Sagan on Extra Dimensions

A student recently watched the video I posted on 2/25/17 in which Dr. Quantum visits Flatland and ecounters a two-dimensional "person." The video shows how the two-dimensional person would be completely baffled by an encounter with a three dimensional being.

The student recalled watching a similar video in which the late astronomer Carl Sagan illustrated what a three-dimensional object would look like in a two-dimensional world. The student liked the video and linked me to it.

It's classic Sagan and pretty good so I'll share it with you:

How Physics Refutes Realism and Confirms Idealism

My classes have recently spent some time discussing realism and idealism. Realism is the view that there is a world out there existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not (Realism). On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Fortunate Universe

Back in December I did a post on a book by two cosmologists named Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

The book details a number of the parameters, forces, constants and ratios that have to be just what they are to a breath-takingly fine precision or else the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I thought the book to be so important and the style in which Barnes and Lewis compose it to be so accessible to laymen that when I came across this short video publicizing it I thought it'd be good to post it on VP in hopes that some readers may want to read the book.

This cosmic fine-tuning as it's called constitutes a powerful cumulative argument for the existence of an intelligent mind responsible for it all. There seem to be no other very plausible explanations, but some who are queasy about the support fine-tuning gives to traditional theism have adduced other possibilities. Some have posited that our universe is the product of a computer simulation somewhat like the Matrix.

Of course, this explanation still relies on an intelligent transcendent being. Others have sought to abandon the idea of an intelligent creator altogether and have embraced the idea of a multiverse which incorporates every possible universe in one unimaginably vast array of worlds.

If such a multiverse exists, the thinking goes, then since our universe is possible it must exist somewhere in this enormous ensemble.

So, there are essentially three possible explanations for why our universe exists: A computer simulation designed by a mind in some other world, an infinity of universes (Geraint Lewis' position), or theism (Luke Barnes' position). The problem is that both of the first two explanations themselves must be explained. If the creator of our world is an alien computer wizard, then how did the wizard come to be? Or, if the reason for our universe is some sort of multiverse generator, how did that come to be?

On the other hand, if the creator of the universe is the God of classical theism then the creator is a necessarily existent mind upon which all contingent existents depend. The creator's existence requires no further explanation because the creator is not a contingent being. The explanation of its existence is in itself. Here's a video I posted with the original piece on A Fortunate Universe which elaborates on this argument:

How Non-Judgmentalism Hurts Women

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali woman who has endured genital mutilation and a forced marriage, prompting her to flee the bondage in which she suffered. She eventually found her way to the United States, after European Muslims made too many threats against her life. She is a strong advocate for women's rights with emphasis on the severe oppression women suffer throughout the Islamic world.

She recently wrote an essay for The Daily Beast in which she had some important things to say, some of which are highlighted below:

The problems being protested against [in the recent Day Without a Woman demonstration] —inequality, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity—are all too real for many disadvantaged women, but the legal protections for them are in place here in the United States. Women who are unfairly treated at work or discriminated against can stand up, speak out, protest in the streets, and take legal action. Not so for many women in other parts of the world for whom the hashtag #daywithoutawoman is all too apt.

Around the world women are subjected to “honor violence” and lack legal protections and access to health and social services. According to Amnesty International’s recent annual report, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, women and girls are denied equal status with men in law and are subject to gender-based violence, including sexual violence and killings perpetrated in the name of “honor.”

The relationship between the sexes in Muslim majority countries is inspired and often governed by a mix of tribal, traditional practices and Islamic law. Algerian author Kamel Daoud recently referred to this system as entailing “sexual misery” for both men and women throughout the Islamic world.Daoud favors the full emancipation of Muslim women, yet many commentators criticized him as being guilty of “Islamophobia,” a term increasingly used to silence meaningful debate.

International Women’s Day should be a day to raise our voices on behalf of women with no recourse to protect their rights. Yet I doubt Wednesday’s protesters will wave placards condemning the religious and cultural framework for women’s oppression under Sharia law. As a moral and legal code, Sharia law is demeaning and degrading to women. It requires women to be placed under the care of male guardians; it views a woman’s testimony in court as worth half that of a man’s; and it permits a husband to beat his wife. It’s not only women’s legal and sexual freedoms that are curtailed under Sharia but their economic freedoms as well. Women generally inherit half of the amount that men inherit, and their male guardian must consent to their choosing education, work, or travel.

Having laid the predicate - that Sharia is profoundly oppressive of women - Ali goes on to note that many feminists tacitly accept and even excuse it:

There is a growing trend among some feminists to make excuses for Sharia law and claim it is nothing more than a personal moral guide, and therefore consistent with American constitutional liberties.

Many Western feminists struggle to embrace universal women’s rights. Decades ago, Germaine Greer argued that attempts to outlaw female genital mutilation amounted to “an attack on cultural identity.” That type of deference to traditional practices, in the name of cultural sensitivity, hurts vulnerable women. These days, relativism remains strong. Too many feminists in the West are reluctant to condemn cultural practices that clearly harm women—female genital mutilation, polygamy, child marriage, marital rape, and honor violence, particularly in non-Western societies. Women’s rights are universal, and such practices cannot be accepted.

This is an important point. The elites in our culture, having abandoned the notion that there are objective moral duties imposed on us by our Creator, have adopted in its place a moral relativism that holds that members of one culture are not in a position of privilege to criticize the practices of another culture. All cultures are equally "valid," according to the relativist, thus no one in the West can judge what Middle Eastern Muslims do. This is, of course, a perfect recipe for moral paralysis.

