Miscellany

Modern cool

Occasionally the demands of the tangible world — unpacking after a recent move, for example, or even trying to be a good scientist — make it hard to indulge in blogging. Fortunately, wiser minds than my own have developed all sorts of coping strategies, such as the Sunday Song Lyrics you’ll find at the Volokh Conspiracy.

So here is a Sunday Song Lyric of my own. In honor of moving, I’ll offer up the first song that really struck me upon moving to Chicago five years ago: Patricia Barber’s Postmodern Blues (punctuation as in original liner notes):

as the century ends and tradition turns in on itself

as Boulez screams and yells his music is put on the shelf

repetition is back, a rose is a rose, said herself

Bill Gates has won

i’ve got the postmodern blues

1900 began the obsession with function as form

with a hammer and nail and a paintbrush and camera they storm

in Russia the Bolsheviks conquer, the masses want more

Karl Marx has gone,

i’ve got the postmodern blues

line is fragmented, Isadora invented modern dance

philosophers ponder while communists squander their chance

illusion is captured in Cubism’s reign over france

Picasso’s gone

i’ve got the postmodern blues

the stock market rallies as futures are tallied and sold

pensions are raided and parachutes painted in gold

conformism packaged to save us all from the cold

Cezanne is gone

i’ve got the postmodern blues

I love Barber’s lyrics, but they’re not her strong suit — take your pick from singing, composing, and playing the piano, she’s fantastic at all of them. Although “jazz” would be the idiom you’d squeeze her into if you were so inclined, she is heavily influenced by classical music (her original training) and is somewhat celebrated for startling interpretations of pop tunes (both “Light My Fire” and “Ode to Billy Joe” are personal favorites of mine). The All-Music Guide sums her up pretty well: “Quirky, Cerebral, Ambitious, Playful, Melancholy, Sophisticated, Stylish, Intimate, Bittersweet, Freewheeling.”

Best of all, she plays (most) Monday’s at the Green Mill here in Chicago, five dollar cover in a cozy and historic venue. Another reason this is the world’s greatest city.

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Homeward bound

No time for blogging, I’ve just become a homeowner. Yesterday was closing — the first time in my life I have ever hired an attorney. (Before, I just knew them as those really competitive people in the intramural basketball league.) Today I actually moved, although much remains to be done. A phone/DSL line, for example; this is being typed from an internet cafe, where I have escaped to after discovering that none of my telecommunication services were working yet.

Another change wrought by my new status: until recently, I’m pretty sure I had never actually set foot inside a Home Depot. Now I am practically friends with all the staff. And I have designed a truly ingenious way to use my bookshelves as a CD rack, of which I am undeservedly proud.

The whole process involves so many failure modes that it’s very frightening to contemplate. (For example, don’t just park in the alley and leave your hazard lights flashing for too long, as you might drain your battery and be unable to start your car — not that I know from experience, you understand.) The key is a good real estate agent, and I was lucky enough to have a true genius on my side — Ed Jelinek, whom I heartily recommend to anyone looking to buy property in Chicago. Putting yourself in the hands of someone who really knows what they are doing, and makes extra efforts to look out for you and set you straight when you are about to make a horrible mistake, makes an intimidating process immeasurably less scary.

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Vacuum popularity

Okay, folks out there in internet-land, help me out here. Did vacuum energy just surge in popularity all of a sudden? If you look for “cosmological constant” in Google or other search engines, one of the first things that comes up is a short article I wrote for the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics some time back. On an average day there might be ten or so hits on that web page; but thus far today there have been well over two hundred, from a collection of different search engines. Did the cosmological constant get mentioned on Oprah or something? (And, more importantly, how can I make money off of this?)

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Precognition

You knew it, right? There was something inside you, as you read just yesterday about the startling evidence of an actual link between Iraq and Al Qaida, maybe even a direct tie to Sept. 11? There was some nagging feeling that it couldn’t be true. There’s been no evidence worth talking about for any such connection, and it would be very strange for it to suddenly pop up now. Who knows, maybe they did something incredibly bone-headed yet again, like mixing up two kinda-Arabic-sounding names. Ha, ha! Wouldn’t that be ridiculous? Any idiot would have cleared something like that up a long time ago.

I’m sure glad this stuff isn’t important, so we can all just enjoy a good laugh about it.

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What would Shelly do?

A gaggle of Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine have endorsed John Kerry for President, on the (sensible) grounds that the Bush administration is undermining science in countless ways, from cutting funding for basic research to ignoring honest input on bioethics issues. Probably most of these folks are good liberal academics who would have voted Democratic anyway, but the administration’s specific affronts to science are what made them get together to sign the letter.

