Causality

I’m thinking about causality a lot recently. What triggers it is I realized I haven’t got a lot going on that can cause something in my life. It’s very predictable. Everyday I go to the university, continue doing something I left with the day before and that’s it. This is a closed society, here, the city I am living in. I am not used to it at all, still, after one and a half years of trying. I try to like it, and in fact, I do for the most part. But this kind of like is by default, because there isn’t a forseen alternative. I have the opportunity to use my time on something I like and am good at. I don’t need to deal with too many social interactions. But on the other hand, unpredicability is the poetic side of life. I gave that up and part of me is yearning for it.

I was trained by the metropolis to let loose. To focus on what I can control and let chance take over those I can’t. It was a beautiful philosophy of life, with the delicate balance between me and not me. From one point there can be ten weighted edges, and although my personality leads me to choose the one of my preference, the environment could push me to picking one from the other nine. Some different decisions, albeit small, like the choice of dinner, could lead to life changes; and some albeit big, like choosing education, can look trivial when time goes by. One cannot estimate the capacity of causality among choices, and that is the art of metropolis life.

Thus I am extremely adroit at making small decisions. I’ve trained myself to adopting a decision-making procedure that is both practical and efficacious. And when the decision is proven to be bad, I don’t cling too much to it. At the end of the day, I can always say that I’ve immersed into life.

But here I’ve taken on a whole different strategy. There aren’t a lot of decisions to make, and if there are any, they are mostly not triggers of anything unexpected. There are conventions on everything, based on what the predicability is high on all fronts.

A direct consequence of this kind of society is that people can feel trapped. Although we don’t know if we have free will, but the appearance of free will is not easily felt in this society. We don’t feel we are free by following convensions. We feel free by coming up with our strategies for unique situations. To be fair, it is very rare for any situation to be unique, which is, not experienced by anyone else in the entire history, but that doesn’t make following other’s coping mechanism a better idea for everyone. In fact, solving problems independently is one of the strongest sources of pleasure, and it makes one mentally and phisically robust.

Thus spoke me. Sometimes I get this subtle feeling of floating above this society instead of being in it. More often, I have a stronger feeling of being an actor to play out my pre-destined role. This is what feels like in this kind of environment. When events have high predicability, one can easily jump out of their position and think what actually is going on here. A streamlined life. A 9-5 actress. Mostly I can go forward with an automatic force, or inertia. The friction is so small that the initial force can make one go strong for quite a while. During this time, life is on auto-pilot. It gives me a lot of time and energy to go metaphysical.

If metropolitan life is art, then small city life is for drudges. Incidentally, I admire a lot of nobel drudges. Even more so than artists.

AI Application and Caveats

I’ve been playing around with AI in academia for a while, and there are bunch of things that I think it can do and bunch of things it sucks.

  • It spits good terminologies. Sometimes we don’t know how to dive into a topic because we don’t know there are vocabularies that describe the phenomenon or pattern, with which we can easily search and learn, and AI is handy in collating all those fancy terms that you wouldn’t easily know. Taking from here, one can find peer-reviewed resources to dig deeper.
  • Caveat: not reliable for direct answers. I used it to answer my questions every now and then, and its answers even contradict themselves. Silver lining is that when reading them carefully, the incorrectness is obvious, but it can be time-consuming so not worth it.
  • It can collate college course schedules for one to know in what sequence to learn a subject. Self-study sometimes get tricky when one follows a flexible schedule and at some point they cannot go forward because there are something they don’t know which is not a google-click away. Thus using college schedules is an easy method. Most colleges have their course schedules open for public so AI can rarely make huge mistakes. Even it make mistakes it’s not a big deal.
  • Caveat: from here it’s better to seek for other resources (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare etc).
  • It gives good sentence parsing. For philosophical, mathematical texts, or generally any texts that are peer-reviewed and is meant to be understood (which excludes anything poetic), I use AI to help me parse them whenever I don’t understand. For a language model I guess that’s what it was meant to do at the first place.
  • Caveat: It mansplains. But good thing is one can shut it up anytime they feel like.

