Category: Atheism

Doubt at the Limit

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I seem to have a central theme to many of the last posts that is related to the demarcation between science and non-science, and also to the limits of what rationality allows where we care about such limits. This is not purely abstract, though, as we can see in today’s anti-science movements, whether anti-vaccination, flat Earthers, climate change deniers, or intelligent design proponents. Just today, Ars Technica reports on the first of these. The speakers at the event, held in close proximity to a massive measles outbreak, ranged from a “disgraced former gastroenterologist” to an angry rabbi. Efforts to counter them, in the form of a letter from a county supervisor and another rabbi, may have had an impact on the broader community, but probably not the die-hards of the movement.

Meanwhile, Lee Mcyntire at Boston University suggests what we are missing in these engagements in a great piece in Newsweek. Mcyntire applies the same argument to flat Earthers that I have applied to climate change deniers: what we need to reinforce is the value and, importantly, the limits inherent in scientific reasoning. Insisting, for example, that climate change science is 100% squared away just fuels the micro-circuits in the so-called meta-cognitive strategies regions of the brains of climate change deniers. Instead, Mcyntire recommends science engages the public in thinking about the limits of science, showing how doubt and process lead us to useable conclusions about topics that are suddenly fashionably in dispute.

No one knows if this approach is superior to the alternatives like the letter-writing method by authorities in the vaccination seminar approach, and it certainly seems longer term in that it needs to build against entrenched ideas and opinions, but it at least argues for a new methodology.… Read the rest

Causing Incoherence to Exist

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I was continuing discussion on Richard Carrier vs. the Apologists but the format of the blog posting system made a detailed conversation difficult, so I decided to continue here. My core argument is that the premises of Kalam are incoherent. I also think some of the responses are as well.

But what do we mean by incoherent?

Richard interpreted that to mean logically impossible, but my intent was that incoherence is a property of the semantics of the words. Statements are incoherent when they don’t make sense or only make sense with a very narrow and unwarranted reading of the statement. The following argument follows a fairly standard analytic tradition analysis of examining the meaning of statements. I am currently fond of David Lewis’s school of thought on semantics, where the meaning of words exist as a combination of mild referential attachment, coherence within a network of other words, and, importantly, some words within that network achieve what is called “reference magnetism” in that they are tied to reality in significant ways and pull at the meaning of other words.

For instance, consider Premise 1 of a modern take on Kalam:

All things that begin to exist have a cause.

OK, so what does begin to exist mean? And how about cause? Let’s unpack “begin to exist,” first. We might say in our everyday world of people that, say, cars begin to exist at some point. But when is that point? For instance, is it latent in the design for the car? Is it when the body panels are attached on the assembly line? Is it when the final system is capable of car behavior? That is, when all the parts that were in fact designed are fully operational?… Read the rest

Two Points on Penrose, and One On Motivated Reasoning

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Sir Roger Penrose is, without doubt, one of the most interesting polymaths of recent history. Even where I find his ideas fantastical, they are most definitely worth reading and understanding. Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast interview with Penrose from early January of this year is a treat.

I’ve previously discussed the Penrose-Hameroff conjectures concerning wave function collapse and their implication of quantum operations in the micro-tubule structure of the brain. I also used the conjecture in a short story. But the core driver for Penrose’s original conjecture, namely that algorithmic processes can’t explain human consciousness, has always been a claim in search of support. Equally difficult is pushing consciousness into the sphere of quantum phenomena that tend to show random, rather than directed, behavior. Randomness doesn’t clearly relate to the “hard problem” of consciousness that is about the experience of being conscious.

But take the idea that since mathematicians can prove things that are blocked by Gödel incompleteness, our brains must be different from Turing machines or collections of them. Our brains are likely messy and not theorem proving machines per se, despite operating according to logico-causal processes. Indeed, throw in an active analog to biological evolution based on variation-and-retention of ideas and insights that might actually have a bit of pseudo-randomness associated with it, and there is no reason to doubt that we are capable of the kind of system transcendence that Penrose is looking for.

