I’ve only recently discovered LibraryThing. It’s a website where you build a library of books you own (or have read), rate them and then receive useful recommendations based on what others with similar tastes like.

It’s noice and I loike it. I loike it a lot.

This is a fairly natural thing to do and if we are aware of our own confirmation bias we can do a lot to gradually eliminate those ideas we previously held to be true but which were, in fact, false.

However, I’ve noticed that when two people attempt to discuss a contentious issue from two very different starting assumptions, instead of fostering a willingness to seek the truth regardless of the impact to our existing beliefs, we are driven further toward defending them against this new ‘enemy’.

I think that if our goal is truth then we ought to spend most of our time challenging our existing beliefs in dialogue with people with whom we have much in common. That way we’ll be less inclined to go into defensive mode and more likely to gracefully discard what was previously an incorrect belief.

This would mean that in many cases there would have to be a certain level of exclusivity to discussions but I think it would go a long way toward self-improvement even though it may take a very long time to unravel long-held presuppositions.

I want to be able to thrash out what I see as difficulties to do with consciousness or first causes without having to deal with the distraction of religious dogma or new age pseudo-science and, more importantly, I’d imagine that there are many conversations that other people would like to have without me jumping in and blurting out what I know must be true.

So, for those of you who have found me an irritation in the past, I hope to be less in your face with what I perceive to be the absolute truth. If you think I’ve got something wrong and you hold very similar starting assumptions to me then please feel free to rigorously discuss your ideas with me. If you hold very different starting assumptions please try to allow for the fact that you may be wrong and I will try my best to do likewise. We may, after all, both be wrong.

In a perfect world we should be happier to learn that we have been wrong than that we have ‘won’ an argument.

An interesting experiment would be to play a series of audio clips of various speakers to people whilst monitoring their heart rates. It would be handy to have them also rate the clips on how strongly they agree or disagree with the speaker.

Once the results were in I then wonder if you could use software to analyse the audio and make predictions as to how strongly a person is likely to respond on an emotional level to a particular style of speech.

• Adolph Hitler
• Todd Bentley
• Richard Dawkins
• NT Wright
• EO Wilson
• GW Bush
• David Lange

Here’s my specs for the ultimate device:

• Small enough to be worn on the wrist (perhaps twice the size of a watch but more fitted)
• An in-built or pull-out screen that suffices and has a minimum 800×600 resolution
• A universal docking port.
• Open source software AND hardware
• Phone
• Good quality camera (~4 megapixels + optical zoom)
• Audio and Video playback
• Desktop-equivalent processor + 4gb ram (to replace current PC but can be hotplugged into screen, keyboard, mouse and other devices wherever I happen to be)
• At least 160GB storage.
• Bottle opener
• Assorted knives, saws, scissors and picky things (air travel issues here)
• GPS
• Heart rate and other physiological monitors
• IR and radio remote control and key control for car, TV and house
• Credit card built in
• Solar panel on the back in case I can’t get near a power point
• Emergency beacon
• Tape measure
• Minesweeper and solitaire (isn’t that obligatory?)
• Total lockdown of sensitive information

And that’s all I can think of right now. Anything less is just not going to blow my socks off.

When my iMate finally dies I’m probably going to go back to my trusty Nokia 8210 which pretty much does everything I currently need a phone to do.

SELECT p.post_title, ROUND((SUM(LENGTH(w.comment_content))/LENGTH(p.post_content))*100) AS roi, LENGTH(p.post_content) AS post_length, SUM(LENGTH(w.comment_content)) AS comment_length FROM blog.wp_posts p INNER JOIN blog.wp_comments w ON w.comment_post_ID = p.ID GROUP BY p.ID ORDER BY roi DESC LIMIT 10

It returns the top 10 blog posts ranked by the percentage return on a post measured by the number of characters invested in the opening post compared to the number of characters returned in the comments.

My top 3:

1. Free Will (43,774% ROI)
2. Last Western Heretic (5,304% ROI)
3. The Location of Jesus (5,223% ROI)

I’ve been bellyaching for years now about how silly it is that there is no way to cycle from Auckland’s North Shore to the city centre. I discovered getacross.org.nz yesterday and encourage everyone to take a moment to visit and register your support for the idea.

The bicycle is the most energy-efficient machine ever made. You give it a drop of oil each month and all you have to do is eat some food to power it. Bicycles take up far less room on the road and can travel almost half as fast as a car on the open road and it often faster than cars in city traffic. Cycling is also far better for your health than sitting in a car.

The next time you are able to observe a traffic queue at lights try to imagine all the cars gone and the occupants standing on the road exactly where they are. You’ll see that cars are a cumbersome and grossly inefficient way of getting around within a city.

The downside of riding a bicycle in a city built for cars is that you act like a human pollution filter (especially if you are puffing a bit) and it is horrendously easy to get yourself killed.

