Wonderful day’s snake watching in Berkshire - March 20th 2011
. Particularly nice female adder fresh from hibernation in expert hands (not mine).
Snake Watching in Sevenoaks (8th May 2011) – 3 juvenile grass snakes (pic 1 & 2 same individual)
Grass Snake (male): fresh from hibernation (Reading April 2010)
The SRH is purely linguistic. There are no contradictions in reality—things just are—problems only occur when we try to assert things one way and then change our mind. The reader is left unsure what we mean and complains.
To summarise: the SRH (which needs a new name) notes that when referring to something by some description (essence) or asserting its existence one cannot then meaningfully attribute that essence or existence to the subject e.g. “(Ex) x exists”, or “(x) P(x) & Q(x) –> P(x)” respectively “there exists something which exists” or “for all x where x has quality P and quality Q it has quality P”. These tautologies sound ridiculous in logic but “all black swans are black” sounds almost meaningful and “I think therefore I exist” is famous.
To recap further the problem with these tautologies lies in their negations: they are contradictions or at least always false. Respectively above: “(x) x ¬exist”, “(Ex) P(x) & Q(x) & ¬Q(x)” that is “for all x, x doesn’t exist” and “there exists an x such that x has P, Q and doesn’t have Q”. The latter is a typical contradiction the former is a type I don’t know that i’m calling existential contradiction. The famous Descartes’ statement has this SRH problem at root: its very appeal and certainty lies in the tautology that to be thinking at all he must exist (we know what he means even if it doesn’t technically imply an existing self like entity). But the statement is misleading because its negation is an existential contradiction and so there being no situation under which it can be false (it is always true) and so fails to convey any particular meaning! We know nothing after reading it that we didn’t know before. Another way to put that is there is nothing to learn about such a sentence’s use; we can say it anytime and anywhere in any imaginable universe.
The relevant to a proof of God is firstly not to prove “(Ex) x is God” i.e. there is a thing called God. This is clearly nonsense at first sight since God made “all” things so one presumes he either made himself or he isn’t a thing. It staggers me that Dawkins et al. waste time pursuing this dead end. It makes more sense for God to be a principle (principal perhaps) namely that nothing can assert its own existence, instead depending upon other things. The name of God in the Arahamic religions is Yahweh in Hebrew which means “I AM”. It is important to realise that because of the SRH we cannot meaningfully assert this for our self. Any sense of “I am” comes from outside us.
Returning to the thread if this blog entry. The SRH and existential contradiction is linguistic. There is one famous field of existential contradiction namely time travel typified by the paradox of going back in time and killing oneself. The problem then arises was there a murder? If there was then the person who was murdered is also the murder. But if there was a murder it also means that the murderer was killed before he did the murder. However if there wasn’t a murder then what exactly did the time traveller do?
It is only an embryonic thought at this stage but similarity to the SRH signals an alarm bell that this “time travel” and indeed “time” itself may be only linguistic at root and not real. This wouldn’t be a new idea but I don’t grasp it yet. I read earlier in the year (but can’t remember where) a poem in which it is said that “self” is only a feature of our Indo-European languages and with a different language structure we would be able to avoid this cultural artefact all together.
A month ago I had a brain wave. It occurred to me that the SRH is to do with existence.
I use the logical syntax:
(x) : for all x it is true that
(Ex) : there exists x such that
¬ : not/negation
<statement>
Thus the proof of God is this:
The simple sentence “this sentence exists” seems unproblematic:
But consider:
These sentences are equivalent and are false because the sentence itself serves as an entity which contradicts them.
Now we can’t say that the sentences are “not sentences” because that would eliminate the entity we need to make them false. So it is not that self-reference is impossible as was naively proposed by the SRH. However there is something odd.
The sentences are necessarily false. Once we have read the sentence we cannot then deny that the sentence exists, for what did we just read? So by the time we have understood the sentence we are already committed to its existence; we are already committed to its falsity. It is an analytic statement false by virtue of the definition of its own words. However it is a posteriori to the extent that we must have experienced it to have proof that it exists. (This is in contrast to Kant’s synthetic a priori.) It is thus a necessary contradiction.
It follows that its negation (statement 1) is not just true but necessarily true. It is a tautology, an analytic a posteriori.
So all the sentences above carry no information that the reader isn’t already familiar with by virtue of reading them. While they seem to make profound statements they are actually meaningless just as “Black swans are black” doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: if we can find a black swans we already know it is black. More generally then for any predicate:
clearly doesn’t tell us anything i.e. anything which is S and has property B has property B… i.e. all swans(S) which are black(B) are black(P).
What this means is that no entity can carry information about its existence or any feature which is required to identify it.
This means, and this is the SRH, that entities can only be meaningful about the existence of other entities apart from themselves.
To put it another way: we are very unlikely to hear that we have died and if we did we would know it was false. Thus the statement that we are alive is meaningless to us. It is this meaninglessness which means that we must be silent when it comes to issues of our self-existence and non-existence. Death, or indeed any word, doesn’t make sense here.
In contrast however other people can die and so we can make meaningful statements about their being alive or dead. When someone else makes a statement that we are alive then it is meaningful, but only from their point of view. This is social consciousness. If we attribute meaning to “I am alive” it is because we have adopted a social consciousness. This is not a good thing because why would we do this when we can see with our own eyes the truth? I suspect that the search for fame and social status derives from this weakness of our own eyes. The need to make noise and words (as I do here) is also such a weakness. For such a consciousness Death is a very real thing.
