Quine's Queue

Non Rapture

2011-05-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

Check out the video that TheThinkingAtheist just put up on YouTube. TheThinkingAtheist does a good production job on his videos and there are several that I like. At the same time this whole End of World (EoW) episode bothers me on the big picture level. I am very sorry for the people who got scammed. I am sorry about the bad things that unstable people have done because of this, and are likely to do in the next few days when it completely sinks in. But what I am really sorry about is the way societies all over the world give nonsense a pass so things like this will keep happening.

Is this a teaching moment? Is it time to get people all around to look at the origins of religious texts and come to understand that they are just what normally happens when the old oral traditions of long gone tribes get written down, and then changed through generations of copying and translating? These old stories may have some moral value to some people, but are not sources of future prediction.

So, does science v. religion in the classroom matter? Look at this case. The EoW prediction was worked out from the date of Noah. Even if you take the crazy "worked out" on faith, science shows that the story of Noah and The Flood could not have actually happened. This is not in the same epistemological class as trying to prove that someone's pet deity does not exist, this is about on the ground (and in the ground) facts and evidence. If you are properly educated about the science, you automatically know that someone coming along with a prediction based on what is demonstrably not true, is almost certainly working a big scam.

What can we do? We can publisize the known tendency for EoW scams to keep popping up and try to get people to remember it can be as bad as Jonestown. We can publicize where the religious texts come from and show the flaws in claims of divine guidance. Don't give Bible or Koran quotes a pass, make the user produce evidence. How can we stop from being fooled again? TheThinkingAtheist would surely agree: we get people to THINK!

The reliable knowledge of evolution from imperfect human brains.

2010-10-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

There has been an interesting thread over at First Things and I have submitted the following to it:

This is a nice long thread, and much of what I would have put in has been covered by others. I would definitely have brought in Feynman's talk about science as a method to prevent us from fooling ourselves.

Joe writes:

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy,” wrote Charles Darwin. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Note that the above says "a monkey's mind" not a whole society of minds with a tradition of thousands of years of passing knowledge (true and not so true) through symbolic representation outside the genetic inheritance. The extent to which natural selection promotes that ability has yet to be studied.

Joe continues:

Although Darwin admits he wasn’t much of an abstract thinker, he could not shake the “inward conviction” that “the Universe is not the result of chance.” Unlike many who followed after him, he appears to have intuitively understood the paradox of combining naturalism with evolutionary theory: If evolution is a non-teleological process, it undercuts our ability to trust that we can form true beliefs and convictions.

First, what evidence do you have as to Darwin's "inward conviction"? Next, if Darwin's inward conviction were as you say, so what? Remember, he did not publish that and ask for peer review. What Darwin was right or wrong about in his time is not a bound on what we know is true or false, today.

As for the idea that a non-teleological process somehow cannot produce "reliable equipment" again, based on what evidence? Others have approached this above, I will just note that simulations of non-teleological evolution can, and do, produce control systems and nothing in theory prevents reliable equipment from being achieved out of ensembles of such; and evolution does ensembles a plenty.

Continuing with Joe:

To have trustworthy convictions, we have to have properly functioning noetic equipment (i.e., a brain, spinal cord, sensory apparatus, etc., that recognize reality). But can a strictly materialistic, non-teleological, evolutionary process produce such reliable equipment? The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, one of the greatest thinkers of our era, thinks the answer is “no.” Although his argument is too complex and tightly argued to be adequately summarized, the basic outline of his case shows his point to be all but incontrovertible.

No, no, a thousand times no. You do not get to tell us we must accept an explanation that is too complex for you to tell us.

Onward:

Plantinga claims, not that evolution is untrue, but that the truth of evolution is incompatible with the truth of naturalism. “As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go,” he argues. “Hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life.”

What does imply that life is not directed, he adds, is not evolutionary theory itself, but the theory of unguided evolution: the idea that “neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing, or orchestrating the course of evolution.” For our purposes, we’ll call this view “evolutionary naturalism.”

No, what we see in the scientific evidence is that there is neither an indication nor a need for direction. It would not be possible to rule out direction that leaves no evidence of its action. We can't show evolution was not directed by Leprechauns or anything else that leaves no evidence.

Back to Joe:

Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage. Unguided evolution does not select for belief except insofar as the belief improves the chances of survival. The truth of a belief is irrelevant, as long as it produces an evolutionary advantage. This equipment could have developed at least four different kinds of belief that are compatible with evolutionary naturalism, none of which necessarily produce true and trustworthy cognitive faculties.

Again, this kind of look at evolution is about the maps of the outside world that naturally form in the brains of individuals, and puts no necessary constraints on the development of knowledge that is formed and passed on in culture, especially the culture after the development of the scientific method. As others have said, the scientific method is all about getting reliable knowledge from the work of imperfect humans.

Joe says:

Take Zed, a prehistoric caveman. Zed is the first to cross the line over tohomo sapien (his parents are very proud) and is the first to develop functioning noetic equipment that is the equivalent of our own. His equipment could produce four types of beliefs.

It is very important to understand that there was no "first homo sapien" we only see these changes looking back over long time periods at the characteristics of the study groups. It is like the Sorites question in philosophy of the exact grain of sand that turns a pile into a dune. In the history of human evolution every next generation looked and acted exactly like their parents. The process works over long time periods through the changing distribution of gene frequencies in a breeding population, which is difficult to see happening at any given point.

I am going to skip over the discussion of "Zed" because the issue of the validity of the beliefs of any given individual is not a restriction on the collective knowledge.

Back to Joe:

If, as evolutionary naturalism claims, our noetic equipment might have developed in different ways, then a belief in evolutionary naturalism itself could be any of the four types of belief listed above. What is the likelihood that evolutionary naturalism has produced in us cognitive equipment able to reliably form true beliefs and know that they are true? Extremely low. Even then, we could never truly know that we knew the truth, because we would know our belief might merely be the most advantageous to us.

No, because Zed did not come up with evolutionary naturalism by himself with only himself to talk to.

Finally:

In order to accept the naturalistic evolutionary explanation for the development of our noetic equipment we have to be agnostic about its reliability. All we would really know is that it works for evolutionary purposes, not for the purposes of discerning truth from falsehood. Evolutionary naturalism, it turns out, is a self-defeating argument. If we believe the theory, we have no reason to believe the theory is true.

Yes, without education (i.e. with only the info in the genes we get from evolution) we really need to be skeptical about our own thinking powers. Thankfully, we have education, and the scientific method has provided us with vastly more reliable knowledge that any one person could ever learn. Just as reliable knowledge produces aircraft we trust to get us from coast to coast, the evidence for evolution is reliable and overwhelming. As for direction, there is no indication, so far, of any kind.

Believe It or Not @ First Things

2010-04-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

David B. Hart posted an article titled Believe It or Not at a religious blog called First Things. It was picked up at RD.net where I saw it and began commenting at both places. From the number of comments (309 at last count) this article has brought them more traffic than they have ever known. I decided to copy my FT comments here where I can keep track of them for later work. Over on RD.net, I wrote that the piece looked like The Courtier's Reply run through the MoPo generator.

4.22.2010 | 1:52pm Quine says:

Wake up, Mr. Hart! You are not living back in the day of Aquinas, now is well into the post Darwin. The old world was a mystery that seemed to run by divine magic. Then, it was the burden of any who challenged the gods to show otherwise. But now, the balance has flipped. We now know the natural history of the world and that people are a natural product of that history. That is why we need no longer try to disprove the supernatural; the weight is on you to prove it.

Got evidence?

4.22.2010 | 5:28pm Quine says:

@ Porphyry & VG,

If you can show we are wrong, do so. Else, drop the name calling ad hominum.

Got evidence?

4.23.2010 | 3:15pm Quine says:

GFA:What you don't get is that quantum vacuum may or may not exist because it is a thing, i.e. a being ("ens").
Got evidence that the quantum vacuum is a "thing"? I do not recognize that as a falsifiable proposition. Can you construct an experiment in which the quantum vacuum does not have the property of existence? How would you show that?

