Friday, 6 August 2010 by bbbeard.

Continuing the documentation of the determinism thread… BBB wrote:

Well, by all means, take me up on my challenge — formulate a principle of determinism and let’s have at it. You seem to be satisfied to voice increasingly vague arguments about determinism, but it is unclear to me what you mean by the term.

I finished the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom a couple of days ago. I think you might be one of the few people who might be able to address it in its proper spirit. Which is to say, there are certain people for whom any hint of mysticism is enough to validate, and others for whom any religiosity is enough to invalidate. But the Dalai Lama’s approach is quite refreshing, I think. He is willing to spend some time explaining some convoluted doctrine, and then add his own comment, such as “I have never understood why this view was reasonable” and then explain his objections. He is a man of great kindness and humility. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this book, for me — and the thing that distinguishes him from other folks like Fritjof Capra — is that over many decades he has moved in what you would call elevated circles, and been able to cultivate friendships with some of the most insightful people in science and philosophy in the twentieth century. Without a hint of self-importance, he discusses his sustained relationships with people like David Bohm, Carl von Weizsacker, and Karl Popper. His international connections have opened doors to people like Richard Davidson, Anne Harrington, Paul Davies — and Eric Lander.

So anyway, here’s some of what the Dalai Lama relates concerning the free-will / determinism antinomy:

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the “conventional” and the “ultimate,” relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identity and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic — such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle  — to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one’s death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is “empty” in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being….

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one’s understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error….

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we’re connected to.

So it would appear that this coming-to-terms would be sufficiently dualistic to satisfy your yen. The Dalai Lama has a good deal more to say about this subject and its relation to modern science, but I advise you read the book.

It seems to me that the kind of predictability to which you refer in physical experimentation revolves around conserved quantities. Four-momentum is always conserved. But that doesn’t place much of a constraint on things. In a two-body decay (e.g. alpha production), conservation of 4-momentum is enough to determine the alpha’s energy (but not its direction), given the initial and final masses of the nuclides. But three-body decay is different, e.g. the decay of a beta emitter into daughter nuclide, beta-minus, and antineutrino gives rise to a spectrum of energies.because the end-state energies are insufficiently determined by 4-momentum conservation. So. We know there are a handful of conserved quantities — 4-momentum, electric charge, angular momentum, baryon number, etc. but these are only sufficient to determine the end states for certain classes of reaction. So I don’t think this has anything to do with your (still unformulated) determinism.

It seems to me that your other examples are of a species I would call “contingent determinism”. That is, the outcome of some measurement, or the behavior of some object, can be forecast, provided that nothing that would change the outcome intervenes. A cynic might call this “tautological determinism”. It is one way to avoid facing the relativistic indeterminism I mentioned in the last post but it really solves nothing.

A personal anecdote addresses your question about clocks. I own a nice big Invicta wristwatch. Had you asked me last week what time it would show right now, I might have guessed “6:48 pm Central Standard Time”. But I would have been wrong, you see. Because I happened to drop my nice Invicta on the floor of the bathroom last Friday and it stopped working a few hours later. So it now shows 12:36 (right twice a day, just as predicted).

Funny thing, moral culpability. On the one hand, some folks (like Alan Dershowitz) argue for a restrictive interpretation of moral culpability. They feel that conditions like mental incapacity, or the inability to tell “right” from “wrong”, should exempt some humans from moral culpability. I would say the broader Buddhist view is that all sentient beings participate in the cycle of karma, but that moral culpability per se is a “conventional level” concept that we use to ground our system of ethics. I think a number of science fiction authors have tackled the concept of moral culpability in alien and other variant forms. Obviously Kirk thinks it is reasonable to hold Klingons and Romulans (and hortas?) to human standards of culpability. Androids and clones, of course, were dealt with in the Alien movie series and Blade Runner, speaking of Philip K. Dick.

Ironically, when #2 Son G is trying to evade responsibility for causing some foreseeable disaster, he exclaims, “It was an accident!”, i.e. the result was unintentional. Perhaps instead he should say, “It was pre-determined!” and thereby avoid culpability altogether.

BBB

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Friday, 6 August 2010 by CVM.

Following up on documenting our discussion of determinism, here is CVM’s response to the previous post:

As to dualism, that is my model, yes, even though I’d be the first to admit that it is unlikely that there is any “real” sense in which the two fundamentally different substances exist.

Never read “Einstein’s Dreams“.  I read “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe” and was turned off by his poetic conflation of memory and physics.  However, I have seen the book and was intrigued — next time it comes up I’ll take a look.

Your argument about determinism and relatively is interesting and new to me — indeed, most texts I have read have suggested that the theory of relativity is firmly deterministic, as indeed the great man himself seems to have believed, but then again, he seems to have believed quantum mechanics is deterministic too, so there you go.

