Fire in the Equations #7

Evidence as private and public knowledge affects our perception of truth.

Science is a public knowledge because we need to prove it, to the eyes of someone else.
Religion is more a private experience. We try to look for our own experience with god in order to believe in him,

But there are other people who tell you you are wrong (in private experience) and this makes you doubt if your experience was true.

Placebo effect: when you believe something is caused by a variable, but really the variable has nothing to do.
Like when we get a headache and someone gives us a sugar pill and we believe that the "medicine" that the person gave us cured us.



Even if we value the scientific method, we have to agree that most of our knowledge comes from first hand experience, knowledge that is not scientifically verifiable.
There is a whole deal of public knowledge that cant be proved. So a lot of our life is just basically believing what other people say or tell us.

We take a leap of faith in order to really live in this world.

Armando de la Torre #6

Elite:
El hombre / mujer selecta, se exige mas a si mismo que lo que exige a los demás. El hombre selecto de adelanta, aunque los demás no le sigan.
los de las masas solo hacen si los demás hacen. Siguen a las personas.

Nosotros del MPC somos selectos. Nos preocupamos por nuestros estudios y nos enfrentamos a algo: a lecturas, cuestionamientos, que las demás personas no tienen el coraje de probar.

Hay que tener en cuenta: las masas tienen compañía. El líder es mas solitario, sufre solo, piensa solo, etc.

Valores:

Todos nuestros valores vienen de la experiencia que hemos tenido de vivir.
La conducta del hombre hoy es diferente a la conducta del hombre ayer. En cambio, los gorilas tienen y siempre han tenido la misma conducta desde hace miles de años.

las preguntas son comandos: ¿Que hora es? uno esta mandando a otra persona para que le diga algo.

Proposiciones:
1. De hecho: esta lloviendo (matters of fact)
2. Relaciones de ideas: verdad de razón. 2 + 2 = 4. Relaciones matemáticas y lógicas.
3. Mandatos: preguntas como comandos.

¿Cual de todos estos hacen que surjan los valores?

Con la matematica se puede hablar de todo, por que no habla de nada. Pero bueno, talves no todo, como la moral, valor, gustos, amor. Pero podemos expresar las relaciones pequeñas materiales.

El hombre nunca podra agotar el conocimiento de la realidad. 

Nosotros nunca decidimos nada. No podemos tomar una decisión sin un previo juicio de valor (hasta para vestirse)

¿La ciencia puede hacer juicios de valor?

La ciencia solo habla de hechos por medio de relaciones entre cosas.
El juicio de valor cae fuera del ámbito de la ciencia. Pero la economía, y la política si emiten juicio de valor.



Al final los gustos vienen de experiencias.
Si uno crece en china, le gusta mas la música de ahí. Igual con la belleza. La experiencia de uno hace que le gustan cosas que probablemente no han visto o experimentado.



No podemos vivir sin algo de bondad, honestidad y belleza.

Los juicios de valor son lo que hacen al hombre un ser humano. La vida gira alrededor de los juicios de valor.

Gödel, Escher, Bach final

If we don't have a word, do we still have a concept? Can concepts exist without words?
Its like the Chinese, they don have a word for God.
If between cultures, we don't have the same concepts, how is it that we can still understand each other?


Nos we are more intelligent than before, and the more intelligence we can acquire, we can reach to a greater understanding of other people (emotional empathy).
Here is where we get our morals from.

Video about the universe

In this video we saw, a guy tries to refute all of the arguments that we know believe are true about the universe, using specific things.

At the beginning I just thought that this guy was on crack, but then... what if we are all wrong, just like the people who didn't want to believe in Copernicus' system? And what if this guy were right and we just didn't want to believe him because we had been taught something else?
Its like its all happening all over again.
How do we know we are right?

I mean, I have never seen any videos or pictures of the Earth moving.

I dont have a theory to negate his, just like the people in the medieval times with Copernicus.

Now days, we don't question these things. We just learn them in our sixth grade science class and absorb them.
Its like if we take a leap of faith.

Copernican Revolution #5

De Revolutionibus is not a perfect book, but is has facts that helped push new ideas.

Copernicus based himself on his predecessors Ptolemy and Hipparchus. and the Copernicans based themselves on Copernicus, just as he did before them.

All of these astronomers had different spectacles. Depending on which ones they had on, they saw the world differently. Ptolomaic spectacles, Copernican spectacles.

Could Kepler have done his solar system without Brahe?
I dont think so, because Brahe's data was more accurate than any other, and Kepler tried to fit in his solar system into this data. So without this data, Kepler would've had an incomplete system.

