Life, the Universe, and One Brow

Evolution without teleology

2011-11-08T18:58:00.000-06:00

The OFloinn recently posted on the existence of teleological principles in evolutionary theory over on his blog. TheOFloinn is certainly a better writer than I am. He writes with style, but that doesn't really make up for the lack of understanding regarding the material, or the lack of imagination being applied, which I'll discuss below the fold. I won't cover everything I dislike in his post, but hit a few items of interest. Overall, his point is to support the notion of importing formal and final causes back into science, which Artistotelians always seem to find lacking in scientific theories.

One of the early footnotes set an interesting tone.

Oddly, Mendel's work and the support from his Order are seldom mentioned during debates about church-science relationships.

The odd part is why a priest doing science, as ascientist, or a church sponsoring research into an area they do not find objectionable, would be relevant to the church-science debate. I don't think anyone objects to religious people doing science, or even science being funded by religious organizations. The issue with church-science relationships come from churches discarding, adjusting, altering, ignoring, and/or contradicting the results of science in order to preserve their preferred notion of reality. For example, when abstinence-only education classes (or people working in AIDS ministries) teach that condoms don't protect against HIV because viruses are smaller than the natural holes in latex, or when scientific funding is cut from research because a legal procedure is not supposed to be encouraged, or when children go unvaccinated because some people don't believe in puncturing the skin, the actions of the church affect everyone, even non-church members. I could only wish that sponsoring a few experiments was the extent of church-science relationships.

Later, after a recap of the well-known problem of defining a species, a solution is offered:

Darwin's problem with "species" was due to his dislike of and lack of background in philosophy; for "species" is first of all a philosophical term. It is in fact an example of formal causation, which Darwin and other Moderns are taught to deny. The form is that in virtue of which a thing is what it is.

Whatever else a species is, within biology it is not in any way a philosophical term, but one of mating potential. The fuzziness of the boundary for species does not make the idea philosophical; it means you can not quantize the concept in simple steps, but must treat it as a continuum. The putative use of form would not improve our ability to determine a species. My form is different from my third son's form (for example, we have different eye colors resulting from different eye coloration processes), even though due to the commonality within our forms, we are both of the human species. Trying to redefine species as a concept of forms adds no clarity at all to the species problem, and in particular does not alter the continuum to a simple categorization. This is an example of using a "problem" (which is not really a problem, except to people who like simple categories) to promote a position, when the position acutally does nothing to solve the "problem". TheOFloinn presents a type of thinking where the usefulness of forms is presumed, therefore forms are declared useful; that type of thinking offers no genuine insight.

Things get even more amusing when discussing the notion of finality in physical systems. We see a two-part attempt at evidence for them, which I'll address separately.

There is telos in physical systems.
1. Systems move toward attractor basins, toward equilibrium manifolds; chemical reactions run to completion, then stop. The equilibrium state may be an orbit or a resonating reaction, but this is still a "finality" to the physical process. An inanimate system tends to minimize its potential function, even if it does not intend to do so.

There is a confusion here between the acheiving of a final state and the entry into stochastically equivalent interactions. Really, the only true final state of matter is complete entropy, the primary form of which is the lack of a structured form, the lack of telos. Chemical reactions run to increased entropy, stipping when the entropy is maximized, the form is least effective, and nay interpretation of final cause has little play. You might say the 'final cause' of matter is to shed anything that looks lie final cause.

2. The evolution of species is more teleological than a river "seeking" the lowest attainable gravitational potential. Living beings have an integrated wholeness and possess inner principles that inanimate bodies do not. A petunia is a bag of chemicals; but it is not only a bag of chemicals. For so long as it is alive, it does things that a bag of chemicals cannot do. This is why biology at one and the same time "is not a hard science" like physics and chemistry, and also "a much harder science" than physics and chemistry.

This is an attempt to appeal to our sense that living things are in some sense superior, but it fails upon close examination. A non-living bag of chemicals identical in composition to a petunia will be undergoing processes that no petunia undergoes, just as the reverse is true. Further, I'm not convinced that biology is any less a hard science, or harder, that the more esoteric branches of physics and chemistry. Since the rvery basics reactions of biology are just physics and chemistry, it's really a matter of direction, not difference in hardness.

TheOFloinn also seems to easily confuse metaphor with meaning.

The very terms of evolution are redolent with telos.

Natural selection.
Adaptation.
Struggle for existence.
Striving to reproduce.
Even when we dive down deep into the gene, we find teleological terms like "information" and genetic "code."

Natrual selection is ultimately a probabalistic term, referring to long-term tendencies to survive, not any sort of true selection process. Adaptation is the outcome of the long-term survival tendency within a changing environment. The struggle for existence and the striving to reproduce are also fundamentally stochastic events. Information, when stored in a linear medium such as a gene, is maximized by randomness. The genetic code is really just the chemical process where amino acids are inserted based on a particular sequence. There is no need to telos in interpreting these concepts, and no advantage offered by so doing.

It is often said that these terms are just metaphors; but metaphor is the business of literature, not of science. No one has yet successfully "cashed out" terms like adaptation for non-teleological expressions.

Actually, metaphor is a mental shorcut, whether in literature or in science. Scientists use them to abbreviate, illustrate, and categorize. TheOFloinn is kidding himself about there being no translation of the metaphors into non-teleological language; the translations are easily available on-line. They're also longer and more cumbersome to a mammal brain with an inherent bias to look for purpose.

The essence of the Scientific Revolution was a shift in scientific focus from the contemplation of the beauty of nature to the enslavement of nature to man's dominion over the universe. ... Insight into nature is seldom touted; only its practical spin-off.

He must read other scientists than I. There's no shortage of eloquence on the beauty in the study of stars, zebraish, or rock formations from the same blogger that dismiss final causes as irrelevant and unnecessary.

Edward Blyth, who described natural selection twenty years before Wallace and Darwin (but who did not call it by that name), proposed it as the engine that maintained the species type by de-selecting variants that were not up to snuff. ... Now it is easy to see that Blyth was correct.

Both correct and incorrect. Natural selection does not tend to maintain the species type nor to alter it. To the extent that is metaphorically does anything, it increases the percentage of the population that can take better advantage of the environment. This increase may narrow or broaden the differences in a population over generations.

In an article that I have long lost, these factors were summarized as follows:

The genetic factor: the tendency to variation resulting from constant small random mutations in the genetic code; i. e., a variety of differing individuals within a species capable of transmitting their differences
The epigenetic factor: the tendency of interbreeding population to reproduce itself in a stable manner and increase in numbers; i. e., the maintenance of type
The selective factor: natural selection by the environment which eliminates those variants which are less effective in reproducing their kind; i. e., the agent determining in which direction species-change will take place
The exploitative factor: the flexibility of living things by which they are able to occupy new niches in the changing environment; i. e., a feed-back mechanism which guides the selective process toward a new type which can exploit new environmental possibilities
Which the Aristotelians among you may recognize as

Material cause
Formal cause
Efficient cause
Final cause

Naturally, we see near the end plea to the four causes of Aristotle. As usual, in evolutionary terms, it turns out that the appeals to formal and final causes are not actual causes at all. There is no tendency to reproduce in a stable manner (unstable reproduction occurs regularly), rather the actions of chemicals. I actually have no problem with the idea of form as a description of the processes undergone, but it does not act beyond the inertia supplied by the underlying physics, and the physics is neutral on the maintenance of some "type". There is no guidance of the selective process, merely a stochastic effect that increases certain traits among members of populations, and a primate species that found the shortcut of interpreting events as if they had a purpose to be a handy survival technique, even when the purpose was non-existant.

On the intellectual honesty of atheism

2011-09-20T20:22:00.001-05:00

Ilion, whose handle is inseparable from the phrase "intellectually dishonest", recently linked to a post he claims present the proof that atheists are indeed intellectually dishonest. The proof itself is somewhat out-of-order. Below the fold, I'll try putting it together in a more traditional fashion as well as looking at the various axioms, to judge the soundness of the proof. Those who wish to see the original form can use the link.

Everything in the indented section, except for the outline numbers, is a direct quote from Ilion's post. I am trying to sort out axioms (A) from logically proven propositions based on those axioms (P). When statements are basically repetitions of other statements, they may be given the same outline number, or deleted.

A1) When an entity reasons, it chooses to move from one thought or concept to another based on (its understanding of) the content of the concepts and of the logical relationship between them.

A2) GIVEN the reality of the natural/physical/material world, IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN everything which exists and/or transpires must be wholly reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes.

A3) This "everything" (which exists and must be wholly

P1) IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN this movement from (what we call) thought to though (which activity or change-of-mental-state we call 'reasoning') *has* to be caused by, and must be wholly explicable in terms of, state-changes of matter. That is, it is not the content of, and logical relationship between, two thoughts which prompts a reasoning entity to move from the one thought to the other, but rather it is some change-of-state of some matter which determines that an entity "thinks" any particular "thought" when it does.

P2) ... there exist entities and events in the world which are not wholly reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes,

P3) ... the denial that 'God is' is a false proposition.

Well, this is somewhat incomplete, but the completion seems straightforward. Let's put this in a prepositional calculus form. First, I'll lay out the bare argument.

Z = "atheism is true"
C(x) = "x changes based on the content of concepts and logical relationships"
R(x) = "x reasons"
F(x) = "x exists or changes solely on the basis of material causes"
T(x) = "x is a mind"
E(x) = "x exists"

Then, I'll rewrite Ilion's statements above.
A1) R(x) ⇒ C(x)
A2) Z ⇒ ∀x(E(x)⇒F(x))
A3) T(x) ⇒ E(x)
P1) Z ⇒ ∀x(R(x)⇒F(x))
P2) ~∀xF(x)
P3) ~Z

Let's add a couple of axioms needed to fill this out, which I suspect were meant to be implied.
B1) ∃x(T(x) & R(x))
B2) C(x) ⇒ ~F(x)

The (shortened) proof is in the table below. Note that this proof does not work without B1 and B2.

1	Z	Assumed for contradiction
2	∀x(E(x)⇒F(x))	1, A2
3	T(c) & R(c)	B1
4	T(c)	B1
5	E(c)	B1, A3
6	F(c)	1, B1, A2, A3
7	R(c)	B1
8	C(c)	B1, A1
9	~F(c)	B1, A1, B2
10	F(c) & ~F(c)	1, A1, A2, A3, B1, B2
11	~Z	A1, A2, A3, B1, B2

This proof is valid. The soundness of this proof is questionable on more than one front (Elizabeth Liddle questioned a different axiom); I want to look at B2. If a change is based in part on concepts and/or logical relationships (CLR, for short), does that imply it is not based solely on material causes? I disagree. I would say that changes based on CLR are actually based solely on material causes.

My position is that CLR are patterned-yet-material reactions in the brain to material stimuli. We react with the same pattern of brain reactions to similar stimuli, and name these reactions the process of reasoning. Different people will likely store different physical patterns, but they will create the same behavior when reasoning.

So, as opposed to C(x) ⇒ ~F(x), I would say C(x) ⇒ F(x), rendering the proof unworkable. Naturally, should Ilion offer alternative versions of B1/B2, I'll take another look.

Response to a post by The OFloinn

2011-09-17T16:58:00.001-05:00

The OFloinn's blog doesn't allow me to comment, and he had a post, pointed out to me by another commentator, that I wanted to offer a couple of small comments on, below the fold. As Thomastic writers go, he's got a light-hearted style that makes him an easy read. I give him credit for that. Since this is a Thomasian poster/blog/argument, I'll be trying to frame this in Thomasian terms, to the best of my limited ability.

Now modern genetics does not falsify the Adam and Eve tale for the excellent reason that it does not address the same matter as the Adam and Eve tale. One is about the origin of species; the other is about the origin of sin. One may as well say that a painting of a meal falsifies haute cuisine.

I agree modern genetics doesn’t say much about the Fall, but it has a much harder time filling in with modern anthropology. For the Fall to be true, it requires that Adam and Eve live far enough back that they can be ancestors of all humans, possess sufficient Intellect to understand and communicate concerning the concepts required of them, and possess sufficient Will to deliberately reject those concepts. So, we have people with an operative language. However, the archeological record shows that humans were using writing technology to track numbers abstractly some 24,000 years before they used similar technology to track verbal concepts abstractly. That's a long time to wait to apply an existing technology in a new way.

Evolution points to the answer. Darwin tells us that at some point an ape that was not quite a man gave birth to a man that was no longer quite an ape.

First, note the inherent sexism. It's a man that gets the ability first, according to the narrative.

Second, even more surely than you can count on scientists to make bad philosophical statements, you can count on philosophers to make bad scientific statements. Evolution tells us that humans are apes. There is no sensible evolutionary organization of apes that excludes humans. You can separate humans from a group containing chimpanzees and bonobos, or from gorillas, evolutionarily. If you want to put chimpanzees and gorillas (or chimpanzees and any other species besides the bonobos) into the same evolutionary grouping, humans will belong there.

Further, this is even true in Thomasian terms. My understanding is that one school thinks that living things can participate in many forms, in which case humans participate in the form of Ape. Another school would say each thing has its own form, and that terms like "ape" are categories of forms. Again, by any reasonable definition (that is, one not specifically designed to exclude humans) of this collection, humans will be categorized as apes.

Yet when the Coynes of the world want to tell us 'what Christians believe,' they agitate over the idiosyncratic beliefs of Bill and Ted's Excellent Bible Shack, whose teachings go back to last Tuesday. Go figure.

People respond to the religions of their culture, and the US is dominated by those last Tuesdayers.

There is an argument similar to Zeno's Paradox of Dichotomy that holds that sapient man arose by slow, gradual increments. That is, arguing from the continuum rather than from the quanta.

This completely overlooks the argument from the plane, or n-space. Pregnancy entails separate steps (for example, arrival in the uterus and fertilization of the ovum). Sapience consists of different aspects (generalization, separation of immediate stimulus from remembered stimulus, separation of pattern from individual instances), all of which are possessed by mammals in differing degrees.

Now, "a little bit sapient" is like "a little bit pregnant." It may be only a little, but it is a lot more than not sapient at all. There is, after all, no first number after zero, and however small the sapience, one can always cut it in half and claim that that much less sapience preceded it. But however long and gradual is the screwing-in of the light bulb, the light is either on or off.

There is no good reason to think positive numbers or light bulbs represent good models of sapience.

It is not clear how Dr. Coyne envisions the same sapient mutation arising simultaneously in 10,000 ape-men.

There is no reason to think the physical mutations that allowed sapience where followed by immediate sapience, either. Sapience comes at least in part from a learning the process of being sapient. The physical tools for sapience could have been present for a million years or more before the cultural tools for sapience began to develop. It that happened, even under the on/off model of sapience offered, sapience would have spread inside of a population of 10,000 with a couple of generations, with kids learning it from adults who were not their parents or from the other kids they played with.

Except, The OFloinn allows his metaphysics, founded in religious beliefs, to prevent him from considering this possibility. Original can't be passed from playmate to playmate, it must pass parent-to-child. Therefore sapience must pass the same way.

The anathemas of the Council of Trent mention only Adam.

It's not Eve's fault, she was just a woman.

And so we might imagine Adam sitting around the campfire after an exciting hunt and remembering the bison they had chased and the moment of truth and he suddenly utters the hunting cry that signifies "bison here!" A cry that is in principle no different from those made by other animals, and possibly his fire-mates look about in alarm for the bison the cry signifies.

We might imagine a bee, looking for a new location for a hive, see the location for it, and then returning to the hive and doing a special dance that all the other bees interpret as telling them about the new hive. Except, we have actually observed it, as well.

But in all likelihood, his ability to speak in abstractions -- to speak of 'bison' rather than any particular bison -- is coterminous with his sapience.

So, will the OFloinn venture that bees are sapient? I find it unlikely.

But Adam is different. Having a rational human form in addition to his sensitive animal form, he is capable of knowing the good.

Sure, he just has three words, but he knows what it means to be good.

But for Adam to know the good means that Adam is now capable of turning away from the good.

Notice that "capable of knowing the good" has transformed into "know the good" in the blink of an eye. I wonder if Adam had time to draw a breath in between?

Well, that's enough for one post. The rest is not much different.

I'll be wearing black

2011-09-08T19:27:00.001-05:00

My employers (both the day and the teaching job) are commemorating the Twin Towers Tragedy tomorrow by encouraging people to wear red, white and blue. I'll be wearing black. I don't judge anyone else for the colors they choose to wear. However, for me wearing the flag colors is for celebrating. It's for days like Flag Day or Independence Day. I don't see anything celebratory for the Twin Towers Tragedy. I mourn for the victims, respect the heroes (such as the first-responders), and denigrate the attackers. I don't associate respect or denigration with any particular color, but black is the color of mourning for me, and thus it will be the color I wear.

If politicians really want to commemorate the occasion, do it by covering the costs of cancer among the first responders. Maybe we can't show any individual cancer is connected to the response effort, but we know they are, as a group, victims to an elevated rate of cancer to a degree that is statistically significant. The worst that happens is we spend a little extra money treating cancer in heroes when they did not receive that cancer directly linked to that particular day of heroism. I can't affect the passage of those laws, but I can and will wear black for those heroes, as well.

Biology, forms, and natural law

2011-08-30T18:08:00.001-05:00

I've been reading up on Aristotelian forms, and I think I now understand them much better than before. In brief, forms are the processes that a thing undergoes as a part of being what that thing is. This has some interesting consequences for Aristotelian metaphysics, from what I can tell. For one thing, it pretty much ends the notion of natural law, because there is no sort of being to which a natural law could apply, and even if there were, there is no overall good to which natural law can appeal. More details below the fold.

The first point, that there is no being to which natural law could apply, is based in this notion:

No thing can be a mereological sum of other things. A heap of sand, then, is not a thing, for it is nothing but the mereological sum of the grains of sand. Whether the grains of sand are things or not is a more difficult question.

It’s actually not a difficult question. The grains themselves are composed of molecules, and the molecules are composed of physically separated items like electrons and protons, each acting according to its own form. However, there is no question of an electron behaving morally. Under Aristotelianism, every electron behaves according to its own form perfectly. There are no imperfect electrons. Since any larger object is the mereological sum of the various subatomic particles, with the apparent unity being the sum of the behaviors of the individual particles, every larger object will act according to the sum of the respective forms. Thus every action is in concord with the mereological sum of the forms, and there is no non-good action. That means all actions are in accord with natural law, rendering it moot.

As for the second point, let's say for the moment biological organisms actually were things, because we allowed certain sums of subatomic things to be things in their own right, and these included biological organisms. Then, it turns out every biological organism is a thing with its own unique form. For example, my form is certainly different than my mother's, since my natural processes have made me male and she was female. My form is also different from my father's since his natural processes made his hair red, and then (opaque) white, while mine has been brown, and is slowly going translucent. So, when people talk about the form of a dog in the general, it turns out there is no such thing. Every dog has its own form, and every person has their own form. Rather, we can talk about common characteristics of dogs, or humans, but no some or subset of these characteristics is the form of a dog, or a human. Natural law claims depend upon the use of something being consistent with its purpose, which purpose is deduced from its form, but since every form is different, there is no barrier for the proper use of the penis on one man being different from the proper use of the penis in another man. Hence, the use of the penis in a homosexual relationship by homosexuals is in fact moral. Actually, since the form changes from person to person, and every person acts according to the processes that make up that person, even child molesters are following the dictates of their forms. Natural law is reduced to acknowledging every action as moral.

Finding the delay of a clock without using the Lorentz transformations, part 2

2011-07-28T19:48:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I discussed how Jill would measure the time delay of a clock she was approaching at .6c without using the Lorentz transformations. I don't know if this has been done, but experiments like this could certainly serve as another validation of SR. However, in particular I'm trying to point out that Jill, regardless of whether she is moving, does not measure Jack's clock to be going faster.

I just edited the previous post to add some more information, including about how Jack can use the same reasoning to show the time delay in Jill clock is by a factor of .8, without using the Lorentz transform. This post will be about how Jill can make the same observation for clock1 (although the calculation is different), and an observer at clock1 would be able to make the reciprocal observation about Jill. Details are below the fold.

Since Jill and clock1 are moving away from each other, rather than toward each other, the diagram is different (and actually simpler). Jill still sees her clock move from 0 to 8 on her journey from clock1 to Jack, however, at the end of the trip cloc1 is read 4. That means Jill sees two of her own seconds to pass for every second that passes on clock1, or that the images of consecutive seconds on clock1 are two light-seconds apart for Jill.

So, if clock1 waits for t seconds between sending the image of 0 and sending the image of 1, the separation distance between the image of 0 and the image of 1 will be 1.6ct. Since 1.6ct = 2 ls, we get t=1.25 seconds. Thus, the fraction of seconds as measured by clock1 to seconds Jill measures for clock is 1/1.25, which is again .8. This means Jill measures clock1 to tick off 6.4 seconds on her trip between clock1 and Jack, the same as she measured for Jack.

In the reciprocal, when an observer (Jerry) at clock1 sees Jill pass Jack, Jerry has seen 8 seconds pass on Jill's clock, but 16 seconds pass on clock1 (the ten for the trip itself plus another 6 to see the image). So Jerry sees Jill's clock move at half the rate his clock does. Jerry can make the same calculations Jill does to measure Jill's clock ticking off .8 seconds for each of his.

Finding the delay of a clock without using the Lorentz transformations

2011-07-26T19:50:00.002-05:00

For my readers who are not following the almost 2000-comment thread, aintnuthin and I are discussing Special Relativity. In particular, there is a question about whether a specific number is a prediction of what Jill measures, or a prediction of what Jill predicts Jack will measure.

The basic scenario: clock1 and Jack are at rest, sitting six light-seconds apart, and Jack has a clock (clock2) synchronized to clock1. Jill, holding a clock, passes by clock1 traveling inertially at .6c and synchronizes her clock to clock1 (so they now both read 0), and them passes by Jack. When Jill passes Jack, her clock reads 8 seconds and Jack's clock reads 10 seconds. If you use the Lorentz Transformations (LT) from the view that Jill's inertial state is the rest frame, Jill gets 6.4 seconds for clock2. The disagreement is over whether the 6.4 seconds is supposed to be what jack sees on his clock, as far as I can tell. My answer is below the fold.

My response is that the 6.4 seconds is the time Jill measures for clock2, not the time Jack measures for clock2. You can show it is the former with basic algebra. First, because of light-speed delay, Jill sees jack's clock to read -6 when Jill passes clock1. As Jill passes Jack, her clock has gained 8 seconds while Jack’s has gained 16 seconds. Jill can use that and her relative velocity of .6c to tell how much time passes on Jack's clock for her, without using the LT. I will load a diagram to help illustrate this.

This diagram is based on clock2 sending out an image reading -6 and then an image reading -4, and Jill receiving those images 1 second apart in time. Jill can measure how far apart the images were when they were sent, and therefore how much time passed in Jill's frame between when the first image was sent and when the second image was sent.

In between the times when clock2 reads -6 and clock2 reads -4, the image of clock2 reading -6 travels at c (as measured by Jill), while the clock2 itself travels at .6c. (Edit: adding sentnces) That means the rate of separation between the image of clock1 readin -6 and the actual clock 1 is c-.6c, or .4c. Thus, the ratio of the distance traveled by the image of clock1 reading -6 to the distance traveled by clock1 is c/.4c, or 1/.4 (End of edit). Since the image of clock2 reading -6 and the image of clock2 reading -4 are 1 light-second (ls) apart, the total distance from where clock2 generates the image of -6 and where that image is when clock2 generates the image of -4 is 1/.4 which is 2.5 ls. Since the image of clock2 travels at c, the image takes 2.5 seconds to travel 2.5 ls. So, Jill measures 2.5 seconds to pass while Jack’s clock moves from -6 to -4, or two seconds. 2/2.5 = .8, so for every second Jill observes on her clock, she observes .8 seconds to pass on Jack's clock, the amount predicted by the LT. Over the course of all 8 seconds Jill observes on her clock, this becomes 8 * .8 = 6.4 seconds. Again, this is what she observes to pass on the clocks, not a prediction of what Jack observes.

To forestall an objection, none of this is an explanation for the time delay. It is only a measure of the time delay that Jill can make without using the LT.

(Edit: adding sentnces) I also want to note that Jack can use the exact same process to measure the time delay for Jill, without using the Lorentz equations. Jack does not see the image of Jill passing clock1 until 6 seconds after it happens, when his clock read 6. So, Jack sees the entire trip in 4 seconds. In that time, Jill's clock moves from 0 to 8. Jack can use the same logic as above to measure Jill's clock to tick off .8 seconds for every seconds of his. (End of edit).

Titan, Acquire, and finding the right way to teach them

2011-06-19T10:52:00.002-05:00

On Saturday CharityBrow, Son#1, Son#2, and I all sat down to play Titan. Today, I'm going to teach CharityBrow and Son#2 to play Acquire (Son#1 is not interested in buying stocks, but recruiting monsters to kill each other off is more obviously fun). The Titan game presented a sort of dilemma in trying to teach Son#1. Like any other kid, he doesn't want to be told what to do at every step. So, where do you draw the line when he is missing a basic concept?

I was actually kicked out of the game early. I took a small risk in an attack, but then messed up tactically and lost an angel (one of the most powerful initial creatures) and wound up with a weak Titan stack. Son#2 killed me off exactly like a good son should. It was a problem, because I was still helping the other three find good moves and giving them advice.

A couple of hours later, CharityBrow wore down a little, and asked me take over her stacks. shortly after that, I attacked Son#1's titan stack. I had an advantage already, but then he advanced every creature in his stack their full movement. the problem was that half the stack could move four spaces, and the other half two spaces, and in particular his angel was sitting by itself on a flank. Basically, it hung his army out to dry. This was not the first time he had done this, and I had warned him about it in the past. So, how do you best teach him how vulnerable his movement was?

I took him out. I'm still not sure if it was the right thing, but I surrounded his angel with an angel and 3 other creature, and killed it the first turn. His stack did not last long after that. I felt bad about taking him out of the game, but I think he'll remember better next time why you don't leave creatures alone on the board.

One result in particular that pleased me: he was not overly upset. For some 15 years losing a game meant a tantrum, but we never gave up trying to get him to play. He's finally learned to lose gracefully. I'm very proud.

Pascal's Wager as a burden of proof argument

2011-06-09T12:12:00.002-05:00

Dr. Vallicella has recently put up a series of posts on the notion of the who had the burden of proof in an argument, and I have some disagreements with the first entry and the most recent entry (which, from the last paragraph, looks to be the last entry).

First, I want to commend Dr. Vallicella overall, for an interesting and well-thought-out series. This is especially true in light of his statement that he had no worked-out position before these posts. I’ll discuss a couple of disagreements with the conclusions, below the fold.

In the first entry, Dr. Vallicella discusses a few different methods of assigning the burden of proof to one side of the other of an argument. They are the notions that burden of proof would rest on someone making a positive claim, an existential claim, counter-empirical claim, an improbable claim, a minority-opinion claim, and an unsafe claim. For example, claiming that there is a Saguaro cactus on a desert hillside in Arizona would be positive, existential, empirical, probable, majority-opinion, and safe. Overall, the burden of proof would be on the person who denies the claim. The assignation of the burden of proof can vary from field to field and situation to situation, though. A man carrying a crate of guns from a factory to a distributor has no burden of proof to show every single gun in the crate is unloaded, while a person handling a gun, even directly from such a crate, does bear this burden.

The difficulty comes in applying these different notions to God. In particular, Dr. Vallicella asserts that the theist accepts a majority-opinion claim, and bears no burden on that regard. I certainly don’t disagree there. He asserts that since some positive, existential claims do not need to be proven, there is no burden of proof attached to the positive claim for the existence of God, which certainly strikes me as fallacious reasoning (some things with A also have B, X has A, therefore X has B). Oddly, I didn’t find a name for that fallacy, although it would be some sort of faulty generalization. Just as badly, he assigns the burden of proof to non-theists on the basis that we would not want to lose our beatitude, which is Pascal’s wager dressed up in fancier language. I don’t feel a need to add to the criticism on the linked page.

In the latest post, Dr. Vallicella discusses the notion of the burden of proof in the competing notions that are or are not miracles. Firstly, I find that tense odd. Wouldn’t it make more sense to discuss if there have or have not been miracles? Is the existence of miracles in the present moment actually relevant to his discussion? However, that’s a minor inaccuracy. More serious is the very careful framing of the question as to the whole general class of miracles, avoiding the focus on individual miracles. Saying that there have been miracles offers no assurance at all about the truth of any individual putative miracle. It only offers emotional comfort in the notion you can’t be defeated on general principles.

Also, the notion that in the science game, the burden of proof will be on those who assert miracles exist, but in the religion game, the burden will be on those who assert they do not exist, is flawed. It confuses the procedural methodology of science with the ontological definition of religion. Science has no opinion on the existence of miracles. Religions do. However, any particular religion denies the existence for more miracles that it accepts.

As to whether the burden of proof lies with those who say morality and its presuppositions are illusory, I’m not sure what such a claim would truly entail in actual philosophical terms, unless you are denying the existence of thought at all, such as in eliminative materialism. Even then, the various collections of neural firings that we associate with morality would still be real, so morality as a behavior would still exist. I’m unsure what position is being assigned the burden of proof, here.

On Leibniz's Mill

2011-06-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

There was a recent post on Dr. Feser's blog reviewing a book on the challenge to materialism presented by Leibniz's Mill, which refers to the illustration Leibniz offers in section 17 on his The Monadology. I haven't read the book, and so offer no opinions there. However, The Monadology and Dr. Feser's post are both items I will to comment upon below the fold.

Starting with The Monadology, the first four parts discuss what these Monads are, and what is means for them to be simple. In particular, Monads are simple, without parts, are not collections of things, can’t be extended, divided, created, nor destroyed through natural means. So, from the start, the grounding of this notion is outdated physics, as monads are created/destroyed by phenomena such as pair production or pair annihilation. Since monads are proposed to have a property that is counter to reality, any discussion of them based on that property will not be descriptive of reality.

The example of Leibniz’s Mill comes in section 17 of The Monadology; the claim is that perception can’t be explained mechanically (if we enlarge the brain to a size where we could walk around in it, we can’t point to any given activity as a perception), and is therefore simple. Leibniz then uses this notion of simplicity to talk about the notion of a soul, how it starts, etc. Since the notion of simplicity itself is not descriptive of reality, there is little point in going into detail about the results from this notion. That’s one of the advantages of arguing in a formal system, a mistake at the beginning invalidates the entire argument.

