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Day 3655, Dynamic Choice.

Daily picture, Definitions

Dynamic Choice (SEP)

Sometimes a series of choices do not serve one’s concerns well even though each choice in the series seems perfectly well suited to serving one’s concerns. In such cases, one has a dynamic choice problem. Otherwise put, one has a problem related to the fact that one’s choices are spread out over time. There is a growing philosophical literature, which crosses over into psychology and economics, on the obstacles to effective dynamic choice. This literature examines the challenging choice situations and problematic preference structures that can prompt dynamic choice problems. It also proposes solutions to such problems. Increasingly, familiar but potentially puzzling phenomena—including, for example, self-destructive addictive behavior and dangerous environmental destruction—have been illuminated by dynamic choice theory. This suggests that the philosophical and practical significance of dynamic choice theory is quite broad.

1. Challenging Choice Situations, Problematic Preference Structures, and Dynamic Choice Problems

Agents often lack some information about the consequences of each available option that they face in a choice situation (with the choice made under some risk or uncertainty about the outcome of that choice). But, even where such a lack of information is not at issue, effective choice over time can be extremely difficult given certain challenging choice situations or problematic preference structures, such as the ones described below. As will become apparent, these choice situations or preference structures can prompt a series of decisions that serve one’s large-scale, ongoing concerns very badly. (Of course, if, due perhaps to some substantial transformation(s), one is so fragmented over time that one has no large-scale, ongoing concerns to which one is persistently accountable, then inconsistency in one’s choices over time may be inevitable; but my primary interest here is in the philosophically puzzling cases of dynamic choice in which an agent remains accountable to certain large-scale, ongoing concerns that are nonetheless poorly served by her choices over time.)

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dynamic-choice/ 

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Day 3653, old and not so old.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

381 Knowing one’s ‘individuality’. – We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there – he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated.

385 The vain. – We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities others ascribe to us- in order to deceive ourselves.

390 Concealing mind. -When we catch someone concealing his mind from us we call him evil: and all the more so, indeed, if we suspect that he has done so out of politeness and philanthropy.

419 Party courage. – The poor sheep say to their shepherd: ‘go on ahead and we shall never lack the courage to follow you’. The poor shepherd, however, thinks to himself: ‘follow me and I shall never lack the courage to lead you’.

 

Day 3649, What do I say?

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry

Comunication is.

Am I the only one who knows what I am saying?

I am the only one who knows what I am saying?

Do I know what I am saying?

Can you tell what I am saying?

Can you tell what you think that I am saying?

Can you tell what you think I want to say?

Do you care what I say?

Do you just pretend?

Do I just pretend?

To know what I am saying.

Day 3647, Caged animals.

Poetry, My thoughts, Daily picture 
Gekooide dieren

Caged animals
Caged animals
From cage to cage
From institution to institution

From one cage to another I move,
the setting changes, but I do not,
not yet outside where I want to be, outside that cage.

But that world outside might
exist only here inside my head,
as hope without bars.

All those people out there, outside my cage,
I do not despise for their freedom,
but for their carelessness, their lack.

A lack of appreciation for their
cage without bars, their naivety,
their not knowing their own reality.

As a caged being I can say nothing,
I can pace back and forth like an animal,
but I am not able to speak.

As an animal I think in images,
feelings and reactions without words
that teach me, teach me nothing.

People talk and talk and convince
each other, confuse each other that this is so
and that is so, but only with words.

Only with words, hearsay,
from once, from the past, from him or her,
but without feeling.

Feeling that originates from the deepest
of what we all are,
caged animals.

Sunday 25 march 2007

In October 2006, I moved to Norway. It’s been 20 years, so I can be forgiven for not remembering everything so clearly, but aside from that excuse, I had a clear story in my mind about those first few years. This weekend, I read my blog from the first three years in Norway. Well, I didn’t actually read it all; I skimmed over it while I copied the text into a document (103 pages, 80.000 words) and fed it to a chatbot. I asked it all kinds of questions and requested it to show me all the quotes, and I was quite surprised. For the last 10 years, I’ve been writing a lot, and I feel like I know myself pretty well now. Because I think I know myself now, the time before the ten-year mark seems like the dark ages to me. It’s a period where I obviously thought about things. I left many relics behind in the form of books I’ve bought in those dark ages, but in my mind, it all felt pretty trivial.

The blog post was meant for family to read, and for the most part, it’s lighthearted. I talk about the weather, my work, and what I do in my free time. But I was also not afraid to share my feelings about life, myself, and the people around me.

One of my go-to stories when people ask why I moved to Norway is about the book “Nooit Meer Slapen” (Never Sleep Again) by the famous Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans. I read that book around age 16, and I can’t quite explain why it resonated with me, but what it represented stayed with me. I realize more and more how it reflects a part of me, the 16-year-old me, wearing a “Great Pretender” T-shirt, was already more aware than his intellect could put into words. The novel shows that human attempts to find certainty, meaning, and success often fail in an indifferent world where knowledge is unreliable and people are fundamentally alone.

