An observation

Some people are like housecats:
obsessed with their own grooming and personal appearance,
but leaving a mess behind them wherever they go.

(I've lost track of the number of times I've cleaned cat vomit off the carpet.)

Wonderwork

Reposting yet another of my comments on someone else's blog.  A previous commenter had explained the etymology of the word 'miracle', and a throwaway comment about the Old English equivalent caught my eye:

“Replaced O.E. wundortacen, wundorweorc.”

Wundorweorc, if it hadn’t been for Hastings, might have come down to us as “wonderwork.” I like the sound of that.

The Incarnation is, of course, both the ultimate wonderwork and a spontaneous act of God. With it, the chains of causation are broken and believers are freed from the natural consequences of their sins.

On "progress"

Revisiting this quote:

Since philosophy is a dialogue, there is no reason to suppose
that the last one to give his opinion is the one who is right.

-- Don Colacho

It wasn't until today that I saw how well it applies to the moderns' arrogant assumption that, simply because they have had the most recent word, they know better than any of their predecessors in bygone days.

(Hey, I never claimed to be quick on the uptake. Quite the opposite in fact.)

A Maxfield Parrish kind of light

I think the time of day I like best are the last few moments of sunset,
when the Douglas fir trees on the hill behind my house are glowing
in a Maxfield Parrish kind of light.

Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", Determinism and Free Will

Stephen Wolfram's massive book A New Kind of Science has been sitting still unread on my shelf for a few years now.

But recently I found this YouTube video of a lecture he gave summarizing the book's content:



It's rather long (like the book) at about one and a half hours. But I think it's worth the trouble to watch -- especially if you don't have time to plow through the book but would like to know what it's about.

I was very interested in what he calls computational irreducibility.

To quote from the book (pp.737-8):

Most of the time the idea is to derive a mathematical formula that allows one to determine what the outcome of the evolution of the system will be without explicitly having to trace its steps.

And thus, for example, an early triumph of theoretical science was the derivation of a formula for the position of a single idealized planet orbiting a star. For given this formula one can just plug in numbers to work out where the planet will be at any point in the future, without ever explicitly have to trace the steps in its motion.

But part of what started my whole effort to develop the new kind of science in this book was the realization that there are many common systems for which no traditional mathematical formulas have ever been found that readily describe their overall behavior.

[...]

If one views the evolution of a system as a computation, then each step in this evolution can be thought of as taking a certain amount of computational effort on the part of the system. But what traditional theoretical science in a sense implicitly relies on is that much of this effort is somehow unnecessary -- and that in fact it should be possible to find the outcome of the evolution with much less effort.

That is, traditional theoretical science reduces the system to a formula which can be used to predict the system's future states. But there are some systems for which the only way to find out what state they will be in is to let them run: there is no faster method.

Thus we have a kind of unpredictability along with determinism. Wolfram's computationally irreducible automata are governed by rigidly deterministic rules, but their future cannot be known at present, even when we are given the rules and the system's current state.

Quoting again from the book (pp. 750-1, italics added):

And it is this, I believe, that is the ultimate origin of the apparent freedom of human will. For even though all the components of our brains presumably follow definite laws, I strongly suspect that their overall behavior corresponds to an irreducible computation whose outcome can never in effect be found by reasonable laws.

[...] if one looks at the individual cells in the cellular automaton one can plainly see that they just follow definite rules, with absolutely no freedom at all.

But at some level the same is probably true of the individual nerve cells in our brains. Yet somehow as a whole our brains still manage to behave with a certain apparent freedom.

Traditional science has made it very difficult to understand how this can possibly happen. For normally it has assumed that if one can only find the underlying rules for the components of a system then in a sense these tell one everything important about the system.

But what we have seen over and over again in this book is that this is not even close to correct, and that in fact there can be vastly more to the behavior of a system than one could foresee just by looking at its underlying rules.

Now, all of this is couched in the terms and perspective of materialism or physicalism, as can be seen by the phrase "apparent free will" and in the implicit assumption that the rules governing the synapses in our brains are sufficient to generate the phenomena of consciousness and the exercise of will.

Nevertheless, I think it is instructive to realize that our minds, like so much else in the world, cannot be reduced to a formula or formulae. The only way to find out what we are going to do is to let us run.

To recall once again what my old philosophy professor used to say, the mark of reality is that it is always larger than any description we have of it. There is always more to it than we imagine.

