Take note, evolutionary sci-fi authors:
"...what we're arguing is, that basic olfactory design actually set a template for the evolution of the association regions of the cortex. OK...so now why - what do you get with the point to point [model of neuron mapping]? Well, it's pretty straightforward. If this area of your cortex lights up suddenly you know that in a spatial map something happened in this region.I can't help but wonder if this is related to art. A major feature of art - of all art, that is, and therefore one of the few major features of this type - is the relatively free nature of its associations. Can we trace the beginnings of human art to before some major change in the olfactory center of the brain? Or does this random neural mapping have still more primitive roots? Quite interesting.
You have - your retina is a map of the external world there's something in the visual cortex on grid square x 1 y 3 lights up. The brain knows that there's something happening at 11 o'clock. There's spatial information tells you where things are and it tells you a lot more than that. But what do you get with a random design? And what you get there is the ability to associate anything with anything else."
Oh - and yeah, this does suggest a route to take for better human-like AI. Not being a computer scientist myself I can't really say how well this solution would play with the ones we're already working on - for all I know someone's already tried this. But if it's a new and doable idea, I say someone should give it a go. So...get on that, someone.
Other than saying that he's oversimplified things somewhat, I don't want to focus on Aman Ali's sociologically questionable premise in this BoingBoing post - at the very least he has a point that "it seemed kind of silly to talk about [hijabs], without hearing viewpoints from Muslim women." Far more interesting is what the Muslim woman, Miriam Sobh, actually says:
"I'm not harming anyone by wearing a piece of material on my head so what's the big deal?Okay, so, free choice: a-okay. Following one's religion insofar as it applies only to oneself: perfectly fine. Islam could command women to wear flaming headscarves and I'd still say that women ought to have the option of doing so. But let's be serious for just a moment, can we? All clothing is a political statement.
I myself wear the headscarf and I do so because it's something I believe is mandated in my religion. No one is forcing me and it has no political significance (I have no idea why people keep thinking it does)."
In many cases this is not at all obvious, so for this post I'll just focus on intentionally declarative clothing. Here are just the five of the many politically significant statements that Sobh's hijab makes, directly or otherwise:
- Islam has a place in this society (in this case, the U.S.). (Obviously political.)
- Observant Muslims have a place in this society. (Before you even ask, no, this is not the same as the first one.)
- Islam can accommodate women like me. (This does have political consequences, though it isn't itself a political remark.)
- "I choose who gets to see me and who doesn't." (Obviously political, but in a much more interesting way than the first two: do laws really work this way?)
- This thing - a scarf - that you take for granted or esteem lowly is for me an object of great significance.
Wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt on the street as opposed to a long-sleeved one is one thing, but Sobh has much more in common with those sad people who put confederate flags on their cars: in theory that flag could say lots of different things, but it's just stupid to pretend that its meaning won't be interpreted pretty narrowly in practice. And you'll have to forgive me my incredulity, but I can't bring myself to believe that the "editor in chief of Hijabtrendz, the original fashion beauty and entertainment blog for Muslim women" is really that ignorant of the communicative nature of clothing. She'd have a much stronger case if she said that she doesn't want her religious garb to have any political significance, but as it is Sobh has made very little effort to approach this topic seriously.
A fundamental component of theism - and, to my mind, a fundamental weakness thereof - is the idea that "God created the world to exemplify [or at least practice] certain values." Different brands of theism obviously offer different lists of values, but reality is more complex than all of them, which makes the entire enterprise more than a little shaky. At any rate, Alex Pruss is right on the money when he says that anybody "who propounds a design argument for the existence of God probably needs to have something to say about these values": values, and the intentions concomitant therewith, are the only measure by which we can estimate whether our world would fit any god's agenda. Pruss takes this in the appropriate direction, though I will say that he doesn't go quite far enough.
If we can identify a roughly formulaic arrangement of values, he says, "models of creation can be empirically tested, and rejected." This shouldn't come as a surprise: it's just the same as any other kind of empirical test, and in fact this sort of thinking underlies currently-existing fields of scientific research (e.g. behavioral economics). By way of an example, Pruss briefly considers (and ultimately rejects) "the Hedonic Model: the only value the world was created to exemplify is the value of pleasure-minus-pain." Despite its failure as a descriptor of reality, the hedonic model still proves his point: he found a value (net pleasure), established a rough formula to express it (pleasure minus pain), and then calculated (albeit via uncertain means) that the real world does a poor job of maximizing this formula. The problem arises when he moves on to what is in his mind a more realistic theory.
It's not too surprising that the hedonic model fails, because, as Pruss points out, it's "fairly specific"; I reiterate that reality tends towards the complex. There would be a problem, then, if all of the testable models were as simplistic as the hedonic model - they'd likely all fail. Pruss holds out hope, however, asserting that "model[s] of creation may be less specific, and yet generate a testable prediction." He calls his example in this case "the Nomic Simplicity and Human-Like Flourishing Model," which (as the name indicates) predicts a universe with relatively simple physical laws and relatively significant opportunities for creatures like humans to flourish. Certainly this model exceeds the hedonic one in terms of complexity, but how well does it match the world in which we live? I for one have no idea, and I don't think anybody else does, either.
My question in regards to this model is: what is the exchange rate between nomic simplicity and human-like flourishing? According to Pruss, the model predicts that "the fundamental laws of nature could not be significantly simplified without this negatively impacting the flourishing of human-like beings," which seems to place flourishing unquestionably above simplicity - but then why have simplicity at all? To put a finer point on it, there are any number of ways to seek the maximum of two generic variables (call them x and y), which means that this new model is not quite as testable as Pruss thinks.
Starting with the obvious, if the maximum of x or y in the absence of the other is greater than their combined maximum,* it's plausible to say that "the maximum of x and y" just means "the maximum of (say) x" - this is the slightly less pretty way of expressing my "why have simplicity at all" question above. The intuitive solution to this is to say that there's some additional value in having some of both x and y, no matter how small; this seems to make the purportedly two-variable problem into at least a three-variable problem, but I'll leave that aside for the purposes of this post. Assuming that a god with two values would try to instantiate both no matter what, we still have to figure out how the two relate. If that god can at best create a world where x is 5 and y is 7, is that the same as a world where x is 7 and y is 5? And let's not even get into the concept of non-linear functions - you might think that an NBA defense that gives up 100 points per game is about 5% less valuable than one that gives up 95 points per game, for instance, but you would be way wrong; interactive variables (where the presence of one amplifies or muffles the effects of the other) would complicate things yet again.
Now, in fairness, it is possible to overcome all of these questions and end up with a specific formula. It just isn't possible to do so non-arbitrarily. Despite his good intentions, then, Pruss has painted himself somewhat into a corner: those value-models that aren't overly simplistic will be either incoherent (i.e., untestable) or else ad hoc. Neither of these will be at all capable of proving or even defending a god - especially when the variables involved resist easy quantification. On the off chance that I've overlooked something and choosing a specific, non-arbitrary formula really is feasible, there's still the small issue of how concepts like nomic simplicity and human flourishing (or, for that matter, pleasure and pain) can be translated into a unit of measurement. So while Pruss's idea is very good, noble even, I don't see how it could ever be useful.
*I.e., max(x|y=0) > max(y|x=0) and max(x|y=0) > max(x+y|x>0, y>0).
Most everyone knows that blind deference to authority doesn't fly as a valid rhetorical strategy, and odds are good that they recognize that the same is true of blind defiance of authority. But there's a weird middle ground, wherein one authority undermines another, which is just as invalid but tends to sneak past people's defenses for some reason or other. I can recall seeing this twice (though I must've seen it more often than that), and both times it's been in the context of international politics. The more recent occurrence can be credited to one Paul Kengor.
