Chaos Theory - Not a problem for a deterministic world view

I believe that our universe is deterministic, everything that happens has a preceeding cause, including our thoughts and behavior. Now many people object to this view on the basis of pure intuition i.e. it certainly feels as if I have free will therefore it must be so, but for reasons I will not write about now this is really a poor argument...


There are other less non-sensical arguments against the idea that the universe is determined and that there hence is no such thing as "free will" (depending on how you define that of course). One argument that I would not be able to meet completely is that at the quatum level there is the uncertainty principle according to which we cannot know the speed and the position of an electron simultaneously. All I can say is that I don't think this uncertainty translates into free will for human beings...

Another argument against free will is based on chaos theory. Chaos theory states that there are systems in the world which are unpredictable. At least that is what many people think chaos theory states, but this is not entirely true, rather chaos theory states that in some systems, more information about different variables will only make your predictions a tiny winy bit better... Let me explain.

The last couple of decades computers have become alot better and a lot faster. In spite of this fantastic development we have not seen a marked increase in weather predictions even though weather predictions are made by some quite powerful computers. This is because weather is a chaotic system. Very subtle differences in certain variables (humidity, winds and what not), can have huge effects in how the weather turns out. The old way of predicting the weather, "the weather tomorrow will be like the weather today", still comes close to the predictions of the best supercomputers.

Nevertheless, if Laplace's demon did exist i.e. if we knew the exact position of all particles in the universe and their velocity, if we did know that we would be able to predict the weather for as long as we wanted to and thus there is really no contradiction with a deterministic world view. All that chaos thery really means is that some systems are very sensitive to initial conditions and we are not well enough equipped to see these differences...


I have as some of you may have noticed not written for quite some time, the reason is that I have become a father. My daughter Lola was born on january 13th and me and my wife have been very busy taking care of her. We will see how much I write the coming months but my blog is not dead...

More Teaching Company Reviews

"Imagine how much you could learn if you spent just 30 minutes a day for the next year in the best college classrooms in the world".

I have written quite a lot about the Teaching Company which is a company that I genuinely love. They have completely revolutionized my life and the amount I have learned by listening to these lectures is absolutely staggering, no doubt about it. Forget about boring high-school teachers who cannot explain their subject and who have no desire to give you knowledge and wisdom, the teachers recruited by the teaching company are absolutely top-notch.

Here I thought I would just add a few reviews of courses that I have been listening to since last time:

Wisdom of History 5: I am currently listening to this course taught by Rufus Fears. In it he goes through many episodes in history in a very entertaining fashion and he tells us about the lessons that can be drawn from history such as "Freedom is not a universal value, power is".

Famous Greeks 4: If you get one of the courses taught by Rufus Fears you can expect terrific entertainment as well as many moral lessons. His story telling ability is marvelous and he even makes voices to some of the characters. In this course you will learn about many fascinating ancient Greeks

Famous Romans 5: This course is very similar to the one about famous Greeks and it is also taught by Rufus Fears. For some reason I think that this one is even better, perhaps because I find Ceasar, Cicero, Hannibal, Scipio and the like even more fascinating than the Greek personalities, fantastic course!

Sensation and perception 5: I may be somewhat biased in judging this course since I have been using it when I am myself teaching – reviewing different sensory systems. Professor Coalvita turns a subject that I recall as not very interesting into a subject that is extremely interesting. Perfect for me as a researcher in neuroscience.

New Testament 5: I could not have asked for a better book about the New testament. The professor goes into depth about the content of the New testament as well as other sources of historical evidence. Highly recommended

Great ideas of Psychology 5: Great Great course! Daniel Robinson is one of the very best teachers in the teaching company series and this course goes through pretty much everything you learn in an introductory psychology course.

Foundations of Western civilization P1 3: Although this is a very good series of lectures with a lot of content, the teachers was unable to hold my attention for some reason, perhaps it is just me…

Foundations of Western civilization P2 5: This course which covers the period from 1500-2000 approximately is truly great. Unlike the teacher in the first part of this series, the teacher here never loses my attention, highly recommended course if you want to understand why the world looks the way it does today!

Free will vs determinism 5: I am also currently listening to this one and the first few lecture have been great so I will go ahead and just recommend it. It may be however, that I am biased here since the topic is one that I find very interesting.

Positive psychology and the hedonic treadmill

How happy are you on a scale from 1-10, with 5 being the average individual? If you are like most people you think that you are happier than most people (7-8 is the average answer you get). But what factors affect your life satisfaction?

