Perhaps you have heard of Pascal’s Wager, a thought-experiment which explores gambling on the existence of God, as proposed by Blaise Pascal. If not, in short, the Wager asks what is the most rational bet regarding whether God exists and how to best apply that information. The result of the thought-experiment done by Pascal goes something like “It is ultimately better to live as if God exists and this is true regardless of the truth about God’s existence.”

Pascal says this result is so, because in part, if God exists, there is potential for infinite gain in having lived accordingly — ie: Heaven/Nirvana/whatever.  Pascal however discounts hell, suggesting that the lost potential for infinite gain is ultimately realized as infinite loss. In other words, using Pascal’s rationale, living as if God does not exist is just lose-lose, even without a hell!

Pascal’s results are flawed though because his version of the Wager analysis ignored the consequence of at least this other decision path — action causing infinite loss. Had he analyzed that decision path as it ought to have existed in his model, he would have seen what I will suggest, that living itself is not a series of methods employed or actions taken but the exaction of diversity. He’d have understood what Einstein gave us: Living if not mortality is relative. Pascal’s postulations while seemingly accurate, are only so when fixed in a foundation terribly reliant on a number of poor assumptions; things like life, morality, perspective, observation and awareness are not relative — whats good to me is good to you.

We must address the so-called rationality Pascal assigned these results as it is as credible as these poor assumptions he’s made at the outset. Poor because Einstein disproved them; assumed perspectives such as “living as if God exists” is merely a statement that describes a set of methods employable in an individual’s life — Pascal suggests putting on a religious life like it was a coat.

Living as if God exists requires as many exclusions as it does inclusions. Sinners must change. Non-sinners must not. Meantime, the definition of sinner itself is variable with religion and God.  A few general things are quite certain, homosexuals for instance would probably need exclude and suppress their entire lifestyle while religious officials would seemingly need change nothing.

The reality is, even such a notion is an indication that there is relativity. Living as if God exists is not merely showing up on Sunday. Its undoing just as many things as it means doing. Its fearing God, its being devoid of interests in his accountability. Living as if God exists is limiting the questions science, philosophy, and mankind can ask as well as those it can ever hope to answer.  It would mean we never knew about Relativity. Its not shocking this went unconsidered to the authors of the bible or Pascal. You must consider how much less sophisticated they were, and how during that time the dynamics and variation of the social structure were extremely limited by exactly the forces discussed: imposed religious rationale as an absolute. Exploring one’s doubt in such notions was considered heresy and punishable by death. Fortunately since the birth of the United States, and over the last couple centuries all over the world, mankind has been able to invent the kind of social complexities that which expose life as an exaction of diversity.

The bottom line is, unfortunately for proponents of his work, Pascal was wrong. There is no metaphysical absolute, nor observational absolute, not about the God bet or anything else. Since the very definition of living to a Muslim Jihadist and to a Homosexual Catholic priest are sure to be relative, so must be living as if God exists. Only if we define living and morality as a static thing devoid of change or variation can “living as if God exists” even be possible in the absolute fashion Pascal suggested and such a definition of living is simply fallacious (equally fallacious is the way I’ve sort of gone along as if there is a single, accepted definition of God).

The minute we agree to impose a rationale as absolute (whether its correct or not) upon ourselves or another, we’ve constructed an obstacle to free will. Then we’ve made our absolutes our God — which suggests an even more interesting question than Pascal thought he had answered: How can one even possess faith while maintaining free will?

For years people have learned from hacking — its the most ancient human art. But, it seems the US has slid so far from its foundation, that now the sheer construction and presentation of information can within itself be considered in some way criminal.

A judge acting as thought-cop told 3 MIT students they were not to discuss their latest hack. Since the halt order, the availability of the information in the presentation has fluctuated. Decius makes mention of the evolving legal manifestation on Memestreams.

I believe information like this ought to be free, and so: a complete form of the content of the halted Defcon presentation is right here (in PDF format). Enjoy.

One day, all our computational abilities will flow, as electricity does, into every home, carrying with it the full force of the entire orchestra of functionality on the Internet — it will cease to be the Internet and become the Grid.

A prediction inspired by this...

Read the rest of this entry »

Religion is the opiate of the masses. - Karl Marx

Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. - Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. - John Buchan

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. - Stephen Roberts

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. - Francis Bacon

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. - Don Hirschberg

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins

Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? - Friedrich Nietzsche

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

– Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes, I do not fit in with ‘the crowd’. And even though I understand my misfitted social standing better than most, it is a problem in my life as untamed as the very seas that surround me. Its a truth that perpetuates simply because I will not offer up my will to those almost automatic processes in my brain that say ‘just rely on altruistic fairness’.

What in the holy hell does that mean? Well, allow me to explain.

