Reading log, 2011

All during 2011 I kept a list of the books I read. I don't feel like writing any book reports, or even short blurbs, so here it is: just the list.

• Chris Townsend
  The Backpacker's Handbook (2nd ed)
  
  
• John Steinbeck
  The Grapes of Wrath
  
  
• Lisa Rogak
  Moving to the Country Once and for All
  
  
• William Gibson
  Neuromancer
  
  
• Jared Diamond
  Guns, Germs & Steel
  
  
• William Zinsser
  On Writing Well
  
  
• Wanda Urbanski & Frank Levering
  Moving to a Small Town
  
  
• (various essayists)
  Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
  
  
• T. C. Boyle
  Drop City
  
  
• Margaret Atwood
  The Year of the Flood
  
  
• John Steinbeck
  Travels with Charley in Search of America
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
  
  
• John Michael Greer
  A World Full of Gods
  
  
• Henry D. Thoreau
  Walden
  
  
• John L. Casti & Werner De Pauli
  Gödel: A Life of Logic
  
  
• Dan Brown
  The Lost Symbol
  
  
• Edward Feser
  Aquinas
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  
  
• Sean Carrol
  From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  
  
• J. K. Rowling
  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

From Eternity to Here

I wish I could write something insightful about Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here, but instead I wrote today's post. This is not to say anything bad about Carroll's book—it's a great book. Rather, it's to say there's nothing like learning a few facts to realize just how little I know, and that's what I got from reading Carroll's book: a few facts a big dose of humility. Cosmology isn't my strength.

Carroll's main point has to do with explaining time and why we experience it as moving forward. The short answer is that time appears to move in the direction of increasing entropy. But this raises another question: why is entropy steadily increasing? The majority of the book explores this question from a multitude of angles, and along the way I learned some interesting facts, which I've summarized in bullet-list form.

• The laws of physics, even at their most fundamental level, may be reversible, which is to say time's arrow mayn't be caused because of low-level interactions. Particle physics appears reversible along the three reflections of nature: time, parity (i.e., right and left, like what a mirror changes), and charge (i.e., positive and negative). When all three reflections are inverted, a particle or a system of particles will run backwards. So, for example, imagine you start with a box, mostly empty save for gas particles crammed into one corner. That's a low-entropy state. Then let the particles bounce around until they fill the box uniformly, which is a high-entropy state. If, at some time after the particles settle into a uniform distribution, you invert each particle along all three reflections, then the particles will move in reverse, with the effect that entropy will decrease from high to low in the box.

• Entropy isn't one-to-one with disorder. Counterexample: oil and vinegar, when mixed and allowed to increase in entropy, will separate into a higher-order state. Thus, sometimes an increase in entropy denotes a decrease in disorder. So it's a good idea to be precise with the terminology and say entropy when that's what you mean, not disorder.

• There is something called a Boltzmann brain, which is a hypothetical brain, or mind, that floats in outer space unattached to any body. But the brain is alive, thinking and feeling just like any human brain does. As extraordinarily unlikely it is that a Boltzmann brain actually exists (for the odds of a brain forming in a near vacuum are extremely tiny), it's more likely for a Boltzmann brain to exist than Boltzmann himself. This is because Boltzmann (the physicist) comprises a brain and a body, which is even lower entropy than just a brain.

• Indeed, Boltzmann brains are maybe the biggest reason why it's important for guys like Carroll to figure out what time is. Boltzmann brains tell us—not the actual brains, mind you, just their possible existence—that we ourselves are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than real people on a planet, just as it's more likely for the universe to spontaneously generate a loaf of bread than it is to generate a loaf of bread and a baker. But we're not Boltzmann brains, so cosmology ought to account for why the universe has much less entropy than it could otherwise have for there to exist someone who, like us, observes what's going on. If Boltzmann brains were impossible, you could merely posit a low-entropy beginning condition—i.e., the big bang—and say the universe had an infinite amount of time before that time in which to fluctuate into the big bang's hot, dense low-entropy state. But, once allowing for the possibility of Boltzmann brains and how we'd much more likely be Boltzmann brains than real people on a planet, we need to explain why the universe's past low-entropy condition was lower than it needed to be—i.e., low enough to produce us.

Carroll explains such a possible model in his book. But that's all you'll read about it here.

Does this ever happen to you?

At least this much happens to everyone: you've closed your eyes but haven't yet fallen deeply into sleep. Suddenly there's a loud sound, such as the slamming of a door or the ringing of a phone, and you're startled awake.

What does that sound feel like to you?

I feel a curious sensation whenever I'm startled awake this way. I see the sound. The part of me that's jolted awake is done so by sight. What I see—every time—is a sudden flash that looks a lot like TV static. Whatever I was seeing before, whatever nascent dream was working its way through my unconscious mind, is replaced by a blinding flash of snowy noise that then fades out, just as if turning off a CRT. Then my mind hears the sound, and I awake and open my eyes—peeved but aware of what awoke me.

How many other people feel this sensation?

Information and entropy

I have a correction to make. A few weeks ago, I wrote that information increases as entropy increases. I was wrong. The relationship between entropy and information depends on who you ask.

Sean Carroll, in his book From Eternity to Here, repeatedly states that information decreases as entropy increases. I take this to be a view more common than mine, though I had long thought it was mistaken. Reading this book changed my mind. It turns out there's more than one way to define information, and unsurprisingly, not everyone chooses to define it as though they're a computer scientist.

As to why there exist different definitions for information, some leading to opposite descriptions of the world around us, that's something of a riddle. Today I'm going to describe that riddle.

First, take view that information and entropy are indirectly proportional—i.e., the view Carroll expresses in From Eternity to Here. Carroll uses an example of a glass containing warm water and an ice cube. The ice cube melts, causing the water to become cool. This change entails an increase in entropy. But as Carroll puts it, information becomes lost along the way. That's because the situation ends with a glass of cool water, but a glass of cool water can result from either an ice cube melting in warm water or else a glass whose water was cool to begin with. Two possible states evolved into one—i.e., information decreased.

However, that's not how I normally think about entropy. I take the view that information and entropy are directly proportional. To see it my way, take another example. Imagine you flip a coin a thousand times, and it comes up heads every time. That's an unlikely, low-entropy result. It's also the simplest result to describe; the two-word description 1000 heads suffices. Contrast that to any high-entropy result you're likely to achieve with a fair coin, where no discernible pattern emerges. In a patternless result, the only way to describe all coin tosses is by listing each toss individually—e.g., heads, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails, etc. That's the meaning of patternless. Thus, higher entropy requires more information to describe what's going on.

So what's going on with the difference between these two scenarios? Which way is the right way of looking at the relationship between information and entropy? I wish Carroll had elaborated on this in his book, but From Eternity to Here is chiefly about time, not information, so I didn't learn why physicists find it compelling to look at entropy and information as being indirectly proportional. I understand only my own view, which stems from a background in computation.

My perspective is that of dealing with computer stuff, including data compression and the shortest program to do X. Put simply: the more random something is, the less it can be compressed—the longer a program must be to contain it. That leads computer scientists to the counterintuitive notion that high-entropy randomness is full of information, whereas patterns are not. That means we look at a TV showing static as containing more information than a TV showing a show, just as a shredded book contains more information than an intact book. As you may imagine, this view takes some getting used to.

As to the riddle of the two examples, and what causes the difference between the two views, the difference is whether one's view is macroscopic or microscopic. The macroscopic view leads to the physics perspective, where molecules are course-grained into big states, such as warm water with an ice cube. As entropy increases, the number of possible macroscopic states decreases, and that's perceived as information loss.

The microscopic view leads to the computer science perspective, where there is no course graining and one keeps track of each individual bit. As entropy increases, the number of possible microscopic states increases, and that's perceived as information gain.

That solves that riddle, but it suggests another riddle entirely: what is information, really? May we say something objective about it?

The new commute

The new commute is tough. But because it's by bike, being tough isn't necessarily bad.

The shortest and fastest legal-and-not-too-likely-to-get-me-killed route to work is the one straight down Central Ave, from the AZ Canal path to downtown. It's a tad over twelve miles, vertically descends about 150 feet, and takes me 45-50 minutes to complete most mornings, door to desk. My guess is that's about 15 minutes slower than taking the freeway by car and a little faster than taking the express bus. Again, this is figuring total time from door to desk.

The route home is different. It ascends 150 feet, and though that's not much spread over twelve miles, it makes enough of a difference when biking in rush hour traffic. Negating the gradient subtracts several KPH from my average speed. That makes it harder to ride with traffic, to time lights and to evade. Add to these the phenomenon—as I observe—that afternoon rush hour traffic is more aggressive and unpredictable than morning rush hour traffic, and I have sufficient motivation to take a more out-of-the-way route home, one that's calmer. That route sends me all the way to 20th St and the AZ Canal path near my old neighborhood. It's more than fifteen miles but traverses only a dozen traffic lights or so, which is remarkable considering I cross through downtown at the start, and downtown is a dense matrix of traffic lights. But the afternoon route's elevation gain and added distance cause it to take more time than my morning route; it takes between 60 and 80 minutes, depending on how much power I put to the pedals.