This post has been inspired by yet another fantastic professor that everyone with an internet connection can (and should), listen to. His name is Paul Bloom and his course in introductory psychology can be found at Yale's open courses site. In the last lecture of this series Bloom discusses "The Good life: Happiness". The first 15min or so is about therapy and whether it really works, an interesting topic on its own, however, it is with happiness that I will be concerned here.

A few years ago (summer 2004) I went to summer school in Cambridge UK. I attended a wealth of different lectures on everything from astronomy and climate change to genetics and ladybird sexuality. One of the most memorable lectures was one held by Nick Baylis which was on the just born branch of psychology called "positive psychology". The general outline of the lecture was something like the following. Since psychology was born in the 19^th century it has merely been focused on the sick and abnormal. How do we deal with crazy and depressed individuals? Now does that seem a bit skewed to you? Should we also not study happy people and see how they differ. What makes them happy? Or is happiness simply not being abnormal or insane (not to far from the truth perhaps…)? What Nick said was basically that we should investigate happy people to see if there are any lessons to be drawn from them, and that I think seems to make an awful lot of sense.

Since this lecture which positive psychology has become a very hyped subject and vast sums of money are being pumped into this field of research with highly variable gains. Some experiments which I will share here are however, highly interesting and also hilarious. In what is perhaps my favorite experiment, random people at work were asked to go to the photocopier and make some copies of whatever. For half of the participants a dime had been planted on the photocopier, as if someone had forgotten it. Now we all know what a great feeling it is to find money on the street but I think that what happens next will surprise you. After having done the photocopies the participants were approached and asked something like the following: "how happy would you say you are with your whole life". What happens? The group that found the dime on the photocopier reported significantly better life satisfaction!!! Conclusion: when we estimate how happy we are we are extremely susceptible to factors in out immediate environment. In a similar experiment participants were asked when the weather was sunny or rainy, and like in the previous experiment, bad weather caused people to say that they were just not particularly happy with their entire life!!!

In fact, the picture that has emerged from research in positive psychology is that our life satisfaction goes up and down. We have some sort of average happiness which we basically stick to, whatever happens, throughout or lives. The nice thing about this is that whatever happens in your life you are not likely to become less satisfied with your life. Even people who have been paralyzed neck down tend to recover, after about a year, in terms of overall life satisfaction.

The more depressing conclusion from this research is that there is nothing you can do to increase your overall life satisfaction. This is where the term "hedonic treadmill" comes from. You can fulfill all your dreams and fantasies, jump from an airplane, win the nobel prize, become a karate champion, become a Mormon and have sex with ten partners simultaneously, buy your dream house, visit exotic places, etc, etc. Whatever you do, your life satisfaction will stay the same. Of course all of the above may give you temporary happiness and some people suggest that this is how to proceed in life, always do new things that make you happy and don't stick to one because the happiness will disappear. The fact of the matter is that we are able to adapt to even the most luxurious lifestyle.

So is there really nothing that will make you happier? There is actually one interesting exception that I want to end with. Individuals who have undergone plastic surgery report that they have greater life satisfaction after the surgery, and amazingly the gain remains. In other words plastic surgeons have done what no-one else in history have ever managed to do, make people happier (I don't know if this statistical conclusion is true for the woman in the picture who want's to become a cat)…

Apollonius of Tyana

About 2000 years ago a pregnant woman got a visit from a heavenly agent who told the mother-to-be that her son would be the son of God. His birth which was associated with some supernatural signs and as a boy he made himself a name among the religious leader. When he got older he left his home to walk around from town to town and convinced people to give up on their material belongings and instead focus on the spiritual dimension of life.

His followers were convinced that their teacher was divine, and indeed he was able to heal the sick as well as casting out daemons. Towards the end of his life he was prosecuted by the roman authorities, and then he disappeared. However, even after he were gone, his followers continued to believe in him and there are even reports of him showing up after he was dead. He came down from heaven to convince the spectators that there is a life after death.

Does this man sound familiar to you? Who am I talking about? Many books have been written about this pagan philosopher. His name is Apollonius of Tyana and his historical existence is not disputed due to the fact that there are several independent sources. These survive in spite of the fact that the catholic church actively tried to destroy all records of Apollonius existence. Apollonius followers had heard about Jesus and they believe he was a fake.