Philosophy: Measurement in Science

  1. Before starting everything, a disclaimer that all these are learned from Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia page. So a huge credit. At the front.
  2. First let’s look at the properties that are measured. According to Euclid, there is this property with lines, surface or solid called magnitude. If one magnitude is a multiple of another, we can use the second one as a measurement; if two are both multiples of some third magnitude, then the third is a measure of the other two. Alright, but not all magnitudes have this whole number relation, then how can we quantify the relation between them then? Euclid used ratio of magnitudes, which uses both rational and irrational numbers, thus can describe numerical relations in a broader spectrum. *my take on this: measurement essentially is about comparison, or relation. Comparison is only possible between magnitudes that are about the same property, e.g. we cannot compare the mass of an object with the volume of another. And when the comparison can be expressed with multiples of some value, it is called measurement; otherwise there is a ratio concept to solve the problem. Bottom line is that the magnitudes have to be of the same properties. I also conceptualize magnitude as property of properties.
  3. Now comes Aristotle. What does he have to say about this? Well, he seperates properties as quantities and qualities. Quantities are those that can be compared among different objects with a standardized scale, and the results are repeatable; while qualities are the properties that after being compared by different people, the outcomes cannot be guaranteed to be the same. Aristotle thinks quantities of one property can only be perceived as an amount and that’s it, there isn’t a more or less degree of that amount; but qualities have degrees. But as for one quality, he doesn’t say whether the different degrees of that quality are all still considered that quality, or are considered different qualities. Some guy (Duns Scotus) believes that qualities can also be operated on! Like adding or subtracting degrees.
  4. Let’s welcome Leibniz to the stage. As usual, he got something to say about this topic. His idea basically is that, look, Euclid, I know it’s pretty cool to measure extended magnitudes in your geometrical thingies, but see, actually the intensities of sensations we perceive can also be measured, and thanks to me, we an now unify all natural changes with degrees, and let’s just agree that this has a cool name of “principle of continuity.”
  5. Here comes Kant. He pretty much agrees on Leibniz, but he thinks Leibniz’s idea can look more elegent. So adding on that, he says that we can now classify magnitudes with being extensive or intensive. The former ones are those extend in time and space, those “in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole.” And the latter is the properties that are preceived by us immediately, like color and warmth, instead of being perceived part by part like the boring spatial ones. How to represent the latter? He thinks it should be represented by how far it goes from that point to negation.
  6. Alright, those are not absolute. New science came, and there are now more ideas on what magnitudes are, but I refrain from digression.
  7. Let’s get right into measurement, after all the digression, yay! There are multiple schools, and let’s tackle one by one.
  8. First, mathematical measurements. But before that, let’s get something straight. So the fact that we often represent reality with numbers are actually not that sound. Imagine temperature. 20 degree celcius is not twice hot as 10, because the 0 point on that thermometer is not the absence of temperature, but an arbitrary point just for the purpose of convenience. Intervals don’t always carry meaning, too. Imagine our opinions on something, scaled from 1-10, like a hot guy. Between a 7 and an 8 doesn’t mean they have the interval of 1 as between 5 and 6. There isn’t an exact 1-worth of handsomeness. Now let’s dive into mathematical measurement. These people are all over how to better represent reality in terms of numbers and number relations. This person Hermann von Helmholtz has this beautiful quote, “What is the objective meaning of expressing through denominate numbers the relations of real objects as magnitudes, and under what conditions can we do this?” Basically, he asks 1) what have we assumed before using this mathematical measurement and 2) how adequate or limited are we when we use them? Following these, a general rule of thumb is that we use mathematical structure to measure the relations in reality that mirrors math relations. Like bigger than in numbers and lengths in reality. In other words, we map relations in reality to relations in maths. And people would assume this kind of mapping as isomorphisom or homomorphism. Actually, people have a lotta different views apart from the aforementioned. Firstly, they have different views on what actually is this object in real world. The object being measured, the sophisticated philosophers call “relata,” can be among the following concepts (or more): it is the thing that’s there; it is our perception; it should be an idealized object of that thing; it is a universal property that can belong to a whole lotta things. Based on these differences, the measurability is debatable because they don’t even agree on what is being measured. Now we can introduce some different ideas on that. A consensus, though, is that measurement is assigning numbers to magnitudes with a unit. Unite is important because it is 1, wheras others are all compared to it. Then the question is what is the right way of asigning? Some people says you gotta make sure when you make algebraic operations like adding, multiplying, etc, the reality stays true. Basically, after manipulating the numbers for an equation, the reality must stay good as well. Some believes that the two expectations from objects are comparison and addition, so they two suffice as a additive numerical representation. And if you can measure 1 thing directly then you are measuring fundamental magnitudes. Other magnitudes have to be calculated and they are called derivative magnitudes.
  9. There are also 4 different scales: objects in the same class without orders, nominal; ordered but interval has no standard meaning, ordinal; ordered and interval has meaning, interval; values that can be calculated as their porportion because they have an absolute zero point, ratio. This is according to a guy with a cool name of S.S. Stevens (is that really not a stutter?). Anyways, he later refined this theory, adding linear and logrithmatic into the interval kind, cause some intervals have equal magnitudes while others have exponential ones, and thus only their logrithmatic value is taken onto the scale. For ratio scales, he catagorized them into those with natural units and those without. Why would our Stevens wanna catagorize that? Well, by catagorization, he can make different operations on different catagories of scales without losing their empirical truthfulness, and that in turn could mark the scales’ catagory. (Actually I don’t really understand why would he wanna do that. Isn’t that circular?)
  10. Now comes the measurement of sensation. There’s a guy named Gustav Fechner (I just realized how this whole area is a boy’s club, but I won’t digress to that now) realized that we can actually measure it with experiments, basically taking down the scales of stimuli with “just noticeable differences.” Turns out when sensations go up linearly, the magnitudes of stimuli go logarithmically. With this law, people started to measure sensation with the measurement of stimuli. But some people beg to differ, e.g. Campell, who thinks as long as the numbers cannot be concantenated and then represent a new reality bearing that number, that doesn’t count as a foundamental measurement! But Stevens argues back cuz he thinks they are consistent and non-random assignments, so they are fine.
  11. I didn’t understand how RTM works with triplets.

