First Futurist

Pythagoras, the First Futurist

By John Taylor; 2013 Jan 07, 169 BE

 

Last month I finished reading a rather disappointing book about the influence of the sun on history. It is called the "petulant sun hypothesis," or something, the idea that sunspots and solar flares have influenced climate and just about every other aspect of our world more than we tend to think.

Its author describes himself as a futurist. Instead of paying his dues by researching this promising thesis thoroughly, though, he relies on his sense of humour to get him through some three hundred pages of fluff. The jokes I found distracting and less than amusing. This is not the only futurist who disappointed me. If, as Bacon put it, some books are to be tasted and some digested, futurists, at least those I have read, are windblown foam that I would not put in my mouth.

Yet the subject itself is so important and fascinating!

The talent pool for futurists seems to be the dubious demimonde of fads and punditry. Instead, I think the ideal place for a futurist to start when exploring the future is in philosophy and the history of ideas. Here, are those ideas most likely to last into the future. Here, you become familiar with those that have been discredited so you can recognize them when they crop up again in disguise. And, not least important, you can give credit where credit is due when an old, profound truth raises its head. It is in this spirit that I wrote the following about the real Pythagorean theorem.

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The Real Pythagorean Proof; Pythagoras and our Object as Humans

 

 

It is now established that the proof of Pythagoras was known by the Babylonians many centuries before his birth; indeed, they understood the theorem much better. We should therefore call that right angled triangle relation, which some say is the most important theorem in mathematics, the "Babylonian Proof" instead of the Pythagorean. Nonetheless, there remains a Pythagorean proof that should be far better known as such than it is. Arguably, it is even more important that the mathematical contribution of Pythagoras and his followers.

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What is our goal as human beings? Pythagoras of Samos (about 570-495 BCE), travelled the known world, from Europe to Asia, from Egypt to India and back, in search of an answer, and his discovery still stands today. He found that our object, our raison d'etre as human beings, is knowledge. Not only that, he found that knowledge has three aspects, just as triangles have three sides, or our world has three dimensions. These are knowledge of self, of the universe and of God. Once we grasp these, truth will empower and set us free, in and of itself. Pythagoras has been credited with this statement:

"Man, know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God... No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself." (Pythagoras <http://www.experiencefestival.com/pythagoras_quotes>)

This unites theory and action, East and West, and all that we now call science, religion and politics. It is still repeated by pundits of all stripes, hundreds of centuries afterwards. The same advice, "Know Thyself," was posted above the Oracle of Delphi. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, a father repeats it to his departing son,

"This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man."(Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Sc. 3)

Ideally, everyone would succeed in this sublime quest to know oneself comprehensively, to rule over oneself with perfect love, justice and wisdom. If we could, we would know and grow smoothly, all the time. Like his right angled triangle, we would grasp the hidden unknowns and progress steadily through each stage of our development, from early youth to old age. We would not need laws, rules or outside compulsion. It would be a libertarian paradise.

Unfortunately, life is imperfect. Self-knowledge tends to fail. Much as we would like it to be, the right angle is not always exactly 90 degrees. We misunderstand. We forget. We change, the environment changes and society grows. The universe is expanding. Knowledge itself is incomplete, by its very nature. We lose hold of our freedom. Rule over self lapses. To adapt, we must be tentative, and continually upgrade what we know, even of one's self.

Pythagoras recognized this when he coined the word "philosopher" to take the place of the much older "elder" or "wise man."

"Pythagoras is said to have been the first to assume the title of Philosopher (lover of wisdom) in place of the name Sophos (wise), by which the sages had before been known." <http://www.nndb.com/people/773/000087512/>

Wise men think they own wisdom, an impossible expectation in this growing, expanding universe. All that imperfect beings dare aspire to is to be seekers after wisdom, to adore wisdom but never possess her. At our best, we are lovers who revere knowledge, and humbly court wisdom. A philosopher does not presume to be wise already. He is tolerant, tentative and evolutionary. Such is the station of a philosopher.

