Naturalism vs Science

I have recently entered a curious pseudo-argument with some people. The issue has been my contention that science is a subset of religion, to which I got a common reply usually summarised as, "No way!" Well, way.

I would have written this up earlier, except that I was too tired, and fell asleep. Besides, there was the sneaking suspicion that such a simple argument must have been promulgated by some more powerful philosopher than I, and the other sneaking suspicion that I might have read it somewhere else and thus could no longer distinguish between what my formulation was and what someone else's was.

So I did due diligence and came up with a little entry by Plantinga in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Link to important section here.

Yep, it's as I remembered. "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion."

Science as a cognitive endeavour claims to seek truth, but Darwin's concern (as expressed by Plantinga) goes this way:

What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true.

Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: "With me," says Darwin, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Darwin, 1887)

This is the issue of faith that underpins science as a religion. We have to be somewhat Cartesian, without knowing whether this is reliable; it is reliable only because we think it is — it is our thought that assesses our thought.

Naturalism (whether Dawkinsian or any other kind) thus militates against knowing whether science is truth or not. Eventually, scientism is forced to say things like, "Well, your computer works, so we know science is useful." Well, yes. In other words, the issue of faith is lost in works, just as it often is in religion.

Latitude

My mind covers many time zones. It is not distracted, but dispersed. It sees night and day, both and severally. I watch my mind, and my watch minds me. I do not mind, and neither does she.

The gears grind on, as the delicate machine of men and minds restructures the Citadel. We are inexorable tools of the Highest. We chip away at the accumulated calcifications. We polish away the crude adornments of the last faddish minutes of the previous insanity. Slowly, slowly, canter the horses of the knights. Faustus has left the house.

It is 4 am. The coffee hasn't woken up yet. I have to wake it up. I have become a post-caffeinate organism.

It is 8 am. Time to go into the market and trade some ideas.

It is noon, neither am nor pm.

It is 4 pm. There is honey still for tea. But not for long, and not for me.

It is 8 pm. Is it supper, or dinner, or neither?

It is midnight, and here we are again, between night and day.

Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism

Humanity is an organic mass mess mass of 'thinking' machines, each one different from each other one and made so by genetic reproduction and other 'genetic' algorithms. This mass appears to have thoughts about itself; it thinks that it has norms, that it has ideals, and that it can have standard types as well as ideal types. It always thinks it can improve on itself.

The problem is that it has insufficient data to actually come to conclusions about what its norms (other than statistical ones, and these too are its own inventions) ought to be; it can have no legitimate idea as to its ideals, based solely on its own perception of self; and it can have no legitimate idea as to how to improve, not having enough data as to where it can improve towards. This mass, however, has elements which will disagree with such a diagnosis, even though it is obviously true.

Once upon a time, an element of this mass said to me (another element of this mass), "Well, it has to be true that making optimal use of energy would be an improvement." I'm not so sure. What is optimal use? Every such idea, ideal, improvement, boundary, definition, norm (etc, etc) is defined by this imperfect mass. As one element named Russell said some time ago, mathematics — which a fair number of elements think is the best (query: best?) mode of thought (query: thought?) — is built on the flimsiest of foundations. So he decided to be a logician, but his project failed too.

Humanism is a work in progress, then. But progress towards what? And if it is a work in progress, what can be said about trans- and post-humanism, which some elements of the human mass also talk about? They are imaginary work in imaginary progress.

Some human elements point out that evolution occurs, and we have strong evidence for it. Of course it does, and of course we do. But there is nothing to show 'fitness' except the promise that we are putatively 'better adapted' to a changing world. In truth, we are adapted, but we do not know if it is better, or will be so, because the genetic algorithms are future-blind. We are reactive, and hence we should have no claim to trans-anything or post-anything.

In fact, the only think we can know is that we are all headed towards thermodynamic 'heat death', and hence it seems good to try to stave it off. Hence the fixation(s) on information, energy, efficiency and effectiveness. But for what? Nobody seems to know. Some, however, have odd ideas about destiny and optimisation. Those too will pass.

In the end is the singularity, as at the beginning, some others say. The point really is that the singularity is the ideal to which all information (whether it is so, or merely an aberration in the energy transactions of the universe) goes, and once it is, nobody knows.

Is it any wonder that man imagines that he imagines God? Or that man (well, some portion or other of the human mass) imagines, "What is man, that [God is] mindful of him?" In the end, faith, hope and love abide; and if not, there is nothing.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an illusion, but a necessary one. The word comes from Latin privus, which means "one's own". The idea that we can own something that nobody else can touch is what makes us persons; if everything we had was shared to some extent, then the only unique thing about us would be the specific configuration of things we shared.

