Category: Philosophy

An Exegetic Theory of Liberty

Mark Davis1 Comment

A modest proposal:

Congress shall make no law interfering with medical decisions except in the case of public health and in the regulation of the practice of medicine.

But now we immediately face daunting challenges about the meaning of these terms. What are the limits of a “medical decision?” What are the limits of the public health clause? Can the regulation of the practice of medicine impinge on medical decisions if, for example, a procedure is regulated out of availability? Does this create an immediate tension between the preamble and the restrictive clauses?

Let’s take a version of Putnam’s concerns about meaning. What is a neutrino? Many people would simply shrug and admit that they don’t know. Some would recall something like a particle that can pass through stuff. A few of these who have some physics or are widely read might say that they are very light particles that emerge from neutron decay and are needed to balance the nuclear decay equation. This last series of images might include thoughts about giant underground detector baths of water or mineral oil or something. In general, though, we can conclude that defining something that is physical, measurable, but incomplete is a daunting task.

Legal theories have this kind of amorphous semantics, especially with regard to concepts like “liberty.” We certainly have some indelible images like “your liberty ends at my nose” but that doesn’t create a very effective template for legal decision trees. Does a stand-your-ground law preserve my liberty to self-defense or is it an excessive application of force when the two parties’ joint right to life is better preserved by a duty to retreat? Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization lays out the problem of defining liberty:

“Liberty” is a capacious term.

… Read the rest

Ancient Conceptual Code-Switching

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I’ve been reading Hesiod as part of background research for a new book project I’m working on, tentatively titled Talos. In Talos, vulcanologists enter a strange artifact that floats to the surface of a lava dyke during a catastrophic eruption of Santorini. Inside is some kind of antique computing machine that operates using a strange fluid. The device is capable of manipulating people and time, in fact, and is used by the protagonists to harass one another, to explore history, and to change the future of the planet itself. And then it is gone again.

Hesiod represents some of the earliest works of the archaic period of ancient Greece. His Theogony is the early catalog of the Greek myths of Olympians and Titans. His Works and Days is perhaps the earliest discussion of Pandora, and it is not what most people know from Laura Croft and common parlance. In the Pandora myth, she is created by the “lame god” and blacksmith Hephaestus as a mechanism for avenging the release of the knowledge of fire to humankind by Prometheus. Why was fire a bad idea? Well, if humankind learned the ways of the gods they would just hang out and play video games, it seems:

The gods had hidden away the true means of livelihood for humankind, and they still keep it that way. If it were otherwise, it would be easy for you to do in just one day all the work you need to do, and have enough to last you a year, idle though you would be.

Perhaps we would have done a lot of sailing on the wine-dark seas. So people need punishing for the sympathetic crimes of Prometheus.… Read the rest

Wordle and the Hard Problem of Philosophy

Mark Davis2 Comments

I occasionally do Wordles at the New York Times. If you are not familiar, the game is very simple. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. When you make a guess, letters that are in the correct position turn green. Letters that are in the word but in the wrong position turn yellow. The mental process for solving them is best optimized by choosing a word initially that has high-frequency English letters, like “notes,” and then proceeding from there. At some point in the guessing process, one is confronted with anchoring known letters and trying to remember words that might fit the sequence. There is a handy virtual keyboard displayed below the word matrix that shows you the letters in black, yellow, green, and gray that you have tried, that are required, that are fit to position, and that remain untested, respectively. After a bit, you start to apply little algorithms and exclusionary rules to the process: What if I anchor an S at the beginning? There are no five-letter words that end in “yi” in English, etc. There is a feeling of working through these mental strategies and even a feeling of green and yellow as signposts along the way.

I decided this morning to write the simplest one-line Wordle helper I could and solved the puzzle in two guesses:

Sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t gotten to it yet! Here’s what I needed to do the job: a five letter word list for English and a word frequency list for English. I could have derived the first from the second but found the first first, here. The second required I log into Kaggle to get a good CSV searchable list.… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

Mark Davis2 Comments

Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

The Art of War

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I was moved today by images and video of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian aggression. I contrasted those images with a drier, intellectualized stream of essays and opinion pieces from WaPo, NY Times, CNN, BBC, Atlantic, and others. I now know the history and conflicted consequences of NATO expansion, as well as how it was blocked in Georgia and now Ukraine by corrupted roadmaps for implementation. I expanded my understanding of Taiwan and colonial states’ self-determination after World War II. I read up on how Javelin missile systems work. I dipped into Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” because, well, it was waiting for me. I bought Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and watched half of it because Sally Kellerman died recently. It was all war, security, brutality, hopelessness, idealizations and global order, plus a layer cake of 19th-century Parisian capitalist critique wrapped up in interminable verbiage to resemble a short story (I stumbled along in French, truly, as well. It didn’t make it better.)

What was left to do?

