Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

From dailykostv.com :

MONICA NOVOTNY: John, what about this controversy over opposition to Obama’s speech to school children?

JOHN HARWOOD: I gotta’ tell you Monica, I’ve been watching politics for a long time, and this one is really over-the-top. What is shows you is there are a lot of cynical people who try to fan controversy, and let’s face it, in a country of 300 million people, there are a lot of stupid people too, because if you believe that it’s somehow unhealthy for kids, for the president to say "work hard and stay in school," you’re stupid. In fact, I’m worried for some of those kids of those parents who are upset — I’m not sure they are smart enough to raise those kids.

Amen!

While I am on sabbatical, I am doing some self-analysis to try to find out why some of my not-so-good behaviors linger. In doing this I am trying to do a deep enough analysis to get to the root cause of each such behavior. Generally going deep enough identifies an erroneous belief. For example, if you are not good at managing money, an analysis might show that it is because you hold a belief that "money is evil," something you may have been taught in Sunday School many years ago and which has hung with you as a self-limiting belief.

Every time I do one of these self-analysis gigs, though, I realize how easy it is to overanalyze some problems, and perhaps to underanalyze others. That is, instead of sticking with what my intuition tells me the root cause is, I keep hacking away trying to go deeper, probably just confusing the hell out of the issue, winding up with more questions than answers. Of course, there are probably some issues where I don't go deep enough. I have a bit of a tendency to do more overanalysis, though.

Okay, so who cares? I agree that not many would be interested in my own self-analyses, but I think the issue of overthinking is something that anyone doing a self-analysis can get into. So, I am just giving you a heads-up on it. When you start a self-analysis, don't go longer than an hour at a time, then get away from it for a while. When you come back to it, you may be in a better position to judge whether you are going "too deep" (pure conjecture) on some items, and not deep enough on others.

TTFN

A friend sent this to me in an email. Not sure who wrote it, but they have a hat tip from me:

Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl, 'Will you marry me?' The girl said, 'NO!' And the guy lived happily ever after and rode motorcycles, and went fishing and hunting, and played golf a lot, and drank beer and scotch, and had tons of money in the bank, and left the toilet seat up, and farted whenever he wanted.

I have been impressed with the way the Carrington Theme, from Crowd Favorite, has evolved and with the fact that it is provided as open source software.

The downside to it to me, as a non-developer, is that is a complex framework for a non-developer to understand (and perhaps even for some developers). That is why I am glad to see that Alex King and his talented team have begun a documentation series for the theme framework. It is most impressive, and is easy enough for even a non-developer like me to understand.

Here are the articles they have put up so far:

1. What is Carrington? The Q&A
2. Carrington Framework Overview
3. The General Context
4. The Comment Context
5. The Post Context

Stuart Kaufman has written a fascinating, although extremely complex, article for John Brockman's Edge, entitled Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind. Among other things, he raises the possibility that our world is "lawless but nonrandom," meaning that there is no law that we could classify as a Theory of Everything, yet the world is not totally random. He uses this, along with his theory of consciousness arising from quantum decoherence and recoherence, to suggest that consciousness arose because it provides a survival advantage in this sort of world. If the world were completely lawful and operated in accordance with the principles of reductionism that so many scientists like to believe in, then consciousness would not be needed: we would only need to have computing facilities for our brains, but not consciousness.

As I read this I wondered to myself: does this mean that God would not have consciousness, since consciousness evolved to help us overcome our inabilities to compute what will happen?

I do not mean this to be a disrespectful question. Indeed, I ask the question in part to point out and emphasize that our concept of God is probably too similar to our concept of ourselves, at least for most of us. I think we typically try to think of God as a "super us," instead of as a being that is beyond our imagination.

Something to think about.

By the way, Kaufman does not claim to have described what consciousness is. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (as described by David Chalmbers) remains, with no clear solution in sight (to my knowledge). There is still the same variety of views about consciousness as there has been for many years, with some saying that it is merely a epiphenomena of the brain, and some saying that it is actually part of the fabric of the universe (as much as is gravity and space-time). I sometimes wonder about this myself, and am also intrigued by the late John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit" interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which our consciousness "cooperates" with the universe in its creation.

Understanding consciousness is probably the most complex problem of all.