Author Archives: mat

SayNoNay

 

One thing I have been practicing with myself for a few weeks is the practice of  not being a naysayer. A naysayer is not someone who says “no”, it is someone who says “no” without good thought.
Dialogs normally go like this:
Offspring: “Dad can I please borrow your…”
Me:(Interrupting): “No.”
That, right there, is me being a naysayer.
I am trying to change that by not saying “nay,” in accordance with the ancient practice of “Saynonay”. To practice Saynonay just keep in your mind not to say “nay” in any way unless it seems, after good thought, to be the right thing to say.
If you ask someone if they are playing Saynonay, and they say “no”, they are probably not practicing Saynonay.
In the weeks I have been doing it I do think it has a positive benefit on my life, and I would expect my kids – all four of whom now have metabolic syndrome and are in prison for gang related offences. I jest.
Interestingly, nobody knows the etymology of “Saynonay”. Some think it traces back to the Great First Language, others think it comes from the PreprotoPalli form “sa su ka” which means “talk outwardly sweetly”. I don’t think it matters, what is important about practicing Saynonay is simply not to say “nay” unless it really is OK to say nay.

NoAM Eating

Not eating in the morning.
I am a pretty big believer that there are fundamental differences between proper fasting and intermittent fasting, even when the proper fasting is but a mere day. It seems plausible, and I think the evidence suggests, that the magic happens with no consumption.
I often go two proper days, I have been three. Some people go for many days but just a few times or once a year. I don’t know what is wellbeing optimal, but my opinion is currently with the smaller, regular, fasts.
Anyhoo’s… this does not mean that I am at all against intermittent fasting.
Quite the contrary. One simple, and I think ancient, fasting routine is just to not eat in the morning. Break fast. Before the PM. I do it two or three times a week. It is very easy, and most of us will have done it without wanting or trying.
In these 16 hours, your body will change state.
Perhaps not into the full-on FAST state with autophagy and stem-cells,  that is the aim of informed fasting, but still, goodness will be happening, even if it is just giving your metabolic organs a bit of a rest from their normal 247mustprocessthis mode.
Some people will find that NoAM fasting is good for calorie reduction, if just because you are going to be missing a meal and eating less. This makes sense.
But this doesn’t work for me because, as happened today, after a NoAM Fasting, my car swerved into Tescos and I rinsed of five packets of Square crisps as I drove home.
The wrappers are in the glove compartment.

A friend just asked me: “What evidence is there that EMF damages our cells on a permanent level?”

You should do your own research on that if you are skeptical, and why not be sceptical?:)

But my understanding, which is not totally naieve, is that there are many mechanisms of disruption.

I am not going to use any research to answer your question here, and I am not one for details, but here goes, my attempt to pursued you, via answering it.

The first thing that you need to understand is that of all the millions or billions of variables that constitute our bodies: Oxygen, Water, salts, amino-acids… there is only one that is totally biologically ubiquitous. This is electricity: Within, and between, every living are electrochemical processes that operate on tiny, tiny voltages.

The second thing that you need to understand is that wirelessly connected devices gain their connection via electromagnetic energy.

The third thing you need to understand is that connected devices operate at energy levels thousands and thousands of times higher than, both the natural background EMF energy (As the earth was 200 years ago, or so) and the biological levels found in every living cell in our bodies.

You need to understand and accept these three things before proceeding really Alexs. They are just science fact, which you should be able to easily disprove or accept.

Once you agree with the three understandings above then you can start to extrapolate from those premises.

Does it seem plausible that connected devices could cause biological change?

I think it does, why would it not. There is nothing special about the electrical energies involved here, over and above say, an electrical motor.

Would such changes be unnatural?

I think clearly yes. Three hundred years ago no human had expected anything like the levels of even measly Bluetooth4. (This is one point I am not convinced about without further researching. #cosmicblasts etc).

Would such changes be disruptive?

I would imagine that if you were to be able to take a person with a magic wand just randomly change the nano-voltages in the electrical systems in their bodies then those changes would have a point at which they would become noticeably negative. This seems totally reasonable to me as an assumption. And it is a case analogous to EMF, except with EMF it is more point of  source dependent.

So where we are now, I think, without any science evidence, just thinking,  is an understanding that, because of the nature of connected devices and biological systems, it is plausible that there could be negative effects from connected devices.