Note that this doesn’t in any way impact the other horn of Penrose-Hameroff concerning the measurement problem in quantum theory, but there is no reason to suspect that quantum collapse is necessary for consciousness. It might flow the other way, though, and Penrose has created the Penrose Institute to look experimentally for evidence about these effects.… Read the rest

Poetics and Humanism for the Solstice

Mark Davis4 Comments

There is, necessarily, an empty center to secular existence. Empty in the sense that there is no absolute answer to the complexities of human life, alone or as part of the great societies that we have created. This opens us to wild, adventurous circuits through pain, meaning, suffering, growth, and love. Religious writers in recent years have had a tendentious tendency to denigrate this fantastic adventure, as Andrew Sullivan does in New York magazine. The worst possible argument is that everything is religion insofar as we believe passionately about its value. It’s wrong if for no other reason than the position of John Gray that Sullivan quotes:

Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Many religious people absolutely disagree with that characterization and demand an entire metaphysical cosmos of spiritual entities and corresponding goals. Abstracting religion to a symbolic labeling system for prediction and explanation robs religion, as well as reason, art, emotion, conversation, and logic, of any independent meaning at all. So Sullivan and Gray are so catholic in their semantics that the words can be replanted to justify almost anything. Moreover, the subsequent claim about religion existing because of our awareness of our own mortality is not borne out by the range of concepts that are properly considered religious.

In social change Sullivan sees a grasping towards redemption, whether in the Marxist-idolatrous left or the covertly idolatrous right, but a more careful reading of history proves Sullivan wrong on the surface, at least, if not in the deeper prescription. For instance, it is not faith in progress that has been part of the liberal social experiment since the Enlightenment, but a grasping towards actual reasons and justifications for what is desired and how to achieve it.… Read the rest

Indifference and the Cosmos

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I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

The Universal Roots of Fantasyland

Mark Davis1 Comment

Intellectual history and cultural criticism always teeters on the brink of totalism. So it was when Christopher Hitchens was forced to defend the hyperbolic subtitle of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The complaint was always the same: everything, really? Or when Neil Postman downplayed the early tremors of the internet in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death. Email couldn’t be anything more than another movement towards entertainment and celebrity. So it is no surprise that Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Wrong: A 500-Year History is open to similar charges.

Andersen’s thesis is easily digestible: we built a country on fantasies. From the earliest charismatic stirrings of the Puritans to the patent medicines of the 19th century, through to the counterculture of the 1960s, and now with an incoherent insult comedian and showman as president, America has thrived on inventing wild, fantastical narratives that coalesce into movements. Andersen’s detailed analysis is breathtaking as he pulls together everything from linguistic drift to the psychology of magical thinking to justify his thesis.

Yet his thesis might be too narrow. It is not a uniquely American phenomenon. When Andersen mentions cosplay, he fails to identify its Japanese contributions, including the word itself. In the California Gold Rush, he sees economic fantasies driving a generation to unmoor themselves from their merely average lives. Yet the conquistadores had sought to enrich themselves, God, and country while Americans were forming their shining cities on hills. And in mid-19th-century Europe, while the Americans panned in the Sierra, romanticism was throwing off the oppressive yoke of Enlightenment rationality as the West became increasingly exposed to enigmatic Asian cultures. By the 20th century, Weimar Berlin was a hotbed of cultural fantasies that dovetailed with the rise of Nazism and a fantastical theory of race, German volk culture, and Indo-European mysticism.… Read the rest

Simulator Superputz

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The simulation hypothesis is perhaps a bit more interesting than how to add clusters of neural network nodes to do a simple reference resolution task, but it is also less testable. This is the nature of big questions since they would otherwise have been resolved by now. Nevertheless, some theory and experimental analysis has been undertaken for the question of whether or not we are living in a simulation, all based on an assumption that the strangeness of quantum and relativistic realities might be a result of limited computing power in the grand simulator machine. For instance, in a virtual reality game, only the walls that you, as a player, can see need to be calculated and rendered. The other walls that are out of sight exist only as a virtual map in the computer’s memory or persisted to longer-term storage. Likewise, the behavior of virtual microscopic phenomena need not be calculated insofar as the macroscopic results can be rendered, like the fire patterns in a virtual torch.

So one way of explaining physics conundrums like delayed choice quantum erasers, Bell’s inequality, or ER = EPR might be to claim that these sorts of phenomena are the results of a low-fidelity simulation necessitated by the limits of the simulator computer. I think the likelihood that this is true is low, however, because we can imagine that there exists an infinitely large cosmos that merely includes our universe simulation as a mote within it. Low-fidelity simulation constraints might give experimental guidance, but the results could also be supported by just living with the indeterminacy and non-locality as fundamental features of our universe.

