Saturday, June 30, 2007
Don't Kiss in India... they might arrest you.
This is an old story but still worth commenting on. It is safe to say that Richard Gere will not be invited back to India anytime soon after he kissed actress Shilpa Shettyat an awards ceremony. It, of course, caused cries of outrage from many Indians because such public displays of affection are frowned upon. Gere has apologized for offending those who watched the awards ceremony. One Indian province actually issued an arrest warrant for both Gere and Shilpa! This incident makes India the laughing stock of the western world for sure since FOX broadcast two women kissing here in the states and no one got arrested. I take offense to this sort of behavior coming from a supposedly civilized democracy. It is ridiculous and to put it mildly, impolite to arrest guests of your country for making social gaffes. Gere, like most Americans, I’m sure had no clue about the no kissing in public taboo of India. On top of that he apologized, yet they went ahead and issued a warrant anyway, though a higher court canceled it later. Punishing someone from a foreign land who clearly is unaware of certain cultural niceties is horribly unfair. Heck, I think punishing someone who is unaware of a law in general should be unconstitutional. Such laws place the entire burden on the individual to know everything about the law, or in this case society, no mater how obscure or face punishment. Society has a duty to be understanding to the circumstances of the individual. We do not execute our mentally challenged individuals for murder in this country because they are unaware of the wrongness of their actions. I have problems with the court ruling that decided this since I feel the level of incapacity of the individual in that case wasn’t enough to justify commuting his sentence but I still feel the general principle of forgiving those who know no better holds true. The Indian courts and public have certainly been less than understanding to the circumstances of Ms. Shetty. While Mr. Gere has been somewhat forgiven, at least enough to not face further legal action, Ms. Shetty still has a court battle ahead of her. Amazingly, the geniuses behind issuing the arrest warrants think that just because she got kissed by Mr. Gere the offense to there overly sensitive sensibilities is her fault. I’ve seen the video footage, she was as surprised as everyone else. These officials should be ashamed of themselves blaming this on the poor woman when it was Richard Gere who did the grabbing and kissing. All I see from this fiasco are a bunch of vindictive and by American standards prudish individuals who are trying to punish whoever they can to save face because they can’t punish who they really want, Richard Gere. If anyone knows anything about the evolution of Indian culture I would sincerely like to know how kissing in public came to be considered public indecency. Please post up in comments if you have them.
The Student's Paradox
The Student’s Paradox
1. If you know a subject (S), then you waste your time going to a teacher of S in order to learn S from her. [p(remise)]
2. You shouldn't waste your time (i.e. do less valuable things when you could be doing more valuable things). [p]
3. Therefore, if you know S, you shouldn't go to a teacher of S. [1,2]
4. If you don't know S, then you take an unreasonable risk (of acquiring false beliefs) in going to a "teacher" of S in order to learn S from her. [p]
5. You shouldn't take unreasonable risks. [p]
6. Therefore, if you don't know S, you shouldn't go to a teacher of S.
7. But there are only two possibilities: you either know S or you don't know S. [p]
8. Therefore, either way, you should never go to a teacher of any subject. [3,6,7]
This paradox is an old favorite of mine since it proves why one should never attend class. It was part of the first lesson of my ancient philosophy course. Fortunately for my professor everyone still attended pretty regularly for the rest of the semester so he still gets paid. This paradox works well enough that my entire philosophy class failed to refute it and we moved on to other things later in the week. For my part, I haven’t really tried since I was amused the entire time watching my professor argue with his students about why they shouldn’t attend his class. So I think I’ll take up refuting this paradox now. 1, 2, and 3, are all fairly reasonable arguments since if you know something you’d be wasting your time going to a teacher to learn it. The key to the paradox is in part 4 where learning from a teacher is put forth as an unreasonable risk of being taught something which is false. If risking learning a false belief is unreasonable then the paradox is true. If the risk, however, is reasonable then it fails to be a paradox. The problem for the student is that in going to a teacher to learn a subject, he places himself at risk of learning false information. The student has no way of judging the validity of any information from the teacher because he has no prior reference from which to judge the truth of the information. It seems to me that in order to be taking an unreasonable risk the student would have to be learning from an individual who has shown no prior indications of trustworthiness, or worse, indications of being untrustworthy. The student could judge whether or not to believe what the teacher tells him based upon what the teacher tells him about what he already knows to be truth. A teacher who is in agreement with the student about what the student already knows to be truth is thereby trustworthy and learning from him/her is not an unreasonable risk. Another method might be to compare the instruction of several scholars who claim to know the truth. If they agree then they are either all right or all wrong but one has a 50/50 chance to learn true beliefs from them. This is better odds than visiting a casino (unless you are betting on black or red at the roulette table or card counting at Blackjack) so I wouldn’t consider it an unreasonable risk to learn something from a teacher when all teachers are in agreement. In the case where teachers do not agree on the truth then the safe bet is to bet against all of them that they are all wrong and to not learn from any of them. There can be only one truth but there may be many falsehoods. Out of 30 different answers from 30 different scholars only one may be right i.e. 1/30 chance of picking the right one to learn from. This leaves 29/30 false beliefs one could acquire. Trying to find the one true belief out of 30 scholars is an impossibility with no prior knowledge of the subject. This leaves us with what we do know for certain and that is 29/30 have to be wrong. Also, it is a possibility that even 30/30 could be wrong since we have no way to judge the validity of the 30 different truths. I think this satisfactorily demonstrates the difference between unreasonable risk and reasonable risk. While writing this I’ve thought about its application to religion. It could be said that it is entirely unreasonable to believe in any religion because there are many, many different religions each with its own truth. The person trying to decide which religion to believe in has no prior knowledge of the truth of any of them. This is why in order to believe in a religion one is said to have faith. To a mathematician this mean, you are taking your chances. By my calculations those are probably something like 1?/2600 the question mark meaning that with no prior knowledge to judge even the one religion that is supposedly right could really be wrong. So lets make it something like 0/2601. That is as good as saying the truth, if such a thing even exists, hasn’t been found yet. Which makes the agnostics right, so far. Good luck, in your own searches for truth. Until next post, keep thinking on this.
