Looking Inward

Toolbelt of Knowledge: Practices
Skepticism
Listening
Deconstruction
Rationality
Mindfulness
Steel Manning
Common Sense

There are times when something happens to make us upset. Something goes wrong, or someone says something, or we read something online, and we are suddenly angry. We stew in that negativity, giving the air around us a piece of our mind, or imagining the angry things we would say. Twenty minutes later, we are still mad. But we notice something odd. Sometime during that time, the target of our anger has shifted to something completely different. In fact, if we look back at what we have been thinking about, we might realize that we have been mad at a whole bunch of things that have little or nothing to do with each other.

Why is this? What does it mean? Well, whatever state of mind we are in at any given moment, that is the lens through which we view the world. We might believe that the reason we are angry so much is because there is so much wrong with the world. However, the truth is that the things our minds focus on are influenced by the way we are feeling. When we are angry, our thoughts filter out the positive things, and focus on the negative. This keeps us angry, and the process repeats.

But what if we want to be happy? What if we want to see the world how it really is, not just the broken parts or the successful parts? The answer is mindfulness. Looking inward and observing how we are feeling, what we are perceiving, and what we are thinking.

Like rationality, mindfulness does not come naturally to us. We are almost always caught up in what we are doing, and we hardly even realize we are thinking or feeling anything at all. We act and react, believing that we are being completely rational, and that there is nothing to look inside for. However, when we take the time to actually look, we see that there are worlds of complexity hidden within us.

How do we practice mindfulness? The easiest way to start out is through meditation. Sit or lie down in a quiet, comfortable place, and just pay attention to yourself. What does your body feel? What are the different sounds that you hear?

After you have some practice with that, there are other things you can observe about your inner self. What are you feeling emotionally? Do you find that there is something you are wanting to feel? What efforts are you unconsciously making to feel or learn something?

Trying not to think can also be intriguing and revealing. If you try to clear your mind, you will find that thoughts appear on their own. You don’t choose to think them. You don’t intend to think them. They just bubble up on their own from your subconscious.

With practice, you will come to see a truth about beauty and ugliness, meaning and meaninglessness, joy and suffering. These things, and others like them, do not exist out in the world. Rather, they exist in the interaction between the world and you. Depending on the lens your mind is looking through, you can see the same thing as ugly or beautiful, meaningless or meaningful. And you will come to recognize the difference between the kinds of things that are subjective like this, and the kinds of things that really are facts in themselves.

You can also learn to pay attention to these things when you are not meditating, when you are in conversation, or traveling, or doing work, or whenever. These are the times when it can be most helpful, because you will be able to refocus yourself so that you can be more productive or better enjoy your existence. There are reasons to be upset, and there are reasons to be happy, and with mindfulness, you can learn to guide your mind toward what is important to you.

Economics: Production and Distribution

Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality

At the beginning of this series, we stated the purpose behind economics: to provide as many people as possible with their basic needs so that they are free to pursue lives that are meaningful to them. In Economics, there are two major processes, production and distribution. It is very common in economics arguments for people to fixate on just one of these, and ignore the other. However, both are essential for a successful economy.

Without production, there is no economy at all. Everyone starves, and everyone sleeps in the rain. Production is often measured by a country’s gross domestic product, or GDP, which is roughly the amount of money spent within a country during the span of a year, adjusted for inflation, as well as some other factors. More useful is the GDP per capita, which divides the GDP by the number of people living in the country. Of course, production and money are not the same thing, but in general, people spend more when production is high, causing the GDP to go up.

However, if we only focus on production and ignore distribution, we get large inequality, with most of the wealth that is created piling up in the hands of a powerful few. Of course, some level of inequality is inevitable, because some people are lucky, and some people make wiser choices. But when inequality gets so great that it prevents people’s needs from being met, or it prevents people from being able to pursue meaningful lives, the economy is not doing its job. So while it may be tempting to say that a high GDP per capita means more prosperity for all, that is not necessarily true.

On the other hand, it can also be tempting to look at the inequality in the world or the country, at the fact that there are both millionaires and poverty, and conclude that we have already produced enough, and distribution is all that matters now. But focusing only on distribution and neglecting production is unsustainable. The reason people get rich is very often because they contribute a lot to production. If we take money and goods from those who contribute a lot to production, people will feel less incentive to produce. If we don’t produce, we will run out, and have nothing left to distribute.

For an economy to work in accordance with our values, we need to take into consideration both production and distribution. So how do we do this? What are our options for the means of production and means of distribution? Here are four that I thought of off the top of my head:

1. The means of production are owned by individuals and corporations, and the means of distribution is the market.

2. A central authority, such as the government, coordinates production and/or distribution.

3. People produce and distribute voluntarily.

4. The means of production and distribution are automatic and run by artificial intelligence.

While reading this list, it’s possible that one of the options jumped out at you as the obvious right answer. It is also possible that I missed something. However, what looks true at first glance is not always the real truth. Remember what we talked about last time in the series; we are looking at this from a rational point of view, not an ideological one. Each of these options has things they do well, things they do poorly, and things they ruin. The real question is what balance of these four things, and any others I may not know about, an economy should have. Gaining knowledge to answer this question more wisely will be our focus in the future installments of this series.