Those who would like to see a great presentation of a more realistic theory of nothing should watch Lawrence Krauss in this video:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4490

4.23.2010 | 3:22pm Quine says:

Ye Olde Statistician, have you ever felt the urge to sacrifice a goat to Existence Itself? (Of course, other than just eating one because you were hungry and wanted to continue to exist.)

4.23.2010 | 3:36pm Quine says:

Correction to my 3:15 comment: the quote should have been from Carlo, not CFA.

Sorry.

4.23.2010 | 6:04pm Quine says:

Hi Carlo,

You seem to misunderstand one of the most basic things about the scientific method. The method gives us a reliable way of showing that a falsifiable proposition holds up to testing. Nowhere does it say that all true propositions can be thus shown. In fact, all the future science that is going to be shown to be true is not at this time shown to be true, but that does not make it false. You could have a 50/50 test question and flip a coin resulting in a true answer. Truth can come by other means, but the problem is that we won't necessarily know it is the truth. The scientific method has no claim of exclusivity on this, but it is what we can use to get results.

Also remember that the method is most effective in cutting away what is wrong. No amount of further testing is going to show that the Earth is the center of the solar system. No amount of further testing is going to restore Newtonian gravity after Einstein. Now DNA testing of complex animals closes the door on questions of ancestry.

If you are going to propose that the quantum vacuum is a thing that could be absent somewhere while still having a "somewhere" you are going to have to tell us how we could check this, for us to take it any more seriously than anything else that could be true but we can't know (such as Russell's Teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot).

4.24.2010 | 3:16pm Quine says:

Carlo said:

Since you clearly think that rationality coincides with the scientific method, and I think that to be absurd, I propose that we can just leave it there.

I am sorry if you misunderstood me as I don't consider that "rationality coincides with the scientific method" but rather that the method is a proper subset of rationality (epistemology, specifically). As a scientist, I am sure you have read Popper and Kuhn on this.

4.24.2010 | 3:28pm Quine says:

James said:

Statistician said:

"A cause must have something in it of the effect, either formally or eminently."

This highly jargonized and archaic conception of causality has no connection to how the world actually works. Therefore, it cannot do the work you want it too. Nice try though!

Thanks, James, you got there first. I was going to run him around trying to justify this in explaining the observer effect in the famous double-slit experiment, or particle decay, or quantum entanglement, or worked backward through the problem of turbulence. Oh well, perhaps I will go do something constructive, instead.

4.24.2010 | 9:16pm Quine says:

Hi Carlo,

Richard Feynman famously described science as a way to keep from fooling ourselves. That is why we take our questions to that subset. I agree that truth can be found outside that bound, but also, we may be fooling ourselves. Also, I admit that you have to grant to others their right to undecidable opinions. However, we must draw the line at facts, and reject speculation that is inconsistent with known facts.

Cheers

4.25.2010 | 3:08am Quine says:

Ye Olde Statistician says:

... One consequence of these virtual pairs that are produced and annihilated immediately is the evaporation of energy from black holes predicted by Steve Hawking. That is, he predicted that black holes are not really black but gray. That is they lose energy. **Thus one can check, in principle, for radiation loss by black holes. If one can show that black holes don’t lose energy, the vacuum energy is falsified.**

Thanks to your friend. Yes, Bekenstein-Hawking radiation is predicted by theory and may be observed at some point in the future. If a black hole is found that does not radiate, then we would have data to use to go back and check the theory. That might mean that something is happening with quantum gravity (not understood at this time) such that the expected separation of virtual particle pairs by the extreme curvature is not enough. We see effects of the virtual particles everywhere else, so observation of no black hole radiation would not cause us to suspect the pairs are not being made as our first possible explanation (special case). Remember, I asked you for a place with nothing, and a black hole is somewhere with plenty of something. Anyway, thanks for thinking about it.

Ye Olde Statistician says:

Quine says:
"As a scientist, I am sure you have read Popper and Kuhn on this."
Are you claiming to be a scientist, or is that just a dangling participle?

That was from a reply to Carlo, who claimed to be a scientist.

Ye Olde Statistician says:

Don't know what any of those examples have to do with the concept that "causes must have something in them of the effect." The usual confusion is that this means the effect must be in the cause formally, that is, in the exact same form. That is why the distinction was made between formal and eminent causality.

I see that as a re-cloaking of the old causal chain arguments, however, it does not add any new strength. Also, you get the problem of generalizing. Showing any number of examples of "something in them of the effect" does not invoke an induction to all examples, which is what you need in order to get it to apply to an unseen cause. That is why counter examples on the quantum level (it only takes one, and there will be plenty) break the generalization and sink the rest of your argument.

4.26.2010 | 12:10am Quine says:

Frederick Greer said:

@ Quine

You may think there are counter-examples at the quantum level, but of course there are not. And all good philosophers of science today would seem to disagree with you. In fact, as far as the philosophy of science goes, quite a lot of very competent thinkers would argue that the evidences of modern physics point towards a stronger case for a modified Aristotelian view of cause.

Frederick, if you go back and read the thread you will see that my comment was about a property that Ye Olde Statistician was trying to work backwards through all effects to all causes, not cause and effect itself. He used that in the first step of an argument, and I am asking him to show that his statement is true over all effects, which I wait for him to do.

Frederick Greer said:

The only physicist I know competent to discourse in real depth on quantum issues tells me that the behavior of the quantum realm long ago forced him to abandon philosophical materialism, and to give up his cherished atheism, and to embrace a kind of "contentless theism."

I kind of like that second-hand anecdote because it exemplifies what I call "Homeopathic Theology" in which traditional concepts of deities are watered down to avoid the inconsistencies when they collide with the ever increasing body of facts discovered through science. The idea is that this avoidance makes them stronger as they are watered to, essentially, nothing. Since it does look like nothing may have exploded into everything, I can also go with believing all deities are, literally, diluted to nothing.

If you want any content, i.e. properties assigned to your deities, you need more than the wonder that there is anything rather than nothing.

Got evidence?

4.26.2010 | 12:55pm Quine says:

Stephen Kennamer, thanks for that truly excellent comment.

Here it is:

Stephen Kennamer says:
All right, here's what Hart gets right: Nietzsche and Hume did the job so well that there is really nothing for Dawkins and Hitchens to add. But I might also say that Augustine and John Calvin did the job so well that there is nothing for Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Kung to add. Nonetheless, Christian apologists go on writing, and sometimes their writing sinks to the level of Robertson and Falwell and Hagee.

The New Atheists are popular journalists and their efforts resemble that of the late 19th century's Robert Ingersoll rather than Nietzsche. Their writings do not add to his, either: he concentrated, as they also often do, on the elementary contradictions that can be found in the Bible by any ordinary reader.

So why are they repeating such stale news? Because over 350 years of knockdown arguments against theism have failed to knock it down. You can't say that Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche finished the job and eradicated what Voltaire called "the infamy." Hart can't argue that there is no need for these books: he can't say that superstitious religion--the rotgut kind, the kind that sees God's hand in every human event and hates gays--has been wiped out.

Everyone but Hart seems to understand that the New Atheists have been galvanized by seeing fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity not only grow exponentially in numbers and influence in the world's one remaining superpower, but essentially take over its government for eight years, there to make war on science as well as on other countries. Yes, it's true, the New Atheists do not engage with Karen Armstrong's impalpable god of the educated mystics of the Middle Ages--a god whose existence is so compatible with his non-existence that nothing is at stake either way. They engage with the god of Robertson and Falwell. Hart probably abhors that god as much as the New Atheists do--I hope he does--but he would rather purge the intellectual commonwealth of everyone who fails read Thomas Aquinas from cover to cover than oppose the people who would burn Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche at the stake if they had their druthers.

