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Name: Patrick Country: United States State: Michigan Metro: Ann Arbor Gender: Male
Interests: Friendship, love, writing, psychology, physics, philosophy, ethics, science, photography, art, gaming, technology, computing Expertise: My skills are primarily in writing, science, and mathematics, though I have a knack for Latin, I'm pretty good at painting and photography, and I'm not atrocious at drawing, singing, or composing. Not much of an athlete, nor do I care to be, though I do try to stay fit and eat right. I'm still working on that whole relationship business. Love is hard to find. Occupation: Student, Researcher, Author Industry: Literature, Science, Education
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Member Since:
5/3/2005
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| These are the first 21 lines:
I tell a tale of men and war, and of a
man
Who saved the world but never fired a
single gun;
I tell of how a war of guns and planes
was won
By reason and by science, at least as
much as bombs.
His enemy is known as the epitome
Of evil, violent hatred and of greed
for power;
His name forever lives in highest
infamy:
Heir Adolf Hitler, fuhrer of great
Germany.
Yet he is not known quite so well; his
name remains
In “tests”, in “theses” and
“machines” that bear his sign;
It's Alan Turing, FRS and OBE;
A hero whose sad tragedy defines our
time.
For Turing after vict'ry was betrayed,
by those
He loved and nations he had served and
even saved;
How fickle England: highest honors
turned to chains
Because of Alan's love that dare not
speak its name.
Thus not by gods, scarcely by chance,
and not by fate,
Was great and noble hero of out time
destroyed;
By men,
by human hands, was done this evil crime.
Small
consolation can I offer him today:
At
least I'll sigh, and speak his name and tell his tale.
| | |
| Basically Nandy is
a religious man trying to excuse inexcusable acts by religious men on
the grounds that they wouldn't have happened if it weren't for other,
secularist men. Keep this absurd undercurrent in mind as you read my
response; whatever else there is to say about this essay, keep in
mind just how crazy it is to
blame sectarian violence on secularism, how obviously backward the
reasoning must be necessarily.
I'm
being required to read this essay for a class, a seminar on “politics
of religion and secularism” run by a professor who is the worst
kind of faitheist. He actually tried to claim that people can and
should believe in faith as trust in God without believing in faith as
belief in God. Stop for a moment and think about what this would
mean: I trust my mother to tell me the right things, but of course my
mother doesn't actually exist. I believe that unicorns will make the
world a better place, but of course there are no such things as
unicorns. (He admitted that my logic is undeniable, yet didn't seem
to care; this was all the more frustrating, since it implies that he
has forsaken rational thought.) Yes, this is the state-of-the-art in
faitheist discourse.
It
was this paragraph that inspired me to blog a response: “Secularism
has little to say about cultures—it is definitionally ethnophobic
and frequently ethnocidal, unless of course cultures and those living
by cultures are willing to show total subservience to the modern
nation-state and become ornaments or adjuncts to modern living—and
the orthodox secularists have no clue to the way a religion can link
up different faiths or ways of life according to its own
configurative principles.”
Whatever this is, it isn't secularism.
Secularism as I understand it—as I advocate it—is explicitly
pluralistic; it destroys “cultures” only in the sense that it
integrates culture—gives
access to cultural arts and experiences from all societies for all
human beings. It destroys us-them thinking,
not cultural complexity. My secularism is reading the Bhagavad-Gita
while standing in the Sistine Chapel and wearing a kilt and a
Bluetooth headset. In the future I imagine, there would be no
Muslims, no Catholics, no Buddhists, only humans, humans
who are social and cultural animals. I've no love of the
nation-state; I think it is at present a necessary evil, and I would
very much like to see it die in favor of a species-state or indeed an
ecosystem-state. Government is clearly effective at securing
stability and preventing violence; but nationalism is fundamentally
evil.
