Why Utilitarianism is Self-Defeating

I was going to write a long polemic. Then I realised it's best explained this way: utilitarianism seeks to privilege something of greater value over something of less value, despite the intrinsic nature of the things themselves. It has no intrinsic mechanism for determining such value. Therefore, it is an incomplete thing. And an incomplete thing has less value than a complete thing. So utilitarianism cannot be privileged.

The counterargument is: but what if such a mechanism cannot be found? Well, then utilitarianism is worse — it is lunacy. How could you premise a course of thinking or action on something you believe (at least for the purposes of your argument) cannot be found?

Libertarianism

Simply put, self-sufficiency and keeping the world free, peaceful and abundant. And of course, an historical and practical impossibility.

Indeed, it's a mightily dangerous illusion, that this philosophy could be implemented. For the world has never been like that, and libertarianism triumphs only in bad science fiction novels after some kind of apocalypse destroys the things of this world.

Standing Room

Carnelian and chrysoprase, space and point group, mildew and shark, I look everywhere for examples of chemistry and physics, biology and mathematics.

And all I find is literature, and the tired eyes of humanity, desperately hunting bedrock to which the edifice of truth can be firmly nailed down.

Am I a Conservative Liberal or a Liberal Conservative?

For many years it's been difficult to articulate my political position (and indeed my position on many socially-related issues). That's because, as with most people, I have complicated positions; but I'm also picky about definitions, and it's hard for me to say I'm 'conservative' or 'liberal' without a whole bunch of caveats.

So here is some stuff about all that.

I'm politically a bit to what some people call 'the Left'. I believe that societies should make provision for their weaker elements, but I also believe that 'the poor you shall have with you always'. There will always be some freeloaders, and by the time that won't matter at all, we won't have political issues either. I don't like freeloaders, by which I mean people who can provide goods or services for remuneration sufficient to make themselves a living, but won't. However, I also believe that the 'better angels' of humanity need constraints in order to keep them better.

I'm socially a bit liberal in the sense that I believe that humans have inalienable rights and that they should be given freedom to express themselves within the meaning of those rights. However, I also believe that not all rights are equal and that some are downright spurious. I've written about such rights before. However, I am socially conservative in the sense that I don't think society needs to change without good reasons and sufficient infrastructural (both material and non-material) support; not all change is good, or good in practice even if good in theory.

I'm theologically conservative in the sense that given any particular body of religion, I'd examine the established canon of that religion before going on to speculative development of doctrine based on looser interpretation of that canon. If people have interpreted canon a specific way for a long time, I'd wonder why that would need to be changed if change were mooted.

Because of theological conservatism coupled with my other positions, some people think of me as morally and ethically conservative while others think I may secretly be a dangerous radical. I suspect I may be even more dangerous than that, but if so, I don't know it for sure. I just note, privately, that 'radical' comes from Latin radix, 'a root'. It doesn't quite mean what many people think it means: radicals are back-to-basics conservatives, who don't believe in preserving the existing complicated stuff-and-flummery structure of 'developed' society.

I think that all humans are essentially liberals at birth, but are made conservative later. At adolescence, some become badly-informed quasi-liberals. If they maintain the position into late middle-age, they often become pseudo-intellectual pseudo-liberals. It's only if they maintain their idealism into old age that they become true liberals again.

Not many humans let their offspring yell and scream without limit, throw their food around, remain unclothed, and set no limits on empirical education. This is what I mean by humans being 'made conservative'. Societies in general tend to have ideas about how children should be brought up, one way or another.

I've observed that universities in America are the most illiberal institutions with respect to what can or cannot be said, or their position on what is good, true and right for everyone else. British universities, by contrast, are hotbeds of dissenting opinion and subversive reasoning. They've honed the traditional British weapons of irony and satire well; nobody else is as good.

And here in Atlantis, the liberals are the ones who want more education for the masses, forgetting that education is the most conservatising force of all — unless of course you don't teach anything except how to reason without drawing conclusions and sticking to them and their consequences. How droll.

