Donald or Hillary?

A friend wrote to give his opinion on the election and said this:

[Trump's] a buffoon and dangerous. Hillary is no paragon of virtue, but it is at least more of the same, which is a lot better in my view than Trump at the helm. I hope you agree.

Well, it's hard to argue with most of what my friend said in those three sentences, but even so, I do disagree with his assertion that Hillary is less odious than Trump. In fact, I think in the "contemptible candidate" sweepstakes she beats Trump by a couple of lengths. Here's part of what I wrote back to him:

I cannot defend much of Trump's rhetoric and wouldn't even try. The man is a textbook case of arrested development, but, even so, whatever criticisms can be fairly leveled against Trump as a potential president can also be leveled with at least equal, if not greater, force against Hillary and her party.

If Trump is a danger to the Constitution so, too, is she. She has openly declared that freedom of religion needs to be curtailed, as does the 2nd amendment. If Trump has talked about abusing women, she and her party have vigorously defended abusers like her own husband, Ted Kennedy, and others (It amazes me that although, unlike Bill Clinton, Trump has never been accused of rape or indecent exposure, and unlike Ted Kennedy Trump has never been accused of assaulting a waitress under the table at a restaurant or of being responsible for a young woman's tragic death, yet some of the same people who condemn Trump for his faults often admired, even adored, these men).

If Trump has lied about some of his past, Hillary has lied repeatedly to the American people and to Congress about how she has failed to protect our national security. If Trump has an unsavory past, Hillary's past has been one scandal after another (Rose Law Firm, Whitewater, Stock Futures trades, White House Travel Agency, FBI files, to name a few). If Trump has refused to release his tax returns, she has not only refused to release her emails but illegally destroyed them. She's also refused to release her medical records. If Trump is foul-mouthed, she is equally so.

She's in fact so vile in her speech and rude in her conduct to her subordinates that secret service and other security agents despise her and try to avoid being assigned to her. If Trump is a terrible role-model for kids, she's just as bad. Indeed, her concern for women and children is belied by her conduct in discussing her role in defending a 41 year-old man - whom she knew to be guilty of raping a 12 year old girl - back in the 1970s. She not only maligned the girl's reputation in the trial but chuckled at the tactics she used to essentially get the rapist off.

She's a radical on abortion, favoring the unrestricted right to abort a baby until the moment it's born - a fact that I'm frankly surprised many Catholics seem unconcerned about. She wishes to increase refugees to this country by 550%, despite the calamity that has befallen Europe as a result of massive refugee immigration. She's a crony capitalist who has put our foreign policy up for sale to the corporatists and foreign interests who contribute to her "charitable" foundation, a "charity" which gives only 5.7% of its income to charitable causes and which exists primarily to enrich the Clintons.

Finally, the stench of corruption clings to her like the spray of a skunk clings to a dog. The Wikileaks releases have shown her and her circle to be steeped in illegality, and now the FBI has announced as I'm typing this that they're re-opening their investigation of her. Trump has exploited the system, to be sure, but no one has accused him of breaking the law.

It's startling to me to realize I'm defending Trump, a task in several ways akin to Hercules' undertaking in the Aegean stables, but if tomorrow we see our mission as casting our vote against the worst of two bad choices, Donald Trump looks shockingly good, at least to me, when contrasted with Hillary Clinton.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

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 the 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.

To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny / annoying / brilliant / stupid / crazy / ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.

“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 in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), 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 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." Too 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 are not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics. 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.”

There's more good stuff from Brian's article at the link.

Where Does Altruism Come From?

An article in Science Daily on altruistic behavior in plants, of all things, quotes a Harvard evolutionary biology professor named William Friedman:

"One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives," said Friedman. "Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary."

Either Friedman doesn't consider humans the product of evolution, which would be an odd stance for an evolutionary biologist to take, or he's never heard of Mother Teresa.

Why He Did It

One of the most stunning developments in a presidential campaign replete with such developments is the announcement by FBI director James Comey that new emails have surfaced that have prompted the FBI to continue their probe into the seemingly bottomless pit of Mrs. Clinton's email server scandal.

