Welcome Home

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You are home.

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Image source: NASA (Suomi Satellite, January 4, 2012)

“Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow!”: When Singularities Come Nigh

At Evolution News and Views, IDer William Dembski reflects on the problem of explanatory continuity:

Science is not merely about discovering continuities in nature that can be described by a seamless naturalistic story. Sure, areas of science are like that. But science also presents us with discontinuities that resist naturalistic just-so stories. The most widely cited of these is the singularity of the Big Bang. A singularity is a discontinuity for which explanations in terms of ordinary physical processes break down.

It’s not that scientific investigation stops at a singularity. It’s just that the usual way of doing science, looking to ordinary processes that we’ve seen active in other contexts, no longer works. Granted, it is no explanation of a singularity merely to say “God did it.” But a singularity can be studied on its own terms, and the natural forces that may have played a role on either side of it may be studied and their inability to bridge the gap may also be assessed. Such singularities, proponents of intelligent design argue, have happened throughout the history of life. Life presents us with numerous singularities, everything from the Cambrian explosion to the emergence of some (but not all) novel proteins.

I think that William Dembski’s observations here are fair ones. There are moments in history where jaw-dropping disjunctures occur (the Big Bang itself, life, and consciousness are three obvious ones). They arrive unexpected and seem to be products of unique, even otherworldly (transcendent) processes.

In fact, there’s something downright messianic about some past events. Were there John the Baptists preceding these, we would not have believed any of them:

• “Prepare ye the way, for a big bang cometh nigh!”
• “Behold, as water to wine or lead to gold, humdrum chemistry shall turn to biochemistry!”
• “Look, the kingdom of self awareness, reason, imagination, and language is at hand! The planet of apes you now see shall birth on this round globe—Shakespeare!“

These are such things as DMT-induced psychedelic trips are made on, but they all came to pass; they really, really happened. For Dembski, these historical disjunctures make the resurrection of Jesus seem downright plausible.

It’s nice to think the universe might not be done delivering flabbergasting surprises. Those who have dialed into DMT report that their consciousness appears to be taken out of their bodies to exotic cosmic realms. And I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs’s dying words:

Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!

What makes you so sure there’s only one world?

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Maybe hope—even hope that death is not the last word—should “spring eternal” because the cosmos springs.

The Speech: Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ SOTU Retort

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is bland oatmeal, but he’s civil and gave as good a speech as Barack Obama did for his 2012 State of the Union (SOTU) address.

As a liberal who plans to vote for President Obama in November, I nevertheless can’t think of anything that Governor Daniels says here that isn’t reasonable.

Why didn’t this guy run for President of the United States? I didn’t even know there were such sane Republicans in leadership anymore.

Behold a Republican making a speech devoid of Obama hatred, gross distortions, craziness, and indecency. How curiously odd.

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My guess is that, if Mitt Romney manages to con enough red meat conservative primary voters to vote for him and not Newt Gingrich, and wins the nomination, that he’ll immediately tack “left” and start talking exactly like Mitch Daniels does here.

Romney will do this calmly, systematically, repeatedly. It’s quite obvious that, if he does, he’s got a high probability of winning.

The weak Republican field and ridiculous beliefs of the Republican base voters obfuscate the real political climate for 2012. Not until watching Governor Mitch Daniels’ speech have I really absorbed just how vulnerable President Obama is to a crushing electoral defeat in November. Independents will salivate to a Daniels-like message. Mitt Romney knows this. It’s why he’s trying so hard to win the Republican primary. Newt Gingrich, were he to win, might very likely blow the lay up.

Contemporary Iconoclasm: Jesus Statue Beheaded in Boston

Jesus beheaded!

What would Freud say? Here’s the Boston Globe this morning:

[P]olice are looking for the vandals who knocked the head off a statue of Jesus outside a Roman Catholic church named for Mother Teresa. The Rev. Jack Ahern of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta at St. Margaret’s church in the city’s Dorchester section says when he arrived at the church Sunday morning the statue’s head was lying on the ground in pieces [...]

I wonder whether this was done in Boston by an anti-religion zealot or just a thoughtless teen out and about for kicks. Maybe somebody lost his wife or children in a car accident and is mad at God, but it’s hard to believe that the target was picked completely at random.

If it was, then why not just choose a storefront sign to knock down? Why Jesus?