Academia vs Others

The university is a very simple place. I never realized it even in my bachelor’s program back home. People discuss what is it, why is it and how it should be theoretically, and don’t worry too much about the practicality of these theories. They are not supposed to be practical. That’s the point. The world outside of the academia is where these theories get to be practiced, and they are always compromised, so the art of practicality is how to compromise, and what to compromise. 

People rarely judge compromises in the executive world. They judge mostly what that execution achieves, either as regards to influence or competitiveness. They don’t really do value judgement on each procedures, but the final result is still under evaluation of such. The academia is another situation: people are careful to make good and right decisions on each process, but the final output is not very much judged whether they are significant or not. 

I prefer the second one, of course. But I have to admit that I oftentimes find myself using some philosophies I learned from the world of execution, because I don’t want to end up building a triviality. I learned so much from it, but the academia is the place to teach me the principles of compromise. I have some hunch about it, but now I can understand it in a more rigorous way. 

Some compromises are better than others. And without compromise, one cannot really achieve anything, not even a theoretical endeavour. To craft a theory is also an execution, and it needs everything one needs for casting an iron ax. The most important features of an ax to an axe-wielder is often the handle and and the kind of force it applies to its objects, and for a theory too. But an ironsmith needs to execute all the details with equal attention to make possible the user face and the function. For a theorist, they need to do all the heavy-lifting work too, proving, testing, reviewing, in order to produce some short and elegant concepts that are tenable or even useful. 

Retreating to academia (not the best verb, but I often feel this way) makes a bit more hesitant in doing things. I started this habit of hoping to craft it closer to perfection and the consequence is that I expand myself too much and cannot easily finish any project. Expansion is easier than the execution of one section, because the details are not exciting and sometimes frustrating. But expansion is necessary, too. Without it, the execution of one section could be unstable because it overlooks its position in the big picture. 

A Practical Procedure of Studying a Subject

One can only study one or two subjects at the same time in college, but with internet, anyone can approach any subject they are interested in without much hussle.

A standard way of looking at a subject is top-down: knowing its nature, its structure and then diving into details. Stanford philosophical encyclopedia is a nice resource to start for a wide range of subjects. Philosophers are responsible for answering a lot of fundamental questions, which never should have a definite anser. A question with an answer is just a piece of information. Knowledge is a jungle, our understanding of which is limited to the length we’ve gone through so far.

