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I just want to play on my panpipes
Oct. 2nd, 2006 11:59 pm
You know why sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell? Because goats lie in the food trough, while the sheep lie on the ground underneath. I'm not sure, though, whether that explains why a sheep is a lady goat. But what I want to tell you about is the goat's--I mean, this one goat's, this really fat grey goat's--manner of eating, now that there are leaves lying around everywhere. This goat goes around the fence, a few inches at a time, and plucks up leaves, one by one, that are sticking through the fence. There are, of course, lots of leaves lying around everywhere on its side of the fence. But it doesn't want those lives. It wants the ones sticking through the fence. Except: if it fails to tug a leaf through, or drops it, or whatever, then it will eat a leaf lying on the ground in front of it.
I have three hypotheses. 1. There's actually a certain quasi-rationality in it, in that the more easily-accessible leaves are held in reserve. 2. The goat was brought up eating its food through a grate. 3. This is like cats' "fresh food only" behaviour: the food in the jar is vastly preferable to the food in the dish.
There are signs in the animals' enclosures saying "Please Do Not Feed Me -- I Am On A Special Diet". And for some reason, people are actually much less likely to feed the animals than they are to feed the ducks. But, you know, I have to wonder whether there's really much that people could feed the animals that might be of less nutritional value than expired maple leaves. That goat is eating a lot of maple leaves. I mean, that goat has got to be bursting with maple leaves. The emus are also eating maple leaves. And the rabbits. (The rabbits, though, don't have a "Don't Feed Me" sign, and they are--or were, in the summer--abundantly fed, mostly carrots, in which, of course, they have little actual interest. When I went by the rabbits today, a grey-haired woman was attempting to fling celery over the fence. Mostly, it was hitting the barbed wire and bouncing back.)
So, today is the first day in about 51 weeks that I don't have a yahoo fantasy team to fret over. Like the Houston Astros, my team miraculously revived itself to defy death until the last day of the season, and then blew its brains out. That was the second time this year that Bonderman had a 6-0 lead and failed to pick up a win. (That was also the major league-leading tenth time this year that the Royals came back from four or more runs down to win a game.) I knew going in that I had a dangerously brittle team, and injuries did in fact kill me--but it wasn't my brittle players who got injured. It's a funny game.
And that would make it Playoff Prediction time. (Uh oh.) Let's see. Tigers and Yankees reminds me of A's-Reds in 1990. No one in their right mind would've picked the Reds to beat the A's in that Series, so I, of course, proclaimed that the Reds would sweep the A's, because, you know, why the hell not? It's a funny game. And it came to pass that the Reds swept the A's. So, maybe you're a genius, and maybe you're a lucky idiot. If you want to be successful, it's better to be a lucky idiot. Well, whatever. Really, though, these are some pretty screwy playoff matchups. This has, actually, been a pretty screwy baseball season. Nobody played .600 in either league, and there's maybe one team in the NL that's any good at all.
Twins-A's all hinges on Game 1: if Santana loses, the Twins don't have a prayer. But then, look, if Martin Gerber goes out in the first round of last year's NHL playoffs, the Hurricanes don't have a prayer, right? And then doesn't Kara Yorio look goofy for picking the Hurricanes to win the Stanley Cup. Do the Tigers have a chance? Did the Fish have a chance three years ago, or whenever it was? (I was shocked to be reminded, the other day, that Ivan Rodriguez was on that team.) Did Bob Brenly have a chance in '01 to become the first manager to win five games in a seven-game series, against America's Team? Ah, forget it. I just hope it's not New York, New York. I'll love it if it's Detroit ... oh, I dunno, St. Louis. Why not: what could be better than LaRussa finally winning one in St. Louis, with maybe the worst team he's ever managed.
Predictions for the long haul, though, are a little more sensible, but just a little. I did successfully predict the top three in the AL East, though that was because the Red Sox were much worse than I expected, and not because the Blue Jays were as good as I expected. (However: by beating the Yankees in their last game, the Jays moved into a tie with the Yankees and Mets for the second-best home record in baseball, behind St. Louis.)