Relativism and its corollary, non-judgmentalism, sound high-minded and tolerant, and as such they have great appeal to the bien pensant, but they have a crushing effect on women in other cultures and even the poor in our own society. Our refusal to make moral judgments, a refusal that follows from the secularization of our public life, is a tacit green light to those who think it's fine to whip and murder women for disobeying their husbands, or to hang gays, or to mutilate young girls so that as wives they're not tempted to infidelity.

Two young gay men about to be executed in Iran

Secular man has realized, if only subliminally, that having abandoned any transcendent ground for moral right and wrong there's no place left for him to stand to pronounce such practices what they are - evil. Oddly, Ali is an atheist, but she nevertheless writes as if theism is true, speaking the moral language of theism and complaining about the relativism of her fellow postmodern atheists:

Like Wednesday’s protest, a large portion of Western feminism has been captured by political ideologues and postmodern apologists....

This International Women’s Day, we should protest the oppression of women who have no access to legal protections. We should support those Muslim reformers, such as Asra Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, and Irshad Manji, who seek to reform Islam in line with full legal equality between men and women. And we should strive to overcome domestic political divisions to defend the universality of women’s rights.

Indeed we should, but only because the treatment of women under Sharia is morally reprehensible. My heart goes out to Ayaan, but what she doesn't seem to recognize is that those postmodern relativists and apologists for Sharia, to the extent that, like her, they've adopted the assumptions of secularism, are being more consistent in this matter than she is.

Untold Story

Donald Trump was roundly criticized for claiming during the election campaign that many illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America are felons, specifically rapists. This claim drew the ire of not only Hispanics but a lot of non-Hispanic Americans, too, so why did Trump make it? Is there any reason to think that it's true?

Columnist Ann Coulter thinks so. In an essay at the Daily Caller she asserts that the media are downplaying the facts about what amounts to an epidemic of rape in North Carolina, an epidemic that involves a disproportionate number of Hispanic immigrants. The statistics she cites are alarming:

According to North Carolinians for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, immigrants commit hundreds of sex crimes against children in North Carolina every month — 350 in the month of April 2014, 299 in May, and more than 400 in August and September. More than 90 percent of the perpetrators are Hispanic.

If this is true, it's literally shocking. Coulter goes on to identify many of the perpetrators of these horrible crimes and notes the failure of the government and the media to inform the public of what's really happening. She adds that,

There have been more stories in the American media about a rape by white lacrosse players that didn’t happen than about thousands of child rapes in North Carolina that did.

Coulter's column addresses one kind of crime, sexual assault, in one state. But if a piece by Adam Bandler at The Wire titled 9 Things You Need to Know about Illegal Immigration is accurate the statistics for other crimes like homicide, drug trafficking, DUI, and so on are equally appalling.

For example, Bandler quotes a FOX News study that,

...sorted through myriad "local, state and federal statistics" and found that "illegal immigrants are three times as likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population and account for far more crimes than their 3.5-percent share of the U.S. population would suggest."

The percentage of illegals committing the number of crimes are as follows, according to Fox News:

• 13.6 percent of those sentenced for all committed crimes in the country
• 12 percent of murder sentences
• 16 percent of trafficking sentences

This is not an argument for preventing Hispanics from seeking a better life in this country - many of them make wonderful contributions to our nation - but it is an argument, a powerful one, for making sure that we control who, exactly, is coming in and that we know what their backgrounds are.

One reason Trump beat Clinton last November is that Trump promised to gain control of our borders while Hillary seemed more inclined to follow President Obama in throwing our borders wide open. Those who support open borders, however, are probably not among the parents of those thousands of girls raped every year in North Carolina and presumably elsewhere.

Inappropriate and Distasteful

Some readers may be aware that the Marine Corps is in the midst of a bit of scandal. It seems that some Marines, whether current or former isn't clear, took pornographic photos of female Marines which they subsequently and without the consent of the women, posted to the internet.

In other words, the men acted like pigs. The surprise in this brouhaha is that the Marines' conduct is considered outrageous. Let me explain, but first read this excerpt from the story:

[A Marine spokesperson] added that "the Marine Corps is deeply concerned about allegations regarding the derogatory online comments and sharing of salacious photographs in a closed website. This behavior destroys morale, erodes trust, and degrades the individual."

Gen. Robert B. Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, also declined to comment on the specifics of the case. "For anyone to target one of our Marines, online or otherwise, in an inappropriate manner, is distasteful and shows an absence of respect," Neller said. "I expect every Marine to demonstrate the highest integrity and loyalty to fellow Marines at all times, on duty, off-duty, and online."

Sgt. Maj. Ronald Green, the Corps' highest-ranking non-commissioned officer, said these allegations go against the core values of the Marine Corps. "There is no place for this type of demeaning or degrading behavior in our Corps -- this includes our actions online," Green said. "We need to be brutally honest with ourselves and each other. This behavior hurts fellow Marines, family members, and civilians. It is a direct attack on our ethos and legacy."

Well, okay, except that there's something incongruous about this reaction insofar as it represents the reaction of society at large (of course, maybe it doesn't). We teach young men in school that being human isn't anything special, that each of us is just a more highly evolved ape. We teach them that morality is relative and arbitrary, that right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, that nothing is objectively wrong, and that the only thing that makes something wrong is getting caught. We then place them into a high testosterone crucible such as the Marine Corps, and add to this volatile environment young women whom we place in close contact with these men who are at a stage in life which could be described as hormonal hyperdrive.

Then, after all that, we profess to be shocked and dismayed when we find these young men acting completely consistently with the modern views on anthropology, morality, and sex they've been soaking up since they were in preschool. What foundation have we given them to behave in any other way?

Reflect upon the word choice of Marine Corps commandant, General Neller. The strongest language he seemed able to summon was to call the behavior "inappropriate" and "distasteful." That's pretty lame stuff. He can't seem to bring himself to declare that humiliating another human being is morally wrong or evil, he only says that it offends his, and presumably others', taste, as if offending another person's taste were a compelling reason not to do something.

