Fluffy Iguana Cookies

If Aliens, then God?

2012-03-07T11:38:00.006-05:00

Recently, I was surprised to learn that many evangelical Christians believe either that there is no other intelligent life in the universe or that any such beings would be demons, not people. Apparently, going by the comments on that article, this is because Christ died for humanity, not them, so either God is condemning countless aliens to Hell or they don't exist. (Or something like that; I am thankfully not an evangelical theologian.)

Regardless, I found it surprising because I think the one thing that could possibly get me to question my atheism is the discovery of intelligent life that did not originate on Earth.

Let me explain.

I think it is now generally accepted among the scientifically (and even science-fictionally) literate that what I call a "Star Trek universe" is absurd--that is, a universe teeming with beings that share none of our evolutionary history, and yet look enough like us to be played by human actors with rubber appliques.

The reasoning is simple. Evolution is a highly contingent process; organisms evolve in response to their environment, but one of the largest defining factors of that environment is the presence of other organisms! If most fruit did not change color when ripe, would primates have color vision, for example? Probably not, unless some other feature of our environment made it advantageous.

As Stephen J. Gould was fond of putting it, if you rewound the history of life on Earth and started from the beginning, miniscule early differences would grow rapidly to make the resulting organisms entirely unrecognizable. Take a look at the Burgess Shale fossils to see just how alien life on Earth can be, and those are organisms that shared the first 3 billion or so years of their evolution with us!

So, we have a long list of human features which were evolutionarily advantageous at one point in our ancestry, and remained non-harmful or could be adapted into something advantageous, but there is no reason to expect them to have been advantageous in the environment where a Klingon or Minbari evolved, features like:

DNA
Oxygen metabolism
Organelles
Multicellularity
Triptoblasty
Bilateral symmetry
Two biological sexes (as opposed to three or one or seventeen)
Keeping most of our sensory apparatus at one end of our body
Endoskeleton
Two pairs of limbs adapted to different purposes
Upright posture
Hair
Skin
Five-fingered hands (as opposed to twelve or three or tentacles, for that matter)

The list is unbelievably long--it would be, in fact, a complete description of a human being. The Drake equation doesn't help, here; the solution space for evolution is infinitely large, while the universe is merely very very large, and thus no matter how many Earthlike planets teeming with life there are, the probability of two of them independently evolving humanoids is still a finite number divided by infinity.

For some reason, however, while this seems to be generally accepted for physical features, people balk at accepting it is also true for our status as sophonts. Sophontry is not a single feature; it is a large number of different features, each of which occurs independently in some form in other species, that together comprise what we call a sophont. Remove even one, and the result, while interesting, is not recognizably a sophont--not a "new civilization." These features include:

Nth-order agency attribution: Agency attribution is the capacity to distinguish between agents (entities that act with intent) and non-agents, and respond accordingly. It is the ability to respond differently to grass rustling because a tiger is passing and grass rustling because of the wind. Most vertebrates and a handful of invertebrates possess it. Second-order agency attribution is the ability to recognize that other entities have agency attribution and respond accordingly--the ability to disguise one's intent, in other words. This is reasonably widespread among the mammals and some birds. Third-order agency attribution is the ability to recognize the possibility of deception, essentially, and has been observed in some great apes. A typical game of cops and robbers involves something like 9th-order agency attribution, and there is no known upper limit to humans knowing that you know that they know that you know that...
Self-awareness.
Ability to contemplate counterfactuals and possible futures.
Modeling: The ability to learn through observation, rather than conditioning.
Culture: Passing information both vertically to offspring, and horizontally to other individuals.
Language or similar.
Complex tool-use, including the ability to improvise tools previously not observed.
Problem-solving ability.
Pattern-recognition ability.
Intellectual empathy.
Emotional empathy.

And, of course, many others. Some of these may depend on one another in order to exist, but others can exist independently. It is possible to imagine a complex tool-using culture that has no self-awareness, empathy, or language-equivalent, for example. We thus run into the same problem as humanoids. No matter how we fiddle the Drake equation, the f(i) term is cheating; we are really asking what the probability is of a random walk in an infinite space happening to hit a predefined point (hint: it's infinitesimal). So again, we are looking at an event so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.

Now, some developments appear to actually be selected for in a wide variety of environments; they are so broadly useful that they recur again and again. Birds and bats, for example, have both hit on variants of wings, despite their common ancestor having none. Eyes operating on similar principles to our own evolved independently in mollusks (although we do likely have a common ancestor with light-sensitive spots to start the process off).

However, there is no reason to believe this is the case for most of the elements of intelligence. And there is even less reason to believe it is the case for intelligent life to develop off Earth; after all, everything with wings that we know of evolved on the same planet; maybe there is something unique about Earth that encourages wings, or some coincidental occurrence way back in the history of life on Earth that shaped the environment in such a way as to encourage wings. Equally, there may be some chance event in the history of Earth that set the stage for agency attribution to evolve multiple times (one possible candidate for that event would be the development of heterotrophs).

So really, what it would mean if we found intelligent aliens is that something about the universe is encouraging all these traits to develop in concert in many different environments. It would mean that the universe is somehow friendly to intelligence in a way that was not previously obvious. That wouldn't be enough to make me believe there was something divine at work, but it is unlikely enough to make me pause and reconsider. Even more so if said aliens follow something resembling a specific Earth religion.

Still, the way to bet is that we are the only intelligent life the universe has ever known. Sad and humbling, but perhaps that gives yet more reason to treat one another better. And at least we will always have science fiction for our alien-civilization fix...