Music, clearly. There must be perfect pieces and composers for this moment. First, we start with Ukraine itself, and Lysenko. Qobuz gives us Solmia Soroka and Arthur Greene’s Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano. Lysenko was an ethnomusicologist who specialized in Ukrainian folk music and represents the Romantic trends of his time, doing for Ukrainian fiddling what Brahms did for Hungary (cultural appropriation much?) or Dvořák and Smetana for Czech sensibilities.

But what of war, invasion, and resistance? We can start with Sibelius’s Finlandia because a day with Sibelius is always an epic adventure, and winter ups the ante. Finlandia served as an artistic attack on Russian censorship and russification, performed using alternative titles and lyrics.… Read the rest

We Are Weak Chaos

Mark Davis1 Comment

Recent work in deep learning networks has been largely driven by the capacity of modern computing systems to compute gradient descent over very large networks. We use gaming cards with GPUs that are great for parallel processing to perform the matrix multiplications and summations that are the primitive operations central to artificial neural network formalisms. Conceptually, another primary advance is the pre-training of networks as autocorrelators that helps with smoothing out later “fine tuning” training programs over other data. There are some additional contributions that are notable in impact and that reintroduce the rather old idea of recurrent neural networks, networks with outputs attached back to inputs that create resonant kinds of running states within the network. The original motivation of such architectures was to emulate the vast interconnectivity of real neural systems and to capture a more temporal appreciation of data where past states affect ongoing processing, rather than a pure feed-through architecture. Neural networks are already nonlinear systems, so adding recurrence just ups the complexity of trying to figure out how to train them. Treating them as black boxes and using evolutionary algorithms was fashionable for me in the 90s, though the computing capabilities just weren’t up for anything other than small systems, as I found out when chastised for overusing a Cray at Los Alamos.

But does any of this have anything to do with real brain systems? Perhaps. Here’s Toker, et. al. “Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (with the unenviable acronym PNAS). The researchers and clinicians studied the electrical activity of macaque and human brains in a wide variety of states: epileptics undergoing seizures, macaque monkeys sleeping, people on LSD, those under the effects of anesthesia, and people with disorders of consciousness.… Read the rest

Leon, Humanism, and Modesto

Mark Davis1 Comment

Modesto, California has a motto that sits proudly on an arched sign as one enters the city from the teaming congestion of Highway 101 that rumbles with diesel trucks through the agriculture core of the state: “Water Wealth Contentment Health.” It is a throwback to The Golden State’s climate and the hope for a better life that led settlers to Modesto (Spanish for “modest”). The goal back then was to build and create, to achieve something where nothing previously existed. There are plenty of caveats we can lard on concerning the fates of indigenous peoples and consequences of the water management system that made it all possible, but the goal of bettering oneself and growing wealthy and content was a driving force across America—an obvious extension of “The Pursuit of Happiness” encoded in the US Constitution.

So it might seem strange that billionaire Leon Cooperman appears in The Washington Post confused about whether or not his success is some kind of moral failure. He came from modest roots, worked his way through college and graduate school, and then worked to make money on Wall Street. Now, with family grown, he still works at making money every day. He lives in an expensive home, but less than he could afford, drives a modest car, and shops deals at Costco. He also gives away prodigious amounts of money to educational and social charities, and he has pledged to give away most of it before death.

Plaudits on success and a long life. He is modesto, mostly, though some of his personal sentiment (at least as reported in the WaPo article) could be a bit more refined. Of a showy Bentley in his neighborhood: “…I could buy and sell that guy 100 times.”… Read the rest

Triangulation Machinery, Poetry, and Politics

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I was reading Muriel Rukeyser‘s poetry and marveling at some of the lucid yet novel constructions she employs. I was trying to avoid the grueling work of comparing and contrasting Biden’s speech on the anniversary of January 6th, 2021 with the responses from various Republican defenders of Trump. Both pulled into focus the effect of semantic and pragmatic framing as part of the poetic and political processes, respectively. Sorry, Muriel, I just compared your work to the slow boil of democracy.

Reaching in interlaced gods, animals, and men.
There is no background. The figures hold their peace
In a web of movement. There is no frustration,
Every gesture is taken, everything yields connections.

There is a theory about how language works that I’ve discussed here before. In this theory, from Donald Davidson primarily, the meaning of words and phrases are tied directly to a shared interrogation of what each person is trying to convey. Imagine a child observing a dog and a parent says “dog” and is fairly consistent with that usage across several different breeds that are presented to the child. The child may overuse the word, calling a cat a dog at some point, at which point the parent corrects the child with “cat” and the child proceeds along through this interrogatory process, triangulating in on the meaning of dog versus cat. Triangulation is Davidson’s term, reflecting three parties: two people discussing a thing or idea. In the case of human children, we also know that there are some innate preferences the child will apply during the triangulation process, like preferring “whole object” semantics to atomized ones, and assuming different words mean different things even when applied to the same object: so “canine” and “dog” must refer to the same object in slightly different ways since they are differing words, and indeed they do: dog IS-A canine but not vice-versa.… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

Mark Davis1 Comment

My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest