Category: Religion

Running, Ancient Roman Science, Arizona Dive Bars, and Lightning Machine Learning

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I just returned from running in Chiricahua National Monument, Sedona, Painted Desert, and Petrified Forest National Park, taking advantage of the late spring before the heat becomes too intense. Even so, though I got to Massai Point in Chiricahua through 90+ degree canyons and had around a liter of water left, I still had to slow down and walk out after running short of liquid nourishment two-thirds down. There is an eerie, uncertain nausea that hits when hydration runs low under high stress. Cliffs and steep ravines take on a wolfish quality. The mind works to control feet against stumbling and the lips get serrated edges of parched skin that bite off without relieving the dryness.

I would remember that days later as I prepped to overnight with a wilderness permit in Petrified Forest only to discover that my Osprey Exos pack frame had somehow been bent, likely due to excessive manhandling by airport checked baggage weeks earlier. I considered my options and drove eighty miles to Flagstaff to replace the pack, then back again.

I arrived in time to join Dr. Richard Carrier in an unexpected dive bar in Holbrook, Arizona as the sunlight turned to amber and a platoon of Navajo pool sharks descended on the place for billiards and beers. I had read that Dr. Carrier would be stopping there and it was convenient to my next excursion, so I picked up signed copies of his new book, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, as well as his classic, On the Historicity of Jesus, that remains part of the controversial samizdat of so-called “Jesus mythicism.”

If there is a distinguishing characteristic of OHJ it is the application of Bayesian Theory to the problems of historical method.… Read the rest

The Ethics of Knowing

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In the modern American political climate, I’m constantly finding myself at sea in trying to unravel the motivations and thought processes of the Republican Party. The best summation I can arrive at involves the obvious manipulation of the electorate—but that is not terrifically new—combined with a persistent avoidance of evidence and facts.

In my day job, I research a range of topics trying to get enough of a grasp on what we do and do not know such that I can form a plan that innovates from the known facts towards the unknown. Here are a few recent investigations:

  • What is the state of thinking about the origins of logic? Logical rules form into broad classes that range from the uncontroversial (modus tollens, propositional logic, predicate calculus) to the speculative (multivalued and fuzzy logic, or quantum logic, for instance). In most cases we make an assumption based on linguistic convention that they are true and then demonstrate their extension, despite the observation that they are tautological. Synthetic knowledge has no similar limitations but is assumed to be girded by the logical basics.
  • What were the early Christian heresies, how did they arise, and what was their influence? Marcion of Sinope is perhaps the most interesting one of these, in parallel with the Gnostics, asserting that the cruel tribal god of the Old Testament was distinct from the New Testament Father, and proclaiming perhaps (see various discussions) a docetic Jesus figure. The leading “mythicists” like Robert Price are invaluable in this analysis (ignore first 15 minutes of nonsense). The thin braid of early Christian history and the constant humanity that arises in morphing the faith before settling down after Nicaea (well, and then after Martin Luther) reminds us that abstractions and faith have a remarkable persistence in the face of cultural change.
… Read the rest

Build Up That Wall

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No, I’m not endorsing the construction of additional walls between the United States and Mexico. There are plenty of those and they may be of questionable value. Instead, it is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday and I’m quoting from Christopher Hitchens (who shared his birthday with Jefferson) in repurposing and inverting Reagan’s famous request of Gorbachev. Hitch promoted the Jeffersonian ideal of separating out the civic from the religious:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

from Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

A rather remarkable continuation of Enlightenment concepts that derive, typically, from a notion of “natural rights” and, even in the Virginia Statue, from religious concepts: “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free.” With the following paragraphs noting that human rulers are fallible and have tended to create false religions down through time, apparently regardless of God’s wishes.

Natural rights are an interesting idea that re-occurs in the Declaration of Independence and were also championed by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The notion that natural rights did not extend to slaves was something that Jefferson was conflicted about, according to Hitchens, until the end of his life, with the issue of state’s rights a pragmatic basis for opposition to an institution that he both profited from and found morally repugnant.… Read the rest

Bayesianism and Properly Basic Belief

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Kircher-Diagram_of_the_names_of_GodXu and Tenebaum, in Word Learning as Bayesian Inference (Psychological Review, 2007), develop a very simple Bayesian model of how children (and even adults) build semantic associations based on accumulated evidence. In short, they find contrastive elimination approaches as well as connectionist methods unable to explain the patterns that are observed. Specifically, the most salient problem with these other methods is that they lack the rapid transition that is seen when three exemplars are presented for a class of objects associated with a word versus one exemplar. Adults and kids (the former even more so) just get word meanings faster than those other models can easily show. Moreover, a space of contending hypotheses that are weighted according to their Bayesian statistics, provides an escape from the all-or-nothing of hypothesis elimination and some of the “soft” commitment properties that connectionist models provide.