Rape Prevention Tips

2012-01-07T09:51:00.005-05:00

(Edit: Per anonymous comment, added the tip about alcohol and drugs.)

(Edit: Per comments from Ursula L and Kit Whitfield, added tips about witnessing/hearing about rape.)

The FBI announced a new definition of rape this week. For 80 years, the FBI has only considered rape by force, even though the weapon of choice for rapists is alcohol.(1) Suddenly the FBI will be counting the 89 percent of rapes committed without a weapon being involved. This is huge, and very good news for everyone except fans of rape.

Oh, it also now includes the 10 percent of rape victims who are male.(2) So, one of the changes affects 89 percent of rape victims, the other affects 10 percent of rape victims. Can you guess which one is showing up in more headlines?

If you said, "The one about men," you understand our media's fucked-up priorities.

Anyway, in honor of these headlines, I would like to offer some tips on what men and women alike can do to prevent rape.

Don't rape anybody.

No, seriously. Don't rape anybody.

Don't have sex with anybody who doesn't want to have sex with you. That would be rape.

Don't have sex with anybody who cannot indicate whether they want to have sex with you. That would be rape.

Don't have sex with anybody who wants to have sex in general, just not with you. That would be rape.

Don't have sex with anybody who wanted to have sex with you before, but now doesn't. That would be rape.

If the only way to get someone to have sex with you involves alcohol or other drugs, don't do it. That would be rape.

If you have to ask whether something counts as rape, it probably does. Don't do it.

If you have had sex with someone who didn't want to have sex with you, regardless of circumstances or who that person is or what your relationship to them is, you are a rapist. Turn yourself in to the police before you rape again. Alternatively, there is always the option of dying in a fire.

If you think any of the above would restrict your ability to have or enjoy sex, you are either already a rapist or on your way to becoming one. See number 9.

If you see someone doing any of numbers 1-9, stop them if possible or call the police.

If learn that someone has done any of numbers 1-9, call the police.

If your response to numbers 11 and 12 is anything along the lines of "But he's my friend!" or "She deserved it because..." see number 10.

Let me know if I missed any!

Kinds of Truth

2011-08-20T14:58:00.001-04:00

Update: Fixed an apparent contradiction on whether critical truths are isomorphic or not.

What does it mean when we say something is true? Most people are fairly confident they know what truth is when they see it, but can we actually define it? I think when pressed, many people answer something along the lines of "A statement that contains no falsehoods," but is that adequate?

Consider the statement "All meebles are foob." There are no falsehoods in that statement, but it contains no truth, either; it is meaningless.

Ah, but maybe we can get away with, "A meaningful statement that contains no falsehoods."

Alas, no. Consider "Chocolate is better than brussel spouts." As I've discussed before on this blog, normative statements are meaningful, and yet cannot be meaningfully assigned a truth-value. The statement is neither true nor false.

So, can we exclude normative statements, and define truth as "A meaningful positive claim that contains no falsehoods?"

A few weeks ago, I might have said yes, but I have come to reconsider that position. The problem is that there are certain statements which are not positive--they are not statements about the empirically measurable properties of physical entities--and yet also appear to be true. For example, "Frodo Baggins is a hobbit," or "Two plus two equals four."

And while previously I would have regarded them as a subtle type of positive statement (the first can be viewed as really being a statement about the arrangement of ink on the pages of a particular set of books, the second as a statement about how the human brain works), they actually differ from positive truths in quite important ways.

I am thus forced to conclude that there are multiple kinds of truth, and it is to those I now turn.

Positive Truths

Positive truths are the easiest category to discuss. We appear to live in a universe that is consistent--it obeys rules. We may not be entirely certain what those rules are, but so far the universe and everything in it has recognizably behaved very consistently.

We can therefore conclude that the set of positive truths is consistent: No positive truth contradicts any positive truth, including itself.

More importantly, we have defined positive statements as being about the empirically observable properties of physical entities. That means that there is an external standard against which to test positive truths; if a positive statement is true, that it means it is isomorphic to (exists in one-to-one correspondence with) some feature of physical reality. Put another way, the set of all positive truths is isomorphic to the physical universe.

Finally, as there is only one physical universe about which there can be positive truths,* and we already have the requirement of consistency, it follows that a positive truth is universally true.

Hence we have a definition for positive truth: Positive truths are consistent, universal, and isomorphic to the physical universe.

Mathematical Truths

Mathematical statements, like "Two plus two is four," alas, are not isomorphic to the physical universe. There is no physical "two" out there, and no physical entity has the property of "two-ness." We also cannot argue that it's a description of the behavior or interactions of physical entities, because there are no physical entities in the statement.

"Two elephants plus two elephants is four elephants," might be true in some circumstances, and we could argue that "Two plus two is four" is merely an abstraction and generalization of this specific case, but unfortunately it is an abstraction that does not always hold. If the elephants are violent, two plus two may equal one. If, alternatively, they are amorous, it may equal six.

Let's try a statement that seems more concrete: "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line." Simple enough, and it seems like it conforms to measurable properties of real objects. Only problem is, when we're talking about physical entities, it isn't true.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line only on a perfectly flat surface. If you are constrained to follow a curved surface, the shortest distance is a curve whose properties depend on the curvature of the surface. If you dig a tunnel straight through the Earth from New York to Paris, and compare that to the shortest path an airplane can take between them, the plane curves notably to the north of the tunnel.

Fun fact: Space is measurably curved. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," is not strictly true anywhere in the physical universe (though for distances short enough relative to the local curvature it is close enough for practical purposes).