I accept that, it seems very sensible to me as a conclusion. There is no WooWoo in what I have said and I challenge anyone to refute any of the above:)

The next stage in my answering your question is to look at evidence. Is there evidence that supports the above plausible hypothesis?

I think there is lots.

The newest (2016?), most-compelling, evidence is to do with their system which decides on whether or not to allow calcium into our cells. Every cell needs calcium. Any cell can be damaged by too much calcium. This system that governs the calcium flow is called a “Voltage Gated Calcium Channel” and it is shown to be heavily susceptible to disruption from non-natural EMF. The effects of this are emerging to be many, but one that seems accepted is that this calcium imbalance, caused by your phone etc, causes sever oxidative stress. This is the cell ageing…rusting… corroding that is the cause of most modern diseases (It’s the thing that antioxidants are touted to reduce.)

So there we go…

I hope that answers your question!

Vegan Oysters. Again.

I am a committed Vegan, but I am totally missing oysters.

Every day this mini-battle goes on in my head.

I am a Vegan for two prime reasons.

Reason One

I think, for reasons of woo woo, that the following is a supreme teaching:

“Do Not Eat Animals”.

Reason Two

Like most people, I do not want to be an increaser of negativity in the world. That is, I don’t want to choose to cultivate and propagate or in any sense be responsible for or supportive or endorsing negativity production in any way.

The “choice” aspect is important here, I think:

When I eat a salad, beings may have died to get that salad before me. A shrew in a field. Two badgers in a pile up on the M4. All is possible, even with kale.

But when I eat meat, I am necessarily choosing that an animal was imprisoned, tortured, exploited and slaughtered for me.

Vegans choose not to cause suffering in their choices, this does not mean that their choices will never cause suffering. #quornpocalypse

Once I accept this principle (Ahimsa and Sukka) it is just a no-brainer to me that if I eat cheese or chicken, then I am causing suffering. Often in massive ways that, as the end consumer, I see myself as ultimately responsible for. I pay the assassin via the teller or waiter or jolly vendor at the farmer’s market.

I have philosophised these kinds of points so much over the last few years, more than most, I would wager. Still my conclusions remain: it is water-tight, a no-brainer, a comestible cogito: We should not eat animals.

Of course I would eat meat in a survival situation.

Of course honey is not the same as ham.

Of course milk is worse than flesh, because it is flesh, plus more suffering. If B contains X and C contains B then C contains X.

I belive that if you want to be one of those people, like most people, one of the… “I-dont-wanna-be-cruels”, then, in no sense, can your meat eating be justified. You are being irrational, alongside your cruelty. (Please, please prove me wrong on this, for I would so love it not to be so true.)

The Mammalian end of the spectrum, and even the birds and the fish, those little fellas, I am close to done with them in my philosophical enumerations and ruminations, but Oysters, they are still in the mirky penumbra, somewhere between figs and accidental cod roe.

Of oysters I cannot say, “I should not eat that.”

I don’t currently eat them, and haven’t for many many months, but by gosh, they are almost on the tip of my tongue.

I cannot yet justify their exclusion for reasons a bit like, but not limited to, the following:

I cannot really make sense of an oyster experincing suffering, in much the same way that I cannot imagine yeast suffering. I could torture a goose, but an oyster? That does not yet make sense to me.

I don’t think it experiences anything. It has no brain, as such. It has a strewn out clumps of proto-neurons. It will respond to stimulus, but feel pain or in any sense be, in any point in anything that can be considered a mental space?

Is it a being?

When I think “Do Not Eat Animals” that last term expands out into something like “sentient beings”. “Sentience” means able to experience. “Being” means able to be. I don’t know really what either of those terms really mean. Nobody really does. Especially not the oysters. But I am sure a dog is sentient, as I know I am. Oysters, profoundly lack this sureness, to me, right now.

We think fish can feel pain, they respond as such, they can be anaesthetised, they have similar pain biologies to mammals. But these arguments and understands do not apply to oysters. Oysters may move away from toxic environments but that does not mean they experience the environment. Singled celled organisms can do the same, and vegans eat those. #youpeople!

There is another point, I will make this my last, which is that oysters are jam-packed with nutrients that vegans find very hard to get without chemical supplementation (Which is what I do).

Is that wise? The vegan definition on the society website centres around the term “practicable”. I like that definition, it gives room for reasonableness. I am forced, by reason, to ask, is it not practicable to eat oysters given that, being human, I need B12?

Is it really better that I get it from some industrial process in pill form?