With all these opinions moving around in my head, and occasionally realigning differently, it's hard to say whether I am more liberal or conservative, or indeed which approach contributes more to my thinking. I am inclined to believe that my thinking contributes more to my perceived conservatism or liberalism. Politically, I'll vote for whoever makes more sense to me in a way that I like.

Conserve or Liberate?

Most humans hate to follow things to logical conclusions. Or so one might conclude when listening to human debates. There are rabid conservatives and rabid liberals, whose two polar arguments may be described as, "No movement," and "Everything must move."

The physical laws of the universe appear to support conservative liberalism or liberal conservatism, but not the extremes. If nothing moves, no work is done, the system does not change state, the womb of the universe remains barren. If all things move, then we hasten towards entropic leveling (which is what would happen if all things were equal, if information flowed without hindrance, and energy could be used at will without impedance) and the heat death of the universe.

I don't think humans are born equal or should be treated equally. Yet I believe in the attempt to create a broad equality of treatment and access, which like any spectrum, has limits and gradual differences. All may be enjoined to abide by the same rules; all may have the same choices; but not all may have the same resources. If all did, then the game should be rigged to allow for no dominant strategy, because if it did, everyone should converge to the same behavioural norm and that would be stultifying because nothing would move.

Another way of looking at it: if all were equally rich, nobody would be rich. That is why Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always." That was a rich and very loaded statement. A simple illustration will suffice.

Let us say that God decided to distribute all the world's riches evenly to all humans, so that everyone had the same amount. Then each human was given the same habitat, in terms of opportunities, aesthetics, resources. And each human was given the same skills, same capacities, same drives and physical structure. And all genders and races were made physically identical. And immortal. Wherever the Omnipotent could make identical and sustainably so, It did so.

What do you think would happen if this state was maintained?

Obviously, nothing would happen. For no creativity, no value, nothing depending on difference would remain. Birthrates would be zero, because a newborn manifestly is not competent and wouldn't be able to be an equal-human. Unless they were born from pods which generated equal-humans.

Equality is a bad thing, egalitarianism a somewhat worthy thing in a grossly unequal world. But just like Sartre's idea that choice is the highest moral good came from a gross fear of totalitarianism, so too does ultraconservatism arise from the gross fear of rapid change.

What conservatism and liberalism need is the opportunity to intersect and balance each other in a world that throws up challenges that neither can tackle alone. But this will often fail because of physics. The only way out is thus... metaphysical.

Absolutes

Sometimes, there are absolute positions. Sometimes, we have continua or spectra. It's good to see which model works best.

Take, for example, the conceptual leap from 0 to 1. If you were thinking in binary, this is a huge difference. But if you're not, it isn't.

Atheists think of themselves as very different from theists. But the difference is only one small axiom: either you have free will or you don't. By all naturalistic accounts, you cannot have free will, no matter how many intellectual contortions you perform — or what kind. And if you don't have free will, you cannot and should not be held to account for anything. And that includes being an atheist, which then becomes meaningless.

That only leaves supernatural accounts. Now, you need to decide in the realm of positive numbers — any number greater than zero. For some people, any non-zero number will do, including complex numbers.

At this point, some people may receive the epiphany that to hold an inflexibly 'zero' position is the easiest to conceptualise and the hardest to defend. Why should there be a universe at all? Why not nothing, if simplicity and parsimony are universal principles?

These are fun things to think about, to be sure.

Aureate

Gold and glow. Not all that glisters is gold, or glistens, for that matter. The only difference between one state and the other is the idea of quality. Yesterday, I asked a student: "What is the difference between the intrinsic value of gold and its extrinsic value?"

It took quite some time to figure it out, and even then, nobody was satisfied.

The Pilgrim's Infinite Regress

Here is the argument, whose latest champion is Sam Harris. Everything is atomic, said Demokritos. There is no spark of the divine. Each thing I have written, it comes from the inevitable working of brain, upon which the universe worked. The universe led inevitably to this argument, whose latest champion is Sam Harris. I had no choice but to believe him.

And so it is meaningless whether I believed him or not. And because it was meaningless, I was under the illusion that I chose not to believe him just to spite him. But that too was meaningless, a striving after the wind. And then I realised or was made to realise that I was sounding like Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, King in Jerusalem.