Kengor, in the beginning of an otherwise unremarkable article about how great Christianity is, observes that, at the recent UN meeting, "nearly every single one of the world's worst rogue dictators [as opposed to the best rogue dictators? - LN] came out of the woodwork to shower heaping praise on the president of the United States." Unsurprisingly, he finds this highly suspicious, complaining that the GOP, even "in its worst burst of cheap propaganda, wouldn't dare conjure up something like this." The grounds for his complaint, however, are rather difficult to see.
True, Ahmadinejad, Kadaffi, Castro, and Chavez all had relatively nice things to say about Obama; true, none of those guys is particularly praiseworthy. None of that means, however, that Obama himself must be doing something wrong. Their turns of heart could just as easily be a response to the growing pro-U.S. sentiment in their respective countries, for example, which Kengor would have to consider a plus. But either way, the mere approval of those men is no more damning than the approval of other leaders is reassuring - surely Kengor and his right-wing friends weren't excited to learn that most of the world preferred Obama to their man. Rationality in this case isn't at all beyond Kengor's grasp, then: all he needs to do is take that skepticism and apply it consistently.
Sorry about the lapse, everyone - I caught myself a nice little head cold on Sunday and am just now over it enough to continue with the blogging. Tomorrow should include 3 days' worth of substantive posts, just to make up for it.
Anyway, thanks for your patience, and stay healthy!
Via a (very confused) commenter named Anders over at Faith In Honest Doubt comes the following theodicy, copied verbatim from someone else's work:
"Though you evolved, it has all been by intelligent design. You aren't a capricious coincidence. You have a purpose – and the sapience, which is an extension of the abstractions enabled by language – nephesh – to seek that purpose.And, from the same work (though I'm unclear on the order - this guy cited the author but no page numbers):
...The purpose of the homo sapien is plain: the development and proving of that which makes the homo sapien distinct: his or her sapience – free will and choice. The universe is the crucible in which each nephesh is subjected to the fires of testing and proving."
"If only good things happened to good people or only bad things happened to bad people then everyone would be good in order to have only good things happen to them and avoid all of the bad things. There is no essential difference between this and good people [being] able to pray and receive good things and bad people not being able to pray and receive good things. Such scenarios are like seriously promising a soldier that if he cleans his rifle properly he'll be a good soldier and will never actually have to fight. That neither develops nor tests one's nephesh... Such an environment doesn't even allow genuine choice and, therefore, precludes free will – the whole point of our existence.First things first: Anders, blogging does not consist just of quoting paragraph after paragraph of someone else's intellectual property. Try to inject some original material every once in a blue moon.
...Blaming ha-Sheim [i.e., God] for the evils of man, however, is clearly irresponsible and unjust. Similarly, blaming ha-Sheim for life's tests, which is the result of impersonal laws of the universe and our whole purpose for being here, demonstrates that the person doesn't grasp his or her purpose in life. Instead, he or she passes the buck, avoiding responsibility for his or her life choices and showing a lack of development of his or her nephesh."
But also, compare and contrast the answers Anders provides with the ones from Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted:
"The same way that World War II gave us the ballpoint pen, the space program had proved the human soul was immortal. What everybody called Earth was just a processing station that all souls had to pass through. A step in some kind of refining process. Like the cracking tower used to turn crude oil into gasoline or kerosene. As soon as human souls had been refined on Earth, then we would all incarnate on the planet Venus.One obvious difference is that Palahniuk isn't serious - in the very next paragraph he calls his idea "nuts." But there's also the fact that his explanation doesn't require the presence of a god, let alone the morally perfect one that Anders posits. A further difference still is that Palahniuk explains suffering as good (or at least valuable, "important") in and of itself whereas Anders evidently thinks that suffering exists as an unavoidable means to an end. Following on this distinction, Palahniuk's theodicy has practically no focus on free will, a focus with which Anders's is practically bursting.
In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process." (389)
As for similarities, both make copious use of metaphor and imagery - soldiers and fires and crucibles on the one hand, oil refineries and rock polishers on the other. Both also attempt to say that our intuitive response to suffering is a category error, indicating that we don't "grasp" the true nature of the world. And, of course, both promise an ultimate reward, though Palahniuk's Edenic reincarnation on Venus is by far the more concrete of the two (Anders promises only that we "will be commensurately held accountable fo[r]" our good choices, whatever that means). Far more subtly, both also fail to fully explain the situation (Anders leaves out God's motivation in all of this and also a reason for many specialized cases of suffering; Palahniuk leaves out basically everything).
So of these two, which is the more compelling? The more comforting? Which does a better job of giving you, the reader, an emotional crutch on which to lean in trying times? Which resonates more with you in a deep, nigh-inexplicable way? Personally, I find both equally unhelpful - but the question is a trick in the first place. It doesn't matter which makes you feel good, it matters which is true.
Theodicies, like opinions and assholes, are ubiquitous. And for good reason: if you ever find yourself short of one, Palahniuk demonstrates the simple fact that you can generate one with little or no effort. Just pick a process of change or an object that undergoes change and tell yourself over and over that your life is just like that thing. "I'm not suffering, I'm merely experiencing the scalding-hot water in the dishwasher of the world"; "This pain is like the precise destruction of the CD burner, apparently disfiguring but really transforming me from something blank and meaningless into an object of beauty"; "Evils in this world are really the key to our souls - we should not resist when we feel our tumblers being pushed aside but rather open ourselves willingly" - I could go on. To change these generic theodicies into god-specific ones, simply add in a bit at the end about how our misbehavior will screw up the end result, even if (as in Anders's case) that doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense.
An extremely clever theist (or other believer) will explain this ease as a mark of truth, but don't believe that for a second. Without supporting evidence that fits into a coherent worldview - which, by this point in time, means a worldview that takes science at its word - even the prettiest or most intricate imagery is only as trustworthy as your average fortune cookie. Or almost, anyway: at least fortune cookies help you learn Chinese.
When I mentioned my thumb sprain to my family doctor during my latest checkup, her advice was: take some aspirin for the pain, it'll go away on its own. Simple enough, right? As a basketball player, these things do happen from time to time, and probably most people follow the recovery path of least resistance.
Except I've had bad sprains before - just last year I screwed up the deltoid ligament in my ankle and noticed that it quite unmistakably was not responding to painkillers and rest. After going through a few months' worth of rehab, though, it returned to about 100% of what it used to be. (Yes, I've been insured the whole time, on a decent plan that allows for this sort of thing. Wish I didn't have to point that out, but I do.) So this time I figured I'd skip the weeks of little to no progress and go straight for the rehab, as provided free of charge through the University of Michigan's very helpful and very Googleable website. This whole thing got me thinking, though: given that there's free advice out there, why would my family doctor not advise me to go find it? Isn't that sort of her job?
My theory about this centers around the assumption that doctors hedge their bets. Along the same lines as how restaurants list super-expensive dishes in order to make the plain-ol' expensive dishes look more affordable, doctors (and other health professionals) may well realize that people cannot be trusted to take the best care of themselves. Thus, rather than providing the absolute best advice - which probably won't be followed and may even turn the patient off to lesser measures - they may choose to pitch a less ideal but still effective solution in the hopes that they'll get the patient to at least do something to help themselves. I seem to recall that this actually does happen, but I can't find it sourced - anyone with more concrete information should please let me know whether or not this is accurate.