While he is accusing the New Atheists of missing the point of highly sophisticated arguments for the existence of God, he seems to miss the point of a really simple argument: if there is no compelling evidence for the belief in question, the skeptic is not really required to entertain the belief and take up the billions of pages of subtle exegesis. Perhaps Dawkins goes too far in arguing that he can prove the non-existence of god, but that does not acquit Hart of setting him up as a straw man. Most atheists are content with a much more modest assertion: "I do not say that unicorns do not exist; I say that you have not given me any reason to believe that they exist." The burden is on the believer. I don't have to read Aquinas's Summa Unicornicus until you give me something better than "He will prove that unicorns, although invisible, non-physical, and undetectable, exist ontologically and necessarily because a contingent unicorn is paradoxical." When Hart's "god" turns out to be merely the spiritual plenitude out of which something rather than nothing sprang into being, the intelligent atheist merely shrugs: a god that transcendent is impossible to disprove, but the existence of he, she, or it leaves earthly matters standing precisely as they stood before. It is only when Hart's god takes an interest in us, loves us, chastises us, and takes human form and dies for us because somehow our original sin required the blood sacrifice of our Maker or the Maker's son, that the atheist is presented with anything relevant to human life; and now the atheist can choose from a thousand arguments in refutation, drawn from philology, history, science, and even religious studies. We simply know too much about anthropology, comparative religion, and how the Bible came to be written and then sacralized. Freud was wrong about almost everything he said about everything, excepting only his observation that monotheism with its eternal life is an infantile wish-fulfillment. He could get this one thing right because it is obvious to any genuinely educated person; in fact, Feuerbach got it right almost a century earlier.

The New Atheists are topical polemicists. They do not argue at Hart's level because it has already been done. They rail against the current state of affairs because it does not seem to matter that it has already been done, and it clearly needs doing again. They don't refute Aquinas, but neither does Hart rehabilitate Aquinas; and if he did, there would still be no evidence for the god of American fundamentalists. The crimes committed in the name of religion are convulsing the globe; meanwhile, Hart's argument that atheists have not proved the non-existence of the not-exactly-existing god leave things just where they are.

4.27.2010 | 5:05pm Quine says:

Let's see if we can get some clarity on the philosophy v. politics of Atheism. I will start with the political aspects of the so called "New Atheists." Yes, there is a political component. This got started with the attempts of religious people to keep the teaching of Evolution out of schools. That was one instance of the general problem of the political power of the religious to inflect their superstitions upon the rest of us. We, who reject these superstitions, don't get burnt at the stake so much, anymore, but may be beheaded in Islamic countries. This part of the political struggle continues, and perhaps, we will see the day in the USA when a candidate does not have to pretend to be religious in order to stand a chance of being elected to a major public office.

Now on the philosophy; there is none. Atheism is the acceptance of neither Theism nor Deism. No atheistic arguments are needed, those who want to establish the existence of the supernatural have the burden to produce objectively observable evidence. No amount of speculation counts, nor does the fact that anything exists, at all, because else is nil. True, some philosophers will take time to show the unsubstantiated premises upon which the religious build their castles in the sky, or point out the folly of watering down the common deities until they are de minimis, but why keep doing that when their side is holding nothing?

Got evidence?

4.27.2010 | 7:21pm Quine says:

Adam Tanner said:

... He is saying that, whereas the best atheist writers once knew all about philosophy, history, religious thought, and so on and were able to produce morally and intellectually profound works, the New Atheists have turned out to be a squad of uniformed, unreflective, strident, boring clowns.

I agree with you; that is what he is saying. Now, here is why I don't agree that he has foundation for that. If you wanted to get from Rome to Alexandria you could hop in a little sailing boat and, if you had the skill, sail across the Mediterranean Sea as was done back in old times, or you could hop on a jet and fly there. Perhaps you might meet with protesters holding signs saying that you had no right to do so because you don't know how to sail a boat.

The old philosophers had the intellectual tools of the time to work with. Yes, they did very well with those tools, and we still quote the likes of Epicurus today. Through time past Hume, they provided reason, but were consistently met with the age old argument form ignorance, i.e. "We don't know the cause of X, therefore it is supernatural." However, as time went on, we came to know the natural cause of more and more phenomena, thus narrowing the application of this ignorance. Today the argument is backed up to the origin of the Big Bang, and is coupled with the burden of proof fallacy to form the ID group's favorite, Irrefutable Perplexity, or "What I say is right because you can't show it is wrong, and what you say is wrong because I can't see how it could be right."

Hume came before Darwin, or Watson and Crick, or the biological proof that all our memories are chemicals that go away when our brains decay, or the work of V. S. Ramachandran showing that some people with temporal lobe epilepsy spontaneously start seeing supernatural beings and write down "scripture." So many things that could not be explained in the days of the "old philosophers" can be skipped over, today. Is there any real reason for Dan Dennett, or anyone else, to get in the little sail boat (although Dan does sail, himself, for fun) to cross the modern gulf of reason?

Finally, as to your assertion that Dennett does not understand Hume:

Got evidence?

5.17.2010 | 8:22pm Quine says:

At least we are getting closer to on-topic. David B. Hart in the article says:

[    The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty.]

Let us look at some of what Victor Stenger (Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado) has written in his "Godless Cosmology" piece in the book in question; specifically, after discussing why the Big Bang need not necessarily have a starting point or time he writes:

[    But even if we grant that the universe had a beginning, this does not imply that it had a cause. D'Souza refers to me: "Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be 'uncaused' and may have 'emerged from nothing.'" He scoffs: "Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous...Hume wrote in 1754, 'I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might rise without cause.'"
    Hume can be excused for not knowing quantum physics in 1754, but D'Souza and Craig cannot today, more than a century since its discovery. They are wrong in their assertion that everything that begins must have a cause. According to conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, nothing, "causes" the atomic transitions that produce light or the nuclear decays that produce nuclear radiation. These happen spontaneously and only their probabilities are determined.
    In 1983 Hawking and James Hartle produced a model for the natural origin of our universe that today remains fully consistent with all we know from physics and cosmology. This is just one of a number of natural scenarios that have been published by reputable scientists in reputable scientific journals. In one variation of the Hartle-Hawking model, following the review by David Atkatz, our universe appeared by a process of quantum tunneling from an earlier universe that extended back into our past without limit. That tunneling passes through a region of total chaos. I have worked out this model in full mathematical detail and published it in both a book and an article in a philosophical journal.
    All the published scenarios for a natural origin of our universe are consistent with existing knowledge. However, none has been proven unique. So, while we cannot say this is exactly how our universe came to be, the fact that we have several completely worked out scenarios refutes any claim that a supernatural cause was required to produce the universe.]

The most important phrase in the above is "was required" in the last sentence. In the time of Aquinas the requirement for a deity was squeezed out of what they did not know as alternatives. So often we see supernaturalists make this kind of Sherlock Holmes fallacy where they think they have shown that we must turn to the supernatural because no other 'possibility' exists when it is their own incomplete knowledge of the possible that is the true problem.

From the straw-man style you have seen mocked in some recent comments, you might expect me to write "therefore, no supernatural" but no, all the arguments do not conclude "no deities" but rather, "no evidence for deities," and therefore, no reason to lift them above mythology.

[note: Victor Stenger posted the mathematics for the above quote here http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Origin.pdf ]
----------------------------------------

5.18.2010 | 2:20am

Quine says:

Along the lines of the subject just mentioned by Papalinton, A. C. Grayling (Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford) wrote (in his essay "Why I am Not a Believer" for the book reviewed here by David B. Hart):

[In its focal and standard sense, religion not only denotes a metaphysical commitment to the existence of something non-natural in, or somehow outside but connected to, the universe, but further that this something's relation to the universe is in some way significant - centrally, by being some or all of the universe's creator, ruler, and moral instructor. The meaning of these remarks is of course only notional - as with a lot of theological and religious discourse, it is hard to attach a literal sense to what is claimed, which votaries defend by appealing to the ineffability of religious "truths" and the finitude of our minds in comparison - but they vaguely indicate what religious people claim to believe.

