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I was reading up on the Vatican's current 'official positions' on various social issues. My interest was motivated by a number of conversations with Jordan about the cohesiveness (or lack therof) of what we call "Christianity." It seems that more than a few people think the current pope is just a little bit too old school, even for Catholicism. Anyway, on the issue of homosexuality, the Vatican has a very interesting position. It is staunchly against the persecution of homosexuals, and condemns hate speech and action against them. Instead, as it is said essentially that homosexual 'tendancies' aren't so much sinful as they are sickly; like a sort of psychological disorder. So this separation is made: homosexuality itself is sin, but the homosexual person is simply ill, stricken with the sinful sickness. It is concluded that gay people ought to receive the full outreach of the church in terms of 'getting help' to fend off their 'tendancies....

New books are terribly overrated. I don't know why anybody buys new, at least when used is an option. Today I picked up five books, all classic fiction, for 18 bucks. I hope to read them, plus two or three others, over the summer. I've read so much this year so far, but almost exclusively philosophy. I am looking forward greatly to opening up fiction, especially since my recent conversion to the belief that fiction, and poetry, have as much to offer philosophy (if not more) than analytic journals do. Sometimes I feel like I'm searching for something, but I'm never quite sure what that thing is. As time passes, I am more convinced that the most important things in my life will not occur on account of my deliberation, but on account of happenstance, luck, or coincidence. An ex girlfriend recently said to me that after four years of philosophy, I'm not one inch closer to figuring it all out. "what out?" I asked. "This whole mess of existence," she r...

At every stage of life I've been told by my elders that it gets more mature as time goes by. All this elementary school stuff will dissipate in high school; the work will get hard, and the silly gossip will be gone. But they were wrong! And through high school I heard the same thing. This is where it stops. University is tough bananas, and the people are mature and grown up. But they were wrong! And then there's relationships. I still cling to the notion, without any supporting evidence, that as I grow older, relationships will be more mature. We'll all act like adults once we become adults. But it is the other way around! We become adults /by/ acting adult! Some people simply never grow up. I see people twice my age with the same nutball relationship problems I had in high school, and have had since high school. Perhaps I am the common denominator, though, and everyone really is growing up around me. Hopefully not though. Heh.

Let us imagine a given lot of evidence. And by evidence I mean plain old sensory input. Patternizing the evidence is what humans do extremely well, but the patterns are often misleading. A theory of how the evidence is the way it is, cannot merely be a pattern. It also cannot merely be complete, in that all the evidence fits within it. The theory must have the capacity to predict future events, and more importantly, it can be falsified! That is, you know you have a bad theory when no matter what happens, and no matter what you imagine happening, it still fits within the theory! Often the evidence is simply too slight, though.

Snow? On March 27th, in Victoria... snow? Seriously? It is coming down hard as I write this. It is a beautiful thing, snow. What I enjoy even more than its pureness is the silence it brings to any environment (at least, snow that sticks, which isn't common in Victoria). I'm told the white stuff is very good at absorbing sound. But, as we like to believe, nature is harmonious, so to the same extent snow quiets us down is the same to which it leaves easy-to-follow footprints everywhere we go. I must go. There is much work to be done. My hope is to write a more lengthy entry in the next week or so elucidating what I believe to be the set of common logical flaws in nearly all of our pop-culture conspiracy theories. Included are: homeopathic medicine and the pharmaceudical industry's alleged coverup "...they're just trying to keep us sick!", the "911 was an inside job" theory, "The Secret" aka the 'Law of Attraction' (extremely...

It is odd, I get probably 5 comments every week about this site via email, but hardly any by the comment sections here. Friends and family comment, but only to me, and not to other readers. Anyway. In lieu of time and energy (all being directed toward intellectual offerings of the school-legislated sort) I'll just mention that I finally shaved off the beard today. It was just an impulse, drawn from the inability of my electric trimmer to do any meaningful trimming. The batteries are old, and it got to the point that there was just too much beard for it to deal with. That, and I have a five bladed razor (a gift), so stunningly unnecessary that I felt compelled to try it out for the sake of novelty. It feels weird to make a big appearance change. I really do look very different, at least a few years younger, and much less "intimidating" and "serious" as people say far too often. When will the gillette insanity end? I googled the company name, and the first result ...

