Incredulity as a Moral Failure

Mark Davis4 Comments

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

  1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses.
… Read the rest

Soak in Me

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I am a soaking wet jacaranda that perseveres Gehenna
Discolored and raked by a pure white northerner
Into a ruddied makeup
Under the frisson of a pompadour crown

I am the corruption of Cyrus
Prophesied and anointed in
Crowdsourced babble
For only I am what am
Soak in me

What you want is hiding
Vast elided meanings for your cabin souls
Drop some spare dread in the passed red hat
And I will bring regulatory disgrace to the Opposer
Virtues will melt into the swamp
As we fight like hell

The ancient order was violence
Now we reorder with glossolalia what was cured of force
Disorder these insecure truths
Castrate protruding honors
Disrupt the cantilevered logs
Soak the timbers of souls
Until they slump

You can hear in this echoic mythos
Clanging in this great opposition
You can read into these fictive sanctuaries
That we can enlarge, expand
Greaten and glisten
Though we are giants in the earth now
Here I am
Soaking wet anger… Read the rest

Uncommon Goods

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In the days before Trump’s inauguration we can see some of the reflections of alt-right and conspiratorial ideas crawling ashore from febrile ponds. They range from mildly-incoherent free-wheeling-conspiratorial (Peter Thiel), to narrowly self-serving Libertarian-light (Marc Andreessen), to often contradictory, racist, and cruel (Curtis Yarvin). What should be asked about each is what vision they have of a common good for America and, though they and the MAGA movement are largely focused on our country, how also the larger world might benefit or change as a result of a new form of American engagement with the world. The idea of a common good is an old one that has been brought back into vogue by some social and legal theorists, like the “common good constitutionalist” Adrian Vermuele who I wrote about previously. For Vermuele there is a common good in redistributing land and resources to help the poor as well as in the government restricting and limiting free speech to enforce his concept (informed by his Catholicism) of morality in thought and action.

In radical contrast we have the new MAGA commentariat. There are some fundamental contradictions at the heart of the MAGA braintrust. On the one hand, they see a runaway federal government that hides facts and strong-arms business leaders with threats of regulation and lawsuits. The government and the establishment media and universities support activism by positioning themselves as the fact-sifters and thought leaders. Andreessen complains that educated workers demand too much from his companies. They want environmental and sustainability commitments. They want DEI policies. They want positions on global affairs and worldwide LGBTQ+ rights. It’s annoying to Andreessen and makes entrepreneurship too complicated.… Read the rest

Time, Consciousness, and Joy in 2025

Mark Davis2 Comments

A glorious 2025 comes roaring in despite the nastiness of contemporary American and (some) worldwide politics. Everyone’s angry, despite the ingenious control of murderous pathogens, the brilliant performance of the post-COVID economic recovery in the United States, dropping crime rates, and the continued progress on reducing and eliminating worldwide poverty. But these are aggregate measures of social and scientific success and far too many individuals remain discontented with their own status and fears that social forces beyond their control are limiting their success and happiness.

In this, one must be circumspect: reading out stats that contradict the mood is not reading the room. So, instead, I try to focus on unexpected innovations that lead us to defocus on our own situational context and instead find a larger reimagining. This is a modern therapy that isn’t dismissive of the effectiveness of our highly successful institutions of scientific achievement, peace-preserving world orders, and liberal democracies that effectively balance individual freedoms against order. It’s a celebration of them, instead.

I give you two new joys as the new year starts to build. First, we have the novel realization that dark energy and matter might be better explained by relativistic distortions of space-time in the universe based on the quantities of matter in denser versus void-like areas of space. Here’s Anton Petrov with a primer:

This certainly simplifies things if true, but it needs to be observationally verified and reconsidered if it doesn’t pan out. There’s that underlying joy in science: everything is tentative because we are all flawed.

The second development changes from an external focus on the monumental scale of the universe to something much more human. I’ve previously covered the curious theory of quantum consciousness proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, but there have been some recent developments.… Read the rest

The Heretical Mind

Mark Davis4 Comments

MacKay Coppins at The Atlantic unfavorably reviews the new horror movie, Heretic, with the teaser being “The hollowness at the center of Heretic.” I won’t watch this movie because it sounds dumb, but some of Coppins’s criticisms have a familiar quality to them: disparage the active engagement of scholars and seekers and atheist personalities on the internet. I’ve been a bit disparaging too about some topics, but some of the ideas that she dismisses with a casual disregard are actually quite new and significant, whether relevant to core Christianity or Mormonism.

Coppins starts off, for instance, critiquing the “Reddit-level ideas about religion” and then quotes a Claremont professor about the “neo-Campbellian spiel that distorts Asian religions.” But one of the most interesting achievements of internet atheist personalities is the deep-dive into mythological borrowing and flow of religious ideology that is demonstrably present in all ancient religions. Whether the movie does that justice or not I can’t say, but the internet commentariat has doggedly surfaced all of the scholarship that the pastors and missionaries didn’t know but now have to contend with. This includes the strong Christian mythicist arguments that Jesus was an invented literary figure; it is of course rejected by believer scholars, but it is only rejected more mildly by secular historians who lean into a few phrase and passage claims to counteract it. Of course, that is just a hyper-personal touchpoint for believers and doesn’t have much purchase against all the obvious mythological borrowings like the Great Flood, miraculous acts, and virgin birth.

What we in fact see on the modern atheist internet are very deep collective engagements with both scholarship and common sense that look at topics that undermine almost all of the claims of these religions.… Read the rest

Gamify This Gnashing

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Oh, the great gnashing of teeth! How can so many Americans favor this felon, low-rent authoritarian, swindler, sexual predator, and singularly unfit former president over Kamala Harris? And also push the House and Senate into red dominance? The analyses run the gamut, from late outreach to young men, the effective use of podcasts, ineffective Democratic messaging, a postmodern normalization of sexism and racism, and the lingering impact of inflation captured by the new phrase, “the lived economy,” which is a way of side-stepping actual economic indicators and focusing on individual anecdotes for reading-out unease.

