A problem I’ve been grappling with:
How large is this seemingly bottomless pit of non-renewable “innocence” we keep losing?
Is there such a thing as “peak” innocence?
How does the city of Toronto manage to lose its so often. (Is it growing back?)
Is lost innocence surrounded by mountains of unmatched socks?
Responses that provide equations preferred.
(As you may have noticed, I’m in a philosophical mood today.)
Update – Looks like we have our answer.
This is because of the Second law of thermodynamics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
****
– In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system
– The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
Innocence is subject to that law.
dS / dt >= 0
where S = innocence(entropy), t = time
The basic equation involved is the truth statement I(t1) < I(t0). The domain of t0 (then), and t1 (now) is time, so that’s easy. However, in order to proceed further, we have to define the range of the innocence function I(), that is to say, what does it evaluate?
Answers.com defines innocence as ~ The state, quality, or virtue of being innocent, as:
1. Freedom from sin, moral wrong, or guilt through lack of knowledge of evil.
2. Guiltlessness of a specific legal crime or offense.
3. Freedom from guile, cunning, or deceit; simplicity or artlessness.
4. Lack of worldliness or sophistication; naiveté.
5. Lack of knowledge or understanding; ignorance.
6. Freedom from harmfulness; inoffensiveness.
So, the question at this point is: which innocence are we talking about losing?
Classical thermodynamics applies only to huge collections of molecules. Innocence, no matter how defined, is not a collection of molecules, large or small. Ergo, classical thermodynamics has nothing to do with it.
(Old Hog Town + North York + Willowdale + Etobicoke)x (Dalton McGuinty/Miller)**(WK) = IF
IF innocense factor
WK (need I explain)
** Fortran exponentiation
In the above case, you get nbr 3.. the freedom from guile..
cheers
Vit
The politically expedient kind…the moral equivalent of anti-matter.
Syncro
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?…….
did He who made the lamb make thee?
songs of innocence and experience – William Blake
Innocence is quantized. The innocent state depends on both spin and momentum quantum numbers. The most innocent state is the ground (or natural) state, known as “zero-point innocence”. This is non-zero, and it may be thought of as the “peak innocence”. Excited states are successively less innocence.
Innocence is thus an absense of evil, where evil is the eigenvalue of a nonlinear Schrodinger’s equation* whose potential is suitably depraved.
*the html is just too daunting for me to attempt, even for Kate.
Lost innocence = one part Gangs, add one part Guns, add one part Stupid politicians and one part “hug a thug” Judges. Stir, and presto, lots of lost innocence and victims of crime.
Opps, sorry that was a recipe for disaster, not a math equation. (Us female Conservatives are more comfortable in the kitchen then the “real” world, so it’s hard for little old me to relate to math, unless it’s when I bake bread.)
vitruvius, I’d suggest definition one.
That also suggests that ‘innocence’ is a state of existence outside of the material..which depraves its purity (I’m being Augustinian here). Pure Eden. A state of being in NOW or Present time, in This Space.
Without any consciousness of Otherness, Without any notion of Not-Now. or Another Space. Indeed, without any consciousness at all. It’s pure quality, pure feeling..without consciousness of any feeling.
If you want to symbolize it, consider it as the Imaginary number in both its simple (square root of minus 1) and compressed state (minus 1).
Can’t change, can’t move. Because change requires differences. And innocence, as pure, is whole and with no internal differences.
[That’s why, AQS, entropic dissipation isn’t really valid here; entropy only operates within differences..to produce no differences..)
That’s also why you can lose your innocence, as did Adam and Eve, when they became ‘material’ and differentiated, and thus, conscious and aware of their own finite discreteness.
But, you can’t reverse it, and become non-material and back to that original purity.
The interesting thing about Purity, symbolized as that imaginary number, is that it can’t exist ‘per se’. On its own. It only exists when connected to a real number, ie, when connected to the particular material classical world, the Impure Material Complex World.
Innocence hell! Can I just get my virginity back?
loss_of_innocence = 0;
innocent = 1;
while ( innocent )
{
innocent -= loss_of_innocence;
}
Looking further at the six sub-definitions of innocence listed above, I note that they are all measures of epistemological ignorance or metaphysical inaction of the type that one would expect to lose as one ages. Ergo, it may simply be the case that innnocence is always lost because people are always ageing, and thus it is the non-renewable conjecture that is out of whack.
If we have that I(t) = Σ I(p,t) across all persons p, and we generally have that I(j,t0) > I(j,t1) for each person j, then logically one would expect that I(t0) > I(t1), unless of course the total number of people P is going down, in which case while innocence is still being lost, it’s not being lost as fast as before, because dP/dt < 0.
