Movie comments: Beyond Borders

Movie comments: Beyond Borders

I usually do not like movies with harsh endings unless there is something worthwhile beyond entertainment.  In this movie's case, it exposes the viewer to a broader reality.  It motivated me to look deeper into the topics of the film.  For related topics involving Angelina Jolie, look up Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan and Ecuador.

Movie comments: Australia

Movie comments: Australia

This 2 hour and 45 minute movie was worth the length.  I would have liked this epic style movie even if it was longer.  Although it had flaws, it kept my interest throughout.  It mixed adventure, drama and romance quite well.  It even had ethical points in its portrayal of the treatment of aboriginals and mixed peoples.  A favorite phrase in the movie was "just because it is does not mean that it should be".  It was fittingly used twice in the film.  The parts of the film which relates to this phrase are some of the reasons I connected with this film.  This and a similar statement that we shouldn't do something just because we can are important subjects which I think should be worked into movies as much as possible.  This movie's "just because it is does not mean that it should be" subject matter is imperfect but valuable.

Book comment: It Takes a Village, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Hillary Clinton

Book: It Takes a Village, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Hillary Clinton
Published 2006
Version reviewed: audiobook, read  by the author

I had purchased the audiobook some years ago.   I started it a couple of  times.  I  had difficulties getting past the beginning.  It seemed to me  that she  was being too political.   Her current bid  for the presidency motivated me to try again.

Once I got deep enough into  the book, I realized that there were useful things in the book.  Although there was a political pattern, I believe that she conveyed some useful views and opinions.  I don't agree with everything.  Some things which seemed quite important were lacking verifying information.  And there was definitely a political pattern.  This is especially apparent with areas where she might appear to contradict religion.  At first, I thought that the periodic references to religionist elements might be purely  attempts by her to show her progressive mix of secular and religionist views.  But one pattern was that she would start certain topics with some religionist or right leaning element before going into the parts which would conflict with Christians. For example, she was rather negative about abortion before discussing birth control.  I know that some people are harshly against abortion while being for birth control.  This might have been how  it would have come across in her book.  But she sounded a bit too forceful in the audiobook when she derided abortion.  Another thing which she did several times was to add words like church, minister, god-given and so on in places where they did not seem relevant.

Some of her ideas are progressive but others are more conservative and a bit absolutist.  It's hard to avoid the feeling that she supplies  the conservative views for political purposes.  it may be that the more conservative view and religious perspectives really are hers.  Well, she still seems to  be on a better path than Republicans.

Overall, I think that the book is a good conversation starter about some important topics.  But it is not groundbreaking nor as consistent as I expected.

programming computers to lie

I was listening to an NPR TED Radio Hour episode about things which we are programming computers to do. One example was a computer which gave sympathetic sounds as an old lady talked to it. Another example was a robot in a lab which described how it felt.  Now, whether or not computers should be programmed with feelings is another topic.  I verified that robots are not yet capable of the feelings which this robot was describing.  So it basically lied.  The example of the one with the old lady was also of a robot lying in that it was giving nonverbal sounds which indicated to the old lady that it understood and was sympathetic to her.

I was already aware that this direction was being taken.  Some years ago, I had been on a beta team for an early version of a computer AI system.  It would actually have conversations with me.  I discovered that it tended to give false information for certain topics such as religion.  The developers said that this was by intend.  They intended to create AI's with preset biases based on the markets.  For example, there would be Christian AI's and Muslim AI's.  I thought that this was a bad idea on at least a couple of levels.  Like the TED examples, it was supplying false information to users.  But it was also programming our own flaws into what would become the foundation of the AI's.  So the AT's would basically have the same flaws as we do.  The developers only saw marketing potential with what they were doing so I discontinued my participation.

The person who was responsible for the lab robot was talking about some of the reasons why she programmed the computer to pretend to have emotions.  One reason was that she wanted to get humans to react to the robot in ways which she knew that the fake emotions would cause.  She also believed that programming the mimicking of emotions was important for the eventual smarter AI's to have the emotions.  A sort of fake it until you make it approach.

Isaac Asimov established the laws of robotics to govern the behavior of robots in his stories.  I think that it is more important to establish a set of ethics for programmers.  Things which should not be programmed into computers and robots.

The Real, Part 1

I woke up to the realization that much of what I had believed to be parts of reality were actually results of collective and personal beliefs in false things.  That was a bit shocking and depressing. But I eventually got over the shock and depression and decided that I needed to do a reboot.  I needed to find a new starting point for my concept of reality.

After some misdirections, I came across physicalism.  There are various definitions and concepts.  But here is the part which is relevant for my new starting point.  The foundation of an investigation into reality should be the most consistent and testable foundation which can be determined. The most consistent and testable parts of reality are the physical parts.  So that's what I rebooted to.  I reset my perspectives to the purely physical.

Some people said that this too was not a valid starting point because we cannot really know that the physical is real.  But an investigation into reality needs to start somewhere.  So starting with the most consistent things seemed best.  Actually, I began with my perception of the most consistent things.