Nandy
makes a distinction early in the essay that he hardly ever uses
later, between “religion-as-faith” and “religion-as-ideology”
(I would use instead the words “religion-as-culture” and
“religion-as-belief”, but the taxonomy is similar); insofar as
this distinction works, I agree with it wholeheartedly, as would any
of the New Atheists. Richard Dawkins says grace and celebrates
Christmas. Sam Harris often writes of the wisdom in Buddhist
literature. Salman Rushdie frequently speaks about the Muslim
cultural values he believes in. The people who have made a false
association between these two categories are not the atheists, they
are the religionists; they are the people who think that you can't
respect the Bible as literature without believing that Jesus rose
from the dead. A pluralistic, metaphorical, cultural experience of
religion is precisely what we New Atheists are trying to
achieve. If that's really what
you want, you agree with us.
Nandy
also goes on about “theories of self” without any actual
evidence; all the psychological evidence I've studied shows that
people around the world, regardless of cultural identification, are
capable of both a fixed and a fluid concept of self.
Nandy's
conception of “two definitions of secularism” is more useful; he
is right that “be religious at home, but secular in public” is a
highly problematic notion. This is why we New Atheists argue for “be
secular everywhere”;
we think religious belief and religious ideology are fundamentally
evil things, and would like to see them eradicated. Separation of
Church and State only makes sense if we agree that there must be such
a thing as Church; New Atheists precisely deny this. On the other
hand, Nandy's second definition is even worse: respect for all
religions is precisely the opposite of what makes rational sense.
Respect for ideas and practices must be earned by
the validity of those ideas and practices.
“His
contemporary, Joseph Bradlaugh, on the other hand, believed in a
secularism which rejected religion and made science its deity.”
Well, except for the idiocy of saying “science its deity”—clearly
you know nothing of science and little of theology, for science is a
methodology, not an ideology, and it is nothing even remotely like a
being—this is in fact the secularism I agree with. Science is true,
religion is false; we need no further reason to believe science and
reject religion.
He
then speaks of a hierarchy of belief; the only change I would make is
to say that people who are religious in public but not in private are
the worst kind of
people, worse even than true believers. The first two I entirely
agree with: Rationalists are better than secular theists who are
better than everyone else.
Nandy
is a fan of ridiculous proclamations about secularism; I doubt anyone
seriously thinks that Britain dominated India because Britain was
secular and India wasn't. I certainly don't think that—gunpowder
and industrialization are far more obvious reasons. Moreover, it's
clear that the violence in “secular” Ireland is motivated as much
by cultural and religious identity as the violence in “religious”
India.
I
feel no obligation to defend the way India was run by the British;
while secular, it was also evil in plenty of other ways.
And
yet another ridiculous proclamation: “To
many Indians today, secularism comes as a part of a larger package
consisting of a set of standardized ideological products and social
processes—development, mega-science, and national security being
some of the most prominent among them.” So
far this is true, except I'm not sure what “mega-science” is as
distinct from plain old science.
“This package often plays the same role vis-a-vis”
(anytime someone says “vis-a-vis”, expect nonsense to follow;
it's an effective heuristic) “the
people of society—sanctioning or justifying violence against the
weak and the dissenting—that the church, the ulema,
the sangha,
or the Brahmans played in
earlier times.” And now
he's gone off the deep end. I challenge you to name one—just
one—New Atheist who
has once—just
once—advocated
violence against religious people. You can't do it, can you? And yet,
I can find thousands of
examples of religious people advocating violence against people who
disagree with their religion. Maybe millions. The
closest example I can find in secularism comes from Communist
tyrants; yet, none of them were actually rational, none of them
believed in Enlightenment values, and all of them were insane
megalomaniacs. That isn't secularism, it's madness. Such people are
beyond the pale of moral behavior, and I do not consider them my
allies.
Nandy
also likes making assertions without evidence, or even in the face of
obvious counter-evidence: “Finally,
the belief that values derived from the secular ideology of the
state” (like
freedom, equality, justice, the
dignity of humanity?) “would
be a better guide to political action and a more tolerant and richer
political life” (like
that actually enjoyed in secular countries?) “(as
compared to the values derived from the religious faiths)”
(like racism, sexism, bigotry, genocide, sectarian violence,
irrationality? Oh, and “don't kill people”, because that's not a
value secularists believe in?) “has
become even more untenable to large parts of Indian society than it
was a decade ago.”
