UK Day 0 - Getting there

I'm traveling to the UK today. While there I hope to create occasional blog posts, this being the first.

Travel

Traveling from Eugene to Heathrow.  My friend, Cat, gave me a ride from Corvallis to Eugene. I have a four-hour layover in San Francisco.

Out the window at the Eugene airport.

Projects

Web Scraping

Learning how to web scrape using Python.  I have lots of applications for this, but the most immediate is coming up with a reasonable reporting tool for my publishing business.  The publisher that I'm using in India has a very limited reporting mechanism.

Trip to Mexico

On the spur of the moment over beers a couple of days ago a group of friends and I decided to go to Mexico in early December.  Part of the motivation is to use upgrade coupons before they expire next year.  Part of the motivation is to use timeshare points before they expire next year. This puts me on point for putting a plan together.  This may get complicated since I'll be in England.

The plan today is to get a flight plan committed to and possibly booked.

The next step is to get lodging figured out and booked.

Thinking

Decision Making

I've been pondering human decision-making for a while.  I've asserted somewhere else that I believe that all human decisions are based on beliefs and if you're lucky and wise those beliefs are traceable to facts.  For example, United claims that if I get on my scheduled flights then I'll eventually arrive in England.  United's claims are facts.  I'll get on the planes because I believe those facts.  There's an assortment of reasons why I have that belief.

Yesterday I was pondering the structure of a belief. It seems like they're uniformly a conditional assertion.  In other words, something like this ...

if <condition> then <action>

This begs the question of what is a condition and what is an action?  A different perhaps more accurate way of looking at this might be ...

if <sensed-state> then <created-state>

In other words, when we detect a particular state then we use whatever resources available to us to create a new state.  Note that the created state is likely to trigger another belief, which in turn will create another state.  This is pretty much non-stop while we're conscious.  Haven't thought about it when we're unconscious.

Obviously, the range of possible states is very large.  Probably not infinite, but perhaps effectively so.  States are collections of state variables.  State variables can have values and transitions.  A further ponder is, is there structure in this space of state variables.  One candidate that I came up with is there are three:  Empirical, symbolic, and subjective.  Empirical states include anything that can be physically sensed.  Listening to a familiar song is an empirical state.  Symbolic states include any pattern of symbolic information including words and symbols, and structures created from words and symbols.  Note that this includes both spoken and written words. The sign that says my flight departs at 2:02pm is symbolic information (transmitted to me empirically) and impacts my beliefs and actions because I understand the implications of those symbols.  Subjective states are basically "how I feel".  This may be physical or emotional.  Am I happy about this trip?  Am I uncertain that I'll get all the travel details right?  These will trigger certain beliefs, which in turn will trigger certain actions (some of which might be interpreted as non-actions).

Any sensed state may include, perhaps will likely include, variables from all of these domains.  Any created state may include variables from all of these domains.  For example, if my flight out of Eugene is delayed (an empirical fact communicated to me symbolically) I'm likely to be concerned (a subjective state) about making my connection and I may send a message (a symbolic state communicated empirically) to those who may care that there's a risk there.  I may also lose confidence in United (another subjective state). 

Beliefs string these states together.  Any state that I'm partially or wholly responsible for may trigger yet other beliefs, which in turn may trigger other actions (created states).  This can be characterized as waves in state space.  This gets even more interesting when my created states contribute to your sensed states.  Then you have waves rippling through groups of people triggering all sorts of actions.