Pythagoras was among the first to notice that this station points in three direction, like a right angled triangle. There is not, and cannot be, only one path to truth. There are three ways of knowing and growing because knowledge starts with knowing the self, then it proceeds to the universe and to God. We have three main motives or reasons for being, which he illustrated by the three types of people who turn up at a sporting event.

 

 

"Pythagoras argued that there are three kinds of men, just as there are three classes of strangers who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest consists of those who come to buy and sell, and next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all are those who simply come to look on. Men may be classified accordingly as lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain." ("Pythagoras," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/pythagor/)

Brain Age Discussion

 

Philosopher’s Café: What is your brain age?

 

 

• Everyone welcome. Drop in for a lively

discussion.

• There is no fee to participate.

• No formal philosophy training required;

real life experience desired.

 

Second Thursday of the month 

 

 

Wainfleet Township Public Library

31909 Park Street, P.O. Box 118

Wainfleet, ON L0S 1V0

 

905-899-1277

www.wainfleetlibrary.ca

Praxeology

Praxeology; Truth in Language, Ethics in Action

 

By John Taylor; 2011 Feb 16, Mulk 10, 167 BE

 

The birth of science in the Sixteenth Century was accompanied by dozens of attempts to devise artificial languages that would approach the perfect, primal language that Adam was thought to have invented in Eden. Invented languages were all the rage among progressive thinkers. Many new languages were proposed based not only on existing languages but also everything from music to logic to mathematics. John Amos Comenius contributed an artificial spoken language whose grammar, he claimed, made it impossible for a speaker to tell a lie. Many of his writings were burned by pillagers in a war in present day Poland, from which Comenius barely escaped. It is conceivable that he did make up notes for such a language. I often wonder, though, how such an inherently ethical language might have worked.

 

Surely, though, free will and ill will, and therefore the ability to lie, are basic to thought. How could thought even exist if there were no way to make anything but perfectly veridical statements? Would that not be as impossible as legs that cannot trip or fall? A biped's very ability to walk depends upon a sort of controlled falling. Even if a totally truthful language were possible, would it be desirable? In that case, there would be nothing to distinguish truth tellers from liars. As the Ricky Gervais film, "The Invention of Lying," demonstrates, the inhabitants of a world where anything less than total candor was never encountered in everyday speech would be hopelessly naive.

 

On the other hand, computer brains may well advance in sophistication to the point where they gain free will, and therefore the potential to consciously lie. Or maybe that will never be possible. There may not even be a need to introduce fail safes. As anyone who has written computer code knows, as soon as a computer registers a "divide by zero" error, it crashes immediately. Perhaps when some high level computer language in the future attempts to tell a lie it will encounter the Pseudomenon, the Liar Paradox, like a brick wall. As soon as it thinks, "I am telling a lie," the paradox would kick in, register the self-contradiction, and bring the whole chain of thought crashing to the ground.

 

In that case, Comenius's dream might be not only possible but unavoidable. We may imagine surgeons implanting computer chips with language circuitry into the brains of patients deprived of speech for neurological reasons. Then, when the patients open their mouths to lie, their speech chip would short-circuit, shutting down their voice box. Only silence come out.

 

Even if we have to introduce artificial fail-safe mechanisms in order to assure that intelligent machines do not lie to us, this is little different from what we already do with humans, each of whom is a potential liar. This is just what Isaac Asimov proposed with his famous "Three Laws of Robotics," laws that were built into the "positronic brains" of his fictional robots.

 

 

Many philosophical problems arise from this idea, however. Some, Asimov dealt with himself in his series of novels and short stories about robots. Others cropped up later on. One contradiction is the theme of the movie based on Asimov's book of the same name, "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. Some of these dilemmas are: If a robot cannot harm a human being (1st Law of Robotics), how do you define "harm?" How can any agent know beforehand all the results of a given action? An entire discipline, history, debates causes and interactions among conscious agents in the past. Surely deciding the consequences in future of present actions poses difficulties many orders of magnitude more daunting than what historians deal with.

 

On the other hand, in spite of these reservations, once we build a working moral compass, no matter how inadequate and complex it may be, it would then be a simple matter to miniaturize its circuitry until it fits onto a single chip. This is just what happened with Geo-synchronous Positioning Satellite devices, designed to calibrate one's location on earth using signals from overhead satellites. These calculations are so demanding that early GPS devices were as large and heavy as a small automobile. Now GPS chips are tiny and inexpensive, built into cell phones and many other hand-held gadgets.