One has to say something along the foregoing lines when discussing religion because religious apologists are inverterately apt to defend against criticism or refutation by saying, "That is not what I mean by religion," and "I don't recognize that caricature of what I believe." Part of the sleight of hand at work here becomes obvious when one notes the great difference between what ordinary votaries of a religion believe and what their theologians and high priests say. For example: the ordinary churchgoing Christian has a more or less vague conception of a some what human-like, only grander, being or beings - God the "father," Jesus, Mary, the "Holy Ghost." saints and angels, and so forth - and they believe, or think they believe, in some literally true (though literally meaningless or contradictory) propositions about them such as that God became man, was born of a virgin, was killed but after a couple of days came back to life, and then "rose into heaven" - some aspect of a physical increase of altitude from the surface of the Earth residually involved - whereas if you speak to a theologian, you will find that, in the complexified and polysyllabic rarifications of his craft, at least not all these things are to be taken literally, but have metaphorical or mystical interpretations, though the grounds on which bits of the story are to be cherry-picked for literal truth and which are to be treated as metaphor are moot.]

5.18.2010 | 8:50pm

Quine says:

David B. Hart also (as I quoted above) touched upon the question of "something" v. "nothing." Picking up from my previous posts, we now know that not every action need have a cause, so that whole argument does not get started, and that there may or may not have been a start of time itself, so necessity arguments based on either side of that don't get going, either. Now, what about "something" from "nothing"? As so often, it depends on what you mean by "nothing." In our ordinary lives we might look at items on top of a table and easily understand that if items are removed, one by one, we will at some point reach "nothing on the table." That is our basic idea in the world of objects and as we grow past very early childhood we come to understand that a object that falls off the table still exists, and (after we get over Santa) that new toys will not materialize under a tree without some agency.

Of course, when you actually take all the items off the table, there still is air on the table, and photons bouncing off the table and entering your eye, and a vast number of cosmic particles traveling through the space on (and through) the table, and (as we discussed above) a vast number of virtual particles coming and going in and out of existence, also in that space on the table. There simply isn't anywhere where we have evidence of the simple idea of "nothing" and we can't establish that such is even possible. All that physics we ignore while looking at an "empty" table starts to matter when you run the clock backwards and try to construct falsifiable theories re the very early time (perhaps start) of everything. In a post above, I give the link to a presentation by Lawrence Krauss that includes computer generated visualizations from calculations of the "nothing" inside the proton (here is the direct YouTube link for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo ).

On thing we try to avoid in our lives (most of us) is having "nothing in the bank" or no money. But it can be worse, we can have less than nothing i.e. debt, or negative money in the bank. Thus you might know someone who owns substantial property and think he or she is quite wealthy, but not know that it is all borrowed and therefore his or her net worth is nothing. Many physicists believe that that is what we see here in a cosmos where the negative energy is in balance with the positive mass. Thus nothing had to exist "before" because the "net worth" of everything needn't be anything.

As in the other cases, you might object that what physicists say "may be true" doesn't prove anything, but the important thing is that it shoots down the kinds of arguments for the supernatural that are based on "we can't think of anything else."

Visualizing Evolutional Change

2010-01-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

Many people have a hard time visualizing the change that happens to species over the long time spans of Evolution and this problem tends to hinder understanding. I am often asked when was the first of a new species born, as a kind of chicken-or-the-egg dilemma. In reality, the offspring of any species are always almost identical to their parents and you cannot find the defining "new" generation just as you cannot find the grain of sand that, when added to a pile, makes it into a dune (see Sorites Paradox).

To try to help with the visualization, I have been asking people to think of it in terms of the kind of change we see when watching our children grow up. There are some simplifications involved, and it is a limited analogy, but useful none the less. It goes like this: in the 20 years you watch your child grow from birth to being ready to start the next generation, you know he or she is constantly changing over this 20 x 365.25 x 24 x 60 = 10,519,200 minutes, but it is hard to see it over any short interval.

We know from the fossil record and DNA analysis that we, humans, had a common ancestors with Chimpanzees about 6 million years ago. If we take an average 20 year generation time (was probably less), that gives us 6 million divided by 20 or 300,000 generations. If we divide the number of minutes of child development, above, by the number of generations we get that each generation represents a step analogous to about 35 minutes. Yes, I know the change is not exactly smooth in either case, but on average the change you would expect to see in any generation is about how much you see your child grow in 35 minutes.

Of course the kind of change is not the same, but the total change in species can be argued to be less than the change in an individual from birth to adulthood. The point of the thought experiment is that, in general, Evolution does not need changes big enough for you to see them from one generation to the next in order to accumulate big changes over the time it uses.

World Press on Atheist Bus

2009-01-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, I am interested in how the world press follows the Atheist Bus ads in London and elsewhere. I am going to post links here and invite folks to discuss these articles, but in the cases where the article has its own comment section, and especially when it is from a bat shit crazy religious publication, I suggest you also post there.
----------------------

Should Evidence be the Same

Public Show Support

New Slogan for Italian Bus

Driving a bus through belief?

The Bishop of Bath and Wells has attacked an atheist advertising ...
(Looks a bit Bath and Wellsish to me.)

Atheist bus signs rile British Christians ...

This bus stop brought to you by prohibitionists ...

Live without Brian

2009-01-12T02:05:00.000-08:00

We are having some trouble over on the Richard Dawkins web site because a long valued poster has been ~~banned~~ insulted by a new, incompetent moderator. If you are out there, Brian, please let me know your side of it.

Okay, the scoop can be found at Brian's blog.

Mission to Me part 2

2008-08-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Rev. Mike informed me, today, that evil now comes from pride and arrogance. I want to ask if he realizes how much arrogance is involved in telling someone else that said person is going to spend eternity in hell, given no evidence that this is even possible. He often uses the phrase that the failure is the person wanting to "be his own God." I was able to get him to clarify that this meant not submitting to divine authority, as in wanting to be one's own boss.

This is turning into a case where the forbidden fruit is reason itself. I wonder how he can see justice when the purported A&E did not have the knowledge of good and evil at the time they, allegedly, committed their "crimes." And what kind of ethics punishes the descenders of those who have committed crimes? I see the basic doctrine of original sin as, in itself, a crime against humanity.

On the subject of biblical literalism, he told me that there was a form of applying logic to the Bible to arrive at the "true" interpretation. Having studied formal logic, this kind of statement strikes me as so deeply and intrinsically wrong that it stunned me into silence. I am not sure how to ease him into the concept that a false proposition implies any conclusion. This most fundamental law of logic effectively shows that once you start applying "logic" to nonfalsifiable scripture, you can "reason" your way into any conclusion you want. This is one of my objections to theology, in general, so it should not have come as such a surprise when Mike brought it forth, but it did.

Mission to Me

2008-08-17T20:14:00.000-07:00

One of my neighbors is a Christian missionary, (I will call him Mike) and for a couple of weeks now, we have been discussing religion and related matters. He is a very nice guy, and I have started this off slowly, just telling him that I am "not a person of faith." So, he has been working on me, somewhat as a mission where he does not have to travel to the ends of the earth.

Those who have followed the comments at richarddawkins.net will understand that I have had months of practice joining with others to respond to exactly the kind of things one expects to hear from those who evangelize. However, it was not my desire to shoot down his points; what I most wanted to do was to try to understand how it is that educated adult people with average or better intelligence can hold beliefs that just make no sense to me.

I am starting to detect several characteristics that I think are common. One is the selective credit given to a supernatural being of a beneficent nature when things go well, but no corresponding responsibility when either no help comes "from above" or when it even looks as if punishment has been meted out. Of course, there is the usual cherry picking of verses from scripture, but I also notice that theology is quickly pushed to the side when it does not logically hold up. Mike's form of "basic" Christianity tends to go with "what works" over what has scriptural justification.

What constitutes "what works" tends to be personal, depending on what the given person happened to ask in the way of divine intervention. Not only is this very subjective, but no consideration is given for what each person's unconscious mind (placebo effect) is doing about all this praying that it is hearing. The personal transformation after "giving oneself over to Jesus" is evaluated as if it were known that without this supernatural connection the prayerful person could not have changed, or would surely have gotten more debased by the material world.