If it is accurate, the question becomes why, as in, "Why would so many people disregard their doctor's best, but more demanding, advice?" In my case, I can (at least partway) avoid this trap because I need my body: you just can't play basketball or softball, or go running or biking, without one. Or, perhaps more to the point, I'm cognizant of the extent to which I need my body, not just in terms of my life and health but, in a strangely more compelling way, also in terms of my own happiness. This athlete's outlook of mine, I propose, increases the perceived value of my body to the point where the it overcomes the disvalue of rehab (which, let's be honest, is annoying, difficult, and intensely repetitive).
Of course, not all of my corporeal parts matter equally for my happiness, athleticism-derived or otherwise. I therefore cut my nails and shave only when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so, these parts being things I view basically as chores that contribute little or no value to my life. Or so it seems to me: this has been a highly speculative chain of reasoning, and one that seems especially prone to confirmation bias and other cognitive pitfalls. So I would like to open up this discussion to you all in order to gain your opinions. Are you an athlete? If so, would you undergo (or have you undergone) an annoying rehabilitation process for the sake of your athleticism? Or, if you don't consider yourself to be an athlete, would you (or have you undergone) an annoying rehab? If so, why?
And, if by some undeserved fortune you happen to be (or have been) a doctor, could you explain this whole thing from your perspective? Cause short-selling me seems like a very un-doctorly thing to do.
One of the nice things about fallacies is how they usually have equally fallacious mirror images. The ad populum fallacy, for instance, could be reversed into the invalid argument that a view is accurate because nobody (or very few people) believe it. Similarly, confusing correlation for causation is the more popular error these days, but we can find many historical examples of a person identifying a lack of obvious correlations for causation of a supernatural or metaphysical sort, a totally invalid inference. The strangest of all of these may be the opposite of dictionaryism: where dictionaryists use convenient definitions of words to gerrymander the world into their preferred order, their opposites list a definition and then proceed to argue that something that fits the definition simultaneously doesn't merit the title to which that definition belongs. Confused? Allow me to show you what I mean.
In his "Capitalism Works - When It's Not Corrupted," Tom Blumer explains that "free market answers are much simpler, more elegant, and will lead to more long-term wealth and prosperity" than any other kind of answer. Blumer supports this idea with three real-life examples: a case of judicial corruption involving private bribes; the shady accounting practices of several privately-owned companies; and the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (cf). Each of these scenarios represents not a flaw in capitalism, he says, but rather a flaw in people (emphasis mine throughout):
"*Privatizations of services traditionally handled by government that will save money without affecting quality should be permitted under strict competitive-bid arrangements. In the case of prison systems, judges should conduct themselves ethically and honestly (imagine that). It’s not capitalism’s fault if they don’t.His theme is obvious enough, but consistency alone won't help him: any system that fails to account for human behavior - especially harmful human behavior - is flawed to that extent; that's what being a flawed system means. Blumer might as well try to exonerate a basketball coach for not taking the other team's defense into account: after all, if that coach's players fail to score, it's because of the other team's defense and not that coach's offense! And all those politicians who never won an election? It's not their fault that they didn't anticipate having other people to run against.
*Public companies should be transparent and ethical; the overwhelming majority were that way before SOX and are still that way now. If we want our economy to be competitive with the rest of the world, the provisions of SOX requiring hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours of ridiculous busywork must be repealed. It’s not capitalism’s fault if management doesn’t obey the law and run an ethical enterprise.
*The government should get out of the housing market completely and let prudent lenders be prudent lenders without the perverse, state-inspired, standard-destroying incentives that brought on the mortgage-lending debacle. Then it won’t be capitalism’s problem if lenders who take on too much risk fail; it will be those lenders’ fault alone."
If there's anything to be salvaged from this trainwreck, it must revolve around this weird focus that Blumer seems to have about the moral culpability of capitalism. All three of his cases use the word "fault" - this is probably not a coincidence. And, insofar as that point goes, he's on the right track: it's stupid to impute ethical blame to an abstract idea that couldn't respond to those accusations even if it could understand them. Indeed, the corrupt judges, double-dealing accountants, and innumeric lenders all bear (at least a good portion of) the moral blame for their respective situations - but so what? These people weren't magicians or otherwise superpowered, they just took advantage of blind spots in the system. Since these blind spots are inherent to capitalism - are, one might even say, the whole point of a free market - it's impossible not to conclude that free-market capitalism (to the extent that we practice it) failed in a meaningful way to prevent these various acts.
Going for extra brownie points, Blumer also throws in the obligatory greater-harms argument, but this is irrelevant to his point: every system gives up something, but that doesn't mean that some systems aren't better than others. Returning to the basketball analogy from above, various NBA teams play with the goal that only contested perimeter shots will beat them - which means, in other words, that their defensive system prioritizes perimeter shots below everything else. A necessary consequence of this scheme is that good perimeter teams (or any given team that gets lucky that night) will be able to take advantage of it. It's a flaw, sure, but it's a hell of a lot less dangerous than giving up layups or open jumpers. Once he ditches his contradictions-in-terms, then, Blumer's next responsibility will be to honestly analyze the strengths and weaknesses of free markets as compared to other systems. If at that point he decides that he still likes pure capitalism more, he's welcome to it. I myself prefer to have some safeguards lying around just in case - but, then again, I also prefer internally consistent positions to self-defeating ones.
Despite its inherent inferiority to basketball, football does have at least one very important upside: it distracts people from the horrid repetitiveness of baseball. Or so I thought, anyway, until I read Thomas Sowell's column on America's pastime as it applies to society. In it, Sowell chronicles the career of one "Ernie Lombardi whose slowness afoot [sic] was legendary." Nonetheless, "Lombardi had a lifetime batting average of .306 and even led the league in batting a couple of years," leading Sowell to conclude that this guy wasn't really an underdog or underprivileged in any way, he just "was handicapped in some ways and privileged in others." As such, Sowell says, we should be wary of "trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs," because then "they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities."
Okay, fair enough: this Lombardi guy had a physical limitation that he overcame with a surplus of talent in another area. But black students, the analog in Sowell's argument, only seem to have limitations. Even in Sowell's own account, the education they receive "is a disaster," and he admits that the only way he escaped a similar situation was through "sheer good luck." Maybe Sowell left out some important connecting ideas, but it's initially very difficult to see the similarities between the dumb luck that he admits was his main advantage and the consistent hard work that he advocates as a solution for others. And, on the off chance that Sowell figures out how to repair this broken analogy, he may also want to take a moment to look back through the long history of sports success stories who were told they "couldn't make it," starting with Michael Jordan.
Leaving Sowell to his cherry-picked anecdotes and self-defeating analogies, we turn to another man who apparently can't hear himself talk: Andrew Sullivan. Having argued for a bit with some other people about the problem of evil, Sullivan finally brings out the big guns. We humans need to suffer, he says huffily, because otherwise we end up like Gabby Gingras, who "suffers from an extremely rare disorder called congenital insensitivity to pain." (I'll let you guess what the symptoms of congenital insensitivity to pain are.) By the age of five, Gingras had already "bit down through the skin" of her fingers cause she didn't know what else to do with her teeth, "broke her jaw and didn't know it until infection caused a fever," and blinded herself just by messing with her own eyes too much. Terrible, right? Those people who want to eliminate pain, Sullivan grouses, are operating on "a sophomoric understanding of human experience" and advocating a system that could only work "not on this planet."
Except...who else could be responsible for all of this if not Sullivan's God? Humans, ostensibly created in this deity's image, really are vulnerable and stupid enough to destroy themselves without ever realizing it; Sullivan himself cites evidence of this. I mean, no offense to Gingras or her parents - presumably Gabby was no dumber than any other five-year-old - but smart beings do not accidentally bite through their own fingers. Indeed, if she'd been born in practically any previous era in human history, Gingras would never have made it to five. Invoking her case may have saved Sullivan the trouble of explaining some (and only some) cases of suffering, but the question now becomes whether he can justify the existence of the thing that he says makes suffering necessary, namely, the shockingly hostile world in which we live. Unless a more benevolent world exceeds God's powers of creation - hard to imagine, especially given the Christian promises of a paradisaical afterlife - Sullivan has essentially only managed to exchange an apathetic God for an actively antagonistic one.