However, your arguments about relativity smack a bit to me of Hume — yes, in principle I agree that the universe need not, perhaps is not, deterministic, but then again there are those pesky measurements, testing both quantum mechanics and relativity, that repeatedly agree with both theories down to the, I don’t know, trillionth decimal place or something (Feynman had some kind of analogy about the precision was as if you could measure the distance between New York and L.A. with the precision to the width of a human hair). That of course is no guarantee of future performance, but I wouldn’t bet a lot that your mileage may vary- while there may very well be influences in our absolute elsewhere, they don’t seem to have had much impact so far.

Strangely, though your arguments invoke science, they seem metaphysical to me.  The problem I put before you was that we hold humans morally accountable in a way we don’t hold other beings, yet there is not reason to believe humans are less (or in your case, more) deterministic than other beings. So what’s the difference?   The gist of your argument seems to be that since we don’t live in a deterministic universe, there is no barrier to ascribing moral responsibility. That’s got promise, but then we have to address why conscious beings are reasonably held morally responsible, but, for examples, computers are not (unless you want to go all Philip K. Dick on me).  As we have discussed, in my model at least computers behave deterministically, though you somewhat snarkily evaded this hypothesis.  How, then, about a clock?

An interesting solution might be that moral responsibility only makes sense in the context of conscious belief in free will (whether or not that belief is true, so we need not get into ontology).  That would rule out clocks, and possibly even variously incapacitated humans, but maybe not electric androids.  If one then accepts your argument against determinism (which however doesn’t explain clocks) this would neatly solve the problem.

As to a Buddhist treatment of free will, I’m all ears.  As I suggested before the dissolution of the self goes a long way toward solving the problem, and, though I agree that this a profound idea, it’s tough to put into practice.  It’s interesting however what the dissolution of the self does to the concept of free will: doesn’t make much sense then does it? I mean, what then is said to be free?

Looking forward to your further disquisition on Buddhism and moral responsibility- and also a description of your personal Buddhist praxis (e.g., meditation?).

CVM

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Thursday, 25 February 2010 by bbbeard.

Valerie Jarrett explains it all.

If the Obama administration wants to  get people feeling better, they should write more knee-slapping one-liners like that.

Still ROFLMAO….

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Wednesday, 4 November 2009 by bbbeard.

Do I detect a sense of panic at the ABC News website tonight?

Just keep saying that to yourself.

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Tuesday, 27 October 2009 by bbbeard.

From Lincoln to Carter to Caesar. Spengler would be proud.

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Monday, 26 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Thursday, 8 October 2009 by bbbeard.

First, a cautionary tale. Some time ago I read a critique of multiculturalism, the central parable of which went as follows: it seems that there was once a classics professor, tasked with teaching a sophomore course in Plato’s Apology. As the professor explains:

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture?  Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?

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Tuesday, 6 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Michelle Malkin has tweaked the other Michelle about her remembrance of things past — specifically, about her memories of sitting in her daddy’s lap while watching Carl Lewis at the Olympics. The fact that Michelle O was 20 years old when Lewis first ran in the Olympics makes her remark a trifle unsettling. Well, okay, in fairness, MO started her sentence by referring to Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, earlier competitors, but the sentence doesn’t parse in any way that is flattering either to her or to her dad. Maybe Barack was borrowing the teleprompter. And fair’s fair, W was pilloried for less creepy assaults on his mother tongue. As it were.

In any case, it put me in mind of our President’s strange detachment from facts about the past. There have been gross errors in interpretation, as when he expressed a belief that leaders like FDR and Kennedy showed the path of virtue by negotiating with our enemies. Well, Kennedy did at least have a summit with Khrushchev, although the summit itself has been described as “disastrous”. But FDR never met with any Axis leader; nor was Joseph Stalin considered an enemy to the United States during FDR’s lifetime. But there have also been peculiar personal exaggerations, as when Obama claimed his parents met because of the (1965) march on Selma — which happened four years after BHO was born. And he has engaged in unnecessary mangling of family history, too, as when he claimed his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz, Buchenwald — so sue me!

My personal favorite is when he credited Muslims with inventing the magnetic compass, an assertion that no doubt came as a surprise to our Chinese friends. This claim came in his Cairo speech, in which he more egregiously (and erroneously) claimed that John Adams wrote “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” Those words appear in the English version of the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, and are attributed to Joel Barlow, not John Adams. Of course, the fact that Obama even thought it was a good idea to bring up the Treaty of Tripoli in an entreaty to the Muslim world is baffling. The Pasha of Tripoli abrogated the Treaty in 1801 when Jefferson refused to pay, initiating a chain of events that are memorialized in the Marines’ Hymn.