We live in a time where a lot of people (not without justification) are pissed at the stupidity and politicized rancor and violence that goes with so much contemporary religion. Thus, this could be the work of a particularly coarse and inarticulate atheist.

Or it might be the product of an internal religious dispute: a Protestant or Muslim attacking a Catholic Church. It’s not an unknown phenomenon for monotheists to break each other’s stuff. Here’s a drawing, for example, of Calvinists gleefully “cleansing” a Catholic Church in Geneva in the the 16th century:

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When we think of iconoclasm, we perhaps first imagine the destruction of temples or the smashing of idols, as in the following fearful gesture of iconoclasm, under the Taliban-like reign of the zealous monotheist Jehu, recorded in the Bible, in II Kings 10:26-27:

And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them.

And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

A “draught house” is a polite way for the King James translators to tell us that the ruins of Baal’s temple were used by the Judeans as a place to take a piss.

But before non-monotheists get too smug here, it should be remembered that iconoclasm has disturbing precedents not just on the “Jerusalem” side of Western cultural history, but also is represented on the pagan “Athens” side as well, as when Aristophanes, in his comic play, Clouds, ends it with the burning of the school of Socrates. Plato famously attributed at least part of the reason for Socrates’s death to the popular prejudicial passions inflamed against him by Aristophanes’s play.

History suggests that the destruction of cultural symbols typically forebodes, not just the end of civil dialogue, but the marginalizing and destruction of people.

This is why we need to find out the person(s) who did this and why they did it.

President Barack Obama’s Long Game

A number of things have, indeed, gotten better since Barack Obama became President of the United States. The following video is a useful reminder.

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And don’t forget the end of George Bush’s sanctioning of torture. That’s a big one.

Approving indefinite detention of American citizens, however, is a historic blunder of this president. But maybe Chris Hedges will fix that one:

Mao Luther King?

I don’t like the look or feel of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C. For one, he looks fat, and he wasn’t particularly fat. And there’s something weirdly Maoist about it—a throwback to 20th century communist propaganda art. It simply doesn’t have the feel of sculpture suited to a democratic country.

I know that Lincoln is oversized on the Mall, but there’s just something wrong about this King depiction. I can’t put my finger on it.

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Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

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UPDATE: Curiously, the sculptor is Chinese, not an American. His name is Lei Yixin. And he went to art school in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. Here’s the sculptor before his totalitarian-feeling, overwrought production.

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Can we start over?

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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UPDATE II: I think I’m able to articulate my objection to the memorial a bit more clearly after letting my repulsion percolate a bit:

King looks like he has a police state backing him rather than before him.

Put another way, King looks like the static guarantor of a new, officially sanctioned and monolithic, status quo, not the contrarian outsider that he, in fact, was, stepping forward against an unjust system. This is King appropriated by bureaucratic elites tone deaf to both art and nonconformity; the overpowering guardian of a closed door, blocking it; not one who persistently sought entrance.

King’s models were Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Jesus. Can anyone imagine these figures memorialized in such a pose and on so ridiculous a scale? The sculptor’s own casual and human stance in the above photo is much more in keeping with King’s general demeanor than the statue itself.

Heaven Can Wait: Cuddly Bear to the Rescue!

I actually find this charming and life affirming.

American Pathetic

Groveling-for-votes cowardice is what Rick Santorum displays in the following clip:

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And calling into Rush Limbaugh’s radio program today, a hysterical Rick Santorum supporter had this exchange with him:

I feel like he [Rick Santorum] is the true conservative.  I am from Pennsylvania, and they are rooting for him up there because they know that he truly lives and breathes conservatism through his whole life.

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER:  I’m so disappointed at these South Carolinians for being snowed by the media, and I fear for my one-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old, and I feel like — and maybe it’s a conspiracy theory — but if Obama wins in November, that this country will fall into communism.  Maybe it’s being too fearful, but I can expect anything.

RUSH: You ought to get my buddy Mark Levin’s book, Ameritopia.

CALLER: Oh.

RUSH: His point is we already have.

CALLER: Absolutely.

The leaders of the modern conservative movement—Limbaugh, Santorum, Gingrich—don’t correct this kind of stupidity, but passively ride atop it as a means to greater power—or even feed it (as Limbaugh does above).

But this is the soulless path of the demagogue. And it’s what the declining and decadent phase of what was once a romantic movement now sounds like. This is not Barry Goldwater’s movement; it’s George Wallace’s. It has no sense of proportion; no real interest in reason or truth.

