fling93 loves fishies

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Short Thought on Science and Religion

Well, the fall semester has started, and I’m taking two night classes this semester (statistics and microeconomics). This means that blogging is likely to be light — but then again, it was already light. I think I’m going to start treating this place less like a collection of thoroughly researched essays, and more like… well… a blog. Which means shorter posts of quick thoughts.

For example, this whole debate on Intelligent Design. This is basically a quick thought I mentioned to Rich Thomas at a recent Giants-Phillies game. Anyway, I consider myself an agnostic, so maybe there’s something I’m not understanding, but I just don’t get why some religious people seem to be so threatened by science. The two are not in conflict:

Science seeks to figure out how the universe works.

Religion tells you why it works that way.

They supply answers to two completely different questions. Science explores how things work in our physical universe just to see what all of the rules are. It makes no attempt to figure out whether or not the rules were created by anybody — indeed, science has no way of determining that anyway.

If anything, the only field that religion ought to have a beef with is philosophy. So what’s the big deal about evolution? Why do they attack that area of science, but not quantum mechanics or the theory of gravity? I don’t get it. And really, science has absolutely nothing to say about matters of faith. It can no more disprove the existence of God than it could disprove the existence of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. And it doesn’t even seek to try.

Not surprisingly, Intelligent Design is not science. It does not come up with theories and verify them empirically, and indeed, it makes no attempt to do so. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, but that you shouldn’t be teaching it in a science course. Teach it in a religious studies course instead — preferably a comparative religion course which will “expose people to different schools of thought.”

So I just don’t get what the issue is. I guess maybe the real issue is not between religion and science, but between organized religion and science. I’ve long considered most churches to be primarily political entities, not spiritual ones, and a political entity might see science as a threat to its power and influence.

Philosophy of the Sims

Okay, last week was a slow blogging week cuz I was unusually busy. What explains all of June and July? Well, it was partly due to blogging burnout, but a big reason was because I’ve been playing “The Sims.” And it’s not just a mindless game, but quite a thought-provoking experience, actually.

It all started when I was reading some Slashdot thread several months ago about videogames taking too much time away from significant others (sorry, I don’t remember the link). Many people responded indignantly that they play videogames with their significant others, and “The Sims” was often mentioned as an example.

Great Courses: Power Over People

Well, I finally completed the Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory on audio CD, part of the Great Courses from the Teaching Company that I blogged about earlier. I thought it was very enlightening and worthwhile, and I found Professor Dalton to be an excellent lecturer (although sometimes when his voice dipped, it was kinda hard to hear him when I was on the freeway, but note that ‘93 Saturns weren’t exactly known for their quiet ride).

I have to say the subject matter it covered wasn’t quite what I expected. I guess I didn’t really know anything about political science. I thought it would talk more about politics and forms of government, but I guess that’d be more civics than political theory. Instead, this course covered various theories exploring human nature to determine what kind of society would be ideal for humans. So there was quite a bit of overlap with philosophy, which surprised me. While I fully expected to see the lectures about Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hitler, and Gandhi, there were also ones on Thoreau, Freud, and “The Hindu Vision of Life.”

A Culture That Rewards Inaccuracy

I know it’s been slow lately. A big reason is that I am very loathe to post anything until I’ve researched it well enough to know there aren’t any obvious weaknesses or holes in my argument and that I’m covering all the bases (and this post is no exception). This means it takes a long time for me to organize and write a post, so I always end up with several partially-completed blog posts stacked up.

This has a double-whammy effect on my traffic because: 1) my posts are much less frequent (if you want a lot of blog traffic, posting at least daily is a huge plus), and 2) a completely argued post is less likely to provoke responses in the form of comments and links from other bloggers.

Clone Wars Gets Deep

I’ve been watching the animated Clone Wars “micro-series” on the Cartoon Network. Each episode is only three minutes, and up to this point, almost every episode has just focussed on one battle scene each. Pretty good fun, but there’d been very little plot or substance, so I didn’t feel compelled to recommend it.