However, according to Dr. Feser, the book under review uses the other aspect of Leibniz’s Mill (the inability to point to a perception in a physical model) to show that mechanical descriptions of nature can’t account for perceptions, a position Dr. Feser endorses. The basic style is a careful presentation of positions that Dr. Feser feels can be refuted. I don’t find some of the refutations to be particularly convincing.

The first is the notion that since we would not recognize collections of nerve activity as being perceptions on sight, asserting they are is basically doing an end-run around Leibniz’s position. However, this is a play to an argument from our ignorance. The real issue is not a lick of connection between brain activity and mind activity, but the lack of the ability to form sight interpretation. Indeed, given a precise translation table between brain states and thoughts, you would expect even under Dr. Feser’s Scholasticism that observing particular brain states exactly corresponds to particular mind states, and the lack is the ability to make the translation.

I do agree with Dr. Feser that taking the position there are no thoughts (eliminative materialism) concedes that Leibniz is correct you can never see a thought. However, I don’t see where that is a problem for eliminative materialism, any more than conceding you can never see a unicorn would be a problem.

Dr. Feser discusses the idea that this could be compared to a computer, where you could see computation going on but not understand the output of the program (again, unless you had a precise translation table). His response is that there can be no such thing as computation without something that assigns meaning to the processing, just as there is no meaning to a written word except as assigned by the reader. However, there is a fundamental difference between an active collection of objects and a passive collection of markings. The water cycle has many of the properties we assign to algorithms, and we can discuss its effects and consequences without making reference to whether the cycle has been designed. There is far less discussion to be had regarding a small collection of rocks lying on the ground. Saying that mental activity which is not previously programmed does not qualify as computation is a matter of terminology, not effect.

Finally, while I’m agnostic on whether the activity cycles of a computer/brain can be pointed to as a separate level of existence or not, such existence would be a far cry from embracing the entire Scholastic metaphysical system or some sort of mystical existence. Noting that activity patterns have cumulative effects does not require that they point to anything outside themselves (so no final causality) and certainly does not entail an exterior mind to direct them. Thus, there is nothing in the computationalist response that need disturb the materialist in the slightest.

Draw Mohammed Day, 2011

2011-05-26T19:00:00.003-05:00

I'm a little late to the party, and I have no drawings to offer, but I have decided to link to the slide-show. I've been torn between freedom of speech issues and respect for other's beliefs issues, but have decided on the side of the former.

Graduations galore

2011-05-23T11:33:00.003-05:00

Son#1 graduated high school this weekend. Daughter#1 is graduating eighth grade on Tuesday. Both of them have faced many challenges on their journey so far, as I have talked about from time to time. Son#1 received Magna Cum Laude, something I never achieved. I couldn't be prouder of him. I think he was the only person who was Magna cum Laude, but not in the National Honor Society. I'll talk al little about what that does and doesn't mean below the fold, as well as what's going on with Daughter#1.

I almost didn't make it to the National Honor Society. In my case, the deficiency was likely character, in particular the showing of respect for my sophomore Geometry teacher. I’m sure the decision was justified; I was often contemptuous toward perceived incompetence as a teenager. I was finally admitted as a senior. By contrast, I hear nothing but positive comments about Son#1’s attitude. By contrast, I can only imagine Son#1 was not considered to show service. He didn’t join any clubs, volunteer to play in any extra bands, etc. He pretty much just went to school and came home, or went to work, after classes were over. I think that’s a part of his condition. Part of the reason to join clubs is to spend time with people who enjoy doing the same things, but Son#1 has very little need to spend time with other people. He likes being helpful and he likes being praised, but he doesn’t really care about social interactions. In some ways, that might make him a permanent outsider.

Daughter#1 has recently (last February) started a medication (Abilify). It has made a huge difference in her attitude and her ability to learn. She is already starting to spend more time in a mainstream classroom (in this case, to pass the Constitution test). You can even tell the days she forgot her pill from the days she has taken it. She’s more alert, more cheerful, calmer, and more responsive to her surroundings. CharityBrow and I couldn’t be happier with the results. We’ll see if it keeps up.

Euology for my mother, 2011-04-17

2011-04-18T21:00:00.003-05:00

What I wrote (below the fold) does not match exactly what I said, but it is very close. My thanks for my father, my siblings, and their families for taking on so much of the effort to help memorialize my mother.

My mother is gone, but she is still alive as well. Her dutifulness, her caring, and her kindheartedness are visible in her children and grandchildren. She not only lived these traits in a way we all can remember, she passed them on gifts, offered not only as lessons, but also as examples for us to emulate. She enriched our lives with hers, and even in her passing, we are still the wealthier in spirit for having known her.

I don't ever recall Mom hesitating to make a personal sacrifice for someone else in the family. When money was scarce, she would find another job. When she felt one of Gram was lonely, Mom took her in. She would give money, cars, and furniture. We could always count on Mom to do or give whatever she could.

Mom always took a little time to give each of us some special attention. She played with babies, repeating the same thing over and over. Anytime someone needed advice, or wanted to play something in particular, or just needed a little extra attention, you could count on her for that. I remember one visit to the zoo; she noticed Nathan was getting irritated by the other kids, so she took him off on a trip with just the two of them. She would regularly tell about the games she was playing with her grandkids.

Mom tried to avoid saying a bad thing about anyone, at least in front of us. When people had let her down, or met her disapproval, she held her tongue, sometimes for years. Back when I was dating, she disliked strongly at least of couple the women she met, but I never found that out until long after they were out of my life. Of course, she did have the occasional gesture to let you know she wasn't saying something, a small shared joke and indication of respect for you or the person being discussed. Still, she kept her negative opinions to herself.

Mom always tried to help us find our own ways in the world, even when she didn't like them. She always told us that her parenting method was to "let go", to prepare herself for our growing independence. Each of us did grow, differently, according to who we were.

My mother will be with us all her life, even longer than we remember her, as we pass on the ways she affected us to those we in turn affect. I miss her terribly, even while she is all around me. I can't think of a better measure for a life than that.

On the differences between deduction and induction

2011-03-31T12:23:00.004-05:00

I’m finally taking the time to comment on a December post from the Maverick Philosopher, this one concerning the nature of deduction and induction. Dr. Vallicella makes some good points, but seems to overlook a key distinction.

Dr. Vallicella begins in a dialectic form, explaining why the usual notions of deductive reasoning moving from the universal to the singular and inductive moving from the singular to the universal are inadequate. I generally agree with his comments on this. However, I would hope in a discussion designed to illustrate reasoning, a better choice would be used for the example of a deductive argument that goes from the singular to the general than the use of a contradiction of singulars to derive a universal general, a usage even Dr. Vallicella acknowledges is artificial. A better choice would have been an argument that is at least hypothetically sound, rather than valid yet vapid. For example, from the singular propositions John is the only chess player born on Feb. 29, 1992 and John is fat, you could come to universal conclusion that every chess player born on Feb. 29, 1992 is fat without having to rely on a contradiction.

However, it is with the last paragraph that I find the thinking clumsy. In saying "To be a bit more precise, a deductive argument is one that embodies the following claim: Necessarily, if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is true", Dr. Vallicella basically removes the meat from the sandwich. A deductive argument is a demonstration of that relationship between the premises and the conclusion by the use the accepted rules of argumentation. That is the separation from the inductive argument, which makes no offer of demonstration except example. In the example of "All As are Bs; All Bs are Cs; ergo, All As are Cs", this is a straight-forward syllogism, and we use the rules of inference to determine it. My example is a little more complex syllogistically, but is straightforward in symbolic logic.

Also, while "the universal to the singular" and "the singular to the universal" are not strictly true, they are simplifications of a more accurate understanding of the scopes of the conclusions. For example, if you interpret propositions as statements about sets, deductive arguments are basically arguments that the set of the conclusion is a subset of the intersection of the sets containing the premises. That is, A∧B ⇒ C is another way of saying C ⊆ A∧B. So, deductive arguments go can decrease their inclusivity from premises to conclusion, but never increase it. Meanwhile, inductive arguments increase inclusivity, by extending membership in a set to something when it was not previously considered a member of that set. So, this is another good way of looking at the difference between deductive and inductive arguments, even if the word choice Dr. Vallicella rejected is inferior.

Jerry Sloan -- a fond farewell

2011-02-12T09:21:00.003-06:00

I haven't had time to write the post I planned to be next. I'm teaching Calculus for the first time, and I am putting a huge amount of effort into it, compared to previous classes I have taught. It's one of those situations where I'm not sure I can measure up to what the class needs. Still, if they let me, I'll be teaching it again. Mental growth comes from mental struggles.

However, I heard yesterday that Jerry Sloan resigned. From what I can tell, he just doesn’t have the energy it takes to constantly herd young players into trusting in his system anymore, and that's not really anyone's fault. I first started rooting for the Jazz in the mid 90s, so it's been quite a time. I'll briefly ramble on about it below the fold. Next post, I'll get back to the topic of the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.

Sloan has always had arguments with players, some much more publically, and just as prominent within the franchise, as Williams. Karl Malone certainly comes to mind, although their disagreements were not as well-documented as those with Ostertag. Sloan seems to have always relied on personal drive, energy, and force of will to keep players playing the system. For better or worse, these things fade as you get older.

Great players tend to have big personalities, and Williams is no exception. You can't expect a man like that, at that age, to just take direction. There will be battles of wills, unless the coach has no authority at all, or just lets the players do whatever they want. Ten years ago, Sloan probably would have been more than up for those battles. In that time, he's been widowed, remarried, and has a knee replaced. Rather than just hang on (ala Don Nelson), Sloan has decided that if he can't be the coach he wants to be, he'd rather not coach at all. I respect that.

I will miss Sloan. I'm going to keep watching, though. I was watching last night, when Kirilenko showed just how good he was by getting injured. I don't know if the Millers will let Corbin coach for 20 years, but it wouldn't surprise me. I'm curious to see if Corbin takes up Karl Malone on his offer to be an assistant coach (I'm sure he'd have a thing or two to show Jefferson). I'm still a Jazz fan, just a sadder one, at least for this season.

Son#1 plays Titan and goes to Disney World

2011-01-08T11:48:00.003-06:00

I haven't about Son#1 for a while. Mostly, that's because even compared to a couple of years ago, he has changed so much. For those who weren't here or don't recall, he has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, specifically Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or PDD-NOS. He was an unusual baby right from birth, although CharityBrow and I only realized it later. Some of his recent adventures, described below the fold, have brought him further on the path to having a "normal" life, whatever that is supposed to mean.

As I mentioned in a prior post, Son#1 has started working at a local TJ Maxx. The Disney World trip I mentioned occurred over Thanksgiving break. While Son#1 is not in the marching band, proper, he was chosen to help carry the banner before the band in the parade. He even got his picture in a local paper. He had a great time on the trip. Sure, there were some kids in the band who didn't like/understand him,and were afraid, but there were others who he could talk to and room with. He had previously gone on a trip to Kings Island a couple of years ago, and there were no problems then. However, it was nice to see him learn about saving his money for special things, that the hard work of learning the trumpet had benefits, and similar things.

Much more surprising was last weekend, when Son#2 pulled out Titan to play with CharityBrow and me, and Son#1 asked to join the game. Titan is a moderately complex game, certainly more so than the type you'll see at Wal-Mart. Son#1 hasn't played in a year. Yet he was able to figure out the recruiting charts, got the hang of movement on the master board, and even did OK on the battle boards. He handled setbacks well, and didn't crow about victories. CharityBrow and I are hoping to get him to play other games with us.

A Maverick Philospher's quest for objective morality

2010-12-07T12:26:00.004-06:00

Many theists believe there is an objective morality to be discovered. However, since you can't uncover such a morality in the same way you can lift a stone and find a pill bug, empirical systems are not use for this process. Instead, many rely on various works that they give implicit trust to, except when the advice of such books goes against their innate beliefs. Hence, we see homosexuals barred from military service, but don't see single women non-virgins barred in such a fashion, much less executed for being a single non-virgin.

Some attempt a seemingly more sophisticated approach of creating a morality based upon a few accepted notions and creating a formal system to reflect it. That's when you see people like the Maverick Philosopher examining the details on what their basic positions entail when examined in detail. Below the fold, I'll go into why I think this helps to pinpoint the inherent lack of objectivity in this construction of a moral system.

I'm not really concerned with the particular argument that Dr. Vallicella is making in his post, rather, I want to highlight what happens when he finds his argument is inadequate. In particular, he doesn't like the breadth of the conclusion of the argument, so he proposes a new starting point. That is, in creating this supposedly objective moral position, he changed his starting point to get the conclusion that he felt was the right one.

Now, I have no objections to this activity per se. In fact, this is one of the better advantages of operating strictly within a formal system. If the starting positions lead you to a situation you can't use, changing the starting positions is to be expected. If you are tracking the movements of ships on the surface of the earth, you don't pretend that the surface of the earth matches Euclid's parallel postulate; instead you assume that no lines (aka great circles) are parallel and use a Riemannian geometry. It will have the tools you need to look at ship movements around a globe.

However, the process of choosing these starting positions is strictly based on the conclusions you want to derive. That makes the starting positions arbitrary, and those positions will be carefully chosen so the results conform to the desired outcome. So, far from getting some objective morality that can be applied to all, you get a tailored morality designed to support a specific set of positions. Some of these systems, like natural law, were debated for hundreds of years before they were codified, and even then still generate disagreements around the edges.

When people come up with another method of knowing things that can exhibit certainty, reality, and demonstrability, that method of know may indeed lead to an objective morality. Until that time, there will be no such creature. All the construction within formal systems will not be able alter the shaky foundation upon which they rest.

Strangers on a Train

2010-10-13T18:17:00.003-05:00

Recently I was riding the Metro from downtown back across the river. Three ladies tried to get off at the East Riverfront station. but one of them had been sitting down, and couldn't get her walker organized and herself out of the seat in time to get through the door. They were at the back end of the train, so the driver was unaware of their situation. The door closed before they could leave the train, and naturally the ladies were very worried about getting back to their station. That's when the other passengers helped out -- sort of.

The ladies were not from the local area, and not used to riding the train. So, while the other passengers reassured them they could change directions at the 5th & Missouri station (the boarding area is conveniently in between the two directions there), they weren't sure how easily this could be done. I volunteered to escort the the ladies, and saw them safely back to East Riverfront. It was not a big deal, I had free time that day.

The reason I bring this up is to point out that I, and my fellow atheists, perform actions like this every day. We do it out of empathy, a desire to make the community a better place to live, a vision that the best world is run by people who help each other. People have always felt this way, since long before humans separated from the other apes.

One of the regular complaints I read is that atheists don't have some source for absolute morality to fall back on. While I usually engage that discussion by pointing out that there is no true, non-arbitrary source for morality (and there will be more on that in my next post), it's also worthwhile pointing out the opposite: humans don't need to taught morality by learning a set of rules or some arbitrarily imposed principles like natural law, they are taught morality by learning to see other humans as worthwhile and deserving of compassion, respect, and fair treatment. People who have an abundance of those qualities will behave morally, with or without an arbitrary set or rules/principles. People who lack those qualities will abuse and re-interpret any given rules/principles to behave immorally. Religious beliefs offer no advantage for moral behavior.

Is "necessary" more than just a word?

2010-10-07T19:25:00.008-05:00

The Maverick Philosopher blogged some thoughts designed to offer evidence that there are necessary beings. Overall, the argument relies on the common co-mingling of the formal and the real, between the description and an actual existence. We've looked at such arguments before, (for example, in this post) and in my series reviewing The Last Superstition. Proponents of the supernatural go to a great deal of trouble to convince us in the existence of archetypes for the descriptions we use for things, because they wish to use those archetypes to cast some being as the thinker of the archetypes. Here, the archetype is "necessary".

Dr. Vallicella breaks his argument down in 6 parts, which I will address in six paragraphs below the fold.

The first part gives the general idea of the descriptions of "contingent" and "necessary". It provides no reason to think of these descriptions as having any sort of independent existence, just as labels we might apply to various phenomena.

The second part introduces a new description, concrete (defined as objects which are or can be involved in causal chains/lattices) and abstract (things that by their nature make them not causally relevant. Non-physical items, such as emotional states, can still be concrete as long as it is possible for them to influence things. However, the items offered for abstracta seem curious. The claim is that ideas like "7 is a prime number" or the set containing Socrates (i.e., not Socrates himself, but the set containing him) are abstracta. Yet, if "7 is a prime number" is abstract, by definition that idea could not have resulted in Dr. Vallicella, nor me, typing that clause into the keyboard. Under these definitions, there are no abstracta that can be discussed, because to discuss them is to have them participate in causing the discussion.

The third part makes the case that there are necessary truths, offering the example that "7 is a prime number" is a necessary truth. As I have mentioned before, this is like claiming that "the Fool's Mate is the shortest chess game" is a necessary truth. People set up the rules of chess, just like people create the number system. There is nothing necessary about the rules we used to create the number system; we can change them at our convenience. So, I am actually unconvinced that necessary truths exist. Nonetheless, I will grant that for the sake of the rest of the argument.

The fourth part has a discussion of what a truth is (a true truth-bearer), and how such a thing can exist, by pointing out that neither marks on a paper nor a brain inscription can be true in and of themselves. Rather, it is the interpretation that we give to those marks, or that inscription, that is true or false. I think the phrase "true thought-bearer" or even "true proposition-bearer" would have been closer to what Dr. Vallicella is trying to convey. After all, if a bearer could only carry truths, it would not need the redundant description "true truth-bearer". Another point of disagreement is the need for there to be a proposition bearer at all. Propositions don’t need to be born to be true, they merely need to be born to be seen as true by the bearer. Especially if the truth is necessary, it will be true regardless of the existence of a bearer. This is another attempt to take a description, in this case "true", and impose some sort of underpinning or instantiation to it.

The fifth paragraph notes that since the marks/inscriptions are themselves contingent, the truths themselves might not be necessary. Applying modus tollens and the existence of necessary truths, Dr. Vallicella arrives at the conclusion there must be non-contingent proposition-bearers. This is where the underpinning attempted in the prior part bears fruit within Dr. Vallicella’s argument, and why the argument fails to be convincing to people who distinguish between descriptions and instantiations of descriptions.

The sixth arguments attempts a reducito ad absurbum on the possibility that all truth bearers are contingent, by using the notion that all descriptions are instantiated to show that, since a proposition can be conceived in any possible world, there must be something to conceive it within that world. It fails to be convincing for the same reason, namely, that there is no reason to think all descriptions are instantiated, so there does not need to be something to think a proposition in any particular possible world.

The good and the bad, side-by-side

2010-09-30T17:59:00.003-05:00

Within the past six weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised by three different websites that I usually disagree with. I have never shied away from vocally disagreeing with people, so the least I can do is extend a little credit from time to time.

Of course, each site has also said something jaw-droppingly stupid since then within the scope of my usual interests, so I'll take note of that, as well. I discuss the details below the fold.

At the beginning of the month, the Illinois Family Institute put together a surprisingly well-balanced take on the misnamed Ground Zero Mosque to kick the month off. Not only do they give, unequivocal support to the right of the Muslims to build the structure, they make a direct comparison to churches all over the country that are facing restrictions on building based on zoning codes. Sure, they forget to mention that some 60+ Muslims (not including the terrorists, of course) were killed on 9/11, but for the IFI, it's better than I ever expected to see. Of course, they have since followed it with the traditional confusion of being anti-bullying with pro-homosexual and some willful blindness to the funding priorities of Republicans in the midst of a rant where they somehow think there are no warnings in the media concerning promiscuous sex. Still, 1 out of 500 is better than 0 out of 500.

Just a couple of days prior to that, Martin Cothran of Vital Remnants showed unusually good judgment in his dismissal of Glenn Beck as a leader for the conservative movement, and more importantly to me, his confirmation of the fundamental personal credibility of Dr. King. There are rare occasions I think Cothran could be promoted from pure blog fodder to the "a little of both" category, that he might one day actually produce information that would be worth reading. Then, he drops a couple of truly stupid posts that arbitrarly criticize public pensions without examining overall total compensation at all and a little gem about Jerry Coyne pulling the last sentence out of context and portraying it as being about something else. With such poor investigative and reading skills, I see little chance of anything valuable coming from his site.

The earliest came from the keyboard of Dr. Feser, with a smack-down of the attempted rebranding of "suicide bomber" to "homicide bomber" by conservatives. While I disagree with his take on Dr. Vallicella (if not paranoid, Dr. Vallicella certainly seems pathologically fearful of Muslims, and his attempts to rationalize his fear bring me regular amusement), otherwise his post was clear and well-thought-out. Of course, that's not going to change his devotion to an outdated metaphysical system, such as exemplified in his incorrect generalizations on same-sex marriage or the grandiose claims regarding classical theism and it's importance today.

Even stopped clocks are right twice a day. Still, three such posts in less than month created quite a surprise for me.

Richard

2010-08-03T20:47:00.003-05:00

When I was first married, I was very poor at my chosen profession (teaching). So, I would often support myself (and help support my wife) with a variety of jobs, one of which working full-time at a Burger King franchisee for three years. I started as a management trainee, but my personality is ill-suited to be management, so I spent most of that time as a typical employee. One of the people I worked with was Richard. It never occurred to me at the time, at least not that I recall, that I might be looking into the future of my own children, in particular Son#1. Below the fold I'll talk about the man I met and worked with, what I knew about him, and what happened to him.

I don't know whether Richard was actually in the autism spectrum or not. I had barely heard of the disease at the time, and certainly didn't know what any of the most common characteristics were. I do remember that Richard was reliable and followed a routine very precisely, and that it was important to take a calm tone with him, all traits that Son#1 possesses. He was already at BK#1 (that is, the busiest store in the franchise) when I transferred in (as a regular employee, having trained at #2, and managed at #8 over the previous six months). He worked M-F, starting at 7am through the lunch rush. He took out the overnight trash, cleaned the outside lot, took a break, and then worked the fry bin. I got along fairly well with him, as he never goofed off nor tried to shirk his duties.

Richard had a twin brother Robert, who also worked at BK for a short period of time. Richard was very protective of Robert, who seemed less able to assimilate that Richard was, and so did not last long at BK#1. I was told they lived with their grandfather, in a house that was fully owned, so they were actually able to get by on minimum wage.

However, there finally came a day when, in the heat of the lunchtime rush, the manager yelled at Richard, and he couldn't handle it. He screamed at the top of his lungs and left the restaurant. The manager was quite shaken, and refused to rehire him. I did see him later, working in another restaurant, doing much the same thing.

Naturally, I wonder if this will be Son#1's life. Bosses who hire him out of pity and then fire him out of fear, moving from job to job without ever really progressing. Son#1 has made so much progress, and been through so many changes, that I think he will continue to do things that surprise me. Still, I worry.

Productive dialog without honest dialog

2010-07-28T19:45:00.002-05:00

The Maverick Philosopher is at it again, this time pondering whether "whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible" in his quest for all that is true (meaning Conservative and Christian, naturally). Oddly, my first thought was that a productive dialog would be much easier if he didn't delete every comment he didn't like on from his blog, despite their being direct and polite, but we can't expect too much from Dr. Vallicella, I suppose.

The Maverick Philosopher reintroduces many of the same misunderstandings as in his Teapot post, to which I posted a reply. As he is a reasonably intelligent man, it is hard to attribute his misunderstandings to something other than a self-induced blindness. Another great example is his post on the liberals playing the race card, where both he and the article of Thomas Sowell's to which he links manage to over look that the two biggest race cards played recently were by Mark Williams and Andrew Brietbart. I guess the race card only offends Dr. Vallicella when liberals play it. So, I'll address the usual misunderstandings of Dawkins point below the fold.

"Some of Us Just Go One God Further"

I've seen this quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

There is one way in which all gods are on a par: there is no reliable evidence for any of them. However, the quote here is not a statement of some necessary ontological status regarding gods. It is a challenge to apply consistent standards of evidence. Given that you reject personal testimonies for Zeus and Anansi, that you find their histories insufficient to believe in them, why do you accept evidence for Yahoweh that is not better in any non-subjective fashion?

What Dawkins and the gang seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously: 'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?' 'Is any particular god the true God' 'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'

I can see no reason to say these questions are senseless or trivial to Dawkins. If they were, he would not have devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to writing a book on them. Dawkins was already a popular author of books on evolution, and his aggressive stance in favor of atheism has cost him some of that popularity. From all indications, Dawkins sees this cost as well-invested, because the issue is both capable of being intelligently discussed and important to address.

The idea, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon. There is no Mind beyond finite mind. Man is the measure.

Well, it does seem trivial that if there is no divine reality, you can't be closer to it with one model of it than another model. However, I have not read anything by Dawkins that says "Nothing could be divine", rather, 'Nothing is divine' seems to be a much better summary of his position. There is no ruling out of any possible type of supernatural, only noting that there is no reliable evidence in favor of any sort of supernatural entity. I have never read a claim he can disprove the existence of an infinite mind, merely that there is no reliable evidence for such a mind.

Of course, this does not rule out the ability to disprove the existence of a particular model of the supernatural, many of which fall apart simply because they are bronze-age creations of people who did not possess what we would recognize as a consistent philosophy, which are then shoe-horned into our modern thoughts. For example, the notion of an omnibenevolent being who engages in eternal conscious torture for temporally limited offenses is inherently self-contradictory. You don't need to rule out the existence of all possible gods to rule out the existence of that particular god.

That is the atheist's deepest conviction. It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin to genuinely doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. But why assume that there is nothing beyond the human horizon?

In my case, I assume there is plenty beyond the human horizon. There are galaxies we have not even seen yet, ideas about the beginning and possible end of time itself, infinities of space, and whole manners of natural phenomena that exceed our horizon. I accept them because we have evidence that they do or at least can exist.

My return question: why assume there is something out there that intends to be found but fails to leave any reliable evidence pointing towards it?

The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

That's easy: theism is absolutely a live option for the majority of atheists. Many of us find it the preferred option. However, the universe does not run itself based upon our preferences. Theism is a live option, but it is not an evidenced option. You can't just wish gods into existence.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a certain amount of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.

So, are we to equate the careful considerations of The Maverick Philosopher with the bold declarations of Dawkins as playing the same role in the social movements dedicated to their respective views of the supernatural? No, I don't think so. Dawkins is not The Maverick Philosopher for atheists. To the degree that we would have leaders at all, he is the James Dobson, the Malcolm X, or the Deepak Chopra: a public persona pushing an agenda. I'm sure Dr. Vallicella knows better than I who the serious atheistic philosophers are.

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible.

Well, I don't recall there being a lot of productive dialog with the James Dobson's of the world, either. Perhaps if you seek dialog, it should be with someone seeking to dialog. Dawkins is an advocate.

Putting the Grim Philosopher argument to sleep

2010-07-27T20:21:00.006-05:00

Now that we understand just what sort of thing a maximal collection of consistent truths must be, we can get around to discussing the attempt to form a contradiction based upon its possible existence, which argument The Maverick Philosopher (Dr. Vallicella) seems determined to support.

In fact, The Maverick Philosopher is so intent on preserving this argument that my comments pointing out a summarized version of my last post are no longer present. That is, I posted the first comment on 7/14, it was gone by 7/15, I posted another comment on 7/18 in the morning, I checked back on 7/18 in the afternoon to see it there, it was gone on 7/19, I sent an email on 7/19 asking why my comment was removed, and so far I have received no response to that email. I should not be surprised The Maverick Philosopher prefers to deal the disproof of his argument by covering up the evidence. After all, this is a man who, despite the presence of a dictionary definition that specifies "A strong fear, dislike, or aversion" as the definition of 'phobia', insists that "A phobia is an irrational fear. If you use the word in any other way you are misusing it. " Apparently avoiding the inconvenient is one of his preferred methods of dealing with reality. So, I'll have to produce the reality regarding his proof on my blog below the fold, where he can avoid it by not coming here at all. For someone who shakes in his boots at the idea of Muslims and thinks it rational, discretion is undoubtedly the better part of valor.

Addressing the 4 points in order:

1. Cantor's Theorem states that for any set S, the cardinality of the power set P(S) of S > the cardinality of S. ... But the proof needn't concern us. It is available in any standard book on set theory.

Quite accurate, assuming the power set can be formed. That's part of the issue with this proof. When you get to a certain size, a collection goes from being a set to a proper class. Depending on the particular set theory, this means either that, for some proper class V, either P(V) cannot be constructed (NBG and ZFC) or it cannot be larger than V (MK). Either way, Cantor's Theorem does not apply.

2. Suppose there is a set T of all truths, ... But according to Cantor's Theorem, the power set of T is strictly larger than T. So there will be more of those truths than there are truths in T. It follows that T cannot be the set of all truths.

As I demonstrated in the last post, the size of T is the size of the ordinal numbers, which is a proper class. So, there cannot be a greater cardinality in the class of all subclasses of T, even if such a subclass were to exist.

3. Given that there cannot be a set of all truths, the actual world cannot be the set of all truths. This implies that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets of propositions. I learned the Cantorian argument that there is no set of all truths from Patrick Grim. I don't know whether he applies it to the question whether worlds are sets.

Since we have no disproof of the notion that there can be a class of all truths (such a class would exist under any typical rendition of set theory), it turns out that worlds can indeed be maximal collections of consistent truths.

4. As far as I can see, the fact that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets does not prevent them from being maximally consistent conjunctive propositions.

This position requires at least some reason to differentiate between the category of consistent sets and the categroy of consistent conjunctive proposition, in that there are member of one which are not naturally a part of the other. However, there is an obvious and natural one-to-one relationship between the category of consistent sets and the category of consistent conjunctions. Namely, {p_i}_{i ε I} <---> &_{i ε I}(p_i). In fact, if you define a partial order on the category of consistent conjuction by sayin that &_{i ε I}(p_i) <= &_{j ε J}(p_j) whenever, for each i ε I, p_i ε {p_j}_{j ε J}, this relationship even preserves the partial order of the set category. This means any maximal consisent conjunction would map to a maximal collection of consistent propositions. So, if you say the maximal collections of sets does not exist, perforce the maximal consistent conjuction does not exist, either.