So, Sowell and Sullivan: really quite bad. But the most inane, least self-aware argument of the week has to belong to Michael Schwartz. Many of you will have heard of this by now and the fallacy is completely obvious, but I just can't resist. Schwartz starts brilliantly, citing "boys around 10 years of age" as moral experts. They "have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people," he says by way of evidencing his moral view on the subject, apparently ignorant of how absurd it looks to list children - who have to be taught morality and almost always struggle with the very concept - as paragons of ethical thinking. It gets even better when he quotes a friend as saying that "all pornography turns your sexual drive inward," a process that somehow morphs heterosexuality into homosexuality. But what does that even mean, that inward-turning stuff? Really: can someone explain that to me? Because it sounds an awful lot like psychobabble with no meaningful content.
And really, if porn turned people gay, wouldn't we have noticed by now? This is a bit like all of those conspiracy theories about how cell phones cause brain cancer or whatever, because really there's no shortage of porn aficionados in the world, the vast majority of whom are heterosexual. Where Sowell and Sullivan constructed rhetorical defenses against their own arguments, then, Schwartz manages to be a probable living coutnerexample to his own conclusion, and it's hard to get sillier than that.
At least, in Seattle: saith The Stranger's Paul Constant on the subject of immortality, "Imagine...Everybody on earth staying on earth forever and ever, never retiring from their jobs or coming to a natural conclusion of their life stories. I'm sick of you people already." But why immortality? Because - aren't you behind the curve! - "in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever."
As exciting and terrifying and (if you are Paul Constant) ennui-inducing as this news must be, it also comes tinged with a note of sadness for yours truly. For, though I am not the Larry Niven of science-fiction fame (nor indeed any other Larry Niven), I am a fan of my pseudonymsake ("pseudonamesake"?), and this frankly goes against everything he's ever stood for. Ray Kurzweil, whose predictive quote is printed above, follows John Scalzi's nanotech scheme for immortality, leaving Niven's organlegging in the dust.
The two consequences of this whole thing, so far as I can tell, are:
- Bioethicists need to shift gears. Thanks in part to Niven's writing (and in larger part to real-life organ smuggling), the proper treatment of organs has been a pretty major focus of the field for a while now. Nanotech blood? Not so much.
- Everyone should really start thinking about how much they really want to be alive. If you think this "death panel" stuff is bad now, just try to picture how totally insane it would be in a society where human death has become elective by default.
Whenever I see Christians go out of their way to talk about logic, I try to pay very close attention - usually with entertaining results.* As a self-styled logician, I imagine this must be similar to how Christians feel when they see atheists talking about Christianity, though strangely this doesn't tend to make me any more sympathetic to their plight. Maybe that's because they tend to produce stuff like Kenneth Samples's 12(!)-part series on the topic, which today reaches its third installment.
Though he does include some logic-specific material, so far the series has mainly focused on argumentative techniques. The two are certainly related - even I've been forced to stray from strictly logical fallicies into the larger world of argumentative fallacies - but, strictly speaking, logic as a discipline operates distinctly from argumentation: the former is a formalized system for relating proposition-types and the latter lays out informal rules for when certain proposition-types are appropriate. When Samples says that arguments must have "(1) a claim (or conclusion); and (2) support (premises) for the claim," he's talking logic; when he says two sentences later that arguments must also have "sufficient proof and backing—adequate in number, kind, and weight," he's talking argumentation.
I don't mean to degrade either one in making this distinction, as both do indeed serve an important function in philosophy (and truth-seeking in general). At the same time, though, it's worrying that Samples evidently doesn't understand the distinction between them. More worrying still is that he finds a "[p]hilosopher and logician" who makes the same mistakes, one Ed Miller. According to Samples, Miller holds that "[r]hetoric (the persuasive use of language) is closely tied to logic." He has a point insofar as "shaped and ordered" thinking tends to produce "forceful and compelling" writing, but as we've seen before, "forceful and compelling" writing is hardly a guarantor of argumentative validity.
And, loath though I am to make this point, Miller's position also fails in the converse manner: just like well-written arguments sometimes fail, poorly-written arguments sometimes succeed. We don't still teach Wittgenstein or Berkeley or Aristotle because of their brilliant explicatory talents, we teach them because - well, maybe not because their arguments succeed as such, but at least because their arguments succeed in some relevant way or other. At the very least, Miller could do himself a favor by looking through the many scientific papers written in prose that's denser than diamonds: clearly some of these express true facts despite the thorny manner in which they do so.
That humans happen to behave as Miller intimates is a simple fact of life: emotional resonance does more for belief than truth ever could. But Miller and Samples both do their readers a major disservice by listing "slickness" as a metric of argumentative validity and thus reinforcing this quintessentially illogical tendency. For Samples, the creationist, this is only par for the course; but Miller - if he really is a philosopher or a logician and not just some guy who wrote a book on philosophy - has an extra duty not to participate in this kind of philosophy-for-dummies half-assery.
*Not just Christians, of course: this is true of anyone with whom I disagree. It's just that Christians seem to do this more often in the context of their Christianity than any other group.
First, the boring stuff - my two fantasy football teams both won, each starting its season 2-0. They triumphed in total by 41.31 points: 41.15 for one and .18 for the other. In related news, thank you, Dallas Clark, for very nearly giving me a heart attack. And also thank you, Miami Dolphins defense, for being totally incapable of covering tight ends.
Following the fantasy teams' example, PSL Indy Team B (i.e., the team I'm on) won its second game by a healthy 30% margin, 26-20. Twenty points, as it happens, works out to one point every two minutes - this was truly a game that my beloved Spurs would've been proud to win. (And, therefore, a game everyone else would've hated them for winning.) Our defensive dominance included another 5ish blocks from yours truly,* a shutout for the first five minutes of the game, and some real grit from the only two gals who showed up: since there were only two, neither was allowed to sub out. Both assured me after the game that they didn't need medical attention, but at least one of them looked like her head was about to explode.
Besides my rapier wit, I also contributed 7 points (again, ~25% of our total scoring) and, thankfully, cut my turnovers down to just one. My shooting from the field was slightly worse than in our first game, however, and I'm not sure I had any rebounds or assists. But hey, a win's a win, and you need more luck as a player to get boards and assists than points. Next up for me: learning how to not miss three of free throws, because really that's just embarrassing.
(Read the previous update here.)
*As an update, my teammates inform me this was closer to 10, but I find that hard to believe.
Remember the "fake learning put together to sell overpriced t-shirts" from a month or two ago? Sure you do! It's LOST University, which I preemptively hazarded would be a "huge letdown" because it appeared to have no function other than to pimp ABC's price-inflated casual wear. Little did I know that they lined up actual professors to teach some of their classes.
Okay, so it's probably not a great sign that one of their actors is listed as the sole professor for "Phys 301: New Physics," but what other television show is lining up real-live experts to provide free, professional-level discourses on subjects like foreign language, history, philosophy, and physics? And, though the LOST University "book"store still doesn't sell any books, all (yes, all) of the courses come complete with a little mini-reading list. If the philosophy list is any indication, they're actually taking this semi-seriously:
"LOST and Philosophy: The Island Has Its Reasons, by Sharon M. KayeThe ideological connections run relatively thin - there's some ethics and government but not really enough to run a full class on either - but the names more than make up for it. I have no idea how many fans will actually accept this invitation to read Hume et al for the first time, but anyone who does will be vastly better off for it.