This decision has raised eyebrows, tempers, and lots of questions. The UK Daily Mail has an article that gives us a glimpse into the state of Mr. Comey's mind, and, although the Mail is a tabloid and perhaps not as reliable as we might like, the story is written by Ed Klein, an investigative journalist who has written four books on the Clintons and who has a reputation as a responsible journalist from his work for a number of high-profile news organizations.

Here are some important excerpts from Klein's piece:

James Comey's decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director.

'The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary,' said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass.

'Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,' said the source. 'They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.'

According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice.

He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.

'He's been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,' said the source.

'When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary's personal email server turned up in a computer used by [her close aide] Huma Abedin and [Abedin's disgraced husband,] Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation.

'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued.

'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state.

'He talks about the damage that he's done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he's been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It's taken a tremendous toll on him.

'It shattered his ego. He looks like he's aged 10 years in the past four months.'

Klein goes on to describe that Comey's decision to reopen the investigation has infuriated both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama who once said that appointing Comey, who has had a reputation for exceptional integrity, was "the worst mistake he's made as president." One wonders if Mr. Obama thinks the Comey appointment was a mistake because Mr. Comey had a reputation for integrity.

In any case, the Director has certainly made this last week of the election campaign interesting, although I'm sure Mrs. Clinton would much rather he had just kept quiet.

The Fundamental Stuff

Materialists believe everything reduces to material stuff - atoms and the particles of which they are made. On this view, even phenomena like ideas and sensations are merely epiphenomena of the material brain. The brain, in other words, is all that's necessary to explain mental events. There is no mind.

This view is becoming increasingly untenable, however, as we learn more about the deep structure of living things. It certainly is beginning to look like matter is itself reducible to information and, since information lies downstream from mind, it would follow that mind is even more basic than matter.

The following video is a bit long, but it illustrates how the theory that matter is reducible to information plays out in biology. It's pretty good.

Perhaps the 20th century physicist Sir James Jeans was correct when he said that the universe is beginning to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

Learning from the Experience of Others

How bad is the migrant situation in Germany? Last week I posted an article which described growing discontent on the part of both migrants and natural-born citizens of Germany that's resulting, according to the article, in a steep increase in German emigration. The discontent expressed was largely anecdotal, however, and it wasn't clear how widespread it really was. This article in the UK Express, to the extent that it's accurate, gives us a bit more insight into the deteriorating situation. According to the Express,

During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40 per cent over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught.

Thousands of migrants who entered the country as 'asylum seekers' or 'refugees' have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretences.

Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.

The violence includes assault and rape, including the rape of a ten year-old girl in Leipzig.

According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behaviour, says the report.

The crime statistics are up considerably since last year, and last year's crime rate was much higher than 2014:

Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report leaked to Bild. This figure represents an 80 per cent increase since 2014 and is equivalent to 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, in 2015 alone.

The report added: "The growing sense of lawlessness is substantiated by an October 24 YouGov poll which found that 68 per cent of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated during the past several years.

"Nearly 70 per cent of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63 per cent feel unsafe at large public events."

There's doubt in Germany that Angela Merkel can survive next year's election given the dissatisfaction with her policies that brought 1.1 million migrants to Germany last year alone.

In any case, a question that might be posed to the architects of this state of affairs is, given all that has happened as a consequence of bringing over a million unassimilating migrants into your country, would you do it all again? Presumably the honest answer would be "no," and, if so, one hopes our own political leaders would draw the obvious cautionary lessons from the German experience.

Materialism and Consciousness

This is the fourth and last of the posts on the philosophy of mind that have been featured on Viewpoint since last week:

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their dominant position among philosophers, a position that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

The Interaction Problem

I've run a few posts on the topic of mind and matter the past few days, largely because we've been discussing it in my classes and because I find the topic fascinating.

In today's post I'd like to highlight one of the common objections materialists make to the belief that we are at least partly comprised of an immaterial mental substance.

This is the objection based on what's called the interaction problem. The problem is that it's inconceivable or unthinkable that two completely different substances, mind and matter (or brains), could in any way interact with each other. Given that we can't describe how brains interact with immaterial minds and vice versa, belief that somehow they do is unwarranted, or so it is claimed.