I do not know the answers to these questions and so I just trundle along, not eating oysters, yada yada, “have another bit of cress, Mat”.

Thanks for reading!

Hard Cheese

First  one realises, just by thought, that they are a cause, enabler, endorser, supporter, antecedent (temporal or not) and well… a fan of the causing of  unacceptable suffering.

Then one realises that, ultimately, the reason that they cause this suffering is to satisfy their  own momentary mouth pleasure.

When these two simple realisations are acknowledged I belive it would be ignoble of me not to then ask myself,  “What should I do?”

If I consume meat, then am I an accomplice in the murder of a baby animal, just for fun?

What should I do?

It took me a while to get to answer this question. There were lapses and cognitive dissonances and a guilty goat curry that was “going to waste”.

But the answer came, a nobrainer it seems to me now, “I do not eat animals.”

And that is almost that, except that  it get’s worse than the worseness of meat and the obvious butchery/epiphany of that equation:

If I eat dairy, then I cause greater and wider suffering than the suffering I cause from just eating meat.

This is startling, when you let it settle.

The dairy industry is the meat industry.

But it is the meat industry with extra layers of humiliation and exploitation.

It has enforced breeding, unnatural confinement, torture, antibiotic recklessness and on and on…

Is it not is even more repugnant and brutal than the meat farming?

Cheese is literally addictive.

I miss it so much.

Should I salute magpies?

One of the key advantages of practicing CHE is the ability to quickly sift through life’s mundane choices, enjoying them and knowing that, by and large, you have made what for you were the right choices when it comes to Home Economical issues. How should one clean their clothes, house, self and mind. Is Amazon Prime is justified? Which vitamins should I supplement? How much is optimum salt?

Consider the CHE equation: Should I wear my seatbelt?

It is simple to see on a three-space Risk/Cost/Benefit vector graph that, yes, of course you should wear your seatbelt. It is irrational not to, if you value self preservation. What is interesting is that such indubitable Cartesian conclusions map into the same kind of epistemic grid as things that on the whole seem woo, irrational or nonsensical.

Consider the CHE equation:  Should I salute magpies?

This one, when you flesh it out, has a few more nexi than the seatbelt one, but the structure is almost the same; where the two equations differ is in the two driving assumptions.

  1. Wearing Seatbelts: It is possible that wearing a seatbelt could save the wearer’s life.
  2. Saluting Magpies: It possible that saluting a magpie could increase the saluter’s  Luck.

In the case of 2, once we accept the possibility of Luck then it is no difference of kind to move on and reason something like:

  1. There is something special called Luck.
  2. It is possible this Luck can be increased by agency.
    1. I’m assuming that if there is a supernatural (“nonprobabalistic”?) reality to luck then it can be something that can be in some sense accumulated or bestowed on.
      1. If this assumption is not accepted then you seem forced to accept that there is Luck but it is distributed stochastically/probabilistically.
        1. Luck would be real but its distribution chanced, which seems absurd.
  3. It is possible saluting magpies could entail 2 (Luck increase).
  4. Saluting magpies is an extremely low risk activity.
  5. Saluting magpies is an extremely low cost activity.
  6. It is rational to solute magpies.

But if we don’t accept the reality of Luck, we cannot go with Assumption 1 in the CHE reasoning above. It all boils down to the reality of Luck.

With anything abstract and potentially magical in a CHE equation, it needs to be weighted. Is there evidence? Is there mechanism? Is there equivalence? Even then, unless there is a refutation, all we can ultimately say is IDK.

  1. I cannot be certain that there is Luck.
  2. I cannot be certain that there is no Luck.

The Reality of Luck

I haven’t researched what others have said on Luck, I assume it has been spoken about lots. One thing that seems clear is that people who believe in Luck are believing in something that’s up there with ghosts and deities. For example, for there to be a reality to  Luck there needs to be some kind of external agent, some Intelligence, that says “Bob is going to be more likely to win this coin toss.”

That’s a huge new guest to one’s ontological buffet, and I think you cannot have Luck without that. So, if you think your rabbit foot brings you luck, you are tacitly assuming, and please CMV, that there is/might be a deciding and intelligent agent affecting your life.

Luck also has implications to do with temporal logic. The kind of arguments against the logical possibility of changing the past might apply in the case of Luck.

  1. At t1 x was not going to happen to P at t3.
  2. At t2 P has luck bestowed on them.
  3. At t1 x was going to happen to P at t3.