Most recently, he visited the United Nations and claimed “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside.” Again, this is a very odd statement from a self-proclaimed “student of history”. One imagines the German and Japanese Ambassadors exchanging puzzled glances over this claim, thinking their translators had malfunctioned.

I fear that we are led by a man whose “study” of history has been seriously distorted by the Marxists he sought out on the Columbia campus, by the race-baiter in the pews of whose church he sat for twenty years, by the political allies he made in Chicago, and by the friends he has chosen to man his administration and to help draft legislation.

In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler urged his readers to understand the times in which they live, in order that they might participate in history and not merely stand outside as spectators. Obama seems to have intuited that, at this moment of world history, the Leader has no need for Comprehension, for Understanding of What Is, for Appreciation of What Has Gone Before, the Leader only has a need to have a vision of What the World Could Be. His dwindling but still-numerous followers seem to agree.

And that is a cause for apprehension.

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Wednesday, 5 August 2009 by bbbeard.

One of the minor stories making the rounds of the blogs this week is about an anonymous artist who is posting a depiction of President Obama as the Joker from The Dark Knight.

Reactions range from chuckles on the right to hysteria on the left.

Personally, I found a revelatory moment in this. My entire life has been lived in the era of “modern art”, promulgated for the most part by talentless hacks who hide behind any of a number of rubrics, e.g. “art is about challenging our preconceptions”, “art is about getting us to see things differently”, “art is about knocking out the scaffolding under the structure of power”, “art is about getting government money from the National Endowment for the Arts” &c.

Here at last is a true specimen of what those modart poseurs were claiming to try to achieve (well, except for the NEA part). The poster attacks and undercuts the most powerful man in the world with visceral imagery — tied cleverly to pop culture — and a single loaded word, “socialism”, that carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. The subversive message cannot be countered or argued away, because the message is visceral and not intellectualized. It is aesthetic precisely because it is a tonic to counter our anesthetic age.

It’s not hard to find commenters who are baffled by the association of the statist Obama with the anarchist Joker, but to me the message is clear: Obama is a person bent on destroying the ‘old’ order of this country (in which freedom is a higher value than equality), and he is using the even older tropes of the left to do it. Obamaphiles can’t see this happening, of course, so they are bewildered by the spreading anger that this President inspires. They lash out with charges of racism, and try to diminish the poster as “dangerous and mean“. They really don’t “get it”. Their outrage is undercut, as usual, by their record of passivity in response to similar images of the previous occupant of the White House.

The anonymity of the artist lends an air of credibility — literally “street cred” in this case — to this satire. An anonymous street artist speaks volumes with a single image, while the Bush-bashing images of incorporated media like Vanity Fair (Bush as Joker) and LA Weekly (Bush as Vampire) and the New York Times (Bush as Frankenstein/Hitler) are merely tired and asinine.

And to those who might find anonymous posters unfair and disturbing, I suggest that the government-organized cult of personality around President Obama is far more creepy.  A thousand U.S. elementary students make the world’s largest beaded mosaic to celebrate the leader’s birthday!? Yes, we can! Remind you of anybody?

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Friday, 31 July 2009 by bbbeard.

WASHINGTON.D.C. (BBB) — The Obama administration today touted the latest results of the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, said to an admiring press corps, “We would like people to note that the latest results of the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll are tout-worthy. In particular we want to focus on the unprecedented number of likely voters who feel strongly about President Obama. Early in this administration, we struggled with ’strongly’ numbers in the low 60%-ish range, but our non-stop efforts to engage Americans in the political process have boosted the total number of strongly feeling voters into the 70% range.”

After uncharacteristically pointed questions about the proportion of strongly feeling voters who actually approve of the President, Gibbs urged the press corps to focus on the overall trend, and not try to “micro-interpret” subcategories of poll results. “We feel the hard part is getting people to feel engaged in the political process, and we feel we’ve been doing a great job with that. We don’t want to dwell on day-to-day shifts in ‘approve/disapprove’ numbers because in the long run those don’t count nearly as much as getting people involved. We like to say, ‘We are the people you’ve been waiting on. Um, for.’ ”

For a closer view of the trends in the Rasmussen poll, click on the thumbnail below.

For a closer look at the “not strongly” voters, click on the next thumbnail:

Asked what it would take to get more of the “weakly feeling” likely voters to feel strongly about the President, Mr. Gibbs suggested that upcoming plans to bring the overnight package delivery business up to the government standards would be a centerpiece of fall plans to rejuvenate the economy. “Once we purge greedy doctors, greedy bankers, and greedy oil companies from the public square, it will be time to purge greedy overnight package delivery companies. You know, why should it be fifty times the cost of stamp to deliver a package overnight? Americans pay a higher percentage of their GDP to overnight package delivery companies than any other country. We are way overdue for reform. And our polls indicate that this issue will help more people than ever feel strongly about the Obama Presidency.”

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