For dealing with details, AI can be handy. It can generate the standard learning process of a subject from top universities, and following that there are online playlists that deal with these sub-branches. If one really wish to dig into a field, a rigorous study is necessary, otherwise there could be patches that are left out if roaming within it without a method.

But roaming is fun. I roam all the time. The rule of thumb is that one should always be immersed in learning. If the systematical way fails to grab one’s attention, then it is better to leave it for a while, roam in the field, get some fun, and then come back. Forcing oneself to pay attention is miserable. We have suffered enough in life, and really should reduce pain whenever we can.

Problem-solving is essential, and should be done with quality instead of quantity. Wrong answers are treasures, from which one learns the most. If the answers are mostly correct, then it is only a waste of time. Mostly wrong answers are just due to different understandings of a concept from the official one. Understanding a concept in the same way as others is important in that people can only discuss the subject when they have a collection of vocabularies that defines the same meaning. Otherwise it is just one man’s game.

And if one hopes to learn something in order to do something, then it is quintessential to just do it. Think about it, try to do it. And if there is any problem, come back to online resources and look it up. After doing it a little bit, then use the time that’s spared for a systematic learning, so as to do it better. There is a hypothesis of vicious regress concerning know-how: if one needs pre-knowledge in any action, given that grabing the knowledge is also an action, there would be an infinite process before actually taking the action one wants to act at the first place. So just do it.

Mathematical Problems

Today I am thinking about problem-solving and how to generally look at a problem.

All mathematical fomulas were written down at some point in history by some people who wanted to solve a problem but lacks a way of thinking about it. Formulas gives out relations among expressions for us to think about problems within their contexts, so that we can reduce the problem and eventually generate an answer to it if lucky enough. Problems can be solved with certainty or probability. There are many standard methods to solve it, exhaustion for example, is one. Looking at all the possibilities and find the right answer. Or one can employ their human intuition to try out the ones that look most likely to be true, so as to reduce the time invested in the process. If for a certain kind of problem there is a codified flow of trying out possible answers, then it can be programmed into computer to try them out for us as algorithms. It can reduce our mannual work, but without that intuition, some flows can be extremely time and energy consuming.

Mathematical problems are extremely elegant, in that it lacks any complexity we have to deal with in daily life about an ordinary issue. We deal with problems all day long, and our pattern-finding can be absurdly wrong, because there are so many factors involved in any issue that we cannot know for sure whether the factors we observe are contributers. Mathematics is not something like that. It is a self-sufficient world where all the factors are in it. The initial factors are very simple, like throwing in a couple of basic lego blocks in different shapes, which can be replicated infinitely. With different amount of those blocks people can build complex relations that solve their own problem and facilitate others’ discovery. Coming up with problems and solutions are both creative processes, and both require an insight into the nature of the problems, tools at hand and other resources that can be manipulated into a more handy and specialized tool. Sometimes, however, we have to take a step back and look at our tools with its compartments, and think whether we need to wield such a contraption for this kind of problem. Sometimes the instrument is too much for our problem, and we need to reduce our tool first.

In any case, I think one should stay pleasant during any problem-solving. Intuition is only at work when one’s brain is active and full of cuiriosity and whimsy. Generally, I come up with more solutions after a good laugh. And laughing also gives me a good appetite.

Brute Force

Dad’s childhood house has just been decided to be demolished. These kinds of decisions are always acted upon the objects they found interesting, upon the people who seem to possess these objects. 

I don’t remember much about this house. My mom was born in the city, and she married my dad, a village guy. Dad doesn’t look village though. He has the appearance of a lady’s man. I once asked him, were you popular among the girls at your school? He went, I wouldn’t say otherwise. 

Mom didn’t like villages. It was backwards. It still is. When mom and dad took me to dad’s house for the New Year’s celebration, she was asked to sit with all the other women and children at a table with half the height of a proper one. Women could not eat with the same status as men. She decided not to go there again. And she kept her words. So I didn’t really go either. 