 

So, if GPS detectors can be made ubiquitous, why not a working moral compass? At the very least, this fail-safe device would assure that no robot could intentionally harm a human being. The "Predator" drones which already are dropping in price and which are capable of attacking any point on the surface of the earth, would cease to pose the clear and present danger that they do now. At least one activist is even suggesting that Asimov's Three Laws be built into corporate charters. This, he suggests, would reduce the harm from human-run institutions as well as from autonomous machines.

 

Robotics is already advancing to the point where, it is claimed, the first "moral" robot has already been built. Named "Nao," this machine works as an orderly in a nursing home. Nao moves about the facility performing rudimentary services like making deliveries, distributing medication and changing the channel on the residents' common television set. Its programming is based on a decision tree of priorities allowing Nao to answer queries and requests from residents, while making elementary choices among several possible courses of action. (Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, "Robot be good; Independent minded machines will soon play a big role in our lives. It's time they learned how to behave ethically." Scientific American, October, 2010, p. 72). Nao can decide, for example, whether to answer a request to change the channel or before that administering pills to a certain bed ridden patient. The makers of Nao hope that as working ethical robots gain and share their experience, they will be ever more prepared as they come across new situations.

 

Like a human worker, when they encounter an unresolvable problem they have the choice of calling for help. The moral robot does this wirelessly, even sending out "crowd sourcing" queries onto the Internet. With the aid of experts, lawyers and ethicists, and even random groups of interested parties on the Internet, robots could conceivably answer the most difficult ethical issues in real time.

 

 

 

Such updating and revision is already being done, and not only in software but also in a faster, partly malleable type of hardware known as firmware. For example, Microsoft's controller-free "Kinect" interface is run by dynamically updated firmware. Off-board firmware updates, constantly revised and updated through a live wireless feed to the Internet, allows the devise to recognize each user, and respond appropriately to that person alone using visual cues alone. Although currently intended only for the XBox gaming platform, it appears that Kinect will soon be our main interface that we will use to interact with all computers. The personal computer, for the first time, will be both personal and personable.

 

Or, maybe not so personal. Who is overseeing the updating of this firmware? Can we trust a single corporation's proprietary feed to be updating the firmware that runs our world? In a time when free access to information is a hot button issue, we cannot afford to leave this issue aside. The release of unauthorized information by the likes of Wikileaks has already provoked two popular revolutions in the Middle East, with many more crowds of unhappy citizens standing in line to be next.

 

 

As democracy spreads, and as transparency and freedom of information become more sophisticated, one word will become a byword around the world: praxeology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology), the science that informs decisions and action. Ethical choices are made at every level, not just the top. Good leadership is a question of praxeology; the more democratic our world becomes, not only political but economic democracy, and every other kind of democracy, the better our praxeology must be. It is praxeology that decides what course of action machines like Nao the robot will follow. The rules of computer interfaces like Kinect are entirely praxeological in nature, and should be decided by democratic, open means.

A Divine Something Gives Me a Sign

On Bad Omens

By John Taylor; 2010 July 11, Rahmat 18, 167 BE

In case you did not notice it, we just suffered through a heat wave.

Our family has chosen not to have air conditioning; instead, we use ceiling fans. Fortunately, we do not listen to weather forecasts in the mass media, so the heat wave was almost over before we realized that we were undergoing a heat wave. Most human suffering comes from bad expectations.

My daughter is attending summer school at Hagersville High School to make up her mathematics course. Normally she takes a school bus but last Wednesday, in the sweltering heat, I drove her to school. Our car does not have air conditioning either, to speak of, so I drove with the windows down. Walking around this small town -- it is slightly smaller than Dunnville -- I discovered that it was market day. Hagersville has a much better farmer's market --by "better," I mean that its prices are actually lower than the grocery stores, and it has farmers who are willing to dicker; one even dropped his prices at closing time, "So that I won't have to carry it all home." That is my kind of market. I purchased a basket of soft cherries for a quarter of the normal price.