But this age of free information flow is beginning to deprive (to separate, to alienate) us of privacy's illusion. The logical consequence of everything about you being shared to some extent by others is that you may no longer be a unique identity; your information can be duplicated and the sum of what you are may be shared.

Hold on, though. Most people would agree that a person is more than just a state of being, but a time-bound entity filled with memories and experiences. That, unfortunately, is more accurately described as 'an entity with the perception of being time-bound, filled with edited information purporting to be a record of past events, bearing the marks of experiences which are ill-defined and sometimes imaginary.'

The problem, as we have learnt over the last 20 years, is that our brains are always shifting. The curse of humanity, we have come to know, is not that our brains don't regenerate, but that they do, and they also shift configurations and modify memories and change the nuances of what we think, even before we know anything is there to be thought. We are the sum of mental processes we can't control, if we are the sum of such things at all.

In fact, some people have come to realise that the more people share a person, the more that person lives on in more dimensions. A person who is 'larger than life' is simply one whose total impact on others is much more than the usual. My grandparents, all deceased, live on in some legendary sense — people who were taught by them, who had experiences with them, tell me stories that seem true to me (and probably are true as far as those people know) about them. When we say that memories live on, that is true; but like living things, they change and mutate before reproducing again.

This is a problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography. You grow up in an environment. You tacitly learn its rules. You learn what you can say, what you should do, and so on. But if you don't commit all these things meticulously to another medium, it remains tacit knowledge, shifty and ill-defined. It becomes private knowledge, set apart only for you, and perhaps applicable only to you; in the extreme, there's something schizoid about it.

But all cultures thrive on shared experiences and shared rules, no matter how untrue or unreal they are. That is how myths and legends define societies — in this day and age, none more so than the myths and legends of science and information technology. 'Privacy' used to mean 'deprivation' — it may yet come full cycle in this age.

Mental Monday

Today is all about journeys. Many things to do, much travelling. It is all a travail and a vexation of spirit, and yet a lot of happiness in actually getting things done. The human mind is a weird place to be. And yet, in some ways, it is the only place to be.

Extrasensory

Y'know, I've decided it is probably a disadvantage 80% of the time. As Arthur Clarke put it, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." This is a remarkable statement, especially coming as it does from the author of Profiles of the Future, a man who first authored the concept of the geosynchronous satellite (without which much of our global communications network would be crippled).

People have said a lot about emotional intelligence, different kinds of intelligence, different kinds of minds... the list goes on and on (at least as long as Howard Gardner has tenure). But one thing is fairly certain: it will never be possible to consider the many thinking options as unique and individual phenomena. Why not? Simple: the number of possible neural networks a human brain can generate is larger than the total number of atoms in the universe.

Let me attempt to justify that. There are about 100,000,000,000 neurons in the brain. A neuron may have up to 10,000 connections (but let's assume something smaller - say 1,000 for example). Not every neuron is so blessed with connectivity, so this is a reasonable assumption. And some are physically too far apart (although you'd be surprised at how long a neuron can be - the long motor neurons which extend from the spine to the feet are about 1 to 1.5 metres long) to connect easily. If the neurons were to line up in random order to form a chain of 100,000,000,000 random elements, the number of possible chains would already be (100,000,000,000 x 99,999,999,999 x 99,999,999,998 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1), the factorial of 100 billion. That huge number assumes every neuron (except the end ones) has only TWO connections, let alone a thousand.

The universe, as we know it right now, in contrast has about 100,000,000,000 galaxies and fewer than 10^80 atoms. That is a number smaller than the factorial of 59 (i.e., 59 x 58 x 57 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1). This has always led me to wonder what the Preacher meant when he said, "God has put eternity into the hearts of men."

These are the large numbers to crunch when we think of lines like Shakespeare's "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." Nobody seriously thinks that Cleopatra's variability was without ending or beginning in a numerical sense, but it is certainly true that if we had lifespans as long as that of the universe, we would not necessarily have to be bored. Think about it: there are more brain configurations possible than the sum total of every atom in existence from the beginning of time to the end of it. Conceivably, there might even be enough useful brain configurations to last us into the end of time (for of course not all our brain configurations are viable or useful).

