Thought Experiments (was Re: Life on Mars?)

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Bill, I am cc-ing this to a Christian mailing list I am on.  I hope
you don't mind.  I would like to get some additional inputs on this
subject, as I find it fascinating.  You may view the archives of the
mailing list at:

   http://eli.wariat.org/upc/net/higher-fire/index.html

or you may subscribe to it by sending email to:

   Richard Masoner <richardm@cd,com>

asking to subscribe to the Higher Fire mailing list.

Tyler, Richard, and the rest of the Higher-Fire list, The "William" in
this conversation is a friend of mine I met back in 1991 while working
at Cummins in Columbus Indiana.  Bill is a software engineer who has
concentrated on automotive applications of computers, such as engine
control systems, safety systems, instrumentation systems, etc.  He
attended the last night of General Conference in Indianapolis with me
in 1991.

>>>>> "William" == William S Alek <wsalek@primenet.com> writes:

    William> Well, my interest in these things spans many religious
    William> faiths -jewish, christian, catholic, and on and on. I
    William> don't intend or pretend to be an expert in any of these
    William> faiths, but my interest is probably like my work style as
    William> a contract engineer thats been around - gee thats the
    William> right way, thats a wrong way, thats the right way, and on
    William> and on. Given these circumstances, one becomes a data
    William> collector. As time goes on, patterns emerge, and one of
    William> my favorite activities are thought experiments.
    William> Collecting, collating, and understanding of these types
    William> of data feeds on itself. So, hearing the word of God
    William> merely reinforces what is already known.

Yes, the more you observe (or perceive, if you include the cerebral
processing of that observed data) the better equipped you are to make
a decision as to what you feel is the best understanding of the
situation.  

In my stochastic signal processing class in grad school 12 years ago,
the term for this was "maximum liklihood point estimation", which
meant you reported a measurement point that might never have been
observed itself, but based on all your observations, together with
your assessed trustworthiness of those observations, this point was
your best estimate.

This is as opposed to "interval estimation", where you report that the
observation is a point somewhere in the interval (or open ball, if it
was multidimensional) with a certain confidence factor.  Many
scientific experiments report their results as interval estimations.

In the "hard" sciences, such as physics, results are generally not
even worth reporting at all unless they have at least a 95%
confidence, and most experimentors prefer 97% or even 99% confidence,
or else they just will not publish.

In the "life" sciences, such as biology, medicine, ecology,
etc. results are generally considered reportable at 90% confidence,
and certain new fields even publish at 80%.

In the "soft" sciences, such as psycology, sociology, economics, etc.,
results are frequently reported as long as the confidence is greater
than 50%, which is really pure balderdash!  Such people really do not
understand statistics.

But if we consider the confidence associated with a point, it must
surely be zero always, since a point is an interval of zero size.  So
how do we get a maximum liklihood point estimation?  We take a limit.
The MLPE may be obtained by starting with a given interval width, and
finding the interval of that width with the highest confidence for the
observable statistic.  Once this interval is found, we shrink the
width of the interval, moving it around all the while so that it is
always positioned to be the interval of that width with highest
confidence.  If we continue this process as width approaches zero, the
limit interval thus obtained will be the MLPE for the statistic.

The usefullness of the MLPE over the confidence interval technique
stands out in applications such as weapons aiming, as performed by
Kalman filters.  It is rather hard to acquire a target on a radar and
aim a balistic projectile at that target if it is represented as an
interval.  That only works for shotguns and hand grenades!  Point
estimations are generally easier to grasp intuitively, since we no
longer need to append the hedging phrase about confidence, and it is a
specific point, not just a vague region.  Since a point estimate is
expressed precisely and succinctly, it may be thought of in symbolic
terms.

So what you are doing, and I suspect we all try to do it, is to
develop your best estimate of a point in some state-space that
represents the "truth" about some situation, or to generalize to the
abstract truth, the point in universal state space that represents the
truth about "everything".  

The only problem with this is that the state space contains your own
brain, which is itself a finite state machine.  Therefore, your
brain's own state is just a very small part of the state space you are
trying to model, and when you think a different thought, you change
the very state of the space you are modelling.  