It’s worth considering, however, what we should think about the nature of the simulator given this potentially devious (and poorly coded) little Matrix that we find ourselves trapped in?… Read the rest

Bright Sarcasm in the Classroom

Mark Davis1 Comment

When a Pew research poll discovered a shocking divide between self-identifying Republicans/GOP-leaning Independents and their Democratic Party opposites on the question of the value of higher education, the commentariat went apeshit. Here’s a brief rundown of sources, left, center, and right, and what they decided are the key issues:

  • National Review: Higher education has eroded the Western canon and turned into a devious plot to rob our children of good thinking, spiked with avocado toast.
  • Paul Krugman at New York Times: Conservative tribal identification leads to opposition to climate change science or evolution, and further towards a “grim” anti-intellectualism.
  • New Republic: There is no evidence that college kid’s political views are changed by higher education and, also, that conservative-minded professors aren’t much maltreated on campus either, so the conservative complaints are just overblown anti-liberal hype that, they point out, has some very negative consequences.

I would make a slightly more radical claim than Krugman, for instance, and one that is pointedly opposed to Simonson at National Review. In higher education we see not just a dedication to science but an active program of criticizing and deconstructing ideas like the Western canon as central to higher thought. In history, great man theories have been broken down into smart and salient compartments that explore the many ways in which groups and individuals, genders and ideas, all were part of fashioning the present. These changes, largely late 20th century academic inventions, have broken up the monopolies on how concepts of law, order, governance, and the worth of people were once formulated. This must be anti-conservative in the pure sense that there is little to be conserved from older ideas, except as objects of critique.… Read the rest

Traitorous Reason, Facts, and Analysis

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dinoObama’s post-election press conference was notable for its continued demonstration of adult discourse and values. Especially notable:

This office is bigger than any one person and that’s why ensuring a smooth transition is so important. It’s not something that the constitution explicitly requires but it is one of those norms that are vital to a functioning democracy, similar to norms of civility and tolerance and a commitment to reason and facts and analysis.

But ideology in American politics (and elsewhere) has the traitorous habit of undermining every one of those norms. It always begins with undermining the facts in pursuit of manipulation. Just before the election, the wizardly Aron Ra took to YouTube to review VP-elect Mike Pence’s bizarre grandstanding in Congress in 2002:

And just today, Trump lashed out at the cast of Hamilton for lecturing Mike Pence on his anti-LGBTQ stands, also related to ideology and belief, at the end of a show.

Astonishing as this seems, we live in an imperfect world being drawn very slowly away from tribal and xenophobic tendencies, and in fits and starts. My wife received a copy of letter from now-deceased family that contained an editorial from the Shreveport Journal in the 1960s that (with its embedded The Worker editorial review) simultaneously attacked segregationist violence, the rhetoric of Alabama governor George Wallace, claimed that communists were influencing John F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement, demanded the jailing of communists, and suggested the federal government should take over Alabama:

editorial-shreveport-60s-m

The accompanying letter was also concerned over the fate of children raised as Unitarians, amazingly enough, and how they could possibly be moral people. It then concluded with a recommendation to vote for Goldwater.… Read the rest

Quantum Field Is-Oughts

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teleologySean Carroll’s Oxford lecture on Poetic Naturalism is worth watching (below). In many ways it just reiterates several common themes. First, it reinforces the is-ought barrier between values and observations about the natural world. It does so with particular depth, though, by identifying how coarse-grained theories at different levels of explanation can be equally compatible with quantum field theory. Second, and related, he shows how entropy is an emergent property of atomic theory and the interactions of quantum fields (that we think of as particles much of the time) and, importantly, that we can project the same notion of boundary conditions that result in entropy into the future resulting in a kind of effective teleology. That is, there can be some boundary conditions for the evolution of large-scale particle systems that form into configurations that we can label purposeful or purposeful-like. I still like the term “teleonomy” to describe this alternative notion, but the language largely doesn’t matter except as an educational and distinguishing tool against the semantic embeddings of old scholastic monks.

Finally, the poetry aspect resolves in value theories of the world. Many are compatible with descriptive theories, and our resolution of them is through opinion, reason, communications, and, yes, violence and war. There is no monopoly of policy theories, religious claims, or idealizations that hold sway. Instead we have interests and collective movements, and the above, all working together to define our moral frontiers.

 … Read the rest