As Mike is an older gentleman, it is sad to hear him say that he must now stick, unquestioning, to what he has believed for so long because it is too late to change. Perhaps some thought patterns can cut such a deep grove in us (control so many neural connections) that they become self continuing simply beyond any disrupting influence from reason or even basic facts.

Do Long Existing Species Violate the Theory of Evolution?

2008-07-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

We often hear a counter claim to the ToE about a species that, supposedly has not changed in millions of years. Usually, this just means that the general morphology is close, but looking at the DNA we always see a record of change. If that change is mostly cellular, as in the constant battle against parasites and disease organisms, it will be seen only in the DNA record.

Let us suppose there really was an organism that showed little or no morphological change in millions of years, is that against the ToE? The answer is "no" and it is because of simple logic. I posted this a couple of days ago at an RD comment thread:

Once again, we see the lack of basic logic. The ToE is all about how new species come into existence. Nothing in the ToE says an existing species has to go extinct. An example of a species that shows very little change over a long time just means that small changes in its genetic makeup were not helpful in its environment, and that that environment must have been relatively constant.

Also, other species can branch off during geographic isolation and evolve into many new species in new places while the ancestral species is not changing very much over in its environment. Thus, finding something that has not changed does not prove that it was not part of evolution you don't know about.

Dawkins and Lennox

2008-07-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

This entry is about the discussion between Richard Dawkins, John Lennox posted on the RD site.

Luke was a doctor? When folks say this, I tend to ask what medical school he graduated from and where he did his residency? We have a brief note from the second century indicating that he was a physician.^[ref] That is it. We don't know if it was true, and if so, what relation does a first century "physician" have to a modern MD?

Someone wrote the Gospel attributed to Luke and the Acts during the second century. This was not Luke, but may have been redacted from something written by Luke, although the sources seem to be similar to those for the Gospel attributed to Mark. However, the author, speaking as Luke, states that he did not, himself, witness the events of the life of Jesus. Thus, even if true, the account fails to measure up to historical writings.

In these arguments we should always resist the tendency to weigh the chance of a "miracle" against a natural event, as if the story in question is true. The probability that the story is just fiction (or something that was once somewhat historical, but then mutated into fiction) is vastly larger than either the probability of a miracle or the misinterpretation of a natural event. Also, in pleadings that this tradition must be true because the martyrs died for it, we must remember that such events are what is in the writing, not what we know as facts, and we cannot, now, question them about what exactly they died for (if they did) and how they knew it was true? Today we have the martyrs of 911; does that mean what they believed was true?

In the case of Genesis, there was an oral tradition before the Babylonian captivity. Scribes wrote down the tradition, and then after the captivity the writings were redacted and finalized under Ezra. It is reasonable to assume that a great deal of Babylonian cosmology got into the story during the captivity, especially as so many of the stories are so similar. Taking Genesis literally is completely ridiculous, in view of the redaction. Going on about the shades of meaning of the word "day" is like spending a day in conversation with the inmates of an institution for the mentally ill (very ill).

The gods of the Egyptians had them write their texts (older by thousands of years) on the walls of tombs where we can read them, today, in the original, no copies, no redaction. Why was the god of the Hebrews not so prescient?

Cosmic Fine Tuning

2008-07-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

Back in October of 2007, Steve Zara and I (and others) were discussing the so called "Fine Tuning" argument on the RD net. I would like to continue to present my thoughts on this subject, but first, here are a few of the posts, and the links to what was on that thread:

[comment from me]

The religious side has hijacked the phrase "fine tuning" from the world of Physics. Yes, there is real, and very interesting, work going on to understand the basic parameters of the Universe. However, the religious use the phrase as shorthand for "this Universe must have been designed by a Creator because these parameters could not be here by chance." It is a flavor of the "God of Gaps" and it is for that we need a quick snappy retort.

EDIT: Yes, the retort should not be about a multiverse or anything else they are not going to get. (Or we will have to eat later.)

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[comment from Steve]

Maybe I'm just ignorant on the cutting edge physics, but do we really know what substrate would form if any of these initial conditions (fine tunings of the strong force and such) were changed in any degree,or do we only know that they will not form the universe as we know it? If not atoms, then what?

The problem is far worse than talking about different types of substrate. If the cosmological constant was not very fine-tuned indeed, the early universe would undergo phenomenal accelerated expansion that would prevent any structure at all from forming.

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[comment from me]

It is not about the physics. It is about a fallback position from Paley's Watch. In the past (and still for ID), life was so complex people thought it had to be designed by an intelligent force. Now, thanks to the fossil record, we can see how life builds complexity without intervention. So, they have fallen back to where we do not have a fossil record, and never will: parameters of this Universe. Yes, we have the background IR (EDIT: more specifically, microwave) as a fossil of the Big Bang, but from inside the Universe we cannot go farther except by inference. We cannot know the Universe of Universes.

So back to "fine tuning" as a red herring: what about your personal "fine tuning"? Let us look at your last 1000 male ancestors (could as well be 1 million etc.) and number each sperm cell ejaculated for each conception. At a low number of 10,000,000 choices for each sperm cell that makes 7 decimal digits per ancestor giving a "fine tuned" number for you that is 7000 digits long. Suppose you could not look around and see other people, and know how this came about? Yes, you might think your spectacular "fine tuning" meant something very special.

Get over it.

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[comment from Steve]

It is not about the physics. It is about a fallback position from Paley's Watch. In the past (and still for ID), life was so complex people thought it had to be designed by an intelligent force. Now, thanks to the fossil record, we can see how life builds complexity without intervention. So, they have fallen back to where we do not have a fossil record, and never will: parameters of this Universe. Yes, we have the background IR as a fossil of the Big Bang, but from inside the Universe we cannot go farther except by inference. We cannot know the Universe of Universes.

Yes, we can. Or at least many physicists are trying to, with ideas like the String Theory Landscape and inflationary multiverses.

Saying it is not about the physics when talking about fine tuning is rather like saying it is not about the biology when talking about evolution.

Get over it.

The Paley's Watch argument is appropriate. Complex life did look just about impossible without a designer before Darwin and Huxley came along. Fine tuning is probably going to look the like a trivial issue when the appropriate mechanism has been found - perhaps some future version of String Theory, or some sort of 'evolving universe' idea like that of Lee Smolin.

But to deny there is a problem at all in terms of fine tuning is equivalent to some pre-Darwin biologist denying that some mechanism is needed to explain the complexity of life by declaring life 'not complex'.

I don't think we are going to impress the religious by denying something is a problem when internationally respected cosmologists and physicists think it is. We just have to deal with the issue when it arises in the same honest way that Dawkins did in TGD.

------------------------------------------------

[comment from me]

steve99 would you please step us through the argument that starts with the constants of Physics, and ends up with an afterlife based on our current free will choices of belief?

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[comment from Steve]

steve99 would you please step us through the argument that starts with the constants of Physics, and ends up with an afterlife based on our current free will choices of belief?

I think you may have confused me with a believer. I am not. I simply share with physicists of renown who know far more than me the belief that the values of the constants of physics needs explaining. That is all. I am confident that such an explanation will be scientific. What I don't much like is attempts to claim that no explanation is needed. I think that is poor science, and perhaps an attempt to hand-wave away something that theists raise that is a problem.

The point is to demonstrate the non sequitor of concluding a designer. It doesn't explain why the universe appears fine tuned, just that it is a non sequitor to assume it must have been/could only have been a designer.

I don't think so. I believe it is intended to mean that there is no point wondering why the universe is supposed to be such a good fit to us, when in reality we are a good fit to the universe, as we come from it. However, if anyone can point me at further commentary from Adams that explains this in more detail, I am prepared to accept that I could be wrong. However, I have come across several uses of that Adams quote which implies that that it relates to fine tuning, which is the sense I take from it.

