From wikipedia:
In attribution theory (in social psychology), the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias, correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
Belief in god can be thought of as an example of fundamental attribution error -- indeed, it's sort of the ultimate fudnamental attribution error. I thought about this today when I was waiting a red traffic light, and was saying to myself "come on! Hurry up!" who was I talking to? Similarly, imagine someone who drops his toast butter side-down. "thanks a lot!" he says sarcastically. Again, who is he talking to? "Thank God that car didn't hit me." Shouldn't he be thanking the driver?
But what if it wasn't the driver's doing? What if the driver simply avoided falling asleep at the wheel? And what if this was caused by his getting enough sleep last night, or simply his consistent attentiveness to driving tasks, which was in turn caused by his particular brain makeup? Don't we have to necessarily attribute this string of causality to something, even if it's perhaps an infintely long string?
This is how determinism is seen to imply the existence of a "higher power" -- if it's impossible to attribute causality, then the only choice is to "attribute" an event to the nature of existence, of reality. Or, if you prefer, to a being who controls it all. Thank god I wasn't late for supper!
But I don't think this sort of determinism has to imply the existence of a god, unless you wan't to call "the structure and nature of everything that exists" "god." you can attribute the causaliy that does occur to inherent random behavior of quanta, the "self-direction" of which implies something sharing that essential property of a consciousness -- a free agent. So, the universe's quantum behavior could otherwise be referred to as an all-encompasing consciousness, to which one may attribute all causality. The laws of quantum mechanics imply the existence of a universal self-directing consciousness, which might as well be called "god."
So, in other words, every assignment of temporal causality, except the one attributing cause to the structure of the universe itself, is a fundamental attribution error. It's not sound to "blame" a drunk's alcohol consumption for his ploughing into another car, because his alcoholism, "decision" (see below) to get drunk that day, etc, had causal agents. However, it is possible to "blame" this behavior on that universal consciosness I was talking about. So, sarcastically muttering "thank you!" after your toast hits the floor might not be so crazy afterall.
The caveat to that is that this ultimate consciousness, to which all causality is attributed, might very well manifest in what you and I experience as consciousness, and as being an agent of free will. So, it's still important to demonstrate personal responsibility -- essentially, each individual is controlling and creating his or her own universe with conscious decisions; the universal consciousness is our consciousness. So in a sense, we are all god, depending on how fruitily you want to define your terms.
Instructions for Posting ASCII Art
I revised my "comments book," and no longer call it a "comments book" or "guestbook," because this terminology is amateurish and reminiscent of AOL kiddie-culture, or at the very least overused, banal, and undescriptive. WELCOM 2 MY HOMEPAGE!!!! PLEAS SIGN MY GUESTBOOK!!!
I replicated a project at UMBC, which I called my "graffiti wall." "my" should be in quotes, because of course I didn't write the php script. Basically, it was a no-frills "guestbook": a single form field and accompanying submit button. When the button was clicked, the content of the field was appended to an html doc. Tres chic, tres simple, tres moderne.
I've done a bit of preparatory reading on graffiti lingo, so as to correctly use such terms as "bomb," "hit," "piece," and "tag." invading a subculture is in large part a matter of learning its language. See, now, if you disagree with this, you can spray your counterpoints along with a few insults, and everyone is that much happier.
I think the author of that file went a little overboard, and included some domain-unrestricted words, like "to dis" (for the benefit of baby boomers: to show someone disrespect). The situation reminds me of a little paperback book I got when I was 9, and still have, called "learn to breakdance." there's a chapter on required vocabulary ("how to talk like a breakdancer"), which includes terms such "awesome," "fresh," and "chill." after the definition of the vocabulary word, the author gives an example or two. This is a real live example, quoted verbatim from the book:
Look at that cheeseburger! Awesome.
I can't imagine the author wrote this book with his tongue completely out of his cheek.
Anyway, very few people posted to my page, when it was a "comments page" (up to a few minutes ago). I expected more, even though it's only been up for two days. Maybe very few will post to it now. Possible reasons a site-visitor might not post:
Anyway, the apparatus been made more interesting and palatable now; a context-appropriate image has been added, and the table font is monospaced.