The problem with the interaction objection is that it seems to be based on the assumption that something can only be affected by other things which are like them. That is, material entities - the brain or bodies - can only be affected by other things which are material, but this principle - that like can only affect like - is surely not true. We see counter examples all around us:

• The idea of food, an immaterial phenomenon, causes the physical reaction of salivary glands secreting saliva.
• The excitation of cone cells in the retina, a physical reaction, produces the sensation of red which is non-physical.
• Swirling fluid in your inner ear, a physical condition, causes the sensation of dizziness which is non-physical.
• Getting your fingers caught in a closing car door, a material situation, causes pain which is an immaterial phenomenon.

And so on. The only way that the principle that "like causes like" can be known to be true is if we assume a priori that materialism is true, but the truth of materialism is the very point that's in question in this discussion. To assume that materialism is true at the outset and then conclude that indeed it must be true is to commit the logical fallacy known as begging the question.

The Evolution of Consciousness (Pt. II)

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent talks about how reflecting on the phenomenon of human consciousness as a high school student led him to doubt the Darwinian story:

I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the beginning of my doubts about Darwin…

Years later, when I related the story to Walter ReMine, he explained to me consciousness poses a serious problem for evolution.

He said something to the effect, “Say an animal has to flee a predator — all it has to do is run away. Why does it have to evolve consciousness in order to flee predators?” Mechanically speaking the animal can be programmed to flee or even hunt without having to be self-aware. Why does it have to evolve consciousness to do anything for survival?

Why would selection favor the evolution of consciousness? How does selection select for the pre-cursors of consciousness? I don’t think it can. Ergo, consciousness didn’t evolve, or it’s just a maladaptation, or an illusion — or maybe it is created by God. Materialists can say consciousness is an illusion all they want, but once upon a time, when my arm was broken in a hang gliding crash, I felt real pain. It would have been nice if consciousness were an illusion back then, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, at some point in our embryonic development consciousness arises, but how does a particular configuration of material stuff generate it? Dead people have the same configuration of matter in their brains (unless they suffered a head injury) that they had before dying and yet before death they were conscious and after death they are not. Why? What's missing after death?

How do physical processes like electrochemical reactions in the brain produce a belief, or a doubt, or understanding? How do atoms whirling about in our neuronal matrix give rise to our sense that the distant past is different from the recent past? How do chemical reactions translate a pattern of ink on paper into a meaning or a firing of synapses translate electrical pulses into the sensation of red?

Consciousness is an incredibly intriguing phenomenon and not only is there no explanation of it in a materialist ontology, there's also no explanation for how it could ever have evolved through purely random material processes.

Cordova has more at the link.

The Evolution of Consciousness (Pt. I)

My classes are currently discussing what's often referred to as the mind/body problem. This is the question whether there is about us any non-physical, immaterial substance like mind, or whether we humans are ultimately completely reducible to material stuff. I thought it'd be relevant, therefore, to run a couple of posts on the topic, slightly modified, which first appeared on Viewpoint a couple of years ago. Here's the first:

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind. In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

This is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism - i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world - and materialism - the view that all of reality is reducible to matter. Consciousness, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid utter defeat by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating. Indeed, this is what philosopher Thomas Nagel tries to do in his much discussed book Mind and Cosmos, and he's been roundly thrashed by his fellow naturalists for his heresy.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1750 to 1950, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the hegemony it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins once put it.

More tomorrow.

The Middle Way

In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a post out of the archives that I did on such a via media back in 2008 (12/24/08). The post starts out by addressing the notion of a kind of compromise position between libertarian free will and determinism, usually referred to as "compatibilism," and ends up summarizing some of the discussions we've had in class on these different philosophical positions. Here it is:

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being compelled by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being compelled by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation for the materialist (i.e. one who allows no non-material entities in his ontology) is to simply accept determinism, but not only does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because then it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive so most people cling to libertarianism even if they can't explain what a genuine free choice would actually be. However, they can only maintain a belief in free will if they give up their belief in materialism. Only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow functions in human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Double Digits

The so-called Affordable Care Act was sold to the American people by the president and congressional Democrats (not a single Republican voted for it) on the pretense that it would make insurance cheaper and medical care better. Critics at the time cautioned us that what we were being told wasn't true, that Obamacare, as it came to be called, would end up in a death spiral because young, healthy people would opt out thus depriving insurance companies of the revenue to pay for the medical costs of the sick people who would flock to the system.