Although not endorsed by LOST, this book has contemporary philosophers share their thoughts and theories on LOST’s philosophical themes.
Two Treatises of Government, by John Locke
One of John Locke’s most famous works.
The Social Contract and Discourses, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
An exploration of Rousseau’s theories on social contract.
A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume
One of Hume’s classic writings.
Utilitarianism and Other Essays, by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
Bentham and Mill’s essays on Utilitarianism."
My final opinion of course remains withheld, but this suffices for me to tentatively upgrade LOST University to "normal-sized letdown." Here's hoping the positive trend continues.
No, really:
"[Rowan] Williams [Archbishop of Canterbury]: Why exactly were we seduced by this [an unlimited sense of economic growth]?
Paxman: Well nobody’s got an answer to that yet, have they?
Williams: Well, I could say original sin, which is a good start, but I’d need to spell that out a bit further…
Paxman: I don’t think you really believe that, do you?
Williams: Original sin? Oh yes.
Paxman: You really believe original sin is the cause of our delusion about this?
Williams: There is, inbuilt into human beings, a sort of dangerous taste for unreality."
And that's all there is to say about that.Charles Mudede, you know that I love you but you've missed the big picture:
"At last, America has a philosopher king!Exactly right! Because other reporting services do such a good job of fact-checking and all that other stuff. Why, just look at the Washington Post (among many other newspapers), which continues to print George Will's factually devoid columns on global warming. Or the cable news networks, which would never feature "people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding." Oh, and let's not forget the local news channels, whose shocking exposes always include the proper contextualization.'Obama said that good journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy," but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election....Our president has sided with the philosophers in their long war against the babel of the plebeians."
"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.'
Yes, it's about time that all of us bloggers learned to discard our own opinions so that we can spinelessly relay the opinions of so-called experts from both sides of the story. After all, isn't it more harmful to say "intelligent design is crap and here's why" than to say "Person X, who has a Ph.D. in a science field, supports intelligent design despite the protests of the mainstream science community"? And really, shouldn't the bloggers - the unpaid, free-time journalists - be the ones held to a higher standard?
Thank you, President Obama, for speaking so forcefully and authoritatively on the great reporting scourge of our time, blogs. Maybe next you can talk about the number one reason to allow same-sex marriage: so that gays and lesbians can finish their Official Government Paperwork collections.
Leery though I am of any praise that starts, "Move over Kurt Vonnegut," I may in time be forced to take James Gunn's words seriously, because James Morrow kicks ass. Midway through his The Last Witchfinder, a few things stand out:
- Morrow can actually handle olde-timey English writing. One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, tried this in his Baroque Cycle and it nearly drove me crazy. I gave up on book one of said cycle and haven't been back yet, but Morrow's prose positively flows by.
- Morrow knows how to think. Many, many authors - including, to an extent, dear old Vonnegut - get away with expressing relatively stupid or banal ideas because their manner of expression is so impressive. To this point, Morrow has admirably avoided the runaway skepticism of Vonnegut, the borderline-incomprehensible giddiness of someone like Tom Robbins, and the unimaginative frankness of someone like Barbara Kingsolver.
- Morrow has a very down-to-earth sense of humor. Here's an excerpt from his self-interview about the book: "[Answering a question:] ...I realized that a woman born around 1678 - don't ask me why, but I knew the main character had to be a woman - would have lived through the great Revelation-to-Reason transition. [Asking the next question:] Why did the main character have to be a woman?" It's always a relief when authors I like turn out to not be self-impressed douchebags (coughOrsonScottCardcough).
- Morrow can handle gimmicks. Okay, so I'm a little bit of a sucker for gimmicks - House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, LOST, etc. - but really, this one is understated and clever enough that people should be okay with it. It's slightly spoilerish, though, so I won't say what it is.
Ever since atheism showed up as a cultural force, it seems like every wordy Christian has been eager to display their Keanu-Reeves-style bullet-dodging technique. From the young-world creationism of Ray Comfort's pals to Biologos's old-world creationism to Alvin Plantinga's ad hoc reformed epistemology, everyone advertises a different way to save God from the ever-sharper skeptical arguments in areas like philosophy, science, and history. Like Neo, however, each of these has a fatal flaw - remember, he does eventually get shot on that rooftop: young-world creationism ignores every piece of evidence available, old-world creationism simply puts God in every gap it can find, reformed epistemology is so amorphous as to allow belief in any religion whatsoever, and so on.
Behind all of this razzle-dazzle lies the troublesome and phenomenally patient problem of evil, powerful enough to transform commonly available sense data into an unambiguous metaphysical conclusion and yet flexible enough to conform to any of the above theodicies.* Despite the repeated insistence from the Christian community that the problem has been solved or defeated, nobody - especially not the rest of the philosophical world - actually believes that. And so we get article after article addressing it, like this one from (amateur) liberal theologian Barney Zwartz. Featured on Metamagician, Why Evolution Is True and Pharyngula - and, interestingly, with different valid criticisms at each - Zwartz's argument makes the now-familiar claim "that the God [the problem of evil] discusses is not a God anyone actually believes in." It has "perfect power, perfect knowledge, perfect goodness – but no personality, no historical context, no interaction with humans." This version of God, Zwartz says, is "divorced from God’s character, which involves love and grace" and is thus "purely theoretical." This last is surely correct - God is purely theoretical, in that it doesn't actually exist - but the rest needs real work.
Unless Zwartz knows something about ethics that nobody else does, he badly needs to explain how a thing can include goodness but not have love or grace or even any personality at all: when we describe a person as good, that's not a character trait? We're referring not to their personality but to their - what, physiology? And, at least in my experience, even those skeptics with non-love-based ethics agree to play by Christianity's moral rules for the sake of argument; it's telling, I think, that Zwartz doesn't cite even one actual instance of the problem of evil that totally ignores God's purportedly loving and graceful nature.
Perhaps all of this is a simple case of projection. After Zwartz finishes with his cripped attempt at philosophy, he returns to the more familiar waters of theology, explaining that those who would hold God to moral account are "infantile." We should never think "that God is relevant only to the extent that he benefits the believer, smoothes her path, makes her a winner," Zwartz says, because "suffering and moral merit are not connected." This is where human psychology becomes a problem: the credulous or dull-minded will, on reading that sentence, agree wholeheartedly. After all, suffering and moral merit really are disconnected. But the truth of any part of a compound idea doesn't at all guarantee the truth of the whole statement: "Kobe Bryant's great skill in basketball led to his psychotic breakdown and eventual involuntary commitment" isn't true just because Kobe really is good at basketball. More to the point, just what kind of God is Zwartz really talking about?
By his own words, we know that Zwartz's God reliably rewards neither good people nor believers (nor, presumably, good people who are also believers). Why should anybody worship this God? My faith, according to Zwartz, will not help me. It will not help anyone else either: "suffering and moral merit are not connected" in any way, not even indirectly. God, in other words, will never help anyone for any reason (so much for "interaction with humans"!). What kind of goodness, of loving, is this? I could love God and laud God and even reshape the entire world in God's image, but God won't even lift a metaphorical finger to relieve the massive suffering into which it created me and everyone I care about? If that's the best God that Zwartz can imagine, I'm unspeakably glad that it doesn't exist, cause fuck that God, that God's an asshole. Nobody would put up with that kind of fantastically selfish behavior from a human and only the most masochistic of us permit it in any other animals (usually cats).
Zwartz, as an adult, is of course free to devote his time and energy to whichever imaginary being he chooses. But I wouldn't stop to give his God the time of day, let alone sacrifice my rationality in order to praise it.