Other people seem to talk about their life as if like some shape, they have always been made just so, and managed to fit into some designated place. These people consider that they have always been right where they belonged. Sadly they are unaware, that this constant is a trick played by the mind. Implemented to keep people (most of them anyway) emotionally stable. This emotional counter-balance can only be described with two words: altruistic fairness.

Altruistic fairness as a measure, is exactly how the mind makes you accept whatever it is you end up with, and it is also what keeps you from trying to set the world on fire, if what you end up with substantially less than desired. The mind does this and other things through a complex process which has been re-enforced your entire life; activities learned all too soon become behavior.

For instance, If you were shooting for a $500,000 house, and end up with a house worth $250,000, almost immediately, neurological activity takes place that quite literally re-writes your preferences. You will now consider the $250,000 option to have been not only just as well, but better (and why not? its YOUR house — that too is part of the trick, just because this particular house is YOURS its better, it now shares all your ‘goodness’). You’ll ponder on how much closer it is to places you like to go. Maybe its near relatives. Its certainty much better than a house worth $100,000, you’ll reason. Besides, you had fallen in love with this particular house’s in-ground pool…

Did you really though? The answer was an obvious ‘no.’ But now, its, ‘of course’. Altruistic fairness provides guidance in this way and would act to make you feel great with whatever you ended up. The mind protects itself from being overwhelmed from any sort of consistently negative observation (as part of the survival instinct), it is achieved in the simplest and most economic way — through the measure of things under the scopes of altruistic fairness, we change what we fundamentally believe was best; we change our mind.  The facts however remain unchanged.

When I see this, I tend to immediately denounce it. Only because I hate to see someone allow such a simple mechanism stop them from the greater goal. For all the good it does, this leverage of altruistic fairness perhaps, is the greatest of human flaws. And as I sit there watching, writhing in unutterable anger at these people, I wonder: How few are we — those of us being weird — that look beyond our own sorted programming, and try to find the world hidden under our cheated senses, conceived within a mind full of lies?

As any writer worth his salt might reflect, we each are characters in a plot-line too big to comprehend. Or, put another way, we are each unique snowflakes thrown across the stormy sky. However you put it, this reality can sometimes make seeing change difficult. This aspect of human life while enjoyable, dynamic and mysterious also means, the actions we take are what make our environment; a place that might be as different without us as that storm without snowflakes.

Voltaire spoke in these exact terms only about people, noticing one way that the impossibly tiny connected with the impossibly massive. For people especially, and maybe with all things, this specific domain where an intersection of scale seems to take place ought to be referred to as the Scale of Truth. When Voltaire pinned down this Scale he did so saying, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

There is a hidden truth revealed in personifying snowflakes this way — perhaps only about people and societies, perhaps about all of nature. It is this: small things make big things; small things happening make big things happening; at least one very small event (like a molecule of air interacting with a molecule of water of a snowflake) must occur as the “responsible” cause of much more massive events (like a whole snowflake moving and causing an avalanche) or else no such larger events are ever able to take place. We call this logical ordering of things, causal thought — for humans it seems it has to due mostly with frame of reference and blame.

Remarkably unlike most, Voltaire, was not pointing out frame of reference, nor looking to blame. That’s probably because Voltaire possessed different knowledge, having realized much earlier than most, how rarely it is about who done it in nature’s court, instead how it was done. This idea of the responsible snowflake in an avalanche, points out how people do not view their own impact when that impact involves big, landscape-changing events. Voltaire observed how human beings over-quantify the fairness of their own assessment — I sense therefore must be correct, as it were; how we inflate ourselves as individuals, yet underestimate ourselves, dismissing the impact we have as groups. In short, on the Scale of Truth, what Voltaire found was, humans have a kind of blind-spot. They are only so considerate or aware (?) of those other people and things happening around them. As Al Gore pointed out, we have all the sense of a frog slowly set to boil.

Using this view of our individual impact, I can provide some realization about technologies or changes which already exists that have solved nearly impossible problems: a) Change must always occur first on the smallest of scales to ever be evident on larger ones and there it may look different (a realizaion that lead to Quantum Mechanics) b) Every change no matter how seemingly insignificant in any particular frame of reference resonates throughout all scales and all frames of reference (a realization called the Butterfly Effect). This suggests we need even newer forms of technology though. Technology not unlike the Internet which capitalizes on this problem within human design to create new ways to communicate on larger scales, decreasing the blind-spot.

If we go on though, each a little at a time, unable, unaware or simply discounting each other as we go, than we are that thing, that avalanche of change, and we are responsible for its consequences. In fact, if we continue to treat the world as we have, all the generations that come to follow us will have no such thing and not understand a snowflake in order to relate such ideas. Imagine, Voltaire’s wisdom will, along with all other wisdom, fall back into the abyss.

From Scienceblogs, a quote I must not let you miss, showing an interesting turn of conversation. Check it out the full beast here. Terse and lovely, the turn goes…

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”