So shall we discard that statement as untrue? Certainly not! There are many contexts within mathematics in which the statement must be treated as true; specifically, in Euclidean geometry.

So, can we say that mathematical truths are isomorphic to particular contexts? Unfortunately, no. Consider my favorite chair. It is a dark-brown leather recliner with some cosmetic damage, but structurally sound.

The previous sentence is isomorphic to certain properties of my chair. It would be absurd, however, to say that my chair is isomorphic to my chair. My chair is my chair; to exist in one-to-one correspondence, two things must be different. In other words, identity precludes isomorphism.

Alas, when we do geometry, we are examining and thinking about a set of statements. The set of statements to which "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," belongs is Euclidean geometry, and thus cannot be isomorphic to it.

Euclidean geometry, to be specific, is a set of axioms--statements which do not contradict each other and are treated as self-evident--and everything which can logically be derived from those axioms. If you change an axiom (for example, the definition of "parallel"), you get a different geometry (such as elliptical or hyperbolic geometry).

Math is, in effect, a number of different sets of statements. Each set has the property of being consistent within itself, but is not necessarily consistent with other sets.

And thus a definition for mathematical truths: mathematical truths are consistent, contextual, and identical, rather than isomorphic, to their contexts.

Critical Truths

Are we done? Have we covered all true statements? We have yet to discuss normative statements; are they a kind of mathematical truth? Perhaps the context is a particular person's opinion and beliefs, and certainly it seems that the identity property is present--the set of true statements about my beliefs and opinions would be identical to my beliefs and opinions.

However, if you honestly believe that a person's beliefs and opinions are necessarily, or even often, consistent? I have a bridge to sell you.

It seems we need a new category, but what could it be? Consistency seems like it ought to be the most fundamental of all requirements for any definition of truth--how can truth possibly contradict truth?

Consider the following true statements:

"The sole author of the original Sherlock Holmes stories is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."

"The Sherlock Holmes stories are accounts by Watson of his adventures with his friend, Sherlock Holmes."

These two statements are both true statements about the Sherlock Holmes stories, and yet they contradict--if they are accounts by Watson, Doyle cannot be the sole author, and vice versa.

Ah, says the savvy reader, but they don't contradict because they represent different perspectives on literature: In literary theory, the Doylist perspective is that from which our world is real and the story is fiction; the Watsonian perspective is that from which the story is true, and our world is irrelevent. Claims made from one perspective need not be consistent with claims made from the other--they are independent contexts.

That's all well and good, but what if I write a story which intentionally contradicts itself? Consider the Invisible Pink Unicorn. For real, physical entities, it is a contradiction to be both invisible and pink, and descriptions of the IPU make it clear it is just as contradictory for this imaginary entity. Thus, if I write a story about the IPU, true statements about that story include both "The IPU is invisible" and "The IPU is pink."

This is even more the case when we get into analysis and criticism. Art is a symbolic activity, and a given symbol may have more than one meaning in one person's mind, let alone many people's. Even the cursory analysis involved in looking at a painting, recognizing its subject, and having an immediate emotional response involves extensive interpretation of symbols(1), and these symbols may have multiple meanings. As analysis goes deeper, the number of available meanings multiplies, and likelihood that they will all be consistent drops.

However, all these meanings are true. Consider the syllable pronounced "hi." It is true that it is a greeting in English, and also true that it means the opposite of "low" in English. Both meanings are true. While we can usually identify from context which meaning is intended, the fact that the other meaning is not intended in this instance doesn't make it less true that that is a meaning of the symbol.
If we are dealing with more ambiguous symbols, and as the number and complexity of symbols increases, the number of interpretations which each correspond to the work (and yet may contradict each other) increases exponentially.

Thus it is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is both a feminist critique of the horror-movie staple of the helpless young woman cornered in an alley, and a misogynistic celebration of woman being punched in the face. Both are true because both can be demonstrated as meaningful interpretations of the images and sounds that comprise the show, and yet the two statements contradict each other--and depending on which interpretations occur more immediately and naturally to me, I might have a very strong emotional response to one or both!

Like mathematical truths, critical truths are statements about human mental constructs(2). However, an individual critical truth is not identical to an element in these constructs(3). They are also contextual--there is a set of true statements about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it is obviously not the same as the set of true statements about Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusic.

Are critical truths isomorphic? No; the elimination of consistency means that critical truths can exist in a two-to-one (or seventeen billion-to-one) relationship to the works they describe. Some critical truths may be identical as well: if a story begins "This is a story about hope," the statement that the story is about hope would be identical to that element of the story. The common element of critical truths is that they are derived from a mental construct--they draw on elements of it, as filtered through a unique human consciousness, to create a new (possibly inconsistent) set of statements about that work which may well be larger than the original work(4).

We can therefore define critical truths as contextual and derivative, with no requirement of consistency or isomorphism.

At last we have the tools to begin to re-examine the truth value of normative statements, which I will do in a future post.
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1: Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

2: One might object to calling art a mental construct, as a work of art must take some physical form in order to be shared. However, that physical form is a representation of a mental construct of the artist, and encountering the symbol creates a mental construct for the viewer. This is perhaps more obvious with storytelling forms such as literature and film, where the author creates mental settings and characters represented within the work, but still just as true of any work of art which requires the artist to first imagine or envision something (which is to say, all art).

3: The signifier-signified distinction, in other words.

4: As a college freshman, I had an assignment to write ten pages about any two lines in Hamlet that were not from the "to be, or not to be" speech.