However, I thought tonight’s episode, Chapter Fourteen, was particularly interesting. If you haven’t figured out where Lucas will probably be going in Episode III, you might not want to read this.

The Message, Not the Messenger

Update 7/23/04: I’ve significantly reworked this essay, specifically expanding the “Sometimes there is a wolf” and “Resist confirmation bias” sections.

As I mentioned earlier, I try to act like a sponge, absorbing as much information as possible so that my opinion will be as informed as possible. I think we should all try to act like sponges. Of course, we’re not sponges, we’re humans, and human tendency is actually to prematurely exclude and filter potentially useful information — for a variety of bad reasons. So it’s pretty valuable to stay aware of this tendency.

Keiko Is Dead

No, not O’Brien’s wife from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but the star of Free Willy. No, I’ve never seen the films, but for a guy who likes fishies, this is sad news:

For kids, Keiko the killer whale was the charming hero of “Free Willy.” For biologists, he was the focus of fierce debate on whether captive animals could be returned to the wild. Keiko, who died of pneumonia this week, never strayed far from humans, keeping company with them in a Norwegian fjord to the end.

Keiko’s apparent love of human company — and his popularity — frustrated handlers’ dreams that he would one day leave them in search of food on his own. Millions of dollars were spent trying to teach him to survive, but he didn’t bond with other whales, apparently feared swimming under ice and died less than two years after he was freed.
…
Keiko’s handlers noticed on Thursday he had become listless, and the six-ton orca died Friday afternoon despite veterinarians’ efforts to save him.

“It was pretty sudden,” his animal care specialist, Dane Richards, told The Associated Press. He said Keiko’s handlers went out to check on him during a late afternoon blizzard and he was still alive. Two hours later, he had died.

The whole article tells a pretty interesting story of Keiko’s life. Anyway, killer whales aren’t actually fishies; they eat fishies. So maybe I should be happy, instead? Of course, I eat sushi myself. Can’t bring myself to give it up. :( And I love kitty cats, and they eat fishies, too. Ditto with dolphins.

Analysis of Matrix Revolutions (Spoilers!)

Warning! Spoilers for The Matrix Revolutions below! If you haven’t seen the film, I do also have a non-spoiler review, but do not continue reading this article unless you’ve already seen the film or don’t care if you have it spoiled for you!

Last chance!

Okay, you can’t say I didn’t warn you…

Life Is But a Game?

This is just a random philosophical musing I had about life and games.

Determinism

In the movie Waking Life (and if you’ve seen it, here’s an excellent breakdown and analysis of the film), one character muses about whether life (or existence, or the universe, or what have you) is deterministic or not. Deterministic meaning that given a starting state, the rules dictate that the system will always go through the exact same states every time, ending (if there is an end) in the exact same spot. For example, the rule of gravity. Ignoring unusual circumstances, if you hold an object in the air and let it go, it will always fall and hit the ground, and (assuming air resistance and other variables remain constant) it will always take the same amount of time and strike the ground at the same speed (determinism is generally a nice thing to have in software design, as bugs are much more easy to fix if you can reliably duplicate them and if you can trace back cause and effect in a linear fashion).

Anyway, this brought to my mind the Game of Life designed by John Conway. No, not that old board game with the spinning wheel and cars and the colored pegs. You have a board made up of squares. Some of which are white. Some of which are black. Every turn, a square neighboring exactly three white squares turns (or stays) white (kinda like giving birth). Every square with more than 3 (overcrowding) or less than 3 (exposure) white neighbors turns (or stays) black. And this cycle just continuous indefinitely. Some starting patterns will die out and become permanently black. Others generate patterns that seem to change endlessly (indeed, I believe there’s an X-Windows screensaver based on the game). I imagine it’s called the “Game of Life” because the patterns behave like crude life-forms, but other parallels occurred to me later, which I’ll discuss at the end.