Economics: Coming in with a Problem-Solving Mindset

Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality

We live in a time when it is fashionable for everyone to have an opinion about everything, and Economics is no exception. We are strongly pressured to have the “right” view of Economics, which is of course the same one as our friends and family and the news we watch. But we don’t do things like that here on A Scientist’s Fiction. Instead, we do our best to put our biases aside and acknowledge our assumptions, observe the relevant facts, and follow where logic takes us.

The first step in thinking about Economics is to shake the ideological mindset. When approaching the subject, the most tempting thing for most of us to do is to jump into the debate between Capitalism and Socialism. But that is the wrong question altogether, and just makes people angry at one another. We might also be tempted to come at it from the perspective of justice, of who rightfully owns what. While this is important from a values perspective, we must remember that it must be informed by our core economic values, which we talked about last time: to supply as many people as possible with their basic needs, so that they are empowered to pursue meaningful lives.

In order to accommodate our values, we need to understand how economies work. The economy is like a machine, built out of a bunch of different parts, all working together. We can look at the parts and see how they work and what they do. Only then can we build a realistic view of how a good economy can be built. It is impossible to build a rocket that will get to orbit without understanding physics. It is impossible to design a new medical drug that will heal people without understanding chemistry. Similarly, it is impossible to design an economy that will provide prosperity and freedom without understanding Economics. And like other sciences, we must be humble and remember that Economics is a complex field of study, and there is much about it that humanity does not yet understand.

Today’s discussion is very short, but it is important enough that it warrants its own post. Although it may seem like common sense that we have to look objectively at the mechanics of how something works if we want to make it work better, we humans so often forget this. Without a conscious effort to understand, our views are shaped by persuasive speakers, and we forget that good intentions are not enough to guarantee good outcomes. Unlike what many smart people throughout history have believed, we humans are not naturally rational. Rational thinking takes practice and effort, just like any other skill. Because Economics is an object of so much political rhetoric and propaganda, it is a high-level challenge for rational thinking. So it seemed appropriate to take a moment to remind ourselves of the mindset we want before we dig into the meat of the topic.

MoebiusQuest – NaNoWriMo Results 2018

Hello friends, family, and people from the internet. Guess what? I wrote a novel!

You can read MoebiusQuest here for free at WritersCafe.

This November has been a milestone in my life in more ways than one. First, I met the official NaNoWriMo goal for the first time, writing 54,500 words during the month. Second, I finished my first novel, which came out to 57,000 words when it was finished. Around 3000 words were written in December, but it still counts as a win because over 50,000 of them were in November. Before this, my longest story was under the 40,000 word novel threshold. Third, the novel I wrote was MoebiusQuest, the story I started and restarted so many times as a teenager. Having finally finished it, I feel as if an obsession I had in the back of my mind for all those years has been lifted, and I am free to focus on other stories. And fourth, I met and became friends with a bunch of fellow writers, who are interested in sticking together to help and support each other in our writing.

As I wrote MoebiusQuest, I noticed something strange happening. I prepared only a barebones outline, so most of the story was made up on the fly. But time and again, I kept striking gold with ideas that could pay off later and make the story better. When the book was finished, I found myself looking at something better than I had ever imagined, where no scene was missing, and no scene had to be cut. The only revision it needed was a very small amount of spell-checking and trimming. It felt like a miracle.

It is because it turned out so well that I decided to post it online for anyone to read. MoebiusQuest is my baby, and I couldn’t be happier at how it turned out. Of course, it is nowhere near the quality of a “real” book, but I didn’t intend it to be. And because it is not garbage, and because it is my baby, I have decided to open it up for the eyes of the world. MoebiusQuest is online, and I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.

MoebiusQuest is a light-hearted space adventure where three friends jaunt across the galaxy in search of the seven elemental MacGuffins—I mean medallions. Every planet they visit brings a new and different adventure, from the high-tech to the alien to the downright weird. It is great fun and excitement from start to finish, and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

Massive Complexity

Scholars used to marvel at the elegance and mathematical simplicity of the universe. That was before we invented supercomputers.

Simulation of the ejected matter from colliding neutron stars. Credit: NASA

From the days of Newton and Galileo to the middle of the 20th century, science was a mixture of brilliant insight and trial-and-error. Intelligent, learned people would come up with ideas and build experiments to test them. It was a golden age, romanticized by the iconic ideas of the scholar in their study and the tinkerer in their garage, creating new machines and discovering new laws of nature.

In the process, better tools were built. Instruments were invented that were more precise, and could measure more things. A new field of mathematics opened up, statistics, which gave scientists guidance on how to make hypotheses, devise experiments, and interpret data. Then, computers came upon the scene, able to deal with vastly more data than human beings could.

When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.

What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.

One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.

Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.

Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.

It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.

What can We Know about Reality?

The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality

We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?

There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.

Abstract Painting 599 by Gerhard Richter. You may not know what it is supposed to represent, but you know that you are perceiving colors and textures.

But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?

The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.

Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.

Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.

The Fool's Gift – The Well of Images Part 4

Read “The Fool’s Gift” at WritersCafe.org.

The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.

“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.

As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.