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Explaining Freedom in term of Slavery
Friday, April 16th 2010
This morning a thought suddenly appear in my mind and I already posted it as my Facebook status. The thought in question is "I am not sure people want freedom. They want to become slaves that can choose the color and material for their shackles. They also don't want you to give them those shackles for free, they want to earn those shackles all by themselves. Yes, people are that masochists."
One thing that lead me to this thought is my observation on how people behave. People rarely want to take as many degree of freedom as possible to their life. If that is true, then we would observe a lot of people wanting to permanently transform themselves into Rainbow Clouds of Nanite. From what I observe, it is not easy to find people who want to transform themselves into Rainbow Clouds of Nanite even among trans-humanists sympathetic population. Even if they want to, it is rare to find among them who want that transformation to be permanent.
The second thing that lead me to this thought is my observation on words and their meanings. Even words with opposite meanings have cross-able distance between their meanings. While free citizens and slaves may have meanings opposite to each other, the meanings between the two words could be bridge by adding some term. Slaves who can choose the color of their shackles for example, is closer to free citizen than slaves who don't.
The third reason for this thought is the fact that if you give for free people will take it for granted, but if you sell people will buy it. If we think about it, the problem with slavery actually lies in the fact that status of slave is given for free to the descendants of people who had hold the same status before. People want to be special and giving the status of slaves for free make them think that the status have no prestige behind it.
On the other hand, if you ask people to work hard and get certain Slaveworthy Certification before they can get accepted as your slaves, the position will looks more prestigious for them. Slaves who work and study hard to get their status as slaves are more likely to work hard to maintain that status. Slaves who get their status by heredity without any efforts in their part, will not be as productive.
Require people to work hard to get the privilege to wear those pretty golden shackles and they will wear it with pride.
Views : 203 Views per day : 1.44 Comments : 3
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Possible shapes of morality graph and principle-based choice
Tuesday, March 23rd 2010
Recently, there is a discussion about principle-based choice erupted in Great Big Group. The way I see it, the discussion is mainly about how a person use principles they had adopted to make a decision when facing several choices. The easiest way to make a decision is by assigning a scalar number to each choice and compare their value relative to our own principle.
Most people would hope that we would face the graph above when we have to make a principle-based choice. Since all the resulting value of each choices are presented as scalar number, we only have to choose the biggest number.
In reality, most of us have more than a single principle. For example, we may choose to be honest and to respect other people's life. When you have more than a single principle, the value of each choice is not scalar anymore, it started to become a vector. Each number in the vector is associated with each principle we had adopted. When someone decide to adopt more than a single principle, they would see one of their principle conflict with others.
There is no way to effectively compare two vectors ( except when all value of one is bigger or lesser than the other ), since it is mostly nonsensical to say that vector A is bigger than vector B. A way to resolve conflicting principle is by turning all numbers in these vectors into a single numbers, usually by multiplying each number with a weight Wi. More detail about this could be learned by searching Artificial Neural Network (ANN) or Binary Classification.
Also in reality, any particular choice may affect the availability of further choices. This is where we might see two different kind of meta-principle. People who choose the uppermost choice are said to be moderate. People who choose the middle choice are they who think that "the means justify the end". The lowermost choice is for people who think that "the end justify the means".
We also have to consider how our decision may affect how other people react to them. The graph above illustrate how things may turn out as other people react to the decision we take. We can only assume which reaction we most possibly invite for each decision, but we can't predict which which of those possible decision other people are going to take.
Views : 162 Views per day : 0.95 Comments : 4
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Why do people miss-communicate?
Tuesday, January 19th 2010
I often personally observe miss-communication events in various communication attempts between two intelligent agents in various occasions. These miss-communication events often happen because each intelligent agent have different experience with each words in their vocabulary. Since it is obvious that not every intelligent agent had thoroughly read the meanings of each words from a single agent, it is obvious that lifetime experience and usage during interaction play more important rules for most intelligent agent in forming the subjective definition of each words.
Since different intelligent agents often undergo different experience during their lifetime, the subjective definition of each words may also vary. Standardized Education could help alleviate this problem by subjecting different intelligent agents to similar experience. This is done to let them accept a socially accepted definition of a word. In fact, being an expert in any scientific field always involve familiarization with the vocabularies often used in that particular scientific field. If you can speak aerospace engineering language fluently, then you are a good aerospace engineer.
While education could help minimizing the amount of miss-communication between people enrolled to the same education system, education can also become a barrier for communication between people who enroll to different education systems. For example, the impression a Christian, a Muslim and an Atheist get from words such as "God", "religion", "blessing" or "afterlife" are likely to be different. In fact, two different people submitting to the same belief system might have different impression about those words.
Last year, I found a question in Facebook asking whether prayers should be allowed in public education system in secular country. What crossed my mind back then was "Should students be punished for praying in class?". Of course I disagree with this notion, thus my answer for the original question was "Yes". My friend however, see the question as "Should students be required to pray in calls?" which prompted him to answer "No". After each of us explain our position, we found out we can agree to each others position without giving the same answer to the same question. I imagine that any conclusion derived from the result of said questioner are going to be invalid, since the question itself is vague.
Views : 211 Views per day : 0.91 Comments : 1
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Meaning of Baka in other parts of the World
Wednesday, November 18th 2009
Most people who either live in Japan, can speak Japanese or simply a fan of Japanese Culture usually know the word "Baka" as the Japanese for dumb, moron or stupid. In fact according to this article, "Baka" is the one from two words foreigners who live in Japan learn quickly. However as I google out "Baka" today, I found that the word could mean differently in other languages and culture. Some entrepreneur even use it as name for their company.