It's all the same bible (mostly), and yet there are so many radically different denominations. Supposing Jesus was a real guy (divine or not), and his words in the good book are accurate, I wonder what he might think about Christianity today, what it has become, all its forms, etc. Would Jesus fit in down in Alabama, among hysteria-inducing evangelicals? Would he fit in at the Vatican among the likes of the exorcism-encouraging pope? Would he fit in at a gay-friendly church in Vancouver? Would Jesus praise Christians for making abortion and homosexuality their pet moral issues, while giving poverty a back seat? Would he praise the Vatican for condemning condom use in Sub Saharan Africa? Would he praise 'liberal' Christians for their extremely generous interpretation of his words; keeping all that correlates with modernity and disposing the rest as the historical zeitgeist ? Of course, these are some of the questions that divide denominations. I find often that the biggest f...

My mind always finds its way to a place of conflict when I look into the eyes of an animal, whether it be a cat, dog, wild deer, or any creature that finds its way to the television via nature shows. I'm just never sure what it is that I see; sometimes I see a conscious being so uncannily alike to humanity, that I want to go over and talk to it like an old friend. Other times, I see blankness; a creature with a look of instinct and nothing more. I am being assessed, rather than being comminucated to. It nevers acts; it only reacts. My movements will provoke responses pre-arranged by the creature's very genetic code and thousands of generations of evolution. Either sense may be no more than a projection. Eyes have a certain universal effect to them; we relate to the stare on many levels no matter whose eyes we stare into. Do I see consciousness because I am conscious? Do I see indifference because I am indifferent? We are often both, after all. Evolution is stunningly powerful i...

Convention can blind people. I've felt for some time that the way we classify and treat animals to be an archetypal example of how norms cause people to focus their outrage and praise in illogically narrow ways. We love and take care of our pets, and look down upon those cultures who slaughter cute little dogs for food. As Canadians, we are up in arms and outrage every year when the greusome ice-pick baby seal hunt happens back east... all those adorable, fuzzy big-eyed creatures whose blood stains their white coats and the white snow. A disgrace to the nation! As I wrote once in a letter to the newspaper: perhaps we should simply gather them up live instead, and slaughter them mechanically in industrial buildings with no windows. Out of sight, out of mind, yes? If we do that, the difference between the seals and cows, pigs, or chickens is naught. Well, perhaps the seals are more cute, admittedly. But in spite of ourselves, we must be able to accept as intelligent beings that cuten...

I had an interesting discussion about the placebo effect with Jordan today. Ths entry will be something of an a-priori overview about the matter. A placebo is a sugar pill. It has in itself no medicinal properties that a teaspoon of sugar doesn't have (namely, none). Control groups in scientific experiments are often given placebos as a way for the researchers to help gauge the effectiveness of the real medication being tested. Interestingly, there is a very strong effect on placebo-takers much of the time, particularly with anti-depressant medication. That is, the sugar pill-takers actually get better more often than the third control group, consisting of people who are taking no pills at all. What's more, there are apparently documented cases of positive placebo effects on even physiological illnesses, even tumors in some cases. Life is full of placebo effects. If we are convinced that some object or activity will assist us with some ailment, it likely will do so, merely on a...

Unmentioned sensations are often the most memorable. The sight of the symphony, or the sound of a quiet art gallery. Perhaps these are the reasons that media in its digital form lacks depth. I don't know. Today I hiked to exhaustion, quite deliberately. Pain is such an amazing sensation, the way it manages to reason its way into the mind and convince one to stop, regardless of the importance or value of the task at hand. When pain arrived mid-hike, I was suddenly compelled to abandon my quest up Mt. Doug from home (a couple miles away) mid-climb and turn back. All these reasons to do so arose, and oddly enough, none of them had to do directly with the pain! "You have homework to do, you still have a cold, you forgot your sweater and it'll be chilly up top, you've climed far enough... gotten plenty of exercise already!" And so on, my deliberation was badgered all the way until about 20 paces from the top, when base inclinations did a turnaround and exclaimed "...

Sick today. I despise colds. Not only do they offer nothing but physical misery, but they also prevent one from going out into the world and having a fun time of it. Spending the entire day inside and bored off my rocker, I've experienced absolutely nothing worth writing a blog about! I can't think of anything to say beyond a few disjointed thoughts: I hate tomatoes. Ketchup (catsup too) is great, tomato soup; awesome, anything tomato-y in fact I love, except for strait up tomatoes. Go figure. I went on youtube today, questing to endure music from genres I literally never listen to, ever. I listened to some thrash metal, hard rock, country, rap (not entirely convinced that ought to count as music), techno, and trance. All of it sounded awful to me, except for some of the trance music. Inside the simple harmonies and rhythms I think there might be something philosophically (or at least psychologically) interesting. Long trance 'songs' have plo...