Despite the warnings that this would happen, a lot of people thought a nice man like Mr. Obama and a nice lady like Nancy Pelosi would never lie to us. Well, they did, and now the bills are coming due, and millions of Americans are experiencing the insurance equivalent of sticker shock.

The Obama administration has admitted that insurance premiums will rise by double-digit percentages in 2017, an admission that will likely bring the debate surrounding Obamacare to the forefront in the final days of the 2016 election:

Premiums will increase at an average of 25 percent across the 39 states serviced by the online marketplace healthcare.gov, according to the Obama administration. Even worse, around 20 percent of consumers, or one in five, will only have one insurer to choose from in the marketplace.

This is because insurance companies will go bankrupt if they stay in the system so they're getting out as fast as they can:

This is not great news for the already struggling healthcare legislation. Obamacare is in the midst of a death spiral: 17 co-ops have failed, the Tennessee Health Commissioner says the healthcare exchanges in the state are “very near collapse,” insurance companies in North Carolina have become a “financial sinkhole,” and few health experts have positive things to say about the future of the legislation.

The total number of insurers participating on the Obamacare exchanges is likely to drop from 232 this year to 167 in 2017. That is a loss of 28 percent in just 12 months.

This year’s expected increase is triple the size of 2016, and will have a direct effect on 16 percent of consumers who are not protected by subsidies, the Hill reports. Some 5 to 7 million consumers are either not eligible for subsidy assistance, or they purchase healthcare packages outside of the exchanges, where subsidies are not available.

The lesson here is that one should never trust politicians, no matter how charming they may be, to tell the truth nor the government to do anything well (other than run the military) or efficiently or better than free people shopping in a free market can do.

This is a lesson that a lot of millenials who supported Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton refused to accept, but now, unfortunately, millions of them are going to learn it the hard way.

Short Memories

One of the more amusing reactions to the last debate between Trump and Clinton was the faux outrage expressed in the media over Trump's insistence that the election is rigged and that he wasn't going to commit himself to accepting the results prematurely. His opponents in the Democratic party have reacted as if such rhetoric is the most shocking thing they've ever heard, cutting to the very heart of our democracy and threatening us all with anarchy in the streets.

The overwrought reaction seems a bit insincere, given that, as MSNBC's Morning Joe (of all places) reports, such allegations have been common among our Democrat brethren for the last decade and a half, and no one has heretofore suffered a fainting spell over it:

After you watch the above video you might also enjoy the next segment of the show in which the host, Joe Scarborough, lampoons those who have succumbed to a case of the vapors over Trump's allegations and his refusal to be put in a box:

In fact, Hillary Clinton herself in a video of a campaign rally in Florida where Al Gore is speaking on her behalf, tacitly agrees that George Bush was not the real winner of the 2000 election. She evidently doesn't accept the results of that election. Watch her nod her head in agreement as the crowd chants, "You won!" to Al Gore:

Trump has certainly said some outrageous things in this campaign season, but his refusal to commit himself to accepting the outcome on November 8th isn't one of them, and those who think such demurrals are unprecedented and a threat to our democracy are simply showing that they have terribly short memories. Either that or they have an underdeveloped aversion to personal hypocrisy.