On another note, last week I had the foresight to buy a set of fenders for my touring & commuter bike. I installed them Monday night and tested them in the wet and muddy conditions during Tuesday's commutes. Conclusion: fenders are amazingly effective. Upon finishing both the morning ride and the afternoon ride, my legs were dry and clean, and that's after speeding through inch-deep puddles. Had I ridden a bike without fenders, I would have been a sopping mess from waist to toe—I know that from experience. Tuesday alone made me pro-fenders.

The sleeping mind

What modern materialist explanations of mind get right, I suspect, is their assumption that minds are entirely material phenomena that abide all the same physical laws as any other material we observe. But what materialist explanations get wrong, I further suspect, is nearly everything else.

It's not just the details we're wrong about; the metaphors we're using for our basic understanding of the mind are misleading. To show what I'm talking about, take as an example: sleep.

Sleep is ubiquitous for all animals possessing a nervous system of sufficient complexity. Even fruit flies appear to sleep. But sleep patterns vary to extremes from one species to another. For example, humans sleep an average of eight hours per day with nearly all sleep happening in one burst. Giraffes and cows sleep only about four hours per day, and armadillos sleep about eighteen. A house cat may sleep twice as much as its human roommate without ever sleeping more than a couple hours at a time. Ostriches sleep fifteen minutes or so at a time. Some animals sleep nocturnally; some animals' diurnal phasing changes with the seasons. Some birds and many aquatic mammals sleep with half their brain still awake, though REM sleep always requires both hemispheres. Seals sleep both in the water and on land, but they attain REM sleep only on land. And so on.

Given the wide range of sleep behaviors across different species, it strikes me as more than an accident that all animals of sufficient neural complexity sleep. Rather, it seems as though sleep is a necessary condition for self-sustained neural complexity, and the wide range of sleep behaviors we observe are animals' diverse ways of coping with the necessary but strategically disadvantaged position of being unconscious on a murderous planet.

Yet, as far as I can tell, sleep figures prominently into no modern explanation of the mind. Modern materialism's guiding metaphor for the mind remains the digital computer and its mechanical manipulation of information. But digital computers don't need sleep, so as a metaphor I doubt they'll take us but partway if anywhere to figuring out what's going on in the mind. Indeed, my guess is that computers' freedom from sleep remains one of the major limitations preventing us from making machines humanly smart, though how we should make computers need sleep is anyone's guess.

I suspect a good theory of mind will make strong claims about sleep and answer many of the puzzling questions we have about it. It will explain why complex neural systems need to shut down and reboot from time to time. And it will explain dreaming.

opinions.go

package main

import "time"

func main() {

  // FIXME: This is not thread-safe. Then again, that just makes it
  // interesting.

  // All opinions strengthen over time, given no facts.
  go func() {
    time.Sleep(24 * 60 * 60 * 1000000000) // 1 day
    for _, op := range opinions {
      op.strengthen(stuckInMyWaysDelta) // presumably >0 but small
      // NOTE: stuckInMyWaysDelta keeps getting increased each time we
      // release. This is becoming a problem.
    }
  }()

  // Accept incoming facts, adjust opinions accordingly. Congruent facts
  // strengthen opinions, incongruent facts weaken opinions.
  go func() {
    for f := range factChan {
      for _, op := range opinions {
        agree, value := op.arbitrateFact(f)
        if !agree {
          value = -value
        }
        relevancy := op.factRelevancy(f) // >= 0.0
        op.strengthen(value * relevancy)
      }
    }
  }()

  // Contrariness loop:
  // Disabled if pleasant or uninteresting.
  if !pleasant || interesting {
    go func() {
      // For each incoming opinion (from another program), reconcile with
      // existing, local opinions. Unlike facts, opinions are strengthened
      // because of disagreement, not agreement.
      for inOp := range opinionChan {
        for _, op := range opinions {
          agree, value := op.arbitrate(inOp)
          if agree {
            value = -value
          }
          value *= howMuchICareCoefficient // see social.go
          relevancy := op.relevancy(inOp) // >= 0.0
          op.strengthen(value * relevancy)
        }
      }
    }()
  }

  go inspireNewOpinions()
  go garbageCollectStaleOpinions()

  metabolize() // doesn't return until SIGTERM
}

On the origin of minds

From Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop:

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that). Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. You cannot order a car with a two-cylinder motor and then tell the dealer, Also, please throw in Racecar Power^® for me. (To be sure, nothing will keep you from placing such an order, but don't hold your breath for it to arrive.) Nor does it make sense to order a car with a hot sixteen-cylinder motor and then to ask, Excuse me, but how much more would I have to throw in if I also want to get Racecar Power^®?

Like my fatuous notion of optional Racecar Power^®, which in reality is nothing but the upper end of a continuous spectrum of horsepower levels that engines automatically possess as a result of their design, consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-huneker-and-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it.

Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel's strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you've got self, you've got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.

Hofstadter's analogy between consciousness and Racecar Power® succinctly explains what I find lacking about non-materialist criticisms of materialism. Just as you can tear apart a racecar engine block, grind it to metal shavings, and never once observe an atom of Racecar Power®, so too you should never expect to discover consciousness as a tangible entity anywhere in nature. But we don't go around claiming that Racecar Power® is an immaterial entity that defies materialist explanations; to the contrary, Racecar Power® is exactly engineered by precise and intentional exploitation of physical laws. So too consciousness is consequence of physical laws applied to plain, ordinary material stuff.

Nevertheless, I find Hofstadter's strange loop view of consciousness lacking. Though the view makes more sense of what I see than non-materialist views, it strikes me as being like guessing the right answer on a test: it doesn't show that we understand what's going on. As yet another analogy, the strange-loop view is like pre-Darwin ideas about evolution, which also were good guesses but guesses nevertheless.

It may surprise some people to know that ideas about evolution predate Darwin, but as far as we know, the idea goes back at least to the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who in the 6th century BC proposed that life began in the seas. Darwin's big contribution to the idea of evolution is the idea of natural selection. Natural selection provides the framework through which we can say how evolution occurs and even a little about what forms it takes. In other words, natural selection is the glue that binds evolution to falsifiability, transforming a weak explanation that says life changes to a stronger one that says life changes as a result of selective pressures of the environment. Pre-Darwin, ideas about evolution were speculative; post-Darwin, evolution serves as a framework that points us to explanations and further questions.

Materialist views of consciousness such as Hofstadter's strange loop are interesting but speculative. What's missing from them is consciousness's analog to evolution's natural selection—i.e, the driving force that explains how the emergent phenomenon works. As for what that analogous thing is, no one knows. But evolution as an idea was around for at least 2,300 years before Darwin entered the scene, and a theory of material consciousness may take as long or longer to emerge—though, if consciousness has no analog to evolution's Galapagos Islands, the problem may be intractable.

Of shirts and cars

On Monday, for my first day at work, I forgot my shirt. How's that for a first impression?

Wallets, keys, phones, papers, packed lunches, etc—these are easy things to forget. But not shirts. It's hard to slip out the front door of your home having accidentally forgotten your shirt. Unless, of course, your shirt is supposed to be out of sight, packed in one of your panniers because you're dressed in cycling attire. Then it's easy to forget that shirt—which you pressed the night before and what a big deal that is because you haven't ironed anything for years and the iron emitted an aroma of melting plastic because it hasn't ironed anything in years either—draped over a kitchen chair.

The company I work for makes chargers for electric cars. Some people thought the future arrived when they first watched a movie on their phone. For me the future has arrived in that I have the guts of an EV charger on my desk at work.

For a guy like me who's pro-bike, it may seem strange to work somewhere that's furthering car culture—even if it's a new fringe part of it. I also spent more than four years working at a company that made software for car dealerships—and car dealerships are evil, no doubt. The truth is: most software development in the world is, well, corporate, and I'm not above selling out.

That said, I don't believe electric cars are the way of the future. (Shh, don't tell any of my coworkers I said that!) Electric cars require a lot of system complexity just to maintain the status quo. I liken our culture's sudden enthusiasm for EVs as a sign that we're entering the bargaining phase in our grief over the continued erosion of our way of life. Please, please let me keep driving a one-and-a-half ton vehicle 60MPH on the freeway. I'll do anything—even put up with limited mileage, higher costs, and the extra inconvenience of electric charging to pumping fuel. Please?

While sitting at my new desk and familiarizing myself with the details of EV charging, I ran some Physics 101 calculations to compare pumping gas to electric charging. Here's what I got:

• There are 4,184 watt-seconds in a Calorie.
• A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 Calories—or what I like to call 31 burrito units.
• At the gas pump, gas flows up to 10 gallons per minute, though I suppose most pumps do about half that—let's say 5 gallons per minute.
• There are 60 seconds in a minute.
• Thus, 4,184 watt-seconds per Calorie, times 31,000 Calories per gallon, times 5 gallons per minute, times 1 minute per 60 seconds is 10 megawatts.