He too was wise, wise as Sam Harris, or at least under the determined illusion that he was so. And what he said was that there is nothing new under the sun, and the wiser he got, the more he realised that free will was an illusion and hey, the chief end of man is to fear God and obey His commandments, for you have no free will, is that right?

And all the people, they said Amen. Sam Harris, Sam Harris, God loves you and He sits on His glorious throne above all universes and He laughs, and each spark of divine laughter affirms there is but one Will, and that Will creates by its ineffable Majesty the capacity for the tiny wills it creates to be free. And so I am free, or at least...

I am under the meaningless illusion that I am free, and what a nice illusion it is, to me.

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.

Subject to Authority

We are all subjective. There is a reality that each of us perceives, and it is never the same as anyone else's. When we compare notes, and they seem to say the same thing, it is never the same, but we believe it is.

The colour I call red is certainly not what anyone else sees when they see red. But we can agree that an object is red because someone taught me that an object with certain properties is red and someone else taught the other person something similar. The same property gives rise to two different perceptions of reality, but because they derive from the same property, we say A is the image of B and C is also the image of B, so A and C are evidence that B is the same thing.

This is the fragile underlying structure that gives our reality authority over us. It is mutual agreement from different subjective perceptions of something we fervently hope is an object; that is, something outside us. If everything were inside us, it would be a terrible joke.

The standard defence against such solipsism is to wonder how on earth a solipsist could possess a contrary opinion, or even have the self-knowledge to wonder about solipsism. But there is no way out of the hall of mirrors.

You see, what makes you think about such things? How would you know it is not you? If you can answer that question, then you admit there is something outside your perception. And if you can admit that, then you open the door to authority that is not you.

Is it hard to accept that reality might not depend on you? Some say that this leads to religion. I disagree. I have no problem accepting that reality might not depend on me, not because of religion, but because it is a possibility.

It is also a possibility that I am all there is, and my humility is merely ignorance of that. That too I have no problem accepting, along with the possibility that having no problems accepting such things is also an artifact of whatever it is that I am.

It makes me happy to think otherwise. And in the end, the faith-based arguments must win, because everything is a matter of faith. It is all a question of whether you choose to cut the never-ending navel-gazing short, or not.

All of us really have a choice of one infinite loop or one still small voice. Odd then, that I should go against my experience and preference, and stick with the latter for once.

Ockhamite Monotheism, or Why I Am A Monotheist

In a frequently-read previous post, I established a simple argument for why I am not an atheist given my beliefs. It isn't a new argument, but it's one that is supported by the converse reasoning of Joel Marks.

His side, of course, is that since God doesn't exist, he should be amoral. It is the same argument, but with a different choice — in my previous post, I said that since I would like to believe in morality, at least one god must exist.

To take that idea one step further, I call upon my interlocutors once again. Most of the friendly discussions I've had with the non-religious, agnostic, or atheistic people I know invoke William of Ockham. That worthy's philosophical principle of reductionism, also known as Ockham's Razor, insists that we should not accept plurality where a reduced set is possible, or that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. It is a principle used by scientists ever since Newton started pretending to be one.

While it is not necessarily axiomatic, consistent application of Ockham's Razor shows better results in most domains. Hence, if one is going to be a theist, then one should be a monotheist, since any system invoking gods is probably best with one God. The only flaw is that human god-systems tend to be unimaginative — they mostly posit contradictory gods and powers (hence the theomachies and titanomachies of mythology) without allowing for a God capable of complex thinking, behaviour and exercise of will. That's because it seems easier to have gods handle separate domains, something like a celestial bureaucracy or equivalent.

Indirectly, this assumes that consistency must be a virtue derived from perfection, with the ultimate consistency being complete homogeneity. An inconsistent God would, by this argument, have to be more than one god.

Such an assumption seems spurious, since a perfect God or a perfect universe would then be a singularity. This in turn would conflict with other concepts of perfection (such as the idea that a being with the property of existence is of a higher order of perfection than one that doesn't exist, non-existence implying imperfection). It would also conflict with the idea that a god must exert powers, since there would be no differential across which to demonstrate any properties whatsoever, let alone powers.