On life at the console

I'm a computer nerd -- in fact, I made my career in software -- but up until now I haven't posted anything along those lines.

Today, while searching for some information on the Linux framebuffer and fbterm, I came across some comments I'd made on a site that was discussing text-mode applications and getting away from X Windows and graphical environments in general.   

As is my wont, I decided I should repost those comments here:

Even when you’ve reached the stage where you no longer run X Windows, you’re still not done.

The final stage has you looking at those ncurses or slang apps that use what ESR calls a “captive interface”. Is there a commandline replacement for them? Can you live entirely at the shell prompt?

For example, can you replace mutt or alpine with nmh?

And which shell? Do you have to use a behemoth like bash, when there are lighterweight alternatives, e.g., ksh?

Even if you find you need to keep some of those captive UI apps, you can still look for lighterweight replacements.

E.g., nvi rather than vim.

(I’d say vifm rather than mc, but my argument requires me to forego vifm too. Besides, I know you’re tired of hearing about it. )

I'd been pestering the owner of the website to consider vifm instead of the Midnight Commander.  I prefer vifm because it's more lightweight and more vi-like.  The Midnight Commander has too many things built-in that could and should be done by separate programs, following the classic Unix model of each program doing one thing well (and only one thing!). 

Besides, I don't like having code loaded into memory when I'm not using it and in fact might never use it.  The beauty of Unix shell-scripting, for example, is that programs come and go as they are needed, rather than lingering on in memory until the controlling script exits.  But when an app loads a bunch of unneeded code (often in one or more shared libraries), it usually doesn't get unloaded until the app is exited. Yecch.

Another commenter suggested that a full-screen text editor like vim/nvi/vi could also be replaced, by commandline tools like cat, sed and awk.  My response:

I do use sed, awk and similar tools as much as possible.

But I think it must be conceded that there are times when it is better, if not absolutely necessary, to have a constantly-updated display of the text being edited.

Having opened that door, however, I don’t want to open it so wide that I end up back in a full-blown GUI environment like Gnome, KDE, or MS Windows. It’s important to know when and where to stop, whether you are heading toward simplification or towards complexity.

I stand by my original comment, that there are some things that people are doing with ncurses-based captive UI’s that could just as well be done at the commandline. But there are also some things that are so difficult or impossible to do at the commandline that a good ncurses app is a godsend.

Boredom is the antonym of solitude.
 
-- Don Colacho

The luminous concrete image

Some excerpts from an interesting post over at the "Just Thomism" blog:

We all value the noetic power of those moments in a historical account when we notice “that’s exactly what we are like!”or when we can see in the narrative something that is universally true of human life.

While some philosophers call this abductive reasoning, in Scholastic vocabulary it is the search for a concrete universal image. It is, in the noetic order, a universal in causando, which is opposed to the universal that is merely predicated. We call them both universals because both are intentional beings that make a multitude known, but the predicated universal is more vague than the concrete individuals it illuminates whereas the causal universal is not. If anything, the causal universal is less vague than what it illuminates, just as the line that runs through a set of data points (which corresponds to no concrete finding) is far more definite than the cloud of data points that cluster around it (though the data points are actual results).

[...] we must abandon the idea that reality is sensible or concrete while predicable universality is a mere addition or construction above and beyond this. Given an experience, we can either develop it in the line of its particularity (by poetics, history, journalism, parts of scientific discourse, narrative analysis or critique etc.) or in the line of its universality (by science or philosophy, which seeks to terminate in the species specialissima). In this first sort of discourse, we follow the logic of the luminous concrete instance or image, in the second, of the predicated universal.

Rules vs. Principles

Found on a website discussing landscape design:

Sometimes we confuse principles with rules. Rules are the outline of methods for carrying out principles. Rules are many and various. Principles are few and constant.

All my life, I've been interested to learn the principles of things, while others have seemingly been content to master techniques.

As a programmer, for example, I've wanted to understand what makes a program good.  What makes this code better than that code?  In particular, what do we mean when we say that this program is more elegant than that one?

Now that I'm retired and puttering around in my garden, I find myself concerned with similar ideas.

In short, what do we mean by beauty?

But perhaps the most interesting, most astonishing thing is that there are principles which can be discovered -- and that, contrary to postmodern prejudices, these are not entirely subjective.