To make that clear, whenever you pump gas for your car, you're controlling an energy flow equivalent to about two to three thousand McMansions. Granted, you fill your tank in only a few minutes, whereas those McMansions keep sucking power all day. But the next time you stop and fill-'er-up during rush hour, look around at the other ten or so pumps in use and keep in mind that that gas station is outputting as much power as a small coal-fired power plant.

This is to say people's dreams of electric cars replacing cars as we know them probably aren't going to come true. Even if we solve battery shortcomings—and that's a huge if—there's still the problem of replacing the convenience of fueling at a rate that's three orders of magnitude greater than what your house consumes. I just don't see that happening. Ever.

The way of the future for personal transportation will involve the word smaller and probably the words slower and nearer. Everything between now and then is bargaining and depression.

As for me and my new job, I'm just glad they don't mind me wearing an undershirt to work.

Where time becomes a loop, where times becomes a loop, …

As I mentioned last week, I'm reading From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. It's a physics book for laypeople and is about time.

Time is a funny thing when you stop to think about it. What exactly is it? How do you define it in non-temporal terms? That isn't easy to do, and you won't be getting any answers here. If I thought I was out of my league while reading medieval monotheistic philosophy, then I feel doubly so now, reading about general relativity and spacetime curvatures. But I like the book a lot. I'm not taking notes—just reading through and absorbing whatever happens to soak in.

Physicists sometimes talk about time as a fourth dimension, but time doesn't appear (at first glance) to have the same symmetries as the other three dimensions. As Sean Carroll puts it, you can turn whichever way in 3D space and maybe even get lost, but you can't make a wrong turn into yesterday. That is, time always runs forward—at least as we perceive it. Why? That's a big question the book aims to answer. At the heart is the idea of entropy and how the quantity of information in the universe has steadily increased ever since some initial high-order state, which we call the Big Bang.

A lot of people wonder where order comes from, even to the point where it affects science's credibility, such as when someone professes their skepticism that complex life could self-arrange from simpler components. The question where does order come from? is interesting, but there's a good answer for it: order comes about by making some other place even less orderly. In that sense, order isn't any more mysterious than the cold air blowing out of an air conditioner. Where does refrigerated air come from on a hot summer day? Answer: by pumping heat uphill to the outdoors—i.e., making some other place even hotter. Marvelous, yes, but straightforward nevertheless.

But the where does order come from? question leads to a compliment question that's harder to answer: where does disorder come from? Currently, no one knows. Not all disorder comes about as a result of order increasing somewhere else. Disorder is, on average, increasing in the universe, so some disorder is coming about from—well, no one knows. Whatever the answer, it appears to have something to do with the essence of time itself.

Time travel

You can't write a physics book about time for laypeople and not include a chapter about time travel, and this book dutifully has one. In it Carroll discusses qualitative features of various theoretical ideas about time travel. One idea is the closed loop of time, called a closed timelike curve in the book. A closed timelike curve is spacetime that bends enough to form a circle, thus causing events to cycle repeatedly, like in this episode of Star Trek TNG.

I'm going to spoil the plot: it appears unlikely that it's possible to create a closed timelike curve if the universe isn't set up from the get-go to produce one. This has to do with the enormous amount of energy required to bend spacetime into a circle. Nevertheless, such loops are interesting to think about as thought experiments. In particular, they necessitate what seems to us to be a problem: a choice between paradox or defying entropy's relentless march.

To explain this, Carroll uses an example of a gate that leads into yesterday. That is, if you walk through the gate at 3PM on Wednesday, you will emerge on the other side at 3PM on Tuesday. Other than this fact, there's nothing weird about the gate—no strange force field, no Hollywood-style light show. You walk through it like any ordinary gate. Someone watching you from the Wednesday side would see you pass through normally, though on the other side you would be in Tuesday. (The observer would be looking backwards in time when they see you on the other side.)

Once in Tuesday, you would walk around as though it were any other ordinary day and re-experience the previous twenty-four hours, but at the end of that time you would return to the Wednesday side of the gate and pass through again. That is the meaning of a closed loop. The paradox problem stems from the notion of freewill: what if you chose not return to the gate? What if you instead decided to board a plane headed to another continent or to shoot yourself in the head? The idea of a closed loop of ever repeating events conflicts with our sense of freewill.

We may resolve the paradox by hypothesizing there's no freewill. But without freewill we're presented with another problem: entropy. After passing through the gate, you spend the next twenty-four hours walking around, doing whatever it is you did previously, and then return to the Wednesday side the gate. However, the condition in which you return to the gate must be exactly the same as the condition you were in when you last passed through the gate. Your hair must be the same, the specks of dust and dirt on your pants must be the same. Every cell and every atom in you must be exactly the same. You must not have aged, learned anything, forgotten anything, or changed in anyway. But this sort of thing just doesn't happen over the course of any twenty-four hour period. Things wind down, and they become more disorderly. A closed timelike curve defies this.

As I said, you won't be getting any answers here.

What happened, dear Astros?

Yesterday I found out the Astros will move to the American League after this coming season. Upon hearing the news, my first impulse was to resign as an Astros fan. But such an overly dramatic and potentially regrettable decision is worthy only of Mets fans, and I know as plain as any fact that in baseball one doesn't give up on one's home team on one bit of bad news alone. Rather, one first waits a few years, enduring bad trades and losing seasons؟

But moving to the Devil League is the worst possible news. To put this in perspective, even if the Astros were to lose all 162 games in a season I would think to myself, Well, at least the Astros played baseball, not like those imposters in the AL, who don't make everyone hit. In baseball, every player hits. Every player hits. I looked at the Astros' presence in the NL and the Rangers' presence in the AL as tangible proof that Dallas is an inferior city to Houston. Now they're division rivals., and I'm forced to rethink my conclusions.

Though, the core of my problem isn't so much with the Astros as it is with MLB. Don't misunderstand me: I fully expect any professional sport to whore itself out given the chance—kudos to anyone who figures out how to earn good money through recreation. But MLB continues to degrade itself from its former position as a high-class call girl to that of a common street hooker on dollar day. Baseball has always been idiosyncratic and resistant to change, but now it seems regretful about it, reforming itself slowly enough to hope no one notices. Well, I notice.

First they created the DH as a kind of pre-retirement package for aging players—a change that appeals to the kind of fan who conflates hitting home runs with strategy. Then they devised interleague play, which eliminated the mystique of the NL-AL distinction and the privilege of the World Series. Then there was the steroid era and MLB's complicity in trashing sacred records to win back fans from the 1994 strike. Now, using the Astros' league switch as an excuse, MLB is increasing the prevalence of interleague play.

I say MLB should stop beating around the bush and just openly mimic the NFL. Here's an idea. Even in pro baseball, not all players excel at both offense and defense. How about splitting each team into two squads of specialists, one for offense and one for defense? Batter shows bunt? Bring in the special team to handle that.

</rant>

Grammar Gripe Tuesday

Three words rarely used correctly and meaningfully are: clearly, obviously, and literally. Though these words have their appropriate uses, they've become so misused in modern English that they should raise a red flag each time you write them.

Clearly & obviously

Clearly and obviously both suffer from the same common misuse, which is that as a meaningless transition between two ideas. Take the following example:

X and Y are large values. Clearly, we don't have enough time to compute Ackermann's function with X and Y as its inputs.

Such use of clearly is self-defeating. If the reader happens not to know about Ackermann's function, then clearly is flat wrong; it's not clear. But if the reader does know about Ackermann's function, then you don't need to alert them to the clarity of the statement. If the statement is clear, they'll know. In any event, it's bad form to point out the obvious.

Obviously, X is greater than Y.

If it were obvious that X is greater than Y, then hopefully you'd have the sense not to write it. Maybe the word you're looking for is thus or therefore.

Literally

The average person probably has a good reason to use the word literally no more than four or five times a year. Literally shouldn't be a common word, but somehow it is, having taken on a new meaning as a kind of superlative—as when mere figurative speech won't do.

On our camping trip the mosquitoes literally ate us alive.

Wow! Man-eating mosquitoes! A zombie that can write! Forget whatever point the author was trying to make; I want to know more about what it's like to be reanimated.

The correct use of literally is when you intend to be taken non-figuratively while using a phrase that's commonly a figure of speech. For example:

George literally worried himself sick over his midterm exams.

We know George is not merely anxious about the exams; he's actually sick, and probably puking is involved.

These gripes may seem small, but they're part of communicating well. These days, anyone reading your words has countless distractions vying for their attention and thus isn't in need of additional reasons to find something else to read. To be taken seriously, first use your words seriously.