If that's the most powerful moral rhetoric in the general's arsenal I'm afraid it'll fall a bit short of making the perpetrators feel guilt and remorse for what they've done. Yet it's all that a postmodern, politically correct society permits him to use. The rules of engagement, as it were, imposed by our secular culture force us to use moral language that is the equivalent of shooting bbs in a fire-fight.

So, here's the exit question for those who wish to eliminate all religious grounds for any moral conviction from our public life: Why, exactly, is it wrong to exploit women, or anyone, for that matter, if one has the power and desire to do it?

The Illusion of Time

Time has been called one of the universe's biggest mysteries and there's little wonder why. What is time? In what sense does time exist? Is time, like Immanuel Kant thought, simply the way our minds structure experience or does time actually exist objectively, independently of human beings and other perceivers?

Physicist Brian Greene discusses time in this video and argues that our experience of past, present, and future is a kind of illusion. There is, he argues, no definite, objective past. The same is true for the present and the future.

This may seem very strange to you if you're hearing this for the first time (no pun intended) so take a look:

The Simulation Hypothesis (Pt. II)

By way of concluding yesterday's post on the possibility that you, I, and our entire universe actually exist in a computer simulation developed by some superior intellect in another world, we note that Robert Kuhn points out that the simulation hypothesis has great difficulty with the phenomenon of human consciousness:

A prime assumption of all simulation theories is that consciousness — the inner sense of awareness, like the sound of Gershwin or the smell of garlic — can be simulated; in other words, that a replication of the complete physical states of the brain will yield, ipso facto, the complete mental states of the mind. (This direct correspondence usually assumes, unknowingly, the veracity of what's known in philosophy of mind as "identity theory," one among many competing theories seeking to solve the intractable "mind-body problem".)

Such a brain-only mechanism to account for consciousness, required for whole-world simulations and promulgated by physicalists, is to me not obvious (Physicalism is the belief that everything in the universe is ultimately explicable in terms of the laws of physics. Physicalism is, for most purposes, synonomous with naturalism).

Kuhn is raising the question here as to how, for example, the sensation of seeing blue or feeling pain could be simulated. Until there is a plausible physical explanation of consciousness, which there is not at this point, it seems very unlikely that conscious beings are nothing more than a simulation.

There's more of interest in the original article, including how physicist Paul Davies uses the simulation argument to refute the multiverse hypothesis. Kuhn closes his piece with this:

I find five premises to the simulation argument: (i) Other intelligent civilizations exist; (ii) their technologies grow exponentially; (iii) they do not all go extinct; (iv) there is no universal ban or barrier for running simulations; and (v) consciousness can be simulated.

If these five premises are true, I agree, humanity is likely living in a simulation. The logic seems sound, which means that if you don't accept (or don't want to accept) the conclusion, then you must reject at least one of the premises. Which to reject?

Personally, I find premise (i) problematic, premise (ii) possible, but questionable (it's just as likely that technological growth reaches a ceiling or collapses altogether), and premise (v) extremely doubtful.

I also think it peculiar that people who scoff at the notion that an intelligent agent designed the universe when that agent is believed to be God, have no trouble believing that an intelligent agent designed the universe as long as that agent is not God.

The Simulation Hypothesis (Pt. I)

Here's a post from last year that's relevant to some of the discussions that have come up in a couple of my classes recently:

Robert Kuhn host and writer of the public television program "Closer to Truth" has an excellent column on the theory that our universe is actually a computer simulation developed by a higher intelligence in some other universe. Kuhn writes:

I began bemused. The notion that humanity might be living in an artificial reality — a simulated universe — seemed sophomoric, at best science fiction.

But speaking with scientists and philosophers on "Closer to Truth," I realized that the notion that everything humans see and know is a gigantic computer game of sorts, the creation of super-smart hackers existing somewhere else, is not a joke. Exploring a "whole-world simulation," I discovered, is a deep probe of reality.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, describes a fake universe as a "richly detailed software simulation of people, including their historical predecessors, by a very technologically advanced civilization."

It's like the movie "The Matrix," Bostrom said, except that "instead of having brains in vats that are fed by sensory inputs from a simulator, the brains themselves would also be part of the simulation. It would be one big computer program simulating everything, including human brains down to neurons and synapses."

Bostrum is not saying that humanity is living in such a simulation. Rather, his "Simulation Argument" seeks to show that one of three possible scenarios must be true (assuming there are other intelligent civilizations):

• All civilizations become extinct before becoming technologically mature;
• All technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating simulations;
• Humanity is literally living in a computer simulation.

His point is that all cosmic civilizations either disappear (e.g., destroy themselves) before becoming technologically capable, or all decide not to generate whole-world simulations (e.g., decide such creations are not ethical, or get bored with them). The operative word is "all" — because if even one civilization anywhere in the cosmos could generate such simulations, then simulated worlds would multiply rapidly and almost certainly humanity would be in one.

As technology visionary Ray Kurzweil put it, "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high school student in another universe." (Given how things are going, he jokes, she may not get a good grade.)

Kurzweil's worldview is based on the profound implications of what happens over time when computing power grows exponentially. To Kurzweil, a precise simulation is not meaningfully different from real reality. Corroborating the evidence that this universe runs on a computer, he says, is that "physical laws are sets of computational processes" and "information is constantly changing, being manipulated, running on some computational substrate." And that would mean, he concluded, "the universe is a computer." Kurzweil said he considers himself to be a "pattern of information."

"I'm a patternist," he said. "I think patterns, which means that information is the fundamental reality."