Gödel, Escher, Bach #14

Just because a program can create words, doesn't mean its intelligent. 

When we compare Hofstader's phrases of humans with the ones with computers, we cant really tell the difference. But the phrases made by the humans have more meaning, while the ones of the computer are just words arranged together, and it doesn't mean that the computer knows what it is writing. 

When we read we only see symbols, that we later translate from our eyes to our ears and later to our mind. (from one level to next, and the next). 

Why should we think that Artificial Intelligence just wants to represent our intelligence, like a copy. When we should really look at AI as an improvement of our thought?

This way AI wouldn't just be a machine that helps us do things (like a calculator).

Meta-Dialogue: may 16

So in this meta-dialogue we tried something different. We wrote down all of the meta-questions of the term and later we wrote on the board all of the questions we had thought of this week. We later picked a couple of those questions, by voting with post-its and we discussed those chosen questions. 

Meta-questions of the term:

What is matter?

What is observation?

What is substance?

What is measurement?

What is cosmos?

What is science?

What is Creation?

Our Questions:

Is God and his creation coherent?

Why is technology trying to imitate the human being?

What if everything we are is just a program?

What if everything is a program?

How do we know if something is coherent?

What is tacit knowledge of thought?

What if God was one of us?

What would happen if there were no leaps of faith?

What is intelligence?

How necessary is subjectivism in order to reach objectivism?

How can we reach approximations of something objective?

Who is the observer? Me, God or the universe?

Why do we give meaning to any content?

How do the parts relate to the whole?

Is there a necessity to believe in God? Why?

What rules would God break, if there are no rules?

How can we measure things that our eyes cant really see?

What if God just created a program to let us choose freely but at the end only let the ones that resemble his ideal survive?

What if everything is just a human invention?

Where do good ideas come from?

Way of the Samurai

So today was mi turn to be quiet for the entire day, and to my delight, I didn't speak a whole word since I woke up until 7pm.

GEB dialogue:

No one had read, and this had also happened last week. It amazing how we are almost at the end of the term and people are still not reading. Also this chapter was amazing and I wanted to hear the dialogue.

Carmen, my partner in this vow of silence said her first word.

On Dialogue:

After Bert had asked a question, Grace and Isa tried to answer, but I thought that they weren't really answering the question, just giving characteristics.
I also want to give a shout-out to Diego, because I believe he was the only one to grasp the question and answer it correctly.

I also noticed in this dialogue that we are not really listening and understanding each other. For example: Pablito said something and Javier said the same exact thing, only with different words. Example 2: Bert didn't understand what Pablito was trying to say. Example 3: Chacho repeated a quote that Bert had already read.

I was really impressed that everyone spoke in this dialogue. I mean, there are some that always speak more than others, but in overall everyone spoke. But this brings me to another point, why was I so shocked that everyone spoke, when its supposed to be like this all of the time? Well, my only guess is that we don't do this often.

Another thing I noticed is that we are not reading thoroughly. Isa asked what leisure meant, and everyone tried  to explain it, and the funny thing was that in the parragraph right after the word, was the definition of it.

Meno

Virtue appears to be present in those who posses it by the gods.

What are the characteristics of virtue?

• Compared to colors. All virtues have a special characteristic that makes them all virtues. 
• virtue is not knowledge so it is not teachable. 
• knowledge is not virtue (being virtuous is not dependent on what we know). 
• virtue is a good thing.
• virtue is part of wisdom. 

You cant say that you have a right opinion. You can have A opinion, which might be either right or wrong. Some external force is the one that will have to say whether it is correct or not. 

True opinion is only fit if it has been proved. 

 Socrates knows that the search for knowing is essential. 

There is something about the nature of knowledge that is not virtuous. 

Once you have received the gift  manifested as a correct opinion it doesn't mean that we have knowledge  that what we are saying is right.. 

"We should call no less divine and inspired those public men who are no less under the gods' influence and possession, as their speeches lead to success in many important matters, though they have no knowledge of what they are saying."

"Virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who posses it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding."

The Copernican Revolution #4

Before St.Aquinas came to unite christian beliefs with the aristotelian system, the reading of Aristotle was rediscovered because the church had a monopoly on education, so it could control it.

Movement wasn't perfect. Being still was perfect. So it is confusing when it says God ascended into the heavens. "Moving earth would be moving God's thrones."

The thought and the non-progress of astronomy for centuries made the solar system and the human thought be stuck in an endless loop.

You must step out of the system.

