I've neglected blogging for a while...

I am now reading a great book called Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity. Finally a book that explains differential forms, gauge theory and all those things in a way that is easy to understand! It really is enjoyable to read.

Victor J. Stenger has a great article about the "Anthropic Principle". It's old, but I just discovered it a few days ago.

Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith:

The philosopher Peter Unger has made a persuasive case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child's blood on it.

Well, that caught my attention and I've been thinking about it for a while. The book in question is Living High and Letting Die by Peter Unger, and I had to order it and see what it was all about!
In the meantime, I found out about Utilitarianism, which is the ethical doctrine that basically says you should do whatever maximizes global happiness (or minimizes global suffering). One consequence is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime - another idea I first encountered in Sam Harris's book and I completely agree with it.

Utilitarianism captures very elegantly what I've been thinking for a long time about ethics and such - so I guess I'm a Utilitarian!

Having finished Ray Kurzweil's book, it feels like I have changed, or rather my perspective of the future has changed. I still haven't made my mind regarding all of his predictions, though.
Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation is a short book in the form of a letter addressed to the fundamentalist American Christians. Reading this book I am reminded of a documentary called Jesus Camp, about a Christian summer camp for children. What a scary film!

Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near is making me think the most important (most ethical?) jobs in the world involve: computer hardware (chips), computer software (AI) and what he calls brain reverse engineering (understanding the principles of how the brain works)... It's all about getting to the "Singularity".
It's a good read, but maybe just because it's so provocative.

The Busy Beaver function is such a neat idea! Turing machines are powerful, indeed.
Who can name the bigger number?

I remember watching this interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett - he's a smart guy. They were talking about consciousness and the interviewer was claiming that this is one of the things you can only probe "from the inside" - subjectively - and that's related to the concept of a soul. However Dennett was arguing that, at least in principle, you can learn everything about another person's mind, thoughts and everything by studying his brain. And you can, in principle, understand what it is to be him, to feel his feelings and so on. Trivial, but somehow difficult to accept...
Anyway, I'd like to read some of Dennett's books, too!

Hi.
I should have probably started blogging long ago, but I hope it's not too late... I'm doing this mainly for myself, or rather for the version of me that lives 5, 15 or 50 years from now. I just want to log my thoughts, and therefore maybe forget fewer of them.
I've recently read Dawkin's The God Delusion and The End of Faith by Sam Harris and spent a lot of time thinking about them. I think The God Delusion is very refreshing and probably one of my favorite books. I really want to read a few more books (almost ordered them from Amazon yesterday, but I don't know if I have the time...): Letter to a Christian Nation (Sam Harris), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit), and The Cosmic Landscape and The Holographic Universe (Leonard Susskind). Too much, but I can't wait to read each one of them...
One interesting idea the Dawkins reminded me of is the apparent "fine tuning" of physical "parameters" to facilitate life. It's really a mystery to me. I can't think of too many options: If the values of these "parameters" are inevitable - they must be such in order for the physics to be consistent - then why is it that these values are also favorable to life? Too unlikely. A designer? Needs more explanation than the "explanation" it provides. Maybe the values aren't that special after all? Or maybe all options are "there" somehow, and by the Anthropic Principle the universe is such that we are able to see it? Nothing seems very appealing.
Ray Kurzweil's predictions looked awfully odd when I first read them, but he is very convincing. He has a bet on Long Bets that a computer will have passed the Turing Test by 2029! It's just around the corner, and I just can't imagine how that can possible happen. Not to mention all his "Singularity" stuff and the living forever...