I had promised to pick up Silvie after school, so I drove slowly around town, checking out the attractions. I must have been going twenty kilometres an hour when a heavy object dropped onto my hood. It immediately disappeared, but a fluff of down on the windshield wipers indicated that it must have been a bird. It was so hot, birds were literally dropping dead out of the sky. That has never happened to me before.

I spent a few hours in the Hagersville branch of the Haldimand Public Library, which had its air conditioner turned up so high that it was almost cold. I basked in the cold, as I read over the draft of People Without Borders that I had printed out for the occasion. I was not pleased with what I was reading. I hung on until it was almost time to pick up Silvie.

Then there was an explosion. A woman ran in to say we should evacuate. Another couple of booms and a power outage had everybody out in a few minutes. I walked across the street and saw the source of the problem. Sparks were flying from a wire across from the library. Finally, in a shower of sparks the power line to the library fell onto the road. A couple of concerned citizens warned cars away turning onto the road with the live wire. The fire station was right next to the library, so I walked over to tell them, but the doors were locked. I do not believe in cell phones, so I left the others to contact the authorities.

The delay from the explosions meant that Silvie had already left in her school bus when I arrived at the High School, so I drove home alone. Later on we were sitting in the living room when another bird hit the living room window and dropped dead to the ground. It was a starling. Again, that has never happened before. I am enough of an ancient history buff to realize that if such things had happened to somebody living anywhere in the Ancient World, they would surely have regarded these occurrences as bad omens.

I did not worry about omens, but I was taken aback. As a Baha'i, I do believe that things happen for a reason; there is a wisdom behind every occurrence, even though there are also adequate scientific explanations as well. Still, I had been listening to lectures about the history of science. The belief in sympathetic magic dominated science until only a few centuries ago. Sympathetic magic is the idea that there are unseen links between objects that we now regard as entirely coincidental; for example, the "cordial" (latin for "heart") was a liquid medication that had things like sunflower seeds and gold dust in it. This was because of the magical idea that "heart" was connected to "sun," and "gold."

I would not have written about any of this if I had not come across the following passage at the start of Zenophon's Memorabilia, his memoirs about his experiences with his beloved teacher, Socrates.

"In the first place, what evidence did they produce that Socrates refused to recognise the gods acknowledged by the state?"

Like Plato, Zenophon was indignant about the false accusations that ended in the execution of Socrates. Unlike Plato, Zenophon emphasized the piety of Socrates in his defense. He continues,

"Was it that he did not sacrifice? or that he dispensed with divination? On the contrary, he was often to be seen engaged in sacrifice, at home or at the common altars of the state. Nor was his dependence on divination less manifest. Indeed that saying of his, "A divinity [or: a divine something] gives me a sign," was on everybody's lips. So much so that, if I am not mistaken, it lay at the root of the imputation that he imported novel divinities; though there was no greater novelty in his case than in that of other believers in oracular help, who commonly rely on omens of all sorts: the flight or cry of birds, the utterances of man, chance meetings, or a victim's entrails."

Oracles and divination no doubt acted like weather forecasts do for us. If you believe you know what is going to happen, be it a bird falling from the sky, or what the weatherman says it is going to be like, you are in effect throwing an emotional wrench into the works of how you relate to the world, to the past and the future. As I said at the start, even when the weatherman is right, it does not make it easier to take what is coming. Anticipation is often worse than the event.

Finally, I did hear a report in the news, which I found surprising. It seems that this heat wave was not a local phenomenon. It was happening around the world, from New York to Beijing to London. This may have happened before, but I do not remember such an event. A global heat wave? Surely, that is global warming at work.

When I heard that this was a global phenomenon, I began to rethink the divination thing. Maybe birds falling from the sky really is an omen. An ancient would be in a tizzy about such a dire event, and so should we. We know more about the science of global warming, but that should put us in a tizzy even more. The sort of tizzy that leads to act to save our skins. In that respect, we have no advantage over the ancients, since action, sacrifice, comes from a place beyond the comprehension of logic or science. As Socrates put it, "A divine something gives me a sign."

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Why we do not save our planet