One must follow errors in order to arrive at something new.
Copernicus' work is just full of errors and this is were new ideas were born.

On Dialogue #4

The paradox:
Feelings and thoughts don't agree.
and you don't believe one of the is the problem, and you try to solve it, when there is nothing to solve, so you are caught in the paradox forever.
(control yourself from flattery, but have a need for flattery)

But there is a problem with our mind.
There are problems that arise with meta-cognition (the mind is trying to understand itself)

"The paradox is that whereas one is treating his own thinking and feeling, as something separate from and independent of the thought that is thinking about them, it is evident that in fact there is, and can be, no such separation and independence."

Root paradox: trying to solve the problems of our thinking with our thinking.

Meta-Dialogue: may 2

There is a possibility that God can exist.
One thinks that one knows. But are we really ever going to know?

Even if we can't reach an objective truth, we can try to reach it or have a n approximation of the truth to make life easier and to help other people (when it comes to science).


If we discover how the mind works, could we lose the sense of our self? of individualism?

Why is there a me?
Could it be to identify an epiphenomenon?
what consequences can this cause?
could it be an obstacle to reach the absolute truth?
But we can know any of this because we would have to jump out of the system, climb another level.


We can only understand a system that is inferior to ours.
Hofstader mentions the brain.
All brains look the same and function the same way, but not everybody thinks the same and not everyone understands each other.
Hofstader says that, contrary to Lucas, humans do have limits. We are not the top.


Something that affects everything are the senses or the information that is interpreted by each person. In other words, everyone has a different perception.

Reality is what exists outside of everyone. It is independent of the person. Truth is just a term that we give to how much the perception of each person approximates reality. It would be an approximation of our perception to reality.
But at the end, it will always be an approximation, we will never reach reality.

On Dialogue #3

Nature of collective thought:
How humanity has been handling collective thought
Trying to see collective thought for what it really is.

We rarely think about how are thoughts have come to be (whether its from our parents, newspapers, etcetera). We should really question where our thoughts come from.

Collective thought influences our personal thoughts and this influences our collective thought.


It is hard to see the world without representations that we have since we are young.
We cant live in a world without representations, but we have to try to make the collective representations as accurate as we can to the real world (knowing that they are only representations).

Armando de la Torre #5

History was the first social science.
After it economy, anthropology, psychology and sociology were added.

Gilhelm Dilthey:
Before, everyone who wanted to do science had to know mathematics. Dilthey was the first one who claimed that history would be a science even if it did not have mathematics.

These sciences don't need mathematics because it is not as important to predict and it is not important to measure.
Not every science needs the same method in order to be called sciences.

At the beginning the social sciences were seen as probabilistic, while the rest of the sciences were seen as exact sciences.

In social sciences:
The efficient causes are not as important as the formal causes.
In the exact sciences:
the efficient causes are more important.

After the 1900 the conclusion was reached that the exact sciences are not exact, but are also probabilistic.

After all of this, Popper proved that  nothing is exact, and everything is an approximation.

Gödel, Escher, Bach #13

Zen: jumping out of oneself.
jumping out of the system.

Can one enter their own system but  at lower levels?
We will never be able to see ourselves. This is why we are a self-referential system.

Lucas things that we can jump out of ourselves because we are special (because we can think, think about who we are, reflect, etcetera.)

Are we as humans a formal system?

What would an informal system be?
something that doesn't have rules.
something that has no self-reference.
contradictions are allowed.

system: parts interacting.

Meta-Dialogue: apr 25

A topic mentioned a lot this week:  How to get to know oneself
Don Quijote (advises)
Vow of silence (limits, etc)
Difficult Conversations
Drama (Monologue)
Rhetoric
Emerson: know thyself.

For all of these, one must acknowledge the things that we don't like about ourselves, in order to change them.
But, there are always things which we don't notice about ourselves. We always need other people to tell us and help us. For example Carmen, she didn't notice she did certain things, until we told her.


What we are trying to do at the MPC is to find our passion, by taking our education in our hands, learning through things.
But at the same time we are not only focusing in our passion. We are also trying to grow in other areas and learning to live.
This is getting out of our comfort zone. It is easier not to try different things.
Our feelings (Difficult Conversations) affect this. We want to please the rest of the people, not feel vulnerable, etc.
We become someone else when we don't listen to our feelings and we don't get to know ourselves as well.

A reality will be a reality or an approximation of a reality. And we believe it is our reality until we discover something else. (What if there i another universe?)

Mechanics #1

Motion: the earth moves.
Does this mean that if I want to measure motion (of a car) I have to add the motion of the Earth to it?

motion is also what happens in our bodies. (blood, etc).