In that sense, philosophically it’s the Zen thing about wisdom
dieing with the old and innocence being reborn with the new.
Found: {1+1=2)
Lost (many more possibilities…)
There are no innocents. — Miroslav Volf
Innocence is a vase on a pedestal. Life is the pile driver next door. The vase can be expected to take a two-dimensional random walk across the top of the pedestal. This random walk is modelled by the expression …
x(t+tau) = x(t) + phi(tau)
where
x = path of the vase
phi = random variable
t = time
tau = time between pile drives
The expected distance of the vase from the centre of the pedestal is proportional the square root of t (a result, I believe, dating back to the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.) As t increases, the probability of disaster quickly approaches 1.
Finding your innocence is akin to a busted vase reforming and jumping back up onto the pedestal all by itself- it’s theoretically possible, but rarely observed in practise. Thus the paucity of google hits.
I hope that clears things up.
a synopsis with guts:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/the_materialist_faith_of_commu.html
Assuming my model above is valid, it has some interesting properties. We can recast the relationship to I(t) = Σ I(o,t) + Σ I(y,t) for all old people o and all young people y. Now since we generally have that I(o,t) < I(y,t) we find that if the ratio of old people to young people is falling fast enough, that is, d(O÷Y)/dt « 0, then we may actually be gaining innocence!
Torona didn’t lose it’s innocence they sold it to the dark side when the Government embraced Multi Cult. If that wasn’t bad enough the City Officials Embraced, gag, Socialism. One need only dial a bride in a Muslim country and viola you can claim multiple wives via welfare. While embracing Multi Cult Torona lost it’s global appeal as a thriving city. The last time I visited I was appalled at the treatment I received at a shopping mall. The mall was busy but only two of us were not wearing a full Burka. The hissing and insults (god knows what language was being hissed at us in) hurled at myself and my Aunt was something to behold. Toronto use to hail it’s self as a Cosmopolitian City, dah more like the ME or UAI.
I have no plans to go back any time in the future to Torontostan. Toronto didn’t lose it’s innocence, the Municiple Governments sold it’s soul and Innocence via welfare to immigrants who want welfare for the next ten generations.
Socialism equals a life time of welfare and a life time of getting the far leftards elected so welfare will continue for the next generation.
A city that battles Jamaican gangs, Islamic Enclaves and a host of other issues that will never be dealt with because “Race” is more important the “Issues”. Oh it’s the white man’s fault, hail Marxism.
Aha! And thus we have a definition of peak innocence, as requested by Kate. Peak innocence is achieved, all else being equal, when the ratio of young people to old people is highest: that time Tn for which Y(Tn) ÷ O(Tn) is greater than for any other time Tj.
…carry the 1 and multiply by the number of Torontonians still familiar with the concept of personal responsibility (this can be a negative #) and subtract anyone under the age of 2.
Toronto never lost its innocence it just keeps getting slapped upside the head by reality. However the liberal nature of Toronto precludes it from facing reality so it defaults to the status of victim. Of course up to the point of being a victim everyone is pure innocence so when mean reality does its thing, liberal Toronto becomes victim and Toronto loses its innocence. AGAIN!
Innocence, once lost, only comes back following severe brain damage resulting in memory loss and reduced mental capacity.
This explains Moronto.
Suppose innocence was a variable and Toronto is somewhere on the scale between complete loss of innocence and perfect innocence
0
rats. html.
Ok, next up on Kate’s assignment, Is lost innocence surrounded by mountains of unmatched socks? That depends on how the Su(p,t) unmatched-sock function correlates to the innocence function I(p,t) as one ages over t. If sgn( dSu/dt ) = sgn( dI/dt ) then we can expect to see a loss of unmatched socks accompanying any loss of innnocence, else the reverse.
Now, it could be argued that the young have more unmatched socks, or not; I don’t see any obvious data at hand. So we should probably set up a number of unmatched-sock monitoring stations and do a little field research. Just don’t tell the shysters or next thing you know we’ll have an unmatched-sock cap-and-trade regime.
vitruvius – I’m still working from MY definition of ‘innocence’, which is a state of pre-formed energy in present time and space, symbolized as ‘imaginary’ or the square root of minus 1.
Now, can lost innocence be imagized as surrounded by mountains of random (unmatched) socks? I understand a sock as a material unit, which is not imaginary but existent as a particular unit in linear space and time.