Information, of course, is the product of minds, thus, if information is the fundamental reality in our world there must be a mind that has generated it. Many people, of course, agree with this and argue that the information which comprises this world is produced by the mind of God, but scientists, at least naturalistic scientists, argue that God is a metaphysical concept which lies outside the purview of science. Instead they advert to the existence of computer hackers in other universes which is also a metaphysical posit, but since it's not God, it's presumably okay to speculate about them.

At any rate, Kuhn goes on:

Would the simulation argument relate to theism, the existence of God? Not necessarily.

Bostrum said, "the simulation hypothesis is not an alternative to theism or atheism. It could be a version of either — it's independent of whether God exists." While the simulation argument is "not an attempt to refute theism," he said, it would "imply a weaker form of a creation hypothesis," because the creator-simulators "would have some of the attributes we traditionally associate with God in the sense that they would have created our world."

They would be superintelligent, but they "wouldn't need unlimited or infinite minds." They could "intervene in the world, our experiential world, by manipulating the simulation. So they would have some of the capabilities of omnipotence in the sense that they could change anything they wanted about our world."

So even if this universe looks like it was created, neither scientists nor philosophers nor theologians could easily distinguish between the traditional creator God and hyper-advanced creator-simulators.

But that leads to the old regress game and the question of who created the (weaker) creator-simulators. At some point, the chain of causation must end — although even this, some would dispute.

In other words, the universe displays indications of having been intelligently designed rather than having been an enormously improbable accident. This poses vexing problems for naturalists who feel constrained to account for the design without invoking you-know-who. So they theorize about a multiverse of an infinite number of worlds or speculate about extra-cosmic computer programmers who've created a world that looks real but is in fact just a computer simulation.

These extraordinary hypotheses are taken seriously by some philosophers and scientists, but if someone were to suggest that maybe this universe really is the only universe, that maybe it's real and not an illusory simulation foisted on us by some pimply extra-terrestrial, and that maybe it's instead the product of a single intelligent transcendent mind, he would suffer the ridicule and scorn of those who'd sooner believe that the universe is a science project of a seventh grader in some other more technologically advanced universe. I wonder which is the more implausible hypothesis.

I'll conclude with a couple more thoughts on this in Part II tomorrow.

Highest Density Information Storage Device Ever Invented

The journal Science reports some fascinating facts about information storage:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.

DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

It is astonishing that chance and natural selection could have produced a data storage apparatus with this degree of capacity. If brilliant engineers bringing to bear all the genius of the human species can't develop storage media that can even come close to what nature has produced pretty much by lucky accident, shouldn't we ask the question, was it really an accident?

Anyway, here's a video which gives a brief explanation of the sort of research being done on using DNA as a data storage medium:

From Whence Comes the Threat?

David Brooks often writes erudite columns for the New York Times and has recently written a piece based on a lecture he attended on the period in history known as the Enlightenment. He discusses a number of interesting aspects of the lecture in his column but one in particular that caught my eye had to do with how we today seem to be abandoning the tradition of open inquiry and skepticism toward authority we inherited from Enlightenment thinkers.

He writes:

The Enlightenment included thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority for how to live. Instead, they should think things through from the ground up, respect facts and skeptically re-examine their own assumptions and convictions. He goes on to explain how the American Founding Fathers incorporated these ideas into our foundational documents and how those ideas gradually became accepted globally.

In the 20th century, however, anti-Enlightenment movements emerged:

Amid the collapse of the old regimes during World War I, the Marxists attacked the notion of private property. That brought us Lenin, Stalin and Mao. After the failures of Versailles, the Nietzscheans attacked the separation of powers and argued that power should be centralized in the hands of society’s winners, the master race. This brought us Hitler and the Nazis.

Brooks then veers away from the lecture and adds his own thoughts.

I’d add that anti-Enlightenment thinking is also back in the form of Donald Trump, racial separatists and the world’s other populist ethnic nationalist movements.

Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements don’t think truth is to be found through skeptical inquiry and debate. They think wisdom and virtue are found in the instincts of the plain people, deep in the mystical core of the nation’s or race’s group consciousness.

Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements believe less in calm persuasion and evidence-based inquiry than in purity of will. They try to win debates through blunt force and silencing unacceptable speech.

Whether Brooks is correct in what he says in his first sentence or not he's surely right about what he says in the rest, but he fails to note that the traits he espies in the groups he mentions in the first sentence are also commonplace elsewhere along the ideological spectrum.

Anyone in the academy, for example, who fails to toe the Darwinian line on evolution or bend the knee to the dogma that anthropogenic climate change is "settled science," can expect professional opprobrium or worse. Skeptical inquiry and debate are not welcomed on these topics by a large percentage of intellectuals at many of our institutions of higher learning nor by many ideologues in our government.

Moreover, anyone who speaks on campus without paying proper obeisance to progressive shibboleths about race, gender or even Israel can forget about being engaged by their opponents with "calm persuasion and evidence-based inquiry." And anyone who offends the enforcers of political correctness on our campuses knows what it's like to be silenced and to have "blunt force" brought to bear on their "unacceptable speech." A recent example is the treatment accorded noted sociologist Charles Murray by students at Middlebury College who shouted him off the stage as he tried to give a lecture. As an aside, I wonder how many of those "protestors" who were so outraged over Murray speaking at their campus ever read any of his books.

In any case, there may well be a threat to the Enlightenment tradition of open inquiry and debate arising among nationalists and Trump supporters (though I think it's a little premature to conclude much about this), but we've already had decades of experience of the rejection of these values by the left, and it's a bit surprising that Brooks doesn't mention it.

He closes with this:

We live in a time when many people have lost faith in the Enlightenment habits and institutions. I wonder if there is a group of leaders who will rise up and unabashedly defend this project, or even realize that it is this fundamental thing that is now under attack.

