BG - Bits of Wisdom

A brief background for each of the 17 "Bits of Wisdom" is presented below either as text or a link.

1. Reality is fundamentally paradoxical.
This statement represents my deepest understanding about reality. My reasons for being certain about this understanding can not be explained briefly. Two well known examples are quantum physics and Goedel's theorems.

By the way, if you think about statements as having three truth values, TRUE, FALSE, and PARADOX, in this kind of a system, Goedel's proofs no longer work, or at least no longer work in any straight forward way as in his original paper. I plan to write something more about this for Buzz's Place eventually.

This item helped me to eventually come to a personal understanding about the old free will vs. determinism conundrum. See item 2.

2. Free will and determinism are dual interpretations of . . .
I became interested in Zen philosophy a long time ago. I never felt that I would ever experience Satori because I could never let go of my awareness of self, but from a previous materialistic philosophy I came to accept Eastern mystical reality as real as Western scientific reality. In particular, the more I read, the more convinced I became that Zen provided a resolution of the question of "whether" free will or determinism expressed the "true" view of human consciousness. This question sort of became my personal koan. It took a long time before the item 1 insight helped me arrive at what I found to be a resolution that works for me. The brief text of item 2 captures for me the essence of this resolution, but I would not expect it to be very helpful to anyone else, except perhaps as a hint about how to start to think about the question in a different way.

3. There is more than one right way to . . .
This is a restatement, perhaps an extension, of a teaching of Daniel Quinn . In Quinn's novel Ishmael (1995) he defines our world dominant culture, the Takers, in terms of three ideas. One of these ideas is, "There is only one right way to live, and everyone should be taught to live this way." Quinn contrasts this with the understanding of the Leaver culture as still surviving in unassimilated aboriginal groups, and this understanding can be expressed as "There is more than one right way to live." My form of the statement emphasizes that there is more than one right way to do anything. By the way, there seems to sometimes be some confusion about interpreting this. This is not intended to mean any way of doing something is a right way.

4. Morality is ... Ethics is ...
This is a paraphrasing of a quote from Theodore Sturgeon. I don't remember the original quote, or exactly where it is from, but I think it is from More Than Human (1954). My paraphrase is intended to emphasize that ethics is well founded on Kant's categorical imperative. The paraphrasing also emphasizes that while morals flow from the group to the individual, it is the individual who acquires moral precepts from the group, and then attempts to coerce others to toe the line. There is an assumption that for both morals and ethics one makes an effort to make the "right thing" happen. For ethics, this mean making yourself do what's right; for morals, this means making others do what's right.

An important issue arises in life about how an individual should resolve conflicts between morals and ethics. A person as a member of a group needs to follow the moral precepts as dictated by the group in order to retain good standing, and to maintain the group's well being as a group. But if these moral precepts oppose what one's ethics tell one what is right, one needs to do what one knows is right (see item 5) and accept the consequences. The consequences may entail trying to change the morals of the group (raise others' consciousness) or leave the group ("walk away"). See Pieces of My Mind BACKGROUND.

5. ... do what seems the right thing to do ... Leave the outcome in the hands of the gods.
This statement is a continuation of the idea to do the right thing of item 4 in the context of an Ishmael web site Guest Book discussion. See Pieces of My Mind BACKGROUND. One of the Guest Book participant's arguments about abandoning intellect and using intuition was that that this was the way to leave issues of good and evil, life and death in the hands of the gods as Leavers do. Item 5 is trying to teach that it is only the outcomes of your decisions about the right thing to do, made using you intellect, that are to be left in the hands of the gods. Grief and disasters come from believing that you can choose the outcomes as well as choosing the right thing to do, and trying to make those beliefs into realities.

6. Life is like poker. ...
The poker adage was learned from some poker book I read a long time ago. Realizing it also applies to life is sort of a corollary to item 5. Believing you can choose the outcomes of your decisions about the right thing to do is like believing some of the money in the pot still belongs to you.

7. A bad plan is better than no plan.
I learned this as a chess adage when I was a teen-ager. I now see it as a special case of item 8. It also has merit as a simple bit of practical every day advise. The following is an explanation of it in its own terms.

A plan is intended to establish a way to try to achieve a goal, and it identifies expected intermediate situations and how to respond to them along the way to accomplishing the goal. The following is the measure of how good a plan is:

How well do the actual situations you will have to deal with along the way toward accomplishing the goal match the identified expected situations in the plan?

A bad plan is better than no plan because it gives you an early warning that what you are doing is not likely to be successful when actual situations fail to match expected situations. So then you can change your plan, and if you can understand why the actual and expected situations are not matching, there is a good chance that the revised plan will be an improvement. If you have no plan, then there is no good way for you to make a reasonable correction to something that isn't working, and it is therefore much less likely that you can improvise to find a way to succeed in accomplishing your goal.

Note the similarity of this adjustment of a plan to the adjustment of a path described in the item 8 statement.

8. Each person needs to find his/her own personal natural path ...
Perhaps the single most influential book I have read, and the one that got me started thinking about Zen was the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (1974). Subsequently I read quite a few other books about Zen and also books about Taoism. My favorite translation of the Tao Te Ching is the recent one by Ursula Le Guin (1998); her title is Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching, a Book about the Way & the Power of the Way. Another favorite about Taoism is The Tao Is Silent by Raymond Smullyan (1977).

For quite a while I was confused by the the relationship of the Tao, translated as the "way" or the "path", to Satori. Eventually I concluded that experiencing Satori enabled one to grasp the mystical undefinable Tao. Also, eventually I concluded that the Satori and grasping the Tao was more than a state of mind, and more than an understanding of the nature of reality, it was a way to live one's life, that is, a path through life. After some more thought I finally reached where I am now. I now understand that the Tao as a path is not a single path, but a kind of path. Each individual who grasps the Tao finds not the one and only Tao path, but his/her own personal natural path through life of the Tao kind.