A primer on transfinitie recursion

2010-07-22T20:02:00.007-05:00

I am going to discuss a transfinite recursion in this post, as a prelude to filling in the argument from last July pointing out that the attempted argument by Dr. Vallicella against the possible existence of a maximal collection of truths, to which I wrote a response last July. Today, that response seems inadequate, so I intend to do the proof more comprehensively. That way, in the future I can just link to the new post whenever Dr. Vallicella decides to raise this argument again, as he did last week.

A good background in ordinal numbers generally will be very helpful for understanding this post. I will not attempt to improve on the three-part series penned by Mark Chu-Carroll over at Good Math, Bad Math. For better or worse, I'll assume the reader understands that material and go from there below the fold.

Transfinite recursion is the process of defining a function over all of the ordinals. Recursive definitions are fairly common at the level of the finite. For example, the factorial function (identified by a bang, for example, 3!) comes up in pretty much any college level math class that mentions probability. Factorials can be defined recursively. You start off saying 0! = 1. Then, for any integer n > 0, n! = n * (n-1)!. Thus,

1! = 1 * 0! = 1 * 1 = 1.
2! = 2 * 1! = 2 * 1 = 2.
3! = 3 * 2! = 3 * 2 = 6.
4! = 4 * 3! = 4 * 6 = 24.
5! = 5 * 4! = 5 * 24 = 120.

This is not the only way to define n!, but it is a useful way. This definition consisted of two steps: the definition for 0, and the definition for any number given the value for the immediately previous number.

With transfinite recursion, the same basic idea applies: for any particular ordinal ω, you use the definitions of some or all the ordinals β where β < ω to define the function on ω. If you can do that as a single definition, so much the better, but often these definitions consist of three steps: define the function for the first ordinal (0), define the function for each ordinal that has a direct predecessor (the are called successor ordinals), and define the function for ordinals that have predecessors, but no direct predecessor (these are called limit ordinals). As you might have noticed, the first two steps are the same as we saw for the definition of factorial. I will be using transfinite recursion to start with a single truth t, and generate from that a maximal collection of consistent truths T that derive from t. "Maximal" means: given any collection T_x of truths derived from t, T_x is a subset of T.

The first step of the transfinite recursion is simple: T₀ = {t}. T₀ is very obviously derived from t.

Edit: In my discussion in the next paragraph, I glected to account for the fact that T_β+1 will contain every truth in T_β even without being unioned. This is corrected.

The next step will be to define T_β+1 given some T_β derived from t. Of course, I will use the definition offered by Dr. Vallicella in his proof, otherwise there would be no point to this. T_β will consist of truths, {t_β,1, . . . , t_β,i, t_β,i+1, . . ., t_β,ω} that derive from t. Consider the power set P(T_β) of T_β. The truth t_β,1 in T_β will be a member of some of T_β's subsets but not of others. Thus, t_β,1 ε {t_β,1, t_β,2}, and t_β,1 ~ε { } are both truths. In general, for each subset s in the power set P(T_β) there will be a truth of the form t_β,1 ε s or t_β,1 ~ε s. You can denote whichever of these statements is true by q(t_β,1,s). We then define T_β+1 = {q(t_β,i,s) | t_β,i ε T_β and s ε P(T_β)} union {t}, and say that T_β+1 is also derived from t. This is the process Dr. Vallicella uses to generate a larger set. Note that since every statement of T_β is repeated in T_β+1, T_β is a subset of T_β+1.

Before we move on, lets look at T₁ and T₂. T₀ has two subsets, {} and {t}, and one element, {t}. t ε {t} (we can call this truth t_1,1) and t ~ε {} (we can call this truth t_1,2). Then, T₁ = {t, t_1,1, t_1,2}. T₁ has eight subsets: {}, {t}, {t_1,1}, {t_1,2}, {t, t_1,1}, {t, t_1,2}, {t_1,1, t_1,2}, and {t, t_1,1, t_1,2}. With three elements of T₁ and eight subsets of T₁, we can generate 24 true statements of the form t_2,j, 1<= j <= 24, two of which were in T₁ (left as an exercise for the interested reader). T₂ will consist of these 24 statements, and t, for twenty-five truths. In case you are curious, there are 25*2^25+25 (i.e. 838,860,825) statements in T₃.

The third step is simple. For any limit ordinal ω, T_ω is the union of all the T_β where β < ω. Since all the statements of each T_β are derived from t by the process in the previous paragraph, every element of T_ω is derived from t.

The (proper) class of all of all ordinals is commonly called Ω. So, for each ω ε Ω, we have defined T_ω. T is the union of all the T_ω over all the ω ε Ω. T is now the maximal collection of truths derived from t. Since for any ordinal ω, #(T_ω) >= #(ω) (that is, T_ω at least as many elements as ω), T has more elements than any ordinal. Therefore, T must be a proper class. I'll discuss what this means in my next post.

At the old ball game

2010-07-21T20:14:00.002-05:00

Recently, Son#1 went to see the Cardinals, by himself. His school's (marching?) band was scheduled to play there, and while he is not in that particular band, he wanted to be there to support them. Unfortunately we couldn't buy tickets through the band teacher due to pressing financial issues at that time. So, Son#1 went downtown to get his own tickets ahead of time. Needless to say, this opened up a flood of conflicting emotions in CharityBrow and me.

First was pride. Son#1 had never been further than a couple of miles from home on his own (he takes a bus to his job at a local department store). This time he took a bus to the MetroLink and then took the MetroLink to the stadium, some 15 or miles away. He never hesitated, showed no fear, and took everything in stride. He called regularly so CharityBrow and I would not worry. In fact, when it turned out the box office was closed on his first visit (a couple of days before the game, the Cardinals were out of town), he didn't get upset. He just turned around and came home. When he got home, he asked me what time he should leave on game day, and we went over the schedule together. On game day, he left on time, bought his ticket, found his seat, watched the game, and came home by a different route than the one he used to get to the game (due to the late-night buses running slightly differently). Ten years ago I had no idea he would ever be able to do these things. Heck, eleven years ago he was still in diapers at age seven.

Of course, there was a lot of fear on my part, as well. CharityBrow and I have always seen Son#1 as an easy target for predators. He trusts pretty much everyone he meets and thinks of them as his friend, at least until they do something mean. He'll hug girls he's never met, always with a big smile. He once left a bicycle unlocked across a park at night, because he never thought it might get stolen. So, we worried about someone offering him a ride and us never seeing him again.

For Son#1, I'm not sure it was even a big deal. Going to the game was a big deal, but the fact he did it on his own, not so much. In that way he's a lot like me. I started taking BiState (now MetroBus) to school in the fifth grade, and never though much of it. Wandering was always part of the fun. I would worry my parents greatly from time to time because of that. In that aspect, I suppose the parent's curse holds true: he is doing to me what I did to them. Should I feel good about that?

Exploring the urban prairie

2010-07-20T19:09:00.005-05:00

I work in East St. Louis, and on occasion move around the city from time to time either as a part of my job, or just to get a bite to eat. So, I get to see a fair share of urban prairie. As an urbanite, I find it rather depressing. I'll say a little more about it below the fold.

There is an interesting variety to the prairie. Sometimes the grass is so thick and high you'd never know anything had been built there at all. For example, along 13th between Exchange and Lynch there are multi-lot sized sections of meadow, which currently feature some wild, pretty, blue flowers (as of yesterday, anyhow). Other times, you can still see large patches of asphalt or concrete that have not yet successfully been buried, such as along State street between 81st and 85th. Presumably, much of this land belongs to the city. So, not only does the city need to pay for whatever upkeep there is on the property (the grass does need to be cut every month or so, at least along State Street), but it brings in no revenue. As more and more land becomes deserted, it becomes harder to support basic services for the remaining residents.

I wonder how long this can continue. Unlike East Coast cities, we still don't have land shortages here in the Midwest. So, O'Fallon, Shiloh, Troy, etc. are all growing, talking about getting new interstate exits, etc., while land much closer to St. Louis languishes. Eventually, the USA will have enough population pressure that this land will be used again. I wonder how long that will take.

Some of the land is apparently going to community gardens. In the next 50 years, we'll see full-scale farms? Can the latest 10 million help reverse the trend? I wonder if I will se a turnaround in my life time (based on family history, another 40 years or so).

The Reluctant Atheist meets The Fly

2010-06-09T19:54:00.003-05:00

I am a reluctant atheist. Every time I read about some new proof of the existence of God/gods, I get a little bit of hope that I will be able to return to belief. So, when I reviewed Dr. Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition (you can read the series by clicking on the label link in the labels list), it was with the hope that there was some substance behind the show, that the tone of contempt shown toward atheists had a basis in real proof. Instead, a careful examination made it clear to me why Aristotlean-Thomasian metaphysics (abbreviated A-T hereafter) had been abandoned, or at least (since I don’t know the actual history of the field) why it will never again dominate metaphysical thinking. Below the fold, I use Dr. Feser’s speculations concerning the metaphysical implications of the movie The Fly to show where I think A-T is giving a poor description, and where Dr. Feser himself doesn’t seem to be using A-T very well. I will assume my readers have read Dr. Feser’s post first.

I will start out agreeing with Dr. Feser’s caveats that with very few actual facts to work with, all of this is speculation. However, I believe that Dr. Feser and I agree on all of the relevant facts, so that should not be an issue.

When addressing the question of whether BrundleFly is human, I think there is another categorization that could have been used to separate distinct concepts and clear up aspects of this classification: person. If we slightly change the traditional A-T definition to "a person is a rational animal", and perhaps "a human is a member of homo sapiens sapiens", with the acknowledge that in A-T, every human has the form that is a person, and therefore is a person, that will clear up much of the confusion. BrundleFly is certainly a person, as Dr. Feser’s descriptions the reasoning behind BrundleFly’s actions makes clear. However, BrundleFly is not a human. He has no evolutionary history when he steps out of the teleportation chamber, he is a type of Swampman or at the very least a hybrid. You are a member of a species based on your line of descent. I could be mistaken, but I believe Dr. Feser would not say that a mule is a horse.

Both of Dr. Feser’s arguments that try to support saying 'BrundleFly is human' actually go against the grain of A-T philosophy. While Dr. Feser assert the retention of reason as a means of asserting humanity, you first have to ask: does BrundleFly still have the form of a human? If you persist in saying that, for living thing, the form is what the living thing attempts to reach, then BrundleFly’s transformation does not deform him, it brings him closer to his true form. The second argument, that "human" should cover any sort of rational animal, serves merely to conflate different concepts. What makes Dr. Feser’s insistence even more self-contradictory is that, for him, there is a regularly occurring event where two living things with distinct DNA strands merge, which event Dr. Feser insists without equivocation produces a new living thing with a new form, different from either of the prior living things.

As for his discussion of what might have happened if BrundleFly has successfully merged with Veronica and her unborn child, the notion that two independent souls might survive in BrundleFly makes for some interesting interpretations for real-world human chimeras and monozygotic twins. Do chimeras really posses two souls, according to Dr. Feser? Do identical twins share a single soul between them? Those are the natural implications of his thoughts.

The reason Dr. Feser and I can start from the same facts, and come to completely opposite conclusions about Brundlefly within A-T, is that the A-T uses the non-factual determination of form to reach its conclusions. While I made what I felt was a reasonable argument that Brundlefly’s form was not human, that does not constitute proof, and in fact form cannot be proved. It can’t be measured, verified objectively, or pulled out by a process. The determination of a form is basically arbitrary, the most people can achieve is to agree to the same arbitrary designations to achieve consistency. That’s why A-T will never supplant the metaphysics of science today. It brings subjectivism to what is intended to be an objective process.

My son's job

2010-06-08T18:41:00.001-05:00

I said earlier that I would discuss what Son#1, who has an autism-spectrum disorder, does to make money. Since I don’t make many posts that are only one sentence long, I will also take the time to discuss what I have seen of him at work, what his teachers have passed back as the feedback they receive, what doing this means for Son#1 (and us), and what I think this means for his future, below the fold.

His job is at TJ Maxx. It is his first job, and he was hired through a special program at the school. He works 1 or 2 afternoons a week, just under four hours at a time. He is responsible for putting merchandise back on the shelves, making sure that it is properly folded, sorted, or matched as needed. These tasks play very well into his strengths. These tasks deal with concrete objects, as opposed to abstract objects or people, require physical manipulation, and result in a nicely structured and patterned display. I have observed him at work once or twice when he did not know I was there. He moves quickly from place to place, and pays close attention to what he is doing and the final result.

According to his teachers, the store is very pleased with Son#1. While he is now an adult, so it’s not really my place to ask for personnel records (in fact, CharityBrow and I are now merely advisers at his school progress meetings, Son#1 is now in charge of his school plan), his teachers have informed me that he was nominated for Employee of the Quarter. They have continued to schedule him even though the school year is over, and have apparently indicated that they want to keep him after graduation. While I have always known that I have a determined, hard-working son, it’s quite a relief to see other people appreciate those same qualities. We’ve had some bad experiences in that regard, in particular at the church Son#1 attends, where they told him he could no longer volunteer at their Vacation Bible School (Maybe I’ll rant on that another day). While I want all my kids to succeed, there is a certain anxiety with regard to Son#1, and it’s nice to have that partially alleviated. You can make a living stocking shelves.

Then there is the money. Son#1’s first priority is a trip to Disney World with the band, and he is contributing half the amount needed every month (we contribute the other half). In addition, he makes regular trips on his bicycle by himself to buy himself little things: a soda here, a bag of chips there, perhaps some ice cream instead. He is primarily a saver, though. When he is out of money, it’s because he has lent it to us (don’t worry, he gets a very good rate of interest).

Son#1’s ultimate goal is still to be a band teacher. I think he has a chance to do, but it will take him longer than it might take other people. In the meantime, he’ll be able to pay for school, buy himself clothes, and generally enjoy his life while trying to make it better. There’s not much more I could ask for.

Thoughts on the last Jazz season

2010-06-07T18:55:00.003-05:00

I just wanted to take a little time to talk about my reaction to the 2009-2010 season for the Utah Jazz. Overall, I was very pleased with the results. I think the Jazz took a couple of important steps forward. The series against the Lakers was disappointing, but that was more than balanced by other events, in my mind.

Before the season started, I had predicted the Jazz would win 54 games. They actually had 53 wins, so I was satisfied with that. More importantly was that a few of the wins showed they made real progress as a team. They beat San Antonio in San Antonio, for the first time in about a decade, and then did it a second time, sweeping the season series. They tied Denver for the division lead. They took a couple of close games on national TV, and came back from 25 points down in one game. All of this points to a team that is maturing, especially the three best players of Williams, Kirilenko, and Boozer (I think pretty much in that order).

The Jazz front office made some good moves as well. Keeping Millsap helped insure they had one of the better benches in the league. Okur was signed for another couple of years. I think ideally Okur would be a great sixth man, able to come off the bench and play inside or out to give the bench different look. However, he has certainly played better than any other center on the team, and I’d rather know he will be here than relay on Koufos, Fesenko, or undrafted Rookie X to start games. They turned a couple in mid-level draft picks of marginal value (Maynor and Brewer) into significant tax relief. They found and signed the best undrafted player (Matthews). While neither of the D-league signees showed great talent, they were integrated into the Jazz system and made minor contributions. Since I usually put the draft and free-agent signings as the beginning of the season, who they draft in 2010 and whether they can keep Boozer doesn’t factor into this analysis.

In the playoffs, the Jazz beat a full-strength Denver in Denver for the first time in a few years, and without two of their best four players. Not only was that another important milestone, but it also highlighted just how good Sloan is. Probably over the past four of five years, the importance I gave to NBA coaches was gradually diminishing. While I still think that talent tends to win out in the end, the Denver series showed that a well-coached squad can override superior talent on a poorly-coached squad.

Then came the Lakers, and it was disheartening. The Lakers are considerably more talented than the Jazz, especially with the Lakers at full strength and with the Jazz still missing two of their best four, and Jackson will never be outcoached to the degree Dantley was. Still, not only were the jazz swept, but in three games it seemed like the Lakers were doing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. I will get real pleasure out of beating the Lakers in some future playoff series, but I don’t see that happening for a couple of years.

So, overall I thought the Jazz were a great team to root for this past year, and I’m looking forward to the 2010-2011 season.

Prom night

2010-05-10T19:38:00.003-05:00

Son#1 is a high-school junior this year. At his school, both juniors and seniors can attend the prom, so he took his own hard-earned money and bought a prom ticket (I'll save the discussion for what he did to make his money "hard-earned" for another post). He was at the dance for four hours, and then I drove him to the after-prom at a local bowling alley, where he stayed for another five hours. I finally picked him up just before 5 am.

Charity (short for CharityBrow, which my wife has as an online time from time to time) was worried about him for weeks leading up to the prom. What if kids pick on him? What if he gets confused and forgets how to call home? What if some less-than-honorable kids offer him a ride (a recurring demon we both suffer from)? I had a little more confidence, in that I at least persuaded her we needed to let him attend, but I won't pretend I didn't worry about the same things. However, none of that happened. He danced, and a couple of times even danced with a girl. He kissed a girl on the cheek. He bowled. He called when he was done dancing, and again when he was done bowling. Each time, he had a huge smile on his face because he had so much fun.

Because he's the oldest, I still wonder how my worries for him will compare with the other four. I think my mother worried as much about my youngest sibling (#4) as about me (oldest), at least in the out-late-at-night situations. Will I worry as much about Sons#2-3 and Daughters#1-2? If I don't, how much of that is because of experience, and how much is because their problems are much more manageable than pdd-nos (although the ADHD of Daughter#1 isn't that far off)?

Son#1 wants to take driver's education next year. I don't know how I feel about that, either. It's been hard enough trying to sit in the passenger seat when Son#2 (who is 16) is driving. Still, I plan to let him go to college and try to become a band teacher. If he can do that, I should probably at least give him the chance to learn to drive. Maybe.

If I thought that the questions would ever end, this would be easier to deal with. But I don't think they ever do.

Back to posting

2010-05-10T19:36:00.002-05:00

Sorry about my recent hiatus. My day job got a little busier, and it can be hard to get time on the computer at home. In times of vanity, I think I may be disappointing as many as a dozen people.

Maybe the answer was no, after all

2010-03-23T19:11:00.004-05:00

Martin Cothran did me the favor of correcting my usage of English as a part of his response to an earlier post. I somehow mixed 'disparagements' and 'aspersions' into the accidental portmanteau 'dispersion', even though there is a homonym with no relation at all to the meaning of 'aspersion' or 'disparagement'. Frankly, it would not surprise me at all if Cothran can "speak it [English] more competently than I". Certainly, one of his duties for the Kentucky version of Focus on the Family is to make speeches, and I have no such experience. Although, since I don't believe he has ever heard me speak, he probably meant write, and I would not be surprised if he did that better, as well. Since my original comment was quoted as "It turns out his English is not nearly sufficient to warrant [Cothran's] casting of dispersion on other posters, or maybe it's his grade-school-level-science that is lacking", I have no problem accepting it's a matter of grade-school-level-science.

So, that's probably a couple of tally marks on his side of the ledger. Of course, based on his post, on my side of the ledger there would be the ability to apply logic to a daily situation, the ability to separate experts from non-experts, an ability to better read English, and a grasp of the differences between short-term and long-term phenomena. I'll address those points below the fold. Of course, I probably shouldn't be keeping score, that's just the gamer in me coming out.

The first point, Cothran's apparent inability to apply logic to a daily situation, is pointed out by Cothran's continued confusion of temperature with precipitation (not to mention apparently missing the implication of the "or" in the quote above). While Cothran is busy blogging about snow levels, 2009 was the second warmest year in the modern era. That means that every year of 2000-2009 is in the top twelve years, IIRC. It seems a simple concept: you measure warmth by looking at temperatures. Even in grade school we learned the difference between a rain gauge and a thermometer. Of course, Cothran teaches as a Christian school, so science is probably low in their curriculum priorities. At any rate, given his continuing difficulties distinguishing between precipitation and temperature, maybe he would refuse to wear a coat in a freezer.

For the second point, who does Cothran point to as authorities making predictions concerning global warming? Politicians. When I want advice on how a law is made/executed/adjudicated, I'll go to a politician. When I want direction on a scientific prediction, I'll go to scientists. I'm just crazy that way.

Of course, some people are probably thinking to themselves that Cothran did also link to an IPCC report. This is indeed a good authority, and if Cothran was not lacking in his basic ability to read English, he might have even interpreted this authority correctly. However, contrary to the assertion "But it's the IPCC saying that Global Warming is inconsistent with increased snowfall", there is not one part of that article which predicts decreased overall snowfall. In fact, the article specifically predicts increased precipitation, and lists snow as one type of precipitation that will increase. For example,

Because precipitation comes mainly from weather systems that feed on the water vapour stored in the atmosphere, this has generally increased precipitation intensity and the risk of heavy rain and snow events.

The only place where reduced snow is mentioned is

As temperatures rise, the likelihood of precipitation falling as rain rather than snow increases, especially in autumn and spring at the beginning and end of the snow season, and in areas where temperatures are near freezing. Such changes are observed in many places, especially over land in middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, leading to increased rains but reduced snowpacks, and consequently diminished water resources in summer, when they are most needed. Nevertheless, the often spotty and intermittent nature of precipitation means observed patterns of change are complex.

So, the prediction is for more precipitation overall, including heavy snow, but in the spring and autumn and in a couple of geographic locations some of the snow will be replaced by rain. This was a very readable and accessible document that Cothran completely inverted the meaning of.

Finally, we get to the difference between long-term and short-term phenomena. One extra-hot year one continent is not proof of global warming. So far, the overall temperature increase since the 1960s is less than two degree Celsius, well with typical temperature variation on a single continent from year to year. By the same token, even if 2010 was a cold winter, one cold year on one continent is not proof against global warming. However, we don't even have a cold month here: February 2010 was one of the hottest Februarys ever (again, the difference between temperature and precipitation). So, here is my response to the challenge

Now maybe One Brow could explain how more snow at lower latitudes is consistent with Global Warming.

It's really quite simple: we had more snowfall at lower latitudes and one of the warmest Februarys ever. That occurred at the same time, therefore they are consistent. QED

Maybe, when he has time, Cothran will use his superior English writing skills to tell me how it can be disadvantageous to have a scientific theory? I am much more interested in that question than in climate, frankly.

On the disadvantages of a scientific theory

2010-03-04T21:16:00.004-06:00

Of course, the first question to ask is: how is a scientific theory supposed to be disadvantageous? Does having a working, tested, reliable explanation for a phenomenon somehow put a person at a disadvantage over someone who shrugs his shoulders and says "Dunno"?

The reader might find this a strange topic, and frankly, so do I. However, it has been brought to my attention, via this post on Vital Remnants, that a least one legislator in Kentucky thinks there can be a disadvantage inherent to having a scientific theory, as stated in Kentucky House Bill 397. Text of the bill and commentary are below the fold.

Here is the entire bill:

AN ACT relating to science education and intellectual freedom.
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:

SECTION 1. A NEW SECTION OF KRS CHAPTER 158 IS CREATED TO READ AS FOLLOWS:
(1) Teachers, principals, and other school administrators are encouraged to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories being studied.
(2) After a teacher has taught the content related to scientific theories contained in textbooks and instructional materials included on the approved lists required under KRS 156.433 and 156.435, a teacher may use, as permitted by the local school board, other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, including but not limited to the study of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.
(3) This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.
(4) This section may be cited as the Kentucky Science Education and Intellectual Freedom Act.

Thank goodness there is not one, but two separate religious disclaimers located in the text. Otherwise, given the specific mention of evolution, abiogenesis, global climate change, and cloning, people might think that the inclusion of the specific scientific topics that have mountains of religiously-motivated denialist materials published might stem from a religious motivation. Actually, I think I have come to that conclusion despite the disclaimer. Maybe the next time some legislator with more faith than brain offers a bill that's designed to undercut science, they could refer to the so-called controversies in physical science (Is the earth really flat?), physics (Can something move faster than light?), or geology (Is the earth 6000 years old?). That should fool everyone, right?

Still, it's pretty amusing to see how desperate the IDers have become. After packing their beliefs as 'equal time' and critical analysis' and watching them both get smacked down in court, after 'strengths and weaknesses' has become a non-starter, they keep trying to peddle the same book in a new cover, and today's cover is 'advantages and disadvantages'.

On another note, I have never heard an elementary/secondary teacher complain that they ran out of material to teach in science class, and need to introduce entirely new conversations regarding the material. Much more common is to hear that there is so much to teach and so little time. So, who does this legislator talk think has all this time in class anyhow? Perhaps those who are personally opposed to teaching the scientific consensus?

Also, it shows a very basic misunderstanding of science to talk about promoting critical thinking skills and logical analysis applied to scientific theories. Scientific theories are the results of applying critical thinking skills and logical analysis to evidence. This is like saying how buttered toast would be tastier if you put some butter on it, of that you could improve the game of basketball if you used a ball. Of course, there would be a lot to be gained from showing how critical thinking skills and logical analysis of the evidence has led to the theories, but that's not in the text of the bill, nor is that the purpose of the bill.

So, going back to the original question: what are the disadvantages of scientific theories? In some ways, I think that was answered in the previous paragraph: they come from using critical thinking and logical analysis of the evidence. If there is one thing the religious groups do not want to see, it is critical thinking skills and logical analysis applied to their beliefs and the evidence they present for those beliefs.

The 131st Skeptics' Circle

2010-02-25T09:17:00.002-06:00

You can now find the 131st Skeptcs' Circle at Providentia. I found the list of areas of knowledge needed for skeptics, and the dowsing for bombs articles to be particularly interesting.

Overpopulation and the Illinois Family Institute

2010-02-24T09:39:00.004-06:00

The Illinois Family Institute only occasionally talks about issues that intersect with the things I like to talk about on this blog. Their primary purpose is political, not social, by their own admission, and I don't really want to discuss politics that much in my blog posts. There are better sites for that. However, when they do discuss issues of science, you can rely on them to be wrong. So, when I saw a couple of videos that were filled to the brim with misleading information on overpopulation, I thought it was worth mentioning. I will discuss some of the facts on these videos, and how meaningful they are, below the fold.

Each video has its own justification page, so I’ll start there for The Making of a Myth.

Claim: Did Malthus really say to kill off the poor? Yep. Reality: There is a the usual quote mine that does not directly support the contention. Malthus did favor enacting conditions that would increase mortality, but nothing in the quote mine nor the link suggests killing off the poor.
Claim: Malthus thought doctors shouldn't cure diseases? Reality: Malthus says that if we stop curing diseases, we can marry at puberty and not starve. There was no recommendation offered.
Did Paul Ehrlich really say that famines would devastate humanity in the 1970s? Reality: while not hundreds of millions, in facts millions did die from famines in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in undeveloped countries. Ehrlich seemed to underestimate the impact of the Green Revolution.
Claim: The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was founded in 1969, the year after Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Reality: Being founded the year after a specific book is published is not evidence the book is a cause. In fact, it’s much more likely the UNFPA’s originators were working independently from the same data.
Claim: Their complicit work with the infamous "one-child policy" ... led the United States to pull its funding. Reality: The UNPF (name changed in 1987) was funded by Congress in every year of its existence. In some years, Reagan and the Bushes chose to not send the funding of the US to the UNPF.
Claim: The wealthy of the West, in their terror of poverty, have given copiously to the UNFPA and its population control programs. Reality: There are over 180 nations that fund the UNPF.
Claim: Every family on this planet could have a house, and a yard, and live together on a land mass the size of Texas Reality: By their own calculations, this living space is slightly less than 33 ft by 33 ft per person. This does not allow for farming, schools, hospitals, work places, streets, sidewalks, places of business, utilities, sewers, parks, etc. The claim is plainly false, we could not live together in such a fashion.
Claim: The population of the earth will peak in 30 years. Reality: Only under the low-fertility variant option.
Claim: While they provide Low, Medium, and High Variants, the Low Variant is the one that keeps coming true, so the Low variant numbers are the ones used in this video. Reality: The database being used to assemble the data is from 2008. The Low, Medium, High, and Constant-fertility estimates (which are higher than High) have an identical historical record.

Then we can move on to 2.1 Kids: A Stable Population.
Claim: But even that is assuming that every woman has children, and that there are no effects from famine, war, or disease Reality: No, a rate of 2.1 children per woman who go on to reproduce already incorporates the effects of famine, war, disease, and the choice of some women not to have children.
Claim: If society does not replace itself every generation, human numbers begin to fall exponentially. Reality: The children of the fecund women will also tend to be fecund, and their numbers will increase while the offspring of other women will decrease, slowing the overall effect of the population decrease. This also leads to cultural change where discouragement of large families is no longer a feature of society.
Claim: Elderly people retiring begin to outnumber people entering the workplace. Reality: As fewer young people enter the workplace, elderly people tend to keep working for longer periods in their life. While anecdotes are not evidence, my father is 72 and plans to retire in 15 years or so, health permitting. I won’t be retiring before the age of 75, and will probably keep working after that.
Claim: many societies are facing a danger of extinction. Reality: None of them are.
Claim: When a population decreases in size, the number of potential mothers also decreases. We say that countries with very low birthrates--like Japan's 1.21 children per woman--are in demographic collapse because each new generation is little more than half the size of the one that preceded it. At this rate, it would take only four generations to reduce the size of population to 10 percent of its initial size. Reality: Based on having one hundred women born from every two hundred and seven live births (a number they use earlier), a replacement rate of 1.21 children per woman give a population of 11.67% of the original, not 10%.
To offset this decline and restore the population to its initial numbers, each woman would need to have 20 children! Hardly a tenable solution.
Reality: Offsetting a decline of four generations within one generation would be daunting (although 18 children will be enough to do the trick). However, having 4.25 children per woman replaces the population in only three generations, and 3.55 children will replace it in four.

While these so-called family groups are harping on the supposed myth of overpopulation, we are seeing fresh water shortages over many parts of the earth, caused by farming in the attempts to feed the burgeoning population. This will not be changed by a couple of cute videos.

However, some might wonder why these family groups worry so much about what will boil down to the choice of the individuals involved anyhow. Fortunately, you can always count on these groups to explain their motivations. In this case, it’s Muslims. I’m not kidding, they are worried about Muslims taking over Europe. For all their claims that population control advocacy has a racist history, their own real motivation is bigotry. This is not surprising.

Would Cothran wear a coat inside a freezer?

2010-02-17T19:11:00.006-06:00

Over at Vital Remnants, Martin Cothran has some fun (because, he is so very seldom serious) sneering at Josh Rosenau's comprehension of English, with gems like

Rosenau is not familiar with Latin, of course, but that is not really his problem. His problem is that he doesn't seem to understand English too well.