Which brings me to something that has interested me since I got into the whole moral luck business: when is a prediction justified? I mean, my prediction that the Blue Jays would finish second turned out to be true, and I had good reasons (well, arguably) for predicting that, but my prediction came true for reasons other than those on which I actually based it. That's analogous to "Gettier cases" in epistemology--where the idea is supposed to be that a true belief that's justified for reasons that accidentally happen to be irrelevant to its truth doesn't count as knowledge ... so in addition to the problem when predictions count as justified, analogously, there would be a problem of when they count as ... what? "Good"? Um.
And finally: read a rather dismaying article in Daedalus by The Damasios (they're multiplying!) about minds and brains and bodies, which mentioned some really interesting stuff along the way about how brains anticipate situations, so that you feel like something has happened even though it hasn't, and mirror what others are doing, so that you feel like you're doing it even though you're not (but then, I would suppose that it helps to get you to do it, like the geese that all suddenly roll on their backs and kick their legs in the air--I saw this once, I shit you not). What's dismaying is that they think they're on their way to solving the mind-body problem when all they're doing, at most, is talking about what's going on in brains when certain things are going on in minds. But mostly what they're doing is replacing the mind-body problem with a brain-body (or, as they say, "body-proper") problem. I heard a talk at CPA last year that did the same thing--it argued that you couldn't have emotions in a brain that was isolated from a body, and that this showed mind-body dualism to be false. I have also been at a philosophy of mind talk where a couple of psychologists in the room could not be made to understand that there is at least a conceptual difference between brains and minds. Like I say, dismaying.
Brains and minds is the theme of this issue of Daedalus, and the brains and minds section ends with a piece by Jerry Fodor, who was a dismaying brick wall that Searle banged his head against in the Chinese room, but who is, here, on, largely against Pinker, about how much we don't know about, in fact don't have any idea about, minds and brains. Talking about the "frame problem"--the problem, which Hubert Dreyfus said in the '60s was fatal for artificial intelligence, of how a computational system could decide what information is relevant for a particular computation--Fodor says, if someone says they've solved the frame problem (like Pinker thinks he has--or so Fodor says--with the idea of heuristics), then they don't understand the frame problem. That absolutely goes for the mind-body problem, but not just if they think they've solved it--if they think they have the slightest idea how to solve it. (Fodor then goes on to say--jokingly? half-jokingly?--that if anyone says they understand the frame problem, then they don't understand the frame problem. I don't see how that might be true of the frame problem, but it certainly could be true of the mind-body problem.)
I have three hypotheses. 1. There's actually a certain quasi-rationality in it, in that the more easily-accessible leaves are held in reserve. 2. The goat was brought up eating its food through a grate. 3. This is like cats' "fresh food only" behaviour: the food in the jar is vastly preferable to the food in the dish.
There are signs in the animals' enclosures saying "Please Do Not Feed Me -- I Am On A Special Diet". And for some reason, people are actually much less likely to feed the animals than they are to feed the ducks. But, you know, I have to wonder whether there's really much that people could feed the animals that might be of less nutritional value than expired maple leaves. That goat is eating a lot of maple leaves. I mean, that goat has got to be bursting with maple leaves. The emus are also eating maple leaves. And the rabbits. (The rabbits, though, don't have a "Don't Feed Me" sign, and they are--or were, in the summer--abundantly fed, mostly carrots, in which, of course, they have little actual interest. When I went by the rabbits today, a grey-haired woman was attempting to fling celery over the fence. Mostly, it was hitting the barbed wire and bouncing back.)
So, today is the first day in about 51 weeks that I don't have a yahoo fantasy team to fret over. Like the Houston Astros, my team miraculously revived itself to defy death until the last day of the season, and then blew its brains out. That was the second time this year that Bonderman had a 6-0 lead and failed to pick up a win. (That was also the major league-leading tenth time this year that the Royals came back from four or more runs down to win a game.) I knew going in that I had a dangerously brittle team, and injuries did in fact kill me--but it wasn't my brittle players who got injured. It's a funny game.