Piss Christ Destroyed

2011-04-19T11:24:00.002-04:00

French vandals (is four people enough to count as a mob) have destroyed the controversial art photograph Piss Christ, demonstrating clearly why blasphemy is a necessary public service and He-Who-Laughs-In-The-Temple one of the most important figures for any belief system.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/18/andres-serrano-piss-christ-destroyed-christian-protesters?CMP=twt_gu

I'll have more thoughts on this later. Too upset about it right now.

Guest Post Up at The Slacktiverse

2011-04-06T20:32:00.003-04:00

My first post in what will hopefully be a regular gig at The Slacktiverse is up!

Excerpt:

I'm not an acommodationist: If someone says something I know to be demonstrably wrong, I will generally argue with them. If someone advocates evil, I will call them out on it, and I will not accept religion as a justification. But if somebody's religion doesn't cause them to spout falsehoods or advocate evil? I still don't accomodate them, because there's nothing to acommodate. They haven't said anything wrong--just provided another fascinating way in which others' perceptions differ from my own.

Short Thought

2011-03-16T11:11:00.001-04:00

Nietzsche is to humanities majors as Ayn Rand is to engineering and CS majors: The philosopher of choice for arrogant, entitled, amoral douchebags seeking philosophical justification for their self-centered assholery.

In which I shake my head, dismayed at the pointless waste that is bigotry...

2011-03-03T16:09:00.004-05:00

So, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 that insane bigot brigade known as the Westboro Baptist Church has a Constitutional right to picket funerals, although they also said that laws making reasonable restrictions on the timing and placement of the protests to minimize disruption to the funeral are okay.

This is, of course, the right decision. If we limit freedom of speech to people and opinions we like, then it isn't really free, is it? But still, what a classy bunch those asswipes are, huh?

Meanwhile, in that insane bigot brigade known as Corpus Christi, Texas, the school board has decided to shut down all extracurricular activities rather than allow a Gay-Straight Alliance club.
I really just don't get it. I cannot get into the mind of a bigot. I suppose it's a failure of empathy, but I just don't understand it. What is it about two dudes or two chicks making out that drives some people so crazy? Don't they have more important things to worry about?

It's the same with racists and sexists and the anti-immigration crowd and so forth: really? The economy's in the crapper, unemployment is sky-high, the environment's collapsing, our schools suck... and you want to waste your energy shutting down ACORN and Planned Parenthood and jailing people for the high crime of speaking Spanish without a greencard?

Really? I mean, honestly... that's what you're spending your time on? It matters that much to you?

Pathetic.

Edit: I misread my source for the Texas story. It's one high school that's losing all it's activities, not the entire school district, and the decision was made by the superintendent of that high school, not the school board. My point still stands.

South Park vs. Radical Islam

2010-04-21T21:41:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted to Animated Discussions.

The South Park creators have received a death threat over last week's episode, "200". I was going to do an in-depth review of the episode, but that's unlikely now, because this news is far, far more interesting.

The episode in question was, as I mentioned in this post, an enormous pile of references to old episodes, gags, and plots. One of these references was to two past episodes dealing with the Prophet Muhammed.

Way back in the fifth season, in the episode "Super Best Friends," Muhammed was portrayed as an otherwise stereotypical Bedouin man with fire powers, a member of the titular superhero team of religious icons (the other members were Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Joseph Smith, and Sea Man (an Aquaman parody), and Moses was their computer). The primary focus of the episode was making fun of Scientology (a recurring theme in the series), and it ended with the Super Best Friends teaming up to defeat the "Blaintology" cult. This was before I started paying attention to the series, so I'm not sure if there was any backlash; if there was, I suspect it was from Scientologists, not Muslims.

Five years later came the Danish cartoon controversy, in which the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons, most of which depicted the prophet Muhammed, and at least some of which did so quite negatively. (I cannot read Danish, but one of the cartoons has no text and is obviously negative, while others have no text and appear neutral or positive). A few Danish-Muslim organizations held protests in response, which resulted in the cartoons being reprinted around the world, sparking more protests and even violence, including setting fire to the Danish embassies Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. Notably, most American media did not reprint the cartoons, even when reporting on the controversy surrounding them.

With this controversy only a few months old, the two-part South Park episode "Cartoon Wars" used the refusal of American media to print the cartoons as a jumping-off point to mock Family Guy and The Simpsons. The plot of "Cartoon Wars" is that Muhammed is going to shortly appear in an episode of Family Guy, but the Fox network is considering self-censoring and either not airing the episode, or cutting Muhammed. Kyle and Cartman travel to the Fox network, Kyle to help make sure the episode is broadcast, and Cartman to support the censorship.

In real life, Comedy Central stepped in at this point, and banned South Park from displaying Muhammed in the episode, even though he had been in the opening credits since the fifth season. As a result, even though the dialogue in "Cartoon Wars" says that the Family Guy episode aired uncensored, the scene in the South Park episode is replaced by a black screen and text explaining that Comedy Central would not allow an image of Muhammed to be broadcast.

And that brings us to last week. In "200", every celebrity South Park has made fun of teams up to sue South Park. However, this is actually a complicated gambit for them to get ahold of Muhammed, whom no one can make fun of. The celebrities (and other forces, revealed later in the episode) seek to steal this power, so they can never be mocked again. Stan is thus forced to seek out the Super Best Friends so he can trade Muhammed to the celebrities in exchange for the safety of South Park. Unfortunately, as Jesus explains, times have changed and it is no longer permissible for Muhammed to be seen. Thus, he is dressed in a bear costume, so no one can see him.

