A journal.

In the dark ages of personal computing, those primitive new devices could do one thing at the time. Their microprocessors had few interrupts and their operating systems (often little more than a language interpreter) used them for the most basic of tasks, such as device management.

When multitasking finally arrived, it came about as a simple outgrowth of its single-tasking predecessors. Essentially, whenever an application felt like it, it said "I guess I can take a breather now" and gave up control of the CPU, thus freeing it for the next task in a queue. This approach was dubbed "cooperative multitasking", and its huge drawbacks were obvious since the beginning. Polite applications that gave up control often were at a great disadvantage over hoarders, as the latter could simply starve the former.

The baffling thing about cooperative multitasking is that it had staunch supporters, who claimed it to be superior over preentive multitasking, which at the time only existed in larger computers able to run Unix and other proper operating systems. Arguments along the lines of "time management is too important to be left to the OS" were made, as well as others that mentioned precise application timing and such. Of course, today, when preemptive multitasking is ubiquitous, no-one would make such arguments, and it would take quite a bit of gall to still insist that cooperative multitasking has anything worthwhile going for it.

And yet, even though the above matter has been settled, there is a completely analogous debate that still goes on, except that instead of time management, it is about memory management. Serious people claim, in all seriousness, that memory is too important to be left to the OS. And thus, millions of applications continue being built under this premise, each with a double burden: to do whatever it is they are meant to do, and to manage their memory.

It would seem obvious why manual memory management is a terrible idea, since pretty much all the drawbacks of cooperative multitasking apply, just as its advantages are equally illusory, but just to be clear, let's mention a few: greedy applications will hog all the memory, and have little incentive to release it other than their own survival; designing applications is harder due to the dual concern; and high-level application designers need to concern themselves with low-level details. Also, unsurprisingly, manual memory management does not get along well with preemptive multi-threading.

Thankfully, the tide has been turning slowly for a number of years. More and more people have realized that garbage collection (automatic memory management) is a necessity, rather than a luxury, and that its supposed drawbacks are trivial, much like those of its now-dominant time-management cousin. One rather aggressive 800 pound gorilla still stands in the way, but it seems inevitable that eventually it will be starved into irrelevance.

One can hope, at least.

I ask the animals "why am I here." They tell me, but I do not understand.

Truth is beautiful. Beauty is right. Righteousness is true.

Trite, unoriginal, but it has something to it, facile counterexamples notwithstanding.

Ludwig said "it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics […] ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same)."

This breaks the circle, maybe. I don't know. I need to think about it more.

Ludwig also said "So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end." And consistently, before he said "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit to the world."

He was wrong about a few things, though: "there can never be surprises in logic." Like all formalist up to his time, he saw provability and truth as one and the same.

Yet some insights are remarkable. "There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." Such as what he said a little earlier: "It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

And it is the fact that Ludwig existed, his life being an open interval between the arousal of consciousness and the un-experience-able death, that gives me hope. The metaphysical subject has always existed, and will always ask these questions about itself.

The next one is bound to be a treat.

Economists of the "freakanomics" variety sometimes ask, rather rhetorically, questions such as "how much is the life of a baby worth?" and such. Of course, part of the point they intend to illustrate is how odd thinking becomes when one reduces everything to economics. And yet such reduction is carried out routinely, by private corporations and government agencies across the world alike.

Needless to say, human lives cannot be reduced to economics. At best one ends up with a crude simplification, and at worst, a gross categorical error, a typical case of looking for the lost object only in the part of the room where there is light.

While I don't think many people would disagree with the claim above, it occurs to me that there is an analogous situation where I would expect a much greater degree of disagreement: the routine reduction of consciousness to physics. It is, i think, just as much of a categorical error as the above. Just like human life is the background, the context where all things economic happen, human consciousness is the sine-qua-non without which the physical cannot be said to happen at all, at least in any form substantially different from any abstract, arbitrary mathematical process. And yet people who would reflectively discard this idea as mysticism would uncritically accept the primacy of physicalism without any real justification of why they would ascribe it a privileged ontological status. I guess, to them, this position is just obvious, just as for other people the interesting question is whether a baby is worth 200 or 300 dollars.

The very existence of humankind is threatened by unending worldwide conflict and the increased availability of nuclear weapons. It is only a matter of time before they are used again.

Worldwide conflict is mainly a consequence of fundamentalist ideology and naive theology. World peace can only be brought about by ending such ideologies, by greatly decreasing the role of religion in public life.

Fundamentalist ideology can only be brought about through education. Not "re-education" or any attempt to replace one fundamentalism with another, but by honest training of the general populace in critical thinking and logic, as well as basic respect for human life.

Education cannot be achieved in a world-wide scale without a significant, concerted effort by the international community. This is not something that can be left to the "wisdom" of the markets, but rather, requires sacrifice from everyone. But the ability to achieve this is hampered by, well, fundamentalist ideology, that sees investment in social values as anathema to individual freedom.

A vicious cycle arises. Ideology prevents education, but only education can defeat ideology.

What to do? We must figure it out. Our very survival depends on it.

Before he filmed Persona, Ingmar Bergman had an operation that required him to undergo general anesthesia for a few hours. He found the experience, consisting of the total annihilation of his consciousness, to be exhilarating. What a fantastic thing it is, to not exist! I got the impression he much looked forward to death, as it would leave him in said state of non-being indefinitely. Should he find himself awakened by a God for whatever purpose, including having to undergo some sort of trial for his actions, well, that would be most distasteful. I can almost see him saying "Go to hell God, don't you see I'm trying to sleep here?"