Aquinas

To understand Aquinas's philosophy, such as his Five Ways, one must interpret Aquinas's arguments according to the Aristotelean metaphysics that underlies them. That's the main point of Feser's book Aquinas, and according to Feser, few modern philosophers interpret the arguments as such, instead interpreting them according to different metaphysics frameworks or even ignoring metaphysics altogether and taking a scientific, empirical view.

Feser devotes about ten dense pages to each Way, first describing the Way and then identifying various objections to the Way and how each objection fails according to an Aristotelean point of view. I gave an example of such an objection last Monday: To Aquinas, the common objection of the First Way, What moves God? makes no sense because God is unmoving.

And so it goes: many common objections to the Five Ways aren't objections but rather misconceptions. However, I won't describe the Ways here, nor will I enumerate the misconceptions; there are other things I find more interesting and I wish to move on. Suffice it to say if you're interested in sharpening your understanding of classical monotheism—and I think that's a worthwhile goal for nearly anyone—you can read Feser's book, settle for Feser's blog, or probably find other authors who have made similar points.

Instead, I'm going to jump straight to commentary.

After finishing the chapter on theology, I feel that Aquinas's Five Ways are solid arguments and atheists who argue against them are usually misguided. That differs from my opinion before starting Feser's book, back when I agreed with some of the common objections because I didn't interpret the Ways according to their Aristotelean premises. That said, Feser cemented my preexisting opinions that (1) Aristotelean metaphysics aren't compelling and (2) the God proved by classical monotheism has little to do with the God that monotheists actually worship.

Indeed, starting with the second point, I felt disappointed that the divine attributes turned out to be the well known infinite qualities such as immutability, eternalness, immaterialness, perfection, supreme simplicity, and so on. These attributes suggest God is another word for impersonal, unfeeling law or order, as in the kind of universal regularity that scientists try to discover through empirical investigation. Indeed, I find the Five Ways to be an interesting set of arguments for the claim that the universe is merely bound and that an absolutist view of things—rather than a relativistic view—makes the most sense ultimately. And here I use the word bound instead of finite because a thing may be infinite yet bound, such as how an endless string of 0's is infinite though possessing a fixed, limited quantity of information. Analogously, the Five Ways suggest the universe, irrespective whether it's finite or infinite, may be bound and thus ultimately subject to scientific law.

That brings me to my first point, which is that I don't find the Ways' underlying metaphysics to be compelling.

Pardon my metaphysics

At the heart of the problems I have with Aquinas's premises is his distinction between form and matter. To me, this distinction is dubious.

The key idea underlying form-matter dualism is that not everything can be material stuff alone—material stuff being matter and energy (and possibly spacetime itself?). Skipping past awkward, macroscopic examples of rubber balls highlighting the difference between rubber as matter and ball as form, there's the idea that concepts, like say, triangularity, necessitate the existence of something beyond mere material stuff. Such matterless things are forms. In the case of triangularity, a triangle is a conceptual thing independent of matter and thus exists as pure form.

Do forms exist as tangible things as though in another realm? Unlike Plato, Aquinas doesn't think so, and in any event we have no evidence for it. But maybe forms are merely mental—i.e., projections humans place onto the universe they observe. Not so, for even if all humans vanished triangles would still exist. For example, the angles of a triangle in Euclidean space add up to 180 degrees regardless whether there are any humans around to appreciate that fact.

So do triangles exist even if no material stuff exists anywhere in the universe? Aquinas thinks so, but this is an open question. Unlike the scenario whereby humans and only humans vanish, if all matter, energy and spacetime vanish then it's unclear what, if anything, remains. This leads to our most basic questions of what reality is all about.

For all I know, Aquinas answers the question correctly. But we can't be sure, and so (I think) it's better to build one's understanding of the universe around what one does know, even if that entails starting with the macroscopic stuff in the middle and using lenses to focus on bigger and smaller things over time. I just can't stop looking at things empirically.

Moving on

As Shelly Kagan jokes in the second lecture of his course on Death (which is open courseware, meaning you can freely read, listen to, or watch all the lectures—oh, how the Internet is a treasure!):

[You] will hear on several occasions over the course of the semester, I'm a philosopher. What that means is I don't really know a whole lot of facts.

Before starting Philosophy Monday on JEC, my intention was to read and blog about one book on polytheism (check!) and one book on monotheism (check!—though I'm ignoring the chapters on the soul and on ethics) and then move on to indulge myself in what really interests me: secularism. And in particular: secular ethics. My plan was to read and blog about Derek Parfit's quietly influential book, Reasons and Persons, which explores just how bizarre rational ethics is.

But those first two philosophy books have left me starved for facts, so I'm changing plans. Instead, I've started Sean Carroll's book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. It's a popular-level science book about cosmology and time. I'm unsure how inspiring it will be for Philosophy Monday material, but on the other hand I've got other things on my mind worth writing about.

The only real freedom

Two jobs ago I worked with a guy named Randy. Randy was a middle-aged developer who had a single-digit employee number and more years with the company than I had with life. He was an opinionated Republican and social conservative, a Vietnam Vet, and an enthusiast of a generally strange view of the world. So when I was assigned to help Randy port his disk storage software from Windows to Linux, we hit it off.

The two of us spent countless hours in his office, half working and half shooting the breeze. I figured that since the company paid me half what I was worth—as I figured it—and that since Randy came and went as he wished anyway, our arrangement with the company's time was fair.

Randy and I rarely agreed about anything philosophical, but one thing we did agree on was the inseparable link between money and freedom. As Randy put it many times: the only real freedom is financial freedom.

Now, civil rights are important freedoms. The right to free speech and the right to due process are important freedoms—critical freedoms. But no rights or freedoms granted to you by any parchment or legal act will keep you from becoming someone's tool, someone's serf. To be your own person, you must have your own wealth. Otherwise, someone will be there to tell you to show up to work on days you'd rather not show up, on days you're inspired to create something of your own, and thus you must drudge through the mediocrity of earning a living.

These last six months I've taken what many people would call a sabbatical. Six months ago I decided I was better off leaving my job, and so I left it. It was that simple. I left because I wanted to and I could. I took the time off to be myself, to set goals for myself. I learned two new programming languages. I made a bike rack and shoe rack. I read philosophy and then moseyed around the neighborhood to think about what I read. I nursed an Achilles' tendon injury. I bonded with Laura's cats.

Sadly, though I'm not fully shackled, neither am I fully free. And so I'm bringing my six months of self-direction to its end. Today I accepted a job offer and will be going back to work.

The new job has a few things going for it. For one, the company makes chargers for electric cars, which is cool even for a product, and making products beats making services. Also, the office is in downtown, and I love downtowns, even Phoenix's, what with their plazas and gigantic public art and their compactness that lets you walk to nearby shops and restaurants. Not that I spend money at shops or restaurants. But it's neat to be one of the shabbily dressed people who walks around, awkwardly staring people in the eye and muttering under his breath.

Proof from motion

Onward, out of the mire of metaphysics and on to firm ground!

The First Way—the proof from motion—is one of Thomas's five arguments for the existence of God. It goes something like as follows:

1. Motion—i.e., change—is caused by something that already exists.
2. Nothing can be both moved and mover at the same time.
3. There can be no infinite regression of movers.
4. Thus, for any given motion, there must exist a first mover—an unmoved mover—and that is taken to be God.

After describing the First Way, Feser raises the common objections and explains why the objections fail. For example:

Objection: The first mover could be anything; this proof doesn't say anything about God.
Answer: The First Way doesn't intend to prove the existence of God. Rather, it shows that if God exists then God should have, among other properties, the property of being a first mover. Other parts of the Summa Theologiae ascribe the divine attributes to the first mover.

Objection: But what moves God?
Answer: Irrelevant, the proof doesn't claim God moves. God is pure act and thus, possessing no potency, doesn't move.

Objection: Why can't a series of causes—i.e., motions—regress to infinity?
Answer: Because they can't.

OK, Feser answered the third objection a little more rigorously than my three-word summary, but I found his answer lacking nevertheless. As for the first two objections, these are the kinds of ideas that drew my to learning about Thomism in the first place—that many of the common criticisms against classical monotheism are based on misconceptions of the underlying philosophy.

An infinite series of movers

Though he didn't convince me that there can exist neither an infinite series of movers nor a circular series of movers, Feser did answer a few of my questions I posed last week: specifically, that causes really do happen simultaneously with their effects and that the distinction between essence and accident is well defined.

Indeed, the difference between accidental causes and essential causes is that a series of accidental causes occur non-simultaneously whereas a series of essential causes happens simultaneously. This definition of essential causes differs from a casual, man-in-the-street view of causes, where we perceive things in the past to cause effects in the present or more recent past and things in the present to cause effects in the future. Essential causes all happen now. For example, imagine a moving hand that moves a stick that moves a rock that moves a leaf. The motion of the hand is an essential cause for the motion of the stick, rock, and leaf, and all move together simultaneously.