I've mentioned before that, for an instructor in logic, Mr. Cothran is rather incompetent at it. It turns out his English is not nearly sufficient to warrant his casting of dispersion on other posters, or maybe it's his grade-school-level-science that is lacking. I would hate to prejudge on that score, as Mr. Cothran is ignorant in so many areas that I would not presume to pick just one. More below the fold.

Later on in the same post, he presents

I had pointed out the record level of snowfalls (something Global Warming advocates said there would be less of because of Global Warming--when they're not saying the complete opposite) and I pointed it out as a subtle way of mocking their own process only using opposite evidence. And when the Warmers began lecturing me about weather not being the same thing as climate, I simply pointed out that if it wasn't for me, then it shouldn't be for them.

and

So let me put the implicit argument of my post in the form of a logical syllogism (And I should probably issue a warning, in doing so, about the possibility that Rosenau might once again try to imitate this exercise himself on his own blog with the usual amusing results):

If individual warm weather events are confirming evidence for Global Warming, then individual cool weather events are disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

But cool weather events are not disconfirming evidence for Global Warming

Therefore, individual warm weather events are not confirming evidence for Global Warming.

Now this is not tu quoque argumentation, it is the logical process called modus tollens. But then we are speaking Latin again, aren't we? To someone who doesn't know Latin--or logic.

Notice the slide from "the record level of snowfalls" to "individual cool weather events"? However, it snows regularly during individual warm-weather events in places like Nome (where even a warm winter day can be well below freezing), while I certainly experienced a few cold-weather events this year with no snow at all falling from the sky. The phenomena are distinct, and treating record snowfalls as indicative of cold weather is a non sequitur. Of course, that's a Latin phrase, so Cothran can obviously translate it. Unfortunately, he apparently does not understand its importance to logical thinking.

So, here's an example to help him out. I'd suggest he get a job at any local fast-food or convenience store (I believe he can stretch his intellectual capabilities that far) and stand in the freezer in the back (say, unloading the weekly shipment). It will not snow inside the freezer, I positively guarantee it. So, according to Cothran-logic, it can't be cold. How long will he be willing to stay in there without a coat?

Of course, this type of confusion is typical of the denialists, pretending that one sort of event is really another.

The 130th Skeptics' Circle

2010-02-17T18:22:00.002-06:00

I've been feeling a little overwhelmed lately, so I have not posted much. Meanwhile, a very nice compilation was made at The Lay Scientist for the 130th edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Featured is reported on the massive homeopathic overdoses seen in England in late January, the results of which were predictable (at least to skeptics).

The 129th Skeptics' Circle

2010-01-28T11:53:00.002-06:00

You can now find the 129th Skeptics' Circle over at the blog maintained by The SkepVet. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, and probably won't for a while, but I am eagerly looking forward to it.

Would Data be immune to woo?

2010-01-27T11:01:00.001-06:00

Recently, there was a post over at Respectful Insolence on the possible anti-vaccination leanings of Brent Spiner, who played Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In particular, Orac wrote:

I realize Data is a fictional character, but, even so, I wish that the spirit of Data would infuse the actor who played him and drive out the Malibu-inspired woo that has apparently lodged itself into his brain.

Naturally, thus leads me to the question of why we assume Data would be woo-free. Given that he is free of emotional responses and uses logic alone to formulate his world, will that suffice to keep woo out of Data's understanding of the world? What role does logic play in the separation of superstition from fact? I will give my impressions and understandings below the fold.

First, I want to briefly reiterate what logic is: a formal system of combining definitions, and operations in a well-defined manner to derive results based on those axioms, definitions, and operations. In classical Western logic we accept certain fundamental notions and classification as the starting points. For example, that propositions can be meaningfully discussed, that every proposition must be assigned a value of True or False, that you can invert the truth value of a proposition by negating it, what it means for one proposition to imply another, etc. All of these assumptions are needed just to form the calculus of logic, the well-defined manner we use to derive true propositions from other true propositions. Then, we need to throw into the mix our undefined objects and axioms. We need undefined objects because you have to have a starting point. The alternative is that if you try to define everything, at some point you will be using term A to define term B, when A has already been defined in a manner that B is important to the definition of A. So, we avoid this circularity by allowing some term to be undefined. Axioms now have a key role to play: they describe the behavior of the undefined objects. We can then define other objects based on the undefined objects. As an example, in a typical geometry class, I note that there are four undefined notions: a point, a line, a plane, and space. We describe what we intend these things to represent, but you can formally define them with using circular terminology. Then, we introduce axioms like Line Creation (there will be one line connecting any two points) to describe one of the relationships between lines and points. We introduce definitions based on these concepts (rays, line segments, angles, etc.). We generate theorems to show what other statements our axioms and definitions imply under the accepted logical calculus. So, logic can be used to show what you accept has additional consequences you may not have realized.

However, one thing (among many) that logic is not is a validation system in any but the barest sense. Sure, logic can occasionally be used to produce contradictions that derive from a given set of axioms. That's really not saying very much. First, to be effective at all as a means of persuasion to change the axioms involved, there has to be a prior commitment to make a change when a contradiction is reached. However, real life is full of situations that seem contradictory and yet persist, saying that are both accepted as true when saying the opposite. For example, the advice offered by "haste makes waste" is seemingly opposed to "a stitch in time saves nine". We have ways of resolving those pieces of advice, of course. However, this skill gets carried into other types of contradictions as well. So, producing contradictions, the only form of validation logic is capable of, is not protection against accepting all sorts of outright nonsense. Indeed, many people who accept axioms like "Properly understood, every word of the Bible is completely true" are skilled at using logic to defend their positions, because logic can be used in cause of woo just as easily as in the cause of skepticism.

This means I don't see Data necessarily having a special protection from woo by virtue of his thought proceeding from a logical calculus only. Whatever skeptical traits Data would possess would be a matter of programming. The more his programming was set to look for, find, and act upon patterns, the more likely Data would have wooish beliefs. One example is the show where the Enterprise-D is stuck in a time loop where it keeps blowing up at the end. Data uses the occurrences of a highly unlikely aggregation of 3s appearing to decide to follow the suggestions of Riker, who has three buttons on his collar, as opposed to 2.5 for Data. Data was eager to find a sign or symbol, and made A rapid, spur-of-the-moment pattern connection with no evidence that the connection is causal in any way. What could be wooier?

The 128th Skeptics' Circle

2010-01-19T08:53:00.002-06:00

At Ionian Enchantment you can find the 128th edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Greg Laden's post is particularly interesting to me.

He doesn't tease me

2010-01-12T08:54:00.003-06:00

Daughter#2 just told me that last night about Son#1. I don't know how it is in other families, but just everybody in out seven-member clan is on the receiving end of an enormous amount of teasing. That includes Son#1. He takes all of the with a reasonable amount of good will, most of the time. However, he never teases anyone. He'll smile, laugh, and even engage in mock rage. But he has no desire to tease anyone else.

I don't know if that is typical of people with PDD-NOS or other autism-spectrum disorders. It's a curious thing.

The Aristotelian Teapot

2010-01-09T11:11:00.005-06:00

A little over a year ago, I created a post on Russell's teapot(Long may we drink!), and how the objections being offered to the analogy did not seem well-founded to me. However, I will fully admit that I did not understand a couple of beliefs regarding the Aristotelian version of God. For example, as occasional commentator Thomas pointed out, any concept of a God that moves or changes, like the Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) will be vastly different from the Aristotelian concept.

However, Russell's Teapot doesn't actually move or change very much. Below the fold, I discuss whether it can be turned into a comparable God to the Aristotelian god. I'll do this by looking at the four arguments of Dr. Feser's that I discussed in part five of my review of his book and seeing if they can be applied to a suitable version of the Teapot (lmwd).

For the Teapot to be the Unmoved Mover, it needs to be something that is immune to change. The normal idea is that this means it is pure form, since in traditional Aristotelian metaphysics material changes, and form does not. However, I think these ideas are outdated. We now know that biological forms do change. For example, the form of a horse has changed from Hyracotherium some 52 million years ago to the modern horse. Since forms can change, the unchangability of the Unmoved Mover can not be a product of being pure form. Thus, the Unmoved Mover does not need to be pure form; it can be an unchanging combination of form and material. The Teapot, sitting as it does in the center of the universe, unchanging, never moving, uses its vast power to activate the chains of potential from all actualities. In addition, you can put water and tea leaves into it, heat the water, and pump the tea out, all without making any change to the Teapot (lmwd) itself. Truly the Teapot (lmwd) is the very embodiment of the Unmoved Mover, realizing every potential, plus making a great cup of tea.

Being the Teapot (lmwd) in no way interferes with taking on the role of the First Cause (who joins forms to material things), the Supreme Intelligence (who maintains final causes for substances so they can be approached), nor the Form Keeper (who keeps real the forms of things that don't exist, like unicorns). After all, whatever means are available to the pure-form God of classical Aristotelianism are also available to the Teapot (lmwd). So, the Teapot (lmwd) is not refuted by the adoption of Aristotelian metaphysics. I'm sure this will come as a surprise to everyone who thought that a metaphysical system rejected by religious people hundreds of years ago would hold the key to disproving a modern philosophical analogy.

The 127th edition of the Skeptics' Circle

2009-12-30T22:15:00.008-06:00

One of the nice things about this time of year is that, with my classes ended, I have time for other things. That's why I am finally able to take the time needed to host the 127th Skeptics' Circle. I probably won't have another chance until the 153rd. While I had hoped to have either a best-of-2009 theme or a beginnings-and-endings theme, only one cool cat noticed. Still, I should have been more proactive, so I can only blame myself. At any rate, this is my 100th post (yeah!), and I'm just going with a straight-up listing below the fold.

We'll start with a look at historical electrical quackery at Providentia. For me, it was a reminder that as awful as quackery is today, it seems like it was even worse a hundred years ago.

Next, at Stuff and Nonsense, we get an entry on how repeating a myth, even in the course of debunking it, can backfire, and another on argumentation tactics that do more harm than good. I'm not too sure on Fail #10, some ideas are so ridiculous that only mockery seems to do them justice.

Over at The Uncredible Hallq, we get a criticism of an AP story on how the scientists reacted to unfounded complaints. He blames overly active journalistic balance, my first thought is sensationalism bias.

A Stone-Cold Creationist talk is discussed over at Bay of Fundie. If I were to call him the six million dollar creationist, would that date me too severely?

Apparently, Australian Television actually mixes some skepticism into its news on occasion. Rainbow of Chaos offers a video of a skeptic embarrassing a woomeister.

While the PodBlack Cat goes on a hiatus (with our condolences), she leaves us with a couple of choice offerings: a list of good skeptical books and a a new podcast project called the Token Skeptic.

If you want to know who in Sweden did the most to enlighten and who did the most to confuse, look no further than the official annual announcements from the Swedish Skeptic Society's, reported to us by Aardvarchaeology.

Skepdude celebrates the tendency of skeptics to turn on each other at the slightest hint of irrationality, even the the irrational person is none other than the Great Randi, over on Skepfeeds.

We have a trio from The Skeptical Teacher, which you might call the cool, the snarky, and the fun. Next time I want to put some stickers on a few eggs and then vaporize them from friction, I know who to talk to.

My final blog guest this week, Weird Things, has posted a reality check for Deepak Chopra. No one expects Chopra to cash it, naturally.

In a slight change of pace, one of my favorite posters at the Skeptics' Annotated Bible Discussion Board, Xenolan, posted thoughts on the differences between how skeptics and religious people approach knowledge, and I really wanted to include them.

Finally, because I am much too vain to not include one of my own posts, we have the thirteenth, and probably last, part of my response to The Last Superstition.

I'll be looking for the 128th Skeptics' circle on January 14th at Ionian Enchantment, and hope to see many of you there too.

Review of TLS -- Promises kept, promises broken

2009-12-28T10:55:00.005-06:00

This is the thirteenth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition, and it will be the last one where I respond to the book directly. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve at those links. Having finished looking at the chapters directly, it's time to take stock of the promises made in Chapter 1, which I discussed in part 2 of my review, and see how well they have been kept. Below the fold I go over them one by one, and discuss my impressions after reading the book.

I haven't read or linked to this before, by the way, but the Uncredible Hallq did a review of the The Last Superstition in two parts, the first one on morality, and the second on the metaphysics. As an actual philosophy student, the Uncredible Hallq was able to point out philosophical errors and oversights I had no knowledge of (although that was the point of my response to begin with: is the book convincing on its own terms?).

Secularism is inherently immoral and irrational, only a specific sort of religious view can be moral, rational, and sane. This claim was based on the claims below. Dr. Feser made a decent argument that secularism is inherently amoral, but failed to be convincing that it is immoral or irrational. The specific sort of religious view turned out to have morals that were as arbitrary as any other, and the argumentation used to support it was not any more rational or sane than the arguments it was designed to rebut.

On intellectual grounds, atheism can not be true. All of the offered arguments for the existence of God had very serious flaws, as I detailed in part five.

Secularism can never spring from reason; its true grounding is from a willfulness and desire for it to be true. Dr. Feser proclaimed this many times in his book. He never offered a positive proof for it; this point rests entirely on what Dr. Feser considers to be the undeniability of Aristotle's four causes and the resulting proofs for God's existence. Since causes and proofs themselves were suspect, this point was just an unevidenced claim.

The basic metaphysical assumptions that make atheism possible are mistaken. This rests on the presumed undeniability of formal and final causes. However, Dr. Feser was never quite able to bridge the gap between mere descriptions and properties existing versus actual formal and final causes existing. He did try to cover this over by pretending there was no gap, but the effort was unconvincing.

Secular propaganda is the source of fideism. Dr. Feser's own presentation of history laid fideism at the hands of deeply religious men. If anything, he showed that fideism leads to secularism, not the other way around.

It is as impossible to say nature has no meaning or purpose as it is to square a circle. Again, this relies on his failed attempt to demonstrate the existence of final causes. Also, in Chapter 6 he abandons talk of final causes as purposes, so even he does not believe this can be proven.

Secularism is parasitic on religion for all its important ideas, it is strictly a negation. Dr. Feser only attempted the first claim, from what I can tell, by saying that the Mechanical philosophy adopted a more restricted form of material and efficient causes. I agree with that. The second claim I generally agree with, even though I don't think Dr. Feser's presentation was conclusive. It was at least evidenced.

What is characterized as a war between science and religion is really a war between competing metaphysical systems. This claim is based on the notion that Aristotle’s four causes entail the adoption of a particular moral system. In part eight, I find that claim is unfounded.

The classical metaphysical picture is rationally unavoidable, and thus so is the traditional Western religious view derived from it. As I have noted already, neither clause was proved in this book.

Given atheism and naturalism, there is no persuasive argument that allows you to trust in either reason or morality. By trust in, Dr. Feser refers to being able to reason your way to an objective opinion. I agree with his assessment, but find that Aritotelian/Aquinian philosophical positions offer no better basis; they are equally arbitrary.

The abandonment of Aristotle's metaphysics has led to the abandonment of any rational or moral standards that can be used to justify moral positions, and is responsible for the current civilizational crisis of the West. Since the metaphysics themselves don't lead to moral positions on their own, abandoning them can't lead to different moral moral decisions.

I don't know if anyone has bothered to read the whole series, but this was really an exercise for me. I was hoping to learn enough to see why many people adopt this philosophical framework and to deflect any claims that, if I only knew what they were saying, I could see how right they were. I think I have accomplished both objectives to some degree. I even find some interesting ideas in the notions of actuality and potential, and of the difference between material and efficient causes, that might enrich some of the ways I think about science. However, overall I found the book to be a failure by the standards it set for itself.

Review of TLS -- Do you mind my science?

2009-12-25T23:04:00.008-06:00

This is the twelfth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven at those links. In the final chapter, Dr. Feser attempts to make the case that science is inherently Aristotelian in practice. Along the way he does a little ridiculing of eliminative materialism and two of its principle proponents, the Churchlands, derides the notions of the mind operating as a computer does, and equivocates the notion that there is regularity in the properties of matter as being indicative of final cause. He relies upon excluding a few middles, the literal interpretations of metaphors, and lots of uncompromising, evidence-free rhetoric. In other words, he uses pretty much the same methodology as the rest of his book. Below the fold I'll go over the various sections of this chapter. The next piece in this series will be a comparison of the promises I listed in part 2 to what Dr. Feser actually demonstrated, and unless Dr. Feser decides to contribute a response to this series, it will be the last installment.

The chapter actually starts in a manner I could agree with, by pointing out how nonsensical the Churchlands sound in a conversation where, instead of Pat saying she is in a bad mood, she'll say she has depressed serotonin levels (or something similar). However, I think the reason their conversation, which replaces things like a bad mood with a low serotonin level in normal conversation, is ridiculous for an entirely different reason. He thinks that their attempt is nonsense because the mind is not eliminable; I think it's nonsense because things like human emotions rarely boil down to a single source, and so identifying your good mood to natural opiates, or whatever, says something you can't possibly know is true at the moment. Of course, for Dr. Feser the Churchlands and eliminative materialism (the claim that their is no such thing as a mind) play the same role he claims Paley and the Design Argument play for the New Atheists, something that it's easy to kick around. Then, by claiming that eliminative materialism is the inevitable result of rejecting final causes (using the negative definition of the mind he set forth in Chapter 5 and I discussed in part ten, linked to above), he attempts to equate any notion the mind exists to the full-fledged acceptance of Aristotelian causes. He graciously concedes that for an acorn, having a final cause of an being an oak doesn't mean that the acorn has a function or purpose to be an oak. Here he undercuts his Chapter 3 Supreme Intelligence proof (which I discussed in part 5) that the Supreme Intelligence is directing the acorn to become the oak; giving the acorn a final cause of being an oak is giving it a purpose just by maintaining the final cause. However, to make his case in this chapter, final causes now become mere directions or tendencies for an event to occur, with no need to invoke something directing it. Maybe he thought no one would notice, or maybe he can't tell the difference himself, I really don't know.

The metaphor of the mind as a computer

Dr. Feser discusses four ways that he thinks the metaphor of the mind as a computer fails.

1) The brain can't really be storing symbols of outside events, because symbols require an interpreter. Since prior to modern times no one thought of the brain as storing symbols, it obviously is not storing symbols [no, I'm not making that up, he really says that]. The whole process idea is circular: the mind is made of symbols; the symbols need the mind to interpret them. Nor is this point of view rescued by referring to memes, because it takes a mind to identify what a meme is, so minds must precede memes [yes, he really says that, too].

2) It can't be said that human minds are running algorithms, because algorithms require intent to follow and algorithm. A repetitive or cyclical behavior by itself is not an algorithm. This, we again have a circular process; the mind can't be built on algorithms if the mind is needed to run algorithms.

3) Causal connections between the brain and the outside world become incoherent under this view. Looking at the process of vision, there is no objective reason to give favored status points the causal chain that start with light bouncing off an object and terminate with brain nerves being stimulated. Thus, the items that demarcate events are not truly objective.

4) Computers can't formulate rational arguments; they can only simulate the following of valid logical forms. If you arbitrarily change the meaning of the forms and symbols, the computer will not change how the forms are processed. For example, if you assign A=>B to mean "Grass is green", B=>C to mean "Cleveland has a Hall of Fame", and A=>C to mean "James doesn't eat fish sticks", then since formally ((A=>B) & (B=>C))=>(A=>C), the computer will interpret this sentenced as being valid: "Grass is green and Cleveland has a Hall of Fame, this means James doesn't eat fish sticks". This shows you need to understand the meaning behind the logical symbols and that logical reasoning is not possible without a mind. This is a version of the Argument from Reason.

Together, these arguments show you can't eliminate goals from human actions. This factors into the main reason why you can't explain the mind in mechanistic terms; it was created to hold the unexplainable. So, if you are going to hold to mechanism at all and not eliminate the mind entirely, your only choice is dualism.

My response

The circularity argument in part 1) ignores a more obvious interpretation of a spiral. Even in animals that we presume have no intentionality at all, such as insects, at a very basic level translate exterior information (such as the position or the sun) and process symbols (such as the dance of a bumblebee telling other bees where to find flowers). So we clearly don't need a full-fledged rational mind to process symbols. This allows for the process to happen in a spiral, where storing the symbols leads to a certain level of mind, which interprets more symbols to create a more complex mind, which can interpret still more symbols to create a yet more complex mind, etc. By trying to present the argument as an all-or-nothing, Dr. Feser attempts to hide the in-between stance of an emergent phenomenon.

Argument 2) is just playing a game with definitions. Whether you can call a basic prcedss in the mind does an "algorithm" or not, the behavior is the same.

Argument 3) ignores that sight developed in a feedback loop. The earliest sighted animals did not distinguish points in the causal chain as being favored, however, those that followed later who did distinguish those points were better able to evaluate the environment, and passed that tendency along.

Argument 4) would be much more compelling if it did not take so much effort to teach logical thinking to humans. Humans are also prone to see form over meaning, confuse correlation with causation, etc. So it's not surprising that computers should have the same issues.

Overall, I agree that in many ways the metaphor of the mind as a computer does not do it justice. However, it's still a good metaphor for specific purposes, and Dr. Feser's objections to it are ill-founded.

Science and final causes

Dr. Feser discusses three areas of science that show final causes are essential.

A) "Darwinian biologists" use teleological language to describe biological systems, and could not do research without it. Phrases like the "function of the heart" and "in order to signal [there are] predators [near]" need to be explained without teleological language. It's not possible to do this without referring to final causes, and scientists don't even try. This is just as well, because the nonsense that philosophers write about science is only exceeded by the nonsense scientists write about philosophy. Any attempts to explain functions in terms of natural selection fails because it means (1) you can't know the function of an organism without knowing it's evolutionary history, (2) nothing that is unevolved can have a function (so the first kidneys had no function, the organs of Swampman have no functions, etc.), and (3) using natural selection as an explanation removes functionality rather than explaining it. You can't remove teleology from your explanations because the mind doing the explaining is teleological [once more: yes, he really says that]. You can't explain teleology in nature without final causes, you can only eliminate it. Descriptions of DNA as holding information, as a blueprint, etc. are fundamentally teleological and show that some interpreter is required; this leads to the notion of form. Note that Paleyan red herrings like irreducible complexity are not a part of this argument. When Dawkins discusses concepts like the selfish gene he pushes science beyond where it can go. When you remove teleology genes/DNA they are no longer useful as biological explanations.

B) Complex inorganic systems, such as the water cycle and the rock cycle, also show final causes, in that each stage in the cycle has a role to play in leading to the next stage. Efficient causes don't explain this, because each stage also has effects that are not part of the cycle. Nor can you say the cycles are just human constructions, they are objective effects. Thus, they are results of goals within each stage.

C) The basic laws of nature make sense only if you interpret final causes as being within objects. The modern view is that the brick shattering a window is not based on anything inherent to the brick or the window, but that event like a brick being thrown are simply followed by event like a window shattering. Hume's empiricism provided cover for these notions, but it is refuted by noting that mental concepts do exist. Humean notions undermine science by saying there are no necessary causal connections between events and denying the existence of law-like correlations. However, scientific regularities are hard to obscure. In practice, scientists draw conclusions after a few experiments, confirming that they accept law-like correlations. Even the notions of "ideal conditions" and "interference" that are needed for various thought-experiments are not Humean.

In summary, because of these reasons we are witnessing the return of a "physical intentionality" to science. This of course means the restoration of Aristotle has been accomplished in fact, if not name.

My response

I know I am being redundant, but I wanted to emphasize this. Back in chapters 2 and 3, formal and final causes were portrayed as having a shaping effect upon objects, where formal causes shaped what they are and final causes what they could become. However, in this chapter, any sort of regularity in behavior is treated as a final cause. Brittleness leads to a tendency to be shattered because the final cause of brittleness is shattering. Matches strike flames because their final cause is to strike a flame. This is done to emphasize repeatedly: science needs final causes. However, the final causes used in this section do not need the Supreme Intelligence to guide them; they merely need a principle of uniformity: under identical conditions, matter behaves identically. This falls short of the Aristotelian causes as described earlier. Dr. Feser is understandably anxious to exclude this middle view.

It's difficult to imagine any thing said about philosophy that is sillier than the notion there was a first kidney, and on top of that to pile on the notions of it being unevolved and without function. So apparently philosphers can win that contest after all. More generally, the feedback loop on survival creates exactly the teleological impetus that Dr. Feser sees as an emergent phenomenon. Beings that act in ways that favor the survival of their offspring see increased survival in their offspring. The goal of survival emerges naturally from this loop. It does not need to be imposed from the outside.

Complex inorganic systems certainly exhibit regularity. However, I have already pointed out that regularity is not the same as a final cause. This is also true basic natures and properties of objects, and the physical laws these natures and properties have them exhibit.

Review of TLS -- Problems, problems, problems

2009-12-24T11:00:00.006-06:00

This is the eleventh part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten at those links. After devoting several pages to the mind-body problem, Dr. Feser briefly discusses six additional philosophical problems he lays at the feet of the Mechanical philosophy of the Modernists, saying each time there is no such problem under Aristotelian causes. The first three problems are rational in nature, the next three are emotional appeals based on presumably undesirable consequences. These problems were followed by a general condemnation based upon the arguments presented. Below the fold, I will summarize each of these sections in a paragraph, followed by a paragraph of my own on how well or poorly I thought he made his point.

The problem of skepticism

This goes to the basic understanding of how you can know that the world around you is represented by the interpretation of sensory experiences by your brain. There is a gap between your mind and reality. Because of this, skeptics must accept all truths as being relative, which makes science unable to find objective truths. The existence of formal causes removes this problem, because the soul/mind ensures the accuracy of knowledge and interpretations by merging the form of an object being perceived into it, thus understanding the true nature of the object. The existence of final causes allows us to say that this representation process is oriented to producing an accurate result, so it will.

On this problem, I don't see any resolution coming out of formal and final causes. After all, if the soul/mind is going to merge with a form to gain understanding, you still have the issue of whether the correct form will be chosen. Also, because instantiations of forms always fail to reflect a form perfectly, that means that the soul/mind can never really instantiate the correct form within itself, and thus never know the true nature of an object. The problem of skepticism is unchanged by Aristotelian forms.

The problem of induction

Induction is the presumption that future event will be the same as past events. Dr. Feser offers the example of the color grue. An item is grue if it appears green before some given date (say Jan 1 2010) and blue after that date. How can you tell is some object, say an emerald, is green or grue? By using formal causes, saying it is the form of the emerald to be green, of course. Of course, this follows with a general knock that the Modernists invented problems rather than solving them.

Again, Aristotelian forms offer no comfort here. There is no proof that the form of any given emerald is to be green rather than grue, nor is there any way to prevent a grue emerald from merely being a less good instantiation of the form of an emerald than a green emerald. When it comes to individual items, formal causes do not guarantee inductive behavior.

The problem of personal identity

Under Aristotelian forms, a person is a rational soul, that is, a being with a rational form. We see the person because the soul is the form of the body. However, with Descartes’' dualism, we never see the person; we can only see how the person behaves. Locke describes a person as a continuous stream of consciousness, still as a mind without regard to the body. Dr. Feser discusses several scenarios which I can only guess are traditional takes on a mechanical interpretation of the mind. If your mind is scanned and duplicated into a second body, is that you? If it is scanned into two different bodies, are they both you? If one of those bodies kills the other, is that murder, suicide, or neither? What if half your brain is transplanted? Is the original body you? If that body dies, does the donor body become you? Without formal and final causes there is no unifying principle, therefore there is no real person that is a combination of both body and soul.

I don't know how to answer these questions. However, Dr. Feser does not bother to give the Aristotelian version of these answers either. I can guess that the answer would be with a new body you have a new person, so that if your mind is downloaded into two separate bodies, those are two separate people. That would be my answer, and it seems like an answer even a Mechanist would use. After all, once they are in different bodies, they will begin having different experiences, and no longer be a single stream of consciousness. So, while here formal and final causes do answer the problem, the same answer is available to Mechanists as well.

The problem of free will

If there are no formal and final causes to create free will, from where can it come? Materialism offers no scope for free will. Compatibilism says we are free to act upon our desires, but under materialism our desires are not free.

First, I wanted to note Dr. Feser slides back to the stronger versions of formal and final causes in this argument, so that they are not merely properties and regularities, but actual controlling mechanisms outside the realm of the material. Anyhow, if there is free will, fine; if there is only the illusion of free will, fine. Since free will can not be metaphysically or physically demonstrated, and Dr. Feser does not even pretend to try, this boils down to an emotional appeal. We like to think of ourselves as being free, so we'd better choose Aristotelian forms to justify that choice. It's not a rational position.

The problem of natural rights

Natural rights come from the existence of the common form and purpose of humans, which entails obligations on people to respect the rights of other people to fulfill that form and purpose. If there are no formal or final causes, there is no true shared human nature.

As we saw in part eight, merely postulating the existence of formal and final causes does not produce a single moral system, you have to actually determine what these causes are. Different people will choose the sets of formal and final causes that best support the morality to which they are naturally inclined. This means that even if natural rights were to exist, we can't use either formal or final causes to definitively say what they are. We get all the disadvantages of relativism, plus the additional baggage of each saying their argument is right according to the dictates of nature. I don't see the improvement. Again, this is an emotional argument, not a rational one.

The problem of morality

Without formal and final causes to determine what is good or bad, there is no objective morality. There is no objective basis to condemn the Nazis.

This is another emotional argument, again falling prey to the fickle nature of formal/final causes. Condemning the Nazis on that basis requires that you postulate every human has the same formal and final cause. If the Nazis choose to say the Jews, homosexuals, or Jehovah's Witnesses have different formal or final causes than Aryans, how do you rebut them?

General condemnation of the Mechanical philosophy

Abandoning Aristotle led to horrors like Nazism, Marxism, crass consumerism, and pop psychology (yes, Dr. Feser lumps them together). They led to the "great disruption" in morals. Abortion and gay marriage are assaults on the family. Sodomy cries out to heaven for vengeance because it flows from unnatural (in the Aristotelian sense) desires. There can be no common ground between believers and secularists on what is real or right, the secularists are too far gone. In fact, they are so far gone that the average person should feel free to ignore what secular philosophers say, they completely lack common sense.

