No Parking

We (people) impose order on our environments.  We build dams and levies to reign in our rivers, we carve roads through forests and through mountains of stone, we breed dogs to be friendly and corn to be productive.  Where many of us come together, we lay down laws and put up signs in pursuit of delineating those things that shall be allowed and those that shall not.

Some rules seem somewhat arbitrary on the surface (you may park your car along the street in precisely this spot on these specific days at these few particular hours), but generally derive from some sensible premise (the street cleaning truck cannot clean the street if your car is in the way).  Rules are designed by society to improve on the experience of society; rules and their design are what enable society in the first place.

Where things get complicated, though, in my opinion, is when people expect rules where there are none.

Since we operate almost exclusively within systems and constraints that we ourselves designed, it can be jarring to take a perspective step back and realize that just outside the cone of electric light there are some dark and complicated shadows.

For instance, biology requires that we mate and raise little versions of ourselves to perpetuate the species.  And that's it, the entire evolutionary rule book is that short: make more humans.  There is no naturally provided guidance about whether your kid(s) should go to pre-school or daycare, whether you should let them see you cry, whether you should put their college funding ahead of your retirement savings...  That's not to say that we haven't learned some tips and tricks to optimize "successful outcomes", but it does suggest that the very term "successful outcome" can have widely varying meanings around the world.  And so the rule remains, either individually or in aggregate: make more humans.

I've come to see humans as techno- or systemo-cratic creatures.  We respond well to a "do this and then that will happen" approach, but the actual experience of living in the real world very often turns out to be highly random or variable.  A spouse can internalize all of the best advice about how to be a good spouse and still find themselves divorced.  A parent can navigate the narrow and twisty path of giving enough but not too much attention to their kids and still end up with a "problem child".  A student can study hard, keep their nose clean, hit all their marks, and still fail to find a good job.  If there are actual "rules" to the game of life, they are designed for the statistical mean experience, not for individual data points.

Religious and secular philosophies attempt to glean a set of rules for the human existence from the natural and physical laws we can observe, and/or the "perfect standard" we can imagine, but again those systems seem to address the aggregate experience of the group and not a given individual.

I am feeling that the upshot is that in the case of an individual, rules are not rules but guides, because for an individual there is no guarantee that following rule X (or step, or process, or system) will produce result Y.  Maybe because NTTATS.

I'll think on this a little more, but the general sentiment above came out of a relatively brief conversation I had with my wife and life partner last night, and I wanted to capture the gist of that for further reflection.

NTTATS update: further thought

When I first started talking (here and elsewhere) about the concept of "No Two Things Are The Same", one of the more valid questions/criticisms was concerned with the practical implications: what can I do with this knowledge?

At the time, my best answer was a somewhat vague "well, you can approach new ideas and decisions armed with the knowledge that No Two Things Are the Same"...today, I'm happy to report that I feel the same way, but have some more concrete examples.

It's well know and accepted (and reasonable) that folks like to use examples (precedents, analogies, etc) to make a point, or to suggest best practices, or offer a contrast, and so statements like the following are pretty common:

During the credit crises of 2008+, the banks of Canada weathered the storm much better than the banks in the States - we should model our banking system on Canada's!

New Zealand has this awesome, pro-business tax policy and everyone there is happy - we should follow this model in the US!

I chose these two examples because they are similar in my view: the population of Canada is about 1/10th that of the States, and the GDP of New Zealand is a rounding error to the US.  Further, the demographics and urban/rural distribution of Canada creates a far different banking scenario than could apply to the States.

In neither case does the surface difference between the US and the other countries automatically invalidate the suggested policy, but those differences point out a very different reality on the ground in the example countries.

Based on my anecdotal experience, some folks are naturally more skeptical / sophisticated about applying some basic criticisms to suggestions like those above, but many people aren't...they hear "Canadian banks remained well capitalized" and they readily accepted the suggestion that the Canadian banks were subject to the exact same stresses as those applied to US banks.  So a more thorough acceptance of NTTATS in society could serve to shift the balance towards more critical thinking.

NTTATS update

I recently realized that even though No Two Things Are The Same is practically perfect in every way, there is another statement that is equally powerful and is equally necessary:

All Things Are Similar.

Taken together, these two ideas will change the way the world thinks.

heavenly minds?

So I was reading something unrelated about the Singularity this morning and that made me think of something else which then made me think of...heaven.

What I'm curious about today may be of no interest to most folks out there, as it may seem a bit abstruse (or conversely may seem ridiculously simplistic)...is there a massive, expansive change in our "consciousness" at  death, according to the religions that suggest the existence of a possible heavenly afterlife?

Where I stumble a little in my thought tumbler on this one is the perspective that a massive change in consciousness could effectively make you a different person (maybe "identity" or "personality" is a better word to capture the incorporeal persistent conceptualization of "you") - you see, because there must be a "you" remaining in some sense to enjoy heaven (or undergo punishment in hell), but if that after-life version of you is essentially a different person, does that not introduce a problematic disconnect?

I'm going to try an analogy, with full knowledge that analogies never work [NTTATS]: While it is common to hold campaigning politicians accountable for things they said, did, or promoted during their adult career years, I have never seen such a person excoriated for something they did when 5 years old...and I think the rationale driving that disconnect is that the "child" is essentially (in terms of consciousness) not the same person as the "adult".