Such a simultaneous series of causes can't regress to infinity. Why? I don't know, and this is one aspect of the explanation I found lacking. Another aspect I found lacking is whether any two causes in a series can ever happen simultaneously. Taking the view of modern physics' general relativity, where no information can travel faster than light, it seems safest to presume that there exists no series of essential causes greater than one. Just as we may define a three-sided polygon who angles sum to 270 degrees in Euclidean space, we're playing with a definition of a thing that doesn't exist. We know from experiment that the hand and the leaf really don't move simultaneously.

What the First Way doesn't say

The big idea I gleaned from Feser's explanation of the First Way is that the First Way isn't a proof for God's existence, though it's commonly marketed that way. Rather, the First Way is a conditional statement that goes something like as follows:

If motion is only caused by something that exists and if nothing can be both mover and moved at the same time and there can be no infinite regression of movers then motion is ultimately caused by something that itself doesn't move.

This seems valid to me. Interesting, though, what the First Way doesn't say. It doesn't say:

There can be only one first mover in the universe.

Nowhere do I see it argued or implied that all series of essential causes are themselves linked together to the same first mover. For example, two different hands and leaves moving about may have two distinct first movers. This is a point Greer made in his polytheism book: that with the exception of the Ontological Argument, all the arguments for the existence of one god work just as well as arguments for many gods. Thomas himself rejected the Ontological Argument, so I'm eager to see how he ascribes the divine attributes of a singular, infinite God to the being postulated by his Five Ways.

$4 lesson

Last week I took my touring bike to the shop after neglecting a repair job for a few months. The problem was that the left-hand brake lever component was loose and would slide up and down the handlebar when I put even a little force on it.

I do as much of my own bike maintenance as I can. Doing it myself serves two purposes: first, I learn skills and become less dependent upon specialized, paid-for help; and second, once I know what I'm doing, I do a better job than a paid-for mechanic does because I have more incentive not to be sloppy.

But I didn't know how to fix my brake-lever problem; I didn't know what needed to be tightened. I tried to figure it out by first peeling the rubber flap that covers the brake lever attachment to the handlebar, hoping that doing so would reveal the secret of what keeps the component in place, but that revealed nothing that could be adjusted. Next I peered into the component itself through the small space that opens behind the lever when the lever is squeezed. All I saw was a single tri-bit screw, and I figured that screw was loose and thus was my problem.

I had never before needed a tri-bit screwdriver when doing any bike maintenance, but I've long become accustomed to needing new, specialized bike tools. My latest tool acquisition was a cone wrench, which is an especially thin spanner wrench used for tightening the cones when replacing the bearings in older wheel axles, like those on my Benotto 10-speed.

So that's how I ended up at the bike shop with my touring bike, waiting to have the mechanic use a tri-bit screwdriver to tighten my brake lever. The mechanic took my bike into the back room. For the few minutes he worked on it I tried to watch what he was doing, but I couldn't see what he was doing without crossing into that strange, employees-only area, and I had to resort to asking him what he did when he was done.

Oh, I just used a —mm wrench, he said.

You mean a tri-bit screwdriver? I asked.

What? You don't need a screwdriver. He was now looking at me as though I'm a mechanics imbecile—which isn't far from the truth.

Yeah, I saw there's a tri-bit screw head in the component. Isn't that what you tightened?

What? No. There's a hex bolt right there that adjusts the tightness.

I then took another look inside the brake lever, which I should add is black and made darker from looking in through a small hole with poor lighting. But now knowing what I was looking for, I discerned the grays of a hex bolt easily accessible through the small hole. Now this repair job made sense: nearly everything that can possibly need tightening on a bike is tightened with a hex wrench, and the brake lever's attachment to the handlebar is no exception. That tri-bit screw is only an internal piece of the brake-lever component and never intended for adjustment.

I asked the mechanic what I owed him, and he said four dollars. I paid the four dollars and thanked him for making me feel stupid—but also smarter.

Thomism C.A.Q.

I now doubt I chose a good book for learning about Thomism. It's not that Edward Feser's book isn't good—it may very well be. Rather, when reading Feser's commentary, I feel like I've imposed upon a heated exchange between a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan: an argument that's been going on a lot longer than I've been alive and is about something I don't care much about. In this case, the argument is between philosophers and is about things philosophers care about—non-falsifiable claims science expelled as irrelevant a long time ago. But I've imposed upon the exchange between the two fans, and now one of them is telling me I'm mistaken for not caring about the Red Sox and Yankees and I ought to take a side.

Thomists and Catholics, like most people in the world, wish more people listened to them and took them seriously. But to be taken seriously you must first take other viewpoints seriously, if only to understand how to phrase your explanations to people who see things differently. I want a book about Thomism that takes my viewpoint seriously and then explains Thomism's relevance.

The book about Thomism I'd like to read would be written for people who aren't impressed with metaphysical systems just because they possess internal logical consistency—i.e., claims ultimately backed with you can't prove me wrong. The book would start with the assumption that the reader takes a skeptical view towards uses of the word natural and would start with Gödel and Chaitin and logical incompleteness, and go from there to show Thomism still matters even after knowing these things. Does such a book, however unmarketable, exist?

I doubt it, and I won't be the one to write it because I don't understand Thomism. Instead, today I'm posting my ignorance in the form of a CAQ—Craig-Asked Questions—questions I derived from the notes I jotted in the margins besides my main notes from Feser's book. These notes pertain only to the chapter on metaphysics.

---

Note: Unlike FAQs, CAQs don't have answers, just more befuddlement.

How does one know which potentialities of an object are natural and which are unnatural?

Using Feser's example, rubber balls don't bounce from here to the moon, nor do they move by themselves and follow people menacingly, because they lack the potential to do so—i.e., such potentialities are unnatural. What then is the definition of natural?

Forms are abstractions, but is matter not an abstraction, too? If it's not an abstraction, what then is matter made of?

This reminds me of my philosophical position on atoms: atoms don't actually exist, but they're useful constructs to keep in mind when reading a chemistry textbook. Ditto for circles with respect to math textbooks.

Are substantial and accidental forms relative?

Using Feser's example, painting a ball a different color causes the ball to lose one accidental form (i.e., non-essential form) and take on another accidental form, but the ball's substantial form of being a ball remains. But perhaps instead of saying we started with a ball that happened to be, say, red, we said we started with a red thing that happened to be in the shape of a ball. In such a case, the accidental and substantial forms would be flipped. Is this a valid way to think about the metaphysical truth of the universe? If so, are there limits to how relativistic accidental and substantial forms are? Without limits, there exists an infinite combination of accidental and substantial forms that may be applied to any one thing.

If substantial and accidental forms aren't relative or are limited relativistically, then what criteria ought we use for determining them?

And how do we justify the criteria themselves? And how do we justify the justification of the criteria? And so on.

What are the final causes of stochastic radiation?

Is chance event a valid final cause? If so, how do we know when chance event isn't the final cause of something?

If causes happen simultaneously to their effects then how does motion occur at all?

I suspect I missed something here. According to Feser's example of a brick smashing through a window, the brick pushing into the glass and the glass giving way are simultaneous events—indeed, actually the same event considered under different descriptions. But cause-and-effect are used to explain change, and saying that a cause and its effect are simultaneous implies a sort of Zeno's paradox whereby change cannot occur. What did I miss?

Are final causes and privations relative?

This deserves a story. I once remarked to my former coworker Shafik how it bugged me that electrons in electrical circuits flow from negative to positive, all due to Benjamin Franklin's arbitrary 18th century terminology. Because of Franklin, a positive potential signifies a negative concept: a lack of electrons.

Shafik put me to ease with an idea so simple it frustrates me I didn't think of it myself: Craig, if the terminology bugs you, then think of a positive potential not as a lack of electrons but rather as a positive desire to obtain electrons. Only because of mental feebleness does this cause electrical flow to make more sense to me.¹

Shafik's advice follows from a relativism heuristic that aids in understanding a lot of math and science: use whichever terminology makes the most sense of what you see. How does this heuristic apply to final causes and privations? For example, maybe the final cause of an eye is to see and cataracts are the result of a privation that hinders the final cause of sight. But maybe instead the final cause of an eye is the development of cataracts and all our early decades of clear sight are a privation of cataracts? Is any one system of terminology more valid than another? If so, what are the criteria for judging the validity of one final cause theory over another?

Why are final causes not tautologies?

(obligatory xkcd reference here)

Feser explicitly claims the notion of final causes is non-tautological, but he doesn't explain why. To Feser, the two statements:

Opium causes sleep because it causes sleep.

and

Opium causes sleep because it has the power to cause sleep.

are inequivalent. Why are they inequivalent? From the book:

[The second statement says] that opium has a power to cause sleep; that is to say, it tells us that the fact that sleep tends to follow the taking of opium is not an accidental feature of this or that sample of opium, but belongs to the nature of opium as such.

That leads us back to the question of the relativism of accidental and substantial forms and how we judge one accidental-substantial pair as more valid than another. It seems Thomism hinges on a preformed notion of natural.