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[comment from me]

No, steve99, I have not confused you for a believer. I know very well from your past writings that you are both a non-believer and an excellent thinker. What I am trying to get to, here, is a response to the rhetoric from a believer on this issue. (That was the question in my last post.) There are several places to hit that bogus chain of 'reasoning' and I am trying to get you to see that it is not necessary that physics have an explanation for the nature of the constants we use in our models to do so. If I am wrong about that, then the believers will always be able to point to the difference between what we do know and what we want to know as their justification.

But to deny there is a problem at all in terms of fine tuning is equivalent to some pre-Darwin biologist denying that some mechanism is needed to explain the complexity of life by declaring life 'not complex'.

Not quite. Before Darwin there was no objection to the claim that humans were specially created with an immortal soul that justified belief in an afterlife. After Darwin, we ask believers when and where in the continual process of decent from ancestors that soul thing started to happen? Also, from biology we see how psychoactive pharmaceuticals shatter the simplistic ideas of duality.

I contend that questions about the physical constants in our models do not logically lead to an afterlife, no matter how they came to be. So, what is belief with no afterlife? I would say, a difference that makes no difference.
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[comment from Steve]

What I am trying to get to, here, is a response to the rhetoric from a believer on this issue. (That was the question in my last post.) There are several places to hit that bogus chain of 'reasoning' and I am trying to get you to see that it is not necessary that physics have an explanation for the nature of the constants we use in our models to do so.

That is what I have a problem with. I think it is necessary, as it is a question about physics.

If I am wrong about that, then the believers will always be able to point to the difference between what we do know and what we want to know as their justification.

The way to avoid such 'god of the gaps' arguments is to explain how other gaps have been filled in the past, and to explain that such arguments are poor in themselves. I don't think we are going to get anywhere by trying to convince ourselves that there are no gaps.

Sorry if I am misunderstanding you here; I get the impression that I may be.

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[comment by me]

I will try to narrow it down. I am not taking a position that science should not pursue the physics of this. I am trying to get to the perception (which is what the Theist argument is based on) that these fundamental parts of our models somehow support them. Perhaps as more is known, it will eat into that perception. I do not think it will be anything as important as was Darwin, because the biology more directly makes us what we are, personally, and impacts our behavior. I also worry that if we do not work on the flaws in the logic of the perception, that they will just keep sliding that along even in the face of past failures.

Always, we need to keep asking believers: "Show me the step by step argument that starts with something science does not know (yet) and ends up with me on my knees praying to your deity."
------------------------------------------------

Other posters brought in other issues, and the thread continued; I recommend reading the whole thing. To get started, now, I want to separate the religious issues from the physics issues. As I stated above, the religious issues are a continuation from Paley's Watch, and don't get anywhere when you realize that even if we had proof of the hand of a creator deity at the start of the Universe, it only gives us Deism at best, and does not preclude the case in which the creator deity went out of existence in the act of creation (in which case, even Deism is pointless).

Now let's turn to the physics. We have ideas about the world around us. I am not going to go into all the ontological issues of Idealism v. Realism, but will start from the basic belief that there is a real Universe out there. Our ideas about the Universe are like the map to the territory. The ideas have a different kind of ontology just as the map is not the territory (the ink on the map isn't even the map). We think of the job of physics as finding out about the nature of the Universe. This is true, and the way it is done is to construct models made out of mathematics.

It is in the nature of the way people think by metaphor and analogy to skip over the distinction between a mathematical constant used in a model and a real property of the Universe. For example, there is the gravitational constant, G, that is unquestionably important if we want our models to give testable predictions in our Universe. But is the strength of gravity an actual constant parameter of the Universe? We cannot know, because it is not a falsifiable proposition we can test by experiment.

Suppose a theoretical physicist (call him George) sent in a paper in which G is replaced by the interaction of some of the other "physical constants" with yet more parameters thrown in such that for the currently known values of these other constants, his equations yield the current value for the strength of gravity. In this case, the reviewer would get out Occam's Razor and cut all that out, complaining that he has given us nothing new. When Planck did this for his famous constant, he admitted that while trying to model black body radiation, he needed a "fudge factor" to get the answer to come out matching experiment, and received just this kind of resistance from the physics establishment.

In the face of rejection, George may come back and point out that, although his work gives the same answer in this Universe, if you look at a different Universe in which a couple of changes are made to the other parameters, his equations give a different value for the strength of gravity, so he really has added something. What could we do? We can't test George's theory in other Universes because we are locked inside this one, but we cannot show that it is false. What this means is that we cannot extrapolate to another Universe from what we can test inside this one. (This is the flip side we pay for the benefits of Occam.)

Yes, we should try to see if our models can be simplified by getting properties to emerge from symmetry breaking and other spontaneous circumstances, but talking about alternate Universes based on untestable variations of the parameters of our models, is not science; and its irresolvable nature plays into the hands of those who wish to hijack it for religious propaganda purposes.

Dover Trial

2008-07-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen it, catch this BBC program on the ID Dover Trial (on youtube in 5 pieces):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Noodly Supreme Being

2008-07-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a post I put up at the RD site advocating conversion to the Church of the FSM, and thoughts on the physical form of the Supreme Being:

There are some good reasons for Atheists to convert to Pastafarians.
* First, you can stop calling yourself an "Atheist" and thus avoid all the negative things that have been discussed so often on these threads.
* Second, being a "person of faith" you may now wrap that faith around you such that others are required to refrain from the "hate speech" of telling you that what you believe is stupid.
* Third, you get to be part of a somewhat secret society (just because it is still somewhat unknown) and put this cool sticker on your car that is even more confusing to other drivers than the Darwin Fish.
* Forth, at some point, the Church of the FSM will get to cash in on US Government "Faith Based Initiatives" so we can use government money to hand out pasta and beer to the needy.
* Fifth, (and biggest) FSM bashes are WAAAAAAAY more fun than Atheist discussion gatherings.

Also, there is the question of the Supreme Being where evidence indicates the Pastafarians are much farther ahead of any other ideology. Although some argue that the SB has been found in the state of Oregon as the Giant Fungus, others support the Pando aspen in Utah while still others go for the undersea creature Posidonia. The point is that morphology shows any of these may be the earthly incarnation of His Noodly Greatness. Why waste time in silly theological discourse about the mere existence of a Supreme Being when Pastafarians can point to actual living candidates?

Book Reviews

2008-07-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

I will review books in this continuing post. If only the link is there, it means I will get around to it.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul

Favoite Quotes

2008-07-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

"Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' This stranger is a theologian." - Denis Diderot

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten." - Ecclesiastes 9:5

"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist." - Epicurus

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" - Epicurus

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Benjamin Franklin

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." - David Hume

"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. " - Thomas Jefferson

"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong." - Thomas Jefferson

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them." - Bertrand Russell

"I think all the great religions of the world -- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism -- both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question."
Bertrand Russell 1956

"Men have become the tools of their tools." - Henry David Thoreau

"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds." - Mark Twain

"All generalizations are false, including this one." - Mark Twain

"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." - Mark Twain

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." - Voltaire

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. " - Voltaire

"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. " - Voltaire

The Story of Archi and Neo

2008-06-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

In my posts on the Materialism thread at the RD Forum, I wrote a little story about metaphorical characters "Archi" and "Neo" to explore the personal viewpoints in a larger evolutionary time span. I have copied the post here:

UE wrote:

Given the amount of thought and discussion that has gone into the mind-body problem over the past 400 years, I am skeptical that any radically new solutions are possible. Someone would have thought of them by now.

This was a joke, ... right? Like when the head of the patent office announced that they were going to have to close because everything important had been invented, and the international physics community declared there was nothing left to do in physics but refine the measurements, both circa 1900? (Well they' gone about as fer uz they can go ...)