BUT – ‘innocence’ once lost, is no longer innocence. That ‘energy’ has moved out of that imaginary zone of present time and space. So would be inaccurate to say that ‘it’ (innocence) is surrounded by those socks.
That’s because innocence, as imaginary, can’t exist as itself in the same time and space as those real time material socks.
‘Innocence’ as pure energy exists in present time and space. Those socks, as material, exist in a different or linear time and space. The one can’t exist in the other’s time and space. They can co-exist (as complex systems) but they can’t each, separately, exist as themselves in each other’s time and space.
So there.
ET, unmatched socks aren’t random, they represent increased local entropy.
I’m still stumped by the guy who wants his virginity back.
Rabbit – you are an optimist. In 2D, a random walk is constrained by its origin. Thus, for a suitably large pedestal, the vase is likely to remain safe for all times t.
In 3D, however, random walks diverge. Find your dustpan…
the loss of ‘innocence’ is not quantifiable…or measurable in any other manner than the feeling one get’s in one’s guts when one finds the girl you loved did you wrong….or rather , COULD do you wrong.
now…apply that intestinal ache to any other situation you care to mention…the llliberals did me wrong…the taqiyah mouthing mullahs did me wrong…warman kinsella did me wrong…
…and so on ad nauseum….
and the lesson ?….at the end of that teary lachrymose night one realizes one did wrong to one’s self by not being as aware and wide awake as one ought to have been……..regrettably this is the way one learns to not make the same error twice…about women…politicians…and mullahs… and demagogues of every stripe.
Ahhh…. but ET, if the mountain of socks is unmatched, the clear implication is that there are an equal number of unmatched socks missing. These are the imaginary socks that enable Viruvius to work his magic. These socks are indeed lost in time and space. The next issue is to determine in which space they are lost. My suspicion is that they are in hyperspace (much cleaner to model there than in any other locale).
Lastly, the question of Toronto. The anecdotal evidence provided by the slogan-spewing fear-mongering fraud-artists seems weak to me. What we need to do, and here we can indulge ET’s urge to introduce complex numbers, is associate the various p, y, and o values above with their complex coordinate ( θ + iΦ ), where θ & Φ represent latitude and longitude, with an assumed Earth radius r ± ε, and i² = -1, and then based on whether or not sgn( dSu/dt ) = sgn( dI/dt ), then as a function of ( θ + iΦ ), we can simply look for the presence or absence of Σ Su(t,θ,Φ). Obviously we’ll need some nice 3D colour graphing software. Perhaps we can get a Canada Council grant.
I think Kate is referring to the unmatched socks that we don’t have anymore … not the ones in the sock drawer … the lost socks.
These lost socks exist as pure energy.
Vitruvius – I dispute a definition of innocence deriving from epistemological ignorance or inaction! This is not borne out by observation or reason (let alone the Hymn). Innocence is a functional attribute denoting ability to achieve a designated purpose.
ET, re: your 8.18:
“…lose your innocence, as did Adam and Eve, when they became ‘material’ and differentiated…”
And when did you become a gnostic?
Arthur Black of CBC’s Basic Black fame once had a great philosophical discussion on missing socks but I can’t remember if Canada’s greatest minds determined the socks went into hyperspace, lost sock heaven or the seventh dimension.
However I am going to conduct an experiment. I will put a tracking device, of my own creation, on a sock and after it becomes lost I will be able to follow it through the nether world and find Toronto’s innocence as well.
Yes, well, I will admit, Tenebris, that my model does not include a theology factor variable. I’d let you use θ for that but I’ve already used it for latitude. Perhaps you could work out an additional term for my equations using some combination of α and ω 😉
Do what I did in Philosophy 1 , Grab the DeMorgan Laws ,Truth Tables . and Venn Diagrams. You will be so damn confused you will do like I did and take Sociology. It’s a cinch B
socks are not lost in the dryer, they in fact breed, eventually you have more socks.
one of the definitions of life is negative entropy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
some of us have teeth, where is the stuttering shutterbug ,jeffdavidson when you need someone to make fun of.