Is that right? I don’t know, it seems so to me.

The point is that accepting Luck is not a small thing, it is a huge thing that brings with it the world being profoundly different to the world without it. But as skeptics, that is no reason to deny the possibility of it.

What about evidence and mechanism? Is there any?

The Physical Argument For Real Luck

We cannot get evidence for Luck. Even if 1000 times out of 1000 I do better with my lucky charm than without it, that could always just be a coincidence.

What about a mechanism for how luck could work? Suppose you were a creator being and you made a universe with individuals in and you wanted to be able to bestow Luck upon them.

How would you do that? What mechanism, in this world, could you use. You would need to use a mechanism that was compatible with this world, or else there would be risk of contradiction. You would need a way to change the outcome of events while the changes being nomologically compatible with reality.

In fact, it seems our universe does have such a mechanism, built in at the bolts,  which would allow consistent changes to be made to outcomes – this is quantum indeterminateness. True randomness exists and it could be used to facilitate the bestowing of luck.  It is not against the laws of the universe that a bullet could suddenly veer off course. It could happen. If you wanted to bestow Luck upon your creations, you could use the indeterminateness built into your creation.

The reality of Luck has no possible evidence, has a huge ontological payload and has a plausible mechanism in this universe. If I had to choose I would say I do not not belive in the reality of Luck – but I do not have to choose; uncertainty is certain in my world view.

Conclusion: Should I salute magpies?

Real Luck could be real or not. It is fundamentally unknowable which is the case. Luck, if it was real would be something worth having – it would be irrational to think otherwise. Given this, and the minuscule cost and risk of saluting the magpies, in my opinion, the CHE solution to the equation is that yes, I should salute magpies. Why would I not?

MSM The Miracle Mineral?

My Cousin lives in LA and will only eat food that has been blessed by monks from at least three different Asian religions and then tested, by both mass spectrum analyzer and professional taster, that it is not just Organic but Kosher. He never eats sugar, except in tea and coffee and all other food and drinks. 

Even though he is like, really, into healthy living (The last time I stayed with him we spent over eighteen hours in West Hollywood’s biggest health food stores, subsisting just on wheatgrass and zen noodles. These are not a brand name, but a fad that only exists in this particular part of West Holywood and only for one summer in the late nineties. The idea was simple. Gluten was bad. Noodles tasted nice. Instead of being made with carbohydrate, they were made with Zen. They also had a bread made with sourdough) he had never ever once recommended me anything. Not once…

Until two months ago. On the phone he said that he had been taking this supplement and it had changed his life. I didn’t need more of a recommendation, I was all over that stuff within moments of getting off the Skype. I didn’t look into it like I normally do, I just went ahead and took a trip down the Amazon. A family pack for a month was a tenner.

Only then, once the order dispatched email was in, like a really bad scientist and skeptic, did I start to investigate it.

Now over the last decades online I have investigated many things using the power of the internet and books. In the crazy woowoo world of snake oil and superfoods, you have to really get skilled at operating the former from the latter. To think that all claims of benefit are snake oil is just ignorant and unreasonable. Equally to think that just because it had a webpage it has legitimacy is very poor think skills.

This is how I generally do it.

Firstly, the big question is cui bono, who benefits?

If its something that you cannot make at home or but freely then that’s a redflag to me. This doesn’t mean that that crazy hybrid amino acid transmogifer isn’t going to be amazing, it does mean that while it is proprietary, you should assume there is profit in the promotion, even without benefit.

Secondly, is it safe?

This is a real tricky one to get through and still today there are a bunch of things I just am not sure what to think of when it comes to their objective safety. MSG, Vitmin E…

Thirdly, is it worth it?

To me this is the great question that only you can ask, but there are some guidelines and, espeically if many are recomending if for no proffit, it is a good sign.

Forthly, is it open?

There are chemicals in, say, apples. which just seem to do us good. Anyone can access these chamiec

There is also a very proven strategy which is to repeaedly and occasionally stop taking X to see if you iss it. If you do it long enough I think you will get attunes to what is good for you and what is not.

I have been taking it for two months now and, so far, really rate it as a wellbeing optimiser, as something I can imagine I will continue to take; like D3 and Boocha.

  • MSM is very very low risk.
  • It is quite a low cost.
  • It is very high anecdote.
  • It has significant scientific evidence.
  • It has a plausible and demonstrable explanatory mechanism.

Have I found it works?