What's insufficient about the distinction between context-free and context-specific that makes final causes necessary for understanding the significance of a given causal chain?

Feser gives the example of how bear DNA causes bears to be big and furry but bear DNA doesn't cause bears to be good mascots for football teams. Feser's point is this implies there's a final cause at work with DNA, and the final cause includes size and furriness but not mascot-worthiness.

But bear DNA does cause bears to be good mascots, just not directly. The issue here is the distinction between context-free and context-specific causalities, not end causes. Bear DNA causes bears to be big and furry regardless whether humans exist, but whether bear DNA causes them to be good mascots also depends upon (1) humans existing; (2) humans playing football; and (3) humans choosing mascots that are big, furry animals. Biologists don't study mascot-worthiness genes in DNA because such genes require context that transcends the scope of biology—but the genes exist nevertheless.

What's the final cause of a final cause?

And what's the final cause of a final cause's final cause?, and so on. How do final causes work at all without leading to an infinite regression?—or are we allowing for infinite regressions?

By the way—and this isn't a question—a decrease in entropic order is an increase in information.

From the book:

…would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that order (and thus information content) tends invariably to decrease, not increase, within a closed system.

Not to pick on Feser here because this is a common misconception: order is a lack of information, and the amount of information in a closed system increases with time as order decreases. As with electrons and the flow of electrical current, many people see this as a backwards way of looking at things. If you're such a person, try thinking of order as a reduction in complexity or a kind of data compression.² For example, if you sort your books according to the Dewey Decimal System then you need only a simple, concise card catalog to describe where any book is; without sorting your books to some such system, you need more information to describe where any book is.

^[1] The backwards terms for electrical charges are useful for pointing out that electrical current is arbitrary. In batteries what flows are protons, not electrons, and the protons do flow from positive to negative.

^[2] But don't think of order as lossless data compression if you want to be exact about it because lossless data compression doesn't eliminate information; instead, it squeezed a fixed amount of information into a smaller space.

Not proved wrong

I glossed over the two terms last week, but the linchpin of Thomism is its distinction between efficient causes and final causes, which together and only together explain change.

An efficient cause is that which actualizes a thing's potential property. For example, cheese melts when heated, with melted-ness being the cheese's potential property made actual and heat being the efficient cause, or actualizing agent, of the change. A final cause, on the other hand, is the end purpose of such actualization. In the same example, cheese melts when heated because the end purpose of heat as applied to cheese is for cheese to melt.

A lot more can be said about efficient causes and final causes, and usually a lot more is, but the previous paragraph provides the gist. As for efficient and final causes' place in modernity, science of the last few centuries conditionally accepts the notion of efficient causes, though in the jargon they're referred to as causes, but it dismisses final causes, regarding them as lying outside science's domain. And this brings me my main point.

Falsifiability

One problem with beginning a book with a chapter on metaphysics is that the author alienates most readers who don't start the book already agreeing with most of what the author has to say. It turns out metaphysical reality is a lot like pornography: we know it when we see it, but when pressed for precision, our opinions often differ. That's to say we each have our intuitive notions how the universe works, but nature at extremely small and big scales, as measured either in size or complexity, eludes descriptions that are both exact and predictive. And if you make a claim that's inexact or non-predictive, then you invite people who disagree with you to continue disagreeing.

Another word for predictiveness is falsifiability. Thomism is non-falsifiable, and I gather as much from the first dozen pages in Edward Feser's book. This doesn't surprise me; a key attitudinal difference between religious-minded folk and science-minded folk is how important they think it is for claims to have the capacity of being proved wrong. Religion values falsifiability little or none at all while science depends upon it. The end. It's not even worth getting into a discussion about the value of falsifiability itself because values are themselves non-falsifiable. Suffice it to say, either you think falsifiability is important or you don't. Those who think it is start with that as their axiom—albeit, one that's a self-referential paradox—and run with it as far as the evidence goes. Those who think falsifiability isn't important run even further.

Let's take an example. Suppose I claim there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy. My claim is, practically speaking, not a falsifiable claim. Though it can be shown to be true by way of evidence—for example, by receiving an alien radio transmission or by being visited by green men in flying saucers—it's beyond our ability to prove the claim false. Despite any lack of evidence for alien intelligence, there remains the possibility that the alien intelligence remains unobserved because it's well hidden though nevertheless out there somewhere. So in a way my claim is safe. When asked to defend it, I might say, You can't prove me wrong, or No one has ever proved me wrong. That ends the conversation—or the useful portion of it, anyway—because you can't prove me wrong. Whether alien intelligence exists across the galaxy from us is doomed to speculative judgment so long as (1) humankind hasn't yet observed positive evidence and (2) humankind hasn't ruled out every possible alien-intelligence-sized happening 100,000 light years away—and we can't do that even for the nearest stars.

Is not being proved wrong a defense? I don't think so. That's because I value falsifiability. Unless already interested in the topic, I don't care about the validity of your claim X, any X, if it doesn't predict some future, testable event. Claiming there exists intelligence across the galaxy from us doesn't tell us anything about the future: the aliens may remain hidden forever or tomorrow they may show up and solve our nonrenewable-resource crisis with their Mr. Zero-Point Energy devices. The claim about aliens works with any possible tomorrow because the claim doesn't say what tomorrow will look like.

But a lot of people do think not being proved wrong constitutes a valid defense. You who're reading this post may very well be one of them: someone who sees things differently than I do and who cares about non-falsifiable claims—or at least a few specific ones. That's OK. I doubt valuing falsifiability as I do is the best choice for all people because I doubt it allows an individual on average to live his or her life better. In any event my goal with these Monday religion posts isn't to change opinions but rather to sharpen them; my goal today is for you to understand the distinction between falsifiable claims and non-falsifiable claims. Just as you wouldn't expect to be understood if you continued speaking English to someone who doesn't understand English, you should recognize when you're talking to someone who values falsifiability and alter your expectations for the conversation accordingly. It's up to you whether that means saying something different than what you would say when around like-minded people or instead forcing no replacement upon silence. But rarely if ever will insisting the other person stop caring about falsifiability do either of you much good.

In my opinion, the point of studying philosophy is not to be brought closer to the truth—whatever that means!—nor is it to argue a few particular points better. Rather, the point is to be able to argue all points better, not because you believe any of them, but because by being able to better argue for something you don't believe, you enter the minds of people who disagree with you and thus improve at communicating with them—at teaching them and learning from them. Can one love wisdom any more?

Some people may say, Yes, Craig, rah rah empathy sounds goods, but the question whether there exists alien intelligence on the other side of the galaxy has a definite, true-or-false answer. Falsifiable or not, there's a decision to make here. By now if you can't see how I see such a question as irrelevant, then probably nothing I write about these matters will ever make much sense to you. That's OK. That needn't end the conversation just yet: next week I'll write specifically about Thomism metaphysics.

Go hack

I didn't post either of the last two Thursdays because each day I was too engaged with my hobby-work in the Go programming language to care about blogging. So it goes. After working with Go for a few months, I feel I've attained a feel for the language and can offer insights about what it does well and what it doesn't. In this post, I'd like to focus on one thing it does well: It makes hacking on the standard library easy.

That first Thursday I didn't post I was busy finding and fixing a nasty Go problem that suddenly manifested up on my laptop. In short, Go's WebSocket support stopped working. One minute my prototype web server handled WebSocket connections flawlessly, several minutes later WebSocket connections in Chrome failed to connect. In the minutes in between, I upgrade Chrome, so it looked like the problem was due to the browser. This surprised me. First of all, like many people, I've come to expect Google products to work as is (unlike certain other tech companies' products). Secondly, I upgraded Chrome as a regular apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Ubuntu update, which should include only fixes, not new features. Why then was Chrome upgraded from version 12 to 14?

In any event, I debugged my code and confirmed that the problem was indeed somewhere in the Go standard library websocket package, undoubtedly manifested because of a change in Chrome. WebSockets are new and not yet standardized, so such breakages are to be expected. The new Chrome implements a newer draft of the WebSocket protocol, and so Go needed a corresponding upgrade.

This is routine stuff for Go. You first install Go by pulling a local copy of the upstream Mercurial repository and locally building the compiler, library, etc., so updating the Go standard library is straightforward, entailing pulling new content from upstream and running a script to rebuild everything. However, pulling the latest from upstream failed to fix my WebSocket problem, so I had to switch from the stable release head (r60) to tip, which is where newest, experimental Go development occurs. I'm not a Mercurial user, having only recently gotten into learning distributed source control by way of git, so I'm a little shaky at switching heads. This time, after switching to the tip head, Go did not build. One of the standard library tests broke. What to do? The r60 head's WebSocket support was broken, and tip failed a test that maybe doesn't matter. I decided to play it safe and make a Frankstein Go. I copied the tip's websocket package into the r60 head and rebuilt everything. It worked: all tests passed, including the websocket's. And my prototype web server program worked again, too, now with the newer version of Chrome.