Quite so, but knowing whereat the most serious challenge lies is the necessary first step in addressing the problem. If people like David Brooks think the gravest threat to the Enlightenment intellectual tradition currently comes solely or even mostly from the alt-right or Donald Trump then the Enlightenment project in this country is indeed in very deep trouble.

The Earliest Microbes

There's a report in the Washington Post that researchers have discovered possible micro fossils of possible organisms that date from 3.77 billion years old to 4.28 billion years ago. This makes them hundreds of millions of years older than previous microfossil discoveries were believed to be.

If the claims in the report are born out, if these really are fossils of biological microorganisms and if they really are as old as they appear to be, the discovery would be extremely interesting for several reasons:

1. The earth is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old. If life arose within a few hundred million years after the earth was formed then it arose extremely rapidly, not at all in accord with the long slow process posited by Darwinism. Abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life) is a mystery to scientists as it is. There's no plausible explanation of how the constituents of a self-replicating system like a cell could have organized themselves to form such a phenomenon. It's not unlike trying to imagine how the code for Windows 10 could have organized itself by chance to produce a coherent operating system. Now evidence has been presented which indicates that the process not only occurred, but occurred relatively rapidly which deepens the mystery of how it could have happened. This excerpt from the video Unlocking the Mystery of Life gives an idea of just some of the difficulties involved in trying to come up with a theory of how abiogenesis could have happened:

2. During the first billion years of its existence the earth would have been extremely hostile to life. Atmospheric conditions, meteor bombardments, volcanism, geologic disasters of every type would have made earth a very unstable incubator for nascent life. If nevertheless, self-replicating life managed to arise and survive by sheer chance during this epoch it's emergence and survival are incredibly astonishing.

3. The lead author of the paper that describes these fossils, biogeochemist Matthew Dodd, noted that when the fossils were believed to have formed Mars was warm and had oceans on its surface. If life can arise relatively easily, Dodd states, “It means we could expect to find evidence of life on Mars [dating from] this time.” In other words, if living things can arise easily and quickly even in hostile environments it should have arisen on Mars as well as the earth. If we don't ever discover similar fossils on Mars, he goes on to say, “that suggests that life is a result of some fluke or phenomenon on Earth.”

4. Finally, if it turns out that biological organisms did arise quickly against all odds, that would seem to count against naturalistic explanations of abiogenesis and in favor of intelligent design. After all, it's far more probable that the information needed to produce living things, like the information needed to produce computer code, is the product of a mind than that it's the product solely of random chance and physical processes. That it happened rapidly in a hostile environment increases the probability of intelligent agency and decreases the likelihood of any purely naturalistic explanation.

Presumably, time will tell.

Is Pedophilia Okay Now?

Daniel Payne at The Federalist asks some questions that the media seems unwilling to ask in the wake of the Milo Yiannopoulis contretemps:

At some point we are going to have to address two horrifying subtexts from two recent public pseudo-scandals: one, is there a child sex problem in the gay male community? Two, is our society essentially tolerant of it? That seems to be the nauseatingly reasonable conclusion one could reach after the events of the past week involving provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and actor-activist George Takei.

I don't disagree with Payne's choice of questions, but I think they need to be cast more broadly. Is our society moving toward a tacit acceptance of adult/child sex not just among gays but among straight men as well? Here's part of what provoked Payne to raise the issue:

In a clip of a livestream webcast that resurfaced last week, Milo, the [self-described] “dangerous faggot” and campus agitator of (former) Breitbart infamy, spoke approvingly of sexual relationships between older men and 13-year-old boys. “In the homosexual world particularly,” he claimed, “some of those relationships between younger boys and older men” give the young boys “security and safety” and “provide them with love and…a sort of rock for when they can’t talk to their parents.”

“In the gay world,” Milo said later, “some of the most important, enriching and incredibly, you know, life-affirming, important, shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys.” “Provided they’re consensual,” he added, “provided they’re consensual.”

During a different interview, with Joe Rogan, Milo talked approvingly of an alleged sexual encounter he had with a priest when Milo was around 14 years old. Milo also described attending Hollywood “boat parties” and “house parties,” where he saw things that “beggar belief.” As Milo put it: “some of the boys at [these parties] were very young. Very young.” Later, he reiterated for the third time: “There were some very young boys around at that time.” In spite of Rogan’s prompting, Milo refused to name anyone at these parties.

The creeping revulsion you’re feeling is perfectly natural: it’s what any healthy person feels when an adult speaks glowingly about sexual encounters between grown men and children (and refuses to name the perverted criminals who have sex with “very young boys”).

It may be that gay pedophiles are more open about their proclivities than are men who are attracted to young girls, but surely the problem is as bad or worse among the latter group.

I was listening to a radio talk show in the car yesterday and the host was talking about his recent trip to Thailand undertaken to learn first-hand what child sex slavery looks like in the country perhaps most notorious for the enthrallment of young girls by sex traffickers. One thing he said he learned is that many of the men engaged in exploiting and abusing these girls are from North America and Europe. Surely, the host said, these men don't give up their cruel perversions just because they return home.

A lot of people were shocked the other day when Chris Cuomo, CNN personality and son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo, tweeted that if a twelve year old girl doesn't want to see a naked man in a restroom she's the one with the problem.

It used to be that a man who exposed himself to young girls was arrested for indecent exposure. Now people like Cuomo are telling those girls that if they don't want to see a man's genitals they're the ones with the problem. It used to be that priests who abused young boys elicited outrage. Now Yiannopoulis is publicly promoting it.