Immigration and Emigration in Germany

The website Zero Hedge has a dispiriting piece about what's happening in Germany as a result of Chancellor Angela Merkel's immigration and refugee policies that have resulted in an influx of over a million Muslims in the last two years. Here's a summary of the Zero Hedge report:

• More than 1.5 million Germans, many of them highly educated, left Germany during the past decade according to the newspaper Die Welt.
• Germany is facing a spike in migrant crime, including an epidemic of rapes and sexual assaults. Mass migration is also accelerating the Islamization of Germany. Many Germans appear to be losing hope about the future direction of their country.
• "We refugees... do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. And please take Saxony and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with you.... Why do you not go to another country? We are sick of you!" — Aras Bacho an 18-year-old Syrian migrant, in Der Freitag, October 2016.
• A real estate agent in a town near Lake Balaton, a popular tourist destination in western Hungary, said that 80% of the Germans relocating there cite the migration crisis as the main reason for their desire to leave Germany.
• "I believe that Islam does not belong to Germany. I regard it as a foreign entity which has brought the West more problems than benefits. In my opinion, many followers of this religion are rude, demanding and despise Germany." — A German citizen who emigrated from Germany, in an "Open Letter to the German Government."
• "I believe that immigration is producing major and irreversible changes in German society. I am angry that this is happening without the direct approval of German citizens. ... I believe that it is a shame that in Germany Jews must again be afraid to be Jews." — A German citizen who emigrated from Germany, in an "Open Letter to the German Government."
• "My husband sometimes says he has the feeling that we are now the largest minority with no lobby. For each group there is an institution, a location, a public interest, but for us, a heterosexual married couple with two children, not unemployed, neither handicapped nor Islamic, for people like us there is no longer any interest." — "Anna," in a letter to the Mayor of Munich about her decision to move her family out of the city because migrants were making her life there impossible.

According to the article, a growing number of Germans are abandoning neighborhoods in which they have lived all their lives, and others are leaving Germany for good, as mass immigration transforms parts of the country beyond recognition.

Given that Hillary Clinton has announced that she wants to increase our own refugee numbers by 500% we can anticipate that what Germans, Swedes, and other Europeans are experiencing today, we may very likely be experiencing tomorrow.

Yet it seems as unnecessary as it is foolish. Just as there are ways to help the homeless without inviting them to live in our own homes there are surely ways to help those fleeing war without deeply disrupting and forever altering our own culture by bringing them into our country (See here, for example). Perhaps when the results of Europe's experiment with immigration become more widely known our politicians will reconsider the course they've set us upon. If they don't, then maybe we'll all have to learn to speak Arabic.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Stanley Kurtz at National Review tells us a bit about Robert Creamer, a convicted felon and Democratic operative who works behind the scenes to orchestrate violence at GOP rallies so that Republicans will be blamed and discredited.

Kurtz writes:

In 2007, Robert Creamer published Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win, a tactical handbook for the left that he wrote while serving a prison term for tax evasion and bank fraud. Creamer’s advice on how to handle conservatives (pp. 74-6) makes for interesting reading about now:

In general our strategic goal with people who have become conservative activists is not to convert them—that isn’t going to happen. It is to demoralize them—to ‘deactivate’ them. We need to deflate their enthusiasm, to make them lose their ardor and above all their self-confidence…[A] way to demoralize conservative activists is to surround them with the echo chamber of our positions and assumptions. We need to make them feel that they are not mainstream, to make them feel isolated… We must isolate them ideologically…[and] use the progressive echo chamber…By defeating them and isolating them ideologically, we demoralize conservative activists directly. Then they begin to quarrel among themselves or blame each other for defeat in isolation, and that demoralizes them further.

Despite, or maybe because of, his sleazy tactics Creamer has been welcomed at the Obama White House almost 342 times since 2009 and met with President Obama almost 50 times. He unknowingly admits to his gutter tactics in the video below.

Please don't watch the video if you're likely to be offended by vulgar language. I issued this same caution concerning another video that featured the same cast of characters on Wednesday, but that video exposed the attempts to fraudulently get ineligible people to vote. This video exposes the attempts to foment violence and make it appear that it's Republicans who are guilty. I'm very reluctant to post material that features people who insist on repeatedly dunking us into a septic tank, but this is so important that I felt it should be posted:

The Daily Caller has more on Creamer and his dubious dealings and history.

It should be astonishing but isn't that the mainstream media hasn't been showing these videos on a continuous loop for the past week. They certainly would be if Creamer and his henchmen were Republicans, but because they're working for Hillary - with her knowledge, Creamer avers - the media simply looks the other way. Much of the major media have turned themselves into a North American version of the old Soviet news agency Pravda, serving as little more than propaganda organs for the statist party.