Happy new year. I rang it in by playing "settlers of catan," eating chocolate caramel balls, and watching the "ball drop" on NBC for something like 30 seconds. Minor fete, to say the least.
I built (well...sort of) a "guestbook," or "comments page," or "graffiti wall," or whatever you'd like to call it -- a perl/cgi script that generates html from text entered into forms. use it as thou wilt. I say "sort of" because I want to make it clear that I didn't in any way, shape, or form write the perl engine behind it, and I don't want anyone giving me credit for being a programmer, when all I can do is change a few variables and get perl to spit out lines of html. Credit belongs here, with "Matt's Script Archive," and, I assume, "Matt." quite amazing, what some people can do with a text editor.
I was looking into setting up CGI here on my server at home, but I quickly realized that it was a lot easier to do it in unix with my SDF account, either because unix is just better at manipulating code and scripts, or because I'm used to it, or some combination. Whatever, it works. I'm sort of surprised I got it working, to tell the truth, let alone designed it all pretty-like.
I'm going to go ahead and link it on my index page, as well as up there next to "go to the archive index." I might go back and put it into all of the 98 other blog-pages, but that might be sort of silly, since everyone only looks at the most recent one. I wonder what the barnaclebook (haha, lame, I know) will look like in a day. Might be pretty ugly. Fun stuff.
There, that wasn't so bad -- there's now a link to the comment book on every blog page, and it took less than a minute to do. Thank god for macros.
This is a program I wrote years ago in BASIC, which I later asked a friend to transcribe into javascript for webpage-mounting. The script below was used in my "dada" random sentence generator, and also in the "ana williams pet name generator," which somehow found its way into google's cache.
Just modify what's in the quotes, and the number of possibilties (adjusting the number up top to match). Then, stick it, including the script tags, in the body of a webpage. That's it -- a cool little random parts generator (any string of text -- lost of uses). Reloading the page runs the script anew.
<script>
function generateWords()
{
document.write();
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( "Joseph of Arimathea" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( "Mary Jane Horowitz" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( "A very ugly person" ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( "A citizen of Canada" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( "A certain someone" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " will fondle" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " ruined" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " destroyed in earnest" ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " bet against" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " boiled" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " a few green" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " rotten" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " heretofor unmentioned" ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " four half-eaten" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " unwillingly shared" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " beef patties," ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " rose bushes," ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " donor organs," ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " chopsticks," ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " prosthetic limbs," ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " and" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " but" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " however," ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " ignoring the fact that" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " possibly because" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " my great-aunt" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " the Nation of Islam" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " Hootie and the Blowfish" ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " testicular cancer patients" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " your greatest enemy" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " befouled" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " ate" ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " put the WWF smack-down on" ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " flew over" ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " ignored" ); }
var x = Math.floor( Math.random() * 5 ) + 1;
if( x == 1 ) { document.write( " a rug" ); }
if( x == 2 ) { document.write( " a 10-story building." ); }
if( x == 3 ) { document.write( " Heaven's army." ); }
if( x == 4 ) { document.write( " a peat-bog." ); }
if( x == 5 ) { document.write( " the Dalai Lama." ); }
document.write();
}
generateWords();
</script>
Here's a sentence generated by that script. Hit the button to do another.
My knowledge of analyitical english grammar isn't (anywhere near) good and complete enough to properly describe, name, or categorize all of these sentence parts, but my ear is good enough to detect that they all work. testing out a few combinations in your head, and seeing if the grammar stays right-sounding, is helpful.
Basically, I use the form {subject} {verb} {adjective} {object}, {conjunction} {subject} {verb) {object}. However, "Joe kill green car, and dog puke," while sort of funny and cool, is a bit on the imbecile side. So, parts need to be more carefully defined. Human language grammar is pretty complicated, and the only way I and most others can get through it is with intuition and ear.
Now that I'm looking at it, this project took a lot more human language ability and effort than it did computer language ability and effort. Just goes to show that geeks are nothing more than the soulless minion-tools of the creative. HA. That example is pretty small -- only five possiblities for eight sentence parts. I'm working on one that has 40 possiblities for eight sentence parts. So, 40^8, or about 6,553,600,000,000 (six-and-a-half trillian and some), possible sentences. All hail google calculator.
I might just replace my dada phrase generator's engine with this new souped-up version, once it's done.