Sometimes I think about the conference that must have happened back in the days of Homo erectus. I can picture that things were going just fine until a guy called Archi stood up (not just to show off that he could stand up) and announced that he was not satisfied with a meaningless life of running around on two legs, hunting things down and then eating them or mounting them (or both). Archi went on to express his desire to have religion and art and to think about philosophy; maybe even work out calculus, someday. The group was not pleased, discussed the upcoming law against any genetic change in the germ line (either by breeding or accidental mutation), and told Archi to be more thankful he could walk and throw a stone at the same time (although there were also a few cracks about what, in Archi's case, passed for "throwing").

I am very thankful that the council was not able to get the restricted gene law passed. None of them could ever know how thankful. Their lives may have seemed meaningless, at the time, but by simply living their lives, and keeping the pattern going, they participated in the unfolding of the Universe that has resulted in you reading this, and having this moment (suchness).

Perhaps in the future, a gene sequence will be written that allows yet another layer of brain, a neoneocortex. Let's call these people Homo neo. These people are, for all practical purposes, just the same as us, except that at around age 60 their hat size starts going up like a baseball player on steroids, and a new layer of brain, structured very similar to the neocortex, grows on top of the neocortex. The neoneocortex sends down chemical trails that cause neocortex axons to grow up into it, and it sends axons down to be able to impact patterns of activity below. The world, for the neoneocortex is the neural activity ecology of the neocortex.

Suppose one of these new people is called, (you knew this was coming) Neo. While the new layer was growing, Neo experienced many weird things that, prior to the "Big Change" had been described to him as something like having electrodes stimulate you during awake brain surgery. Strange flashbacks would happen, strange ideas would "just pop up." When the moment of the BC happened, it was a great meta-awakening. Neo saw in a moment how the thoughts of his prior life had been produced. He realized that his prior life had been lived as what old time philosophers had called a "zombie." Yes, he had had what he thought was an "inner life" but could now see the swirling patterns that had formed his earlier personality. It was a very humbling experience.

Neo was reminded of when his prefrontal cortex had really kicked in at about age 20. This happened to be more sudden for him than for most of his friends, so he made some observations, and even wrote some of them down. Although many of the experiences he could remember were both beautiful and poetic, he also noticed just how stupid had been the impressions and conclusions he had had as a child. This was especially true of those things that happened before he could see himself as a separate being. He remembered that after age 20, he could still listen to the voice he had inside that was left over from being a child, but of course, knew better.

Neo was glad to no longer be a zombie. He still had the inner voice of the zombie he had been before the BC, and could listen to this voice, but of course, knew better.

[Edit: I forgot to put in how thankful Neo is to us for living our lives, here in our time.]

The original post can be found at this link.

Materialism

2008-06-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

Starting back in April of 2007 I began posting comment on the Materialism thread at the RD Forum. There was some good back an forth that went on for awhile. Here is the first paragraph of the first post:

Materialism has a negative quality to it, in that it states that there is no thing but material. To prove it true you would have to check everything in the Universe and show, in each case, that nothing was going on but the actions of mass and energy, thus, you can't prove it. Even if you could get around to everything, you would still run into a problem at the zeroth case, your own thoughts. You can't check the mechanism of your own thoughts while they are happening. In principal (but not technically available at this point) you could record your brain processes while awake and thinking, and then go back and look at the data later. You have not stepped out of the Universe, you have just used a time slip to get something like an outside perspective. Of course this is after you have checked everything else in the Universe, and if you can then prove materialism, it is only valid for the past.

The rest of the post is at this link.

Just an Animal?

2008-06-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent post from the RD site:

This nitpicking the ToE is just a sideshow put on by the Theists to get their minds off the central problem that humans are not 'made' in the image of their deity, but descendent from apes. DNA evidence is fact beyond any theory. From these facts, we can also make conclusive inferences that also count as facts, just as we make conclusive inferences from the tracks in bubble chambers to establish facts about subatomic particles we never actually see.

It is still theory that all living things have common ancestry because we have not looked at the genetic blueprint of each and every one. Perhaps some scientist will pull up an organism from a deep sea vent and find it can not be anywhere on the known Tree of Life. But we have checked humans and chimps and know that both descended from a common great ape.

Having established that, the problem for Theists is that they do not expect to be "hanging out" (literally) with Cheetah in the next life. There is no provision for chimps to be "saved" even if you trained a very smart one to go through the church motions just as well as a retarded Mormon. The retarded Mormon, supposedly, has that piece of divine non corporality (soul) that the (potentially) more intelligent and functional trained chimp can never have, and thus, is expected to exist, somehow, when both his and the chimps atoms have been scattered into the expanding sun at the end of solar 'life cycle.'

But we know that we all had an ancestor that had to have been "just an animal." This is not theory, but conclusive inference from the DNA. So, somehow, Theists have to dip into a bag of metaphysical mumbo jumbo and come up with when and how in an unbroken chain of mortal reproduction the non corporal was introduced, and how it reconstitutes in each person from a single cell. It is just not there, and I contend that we can conclusively infer that humans are biological organisms that, as all the other biological organisms on the planet, live until we die.

Brain to Body

2008-06-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

Again, posted at the RD site:

There is something to the brain to body mass ratio, but I tend to be careful there. It is understandable if the cost to an organism of supporting each cell is about the same, and the value (in getting genes into successive generations) of what the brain does is about the same for all individual animals. That is not always the case. (Also, it is hard to imagine a simple rule is going to work from the scale of the Orca on one end down to the Portia spider one the other.)

For bird intelligence there are also different things of value. Sometimes it is flying and navigation skills, or visual processing, or auditory processing. I would be tempted to teach Betty to pick locks, but if she escaped and taught that to other crows, I might be charged with a crime against humanity.

A different kind of intelligence is shown in this Attenborough Bower Bird video.

What I have found in the CAG parrot is less focus on tool using and much more on emotional reading and interaction. Some people find this very compelling. After the death of the famous Alex, folks have been using the web to actively trade anecdotal clues about these birds. I have been collecting some of these, and the impression that there is some kind of consciousness in there is very strong.

Synesthesia and Belief

2008-06-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

I posted this a couple of months ago at the RD site:

I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Dr. V. S. Ramachandran at UCSD. He studies information processing in human brains. Part of that is about information origination due to some signals coming in through one modality, and then crossing over to generate experiences in another. He started with the phenomenon of synesthesia and followed that into aspects of abstract thinking. He also studies temporal lobe epilepsy and in doing so interacts with folks who report voices form supernatural beings. He has reported that some of those folks will spontaneously start writing new Gospels.

There seems to be intermediate steps and it becomes very difficult to find the line where internal experiences of cross signal metaphoric realizations go over into internal experiences of receiving communications from the supernatural. If you have not thought about this, you might want to watch this video in which he talks about the signal redirection.

Anthropomorphizing Fine-Tuning

2008-06-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

This is another post from last year at the RD site:

When scientists deal with the popular press they often find themselves hindered by an intrinsic problem of language. Long ago, practitioners found that complex technical knowledge of the physical world, while very difficult to express in common language, was best represented by mathematical models (usually in equations). However, the popular press will ridicule attempts to use language (forget equations) that even attempts to preserve this precision, then, when analogies are loosely made, misquotations run rampant.

Being people, we naturally use metaphoric language. We don't usually coin an entirely new word if we can overload an existing word with a new meaning (especially if the usual meaning is a helpful mnemonic). Also, we tend to use anthropomorphic representations for inanimate objects and processes. Within a community of workers, this can become quite casual; a solid state physicist might refer to an electron that, "wants to travel ballistically across this transistor junction, but feels the resistance of variations in the conductance bands" or a biologist might refer to a "selfish gene."

IMHO, this tendency to overload and anthropomorphize is what opened the door for the theistic apologists to latch on to the so called "fine-tuning argument." We have had this idea of what it is to fine-tune from the early days of string music instruments, which was overloaded to cover actions in the early days of radio equipment, which continues to be extended to other ways people (or automatic systems) make adjustments to settings. However, this is categorically misapplied to the notion of the constants in the models used by physicists to describe what science has discovered.

