A study in ecclesiastical motive...

The therapeutic stance towards sin is among the greatest aids for sinning yet more. An examination of the clerical abuse scandal in Denmark bears this out. The milieu for that scandal was one in which sexual liberty, indeed, sexual rambunctiousness, was encouraged in mainstream elementary pedagogical texts, based, of course, on the regnant psychological theories of the time. Such theories regarded repression and moralistic guilt as infinitely worse sins than masturbation, fornication, pornography, and the like.

The same theories pervade Family Planning materials, in which children are explicitly encouraged and instructed how to explore their own bodies and the sexual capacities of others. It is not a question of accepting a child's sexuality but one of actively stimulating it. If it happens that one of the best guides a child has for activating his sexuality is a minister, coach, or priest, then we must allow the exploration to advance , since both parties are willing co-explorers. Above all we mustn't judge or condemn in a dogmatic, moralistic spirit.

I am certain a similar broadminded lassitude was present in the American abuse scandal. It is no mere coincidence that the crooked handling of offending priests went in parallel with the sexualization of psychiatry, a trend which came to a head in the nineties, when pedophilia was clinically chicAn offending priest would be given a change of environment, not a swift and dogmatic censure, since he is not to blame, indeed, none of us is to blame, for we are but the product of our environment. The abuse festered not because it is a particularly Catholic thing—indeed, rates of abuse are at least as high if not higher among non-Catholic and secular contexts which allow for abuses of intimacy, trust, and authority—but because the motives of clerical administrators was skewed by a therapeutic bias. The aim was not to do the right thing, for such a course necessarily implies one can do or has done a wrong thing, has committed a sin, plain and simple, and that the right thing to do is to dispense and suffer punishment. Punishment is however an outdated shibboleth of dogmatic moralism. As such, the only right thing to do, the only socially commendable motive, was not to do right, but to do right by a psychologically maladjusted subject, the hope being that an adjustment in the subject's surroundings would yield an adjustment (not to use so high-handed a term as rectification) of the subject's behavior. Redeem the efferent phenomena by tweaking the afferent noumena, as it were.

The big antlers serve the good of the species by enhancing reproductive success...

The core of Frank's thesis is that unmitigated self-interest does not, according to Darwinian awareness, produce the larger, collective, common good.

So, you ask, what's all this about economics and social ethics lately?

A few things:

0. I'm not a communist! I'm a capitalist... with qualms. My tentative thesis: capitalism rests on the free-market mechanism (FMM), but is self-defeating as soon as it is applied in a necessarily limiting social context (i.e., capitalism requires market-external intervention), whereas distributism protects the FMM but in a radically different form (i.e., the ecological analogue of 'distributed cognition/processing'). Since both theories consist in the FMM, there cannot be a clash between them, unless/until the former rejects the structure of the latter in favor of politically abetted concentration, a concentration which denatures the 'neural' tissue of the FMM. Capitalism emphasizes the mechanism of the FMM at the expense of a sustainable structure, while distributism emphasizes the structure of how the FMM can persist.

1. I don't capitalize "distributism". It's too tendentious/pugnacious, otherwise. Marxism, Darwinism, Georgism, etc. Okay. But let's stick to socialism, capitalism, distirbutism, institutionalism, solidarism, etc.

1a. Georgism and distributism, dear cousins!

2. Even mentioning "distribution" scares otherwise receptive conservative/traditionalist minds, so distributism needs a new name. I propose: "[Darwinian] niche capitalism" or "radically parallel-process capitalism" or "ecomodular capitalism".

3. I'm not a bought-and-sold distributist. Not yet, anyway. I really am just reading in all directions, and basically making up for a mediocre economic education along the way. I'm a big fan of the free market and, as an American, I'm hugely biased towards capitalism. I am gravely dissatisfied, however, with the historically regular and increasingly manifest link between "capital concentration" and "political centralization" (and vice versa!) If, however, the Magisterium indicates that neoclassical liberalism (NL) is heresy, let NL burn.

4. As John Médaille argues, economic reform is only possible after political reform, and political structure follows economic dynamics. The rise of federal hegemony over states' rights is a parallel development of the corporatist centralization of capital in the USA. Likewise, the dismantling of federal debt and welfare statism can only come by (re)distributing the political power to the states, cities, and boroughs of the USA. In turn, once these local (!) powers regain their power, they will regain their revenue responsibility in the republic. Away with kicking problems upstairs to Uncle Sam!