I do feel more energy. I have started running, at about the same time that I started taking it. So its a bit of a mishmash when it comes to isolating the cause. Did I get into running because of MSM or JMR?

I have suddenly started writing poems again like I haven’t for many years, is that MSM? (The point here is the action, not the quality).

Anything else?

Today, for the first time in my life I ran 5k. MSM? It felt like I was going to collapse in a cardiovascular blamache. MSM?

Tonight, it was a consensus that I played the best poker of my life. MSM? I still lost badly, MSM? I dunno!:)

Here are some links for your own perusal:

 

Chase The Butterflies

I have long been a collector of the various ways we humans have found to express that abstract goodness to life, and the singular, hopeful, response to that goodness; Seize the day. Play The Game. Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

My Uncle Andy died a few years ago, he was a great man; all thought. My older cousin, and Andy’s first male nephew, Yeof , he came to stay, from LA. Just the other day. He told me how Andy had been such a fertile influence on his life; as Andy was to many. He told me of the wise and pristine advise that his uncle had given him, without claim, many long, long years ago… .

“Chase The Butterflies”

Uncle Andy ’47’10

Thought Experiment Two: The Single Point Universe

This thought experiment is exactly the same as with the Glove Universe, except that it will have less parts. We will simply stipulate a new Universe for the game and then look at the Truth Lists for this Universe

Imagine a universe that is just a circle. No different on the inside or out, but a circle, perfect in its simplicity.

Your Glove Universe and my Glove Universe would have been distinct, it’s very unlikely we could imagine identical gloves, especially not if we started getting really trivial with our Truth List. Perhaps yours had stubbier fingers than mine or yours had thick external seams whereas mine were concealed.

With the Circle universes our Imaginings, and thus stipulations, will be identical. To see this, try to imagine a statement that could be true of your perfect Circle Universe but not True of mine. If you can imagine one in your Universe then you have cheated and not imagined a perfect circle.

Now let’s play the Truth game with this new perfectly circular board.

I will write my Lists using Bullets from now on. I am no mathematician but perhaps I may start my Lists like this:

    • True:
      • The proportion of the area of the circle is Pi times the radius squared.
    • False:
      • The circle has exactlly four axis of symmetry.
    • Meaningless:
      • The King is dead.

It is a lot harder with Circles than Gloves to fill the Three Lists because the very act of stipulation/imagination/creation limits what’s possible to say about the Circle Universe. Also, and importantly, the fact that all circles in the Game are perfect means they must also be identical. Two things are identical if the totality of their Truth Lists contain all of the same statements on each List, as would be the case with Perfect Circles but nor red gloves. We can imagine the difference in gloves, but not in perfect circles. And therefore, if follows that we can have no differences between our Circle Universes, to show me wrong here you just need to come up with a statement that would be true of your universe but not mine (without changing the rules of the game.)

We are going to move to the even more simple “Board” for our next variant of the Game, in the next part of this Thought Experiment.

Imagine a Single Point universe.

I don’t know what that means in any deep or metaphysical sense. I can’t imagine a Single Point Universe like I think I can a Glove Universe or a cosmic Universe and I certainly can’t imagine it like I can imagine yesterday’s lunch. But, just like with gloves and circles and anything else, I can fill out the Truth List for the Single Point Universe.

So… let’s play, fill out the Truth Lists for a universe that is just a point. No space or time, without change and structure.

When you try to do this, you will soon see that the Meaningless List can be added to easily, but the other two, Truth and False, are much more challenging.

There are only two true statements I can think off about the Single Point universe, and even these I am not sure what they mean. Here is my Truth List for the Single Point Universe:

    • True:
      • The Point Exists.

 

    • The Point is Identical with Itself.

How can I even be sure that I can have these two True Statement’s on my list? I am not sure that I can, but it strikes me that whatever “existence” is if it is True of the Glove Existing then why would it not be True of the single point existing.

We have stipulated that the universe contains no change. It follows from this stipulation that the point must be identical with itself. If it was not, there would be a change, either in sequence or structure (We shall see what these terms mean in future experiments).

Let’s look to the False List:

    • False:
      • There is no existence.
      • The Point is Identical with Itself.

 

The Single point universe has two False statements on its List, these are, as you can see, simply the opposite of the Truth List.

If this was the case, if the two lists contained items that couldn’t exist within the same game’s Truth lists, then we would have a problem, the most fundamental of problems, the Contradiction.

