Three Things to Think about Before You Vote

We've all heard, probably more than once, that Tuesday's election may be the most consequential election of our lifetimes. I don't think that that's an exaggeration, but whether it is or isn't, I doubt that there are many who will vote on Tuesday who are still undecided as to whom they'll cast their ballot for.

Indeed, almost 70 million voters have already decided and have taken advantage of early voting to express their support for their favored candidates.

Nevertheless, for those who haven't yet voted here's a short (less than 3 minutes) video from Dennis Prager that might be helpful. It's titled Three Things to Think about Before You Vote:

Also, I'd like to take the liberty to recommend a couple of previous VP posts that might be helpful. This one explains the differences between the various political ideologies such as conservatives and progressives, a matter which many find confusing and which, hopefully, this post will clarify.

This post, on the other hand, explains why I'm voting the way I am.

What's Wrong with Socialism?

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true or not far from the truth concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.

In an attempt to help correct this gap in the public's understanding I offer this allegory to which everyone should be able to relate:

Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they play video games instead and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.

Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where the socialism metaphor comes in.

Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success. The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.

Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C.

When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they do well enough to suit them by just goofing off. The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, they're only C's.

When the professor redistributes the points everyone, including you, now has a D.

By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

Does Evil Exist?

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 produced horrors that defy description. Serb soldiers raped Bosnian women and girls and butchered their men and even their babies by the tens of thousands. The record of their barbaric inhumanity is as hard to believe as it is to read, and is a sickening testament to the depravity that lies within the human psyche.

That so many men were capable of such cruelty is surely compelling evidence of human fallenness and the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, a couple of years back offered some insight into the terrifying iniquity that plagues our world.

Francis reminds us that,

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God's] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter.

All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. An atheist like Leff has no grounds for believing that there is evil in the world. The most he can say is that there are behaviors he doesn't like.

The word "evil" has no meaning in a godless world other than as an expression of personal, subjective revulsion. Those who share Leff's unbelief have a choice. They can acknowledge that evil exists or they can continue in their atheism, but they can't do both.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

This post is a rerun of one I originally wrote in 2016:

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it was Postman's thesis that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by that medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

Journalist Paul Brian has a column at The Federalist which amplifies Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argues that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought.

Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reuns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no 'Big Brother' is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas.

They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that ... when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial, frivolous and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless side-line interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters." Many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafness-inducing high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We're not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics and religion. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

A Beautiful Dance

In the past I've posted video of a spectacular ornithological phenomenon carried out by one of the most common birds in North America and Europe - the European starling. Starlings were introduced into North America in the early 1890s by a group who released 100 of them in Central Park, New York because they wanted North America to be blessed with every species of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.

Every North American starling is descended from these original 100 birds, and the descendents have spread so far so rapidly that some birders consider them "trash" birds. If you have a bird feeder at home and use suet in the feeder starlings have doubtless visited it (and probably hogged all the food).

Yet, even though some people consider them pests, there are places throughout their range where they perform one of the most beautiful aerobatic dances ever witnessed in nature. It's called a murmuration, and the photographers at Lad Allen Media went to Modesto, California to film it.

If you've never seen a murmuration you'll want to watch this five minute video. It not only shows beautiful footage of this amazing display but it also discusses the latest research into how these birds do it.

Enjoy:

The Problem of Consciousness

There are two phenomena in the universe which are as mysterious as they are commonplace. One is time and the other is human consciousness. Despite their ubiquity in our lives no one really knows what either of them actually is.

Consciousness is particularly problematic for those who embrace a materialist ontology, i.e. those who believe that everything that exists is reducible to material "stuff" like atoms and molecules.

Consciousness, however, seems to refute this belief because whatever consciousness is it's not material nor is it something, like gravity, that matter could produce.

This video does a good job of explaining the problem. If you watch it you'll hear the term physicalism. For the purposes of the video physicalism is synonomous with materialism.