The poster at RevolutionMuslim.com (Fox News has his name as "Abu Talhah al Amrikee", but it's Fox News, so who knows) seems to have missed the point completely. The episode isn't about making fun of Muhammed; South Park has never made fun of Muhammed. It's about making fun of American media, who cravenly bow to the fear of "controversy" and terrorist attacks, creating a culture in which the biggest bully wins. And it is, of course, about making fun of those bullies -- that'd be you, al-Amrikee.

I hope very much that tonight's South Park depicts Muhammed by the end -- and that it mocks al-Amrikee. South Park uses a frankly ridiculous level of technology to produce such crude results, and thus is able to make or alter episodes ridiculously quickly -- so it should be completely possible for them to make the change. Stone and Parker are among the few people working in television today who understand that blasphemy is one of the most important social functions of humor. By mocking the sacred -- whether it is a religious icon such as Muhammed or Jesus, or a secular sacred cow such as the innocence of children -- humor forces us to think, and reduces the ability of such images to manipulate us, while leaving us free to continue believing in them if we so choose.

Blaspheme away, Messrs. Stone and Parker. I know you know it's the right thing to do.

Positivism 101

2010-04-06T13:57:00.004-04:00

The philosophy underlying the sciences is known as "logical positivism", and was first codified around the turn of the 20th century. At its core is a fairly simple, obvious epistemology that permits metaphysical and ethical questions to be ignored entirely, freeing the sciences to concentrate on the questions the scientific method can actually work on.

The basics of positivist epistemology are simple: All statements are either positive or normative (we'll ignore for now the possibility of completely nonsensical statements). A positive statement is a statement about the empirically measurable properties of one or more physical entities. For example, "This camel has three humps," is a positive statement, because the camel is a physical entity, and its number of humps is an empirically measurable property. "No camels have three humps," is also a positive statement; it speaks about the same empirically measurable property of a large number of different physical entities, the camels.

A positive statement can be either true or false, and indeed all positive statements are one of the two (though we can't always know which). For example, though we can never know how many times George Washington blinked on April 26, 1780, there is a correct answer to the question. George Washington is a physical entity, and the number of times he blinked is empirically measurable. Each of his blinks had an impact on the world around him -- for example, by creating tiny air currents -- and in theory, given infinitely accurate measuring devices, unlimited computing power and speed, and the right theoretical models, we could reconstruct his blinks on that day.

Sometimes a statement can be defined as positive not because it is itself about the empirically measurable properties about a physical object, but rather because it has logically necessary consequences which are positive statements. For example, the claim that a physical object exists is a positive claim because, although existence itself is not an empirically measurable property, in order for a physical object to exist it must have certain properties. For example, Russell's teapot is a hypothetical that claims that there exists a small china teapot suspended exactly opposite from the Earth in the same orbit, so that the Sun is always between us and it. If the claim is true, then the teapot, as a physical object, must have mass; this is an empirically measurable property. Thus, Russell's teapot is a positive claim.

Claims which are not positive are normative. An example of a normative claim is, "Eating kittens is wrong." Eating a kitten is a physical event, but "wrongness" is not an empirically measurable property. Normative statements are too dependent on the speaker to have a truth value; I might find eating kittens to be wrong, but you might not, despite no change in the physical event.

Any normative statement can be turned into a positive statement about Bob by adding "Bob says that..." to it. (Substitute the speaker of your choice for Bob.) For example, "Eating kittens is wrong," is a normative statement about eating kittens. "Bob says that eating kittens is wrong," is a positive statement about Bob. We can take empirical measurements (for example, asking Bob and listening to his response) to determine if this claim about Bob is true.

Some people argue that experiences such as "wrongness" or "the numinous" or "freedom" are empirical phenomena because they correspond to particular states of the brain. While probably true (certainly there is no evidence to suggest that any state of mind is anything other than a state of the brain), this is really only a variant of adding "Bob says that..." "This brain responds to kitten-eating by firing the wrongness neurons," is a statement about a particular brain; it still does not point to any inherent properties of kitten-eating.

As I mentioned above, normative statements cannot be regarded as "true" because they depend too much on the speaker. They qualitatively differ from untestable positive claims like George Washington's blinking: Even given unlimited measuring equipment and infinite computational power, I cannot detect a physical property of wrongness or justice or value because there is no such thing. The most I can accomplish is some version of "Bob says that..." There is no correct answer to the kitten-eating question, only opinions.

If no normative statement can be true, then no normative statement can be false. If a normative statement were false, then its negation would be true. For example, if we declare "Eating kittens is wrong," to be false, then we're saying "Eating kittens is not wrong," is true. But that statement is also a normative statement, and therefore cannot be true. Thus, we must conclude that normative statements have no truth value.

The founders of logical positivism went further, and declared normative statements to be meaningless. From a purely scientific perspective, that's true: science cannot work with or generate normative statements, and it's dangerous to try. From any other perspective, however, that's nonsense. Linguistically, culturally, neurologically, normative statements absolutely do have meaning -- I'd like to see someone try to get through a day without acting as if value is a meaningful concept! -- and so, except when we are considering scientific questions, it would be foolish to dismiss normative statements just for being normative.

Let's put this another way. A statement is true if it accurately models our physical reality. It is false if it contradicts physical reality. All true statements and all false statements together make up the set of positive statements; hence, all positive statements are attempts to model physical reality and vice versa. A statement which does not model physical reality is normative; since it neither accurately models nor contradicts physical reality, it is neither true nor false.