OK, this may be a stub of a thought but I have to get to some other stuff this morning.

extending the theory into the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!

I wish there was a font to convey that wavery science fictioney voice...

The latest evolution of the GUT (for me at least) is that it applies not only to distinct items at a given point in time, but also to a given item at two different points in time.

So to recap and say the same thing in a different way:  no two things are the same.  Also, no one thing is the same at any other time.

This revelation came to me while showering yesterday and thinking about the comments from Mr. Anonymous on the "narrative" post...he's not actually anonymous to me and from past conversations/debates I was trying to infer where the discussion of narrative bias might go with him from here.  It led me back to my central premise that No Two Things Are the Same and also non-starter problems in debate I discussed here before.

His comment on the narrative post he stated "truth is truth", which points to a particularly contentious debate among those who like to talk philosophy; whether or not there is an objective "truth" has been debated to death among we quasi-intellectual coffee house navel gazers.

But back to my shower (and how it connects back to this desultory post): I was wondering how two separate people (who cannot be the "same" given NTTATS) could ever come to an agreement on the question of objective reality (or truth), and then - BAM - it hit me that even in a given person's experience it is possible to hold two conflicting opinions on a given subject.

The best example of this that comes to my mind is the difference between a teenage person's perception and the "adult" perceptions of the same person 10 or 20 years later.  It may appear to a 14 year old boy that the objective truth is that the girl in his social studies class is the girl for him for all time.

Or, say you are at a party in March 2006...the well dressed young man drinking Maker's Mark over ice suggests that you consider getting out of the rental racket and buy some property.  "You see," he explains, "when you rent you are just throwing your money away every month...if you bought a condo, instead, you would be investing.  Buying real estate is the biggest no-brainer investment out there" he might add, or something similar.  So you give it some thought, do some research, and find that EVERYONE else in your circle of friends and coworkers has been making serious jack in the condo market.

superfluous paragraph break for aesthetic purposes


So you do some more research and find that real estate prices have been rising steadily for quite some time, and that, on top of that promising trend, the government and the major banks are working together to push borrowing rates for people just like you to ALL TIME LOWS.  So you bite the bullet and buy a condo [let me, the blog author for this here post, interject that I'm not suggesting that this action was either rational or irrational...I'm just trying to create a scenario to make another point].  Given all of the evidence at hand you felt confident that buying a condo was the right thing to do.

Two years later you feel that buying a condo was the wrong thing to do, when "price corrections" lowered the value of your condo significantly below the associated debt load to buy the condo, which further reduced  your ability to source credit to make other investments, hindered your mobility, and raised your leverage ratio.  Let's examine this made up scenario (this example is obviously not drawn from any real world examples, right?) for just a minute...none of the original premises turned out to be exactly false

• real estate prices were rising steadily
• interest rates were at all time lows
• renting truly did not provide an opportunity to build equity in real estate, while
• buying a condo actually did provide the opportunity to build equity (even if the certainty of that eventuality was mis-measured)

And yet, under this scenario, there existed a point in time where a given person in possession of a bunch of basically true "facts" came to a conclusion about the nature of a given reality, only to come to the opposite conclusion when presented with another set of "facts".

It's possible this is a flawed example, stilted by the blogger's bias.

Let's try another one:

(it's hard...I'm pretty cynical about objective reality, so I'm struggling to come up with reasonable examples)

I was surprised at some point in my education to find that weights and measures are basically defined by agreement...I mean, I didn't think that there was something in nature that everyone could look at and say "that's a foot - it's exactly 12 inches long."  But I also didn't expect that there was a place you could go to check your ruler against a "standard"...but that's the case.  As it is the case that you can go see the reference kilogram.

It made sense to me after I read it, but was one of those things that I was unprepared to learn.  But it's relevant here: the only way we can collectively make use of something useful like the concept of a given weight is by consensus...there is no objective, Platonic "kilogram" out there in space, only a chunk of material we have agreed to call a kilogram.

And - to tie it all back in to this idea of non-sameness along the timeline - the reference kilogram is not the same weight from moment to moment.  (Admittedly small) variations in pressure, temperature, composition of the air in the room, intensity of the lights (this is getting goofy) will affect measured weight.

The essence of the theory is essentially theoretical

So getting back to this post from earlier in November...

The premise that lays the foundation for my grand unifying theory is that: No Two Things Are The Same.

I'm working on a catchier set of words that capture the basic idea (you know, for the book title!) but NTTATS more or less communicates the idea.

(used with permission)

People say snowflakes are unique...I'm suggesting that everything is unique.

I also suspect that this idea will resonate with some people as common sense and will strike others as silly.  Isn't that how it's supposed to go with philosophy?

Consider these examples:

These Two Things Are Not The Same

It's egomaniacal , bombastic, and most likely misguided, but I think I'm on the trail of an actual Grand Unifying Theory.  If I get much closer, it may turn into a book.  In fact, I think I'll write a book anyway, exploring the relationships between knowledge, risk, wisdom, common sense, experience, randomness...and I'm sure that 3 or 4 people will actually read (most) of it and enjoy it!

And if it turns out to all be bunk, I'm sure we will all be better off for finding out yet another thing that does not work as a Grand Unifying Theory!