Baka Communication
Baka Communication is a Canadian company selling various communication and data storage products. The company started in 1985 as a single store and have been expanding across Ontario since then.
Baka Beautiful
Baka Beautiful is a company selling various cosmetics products for ethnic communities. The company started in Philadelphia as a hair braiding salon in 1990. Later Baka Beautiful started to sell chemical-free natural-cosmetics products to USA market.
Baka, West Jerusalem
The word "Baka" means "valley" in Arabic. It is also the name of a neighborhood in West Jerusalem. As could be seen in this article, the price of real estate there is quite expensive.
Baka Brahma
Baka Brahma is the name of a brahma that appear in the Jayamangala Atthagatha, one of the most famous chanting of Thai People.
The story is that Baka Brahma has a wrong view that everything is created by Brahma. All things are always certain and last forever which is against the Buddha’s teaching of the law of impermanence. The Buddha challenges Baka Brahma to fight by letting him hide in the place he thinks that he will not be found. But every time Baka Brahma hides, the Buddha can find him. Then the Buddha takes his turn, he hides himself, but this time Baka Brahma cannot find him. Baka Brahma can only hear the voice of the Buddha. Eventually, Baka Brahma realizes that the Buddha is not going anywhere, but walking on his head. Therefore, it is stated in the chanting that by the supreme knowledge, the almighty Buddha defeats Baka Brahma and corrects his wrong view. This story of the fight between the Buddha and Baka Brahma is also found in many local texts, it is the legend of the sacred song Sadhukarn used at the beginning of a ceremony. Also, it is represented as a gesture of Buddha image too.
Nilagang Baka
Nilagang Baka is a Philippine healthy dish made from beef, onion, garlic and potatoes. Basically, it is a stewed beef and vegetables.
Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park
Bukit Baka Bukit Raya is one of Indonesia important National Park. The National Park is located in both Central and West Kalimantan.
Views : 144 Views per day : 0.49 Comments : 1
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Pascal's Wager with 3rd Order Probability Integration
Thursday, October 22nd 2009
When my friend David Jackson mentioned about Pascal Wager's for his possible reason to befriend God in Great Big Group as a reply for my finding about God Account in Facebook, another friend of us -Aaron Harts- mentioned that it is not possible to use game theory for cases where the probability of any happening is not known.
I have talked with David Jackson about Pascal's Wager before and decided that one of its weakness ( in relation to its use to prove that it is better to believe in any particular deity ) lies in the fact that humanity had believed in more than a single god. It means that any calculation about the possibility of any possible afterlife, have to take all possible gods into account.
3rd Order Probability Integration
A possible way to calculate the probability of an afterlife by taking all possible gods into account is by assuming that each probable probability for the existence of any god is equally probable, thus the 3rd order probability for the existence of any god. We assume that any world from an n-order-infinite number of world, each having different possibility for any gods to exists is equally possible. We also assume that while no more than one god may actually exist in any world, there could be more than a single probable gods within any of those world. If the assumption is deemed to be just, then the probability of any probable afterlife could be calculated using the following repeating-integration formula over the n-order infinite number of equally possible worlds (look for repeating integration operator here):
Where Pi is the probability for the existence of god number i and Fafterlife(P1..Pn) is the function for the probability of any possible afterlife given the existence of any gods.
We have to assume that Fafterlife(P1..Pn) is a linear function over the variables P1..Pn, where Ai is the probability of a specific afterlife for any particular mortal given the existence of god number i. By assuming that Fafterlife(P1..Pn) is a linear multivariable function, we could calculate the probability of a specific mortal getting a specific afterlife using the following simplified formula.
Possible Types of gods
Along the thread where I presented Is Pascal's Wager a reason to believe in God? in Great Big Group, Ares Johnson mentioned that it is possible for different kind of god to exists. His category of gods are :
Petty Minded: Such Gods have narrow criteria; you must believe in them and/or fit their narrow criteria for good. An Atheist is certainly screwed, a religious person probably is, since odds are, they have the wrong god.
Jealous: Such Gods are angered if you believe in other gods ("thou shalt have no other gods before me"). Their moral standards may vary, but you're probably safe on the moral part so long as you don't hurt anyone. An Atheist will never invoke their jealousy, since they believe in none, but a Religious person will almost certainly invoke it, since, once again, there are lots of gods and they only believe in 1 or 2.
Indifferent/Open-Minded: Such gods either don't care about damning you are have very liberal standards about not doing so. Atheist or not, you're probably safe.
The number of each types of possible gods, the specific memetics of a mortal and the kind of afterlife which probability are going to be calculated will affect the value of Ai inside the Fafterlife(P1..Pn).
Determining Specific Afterlife Probability Function for specific Mortal
For example, there are 999 possible gods, 333 gods are Petty Minded (number 1-333), 333 gods are Jealous (number 334-666) and 333 number (667-999) gods are Indifferent. To calculate the probability that a believer of a petty minded god, an atheist and a believer of a jealous god to enter either hell or heaven, we should do the following calculation:
The calculation shows that if there are 333 number of possible gods from each category (Petty Minded, Jealous and (Heavenly) Indifferent) of gods then it would be better not to believe in any of them.
Of course this calculation is an oversimplified one. There could be other type of gods that doesn't fall into the three categories mentioned above. In real world, each gods known by humanity have various personality. It is also possible that a god may consider a mortal with moral value taught in different religion to be acceptable. Therefore it is necessary to personally determine your Fafterlife(P1..Pn) for each possible gods based on what you believe.
Views : 170 Views per day : 0.55 Comments : 1
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