Claims of existence are a somewhat tricky case. The problem is that most people are not philosophically rigorous, and hence language is not, either. So, for example, when Russell claims his teapot exists, he is claiming that it physically exists and therefore has physical properties, such as mass and position. When someone claims that love exists, however, they are generally not saying that there is a substance called "love" that physically exists and can be detected; rather, they are saying that a particular pattern of behavior occurs in human relations. This is still a positive claim -- human behavior can be empirically observed and recorded, and we can see if it's consistent with the love hypothesis or not.

However, when someone claims that free will exists, they are using a different definition still. They are not (generally speaking) claiming that there is a "free will" substance with physical properties. Nor is the claim that free will exists something that can be tested by observing human behavior; human behavior is exactly the same whether it is caused by deterministic, but highly complex and impossible to predict, natural phenomena or free choices that "hide" in the "highly complex and impossible to predict" part. There are, in fact, no statements about physical phenomena that follow logically from "Free will exists"; thus, it is not a positive statement.

Similarly, one could claim that a teapot exists in another universe, entirely distinct from our own. Since there is no attempt here to model physical reality -- we are talking about some other, purely hypothetical, reality -- the claim is entirely normative. Depending on the context in which the claim is made and how seriously we are expected to take it, we might call such a statement fiction, myth, allegory, a thought experiment, a parable, or any of a hundred other related concepts.

So, we come to the big one: "God exists." Is this a positive or normative statement? Well, it mostly depends on what you mean by "God." If you're an animist and believe that the universe has a guiding spirit akin to the human will, that's not a positive claim any more than free will is. If you're a Christian and mean that a first-century rabbi healed sick people, revived the dead, preached, died, came back from the dead, and then left this universe (reducing its total mass-energy by a hundred kilos or so), that's very much a positive claim.

A universe in which Jesus came back from the dead is different from one in which Jesus did not come back from the dead. Given the right equipment, we could measure the universe and determine which occurred. This is not a matter of opinion; it happened or it didn't. I think it didn't, but even if we could prove it didn't, most Christians would adjust just fine. They've already adapted (except for a few vocal nutters) to viewing their creation myth in metaphorical terms, once its positive claims were shown to be false. There's no reason they couldn't do the same with their main hero-cycle myth, as well.

Most religious people, like most people, don't particularly care much about modeling physical reality. Most religious people are just fine to say "Leave it to the scientists to work out how the universe functions; God is why." Just as free will has no impact on human behavior, and thus is not a positive statement, so does the existence of this sort of God have no impact on the behavior of the physical universe. Such a God is not a positive claim. There is no difference between a universe with such a God and a universe without such a God; they are the same universe.

Since they are the same universe, neither the believer nor the atheist can be right or wrong. There are no competing models of physical reality here; only two different ways of looking at the same physical reality. Reason does not compel a position on the question; we are free to believe as we choose.

Meritocracy vs. Freedom

2010-03-24T23:29:00.001-04:00

Secret shame time: in high school I was a libertarian. This was a pretty weird position for me to take, all things considered: My family lived on welfare, my health care was a mix of Medicaid and free clinics, and my education was courtesy of (at the time) the best public high school in America, and by a number of measures one of the best high schools, period.

But a libertarian I was, nonetheless. A lot appealed to me about libertarianism, so I will here present what I understood the ideal libertarian society to be, before I explain why I now reject both the movement and the ideal.

The ideal, at least as I understood it, was a society of maximal freedom, here understood to mean a society in which one cannot use force or the threat of force to compel the actions of others, but all other actions are entirely legal. The government exists solely as a monopoly on the use of force, which it uses only to prevent others from using force – in other words, the military and police. I recall fire departments were rarely to never mentioned, but I think the general consensus was that the government could run those, too. Nobody was very clear on how the government would go about paying for these things; generally the idea was to eliminate the progressive income tax and introduce a flat tax or a sales tax, which would be “fair.”

In such a society, the reasoning went, we would all be maximally free. True, some people would be more successful than others, but that was because they had the skills necessary to get by or achieve. People who lacked the necessary skills or were lazy would fail, and that’s as it should be. The term for this was “meritocracy.” It was regarded as vastly superior to equality or democracy, which were held in contempt – after all, the general population is an ignorant rabble who waste their time following sports and celebrities, and can at most regurgitate a couple of popular slogans, but understand nothing of science, business, or politics.

There’s not really one thing that led me to realize how entirely idiotic (not to mention inhumanly heartless and cruelly elitist) this vision was. A lot of factors played into it. One major influence was learning some history, and seeing the term “meritocracy” used in another context: the old Chinese system of public service exams. I had heard these praised as a shining example of meritocracy in action before, but it wasn’t until nearly the end of high school that I learned they tested mostly one’s ability to memorize and regurgitate classic Chinese texts, plus some general liberal arts – writing poetry, painting, calligraphy, and the like. How could that be a meritocracy? What does the ability to draw have to do with the ability to govern? It was obvious to me what happened: people who were well-versed in Chinese texts and the liberal arts, who measured a person’s worth by knowledge of Chinese texts and the liberal arts, decided to make rank in their society dependent on knowledge of Chinese texts and the liberal arts.

In my first semester of college, I read Plato’s Republic. In it, he argues for another meritocracy; in this one, philosophers rule. That seemed a little more reasonable – wouldn’t a person who studied ethics and government be the ideal person to govern? Except, of course, that Plato was a philosopher himself. Was his proposal really any less self-serving than the old Chinese civil servants? Any less self-serving than medieval nobles who, lucky enough to be born into noble families, declared that such birth was the only rightful qualification for power?