I know I keep coming back to this, but it bears frequent repeating: A secular society simply has no place to stand in judging anything to be morally wrong. When modern or postmodern man tries to decide whether something is right or wrong he's like an astronaut floating in space trying to decide which way is up. Our intuitions tell us that it's profoundly wrong to sexually exploit children, but when we try to think of a reason why it's wrong, we have to admit that our only reason is that we personally find it very distasteful. When we ask what it even means to say that exploiting children is wrong all we can say is that it means we wish people wouldn't do it.

If there's no objective moral law and no accountability beyond the grave then there simply can be nothing that's really wrong. As Dostoyevsky put it, "If God is dead, then everything is permitted." Or, in the words of biologist Richard Dawkins, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." (emphasis mine) Modern man has declared God dead and now our sons and daughters are prey for sexual deviants who follow the secular assumption of God's irrelevance to its moral conclusion. There is no evil and no good, just acts of which we approve and others we deem "inappropriate."

Alexander Pope wrote the following lines in his Essay on Man some three hundred years ago, but they capture perfectly our modern/postmodern moral paralysis, even when confronted with something as horrible as the sexual abuse of children. Pope wrote:

Evil is a monster of such frightful mien,
that to be hated needs but to be seen,
but seen too oft, familiar with her face,
first we endure, then pity, then embrace.

The Sizes of Things

I've told my students that the world appears to us as it does because we happen to be the size we are. I've suggested that were we considerably smaller, say, the size of an atom, the world would look much different. What appears solid, for example, would not seem solid at all to an atomic-sized creature (if such a thing were physically possible).

As something of a follow-up to that discussion I thought I'd repost this link to a fun interactive site that you'll find difficult to stop playing with once you start. By moving the scroll bar you can zoom in or out to see how big the universe is compared to our planet and how big we are compared to the smallest parts of an atom.

As you scroll toward the very small notice that it seems as if what we call matter simply ceases to exist. All there seems to be at the most fundamental level are hypothetical entities called strings - incredibly tiny filaments or wisps of energy. But if there's no material substance at the heart of reality is matter just an illusion? Give the interactive site a try and spend a little time just being amazed. It may take a few seconds to load so be patient.

Our Most Authoritarian President

Who was/is the more authoritarian president, Barack Obama or Donald Trump? It sounds, perhaps, like an easy question, but you may be surprised. The answer depends, of course, upon how you define an authoritarian, but if you define it as a leader who seeks to arrogate for himself more power than the constitution allows him then, clearly, Barack Obama was more authoritarian than Donald Trump, at least according to David French at NRO.

As French notes,

[A] president is “authoritarian” not when he’s angry or impulsive or incompetent or tweets too much. He’s authoritarian when he seeks to expand his own power beyond constitutional limits. In this regard, the Obama administration — though far more polite and restrained in most of its public comments — was truly one of our more authoritarian.

Indeed, whereas Obama used executive power to circumvent the legislature and increase the power of the federal government in our lives, Trump has used it, so far, to limit federal power and get the government out of our lives. Herein, perhaps, lies the cause of so much of the seemingly irrational hatred for Trump. Those who desire an overweening, centralized regulatory state which intrudes itself dictatorially into every nook and cranny of our lives may well fear that Trump will be successful in unravelling much of the "progress" they've made in realizing their dream over the last fifty years, for the fact is that so far from governing like an authoritarian statist Trump has, at least until now, governed like a small-government libertarian.

French gives a number of examples of the differences between Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump in this regard:

Lost in most of the coverage of President Trump’s decision to rescind the Obama administration’s transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality — the Trump administration just relinquished federal authority over gender-identity policy in the nation’s federally funded schools and colleges. In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama.

And that’s not the only case. Consider the following examples where his administration, through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique.

Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument against executive-branch overreach. Based on his previous legal writings, if Gorsuch had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most dramatic check on its authority since the early days of the New Deal.

By overturning judicial precedents that currently require judicial deference to agency legal interpretations, [a Gorsuch] Court could put a stop to the current practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily (and vastly) expanding their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing legal statutes. For example, the EPA has dramatically expanded its control over the American economy even without Congress passing significant new environmental legislation. Instead, the EPA keeps revising its interpretation of decades-old statutes like the Clean Air Act, using those new interpretations to enact a host of comprehensive new regulations. If Gorsuch’s argument wins the day, the legislative branch would be forced to step up at the expense of the executive, no matter how “authoritarian” a president tried to be.

When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump’s immigration executive order (which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power), he responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar judicial setbacks. Rather than race to the Supreme Court in the attempt to expand presidential authority, it backed up (yes, amid considerable presidential bluster) and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to rewrite and rework the order to address the most serious judicial concerns and roll back its scope.

Authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. Indeed, if you peel back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump’s early actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over the rollback of governmental power. Education activists are terrified that Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual-assault tribunals.

Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.

In almost everything he's done he's proven to be less authoritarian, less of a statist, than his predecessor. That doesn't make him right, of course, but it makes the charge of authoritarianism, especially when it comes from critics who supported Mr. Obama, seem pretty silly, and it makes the cry of "fascist!" even sillier.

To be fair, Trump did say things in the campaign that warranted concern, but nothing that he has actually done in the first month of his administration justifies the allegation that he's an authoritarian or fascist. As Washington Free Beacon executive editor Sonny Bunch tweeted with a heavy dollop of sarcasm, Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist dictator that literally no one fears speaking out against him on literally any platform.

French offers more examples to illustrate how Trump is less authoritarian than Obama at the link. He makes a pretty interesting case.

The Difference an Extra Dimension Makes

To paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our view of reality. We observe the world with our five senses and take for granted that the world we perceive is exactly what's there. We simply assume that our senses give us an accurate and exhaustive picture of reality, but why should we think that?