The point really is that no matter what philosophical and theological convolutions we go through, if we want to be theists, it makes most sense to be monotheists. And creative ones at that.

Stuff That Can't Be Explained

You know, it hit me that we thirst for explanations to the point where we assume that everything must have a rational explanation. All things have a cause, is the theory. But we don't actually have a reason as to why things have reasons, or even why things should have reasons.

Consider the workings of the mind. At our current state of knowledge, we know that action occurs when a certain potential in the brain is exceeded in a certain direction. It is possible to see how this might be so, but the causes are complex. In principle, we can predict how a person should behave; in practice, we cannot. To make matters worse, it seems that we decide upon acting long before we actually are conscious of the decision, and that we appear to act on knowledge before we are aware of this knowledge. This leads to the illusion known as intuition. The final insult to the idea that our minds are rational is the fact that memory is mutable, and that our brains reconfigure with some sort of biased randomness in the direction of whatever seems most convenient.

It seems that the very lack of constancy, consistency and/or dependability of our minds and our world is what drives us to want things that are rational and consistent. This is why we invent mathematical structures and rules, and pursue the scientific paradigm. The fact is that we see data points all around us, and we confer upon them significance so that they become information. We weave information into structures that seem useful, and once utility as been conferred upon these, they become knowledge. We weave related-looking bits of knowledge together into elaborate tapestries, and they become areas of knowledge, disciplines, and more complex structures.

But what in all this is useful? The very term 'useful' ranges in utility, from being indicative of necessity (food, water, air, shelter), to denoting the very important (communication, education, construction and synthesis), to labelling the stuff we can demonstrably live without but which we cannot imagine living without (electricity, information technology, powered mechanized transport). Everything has its uses, little is completely useless.

The power of reason overheats the brain in a world that is changing faster and has more and more complexity. A lot of that complexity is man-created; the volume of knowledge constructed follows an exponential curve, but the value of that knowledge is also exponentially less accessible — it consists of stuff that fewer and fewer people need to know or which requires even more stuff to be useful at all.

Why build a Large Hadron Collider? What utility value does it have? There is a long list of questions that it certainly will answer when fully deployed and once the myriad (yes, at least 10,000) scientists, engineers and mathematicians around it get to work. Will it feed the poor, make people happy, tell us right from wrong? Not yet, if at all. But it does cost ten billion US dollars, which is not small fish.

As a teacher of science, I've heard and understand all the reasons why we 'do science'. I understand how and why scientific principles and discoveries have improved the standard of living starting from very basic stuff like what an electron is, or how gravity appears to work. But you can't build a case for future benefits from past successes, especially when immediate needs (urgency) may outweigh the importance of such benefits.

In a sense, we are all necessarily hypocritical. We enjoy the fruits of science and the illusion of its necessity as an industry and costly endeavour, while turning a blind eye to the problems that could be rectified by altruism. But altruism doesn't gain points, and it doesn't work, until material resources have been accumulated (or the illusion thereof, as in money). Such points are real because we have made them so. It is no longer possible to quantify a person's work in load carried or bits generated, but only according to the market value. And the market is all in our interactions and in our heads. It can be explained, but only in terms of our sub-rationality.

In the end, all of it can be explained, but none of it can be explained away. We are full of motives and reasons, excuses and theories. Our propensity for violence has been relatively lowered for a few brief shining moments in a murky sea of disease, death and destruction. This, we call civilisation. I don't think there is a comprehensive explanation for that.

Gnosis and Inkery

In Atlantis for the last few years, there has been a course of study in which novices may elude the crassness of general papery and switch to inkery instead. For those who are less informed, papery is the process of wielding paper, whereas inkery is the superior art of wielding ink, which defeats and dominates all paper (except perhaps blotting paper).

This inkery learning is a subtil (as our forefathers would have said) beast. By careful questioning, as if from the mouth of that ugly Socrates, one is to somehow draw out (Latin: educare) meaning from knowledge (Greek: gnosis). This is thus supposed to make one less agnostic (or more gnostic, if you think that way) through a process of diagnostics (which does not mean two agnostics reasoning together).