As I studied more, I began to realize that “meritocracy” was really just a form of tyranny: it is a system by which people who have power can perpetuate that power, by defining merit as whatever the powerful regard as virtuous about themselves. When the powerful are good at war and born into elite families, those are the requirements for power. When the powerful are good at the liberal arts, that becomes the requirement for power. When a philosopher proposes a meritocracy, he makes merit equivalent to knowledge of philosophy.

And when people who see themselves as more intelligent, harder working, and possessing (or, in the case of my high school self, in the process of acquiring) desirable job skills design a meritocracy, they build a capitalist one, where intelligence, hard work, and job skills lead (supposedly) to power. It’s ultimately just elitist, self-serving arrogance.

It’s idiotic, too. Figuring that out required learning a bit of economics, and in particular, the fact that wealth has gravity. The more wealth you have, the less effort it takes to acquire more. Once you get more than a certain amount of wealth, you can invest broadly and deeply enough that you turn a profit every single day – without making a single product, providing a single service, or managing a single employee. There’s a decent argument to be made that, by the act of investing itself, you are enabling others to do these things, and thus still contributing to society – but you aren’t actually demonstrating any intelligence, skill, or effort, which supposedly is the measure of merit.

In fact, in libertopia, the measure of merit is wealth, and it really doesn’t matter how you come by it. If you are wealthy, you are presumed to be intelligent, hard-working, and skilled. If you are not wealthy, you are assumed to be failing that measure in at least one respect. Wealth is power; at its core, libertarianism teaches that to have power is necessarily to deserve it. Might makes right, in other words.

Further, wealth inevitably follows a Pareto distribution. In any society with anything remotely resembling markets, the majority of the wealth will always be controlled by a minority of the population. This minority’s wealth exerts that gravitational pull, and so, in the absence of contrary forces, they get richer and richer. In libertopia, where wealth really is the only form of personal power that matters, the inevitable result is that the most powerful become more powerful every day, while everyone else becomes weaker.

What really broke libertarianism for me, at least on the meritocracy front, was the realization that by “freedom” it really meant “the freedom of the strong to oppress the weak.” In a libertopia, a worker has no recourse against any abuse. Sure, there are always strikes, but with nothing to prevent managers from bringing in scabs and no social safety net to support the strikers, such an attempt is doomed to failure, and quite likely to end in poverty and starvation.

Libertopia is not a free society at all. It is a society in which a small number of people live like kings, while the rest labor in near-slavery. A tiny segment of the population have enormous freedom to do almost anything they want, with no need of force or threat of force to control the rest; they can simply dangle the prospect of unemployment and resulting starvation, and everyone jumps to their call. Sure, in theory the unemployed could seek employment elsewhere – but if every employer is equally abusive, how will that help? And yes, the unemployed are free to try to start their own business – but with what capital?

No, there is a word for “meritocracy,” for a society where an elite few have all the power and all the freedom, and the rest must labor in their service or suffer the consequences. And that word definitely isn’t “freedom.”

Gay Marriage in DC!

2009-12-18T14:42:00.004-05:00

I am extremely proud of my city right now -- Mayor Fenty just signed gay marriage into law. The City Council had to fight some pretty strong opposition, most notably the Catholic Church. The situation there was pretty complex; the city uses a lot of contractors to provide services like homeless shelters, and Catholic Charities is the largest such contractor. In order to qualify as a contractor, they have to follow the same rules the city does on things like discrimination and employee benefits, so they were already prevented from excluding gay people from working for them. Now that gay marriage is legal, they have the additional requirement of recognizing their employees' gay marriages for benefit purposes, which of course completely enrages the bigoted fucktard contingent. It is highly likely that the city is going to lose CC as a contractor, which will be a pretty serious blow; I'm really proud of the Council for being willing to do that in the name of civil rights.

The other thing the city had to overcome, of course, is strong opposition on the bad side of town. Northeast and most of Southeast are both pretty poor and very religious, and that combination has historically correlated to opposition to civil rights. There's been some race-based noise about this, because those neighborhoods happen also to be majority black and Proposition 8 created this "black vs. gay" myth, but the statistics are pretty clear that the correlations with poverty and religiosity are a lot stronger than the correlation with race.

There's still the possibility, of course, that Congress will overturn the bill, but I doubt it. They've got 30 days to it in, and they're on vacation for most of those days, and planning to spend the rest finishing up rewriting the health care bill into a feudal boon for their insurance-industry masters.

It's Rational to Be Irrational (Sometimes)

2009-11-20T08:53:00.005-05:00

A little thought experiment that will help lay the groundwork for later posts:

A rational being is one which always acts to maximize the likelihood of producing optimal outcomes. In other words: A rational being has some set of pre-rational preferences, and a body of available information. Using this information, the rational being evaluates the available courses of action and chooses the one that appears likeliest to produce the most-preferred (optimal) outcome.

We thus already see that a rational being cannot exist without something irrational, namely preferences. But there's a deeper way in which irrationality can be rational.

Imagine that you are in the jungle. You, like all human beings, have a capacity called agency attribution. This is, effectively, an alarm system that notifies you when a sensory input is caused by an intentional act. In other words, it's what distinguishes between leaves rustled by the wind (non-intentional), and leaves rustled by a hungry tiger stalking you (intentional). If you were perfectly rational, you would assign agency wherever there was evidence of an intentional being, and no other time.

However, here in the jungle, tigers are pretty good at hiding. There's a good likelihood that those rustling leaves are a tiger, even though there's no evidence that it's anything other than the wind. If you fearfully and irrationally shoot at every rustling leaf, on the knee-jerk assumption that it's a tiger, you are likelier to survive than if you're purely rational about it.

