Not Having a Particularly Good Week

I'm not having a particularly good week this week - it seems like everything has gone wrong/worse this week for me - on all fronts! One of the very few times when I feel like I am either taking a step in the wrong direction or not making any progress in all categories. I won't provide any details, but:

- Career-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Academic-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Finance-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Health-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Life-view-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Social-wise, things are not going well this week.

- Creative-wise, no real progress has been made in a while, so no change there.

- Travel-wise, things have not improved since going downhill dramatically in the past few months.

- Personal project(s)-wise, things have not gone so well for me this week.

So... not a particularly good week for me. Let's hope that next week is better...

Consciousness Understanding Consciousness - For Computer Scientists!

I've always mused at the idea that perhaps we will never understand our own conciousness. Perhaps there are different levels of conciousness, and only higher levels of conciousness can understand a lower level. For example, maybe a plant (or a computer!?) has a "conciousness" of some sort, and we can understand how a plant functions because we are at the higher level of animal "conciousness," and a being at a higher level of "conciousness" than us can fully understand how we function (What if even inanimate objects have some form of "conciousness," what ever that may be?). Well, I won't get into discussions about this here, since I know very little about conciousness and I don't really have any way to argue for any side.

I recently came across some interesting computer science problems that reminded me of this view - but applied completely to computers! If you are unfamiliar with computer science, it may be a good idea to look up Turing Machines and the Halting Problem before reading the next part.

There is a fundamental problem, called the Halting Problem on Turing Machines that are not solvable by Turing Machines, which can solve all computable problems (read: anything a computer can do). A Zeno version of the Turing Machine, a Turing Machine that doubles its speed of computation at each step, can perform an infinite amount of Turing Machine steps in just two steps due to series convergence. Thus, a Zeno Turing Machine can actually solve the Halting Problem of a regular Turing Machine! However, it is unable to solve the Halting Problem for itself or other Zeno Turing Machines. From what I can tell, this chain seems to go on forever - a Zeno Zeno Turing Machine can solve the Halting Problem for a Zeno Machine, but not itself and so on. This seems to create classes of computation problems (under the umbrella term "hypercomputation") that can't "understand" itself or anything higher, but can "understand" problem classes below it (the use of the term "understand" is even more applicable when one considers Rice's Theorem about Turing Machines being to determine some property of other Turing Machines). I don't know where the boundaries of the classes are, but the Zeno extension seems to create some pretty intuitive examples.

Of course, this has nothing to do with consciousness, but it just reminded me of it, as it seemed to be such a perfect analogy! So I hope pseudo-scientists don't take this the wrong way and get a way overblown idea of how important this "connection" between computers and conciousness is. , anyone?

Lottery - a tax on stupid people? Maybe not...

There's a saying that lottery is a tax on stupid people. At first glance, that's absolutely true, as statistically, the expected return of a lottery ticket is lower than the cost of a lottery ticket. If this wasn't the case, no organisation would run a lottery.

However, perhaps things are not a straightforward as it seems. Recall that money should never be seen as a goal - money is a tool for obtaining the experiences you want and living your life the way you desire. In this case, perhaps looking at the psychological cost and return (happiness) is the right way to see it.

I suspect that for most people (who are not millionaires), if one produced a graph of psychological cost on the y axis, and financial cost on the x, the graph would like something like a polynomial or exponential function, or perhaps an S-curve if one looks far enough. This means that the psychological expected value is higher than the psychological cost of purchasing a ticket. Another way to look at it is - if this was not the case, we wouldn't be buying the lottery tickets anyway.

Then again, maybe people are just bad at intuitively understanding odds at such low probabilities, and lottery really is a tax on idiots. In any case, I don't think the answer is that straightforward, there are definitely good reasons both for and against purchasing lottery tickets, and I still haven't decided if I should or not. For now, I'll give it a pass, but I will continue to ponder what the implications are.