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Day 3646, a day.

Daily picture, Poetry

One step after another I walk toward that distant place among the peaks, where tonight the sun will cast its red glow for the millionth time in thousands of fading hues as the earth spins on its path of madness and joy, and I ponder it all the still, crisp air, the next step up and then down, my hand pressed to the earth to feel its reality, not as a dream here, where space widens my happiness and my gaze grows solitary, unburdened by memories of what once was, now both on my way and already arrived, enjoying the company of my past and present, the view of ice shattered into thousands of shards by the tides and the turning of the world, the moon that has watched me for millennia as I seek her before sleep, today’s cold stillness giving me rest before morning’s startled birds and another day in repetition, walking toward the horizon that at dusk bathes my soul in red and steals my breath, resigned to the days ahead and a world that continues without us until the sun reclaims what she gave, and we, as the dust, drift on, perhaps to live again, or next time as a red glow lighting the path of another traveler who does not yet know that the most important thing in life is simply to breathe.

Day 3645, The Chinese Room Argument.

Daily picture, Definitions

The Chinese Room Argument (SEP)

The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle (1932– ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.

The narrow conclusion Searle draws from the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science, and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

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Day 3642, according to my past individuals.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry 
When butterflies don’t fly.
Fading away, overwhelmed in lies.
Wings eager, restricted by weeds.
Cracked mud of the soil grades the time.
When butterflies couldn’t fly.
Day 864

Individuals, according to my past individuals

Definition by Chatbot: The concept of the individual is not as simple as it appears. It is often presented as a single, distinct human being, defined by unique biological, psychological, and social traits. But this definition is superficial. The idea of the individual as an autonomous, self-determining agent is largely an illusion. The mind does not generate ideas in isolation; it is shaped by language, culture, and education. Thoughts are constructed from what we absorb from others, from the environment, from history. The individual is not a self-contained entity but a reflection of inherited ideas and external forces.

Reinterpretations of older work, see the quotes underneath.

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Day 3641, to a world.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Olst, late 80s
A youngling opens up,

to a world in riddles.

I admire Tolstoy, not because of his work, which I have never read, but because of what he stood for. I believe that when people say it is a fantastic read, I can see it after a few pages; I don’t have the time to read the rest. Too many books lie around that I have started reading or are waiting patiently for my attention. I have the idle hope that one day I will take the time. I found this quote online, well, not this quote, but something similar. The quotes you find online are not always correct, but after some digging, I found the source and read the chapter till I found it. Russians are a mysterious folk; I wish they still were, now they are as predictable as the rest.

“I have met him. But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You know, one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d’emblée in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days the free – thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free – thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free – thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Part 5, Chapter 9)

You can read the book here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1399 

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Day 3639, 5 zonnen.

Daily picture, Poetry
Early Photoshop exercise, 2007

I tried out a new AI Chatbot (https://chat.mistral.ai/chat), one that is not US-based and respects your privacy more. I tested it out today, fed it 10 years of short poems, and asked for the 10 best ones. I guess it knows what it’s doing, so here they are. I didn’t specify what the format of the documents was, so it didn’t include the titles, no AI is that smart.

 

Preparing the day
for another trail of sweets
and bringing it home.

Decomposing leave
returning inhalation
autumn disquiet.

The wind is moving
bending wheat where it settles
in rough ground and sun.

The sun is too late
shrouded in drawn out shadows
it will never bloom.

Waiting for the ground
absorbing time, decisions
and giving it back.

Mother in nature
shining for posterities
yellow panama.

When butterflies don’t fly.
Fading away, overwhelmed in lies.
Wings eager, restricted by weeds.
Cracked mud of the soil grades the time.
When butterflies couldn’t fly.

Red berries in the sun.
The air smells from afternoon rain.
Let me forget and stand still.
And leave me here.

Delicate nature
in a midsummer’s warm wave
elegant white dress.

Alluring symbols
assessed by many facets
in virgin colors.

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Day 3638, Chaos.

Daily picture, Definitions
Olst, late 90s

Chaos (SEP)

The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system’s behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such tornado would have occurred in Texas. The mathematical version of this property is known as sensitive dependence and such sensitivity has implications for predictability of future behavior. Clarifying sensitive dependence’s significance is important given there have always been limits on prediction. Chaos studies have highlighted these implications in fresh ways, enabled forms of mitigation as well as control of chaos, and have led to other implications for how we think about our world.

In addition to exhibiting sensitive dependence, chaotic systems are deterministic and nonlinear and exhibit aperiodic behavior (Lorenz 1963). This entry discusses systems exhibiting these properties and their philosophical implications. For those not familiar with the basic phenomenology of chaos, reading nontechnical treatments such as Smith (2007) or Bishop (2023) is highly recommended. Because of the distinctive nature of quantum chaos, it is treated separately in the Supplement: Quantum Chaos, needed for discussions of broader implications in §6.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

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