If Santorum or Gingrich achieve the Republican nomination, may they be repudiated by the broader electorate at the polls in November. It will take a couple of election cycle losses before the Republican Party starts easing its way toward sanity (and even basic decency) again.

Critical Thinking Watch: Background Knowledge, Coherence, and Reflective Equilibrium

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In the context of this post, the above Amadeus clip should make sense momentarily. But what I really want to direct your attention to, after you read my set up comments here, is the below video by Massimo Pigliucci.

Pigliucci does an admirable job explaining why it’s important, when arguing, that you keep an eye on your coherence.

If, for example, you argue for the existence of ESP (extrasensory perception), one would also hope that you have some plausible physical theory that accounts for it.

For instance, let’s say you believe that a gifted psychic, using her ESP, can know, at this very instant—and by intuition alone—an event going on in Mongolia. Let’s also say you believe that nothing, including information, can travel faster than the speed of light. If so, you had better think again about the truth of either:

• your claim that ESP is real; or
• your belief that the speed of light in inviolable.

If you don’t, you’re not being especially coherent in your beliefs; you’re treating them as one would a visit to a buffet. You’re mesmerized by the sight of a little of this, a little of that, but in no particular order:

Why can’t I have two mouths? I like the look of the salad and the dessert and—however inelegant—I want to hold them both right now, on the same plate!

Of course, if you don’t have the energy for reconciling your desires or beliefs with one another, there’s always that universally human and ever handy device for being happy anyway: cognitive dissonance.

And masturbation.

Here’s Pigliucci:

2012: Love for President

The Other 1%

That would be the black Republican primary voter in South Carolina. Here’s the FOX Noise exit poll from yesterday:

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Absorb that. Blacks are 28% of South Carolina’s population, but are 1% (or less) of Republicans in the state.

How does a national party alienate an ethnic demographic in a state so completely?

Oh, I see.

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To prick the bubble of self-righteous rectitude and feigned “bravery” in Newt Gingrich’s comment—and expose his racism—simply trope, for food stamps and NAACP convention, two terms near-and-dear to the hearts (and wallets) of white farmers in the Midwest: ethanol and ethanol convention. Gingrich has not only supported federal ethanol subsidies—ethanol welfare—but lobbied for them (himself thus enjoying remuneration around the taxpayer supported ethanol trough).

Gingrich should get off the government tit and earn his money honestly, don’t you think?

And I eagerly await the day that Gingrich bravely takes on, not the black “welfare mom,” but the white “ethanol mom.” But do you think that day will ever come, or that he would frame and drive the ethanol issue at rural white voters with such an inflammatory, personal, and alienating term?

Why, then, is it perfectly acceptable, within the 2012 Republican Party, to direct, nonchalantly, such rhetorical moves toward blacks? Do a lot of Republicans really believe that the black race in America is the enemy and a substantial source for the federal government’s deficit spending?

You betcha.

Newt Grointwitch Tops Willard (Mitt Romney) in South Carolina

Evangelicals in South Carolina have spoken. For president, they prefer a thrice-married serial adulterer and unapologetic Herderian to a Mormon.

Informative.

Who ever said the world was perfect?

Andrew Sullivan lays out a plausible route forward for Republicans this year:

This is the Republican crack-up people have been predicting for years. Gingrich is on a roll. I think he can win this – and then lose this in a way that could change America history. That is a brief impression in one moment of time. But I cannot see Romney winning this at this point. [...]

[Grointwitch] will deploy race and religion and nationalism as his themes. No wonder South Carolina loved him. And rather than retreating on the racially charged “food stamp president” line, he reiterates it.

This is what the GOP now is, and it deserves its spokesman. But do not under-estimate the appeal to some of the idea of humiliating and removing the first black president. That’s what Gingrich is really about. He is giving them what they want. And it’s meat that has barely seen a skillet. [...]

He knows in his bones how to work this constituency, while of course, “fundamentally reforming the government at every level.”

Popcorn!

Glamour Girl: Barack Obama Sings Al Green

Conservatives have never quite gotten President Barack Obama’s glamour. They didn’t understand the Beatles or JFK’s glamour, either. Or, rather, they got it, but didn’t like it. The same goes for Obama’s glamour. Maybe conservatives do get it, but just don’t like it because it’s Dear Leader cultish, hardly in-keeping with an independent people.