The mathematical trick for the rapid transition is rather interesting. They formulate a “size principle” that weights the likelihood of a given hypothesis (this object is most similar to a “feb,” for instance, rather than the many other object sets that are available) according to a scaling that is exponential in the number of exposures. Hence the rapid transition:

Hypotheses with smaller extensions assign greater probability than do larger hypotheses to the same data, and they assign exponentially greater probability as the number of consistent examples increases.

It should be noted that they don’t claim that the psychological or brain machinery implements exactly this algorithm. As is usual in these matters, it is instead likely that whatever machinery is involved, it simply has at least these properties. It may very well be that connectionist architectures can do the same but that existing approaches to connectionism simply don’t do it quite the right way.… Read the rest

Lucifer on the Beach

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glowwormsI picked up a whitebait pizza while stopped along the West Coast of New Zealand tonight. Whitebait are tiny little swarming immature fish that can be scooped out of estuarial river flows using big-mouthed nets. They run, they dart, and it is illegal to change river exit points to try to channel them for capture. Hence, whitebait is semi-precious, commanding NZD70-130/kg, which explains why there was a size limit on my pizza: only the small one was available.

By the time I was finished the sky had aged from cinereal to iron in a satire of the vivid, watch-me colors of CNN International flashing Donald Trump’s linguistic indirection across the television. I crept out, setting my headlamp to red LEDs designed to minimally interfere with night vision. Just up away from the coast, hidden in the impossible tangle of cold rainforest, there was a glow worm dell. A few tourists conjured with flashlights facing the ground to avoid upsetting the tiny arachnocampa luminosa that clung to the walls inside the dark garden. They were like faint stars composed into irrelevant constellations, with only the human mind to blame for any observed patterns.

And the light, what light, like white-light LEDs recently invented, but a light that doesn’t flicker or change, and is steady under the calmest observation. Driven by luciferin and luciferase, these tiny creatures lure a few scant light-seeking creatures to their doom and as food for absorption until they emerge to mate, briefly, lay eggs, and then die.

Lucifer again, named properly from the Latin as the light bringer, the chemical basis for bioluminescence was largely isolated in the middle of the 20th Century. Yet there is this biblical stigma hanging over the term—one that really makes no sense at all.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes: Section 18 (Chapter 15)

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Against SuperheroesThe sessions with Sakara were illuminative and intimate. She asked me about what I remembered from before the transformation. I sat in the chair across from her, the susurration of the air conditioning that seemed to feed the field projectors as much as our comfort was a constant presence beneath our discussion. I remembered very little: hints of childhood, more about the dig at Mt. Hasan, bits of Ela’s sexual mystique, strange flashes of schools and lights. Interrogating this past revealed very little new or surprising to me. I was candid about my limitations concerning the changes to my memory. I was also candid about how with the loss of a personal history came, inevitably, a loss of the essentials of being human. We are continuitities of experience. I can’t describe who I am except as part of my memories and the feelings that surround and enervate them. The protracted calamity of religious ideas that Sakara raised, from ethical concerns about harming others to the status of the unborn all unravel with this consideration. A baby is alive but only tentatively human in the strongest sense. A god knows this—can even feel it as a ribbon into the future—but humans just arbitrarily assign categories that are driven by misunderstandings of these cognitive postures.

Why were the gods so capricious, she asked me. Why were they so inhuman? They were good human questions but the answer hardly raised above this faint echo of incapacity. If your mind is subsumed in this web of temporal flux, if you recognize the flammability of experience, and where there are other islands of experiences too, like for a human that there is only instead a moving arc of intransitive expectations and plans, then what is left is the broader permamence of an ineffable now.… Read the rest

Free Will and Thermodynamic Warts

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Free WillyThe Stone at New York Times is a great resource for insights into both contemporary and rather ancient discussions in philosophy. Here’s William Irvin at King’s College discoursing on free will and moral decision-making. The central problem is one that we all discussed in high school: if our atomistic world is deterministic in that there is a chain of causation from one event to another (contingent in the last post), and therefore even our mental processes must be caused, then there is no free will in the expected sense (“libertarian free will” in the literature). This can be overcome by the simplest fix of proposing a non-material soul that somehow interacts with the material being and is inherently non-deterministic. This results in a dualism of matter and mind that doesn’t seem justifiable by any empirical results. For instance, we know that decision-making does appear to have a neuropsychological basis because we know about the effects of lesioning brains, neurotransmitters, and even how smells can influence decisions. Irving also claims that the realization of the potential loss of free will leaves us awash in some sense of hopelessness at the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical reality of an objective moral system. Without free will we seem off the hook for our decisions.