4a. There is a crucial link between states' rights and truly free markets, since (classical) federalism is just political distributism. This is why I believe the "Austrian–distributist" debate among Catholics is a new kind of De Auxiliis for the Church. If they are ever going to find each other (as kissing cousins, indeed), Austrianism and distributism will do so in the domain of states' rights, at least in the USA.

You keep using that word, but I don't think "free" means what you think it means…

"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate … [argument] that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"

–– Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, p. 142

Finding the flood…

"Evidence shows that what is now the Persian Gulf was flooded by the waters of the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Dr. Rose thinks the new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf to escape the rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the water."

This is where my head is...

Up with economy, down with chrematistics!

Below is the TED Talk for Open Source Ecology. Have a gander. It has me drooling.

The book that got my wheels spinning in this direction is Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. My recent posting of Matthew Crawford's essay on "the case for working with your hands" is also part of this impulse. Wendell Barry's new book What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth is also good stuff.

My larger philosophical impulse is an increasing absorption with distributism, as my recent various quotations about economic matters should indicate. Distributism is often mocked for being impractical, but the Open Source Ecology shows how hollow that accusation is. I have been reading numerous posts at The Distributist Review and have a stack of books on economics and social equity ahead of me. I have long been skeptical of the ideology of overpopulation fear-mongering, and one aspect of the debate is hunger and economic equity. The problem with global population is not whether resources are adequate--they are!--but how the resources are distributed and tended by global peoples. It was not until recently, however, that I realized the direct link between my own standard-and-style of living and the problem of unjust economic distribution.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about redistribution, but I think that misses the point on two fronts. First, since America long ago ceased being a quasi-distributist polity, the redistribution many people want remains confined in the capitalistic strictures that distributism opposes. Second, distributism allows for economic prosperity and entrepreneurship--indeed, distributists believe a distributist economy is what grounds entrepreneurship in the first place!



Hence, distributism avoids the errors of socialism (i.e. negation of private property and absolute centralized regulation of property development) and avoids the errors of capitalism (i.e. the intrinsic centralization of capital apart from individual families' autonomy over their own property as a potentially total domain of "real value"). It is a central tenet of Catholic social teaching that the family is the nucleus of human society, and in so far as distributism puts families, as opposed to the state or consumers, first, puts me largely in the distributist camp.



In any event, perhaps being a husband and father-to-be has given me the focus and personal attachment to see how simply living and living simply are great sources of joy, and how I myself can live out our abiding Adamic call to stewardship of Creation.

Thinking about thinking about physics, part 2...

In my introductory post of this series, I noted how Roger G. Newton is what I call a "chaste realist" (C.R.) and that, as such, his instinctive realism is at odds with his crypto-Kantian idealism. As I noted in the introductory post, Newton's thinking about physics is largely deflationary, in the sense that, at the end of the day, even the strangest scientific discoveries and theories can and should be reconciled as closely as possible with common sense (i.e. realism about the world and our knowledge of it). The following are informal characterizations, but I think they will make my basic point.

A C.R. is someone that, so to speak, wants realism to be true, but who is also aware of how far from reality scientific theories can be and are. Secretly, a C.R. knows science is on the right path and that normal science tells us important, lasting things about the real, mind-independent world. A C.R. cannot bring himself to subscribe to scientism, since he admits the ontological limitations of scientific claims are tied up with their origin in human cognition. C.R.s recognize that idealization, pragmatic selectivity, aesthetic bias, and so on, effect scientific paradigms, but they insist the general thrust of scientific inquiry tracks reality better than most, if not all other, methods of reasoning. On the other hand, a C.R. rejects constructivism and most of the non-progressive, anti-realist theory of science (as espoused by Duhem, Carnap. Hempel, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Van Fraassen, Giere, et al.). Scientific standards and conceptions may be relative to human "users" of science, but that does not entail the former are relativistic and fictional. In effect, C.R.s say to the regnant anti-realist regime in the philosophy of science, "If we promise not to claim too much for science as a 'truth engine', can we be allowed to accept scientific findings as 'true enough'?"