Like Chris C. Mooney, I wonder how much impact such a letter will have. It got a good amount of play on the news, and polls typically indicate that the public has a high regard for the honesty and ethical standards of scientists (compared to journalists, prostitutes, car salesmen, politicians, etc.). But as Chris says, people don’t turn to scientists for policy guidance the way they used to (or we imagine they used to, anyway).

I think the laureates are doing the right thing by intervening, though. If Sheldon Glashow wants to give his opinion about globalization or literary theory, his expertise as a particle physicist don’t count for very much; but in a letter focused sharply on science policy, they have every reason to stick their noses in the debate. And in a society that takes your opinion about world peace seriously once you simply demonstrate your ability to carry a tune or look good on screen, why shouldn’t people with actual expert knowledge about a field make their judgments known?

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Rawls

Brian Leiter points at a memorial notice for the late John Rawls, one of the leading (probably the leading) American political philosopher of the twentieth century. I got to know Rawls just a little bit, when as a graduate student I sat in on one of his classes. He was both one of the warmest and one of the most intelligent people I have ever had the privilege to meet.

The class I took was offered both to undergraduates and graduate students; there were twice-weekly lectures, plus weekly discussion sections. The sections for undergrads were led by philosophy grad students, while Rawls himself led the session for grad students. I asked whether I could sit in on the grad-student section, given that I was an astronomy grad student who was merely auditing the class; being the paragon of fairness that he was, he said that since I was a grad student, I should go to the section for grad students, simple as that.

Unfortunately, I almost never got to talk with him about philosophy; once he found out that I was interested in cosmology and the early universe, he was always asking me questions about that. He had wide-ranging interests in math and science, and would often use metaphors in the lectures that I’m sure nobody but me could appreciate. The best was when he said that deriving his two principles of justice should be like proving Stokes’ theorem in differential geometry on an arbitrary manifold: it required a large investment to set up the definitions and axioms, but then the proof was almost immediate. He also had a standing offer of $100 to anyone who could find a “mistake” in his theory of justice as fairness, in the sense of an incorrect conclusion drawn from his premises. He believed that good philosophy should be like good mathematics; it need not be “right” (if you didn’t believe in the premises), but it could be free of mistakes.

He influenced my own views a great deal, moving me from a confused utilitarianism to a fervent social-contractarianism. A rare combination of genius and genuine humanity.

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God: threat, or menace?

I’ve learned from experience that the way to get a lot of comments is to claim that God doesn’t exist. Some of the comments, unfortunately, seemed to imply that the statements in my post were naive, simplistic, patronizing, etc. My response was basically that the post was indeed simplistic, but not naive (patronizing I will leave as a judgment call); I was just blurting out some things I believe are true, in a rhetorically oversimplified fashion, and not trying to give any sophisticated arguments just then. But it wouldn’t hurt to be more careful and explain what I actually do believe, even if restrictions of space, time, and interest mean that I’ll still be pretty superficial about the reasoning.

One problem with “God” is that nobody agrees on the definition. Of course it’s useless to argue about the “correct” definition, but we should agree on what we’re talking about. So, when I say “God”, I am thinking of something we would recognize as a conscious being, unique in the universe and playing some important role in its creation and/or maintenance, with apparently supernatural abilities (maybe omnipotence or some similar degree of ability, but certainly way above anything we’re familiar with in everyday life). For many academic theologians (although certainly not all), the sticking point there is likely to be the “conscious being” part. In particular, I don’t want to use “God” to refer to nature itself, or to a feeling we get in certain sacred situations, or to the abstract laws of physics, or to our capacity for joy and love, or anything so insentient. Those things might be interesting to talk about in their own rights, but I don’t see why we should call them “God” — they are quite different from the God of classical Abrahamic monotheism, as well as from an Aristotelian unmoved mover responsible for creating the universe. Nor are they what 90% of the 90% of Americans who profess belief in God really mean when they profess that belief, I’d be willing to wager. Whatever most people have in mind when they speak of God, it must be some being that is able to care about we humans. (If you’d like to define God as all of nature or as our love for our fellow persons, then fine, I agree that God exists. But as a good pragmatist who sees no practical consequences flowing from such an identification, I wonder why we should bother. Why not just use a different word?)

So, do we have reason to believe that God exists? There are two possibilities: either the existence of God is a logical inevitability and can be demonstrated through pure reason, or God is possible but not necessary and we must turn to experience, revelation, or something otherwise more contingent.