To give a sense of the state of our ignorance about the nature of consciousness and how consciousness arises in human beings consider the following quotes from philosophers and scientists who work in the fields of philosophy of mind and neuroscience:

• "But the hard problem of consciousness [The intractable difficulty of explaining how something material like electrochemical reactions in a brain can produce conscious experience like the sensation of pain is referred to as the “Hard Problem” of consciousness] is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run." David Barash, atheistic materialist and evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington.
• “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.” Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University philosopher.
• “Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.” Roger Wolcott Sperry, Nobel neurophysiologist.
• “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.” Nick Herbert, physicist.
• “No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians’ hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it.” Larry Dossey, Physician and author.
• “I think the idea of (materialists) saying that consciousness is an illusion doesn’t really work because the very notion of an illusion presupposes consciousness. There are no illusions unless there is a conscious experience or (a conscious person) for whom there is an illusion.” Evan Thompson, philosopher.

Perhaps the difficulty arises because so many thinkers in the field are trying to squeeze consciousness out of matter when in fact that's like trying to squeeze orange juice out of a turnip. Perhaps, too, it is the materialist's adamant refusal to accept the existence of immaterial mind that is at the root of their difficulty.

Four Questions about Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers."

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even people who are determinists can't shake it.

Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they have embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their doxastic structure anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Those laws are strictly deterministic, thus our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

The next question we might ponder is why should anyone embrace materialism? Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

Accounting for an Exquisitely Calibrated Universe

The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe. Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:

The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.

The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.

The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.

The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other, and even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.

The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.

There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.

The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.

The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, whether universes or their inhabitants.

Which of these options is thought most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.

The Tyranny of the "Tolerant"

The Wall Street Journal ran a column a couple of weeks ago by Joseph Epstein which was headlined "The Tyranny of the 'Tolerant.'" In his column Epstein argued that tolerance, once a reasonable virtue among liberals, has been transformed by the contemporary left into an oppressive form of tyranny.

Epstein starts off with this question:

[I]n the current day, who is more intolerant, more close-minded and unforgiving, more malicious than those who officially pride themselves on their tolerance for sexual difference, minority mores, protest in all its forms—namely, those who march under the banners of the woke, the politically correct, the progressive?

Epstein is correct in declaring that the left is home today for the least tolerant people in our society, but how did we come to this sorry pass? He explains that the genesis of the left's contemporary intolerance, like most of our cultural dysfunctions, traces back to the 60s:

Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, published an essay in 1965 with the provocative title “Repressive Tolerance,” in which he argued that “liberating tolerance” would entail “the withdrawal of toleration of groups and assembly from groups and movements” on the right, while encouraging all aggressive movements on the left.

Marcuse's recommendation has been embraced by the modern left and enjoys a prominent place in their field operations manual.

Here's how the current tyranny of the "tolerant" manifests itself in our culture:

Use the wrong word, have a political flaw in your past, fail to line up for the next obviously good cause, and the tolerant will be the first to come after you. They may not be able to burn you at the stake...but they will make sure you don't get the job, promotion, prize or leg up. They will instead see you castigated, fired, consigned for life among the mean, ignorant and lumpen.

He goes on to list five opinions and views — one could add many more — that the "tolerant" absolutely won’t tolerate:

• That abortion is, somehow, anti-life and thus might just be wrong.
• That the final word isn’t in on climate change, let alone what, if it exists, ought to be done about it.
• That racism isn’t systemic but the absence of fathers in African-American families is, with 70% of black births being out of wedlock.
• That sexual reassignment surgery and transgendering generally is a ghastly solution to what possibly isn’t truly a problem.
• That most government programs for the improvement of the human condition are unlikely to be effective and in many cases exacerbate the illnesses they set out to cure.

Anyone reckless enough to openly express any of these opinions publicly is at best regarded as a stupid rube - "deplorable" in Ms. Clinton's felicitous formulation - and at worst an evil, dangerous enemy of society in need of being shamed, prosecuted, persecuted, shouted down, fired from their jobs and personally and financially ruined.

The self-righteousness, judgmentalism and cruelty of these folks would make the religious inquisitors of the Middle Ages envious. Epstein states that they are possessed of a "strong sense of their own virtue."

They are convinced they are on the right side: the side of social justice, of generosity of spirit, of sensitivity, of goodness and large-heartedness generally. They think themselves the cognoscenti, in the know, superior in every way. They are the best people, and they darn well know it.

Of course, so did the inquisitors. It's one thing, Epstein notes, to laud oneself for the superiority of one’s own opinions and quite another to want to destroy others for what one deems the moral inadequacy of theirs.

In the current political climate this is what those who pride themselves on their tolerance are all too happy to do. What is unprecedented, and unhappily becoming a contemporary condition, is the intolerance of the ostensibly tolerant for even the slightest disagreement.