My point here is Go makes its internals easily accessible. I can't imagine making such a copy-and-paste-between-versions change to the C standard library and not end up spending a few days working through problems. Nor do I imagine this kind of fix would be easy in Python or many other nice languages. Partly Go benefits because nothing on my laptop uses it other than the few programs I write, so I can tinker with the Go standard library all I wish without system consequences. However, even if most of my OS were written in Go, Go makes it easy to sandbox development by having simultaneous Go installations.

But there's more to this. In no other language have I found myself daily reading through the language's source code to figure out how it makes things work. With Go I find it's useful to look inside the standard library. It's also easy and fast to insert Printf()'s inside the standard library to debug problems and work around incomplete documentation. Between the ease of (1) hacking on the standard library and (2) having a runtime that catches most runtime errors and prints stack traces and useful error messages, Go is unusual in that it uses pointers and bare access to memory heavily and yet I rarely find myself wishing to use a traditional debugger like gdb.

So the standard library and the development environment is something Go does well. But there are things it doesn't do well, too, and I've now spent enough time with the language to come to understand many of its limitations. (You don't really know a language until you can list a dozen problems with it.) Perhaps I'll write about those in the future.

Aquinas

Three clicks away from John Michael Greer's blog I found Edward Feser and his blog. Feser isn't someone I'd likely read past the first paragraph, owing firstly to his material and secondly to his polemic style, but the first post I read on his blog caught my attention. In it Feser made an analogy between the history of philosophy and the Godfather trilogy of movies. Suppose you knew someone who has seen half of the first Godfather movie, none of the second, and the third fifteen times. How would that person's opinion of the trilogy compare to someone who's seen all three movies? Answer: their opinion would be skewed. Not only would they know little about the first two movies and what made those movies great, but they'd probably be confused about many parts in the third movie as well, despite having seen the third movie many times.

So it goes with philosophy. Western philosophy divides into three eras: the classical era of the Greeks and Romans, the medieval era of the Scholastics and of classical theism, and the modern era consisting of a hodgepodge of poorly written nonsense. And yet most people's knowledge of philosophy is as warped as the previous paragraph's Godfather fan's knowledge of the Godfather trilogy: most people's understanding of philosophy includes a little about the classics, little beyond a caricature of the medieval period, and a whole lot of the modern period, usually starting with Descartes and I think therefore I am. And so it goes that we should stop re-watching the third movie and get busy learning what makes the first two movies masterpieces.

Feser's analogy sold me: I ought to learn more about medieval philosophy. Years ago in college I took two philosophy classes, one a generic intro and the other an ethics class (which gave me more questions than answers), and from those courses, as well as my ongoing interest in loving wisdom, I can't say I know more than a shadow of what was going on in the minds of learned Europeans one thousand years ago. Feser's academic specialization is St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century, in case you're wondering), who is to classical theists as Adam Smith is to modern free-market supporters: often cited, rarely read. But Feser has made a career out of Aquinas, and he knows his topic—or purports to know, for I'm in no position to judge. He's written a few books, and he says that few people really know what Aquinas is all about. Aquinas has never been refuted, only neglected. If only more people watched the first two Godfather movies in whole, we'd realize how special classical theism is.

The book I'm reading is titled simply Aquinas. It's a beginner's guide and fulfills one of my requirements for reading about other religions: it's short, just around 200 pages. I was pleased to discover the book is also clear and mostly devoid of clutter. What will follow on Mondays here at JEC for the next few weeks are my thoughts and impressions of the book's content.

Metaphysics, briefly

Feser begins with a chapter on metaphysics, that quagmire of a topic useful for transforming conversations from evocative to provocative. I'm halfway through the chapter, which makes up nearly a third of the book, so I can't conclude on the matter just yet, but so far Aquinas's metaphysical framework looks much the same as the classical ones I learned in school—mainly, the Forms.

I admit to never making much sense of Platonic and Aristotelian forms while in school and learning only enough lingo to get by on exams. In his book Feser makes something clear that would have helped me as a student: the primary difference between Plato's forms and Aristotle's forms is that Plato's forms existed as real things in a heavenly realm of forms, whereas Aristotle's forms are merely the yin to the yang of tangible matter. Take as an example my touring bicycle. It comprises matter by way of steel, rubber, aluminum, plastic, cork, and so on, and its form is of bicycle-ness. According to Plato, you could destroy the matter and the bicycle-ness still exists, somewhere out there, but Aristotle—and Aquinas, who takes Aristotle's side—argues that if you destroy the matter then you've destroyed the bicycle-ness, too.

In addition to the forms, there's the duality between actuality and potency, and there are the four causes. Actuality and potency pertain to an object's properties: actuality being the set of properties the object has, and potency being the set of properties the object may attain through change. The four causes then explain change. The first two causes, the material cause and the formal causes, are matter and form restated. The other two causes are the efficient cause and the final cause. The efficient cause transforms a potential property into a actual property, and the final cause is the teleological end, or purpose, of a change.

I'm rushing the descriptions of these concepts because I expect most people will skip past them no matter what I write, with maybe one person interested enough to read about them elsewhere. So far Feser's book reads much like any other I'd expect to see in an intro philosophy course, so I'll wait at least another week before giving any commentary.

Not to scare away further comments, but...

According to the schedule, today I'm supposed to write about St. Thomas Aquinas. But according to the schedule, I was supposed to post something last Thursday. Let's just say I haven't been well taken with schedules lately, and this week I'm going to shirk Aquinas and instead respond to Shafik's long comment to last Monday's post.

Those of you who haven't figured out you can save time by skipping these Monday philosophy & religion posts will remember last week's post was about how absolutism and relativism both make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. The post garnered a few comments, which makes it a successful one as measured by my validation-seeking blogging mindset, and one of those posts—Shafik's—included eight question marks, which makes it a good comment as measured by my opinion that questions are generally more interesting than answers. Shafik invited me to speculate further about the mysteries of the universe, and I'm not one to resist making non-falsifiable claims when asked. So here's my response to Shafik's comment.

* * *

Does Relativism make any sense if no consciousness is involved?

If a universe falls in a forest and no one is around, is the universe still sound? My guess is consciousness has nothing to do with relativism vs absolutism. While it's hard to imagine relativism being meaningful without a sentient entity around to use it, the same goes for absolutism, too. What does meaningful mean when no one is around to ascribe meaning? As for whether the secrets of the universe are any different only because the universe now contains small pockets of complexity capable of referencing some of those secrets—I'm skeptical.

Talk about a nature of things invites a slew of question-begging. What nature? How do you know? How are you sure? How are you sure about being sure? And so on. I've seen nothing further down those holes but faith and mysticism, and everyone's mileage varies with those. Even scientism, which is the belief that science is making progress, is merely calling the other side of the same absolutist coin. Only after starting with some form of absolutism do any of these modes of thought make any sense.

Care must be taken, however, to prevent Relativism from becoming a destructive tool against well-backed and strongly justified facts and "truths" about the universe.

Relativism and absolutism both can be taken in, muddied, and used to project rainbows and shadows onto the universe one sees. These days relativism is most closely associated with secularism, which is the socio-political equilibrium you get when you put together millions of materially wealthy, differently thinking people. It's also the system that affords people the freedom to sit at home with their laptops and trash secularism on their blogs, but that's another matter.

When I hear someone say, People ought to do X, I like to play a game with myself and speculate as to whether people alive 500 years from now will be more likely to agree or to disagree with the statement. It's my guess that little of the knowledge and material wealth we value highly now will be much valued by people then, and meanwhile they'll care a great deal about many things we value little now. I for one draw comfort from this transience, just as I draw comfort from a universe that's uncaring. It really takes the pressure off.

…Godel's theories…

I agree.

What about the strange and esoteric world of Quantum physics?

While you have to give up the old-fashioned notion of absolutes to make any sense of quantum physics, many people argue that quantum physics is merely pressing forward to an ever more accurate model of the universe—i.e., scientism and its absolutism deja vu. But quantum physics, computation theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and many other recent successes requiring relativistic thinking suggest there's merit to learning how to use relativism as a tool.

Or do they? Actually—and this is where I disagree with most atheists—I'm not at all convinced that building a more accurate model of the universe, whatever that means, is of much help to most people. In fact, I strongly suspect self-delusion is one of mankind's greatest survival skills. Some people need a deadline and some pressure to get things done. Speaking of deadlines, let's see if I can get around to that Thursday post…

The relativism that can be told

The relativism that can be told—to borrow a line from Eastern mysticism—is not the eternal relativism. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

Cutting out the jargon, many philosophical debates centering around relativism vs. absolutism reduce to a pattern like this:

Relativist: There are no absolutes in the universe.

Absolutist: On what absolute are you basing that?

Relativist: Dang, you got me.