Increasing your survival chances is, generally, a pretty rational thing to do. So, in this circumstance, behaving irrationally on one level is actually rational on a higher level (meta-rational?) Indeed, I'd speculate that something like this scenario creates a selection pressure for a hair-trigger agency attribution, which would explain why it's a nigh-universal human trait.

Anyway, if this scenario seems oddly familiar, it should be: it's Pascal's Wager, only with a tiger instead of a vengeful God. I'm not arguing that Pascal's Wager should be regarded as a valid argument for belief in God (the difference is that tigers can be demonstrated to exist); only that the kind of irrationality which leads to Pascal's Wager serves a useful function.

Edit for Clarity: What I am arguing, in essence, is that there are circumstances under which a hypothetical, fully rational being, who prefers survival to death, will wish to be less rational. To put this yet another way: there exist selection pressures favoring certain forms of irrationality.

slow clap

2009-11-19T00:34:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while, in the midst of the seemingly unending flood of bigotry, hate, war, greed, and pointless suffering, I'm reminded why I love humanity.

Apologies

2009-11-11T17:30:00.002-05:00

The dread specter of real life has reared its hideous carapace. I will be returning shortly to pick up discussion threads left dangling, but it may be as much as another week.

Unburdened

2009-10-26T13:24:00.010-04:00

One of my purposes in starting this blog has been to serve as a counterpoint to some of the atheists you tend to encounter online. You know the ones I'm talking about, I'm sure -- running around insisting religion is stupid and irrational, demanding that religious people prove God exists, and generally proving that fundamentalist Christianity by no means has a monopoly on assholes.

Part of my plan is a series of posts dealing with the serious flaws in standard Internet Atheist arguments. For this inaugural post, we'll talk about the burden of proof.

(Note: When I refer to God with a capital "G", I'm talking about a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient creator which is also a person. I also intend the term to include sets of persons who have those properties when considered collectively, for example some views on the Hindu pantheon. I use the male singular pronoun to refer to God, because that's the tradition used by most people who believe in such a God. I am well aware that not every religious person believes in a singular, personal, masculine, transcendent divinity, and that any given tradition may reject one or all of those descriptors. No offense is intended or, I hope, taken. Please bear with me for the sake of argument.)

The concept of burden of proof, as used by Internet Atheists, has to do with competing claims about existence. Imagine, for example, that I claim there is such a thing as a three-humped camel. You claim there is no such thing. Obviously, only one of these claims can be true.

If there is such a thing as a three-humped camel, then I can prove it by producing the camel. On the other hand, if there is no such thing as a three-humped camel, the only way to prove it is to examine every camel in the world. Quite a difficult task! So, my claim is easier to test, and the burden of proof thus falls on me. In the absence of evidence for a three-humped camel, it's best to assume there is probably no such thing.

This may seem counterintuitive: the easier claim to prove is the one you assume is false. However, it makes sense if you think about it. Since, if true, my claim is so much easier to prove, the fact that I haven't proven it is suspicious. In general, claims that something exists are easier to prove than claims that it does not: to prove it exists, you just have to produce it, but to prove it does not requires searching the entire universe. Hence the rule of thumb that the burden of proof lies with the person making the positive claim of existence. Closely related is the claim "It's impossible to prove a negative." You can't prove that three-humped camels don't exist, because there's always the possibility that you missed the one camel that does have three humps.

If you stop there, it might seem like the Internet atheists have a point: doesn't the burden of proof rest on the person making the claim that God exists?

Well... not always. Remember, the only reason the burden of proof rests on the person claiming three-humped camels exist is because that is the easier claim to prove. In the case of God... well, how exactly would you go about proving that God exists? People have been trying for centuries, and consistently failed. God is neither logically necessary (there is nothing known about the universe which could not be true if God did not exist) nor empirically detectable. There is no device or experiment that can detect an omnipotent being if it doesn't want to be found, nor is there any way to be sure that an apparent miracle is not actually a perfectly natural phenomenon we simply haven't figured out yet.

What about disproving God? Again, you can't. It's not just a matter of checking every camel in the world -- here we're dealing with a three-humped camel that can look two-humped whenever it wants to. The way God is defined makes it impossible to disprove.

So, both claims are impossible to prove, and thus equally (infinitely) difficult to prove. Neither claim carries the burden of proof.

What does that mean? Well, with the camels, in the absence of evidence either way, it is more rational to disbelieve in the three-humped camel, because there should be evidence of it if it's true. That doesn't apply to God. In the absence of evidence either way, and all other things being equal, it is not more rational to disbelieve in the existence of God, nor is it more rational to believe in the existence of God. Both claims are equally (ir)rational.

First Cold Day

2009-10-14T09:56:00.002-04:00

First cold day of the fall today. Not sure exactly what the temperature was, but I decided to wear short sleeves to work. The five blocks from my apartment to the Metro were a little too cold, but then once I got downtown the three blocks from the Metro to work were glorious. Clear and crisp and energizing. I love the cold; it makes me feel alive. Definitely a great start to the day.

Why Fluffy Iguana Cookies?

2009-10-01T16:48:00.000-04:00

Iguanas are reptilian, leathery, kind of grumpy and evil-looking (albeit awesome).

A fluffy iguana thus seems like an odd contradiction. Kind of like being an agnostic atheist Jew.

Also, cookies are yummy.

Mostly, though, it's suddenly become the favored term for "the best possible thing ever" on my favorite blog, Slacktivist. And somebody suggested it should be used as a blog title or band name, and, well... I pounced first.