Hence the refusal of our once most august universities to allow speakers whose views their students and faculties find uncongenial. Hence the organization of what are in effect lynch parties devoted to tearing down statues and insisting on the renaming of schools and institutions. Hence the McCarthy-like search through people’s pasts for unfashionable opinions with which to destroy their reputations.

It is profoundly ironic that a political ideology, progressive liberalism, that started out in the 19th century encouraging open-mindedness, personal autonomy and freedom of speech and thought has morphed into something out of George Orwell's 1984.

In fact, the story of the evolution of modern "progressives" from classical liberals to tyrannical neo-Marxists and fascists sounds very much like the story Orwell narrates in his other famous novel, Animal Farm. Both books should be required reading for every college student in today's America.

The Difficulty Intentionality Poses for Materialism

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism.

Materialism is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to matter and the atoms that make matter up. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial. They deny that we possess an immaterial mind or soul, and they insist that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as solely a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general.

Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

Who Is the Simulator?

A lot of very smart people think that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix. Consider these two excerpts from a 2016 BBC article on the subject:

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced to describe what people like Musk and Kurzweil believe is going on. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

A second, more popular, scenario, however, seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely, so how can the existence of such an exquisitely calibrated universe be explained? 

There are two options compatible with naturalism. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse consisting of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty, speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. 

In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago. 

I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Nice Nihilism

In his book The Atheist's Guide to Reality Alex Rosenberg unequivocally promotes a scientistic view of knowledge.

"Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it's a cognate of a view called "scientism" which claims that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not even something we should believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism." Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, but Rosenberg thinks this is neither good science nor good epistemology.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor in any way "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unremittingly dark world, and even this little glimmer is beset with problems. Here's one:

If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes like evolution then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved numerous behaviors that are not "nice." If we are the product of mindless evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and there's nothing which is wrong to do. Niceness is no more right, in a moral sense, than cruelty.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to face up to the fact that these are the consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview, and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (see the links at the top of this page) that the consequences he outlines in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism, but that should hardly be construed as a commendation of atheism.

The atheist who lives, as many do, as if none of the consequences mentioned in the third paragraph exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief that leads to consequences and conclusions one cannot consistently live with, however, stands in serious need of a thorough reexamination.

Follow-up to Yesterday's Post

On yesterday's post I wrote about Sabine Hossenfelder's claim that free will is an illusion. Whether one is persuaded by her argument or not, it seems to me that everyone, including Hossenfelder, should hope that she's wrong.

Ideas have consequences, and there are a number of reasons why the consequences of determinism being true, or at least the belief that determinism is true, are at best awkward and at worst corrosive to a healthily functioning society.

If determinism is true, i.e. if we really have no free will, if our choices are the inevitable product of our strongest motives which are themselves the product of the totality of influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives and/or our genetic inheritance, and if it is the case that at every moment there's only one possible future, then it would seem that several unfortunate consequences follow.

Some of these were mentioned in yesterday's post, but I'll reiterate:

1. Reward and punishment are never deserved. Imagine the most heinous crime you can think of. On determinism the perpetrator of that crime does not deserve punishment. Society may "choose" to punish him, but only to deter others from committing similar crimes and/or to protect the rest of us from the criminal who may commit such a crime again if he's not removed from society.

Reward and punishment can only be deserved if we are somehow responsible for choosing what we do, but if choice is an illusion and we could not have done otherwise than we've done then the idea that someone "deserves" something is an error.

2. There can be no moral obligations or duties. It makes no sense to say that someone "ought" to do X if he can only do Y. The words "ought" and "should" imply the ability to choose to do X. If determinism is true we can only do what we've been "programmed" to do by our environment and/or our genes.

Moral obligation is contingent upon free will. We can't have a duty to do what we simply cannot do.

3. If determinism is true there's no good reason to believe it's true. On determinism, our beliefs are determined by environmental and genetic influences that we're mostly unaware of, but if this is why we believe what we believe then truth and logic are largely irrelevant. They may have played some role in shaping our beliefs, but we have no way of knowing whether they did or how much of a role they played.

The determinist has been predestined by physical events occurring since the origin of the universe to believe in determinism. It's not a matter of weighing the evidence and choosing determinism because there is no genuine choice to be made. Further, the person who rejects determinism can't be criticized since she was determined to do so by all the influences that have acted upon her. She didn't really "choose" to reject anything.