I honestly don’t know what it would mean for some aspect of reality to be logically necessary; logical necessity is a characteristic of formal statements, not of the real world. Our descriptions of the world might involve certain logical requirements, but the world is whatever it is. In particular, there is absolutely no obstacle to imagining a world without God. It is perfectly straightforward to imagine a strictly mechanistic universe, consisting of certain dynamical objects obeying a set of immutable rules. (In Aquinas and elsewhere you can find the idea that the universe requires a First Cause to keep it all moving. Everyone these days should recognize that this is a perfect example of how you can trick yourself by sloppy use of language; ever since Newton, we’ve understood that motion is a perfectly natural state of being, and doesn’t require any agent to keep it going.) I furthermore see no obstacle to imagining that some of those objects get together to form complex collections possessing what we would call “consciousness.” (The details of how it might happen remain to be worked out, but that’s not an obstacle in principle.) Such a universe could easily last forever as a self-contained entity, without the aid of any external creator or first cause. Indeed, I think our universe is really like that. And since I can perfectly well imagine it, there’s no way to use pure reason to argue that it’s not possible; we have to turn to the actual universe we find ourselves in to determine if God is playing a role.

So we need to examine our particular universe and decide whether it looks like God is a part of it or not. Of course, we ourselves are part of the universe, so we might in principle be able to look purely inside ourselves, appealing to contemplation or even revelation. Personally, I find those methods completely unreliable; we could come to all sorts of absurd conclusions by trusting them. Instead, we should be good empiricists, and try to judge as objectively as we can whether our universe makes more sense with God or without. In other words, we should consider the idea of God as any other hypothesis about how nature works, and test it using conventional scientific methods.

Although natural theology has a long history, it’s not an especially distinguished one, with the argument from design taking an especially heavy beating (from Hume even before Darwin). Consequently, a lot of people don’t like the idea that we should treat God as an hypothesis to be empirically tested. Stephen Jay Gould tried to argue that religion and science are compatible because they are strictly non-overlapping in their spheres of interest. But if you look hard at his argument, it only makes sense because his definition of “religion” is what most people would call “moral philosophy.” It’s certainly true that religion has important aspects other than a theory of the nature of reality — moral and social aspects, most obviously. But it also makes claims about how reality works, and those claims can be tested by the same criteria that other claims about reality can be tested. (Furthermore, if the claims about reality fail to be supportable, there doesn’t seem to be much reason left to put any stock in the moral or social aspects — but that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish.)

By the standards of conventional scientific reasoning, the idea that there exists a God that plays an important role in the universe does very badly as an hypothesis, as I’ve discussed in some detail elsewhere. Everything we’ve ever seen in the universe is completely compatible with a purely naturalistic description; we’ve never seen any reliable evidence of supernatural influence or design, and adding an entirely new metaphysical category to a perfectly self-sufficient universe is an unnecessarily drastic step in our attempts to fill in those gaps that remain in our understanding. (Again, plenty of people disagree; the argument from design is alive and well, and now typically refers to the exquisite perfection of the laws of nature rather than to the human eye. I just think adherents of this view are wrong.) It didn’t have to be this way; I could equally well imagine a universe in which evidence for the existence God were quite manifest, with good alternate-universe scientists who were among the most devout members of society. It’s just not the universe in which we live.

Of course mine is a minority view, if we were to take a poll among all the people in the world. That’s exactly the reason why it’s worth pressing the issue. It wouldn’t be fair to call belief in God the Big Lie, as the people who argue in its favor are generally quite sincere. But it is the Big Mistake; of all the incorrect beliefs in the modern world, this is certainly the one that combines the widest prevalence with the most significant impact. So it’s worth arguing against, gently but persistently.

Not that I expect to change anybody’s mind (although one theologian did tell me that I had convinced him to give up on the argument from design, if not on belief in God). But at least now I can point to this post if the issue arises again, so the blog can concentrate on important issues like ice cream and performance art.

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Blog news tidbits

Good news and bad news here at Preposterous HQ. The good news is, we’ve added a Google search to the site — find it near the bottom of the right-side column. (I noticed this gizmo at Christina’s LIS Rant.) Now you can find out how many times I have mentioned Einstein (9), God (8), or Bush (16). Something should be done to redress the balance there.

The bad news is this paragraph I came across at Blogshares:

Preposterous Universe suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but Alan Dean was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Schroedinger’s Cat (artefact) was involved. Preposterous Universe share price dropped from B$745.92 to B$305.83.