Thus I cannot say much about it. I have some vague memories about an unappealing toilet that was just a deep hole into the ground. I had to walk pass a dog that looked like he didn’t enjoy strangers releasing themselves in the toilet of his house. I had to be accompanied by someone from the family everytime I had to pee or take a shit just for this reason. They would wait for me, not really outside, because we both were. The toilet had a roof, so it provided some shelter for pee-takers during rain and snow, but if it was windy, it wouldn’t have more functionalities to offer. 

During the few times that I was actually there, I remembered being chilly almost all the time. Radiators were non-existent in the villages, and people generally burn coals to endure the winter. Coldness could lure people into making silly decisions, like shutting their windows and doors during the night while buring coal. Dad was nearly killed once, being very warm with the coal buring all night, absolutely no draught sneaking inside from any cracks of the windows. 

The house was made of wood and brick. The wooden roof smelled moldy, probably due to ventilation problem. It had a Chinese structure, which means all the rooms in one household connected into a circle, and the doors all face towards the center of it. The central area bounded by the roomss were a garden. The main gate faces the main room, indicating the highest status of the people living in it, usually by the exclusive standard of old age. 

Dad’s house was a little different in that there wasn’t a main room in that area, so grandparents lived in the one on the right side. I guess rightness is still higher than leftness, but this is just my conjecture. Their room was symmetrical. Walking inside, there was a table with the shape of a cube, and on each side there were two chairs roughly with the shape of two cubes stacking on tope of each other. The two chairs faced towards the door. Grandparents were supposed to sit on the two chairs facing outwards to talk to their inferiors. Pictures were hung on the walls, with symmetrical constellations. There probably were some ones capturing the reminiscence of the cultural revolution, but that I don’t really recall. The two sides of the table-chair centrality were communal areas and grandparents’ bed respectively. This table was that proper dining table at which only men can eat. 

I cannot say everything about it. I cannot even describe it from the perspective of an insider. Whenever thinking about the condo of my grandparents from my mom’s side, I attach it with a personal connection, as if thinking about a body part of mine. It is my extention. But dad’s house has always been far from me. I was a sporadic visitor. Looking at their lifestyle with curiosity and dazzlling. 

Dad’s parents passed some years ago. He’d always had a strong connection with them, but especially after he parted with mom, since he didn’t have more family members other than his parents and me. Mom’s parents love him, too, but he had to keep an arm’s length. Dad used to be a painter, and I used to hang a lot of his paintings in my room. When they parted, mom packed dad’s things and put them outside of our condo. He didn’t come to pick them up. Mom didn’t take them back, either. 

Dad texted me some days ago, saying he was going to travel back to the village for some demolition process. He stopped visiting it regularly after his parents passed away. 

He doesn’t have much belongs due to the fact they were left outside of the condo in which we used to live together. I remember going back to that condo once after mom had sold it, and took a look at the area where dad’s belonging’s used to be. It was occupied by something else. 

The vicinity of his house was planned for some reconstruction project. The village used to be a historical town, and it was decided the original architecture should be rebuilt in order to remember this fact.

Antiques demolished for a reconstruction of official antiques. 

In a court, a judge would declare a statement false without material evidence. In a scientific world, my memory is this kind of narrative. All the materials are easily demolished by invincible force. Only the mind, along with the memories, keeps archive, retains history, celebrates love and courage. I trust it and cherishes it. With my pen, I materialize them, until it is proven false due to the lack of evidence. 

On Philosophy: Existance, Event, Object

This is something that I decided to try out. Everyday I am bothered by having to attend some courses that teach me nothing new when I leave the class. So I decided to do a summary everyday to reflect on what I learned during the day that’s actually new and worthy to learn. And they are the moments when I laugh a bit with epiphany.

1) Philosophers argue over how to reduce existence to a basic element in reality, like whether it can be treated as a property, and if so, what is its position in the hierarchy of all the properties that an object has.

2) There is a debate over what counts as property. Basically one school believes that there are plenty of properties (countably infinite) out there, and each sentence with a predicate assigns properties, without the need to consider the predicates’ significance, and they have an “abundance conception of properties.” Another one believes that properties are not that many! We gotta be economical in deciding whether something is a property, i.e., only those who truly categories a bunch of objects with their intrinsic features count. They have a sparse conception of properties.