So, I'm calling Newton a chaste realist. I'll begin by noting his realism. First of all, Newton has i) ambitious aims for scientific explanation (Se). Se must not be mere description. For instance, Newton argues, even if we discovered that physical constants changed, as Paul Dirac and others have suggested based on the expansion of the universe, "we would still have to search for an underlying time-independent law that would account for the specific way in which these constants vary with time. Physics never regards history itself as a sufficient explanation of any fundamental change" (Thinking About Physics [TP], p. 10).

Likewise, ii) Se is about more than the pragmatic success of science. "What justifies our confidence in the basis soundness of the entire [scientific] structure," Newton writes, "is its coherence, an intellectual coherence that includes consistency with all the experiences and expectations founded on it, the fulfillment of precise, far-reaching predictions implied by it, and the functioning of all the technology built on its basis" (p. 19, my italics). Newton's claim contains a number of overly realist quantificational implications, which ultimately are at odds with the chastity of his realism, about which more later.

In any case, Newton continues with a point which strikes, wittingly or unwittingly, against a main pillar of the crude scientism prevalent in much of Western society, namely, the 'argument' that "Science Works, Bitch!" As Newton says, however, "[t]o point out that science works, in the sense that we readily watch television..., is, of course, the most banal of the answers we can give to those who question the truth of science... [though] it is an important component of the coherence of physics" (p. 19). These claims indicate how, for Newton, scientific truth is not merely a matter of technical success or "better living through science," but rather derives from the ambition of making sense of the world by way of science itself. Coherence, as Newton describes it in "the broad sense above... is the basis for claiming truth as the goal of physics-- not as an attainment, but as an aim" (p. 20). Lawrence Sklar, in Theory and Truth, makes almost exactly the same claim, so I hope to discuss both authors in tandem at some point.

Lest the above seem too theoretical, I should note that "the philosophy of science" is not Newton's focus. Rather, his focus is largely on how to reconcile the oddity of quantum theory (QT) with the mainstream of historical scientific claims. For instance, he denies that QT undermines good ole fashioned Newtonian determinism in the popular "spooky" way many people think, since "[q]uantum mechanics is as deterministic as classical mechanics" and that the truly weird things about QT--namely, entanglement--"originates in the wave-particle duality" (pp. 22-23). Indeed, "while part of what is meant by entanglement would obtain for any probabilistic theory... other parts [of QT] go further and are caused by phase correlations" (p. 23). Such entanglement, free of the wave-particle duality, does not strike us as odd for wave dynamics proper, so, as I mentioned in the introductory post, it is Newton's implicit aim to demystify the weirdness of QT by situating it in the larger context of physical statistics as such. A crucial premise in Newton's deflationary QT, is that "reality at the everyday level has to be distinguished from reality at the submicroscopic level" (p. 26).

This is a striking claim, and one with profound philosophical implications. Since, as always, my time is running short before I must head to class, I will close this post without getting any deeper into Newton's own claims in TP. In the next post I will connect Newton's premise about the macro-/microscopic cleft in reality (or the MMC) with its larger philosophical implications from an Aristotelian perspective (mainly by citing Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma and David Oderberg's Real Essentialism).

Stay tuned.

Thinking about thinking about physics…

The following are some observations derived from some of my recent reading materials, mainly Roger G. Newton's Thinking about Physics (TP), as well as Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen (EE).

The first thing to note is that Huggett's and Newton's approaches to "the philosophy of physics" are very similar, while their methods of exposition are very different. Both authors show a strong bias in favor of letting "normal science" reign over philosophizing about "science per se". For both authors, physical results can be dispositive of metaphysical questions. Newton plainly states in his preface that he will stick as close to physical data and methods as possible, but does defend metaphysics as the arena for honest disputes between intelligent people about those data and methods. At the end of nearly every chapter in EE, Huggett shows how physical discoveries can shed light (even decisive light) on classic philosophical queries.

Huggett's book is much broader than Newton's, and much more accessible to "the intelligent lay reader." Indeed, three or four times while reading EE, I realized Huggett had explained matters so well that it felt like the first time I had really grasped the issue, despite countless previous exposures on my part. Newton is also a very lucid writer, but, as he points out in the first sentence, TP is addressed to "readers with a good undergraduate education in physics", so, if, like me, you lack such an education, TP will be rough sledding. One deficit of EE, is its relative (!) lack of discussion of quantum mechanics, whereas TP discusses quantum theory in great detail. A good book to read in conjunction with TP, is Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma. Another good companion book is Lawrence Sklar's Theory and Truth, not the least because both authors qua "chaste realists" evince the same weaknesses in what I would call Kantian or critical realism.