Underlying all of these Games we can play is a rule set that contains as its most fundamental rule:

There Can be No Contradictions

It doesn’t matter what Universe we try to imagine, if we are reasonable then the underlying truths of Logic dictate that things will be consistent. There can be no contradictions. Soon we will see how emergence is a dependency relationship and we will be able to test this with any statement against any possible universe and see that this NonContradiction flows thought reality, possible and actual.In other words, if you are not prepared to accept this most fundamental rule then these Thought Experiments just cannot be for you:)

Conclusion: The Single Point Philosopher

The Single point universe is logically the most Simple Universe anything could consistently imagine or represent. All we can say are four nontrivial statements, is “that it exists” and “that it is identical with its self” and the negation of these two statements. That’s all we can say, but as we shall see in the next experiments comes, from this most minimal of atoms we can create some amazing things. Before this, I think it would be good to ask the questions we cannot really answer about the Single Point Universe.

So far we haven’t been anywhere near what is traditionally and culturally considered the deeper side of philosophy. In fact, we haven’t really been doing any “philosophizing” at all in these two thought experiments. We have been reporting “the facts” about imaginary universes rather than asking the big Why/What/How? questions common to Philosophy.

As a final exercise, which is ideally suited to the bath, bed or pub, I want you to think about the Single Point Universe in as many ways as you can (or can’t). Try to contemplate the Single Point universe, as we have been; asking questions and suggesting answers. Try to meditate on the single pointed universe, focussing on it with as little distraction as you can (I find this very hard!). Try to visualise the Single Point Universe, even if you never can. Try to doubt it. Try to disprove its possibility.

And when you have tried the above, try, however you can to answer these kind of questions:

    1. Could it exist?
    2. Can I make sense of it not existing?
    3. What is the difference between it existing and not existing?
    4. Does it contain Pi?
    5. Does it the anything like time or space?
    6. Is it true that 4+6=10 in the Single Point Universe?
    7. If it exists can it then not exist?
    8. Are the Truth Lists of the Single Point Universe contained within the reality we are now in This Universe. Are all things identical with themselves in this universe? Do all things in this universe exist in some sense in this universe?
    9. What happens if we add another point exactly like the first?

If you are like me you won’t be able to clearly answer most of the above, but that really doesn’t matter.

Thought Experiment One: The Glove Game

Close your eyes and imagine an ordinary, small, red ladies glove. Imagine that in the wrist part of the glove is a slit and one side of this is a small red button. Imagine that on the other side of the slit is a small loop that can go around the button, to hold the glove in place on a hand.

You have just imagined a glove. Now I want you to imagine this glove floating in a void of nothingness. No other things, no time, no light, no observer, just the glove. I want you to imagine The Glove Universe.

In fact, you cannot imagine a universe that’s just a small red ladies glove. For a number of reasons:

You can’t imagine something being “small” if thats’ the only thing there is. Smallness is a relative property, it needs more things to be realised.

You can’t imagine something as being red if there is no light and no observer. “Colour’s” don’t make sense in the glove universe (Though you can imagine the surface of the Glove has properties that were it on your hand right now would make it red).

You can’t imagine just a glove because gloves are what’s called “enantiomorphs” (One of my favourite words), this means that they are left or right handed structures that cannot exist without a “counterpart.”

Perhaps, even without the above three issues, we just cannot imagine universes in anything like the same way we can imagine tomorrows weather or the things we can imagine. Perhaps we can’t imagine the unimaginable.

Luckily. We don’t need need to imagine the unimaginable to be able to think about it discuss it and learn from it. Too see this point and too see some other things we are going to play an imaginary game, but one we could all play any time.

The Glove Game: Round One

Start a document that has room for three lists. You can use pen and paper, bullet points, mental notes, whatever, it really doesn’t matter. I will use bullet points for my side of the game.

Label the first List, “True List.”

All you have to do to win Round One is add more True statements about the Glove Universe than I do. When we say “True” in the context of this game we mean:

True: “A statement is True about the Glove Universe if what it describes can be found within the Glove Universes.”

Here is my first Truth List:

  • True:

    • The Glove has four fingers and a thumb.

When I look at the imaginary universe I see that this is True. The meanings of the words are from outside of the Universe but what they represent can be found inside the Glove universe. If you’re going to try to imagine a six fingered glove, then you lose the game because the game requires an “ordinary, small, red ladies glove.”

