Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

The Heretical Mind

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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!

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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

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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

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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

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

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One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest

A Myth for Fools and Children

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Like the Overton Window, the Economic Expectations Window is the range of acceptable ideas about economics. Here’s my answer to the question of what I would do about inflation if I had been debating with Trump and Biden:

Folks, these two clowns (and one is more clownish than the other…you be the judge) are not divulging the truth about inflation. Here it is: the best guess by economists about our recent spat of inflation is that it was caused by two factors. First, consumer patterns shifted during COVID and that put demand stress on certain areas of the economy. Money chased after home offices and accessory dwelling units, and it stopped flowing to travel and tourism and eating out. Second, the payments and benefits to people—payments that were needed to head off greater suffering and possibly an economic depression—enhanced the effect. You had more money and lots of time on your hands.

There is no Biden or Trump economy. It’s a myth for fools and children, at least insofar as neither of them does anything dumbly radical (ahem, crazy tariffs).

The primary tool our government uses to manage inflation is the independent Federal Reserve changing certain government interest rates and attempting to slow spending. They have a hard task—a difficult balance—because they don’t want to force the economy into a recession. Raised interest rates ripple out and also impact the affordability of homes and cars. But the president doesn’t control how the Fed sets interest rates. They are independent and for good cause: to avoid creating an economic mess for political reasons like juicing the economy before an election.

There is one other tool that presidents do have a hand in, however, and that is taxes and spending by the government.

… Read the rest

Uncertainty, Murder, and Emergent Free Will

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I’ll jump directly into my main argument without stating more than the basic premise that if determinism holds all our actions cannot be otherwise and there is no “libertarian” free will.

Let’s construct a robot (R) that has a decision-making apparatus (DM), some sensors (S) for collecting impressions about our world, and a memory (M) of all those impressions and past decisions of DM. DM is pretty much an IF-THEN arrangement but has a unique feature. It has subroutines that generate new IF-THENs by taking existing rules and randomly recombining them together with variation. This might be done by simply snipping apart at logical operations (blue AND wings AND small => bluejay at 75% can be pulled apart into “blue AND wings” and “wings AND small” and those two combined with other such rules). This generative subroutine (GS) then scores the novel IF-THENs by comparing them to the recorded history contained in M as well as current sensory impressions and keeps the new rule that scores best or the top few if they score closely. The scoring methodology might include a combination of coverage and fidelity to the impressions and/or recalled action/impressions.

Now this is all quite deterministic. I mentioned randomness but we can produce pseudo-random number generators that are good enough or even rely on a small electronic circuit that amplifies thermodynamic noise to get something “truly” random. But really we could just substitute an algorithm that checks every possible reorganization and scores them all and shelve the randomness component, alleviating any concerns that we are smuggling in randomness for our later construct of free agency.

Now let’s add a rule to DM that when R perceives it has been treated unfairly it might murder the human being who treated it that way.… Read the rest

A Pelican Ate a Lemon and the Kindness Test

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The Pelican State, Louisiana, just passed a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. The posters have a specified size and must be paid for by private donations. The purpose of the law is a blatant attempt to get religion back in public schools but the legal convolutions for trying it out once again are rather interesting, though I don’t think the reasoning will work.

Here’s an NPR interview with Matt Krause of the First Liberty Institute that defends religious liberty cases and supports the new law. He specifically singles out Kennedy v. Bremerton School District as showing a path forward for the Decalogue to reappear on schoolhouse walls. In Kennedy, a football coach would go pray at the 50-yard-line after games. He didn’t gather students with him or utter prayers over a loudspeaker. He just prayed alone. The school district fired him because they were nervous about the separation of church and state and the appearance of endorsement by the school system due to an employee acting religious. SCOTUS, however, used a balancing test between the coach’s First Amendment rights and the school’s desire for non-endorsement and concluded that the school system went too far. Krause thinks that the suspension in Kennedy of a hard delimitation gained from Lemon v. Kurtzman and the adoption of a weaker “history and tradition” standard creates a gap that the Decalogue can sneak through.

I doubt it. The balancing in Kennedy sheds little light on schoolhouse Ten Commandments posters which were ruled against in Stone v. Graham. In Stone, a strict “Lemon test” was applied to the display and it was found to have no secular purpose.… Read the rest