It is in this vein that we can begin to discuss what I think is a substantive philosophical disparity between EE and TP. As a professional and highly awarded physicist, Newton is much more inclined to "let the physics do the thinking," as it were. In this way, he is very much a realist about scientific truth, since he writes as if we can read reality from the very face of science. His form of realism is, however, burdened by serious complications, which I shall discuss presently. Huggett, by contrast, is a professional philosopher with training in physics, and so he is much better at situating various physical questions in their broader philosophical context. Even so, Huggett strikes me as even more of a realist than Newton, and this, precisely in inverse proportion to their respective rejection of, or kinship with, Kantian idealism. Huggett locks horns with Kant on a few occasions to refute him in EE. As far as I can tell, Newton only refers to Kant once in TP, and dismissively, but certain statements he makes show how he is unwittingly a disciple of Kant, a connection which I shall also have to discuss later.

In any case, to focus on TP, Newton writes in his preface that he wants "to demystify quantum mechanics as much as possible." This is a key admission, since TP is very much a philosophically deflationary book. Time and again in TP, to philosophers of quantum reality, and physicists who would like to imagine they are philosophers of their trade, Newton effectively say, "Simmer down." Quantum theory (QT) tends to make people say and propose wacky theories, a tendency which Newton does not entirely gainsay, nor repudiate, but one that he insists can and should be toned down with a more reasonable interpretation of basic physics. His key tactic for demystifying QT, in express disagreement with Feynman and Heisenberg, is to shift focus from the particle as the most fundamental reality to the field as being most fundamental. It is only because people instinctively treat QT as a particle-based theory that QT seems to bizarre. An extension of this tactic is to undermine the crazy-making focus on indeterminacy in (Copenhagen-interpretation) QT, and treat quantum indeterminacy as just one mode of the larger, rather pedestrian issue of probabilistic physics altogether. Hearing that QT is indeterministic, Newton basically shrugs, and points out that so is, for example, classical thermodynamics. Get over it. Simmer down.

Now I want to begin discussing what I think are crucial defects in Newton's philosophical handling of his own beloved subject. I will have to bracket a discussion of Huggett for now, not only because this post is getting largish, but also because his book requires more codgitating (and a re-reading) on my part. In fact, since I need to go to class soon, I will leave this post as an introduction to the more detailed critiques to come.

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

…problem.

This an argument I think I devised while teaching this morning. I say I think I devised it, since it is still so tentative that I need to present what the strands to see if it is even an argument, or rather just an observation, sprung, like so much, from my endless ignorance.

So.

I was thinking about the halting problem (HP) (I'll save you the click):

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

(Here is a delightful proof of the halting problem, for those of you seeking reading materials for your children.)

Now, here was my wondering:

Assuming that "the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer"––a thesis which I do not accept (cf. e.g. Schulman, Searle, Tallis, Dreyfus, Ross, Bougis, et al.)––, but for argument's sake, say that the thesis of the computational mind (TCM) is true.

If TCM is true, then there is nothing in the brain itself qua algorithmic engine, to halt its own computations. A stop would only come from outside influences, say, if all sensory input were blocked, or if so many portions of the brain were mangled that the brain simply shut down.

Which brings us to a second prong of the inquiry: the modularity of the mind (MoM).

I think that TCM nearly goes hand in hand with MoM these days, since it is a lemma of TCM that the "programmer" of the mind is blind natural selection, and therefore there is no "central programmer" for making a unified mind. This lemma is extended in research programs about the modality of the mind. What biological sub-systems still exist in the human nervous system and comprise the modular mind? Apart from the different lobes of the brain (visual, somatic, motor, etc.), there are also cognitive modules that are all vestiges of earlier cognizant organisms, and just happen to be confined in one space––the human cranium––by natural selection. The mind is a "kludge", as some would put it. The mind is actually just a quilt of neural-cognitive modules which have tended to increase reproductive success in humanoid populations over time.

Fine. We'll take TCM and MoM as true for the purpose of argument. What follows?

