It's easier to shout than it is to sing.
It's easier to obey than it is to think.
It's easier to destroy than it is to create.

I do not seek an easy life.

May you live in interesting times.

Being Human

Life's endlessly interesting. This haphazard zone of my web-site might be accused of philosophy, but that's more grandiose than what I aim to do with it. I've written less here than in other areas; not because it's less important, but because I can't articulate my thoughts on it as fluently. The fragments that exist are:

On altruism and a common folly of socioeconomic science.
On love.
On the art of persuasion.
On unfair pay between women and men.
On rights and intelligence (even if artificial).
Some things are less noteworthy than those who remark on them usually suppose.
Lessons from Bill Watterson (author of Calvin and Hobbes, a.k.a. Tommy and the Tiger in some translations)
My take on the age-old controversy over Free Will and determinism (or predestination).
Incoherent ramblins trying to relate Gödel's theorem to spiritual/religious cultural behaviours.
Skepticism about the half full vs half empty false dichotomy.
On judging folk.
A sideways look at learning about sex.
On sharing and collaboration.
Why I doubt there are alpha humans.

It seems worth mentioning Arthur Clarke's three laws (far more relevant to the real world than Asimov's):

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of humanity's greatest unsung triumphs has been the defeat of leprosy. Although around a quarter million victims remain, the WHO campaign to eradicate leprosy makes steady progress. Many millions of victims of this ancient scourge have been cured. A 1991 WHO policy to reduce levels of leprosy to below one in ten thousand by 2000 was completed on schedule.

Given that a human brain contains of order 1e11 (a hundred milliards of) neurons, say N of them, suppose the length scale of a typical neuron (they're quite gangly, for cells, so maybe 2 mm isn't too unrealistic) is r times the length scale of the human head (something like 200 mm), say r ≈ 0.01 or so, the fraction m of the total brain-cells within reach of each is about 1/r/r/r; so m.N is still pretty big (still 1e5, a hundred thousand). If each neuron connects to k others, it's got chose(m.N, k) = (m.N)!/k!/(m.N −k)! choices open to it and there are N such neurons; we count each connection twice (once for each of the two neurons connecting at it), so this gives N.(m.N)!/k!/(m.N −k)!/2 possible patterns of interconnection. If k is reasonably small compared to m.N (as seems likely to my guesses) this is of order N.(m.N)^k, something like ten^{11 +5.k}, which is going to be pretty huge for even quite modest value of k. That's just the possible patterns of interconnection: each neuron has potentially quite complex state and the brain has chemical signaling going on via other paths than direct neural connections. The number of possible states of a human brain is pretty big.

Being Human

See also