Why, for example, should we suppose that just because our minds can only apprehend three dimensions (four, if you count time) that that's all there are? Could the world not consist of numerous dimensions that we can not only not perceive, but that we can't even imagine? Could there not actually be entire worlds integrated with our world but closed off to us because our minds lack the necessary structure to perceive them? Perhaps the reality we find ourselves in is something like The Truman Show.

One way to try to imagine what reality might be like if there are actually more than three dimensions of space is to imagine how a three dimensional object would appear to a two dimensional being as illustrated in this short video:

If we actually do consist of more than three dimensions we would look completely different to a being who could perceive those other dimensions than we do to each other. There could, in other words, be literally far more to you than what meets the eye.

Dawkins' Central Argument

One year ago biologist and uber atheist Richard Dawkins suffered a stroke (apparently minor). News of his illness brought to mind his attempts over the last couple of decades to undermine religious belief, specifically with the arguments in his 2006 book titled The God Delusion.

The book rocketed to the top of the best-seller charts and influenced who knows how many young people who lacked the skills to analyze the arguments it advanced against belief in God. Philosophers, however, even many who were sympathetic to Dawkins' naturalism, derided the book for its philosophical superficiality and, worse, its several blunders.

For example, Dawkins claimed that the central argument of the book goes something like this:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect is to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself, i.e. an intelligent designer.
3. The temptation is a false one because the hypothesis raises the larger problem of explaining who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious explanation for the complexity of life is Darwinian evolution.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation in physics for cosmic fine-tuning.
6. We should not give up hope of finding a better explanation in physics for cosmic fine-tuning.
7. Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.

Dawkins' conclusion appears like a rabbit pulled magically out of a hat. Nothing in the premises leads to it. In fact, even if all six premises were correct, there's no logically possible world in which that conclusion follows from them. The most that might be inferred from this set of propositions is that perhaps we'll someday discover a good physical explanation for cosmic fine-tuning, but even if that were to happen it still wouldn't justify Dawkins' conclusion that God almost certainly does not exist.

As it happens, the conclusion is not only a non-sequitur but it's based on at least one premise which is patently false. Premises 1, 2, 5, and 6 are uncontroversial, and I'm willing to grant 4 just to be easy to get along with, but premise 3 is clearly erroneous.

Dawkins tries to support premise 3 by arguing that if the world's complexity requires an explanation then the designer of the world must itself be even more complex than the world it designed, and must itself require an explanation a forteriori. There are, however, at least three things wrong with this:

1. If it were concluded that a designer was the source of the complex design of the cosmos (or of living things) that conclusion stands whether we can explain the designer or not. We believed, for example, that gravity existed long before there was any explanation for it, and if some future astronauts landed on Mars and discovered there a six foot platinum cube with nearly perfect angles and facets as smooth as glass they'd certainly be justified in believing that the cube was left there by some intelligent beings even if the astronauts had no idea who they were, how they made the cube, how they got it to Mars, or how long ago they did it. None of that would be relevant to the inference that the cube was an artifact of intelligent agents.

2. Complexity is a property of physical, material things which have parts. If there is a designer of the space-time-matter universe it would transcend the universe and thus itself not be material, physical, or spatial. It would be pure, immaterial mind. Mind doesn't have parts, and Dawkins commits a category error when he argues that minds must be complex. The products of minds might be complex, but it doesn't follow that minds themselves are complex.

3. If everything needed to be explained before it could count as an explanation then nothing would ever be explained. We'd be caught in an infinite regress of explanations, none of which would be satisfactory until it, too, was explained.

I hope Prof. Dawkins suffers no recurrence of the stroke and that he lives to a ripe old age. Indeed, I hope his health fares much better in response to the ministrations of his doctors than has the central argument of The God Delusion fared in response to the ministrations of his philosophical critics.

The Future of Identity Politics

Victor Davis Hanson sees a bleak future for diversity politics in the U.S. and discusses six reasons in an article at The Federalist why that future is uncertain at best.

At least some of his reasons would, I think, be universally welcomed by both left and right. At least they should be. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Intermarriage and integration are still common. Overall, about 15 percent of all marriages each year are interracial, and the rates are highest for Asians and Latinos. Forty percent of Asian women marry men of another race—one quarter of African-American males do, as well—and over a quarter of all Latinos marry someone non-Latino.

Identity politics hinges on perceptible racial or ethnic solidarity, but citizens are increasingly a mixture of various races and do not always categorize themselves as “non-white.” Without DNA badges, it will be increasingly problematic to keep racial pedigrees straight. And sometimes the efforts to do so reach the point of caricature and inauthenticity, through exaggerated accent marks, verbal trills, voice modulations, and nomenclature hyphenation. One reason why diversity activists sound shrill is their fear that homogenization is unrelenting.

I have several times over the years speculated that our racial and ethnic divisions will begin to heal when more whites and blacks share grandchildren in common. I still think that's true, and what Hanson says above gives me hope that we're moving, if only gradually, in that direction. He adds that,

The notion of an identifiable and politically monolithic group of non-white minorities is also increasingly suspect. Cubans do not have enough in common with Mexicans to advance a united Latino front. African-Americans are suspicious of open borders that undercut entry-level job wages. Asians resent university quotas that often discount superb grades and test scores to ensure racial diversity....

It is not certain that immigration, both legal and illegal, will continue at its current near record rate, which has resulted in over 40 million immigrants now residing in America—constituting some 13 percent of the present population.... Were immigration to slow down and become more diverse, the formidable powers of integration and intermarriage would perhaps do to the La Raza community what it once did to the Italian-American minority after the cessation of mass immigration from Italy. There are currently no Italian-American quotas, no Italian university departments, and no predictable voting blocs.