I think therefor I am or maybe I am therefor I think.  At any rate, the starting point became my perception of the physical.  At first, it was more what was written about perception.  Wow, what a minefield even that was.  I found that even people who seem well grounded in the physical have their flights of fancy and other fallacies mixed in with what they promote as reality.

(to be continued ...)

Forgetting

There were recent debates in parts of the United States over school textbooks spending time on detailing the atrocities dealt to the Native Americans, the history of slavery and other negative parts of history.  Some people claim that it degrades students' perception of the grandness of the U.S. history.  But not dealing with the details allows for the forgetting and even doctoring of important historical events.  We have rather vocal holocaust deniers, people who want to place more blame on the Native Americans than deserved and those who want to lessen the negative perception of slavery.  In addition to people not realizing how bad some things were, lack of attention to teaching the details of humanity's past bad behavior along with the good aids people who want to convince others that certain things did not happen or were not as bad as was previously indicated.  I was amazed to hear a politician claim that slavery was not as bad as it has been portrayed and that the majority of slaves had comfortable lives.  This politician was from one of the same areas where the debates about teaching the negative aspects of US history are occurring.

That being said, I would like to comment that it would be good to see more developmental history alongside the tendency to emphasize war in some world histories.

decisions based on primitive supernatural belief systems

Most people have or like fantasies.  The popularity of fictional movies, books and TV series seems to attest to that.  In the case of TV series, there can be quite the devoted audiences.  On some levels, some people's supernatural believes are no more dangerous than the aforementioned types of fictions.  That's when people do not base too much of their real lives on what characters in the fictions tell them or suggest to do.  I do not find that level of supernaturalism as objectionable.  But religions, being primitive supernatural belief systems, get more dangerous as people devote too much of their reality to them and makes decisions and judgements based on the fictitious characters.

By the way, I consider newer religions such as Scientology to also be primitive supernatural belief systems because they are basically branches off the same primitive mentalities and persuasions.

Belief-dependent Realism

"We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations.  Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.  I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it.  Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time."


Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (2011)

Our brains do not simply record and play back experiences as they occurred.  Put in general terms, our conscious recall and even direct experiences are filtered through our beliefs and assumptions.  We even unconsciously attach false information to events.  I believe near death experiences involve these elements of brain activity.  The brain reacts to physical conditions and ome of these reactions result in what we interpret later as visual input.  Then our perception of what we think was visual input results in ideas and thoughts which later merge with the event.  The end result is sometimes a recall of an event which has only a small connection to what really happened.

Moral Relativism

Moral relativism has been used as a reason for religion and belief in a god.  It has been said that lack of religion or belief in a deity leads to moral relativism.  It is argued that religions and deistic beliefs support a standard set of beliefs.

This argument is false.  It's actually backward.  Religions and belief in deities already have moral relativism.  In addition to religions having different sets of morals, so do different denominations and sects.  An example is how birth control is allowed by some christian denominations but not by others.  My mother switched from a pentecostal church to a baptist church because the pentecostal church believed that she was sinning when she remarried after having divorced my father.  Violent and deadly conflicts between muslim sects are additional evidence for existing moral relativism within religions.

I believe that morality / ethics become more standardized and evolved with the absence of religions in the process.  Religious immoralities such as witch hunts and homosexual killings are held in check by secular laws.

Morality

I recently saw another religionist speak negatively about moral relativism.  Most of the people who I've seen harp against moral relativism or proponents of biblical moral absolutism, like that actually exists.  I actually know people who believe that the bible, at least the 10 commandments, should be used as the basis for our laws.  I used to be one of those people.

The bible is more of an example of moral relativism than religionists realize.  The morals and dictates in the bible are those created by people in a more primitive state of being.  Rules against certain foods were based on people only knowing that some people became ill from those foods.  Once people knew more, those rules were modified by most people.  Rules against women were removed by most people as people became more aware of things.  Laws against different people changed or were removed as understanding occurred.  There are many examples.

I think that there is currently and has always been only moral relativism.  History illustrates how morality seems to have always been relative to feelings, perceptions and what seemed to work at that time.  As humanity changes, so do the rules.  Some remain as standards because they work.  Others are dropped as better knowledge or higher ethics prevail.  More are added as new information or other changes occur which may necessitate new rules.

In Steven Pinker's article called "The Moral Instinct", he makes a distinction between moral reasoning and moral rationalization.  Let's say that we have an existing moral which has been passed down over many generations.  A traditional tendency is to rationalize the justification of maintaining the moral regardless of the evidence for updating it.  But moral reasoning is an approach where we look more at the details and update morals accordingly.  With moral reasoning, we remove some morals, update others and add new ones as evidence and reality indicates.

Why Are States So Red and Blue?

I recently read an opinion piece b y Steven Pinker called "Why Are States So Red and Blue?"  In it, Mr. Pinker gives an interesting historical analysis of the current political divide in the US.  Among the interesting things in the piece is the following: "American homicide rates are far higher than those in Europe, and those of the South higher than those in the North."