Only
when he actually makes substantive historical claims does Nandy begin
to sound reasonable: “It
is not modern India which has tolerated Judaism in India for nearly
2000 years, Christianity from before the time it went to Europe, and
Zoroastrianism for more than 1200 years; it is traditional India
which has shown such tolerance.” This
could indeed be correct; I somewhat doubt it, given the history of
sectarian violence in the rest of the world, but perhaps its true. If
so, all that shows is that the forced
transition to
modernity causes violence—something I do not doubt. It does nothing
to show that modernity
itself
is harmful—to do that, Nandy would need to show that Sweden is a
more violent and horrifying place than India or indeed Congo or Saudi
Arabia. I'm fairly certain he can't do this. And even so, Nandy
trusts ancient records to be accurate and comprehensive, which is an
absurd trust to have. Even if no one wrote
about violence,
that doesn't mean violence wasn't happening. Maybe it wasn't—but we
simply don't know. What few written records we have from the time
period (ahem, The
Bible? The Qur'an?)
are simply chock-full of genocidal violence, depicted as if it is
completely normal and acceptable.
In
general, Nandy hates modernity because it challenges his own
religious beliefs, and he is trying to convince us that modern times
are more violent than the past, when the evidence shows precisely the
opposite. Even the most horrible acts of modern times—Hitler,
Stalin, Pol Pot—were the sort of act that was commonplace in
ancient times. The Bible, the Qur'an, the Odyssey, the Aeneid... all
the ancient texts we have verify that life was brutally violent for
everyone. Genocide used to be a way of life for religious humanity.
We feel more violent now paradoxically because we are less violent;
we are more aware
of
the violence and how terrible it is, so when we do still see it on
occasion we are more horrified by it.
Overall,
I am convinced that Nandy has nothing useful to say, because he
systematically distorts secular ideology in order to defend some
weird form of “religion” that no one actually believes—except
perhaps we New Atheists.
| | |
| It's working for me so far; for lunch
today I am eating such things as mashed lentils and fluorinated tap
water with a feeling of privilege. Usually a chore, the salad bar now
feels like an honor. The
Pepsi I would normally enjoy with lunch now feels criminal.
Consider
my consciousness raised.
I
think I'll call this the “perspective diet”. It is the diet one
begins to eat when one finally internalizes the knowledge that
millions of people around the world are facing starvation. It is the
diet that happens when you realize that the food you had been taking
for granted is in fact a survival need that many people have trouble
meeting. It is the diet one eats when food becomes once again
biological instead of
recreational.
What
brought this on? Well, I'm taking a course called “Global Justice:
Social Theory and Practice” (currently listed as RCSSCI 360-005,
though I'm told next year it will be either PHIL 224 or ECON 224);
nothing like reading Peter Singer's “Famine, Affluence, and
Morality” and watching Eduardo Coutinho's Boca de Lixo to
change your perspective on economics, politics, and, yes, food.
What
is Boca de Lixo? It's
a little hard to find online, since it shares its name with many
other things, probably as an intentional remark on those other
things. It is a documentary telling the story of garbage-scavengers
in Brazil, people who literally work 16-hour days digging through
garbage searching for scraps of metal to sell and scraps of food to
feed their children. A whole subculture has grown up around these
garbage scavengers; people live and marry and die never leaving the
community of garbage-scavenging. Others have begun living this way
after losing their jobs in other industries, like fishing and auto
repair.
For
me, the first change has been to realize just how much I take food
for granted, and how much of my slightly-overweight condition is due
to this fact. Living middle class in the world's richest nation, I
simply presume that there will always be fresh food and clean water.
My nutrition is not in jeopardy, so I am free to choose foods that
will maximize my pleasure—usually fattening corn syrup products. I
don't actually have to work to survive, so I can get by with minimal
exercise. I have access to high-tech medical care, so the risk of
diabetes I'm incurring doesn't frighten me.
Meanwhile,
my own frustrations about swine flu and the University of Michigan
bureaucracy suddenly seem... beside the point.
| | |
| Virus of the Mind could have
been a truly great book, on par at least with The Selfish Gene
(Richard Dawkins) and The
Language Instinct (Steven
Pinker) in its clear
explanation of frontier science, but it failed at this; instead it is
merely a mediocre book, worth reading in its own way, but not nearly
as good as it might have been.