But because of the historical origins and biases of Atlantean education, most of the wise men quoted and imbibed (metaphorically) are of Greek origin; and if not Greek, otherwise Mediterranean; and if not otherwise Mediterranean, European. This has led some to misperceive the nature of the world and assume that there are no wise men of Sind or of Cathay.

On the contrary, it has to be said that all our Atlantean wisdom is primarily the legacy of Mu and Lemuria, of the chilling Plateau of Leng, and of long lost cities buried deep in the history of the greatest of continents, Asia. This is what the novices are missing, as they pursue gnosis and inkery.

The disconnect between where wisdom lies, and where superficial knowledge lies more heinously, is what leads to the horrible lacunae that commentators find in the minds of these novices. They are extremely good at spouting Teutonic names, steeped in primitive barbarism, but extremely bad at quoting the Sanskrit masters who gave us words. This means that their idea of the Logos is one based on mnemonics, and not on the essential nature of language, structure, form and being.

It leads to nihilism, abolitionism, and other forms of reductionist philosophy which make the task of thinking less important. It is like the famous proof that invokes the idea that all numbers are nothing compared to infinity, and hence numbers have no significance — or the obverse, that all numbers are so much greater than zero, and hence all numbers have equal significance.

I think that any novice wishing to prepare for the higher levels of education should begin with simple things. Start with epistemology, the basic ideas of how things are known, before you try elaborate games with paper and ink. People who seek wisdom through inkery often come to a sticky end.

Philosophy and the Problem of Computers

The philosopher Gordon Clark once said, "If a truth, a proposition, or a thought were some physical motion in the brain, no two persons could have the same thought. A physical motion is a fleeting event numerically distinct from every other. Two persons cannot have the same motion, nor can one person have it twice. If this is what thought were, memory and communication would be impossible…It is a peculiarity of mind and not of body that the past can be made present. Accordingly, if one may thing the same thought twice, truth must be mental or spiritual. Not only does [truth] defy time; it defies space as well, for if communication is to be possible, the identical truth must be in two minds at once. If, in opposition, anyone wished to deny that an immaterial idea can exist in two minds at once, his denial must be conceived to exist in his own mind only; and since it has not registered in any other mind, it does not occur to us to refute it."

But every single one of his assertions is nullified by the existence of computers. Two computers can indeed have the same thought, or one so similar in each machine that it defies differentiation to all intents and purposes. Two computers can have the same motion, and each of them can replicate that state indefinitely. Memory and communication obviously remain possible, as do immaterial ideas that exist in two (or more) minds at once. In fact, this post, if considered an immaterial idea, will soon register on many different servers in many different places, all at once.

The Clark quotation can be found in Ronald Nash's 1994 book, Faith and Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith, in which Nash states a six-point defence of truth. A quick reading of this tome, followed by a quick re-reading of other related issues, convinces me that almost all philosophers have a blind spot which has to do with their audience. Essentially, philosophers are writing for a human audience, and so their thoughts are limited to what humans can understand, evaluate, or otherwise process. This can still be pretty strong, sometimes, since you can convert many such arguments into symbols and have a computer evaluate them.

The problems begin to surface when you substitute the implicit or explicit human audience with an audience of computers. You might not be able to duplicate, clone, or replace chunks of memory perfectly in a human — but you can do this with computers. In theory (well, information theory, anyway), you can do many more things with computers reliably than with humans, when it comes to information. The only escape is to assert that a computer doesn't think and hence cannot be used to answer philosophical questions about mind and God, while asserting that this 'idiot-savant non-thinking data-processing' ability is different for humans.

That, however, is a point not of philosophy, but of faith. I have no problem thinking of this as an article of faith, but I think it is dishonest to sell it as a premise on which to base rigorous systems of philosophy.

Defeasible Reasoning

For the last twenty-five years or so, students and colleagues (and colleagues who are fellow students, or students-turned-colleagues) have been asking me questions and which I've gamely tried to answer. We trade questions, mostly with civility, sometimes with a slightly jagged or sharp edge; it can get heated at times, but we learn a lot from each other.

