Mr. Grouchypants

I have a new home for this blog. All new posts will be made to the following site:

Mr. Grouchypants

If you have me bookmarked for some reason, be sure to update your link.

Lines I wish I had written:

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

The Economist has a surprising article on how people communicate. A cognitive scientist at Yale, Bruno Galantucci, developed an experiment which has two participants attempt to find each other in a virtual bungalow. They could only interact via a couple of networked computers using a device that allowed them to scrawl out symbols but not words.

Most of the groups were able to successfully communicate enough information to solve the game, some doing so in a manner of minutes. What caught my interest was the following excerpt:

One strength of Dr Galantucci’s experiment that does not exist in the real world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards. What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player—as long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.

When I read this, I immediately though of Searle’s Chinese Room argument which emphasizes semantics over syntax. In the Yale experiment, semantics did not seem as important as syntax judging from the quoted passage. The participants could have at least a rudimentary understanding of their messages without agreeing on the semantics of the particular symbols. I’m not sure that this has any important implications for Searle’s argument, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

(Via GeekPress)

Update: Added clever-ish title.

Professor John Silber has an insightful article about “scientism” and the troubles that it causes. He rightly criticizes scientists for making assertions that cannot be bolstered by science. I don’t think I can completely agree with his remarks about diminishing of humanity, but I think he is dead on with his comparison of adherents to scientism and fundamentalist religious believers.

I have no problems with people claiming that the scientific method is the most reliable tool we have for learning about the world around us. That assertion can be supported by appealing to the success of various physical sciences. However, claims that science is the only way to learn about the world seem to me to be self-referentially incoherent. You can’t, after all, show scientifically that science is the only way to gain knowledge.

What I find particularly annoying, however, is the notion that science will eventually provide an explanation for everything. That is just hubris, especially since we can’t be certain that we are even capable of asking all the necessary questions required for an understanding of the universe. We are finite creatures with finite capacities, just like other animals. Chimps don’t understand algebra. They aren’t even aware that they don’t understand algebra. What reason do we have to assume that our brains are not limited in a similar fashion?

I can’t think of any, but I suppose that could just be due to the inherent limitations of my finite brain.

(Article via AnalPhilosopher)

Curse Paul Stamatiou and his tutorial on creating a blog header graphic! I thought I had more or less finished working on the layout for this site, and then I stumbled across that infernal article. So naturally I had to try to incorporate a nifty background image into my header. I used Photoshop Elements instead of CS2 to crop my image, but it worked just fine. I would try to have multiple rotating images, but I don’t think that Blogsome supports that. I’m pretty happy with the changes and probably won’t make anymore for a while. Of course, I thought the same thing last week.

(Via LifeHacker)

Lines I wish I had written:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me.

Bob Dylan - “Every Grain of Sand”

Tech Central Station has an interesting article on Intelligent Design by Douglas Kern. Mr. Kern argues that Intelligent Design will supplant Darwinism in our lifetime. I’m not sure he is correct, but he does make some interesting points.

The first reason he gives is:

“ID will win because it’s a religion-friendly, conservative-friendly, red-state kind of theory, and no one will lose money betting on the success of red-state theories in the next fifty to one hundred years.”

This is the most persuasive of his points. Given a choice between a religion-friendly and a religion-hostile theory, most people will choose the religion-friendly one since most people are religion-friendly themselves. Now one could argue (and many do) that Darwinism isn’t religion-hostile. However, many of the most vocal proponents of Darwinism are quite hostile to religion.
Which brings us to Mr. Kern’s second argument, which is “ID will win because the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers.” He summarizes most responses to ID theory as follows:

“Ewww…intelligent design people! They’re just buck-toothed Bible-pushing nincompoops with community-college degrees who’re trying to sell a gussied-up creationism to a cretinous public! No need to address their concerns or respond to their arguments. They are Not Science. They are poopy-heads.”

Sadly, this characterization isn’t all that far from the truth. Arrogance and condescension are not reliable methods for winning friends and influencing others. Plus there are some very intelligent people in the ID camp. And, as Mr. Kern points out, some of their criticisms have been echoed by pro-Darwinian scientists. So simple dismissals of ID proponents makes the Darwinian side seem far too defensive, not the position one would expect from a group confident in their theory. And the attacks seem to be coming more frequently these days. I take this to be a sign that the Darwinists are bothered by the progress the ID camp has made in acceptance of their views.

While I’m sympathetic to the argument, I’m not convinced that ID will win out. There are an awful lot of politics involved in the scientific community. And ID theory doesn’t have a great deal of political clout at the moment. But they do have the advantage of opponents who seem to have a tin ear when it comes to selling their view to the public.

(Article via email from my brother)

I haven’t felt compelled to write about anything in particular for the past couple of days. Though I’m trying to get in the habit of posting at least every couple of days, nothing has caught my interest enough to motivate any writing. What my mini writing rut has done is to cause me to think about why I’m blogging in the first place.

There certainly isn’t a shortage of blogs, so I don’t think there is any particular void this site fills. I’m not getting paid to do this either. So why bother?

I suppose that simple narcissism is part of my motivation. I would like to think that I’m above that sort of thing, but that might me narcissistic too. I do think you have to be at least a bit stuck on yourself to publish a blog though. Otherwise, why would one expect people over the globe to drop by and read your thoughts?

But there is more going on here than simple egotism. We also have complex egotism, but that involves irrational numbers or irrational self esteem or something like that. So I’ll just skip that and move on to some other motivations.

One reason I started this site was to provide myself with a regular writing exercise. For me writing is a lot like working out. I will put both of them off, and I am frequently uncomfortable while doing them, but I’m always glad to have done them (unless I pull a muscle or write too many run-on sentences). So this blog is a creative writing outlet, or maybe a not-so-creative writing outlet depending on your point of view. Either way, it does provide me with some needed motivation to write some thoughts down from time to time since I know that at least one person checks the site everyday (Hi, Honey!).

Finally, I write about topics to help sort out my thoughts on them. Trying to come up with even a short post requires me to put forth some effort and analyze my position on whatever I happen to be writing about. This is especially helpful when it comes to issues on which I haven’t reached any firm conclusions, such as theism and consciousness.

So those are my primary motivations for inflicting this site on the world. I’ll try to make it worthwhile to someone other than myself, but I’m not making any promises.