I’d like to see our cities redesigned to favour walkers and cyclists and have car traffic relegated to motorways and as second-rate citizens within cities themselves. Cars are still useful and are probably here to stay but we need to recognise that there are better ways of getting around our cities and that one of the things holding this back is the fact that our infrastructure is often designed exclusively for motor vehicles without regard to walkers or cyclists.

The problem is that it’s completely constrained to our current world view and doesn’t come anywhere near covering all the potential issues that are ahead of us (or even many existing issues like abortion, war, stem cells, euthanasia and so on).

Here’s my initial stab at a theory for discussion (read my meme post if you are unfamiliar with the term):

“Morality is the degree to which an expressed meme will affect the survival of the host’s memes and genes.”

I’ve played with lots of different variations and I suspect this one has holes in it too but I’m putting it out there for critique.

I’ve included the meme because non-living objects and organisms that are unable to share ideas are only really directly responding to their environment and so can really do no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. One could argue that we only ever respond to our environments but in a more complex way in which case you would probably have to throw out the concept of morality altogether (or perhaps introduce the meme of morality to further influence how we respond?).

I’ve treated the issue as a matter of survival of memes and genes in much the same way that Dawkins treated our bodies as if they were “lumbering robots” that exist to make more copies of genes.

Please, feel free to pick this apart or even come up with your own all-encompassing theory.

[edit:] I’m becoming less and less satisfied with this hypothesis; it doesn’t cover the ‘wrongness’ we feel when people torture animals (or perhaps it does if the actions that are tied to harming animals are also tied to harming people). Also, we can see that morality evolves (slavery, animal welfare, capital punishment, etc) so it may well be that any definition of morals has to evolve as well?

Living things are made of lots of cells and cells have DNA in them. DNA are long, double strands of molecules made from just four different kinds of molecule that provide a kind of a blueprint for the organism it belongs to. A gene is one of many small regions of DNA that is able to be read (or be ‘expressed’) and contain specific instructions on how to build living structures. If DNA were a blueprint, genes would be the details like “the door handle goes here” or “use concrete for the floor”.

When living things reproduce they are really just making duplicates of themselves. Asexual reproduction means making a direct copy of the DNA and sexual reproduction means mixing up two sets of DNA to come up with a slightly different version. Sexual reproduction has been very successful because each time you mix up the blueprints to make a new organism you have a chance at making a slightly better version than the original which can then go on to make more copies of itself when it reproduces. If, in the mixing process, one of the genes gets changed a tiny bit to say “make the legs bigger” and the creature is born into a world where bigger legs are an advantage the chances are that it’s going to have more offspring than others.

So, over many generations some genes survive the ride in tact while others mutate and provide an advantage to their hosts. Others are less fortunate due to bad mutations or just plain bad luck and their host dies without having children. Some genes are bad – like a gene for old age cancer – but survive the ride anyway because they haven’t got in the way of reproduction. This set of genetic behaviours is called evolution by natural selection.

We all have genes and are the product of genes. In fact, from our gene’s perspective, if we were to look for our true purpose in life it would be fair to say that it is to survive long enough to make as many copies of our genes as possible.

Memes

The concept of memes was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memes are ideas that spread from one creature to another. Like genes they inhabit the bodies of their hosts and can form large groups of ideas as well as mutate over time. Unlike genes they are able to spread sideways to other people instead of only to direct offspring, they can be spread individually instead of en mass and they can spread at much faster rates and therefore change very rapidly as well.

A meme can be an idea, a language, a ditty, a belief, a religion, a saying, a joke, a fishing technique or even wearing yo’ cap sideways. This blog entry is a meme. I’m spreading a meme from my body to yours.

Like genes, memes that are of benefit to the host organism are likely increase in numbers the longer the host remains alive to spread them around and like cancer-activating genes, some memes can be fatal to the host but are able to be spread before killing it.

Genes are like the hardware we come standard with and memes are like the software that gets installed. Some hardware components work perfectly, some can be faulty. Some software can boost our productivity and some come as email attachments entitled “funny_screensaver.exe”.

So what?

Over many millions of years we’ve adapted clever ways to detect whether someone has good genes or not and we’re quite picky about who would make a good partner to make copies of our genes with. But we’ve only been doing the meme thing for a relatively short amount of time and with the volatile mixture of poor meme-recognition and the sheer speed at which memes can mutate we have to be very careful not to allow bad memes to spread. A bad meme can do infinitely more damage than genetic heart defects and cancer. Just ask a victim of the crusades, the holocaust, jihad, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, Afghanistan, the KKK, the slave ships, the Inquisition or the Roman Empire.

One of the best ways to inoculate your body against a bad meme is the liberal application of rational thought. Most bad memes don’t stand up to reasoned scrutiny and most bad memes occur in environments that discourage free thought and criticism. If a meme doesn’t encourage scrutiny or open criticism then it’s possibly hiding something. Stay on your guard; life’s too short for bad memes.

And that, my fellow organisms, is genes and memes (and why they matter) in a nutshell.