The cold air simply will not break. It has been a long winter in Victoria (by Victoria standards, that is), and I look forward to the warmth of april, and summer. They say that in scientific experiments, there really isn't such a thing as a closed system, practically speaking. Hell, if i stick a thermometer into hot water I've actually cooled the water just a little bit, because some of its energy has made its way into the expanding mercury. Often the only way to make a measurement is by forcing interactions, which inevitably alter the thing being measured. Or, imagine yourself in a room, blindfolded, with a long stick in hand. There are ten ping pong balls on the floor, and you are asked to find them all using the stick. Of course, the moment you find one, you've moved it into a new place that you'll have to locate again. The balls can never be mapped this way.

Final semester is less than a month from being over. It is so near, the ceremony, the little hat, the snazzy piece of paper signed by important people. And yet it is still so far; I have still to write 5 upper level essays, and 3 exams. The metaphor to a long and grueling race is a strong one: as you get closer to the end, every step becomes a little bit more difficult than the last. You must refocus your mind constantly; thoughts get all fuzzy, and your impulses start forcing you to doubt the purpose of the whole thing. And this is psychological. There is no coincidence to the fact that whenever I go for a jog, I slow down into exhaustion at the very moment I finish the loop and return to the front porch. Had the route been a hundred meters longer or shorter, that would be no different. There is always a bigger picture, that the id never wants to look at. Soon school will be over, and I shall be sitting in this very chair a graduate, reading back on this blog feeling sorry for that mi...

I presented my honours thesis today. It was a 15 minute speech, followed by a 15 minute question period. The essay has yet to be written, but when it is I will probably not post it, for it will be fairly obscure and highly technical in nature. However, I can post for your interest a transcript of today's speech. It is highly accessible and contemporary. Enjoy: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Good Afternoon. My presentation today will focus primarily on Memetics, which is a hypothesized branch of science that we might also name cultural evolution devised originally by Richard Dawkins in his book “The selfish Gene.” My intention is to outline his theories of gene selection and its analogous meme selection and one or two of their applications, briefly, before moving along to the primary text to which I’ll be responding: an essay by the philosopher Dan Sperber criticizing the empirical force of the theory. To begin: Richard Dawkins is what they ...

One thing that any family-restaurant server can attest to is the number of arguments and breakups they witness over the course of their shifts. I worked at Denny's for several years, and I couldn't possibly count the couples who came in just to eat a bite or two of their meals, and fight the rest of the time. And for all you couples out there, people do notice. Simply lowering your voices doesn't do a lick of good, the vibe of emotional tension and conflict is palpable, everybody near you knows exactly what is happening, especially the mild mannered individual who serves your food. Your server will go and tell his/her server friends, and they will discretely walk by your table just to get a little taste of the fight. They will make predictions, even bets as to who will storm out, and who will be stuck with the bill. My Grandmother (who, incidentally, thinks the whole notion of blogging to be ridiculous) gave me some very good advice just yesterday. "Jared, it...

So the Jehova's Witness came to my door again. I've had something of a love/hate relationships with these folk. On the one hand, it does annoy me that they feel the need to go around campaigning for their religion. I do like the principle of keeping one's faith to oneself, and generally not soliciting people like it was life insurance. But on the other hand, has anyone actually read the stuff they believe? I've read two entire JW books to this date, albeit fairly small books with a lot of pictures, and these people believe some pretty intense stuff. Essentially the apocalypse is on its way, quite possibly in our lifetimes, and anybody who hasn't checked "become a Jehova's Witness" off their to do list by the time it happens is in some really, really deep trouble. Those who did convert in time, however, have all sorts of great stuff to look forward to: essentially the garden of eden will be restored on Earth for all the JW's and their dead relatives...

It is time for an experiment. I am of the mind that weight problems in north america are attributed to diet far too often, and lack of exercise not nearly often enough. Obviously, both are causal factors, but exercise I believe can, as it were, untip the scale even with an unhealthy diet. I'm a big guy right now. Someone just sent me pictures from about two years ago, when I weighed about 30 pounds less, and I looked much more healthy then. And, since I like my diet just the way it is (yes, in all it's cheesy, nutella-y, ice-creamy goodness), exercise will be the route of attack. I'd rather experience both pleasure and penance, than neither. Starting this day, day 74, I will, every single day, either : workout at the gym, hike, or jog. Or, do something similarly good for the cardiovascular system. Sex might count. Every day, no exceptions. If I can sit on my behind writing a blog entry every day (many of which take a lot more time than it does to run around the block), I ca...