Compatibilists will disagree, and might even cite quantum indeterminacy as a rescue donut for pulling some notion of free will up out of the deep ocean of Irving’s despair. But the fix is perhaps even easier than that. Even though we might recognize that there are chains of causation at a microscopic scale, the macroscopic combinations of these events—even without quantum indeterminacy—becomes only predictable along broad contours of probabilistic outcomes.… Read the rest

Rationality and the Intelligibility of Philosophy

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6a00d83542d51e69e20133f5650edd970b-800wiThere is a pervasive meme in the physics community that holds as follows: there are many physical phenomena that don’t correspond in any easy way to our ordinary experiences of life on earth. We have wave-particle duality wherein things behave like waves sometimes and particles other times. We have simultaneous entanglement of physically distant things. We have quantum indeterminacy and the emergence of stuff out of nothing. The tiny world looks like some kind of strange hologram with bits connected together by virtual strings. We have a universe that began out of nothing and that begat time itself. It is, in this framework, worthwhile to recognize that our every day experiences are not necessarily useful (and are often confounding) when trying to understand the deep new worlds of quantum and relativistic physics.

And so it is worthwhile to ask whether many of the “rational” queries that have been made down through time have any intelligible meaning given our modern understanding of the cosmos. For instance, if we were to state the premise “all things are either contingent or necessary” that underlies a poor form of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, we can immediately question the premise itself. And a failed premise leads to a failed syllogism. Maybe the entanglement of different things is piece-part of the entanglement of large-scale space time, and that the insights we have so far are merely shadows of the real processes acting behind the scenes? Who knows what happened before the Big Bang?

In other words, do the manipulations of logic and the assumptions built into the terms lead us to empty and destructive conclusions? There is no reason not to suspect that and therefore the bits of rationality that don’t derive from empirical results are immediately suspect.… Read the rest

Non-Cognitivist Trajectories in Moral Subjectivism

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imageWhen I say that “greed is not good” the everyday mind creates a series of images and references, from Gordon Gekko’s inverse proposition to general feelings about inequality and our complex motivations as people. There is a network of feelings and, perhaps, some facts that might be recalled or searched for to justify the position. As a moral claim, though, it might most easily be considered connotative rather than cognitive in that it suggests a collection of secondary emotional expressions and networks of ideas that support or deny it.

I mention this (and the theories that are consonant with this kind of reasoning are called non-cognitivist and, variously, emotive and expressive), because there is a very real tendency to reduce moral ideas to objective versus subjective, especially in atheist-theist debates. I recently watched one such debate between Matt Dillahunty and an orthodox priest where the standard litany revolved around claims about objectivity versus subjectivity of truth. Objectivity of truth is often portrayed as something like, “without God there is no basis for morality. God provides moral absolutes. Therefore atheists are immoral.” The atheists inevitably reply that the scriptural God is a horrific demon who slaughters His creation and condones slavery and other ideas that are morally repugnant to the modern mind. And then the religious descend into what might be called “advanced apologetics” that try to diminish, contextualize, or dismiss such objections.

But we are fairly certain regardless of the tradition that there are inevitable nuances to any kind of moral structure. Thou shalt not kill gets revised to thou shalt not murder. So we have to parse manslaughter in pursuit of a greater good against any rules-based approach to such a simplistic commandment.… Read the rest

On Killing Kids

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Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God is a remarkable piece of scholarship. I was recently asked what I read for fun and had to admit that I have been on a trajectory towards reading books that have, on average, more footnotes than text. J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans kindly moves the notes to the end of the volume. Smith’s Chapter 5, Yahwistic Cult Practices, and particularly Section 3, The mlk sacrifice, are illuminating on the widespread belief that killing children could propitiate the gods. This practice was likely widespread among the Western Semitic peoples, including the Israelites and Canaanites (Smith’s preference for Western Semitic is to lump the two together ca. 1200 BC because they appear to have been culturally the same, possibly made distinct after the compilation of OT following the Exile).

I recently argued with some young street preachers about violence and horror in Yahweh’s name and by His command while waiting outside a rock shop in Old Sacramento. Human sacrifice came up, too, with the apologetics being that, despite the fact that everyone was bad back then, the Chosen People did not perform human sacrifice and therefore they were marginally better than the other people around them. They passed quickly on the topic of slavery, which was wise for rhetorical purposes, because slavery was widespread and acceptable. I didn’t remember the particulars of the examples of human sacrifice in OT, but recalled them broadly to which they responded that there were translation and interpretation errors with “burnt offering” and “fire offerings of first borns” that, of course, immediately contradicted their assertion of acceptance and perfection of the scriptures.

More interesting, though, is the question of why might human sacrifice be so pervasive, whether among Yahwists and Carthiginians or Aztecs?… Read the rest