More from the oracle.

I've been rather busy for a while, so I haven't been posting here, but I have still been getting emails from the sibyl. I've got 3 more since I last posted, and I'm not sure what to make of them.

Here's the first:

Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 13:26:03 +0100
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

World peace would be a good thing.

I didn't pay too much attention to this one when I first got it. I thought it was just a return to the simple truths of the earlier emails. I didn't notice the obvious problem until I read the next email:

Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:13:26 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

The Badshahi Mosque is a beautiful building.

Again, my first reaction (after finding out what the Badshahi mosque is) was to accept this as a standard fact about the world, easily determinable by a wiki-search. Then I changed my mind. After all, whether a building is ugly or not isn't an objective fact; it is subjective. I guess that there are people somewhere who think this mosque isn't all it's cracked up to be. We don't have an objective standard we can go to to show that they are wrong: It's a matter of taste.

On the other hand, the emails from the sibyl have all been true (I've given up on explaining how) so I'd expect the content of this one to be true as well. Is the accuracy of the emails so far a good reason for me to accept the idea that there is an absolute aesthetic standard? Is it good enough to accept that the Badshahi mosque is (absolutely) beautiful? Is it better evidence than my own direct perception of that beauty in pictures of the mosque?

This train of thought led me to reevaluate my thinking about the previous email. After all, I don't normally ground my moral decisions in an objective moral standard. But for the content of that email to be true there would have to be such a standard. Is this good enough evidence for me to accept that some things are good in an absolute sense, or that world peace is one of those things? Is this a better reason to believe that world peace is good than my own direct perception of that fact?

Things got even worse this morning, when I got the following email:

Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:11:19 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

Humans have souls, which survive the death of the body.

This is a statement for which (apart from this email) I had negligible evidence. Is the accuracy of the previous emails on matters of fact enough to make this email into good evidence of life after death?

I don't know quite how to think about these emails. First, I have no explanation for their earlier accuracy. Second, I have no idea whether or how far it is sensible to extrapolate that accuracy to statements about beauty, morality or spirituality.

An extreme oddity.

Today I got yet another email from the sibyl, and it has completely freaked me out. It read as follows:

Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 07:37:41 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

When you read this email you will have 3 20p coins in your pocket. Toss one of them 30 times and you will get the sequence THTHHHHHTHTTTTHTTHTTTTHHTTHTTT.

I had 3 20p coins in my pocket and I tossed one 30 times. I got exactly that sequence of heads and tails. The chance of this is less than 1 in a billion. There's no way any scammer, however sophisticated, could beat those odds. Dedicated googling has turned up no information at all about where these emails could be coming from. I can think of no explanation. Maybe I'm going mad.

A worrying development.

I've been avoiding checking my inbox for a couple of days, but today I finally had a look. I've only had one email from the sibyl, which was as follows:

Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 00:17:24 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

When you read this email you will be wearing glasses, beige trousers, a black T-shirt, a brown patterned jumper and gray boxer shorts. You won't be wearing shoes or socks.

This prediction is spot on, but I'm not sure what it means. How do they know what colour my underwear is? Is this supposed to be some kind of veiled threat? In any case, if they know so much about me then they almost certainly read this blog. If so, I'd like to make the following statement:

I did not buy a lottery ticket, and I do not believe anybody has the ability to forecast lottery results. I cannot and will not reimburse you for any money you have expended in the course of your scam. If you threaten me in any way or ask for money from me, I will contact the police.

The oddity again.

I've just had a look at the national lottery results from last night, and they matched the email from the sibyl. I guess this means that, if this is a scam, I'll soon be targeted. If I'm right in my guess about how the scam works then whoever is running it has lost a reasonable amount of money and is hoping to make it back from me. Of course, all of this is built on a tissue of conjectures which I'm now beginning to hope are false. I'm not really sure what to do; I need to take a little time to think.

Reviewing ideas.

The second birthday book I read was a mini-tome called 'Ideas - A history', by Peter Watson. The aim of this book is to provide a condensed overview of the history of ideas and their development, and it does this in a remarkably thorough and wide-ranging way. I was enthralled with the scope of the development and continually surprised by two particular aspects of this history.

The first thing that struck me was how recent many of the ideas were. In particular, ideas that I hadn't recognised as such because I take them for granted are in some cases just a few thousand years old, or even less. For example, the key idea that we can distinguish between subjective and objective kinds of knowledge (on which I'll say more when I discuss one of the later books) seems to have sprung up in the last millenium, and the distinction between personal and physical explanations of events is almost as recent.

The second big surprise was the number of ideas involved in the development of things which I normally think of as individual ideas. A good example is writing, which is a skill I have known for so long that I did not realise how many ideas (apart from the obvious development of language itself) must be developed before it is possible. I can think of at least 12 steps:

1. The use of tools external to the body.
2. The preparation of tools in advance of when they are needed.
3. Using the state of the tools as a memory aid.
4. Creating tools to be used purely as memory aids.
5. Drawing pictures as a reminder of the things they resemble.
6. Associating the pictures with particular words.
   
7. Representing abstract ideas by the pictures of words with similar sounds.
8. Representing ordered strings of words (as from speech) through strings of pictures of the individual words of which they consist, to achieve a kind of frozen speech.
9. Representing particular sounds consistently by abstract symbols.
10. Developing conventions for which collections of symbols correspond to which words.
    
11. Representing other aspects of speech via punctuation marks.
12. The development of forms of language appropriate to written, rather than spoken, communication.
    

Each of these steps happened surprisingly recently. Further, although each seems trivial given (or even indistinguishable from) the last, the gaps between the developments of these ideas were remarkably long, being at least a generation in even the shortest case. The fact that this process was so painstaking makes it clear that we are currently missing some developments which, with hindsight, will seem equally obvious.

There were a couple of problems with the book, though. The first is related to the fact that the book is one of history, and often had to deal with periods about which we have very little evidence. In these cases, Watson would give the latest scholarly opinion, but without treating it as opinion. He reported it (in many cases) as if it were established fact. This meant that he was often reporting current, rather than past, ideas.

The second problem was the provincial focus of the later parts of the book. The only serious ideas mentioned for the last 800 years were from Europe and North America. Though other countries were mentioned, it was only in terms of what effect consideration of their cultures had on the West. It gave the impression that everyone else had been sitting on their hands for the last millenium.