Black [X] Truder

The Omnipotence Paradox

Friday, August 06, 2010

"Can God create a stone that he will fail to lift?"

This is a question that is often used by non-believers to argue against the existence of God. It is actually a particular form of The Omnipotence Paradox illustrated by the argument that if an omnipotent being exists, then it is capable of creating a task that it will fail to perform and is therefore not really omnipotent.

So does this debunk the existence of God? here are my two cents ...

Disclaimer: this post is meant to discuss the subject from a philosophical point of view only. Any apparent bias towards any set of beliefs, should any exist in the post, is completely unintended. The views presented here are the author's and do not by any means represent facts. Expression and discussion of religious beliefs on this post is not welcome, will not be tolerated and should rather be redirected here.

The question form of the argument can be rearranged into the statement "God can create a stone that he will fail to lift" to which we require a boolean evaluation; either true or false. The answer is trivial but is the source of a lot of confusion: there is no valid logical evaluation!

Actually, there is an infinite number of statements that do not have valid logical evaluations. For example; this statement is false, which again can not be either true or false. This is why these statements are called paradoxes. The real question is; in case of the omnipotence paradox, what does "not having a logical evaluation" really mean?

Non-believers answer this by saying "hence there is no such thing as omnipotence and therefore God does not exist". However, this is not necessarily true. The non-existence of a logical evaluation can simply mean that the model we used to represent and solve the problem is not perfect. The model in this case being logic. Logic says that each statement can be either true or false, so how come such a statement that is neither true or false exist?

Many branches of logic and philosophical reasoning provide different interpretations to the contradiction presented by such statements. In all cases, we have to keep in mind that our science is based solely on observation and the preposition of axioms (statements that can not be proved but are considered true and the base for further inference, such as 1x1=1). Therefore our science is by no means absolute and its failure to capture or model any phenomena should not necessarily indicate the non-existence of the phenomena.

IMHO, when somebody says "Can God create a stone he can not lift?", I see both an argument against the existence of God and a proof of the failure of the science behind the argument!

P.S: the omnipotence paradox is the subject of ongoing heated discussions in the scientific community. For a better overview and understanding on the almost-infinite different stands, check the Wikipedia article on the subject.

7 Girls a Geek Shouldn't Date

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Geeks are peculiar creatures with very specific needs and a life style on their own. It so happens that due to uncontrollable factors such as a nagging mom or a misaligned biological clock that renders his logic temporarily impaired, a geek might find himself obliged to take part in reproduction and the continuation of the human species. This pushes the geek to start seeking a partner. While others falsely interpret this as 'falling in love' and proceed through unnecessary mating procedures, a geek devises his own scheme to secure a partner while trying to fit in as much as possible (at least apparently) with the norms of society.

Being on his own in executing his plans, it is relatively easy for a geek to get confused and fall back to erroneous society-adopted mating models. It is important that a geek develops a thorough understanding of what makes a suitable partner. Here's a list of 7 types of girls a geek should definitely stay away from:

1 - The Emotional, Social or Talkative

Your life as a geek is spent mostly in deep and long silent stares into a laptop screen. Frequent interruptions grab you out of the digital world and make debugging your assembly programs much harder. It is important that your partner never interrupt you when you're focused and rather wait for your food or toilet breaks to approach you with any matters of concern. Your partner must be able to overcome their emotional insecurities on their own and should not propose any social activities that are out of schedule.

2 - The Web Programming Illiterate

As surprising as it may seem, natural selection is still in the process of eradicating these inferior individuals and it may take few more decades for them to completely disappear. A geek has to understand that during his mating endeavour he is at risk of coming in contact with female individuals who lack complete understanding of simple web technologies like DOM, CSS and AJAX. Unless you want to spend your life with somebody who doesn't know what an XMLHttpRequest object is, stay away.

3 - The Poor Server Administrator

Being able to administer and maintain home servers is crucial to a successful and happy marriage. While helping her install some antivirus software on her laptop might seem as a sign of bonding and affection at the beginning of your relationship, chances are such a partner will fail to maintain any future linux-based servers and will probably ask for your help even with a simple kernel upgrade. Your offspring won't have central file storage and might even have to setup their routing tables manually to connect to the Internet. This is preposterous ... ditch her!