Brodie does
display an enthusiasm for memetics, and for the most part has a good
understanding of the theory, but he makes some fundamental errors
that call his entire argument into question. He has an engaging and
readable style, which is no doubt why his books sell very well—their
memetic fitness is high. But his errors and misstatements are too
significant to ignore.
First, he does not
understand entropy. He essentially uses the Creationist definition,
and then in a stroke of boldness declares that evolution is the
opposite of entropy—in essence, he is agreeing that evolution
violates thermodynamics and then saying that it is thermodynamics
which is in error. He writes (p.49), “Evolution is a scientific
model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things
become simpler. They are the creative and destructive forces of the
universe.” This is wrong. It's not even an oversimplification;
it's just basically wrong.
Evolution
is a scientific model of how imperfectly hereditary
replicators change over time. Every
word here is necessary (except perhaps over, which
as Pinker would note merely serves to give time a
case): the entities in question must replicate
(copy themselves) with some heredity
(offspring similar to parents) but only imperfectly
(some errors and changes are made); the result will be change
(future generations more adapted to their environment), but this
requires time (many
generations of replication). Complexity isn't really the concern
here. It is true that evolution can add complexity; but evolution can
also remove complexity. Evolution adapts replicators to their
environment; it adds complexity when (and only when) complexity
serves fitness.
Entropy is a
physical quantity representing the amount of thermodynamic
information that is inaccessible at the macroscale. S = k ln W.
Entropy describes the data loss in transition from “ensemble of
protons and electrons with the following positions and velocities:
[list of 10^26 variables]” to “1 kilogram of pure water at
equilibrium at 274 Kelvin.” Another way of looking at entropy is
“energy per temperature”; as the energy in a system becomes more
and more devoted to temperature rather than other forms of energy
(e.g. mass, electricity, gravity), the entropy of that system
increases. DH = DG + T DS. [read the D as a capital Delta]. In many
cases this does fit with our concept of “disorder”, since a
highly-ordered crystal is usually of lower entropy than an amorphous
mass of liquid, and a human being is of lower entropy than a rotting
mass of flesh. But this is not always the case; the entropy of a 60
kg mass of bacteria is not much higher than the entropy of a 60 kg
human (both are quite low, which is why both need to metabolize
constantly to maintain their homeostasis). Further, pseudocrystals
actually violate this pattern, having high-order high-entropy states.
If you mean to say “disorder”, say “disorder”; if you use the
word “entropy”, you should be talking about thermodynamics.
Evolution is
entirely consistent with thermodynamics, and both can create either
complexity or disorder under particular circumstances.
His analysis of
human mating behavior borders on sexism, though he is careful to
straddle the line between scientific facts and pop-psych
simplifications. Except when being plainly flippant or facetious,
Brodie does not ever actually assert anything about human mating that
isn't true; he merely delivers it in an insensitive and sometimes
crass way, probably to garner attention.
It is
in fact the case that in general, males have a stronger Darwinian
motive to seek many mates, and females have a stronger Darwinian
motive to seek a single, high-quality mate. Nonetheless, human beings
are very complicated, their number of offspring is very low, and
their parental investment is very high; all of this mitigates against
the image of “promiscuous male, monogamous female” without even
considering the contribution of society, religion, ethical norms, or
traditional practices. Humans have a very odd sort of mating
strategy; it's something like “polygynous and/or monogamous and/or
polyamorous, but mostly really confused”. I actually think serial
monogamy is what most people are most comfortable with, what they
would incline to naturally if they were offered the choice. Yet
temptations toward other ways of life are always present, and
consequences for transgression always enacted. It seems to be in
human nature to be confused and frustrated by sex. (We may not be
alone in this.)