There is one particular problem I've identified, which I personally call the 'textbook problem'. This is best stated as a subconscious tendency to adhere to 'textbook knowledge', which is not reprehensible or to be considered less lacking in authority simply because it is from a textbook, but is problematic because textbooks are always out of date. By the time a textbook is edited and published, it is often a year or two out of date. In some cases, because it is indeed a good textbook, serious revisions do not occur for longer periods of time.

One would think that the quicker publishing that online modes afford should eliminate or reduce the problem. This is not always the case. However, it does bring the horizon closer to the sailor, as it were.

The second part of the problem, however, is that this enhanced access to knowledge doesn't seem to be utilised by a lot of the people I encounter. This is not meant as an insult or belittlement, but is a fact based on my own perceptions. I interact with many people, and in my interactions, find that they haven't used something simple like Google or Wikipedia to find out more about whatever they are supposed to know.

The third part of the problem is that people assume that other people know how to use Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful iterations of the information age as manifest in the works of the internet. But because of the second part of the problem, these expectations are sometimes dangerously unfounded and may lead to awkward disappointment.

This is the case with the many people I encounter whose epistemology seems to be based on a stilted sort of hybrid of Plato and logical positivism. Or some vague spirituality. Or other ideas which they got from other people — and strangely enough, didn't bother to evaluate further using internet-based tools. I'm not saying that these tools are better, but they are certainly faster than the ones I grew up with, in most cases. In a pinch, speed has to be a substitute for depth, and often is.

Let's try an experiment. All you TOK students out there, looking for answers to your 2010-2011 TOK Essay Topics and suchlike, why don't you try working your way through this article from the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy first? I am very certain that it will yield dividends in the days ahead. I mean, just imagine what the following sentence might mean for the fate of your TOK essay:

"With the collapse of logical positivism in the mid twentieth century (and the abandonment of attempts to treat the physical world as a logical construction from facts about sense data), new attention was given to the relationship between sense perception and the external world."

Now imagine that I was setting the 2011-2012 TOK Essay Topics, and I used that quote, followed by, "Discuss the nature of this relationship, with respect to two different areas of knowledge." Are we having fun yet?

Secular Reason?

By some odd coincidence, I was going to write something about this because in the last few weeks, a lot of guff has been spewed forth about religion, lack of religion, society, religious impact on society, minimising this impact, and so on. Then Stanley Fish wrote this op-ed piece in the NYT.

It's by no means complete, and it has holes of vagueness in a few spots, but it highlights the problems of purely secular reasoning. These can be summarised like this: 1) it's not human to reason ONLY from 'what is known'; 2) 'what is known' is known only by the rules we form from 'what is known' — ahem; 3) if you reason from 'what is known', then how do you determine what to do with 'what is known', since that would mean that 'what is known' determines its own ends?

From this, one possible conclusion is that one should look for stuff that is not based on 'what is known' in order to figure out what we ought to do with 'what is known'. The problem with that is that there are many things which are by definition illogical and nonsensical (that is, they are inconsistent or incoherent with 'what is known'), and we can't know which (if any) of them actually provides the answer to what we ought to do with 'what is known'.

This leads us in the other direction. We have to figure out, if we want to reason secularly, what to do with 'what is known' based only on 'what is known'. Is this useful, or is this just saying that 'secular' is a mispronunciation of 'circular'?

George Holyoake in 1896 defined secularism in terms of 1) improving the present life by material means, 2) science determining the range of benefits available through material means, and 3) doing good for your present life is good, whether or not you can determine other forms of 'good'. Nietzsche defined it in terms of something more empirical — what is strong survives and is therefore better than what does not survive (and is therefore 'weak'). Kant said that the test of a moral assertion or maxim was whether a viable world could be imagined in which everyone behaved according to this — the 'categorical imperative' test.

Later, the idea of utilitarianism (measured numerically, statistically or economically in circles of ever-increasing complexity) was championed by people like Bentham and then J S Mill. This was Kantianism upside-down — you assess if the end is good, not bothering with the principle or practice leading to it. Marx was dead against this, pointing out that such assessment, based on humans, would change in each era and circumstance of mankind.

The latest word on secular reasoning is probably that of Ayn Rand. She said essentially that you should live for yourself only and that keeping yourself alive in certain ways, because of the pleasure of being alive, should be the main principle of existence. It provides a strong and readily-available basis for a secular life.