If a person has whatever one needs to achieve Satori, then s/he will find his/her personal path, and s/he will know it to be the true path for him/her, and no verbalizable criteria are necessary. But, for someone like myself, some criteria are needed. Unable to experience Satori (see item 2), I expect my chosen path to be at best a good approximation of my own true personal natural path. The criteria to use is simply the practical ones of determining whether your life is working out well for you by any reasonable meaning of "working out well". If and when you find your life not working out well, then it is time to change your chosen path, using your intellect to choose one that will work better for you.

9. Everyone believes all of his/her beliefs are true. ...
The origin of this item is a quote from Quiddities, an alphabetized collection of witty and insightful short essays by Williard Van Orman Quine (1987). Here is the original quote from the essay "Belief".

A reasonable person believes ... that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.

The first two sentences of item 9 are a paraphrasing of this quote. The remainder of item 9 is based on the insights from studing Zen and Taoism, and is a summation of ideas from many of the previous items.

10. Any complex whole has emergent properties ...
My introduction to this idea came from two sources. I don't remember which came first. One was the book The Collapse of Chaos by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1994). The second was various articles about the Sante Fe Institute. Technically, I should use the work "system" instead of "whole" in my statement, since the scientific field of study that the idea comes from is called "the theory of complex systems". Aesthetically I find the word "systems" too "teckie" for an aphorism. Also, I can't imagine a whole that is complex, in contradistinction with complicated, that is not also a system.

The text of item 10 is intended to capture an idea proposed in The Collapse of Chaos that the foundation of Western science on the principle of ontological reductionism is in a way flawed. This somewhat flawed characteristic of science is, from my point of view, another example of item 1.

11. Life will appear on any planet ...
I have for most of my life been interested in origins of many kinds, the origin of life being one of my major interests. The first book that gave me a coherent way to begin to think about the problem was The Origin of Life on the Earth by Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin (1957). Even though I suspected that details in Oparin's monograph would turn out over time to be flawed, I always believed in the basic truth of the first sentence of item 11. When I finally read Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative by nobel laureate Christian De Duve (1996), I felt the scientific details were strong enough to be a complete validation of the first sentence of item 11.

The second sentence of item 11 is based on a personal interpretation of the Drake Equation, which calculates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations with which we might be able to communicate, based on assumptions about the values of seven parameters. One of these parameters is n_e which is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets. A very small value of n_e is assumed for what is knows as "The Rare Earth Hypothesis", which is an answer to the Fermi paradox. This paradox asks. "If the Drake Equation says there are many civilizations ready to communicate with us, where are they?" My own wrinkle on why n_e is small is that we have a large moon, and a large moon is a rare thing. A large moon means complex tidal patterns occur because lunar tides are about the same size as solar tides, at least in appropriately shaped bays with the right resonances. I believe that complex tidal patterns have an critical influence on the pre-biological chemistry of long chain RNA evolution during the time De Duve called the RNA World. I included this idea in Church of the Pristine Rock: Genesis.

12. Reality consists of infinitely many potential realities ...
This statement summarizes my current understanding of what quantum theory means philosophically.

The conventional explanation is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. The proper citation for this link is:
Faye, Jan, "Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics",
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/qm-copenhagen/>.

I have always been very uncomfortable with the Copenhagen Interpretation. It leads to a number of really wierd paradoxes, for example, Schroedinger's Cat. While I have a high tolerance for paradox (see item 1) the paradoxes from the Copenhagen Interpretation have been too much for me too swallow. The idea behind item 12 came from reading a paper written by a former colleague of mine named Gary Drescher. Although the idea of parallel potential realities is not what Gary had in mind, I think it is consistent with his model and his mathematics. Unfortunately we haven't had an opportunity yet to discuss this to confirm it or refute it. Until we do get a chance to discuss it, I plan to stick with it because it works for me. I also plan to write something in detail eventually about the idea for Buzz's Place in which I will include an explaination about how the Schroedinger's cat paradox goes away.

For a general comparison of various interpretations, click here. My view of quantum mechanics is close to that of the Everett many worlds interpretation. Where I differ with the Everett many worlds interpretation is that I don't interpret the alternative universes as actually real, only potentially or contingently real.

13. The horse may learn to sing.
See The King's Horse and the Condemned Prisoner.

14. Your end of the boat is sinking.
See The Sinking Ship.

15. How much is a hen's time worth?
See Feeding the Chickens.

16. When money talks, money lies!
This is a bumper sticker design with a political message. I intended to have a small number of bumper stickers printed up for some of my friends, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. The intent of the political message is left to the reader as an exercise.

17. The present value of the future is (approximately) zero. (NOT!)
A few years ago I had the insight that our political, industrial, commercial, economic leaders all seem to be making decisions based on the current widespread business school teaching about discounted cash flow. According to this teaching, you calculate the present value of some future benefit by taking the future value, in constant uninflated dollars, and dividing it by the compounding of an assumed average interest rate over the period between now and the time of the future benefit. On this basis you make a decision about the value of an investment now to achieve a future benefit.

Here is an example. Assume optimistically that human life can and will survive for a thousand years on earth with a sustainable population no greater than ten billion. Also assume generously on an economic tort death settlement basis that each life is worth on the average no more than ten million dollars. Then a thousand years from now the total population is worth less than $100,000,000,000,000,000. If we compound one dollar for one thousand years at a conservative four percent interest we get approximately $108,000,000,000,000,000. What this means by this mode of reasoning is that is is not worth a world wide investment of more than one dollar today to ensure that human life on earth is not extinct one thousand years from now. This perhaps explains why there is so much political indifference among our leaders to issues like global warming.