Well, he got his wish a couple years ago. He produced many more movies and then went onto that endless, dreamless, eternal sleep whose prospect he found so charming. And I cannot help but question his sincerity, still finding myself more in the camp of his disciple, Woody Allen, who finds the idea of death not only incomprehensible to the point of incoherence, but also terribly disquieting. And I bounce between seriously considering the possibility of the Brahma playing a game with him/herself by inhabiting all sentient beings and pretending to forget who s/he is, to trying to stop fooling myself and seeing life as a consequence-less cosmic joke that causes us to be awake for a blink, and in Bergman's Nirvana at all other times. And I don't know which is the hopeful choice and which is the nihilistic one, and whether there are any other choices at all.

And then, I wonder what the hell time is, anyway.

It seems to me that the most basic question is a binary one: "which is true, modal realism or substance theory?"

If modal realism, a la David Lewis, is correct, one must discard all forms of essentialism.  There is no fundamental difference between a real star and an imaginary star, a human being and an axiom, a horse and the color blue, "actual" history and all possible histories, and all possible future versions of myself.

If modal realism is true, then I am infinite, as are you, because the ultimate ensemble is physical and there are infinite versions of me on an infinite number of possible universes.  There is no real death, or birth, no end and no beginning, and all meaning is local.  Logical truth is the only universal, and formalism is universally false.

If substance theory is true, then we occupy an extremely odd, incomprehensibly privileged position outside the world of ideas.  The property of physicality is what separate us from the possible but not actual, even though such property is inherently ineffable, because if it could be understood completely, then it would be another idea.  Physical existence must be ineffable in order for its concept not to be self-defeating.

If substance theory is true, then every physical thing in the Universe, each atom, each vibrating photon, each star, each dog, each planet, is a miracle of incomprehensible uniqueness, a physical entity among an infinite number of possible, but not actual ones.

Modal realism is catastrophically counterintuitive, because it declare that everything that is possible is real.  Substance theory is catastrophically counterintuitive, because it calls for the existence of a property, substance, whose nature is necessarily incomprehensible.

Occam's razor criticizes modal realism because it calls for a extraordinary proliferation of object.  Occam's razor criticizes substance theory because it calls for an undefinable attribute.

Occam's razor favors modal realism because the ultimate ensemble has no information, and hence is the simplest possible object.  Occam's razor favors substance theory because it limits the size of the Universe substantially.

Modal realism and substance theory cannot be both true, for if they were, substance would be a property that adds nothing to the model.
Modal realism and substance theory cannot be both false, for if they were, certain mathematical constructs would be inherently different from others simply by virtue of being accessible to me.

So exactly one of them must be true.  Can you please tell me which?

"I don't think there is a God.  I think there are millions of gods, because everyone can make up their own."

"God is in your heart.  God IS your heart."

Not bad for a six-year old.

In the sporadic occasions when I found myself being scrutinized on my musical interpretations, be them live, delayed, programmed or otherwise, I was often told that they were somewhat mechanical, robotic.  While I understand now what that meant and I am happy this was pointed out to me (I have taken steps to remedy the situation), at the time I took offense.  Not at being called that, mind you, but sympathetically, on behalf of the robots.

The clear implication, and something that I saw as garden-variety stereotyping, was that robots. machines and the like were, and always would be, incapable of that intangible- ineffable, musical je-ne-se-quois that turns an arithmetically simple sequence of tones into music.  "You ignorant musician," I thought, "we are machines ourselves.  Surely there is a precise description and and quantification of such things, and the fact that you cannot elucidate their nature speaks more about your own limitations than those of a musician robot."

I have been proven largely correct, of course, as computer-generated musical composition and interpretation have been carried out and proved indistinguishable from that coming from among the best of our human musicians.  And yet the term "robotic" prevails, and as I see it, it is used in the same contexts where we declare ourselves human but not animal, civilized but not barbaric, rational but not superstitious.  We strive to point fingers at that otherness we deem inferior, and we hang to such illusions even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Perhaps it is such folly where we will forever remain unrivaled.

My greatest desire is to become a good person.

My greatest hubris happens when I convince myself that I have succeeded.

My greatest disappointments come whenever it becomes evident that I have not.

A few years ago I saved a dog.  I few years later, I killed another.

A few years ago, I was happily driving to see the house I eventually bought, when I saw this poor dog in the middle of the street almost get run over by three different cars.  It was clear that a street dog this was not, as it really did not seem to understand that the middle of a busy street is no place to make friends.  I stopped the car and encouraged the door to get in the back seat, which it happily did.  I went to my hotel room and tried to locate the owner from the collar tag, but couldn't.  Eventually I was able to get an Animal Control guy to take the animal, after leaving a message in the owner's machine of where to find it.

The next day, the owner called me to thank me. "You saved my dog," he said.  I did not mention to him that his very, very hairy dog left much of himself behind in my back seat fabric.  It took a couple years to remove the last visible traces.

A few years after, as I was driving home, I saw white lighting zip in front of me, and immediately I felt a bump under my front tires.  I got out and saw a dying dog.  My tire had hit him straight in the head, and only spasmodic motion remained in his dying body.  At the side, the white jack-rabbit the dog was chasing simply stood, watching me and its victim.  I could have sworn it was laughing.

My dog karma remains with a net gain of zero.