3) Perdurantism vs endurantism. The former believes objects are 4-dimentional and each temporal picture of the 3-d object is a part in the objects entire existance. While the latter agrees to disagree. They believe objects are wholly present at all temporal points. Their objects are 3-d and don’t take time into consideration.

4) Derived from this, there is a perdurantist view on what an event is: they think event occurs if objects’ properties change over a period of time.

5) And based from this, there are a bunch of interesting quotes from both schools over event vs object. For example, Katherine Halway says, change is “the possession of different properties by different temporal parts of an object,” which links event to change, and, which links this concept to calculus in mathematics. For example, we can calculate an event’s intensity based on its first derivative.

6) Necessity vs contingency. These are properties of objects or events. Necessity means the existance/occurance is guaranteed and independently true of all circumstance; contingency means that is not guaranteed, caused and possible to be false.

7) Alright! So is there really a difference between objects and events? Can one merely treat them as the same entitiy? Yes! But first let’s look at the differences.

VerbSpacial BoundaryTemporal BoundarylocationMovablilityPersistence
ObjectExistCrispVagueLocated at a spaceYesEndurance
EventOccurVagueCrispCo-location is possibleNoPerdurance

But they are treated as the same by some schools, because these two entities’s properties that are not under the same field are not diametrically apart from each other, but are comparative. They can overlap too. According to Nelson Goodman, an object is just a monotonous event and an event an unstable object (not the exact words). And Alfred North Whitehead also has a nice quote: endurance is the property of finding its pattern reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event.

Philosophy & Maths

This is something that I decided to try out. Everyday I am bothered by having to attend some courses that teach me nothing new when I leave the class. So I decided to do a summary everyday to reflect on what I learned during the day that’s actually new and worthy to learn. And they are the moments when I laugh a bit with epiphany.

1) There are a bunch of properties that are hereditory along the lines of graphs and their minors. And for some hereditory properties there are a bunch of simple forbidden minors. Some smart people namely Neil Robertson and Paul D. Seymour proved that we can know whether complex graphs have certain hereditory properties by testing whether they have these properties’ fobidden minors. If they don’t, guess what, they have those properties, and it’s also true the other way around.


2) Arguments are structures, composed with premises and conclusions. Premises are propositions in favor of that conclusion. There can be some variations of the concretness of that logical structure: P guarantess the truthness of C, or P makes C closer to truth; P implies C; or P just makes C more convincing.


3) An entity have multiple properties and they are not equally weighted. The dominant one might give name to the entity like how drunkard gets the name from their drunkness. These properties are predicated of the entities and thus predication is that act of judgement. As opposed to properties that are universal, tropes are the “properties” that are particular. Also, predicate is also the linguistic term for the chunk except the subject, which makes sense since that chunk is right now assigning a property to an entity!


4) Those most heavily weighted properties are one way of determining the nature of the entity to which they are clinging, in other words, without those properties, the entity is not that thing anymore! Another way of deciding the nature of that entity is its cause. I’m kinda surprised that the materialistically smallest component is generally not considered the entity’s nature at all.


5) Oh right. Apart from the property thingies, an entities can also have accidents, which don’t really hold sway over the entity in question.


6) And what is nature? It’s how things go without intervention, whether that’s human, divine, doesn’t matter. And natural science is the study of how they go. It does’t really care about what exactly is nature though. It just takes a grand concept and study the laws that govern that big, big picture.


7) And Aristotle said something quite fun. He says there is no truth unless a property is predicated of something.

学术

今天看了一下学术的划分。

我以前没有意识到的是数学及计算机科学是单独的一类，也就是划做形式科学。另外，我很意外的是实用学科就直接被分类为“职业”，有点戳着脊梁骨骂人的感觉。

另外，地理是被放在社会科学的，我以前也没有想过，当然，它同时也属于自然科学。在关于物权和知识产权的课中教授曾提过领域算作社会的一部分，也就是说，社会的基本组成部分不仅包括人、动物这些生命体，也包括这些生命体所占有的地理区域。但将地理看作如此重要的社会概念，甚至被放在社会学科的框架中，还是超过我的预料。

从分类能看到，目前大学的教育体系大体关注在求真（科学）、求善美（人文）以及职业训练。