And that brings me back to the beginning. Is intelligence useful at all? Can it be cultivated? The answer seems to be yes or, at least, that we live in a world where we think this is true. That is the crux of the problem. It is our intelligence that tells us that intelligence is useful. It is our intelligence that tells us that to be more intelligent is a better thing. How self-serving this purely abstract concept is! How beautifully subversive!

Because, you see, it allows us to classify ourselves and others by a pseudoscientific concept which inevitably makes half of us feel better (yes, the perils of assuming a normal distribution) than the other half who don't get it (and thus are not necessarily made to feel worse). In such a world, I am very cautious when accepting my own intelligence, because it might not really be there; it might not exist or it might be a misattributed or inaccurate identifier for something else. For the snark was a boojum, you see.

ADDing & Subtracting

A short time ago, I mentioned how the most favourable diagnosis of the most kindly psychonomist would probably still have diagnosed me with ADHD (minus the hyperactivity to some extent). That would have been true for me up till the age of 15.

And yet, I note that whatever Freud got wrong, the superego has a role to play. If I were left unchecked by my own discipline and will, empowered by what I know to be the Spirit (and what others might decide is the environment or something else), I would certainly still act ADHD. Traces of it leak out when I give lectures, for example.

But most of the time I don't. Some aspects of what people call ADHD are utterly controllable with practice and determination. Some are not. When you have subtracted the things which are controllable, you aren't left with much of a disorder. What are you left with?

1) I still sleep at will, and sometimes, by accident. All it takes is someone droning on without engaging my brains, and I will sleep. You can ask my boss, he's seen it and commented on it. You can ask my wife, who is envious. I tell her all it takes is a good conscience and this: '...for He grants sleep to those He loves. (Psalm 127:2). It is one of those things I cannot prove to be true, but I certainly hope is true.

2) I still get very restless unless obsessively engaged in a task. Sometimes, I have to work myself into an obsession before I can finish a task. When I have created the obsessive fixation, I can churn out 10-20 pages in one evening; maybe 10000 words or more. When I cannot find it in me to be obsessed, I'm lucky to get a tenth of that, if at all.

3) I have great temptations to jump up and down and call boring stupid people names. Thank God I have been blessed with a great reduction in those temptations (or a great increase in temperamental fortitude)!

4) I am still easily distracted by snatches of conversation, bars of music, interesting books, the idea of food, the need to experiment. Some time ago, one of my younger acquaintances made a small and messy fire which was pretty much a disaster. The funny thing is that I completely understood why he did it, and I might have done it too at that age.

It's my conclusion, however, that ADHD as a description of a problem with the holistic physical state is a lousy description. There are nine descriptors in Part A. You have ADHD if you have six of those. Simple math tells you that this is (literally) dozens of possible versions of ADHD. I would prefer my grandfather's answer to why kids behave badly: "Because their parents do."

Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves...

And other such lawless characters, I suppose. This is of course the title of Cher's hit song first sung (I think) in the 1970s, although my memory is, understandably, a bit hazy. But I heard it tonight on the radio, and something made me think of my schooldays.

I've written before about what people call 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder'. Yes, I do suffer from it. According to DSM-IV-TR, that venerable and interesting tome in which you may find any form of mental oddness known to American humanity, I have ADHD – Predominantly Inattentive Type. ADHD-PIT. Dear me. Of course, it was worse when I was younger and suffered from every one of the symptoms listed.

But what are the symptoms I suffer from? I suffer from all nine of the symptoms listed in Part A:

• does not give close attention to details and/or makes careless mistakes
• has trouble keeping attention on tasks – yes, I have been known to fall asleep in meetings that are not stimulating my brain
• often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly – yes, I've had to work on that, which is why I tend to stare deliberately at people who are talking to me
• often does not follow instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behavior or failure to understand instructions) – I'm notorious for this
• often has trouble organizing activities – which is why one should always marry a spouse who can
• often avoids, dislikes, or doesn't want to do things that take a lot of mental effort for a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework) – heh, probably why I find it repugnant to inflict homework on people
• often loses things needed for tasks and activities (e.g. toys, school assignments, pencils, books, or tools) – hence the need for shelves and organisers and spreadsheets and catalogues
• is often easily distracted
• is often forgetful in daily activities

Basically, I get bored easily. Tremendously, mind-numbingly bored. It has taken me 30 years to learn how to pay attention to people, and I still fall asleep in meetings. I even suffer from a few of the symptoms in Part B (as some of you know).