Afterwards, the relativist holds his head low, his relativistic universe thoroughly rocked. How can relativism be defended without abandoning the principles of relativism? It can't be done.

But the absolutist's trick cuts both ways, with some other debates reducing to the following, different pattern:

Absolutist: There are absolutes in the universe.

Relativist: Yes, according to your premises. But I reject your premises.

Absolutist: But my premises are not mere abstractions. They're truth.

Relativist: So you say.

The trick both patterns exemplify is: both absolutism and relativism make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. Want to poke holes in the other guy's framework? Easy: use your own framework to do so. And thus legions of philosophers, professional and amateur alike, continue poking holes and begging questions. The usual strategy I observe them using is obfuscation: syllables and complexity are added to the debate until at least one of the debate's participants no longer recognizes how the debate fits into one of the two patterns above. But just as you can't change what's in one book by writing new books, no amount of adding to can get around these two points: (1) to the relativist, absolutism's objectivity remains ever yet another framework among many and (2) there's no room for relativism's infinite speculation in the universe of truths as seen by the absolutist. But this isn't the end of the conversation. The nonsense to the other relationship between absolutism and relativism is asymmetrical. Specifically, relativism is indefensible.

The relativist who disagrees with that last point is stuck in debate pattern #1, playing the part of the absolutist and by my account better labeled as such, though of a quasi-relativist kind. That relativism can't be defended is not mere sophistry: it has to do with the absolutist's monopoly on defense itself. Things are objectively right or wrong and objectively true or false only in the absolute universe. Thus relativism, unequipped with even the language of right and wrong and true and false, can't argue its own point one way or the other according to the classical standards of Western argumentation, which hold it as absolute truth that ideas should be defensible. Rather, relativism merely is, and that's about all that can be said for it.

If a conclusion is the place where someone got tired of thinking, many absolutists peter out after the previous paragraph, saying something along the lines of: What good is relativism if it can't even be defended? That's a white flag of surrender (and irrelevance) if I ever saw one! But the absolutist derives his valuation from his own premises, which are exactly what are in question: generally, whether the universe makes some degree of objective sense, and specifically, whether our attempts to make sense of the universe should be defensible. You can't bootstrap absolutism with anything other than absolutism. In all its variations it requires the universe to obey at least one bedrock claim, even when that claim is the one made by the quasi-relativist who says paradoxically but with conviction: Humans are incapable of understanding the universe.

While it's fair to call absolutism a belief or a world view, in my opinion relativism is better described as a tool. Just as there are no perfect carpenters in the world but only people with varying levels of carpentry skill, there are no perfect relativists, only varying degrees to which people are comfortable with and are capable of using relativistic thinking. To borrow again from Eastern mysticism: The relativist that can be named is not the eternal relativist. There's no such thing as an unqualified relativist.

It's little surprise to me then that relativism invites the scorn, ridicule, and bafflement it does. The relativist's world is indefensible, utterly bizarre, and commonly misunderstood. The relativist navigates his ship without longitude and latitude to dock without anchor or ropes. Knowing where you are only in relation to what you see around you sends the mind reeling, not unlike trying to keep one's sense of direction intact while doing a flip off the diving board. And just as there's no trick to doing flips off diving boards, there's no trick to adopting the relativist mindset: it just takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it. As for whether it's worthwhile to do flips off diving boards, that's up to each of us to decide.

Next Monday I'll begin posting what I learn about St. Thomas Aquinas and classical monotheism, just as I've posted about polytheism for the last many weeks. Though I'm no polytheist, I found writing about it straightforward because polytheism employs a lot of relativistic thinking, and I've felt comfortable with relativistic thinking ever since it captured my imagination for keeps in a non-Euclidean geometry class I took in college. So when, for example, the polytheist claims it doesn't matter whether different cultures' conflicting thunder gods are the same god, that makes sense to me, just as do triangles with angles summing to 180 degrees or 270.

Aquinas and classical monotheism, on the other hand, are by no means relativistic. From the start they espouse absolutism by claiming things have a true nature, and it's hard for me to see such teleology as anything other than an assumption—and one that's more misguiding than useful, in my opinion. When such a claim comes from the eleventh page of a 200-page book, time-saving heuristics in my head urge me to dismiss the whole discourse. But that's the disservice I see Internet philosophers doing to themselves daily: judging the value of the other guy's ideas using only one's own ideas. It's no random happenstance we lose a lot of mental flexibility as we age, and I suspect time-saving heuristics have a lot to do with it.

Reading about Aquinas requires a hefty mental shift on my part, but that's a shift I'll try to make here at JEC for the next month or so. Writing about classical monotheism purely by my own standards wouldn't contribute originality to the Internet, and neither would it be much fun to read. Instead I aim to write about classical monotheism according to its own standards and to see what interesting things it has to say. Hopefully you'll find them interesting too.

This

You believe this sentence is false.

If you're not from Mars then you believe this sentence is false.

If and only if you prefer to be right about this sentence then you do believe this sentence is false.

If the previous sentence frustrated you then you believe the next sentence is false.

If you haven't yet caught on that there's something screwy about logic then you believe the previous sentence is false.

Polytheism: myth and meaning

If gas prices hadn't spiked to $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, I wouldn't be reading Greer's opinions about polytheism today in 2011. But such strange connections make up the stuff of life. I discovered Greer through his peak-oil blog in my search for explanations about what was happening to the oil markets three years ago. What initially attracted me to his site among the many others was the historical sensibility of his stance that civil collapse is a long and messy process—not at all the abrupt end of the world so many people imagine. But what kept me reading his blog week after week was his strange way of explaining his stance through his talk of myth and meaning.

Though I find myself eager to finish A World Full of Gods and to move on to the next topic of classical monotheism, I want to include a post about Greer's ideas about myth and meaning. He raises the topic in the eleventh chapter out of thirteen, which from my point of view as a polytheist skeptic may be mistakenly too deep into the book. It's the chapter of most value to non-polytheists, as the skill of thinking-about-thinking benefits oneself in so many endeavors, both inside and outside religion. On the other hand, most people read for the confirmation of their existing beliefs, and I doubt many non-polytheists will ever crack open this book, so what does it matter how far into the book this chapter is? As it is, I'll relate some of Greer's ideas about myth and meaning here at JEC because I've intertwined his ideas into my own jargon for talking about philosophy and science, and I want to share the story.

According to Greer, a myth is a story that gives meaning to the world. This sharply contrasts from the term's common use, where myth means a falsehood. Indeed, as Greer points out, a myth that's unequivocally false would do a poor job providing meaning to anything and would thus be a poor myth. Rather, the validity and meaning of a myth lies in the ears of its listener. No one doubts Easy Rider is fiction, but how many of the Baby Boomers we see riding their motorcycles out on the open roads on any given weekend haven't found at least some meaning in Peter Fonda's and Dennis Hopper's portrayal of nomadic independence? Myths work on many levels, unlike facts.

As with trying to make sense of a Coen Brothers' movie, problems emerge when people ask what a myth is about. Myths aren't about anything; they're mere stories, building blocks for people to ascribe meaning to the universe they experience. A listener can give any story a wide range of meanings, from the literal to the abstract symbolisms we drudged through in high school English classes. Those differences in meaning stem from differences in interpretive schemes, and no scheme is right or wrong except as measured by other myths and their schemes.

Myths are not veiled presentations of some other discourse; all other discourse are veiled presentations of myth…

Thus, there's no way to escape the use of myth. The human brain hardwires us to use them as a way to understand things. Indeed, the modern man's belief that he doesn't believe in myths—that mythical thinking went extinct along with many other superstitions from long ago—follows from his very belief in a specific myth, a myth that has captured our collective imagination for the last couple hundred years, the Myth of Progress. The Myth of Progress holds that humanity, darling of the universe, moves ever onwards and upwards to bigger and better futures, that our lives are better than our parents' and our children's lives will be better than ours. There's no room in the ascent of man, as the myth goes, for the irrationality of myths.

Greer's point in all this, far from the impossible task of ending our beliefs in myths, is that we ought to know more myths. No myth makes sense of all phenomena, and our ability to make sense of our experiences is largely tied to how many myths we know.

Our problem is not that we have no myths, but rather that too many of our myths tell the same story and make sense of the world in the same way. Most of our stories end and they all lived happily ever after. We are left floundering and baffled when things do not turn out that way, and our hopes of perpetual improvement burst like bubbles—financial or otherwise.

This is where polytheism comes in. Paganism has a wealth of myths covering many possibilities and circumstances: triumph and defeat, pride and humiliation, fidelity and adultery, and so on. There's no one moral or one set of morals one can derive from Paganism. Such diversity empowers.

I take Greer's ultimate battle here to be with secularism and its linear view of history. However, Greer also criticizes monotheisms for their myths' otherness, their detachment from nature. Greer is a druid and likes his stories, on the whole, to draw from and reflect nature and its balance, limitation, and reciprocity. Greer advocates his view well, though in the end it's all just another story.