Mind the Body
OK, time has come for the first update to my body stats. You all get to see any improvements I’ve made, or any instances of my stats getting worse.
And so, onto the measurements (and basic other data):
Age: 24 years, 44days
Height: 180 cm (about 5′ 11″)
Weight: 81.5 kg (up 1.4 kg)
Body Fat Percentage – removed from list as scales are crap.
Bicep/Tricep: Right: 35 cm (up 1 cm). Left: 33 cm (down 0.3 cm)
Forearm: 28 cm (up 0.7 cm)
Chest: 107 cm (up 0.5 cm)
Waist: 88.5 cm if left neutral (up 0.5 cm), 82 cm if sucked in (no change)
Hips: 95 cm
Upper leg: 54 cm (down 2 cm)
I can’t figure this out – perhaps my method of measuring is wrong, but the changes seem to constantly contradict each other, as well as common sense. My waist increased for neutral but not for sucked in… but does that mean an increase in fat, or in muscle? My legs are definitely more powerful, yet they seem to have shrunk; am I not accounting for fat loss from the legs, or are my leg muscles actually shrinking? My right upper arm grew, but my left shrank, even though they appear to be about the same size, and my left arm seems to be gaining in strength. Even my hips seem to have widened, which doesn’t make any sense at all to me (I didn’t bother including the change, because of the aforementioned nonsensicality of it).
Note: these measurements were taken at 11:00 PM on a Sunday. As measurements can vary throughout the day, this doesn’t represent exact figures.
With body out of the way, it’s time to talk about the mind. In particular, on the strangeness of the human mind when it comes to debate.
I recently read a debate hosted by Internet Infidels, between Bill Cooke and Imran Aijaz (find it here). What was strange about it was that, although Cooke was a ‘respected’ atheist and Aijaz was from the Auckland University Islamic Society, Cooke resorted to ad hominems and failed to rebut even one of Aijaz’s points, instead being quite rude and inflammatory, while Aijaz was a courteous and relatively competent debater. Cooke’s behaviour was so bad that the moderator wrote a piece attacking Cooke, essentially denouncing his behaviour, and actually went through and pointed out the holes in Aijaz’s arguments himself, because Cooke had failed to do so. (on a side note, Cooke then attacked the moderator for denouncing his behaviour, and yet again failed to provide anything logical in the process).
At first, I just took it as an idiot given a voice that he didn’t deserve. But after a bit of thought, I realised that this sort of behaviour is all too common, not just amongst atheists, nor amongst people arguing about religion, but amongst all people and about all topics. What is it that draws people to the use of ad hominem (sometimes called “shooting the messenger”) and other such poor argument methods? Why do so many people have so much trouble debating in a rational, reasonable, polite method, and why does this happen to people who uphold rationality as of great import?
There must be something within the human mind that draws people to these techniques, something that makes people think that such irrational methods are effective tools of convincing rational people of things. Perhaps the problem is that so many irrational people are swayed by such arguments, but this leads to another such question: why are so many people irrational?
Note that this isn’t about people being religious, or dogmatic – this is about people using flawed argument methods in arguing about something. The concept of logic is generally easy to understand – if A implies B, and A is true, then B is true. From that one statement, almost all of logic flows, either directly, or indirectly through variations of it (If A implies B, and B is false, then A is false, for instance). The ideas that logic encompasses are not complicated, and most people use these very ideas in everyday life. Why is it that these same ideas are so rarely applied once people start arguing?
Having pondered on that for a while, I would like to divert to a slightly different topic; religion itself. One of the basic beliefs that most religions include is “free will”. Christianity in particular holds that free will was something that their god gave to humans, and often they argue that free will is the reason why evil exists – because if evil did not exist, people would have to choose good, and thus would not have the free will necessary to choose evil.
This, however, leads to a different question: why did god not give us complete free will, then? He clearly did not give us the ability to fly unaided – does this not restrict our will? We may want to fly, but irrespective of this will, we are forced to be kept on the ground. We weren’t given the ability to transport ourselves instantaneously across a region of 100 metres, yet does this not restrict our free will further? We also do not have the ability to turn into animals; yet another restriction on our free will. Why did god choose to give us free will such that we can commit evil acts, yet not free will to do other things?
I guess the conclusion I am hinting at is that free will cannot be used as the argument for the existence of evil under an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being, as free will clearly isn’t complete.
Another such ponderance is on the so-called “creation of the universe”. Most people seem to fall into one of two categories: either they believe that the universe started with a big bang (or some other mechanism), or they believe that the universe was created by some being outside of the universe. However, there is a third possibility that always seems to be dismissed: the universe has always existed, and did not need to have any sort of creation. The most common arguments against the always-existing universe (which by nature must also be infinite in space) are the arguments of infinite-light, infinite-gravity, and the decrease of entropy. Each of these can be countered with ease.
The infinite-light argument is that, if the universe were of infinite extent, and populated roughly uniformly with stars, the light from those stars must necessarily sum to infinity, and thus the sky would be infinitely bright. The flaw to this argument are the assumptions of light not decaying with time, nor being absorbed by any intervening substances. Clearly the second of these assumptions is incorrect, as simple space debris will absorb small amounts of light, as will any other object (such as a planet, another star, etc), which implies a decay profile for light as the amount that travels a given distance will have a given amount absorbed by such debris and other objects – adding this decay pattern leads to non-infinite light, which would then sum to some small value (consider the background radiation that has been observed). Of course, the first is likely false, also, as all other particles have been observed to have half-lives, and thus are expected to decay; why should the photon be any different?
The infinite-gravity argument is simply ludicrous; the force due to gravity is not proportional to the gravitational potential energy, but rather to the gradient of this energy. Since an infinite universe would, on the larger scale, be roughly homogeneous, the force due to gravity caused by this would sum to zero, and only local variations would actually affect gravity, as is observed in reality.
The last of the three is the argument from entropy – entropy increases, and cannot decrease globally, because the universe moves towards disorder. This argument is fallacious, however, as nothing says that entropy must increase – it could, on the universal scale, remain constant. More importantly, however, the law applies to a closed system, which an infinite universe in space is not – such a system is inherently an open system, and thus the law of entropy cannot be applied. Furthermore, the law of entropy does not take into account various other possibilities, such as black holes acting as entropy-reduction devices, as the laws that lead to the law of entropy break down at singularities. So such an argument is useless, as the law of entropy can tell you nothing about an infinite universe.
Anyway, with both mind and matter having been discussed, it is time that I stopped this.