They did ring to Ronald Reagan’s glamour, though. They embraced it without irony.

But in the Age of People Magazine, how does Boss Tweed (a.k.a. Newt Gingrich) compete, in an election, with Al Green?

I admit that Gingrich has a gloriously thick mane of healthy white-silver hair, and he carries it like an Apollonian helmet, blinding as harsh sunlight. In stage lighting, there’s beauty in the sheen of it. It supports his “one who speaks with authority” persona, and makes up (somewhat) for his otherwise Pillsbury doughiness. Gingrich leads with his head (at least in public). And, by the end of this year, that iconic visual—Gingrich as big brain with helmet mane—may capture the imagination of the electorate.

But still. Behold the competition. Our shape-shifting American Dionysus:

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And the original.

Mitt Romney, Playing the Demagogue, Tells an Occupy Protester to Love America or Leave It

In the below video is some shameless demagogic grandstanding on the part of Mitt Romney. In it, he tells an Occupy protester that his concerns are not American.

The exchange says a lot about Romney.

The Occupy protester asks him about the genuineness of Romney’s public spiritedness: what did he ever really do throughout his business career that benefited the 99%? This clearly hits a nerve with Romney, and he replies by changing the subject to an obfuscating false alternative: America, love it or leave it.

This ignores the middle ground (and the middle class). Romney implies that his business dealings are simply beyond question, and that the protester—if he doesn’t like the rules of the economic game as they are currently set in America—should move to North Korea, Cuba, Russia, or China and then “I’m glad to hear all about it”—how great one of those places is and how well its model works (presumably from a distance of thousands of miles).

This is how low Romney will go to win the Republican nomination—aping Newt Gingrich’s flippant and alienating style, and thereby giving sanction to the worst knee-jerk, anti-dialogue, and anti-intellectual impulses of the far right. It’s why Romney may well find his hold on the Republican nomination slip away from him.

To echo Harry Truman from another context, if you give Republican voters a choice between a demagogue and a demagogue, they’ll pick the demagogue every time. Romney is the fake demagogue; Gingrich the real thing.

Score Republican votes to the Gingrich column here.

Definition: What is a Fundamentalist?

The word “fundamentalist” is bandied about—most typically as an insult—across a broad range of contexts. There are:

• Muslim fundamentalists
• market fundamentalists
• Hindu fundamentalists
• Marxist fundamentalists
• Christian fundamentalists

Of course, there are other “fundamentalists”—but you’ve probably never heard someone called a Buddhist fundamentalist, and this leads to a question:

Why does the moniker “fundamentalist” seem to work in some contexts, but not in others?

What is a fundamentalist, really?

Here’s my stab at defining “fundamentalist” (as the term tends to get used in contemporary culture):

A fundamentalist is someone who, with missionary, martyr, or terrorist zeal, is doctrinaire: she or he rigidly adheres to—and actively propagandizes to others—the fundamentals of this-or-that religion or ideology as it (supposedly) first appeared on the historical scene. The fundamentalist, however, gives little serious attention to subsequent intellectual developments surrounding that religion or ideology. In other words, he or she substantially discounts or rejects Modernism, and is alienated from contemporary intellectual culture. And there are ur-texts and historical moments that take on sacred status for the fundamentalist, and they are not to be seriously questioned or reinterpreted.

To put it more concisely, a fundamentalist is someone who sings some version of the following:

Give me that old-time religion!

Hence the connection between, say, a Muslim fundamentalist and a Christian fundamentalist. Both are:

• rigidly devoted, in a doctrinaire fashion, to sacred texts;
• missionary (or worse) in their zeal; and
• battle, discount, or simply ignore the contemporary intellectual scene.

Thus we rarely—even never—hear someone called a fundamentalist Buddhist for the simple reason that so few Buddhists (at least in the West) are especially doctrinaire, obsessed with reading and following Buddhist texts literally, overtly missionary in their activities, or in intellectual flight from Modernism and secular university culture.

We also rarely hear the Pope—even Pope Benedict—called a fundamentalist because the Catholic Church, though missionary and Orthodox, seriously engages with Modernism. It does not, for example, reject biological evolution. Likewise, a professor such as Alvin Plantinga (who is a Reformed Calvinist) also generally dodges the fundamentalist label by his flexible and open intellectual engagement with the contemporary world.

