Category Archives: Concepts

How to Find Out If You Are a ‘Brain In a Vat’

Concepts

The brain-in-a-vat -concept points to the question, how do you know that you are not really living in a awfully sophisticated virtual reality? You have no direct access to the universe itself, you have to experience it through your sense and those can be fooled. This is an ancient old question debated in Philosophy in many forms since at least Descartes. Matrix has made this idea ‘pop’ in recent years.

If you are a brain-in-a-vat how could I find something like that out? Of course, without direct access to the outside world, you can’t know anything about it, but there are ways to suggest that the reality you think is real is not. Of course these ways come in different degrees of certainty and you can never be absolutely sure, but absolute certainty is rarely an requirement outside philosophers, others are usually content with bloody damn sure.

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On Cute

Concepts, Nature, Social

Cute is something that seems to have found a perfect way to propagate itself in the Internet. There are websites such as cuteroverload and lolcats that are especially catering for peoples need for cute. In the Internet, cuteness is usually associated with animals, but also on inanimate objects, like toys. The defining quality in cute is not the object matter but that it somehow possesses some human qualities such as sadness, vulnerability, guilt, speaking, stealing etc. When a duck has learned to steal packs of crisps from a store, it’s cute. When a cuttlefish appears to be sad, exhibited by its (apparent) droopy eyelids, its cute, nevermind that a cuttlefish has no eyelids. If a cats mouth seems to portray a smile (preferably in a manga style) thats cute. You get the point.

Sometimes this humanizing animals for cute has its drawbacks. If a pomeranian lets out something that sounds like a human giggle, is it really enjoying the “tickleing” administered by its (apparent) mistress? Some of the viewers don’t seem to think so.

As a petless person, this tendency to see human qualities in animals is quite, should I say puzzling? It clearly gets it wrong in many occasions and therefore the whole meaningfulness of this tendency becomes questionable. Afterall we are talking about mostly people who claim to be animal-lovers who administer procedures on their pets based on their loaded view of their pets. It has been said that a dog understands its owner better than its owner understands it.

On Luck

Computer Games, Concepts

Luck is one of those interesting concepts that have meaning whether anything like it actually exists or not. I think it’s farely safe to propose that luck doesn’t exist in at least in the form that you could acquire it somehow. Of course this doesn’t stop anyone from trying. Yet an utterance like:”He sure is lucky” when someone wins the lottery is perfectly meaningful sentence. It is highly unlikely to win at a lottery, so you can say that winning it takes luck.

But someone always wins at lottery. If you could keep on playing it for long enough, you would win. Being lucky in this way probably wouldn’t propagate elsewhere in life nor would it be expected to. People believing in luck might even feel that something bad should happen to them to balance out the luck they’ve received.

Luck seems to be associated with isolated incidents then. A person isn’t born with intrinsic luck, it happens to him at certain times. Contrast this with Computer Games such as NetHack where you can actually be lucky and luck can be acquired. What does this mean? If you jump in the moat and you are about to drown, if you are lucky enough you get a chance to crawl out before you die. If someone uses the Finger of Death on you, they will mostly fail, and so on. A concept that doesn’t have a real-life counterpart, yet still has a meaning, has a perfectly valid existence within a Computer Game.

Can you say the same about any other form of Art?