This leads to quasi-infinite regress.  I say "quasi" because of the
finiteness of your own brain.  Since the brain is finite, the number
of its internal states must be finite, hence it is a [very large]
finite state machine, or FSM.  It is a theorem from automata theory
that any FSM operating without external inputs will follow some
trajectory that ultimately loops back on itself somewhere in that path
and then cycle through that loop forever.  

If you are thinking about observed measurement points, instead of
actually observing them, then if the size of the loop you converge on
is a single state of your cerebral FSM, then we say you have reached a
conclusion.  

But if the limit cycle of the FSM is non-unitary, then you are just
arguing with yourself, and a circular argument at that.  

If this limit cycle is short enough, you will realize this and decide
you have found a contradiction, and that either your hypothesis is
wrong, your measurements are contradictory, or your reasoning is
faulty.  

If this limit cycle is longer, even much longer, then you will not
likely realize what is happening, and we say you are insane!

If it so long that nobody realizes it is circular, we might say you
are a genius that is so far above the rest of us that we just cannot
understand what you are trying to say.  In this case, we may think you
are correct even if you are wrong.  We would then say, after
discovering your falacy, that you were a deciever, or false prophet.

    William> Given that, whether religious or scientific ideas, is the
    William> same to me, which is truth. Not perceived truth which is
    William> a consequence of the human condition, but the whole
    William> truth. The VP of engineering at Mack's favorite quote was
    William> "Perception is Reality". My thought experiment was "You
    William> change Perception, you change Reality". The ability to
    William> distinguish truth from perceived truth is most
    William> challenging, and one I think I will find most rewarding.

"You change Perception, you change Reality" is an echo from the
popular subject in the 60's called 'altered states of awareness'.
Timothy Leary liked to use LSD to change perception.  Some people use
meditation, or Qabalah, or even Christian prayer and fasting.  The
important thing to keep in mind when changing one's perception is the
reason why you are changing it, and what effect you are trying to
achieve.  These considerations should drive how you change your
perception.  

Although I used a lot of drugs before 1978, I believe that most
radical change in my perception occurred when I was filled with the
Holy Ghost on December 13, 1978.  That *REALLY* changed my perception!

Yes, I have decided, and it was definately an act of faith on my part
to do so, that I ascribe the highest confidence to Biblical
statements.  Now the trick is to line that up with what I percieve
with my own senses.  

This sometimes requires me to go back to the original Greek or Hebrew
(by means of Strongs concordance and a lexicon) to understand what the
original words really meant, since the King James English is a bit
different sometimes from the modern English we are accustomed to.

I sometimes have to reconsider what I have observed or perceived (how
I interpreted those observations).  Previously, we spoke about
observations made in the "world" (the Biblical term), and the
statistical nature of all such observations.  But the Bible is
symbolic, and its truths are absolute, not relative.  Therefore, we
must use symbolic reasoning to reconcile these worldly observations
with the Bible.  Point statistics are much easier to unify with
Biblical truths that interval estimations are.

The process called for is J. A. A. Robinson's "unification" principle,
and the "resolution" algorithm that uses that principle.  I realize
that to run a resolution inference engine on all of the scriptures and
try to unify them with all the observables we can dig up would be
computationally unfeasable, but it makes a good thought experiment to
consider it.  

The result would be the "truth" you are looking for, as opposed to the
"percieved truth" that we all have, although with a different truth
for each person, to match his different perceptions.  If you changed
the weights you associated so that, say, the Koran had greatest
confidence, then you would get a "different" truth, etc.  

I guess the real trick would be to determine the maneuverability
matrix for the maximum likelihood point estimation that you came up
with for each different set of confidence weights, and then choose the
"sharpest" of the derived universal "truths".

-- 
--------  "And there came a writing to him from Elijah"  [2Ch 21:12]  --------
Robert Jay Brown III  rj@eli.wariat.org  http://eli.wariat.org  1 847 705-0424
Elijah Laboratories Inc.;  37 South Greenwood Avenue;  Palatine, IL 60067-6328
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