From this stems all the rest of the SRH. Most importantly that no system can exist independent of another because if it was an Ultimate theory of Everything it would need another system to state meaningfully that it did indeed existed as the ultimate system.
Likewise for every entity that seeks knowledge of its existence there is always an Other outside it that it must acknowledge first. This is the God Proof. Not the proof of a particular entity amongst all the others (the naive view of God) but the principle that there is always and necessarily an entity outside.
This also explodes the narcissistic, solipsistic world view. No self can know its existence before it knows the existence of another, and worse for the self it is the view point of the other that it adopts as its own proof of its existence! If it really looked at itself with its own eyes it would be speechless because what can its eyes “see” that his “seeing” hasn’t already told it?
Just compressing some files with MediaCoder and did some reading and looking at the various options. MediaCoder is a front end for the various opensource and free solutions that have emerged over the years. Have settled on the following settings after comparing various options:
Container: MP4
Audio: AAC seems better than MP3 for high compression (<44kbps variable). But >77kbps, variable, AAC versions 2 is worse than version 1 and as compression is reduced quality doesn’t increase much for either so MP3 becomes the favoured compression.
Conclusion:
For low quality TV storing am using HE-AAC V2 (Nero Encoding). Quality=15. 32kbps (voice). 44.1kHz sampling - seems to affect quality a lot if lower.
For movies MP3 (LAME), 112 Average Bit Rate i.e. cassette quality (CBR is pointless!). Original sampling.
Video: have settled on XviD (opensource version of DivX) Advanced Simple Profile Level 5 for phone, and H.264 for movie.
Conclusion:
Movie Video Quality: 90 halves video size.
Phone Quality: 80 seems to provide good quality and less than 1/4 size.
If interlaced (i.e. TV format) needs to be converted to progressive to aid compression codecs. This has bonus of removing some unneeded frames too. (Interlacing refreshes the screen in alternating lines so frames come in pairs called fields, these pairs are combined into single frames for progressive.)
Frame rate: the phone is 15fps. For movies and long video keeping original as low frame rate is tiring on eyes.
Aspect Ratio (AR). The phone is 320x240 pixels (4:3). Set Display AR for phone 4:3 but without crop squishes the picture but is watchable.
Having waited for many buses the question arose of why it always seems that a bus comes first on the other side of the road.
Assuming that it is the same buses running in a circle on the route then we know that the average probability of a bus on either side is the same (call it p).
However the fun occurs if there is any synchrony. Suppose that there are no delays and the buses are scheduled to arrive at 10mins past the hour (PTH) on the other side and 20 PTH on your side. In order to see your bus come first you need to arrive between 10 and 20 PTH which is only 1/6th of the time. At such a bus stop you will experience an apparent “unfairness”.
In reality buses set off on time from the depot but synchrony happens en route. The reason is that the number of passenger to board a bus is proportional to the time since the last bus, and the time spent at the stop is proportional to the number of passengers. Any delays thus feedback positively. A large party of people turning up at the stop, or someone looking for their ticket will delay the bus. It means they have more people to pick up at the next stop, and the bus behind will have caught up a bit and so have less people to pick up and so very quickly it will be following the bus in front. This is why buses never come singly (especially toward the end of the day or the bus route). This means that there is a different grouping of buses for people waiting on the outward and return routes of a bus route.
2Do…
I still need to do the maths here…
The other thing I wanted to do was use appropriate distributions to show the exact probability of n buses passing on the other side…
I once had an argument with an ex about whether it was cheaper to put all our wet clothes in one drier and run it for longer or split it between two driers and run each for less time. She thought two, I thought one. I should have known that in such heated dualistic debates there is truth in both arguments!
All the water in the clothes (above the dryness level) needs to loaded into air and removed from the dryer. First up a model of the air moisture curves from both scenarios.
Let us assume that there is a maximum water load that air through the drier can take, there is therefore a maximum rate of drying at saturation. The amount of water removed at saturation is this rate multiplied by the time at saturation.
Once the rate of evaporation of water from the clothes falls below saturation of the air then the moisture of the air will decay. I assume an exponential decay curve and some arbitrary percentage as “dryness”. The moisture in the air through the load with twice as many clothes but the same air flow one would expect to reduce at half the rate of the half-load. The area under a decay curve that starts with half some rate R is twice that of one with rate R, and also takes twice as long to reach some arbitrary level. So once the moisture falls below saturation there is no advantage to either method.
It is then easy to see that, at saturation, the remaining water (which is the same in both scenarios) will be removed in a time proportional to the amount of water. So the large load will take proportionally longer.
From this argument there is no difference between strategies. Which is easier to argue in terms of energy. The cost of any scenario is proportional to the amount of energy (electricity) put in. The length of time to dry is also proportional to the amount of energy put in, or in other words the cost.
The only variable remaining is the efficiency of drying, that is the possibility that one scenario allows for air to be “unused”. Originally I thought that putting all the clothes together increased the chance of a air coming into contact with a wet surface. However if we over-load the drier so air cannot flow between the clothes then this reduces the efficiency. On the other hand if we put just one sock in the drier then most of the air will flow through without ever coming into contact with the sock. It seems that (as usual in such arguments) we were both right and actually there is a bell curve with an optimum loading. That optimum will be around the loading where the clothes are freely spinning in the tumble drier, but not so far apart that air can pass through without good contact with the clothes.
Today is the vote for AV. First past the post is good for immediate and decisive action, but as seen in this exemplary situation above, in reality the correct action requires understanding and resolution of both sides of an argument. This is why an educated King making decisions based upon the competing input of his advisors makes the best form of government.