Moreover,
the explanations of “men and women are different” or “women are
complicated” could only have been written by heterosexuals. As a
bisexual person, I think I can speak especially well to this: people
are different, and people
are complicated. Forming and
maintaining a happy, satisfying relationship is not substantially
easier with people of the same sex than it would be with people of
the other sex. This is true whether or not you want sex—and woe to
those who want sex with those who do not want sex with them. Indeed,
given all the various kinds of relationships we form with other
people—colleague, superior, subordinate, friend, acquaintance,
citizen, leader, buyer, seller, enemy, ally, lover, one-night-stand,
partner, spouse—it's not clear to me that sex (either the act or
the trait) has much to do with it. Sex isn't completely irrelevant,
but it's far from the only consideration, and often not even the
primary one. Nor are sex differences very explanatory, since humans
are so barely dimorphic that our within-sex variation vastly
outstrips our between-sex variation. “Vive la
difference!”? Vive
que difference? Do you refer to
the medium effect-size in mean muscle mass and height? Or the small
effect-size in average promiscuity and sex drive? Or the even smaller
effect-size in mean visual-spatial scores? Honestly the only things I
can see that really constitute the difference between sexes are those
that are true by definition—namely
primary and secondary sex characteristics. Men have penises, women
have vaginas; women have breasts and men don't. To me, that seems to
be about it.
Brodie
also writes like a self-help author, always entreating us to make our
lives better and more meaningful; this is probably because he is
a self-help author—all his
previous books have been on self-help, not science. At times he gives
the impression of a charismatic charlatan, who really has nothing
worthwhile to say, but is so very uplifting in the way he says it.
This
isn't quite a fair assessment, since Brodie does occasionally have
insights to offer. His image of a “virus of the mind” is both
compelling and reasonably accurate. His analysis of “levels of
experience” (survival at level 1, productivity at level 2, and
transcendence at level 3) is simplistic, yet sensible; he explicitly
bases his reasoning on Maslow, whose ideas are well-supported and
quite respected in the psychological community. He speaks of the
quiet desperation of ordinary men, and I share this sense; indeed,
being both of philosophical mind and chronic depressive disorder, I
feel it particularly intensely. Still, Brodie overstates his case and
oversimplifies the issues; it's not enough that we convince
ourselves we are happy and
transcendent, we must actually seek happiness and transcendence. The
latter quest is what is genuinely worthwhile, though surely it is
more difficult and more prone to failure. But unless the happy
schizophrenic is Brodie's goal, he should be more careful about
claiming that the search for pleasant and uplifting memes is our
primary objective.
All
this would be bad enough, but the book is really far worse than this.
Throughout it Brodie makes a series of halfhearted forays into
postmodernism. He talks about distinctions, and claims they are all
arbitrary (p. 19-20). He starts with the example of “The State of
Alabama”; this is surely a paradigmatic example of an arbitrary
distinction. Alabama is not a natural kind, and has no physical
existence. Then he expands this to “the Earth”, which is a little
more dubious—there does really seem to be something different about
the Earth compared to the space around it—but might still work,
since ultimately what constitutes “atmosphere” and what
constitutes “outer space” is a fuzzy-edged and somewhat arbitrary
thing. But then he goes off the deep end, asserting that “you”—by
which he means your identity as a conscious agent—is
a purely arbitrary distinction. This is clearly wrong; there really
are certain things that I can do, being me, to myself, that you
cannot do to me, because you are yourself. Moreover, in the rest of
the book Brodie depends upon this distinction, because otherwise he
could not entreat us to make decisions about what we believe (what
memes we allow to program us); one does not entreat the universe as a
system to change its configuration. (In fact, what Brodie does not
seem to grasp is that memes are at their core units of meaning,
something only intelligent
beings can access. To be “programmed by memes” is really to be
persuaded by
propositions,
precisely the sort of thing a rational being ought to be doing.) He
then proceeds to undermine his entire argument by saying that the
distinction between reality and concepts is yet another arbitrary
distinction.
He
then goes on to deny the existence of truth (p. 31-2). This is
incredibly stupid, and frankly it made me wonder if Brodie
understands the words he is saying or is merely some sort of
imitative automaton. He capitalizes True and Truth as if to frighten
us; yet his whole argument—indeed, any argument for
anything—depends upon the
presumption that there is an objective fact of the matter
to be discovered and understood.