1. If you know a subject (S), then you waste your time going to a teacher of S in order to learn S from her. [p(remise)]
2. You shouldn't waste your time (i.e. do less valuable things when you could be doing more valuable things). [p]
3. Therefore, if you know S, you shouldn't go to a teacher of S. [1,2]
4. If you don't know S, then you take an unreasonable risk (of acquiring false beliefs) in going to a "teacher" of S in order to learn S from her. [p]
5. You shouldn't take unreasonable risks. [p]
6. Therefore, if you don't know S, you shouldn't go to a teacher of S.
7. But there are only two possibilities: you either know S or you don't know S. [p]
8. Therefore, either way, you should never go to a teacher of any subject. [3,6,7]
This paradox is an old favorite of mine since it proves why one should never attend class. It was part of the first lesson of my ancient philosophy course. Fortunately for my professor everyone still attended pretty regularly for the rest of the semester so he still gets paid. This paradox works well enough that my entire philosophy class failed to refute it and we moved on to other things later in the week. For my part, I haven’t really tried since I was amused the entire time watching my professor argue with his students about why they shouldn’t attend his class. So I think I’ll take up refuting this paradox now. 1, 2, and 3, are all fairly reasonable arguments since if you know something you’d be wasting your time going to a teacher to learn it. The key to the paradox is in part 4 where learning from a teacher is put forth as an unreasonable risk of being taught something which is false. If risking learning a false belief is unreasonable then the paradox is true. If the risk, however, is reasonable then it fails to be a paradox. The problem for the student is that in going to a teacher to learn a subject, he places himself at risk of learning false information. The student has no way of judging the validity of any information from the teacher because he has no prior reference from which to judge the truth of the information. It seems to me that in order to be taking an unreasonable risk the student would have to be learning from an individual who has shown no prior indications of trustworthiness, or worse, indications of being untrustworthy. The student could judge whether or not to believe what the teacher tells him based upon what the teacher tells him about what he already knows to be truth. A teacher who is in agreement with the student about what the student already knows to be truth is thereby trustworthy and learning from him/her is not an unreasonable risk. Another method might be to compare the instruction of several scholars who claim to know the truth. If they agree then they are either all right or all wrong but one has a 50/50 chance to learn true beliefs from them. This is better odds than visiting a casino (unless you are betting on black or red at the roulette table or card counting at Blackjack) so I wouldn’t consider it an unreasonable risk to learn something from a teacher when all teachers are in agreement. In the case where teachers do not agree on the truth then the safe bet is to bet against all of them that they are all wrong and to not learn from any of them. There can be only one truth but there may be many falsehoods. Out of 30 different answers from 30 different scholars only one may be right i.e. 1/30 chance of picking the right one to learn from. This leaves 29/30 false beliefs one could acquire. Trying to find the one true belief out of 30 scholars is an impossibility with no prior knowledge of the subject. This leaves us with what we do know for certain and that is 29/30 have to be wrong. Also, it is a possibility that even 30/30 could be wrong since we have no way to judge the validity of the 30 different truths. I think this satisfactorily demonstrates the difference between unreasonable risk and reasonable risk. While writing this I’ve thought about its application to religion. It could be said that it is entirely unreasonable to believe in any religion because there are many, many different religions each with its own truth. The person trying to decide which religion to believe in has no prior knowledge of the truth of any of them. This is why in order to believe in a religion one is said to have faith. To a mathematician this mean, you are taking your chances. By my calculations those are probably something like 1?/2600 the question mark meaning that with no prior knowledge to judge even the one religion that is supposedly right could really be wrong. So lets make it something like 0/2601. That is as good as saying the truth, if such a thing even exists, hasn’t been found yet. Which makes the agnostics right, so far. Good luck, in your own searches for truth. Until next post, keep thinking on this.
The Songbird
Like a songbird he lies
In his nest, in his cage
Protected from the world outside
From anger, hatred, and covetous crimes.
Does anyone hear the songbird cry?
The despair and anguish floating from his cage
Through the woven wicker bars he cries
As the seasons slowly change.
Finally, the songbird rests
Trapped behind thorny vines
Waiting for the light of day
As darkness smothers his heartfelt cries
Enfolding his song until it dies.
No one listened from outside.
In his nest, in his cage
Protected from the world outside
From anger, hatred, and covetous crimes.
Does anyone hear the songbird cry?
The despair and anguish floating from his cage
Through the woven wicker bars he cries
As the seasons slowly change.
Finally, the songbird rests
Trapped behind thorny vines
Waiting for the light of day
As darkness smothers his heartfelt cries
Enfolding his song until it dies.
No one listened from outside.
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