Class is finally reemerging as a better barometer of privilege than is race—a point that Republican populists are starting to hammer home. The children of Barack Obama, for example, have far more privilege than do the sons of Appalachian coal miners—and many Asian groups already exceed American per capita income averages. When activist Michael Eric Dyson calls for blanket reparations for slavery, his argument does not resonate with an unemployed working-class youth from Kentucky, who was born more than 30 years after the emergence of affirmative action—and enjoys a fraction of Dyson’s own income, net worth, and cultural opportunities.

Finally, ideology is eroding the diversity industry. Conservative minorities and women are not considered genuine voices of the Other, given their incorrect politics. For all its emphasis on appearance, diversity is really an intolerant ideological movement that subordinates race and gender to progressive politics. It is not biology that gives authenticity to feminism, but leftwing assertions; African-American conservatives are often derided as inauthentic, not because of purported mixed racial pedigrees, but due to their unorthodox beliefs.

Hanson closes with this:

It is increasingly difficult to judge who we are merely by our appearances, which means that identity politics may lose its influence. These fissures probably explain some of the ferocity of the protests we’ve seen in recent weeks. A dying lobby is fighting to hold on to its power.

Frustration with identity politics and the injustices and absurdities that go along with it are one of the contributing factors to Trump's unexpected victory in November. People are just weary of the balkanization and isolation of Americans along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on, and the resentments and conflicts it engenders. They want a nation in which we all think of ourselves as Americans. If identity politics is dying, a lot of people are going to have trouble getting themselves to grieve its demise.

Who Are You?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? Is it the information in my brain? If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What significant thing about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

The questions just keep coming. Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Imagine further that doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one person, which person are you, John or Mary? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might partially resolve this perplexing problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, not in our body or our brain, at least not completely, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it "inhabits." But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve it?

Perhaps their only recourse is to deny the existence of any significant self altogether, as did the philosopher David Hume, and declare that your self is just a bundle of perceptions that you experience from moment to moment. Or they could maintain with biologist Francis Crick that you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

Unfortunately, neither of these options seems very satisfying.

Interpreting Polls

Many of us have been a bit confused by conflicting polling data on the president's approval rating since the election. Polling companies hardly distinguished themselves in the last presidential plebiscite, but in their defense it might've been difficult to detect the large number of voters who were heretofore politically somnolent who nevertheless were energized to turn out in support of Mr. Trump. Even so, these "invisible" voters shouldn't be a factor now so why are his approval ratings all over the map? Over the past three weeks polling on approval of President Trump's performance ranged from as high as 53% to as low as 39% depending on the poll:

The reason for the discrepancy apparently lies in the fact that different surveys poll different segments of the electorate. Claudia Deane of the Pew Research Center has written a very helpful article which clarifies a lot about how these polls are conducted and why different polls come up with such disparate results. She writes:

There are a number of possible reasons for polls arriving at different estimates – from the mode used to collect data to how people are selected for a survey – but here we’ll tackle one of the most basic: Did the poll include or exclude the 45% of adult Americans who didn’t cast a vote last November?

Typically, polls in the U.S. are designed to represent one of three populations. The broadest is the general population of all adults (GP). Surveys based only on adults who are registered to vote (RV) apply a narrower lens on the public. Narrower still is the filter applied with surveys that interview only registered voters who are deemed likely to vote (LV). Many pollsters might conduct surveys of all three, depending on where they find themselves in the election cycle.

In non-election years like this one, most pollsters survey all adults, but not all follow this convention. A number of pollsters continue to do surveys of registered or even likely voters. Why does this matter for Trump’s approval ratings? It’s about demographics. Voters as a group skew older and whiter than the general public. And older Americans, as well as white Americans, tilt more Republican than other groups. So, voter-only polls tend to get somewhat more favorable views of a Republican president or candidate and less favorable views of Democrats. This pattern was evident during Barack Obama’s presidency, with his overall ratings tending to be somewhat higher among the general public than among registered or likely voters.

A look at some of the presidential approval numbers released this month shows a pattern consistent with these demographic differences. LV polls – those surveys based only on the views of “likely voters” – are generally reporting higher levels of support for Trump than general population polls. There is a more muted but still significant difference in an RV-GP comparison: Pew Research Center’s general population poll conducted Feb. 7-12 recorded Trump’s presidential approval rating at 39%. Among registered voters in that survey, his rating was 42%.

So, President Trump fares better among those who are actually likely to vote than among the population at large. In other words, many of those who don't like the president's performance thus far didn't vote in November and thus have only themselves to blame.

In the U.S., roughly six-in-ten adults are registered to vote. This means that RV polls, by design, exclude nearly 40% of adults living in the U.S. and LV polls ... exclude even more, as they aim to include only those registered voters who actually cast, or will cast, a ballot. The voting rate among adults ages 18 and older was 55% in the 2016 presidential election and 33% in the most recent midterm election.

If a pollster is currently conducting an LV poll with 2018 (a midterm election year) in mind, then recent midterm voting behavior suggests that their results might be excluding the views of a majority of adults in the U.S.

The question is, though, what do the opinions of those who don't care enough to vote matter? If people are too apathetic to bestir themselves to the voting booth then surely they're too apathetic to inform themselves on what's actually going on, so why should anyone care about what they think?

Non-voters skew more Democratic which means that if all non-voters had voted in November Hillary Clinton would probably be president today. Unfortunately for those who lament the fact of a Trump presidency, a sizable percentage of Democrats just don't care. Of course, the same could be said of the majority of Republicans, but in their case enough did care to elect not only the president, but also majorities in both houses of Congress and, since 2008, a substantial number of governorships and state legislative seats.

The picture looks even bleaker for Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections unless they up their game and get their people to care enough about who runs the country to go to the polls on election day.