The particular examples he gives are indeed heuristic approximations
useful for some purposes but not others; but this does absolutely
nothing to undermine the fact that some statements are objectively
false and others are objectively true.
Brodie writes,
“The truth of any proposition depends upon the assumptions you make
in considering it—the distinction-memes you use in thinking about
it.” (p.31). This is either trivial, false, or meaningless.
It is trivial if
all we mean by “assumptions” is the semantics and syntax of the
statement being expressed, so that we can articulate the proposition
it expresses. “2+2=4” wouldn't mean anything to someone who had
never used the Arabic numeral system, and it might not seem like an
objective truth if the speaker and the listener did not agree on the
presumption that the domain under consideration is the integers.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that “2+2=4” is an objectively
true fact.
It is
false if by “assumptions” we mean the conceptual paradigms and
presumed facts that we already have about the topic at hand. This
seems to be what Brodie is trying to suggest—that “2+2=4” could
be true for one person, who uses one paradigm, and false for another
person, who uses another paradigm. Yet insofar as both parties
understand what is being said and what it is being said about, if
they disagree then at least one of them is wrong. When someone
asserts that the Earth is 6000 years old, that person is wrong; they
presume things about the universe that are untrue. They are blind to
the evidence, or utilize the evidence incorrectly, or think
illogically, or else have been brainwashed by the force of some
powerful memes of delusion. Yes, the statement seems true in their
paradigm; that's because their paradigm is fundamentally
incorrect.
Finally,
it is meaningless if we take the word “assumptions” to be so
broad that anyone can legitimately assume anything about anything.
If all possible syntaxes and semantics are equally valid in analyzing
Brodie's statement, then what I read as “The truth of any
proposition” someone else could read as “Yellow elephants” or
even “view dangerously” (this is tricky to articulate; the sense
is something like, what “Yellow elephants” means to me could be
the same as what “The truth of any proposition” means to someone
else). If we allow assumptions and paradigms to be this broad, then
it is not even clear what we are talking about when we assert
something about assumptions and paradigms—indeed, it is not clear
that we can assert anything
at all. Cognitive content and expressive symbol become unhinged. We
are making noises and creating little marks on pages, but nothing we
say has any real meaning.
Ultimately,
I think Brodie was seduced by the power of memetic theory to explain
human behavior, and forgot to include the fact that some memes have
power precisely because they are correct. The
human brain evolved to reproduce human genes—of this there can be
no doubt—but in the process of doing so it gained a remarkable
capacity not found in much else in the universe: the capacity to
reason, to discern
truth from falsehood.
It does so with difficulty, and
often in error; yet it does so nonetheless. A RAM chip will store a
sequence of binary digits regardless of its meaning, yet a human
brain will demand consistency and
sense in the memes it
accepts. Indeed, the wonder of the human brain lies in its capacity
to in some sense transcend syntax and achieve semantics—this
capacity has troubled us in Searle's Chinese Room and thereby become
subsumed as a facet of the Hard Problem. On the one hand we can feel;
on the other hand we can mean.
Experience and intentionality;
these two facets of our existence (Are they related? We sense that
they are, but cannot be sure) comprise the most difficult questions
we have ever asked in our science. Brodie simply brushes them aside
as if they were unimportant, or even meaningless. Where behaviorists
said “it's all action potentials”, Brodie says “it's all
memes”. Both are in some sense true—surely it is,
indeed, action potentials, and
it is, indeed,
memes—yet both are missing something, a level of analysis, or a
theoretical breakthrough, that would explain how in fact action
potentials are memes
are meanings. Because
we lack this theoretical understanding, we are unsatisfied by
analogies to “there is no water, it's all just H2O” (we can see
how water and H2O are the same thing); yet this must be the
way of the universe. Whatever minds are made of, they are made of
stuff, and stuff
follows the laws of physics,
whatever they may be. Identity-monism is an inevitable consequence of
the fact that we exist and we think—which, per Descartes, is an
inevitable consequence of the fact that we think. I think, therefore
I am made of stuff.
| | |
| I'm convinced; the Rabbit is a great and holy mystery. Miranda Celeste Hale has convinced me. | | |
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