Cicero's Warning

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's right that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the pillars of society, the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and which crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall to lose trust in their government, their courts, the news organizations and the free market, when our citizens are encouraged to no longer value family, church, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that all that matters is their own personal happiness and that the way to achieve that is through accumulating consumer goods, entertainment and pleasure, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed from outside.

One way to avoid that fate is to recognize that there are many voices out there whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions that made America great (I apologize if that sounds Trumpian. I don't mean it to.). The second thing is to stand up to those voices or stop listening to them altogether. The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has been done to those "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if we lose the will to resist, as Cicero puts it, then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?

Four Small Steps for Saving Friendships

Mary Tillotson at The Federalist discusses four things we should all keep in mind as the election gets closer and our political conversations get more intense and perhaps more heated.

She opens by noting that,

1 in 14 Americans has apparently lost a friend over this election. While this year seems especially awful, 7 percent seems to be a fairly stable number of friendships fracturing during election years.

Somehow, only 70 percent of respondents say this year’s election has brought out the worst in people. Maybe that’s because fully 30 percent “feel that the harsh language used in politics today” is justified.

It’s unfortunate, because if there’s one thing we ought to be able to agree on, it’s that we could use a little more civility in our civic conversations. So here’s a guide I hope people on both sides of the aisle—and anywhere in between—can use to keep their conversations civil, their friendships intact, and, therefore, their country strong.

I list her four recommendations here with a brief note about each. She goes into more detail at the link:

1. Believe in the other person's good intentions: This, Tillotson states, is the first important principle of civility: believe in good intentions. Even when people are objectively wrong they probably have good intentions underlying their opinions. That doesn’t make them right, but it does make them worth respecting and listening to.

2. Keep an open mind and reject polarization: If you never honestly consider others’ opinions, Tillotson believes, your mind will shrink and become its own little echo chamber. Listen to your interlocutor. Plan to learn something. Put yourself in his or her shoes and consider a perspective you hadn’t thought about before. Maybe there is a valid concern that you weren’t aware of and is bringing you to different conclusions. That may be true vice versa, as well. Political issues are complicated, and different policies affect different people in different ways.

3. Remember your priorities: Consider whether your friendship or your political opinions are more important. Is your friend’s one vote going to change the course of American history? For that matter, is your friend likely to vote the way you vote after you’ve fallen out over politics? If anything, your friend is probably less likely to agree with you after a fight.

4. Keep it off Facebook: Social media probably isn't a good venue for having a productive political debate. In fact, because it's so public, it may be the worst venue if we're interested in persuading our friends and keeping them as friends.

Tillotson gives good advice. Check out the whole article at the link.

Is the Fix In?

Donald Trump has had a rough couple of weeks, some of it deserved, some of it completely unfair.

An example of the latter was the blowback from his threat to prosecute Hillary for her manifest crimes. Ordinarily such a threat in the midst of a political campaign would at best be unseemly, but given the fact that Democrats have so often shown no reluctance themselves to use the law to intimidate or punish their political opponents the unseemly aspect of this is, in fact, the hypocrisy of the left's faux indignity over Trump's threat.

Trump has also taken a lot of flak from the media for his assertion that the coming election is rigged. Well, whether it is or not, it's certain that there's plenty of potential for electoral fraud as these stories from Indiana, Texas, and the nation as a whole illustrate.

And here's some icing on the fraud cake from The Federalist.

In any case, even if there really is no significant fraud in November it's not because the Democrats aren't trying. Undercover journalism by James O'Keefe's operatives reveal in the following video some of the egregious attempts by Democrats to manipulate and cheat the system to get illegal residents to the polls to vote.

I have to warn you, though, the language used by these people is as vulgar as their ethics. Please don't watch the video if you'll be offended by obscenity and sleaziness:

Meanwhile, the left continues to resort to violence against the Trump campaign with hardly a peep of outrage voiced by our media. Not only are Trump supporters attacked at rallies, but, in good brown-shirt fashion, Trump campaign offices are being vandalized and firebombed.

And these are the people who tell us that Trump lacks the temperament and character to be president. Well, I don't argue with that, but look at the people who are offering themselves as the alternative.