This is only more emotional appeal, with no rationality behind it and little truth. The only difference between the slaughter under Nazism/Marxism and the genocides that occurred long before Scotus and Ockham was the scale and efficiency. The belief in formal and final causes did not prevent genocidal intentions; the lack of technology merely impeded their scope. The wealthy have always been prone to consumerism and fads. The condemnations of abortion, gay marriage, and sodomy are based upon arbitrary determinations of final causes. Secular and religions leaders continue to find common ground, despite Dr. Feser's proclamations, in the pursuit of knowledge, caring for the less fortunate, and in many other ways. Finally, I agree the average person should continue to look at arguments or ignore them as the average person pleases. After all, all they will do is confirm their preconceptions, whatever they may have been, for the most part.

Review of TLS -- Minding your body

2009-12-23T08:25:00.007-06:00

This is the tenth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine at those links. The next couple of posts will cover the remainder of chapter 5, which is devoted to several now-traditional philosophical problems. Dr. Feser attributes the existence of these problems to the subscription to the Mechanical philosophy, and claims they do not exist for Aristotelians. By far the longest of these discussions is on the mind-body problem.

Before digging into the details below the fold, I want to comment on a couple of overall themes that start to emerge in the rest of the book here. The first is Dr. Feser's repeated claims that these problems do not surface for Aristotelians. These claims are offered without evidence and do not bear close scrutiny. The second is on the increasing role of eliminative materialism as a foe. In many ways, eliminative materialism plays the role for Dr. Feser that he claims Paley plays for the New Atheists, something to knock around and ridicule, while claiming it is the true version of materialism. I’m not surprised to see a partisan use a tactic he complains about other partisans using, of course.

This section begins with some information on Descartes, who was well-respected for both his natural and mathematical abilities. Dr. Feser seems to think that Descartes is best remembered for his philosophical contribution, although as a mathematician, I would disagree. Every student who progresses to Algebra in high school learns about Cartesian coordinates, certainly many more than will wind up reading Descartes philosophical works. Not that this is necessarily a good thing.

Dr. Feser's position

Key to the understanding of mind-body dualism is notion of an object, for example an apple, having primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities would be those that are objectively measurable, secondary qualities would be our subjective experiences, and might vary from observer to observer. For example, any two people could weigh the apple and get the same weight, but one person might see a red apple and another, color-blind person might see a gray apple. Or, given a bucket of water, two people would measure it to the same temperature, but the same person might experience the water as being warm if they had just had their hand in an ice bucket or cool if they just had their hand in hot dishwater. Weight and temperature are the primary, mechanistic qualities while color and warmth are the secondary, common-sense properties. The part of the person that observes and records these secondary properties is the mind. That we have a mind that controls the body is mind-body dualism.

Since secondary properties are not objective in nature, they can't be reduced to material things, so they can not be present just in the brain/nerves. The mind gets defined as the part that is not measurable or objective, so it can't be reduced to material operations. Capabilities like intentionality (the ability to think about things) show that the reduction of the mind to the material is a "conceptual impossibility". This is because such capabilities show a sense of final causality, but the brain itself can have none, under the Mechanical philosophy.

Meanwhile, those who subscribe to mechanism find themselves without a coherent conception of matter. Secularism has no positive content to offer, it is purely a rejection of religion. Mechanism offers nothing but the denial of formal and final causes. Since the mind requires formal and final causes to exist, materialism's attempts to explain the mind are really attempts to eliminate it. This makes eliminative materialism (the position that there is no mind) the only "honest" form of materialism.

Thus, if you adopt a mechanical conception of the world, as Descartes did, the mind becomes a separate entity removed from the brain, present in a separable soul, sometimes derisively referred to as the ghost in the machine. This soul would nonetheless have to generate mechanical effects, and take information from mechanical sources, thus violating the conservation of energy. Dr. Feser disapproves of the notion of the soul violating the laws of physics. However, since under the Aristotelian view, the soul is the form of the body, all of these issues are removed. The soul is no longer separate from the body.

My response

Firstly, I disagree with this definition of the mind. It is an entirely negative definition, defining the mind by what it is not. You might refer to this as a mind-of-the-gaps. This allows Dr. Feser to rig the game; any phenomenon that does get explained objectively is no longer a part of the mind. We now have physical explanations for both color-blindness and why the perception of warmth depends upon prior experiences. If we had a consistent, unchanging definition of the mind that included things like color-blindness and warmth, we could say we have explained a small part of the mind by explaining why these things happen. With Dr. Feser's mind-of-the-gaps, the domain of the mind shrinks instead. This is what allows him to say eliminative materialism is the only honest version: his mind-of-the-gaps would indeed be eliminated if we could explain all human thoughts in material terms. That doesn't mean that what we normally consider the mind would be eliminated, though.

I find it believable that we have no coherent conception of matter, that it is treated like a brute fact. You have to have a few starting points, and 'matter exists, and behaves in the following ways' seems as good as any of them to me. I also agree that atheism/secularism, per se, has nothing to offer past a rejection of religion. Pretty much the only thing atheists have in common is no religion. It's almost like not having a religion is the definition of atheism, or something.

Finally, while I agree that Descartes dualism violates the conservation of energy, I don't find that a particularly important point and certainly not one Dr. Feser should be pointing a finger at. First, laws of physics are only true until they are not. If the law is violated, you make an exception or re-write the law, which is how science works. Second, Dr. Feser's First Cause is an immaterial being that imports energy into the cosmos every single second in order to sustain formal and final causes. His position regarding the conservation of energy is worse than Descartes, if anything. Further, the Aristotelian position concerning the effect of the mind on the body requires that the immaterial form (the mind) merge with the immaterial universal (of a triangle. for example) to create physical effects (a teacher drawing a triangle). Thus, Dr. Feser's mind-body interactions offer exactly the same ghost-in-the-machine and non-conservation-of-energy problems as Descartes conception. His position offers no improvement on this at all.

Unfortunately, we will be seeing more of Dr. Feser's playing fast-and-loose with definitions, his claims to offer improvements where there are none, his attempts to force diverse theoretical concepts into a single point of view, and his equivocations in the rest of the series. That seems to be all the book has left to offer.

Review of TLS -- Descent of the Aristotelian

2009-12-20T10:25:00.009-06:00

This is the ninth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven , and eight at those links. I'm discussing chapter 5, which is titled Descent of the Modernists and is the longest and philosophically densest part of the book, over the next three parts.

Dr. Feser talks about the history of the modern rejection of Aristotle's formal and final causes, and describes what he sees as reasons for judging it to be inferior. From here on out the book's positions and claims get more incoherent and self-contradictory, from what I can tell. Below the fold, I'll start his notion of who started us down the path away from Aristotle, and why his claims don't match even his own presentation of the history.

Dr. Feser starts by discussing religious men like Scotus and William of Ockham, who rejected the schools of thought of Aquinas, et. al., because they made God too predictable or rational to humans, while Scotus and Ockham thought that the likes of God was so far above us that we could not reliably interpret this world to understand God's character. In Scotus and Ockham we see the beginnings of both fideism (faith alone leads to God) and Mechanism (the material universe is just a bunch of billiard balls knocking against each other, while God is an outside spectator instead of the First Cause). Ockham in particular is identified as a conceptualist. Dr. Feser takes the time to remark that he wonders if other skeptics think as highly of the creation of fideism as Christopher Hitchens does (at least, according to Dr. Feser). So, to be clear: I agree that the creation of fideism is a great advance in thinking, especially compared to the muddle-headed proofs Dr. Feser has presented in previous chapters and I have responded to in previous parts.

Dr. Feser next claims that the very process of doing science requires the acceptance of final causes, otherwise causes and effects become "loose and separate", and a match is a likely to produce a baby bunny as to strike a fire. This theme is the focus of Chapter 6, so I'll respond in more detail there. Here, I'll just note the equivocation; the final causes he says are needed for science are much weaker ontological propositions than the ones he put forth in his defense of God/the soul/natural law.

In addition to Scotus and Ockham, Dr. Feser identifies Henry VIII, Luther, and Calvin as people who were subverting Aristotelian forms before any of the moderns. In so doing, he undermines one of the central ideas of his book: secular thinkers reject Aristotelian forms entirely for religious reasons. There were clearly many people who rejected Aristotelian forms that were religious. I don't know the litany of reasons provided for the rejection of Aristotelian forms, but I do know Dr. Feser's own historical synopsis doesn't match his claim and I know he has no trouble with equivocations, so I have no confidence he is telling me the whole story or anything close to it. His position comes across as arbitrary, not rational or thought out. Meanwhile, he takes the time to snicker at how modern secular thinkers don't fuss over logic like Aristotelians do. You can't make this stuff up.

A little side note on Galileo's troubles with the church authorities: it was really his fault. After all, he had the audacity to proclaim heliocentricity as proven before it really had been; there were even errors in his calculations. Sure, some of the churchmen over-reacted a little, but Galileo should have been much more modest. This analysis by Dr. Feser does not inspire confidence in me regard the morality of Aristotelians or their ability to govern wisely, to say the least.

There is also some dialogue on how modern science has not refuted Aristotelian forms. Metaphysical notions like actuality and potentiality are still valid in science today. Aristotle’s physics have been refuted, but not his metaphysics (Can any metaphysics be refuted by science? I don't see how.). Meanwhile, the modern understanding of science offers no reason to prefer Mechanism over Aristotelian forms because (1) the use of Aristotelian forms is not aimed at the technical mastery which is the goal of the Mechanistic view, (2) just because the Mechanistic view has worked to achieve technical mastery doesn’t mean there is nothing more, (3) the Scholastics (that is, the believers in Aristotelian forms as interpreted by Aquinas) were starting to do these same things anyhow, and (4) modern science is completely compatible with Aristotelian forms. Frankly, reasons 1-3 read like sour grapes to me. I have no reason to doubt that they are true, but they seem like more like schoolyard complaints that reasoned positions. Reason 4 is also correct, from what I can tell, but doesn't seem very meaningful. We've already had one example in this series (in part 8) where two different, plausible determinations of the final cause of reproduction lead to two different conclusions about the legitimacy of homosexual marriage. If final causes are so arbitrarily chosen and lead to such conflicting results, I don't foresee much benefit to using them in science.

The 126th edition of the Skeptics' Circle

2009-12-17T08:19:00.003-06:00

Weird things has put up the 126th edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Plenty to see, plenty to read.

The 127th Skeptics' Circle will feature beginnings and endings. It will be the beginning of my hosting of the circle, the end of 2009, the beginning of 2010, and the end of my review series of The Last Superstition. In addition to the usual posts, feel free to submit examples of your most memorable posts from 2009 and any beginnings or ending you want to include. My email is one_brow(at)yahoo.com.

Pornagraphy correlations

2009-12-13T16:34:00.005-06:00

Focus on the Family has released a new pornography "study", which I first saw mentioned in the Illinois Family Institute site. The document is really more a summary than a study, it involves a lot of claims and references to other documents, but incorporates no new research. It seems to me this is a massive conflation of correlation with causation, and in fact generally seems to have them reversed. The claimed results are below the fold. I replaced the bullets with numbers; the rest is quoted from the document directly.

KEY FINDINGS ON THE EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
THE FAMILY AND PORNOGRAPHY
1. Married men who are involved in pornography feel less satisfied with their conjugal relations and less emotionally attached to their wives. Wives notice and are upset by the difference.
2. Pornography use is a pathway to infidelity and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters.
3. Among couples affected by one spouse’s addiction, two-thirds experience a loss of interest in sexual intercourse.
4. Both spouses perceive pornography viewing as tantamount to infidelity.
5. Pornography viewing leads to a loss of interest in good family relations.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND PORNOGRAPHY
6. Pornography is addictive, and neuroscientists are beginning to map the biological substrate of this addiction.
7. Users tend to become desensitized to the type of pornorgraphy they use, become bored with it, and then seek more perverse forms of pornography.
8. Men who view pornography regularly have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression, and sexual promiscuity.
9. Prolonged consumption of pornography by men produces stronger notions of women as commodities or as “sex objects.”
10. Pornography engenders greater sexual permissiveness, which in turn leads to a greater risk of out-of-wedlock births and STDs. These, in turn, lead to still more weaknesses and debilities.
11. Child-sex offenders are more likely to view pornography regularly or to be involved in its distribution.
OTHER EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
12. Many adolescents who view pornography initially feel shame, diminished self-confidence, and sexual uncertainty, but these feelings quickly shift to unadulterated enjoyment with regular viewing.
13. The presence of sexually oriented businesses significantly harms the surrounding community, leading to increases in crime and decreases in property values.
14. The main defenses against pornography are close family life, a good marriage and good relations between parents and children, coupled with deliberate parental monitoring of Internet use. Traditionally, government has kept a tight lid on sexual traffic and businesses, but in matters of pornography that has waned almost completely, except where child pornography is concerned. Given the massive, deleterious individual, marital, family, and social effects of pornography, it is time for citizens, communities, and government to reconsider their laissez-faire approach.

Now, this observation is strictly anecdotal, but I'm guessing it has wide application: almost no heterosexual man would rather have his hand around his genital when he can have the genitals of an enthusiastic female around his genital. While that may seem like a surprising thing to the Focus on the Family, I am going to look at all these correlations under that particular interpretation. For the sake of this post, I will grant that the correlations involve really exist.

1. I would expect that a man who doesn't have a wife enthusiastically having sex with him will turn to pornography. If the wife is really that interested in her husband's sexual attention, she generally knows how to get it.
2. Men who don't get enough sex, or don't get enough satisfying sex, are much more likely to want divorces than those who are. Pornography does not fill in the gap satisfactorily for many men.
3. A wife losing interest in sex is a common reason to use pornography to release these desires.
4. Perhaps in some households, watching pornography is viewed this way. Many of the marriage traditions center around being your spouse being your property, at least sexually, and pornography would diminish that. On the other hand, if the spouse being "cheated" upon would act more aggressively to properly maintain their property, the need for such cheating would diminish.
5. Pornography acts as a substitute when good family relations are not available.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND PORNOGRAPHY
6. Sex itself is even more addictive, and pornography becomes a poor fix for sex.
7. This is true in the marital bedroom as well. The best solution is for the spouses to bet more creative with each other in the bedroom.
8. I would expect that men who have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression, and sexual promiscuity, would avail themselves of such inclinations in pornography, and on a personal note I find it highly preferable, as opposed to such men trying to satisfy inclinations for rape and aggression with women.
9. Men who think of women as sex objects are certainly more likely to find an outlet for these feelings in actresses with whom they have no personal connection at all.
10. Sexual permissiveness would of course include a more permissive attitude to pornography.
11. I would much rather there were no pedophiles, but since they exist, I would also much rather they use pictures of children than actual children. No doubt the pedophiles who agree are active in making these picture available to themselves and others.
OTHER EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
12. Adolescents are often sexually capable but without willing partners, so naturally they turn to pornography.
13. Sexually oriented businesses have trouble finding permits and room to operate in communities that see themselves as maintaining a respectable image, so they are forced to locate themselves in communities that are depressed, desperate, and otherwise more prone to the ills of society.
14. People who have good relationships and good marriages, which typically will mean spouses go out of their way to please each other, don't need pornography as much.

If you really want to study the effects of pornography, you need to find a population that does not partake of it to compare to. That's not an easy task. Until then, any results show be taken with a hefty dose of salt.

The first job

2009-12-13T11:24:00.003-06:00

I haven't written about Son#1 in a while. His ultimate career ambition is still to be a band teacher, but for now, he has his first job, working or a local TJ Maxx. There were days I never thought this would happen. Details are below the fold.

Last year, his class all went to the store as a part of a program, learning to work in a structured fashion. Son#1 did so well that they decided to hire him, and he is currently working 4-8 hours a week after school, officially as a trainee. I showed up early to pick him up one day, and watched him work for a while. He has taken his normal attributes of being highly focused on order and proper places, not being social, and determination that things must be in a specific order and turned them into positives. Putting a shirt back on the rack, or folding it, is done just right, and they get placed exactly how the store wants them to look, at least as far as I can tell. He doesn't get distracted by conversations with coworkers.

I don't know if he can ever be a teacher. My hope was that he might be a studio musician of some sort, but he doesn't seem to like music that well, at least he never practices at home. Oned thing I'm not worried about anymore is whether he will be able tomake a living. The job he has right noe isn't all that different from the Jack-in-tghe-Box job I had at 17.

Review of TLS -- Natural law enforces natural prejudices

2009-12-08T10:16:00.004-06:00

This is the eighth part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven at those links. I am again going without my notes, so I wanted to make to write this while the material was still fresh in my mind.

The remainder of chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of sexual morality as understood through the lens of natural law, and a brief section on the argument from evil, a position that claims God can not be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent because evil exists. Below the fold I will discuss both of those topics in this post, where I find myself, ala Bret Maverick, agreeing with Dr. Feser in an unusual way.

In Dr. Feser's philosophy the soul is the form of a human. Because this statement implies an acceptance of all four Aristotelian causes, including final causes, moral choices become choosing to accept and follow the final causes of actions, even if we have a natural inclination to go against these final causes. That is, to be good means to exhibit form that allows the final cause to be more closely fulfilled, so that a triangle on a chalkboard drawn with straight lines is a better triangle than one drawn with curved lines. Following that, to be moral is to choose to do what is good, for example, choosing to draw a straighter triangle becomes a moral good (Dr. Feser does not use this example in this way). When applied to sexual activity, the final cause of sex is put forth as reproduction, because it is obvious to Dr. Feser that this is the case. This means that every act of sex that ends with depositing semen inside the proper orifice is the proper way to have sex, and all other ways are less proper, less good, and less moral. Further, the needs of raising children mean that there needs to be a stable relationship between the mating couple so that the man will stay around to care for the children. This is the essentials of the natural law argument against homosexual activity and homosexual marriage; it does not engender actions that would further the final cause of sex.

Along the way he discusses various riffs on this idea and various objections to it. For example, the inability to complete the act of reproduction (due to infertility for one reason or another) does not change the final cause of sex, and so does not change what good sex will result in (the proper depositing of semen). Another one is that other features of sex, like the pleasurable sensations, are not equal in status, but subservient to this primary cause (we enjoy sex so we will have more of it, and thus make more babies). Finally, the notion that any organs involved have multiple, disparate functions does not change the final cause when involved in one function in particular.

I happen to agree that, if one can determine a final cause for sex (a proposition of which I am dubious, but I will grant it for the sake of the argument), then one can make the sorts of determinations Dr. Feser makes. However, making such a determination by fiat seems counter to the spirit of using nature to determine causes. Instead, let's look at nature to see what the real final cause of sex is. If we go back two or three billion years in our history, we see our ancestors as single-celled living things, not yet rational souls. They are having sex (at any rate, exchanging bodily fluids), but not for reproduction, which is a different process. Instead, we see processes like bacterial conjugation and syzygy being used to strengthen other members of our community and our species, preserving a healthy species, and binding the community together. Reproduction becomes attached to sex later on.

So, since these causes exist in a hierarchy, the top of the hierarchy is not reproduction, it is the preservation of a healthy species and the binding of a community. Obviously reproduction is one of the ways sex can accomplished this, as a healthy community needs a steady supply of new members, but any activity that serves to bind a community together and strengthen it also serves the final cause of sex equally well. In particular, monogamous homosexual partners strengthen a community by adopting children that might otherwise be uncared for. Those who have no children will leave their mark in the community by using other, more self-sacrificing means, often by using excess resources in civic activities for the community as a whole. Clearly, a commitment to natural law entails the acceptance of homosexual marriages as valuable to the community, and thus as a moral good.

I again challenge Dr. Feser to really stand by his principles and start promoting the moral goodness of homosexual marriages. However, I don't expect this to happen, because I don't believe Dr. Feser chooses his moral beliefs to follow the teachings of natural law. Rather, I suspect that he chooses the principles of natural law to reinforce his personal prejudices, and I would be surprised if he did anything other than reject my reasoning outright, claiming that I don't understand his argument or have misidentified the true final cause of sex. He will make these claims, but all they can ever come down to is personal preference. This is the real difficulty of saying formal and final causes exist; there is no way to say what they are. Different observers will see the same object or activity and use their own prejudices to put a formal and final cause on that activity, resulting in different formal and final causes being assigned to it. This make the morality that comes from natural law just as arbitrary as morality that comes from fiat by God or from a local culture, but the arbitrariness is given cover by natural law reasoning. Peel back the cover, and you still have basic human prejudices and arbitrariness underneath. I don't find natural law convincing or rational, and the veneer of rationality does not change this.

With regard to the argument from evil, Dr. Feser's rebuttal is quite simple: the argument from evil depends on the presumption that God can't turn an awful act in this world into an even greater blessing in the next. Aside from the consequence that this means you are doing people a favor when you do evil to them, since God will make that into an even greater good, this objection satisfies me on a rational level. The argument from evil is an emotional argument, not a rational one, and it doesn't carry much rational weight.

Review of TLS -- A soulful discussion

2009-12-06T10:23:00.006-06:00

This is the seventh part of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four, five, and six at those links. I believe this will mark the half-way point in this series, as we have three more chapters to go. At the rate of one or two posts per chapter, plus one to compare the promises listed in chapter one and how well they were fulfilled by the end of the book, possibly with a final post of corrections/comments/explanations by Dr. Feser, should he choose to make one, this is looking to be a 12-14 part series in total. In chapter 4, we start moving on from his claims concerning God to his claims concerning people, our nature, and morality. In this post I'll be looking at the notion of the soul, in the next at sexuality and at the argument from evil.

To be frank, I have misplaced my notes on Chapter 4, and at this point I am disinclined to recreate them from scratch. So, more those than previous installments, the next two will be relying on my memory of the arguments presented and my thoughts concerning them. However, of all the chapters this seems to be the one directly involved with our daily decisions as a society, and one of the least technical chapters in the book, so I have a reasonable degree of confidence that my below-the-fold summary of Dr. Feser's positions and the reasoning methods used are accurate.

In this chapter we get the first solid confirmation that a formal cause is more than a description to Dr. Feser: he describes the soul of a person as being the form of that person. Unlike the later conceptions of a soul, as some separate thing than controls a body, the body is a part of the souls. Indeed, plants and animals, having forms, therefore have souls. Plants have nutritive souls and animals have sensory souls, which are nutritive souls with additional capabilities in their form. Humans have an even better type of soul, a rational soul that has all the properties of a sensory soul (including therefore all the ones of a nutritive soul) and also the ability to evaluate abstract things, form patterns, etc.

So far, this actually reminds me of Jehovah's Witness dogma. For JWs, people have bodies and minds, but they are souls, as are any animals. Where they differ is that, while JWs do not believe consciousness persists after death, for Dr. Feser the ability of the rational soul understand the nature of objects without physically merging with their forms means that the soul itself must have an extra-physical existence. For example, you can't understand the essence of a dog without invoking the form of dog-hood in some fashion. Since the brain does not assume the physical form of a dog, this merging has to take place in some non-material fashion, and this means that a rational soul has access to the immaterial in ways that a sensory soul does not. Thus, even though the soul as a whole can not be separated from the body, when the body dies some part of rational aspect of the soul can continue to exist. Naturally, if it exists after the body it must come from somewhere outside the body, and this place is from God, who joins the form (soul) of a person to the body at conception. Further, since the zygote already has a rational form, they are entitled to all the protections to be afforded any other rational soul. Thus, Dr. Feser claims the only rational position is pro-life. Further, the development from zygote through embryo and fetus to baby should not be compared to the type of change where a rubber ball is melted in a pan (this is a change of form), but rather to a ball which expresses its potential by rolling downhill.

Another aspect mentioned is that any claim natural law can be used to support slavery, with the possible exception of debt and crime, is a slander, according to Dr. Feser. In no way can it be interpreted as saying one person can be forced into the servitude of another when no crime or obligation has been undertaken by the one who would be enslaved. If Dr. Feser really believes this, then it should be obvious that he also supports a pro-abortion position, as long as zygote-embryo-fetus is not killed during the extraction, but allowed to live out its own life as best it can. So, I call upon Dr. Feser to live up to his own words and support the right of any woman to end any pregnancy in a delivery at any time in the pregnancy, even if the pregnancy is less than one month along. After that, the embryo or fetus can continue to develop by rolling down its metaphorical hill without forcing the woman to act in its service. Mind you, I don't believe Dr. Feser will actually support this sort of right-to-immediate-birth position, because I don't think he is looking to be consistent with his premises. Rather, he has chosen his premises to support his prejudices, and disguised under something he claims is natural law. I'll talk more about this in the next part.

However, this post would not be complete without mentioning Dr. Feser also uses this reasoning to oppose positions like euthanasia, and in the process he takes the traditional swipe at Michael Schiavo. However, Dr. Feser does not mention opposing the right of an individual to refuse medical care, even nutrition, or opposing the right to create living wills on this issue. Since the determination of the judges in the Schiavo case was that Terri Schiavo would not have wanted to continue indefinitely in her state (at least from what I recall), they were basically enforcing a verbally communicated living will. I find myself in the position of wondering whether Dr. Feser was 1) ignorant of this detail, 2) neglectful in mentioning his opposition to living wills with end-of-life directives, 3) just playing to his target audience, or 4) some combination of these things possibly with other reasons mixed in. At any rate, there is no good argument presented against the results of the Schiavo case, just condemnation.

I'm not sure how to judge how convincingly this section of the book was argued, because I agreed with many of the ideas, or at least had a disposition to agree with them, in many ways. Since I didn't see any reason to accept a formal cause as something that was stronger than a description, to use those forms to create a rational soul, part of which survives death, did not persuade me. At the least, it seems that Dr. Feser has not followed through on his claims that his positions by rational means and through reasoning. His natural law position does not, at least as presented, support his condemnation of abortion nor of Michael Schiavo. So, to the extent that he claimed his book would show an atheist he takes his positions for rational reasons, he has not lived up to his claims.

Edited to add:
When discussing the process of thinking about forms, and saying this process means instantiating that form in an immaterial way, Dr. Feser uses this concept as proof that the mind can never be found to be material or even to depend solely on the material. This would mean that any discovery which indicates the mind does indeed depend on the brain must be wrong (unless one of his fundamental assumptions is wrong). I mention this as an example of one possible motivation for the dropping of formal/final causes to begin with: once you start saying certain results of an experiment must be wrong and can not possibly be valid, you are drawing a line in sand that science is not supposed to cross over. Maybe there will never be a material explanation for something like the ability to understand what a triangle is, or maybe in 100 years we will have created artificial life that exhibits this behavior. To rule it out a priori is stultifying and limiting, for no good purpose.

The 125th Skeptics' Circle

2009-12-03T09:34:00.003-06:00

You can no find the 125th Skeptics' Circle at Effort Sisyphus, with two ways to experience the journey. Is your pill red or blue?

Review of TLS -- God uniquely and uniquely God?

2009-11-30T10:39:00.004-06:00

Welcome to the sixth installment of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, four and five at those links. In Chapter 3 Dr. Feser presents arguments for the existence and nature of God. Having covered existence in part five, I will not turn to some of the arguments offered for the nature of God. For the purposes of this post, I will treat Dr. Feser's arguments for existence as being completely convincing, and see if they really do tell us what he claims concerning the nature of God.

As an aside, given that the Unmoved Mover depends on the impossibility of an infinite essentially ordered causal series, it's rather curious that the Unmoved Mover themself must possess infinite power (otherwise, use of any causal power would diminish the Mover). It seems we can't avoid the infinite, no matter what.

While Aquinas may have written thousands of pages on the arguments about these attributes, Dr. Feser's words are considerably more brief, and I should be able to discuss them below the fold.

Starting with the Unmoved Mover, who has been revealed to be pure act and no potential, Dr. Feser says there can only be one of them. After all, if there was more than one, there would need to be some way of distinguishing them, and any possible distinction, such as one having more power than another, would be a potential for one that was an actuality for the other. It was difficult to take this argument seriously. No where else in his book does Dr. Feser use one being's actuality to assess a potentiality of a different being. My actuality as a human is not affected by the potential of soil to turn into an oak tree in the presence of an acorn. Unmoved Mover A can easily have some feature X that is not a potentiality nor an actuality at all for Unmoved Mover B. Now, you can certainly argue that A can in no way change or affect B, and vice-versa, but this does not make them the same.

Another argument is that the Mover can not be material, because to be material is to have potential to be something else. However, this seems to be a generalization based on the material things that we know. There is no reason to think that the Mover can't be a material thing with no potential to change at all. If you care to go back to Russell's teapot, the teapot is by definition at the center of the universe, and all other things circle it. Nor does it have any potential to become a cereal bowl or a silver spoon, it is fully expressed, unchanging as a teapot.

Finally, as the source of all causes, the Mover must possess all attributes in the highest degree. Of course, these are only the positive attributes like goodness and love, negative attributes like badness and hate are privations, states identified by the absence of a positive feature. I don't find that description metaphysically persuasive. Just sticking with emotions, the enjoyment of seeing another person in pain (schadenfreude) is not in any way the lack of some other attribute. Empathy is an attribute, but you can have neither empathy nor schadenfreude, just indifference, which would seem to be the privation of both. However, I find it unlikely Dr. Feser would claim schadenfreude is a feature of the Mover.

The last feature is that the First Cause, who merges every other essence with its existence, had no other being to merge it's essence and existence together. Thus, the Cause is simple, in that its essence is its existence, and its existence is its essence. This argument makes sense to me, and I have no objection to saying God is simple. What's interesting is that I hear this doctrine of simplicity used as statements why the Teapot, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and/or the Flying Spaghetti Monster are not comparable to God, because their existence is composite, being both material and essence. However, I can't see that. Just because for everyday, potential-laden, material things we separate essence from the matter does not mean this applies to the Cause. We should not let our analogies limit who the Cause can be.

Review of TLS -- the unmoving First Cause argument

2009-11-27T19:30:00.009-06:00

Welcome to the fifth installment of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, and four at those links. I have reached Chapter 3 in TLS, which starts start discussing some of Dr. Feser's argument for the existence and nature of God, along with a few other things. In this post I'll focus in the existence arguments, of which three are offered, namely that of the Unmoved Mover (better understood, perhaps as the Unchanged Changer), the First Cause, and the Supreme Intelligence.

First, a few brief paragraphs about Dr. Feser's comments on the reliability of these proofs. He sees them as being a mixture of formal and empirical reasoning, because they use premises that are empirical as well as conceptual. and that this make the proofs more certain to be true than either method can produce on its own. Personally, I see the methodology as being purely formal. Taking a few empirical notions as being starting points (Edit: ~~does~~) does not alter what is basically a formal exercise in TLS. To be sure, there are ways of trying to mix empirical and formal (as well as revelatory) reasoning, much like mixing oil, vinegar, and parsley to make a salad dressing. I just don't see that being done in his arguments.