De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, Norgib, yet in my opinion De Morgan’s laws are among the most beautiful things I’ve ever understood. Look, I have friends who can do music I can’t, and I can do logic they can’t, and we don’t fight about it, we celebrate each other’s skills. Kate asked for math, physics, and equations. She did not ask for sociology. Under these circumstances, your disparaging De Morgan’s laws is uncircumspect.
neil – no, the ‘rest of the unmatched socks’ can’t exist in imaginary time/space. In that time/space, they aren’t socks. Just potentiality or pure energy, as ural pointed out.
tenebris – is the transformation of adam and eve from ‘potentiality’ to spatiotemporal material units in finite time/space – is that a definition of gnosticism? My understanding of gnosticism is that it’s Platonic, ie, that the ‘spirit’ (Form) exists as such and is considered a priori Pure Wisdom. My outline of the imaginary doesn’t and can’t exist per se. And it most certainly isn’t an a priori wisdom. I’m not a Platonist! (Fan of Charles Peirce).
As for socks and Toronto – Toronto is a strange, closed city, Rather like a washer-dryer, isolate from the world, totally self-absorbed in its own violence and activities. It turns people into random bits (single socks).
Clearly you folks haven’t ever had to call the Maytag man. The lost socks are under the washtub, twisted around the drive thingy.
Sorry, I didn’t ask the service guy to check for innocence. At $75/hour I didn’t want to spend the money looking for something that keeps getting lost anyway. Since Kate wanted an equation for innocence,
75/60 > a
where a = number of American visitors crossing the border at Buffalo to shop at the Eaton’s Center.
We must keep in mind that imaginary time/space doesn’t
exist, it’s just an abstract-model-building tool, pace Plato.
(Did I mention that I love building abstract models?)
But we’re ultimately modelling existential reality.
So the issues are: testing the models, weighing the results.
Meanwhile, my model above is the only one so
far that addresses all of Kate’s six points. Hmm.
However, Vitruvius, we must account for the distortion of the lens through which we view the model.
Certain lenses, worn on the left eye, show the delta between P(tc) and P(u) [where tc = current time, and u = time of utopian endpoint], to be decreasing in proportion to Ri [regulatory interference].
Other lenses, worn on the right eye, reveal that this delta is remaining constant, or even increasing, while Ee (efficiency of economy) is asymptotically approaching 0.
One must take into account the interaction between the observer, and the phenomenon being observed.
I agree, Shaken that some sort of negative utopianismist factor needs to be worked out, and indeed it too is probably positively correlated to youth; so like Tenebris I invite to you add such a refining kµ factor to my working model so far. For your ease of reference, my current model, which happens to address all six of Kate’s points, but which admittedly does not account for the α v. ω factor, nor kµ, is as follows.
The basic equation involved is the truth statement I(t1) < I(t0). The domain of t0 (then), and t1 (now) is time, so that’s easy. However, in order to proceed further, we have to define the range of the innocence function I(), that is to say, what does it evaluate?
Answers.com defines innocence as ~ The state, quality, or virtue of being innocent, as:
1. Freedom from sin, moral wrong, or guilt through lack of knowledge of evil.
2. Guiltlessness of a specific legal crime or offense.
3. Freedom from guile, cunning, or deceit; simplicity or artlessness.
4. Lack of worldliness or sophistication; naiveté.
5. Lack of knowledge or understanding; ignorance.
6. Freedom from harmfulness; inoffensiveness.
So, the question at this point is: which innocence are we talking about losing?
Looking further at the six sub-definitions of innocence listed above, I note that they are all measures of epistemological ignorance or metaphysical inaction of the type that one would expect to lose as one ages. Ergo, it may simply be the case that innnocence is always lost because people are always ageing, and thus it is the non-renewable conjecture that is out of whack.
If we have that I(t) = Σ I(p,t) across all persons p, and we generally have that I(j,t0) > I(j,t1) for each person j, then logically one would expect that I(t0) > I(t1), unless of course the total number of people P is going down, in which case while innocence is still being lost, it’s not being lost as fast as before, because dP/dt < 0.
In that sense, philosophically it’s the Zen thing about wisdom
dieing with the old and innocence being reborn with the new.
Assuming my model above is valid, it has some interesting properties. We can recast the relationship to I(t) = Σ I(o,t) + Σ I(y,t) for all old people o and all young people y. Now since we generally have that I(o,t) < I(y,t) we find that if the ratio of old people to young people is falling fast enough, that is, d(O÷Y)/dt « 0, then we may actually be gaining innocence!
Aha! And thus we have a definition of peak innocence, as requested by Kate. Peak innocence is achieved, all else being equal, when the ratio of young people to old people is highest: that time Tn for which Y(Tn) ÷ O(Tn) is greater than for any other time Tj.
Ok, next up on Kate’s assignment, Is lost innocence surrounded by mountains of unmatched socks? That depends on how the Su(p,t) unmatched-sock function correlates to the innocence function I(p,t) as one ages over t. If sgn( dSu/dt ) = sgn( dI/dt ) then we can expect to see a loss of unmatched socks accompanying any loss of innnocence, else the reverse.