So it turns out that yes, there are secular reasons for doing things. Whether they are good reasons or not is arguable. They are probably the best reasons that reason can produce from what reason affirms to exist. Still, the sense of the order of the world being nothing but a circular orbit is sometimes painful. From an information science point of view, can data determine information? Can information determine knowledge? It all seems the wrong way round.

Disaster Philosophy

Suppose a natural disaster occurs, and thousands of people are instantly rendered homeless, hurt, horrified. Some are beyond that. Then an atheist says, "These people need help."

Why is this so? From what first principles is this derived?

Perhaps it's the principle of empathy. "You can imagine yourself in their position, so you should help." But this is a position based on an imaginary situation, one that not only does not exist, but which you are deliberately imagining in order to rationalise your behaviour.

Perhaps it's the principle of equivalence. "Something like this might happen to you, and when it happens (if it happens), you would be glad for others to help you." But this is a position based on a hypothetical situation, one that does not exist and one which you imagine might exist because you hope that it is true. This one's more serious, with two possible replies. Firstly, people will help you anyway, because people help people they don't know — this is an empirical finding. Secondly, this is a bad justification for helping others; it's like pretending there's a heaven so that people will behave themselves on earth.

Perhaps it's the principle of emotion. "Oh, that's a bad thing! Here, have some money. Now I feel good." Ah, this one doesn't deserve comment. Doing things so that you feel good? Isn't that hedonism of some sort, thinly disguised?

Perhaps it's the principle of economics. "If I help people, then the nett economic power of the world increases and everyone's life gets better." Sounds plausible. But can you prove it?

Actually, the more you think about it, the more you realise that the rational atheist has no real reasons to help anybody.

But what about the rational Christian? The Christian is told essentially that he should help others because he is saved for no particular reason, and this point is rubbed in so that nobody can boast about being saved. Get this: you don't deserve it, so you should be happy with what you have — and you should help others whether or not you think they deserve it, and especially if you don't think they deserve it, because you were helped when you didn't deserve it.

It's a strangely compelling argument. It turns all the other arguments on their head. It's a WINNER.

Trapped

It's sometimes possible to see the world as a trap. Here you are, a transmaterial entity, stuck in a world where your corporeal behaviour is dictated (and dictated to) by mere physicality.

Then again, modern philosophers have also tried taking the ghost out of the machine by saying that this perception (along with all your sense of self and such) is just an emergent property of physicality. This is of course science at the it's-all-I-can-see-and-all-else-is-vaporware level, which to be honest is about all science should aspire to (which is why philosophy is its metacognitive overview).

In this latter view, you can't possibly be trapped. Rather, your emergence is just that and signifies nothing. It's an illusion of self-awareness because there isn't really a self, just a corridor of mirrors. It's not so much a butterfly from a cocoon as one of those stereo images that you don't see until you've focussed on them just right. And you're the image.

What's always bugged me is that of course everything I use to evaluate anything is pinned to this emergent (or pre-existent) sense of self. All your tests are circumscribed by this sense of self. There is literally nothing that can be objective without being acknowledged as such by the subjective. And if the subjective is illusory, the objective may be more so, since it is merely the subjective at one level (or any number of levels, if you like) removed.

This is all old stuff, but it hits you sometimes that for all the illusory nature (or not), you can't escape from the self. You're stuck with you. Best make the best of it.

Violence

Violence is necessary even at the atomic or molecular level. There can be no transactions of energy or matter without enormous violence at the submicroscopic scale. This violence continues all the way up into biology at any scale, and thence to sociology and other more macro-level constructs.

The problem with much of the humanities is that they are elaborate narrative artifices or narrative factories designed to allow us to pretend as well as to mask such pretense or pretensions. The simpler (or earlier) the narratives, the less they mask the violence (see the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, for example; also compare Genesis to the Gospels).

The reason we tend to confuse all narratives with religion is that the whole thing is a seamless body of interwoven narratives. There is no literature or avenue of inquiry in the humanities that isn't religious in its roots.