*For young-world creationists and reformed epistemologists: why would a loving God create us with such an incredibly misguided set of truth-finding mechanisms, especially when our misunderstandings cause so much of our suffering? For old-earth creationists: why would a loving God bother with long-scale evolution at all, given that it entails so much suffering? I can do this all day, really.
Shorter ONDCP anti-drug commercial: "Let me think for yourself."
Delving into the blatant symbolic overtones in the commercial (gee, should he go with the angel and the astronaut or the devil and the dropouts? I wonder...) would only dull the point here. Only a real asshole would script a line about independent thought into what's essentially a 30-second-long morality play.
And, in case you can't get enough of the joke, there's more!
Yay!
From a certain perspective, this post by jj reads as a condemnation of the entire premise behind my blog:
"One could argue that a huge part of the problem with aggressive philosophy is not that it scares women, but that it subverts its supposed purpose; namely, communal and constructive philosophy. Flashes of philosophical insight – suddenly getting what else is at stake, for example – may indeed be just that, flashes. But it takes time to figure out the best articulation of an insight, and its value. Complexity and uncertainly [sic] need to be admitted, unless one is just going to quickly crank through the surrounding logical implications of a first articulation. Other things being equal, the best discussions would open up alternatives, not close them down."Indeed, I pride myself on closing alternatives down - at least, to the small extent that that can be done just by identifying fallacies. (I remind my readers yet again that the fallaciousness of any given argument does not by itself demonstrate that all similar arguments are invalid, nor that the conclusion of the argument is false.) But I also pride myself on identifying areas of complexity and uncertainty (communality is nice but hard to do with blogs and, while I would like to think of myself as a constructive force in philosophy, I'm not dumb enough to think that I'm anywhere near influential enough). So what's going on here?
One immediate thing to note is that opening up alternatives involves closing down alternatives and vice versa (at least, from an epistemological standpoint). Taking the first example that comes to mind, the problem of evil eliminates the possibility of the traditional God, yes, but by the same token it makes non-theistic ontologies available. This is the same phenomenon that led Dawkins to say that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist": evolution obliterates direct-creation theories (with no unnecessary nods to community or uncertainty, note) and provides a huge amount of leverage with which atheistic histories can operate. This false dilemma appears to serve as the foundation for jj's others - that aggressive philosophy can't be communal, or that non-communal philosophy can't be constructive, or that constructive philosophy can't be simple, and so on.
But there is a much bigger problem here: since when is philosophy supposed to be "communal" or "constructive" at all? If jj means "constructive" in the sense of "truth-finding" then yeah, but that isn't what she means: she advocates for "the kind of setting that allows for exploration of insight and meaning." I'll return momentarily to these terms to see how much of jj's position can be salvaged - hint: some - but not before driving home the way philosophy ought really to work. Philosophy, as the name indicates, is primarily about knowing, not forming communities or finding insights or (despite the colloquial usage of the word) building meanings or even artificially injecting complexity and uncertainty into things. If jj thinks that insight, meaning, complexity, communality, and uncertainty help with knowledge, she needs to say that and then explain how - otherwise, she needs to quit perverting the discipline.
Up to this point, I've been considering jj's vocabulary in the pejorative sense - the Karen Armstrong sense, if you will. "Insight," for example, can mean "subtle, unexpected, and relevant aspect of an idea" - but it can also just mean "thing I just thought of," just like "God" could mean "really-existing deity" or it could mean "indescribable something-or-other." Likewise, "meaning" often vacillates between "comprehensible explanation or interpretation of something otherwise inexplicable" and "any explanation whatsoever that resonates with me emotionally"; only one of these has any place in philosophy. jj, from what I can tell, almost certainly uses the weaker versions of these phrases - her language points very strongly to a vision of happening upon a highly speculative idea ("insight") and being able to float that idea to an audience ("explore") with the aim of solidifying ("articulating") it. Which is a good first step to philosophy, don't get me wrong, but it (a) almost certainly already exists in the world of philosophy and (b) absolutely cannot be the purpose of philosophy. Still, it's only fair to consider the advantages obtained by including these weaker versions into the philosophical culture, meager though they may be.
Insights, typically called "intuitions," already have a valued place in philosophy - here, jj needn't worry. Even when these insights are of the weaker variety, philosophers tend to take them very seriously, naming them after their authors and such. But, it bears repeating, insights (or intuitions) are very often just plain wrong. The insight behind the problem of evil, for instance, is incompatible with the insight behind any Christian apologetic you care to name, so while both of them get some special treatment only one of them really fits into the mission of philosophy. Meanings and communities, on the other hand, at best only contribute to the recognition of intuitions. This isn't unique to philosophy: the more time you spend in any group, the more easily, quickly, and thoroughly you'll understand that group's idiosyncrasies. Part of this deeper understanding usually includes recognizing complexity and uncertainty in those idiosyncrasies, and this reinforces the communal bonds - but, much as I hate to be repetitive, it doesn't necessarily help get at the truth of the matter. Especially if we define insight-comprehension (or "articulation") as the purpose of philosophy - which is what jj does, you can scroll back up and see for yourself - we run the very real risk of losing what little knowledge-centeredness the discipline still has: I could sit around with fifty other thinkers and just articulate insights until all of our hair turned blue and we wouldn't be one iota closer to knowing which of them best matched reality.
Now, all that having been said, some loose ends remain. jj brings this whole thing up in the context of the disproportionate maleness of professional philosophy, and insofar as she labels this a problem I agree with her. I even find it plausible that the changes she recommends would bring more women into the field, even if that's just a consequence of making the field less intimidating for everyone. And there are certainly some (maybe even many) philosophers who take the job way too personally, which hurts the search for knowledge in its own way (I have the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Almeida from earlier today is one such person). But none of these points is her major claim, and each of these subsidiary statements can be addressed in any number of other ways - remember, we saw above that aggression doesn't necessarily preclude uncertainty or having a community or any of those other things. Women don't deserve to be shut out of philosophy, true, but they also don't deserve to be welcomed into a discipline that has totally lost its way. Whatever changes we effect in order to make philosophy more fair, knowledge must remain its focus; if that means that it's a bit rougher and less polite than some people might prefer, so be it.
You know, that Jon Stewart guy really riles me up, always going after conservatives! He clearly would never pull that stunt with a lefty liberal institution like ACORN!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Audacity of Hos | ||||
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Buh, okay, maybe he'd go after ACORN, but he'd never criticize actual Democrats!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Arizona State Capitol Building for Sale | ||||
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...
Dammit, this is the last time I go to Tucker Carlson for my news...
Not much going on today, apparently, so if you're interested in some philosophy, go read Mike Almeida's comments here and try to figure out why it takes him so long to understand that the verb "put" is different than the verb "remove." Also of note are Mycol's comments, which indicate a very sharp mind that - inexplicably - doesn't yet have its own blog. Mycol, if you're reading this, the internet could always use more sharp-minded bloggers.
Shades of LOST in Washington state:
Also like LOST: this thing, whatever it was, ripped up some trees. Word is not in yet on whether or not it then shape-shifted into dead people. Either way, thank you, Terry Griffin and whoever captioned this image.
There's just too much of it. I mean, are you kidding me, Nathan Tabor?