To expand on an earlier thought: I don't like to fight about nothing, but the fight is compelling. Why is this? I don't know why. I'm sure the giant textbook for my introductory psychology class might offer a bunch of explanations, but I'm hesitant to buy any of them, for two reasons. First, the text will be 'outdated' in no more than a few years. Second, the explanations never really do a lot for the individual. Psychology is good at categorizing and pushing out some causal relationships from many correlative relationships, but it is all merely statistical; probabilistic. I don't like the concept of the norm. It seems like an artificial generation. This makes the notion of "non-conformism" an equal artifice. One thing about relationships, at least among us responsibility-free youngsters and twenty-somethings, is that they're never what people say they are. I cannot count the number of times I've seen what b...

I can finally feel spring. The clocks have gone ahead, and tonight as I rode home I could smell it in the air. Maybe it was just a combination of faint pollens, or an extra bit of warmth in the air, but it was spring alright. From four years of philosophy at university, I can honestly say my views have changed in a few very significant ways. Perhaps these changes are too easily explained by the classes, when life outside of them could just as easily be a contributing factor. Either way. I've grown to have a distaste for explanations of human feelings in terms of "just" physical processes. For example, after my run today I felt a certain uplifting sensation, a boost of energetic and healthy happiness, in spite of exhaustion. Four years ago, if you were to ask me what was happening there, I'd say something like "That's just endorphans being released." But no, it isn't just that. Call me old fashioned, call me archaic, but I am increasing...

I once saw a documentary on television about volcanos. There was one I think in the phillipenes that was slowly erupting, and a creeping lake of orange-hot lava inched its way toward a small housing community. Nobody was in serious danger, as the lava was spreading at a pace no faster than thick syrup over a plate. But it was devastating. Everything in its path turned to fire, then to ash. One family desparately moved all their belongings out of their house, and as the lava approached a woman desparately cranked up the garden hose and had at it, in an effort to save the property. Sometimes in life you can still win, and sometimes there's just no hope. Obviously this was the latter of the two, but perhaps her choice to put up that last little fight amounted to something significant. The very next day, everything was gone under something like ten feet of solidified volcanic stone. The earth had simply outgrown her worldly goods, into something fresh, but barren.

It has been a weird few days. There's a lot going on, and as my father mentioned to my utter shock last night, there's only slightly more than a month of school until I'll be done completely. For some reason this hadn't occurred to me. But, with more essays, exams and presentations pending than I'd care to list, the light at the end of the tunnel is still dim and distant. And to be honest (this is one of these rare occasions that I'll inflict you with personal life stuff), this is the first time in a very long time that I can honestly call myself single in the fullest sense. Relationships have been coming and going with varying degrees of success, but more to the point there's never been much time between the going of one and the coming of the next. Periods of my life classified in this way, have been bumping into each other; in some ways even literally, from my perspective at least. "There's no rush." This is the kind of lesson that no one r...

Here is an excerpted version of my honours thesis proposal. The thesis itself has yet to be written, this is basically a very short essay on what I intend to write for the upcoming, much longer essay. It is interesting, I assure you... the topic is interdisciplinary, and doesn't require much background at all: Analyzing the Interrelationships between genes and memes The general area of study under whose umbrella this essay falls is Memetics. Hypothesized originally by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, it is a theory of cultural evolution arguing that units of cultural information – memes – are analogous to genes, such that they can be taken scientifically as things which fall under Darwinistic laws of adaptation. Dawkins argued in favour of a position that the gene ought to be viewed at the unit of evolutionary selection (rather than individual creatures, groups of creatures, or species), and the same is said for the concept of the meme. The strength of the analogy as hotly de...

People are commonly asked what superpower they'd like to have, if they could choose just one. I'd choose to have super magnifying eyes. I'd love few things more in this world than to be able to look at something, and dive into it at down to the same level as an electron microscope. I bet it would be fascinating to absolutely no end. Understanding what goes on at the microscopic level could give one a useful perspective on one's own way of living. Such a superpower would give one very detailed knowledge of, for example, the beautiful complexity that goes into every object on the planet, especially living things. It also would be a total nightmare for germophobes! Size, I suppose, is also relative to distance, if we're to speak from the senses, and unscientifically. I remember many times as a child camping in the interior, or down the Washington/Oregon coast, carefully aiming my flashlight toward a star and flicking it on. Any one of these occasions could be, oh, say ...