On page 129 of Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis

Physicists invent mathematical models to describe their observations of the world. These models contain certain general principles that have been traditionally called "laws" because of the common belief that these are rules that actually govern the universe the way civil laws govern nations. However, as I showed in my previous book, The Comprehensible Cosmos, the most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. Rather they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior.

(Also see Stenger's fine-tuning paper)

There is no evidence that the Universe is "fine-tuned." There is no evidence of either the "knobs" or the "knob twiddler." We do have models of the Universe that do a good job of backtracking to what has (also inappropriately) been called the "Big Bang." It as been noticed that these models have parameters (universal constants), some of which are sensitive, such that, only small ranges of values cause the model to produce results that agree with observed experimental data. Another way to say that a model is parametrically sensitive is to call it "brittle" (yes, another overloading).

Asking, "Why are our models so brittle?" (if they are) is a valid scientific question. We should explore this. And we should remember that exploring the nature of the models is not necessarily exploring the nature of Nature. These models are intrinsically different from models such as business models that allow you to play "what if" games by changing variables that represent the amount of capital spent on marketing v. R&D. At any time in the future, new ideas from new people can replace the models we have now with new models that may reveal that parameters we now think of as constants are actually the results of new substructures.

Once you start speculating about universes that are not the Universe we can measure, there is no end. Take any model parameter you want: say "G" the gravitational constant. [Edit: a dimensionless ratio parameter would be a better choice, but the argument still holds.] Suppose we want to think about the different results we would get if we used different values for this model parameter. How many different values could we have? Would one expect quantization or continuous variation? (Do the 'knobs' click, or move smoothly?) If quantization, how would we know the quantum size? (How far away, parametrically, is the next universe we are not in?) If continuous, we might speculate about an uncountably large set of universes with values of G that differ past the one hundredth decimal place, for which our model gives identical results.

Bottom line: A parametrically sensitive model (that we may have) does not necessarily give you a "fine-tuned" Universe (that theists want to claim).

How to Argue Religion

2008-06-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

This was posted on the RD site:

The debate about religion encompasses so many people of different cultures, ages, and levels of economic and educational backgrounds that no "one size" of argument or style of personal persuasion is going to "fit all." Instead, there is an ecology of discussion that has many ecological niches. Some present evidence from science about the cosmos and how our brains evolved and work. Some present anthropological theories about the development of belief systems in cultural context. Some work with the reason of logic and philosophy. Some argue against superstition and debunk charlatans and hypocrites. Some try to work from within to expand tolerance and understanding. There are many ways, including some room for those who just make stink (thankfully, we only have a few of those).

It is often said that you cannot change minds by just presenting facts. Although there is some truth to this, as I said above, there is a place for this. Sometimes you don't have to change minds, you just need to prevent minds from locking up in an uninformed state. Presenting facts to young people before they have made up their minds has a much bigger effect than after. (An ounce of prevention is worth ...)

Given the subject is religion, it is natural for people to use religious metaphors. Thus we have folks talking about "converting" people to Atheism as if it were a belief system. The point is that it is not a belief system, but rather, the lack of a belief system. Further, Atheists do not get points, or a higher position, in the "next life" for bringing in "converts." Although there is in most of us an empathetic concern to help educate humanity, primarily, Atheists just want the religious to stop inflicting the consequences of their superstitions on us, and other innocent bystanders. This sets up an intrinsic asymmetry that partially answers the question "If religion is wrong, why have we had it so long?"

There is no good reason to have a central voice, person, or style in this discussion. It is an ecology, let us each go after a niche.

"Holy" Words

2008-06-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is a post from the RD thread about an appearence by Prof. Dawkins on CNN:

As I watched Richard I was pleased to see how much better he is getting at this (I was reminded of that scene in the movie "Ghandi" in which one of his supporters remarked at how much better Ghandi was getting at addressing the people). I was especially gratified that he did not just say "God" (which does end up capitalized in the CNN transcript) but rather, referred to the "Judeo-Christian god" so as to put it on a more even playing field with Thor and Zeus and the FSM. I would have gone as far as saying "the Christian deity" in order to make it clear that all these different deities are mythical. The tendency to mythology is just part of human nature.

I recommend that we non-believers clean up our language. As soon as you say "God", "Christ", "Saint", "The Prophet" or "holy" you have bought into the mythology. Most people in this country don't know that Jesus of Nazareth (if he existed at all) did not have "Christ" as a last name. "Christ" comes from the old Greek word meaning "the anointed one" and was tacked on to Jesus long after his death. If you call Jesus of Nazareth "Christ" you accept the whole divine son sacrifice myth cooked up by Saul of Tarsus (yes, they call him "Saint" Paul).

Even something as simple as "holy" carries big psychological weight. It means "held in high esteem by some or other religious group," as in "The Holy Lands" or "Holy Scripture" etc. If you use this word, you are buying into holiness itself, which puts you over the edge and into the supernatural. In dealing with the psychology of the people, choice of words matters.

False Premise

2008-06-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Here is a post from the RD site in reply to an objection to one of my posts:

To Michael (#16911):

I also think Quinne is being too simplistic by suggesting that a false premise allows any conclusion. I would agree that the conclusion has to be wrong but reason does not allow any conclusion.

Please do not confuse terse for simple. That a false premise implies any conclusion is not a "suggestion" it is a foundational law of formal logic that, sadly, most people do not know. It comes about because the validity of implication rests on the assurance that the case of a given premise being true and the implied conclusion simultaneously being false, will not happen. If the premise is always false, this can never happen, so it does not matter what the conclusion is (true or false). Thus, a false premise implies any conclusion.

If you get people to believe that angels exist, you can make anything up as to how many can dance on the head of a pin. If there are no angels, you will never have the case in which the count on the pin will prove you wrong. Given a foundation of beliefs that cannot be tested, you can proceed to construct great castles of reason, as did Aquinas and Kant, and impress people so much with the construction that they accept your conclusions. (note: neither Aquinas nor Kant were stupid)

Irrefutable Perplexity

2008-06-23T17:54:00.001-07:00

The stealth attempt to get Creationism taught in the public schools of America was "Intelligent Design" (ID) and its supporters (IDiots) based their argument on an idea called "irreducible complexity." (Now transformed to "Teach the Controversy" but with no progress.) This whole approach was seriously flawed from the start as shown by basic logic. In the first place, even if the Theory of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection (hereinafter the ToE) were found to have a fatal error, it does not imply the existence of an Intelligent Designer. The only valid positive evidence for ID would be something like finding a specific message written to us in the decoded DNA of our species (e.g. "Hi, I made you this way. The Designer").

What the IDiots have is the argument from Irrefutable Perplexity: "What I say is true because you can't show that it is not, and what you say is false because I don't understand it." They insist that their faith in a Designer cannot be shown to be false ("could be true, ergo get off me"), and then combine that with incredulity ("I don't see how something as complex as life could have happened on its own").

However, simulations using genetic algorithms have shown that the same process that produces new 'designs' in the ToE can easily produce a design for a computer algorithm or electronic circuit with complexity that exceeds the understanding of our best expert humans.

Q.E.D.

Getting Started

2008-06-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

This is the start of my public blog. For a couple of years I have been posting comments at the Richard Dawkins site and finally got to the point where it was clear that I needed a place to save my thoughts so that I could link to them as time goes on. At the RD site I choose to use "Quine" as my screen identity as a tip of the hat to one of my favorite philosophers of the past, W.V. Quine. This is partially because I was expecting to be making comments that delt, primarily, with logic (Prof. Quine's strong suit) in philosophy. I was not so fortunate as to have Prof. Quine as an instructor (as did Dan Dennett), so he is not responsible for any errors I make here, but I hope I do not embarrass his memory in any way.

I have met some fine people through the posting at RD, and hope that those of you who find your way here will get some use out if this blog. The freedom of a separate blog means I will be expanding subjects past logic, and I hope to include links here to many other interests. Your comments are welcome as long as you refrain from the advocation of violence towards anyone. Enjoy.