4. Human dignity is contingent upon our ability to make significant choices. If that ability is illusory then we're little more than flesh and bone machines and there's no room in such a view for human dignity. This is why the 20th century psychologist B.F.Skinner, a determinist, wrote a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

His argument in the book is that we are little more than glorified laboratory mice responding to positive and negative reinforcers in our environment, and, that being so, we need to get beyond the notion that there's any special dignity in being human. There's no dignity, after all, in being a somewhat enhanced version of a mouse. It is instead rather degrading.

5. The belief in determinism is very difficult to live with consistently. Science writer John Horgan writes that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will. Philosopher John Searle declares that, "We can't give up the conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

If we find that we can't live consistently with a belief we should interpret that as an indication that our belief is in some way deficient or incoherent and needs to be modified or abandoned.

Is Free Will Merely an Illusion?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a brilliant physicist whose videos usually explain some aspect of physics. In this 11 minute video she argues that free will is an illusion, that it's contrary to the laws of physics and that belief in it is unscientific.

Hossenfelder's argument might be summed up in this claim:

These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

I think there are at least three problems with her argument.

First, she's basing her conclusion that free will is an illusion on an unprovable metaphysical assumption, the assumption that materialism is true. If it is true then determinism does seem to be the most reasonable position. If, as she claims, all we are is particles of matter then it's not hard to believe that - like planets, stars and every other material object in the universe - we're totally in thrall to physical laws.

However, there's no compelling reason to accept her assumption that materialism is true. She holds it simply as a metaphysical or psychological preference, and if materialism is false, if human beings possess immaterial minds not subject to physical determinism and which work somehow in concert with the material brain, then our overwhelming conviction that we have freedom of choice may not be an illusion at all.

In fact, the conviction of freedom is one reason for thinking that there actually is more to us than just our material selves. In any case, in lieu of a compelling reason to think materialism is true, her argument for determinism is unconvincing.

The second problem is that if materialism is true then our beliefs are merely the epiphenomena of particles whizzing around in our brains, and there's no reason to think that truth, especially truth about metaphysical matters, can emerge from mindless particles banging against each other.

Thus, given her belief in materialism, Hossenfelder has no good reason to think that her metaphysical beliefs are true, including her belief in materialism.

Moreover, if everything is determined then our beliefs are determined, and it follows that Hossenfelder's belief in materialism is a product of influences, many of them unconscious, that have acted on her throughout her life.

Given those influences it was inevitable that she'd be a materialist, but if her belief in materialism is largely the product of the unconscious effects of childhood experiences why should we be expected to accept an argument that reduces to something like "given my childhood experiences I [Hossenfelder] am convinced that materialism/determinism are true"?

Likewise, if materialism and determinism really are true but her listeners nevertheless reject them, they're not being irrational because their rejection is a decision that they were predetermined ever since the Big Bang to make. They could not have done otherwise. No decision we make in life could have been other than what it is.

There's no scientific argument that can demonstrate that materialism is true and good reasons to think it's not, but many scientists like Hossenfelder take it as their starting assumption because they find it psychologically congenial. Her entire argument for determinism, however, is predicated upon that assumption. It's the reason she privileges her faith in the laws of physics over the powerful experiential intuition that we're somehow free, and it's the reason she concludes that the powerful intuition of freedom must be an illusion.

Here's a third problem with her presentation.

In the video (8:05) she mentions moral behavior, but she's careful not to talk about it in terms of right and wrong acts. She's correct to avoid this language because if materialism/determinism are true there can be no moral right or wrong. People do what they're determined to do and though there may be a kind of responsibility in the sense which she explains it, there's no moral responsibility and no moral guilt.

If my behavior harms others they may not like it, and if they have the power to punish me they will, but that doesn't mean that I've done anything for which I should feel guilt or remorse. Humans, if we are determined, should no more feel remorse for harming others than a shark feels remorse for attacking a surfer.

The fact that we know what we're doing when we harm another and the shark doesn't know makes no practical difference. If we were programmed, as it were, to harm others and couldn't have done otherwise, then our awareness of what we're doing is irrelevant. There's no moral guilt, and feelings of guilt and remorse are merely a psychological trick played on us by nature.