I did not hear about this man Apollonius until recently and I must admit that I was quite surprised to hear that Jesus is not unique at all, at least not if you go by historical documents which is really the only proper way to go about if you do not want use subjective arguments such as "I feel (or know) that Jesus existed and that he did all those things written about in the gospel".

I have found a number of webpages claiming that a lot of what is written in the New Testament was really about Apollonius and that only later was names changed. This could explain some of the discrepancies between different books of the bible, but I guess it is very hard to tell one way or the other. I am no historian so I will merely say that I find it unlikely that those who wrote the New Testament had not been influenced by the books or tales about Apollonius in any sense. The stories of Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana simply have too much in common with each other for everything to just be random chance

Here is another blogpost from "atheism and happiness"

The New Testament and “Russian scandal”

There are many ways in which The New Testament is a great book. It has been read by many people (to say the least), it gives many people guidance in their lives and has done so for many years, and it also serves as historical evidence for the character named Jesus.

It is on this last point that I want to expand here. Having recently listened to two different courses from the always fabulous "Teaching Company", one exclusively about The New Testament, and one on "The foundations of western civilization P1", I have been fueled in my skepticism towards these books as any more than a fiction which one can interpret and then depending on who you are, help you do good things or bad things. (By the way, feel free to send comments and point out if I make any blatant mistakes – I have never read the book in their entirety)

Jesus was never famous during his lifetime it seems. Apart from the bible he is barely mentioned in any historical documents. So what we know about Jesus we know mainly from the gospels in The New Testament.

Mark, which is generally regarded as the earliest of these gospels was written, according to most historians, about 70AD, that is almost 40 years after the death of Christ (the exact year of this event is also very uncertain). 40 years in an age where very few people had access to any written sources and where perhaps even fewer could read. This means that the story of Jesus must have been passed on verbally for about 30 years or so.

Anyone who have ever played Chinese whispers (I just saw that this game also goes under the name of "Arab phone" or "Russian scandal" =)), knows that this is a problem. In Chinese whispers a message is passed along in a ring eventually coming back to the person who formulated the message. The final message is compared to the original message and there is invariably an astounding difference between the two.

The normal way to play this game is to have a group of children passing along a short message, say ten words or so, with little personal significance and hence little motive amongst the children to change the message in any way. In contrast, The New Testament is a rather long message, and the people who have passed it along have had every reason to alter the story to make Jesus sound better and greater than he actually was (does anyone seriously believe that he can turn water into wine?). What would 30 years of Chinese whispers with people who would have a strong interest in changing the story do to tales about Jesus? Well, let's just say that it would be no less of a miracle should the story be accurate and precise.

Popular fallacies of alternative and complementary medicine

In the most recent issue of the magazine "Skeptic", Harriet Hall, also known as "SkepDoc" writes about three fallacies that you will encounter very frequently if you engage in discussion about alternative or complementary medicine. I will of course not plagiarize Hall's article, but what I am writing here is her article, filtered through my brain (I have written about related matters here and here)...

The fallacies that you will inevitably hear are the following three;
(1) It is "natural" (and hence better for you)
(2) It has been used for a long time (and if it didn't work people would have stopped using it)
(3) It works for me (or a friend or a spouse or a friend of a friend...)

So natural is good by default ehh? In this form the statement sound very categorical, and hence, put in this fomr, the claim can be falsified by a single unambiguous counter-example, and there are plenty... Curare, a compound extracted from nature (and thus a natural compound?) will paralyze you and hence is not recommended unless you need to be still during a surgery. There are many different, naturally growing mushrooms, which will kill people who try to eat it. There is also the fen-phen scandal where a product which was advertised as an alternative medicine was later shown to have severe side effects, despite the fact that the active ingredient was "natural".

Ok, sure, there are a few extreme counter-examples, but still, isn't natural products better in general? Well this is certainly debatable and I would not jump to verdict just yet, however, the evidence to date actually tells the opposite story, namely that natural is often worse than "synthetic" (or whatever you won't to call it). Plants which are sprayed with pesticides are protected from potential predators and therefore they can use all their energy to grow. Now that I think of it, it is rather similar to us humans, in peacetime we can spend our energy on building schools and being nice to children and that sort of stuff... Plants which are not sprayed are not given their protection and therefore they have to use allot of energy on chemical warfare (or the plant-equivalent thereof). Basically they produce chemicals which will make the predator (us), sick.

But don't synthetic pesticides make you sick too? In large quantities they might (just like natural pesticides). However, pesticide control is rather strict and the chemicals used are tested so that they are of minimal danger to us... I have written more about this issue here.

