R.E.S.P.E.C.T

belief 
n.

1. something believed; opinion; conviction.

2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

3. confidence; faith; trust: children's belief in parents.

4. a religious creed or faith.

Consider an island on which there are two people A and B. A holds a belief which to them means certain foods are prohibited. B has no such belief and can eat anything edible.

B is given control over how the food is split between both A and B. The pieces of food will be X and Y. A can eat X but holds a belief which means they choose not to eat Y. This is where B’s choice becomes important. Within the modern world great emphasis is placed upon the freedom of others and their right to believe and think whatever they like. This is of course is important and should not ever be changed however the issue comes from the virulent nature of some beliefs and their brutish and arrogant assertions which can encroach upon the freedom of others.

Personally everyone has the right to think and mould ideas however they like and also the right to voice these opinions, however once voiced it is also the right of everyone else to question and debate these views. After all ideas have elements which can be tested using empirical evidence and logic to convey the validity of these ideas. In a perfect world this would mainly be done in a purely objective fashion with no emotional attachment to the ideas and their fate. This of course comes with the proviso that the challenge of these ideas is constructive and based around reasons and not ad hominem attacks upon the arbiter of the idea or subjective comments which are baseless. This is not the case and it causes vast problems when trying to provide freedom for all.

Now back to the scenario, the fairest way to split the two pieces of food is 50/50. Both A and B are capable of eating both X and Y without incurring any physical consequence.  To some it would be disrespectful of B to force A to eat Y. However this is deliberately choosing one side over the other on subjective grounds. In a similar regard it is wrong of A to demand a certain pattern of behaviour from B because of A’s personal belief. This belief could be affiliated with a religion or just a personnel philosophy it makes no difference. A has no right to change the behaviour of B because of his own thoughts on the world just like B should not do the same unto A.

For example A’s belief should be considered to have more weight behind it than B’s personal preference to eat Y instead of X and vice versa. Given this there is only one way to split the two which is 50/50. Should there exist a queue for the food in which first come first serve applies then whomever is first will get to choose X or Y with no consequences. This would be exactly the same as if A or B are given first pick of X and Y, whichever one the person with first choice would like they get. So if B wants Y he may take Y with no judgement even though A believes they cannot eat X. Again this comes down to the fact that A’s reason for wanting Y is purely subjective.

This remains the same for any belief or preference unless one of A or B has a ailment which would inhibit them from eating one of either X or Y in which case there is more than just opinion behind the preference and the food should be split accordingly. For example if A is allergic to X then they should receive Y and B X.

This should apply to everything and work both ways. You have no right to assert your beliefs or preferences upon others just like they have no right to do the same to you. Although it is clear everyone is not equal to one another in so many ways we should at least give everyone the freedom we would demand if placed in the same situation. The baseless argument that can be thrown at people who are not a member of a large social group or religion is that they are not respecting an established pattern of behaviour. This is both hypocritical as it potentially undermines the persons opinions and thoughts showing the same disrespect they would charge that person with coupled with an ignorant disregard for the rights of others even though they would demand those rights themselves.

Gettier

Gettier, Clark and the tripartite theory of knowledge all closely link together in the complicated debate that has become the definition of knowledge. As Gettier questioned is justified true belief knowledge picking flaws in an attempt to define knowledge. This definition was the tripartite theory of knowledge which shows in three steps whether someone can have knowledge as shown below.

S knows that P IFF           i) P is true, ii) S believes that P, and iii) S is justified in believing that P.

In principle the tripartite theory of knowledge will allow anyone to decide whether an agent has knowledge based on a certain event. However as shown by Gettier this is not the case as it is possible through what has become known as Gettier cases to show that this rule is not all encompassing. It allows for the agent to believe in certain cases that they have knowledge when in actual fact their belief is based on false premises. Gettier wrote this in his only paper on epistemology titled is true justified belief knowledge. In this he gave counterexamples which showed that although the agent is justified in believing that something is true it cannot say that it has knowledge. Gettier offers no changes to the tripartite theory to allow it to accept the scenarios he proposed as he did not publish or even show any interest in following up his paper so all the responses have come from other philosophers who have either tried to patch up the theory or tried to say the Gettier cases themselves are not valid counterexamples.

Clark who makes the point that if the agent has solid grounds for their belief then they can in turn infer that they have knowledge Clarks shown below.