4 - The Mac Girl

Geeks understand that Macs are very well suited for design work and presentations but are beaten by hand-held calculators in doing real computations. Girls fancy glowing stuff and sleek appearances and might be easily taken by the looks of a Snow Leopard desktop. It is important that your partner understands the pros and cons of each of the personal computer systems and are able to judge and make their choices objectively. If the female candidate uses a Mac but is neither a graphics designer nor in a job that requires frequent slideshow presentations, take her off the list.

5 - The Materialist

This genre of people is often the source of great distress to their partners. They are obsessed with superficial things that possess no real life value and often render the life of people around them too uncomfortable. To the geek, such people represent an even greater disaster and should be at least avoided if you think that taking their hearts out and slicing them using CNC machines running your customized driving software is a bit of an overkill. To know if she's a materialist or not, ask her whether she'd buy another pair of shoes or rather get herself extra 2GBs of RAM.

6 - The "Challenged by High School Physics"

Your household is the nurturing home of your offspring and the love nest for you and your partner. It is also a complex physical environment that requires monitoring and frequent adjustments to ensure it remains a suitable habitat. Your partner must be completely fluent in Physics to understand your arguments regarding the dynamics of air flow, heat transfer, entropy and electromagnetic radiation. Ideally, you wouldn't need to explain to her why leaving the fridge door open in a sealed environment will increase the temperature.

7 - The Facebook Addict

Choosing a partner who has a Facebook profile is more dangerous than you think. Not only does her usage slow down your torrent downloads and her ignorance regarding Facebook's policy set a bad example to your offspring but she might as well be disclosing sensitive information about you on her profile. Your friends will read that it took you 4 hours last night to debug that silly exception in your C# .NET class and that you still refer to MSDN when you're stuck with something you don't know. If she's unwilling to switch to reading Wikipedia in her spare time, get rid of her.

Life is Poker, not Chess

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

In game theory, games can be classified as being of either "perfect information" or "imperfect information". In games of perfect information, all the game data is available to all players at all times. Examples of this include Chess, Checkers and Go, where the pieces on the game board are visible to both players throughout the game and the exact outcome of every move can be determined given enough time and computational resources. Contrary to these are games of imperfect information which rely (often partially) on "hidden data" or "luck" such as most card games.

Poker is a game of imperfect information that I find very resemblant to our everyday's struggle with life. In poker, you can play with perfect strategy only to be beaten by pure luck. Although disappointing, this doesn't make the game any less interesting. Actually, this is EXACTLY what makes a game of such simple rules so thrilling and enjoyable.

Life is similar to poker in a sense that sometimes you still lose even if you play a perfect set of moves. For example, you might have worked twice as hard as any other student in high school only to find that some others have secured jobs that are far better than yours. In this case, the element of "luck" has contributed to the game result much more than your efforts.

Professional poker players understand that although you can't beat the odds at every single game, you can increase your chances of winning by perfect play and accumulate a statistical advantage over a number of rounds. It is important to understand that just because you lost a particular game doesn't mean you were wrong to play. So it is in life, one has to play as good as they can and hope that luck will roll in their favour. It is important not to look back with sorrow at any past efforts that were justified in their time but didn't yield fruit in the present. Again, just because we lost doesn't mean we were wrong to play.

Perhaps most importantly, one has to play with a solid belief that the odds are going to be in their favour one day. Only this way can one be ready to win the game when that day comes.

Fortune is when readiness meets opportunity.

Inception = Genius

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Just came back from watching this movie and I must say it totally rocks!

Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be going for a different kind of plots; I mean 'Shutter Island' and now this? In 'Inception', DiCaprio plays the role of professional mind-breaker or an 'extractor' who can join people in their dreams and direct the course of events to expose the secrets of the minds he's trying to hack. The twist is when DiCaprio is hired to do something of much more difficulty ... implanting an idea is somebody's mind!

When I watch a movie of this complexity it really makes me wonder whether plot writers and directors take into account the fact that if most people can't follow up on the story line and make the connections, the movie is gonna fail. The way I see it, presenting a content of this complexity on screen either assumes that the average Joe has a grasp of philosophical concepts like Brain in a vat and understand the basic reasoning behind virtualization, or that the movie is gonna play for computer scientists exclusively!

Anyways, not to say that it bothers me, au contraire I find it brilliant that a share of directors cater for those of us who enjoy complex themes. I must also express my admiration for the level of details brought up by the plot (time perception in dreams, inter-reality signaling and the butterfly effect to mention few). The director, Christopher Nolan, is also the man behind Memento and The Prestige.

Too bad I was starving and had some salted popcorn which upset my stomach. Judging by the ads it seems we're on to a lot of good movies this summer!