Difficult Conversations #5

Even if we don't share them, our feelings come out sooner or later (which our body language, tone of voice, etc).
We are always trying to feel less vulnerable.

The Copernican Revolution #3

Aristotle wanted to explain the universe philosophically and Ptolomy explains the universe in a more mathematical kind of way.
This is interesting because one thinks that they more or less thought of the universe the same way, but their interests were different.


Aristotle thought that there weren't any vacuums on Earth or the universe. The proof of this is that he said that matter and space are inseparable , that there couldn't not be any matter without space. If there in no matter, there isn't anything with which we cant define space.

Don Quijote

Capitulo 42 segunda parte.

Me parece ilógico que Don Quijote quiere que Sancho sea mejor con las personas y las trate mejor  (en la parte de sabiduría), cuando Don Quijote mismo no trata muy bien  a las personas y siempre las para lastimando.
Yo solo creo que Don Quijote solo es un loco, que no sabe nada y siempre causa desastres con los demás y a los lugares que va. Me parece tonto y me cuesta tomarlo enserio.

En el consejo dos, Don Quijote dice que no debe aparentar quien no es. Pero entonces contradicción a lo que el mismo dice, ya que Don Quijote dice que es un caballero cuando no lo es.

Estos consejos van en contra de lo que Don Quijote dice y no es constante.

Gödel, Escher, Bach #12

What Hofstader does in this chapter:

1. a system that can self-reference.
2. cantors diagonal: all of the capacity to self-reference is in a single string.

TNT: a system that is not based on numbers, that way we are not biased by numbers.

Meta-Dialogue: apr 18

At the MPC:
we have been more organized
our relationships with each other have improved
we have applied past experiences

we have been more present in nature:
we listen to the birds more often
we observe more


People cant do things for us. But they cant support us and help us (like in the waterfall in the Zapote). We didn't give up and we supported each other.

We use knowledge to improve in things. Everything applies in our daily life.

Tacit knowledge is brought up by experiences and it is mostly and attitude.
We have to search for solutions and answers, but also for questions.
It is also about moving forward, after making mistakes.
Something else that influences a lot is that we have to try to expose ourselves to new things and different situations, in which we can learn.


Approximations:
We are trying to make an approximation to the ideal MPC.
As Heinz said, there will always be a margin or error. In physics, in life, at the MPC, in math; everything is going to be an approximation.



How can we ever get to know ourselves?
It is impossible because we would need to pop-out.

We depend on other people who knows us in order to get to know ourselves. Sometimes we have assumption about ourselves, about how we are and how we act. and we need to be proprioceptive about this and keep in mind that other people are outside our system and will probably notice a lot of thing about us that we haven't noticed. But we should always keep in mind that we will never truly get to know ourselves.

In the MPC we have already started to imitate each other and to share many things, because of all of the time that we have spent together.  This is why we should always try to be our best and help the rest to be their best because at the end we are imitating each other, and it is better to imitate the good.

Meno #3

It is okay to bot know something and it will make us greater men if we search for answers and try to look for what we don't know. We need to believe  we can learn new things, instead of just staying with our doubts and  and not looking for answers and thinking that it is impossible to know.

The greater good of questioning.
The truth is not out our reach (or at least an approximation of the truth)

Can you teach virtue? No
Can you learn virtue? Yes

Meta-Dialogue: apr 17

In Crito, Plato says that one can betray your own values if it is for the common good of the law. And if it you live in a city, you have to follow that city's laws.
Something like this happened in the movie Agora, when they destroy the library, also when Orestes doesn't betray his values and then he does.  Also with Hypatia's dad, when he declares that they can fight the other religion.

You never know who is going to have the real truth. Like in the movie, one didnt know if the Jews, Christians or Greeks were right. This relates to what Armando says about approximations and that nothing can really be proved. The same thing can be seen in The Fire in the Equations. Which is the real theory that originated the word? The Big bang? the universe just was? God?

Is there a way to prove all of this?
We would need a leap of faith.
We can never really prove anything to be certain in science and religion.

Usually, they teach us that we cant question that leap of faith and this is why religions crash.
Sometimes questioning can be uncomfortable, that is why people don't question religion and science. In science people might be afraid to question because it means that they are entering an unknown place and they might not have the answers.

In science, not everything can be proved  y this creates a risk to our identity. We reach the point in which we cant prove anything and we only believe what we like and what we believe to be pretty.

If we could prove something with certainty, there wouldn't be any rooms for faith.