Is it fair to compare physical expressions with words in the first place? I say often, as to many, that sometimes a simple facial expression, or sign, or whatever, can get across more information than any number of words possibly could. Most people, I assume, would agree with this. Take the internet for example, and the endless lengths to which we type just to get across things that a wink or a sneer could in real life. But perhaps we are making a category mistake; that is, we're comparing two things on the same ground when they shouldn't be compared at all. One might want to say that language is for one thing and 'expression' is for something else entirely. Each compliments the other, and they are usually intertwined, but when separated they take on different roles entirely.

Apologies in advance for the rather macabre nature of this entry. I am genuinely a happy, contented person, it's just that sometimes I am fascinated with some of the less sun shiny aspects of humanity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I was watching an episode of House online today and there was this odd situation. A man had been accidentally diagnosed with a terminal cancer, then three months later was told the diagnosis was false; that he was in fact totally fine. The man was furious, and filed a lawsuit. He said that knowing his death was immanent made him feel truly alive, and then that got taken away from him. So he wasn't suing for the bad diagnosis, he was suing because it turned out to be false! I know that countless books have been written on death, suicide, and mortality in general, so probably anything I think to say has been said to death already... har har. Anyway. I've always found the notion of the end...

I remember quite well when the world's best chess player finally fell to a computer opponent. It was 1997, and although the tournament was close and quite controvercial, it was clear the computer had caught up to humanity. A few of the guys in the philosophy department believe that this, in a way, has ruined the game. They very much dislike the notion that no matter how good one ever gets, it can be beaten by a program running on a processor of ones and zeros. I too find this discouraging, but the game is still a great deal of fun. There is something artistic about the game. It very much is the case in countless different positions that there are two 'equally good' possible moves. It isn't even beyond computer intelligence to choose moves according to a particular style of play (whether it be aggressive, defensive, etc). Will this always be so? Will some computer 100 years from now completely deconstruct the game into every possible position and every possible best move...

It's weird that those who believe in an afterlife are typically those who also hold more absolutist positions on the value of our lives here on earth, regarding things such as abortion and euthanasia. Wheras those who do not believe in an afterlife whatsoever more often tend to hold less absolutist positions regarding the value of our mortal time, favouring stances in favour of abortion rights and right-to-die legislations. You'd think that it would be the other way around.

Fun with numbers This is a short response paper I wrote up this morning for a class. There are a couple of references you won't catch, but the rest I think is really interesting stuff to ponder: I find most interesting Dennett’s argument regarding the often probabilistic nature of cause/effect relationships. He criticizes Fodor’s Jack & Jill example by noting that it does not adequately apply to evolutionary processes, because it is taken as a singular case: “Fodor’s quaint view of causation leads him to ignore the power of effects that depend on probability. He views such phenomena as not properly causal at all.” I am strongly sympathetic to Dennett’s view that such phenomena can certainly fall under causal nomologicality. Look at a very simple example such as flipping coins. Any given flip, sure, is indeterminate. It could go either way with a 50/50 probability. It is logically possible to flip any number of heads in a row, but sure enough the more coins one flips there is a ...

Due to a frightening quantity of homework that I've managed to accumulate, this evening's entry will be short, and probably uninteresting. I think that we admire militarism far too greatly in this country. We have a convention that not 'supporting the troops' is what we call unpatriotic, so much so that the Democrats down south have coined the phrase 'support the troops, not the war.' Well hold on just a second! Aren't the troops the ones fighting the war? This isn't the 12th century, and as much as I'd love to see it, the president isn't exactly leading the charge on the battlefield. In fact, the only times he actually visits Iraq, no media outlets are notified until after he's back, for fear of assasination attempts. Any attempt to divorce a war from the people who are the ones actually waging it will only obscure the real problems. Again, politicians are forbidden from blaming anybody aside from other politicians and upper-level leaders, w...

"What's the point of dating without games? How do you know if you're winning or losing?" - Jerry Seinfeld The interesting thing about relationships in which each person can have a deep emotional effect on the other, is the profoundness of the power of pursuasion. I can honestly say (to confess) that I've made people feel guilty for things that were not wrong in any way, merely by overtly expressing that said things made me feel bad. This is what people call the guilt trip. But of the many problems that occur with people guit tripping each other, there is a particlar one I'd like to mention in this evening's entry: There is a reflexive property to them. I mean to say that if, for example, I make someone feel guilty for some minor lie or ommision, acting as though it is a big deal, I have inadvertantly made the problem worse, because it convinces the other person that there is no difference between what we might call the small things, and the big things. Ove...