What does living with ADHD mean? Well, it's relatively easy to deal with through behavioural and pharmacological therapies (hence my interest in both). Most pharmacological therapy uses stimulants. I've found caffeine useful, and doctors have used amphetamines. The thing about stimulants is that they focus the mind, making it easier for the ADHD sufferer to pay attention in class and in general act normal. It doesn't make them much more physically 'hyper'.

And now we come to the controversial part: behavioural therapy. Well, everytime I was naughty I was caned. It made me very nimble, and more circumspect in my actions. The thing is that I wasn't beaten gratuitously, but enough to keep me focussed and aware of wrongdoing. When I got old enough to understand things, I learnt a few useful behaviours:

• look at people who are talking to you
• when you think people are boring you, do math in your head
• smile a lot
• sit down until you have written something or done one unit of work
• organise things in boxes and with labels
• write down lists of things to do and to buy (etc)

And so on. Very useful. I think the most important point for me is that ADHD could be beaten. I still took five years to complete my Master's degree (excuse: it was done part-time, haha), but I remember that in June 1999, just before the deadline, I wrote 30000 words in four days.

What does living with ADHD not mean? I learnt early on that being an ADHD sufferer was not a license to be rude, disruptive, violent, or discourteous. I was trained that way, with firm admonition and a few sharp strokes which marked but did not bruise me. These days, we tend to shy away from the 'hard' part of training, preferring to educate in some soft and human-respecting style. I think we should respect the fact that hard training, severe counsel, and pain are all important for the proper development of the individual. I learnt that way, and it made me better than I might have been.

Which brings me back to Cher, and Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves. Here's the refrain to that song:

Gypsies, tramps, and thieves
We'd hear it from the people of the town
They'd call us gypsies, tramps, and thieves
But every night all the men would come around
And lay their money down

As a student, I was called many things when young. 'Rogue' would probably have been one of the kinder and more decorous ones. I was a terribly disruptive kid in primary school. I was passive-aggressive from 12-13, then weird thereafter. I learned to restrain a tendency to violence by 15. After that, I think I was old enough to not show it, and having an effective brain was a bonus that helped me to disguise my inability to do work.

But for all you ADHD sufferers out there, just bear in mind: I was a hopeless student until I was about 30 years old. No wonder the Jews insist that manhood begins then. There is hope yet. All you have to do is work for it.

A Sinister Dexterity

I was trundling around the workplace today when I noticed something decidedly sinister. The clients I was serving in one section were... hmm... displaying a preponderance of left-handed behaviour. I was intrigued. Was it a purely local phenomenon? Was the cosmic order under siege? I had to know more.

=====

I was ruthlessly empirical about my next step. Yes, one had to design an hypothesis and gather relevant data to disprove it! (Note: data have been rounded to prevent allegations of security violation.)

Null hypothesis: there is no significant statistical difference between the proportion of left-handers in population A and that in population B. All come from the same demographics, and are indeed selected for this. Despite the fact that population A has n=250 and population B has n=100, there should be no difference in terms of proportion.

Data gathering procedure: clients were examined by visual means; this examination was then crosschecked once by observation of tool location, limb preference and digital behaviour when at rest.

Data and Data Processing:

• Population A contained 20 LH plus one ambiguous out of 250, %LH = 8%
• Population B contained 10 LH out of 90, %LH = 11.1%

This meant that the two populations had different proportions of left-handers. Ah, but was this statistically significant? How would you know?

I shall skip the subsequent steps and keep the conclusion to myself. It is safer that way.

=====

At this point, it might be wise, lest I be overwhelmed by sinister forces, to say that I am the direct descendant, on both sides of my family tree, of ambidextrous people. It shows to this day: I play tennis left-handed, use my left hand when gathering information, use my right hand when transcribing or writing, use my left eye when aiming and under-use my right eye. All the tests I've taken so far place me as almost (if not exactly) halfway between left-brained and right-brained orientation (if these are valid descriptors at all). For fine work I use my left hand; for crude work I use my right. I can sketch with my left hand, but my right hand is aesthetically challenged. And so on.

Readers who can identify populations A and B, please note that a certain population C comprising about 10 individuals also contained 2.5 left-handers, for a %LH of 25%. Now, assuming that the three populations A, B and C are listed in order of mathematical ability (or preference for doing mathematics at a more rarefied level), which population do you think was most mathematically inclined?

Interesting what mental activity goes on when you have an ambidextrous mind...

Brvhrt

It is hard to enunciate anything without vowels, although a thick Scots accent comes close in some cases. I remember Celine Dion singing that her heart would go on (and on and on and on to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars).

