself, but I'd be no good at writing novels.

Do animals experience jealousy?

From the following article:

Humans Aren’t The Only Animals To Experience Jealousy — Dogs Do, Too

It says:

Jealousy is a fairly common human emotion — and for a long time, it was presumed it truly was only human. Some have argued that jealousy, with its focus on social threat, requires a concept of “self” and a theory of mind.

Anyone who's had a dog as a pet knows that dogs feel jealousy. We don't need to look at any studies. It's clearly the case that a dog doesn't have to have a concept of self, it just has to know that another animal is receiving affection and it isn't. Apparently, people are "anthropomorphising" in assigning emotions to animals. That's right, we are! If an animal behaves in a very similar manner to a human being who's in a certain emotional state, it is rational to assign that emotional state to the animal too. Any sane person would, but unfortunately many scientists have a propensity to believe the most preposterous stuff imaginable.

Life back in 1300

I have no idea what peoples lives were like centuries ago. Say in 1300 or whenever. Were the common people mostly hungry all the time? Constantly suffering from plague, disease, illness? Was life short, nasty and brutal? How did they entertain themselves? They didn't have the Internet, nor TV, nor books (and they couldn't read anyway). And what would they think of our modern world?

And if I went back in time to 1300, what would they think of me? Would I be able to blend in? Would they think I'm weird?

The fetishizing of work

I read the following article:

The Cult of Busy-ness

The author says:

[Steve Jobs] was a man who lived a life almost completely devoid of any reason to be alive. His renowned ascetic existence was grey and cheerless and boring beyond endurance. And… well… he’s dead. How is this success?

Our culture has a fixation on work. Success and worthiness, one's standing, have been defined by how hard one works and how much money one earns. For many people, work becomes the point of their existence. Without it they would become lost, be forced to look inside themselves and face the inevitable existential angst. We all need goals, and the goal of being a "success" and held in high esteem by others has a certain appeal.

Newton and a smartphone

Imagine if you went back in time to 1770 and showed Isaac Newton a modern smartphone (obviously can't make calls, but the camera, torch, chess programs etc would work). Would he think it was magical, produced by witchcraft or whatever? Or would he understand that the regularities (physical laws) describing reality are much more intricate than he might have supposed. Regularities that can be utilized to produce such a wonderous device?

I think the latter.

Chatting about other people

I've heard it claim that two-thirds of human conversation is gossip about other people. Surely not?? Anyway, I scarcely ever talk about other people. It's just not something that interests me. I'm extremely bad even by male standards.

This is problematic because it's how many people bond. They don't like talking about intellectual stuff, they like talking about whatshecalled been up to. "She did what?? Ooh, well I never!" Well, at least some women talk like that, if not men!

Anyway, more seriously, as I said it helps to bond people together . People like to share their experiences of others, especially negative experiences. They want sympathy, they want to express how they feel about others. I think it's disadvantageous having little interest in such stuff. Oh well, I've always been different.

By 2404

I really have no idea what the future might be like in, say, 400 years time or so. What will the world be like in 2404? What will have happened to the climate? They'll have been mass migration from the hot areas of the world to Europe by then, since these hot areas might be too hot for human beings to exist. People will start living in Antarctica.

What will technology be like? Probably we will have a shared virtual reality pretty much indistinguishable from real life. We'll have robots that maybe look like us and on a superficial level behave and speak like us. But they still don't fool people that they are sentient for any appreciable length of time as there's something off, weird, unconvincing about them.

And will people still subscribe to philosophical materialism? Next 100 years the mainstream view might be some type of materialism, but not by 2404.

If I'd never been born

What would the world be like if I had never been born? Exactly the same as very few people have known me and even those that have never listen or read anything I say? I don't think so. Infinitesimally small changes in the world lead to larger and larger effects without end, leaving nothing untouched until the whole world is changed. I reckon if any one of us had never been born, the world would be different, perhaps very different.

A trip to the supermarket (fictional).

I was just thinking. Suppose I went into a supermarket, a large one to shop for my groceries. It's fairly quiet as it's early evening and there's only about a 100 people in. Suddenly, as I'm walking around holding my basket, I hear a loud boom and I feel the floor move beneath my feet and I almost fall over. I look around, wondering what the hell happened there. There's a couple of people near me who likewise appear bewildered.

A few seconds later, from the front of the supermarket near the entrance, I hear a bewildered shout followed by a babble of confused voices. The shouting and confusion soon gets worse -- much worse bordering on hysteria. I make my way to the front of the supermarket. Out of the windows I see that the world has completely changed! Instead of a car-park filled with cars and nearby buildings, they've all been replaced by a lush, vibrant green forest.

We all pour out of the entrance. The cacophony of confusion, bewilderment, and hysteria continue. Suddenly, we all hear an almighty, huge roar. It's a tyrannosaurus Rex, attracted by the noise and feasting its malevolent gaze upon us! We all panic and there's a stampede to get back into the supermarket, jamming the door in the process. Thankfully, we all manage to get back inside before it reaches us.

Oh well, plenty of tins of food to consume for the near future, and also shelter provided by the supermarket. Pity supermarkets don't sell guns though.

Think will continue getting my groceries delivered.

We cannot see the self

The fact that you can’t see your eyes doesn’t mean that you don’t have any. Likewise, the fact we cannot see the self doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. The self is that which perceives, it's not itself a perception.

The Wisdom of the Cherokee

 

Yes, precisely. The issue of rights and the associated notion of pursuing one's own self interests is often to the detriment of society as a whole. The tragedy of the commons illustrates this. It serves to alienate us all from each other, to view others as competitors. Contrariwise, obligations serve to bind us together, to care for one another. This leads to close-knit communities that are not only beneficial to the local environment and ultimately the planet, but leads to fellowship, a sense of belonging, contentment.