Second, Dr. Feser does sneak in a fourth attempt at proof prior to the listed three. The claim is basically that since universals exist, they have some sort of reality even when there is no matter to take their form and no mind to appreciate their essence, but they are not real in the Platonic sense. So there must be a mind that instantiates them even when there is no mind instantiating them. He does not even present this as a reducito ad absurdum argument, just as ~A => A.

Finally, I think I have come to understand some of the motives behind the constant stream of invective being launched at Dawkins, Hume, and various others. Dr. Feser's stated goal may be to convince atheists of some of these claims, but the more likely result of these continual insults is to get people who like what Dennett, et. al., have to say so upset that they don't read the logic itself objectively or clearly, and so miss the important points that are understated and focus on the repeated, emphasized, not-exactly-correct shortcuts (there's also a little playing to the crowd in that, too, since the best market for his books is almost certainly not atheists). Then, when the upset reader treats those shortcuts as the real argument, they can be dismissed as missing the point of the argument. I have seen one example of this directly, and I'll expand on it in the discussion of the Unmoved Mover below the fold.

The argument for the Unmoved Mover is based upon several ideas: change is movement from a potential state to an actual state, no object can activate it's own potential, and every activation has an immediate efficient cause. He takes the time to distinguish between accidentally ordered causes and essentially ordered causes. One example he gives equates to saying that one cause of your father having you is your grandfather having your father. Even your grandfather died when your father was young, that did not prevent your father from having you. This is an accidentlly ordered causal series, in that the separation of time means that the earlier cause doesn't need to be present to have the causal chain continue, that the causal chain is transmitted independently of the continued existence of your grandfather. Another example would be that you don't have be smoking while you actually develop lung cancer in order to have the smoking be a cause of the cancer. This is contrasted with an essentially ordered causal series, which is basically that the cause's presence is required while the potential is activated. The offered example is that of a hand shaping a clay pot. Whatever the past reasons that motivate the potter, without the hand directly present, the clay is not shaped. The clay does not continue shaping itself when the hand is withdrawn, all the change is completely dependent on the hand.

Taking a break from the argument to comment on style, Dr. Feser presents this dependence-oriented description of an essentially ordered causal series precisely once. He then says the actions appear to simultaneous in the essential series due to the dependence. In fact, over the next 5 pages, he uses various derivatives of simultaneous 9 times, twice in italics, to describe essentially ordered causes. Naturally, when the occasional reader sees this repetition, they take away the notion that simultaneity is essential to the argument, and see that fact that elements of an essentially ordered series are not truly simultaneous as a disproof of the line of reasoning. This allows Dr. Feser to dismiss the reader based on a lack of understanding, and I have seen him do this in the comments on his blog. Of course, I don't really know if this is a deliberate deception on Dr. Feser's part, if he is too incompetent as a writer to understand the effects of repetition, or if he just let some other hack write or edit his book that way (no doubt other possible explanations exist). I can only comment on the effect, not being able to fathom the purpose (or final cause, if you like).

Going back to the argument, Dr. Feser presents that these essentially ordered series of causes have terminating points, so they have starting points as well. Further, since each event in the series does not have the potential to activate itself, it cannot be considered the initiating force of the series, but only a participant therein. He likens the series to a train have a caboose and several railroad cars: at some point, there must be an engine that sets the essentially ordered series in motion. Since nothing activates its own potential, this origin does not change, it only activates changes. This origin is God, continuously activating all the events in the world, such as a rock rolling down a hill, a spider spinning a web, one man feeding the hungry, and another (or the same) man molesting a child.

Dr. Feser recommends that the best way to show his arguments are invalid is to demonstrate errors in the reasoning and the starting premises, so naturally I will take him up on this offer and select both a premise and a bit of reasoning. From the starting premises I will pick one that stands out (besides the notion no act can be its own cause which I discussed in an earlier post): in the material world, essentially ordered series do not terminate. His example is that of a hand pushing a stick, which stick pushes a rock, and he treats the rock as the final object in the sequence. However, the rock pushes the ground and the air, each of which engage in their own set of reactions with other air and ground molecules, in a never-ending series. So, while the ideas that a last member implies a first member is also highly debatable, this debate is not relevant because there is no last member. From his reasoning, let's choose the notion that each member of the series is a passive link to the next. In fact, the ability of one event to activate the potential in the next event is a motive force. In the train analogy, it's much more like each railroad car has an oxygen tank inn the front, a hydrogen tank in the rear, and in between each car is a little motor that burns the fuels to power the following car. The engine is not only quite possibly infinitely far away, it is not needed at all.

Dr. Feser decreases the number of word he devotes to each of the causes as he progresses, and I shall do likewise. The First Cause argument is based on the notion that forms are real, and they include the essence, a definitive form, of things. Since the forms can exist without being instantiated in any particular material object, merely having an essence does not guarantee existence, such as the essence of unicorns exists, but this does not mean unicorns exist. Since they are initially separate, something must combine an essence to an existence, and this is the cause of that object. Since this combination of existence and essence must be performed for every object in the universe, it must be performed for the universe as a whole.

There is brief break in the argument, where Dr. Feser discusses the fallacy of composition. One example of this fallacy: I can step over each cinder block from a group of 20, so if you stack all 20 vertically, I can step over the whole stack, as well. Dr. Feser says that since the fallacy of composition is sometimes true (the individual cinder blocks are gray, so the stack will be gray), he can use it here to say if every object in the universe has a cause (an event that joined essence to existence), so does the universe as a whole. No, I'm not kidding, he really claims that since a fallacy sometimes works, he can use it in this argument. He offers no other justification for applying it.

Anyway, these joining of existence to essences wind up being the essentially ordered causal series, and in a similar argument against infinity, the series must have a first element, the being whose essence includes existence without a cause, that set every existence in motion directly or indirectly, a First Cause, aka God. Further, since God initiates all these objects, he is constantly maintaining them. This is offered with no justification at all, he just slides from creating to maintaining as if they are the same thing.

This is basically the Unmoved Mover argument, expect the supposed terminus is the change of beginning an existence, as opposed to a different type of change. It offers no corrections or improvements to the defects of the previous argument. It is not any more rational as a position, and actually less so, since it depends on the fallacy of composition, where as the Unmoved Mover did not.

Finally, we get to the argument from the Supreme Intelligence. Since final causes are presumed to exist, the future oak exists as the eventual form of the acorn. Since the oak itself doesn't exist yet, its form must be in the thought of some intelligence that allows the form to direct the acorn in becoming an oak. This Supreme Intelligence Is ... (wait for it) ... God! Yes, the suspense was killing me, too.

This argument certainly clarifies why Dr. Feser likes formal causes so much, even though it makes no sense to claim that the form of the oak is not already in the acorn, within the DNA that will direct its development. Not too mention, in examples like this, how come we never hear the form of the oak is in the soil, or the rainwater? Certainly the oak is much more soil and rainwater than it is the original acorn. Maybe that's too complicated for our discussion, though. Needless to say, as I have outlined above, I found the argument for God as outlined in TLS to be completely lacking in accurate empirical starting points and also to have a couple of steps of poor reasoning. I was not convinced, at all. Despite that, for the purpose of part 6, I'm going to grant Dr. Feser has proven his case for existence, and then respond to the attributes he attributes to God based on these arguments.

The 124th Skeptics' Circle

2009-11-20T12:25:00.002-06:00

There is a huge collection of links at Beyond the Short Coat for the 124th edition of the Skeptics' Circle. I might get to them all this weekend, but you can bet Jay Leno's "reading" by Sylvia Browne will be near the top of the list!

Review of TLS -- Just cause or just 'cause?

2009-11-17T18:16:00.009-06:00

Welcome to the fourth installment of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, and three at those links. I have finished the book and some background reading, so hopefully from this the pace of these responses will accelerate.

First, I want to thank Thomas, author and blogger at Tearing Down the Mask of Maya, who very kindly presented some supplemental reading material on the topic of today's post, the metaphysics of Aristotle. Without his contributions this response to Dr. Feser would have been devoid of much of the level of understanding it possesses, even poorer than its likely impoverished condition. Also, I want to thank aintnuthin, who challenges me to keep my head level and whose thoughts in the discussions of this book occasioned some valuable realizations. The discussion of Dr. Feser's material is below the fold.

One of the interesting aspects of both TLS and the supplemental material is that abandon the traditional translations of act and potency, Dr. Feser preferring actuality and potential. The basic idea is that every object has both the ability to be what it currently is, and also contains (in a sense) what it might become under given conditions. A glass vase contains the potential to be melted and cast as a figurine, or to be shattered. One of the primary principles is that no potential activates on its own, there is always some outside agency. So everything is what it is, and only changes when something else influences it. Dr. Feser describes this distinction as the first step on the way to seeing there is a God. But even here, at the first step, we find it is not descriptive of how some of the world works. Protons don't decay from any outside influence that can be determined, nor do atomic nuclei. Bell's theorem has actually shown there must be random quantum effects, in that the existence deterministic effects lead to predictions that are countered by experimentation. So at the very beginning of the discussion, Aristotle's metaphysics is, at least, not universal in scope. If you are going to convince an atheist that their position is insane, wicked, and counter to reality, you really should start with a position that reflects reality.

Another point Dr. Feser makes, with no particular argument to justify it at this time, is that you can have actuality without a potential for change, but you can't have a potential to change without having something there. I'm not sure that is true, depending on what "something" is.

Next the discussion turns to form and matter. The illustration used is that of a rubber ball. Rubber would be the matter; the spherical shape would be the form. Just as it's not a rubber ball if it is made from some other matter, it's not a rubber ball when the form is not spherical. Here Dr. Feser again makes a claim, sans justification, that all matter must have a form but that form can exist without matter (an immaterial form).

This is then followed by a discussion of the four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The material and formal causes are the matter and form of the object, portrayed as directing influences on the object. So, it's not just that the ball is made of rubber; the rubber in the ball provides it with certain potentials. It's not just that the ball is spherical, the shape of the ball guides what the ball's actuality is. The efficient cause is an account of the material aspects of the creation of the ball, and the final cause is the reason the ball was constructed. These four causes are declared to be completely general, applicable to everything in the natural world.

According to Dr. Feser, formal and final causes have been banished from modern thinking. Oddly, he never addresses the concept of the properties or capabilities of an object in this discussion. It certainly seems to me that formal causes have been displaced by properties, that being spherical is true of some pieces of rubber and not others, and that being a sphere doesn't seem to impose any actuality on the ball. He uses the heart as an example of a final cause (it is there to pump blood), but that's just as well accounted for by saying the heart is capable of pumping blood and the rest of the body has come to rely on this capability. There is no need to treat the capability as an independently shaping event. One might almost suspect Dr. Feser of deliberately distorting the picture on this, but you would need to believe he has the potential to engage in that sort of deliberate deception. Still, the importance of having a final cause is of paramount importance to his future conclusions.

I was completely unconvinced by the attempt to elevate properties and capabilities of objects into formal and final causes for the objects. I suppose it is rational to assert them in the sense you can't disprove they exist; in the same sense you can assert rationally there are invisible pink unicorns. However, much like the invisible pink unicorns, formal and final causes will prove impossible to observe objectively, and be the products of declarations, assertions, and faith, not of reason.

The 123rd Skeptics' Circle

2009-11-06T18:02:00.002-06:00

Colin channels Galileo in the 123rd edition of the Skeptics' Circle at Blue Genes, with a list of links that is simply huge. Highly recommended.

Review of TLS -- realism, really?

2009-11-03T18:33:00.011-06:00

This is the third in what looks to be a decently long series of posts looking at the argument Dr. Edward Feser presents in the The Last Superstition. You can find parts one and two at those links.

As was noted in part two, Dr. Feser claims to prove quite a few things in his first chapter, and he begins chapter two with a brief history of Greek philosophy from Thales of Miletus, with stops to mention Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, the Sophists, and Socrates, before delving somewhat more deeply into Plato. I certainly don't know enough of historical Greek philosophy to comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of his summations, nor is that my purpose in this series. As a reminder, my purpose is to comment on what I find convincing in Dr. Feser's book, what I find unconvincing, and whether he has lived up to any or all of his claims by the end of it, either to the extent of convincing me that he is correct, or his fallback position of convincing me his position is rational. To that end, his historical accuracy is barely a footnote. The first step on that path will be below the fold.

After a discussion of Plato, the first bit of meat for my meal appears: a discussion of realism, nominalism, and conceptualism. As Dr. Feser himself acknowledges, the position of realism is indeed central to his arguments later in the book:

Indeed, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that virtually every major religious, moral, and political controversy of the last several decades -- of the last several centuries, in fact -- in some way rests on a disagreement, even if implicit or unnoticed, over the "problem of the universals" (as it is known).

, with realism being the position that these universals, numbers, and propositions are real in one fashion or another. He notes there are many flavors of realism.

Before we get into Dr. Feser's nine justifications for this position, I wanted to note what these things are. Universals are adjectives being treated as nouns. His three examples: triangularity, humanness, and redness. Mind you, he never pulls out the word 'adjective' and carefully avoids using the adjectival forms of triangular, human, or red. Nevertheless, he is saying that the common features of the descriptions of various objects are themselves real. By numbers, he means the ordinary sorts of numbers on a real line, making quite a bit of the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 is a necessary truth (even though this is not always true, for example, 2 liters + 2 liters will often be less than 4 liters). Propositions refer to the meaning behind sentences that make a claim about the world. For example, he says that "John is a bachelor" and "John is an unmarried man" are the same proposition.

His first justification applies primarily to universals, and is the notion of "one over many". That is, you can describe many different objects with the same adjective, and that the description could apply to something even when it doesn't actually apply to anything, and even when no mind is thinking about it, therefore it is real. So, even though unicorns and griffons are not real, the concept of being a unicorn or being a griffon is a real concept. Oddly, he does not use fictional examples like unicorns and griffons to illustrate this point. No doubt this is an oversight.

The second and third justifications apply to mathematical objects like circles, numbers, etc. (they are divided into two for some reason). Again, Dr. Feser relies on the notion that these statements are always true, as opposed to models that true given the right circumstances. I am firmly opposed to the notion that mathematical truths are real, because I understand there are too many situations where they are not true.

The fourth is an argument from the nature of propositions, and is basically the idea that a true proposition will often be true even when there is no one around to state it, and that it has no material component. He makes an excellent argument for these propositions being true. However, he makes no argument for them being real.

The last of the arguments directly supporting realism, as opposed to attacking the alternatives, is the argument from science, which amounts to saying that science uses universals and mathematics, and both are real based on arguments 1-3, so anyone who accepts the results of science accepts 1-3. I found this argument did not add any force to his position, as it rests entirely on arguments 1-3.

The remaining four justifications discussed are arguments against the plausibility of nominalism and conceptualism. Nominalism is presented as basically denying the reality of universals (and presumably numbers and propositions, although this is not specifically discussed). Instead, we apply the same descriptions to items because they resemble each other in some fashion, but that resemblance is not some instantiation of a universal. Conceptualism is presented as saying that any existence to universals occurs only in the mind, not in the exterior reality. While acknowledging there are many varieties of nominalism and conceptualism, Dr. Feser prefers to focus on the most extreme variations for his criticisms.

The first of the two arguments directed against nominalism specifically is the vicious regress problem. When the nominalist speaks of resemblances, is the property of resembling something itself a universal? If not, and we identify them all as resemblances because they are similar to us in some ways, is that similarity a universal? Personally, I don't see where there is a good answer to those questions either way. I can certainly understand why someone would reject nominalism on this basis.

The other argument against nominalism, which is also the second argument presented against conceptualism, is that words themselves must be universals. Otherwise, every time we used a word, it might mean something different, and communication would not be possible. Of course, this objection works only if this situation is different with realism, and it seems to me that realism suffers this same communication defect, in a different fashion. Because there are so many universals, we can never be sure which universal the other person is invoking. After all, in addition to redness, there are universals for scarlet, rose, burgundy, crimson, etc., and all of these are particular types of redness. There is nothing in realism that prevents Person A from invoking the universal of red that is close to rose, while person B hears the universal of red that is close to crimson. I recall reading there have been studies that the white universal of people is the USA is more bluish that the white of the South Americans (which looks pinkish to USAers). This theme of an overwhelming number of universals, and the arbitrariness that people use to select from among them, will appear again in future parts of this review.

Finally, the first argument against conceptualism is the objectivity of concepts and knowledge. Dr. Feser claims that when we entertain concepts of the same thing, such as a dog, the concepts are the same inside our brain, that when we think about the Pythagorean Theorem, we are discussing the same proposition. Similarly to what I wrote above, I do not agree. We often are thinking about difference concepts when we think about dogs (since we have two beagles, my dog concept is very beagleish) and while I don't know how beagleish his dog concept is, it's fairly clear our concepts of the Pythagorean Theorem are different.

Coming to my purpose for this review: Dr. Feser presented no evidence that realism is a better position than conceptualism from what I can see, while his argument against nominalism was stronger. So, I would say he failed in the part of the task where he wanted to convince me he was right. However, I can certainly see why people might reasonably hold to realism, so he was successful in his fall-back option of convincing me that his position is rational.

The 122nd Skeptics' Circle

2009-10-22T09:05:00.003-05:00

As the lone self-aware monobrow on the skeptical comittee dominated by humans, I was in general peased with the overall quality of their presentations, and offer my congratualtions to the hosts, the Young Australian Skeptics, and in particular Mr. Hughes.

Review of TLS -- Promises are made

2009-10-19T19:11:00.016-05:00

This is the second in a series of posts that will be reviewing and responding to the arguments of Dr. Feser's The Last Superstition. This was part 1. I haven't read many books of philosophy, and none aimed at popular audiences, so when I note that Dr. Feser starts out with a list of claims that he promises to demonstrate later, I have no idea if that is standard procedure or not. It does make the first chapter, Bad Religion, devoid of meaningful content with regard to establishing Dr. Feser's claims. However, one of the things I want to do is to in this post is list all these promises Dr. Feser makes in Chapter 1. After I review the last chapter, I will return to this list and we will see what has actually been proven.

Claims Dr. Feser says he will demonstrate
Secularism is inherently immoral and irrational, only a specific sort of religious view can be moral, rational, and sane
On intellectual grounds, atheism can not be true
Secularism can never spring from reason; its true grounding is from a willfulness and desire for it to be true
The basic metaphysical assumptions that make atheism possible are mistaken
Secular propaganda is the source of fideism
It is as impossible to say nature has no meaning or purpose as it is to square a circle (more on that below)
Secularism is parasitic on religion for all its important ideas, it is strictly a negation
What is characterized as a war between science and religion is really a war between competing metaphysical systems
The classical metaphysical picture is rationally unavoidable, and thus so is the traditional Western religious view derived from it
Given atheism and naturalism, there is no persuasive argument that allows you to trust in either reason or morality
Edit on 2009-NOV-17 to add: The abandonment of Aristotle's metaphysics has led to the abandonment of any rational or moral standards that can be used to justify moral positions, and is responsible for the curent civilizational crisis of the West.

Dr. Feser allows himself a full 241 pages in the next five chapters to accomplish all this. Of course, with so modest an undertaking, he leaves himself plenty of space to continue to denigrate atheism, secularism, the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens), Hume, and many more in those chapters as well.

I do have a few other comments on some of Dr. Feser's remarks in chapter 1. While I still intend to avoid responding to the mere demagoguery that he indulges himself in, there are a few points that reveal interesting and noteworthy aspects of both him and his opinion of his audience.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy or striking about his claim that the less people know, they less they realize their ignorance. In fact, I read similar thoughts from a variety of science books and scientists growing up, typically along the lines of 'The more you know, the more you realize how little you know'.

I do not agree that attempts to account for phenomena such as the mind without referencing God is a religious discussion. You might as well say that attempts to account for lightning without referencing God is a religious discussion. Then again, perhaps Dr. Feser would say that. I would not be surprised at all to see him claim that any discussion of any natural phenomenon is inherently religious.

One of the common hallmarks of purveyors of woo is a sense of persecution that results from being treated equally. This comes out twice in Chapter 1, where first Dr. Feser complains that some philosophical positions distasteful to him are considered still worth discussion even when they can't be demonstrated, while the subject of religion is considered not to have made its case. Of course, the second standard is a far higher hurdle than the first, and certainly not to be awarded lightly. To imply that religion must be granted the second when other positions are granted the first, or else the supporters of the second are receiving unfair treatment, sounds very much like a persecution complex. Shortly after that, he complains that the distasteful propositions are referred to as making people think, whereas in this context religion is apparently not worthy of a moment's notice. He acknowledges that most people are raised religiously, but somehow misses the point that immersing people in thoughts they already find comfortable will be doing the opposite of making them think, it is much more likely to lull them to stupor. However, the concern seems to be for some sort of time equality, not purpose, because otherwise religious ideas are just not being treated fairly.

Dr. Feser pulls out the old saw about the desire to disbelieve in hellfire being a motivation for atheism. Oddly, I have met very few Christians who believed they, personally, were going to hell. I certainly never did, back in the day. He doesn't seem to understand the human tendency for exceptionalism, or to be deliberately ignoring it.

Dr. Feser declares that the notions of a selfish gene, or design via natural selection, can only be true and interesting if by these terms we attribute some superhuman, literal intelligence to the gene and the process. I'm not sure what to make of this. Obviously he knows the terms are metaphors that describe the complex interactions of various feedbacks mechanisms. He doesn't think that the study of feedback mechanisms is interesting, that the feedback mechanisms are not true, or that the use of metaphor makes the concept untrue or uninteresting?

Dr. Feser complains about 'Easter Bunny comparisons to God', which he disdains. This is all fine for him, but the authors upon whom he heaps this disdain are do not have the audience of his peers in mind; their books are for the general public, and often specifically the religious members thereof. The Easter Bunny example actually strikes right at the heart of what many of these people believe. If the religious group doesn't have their followers trained in the ideas of Aristotle, why should it be the job of Dennett, et. al., to train them? Later on, Dr. Feser says that this is an example of these authors not being willing to take on the real issues against the formidable opposition. With all the diminutions hurled against these authors, you would think he believe this is the appropriate level of opposition for them, but I suppose he thinks even more poorly of his fellow believers in this regard. At any rate, while I might not have the training of a Dennett, I am happy to accommodate Dr. Feser by engaging his ideas directly. Having read through Chapter 4 so far, I have not found any reason to see his presentation of reason, faith, and religion as having a superior metaphysical basis to your typical Sunday preacher.

Finally, Dr. Feser likes to make great use out of the metaphysical absurdity of square circles. He is unaware that all circles are indeed squares, under the taxicab metric (I'll devote a separate post to that). This is a problem with his metaphysical analysis that we’ll cover in more detail later. For now, let’s just say that like any other formal system, Aristotle’s metaphysics will turn out to be founded on arbitrarily chosen premises that are inherently improvable and not obviously better than a variety of alternatives as a description of reality.

Pure Denialism at vere loqui

2009-10-12T13:01:00.003-05:00

Martin Cothran joins in the denialfest on the news that the level of snow melt is at a 30-year low.

Both from the terminology and from a small bit of research at a couple of sites, including NASA, the snow melt in any given year seems to be how much the difference in the snow cover over the previous years. Any snow melt is a sign of warmer temperatures. So, saying that this was a year of smaller gains in temperatures than we have seen for a while doesn't really change the message that the warming is going on.

Never thought it would happen

2009-10-12T11:41:00.001-05:00

Watching the lastest Real Time with Bill Maher Sunday, Dr. Bill Frist completely dressed down and embarrassed Bill Maher over Maher's anti-vaccine rhetoric. I cheered out loud. I never thought I would cheer Dr. Frist like that, but he richly deserved my support on that topic (and, for that matter, on most of the health care positions he seems to be taking).

The 121st Skeptics' Circle

2009-10-09T16:53:00.003-05:00

The 121st Skeptics' Circle is up and running at The Mad Skpetic, where Myron does an amusing bit as an announcer for W.E.B.S.

A discussion of asymptotes

2009-10-09T07:24:00.003-05:00

One of the objectives in the Intermediate Algebra class is identifying some basic properties of a relation from looking at a graph (domain, range, is it a function). So, on a test I put in a graph that could roughtly correspond to -log (-x). This graph has the y-axis as an asymptote.

While I have done this a few times before, this is the first time I've had members of the class question whether it was possible for a graph to be an asymptote. As one student said, "Doesn't it need to either go straight up or curl back?" No, not exactly.

So, to make it easier to understand, I talk about how y=1/x behaves as x increases. I won't bore with the details. I get to end the discussion with one of my favorites things to tell a student: It makes perfect sense, it's just counter-intuitive.

If you know anything at all about mathematics, you should know that.

Review of TLS -- a preface

2009-10-06T19:50:00.006-05:00

I'm starting a multi-part project today, my first in almost a year (the last one would be a critique of Nagel's paper, if I recall correctly). I will be reviewing/critiquing/responding to Dr. Feser's The Last Superstition for probably the next couple of weeks, at least. I'm going to start this post with a preface of my own, and then look at the preface in the book.

My main purpose will be to look at one thing only: does Dr. Feser present any sort of proof that atheism is untenable, and in particular for his version of God? I have read a variety of comments on Dr. Feser, his variations on the teaching of historical figures, his own associations, etc., from comments on this blog and elsewhere. I understand that many of them are probably legitimate, but I'm not going to address them. Other topics, such as the nature of morality or the practical and political applications thereof will creep into the discussion only because Dr. Feser insists that his proof is evidence that his own particular brand of theism offers these positions obvious rational support. I'm also not going to address the judgemental rhetoric, except to examine any underpinnings they seem to be stemming from, as I don't particularly care what Dr. Feser's opinions are nor how he states them. Further, my goal is to address Dr. Feser's argument on his own ground, in his own terms. Any argument crafted with so much effort deserves at least that much.

Dr. Feser starts with a quote of Plato and then follows with this quote from Aquinas, "A small error in the beginning of something is a great one at the end." I find it ironic that even at the beginning (the preface) of his book, we find errors of category and an error of fact. Now, I don't think these particular errors will be overly relevant to Dr. Feser's argument (certainly not the error of fact), but that just makes them small errors. Whether they have blossomed into great ones at the end, I don't know yet (I'm still in Chapter 2). Both of these errors appear in the same passage:

It is no more up the courts or "the people" to "define" marriage or to decide whether religion is a good thing than it is up to them to "define" whether the Pythagorean Theorem is true of right triangles, or whether water has the chemical structure H₂O. In each case, what is at issue is a matter of objective fact that it is the business of reason to discover than democratic procedure to stipulate.

Just in case you were wondering whether Dr. Feser means that the Pythagorean Theorem is actually true, he leaves no doubt of that in chapter 2 when discussing Platonic Forms: he does indeed mean the Pythagorean Theorem is true as a real-world proposition. This is of course an error. In a formal system where all of Euclid's postulates hold, the Pythagorean Theorem is deducible. However, not all of Euclid's postulates hold in reality (in particular, the postulate regarding lines crossed by a transversal meeting on the side of line where the sum of the interior angles is smaller than 180 degrees, the equivalent to the parallel postulate, does not hold). So, for the followers of realism (as is Dr. Feser), the Pythagorean Theorem is actually false.

The second error is more subtle, and I doubt Dr. Feser would even agree. The types of knowledge used, and the ways that we decide, what marriage is and whether religion is good is completely different from how we derive the Pythagorean Theorem, and the knowledge that H₂O is water is a third way of knowing what is true. The three are not comparable. In fact, we aren't completely certain H₂O is the formula for water, the Pythagorean Theorem is not real (nor any other purely mathematical concept), and my strong suspicion is that there can be no demonstration of a proper definition for marriage or the goodness of religion.

To their minds (or what is left of them) sexual libertinism and contempt for religion, as public, mass phenomena (rather than the private eccentricities of a decadent elite, which of course have always been with us) constitute the final victory of reason ...

Isn't nostalgia great? How all those ordinary people were so sexually moral that prostitution was practically unknown, were so religious that they never cursed God and went to church every day. Not to mention, and maybe he missed this, but a modern lower-middle class family of today would be part of the elite back in the days of Aquinas. So, even if his position is true, the modern libertinism and contempt represent no change at all from previous times except for the higher percentage of the population in the elite status.

The 120th Skeptics' Circle

2009-09-24T09:54:00.001-05:00

You can fine the 120th Skeptics' Circle at Pro-science, with a straight-forward roundup and topic indicator, and a lot of very good reading.

Scientific jargon does not support the Fifth Way

2009-09-23T13:18:00.003-05:00

Dr. Feser regularly complains that modern's critics of various aspects of design claims and ontological proofs don't really understand the deepness of the arguments of Aquinas-Thomists, and instead are responding to less-rounded arguments made by later philosophers. While I find it curious that his position indicates philosophers seem to have regressed when so many other disciplines have progressed, I feel that the least I can do is repond to Dr. Feser at the level of the arguments he is making. So I'm responding to a post he made on the comments of Jim Manzi regarding the Coyne review or Wright's book and Wright's response. First of all, as a part of my regular theme that we all misread based on our preconceptions, let me say Coyne's review is quite funny in light of Wright’s responses, which boil down to 'I agree with Coyne's point, my book made the same point Coyne is making, and I am not sure why Coyne thinks otherwise'. It's a little embarrassing for Coyne.

Manzi, while claiming to defend Wright, actually addresses a part of Coyne's review that does not even directly refer to Wright's book, but is some stage-setting by Coyne. So, the title to the article is rather incorrect, as Manzi does nothing to defend Wright at all. However, Manzi does defend his own ideas about the comparison of genetic algorithms on computers to the way genes behave, trying to set abiogenesis aside as a philosophical study (without referring to it by name), the importation of a goals into evolution, and the non-physical randomness of mutations. I might decide one day to fisk that article directly, but not today. Below the fold I will excerpt some of Dr. Feser's response to the article, and intersperse some of my own thoughts.

I argued in The Last Superstition that whatever one thinks of Darwinism, its truth or falsity is (contrary to what New Atheists like Richard Dawkins suppose) irrelevant to the cogency of the Thomistic proofs of God’s existence, including Aquinas’s Fifth Way (which Dawkins incompetently assimilates to Paley’s Design argument).