These two things eat at me sometimes. They don't irritate me, but they are things which are of interest. And they hardly ever come together. Except, today.

I don't think I am suffering from a splintered mind. I think I am suffering from an abbreviated heart.

My heart is normally large enough to give a space to almost anyone who needs or wants it, and even to those who don't believe that anyone would want to provide some. This is of course altogether different from the romantic ideal (or idyll, for the more romantic) of the single heart given to another – or else how on earth could we love the others we are supposed to love?

(It is unlike my mind, which operates under a different paradigm. I am known to give a piece of my mind even to people who do not want one (or have one of their own, poor things). My mind is clever. It regenerates what it has given away by transcriptive and descriptive crypto-cloning.)

But of late, with the heavy end of the last bright year descending, the whole thing is just a claustrophobic blackness which squeezes what's left of my heart into a lump the way the Scots accent squeezes what's left of your tongue into a haggis. It will pass. Of course it will. Yet, this is one of those times you just need to let go. You need to let it out and away. And over the sea to Skye.

=====

No soy el hombre más piadoso ni más honesto, sino que soy un hombre valiente, said Captain Alatriste in the wonderful novels by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Not I a man most pious nor most honest, but I am a brave man. And that courage comes not by force of arms or force of will, not by passion or by mighty striving, but by the grace of God.

Ha. My heart will go on...

Split

Today's local newspapers declared that 1 out of every 100 young people suffered from schizophrenia (from Greek schizo, 'I divide'; and phrenos, 'mind') - a 'shattered mind'. I am now driven by my inner workings to look around the place I work and try to identify the 30 or so people who (statistically speaking) must be schizophrenics (or should that be schizophrenes?)

Schizophrenia is an interesting condition. I am not so sure it is an illness, although it is certainly considered to be a bad thing in the world we live in. It is commonly defined as debilitating, with onset during adolescence and resulting in bad misperceptions of reality and of human social interaction. Some say it is an emotional disorder; most consider it a psychotic condition. Some of it seems treatable with drugs or surgery – there is certainly some physiological basis for it.

The reason it is interesting to me is that this is a condition which, as described, seems present in many who are otherwise considered intellectually or spiritually enlightened. They see things differently from other people, and are strongly fixed in their views. They are often amenable to listening to reason, but reason seldom shifts their deeply-engrained positions. People have theorised that schizophrenia accounts for hallucinations of the divine, and that many of the world's religious people who claim to hear God speaking to them are actually schizophrenic.

At 1 in every 100, this seems plausible. That's not to say that God can't speak to you, or that schizophrenia is a gift designed to make it easier for Him. Either position seems dangerous, limited, or... well, schizophrenic. But really, I don't see the fuss. It would make sense that if you want to be able to communicate with the world beyond, you'd want to install a broadband connection in your house. In the era that most people were using telephone modems at 56 kbps, broadband connections were considered a luxury; before that, when the maximum speed was about 14400 bps, broadband users were thought to be insane.

I need to think more about this. It's always good to see more than one side to a problem. Hrrrrm.

March

Hey. It's March now. Somewhere under the turnings of the earth is vigour, sparking into life. You think we have no seasons here? Let me tell you about two seasons, the season we are leaving and the season ahead.

The first of the seasons is Muddle. Muddle begins just after Christmas; it starts the moment you realise that you are confused about what to do before school starts and after the holiday season has begun to die. And it muddles on, bringing newness and chaos, newts and toadstools, rain and the promise of rain and tantalizing summery days which are just spots of light in grey and messy schedules. Muddle is the period in which the mind is engaged in work, but the heart is unwilling, and the soul is angry at the difference - but the spirit is resigned and somehow we negotiate Muddle, and the term ends, somewhere around the Ides of March.

And that brings us to Distal. Distal is the season of being further-into-the-year-than-you-want-to-be. It is in Distal that one thinks of approaching deserts and distant mirages and a sense that one is being worked to death despite it being only the middle of the year. April's Fools offer scant respite; April and all her Fools do not compensate for a long March, although sometimes they just May. And then comes June. Distal is the period in whcih the mind has taken a break, the heart has stirred to life, the soul feels ill at ease because the engine-brake is now working against the flow - and the spirit soars at the thought of a long break. Which it will never get.

Ah, life. In all my forty years, I have enjoyed it. Some people think it is sinful or immature to enjoy it this much. But I have only one thing to say: "I am young, still."