S knows that P IFF i) P is true, ii) S believes that P, iii) S is justified in believing that P, and iv) it is on true grounds that S believes P. Michael Clark (a response to Gettier)

This now means that as long as there are solid grounds for the belief and the agent believes in it they can have knowledge. However this leads on to what is then known as the chain where each one of these grounds must also be checked and in turn the grounds of the grounds of the grounds of the belief must also be called into question and so on. Only when all the grounds have been proven can the original belief be fully grounded and considered knowledge. This can of course become very complicated and it is quite possible that several different grounds can be balanced upon each other leading to a mesh network wherein if one of the links becomes un-grounded then all of the beliefs connected to this can no longer be considered knowledge. Although Clark’s changes to the theory improve upon the original but it still will not satisfy all scenarios.

For example the dictionary definition of knowledge is: the psychological result of perception, learning and reasoning.

This depicts knowledge to in fact be from a first person perspective and not from an observer like Gettier and Clark. The observer has prior knowledge of the event being considered by the agent and can therefore make the assessment that the agent is not justified in their belief and that they do not have knowledge.

Knowledge itself should be considered as the best available explanation to the agent at the time of the event considering that this explanation is fully grounded at the time from the best possible information available. Making knowledge an evolutionary concept which with an infinite amount of time would be correct at the end and considered correct at all points before that.

An example of this can be observed in the case an automatic hoover which has a basic program which allows it to map the world around it and to remember everywhere it's been. When first turned on, sensors will tell it if the squares around it are flat and if it has cleaned them or not. Using Clark’s theory the machine can when first switched on and consider according to its memory which is all it will use as its grounded reason for making its assumptions. Its first assumption is “The world around it is all flat therefore the world is flat”.

The machine will recursively follow a pattern of going to every single tile possible, as it passes through a tile it will consider that tile clean or not as well as whether its surroundings are flat or not to make sure it does not run into anything. Eventually one of the tiles around it will not be flat. Once this has happened, its old assumption which it previously considered knowledge is now no longer fully grounded and is in fact incorrect. At this stage the machine can now make a new assumption that not all the world is flat and its knowledge has evolved.

As the hoover has a perfect memory it can give an exact numerical value for the amount of the world that it knows is flat. So if it has searched 100 tiles and five of them have not been flat they it can say that 5% of the world is not flat. In this case the five tiles will be considered as P. P is true the agent believes that it is true the agent is justified in believing it is true and the belief is fully grounded because its memory is perfect and the world that has explored is all confirms this therefore an exact value can be given.

This cycle will continue for an infinite amount of time while the machine explores the world around it. At no point can the hoover hope to know the world outside what it has explored. However it can happily make statements about the world that has been memorised. At every single point it can consider itself to have the best available knowledge about the world is true at that point in time. If you were to look at the hoovers statements from a observers perspective with prior knowledge you could easily say that it's justified true belief is not knowledge however as the definition of knowledge itself is the perspective, learning and reasoning of the person or in this case thing, then from its point of view the belief it holds will be not only justified but correct and therefore knowledge.

This approach would mean that Clarks definition would require an extra line that would essentially say that while all the grounds at the time are fully grounded, can change when new information becomes available and the outcome should change appropriately along with the belief that fuels it. Taking this new five line rule is shown below then the agent can consider it self to have knowledge.

S knows that P IFF           i) P is true, ii) S believes that P, iii) S is justified in believing that P, iv)it is on true grounds that S believes that P, and v) P and its grounds remain the same.

This rule however does not work if two people are both using the same rule this case should call them X and Y. If X goes up and down stairs on the right-hand side and Y uses the left-hand side. They are both on the same staircase with X going up Y going down. When they will collide both will consult their rule and both will consider their knowledge to be incorrect and change their behaviour appropriately to use the opposite side. From this the two will then when the next and are going up and down stairs in opposite directions will collide again this will recursively occur whenever they meet on the stairs. Meaning the knowledge they hold at different points is both correct and incorrect which would point to the fact they have no knowledge because of its continuous fluctuation.

It is from this it can be considered that no matter how many changes to the theory philosophers come up with the whole idea of an all-encompassing definition of knowledge is one of grandeur that most disciplines have sought after from the theory of everything that physicists dream of but have yet to achieve to systems people believe will win every time when gambling. As physics and gambling both require knowledge to prove their theories then knowledge itself should be considered infinitely more complicated as neither of the two aforementioned examples have ever been reached. Surely then knowledge itself should also be considered near impossible to explain or to define without having itself broken down into many smaller parts like physics has with its equations in order to explain events. As knowledge encompasses everything it is unlikely to be defined in such a way that the definition is able to cover all possible scenarios past present or future.