The second argument says that if something has been used for a long time then it is because it is good. Again there are many counterexamples. Some people persist in using astrology even though it has been falsified over and over again. Astrologers cannot do what they claim to be able to do, and add to that the fact that their quackery is based on an astronomical model that is very out-dated. Still people are still using it… If we would have strictly gone by the "old is good" rule we would still be drilling holes in people's head to relieve headaches (here you can buy your own drill kitJ), and what about all new techniques and medicines that are developed? Are we to discard them because they are new? The fact of the matter is that we cannot rely on tradition. The way to test whether a therapy is good or bad is to do a proper, scientific test where it is possible to isolate the effect of the medicine from other factors such as placebo.

The last argument (it works for me), is the one that I have most sympathy for. In my opinion we should have respect for individual differences as well as the power of people's belief to cure them or at the very least make them feel better. If someone starts taking extra vitamins to bolster their immune system and then they do not get sick for a long time then everything is great (as long as they don't overdose which could be dangerous). Similarly, when I tell people that I am studying the brain I am often told about some therapy or mental training that I have never heard about before but which has changed their life. In those cases I normally just say that I am happy for them. However, the mistake that is often made is to assume that just because you have experienced miracles everyone else will too. Even with most conventional medicines which have a proven effect that is greater than placebo, it doesn't work for everyone. The point is that what works for you might not work for other people. Most alternative therapies have not been tested (or they have been tested with no effect). The responsible policy if you ask me is that doctors advocate therapies which have a proven effect, but do not prevent people from spending their money on other therapies (as long as they are not harmful)…

Religion as refuge

Christianity as well as most other religions are, I believe, false in the sense that their view of the world do not agree with the world as we perceive it. However, one might ask why false theories flourish so much. Would so many people believe in something which is false? My answer to this is obviously, yes they would! Here I want to propose one explanation of why there is religion.

Last time I wrote about Plato who grew up in wartime. I do not think that it is a coincidence that his republic, his utopia, is a state which would be very static. Everyone has their role, and there is left no room for progress, scientific or otherwise, in this state. Could it be that Plato somewhere desired something lasting and permanent? His idea of ideas similarly refers to something which is constant albeit not in our world.

Stoicism is another example of a philosophy which seeks something permanent beyond the world that we perceive. This philosophy advice us that the path to happiness is to ignore all calamities in your life. Do not let people irritate you. If your wife dies then there is no point in grief, after all what good does it do that you are also unhappy?

I am not entirely sure how the concept of philosophy and that of religion is connected. However, in this case I see religion as just another instance of the search for something permanent. I do not know whether there is any data on the hypothesis that I am just about to spell out, I was not able to find any when I did a google search, however, if true it would fit perfectly with where I am going here. I think that as hardships disappear from a society, more people become atheist, and vice versa. When life is rough people rely on religion or philosophies of endurance such as stoicism to achieve something permanent. Religion is in other words just an expression of people longing for a safe haven, something they need to cope with the hardships around them. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so, many people really do need religion, however, some of the consequences of such beliefs have been devastating as I have indicated in other posts (I think).

Some personal experience can also be used as evidence of the point I am trying to make. I remember when I was little and did not know whether I believed in God or not. Perhaps this is an after construction, but as I remember it, I used to pray to God about only when I was in some sort of trouble or when I needed something, not when everything was going well for me. It was as if God was some sort of last resort when I could not handle the situation myself. I do not think that I am the only young boy exhibiting this type of behavior. Further I do not think it is even limited to boys. In Denmark where I was born and lived until I was seven, the most religious part, traditionally, is western Jylland. Coincidentally, this is also where people have traditionally made a living of fishing. Many people who went out a random day to catch fish never came back. What can you do about this (in the absence of supercomputers that predict the weather)?, not much except pray to God , who will in most cases answer your prays...

Much of the inspiration to this post came from Bertrand Russell and his book ”History of western philosophy”, a book that I highly recommends. He sums up the point I tried to make above in these words:

”The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no doubt, from love of home and desire for a refuge from danger; we find, accordingly, that it is most passionate in those whose lives are most exposed to catastrophe. Religion seeks permanence in two forms, God and immortality. In God is no variableness neither shadow of turning; the life after death is eternal and unchanging. The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology believes that there is progress in heaven and evolution in the Godhead. But even in this conception there is something permanent, namely progress itself and its immanent goal. And a dose of disaster is likely to bring men's hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is despaired of, it is only in heaven that peace can be sought.”