I actually agree with Dr. Feser here, for a given definition of "Darwinism" at any rate. To the degree that we are relying on the science, we have no method of elimination all sorts of exterior teleology and causality. If Dr. Feser is referring to ideas that go beyond the science, then we get into metaphysical assumption whose basis in reality can never be firmly demonstrated.

Indeed, if Darwinism has any relevance to the latter argument at all, it is in fact by slightly reinforcing rather than undermining it. The reason is that Darwinism, like any scientific theory, posits various causal mechanisms, all causal mechanisms presuppose (for reasons set out in TLS) final causality, and thus (since the take-off point of the Fifth Way is the existence of final causality) Darwinism, qua scientific theory, only lends further support to the Fifth Way.

This is a fine example of 'heads I win, tails you lose' argumentation. Any failures by science to explain something, such as the emergence of consciousness in the brain, is of course evidence that there is something non-physical at work. On the other hand, finding the causes and explanation things can only serve to strengthen the 'Fifth Way' argument of Aquinas for the existence of God. Dr. Feser relies on the work in his book (The Last Superstition, he abbreviates it TLS) regularly rather than outline its arguments, and I have not read it so far. However, I don't find the notion that there is some supernatural "final causality" to be any more likely a proposition than a natural final causality.

I also argued in TLS that the application by biologists, physicists, and other scientists of concepts like “algorithm,” “information,” “software,” “program,” etc. to the natural world evinces a tacit recognition of the reality of teleology or final causation. The reason (set out, again, in detail in TLS) is that the sort of directedness-towards-an-end that these concepts entail just is the core of the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception of final causality.

I'm not sure whether Dr. Feser understands this or not, but terms like algorithm and information means very different things when applied to biological objects or other non-human-created systems than to computer programs. Algorithms are merely cycles enacted and altered by external stimuli and ended, if at all, by other stimuli (possibly external or internal), while information represents how easily a string can be compressed by interpretations functions that are not aimed specifically at that string. Neither concept has any recognition of teleology or lack thereof, they are statements of content, not purpose.

Again, Aristotle and his followers do not argue for a temporal beginning of the universe (even though some of them do happen to believe, on independent grounds, that it had such a beginning). Nor do they think that an infinite regress is a “problem.” For by “infinite regress,” one either means an infinite regress of accidentally ordered causes extending backward in time – in which case such a regress is perfectly possible (and, indeed, actual, in Aristotle’s own view) – or one means an infinite regress of essentially ordered causes of the sort that trace ultimately to simultaneously operating instrumental causes here and now – in which case such a regress is, not merely “problematic” or mysterious (as if such a regress could exist in some as-yet unknown fashion), but flatly impossible in principle. (Again, all of this is explained at length in TLS.)

I do distrust the notion of being "flatly impossible in principle" for many reasons, not the least of which comes from my mathematical training. I find that the Axiom of Choice, or more precise the equivalent statement that the cross-products of non-empty sets is not empty, to be intuitively obvious, to the point that I find it ridiculous to claim that can be an empty cross-product of non-empty sets. The "flatly impossible in principle"Banach-Tarski paradox is a result does not change my mind, since I am forced to choose between to different flatly impossible notions, one of which must be true. I'm Dr. Feser feels he has a good argument for the impossibility of an infinite string of ontological causality, but my recent encounters with philosophers trying to use infinity in a mathematical way leaves me skeptical to the general abilities of philosophers who don't have an extensive mathematical background.

But Manzi’s remarks can be interpreted in another, more Aristotelian way. He might mean that even if the universe had no beginning in time, the basic laws that govern it, and the fact of their continual operation at any given moment, would still require an explanation. Talk of “laws of nature” is more a modern than an Aristotelian way of speaking, but the basic point remains that there is nothing inherent in material reality that can account for the “actualizing” of its “potential” for existing and operating in just the way it does at any particular instant. Unless we trace it down to that which is “pure actuality,” an Unmoved Mover or Uncaused Cause sustaining it in being and operation here and now and at any moment we are even considering the question, we would have no way in principle to account for why the universe exists at all and operates in precisely the way it does. The “problem of infinite regress” on this interpretation is not a matter of accepting a mystery which might have a solution – just one we do not and perhaps cannot discover – but rather the fatal (to naturalism) problem that without acknowledging that the regress of essentially ordered causes operating here and now terminates in an Unmoved Mover, the material world becomes unintelligible even in principle. (You know the drill: See TLS for the details.)

Having read up just a little on what Dr. Feser means by action and potentiality, this strikes me as being pure doggerel. The questions of why the universe exists and operates the way it does do not ever need to end, and they certainly do not end simply because we have an Unmoved Mover or Uncaused Cause. I don't know, nor pretend to know, that such a Mover/Cause does or does not exist, but I do know that, even if we arrive at such an august figure, they are not immune to the further questions of why the Mover/Cause does this, why they feel that, etc., and that the inevitable terminus of this chain is 'We just don't know'. This makes the end of the chain no different from the end of the chain of questions to the naturalist, except the naturalist stops the chain earlier in the process.

Manzi is clearer on the issue of final causality. Coyne seems to think that to attribute purposiveness to evolution entails seeing the human species, specifically, as having somehow been the end result toward which natural selection was working; and he trots out the usual ad hominem response to critics of Darwinism to the effect that they just can’t handle evolution’s humbling implications, blah blah blah.

This actually reverses motivation and effect from Coyne's point, which is not that attributing purpose to evolution allows the elevation of humans, but that the refusal to accept a non-elevation of humans results in the attributing of purpose to evolution. A => B is quite different from ~B => A.

And if this “algorithm” talk is taken seriously, then (to put things more strongly than Manzi does) it necessarily entails, given the nature of algorithms, that there is an end-state towards which the processes in question point – not, to be sure, the generation of some particular species (human or otherwise) at some temporal culmination point, but rather the (in principle non-stop) generation of species after species meeting certain abstract criteria of fitness.

Again, we have a reversal of cause and effect. It is not the algorithm that acts upon species causing new species to arise, it is the arising of new species in regular ways that is described in terms that look like algorithms to us.

Hence one either has to agree with the judgment of thinkers like John Searle that talk of “information,” “algorithms,” etc. is at best a misleading set of metaphors and at worst a complete muddle; or, if one thinks such talk is indispensible (and there is good reason to think it is) one must acknowledge that something like the Aristotelian conception of nature is correct after all.

I'm not sure if that is a necessary choice, but I do happen to be on, or at least closer to, the former side. We use terms like "information" and "algorithm" in a jargonistic sense to describe non-human-created systems, and this jargon has its beginning in metaphor. However, the terms have been fairly precisely defined in the given context, so I think it is going too far to say they are merely metaphorical now.

And, of course, I have noted the many neo-Aristotelian themes to be found in the work of many contemporary philosophers and scientists – including many who have no theological ax to grind – both in TLS and in earlier posts like this one and this one.

Another good case of a person seeing what they are pre-disposed to see.

My first hour in a Geometry class

2009-09-21T10:10:00.004-05:00

This is basically a longer form of the signature quote at the bottom of the page, originally created by a poster named HRG on CARM. My personal attitude toward mathematics is much closer to some combination of formalism and fictionalism than any other position, and I find it useful to remind students that what we are studying is doesn't have to be a perfect representation of the real world in order to be valuable. Indeed, since at the very least the parallel postulate doesn't hold for reality, we are not studying such a system.

So, I start of talking about three criteria that we would like any sort of knowledge to possess. The differ slightly from the usual description of epistemology.

Reality
We prefer knowledge that reflects the world in which we live, one that has an application to things outside of our imagination. Saying that a ball is red, that an action is evil, that 2 + 2 = 4 would ideally say something about the apple, the action, or the numbers themselves.

Demonstrability
We prefer knowledge that we can show, by some sort of objective process, holds to be true. This allows us to convince skeptical people that the knowledge is valid. Saying that a ball is red, and action is evil, or that 2 + 2 = 4 would mean we had accepted means of demonstrations so that every observer who accepted such means as valid would accept the result.

Certainty
We prefer knowledge that won't change with time, that stands firm. when something is true, it should stay true and not become partly true or even false later on. A red ball should always be red (assuming the ball itself does not change), an evil action should always be evil, and 2 + 2 should always equal 4.

The next part discusses what I see as three different systems that focus on knowledge using the desired attributes above. Of course, any truly broad system of inquiry will make us of all three of the systems I discuss below, but generally only one of them at time. Like a three-way combination of oil and vinegar, they don't seem to mix together. In the examples, I try to offer samples where the primary dependence seems to match the system I use, and the other systems are of secondary significance.

Empirical systems
Empirical systems rely on the investigation of the real word and use inductive processes and assumption to decide what is more generally true about that world. They use demonstrable methods such as taking measurements, running controlled experiments, and making predictions to be verified by further observations and experiments. Because the observations are founded in actual investigations, their reality to the world is a natural consequence. However, the use of the inductive method means that the results can not be certain, that all finding are provisional and possibly erroneous. The best that can be hoped for is beyond a good reason to doubt a finding. Examples of empirical systems would include physics and the results of national polls regarding elections.

Formal systems
Formal systems rely on working from a starting point accepted as being true and using an accepted, objective, deductive means of deriving new truths within that system. The method of deriving new truths within the system is the demonstration of that truth, and the process of deriving the truth would be repeatable regardless of the observer. Also, given a specific starting point, the same truth will always be the result (at least, ideally). However, since the starting point is selected rather than derived, there is no guarantee that such a starting point will have any bearing on the world around us. A formal system may be a useful model of reality, but we can never know whether it matches reality. Examples would include philosophy and law (as practiced at the appellate level).

Belief systems
Belief systems use the trusted, revealed knowledge of an authority of some sort to provide as description of the world and its operation. The truths that we get from this authority are accepted because of the level of trust, not because of any independent test that we run. Belief systems do provide a view of reality and knowledge about the state of affairs in the universe. Also, because the source is some consistent authority, they have the feature of certainty, of not changing within the system itself. However, because our acceptance of this knowledge is based upon trust rather than a means to validate them, these truths are generally not demonstrable to others in a significant or meaningful way. Examples include Shintoism and Objectivism.

Then the question that guarantees a minute of silence and ten more of discussion: which one of these is mathematics?

The 119th Skeptics' Circle

2009-09-10T10:31:00.002-05:00

You can find the 119th Skeptics' Circle up at Cubik's Rube, with a long narrative and a host of links i don't have time to read today. There is also a shorter, link-only version.

Why ID advocates need proof of a Designer

2009-09-09T13:31:00.004-05:00

In my recent discussions with JoeG at the self-styled Intelligent Reasoning, one of the topics that arose was that design is offered the default status in Dembski's Explanatory Filter. You supposedly rule out necessity at the first step, and chance at the next two, and are left with design at the end. This is also true of Dembski's Complex Specified Information formulation and of Behe's Irreducible Complexity. By claiming they can defeat the argument that certain types of objects can not arise through chance alone, they then present you with their only alternative: some outside-the-process designer who deliberately sought to create life as we have it, apparently with special care given to clotting cascades and bacterial mobility. In the course of the aforementioned discussions, I pointed out that there are two other alternatives beside the Designer and no design. JoeG, with the usual deftness of ID advocates, disputed that these were alternatives, and in the process created two I had not even considered, helping to defeat his own position. While I have seen reference to other possibilities existing, I don't recall reading a listing of them, so I thought I would provide one. Let's say that at some point in the future ID proponents succeed in their efforts at convincing us that necessity and chance can provide no sufficient explanation for life. For any program to prove a Designer exists, all of the options below will need to be disproved as well.

Suggestions from the commentators are welcome and may be added. In fact, I may make this my other annual re-post. Details below the fold.

The first option I proposed is life as a by product of some other intention by an outside agent. Life on earth might be a spandrel, something that happened when the Agent was in the process of organizing some other thing. This allows for all sorts of possibilities in the history of life, including the sudden appearance of features of organisms, or even entire organisms, not because the Agent cares about or even notices life here, but as a side-effect of some other intended cause. Any functions we perceive in biological systems would be reflections of the real design, unheard echos.

The next option I proposed was the interior designer, life having a gradually emergent consciousness that began to direct its own activities. The geek in me would call it the Force. As life grows, it begins to direct and design itself, shaping itself into greater levels of complexity, sacrificing some of its own forms in favor of other forms, weathering mass extinctions with determination and ferocity. Life would add it's own functions, choosing to make sure the bacteria got its flagellum, leaving all the hallmarks of design and purpose directly but having no outside designer they are attached to. It's very New Agey.

While disputing my first option, JoeG suggested the outside agent who doesn't even care what he's doing as an attempt at rebuttal, creating a third option: the random outside agent. ID proponents are fond of the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument, the equivalent metaphor here might be a sledgehammer-in-a-junkyard. Of course, the key difference is that the sledgehammer still has to be swung by some person. This is an outside agent that would leave traces that looked like they might design all over the places (the marks from the hammer), but involve no actual design intention on the part of the agent. So, merely detecting signs of design is not proof of design.

Finally, while discussing my second option, JoeG derisively referred to it as "poof". I thought about it, and decided that Poof is a poor description of that option, but an interesting alternative to it. One variation would be a sudden, persistent appearance of a consciousness for life, but an even more interesting variation is a consciousness life creates that appears only when it is needed to direct or preserve something about life, or life itself. Poof awakens when an asteroid hits the planet, or the global temperatures get too warm or too cold, etc. Poof then gets to work in changing the living things that remain, adding a flagellum her or altering a blood cascade there, to make sure life goes on as it should (or at all), and then disappears, ready to be summoned again at need.

So, even if the ID proponents somehow manage to topple the possibility of chance and necessity being sufficient, they have a long way to go to get to their Designer. I doubt I have exhausted the possibilities, either. If you want to say there is a Designer, you need proof of a Designer.

Keeping the kids in a bubble

2009-09-01T18:19:00.006-05:00

I probably won't mention the Illinois Family Institute very often on this blog. For the most part, their particular flavors of intolerance and woo don't interact with the subjects I like to write about. Once in a great while they'll put up some bland global warming denialism, but mostly it's just politically slanted tripe and homophobia, and there are other bloggers who are really passionate on those topics. My rant is below the fold.

However, Laurie Higgins decided to direct her focus at my kid's school, and in particular at the Challenge Day program they are bringing over. Before I go on, there are two things you should understand about O'Fallon: we are the dead center of the most conservative area of St. Clair County (many residents are current or past Department of Defense workers, as Scott Air force Base is quite close), and our school system has plenty of money (we have 2 new schools built in the past 2 years). So, we really don't need some conservative wingnut protecting our family values, we already have an elected school board that is almost as right-wing anyhow. I'm not going to pretend I have enough information on the program to evaluate its true value, and am skeptical of any week inducing a life-changing experience on people (shy of physical trauma), but if this program was really just some touchy-feely lib-fest, it would not have been funded.

Of course, Ms. Higgins has to pull out some made-for-right-wing expert testimony, and her choice is the book One Nation Under God, a book described as "...a literary version of the thankfully defunct TV show "Crossfire"' and 'They are also waging a dated war against an imagined army of censorious liberals, ... It is culture-wars kitsch'. This of course makes them fabulous sources for a blog devoted to those culture wars.

Fortunately, we get to find out the real problems directly from Ms. Higgins. She quotes from the website:

Challenge Day successfully addresses some common issues seen at most schools during our school programs including cliques, gossip, rumors, negative judgments, teasing, harassment, isolation, stereotypes, intolerance, racism, sexism, bullying, violence, homophobia, (emphasis added) hopelessness, apathy, and hidden pressures to create an image, achieve or live up to the expectations of others....Be challenged to celebrate the diversity of ALL people.

Note that I did not add the emphasis, nor did the goals of Challenge Day. The emphasis is being added by Ms. Higgins, because that's the stuff that's really concerning. Not that she approves of stereotypes, intolerance, sexism, or homophobia. Just because she thinks children should be pulled from school when teh school allows protesting homophobia does not mean she supports it herself, no siree. She just doesn't think children should be exposed to other children opposing homophobia. You know, because being exposed to homophobia-opposition will be so damaging for the kids.

Ms. Higgins, your attention is not needed, productive, interesting, nor welcome.

The 118th Skeptics' Circle

2009-08-27T13:06:00.002-05:00

At Evolving Mind we have the Looking Closely edition of the Skeptics' Circle. There are nice bits about the development of precision lenses in microscopes and telescopes as well as the usual links, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The foundations of non-skeptical thinking

2009-08-26T12:28:00.003-05:00

I was looking over some of the web sites attached to the members of Intelligent Reasoning when I came across the blog More Than Words by team member David Anderson, and in particular noticed a label he had for Mathematics. It turned into an opportunity to blog on skepticism, mathematics, and philosophy in general, an irresistible combination to me. Continued below the fold.

The particular topic is the general notion of whether mathematics, and similar sorts of activities, are describing something that is real. I have touched upon this topic in previous posts. In some ways, this argument is at the very heart of the worldviews that assert there can be some absolute truth, moral principles, authority, etc. You can't hang an absolute morality or absolute knowledge on a logical foundation that is arbitrary, at least not without some cognitive discomfort.

So, n Anderson's post on mathematics, we find Anderson arguing for how mathematicians feel mathematics is a feature of reality. All quotes following are from his post, unless otherwise noted.

Mathematics is also a very interesting field if you have an interest in philosophy and questions about design in nature. Almost all mathematicians are in practice realists - they believe that as they make progress in their field they are involved in discovering and not in inventing. (See here for more on this distinction). That is, they act and research as if there is already a transcendent, pre-existing mathematical universe "out there" that is waiting for us to find and explore it. The opposite of that is behaving as if mathematics is our arbitrary toy, to be played with, deconstructed and rebuilt as we please. Shall we adopt the convention that 2+2 = 5 from now on and see where that takes us?

Yes, the good old 2+2 = 5 argument (it never occurs to such people that it is perfectly reasonable in some circumstances to say 2 + 2 = 1). Now, I am sure there are mathematicians who think there is some big design they are uncovering, and that belief does not prevent them from being fine mathematicians. It's probably even a positive when you are working closely with computer scientists, engineers, or physicist in pushing the boundaries of mathematics for direct applications. However, having enjoyed some 66 semester hours of undergraduate mathematics and another 36 at the graduate level, I can say that I ran into more than a few instructors and fellow students who treated mathematics exactly like an arbitrary toy, something you could play with, take apart, and build to order. Most of them, to my knowledge, would not have cared if there were a philosophical position that reflected this attitude, but I find fictionalism to be a decent approximation. We were playing in a universe we created for our benefit, and occasionally something useful would pop out.

In my view, the atheist materialists who have tried to explain their view of reality are in an exceptionally weak position when they seek to explain mathematics in non-transcendent terms. Mathematics resists, at multiple levels, any attempt to treat it as an arbitrary invention of the human mind. Almost at every turn it cries out "I was here before you, and I am bigger than you!". Maths is a very theistic subject!

Actually, mathematics is highly receptive to humans treating it like an arbitrary invention. It's why we have Euclidean, Lobachevkian, and Riemannian geometries to describe different sorts of space. It's we we have intuitionist, constructivist, and para-consistent logics and their mathematical descendants. We add or remove axioms at our pleasure, look at the results, and call it fun (and occasionally useful).

I can of course always add two apples to two apples and will always get four apples (an inconvenient truth for the atheists who want to argue that mathematical truths are not transcendent!) - but as I do so I'm conscious that there is a notion of "two-ness" or "four-ness" that goes far beyond the tasty bits of fruit and is independent of them.

Now, this is a great example of fuzzy-headed thinking, an absolute truth that is right except where it is wrong. If I smash two apples against two apples, I will quite possibly have over 100 bits of apple. If I pour two liters of water into two liters of alcohol, I will have under 3.9 liters of fluid. Except in very limited circumstances, numbers are not conserved!

The more complicated the mathematics gets, the more obvious this becomes. I can move from the simple adding of objects to a dimension up and do calculus to work out the area under a graph. I can then accelerate to five or six dimensional spaces and work out their corresponding concept of volume. I can work out the properties of completely theoretical objects. you get the idea. Mathematics speaks to us of an ideal reality which depends on the mind.

Here's an interesting question: how the fundamental nature of an ideal reality depend upon a human mind? Personally, I don't think is can or does. Perhaps Anderson mistyped, and meant that the reality is revealed to the mind, or perhaps it was a Freudian slip. I do think that the reality of any particular five-dimensional construction we create depends on our mind. That makes it not a fundamental property of nature.

Whilst it depends on the mind, mathematics also seems to have an unbreakable link to the physical world. In the most simple example, there's something about those two oranges that has the notion of two-ness. The notion of two-ness is contained, but not exhausted, by them.

The notion of twoness, and similar notions, is the pattern that we humans impose upon our world to make it simpler. Since we are identifying a pattern, it is unsurprising that no one instance of the pattern will form a complete rendition.

I can create a two-dimensional shape that is approximately (but never exactly - because we live in a world of discrete atoms and molecules) equal to the one in the equation of the graph I was using. This is all simple enough.

Anderson references quantum mechanics later on. Perhaps it's my ignorance, but wouldn't it be much more correct to say we live in a worlds of fuzzy atoms and molecules behaving in probabilistic ways? Even here, the need to have absolutes alters the mindset.

What is more breath-taking, though, is to understand that correspondences between abstract mathematics and the physical world have also been discovered in far more complicated cases. In some areas, mathematicians discovered new theorems in highly abstract areas that nobody thought would ever turn out to have a practical application - but in fact they actually perfectly described physical phenomena observed decades later. Do you get that? Away in his dusty study somewhere, the mathematician was working on a problem that was thought to be far too abstract to have any real application. Some time later, a physicist realised that this bit of mathematics was the key to something that he was observing. Quantum physics provides a number of illustrations of this.

I'm not sure why this is particularly breathtaking. While we play with mathematics as a toy, we also do like to make it useful. So, a mathematician, playing around with equations that are useful descriptions of quantum mechanics, comes across a new feature which also has utility, based upon deductively playing with something already utilized. I don't see why that would be surprising. I don't think it would be particularly shocking to Anderson if an engineer predicted that a steel beam would collapse under a certain weight load, and was correct.

Observation one: Mathematics has its seat in minds. Observation two: We also now know that mathematics is also embedded at a fundamental and essential in physical reality. Inescapable conclusion: Physical reality is the product of a mind.

Anderson very obligingly illustrated my point for me. This notion of real versus useful fictions is not just semantics and playing with words. It's a part of how and why believers believe, one of the pillars they use to prop up their world view.

I'll offer one final link to a rant by a mathematician, offered because he views mathematics as an art. I don't endorse everything he says about education, but his view of mathematics fits much more closely with the mathematicians I learned from and with.

Discussion on evolution, part 4

2009-08-25T10:47:00.001-05:00

I think we are getting close to the end of this discussion. Response below the fold.

You may disagree with my point, if you truly understand it, but it cannot be because you disgree with my useage of the term theoretical. That's what you have tried to make "the point" but it aint, and never has been, mine. Call "natural selection" theoretical if it pleases you. I really don't care in the least what you "call" it in that respect. Either way the assertion of it's "existence" is a completely different issue than the issue of defining and explaining the exact role it plays in causing evolution.

I agree here too. Since my point is that theories can be as sure, as reliable, as supported as facts, and the issue of the role of a theoretical construct is a different discussion from it's existence, your point does not detract from mine.

Ok, finally we agree. Now, if we can just leave "natural selection" out of the process of creating novelty, we can perhaps make some progress on the issue I'm trying to discuss---the "mechanisms" by which genetic novelty is produced. Recombination aside (which itself "creates" nothing novel) do you agree that "mutations" are the sole source of genuine heritable novelty? If you say yes, then I will ask you about how the "randomness" part works.

That would almost be by definition, mutations are defined as heritable variations, unless you mean specifically mutations to DNA, in which case I would disagree.

Where, here again, I think we have two different understandings of what epistemology (whether used as a noun, an adjective, or whatever) is, so I suggest we quit using that term. Any meaningful statement of any kind will contain some "notions," but that does not make the nature of the claim itself epistemological (in the sense I think you are using it--which is not my sense). If I say "God is a big dude, probably at least 9 feet tall, who lives in the sky," I'm sure that claim must contain some element which you would call epistemological. The nature of the claim is nonetheless metaphyical.

We still need a way to categorize the difference between 'God is 9 feet tall', which would be a property God would have independent of the surrounding environment, and "God has helped me', which is a statement that only makes sense in a particular environment and is not just about God. I have accepted referring to both as ontological. If you want to call them both metaphysical, I think that is an abuse of term, since it allows the conclusions of science to be metaphysical, but I'm willing to live with it, as long as there is a way we can refer to the difference.

Yes, I do feel this is a very close analogy to the ways mutations are or are not considered random.

Well, in one sense of the term "metaphysical," it is precisely those assertions which are assumed as an unquestioned starting point which are "metaphysical."

It is always assumed that "metaphysical" claims are not subject to verification. In many places in this thread you seem to imply that the starting "axioms" of a theory are themselves empirically derived. This can't be the case.

This is why you don't understand scientific theories.

An assumption according to Asimov is...

At times you have also indicated that you think "scientific theory" is utterly devoid of any assumptions which have not been empirically proven (and at other times you seem to say you think otherwise). What is your stance on this issue exactly?

The assumptions of science include uniformitarianism (reactions that happen today are the same as those that happen yesterday, a million years ago, etc.), the ability to obtain objective measurements, and the actual existence of the universe to measure. I'm sure I could name more along those lines. They are metaphysical assumptions, not subject to verification.

Theoretical starting points like the constancy of the speed of light and the randomness of mutations with respect to the needs of the environment are inferential extensions based upon observation in a variety of conditions. They are not axioms in the sense a formal theory has axioms. They are always provisional.

I agree with your first paragraph. A naked hypothesis with no specific content, such as, matter is made up of atoms, is NOT a scientific theory,

That's not a hypothesis, it was a speculation (now I would say it is a fact).

even though, people may refer to the "atomic theory" of the ancient greeks as simply this. At a minimum, some specific content is require as an essential prerequisite for qualifying as a "scientific theory." That said, I do not think that mere fact that some claim has a semblance of "theoretical" overtones makes it a full-blown "scientific theory," and I take it that you don't either.

I'm not sure what you meant here, so I am assuming it is, 'I do not think the mere fact that some claim has a semblance of "theoretical" overtones makes it a full-blown "scientific theory," and I take it that you don't either'. I would agree that claims with theoretical overtones start as hypotheses. I would agree a claim that makes flat, simple assertion of mechanism is a poor theory in need of enrichment, and thus not a full-blown scientific theory. I'm not sure if that is what you meant.

This whole discussion relates to the NAS pamphlet and their equivocal use of the term "theory" in that pamphlet. I really don't care to dwell on semantics for semantics' sake. But when sophistical semantical tactics are used to mislead, I may take a greater interest.

I see the pamphlet as trying to communicate the idea correctly using language that would be imprecise in a discussion between science philosophers, but is understandable and communicates the idea correctly to laymen with far less exposure than us. I agree "factual" is less than ideal, but it does communicate the surety correctly.

In the next quote, you attributed your words to me. Please be more careful.

aintnuthin said: "Used in this sense, it is a mere hypothesis devoid of any broad explanatory content.

One Brow said :"It's a one-sentence summary of a long list of diseases to which the theory applies, the germs that cause them, the methods the germs have for entering and multiplying within the body, etc."

It could be taken as an (implicit) summary, but it doesn't have to mean that (that is simply the way you would read it).

I encourage you to email Orac at Respectful Insolence, or any other person who writes and thinks about such things, and ask them if saying 'the germ theory of disease is the theory that various germs cause various diseases' is the content of the theory or a summary of such as I described above.

That is the problem with the NAS pamphlet, they don't mean it the way you are interpreting it, but they know you are nonetheless likely to read it that way.

1) I am not the intended audience.
2) I believe that is exactly what they mean by 'germ theory of disease', or theory generally.

That's what they want you to do. They don't even attempt to clarify what they really mean, but they leave themselves an "escape route" if challenged, by claiming that if you take it the way they want you to, then you misread it. That this is exactly what they are doing only becomes fully exposed when you read other literature of theirs.

I have no idea what sort of exposing you think can happen.

As with germ theory, wiki has a generic definition of "atomic theory" which term basically serves to distinguish from the opposite hypothesis:

"In chemistry and physics, atomic theory is a theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms, as opposed to the obsolete notion that matter could be divided into any arbitrarily small quantity. It began as a philosophical concept in ancient Greece and India"

That is one defintion of "atomic theory."

Again, it is a summary, not a definition. I encourage you to email a few physicists who think about these things and ask them.

Yes, I suffer from vanity

2009-08-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

I was very pleased to see today that, if you enter 'One Brow' (sans quotes, no less) in the Yahoo! search bar, my blog is the first item returned, and the second one at Google.

On the other hand, I don't appear in the first five pages of MSN/Bing. In fact, searching on 'life universe "One Brow"' brought multiple hits to other blogs linking to me, but not my blog, in the first five pages of search. Why does MSN hate me?

A few less popular blogs looked at

2009-08-16T09:25:00.004-05:00

While it can be interesting, and sometimes challenging, to look at the more popular blogs in the ID movement, I'm going to look at a couple that are not so well-traveled. Picking on someone my own size, so to speak. Also, many bloggers like to have regular blog-fodder, I'm no different there. These are the foot-soldiers of the movement. They cough up the money buying the books, and don't use weasel-words designed to give them an out.

Over at the self-styled Intelligent Reasoning, we have Joe G saying in this post that there really is a scientific statement lurking somewhere in ID, based upon Behe's statement

Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.

He also offers this note:

To test the design inference specific criteria must be met. Criteria such as irreducible complexity, complex specified information and/ or the mere presence of counterflow.

To falsify the design inference all one has to do is to demonstrate that the object/ event in question can arise via nature, operating freely- ie it is reducible to matter, energy, chance and necessity.

However, Joe G misses a couple of basic problems with his arguments. First of all, the effects of design can exactly resemble the effects of nature. In fact, design uses naturally occurring elements to make changes. If I come across a few pebbles that have fallen onto some solid rock, and i move one or two pebbles into a configuration that I find pleasing, and leave the other 8-10 alone, there is no evidence that the resulting configuration is designed. Outside of finding actual fingerprints, or recognizing the configuration himself, Joe G would not even suspect design. Secondly, Behe's entire characterization is full of weasel-words, as any naturally generated ordering of separated components can be deemed 'not sharply dependent' or 'not truly identifiable' at need.