X is the same person as Y if and only if

Who are you at the moment, a question that could quite easily flummox most people? Describing and being able to convey who you are to others is tricky so add to that question the metaphorical prefix and the suffix in the form of who were you and who will you become is going to take a while to provide a decent answer.

With about 7 billion people alive today it is probably worth having the ability to pick yourself out from the crowd and answer the previously posed question. Some people have set about this task already explaining who we are in many different forms one of which is quantitative identity, X and Y so often used in mathematics to describe numbers and objects can now be used to denote a person. They can be used to describe the same person at different stages of their life. For example X could be a young boy and Y an old man. Which leads to this first part of the statement which is “X is the same person as Y if and only if” with different endings being alluded to below to best explain when X and Y are the same or if they can be.

There are two prominent criteria for X to be the same as Y, these are the memory criterion and the bodily criterion. Both have their own way of explaining identity and making it quantitative. The first which is the memory criterion which dictates that someone who has memories of their previous state is the same person as the one who existed when that state was in the present. So essentially X is the same person as Y if and only if Y has memories of being X.

¹The bodily criterion dictates that if X is a kid from 20 years ago and Y has the same body as X then they are the same person. This means that the bodily criterion can convict Y of a crime X has committed even if they have no memory of it as long as they share the same body.¹

¹The memory criterion relies on consciousness simply being that X and Y are the same consciousness if they share memories.¹ Consciousness is probably better defined as the blueprint for personality. It is often said that people don't change and the only reason for anyone changing is the memories they have gained throughout their life and how they react to them. Physics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed only transferred. That same logic could be applied to consciousness when someone dies their conscious is transferred to a living entity with the same personality but with a different physical form that will again if placed in exactly the same scenarios make exactly the same decisions.

So X and Y are the same person if and only if the two are placed in a series of scenarios with no previous memories and they make exactly the same decisions and the reason for making  those decisions and thought behind them is exactly the same.

This means that unlike the original memory criterion if X committed a murder which is only discovered after X's existence has finished and Y's has commenced then Y can still be charged because despite there being no memory of the event the decision-making process that led to X taking someone's life is also present in Y.

²Mentioned earlier the bodily criterion states that we are the same if we have the same body as stated earlier. So if X is originally a child and 20 years later Y inhabits the same body despite being an adult then they are the same.²

This of course is all well and good as long as you can define what a body is. The human body is made up of billions of cells; each of these cells like people can only live for so long therefore the cells that made up the child's body will be different to the cells that make up the adult body some 20 years later. If X and Y have completely different cells then their body is completely so they surely cannot be one and the same.

A way around this is to assume that although the cells will completely change the new cells will presumably inhabit the same entity as the previous ones. Therefore the position of that entity and the cells contained within the body at that time and place. If every change in the entity is recorded into an array along with the entities position in the universe essentially it will be possible to track back from Y to X each state that has existed and confirm if they are the same body.

This would create the rule X is the same person as Y if and only if when tracked back through Y's array there exists a state that is equal to the state of X. This would also allow fission cases to have each of the identical people within each case distinguish who is who and that they are not the same.

³A fission case is where an identical copy of you is created. Then the memory criterion would dictate that because you both share the memories you are the same person. Again the same issue occurs with the bodily criterion where if the at an atomic level then you would have the same body and therefore you would be the same person.³

The change in the bodily criterion would mean that though at the initial point when your copied you would indeed be the same person the minute a new entry is created in the universe position array then you'd be two different people as you would no longer be able to match up every single part of the array although you would share a significant amount of similarities.

The adapted memory criterion may have redefining our conscience but it will still suffer from fission cases as the newly theorised conscious cannot be created or destroyed and therefore would be an impossibility to create a copy. Meaning that both fission cases would be proved wrong and the adapted memory criterion proved right or vice versa.

With the fission case issue forcing the memory criterion back to the drawing board and the issue that X and Y are merely linked by a memory, a shrewder change is needed. If Y is changed to be itself and each state it has been along its journey to be added to Y with varying amounts presumably becoming smaller over time. Then you can prove that X is part of Y as no matter how slight its effect X is within Y. So Y and X are the same person.

For example M (Y) = Y + 1/2X. Then suppose that the next stage in this person's life is represented by Z then M (Z) = Z +1/2Y + 1/4X with M representing a function that gives a person’s memories. The previous states that person will always be fractal and never be zero meaning that if X was a young boy, Y a middle-aged man and Z an old man. X would always be a part of Z that cannot be removed.