And that would make it Playoff Prediction time. (Uh oh.) Let's see. Tigers and Yankees reminds me of A's-Reds in 1990. No one in their right mind would've picked the Reds to beat the A's in that Series, so I, of course, proclaimed that the Reds would sweep the A's, because, you know, why the hell not? It's a funny game. And it came to pass that the Reds swept the A's. So, maybe you're a genius, and maybe you're a lucky idiot. If you want to be successful, it's better to be a lucky idiot. Well, whatever. Really, though, these are some pretty screwy playoff matchups. This has, actually, been a pretty screwy baseball season. Nobody played .600 in either league, and there's maybe one team in the NL that's any good at all.
Twins-A's all hinges on Game 1: if Santana loses, the Twins don't have a prayer. But then, look, if Martin Gerber goes out in the first round of last year's NHL playoffs, the Hurricanes don't have a prayer, right? And then doesn't Kara Yorio look goofy for picking the Hurricanes to win the Stanley Cup. Do the Tigers have a chance? Did the Fish have a chance three years ago, or whenever it was? (I was shocked to be reminded, the other day, that Ivan Rodriguez was on that team.) Did Bob Brenly have a chance in '01 to become the first manager to win five games in a seven-game series, against America's Team? Ah, forget it. I just hope it's not New York, New York. I'll love it if it's Detroit ... oh, I dunno, St. Louis. Why not: what could be better than LaRussa finally winning one in St. Louis, with maybe the worst team he's ever managed.
Predictions for the long haul, though, are a little more sensible, but just a little. I did successfully predict the top three in the AL East, though that was because the Red Sox were much worse than I expected, and not because the Blue Jays were as good as I expected. (However: by beating the Yankees in their last game, the Jays moved into a tie with the Yankees and Mets for the second-best home record in baseball, behind St. Louis.)
Which brings me to something that has interested me since I got into the whole moral luck business: when is a prediction justified? I mean, my prediction that the Blue Jays would finish second turned out to be true, and I had good reasons (well, arguably) for predicting that, but my prediction came true for reasons other than those on which I actually based it. That's analogous to "Gettier cases" in epistemology--where the idea is supposed to be that a true belief that's justified for reasons that accidentally happen to be irrelevant to its truth doesn't count as knowledge ... so in addition to the problem when predictions count as justified, analogously, there would be a problem of when they count as ... what? "Good"? Um.
And finally: read a rather dismaying article in Daedalus by The Damasios (they're multiplying!) about minds and brains and bodies, which mentioned some really interesting stuff along the way about how brains anticipate situations, so that you feel like something has happened even though it hasn't, and mirror what others are doing, so that you feel like you're doing it even though you're not (but then, I would suppose that it helps to get you to do it, like the geese that all suddenly roll on their backs and kick their legs in the air--I saw this once, I shit you not). What's dismaying is that they think they're on their way to solving the mind-body problem when all they're doing, at most, is talking about what's going on in brains when certain things are going on in minds. But mostly what they're doing is replacing the mind-body problem with a brain-body (or, as they say, "body-proper") problem. I heard a talk at CPA last year that did the same thing--it argued that you couldn't have emotions in a brain that was isolated from a body, and that this showed mind-body dualism to be false. I have also been at a philosophy of mind talk where a couple of psychologists in the room could not be made to understand that there is at least a conceptual difference between brains and minds. Like I say, dismaying.
Brains and minds is the theme of this issue of Daedalus, and the brains and minds section ends with a piece by Jerry Fodor, who was a dismaying brick wall that Searle banged his head against in the Chinese room, but who is, here, on, largely against Pinker, about how much we don't know about, in fact don't have any idea about, minds and brains. Talking about the "frame problem"--the problem, which Hubert Dreyfus said in the '60s was fatal for artificial intelligence, of how a computational system could decide what information is relevant for a particular computation--Fodor says, if someone says they've solved the frame problem (like Pinker thinks he has--or so Fodor says--with the idea of heuristics), then they don't understand the frame problem. That absolutely goes for the mind-body problem, but not just if they think they've solved it--if they think they have the slightest idea how to solve it. (Fodor then goes on to say--jokingly? half-jokingly?--that if anyone says they understand the frame problem, then they don't understand the frame problem. I don't see how that might be true of the frame problem, but it certainly could be true of the mind-body problem.)