Below is Johnny Cash nostalgically singing “Give Me That Old Time Religion” at a time when religious fanaticism seemed to be largely a thing of the past. Of course, in the 21st century fundamentalism has reasserted itself into history once again in a more serious fashion.

Too bad.

Salman Khan’s TED Talk and Website

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And here’s his exciting website.

Correlation-Causation Fallacy Watch: Packers Lost Sunday Because Casey’s Stupid Sister, Megan, Told Her to Put Sparkles on Her Nails

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What strikes me about this clip (apart from its humor) is Casey’s fundamentally religious intuition: the reason the Green Bay Packers lost to the New York Giants on Sunday is because the ritual guaranteeing success was not followed perfectly—with total purity. Casey’s green jersey needed to be perfect and her nails needed to be perfect (the green not tainted by things like sparkles).

What underlies Casey’s theory of why the Packers lost is akin to the Israelites attributing their exile into Babylon to a failure of sufficiently holding to the religion of Yahweh and the rituals of His temple in Jerusalem. In times of stress, humans often attribute their misfortunes to failures of appeasement—failures to conscientiously please, in every detail, the powers that have overwhelming control over their lives. In childhood, this is mommy and daddy. In adulthood, this is God (or the gods).

In this particular case, Casey was trying to manipulate the magic football-daddy-god that presides over the NFL, the god of Packer fate. But she wasn’t pure enough. Her offering was not received. Her sister Megan, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, tempted Casey away from the ritual purity the god demands, and to catastrophic effect. She is now awash in despair. Her Packers, cast out of Super Bowl contention, are in exile. She turns for comfort to yet another god, Dionysus. Casey’s impious and ironic sister, perhaps an atheist, smirks at her ridiculous and excessive religiosity, but also plays the saintly role of designated driver.

Barack Obama’s Anger Translator

Schrodinger’s Cat in 60 Seconds

An exceptionally clear explanation of the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment:

Will Computers Ever Really Be Conscious and Intelligent?

Philosopher John Searle thinks not.

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And literary critic Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times, appears to agree with Searle, offering the following as a key distinction between himself and a computer:

[I]ts procedures do not track my practice. I am not self-consciously generating a pattern of statistical frequencies. I am producing words that have been chosen because they contribute to the realization of a governing idea or a compositional plan. In fact, to say that the computer is wrong  is to give it more credit than it deserves; for right and wrong are not what it does; what it does is count (faster than I or anyone else could) and match. What it doesn’t do is begin with an awareness of a situation and an overall purpose and look around for likely courses of action within that awareness. That is because, as the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus explained almost 40 years ago,  a “computer is not in a situation” (“What Computers Can’t Do”); it has no holistic sense of context and no ability to survey  possibilities from a contextual perspective; it doesn’t begin with  what Wittgenstein terms a “form of life,”  but must build up a form of life, a world, from the only thing it has and is, “bits of context-free, completely determinate data.” And since the data, no matter how large in quantity, can never add up to a context  and will always remain discrete bits, the world can never be built.

What most strikes me in Fish’s observation is this: human beings are always in a situation. That’s the foundation for every gesture of storytelling, and it’s also what makes us human (and not computers).

Here’s some more from Fish:

[W]e  don’t walk around putting discrete items together until they add up to a context; we walk around with a contextual sense — a sense of where we are and what’s at stake and what our resources are — already in place; we  inhabit worldly spaces already organized by purposes, projects and expectations. The computer inhabits nothing and has no purposes and because it has no purposes it cannot alter its present (wholly predetermined) “behavior” when it  fails to advance the purposes it doesn’t have. When as human beings we determine that  “the data coming in make no sense”  relative to what we want to do, we can, Dreyfus explains “try a new total hypothesis,” begin afresh. A computer, in contrast, “could at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.”

This is why I would say that Aristotle’s notion of telos as a reason for why things happen in the world is still a relevant concept—at least when it comes to humans. We have beliefs, make choices, and have purposes that (at least appear to) transcend the processes of determinate things like computers (and the rest of the universe at large).

Maybe we really are de trop in the sense of being something excessive—greater than the sum of the universe’s determinate parts; free souls coming from God, who is our home (to echo Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, lines 58-71):

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He

Beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy; [...]

Presumably, no computer will ever consciously see or experience anything, let alone joy.

So why are we here?