Now, it could be argued that the young have more unmatched socks, or not; I don’t see any obvious data at hand. So we should probably set up a number of unmatched-sock monitoring stations and do a little field research. Just don’t tell the shysters or next thing you know we’ll have an unmatched-sock cap-and-trade regime.
Lastly, the question of Toronto. The anecdotal evidence provided by the slogan-spewing fear-mongering fraud-artists seems weak to me. What we need to do, and here we can indulge ET’s urge to introduce complex numbers, is associate the various p, y, and o values above with their complex coordinate ( θ + iΦ ), where θ & Φ represent latitude and longitude, with an assumed Earth radius r ± ε, and i² = -1, and then based on whether or not sgn( dSu/dt ) = sgn( dI/dt ), then as a function of ( θ + iΦ ), we can simply look for the presence or absence of Σ Su(t,θ,Φ). Obviously we’ll need some nice 3D colour graphing software. Perhaps we can get a Canada Council grant.
Enhancements and corrections are of course always welcome.
SCRRRRREW THIS SH-T!! If I thought that brains were required to visit this site I would have gone to Warren Kinsella”s!!!!!!!!!
Oh bother, I wrote “α v. ω factor” above, when
I meant to say “α and ω factor”. Sorry, Tenebris.
You know what they say —
Every time a bell rings,
Toronto loses it’s innocence.
I think the equation looks something like this:
Innocence lost = (-i)
moral relativism = mr
narcissism = nss
nihilism = ni
ignorance = ig
equivocation = eq
time = ti
Innocence found = (+i)
(-i)+ 2mr + nss + ni + ig + eq + ti = (+i)
What the above equation shows is that we can use Eastern Liberal characteristics to actually restore Toronto’s lost innocence. This however leaves us with a different problem… (-i) and (+i) cancel each other out which leaves us with nothing. In scientific terms, “nothing” is otherwise known as a vacuum. Knowing that nature abhors a vacuum, it automatically introduces the variable called reality (rt). Reality cancels out the effect of the Liberal Party characteristics and returns Toronto to it’s previous state of innocence lost:
(-i)+ 2(mr) + nss + ni + ig + eq + ti = (+i) + rt = (-i)
Now, when reality hits Toronto, it, wanting to return to innocence, introduces yet another variable called denial (de). What denial does is double the amount of Eastern Liberal characteristics, masks the initial introduction of reality and leaves the city with a “perceived innocence”; [masked(+i)].
The equation now looks like this:
(-i)+ (de + 2(2(mr) + nss + ni + ig + eq + ti)) = [masked(+i)]
In Toronto a masked, or fake, reality is the same as a real reality so it’s all good.
Back in the real world nature’s still at work and, seeing what looks to it, like another vacuum, compensates appropriately. It introduces a double dose of reality; 2(rt). This double dose of reality cancels the effect of “denial” and returns the equation back to it’s original state of (-i)
(-i)+ (de + 2(2(mr) + nss + ni + ig + eq + ti)) = [masked(+i)] +2(rt) = (-i)
This is going to get a little legenthy so I’m going to use (liberal) in place of the (2(mr), nss,ni…) portion of the equation. As such, the equation directly above will now look like this:
(-i)+ (de + 2(liberal)) = [masked(+i)] +2(rt) = (-i)
Once again hit with reality, Toronto doubles it’s denial and to compensate, nature doubles the reality:
(-i)+ (2(de + 2(liberal))) = [masked(+i)] + (2(2(rt))) = (-i)
This doubling and redoubling of denial and reality continue for infinity until you have the following equation:
(-i)+ (to the “n”th(2(de + 2(liberal)))) = [masked(+i)] + (to the “n”th(2(2(rt)))) = (-i)
Reality always wins. The current periods of perceived innocence are just that, perceived.
The fact is that Toronto lost it’s innocence as it was being built by the french (have you ever met an innocent frenchman?) back in the 1700’s and the poor bastards have been deluding themselves ever since…
Remember when the days were long
+ Summer
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
+ on the Prairie
Didn’t have a care in the world
+ youth
With mommy and daddy standing by
– a problem in parts of TO
When happily ever after fails
-adulthood
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
– CBC
_______________
+1
But I know a place where we can go
Well sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind
Just lay your head back on the ground
Who knows how long this will last
Now we’ve come so far, so fast
But, somewhere back there in the dust
That same small town in each of us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnOP1WKTiLc