"It's a shame that the Obama White House ignored the National Day of Prayer and instead issued a paper proclamation, meanwhile he has a White House Celebration for a Muslim holiday. I have no problem with the Muslim holiday but I do have a problem when it is celebrated in lieu of the National Day of Prayer. With Obama ramming down Ramadan [sic] down the throats of Americans, I hope Americans realize their leader uses faith as a political prop."The hypocrisy here is almost fractal in its complexity. Obama, first of all, necessarily practices some measure of inconsistent behavior by excluding some religions from this official White House treatment - and, given the sheer number of religions, he must exclude at least one or two of them. But that's not what Tabor means: he only cares whether Obama celebrates Christianity. Thus, only celebrating Islam* counts as politicking for Tabor when leaving Islam out doesn't - so there's another level of inconsistency. This in turn means that Tabor himself is using religion as a political bludgeon, which of course is the exact thing he (correctly, but for the wrong reasons) criticizes Obama for doing. It's all a bit dizzying, isn't it?
Between Obama's initial inconsistency, Tabor's inconsistency about Obama's inconsistency, and then this further meta-inconsistency about the whole thing, it's almost too much to point out that Tabor's "ramming down throats" comment applies to a fasting holiday. I'd like to credit him with an attempt at irony, but he's pretty clearly not that bright.
*Which, let me just note, is not at all what Obama's doing - there's still the White House Easter egg hunt, and the White House Christmas tree, and...
The good news first, you say? So it shall be: my two fantasy football teams each won their opener, the competitive team by a healthy margin (thanks, Adrian Peterson!) and the casual team thanks to a literally last-minute touchdown from Darren Sproles. As a fantasy coach, I made sure to tell my fantasy players not to get too excited - there's always room for improvement, and our fantasy goal for the fantasy season is to get better every fantasy week.
And now for the bad news: despite an (approximately) 8-point, 4-block, 2-steal, 2-assist, several-rebound game from yours truly, my Pittsburgh Sports League basketball team lost its opener thirty-something to I think forty-something. It probably didn't help that my stat line also included 3 or 4 turnovers, but I blame those mostly on my teammates. One pass of mine should definitely have been a bounce pass and not a chest pass, but other than that I had a lot of people run away from the open area as soon as I threw them the ball. This will hopefully improve over time...but I'm not holding my breath.
The canny reader will have figured out that I was responsible for roughly one quarter of our points. For comparison's sake, that's basically what Carmelo Anthony does for the Denver Nuggets. My efficiency was okay - I shot over 50% from the field and drew a couple of shooting fouls - but I also did basically a nonexistent job of running our offense, which turned out to be the main problem. Our team was up midway through the first half and my unit brought us within 3 midway through the second half, but we just had too many bad, quick shots.
So, to my fantasy opponents, good games - losers. To my real-life opponents, good job, and I'm sorry I knocked one of you over trying to go for a loose ball. If I see you in the playoffs, expect a better performance. And to my teammates, please don't run away when I pass you the ball.
Thank you, Kanye West:
More - many more - here. Some are tasteless and dumb, yes, but overall I say this is a goldmine.
If someone in the distant future was (for some unfathomable reason) given the unenviable task of analyzing this blog, here are the themes I hope they would find:
- Hypothetical evidence begs the question
- Evaluating a thing positively or negatively isn't a good reason to classify that thing differently in an ontological sense (so, for example, there might be good lies and bad politeness)
- No amount of subject matter expertise can replace a solid understanding of logic
- I hate the Lakers
"Once they had formed 2-keto-4-methylhexanoate, the researchers reasoned that this compound could be converted to 3-methyl-1-pentanol (a C6 alcohol) by the sequential action of the enzymes KVID (2-ketoisovalerate decarboxylase) from the bacterium Lactococcus lactis and ADH6 (alcohol dehydrogenase) from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae."If you know what that means, more power to you - but, as it turns out, this didn't impact his argument whatsoever. Stacking up a lot of high-powered jargon makes you seem really smart as a writer but, as this case demonstrates, has no reliable bearing on the success of your viewpoint. Likewise, writing assertively makes for very a convincing essay but doesn't at all guarantee accuracy or truthfulness. With that in mind, I turn to Jim Manzi.
In his response to somebody about something (I don't think that part is relevant, is why I'm not bothering to fill in the gaps), Manzi contends that the implications "of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology (MES) do not demonstrate that the universe is not unfolding according to a divine plan that privileges human beings." This means denying "that there is some incremental knowledge provided by the MES that rules out such a divine plan that was not available to us prior to Darwin." For the sake of simplicity and also because I think it's what he means, I'll restrict my analysis to cases where "divine" specifically references the Christian God. This excludes other gods - Zeus, Vishnu, Stephen Law's God of Eth, Cthulhu, and so on - but, again, I don't think Manzi intends to defend those gods.
In order to defend his thesis, Manzi picks two arguments to debunk. One, "the argument from change," operates on the intuition that "an omnipotent deity who desires some outcome" wouldn't need "to get there through a process that unfolds over time"; the other is just the problem of evil. The problem with these arguments, he says, is that they don't "require knowledge of evolution" at all - having originated well before the theory of evolution, both are "independent of any knowledge" thereof. Manzi then embarks on a several-paragraph investigation of genetic algorithms, quantum influence, and many other interesting - but, again, 100% irrelevant - topics. But in his haste to get to the good part of his post and impress people with his nifty background in physics and comp sci, Manzi left a few gaping philosphical holes in his argument.
His most egregious error is to think that filling in a hypothetical doesn't count as serious progress. The arguments from change and evil may have originated centuries ago on a theoretical level, but evolution entails certain crucial premises that would otherwise be missing. For example, the problem of evil prior goes like this:
1E. If there's gratuitous evil in the world, God doesn't exist.
2E. There's gratuitous evil in the world.
3E. Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Easy, right? But premise 2E is notoriously difficult to nail down, especially in the case of human-chosen evils. And, prior to evolution, it was (borderline) plausible to suppose that all evils were at least in some sense human-chosen: defenses of this sort rely on the Biblical fall from grace to argue that humanity bears the responsibility even for natural evils. On an evolutionary view, however, premise 2 is no longer speculative. This makes a big difference for the argument, as you can trivially construct a series of premises that lead to any conclusion; the trick is picking demonstrably true premises.
The same thing happens with Manzi's argument from change: according to the Bible, God did create a perfect world, so the key premise in the argument from change (that the world is or at one point was imperfect for reasons other than human action) similarly relies on the truth of evolution. I've oversimplified this arguments somewhat for the sake of brevity, true, and there are other ways out of this (which I'll address momentarily), but Manzi seems to think that this premise-supporting ability of evolution is irrelevant or meaningless. On this point, he's just wrong.
I hope I've made this point well enough already, but just in case I haven't let's depart for the moment into the world of detective literature. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - spoiler alert - Holmes identifies the villain by the non-reaction of a dog. The chain of reasoning in that case was (roughly):
1D. If the dog didn't bark, it knew the culprit.
2D. The dog didn't bark.
3D. Therefore, the dog knew the culprit.
What Manzi is saying is that Holmes was stupid to hold out for evidence of (2D) - after all, this argument, the argument from non-barking, must have been in his mind before he had evidence of 2D, yes? But then the argument from non-barking is independent of any evidence for non-barking, which, by Manzi's totally backwards reckoning, means that evidence of non-barking doesn't count as "incremental knowledge" towards the incrimination of the culprit. If Manzi were a juror on this case, the criminal would likely have gone free. Just because a piece of evidence doesn't immediately inspire a whole new argument doesn't make it philosophically inert.
But if it's new arguments that Manzi wants, I've got some for him. Here's my argument from physics:
1P. If evolution is true and God exists, either the argument from change is sound or God had sufficient reason to create an imperfect but possibly improvable world.
2P. If the argument from change is sound, then God doesn't exist.
3P. If God had sufficient reason to create an imperfect but possibly improvable world, then God had some non-evaluative reason to create an imperfect but possibly improvable world.