Our belief that we are in some sense free, if we have that belief, is a properly basic belief. We're rational to hold it - given the powerful intuition we have that we really are free - unless and until we're faced with a compelling defeater for that belief. Hossenfelder's presentation is only compelling if one accepts her materialism, but why think materialism is true?

She doesn't tell us.

What Exactly Is "Court-Packing"?

High ranking Democrats have repeatedly threatened to "pack" the Supreme Court if they regain the White House and the Senate, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have repeatedly refused to say whether they'd go along with such a move if they were to take office in January.

Biden, feeling pressure to say something about his stance on this issue, recently mumbled that he's not a fan of court packing, which was about as tepid and non-committal an answer as one could imagine.

Democrats prefer to change the subject when the matter of court packing is brought up and one way they're doing this is by changing the meaning of the term.

The phrase "packing the court" refers to a gambit undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when an uncooperative Supreme Court was stifling his presidential initiatives on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. Roosevelt threatened that he would appoint up to six more Justices to the Court (the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices) and that these would be Justices more amenable to the president's wishes.

By increasing the number of Justices, people who would serve for the rest of their lives, from nine to fifteen Roosevelt and the Democrats hoped to do an end run around the Constitution and the legislature and have their way politically for generations.

Roosevelt never carried out his threat, but now that President Trump is filling vacancies with Justices who esteem the Constitution and who believe that the proper role of courts is not to make law but to interpret it, the Democrats are in a panic and are pledging to do what FDR only threatened.

They realize, however, that it might look bad with the voters prior to the election to explicitly promise to destabilize the country in this fashion, so Biden and Harris are refusing to talk about it, offering instead the lame excuse that if they said what they'd do then that would become the issue, which, of course, it would and should.

Mr. Biden even declared that the voters "don't deserve" to know what he'd do before the election and that he'd deign tell us what he'll do after he's elected, a statement as full of arrogance and contempt for the American people as Speaker Pelosi's claim during the Obama administration that if Congress wanted to know what was in the Obamacare bill the House would have to pass it to find out.

A more brazen tactic emerging in recent days is to redefine what's meant by "court packing." Vice-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris led the way on this as Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal observes:

Sen. Kamala Harris rolled out the first try at a new defense last week when Vice President Mike Pence (rather than, say, the moderator) challenged her to justify the [court packing] proposal.

“Let’s talk about packing the court then,” she said, and an eager nation edged forward on its collective couch to hear, at last, the refined Democratic justification. But all we got, after a false story about Abraham Lincoln and a court vacancy in 1864, was an attempt to redefine the term “court packing” (delivered with trademark smiling condescension). She claimed it meant appointing insufficient numbers of nonwhite judges.

Well, claiming that court packing is having too many white people on the federal bench is a creative riposte, but it's not at all what the term means. Other Democrats quickly realized, however, that redefining the term was a fruitful way to neuter the issue, much like redefining what constitutes a criminal act is one way to reduce crime.

Baker continues:

Now a second redefinition has emerged. In a barrage of comments over the weekend, Democrats and their supporters have alleged that their plan for the court is no different than what Republicans have been doing for the past few years—“packing” the judiciary with Republican-appointed judges.

The message has been widely disseminated and is now being regurgitated at volume. Democratic politicians and Biden supporters in the media have been parroting it. Sen. Mazie Hirono, always a reliable vehicle of whatever Democrats have been instructed to say, told CNN: “I’m really concerned about the court packing with the ideologically driven nominees now sitting on the court.”

So, if the president appoints too few people of color or too many conservatives that's what we're supposed to think court-packing is. In other words, court packing occurs when Republicans follow their Constitutional mandate to nominate Justices that they believe will uphold the Constitution regardless of the race of the nominee.

If the Democrats actually do add more Justices to the Court then the next time the Republicans control both the White House and the Senate they'll do likewise producing an escalating judicial "arms race" until we eventually have a hundred Justices sitting on the Supreme Court. By that time the Constitution will have long since ceased to have any legal significance.

Once upon a time Joe Biden recognized the stupidity of doing what he refuses to disavow today. In 1983 he said this:

President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and Congress a proposal to pack the Court. It was totally within his right to do that. He violated no law. He was legalistically absolutely correct. But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. (emphasis mine)

That version of Joe Biden was wiser in 1983 than the version running for president today. Today's version has apparently sold out to the radical left-wingers in his party who are increasingly promoting that "bonehead idea."