The Nature of Time

The class discussion recently turned to questions concerning the nature of time and a student dug out this post from 3/7/2014. Since it addresses some of what we talked about in class I thought it might be worthwhile to run it again:

Anthony Aguirre at Big Questions Online discusses the two theories of time. His discussion is difficult to follow unless one is familiar with quantum mechanics and relativity theory, but he does give a clear explanation of the two basic theories on offer. What he calls below the "Unitary Block" theory is sometimes referred to as the B-Theory of time. What he calls the "Experienced World" is the A-Theory.

When we step back, we thus seem to have two rather different and contrary views of time’s nature. In one, the ‘Unitary Block’, spacetime and quantum states are laid out ‘all at once’, specified once and for all by some set of boundary conditions. Everything at any time is uniquely determined by — and thus implicitly contained in — any other time, and the world exhibits no distinction between past and future.

At the same time, the ‘Experienced World’ we actually inhabit and observe has a very clear distinction between past, present, and future, produces entropy, and allows branching between a single present reality and several possible future realities.

Among knowledgeable and thoughtful people, there seem to be three basic views of this paradox:

1.The Unitary Block is the fundamental, and by implication more true description; things such as the arrow of time, definite experimental outcomes, etc., are emergent phenomena that, if we only could make precise enough computations, could be reduced to ‘nothing but’ the fundamental description.

2.The Unitary Block is wrong in some essential way. A more correct view would be much more like — and much more readily reconciled with — the Experienced World.

3.The Experienced World is more fundamental than the Unitary Block, which is just the correct description of regularities in the Experienced World in very particular regimes.

View 1 is by far the most common amongst my theoretical physicist colleagues, but I’ll make three arguments as to why we should think carefully before embracing it.

His arguments for considering the Experienced World (A-Theory) to be fundamental can be read at the link. One might wonder why scientists even think there is a Unitary Block. The answer has to do with Einstein's discoveries about relativity:

Right now, this second, an old man is exhaling his last breath. Elsewhere, two young lovers exchange their first kiss. Farther afield, two asteroids silently collide. Sunrise comes to a planet orbiting a neighboring star. This very second, a supernova detonates in a faraway galaxy.

And yet ‘this very second’ across the universe apparently does not really exist! Our best fundamental theory of space-time, Einstein’s Relativity, expressly precludes a single, objective definition of simultaneity. Events occurring ‘now’ by one observer’s estimation can — with equal validity — be said to occur at different times according to another observer who is far away and/or in motion relative to the first.

We don’t notice this issue much here on Earth, but it becomes very obvious for example in cosmology, where how one defines ‘now’ can determine whether the universe looks uniform or not, and even if it is finite or infinite!

It's all very fascinating stuff with fascinating implications. For example, if the Unitary Block theory is correct I'm not sure what sense it makes to talk about the age of the universe. Every moment of time would have come into being at the instant that the universe was created. If that's so, then what does it mean to say that the universe is 14 billion years old?

A Fortunate Universe

Two Australian cosmologists, Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis, have published a book on the fine-tuning of the universe. The book is titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos and it explores the implications of cosmic fine-tuning.

By fine-tuning is meant that there are numerous parameters, forces, and values that comprise our universe which, if they were even minutely different than what they are, the universe would either not exist at all or not be the sort of place where life could exist. In some cases the fine-tuning is calibrated to a precision which boggles the mind.

If, for example, the initial expansion rate of the universe at the time of its origin had varied by just one part in 10^120 the universe never would have formed. To give an idea of how enormous this number is, and thus how precisely set the expansion rate must have been, there are about 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.

No one questions that the universe is fine-tuned, but since a finely-tuned universe has profound implications for one's metaphysics, particularly the question of whether the universe is intentionally designed or not, and since the notion that it's designed is repugnant to naturalistic materialists, three alternative possibilities have been advanced to account for the universe's breath-takingly precise constants.

Lewis and Barnes have put together a short video to introduce their book and give a brief summary of each of these alternatives. Take a look:

For a list of some of the parameters and constants that are agreed by most scientists to be fine-tuned, and a lucid explanation of each, see the article by philosopher of science Jay Richards here.