I think I might be worried/sad/philosophical, if only I had any idea what any of it meant.

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Wild & crazy

This is an image of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt”), taken by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft as it did a fly-by in January.

Can you believe it? It looks too dramatic to be true, although I’m sure it’s for real. The heavily cratered surface seems different from other comets we’ve seen up close. Probably the image was tinkered with a bit to bring out the highlights, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

So is the mission: Stardust is not just taking pictures, it has captured material from the comet’s tail and is sweeping its way back to Earth. In January 2006, if all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will land gently in Utah, and scientists will begin analyzing the comet material in the lab. A great example of what wonderful science can be done without diverting all of our money into sending astronauts to Mars (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

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Interesting and uninteresting questions about torture

There are interesting and uninteresting questions one can ask about torture. An interesting one is “Is it ever morally permissible for a regime to torture prisoners?”

I would love to answer “No”, but it’s a complicated question. The standard arguments in favor of torture are well known. Imagine we are in a situation of imminent peril to a very large number of people (a “ticking time bomb,” literally or figuratively), and we know for sure that a certain prisoner has information that could be used to prevent the disaster, and strongly suspect that the prisoner would give up the information under torture but would not under conventional interrogation. That’s a lot of conditions that must be satisfied (1. imminent danger to 2. a very large number of people, 3. knowledge that prisoner has crucial information that 4. they will not give up without torture but 5. they might give up under torture), but I would add at least one more: 6. the prisoner must, by previous actions, have forfeited even minimal personal rights, e.g. by committing some egregious crime. I don’t think it’s right to torture an innocent bystander who happened to overhear a terrorist plot but for some reason doesn’t want to divulge the information. If all of these circumstances clearly applied, I would be willing to concede that torture would be justified. Under ordinary non-desperate conditions, I strongly believe that every person has a minimal set of rights that society has no right to violate; but under well-defined emergency conditions, the interests of the larger group can reasonably take precedence.

The problem, of course, is that such stringent conditions rarely apply. I used to be in favor of the death penalty, as I believed that there were some people who had, by their behavior, given up any right to live. I still believe that, but now I am strongly anti-death-penalty, only because I have no confidence whatsoever that our justice system can accurately determine who those people might be. Even the chance of one mistake, putting someone to death who was innocent (or even not as unforgiveably guilty as had been supposed), makes the use of the death penalty completely unpalatable. Similarly with torture — the danger that it could be used against people who do not meet all of the above criteria is real and terrible. Of course, with the death penalty there is a straightforward alternative (life imprisonment), whereas in the shadow of a ticking time bomb the choice may not be so clear.

There are further problems, which have been widely discussed of late: specifically, the longer-term deleterious effects of being known as a country that permits torture. Breaking the prohibitions against such behavior invites similar treatment of your own citizens, not to mention general resentment among people who tend to sympathize with the tortured subjects. On the other hand, if all of the above highly restrictive conditions were actually met before torture was ever used, it would be confined to moments of such extreme danger that the attendant bad publicity would likely be an irrelevant side issue.

There are interesting blogospherical thoughts on the issue from Jack Balkin, Eugene Volokh, Kieran Healy, and Matthew Yglesias, among many others. It’s very difficult, as Volokh mentions in another post, to even think rationally about these questions, as the real-life consequences are so sickening. But, as recent events have shown, we have little choice.

An example of an uninteresting question about torture would be: “Did high-level officials in the Bush administration understand how it was being used in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons?” This question is uninteresting, not because it is unimportant, but because the answer is perfectly obvious: Of course they did. Not only does it seem implausible on the face of it that widespread patterns of similar behavior spontaneously arose in the acts of a few bad apples, and not only do the infamous torture memos and other documents make clear how the administration was planning its legal justification all along, but the administration has been very open in its view that there should be essentially no restrictions on how the “war on terror” should be conducted, in any theater and by any U.S. agent. The President and his officers consider themselves to be unimpeachable agents of good in the war against evil, and will never hesitate to break a few eggs in the process of making their omelet against terror. What’s been happening in Iraq is a perfectly consistent extension of well-documented policy, and there’s no reason to think that it’s disconnected from the orders from on high.

The only reason the administration is acting even somewhat contrite is because there were photos taken, and the images are too vivid and horrifying for anyone to admit they were part of an approved policy. Had the evidence been limited to testimony of prisoners and Amnesty International reports, the response would not have extended beyond stonewalling. Who knows what else is still going on.

Update: Never mind. Belle Waring has answered all the questions. Or unasked them, at any rate.

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