What Postmoderns Assume

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites.

Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent who perhaps works through natural processes, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

A Metastasizing Hatred

Our society seems to sink further into hatred, division and coarseness every day. It's as though bitterness and bile are metastasizing throughout our culture like a virulent cancer.

Here's an example: Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said in her opening statement at her Senate confirmation hearing that,

[C]ourts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life. The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the People. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try.

This has enraged the left that a Supreme Court nominee should think it her responsibility to follow the Constitution and not to usurp the role of the legislature by making law.

One sweet individual responded to Coney's statement with this, "this is probably the one and only time i want misogyny to do it's thing and let this woman f***ing fail."

I doubt if this person limits his or her misogynistic wishes just to Ms. Barrett. Doubtless, any conservative woman would be the object of similar vituperation.

And there are worse examples.

Late last month ex-CEO of Twitter Dick Costello said in a tweet that “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.”

It sounds less like a simple prophecy than an enthusiastic endorsement of the prospect.

One of the premier haters in the media is a man named Keith Olbermann. Olbermann has been a pundit on MSNBC and ESPN and has recently hosted a YouTube show dedicated to defeating Donald Trump.

Olbermann recently delivered himself of this rant:

If Trump has triggered hate, as Olbermann alleges, it's a hatred primarily manifested among those who oppose him, not those who support him. Olbermann himself is exhibit A.

Mr. Olbermann chose not to specify the crimes Trump and his supporters "must" be prosecuted for. His listing of offenders (Mike Lee? William Barr? Amy Coney Barrett? Mike Pence?) sounds like nothing so much as the ravings of a lunatic driven over the edge of sanity by an irrational and perverse obsession.

"The fight," Mr Olbermann avers in his best Inspector Dreyfus impersonation (see below), "is not just to win the election, but to win it by enough to chase — at least for a moment — Trump and the maggots [Trump's supporters] off the stage and then try to clean up what they left."

It's hard to say what mess Trump has created, but then haters rarely get into specifics. They believe that emotional hysteria suffices to convince their audience that their point has been made. Who needs to present facts when visceral loathing and name-calling can be mustered instead?

President Trump's opponents sometimes say that our nation can't survive four more years of Trump. Maybe what they mean is that they themselves can't survive four more years. Four years is a long time to endure the debilitating sickness of the soul such as seems to afflict at least some of our friends on the contemporary left.

How Does the Brain Do It?

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Indigenous Peoples Day

A student came across this post from Columbus Day 2019 and suggested that it'd be worthwhile to run it again this year. I concurred so here it is:

Monday is Columbus Day here in the U.S. and past observances of the day have elicited protests and disdain for the savage legacy of early European conquerors. The topic, in fact, brings to mind a stomach-churning book I read several years ago titled The Destruction of the Indies by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas. The book is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I much sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds, or even thousands, of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they certainly were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”

“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savage depravity. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, they're not endemic to Europeans.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others throughout much of the last millenium or so it's not because they're more evil than others but because for the last thousand years they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

What Solzhenitsyn said is true of every human being no matter what the race or ethnicity of the individual may be. In these days of identity politics that's worth remembering.

My Two Questions

The science writer at Forbes, Ethan Siegal, was once asked which of these five physics-related mysteries would he most like to have the answer to:

• Did cosmic inflation happen or was there another process?
• Is earth the only place in the cosmos with life?
• How [can we] merge general relativity and quantum mechanics?
• What is dark energy and dark matter?
• How did life begin on Earth?

These are all fascinating questions, and I'd like to know the answers to all of them myself, especially the last. Siegal gave good explanations at the link as to why these questions are significant, and interested readers should check it out, but for my part the two most fascinating science-related questions are not on this list.

The first question I'd like to read a convincing answer to is how did brute matter - atoms and sub-atomic particles - ever give rise in evolutionary history to human consciousness? Indeed, what exactly is consciousness? It would seem that the explanatory gap between material stuff and conscious experience is enormous so how was it bridged in human development and, for that matter, how is it bridged in each human brain?

The second question I'd like to see answered is what is matter in the first place? What is the fundamental constituent of matter? Is it something solid or is it a force of some kind? If it's the latter then how does solidity arise? Is solidity just an illusion? Is the material world objectively real and to what extent is it so?