It isn’t hard to come up with True statements about the glove as my “True List” shows:

  • True

    • The Glove has four fingers and a thumb.

    • The button is not between the index finger and the thumb.

    • The little finger is not longer than the middle finger

    • The thumb is not between any fingers.

You can add to your list and I can add to mine and on and on we go. Sometimes we may come up with statements where it isn’t so clear if the statement is True. For example, what do we say about?:

It is possible the tip of the thumb could touch the tip of the index finger if the rest of the glove remained the same.

I don’t know what to say about this. It mentions possibility and conditionals (“if the…”) that don’t seem to belong. We shall discuss these in Round Three, for this round, its pretty clear, none of us can win.

If you want to imagine that the loop is has a tangent that intersects the seam of the thumb at 23% degrees, that’s fine, it’s your thought experiment and so long as your Stipulation of any single fact is consistent with your stipulations of the other facts, you can “imagine” it. And this means the Truth List is just a repository for facts that are consistent with a universe that consists of just an “ordinary, small, red ladies glove.”

The Glove Game: Round Two

For the next round, we have to start on the second List. Label this the “False List”.

The winner of Round Two is the person who comes up with the longest statement list of False statements about the Glove Universe. To see if a statement is False just see if the thing it describes is to be found in the Glove Universe, if it is not, then the statement is False.

Here is the start of my “False List” (Comments are in the lines below):

  • False:

    • The volume of the thumb is greater than the volumes of the other fingers combined.

      • Although we can easily imagine gloves with very big thumbs, that would be outside of the rules of this game which requires “a small red ladies glove…”.

    • The glove has symmetry.

    • It is possible to weave the thumb through the other fingers

    • The glove has the same topology as a doughnut.

It’s pretty easy to come up with False Statements about the Glove Universe. And like with True Statements, when seeking False Statements we also find some statements that don’t seem to be False. For example:

    • The Glove Is underneath a Hat.

Seems to be False because the Glove is not underneath a hat. However, it’s not False and yert equally it doesn’t to be a True (That is, Not Flase.). These statements that don’t fit on either list will be discussed in Round Three.

The Glove Game: Round Three

The Third List in the game is the “Meaningless List” and it will take only statements that are meaningless relevant to the Glove Universe. This will take a little bit more to appreciate before we play.

A statement is Meaningless relative to the Glove Universe Game if it is nether True nor False about the Glove Universe. You might like to think of Meaningless statements as containing things that simply cannot be found in any possible Glove Universe.

  • True statements describe things that exist within the Glove Universe.

    • By “things” here we mean structures, relations, properties that are contingent upon the stipulation of the universe.

  • False statements describe things that do not exist within the Glove Universe.

  • Meaningless statements describe things cannot exist in the Glove Universe.

    • That is, “cannot exist” without cheating and stipulating something other than a “”a small red ladies glove…”.

With an idea of what it means to be “Meaningless,” here is my Meaningless List:

  • Meaningless:

    • Paris is the Capital of France.

    • Mars is often called “The Red Planet”

    • The glove is larger than an elephant.

    • All gloves are smaller than houses.

    • The glove belonged to Audry Hepburn.

    • The Glove is left handed.

    • We understand this experiment.

    • All games are not fun.

This game is rubbish!

Nobody could win Round One, nor Round Two and it now it looks like nobody can win Round Three. In fact, it strikes me that there are always going to be more meaningless statements because most possible statements simply won’t refer to things in the Glove Universe and thus, are meaningless.

Conclusion to the First Thought Experiment

This experiment has highlighted a number of things. Perhaps most importantly it’s shown what a Thought Experiment is, in case you didn’t already know. A thought experiment is simply a stipulated possible Universe that is created to be experimented on or questioned about.

We make Thought experiments all the time, “If I won the lottery I would..”, “Imagine all the people, living in Harmony…”

It’s also shown that thought experiments are about what’s relevant to them by stipulation, not by assumption. You can imagine things that are not really possible to exist or imagine and yet, you can see how still we can ask relevant questions about them.

But with the Glove Game we have employed a useful tool in the Truth Lists that allows us to speak about the possible universe in a pretty precise and useful way. I hope in the next experiment you will have an even more intuitive understanding of the potential.

The last thing we saw from this experiment is that all possible statements seem to fit into only one of three categories, True, False or Meaningless and that which list any statement belongs on depends on the stipulated nature of the relevant universe. This will become very important in future experiments.

The next Experiment will be published here shortly.