4P. If God had some non-evaluative reason to create an imperfect but possibly improvable world, God's power is limited by physics.
5P. God's power is by definition not limited by physics.
6P. Therefore, if evolution is true, either the argument from change is sound (in which case God doesn't exist) or God's power is limited by physics (in which case we get a contradiction and must reject the premise that God exists).
7P. Therefore, if evolution is true, God doesn't exist.
The first two premises should be relatively obviously true. Premise 3P just states that God's creation of an imperfect world can't be the result of God making the world more valuable (this would be a contradiction, as it's incoherent to choose a less valuable thing for its value). 4P identifies this reason: that God couldn't make such a world directly and instead had to rely on physics to do part (or most) of the work. But a God limited by physics is no god at all, and thus the whole thing collapses.
I can do something similar with the problem of evil - call this the argument from lack of privilege:
1L. If evolution is true and God exists, either the problem of evil is sound or God has sufficient reason to allow massive amounts of animal and human suffering.
2L. If the problem of evil is sound, God doesn't exist.
3L. If God has sufficient reason to allow massive amounts of animal and human suffering, God has higher priorities than humans and uses both animals and humans as means to the same end.
4L. If God has higher priorities than humans or uses both animals and humans as means to the same end, humans are not privileged by God.
5L. If humans are not privileged by God, God doesn't exist.
6L. Therefore, if evolution is true, either the problem of evil is sound (in which case God doesn't exist) or humans are not privileged by God (in which case God doesn't exist).
7L. Therefore, if evolution is true, God doesn't exist.
Again, the first two premises shouldn't require explanation; the third just says what it means for a morally perfect being to allow something; the fourth expands the Christian concept of privilege; and so on. The sticky part here is 3L, I think, because of the long consequent. I'll take just a moment to explain my thinking there and then wrap this up.
God allowing human suffering means that another goal is being met - this much is clear. Lots of people have different ideas of what this goal might be, but some of the candidates include beauty as a result of the regularity of the universe, soul-building, and allowing for loving relationships. Any of these that only requires humans (soul-building, loving relationships, e.g.) excludes animals (duh), which means that animal suffering is redundant: these reasons, then, cannot by themselves fit for 3L. (And remember, the theist must opt for 3L over 2L.) But the other reasons - beauty and so on - treat humans the same as every other living thing (i.e., treat "both animals and humans as means to the same end"). It won't work to use a combination of these, either, as this will always result in gratuitous animal suffering or the physics problem we saw above - if the animal-inclusive reason is regulated beauty, for example, there's no reason to have animals at all unless God can't create the logically possible world in which humans evolve as the result of an extraordinarily fortuitous evolutionary shortcut.
Manzi, then, fails on two levels. He's wrong to think that his two arguments complete the set of all possible evolution-based arguments against God, as I thought up two more just in the space of an hour or so. But more importantly, he seems not to understand at all the way that reasoning works. Building a pretty set of numbered premises differs in several essential ways from building a good argument, and while we may have done the former before evolution our ability to do the latter benefits hugely as a result of the theory.
Today, dear readers, I flaunt the current state of the sporting world and argue (once again) via analogy with basketball. My subject: William Lane Craig.
In the most recent of his Q&A entries, Craig takes on the teleological argument and an objection thereto. "The salient point" of design arguments, he says, "is that intelligent design is characterized by certain recognizable earmarks that tip us off to its presence quite independently of our familiarity with the designer." Our focus will be on the word "characterized," but we'll get to that in a moment. First, to give some substance to Craig's position, we should specify which earmarks he's talking about. Citing William Dembski, Craig says that "the combination of high improbability plus conformity to an independently given pattern" allows us to "infer that [a thing] is not random...but the result of some sort of intelligence out there." In some sense this begs the question about evolution, but we aren't talking about evolution in this particular case. At any rate, there's a bigger problem afoot.
Allow me to, as promised, take a momentary departure to the world of roundball. (I know, right? What a stupid nickname. Anyway.) My beloved Spurs are characterized by unselfishness, high basketball IQ, a commitment to defense, and (sadly) a distinct lack of athleticism. It does not, however, follow that all unselfish, unathletic, defense-minded, savvy basketball players are Spurs: Shane Battier plays for Houston, Kirk Hinrich for Chicago, and so on. Characteristicness, then, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition - or, in plain(er) English, "x is characterized by y" means "all x-type things have attribute y" ("all Spurs-esque players have a high basketball IQ," e.g.). Bringing this lesson back to the subject at hand does not mean good things for Craig's argument.
If indeed "the combination of high improbability plus conformity to an independently given pattern" characterizes intelligent design, that just means that all cases of intelligent design will feature those two things. Craig, in other words, has only this premise:
(1) If the universe (or any other thing) is intelligently designed, it will display the combination of high improbability plus conformity to an independently given pattern.
But where can he go from here? He wants to follow this like so, I think:
(2) The universe displays the combination of high improbability plus conformity to an independently given pattern.
(3) Therefore, the universe is intelligently designed.
But that's no more valid than me concluding that San Antonio has every Spurs-type player in the league on its roster (much as I wish they did). If this account accurately represents Craig's or Dembski's argument, we might as well give up on them altogether: their error is obvious and irreparable, and that's without even asking whether or not their proposed attributes really are characteristic of intelligently designed things.
...in other news, has the NBA started yet?
Dear Chart magazine,
Your readers suck, as do your editors. See, I was reading this post, which led me here, which in turn revealed (after I'd read down the page a bit) that your magazine had named Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" the tenth-best Canadian song of all time. This came as a bit of a surprise, because I just so happen to know that "Hallelujah" is in fact the number-one best song of all time, regardless of national origin.
But I am nothing if not fair, so the next step was to check the actual lists. Who knew - maybe some Canadian artists existed whose work was akin to musical crack-cocaine (or, if that's too hard-edged for you, flourless chocolate cake). Imagine my surprise, if you can, at seeing the full top 10 list:
10. Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah"
9. Neil Young - "Heart of Gold"
8. Neil Young - "Cortez the Killer"
7. The Band - "The Weight"
6. Rush - "Tom Sawyer"
5. Bryan Adams - "Summer of '69"
4. Gordon Lightfoot - "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"
3. Neil Young - "The Needle and the Damage Done"
2. Sloan - "Underwhelmed"
1. The Guess Who - "American Woman"
With all due respect, are you and your readers out of your fucking goddamned minds?
Look, Neil Young deserves at least one spot on the list, though three may be too many (especially since you left off Joni Mitchell, among others). And "The Needle and the Damage Done" says something important in a touching way, yes, but it's not better than Cohen's "Hallelujah." And Rush has certainly been a major influence, but "Tom Sawyer" (clever rhymes and all) is not as good as "Hallelujah."
As for the rest of the list, don't make me laugh. I had to look up the lyrics to "Underwhelmed" cause I'd never even heard of it - turns out they're okay but (surprise!) not better than "Hallelujah." Anyway, the music barely matches. The inclusion of "American Woman" and "Summer of '69" on the list very nearly qualifies this run-down as parody. "Those were the best days of my life"? Please.
I understand that this list was compiled by people not on your staff - readers or critics or whoever. But have some pride, for crying out loud. I know your country is cold and gray and filled with boring people and probably moose, and this must be very hard for you. Also, your country only has one vowel, which probably doesn't help with the dull monotony. None of this, however, excuses either the exclusion from your list of the real Canadian greats or the preposterously low placement given to the apex of lyrical musical achievement.
In the future, please enforce some stricter limitations on this poll or else refuse to release the results - the music world, already teetering on the brink, clearly cannot take much more.
Yours truly,
An American who hadn't even heard of you half an hour ago