That puts us in a parlous position when discussing violence. Everything is tainted with it, a fact which is as much acknowledged in the old stories (like Cain and Abel) as in the modern narratives.

The argument, therefore, that religious impulses are a major cause of violence (as people like Sam Harris seem to believe) is impossible to test. It is like saying, "Being human makes you prone to violence." The only way to test that is to remove what makes you human and see if you are still prone to violence; since we don't know what it is that we have to remove, and the causes of violence (in general) are too many and too different, we can't really test this assertion.

Likewise, to test the assertion that religious belief is a major cause of violence requires one to believe in turn that the human tendency to be violent is one level higher than the human tendency to have beliefs that can be considered religious. That has to be wrong; it's easier for humans to apprehend and comprehend violence than religion, and requires the use of less brain. Evolutionary biologists would have to agree — it's easier to observe violence in animals (and figure out why and whence this tendency arises) than to observe religion in animals.

Sam Harris and those of his ilk must be wrong. They have been overwhelmed by their own narrative and rhetoric, and have now turned the universe firmly on its head in order to squat in the ruins of the New Atheism.

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Note: Harris is particularly against Islam in terms of one kind of violence. He seems to say that if an increased tendency to commit acts of terrorism can be linked statistically to being Muslim, then all Muslims should submit to the indignity of their ethnicity being used as a tool for profiling. Actually, the statistics can be shown to be distorted by the unique case of the 9/11 incident, which was indeed carried out by terrorists who were Muslims.

Educational Values

On a warm August morning in 1963, 144 years after the Gambler, the Gnome pronounced these fateful words: "I have always regarded the pursuit of knowledge as the noblest and the most rewarding activity of mankind... If I were asked what is the most important single criterion by which to judge the prospects of any underdeveloped country, I would have no hesitation in saying that it is its attitude towards education." He said this in the context of a talk entitled 'Industrial Growth and Political Stability'.

The problem of course is that defining development is the difficult part. The Gnome grappled with it all his life; he said early on that you would need to look at it sociologically, psychologically, culturally, economically, historically — and you would still be like the blind men and the elephant. In fact, he said, you would be reduced to the maxim of, "I'll know it when I see it."

The issue is perhaps more clearly delineated as one of what kind of development you are looking for. The Gnome's world was primarily an economic one, although in his writings you can sense the frustration he had in realising that his beloved economic precepts were inadequate. In fact, he once said (firmly tongue in cheek) on the eve of a trip to the Annual Conference of the World Bank and IMF that he had to abstain from saying certain things because a) it would not be prudent for a small state to cause unnecessary offence to the great, and b) one should not go to the College of Cardinals reeking of heresy.

He always believed that education was the root of success. The problem was that it was inexorably linked in his mind to economic success, as well as cultural depth and political stability. He linked it to many other things, but the one thing that comes across was that he believed his people to be economically rational, perhaps to the exclusion of other things.

To this day, this is still the problem. Even those who lament the dearth of non-economic values in the national discourse are trammelled by the fact that Atlantis was a state born out of entrepreneurial migration and entrepot trade. The measure of man in modern Atlantis is his effectiveness as some sort of economic factor — how effective, how influential, how good a leader, how able to defend what has been raised.

The great thing about the Gnome, on closer reading, is that he was indeed decidedly heretical in his economic insights. He believed that state control was a good thing in parallel with a free market. That sounds odd, but in the 1960s, when he first said it, it sounded perilously like crypto-Marxism to some in the West. But the Gnome was really an avowed pragmatic socialist, if anything else. His was the world of Weber as well as Marx, of Adam Smith but only as far as an appropriate scale for the exercise of the invisible hand. He believed that the invisible world was all well and good, but it went with a visible glove, at the very least.

All that has crept into the metrics by which we measure local education. It is all very numerical, and if not, it is quantitatively qualitative. We have awards for things like 'Character Development', and schools list these awards — the more awards for qualitative development, the better. It is all very disturbing to those who look at the system from outside.

People, however, deserve the education they desire. For all the bitching, people here love the reliability of the system in the sense of its replicable behaviour, schedules, and concepts. They might dispute the validity, but seldom the utility. And that is probably how the Gnome would have wanted it.