But perhaps the most interesting to me is the suggestion that there are two abstractions that contemporary “conservatives” have recently excelled at (adding in scare quotes to give the RINOs and Never Trumpers a way to gnash their cheeks): aesthetics and archetypes. Brand differentiation and identification is critical for low information voters, and the archetypes and surrounding aesthetics serve as proxies for a vision of who should be a ruler and why. Democrats are too focussed on dry little policy ideas like increasing childcare options or improving housing affordability. The MAGA Republican has Tradwives, podcast bros, and gun gurus.

In 2003 I developed a social media platform called Planktown that I thought radically improved upon the kinds of political discussions, arguments, and trolling that I saw in the comment sections of online newspapers and other platforms. In Planktown, you would create a page for yourself or your party or coalition, etc. and then drag and drop interests and policy points to populate your page. You could link to news stories, other pages, and the whole system would be monetized through advertising and paid subscriptions for pros and campaigns that could get additional analytic tools.… Read the rest

Deep Zombies

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There is a slang nominal form of the word “deepening” for when a person seems to be purposefully adding awe, mystery, and unknowns to their arguments: deepenings. It often arises in discourse on religion and mystical experiences. As a child in the 70s we had Bigfoot, Nessy, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, near-death experiences, and the strange stuff from Velikovsky, von Däniken, and Sitchin. The books and movies built deepenings into communities and businesses just as surely as Catholicism, Mormonism, or Scientology have done. There is a human desire for mystery. But it doesn’t make the mysteries true. But many religious folks hold on to thin threads that point towards mystery as an added data point for justifying their faiths as real, true, valuable, and beautiful.

Given this, I was curious about David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life after Ross Douthat praised it at New York Times. It’s a big book and I’ve just skimmed around a fair bit so far, but there is a repetition of an error (among the extensive repetitions in the volume) concerning the mind-body problem that is also related to arguments from Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution. Specifically, the notion of philosophical zombies is largely irrelevant I think to claiming that subjective experience (“what it’s like…”) is non-material or of a distinct nature from the brain and the nervous system. Given what we know about evolutionary development, I don’t think that we can even conceive of a p-zombie in the way it was originally proposed.

We might try to imagine an evolutionary development of homo sapiens that does not include this subjective experience, but that would not lead to an identical human sans the qualia-experiencer because the developmental trajectory would have to be different, resulting in differing brains.… Read the rest

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Death, Healing, and Language Games

Mark Davis1 Comment

A phone call came in the early afternoon in late August: she was reclined on her day bed and she was dead. She had lain down for a nap and didn’t wake up. In the subsequent weeks there has been a rallying of the families, grief, tremendous effort, flights before dawn, and scripted expressions of condolences. In my youth I had necessarily been a rules deconstructor, going in bare feet to a wedding, challenging expectations, trying to find novel ways to intervene—sometimes boorishly, I’m certain. But now I prize cheerful clarity and just volunteer to do whatever is needed to reach our collective goals. Remember: freedom and coordination.

In moments like this there are somewhat scripted conventions for discussing the hard matters of duties and feelings. These language games have organically arisen from contending forces, from Anglo-American sentimentality to the influence of organized religion, and they serve to facilitate life transitions. And now they have been summarized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that have trained on the masses of written content on the web to the point that they have reliable consistency. An emergency room doctor reports in the New York Times that ChatGPT does a better job than he does at the hard job of best-practices for bedside manner when conveying bad news. He also notes that LLMs are remarkably reliable for refining the scripted discussion of symptoms and medical diagnoses.

So a counter to the “slop economy” at least that provides some guidance for harried professionals trying to do a good job at the delicate threshold of personal pain and fear. The stochastic parroting is suddenly desirable insofar as it is parroting best practices and conventions.… Read the rest

In the Madding Crowd

Mark Davis1 Comment

The travesty of diffusion theory is not that it has displaced overlay theory and source analysis, but that it has been allowed to fertilize a generation of academics and practitioners who liken its inventor and enthusiastic promoter, Suds Beamershiff, to an Einstein of crowd size analytics. Arch and preternaturally adroit in conversation, Beams (as his grad students and lovers call him) turned the narrow and strenuously academic discipline into a distinct ring in the big top (or lower circle, some might say) of contemporary politics with his recent smattering of talk news appearances where he would shake his warm chaos of bangs gelled up above his blond eyebrows as he raised his left index finger to make and hold a point. The camera was as fascinated as the public was and he found himself quickly voted onto the editorial board of Crowd Demography, Science and Philosophy, the preeminent publication for both the practitioner and the cognoscenti. There was scant support for diffusion, but there was genuine new enthusiasm for Beams that even infected the old-schoolers drowning in their musty beards and tweeds. The most obvious comparison to Beams’ rapid rise was the sudden global fascination with Australian Rules Breaking that was shattering expectations about dance, art, and even crowd-sizing issues during street performances in Wollongong and Perth. The Kangaroo Punch Up was gaining mindshare and the masses followed.

All of that overshadows Crowd Analytics 2024 (Crownal 2024) even as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started promoting a competition to ascertain the accuracy of all known methods for analysis, a shoot-out of sorts designed to evaluate the different approaches and enable better depths of crowd insights. The locals ride the Metro to Reston Town Center in their light professionals while the visiting crowd of academics in polos and hoodies bounces from restaurant to bar and then downtown for shadow vacations mashed onto the end of the conference.… Read the rest