The reason why it is impossible for X to not be a part of Z is because although there may no longer be any memories that Z can remember about being X the thought patterns and the way that Z approaches every part of his life will have been set up as such as a direct result of something X has done. Each of the steps after X is an evolution which requires an original step to begin and without this step Z could not exist. So X and Y are the same person, if X no matter how smaller percentage exists in the total memory of Y

In terms of the fission case related to this new memory criterion the original clones like the bodily criterion would be the same person after that point they would become less and less alike and can never be considered as the same.

In conclusion to truly define whether X and Y are the same person a number of dependencies would be required. Both the memory and bodily criterion should be combined to create a larger rule which essentially combines the adapted bodily criterion using the universe positional array and the evolutionary memory criterion to create a single all-encompassing formula to define if person X is the same as person Y. This would minimise the effect of any fission case surrounding a person and also give the best possible identification of X and Y. So X and Y are the same person if the adapted bodily and memory criterions are true.

Hello World

As a brief introduction I am 22 years old well at least I was at the time this was written. Having been assigned the name of Thomas at birth and then Tom by most people years later writing took my fancy. The reason is simple having gone through 22 years of life my pursuit of interesting ideas often gets left behind and forgotten in place of football results and video game manuals. It has long been evident that instead of just thinking about ideas and briefly boring anyone within ear shot that these ideas should be written down to both improve my own understanding of them and to bore people in another medium.

With the rise of social media it seems everyone is writing more but most the time about nothing or at least in my opinion nothing. Anyone who knows me will be aware that small talk or mindless data transfers bore me beyond reason. This is not out of any need to offend the people or that what people are doing isn’t interesting to them or anyone else merely the fact that it is boring to me. To get to know someone I would much rather get their take on what they think is a good way to govern people or what they think about the universe than the contents of their breakfast, the quantity of alcohol ingested the night before and the location at which said alcohol was purchased.

Like peoples taste in music differs so does my taste in conversation which would be considered to be away from the norm. Small talk just doesn’t resonate with me as it isn’t really giving a lot away about what the person thinks. In the same respect no one has to like my attempt at writing some philosophical pieces. This is merely a space for me to write down my thoughts on the world whether they are listened to or not. If you end up liking these pieces and wish to comment and discuss further then great if not there is an almost a vast amount of things to do and I would strongly urge you to do what you enjoy and not fall asleep to my musings. Unless of course you have been suffering from insomnia and I have somehow developed a personnel cure for you in which case please inform your doctor of my blog and have him spread the word.

Philosophy: The study of general and fundamental problems such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy)

Now I was once told during a brief spell at the University of Birmingham (Studying Computer Science) by my Philosophy lecturer that the only good philosophy is published philosophy. This view didn’t sit well with me as in my opinion everyone will have something worthwhile to say. After all published philosophy is written by people, a quick look will also reveal you are a person and although the authors of published philosophy have had more training and spent more time on it this does not mean that there isn’t good philosophy beyond the published kind and that it is out of all of our reaches. This also does not mean what I am writing is good merely that it can be done by anyone and I wish to create a premise where I have a chance even if it may be biased in my favour. We all face the same existential issues and possess the ability to communicate our thoughts on these general and fundamental problems to one another. Whether what is written is right or not is for every individual to decide, of course using a logical and rational thought process to assess the material does help get a general picture otherwise there is a danger of descending into complete randomness, but these tools at least in their basic form are easy to pick up at any good hardware store.

Another quick proviso is that I have no qualms with any idea. It has become the bedrock of my thinking that any idea can be expressed and should be however when that idea is made public it can be scrutinised and discussed. This goes for every idea including but not limited to personnel beliefs, religious beliefs, philosophical beliefs and political beliefs. I will most likely deal with all these topics in a purely rational and logical way to the best of my ability and use on the whole objective arguments to explore these. I will also clarify that scrutinised and discuss does not mean to abuse or discriminate against an individual person this wholly encompasses the idea itself and not its connection to any one person or group of people coupled with the intent of evolving the meme. For me an argument is not between people to prove one right and the other wrong but a mechanism to evolve a meme.

Meme: An idea behaviour or style which spreads from person to person. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme)

From here onwards there will be more substance but it seemed like a decent way to explain what the blog was meant to be about and who I am as well as giving myself a sort of framework to build on. I hope you enjoy reading more of what I write and If not all the best with whatever you do. J