Someone might dismiss such questions with the remark that the answers make no difference to how we live our everyday lives, and at one level they'd surely be correct. But, if, as a lot of very smart people think, the answers to these questions would point to an ontic reality beyond the universe itself, an intelligent mind, then the implications for everyday life could be considerable.

If, for example, it should turn out that consciousness cannot arise from matter but must itself be the product of yet another consciousness then it would appear that conscious mind underlies the cosmos, and if it should turn out that matter (or mass/energy) reduces to information then, since information is the product of minds, it would appear, again, that a mind must underlie the cosmos.

Those are conclusions of immense significance for every thinking person.

Perhaps we'll never know the answers. Perhaps we cannot know them. Perhaps solving these puzzles is as far beyond our intellectual capacities as solving quadratic equations is beyond the intellectual capacities of a rabbit. All the same, it'd be a stupendous achievement were the answers ever found.

Amy Coney Barrett and Her Democrat Opponents

As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett approach it seems that her Democratic opponents have decided not to try to attack her personally - although there've been simple-minded outliers, who've called her a racist, strangely enough, because she and her husband have adopted two Haitian children. But so far she's mostly been spared the sort of treatment meted out by Democrats to past judicial nominees like Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.

Her democratic foes have apparently decided to concentrate their attacks instead on the probable results of seating a Justice who believes that her decisions should be based on what the Constitution says and not on whatever happens to be progressive dogma on any given day.

The editors at The Washington Free Beacon write that,

Barrett is too squeaky clean for their [the Democrats] usual tactics to work. Democrats have instead gone to plan B, making clear what they've worked to obscure for the past three decades in previous attempts to derail Republican judicial nominations. If they can't attack Barrett's qualifications for the Court, they'll explicitly attack the political consequences of her nomination.

The Free Beacon article gives a short recitation of the sorts of attacks that have been employed against conservative nominees in the past, but beyond that, there's a very important issue at stake being raised here, one that has gone largely unremarked by our media: What should the role of a Supreme Court Justice actually be? Should Justices decide cases according to their personal political beliefs or should they decide them according to what the Constitution allows?

The opposition to Barrett stems entirely from a belief by her opponents that it should be the former. They want a Court which would in essence be a legislature that would circumvent Congress and impose their political views on the rest of us. That's what's behind the threats to "pack the court," i.e. add two more progressive justices to the Supreme Court, if they regain the White House and the Senate.

The Free Beacon editors add that,

This time around, the smears aren't sticking. Instead, Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud: At last week's presidential debate, Biden said he opposed Barrett not because of her qualifications but because she would hasten the overturn of Obamacare, [which is] once again before the Court in November, and because she would be a fifth or sixth vote against Roe.

Senate Democrats have followed suit. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) has refused to even meet with Barrett because he thinks she will "decimate health care," while Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) objected explicitly to Barrett's "closely held views that will impact a woman's right to choose."

These objections are completely wrong-headed. If those laws, or certain features of them, conflict with the Constitution then they should be overturned and sent back to the legislature for revision, and if they're not in conflict with the Constitution they should be allowed to stand.

To argue otherwise is to argue that the Court, an unelected body with lifetime tenure, should legislate rather than adjudicate, that the Justices should make law instead of interpreting it in light of the Constitution.

As the editors conclude,

Biden and his Senate colleagues are finally admitting what we've always known: They see the Supreme Court as just another venue for progressive rule and fear a judge who won't legislate from the bench. Claims about fitness and character were always a pretext for political ends.

Barrett is extremely well-qualified as even many of her opponents concede. The only question that remains, or should remain, is whether her decisions will be in keeping with what the Founders stated in the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.

The problem is that this is the last thing the left wants. A Court whose majority hews to a judicial philosophy which includes an intense fealty to the Constitution would stop in its tracks the progressive ambition to "fundamentally transform" this country, as candidate Barack Obama put it in 2008.

Political Taxonomy

The presidential election is less than a month away and we're hearing a lot of talk about liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene or just casual observers the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly edited) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is believed to be a conservative. Conesrvatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is a contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is a well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. Joe Biden is an example of a liberal politician.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives often tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here;. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as is current VP candidate Kamala Harris.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the confirmation hearings for Judge Barrett and in the campaign for the presidency that will continue this month. Reply Reply All