A post in the August 2009 archive of Intelligently Sequenced
titled "Commonly Employed Arguments Against ID", we see the attempted response:

39] ID is Nothing More Than a “God of the Gaps” Hypothesis may be the most common anti-ID argument.

ID is not proposing “God” to paper over a gap in current scientific explanation. Instead ID theorists start from empirically observed, reliable, known facts and generally accepted principles of scientific reasoning:

(a) Intelligent designers exist and act in the world.

(b) When they do so, as a rule, they leave reliable signs of such intelligent action behind.

(c) Indeed, for many of the signs in question such as CSI and IC, intelligent agents are the only observed cause of such effects, and chance + necessity (the alternative) is not a plausible source, because the islands of function are far too sparse in the space of possible relevant configurations.

(d) On the general principle of science, that “like causes like,” we are therefore entitled to infer from sign to the signified: intelligent action.

(e) This conclusion is, of course, subject to falsification if it can be shown that undirected chance + mechanical forces do give rise to CSI or IC. Thus, ID is falsifiable in principle but well supported in fact.

Of course, this is swallowed whole, despite that:
(a) I agree here.

(b) There are no reliable, scientific signs of designers.
We infer design by analogy top known human designers.

(c) There are no "islands of function" in the significantly multi-variate space described by typical protein construction. Function at a point (w', x', y', z') that, on a local level, ends quickly in direction w will often be unchanged in direction x and changed only mildly in directions y and z. Now, replace that four-dimensional model with a more common 100-dimensional model, and the notion of islands of function is easily seen to be preposterous. Further, the whole notion of "plausible source" is a direct invocation of a 'designer of the gaps'.

(d) Generally, the principle of "like causes like" comes from magic, not science.

(e) Every testable formulation of CSI and IC has been been falsified. This has resulted in definition changes to the concepts, especially IC, to the point they are identified post hoc instead by prior standards. That is, first they look at a sequence/construct, check to see if there is an origin, and only proclaim it CSI/IC after no origin exists. This a manifestly non-science.

The 117th Skeptics Circle

2009-08-14T11:20:00.004-05:00

The 117th Skeptics Circle is up at Ionian Enchantment. No post from me this time, but there will be for the 118th. I'm also helping out in the proposed Google bomb on the words chiropractor and chiropractic, because the use of English libel law by the British Chiropractic Association to defend the unwarranted claims of its chiropractors using chiropractic techniques for conditions like asthma, when the chiropractic techniques of chiropractors are little more than good back massages.

Discussion on evolution, part 3

2009-08-10T12:33:00.003-05:00

Again, the previous thread have exceeded 200 comments, I am putting a response below the fold.

"Maynard Smith credits August Weismann’s germ plasm theory as a key factor in the modern synthesis ..."

See? Impossible, in principle, from the git-go, and we aint just talkin some kinda candyass "methodology" here, eh, Eric? We're talkin about what is otologically IMPOSSIBLE.

Thatr reduction allowed a great deal of work to get done, and was later discarded when found insufficient.

Well, apparently you didn't read them very closely (or else just read them with a pre-formed conclusion in mind, which was unshakable. "Explanation" (whatever that is) is the sine qua non of a theory. Mebbe this article is more direct, eh?

"A scientific theory is used as a plausible general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomenon.[4]

A scientific theory is a deductive theory, in that, its content is based on some formal system of logic and that some of its elementary theorems are taken as axioms. In a deductive theory, any sentence which is a logical consequence of one or more of the axioms is also a sentence of that theory.[3]"

Did you miss the phrase "explain a phenomenon"? Scientific theories do use some formmal processes in their efforts to explain. If no explanation if offered, there is no theory.

"In pedagogical contexts or in official pronouncements by official organizations of scientists a definition such as the following may be promulgated.

According to the United States National Academy of Sciences: Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory."

This causes the theory/non-theory distinction to much more closely follow the distinctions useful for consumers of science (e.g. should I believe something or not?)"

What this article calls "pedagogical" is more what I would call absurd brainwashing. This is definitely a thoroughly unique and unprecedented way to define "scientific theory," to say the least.

You have to ask yourself what level of evidence would be required to overthrow the theory? How ikely are we to discover that anthrax/measles/smallpox is not caused by pathogens (germ theory of disease)? Should consumers of science believe, and act, as if germs cause diseases? Would you be willing to accept that measles being caused by Morbillivirus is a fact?

"Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe..."

"Real world?" "Factual explanation?" And you claim that only "methodology," and not "ontology," is involved here?

You left out the rest of the quote.

It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.

Yes, the phenomenon of evolution is a fact. Yes, the theory of evolution is as facutal as atomic theory or germ theory.

I also note that this claim is made with specific reference to the "theory or biological evolution." They have now turned "theory" into fact, eh?

Evolution is a fact (we have measured all sorts of change) and a theory (explanations for why the change occurs, what it has meant for life, etc.).

This is really just incredible, ya know? Anyone with the least bit of sophisication with respect to the philosophy of science, or even used the least bit of critcal thought, would see the NAS claims as completely over the top on the propaganda scale.

An explantion becomes a theory when "no new evidence is likely to alter" it, at which point it is a "factual explanation" which serves as a "reliable account of the real world."

Simply incredible that NAS would promulgate that view. Are they actually retarded, I wonder?

I find it hard to believe you misunderstood a simple simile. Are you just trolling here, or so ideologically committed that you misunderstood a simile to be an equivalence?

One Brow said: "I don't see anything in this quote that equates to "unfortunate and misleading". I'm sure you had anopther quote in mind."

Then you are just as blind as every other devoted apologist I ever ran into, I guess. No doubt you missed the word "sadly." If you can't see where it was misleading (suggesting that development was irrelevant to evolution) then I really don't think there's anything you could see, unless mebbe you wanted to, ya know?

I think that putting development to the side was a limiting, necessary choice, and the "sadly" was a reflection on the current state of knowledge, and not the choice.

One Brow said: "of the various ways mutations are known to happen, none of them take the actual needs of the organism into account."

This appears to be claim of fact, eh, Eric? Or do you say that strictly as a "methodist," with no ontological intentions at all? If the latter, you might want to study the english language a little more, because that sho nuff aint the meaning you're conveying.

When I say "known to happen", that obviously refers to the limits of what is currently known, making the statement epistemological. Had I spoken 'all the ways a mutation can possibly happen', you would have a point. That you have trouble distinguishing them is not a failing of my English knowledge.

One Brow said: "I don't think he would argue that statement even after acknowledging the importance of development, for which he used the term "selected through their effect on development", as opposed to varying because of their development."

He might or might not argue it, I don't know (but, first, remember that Mayr is not Maynard Smith). I get the feeling that both you, Mayr, and possibly Maynard Smith are confusing genes with some kinda physical objects, as opposed to simply "packets of information," as they seen by George C. Williams (who is highly praised by Dawkins, Gould, Elridge, Maynard Smith (via Eldrige) and others here: http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/h-Ch.1.html

True enough. I am sure that by "gene", he meant 'packet of knowledge on a DNA strand'. Many scientitsts probably do mean something broader than that.

As noted by Magulis, "The neo-Darwinists say that variation originates from random mutation, defining mutation as any genetic change." The close association, if not virtual identity, that the neo-darwinists once tried to make between "genes" and dna has vanished, but many still seem to think in those terms.

Old habits die hard.

If "genes" are simply the message, irrespective of the medium; if, indeed, genes are ONLY information, then certainly the "epigentic" means by which regulatory genes "choose" to express the dna is at bottom a form of "genetic mutation." This would seems to imply that, in Williams' view, genes vary "because of their development," to use your words.

I would agree, with the caveat that if we use a braod notion of 'gene', we should probably be careful to note which type of gene were are discussing in such a context.

You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms, because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can't do that with information and matter."

Very true.

I said: We have already agreed that the notion of "random mutation" is at bottom a metaphyisical one that cannot be proved or disproved. So why is not neo-darwinism, like ID theory, untestable and hence "not scientific," I wonder.

You responded: We did? I must have been off my feed that day/week/month

Musta been, yeah. This is was you said on April 27: Me: You repeatedly say that all heritable genetic variation has been shown to be random.
You: I certainly hope I have not, because such a statement would be unprovable

April 28: You: "As we have agreed (I think), there is no known test for randomness/design per se.

Your current (and former) ongoing assertions that the "randomness" of mutations can be, and has been, confirmed, seems to relax on occasion, such as on May 3 when you said: "Even if Dawkins is uncomfortable with it, adaptive mutation (which is not classical Lamarckism by any means) happens, and we know this because we have tested mechanisms to demonstrate it."

Are "adaptive mutations" consistent with the claim that all mutations are random? Doesn't seem to be.

Ya know, going through some of these old posts, I realize that you must, as is typical, I guess, have entirely different definitions for "ontological" and "epistemological" than I do. I really can't make a lick of sense of a statement like this: "Neo-Darwinism is dead, remember? Even when it was alive, the biological version relied on epistomological randomness, specifically of the type where mutations are not controlled by the organsim, not ontological randomness."

On an ontological level, most mutations would seem to be non-random, as I mentioned before. They happen for chemical reasons. There are probably a very few that happen for reasons like quantum fluctuation which might be ontologically random. Outside of that, on a metaphysical level, mutations are not random. I don't see anything in the above statements that disagree with this. Even then, this does not of course address unknown methods of variation.

Mutations are random in the sense that, of the known methods by which mutations happen, we have no mechanism that connects that mutation to the needs of the organism. They are random in that regard within the limits of our knowledge. They are also random in sense that we are unable to predict them through an insufficient knowledge of the actual chemical interactions involved along any particular strand of DNA inside a organism. So, random in those two ways.

It would be impossible to prove something is metaphysically random. Even for quantum effects, where we have the stongest evidence, this is a possibility that can be easily overturned. The most we can ever say in that regard is that we have data that resemebles a probablitliy distribution.

The word 'random does not mean 'every occurence is equally likely'. Adaptive mutations seem to mean that the probability curve is adjusted in favor of changes occuring at certain locations on the DNA strand.

I don't know what definitions you are using for ontological claims versus episemological claims. Ontology, to myu understanding, is soncerned with how things are, what their true nature is, while epistemology is concerned with what we can know about things and how we can know it. Do you mean something different?

This all gets quite tedious, eh, Eric?

Yes, it does.

The question was this: "So why is not neo-darwinism, like ID theory, untestable and hence "not scientific," I wonder."

Do you have a direct answer to that question, or not?

Since neo-Darwinism was falsified, it was obviously falsifiable. What could falsify ID?

Is your answer that neo-darwinism makes no claims about reality? If so, does ID make claims about reality, or is such a hypothesis merely "methodological." If they are different in this respect, HOW are they different. You seem to agree that it is not in the "testability" of the two, insofar as their basic premises go.

ID seems to make the claim that a designer is responsible, in part, for the structure of life. Materialism would make the claim no designer is involved in life. Both are equally untestable. Niether is a claim of neo-Darwinism or modern evolutionary theory, in that the 'randomness' present in neo-Darwinism and modern evolutionary theory is compatible with the existence of a designer. Both are claims made by various men, including scientists, when speaking about life outside the scientific literature. Neither claim belongs in a science classroom.

It seems obvious that both views feel compelled to deny that all evolution is (was) random, sensing intuitively that would be prohibitively improbable. Both insist that evolution is NOT random, but disagree on the reasons why this is so. Philosophically speaking, these two viewpoints, as they relate to living matter, seem come down to "vitalism" vs. "materialism."

I disagree. Yo can be a Lamarckian materialist, or a wiesmannian who accepts design.

It is in no means self-evident that such inferences are "unreasonable" or "unscientific" unless one merely defines them as such. One can, for example, say: "I define any inference of design to be both unreasonable and unscientific." But, of course, definitions are arbitrary, and do not dictate the reality of the matter.

I agree.

Again, as I have said before, I can assume (or infer) that an object has been designed without that assumption in any way affecting the way I try to analyze it or explain it. Such an assumption may assist my investigation, but it does not change my methodolgy. If I know nothing about the workings of machines motivated by internal combustion engines, for example, I still will not "understand" one until I know how all the parts interact with each other and what function they serve, which requires investigation (for me). I do not purport to "explain" anything by simply saying: "this machine was designed." Science is ultimately about explanations, not metaphyscial presumptions, although the latter may inform the former. An assumption of "vitalism" would not change that. We would never have, or even be expected to, explain the ultimate nature of the "vital force" to simply investigate the phenomena.

I agree. This is why the discussion does not belong in a science class.

The point I'm making is this: Whether one ultimately believes in or presupposes vitalism (lamarckism in evolutionary terms) or materialsim (darwinism) has nothing to do with science as such. The vociferious outcry that materialism must be taught as an underlying presupposition, but that any notion of vitalism cannot even be discussed as an alternative presupposition, is not "scientific" either.

As noted above, I disagree on the associaiton of vitalism to Lamarckism. Outside of that, I agree.

Lamarckism, whether true or not, whether ever irrefutably demonstrated or not, is NOT off limits to either scientific investigation nor is it inherently outside the realm of "scientific thinking." Of course, neo-darwinists have always thought otherwise, but, still....

That's why the once fruitful school is not bveing discarded.

One Brow said: "But the warping of space is a mechanism for the attrction of bodies. There is no more "spooky action at a distance", just local effects."

Heh, as if the "warping of space" isn't spooky? Seriously, what exactly is "space, and how can it "warp" as a practical matter? Of course, for Einstein, there is no "space" per se. Only space/time. Now, tell me, what is "space/time," apart from a verbalization of the mathematics involved (as was the Newtonian use of the concept of "attaction of matter to matter" to verbalize the mathematical relationship detected)?

I doubt I could, although physicists might be able to. At any rate, that's a new level of mechanism. Anytime you explain something, the explanation itself will open up new questions.

More "pedagogical information," from the AAAS, eh?

...

Well, they pack all the theory in there, eh, and simply call the theory "evolution" which is "described," not hypothesized, interpreted, or deduced. Random mutation (why not just say "mutation," I wonder?--Why does "random" ALWAYS have to be inserted as a qualifying adjective?). Common descent, natural selection, macro-evolution = micro-evolution, the whole 10 yards.

This is an obvious simplification.

I wonder if anyone who aint plumb stupid doubts any of this, eh? Lemme see here....

"Is there "evidence against" contemporary evolutionary theory? No.

Do yo know of some? Against, as in saying evolution didn't happen?

Is there a growing body of scientists who doubt that evolution happened? No...Of the few scientists who criticize contemporary evolutionary theory, most do no research in the field, and so their opinions have little significance for scientists who do."

Well, there ya have it, then, eh? All wrapped up in a ribbon.

Who are the evolutionary biologists who feel there is evidence against evolution?

Hmm, where to even start trying to intrepret and assess this curious brochure, eh? Well, in passing, one might note that the last sentence quoted claims that "that evolution by natural selection is how life on Earth arose."

If "arose" refers to abiogenesis, that seems to be wrong. If they meant 'grew from a small part of the planet to being universally present', that seems to be accurate, but a poor word choice. Looking at the context, I'm inclined to pick the latter.

What you, Eric, have called a "mechanism," this brochure calls "process" [they say "Natural selection is the process by which some traits succeed and others fail..."], so let's use that as a substitute synonmyn is the next sentence, which would then read: "Scientists no longer question the basic facts of evolution as a mechanism."

So the "mechanism" (which Gould said was the theoretical part) is now a "basic fact," eh?

I would say there is more to being a mechanism that there is to being a process. Photosynthesis is a completely factual process, but it explains nothing in and of itself. Natrual selection can be explained as a process only, or an a larger level as a mechanism.

The care and authority which went into this dubious publication makes it all the more appalling to a disintered observer.

You think you are disinterested?

Ironically, this brochure has the gall to say (addressing ID theory, of course): "Teaching
non-scientific concepts in science class will only confuse students about the processes,
nature, and limits of science."

The opposite is probably true. Perhaps teaching ID theory would be one way of unconfusing students who are exposed to such "non-scientific" concepts as are contained in this brochure and help them understand the true "nature and limits" of science.

If "ID theory" ever starts to accurately discuss the true nature and limits of science, perhaps.

Well, first, that a "scientific theory" is an "explantion." Just any old explanation? Naw, apparently only those that "are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them." [In the entire history of science has there been a single case of such an explanation?].

The atomic theory of matter. The germ theory of disease. Heliocentric theory.

As a side attribute, a scientific theory also allows us to make predictions, they say.

Do they have an example? Well, yeah, they have two, actually. " A good example is the theory of gravity." Hmm, and you say that Newton's explanation of "gravity" is simply a law, not a theory--I wonder who's right here, you, or them? Whichever, they say "Scientists then use the theory to make predictions about how gravity will function in different circumstances" (as Newtonians did for the "hundreds of years" this brochure brings up). Of course, you also keep saying that Einstein's relativistic view of Newton's mathematical formula was a mere "refinement" of Newton, so let's not quibble here, OK? (having made that request, I expect you to quibble, but I will wait and see about that).

The brochure does not reference a *Newtonian* theory of gravity, so what makes you think they are referring to Newton's Law? Theories have to acount for all of the available evidence, old, new, and yet-to-be-tested, to be viable.

Also, surely you are not confusing what I said about Newton's Laws of Motion and his Law of Gravity. I believe I was clear and held different opinions on that.

Of course their second example is evolutionary theory: "Evolution stands on an equally solid foundation of observation, experiment, and confirming evidence." I mean, like, really now, is this a joke? Are they really trying to compare the predictive power and confirming evidence for "explanantions" advanced by evolutionary theory to that afforded by the strict mathematical formulaes used for gravity?

Only a straight-up chump would fall for that claim, I figure, but that's not to say I haven't found many darwinist cheerleaders swallowin it hook, line, and sinker.

Only a straight-up chump would fail to see that there have been thousands of predictions upheld.

Read this brochure critically, Eric. Look at this sentence and then tell me that the "creationists" who said the term "evolution" was used in multiple, confusingly unspecified manners, are not worth trusting. "Evolution stands on an equally solid foundation of observation, experiment, and confirming evidence."

Didn't you claim that nobody would use the word "evolution" to mean the theoretical elements thereof in a teaching setting?

I certainly hope not. All high-school and above science class should include theory.

The equivocal use of terms to "explain" the topic of evolution as used here is simply a method of misleading students into an extremely mushy, uncritical "understanding" of the theoretical issues, as I see it? Is it intentional? Well, either that, or totally incompetent, as far as "teaching" methods go.

I don't find your analysis persuasive or factually based.

OF COURSE IT IS(!), according to the NAS: "For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells." (Science and Creationism, 1999).

That sentence is not in the brochure you linked too. Pennock's statements in that don't necessarily have NAS agreement.

Why say that ID theory is "not science" if naturalistic processes could provide a basis for it, hmmmmm?

Creating a natrualistic basis does not rescue ID theory, because it makes no scientific claims.

I wonder if the authors of these pedagogical brochures, which stress natural selection as the virtually proven theory of evolution (remember, it's not even a theory unless it is doubtful that any new evidence could alter it), are familiar with the works of Masatochi Nei who wrote, just for example, a research paper called "The new mutation theory of phenotypic evolution."

I think they might respond: "As scientists gather new results and findings, they continue to refine their ideas. Explanations are altered or sometimes rejected when compelling contradictory evidence comes to light." Same answer for most of the quotes.

"This is the fundamental reason why we already have the well formulated 'Atomic Theory' but not yet a comparable 'Living Systems Theory.'"

No "theory" because it's all just too complex, eh? Like, whooda thunk, I ax ya?

Everyone. It's probably not possible to have a system as well-reduced as Atomic Theory.

The 116th Skeptics' Circle

2009-07-30T09:44:00.002-05:00

The 116th edition of the Skeptics' Circle is up at Beyond the Short Coat, as a doctor wander through a homeopathic ER. Very amusing.

How our world views can blind us to reality

2009-07-29T11:25:00.002-05:00

The way the world-views of a person can interfere with their observation of reality seems to have been a recurring theme this week. In my discussions with aintnuthin on evolution, I find myself accused of this, along with all the "neo-Darwinists". Meanwhile, three other examples appear on a couple of blogs I read from time to time. So, I'm going to talk about all four below the fold.

With regard to myself, I am always hesitant to be quick to my own defense. Every other person (or, nearly so) is prone to allowing their blinders, and in fact I just finished a conversation on the existence of a maximal set of truths where my own inclinations stopped me from seeing what should have been an obvious inference. So, I'm not really sure what to make of the claim that I see the natural explanations for evolution as being far stronger than they are--that saying the theory of evolution is a well founded and demonstrated as heliocentrism is somehow wrong. Part of the problem is that I used to be an Old Earth Creationist, and it was the evidence of evolution that swayed me away. Did the pendulum swing too far in the other direction? I can probably never answer that objectively. However, I do take it as a personal responsibility to question my own views as well as those of others, and to change my views when reliable evidence opposes them. Isn't that part of the heart of being a skeptic? For now, I'll consider myself probably innocent on that particular charge. For those inclined to disagree, please use this thread to talk about skepticism and/or me generally, and let's keep lengthy comments about evolution specifically in the above-linked thread.

Meanwhile, at Martin Cothran's discussion of atheism and logic on vere loqui, an old contention about atheism and morality that I'm not interested in re-arguing today, find inserted this interesting little ditty (any distortion of the meaning by my snips is strictly unintentional).

There were, in fact, moral beliefs before Christianity came along. There are two kinds of virtue: the cardinal (or classical) virtues: Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage; and the theological (or Christian) virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first four, the cardinal virtues, not only can be sustained without explicit religious belief; they in fact were. They arose in a world, not without religion, but without religions that said much about morality.

The cardinal virtues have also been called the “practical” virtues. They had mostly to do with getting along in life. The most familiar examples of this were Aesop’s Fables.

...

All these cases involve sheer self-preservation. This is of the essence of pagan morality: it is exclusively self-preservative or at least self-gratifying (and usually applied only to other members of one’s tribe or race).

...

But there is nothing in Aesop like the parables of the Good Samaritan, or the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son. The theological virtues are completely different from the practical or classical virtues in this: there is literally no practical reason for them.

It turns out this is just plainly false. For example, in this version of the Serpent and the Eagle, there is no virtue more appropriate to describe the action of the man, or the eagle, than Charity. Neither expects to gain a direct benefit from their behavior. Of course, Cothran probably did not bother to actually research all of Aesop's fables before his comment. He knew of a handful, and they confirmed his previous bias that there is some sort of real difference in the notion of virtues between non-Christians and Christians. why should he bother to do any research to see if it was true? Of course, that's a theme skeptics see all the time from the credulous of all sorts.

Meanwhile, from Edward Feser's blog, we are treated to an article where, while trying to disprove “Having a thought with the content that P is identical to, supervenient upon, or otherwise explicable in terms of having a sentence with the meaning that P encoded in the brain", Feser begins by making a comparison to musical notes and numbers, saying that "... the point is that the relationships between notes are clearly not reducible to or entirely explicable in terms of mathematical relationships." Feser seems to have a habit using counter-to-reality claims (in other posts, we see a discussion of the notion of simultaneous cause-and-effect, which has no physical example). On a typical piano, there are seven "B" keys, each of which is exactly described by a number of Hz.

Finally, on the Maverick Philospher's blog, there is a brief post objecting to the term Islamophobia. For a person that prides themself on such a precise use of language that they are careful to distinguish between single quotes for non-direct quotes, and double quotes for direct quotes, this is just an embarrassing oversight. My guess is that it comes from the usual persecution complex we see among the religious, the automatic assumption that any term must be implying the worst possible meaning. While many times phobia indicates fear, the term is also used to indicate dislike or aversion. No one thinks you have to be scared of French or English people to be Francophobic or Anglophobic, similarly, you don't have be afraid of Muslims or Islam to be Islamophobic. It's quite correct to use the term Islamophobic (or homophobic) to describe people who just dislike Islam (or homosexuality). I think Dr. Vallicella needs to stop being "a dumbass PeeCee" conservative, and just accept this is what he is.

The 115th Skeptics' Circle

2009-07-20T12:50:00.003-05:00

You will find the 115th edition of the Skeptics' Circle at Effort Sisyphus, where in it is revealed, among other things, that when asked to name a planet, I can't even figure out they don't mean one of the eight around our sun. Otherwise (or perhaps because of that), it's a delight and a treat.

My oversight, apologies, and thoughts

2009-07-12T10:59:00.004-05:00

After last week's post concerning the Cantorian argument against possible worlds being maximally consistent sets of propositions posted by Dr. Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, I sent an email to Dr. Vallicella for his thought, and his initial response was that I missed the point of the argument entirely. He was kind and patient through out the exchange, and entirely correct instating that I had missed the point. Using "e" to represent the element relation, I had entirely missed the point that the truths being constructed were of the form t₁ e {t₁, t₂} and ~(t₁ e {t₂, t₃}. This means that Dr. Grim/Dr. Vallicella have created a set of size T X P(T) of truths from set T. Why I missed this, and what it means for my analysis of the proof, is below the fold.

As for why I missed it, it just seems to be a blind spot with me. Ii will probably not make this error again in the next month or two, but it will happen eventually, because I see a fundamental difference in the type of between saying "the earth orbits the sun" and "t₁ e {t₁, t₂}", and I don't really see the latter belonging in T. The latter sort of statement I think of as being a formal truth, one that it true based on the initial definitions, definition that we select arbitrarily because of their usefulness. My understand of Dr. Vallicella's worldview (and if I mis-characterise him here, I apologize) is that there is no relevant difference between the two statements. As long as I carry the first view in my brain, I no doubt will fall prey to the same blindness about arguments founded in the second view in the future. I beg the patience of any readers in this regard.

Well, after being so kind and professorial in our exchange, Dr. Vallicella certainly deserves to have Grim's/his analysis validated, and it would have been my pleasure to do so. Unfortunately, I can't do this with honesty, because it turns out that the proof will still fail. One of the unfortunate side effects of mixing formal truths and non-formal truths is the formal truths have a tendency to grow past any reasonable size. When you include all the formal truths of the type "t₁ e {t₁, t₂}", you wind up with T being a proper class, and that means |T| does not exist, and to the degree P(T) can be defined, |P(T)| does not exist either, so obviously you can't have |P(T)| > |T|.

This is easy to see when you consider what must be included in T. For simplicity sake, let's start with a universe with one non-formal truth, t₀, and call the universe itself T₀. We can use the very process describe to create R₀ containing two truths: t₁ saying t₀ e {t₀} and t₂ saying ~(t₀ e {}). Defining T₁ as the union of R₀ and T₀, T₁ = {t₀, t₁, t₂}. Applying the same process to T₁, you get 24 elements in T₂, 402,653,184 elements in T₃, etc. Then, you need to combine the contents of all the T_n into T_aleph-0. From T_aleph-0 you can build (assuming without loss of generality the generalized continuum hypothesis)T_aleph-1, T_aleph-2, etc., so that there will be a version of T_x greater than any specific cardinal number. This means that, when you finally union all these T_x to create T, T has the size of a proper class.

I want to thank Dr. Vallicella for his cooperation and gentlemanly behavior.

Cantor offers nothing useful on maximally consistent worlds

2009-07-05T12:21:00.002-05:00

I fully acknowledge that I am a philosophical amateur, and no doubt from time my thought and questions reflect this. However, I know enough to know that people who have studied philosophy professionally, but not mathematics, make ludicrous mathematical arguments. Such is the case with an attempt by Dr. Vallicella to export a standard Cantorian argument from mathematics to philosophical constructs. While you could say logic is the grammar of mathematics, the difference in vocabulary makes any sort of transition of proofs from one venue to the other a difficult procedure, and not one to be done casually.

So, lets say we have this maximal set T of true statements (truths, for short). {t₁, . . . , t_i, t_{i + 1}, . . .}. In particular, let's consider {t₁ ,t₂}. The first question we need to answer: Is this subset itself a truth? If this subset is not a truth, then the entire argument from the creation of the power set is meaningless, because the power set does not consist of truths, but of collections of truths, and there is no reason to presume the cardinality of all collections of truths would be the same as the cardinality of all truths. In fact, since the proof relies on looking at elements of P(T) as if there were in T, for Dr. Vallicella's argument to be cogent, we need to apply the standard that {t₁, t₂} is itself a truth. We are not given a definition for this truth, unfortunately, and how it relates to t₁ or t₂, possibly via some sort of truth table. At least, since we are using sets, we know that {t₁} = {t₁, t₁} = {t₁, t₁, t₁}.

However, that leads us to another area of fuzzy definition. Is {t₁} the same truth as t₁? Is {t₁} the same truth as {{t₁}}? Will {t₁ ,t₂} be the same truth as {t₁ ,t₂,{t₁ ,t₂}}? Basically, can we remove all internal braces (except for the empty set)?

If we we allow the removal of all internal braces, then the proof falls apart, because all of the elements of P(T) will already be elements of T, after removing the internal braces and reducing the duplications. For example, let's look at a world of one atomic truth (that is, truths that not sets of other truths). T = {{}, t₁}. Then P(T) = {{},{{}},{ t₁},{{},t₁}} = {{},{}, t₁,{},t₁} = {{}, t₁} = T.

So let us consider the construction where we can not remove internal braces. Now, since we have a valid method of creating a new truth from previously existing truths, by inclusion in sets, that means for any set Q of atomic truths, we find the power set of that set of truths, and the power set of that first power set of truths, and the power set of that second power set of truths, etc., already in T. How far can we go? Do we allow for there to be (loosely speaking) an infinite number of brace levels? If we do not allow that, then we know either |T| (the cardinality of T) = |{1, 2, 3, 4, ...}|, that is, T is countable, whenever Q is finite or countable, otherwise |T| = |Q|. However, this has the defect of removing much of P(T) from being eligible to be in T, because P(T) will include elements with an infinite number of braces.

In fact, if we place any limit M at all on the number of braces, we find that |Q| being less than or equal to M means |T| = M, otherwise |T| = |Q|, and either way P(T) will have elements that are not capable of being in T. So, the only way around this is place no restriction on the number of levels of inclusion. This has the side effect of making T a proper class even when |Q| = 1, so P(T) does not even exist.

So, it would seem regardless of set-up we are left with a choice of P(T) = T, P(T) having elements that do not qualify to be in T, or P(T) not existing. Regardless, the attempted proof fails.