If the mind is the brain and the mind is a computer, then the mind:brain is subject to HP.

If the modules of the human brain:mind are themselves kids-of-minds by virtue of being algorithmic engines, differing from "the human brain" on in degree, then human neural-cognitive modules (hNCM) are subject to HP. This is modus ponens.

If, however, the brain, either as an agglomerate of hNCM or as any one hNCM, is subject to HP, it (or they) should never halt in any algorithmic state. hNCM do/does not, however, endlessly "fail to halt", therefore…. This modus tollens, but I must elaborate on some conditional conclusions.

Since human cognition does not endlessly fail-to-halt––otherwise, how do we perform any action?––, but our behavior is governed by hNCM, then something peculiar is happening in our mind:brain. Enter my hypothesis.

Even if we grant humans are governed wholly by hNCM, we can see why humans have free will. If each hNCM is its own little non-halting Turing machine (á la TCM), then none of them should ever halt in a concrete decision. Halting is a function of decidability, but purely algorithmic halting is undecidable. So, how does/do our hNCM ever halt? From MoM, we must treat each hNCM as an external environment to every other hNCM. It is because our hNCM mutually interact that they can halt in ways that produce our unified-modular behavior.

The upshot is that there is a radical indeterminacy in the total hNCM nexus known as our consciousness, yet one that does not generate simple randomness––and this is the basic meaning of free will: non-random indeterminacy. The competing pre-halting computations of our hNCM lead to a dynamic series of non-random but non-deterministic actions aka our selves. Interestingly, even research into the irrational biases of hNCM itself relies on a standard of rationality that surpasses those very biases: we are not determined by our modular biases, although our modular mind is wholly physically deterministic. Even the mind:brains of cognitive scientists defending TCM indicate the non-random, non-deterministic nature of human consciousness.

This is akin to Robert Kane's account of free will, in that at any moment of conscious decision (note that MoM-TCM accounts for unconscious decision processes), we are literally an indeterminate, yet wholly physical, complex of unhalted, unweighted decision variables. Once the mutual interference among hNCM generates a halting state which propagates non-centrally but uniformly through the mind:brain, we act freely. We act because hNCM halt; we act freely because there is nothing deterministic about hNCM qua computational algorithm engines. The understanding of chance qua the overlapping of otherwise disparate causal chains goes back to Aristotle, and it is that sense of indeterminate causality which I invoke here. We are free because––assuming TCM-MoM––there is an intrinsically indeterminate congeries of hNCM which could not function unless they mutually limited each other. A jumble of indeterminate rational engines produces a stream of rational action.

So, I propose that free will is intelligible even on a materialist account of the brain, and certainly intelligible on a non-materialist account of human existence. Regardless which ontology of persons is true, the doctrine of rational, human free will is true.

Various and sundry…

Strive to learn at least one new prëmbil every day.

+ + +

Everyone is happy until they are not. Therefore, no one is happy. No one can be made unhappy if they are already truly unhappy. Therefore, everyone is happy.

+ + +

Telling yourself over and over again that "telling yourself something over and over again makes it true" doesn't make it true. Or so I am told.

+ + +

If time increases (or "slows") at higher speeds, and time increases in speed (or "flies"), when you're having fun, then having-fun is a slower activity, and therefore closer to the immobility of the divine.

+ + +

‎"The gravity at the CERN site where the neutrinos left, for example, is actually slightly greater than the gravity at the OPERA detector site. As a consequence, time would appear to move more slowly at CERN from the vantage point of the OPERA detector. Failing to take this into account, Contaldi contends, means that '[t]he resulting measurement that the neutrino velocity differs from c is not only unsurprising but should be expected in their setup.'"

–– cf. Gravity May Have Thrown Off Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Calculations - Forbes

“'From the perspective of the clock [on the GPS satellite], the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter….' Which is to say: it is shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. [It seems] the OPERA team failed to take this into account––indeed, that they thought of the clocks as on the ground, not in orbit. Van Elburg argues once you take the changing distances between the GPS clocks and the neutrino detectors into account, it cancels out the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to exceed the speed of light."

–– cf. Netherland Scientist Claims Solution to the FTL Neutrino Problem - Forbes

+ + +

Hilarous cuz it's verdicial. 

+ + +

Class, make sense of this prop. 

+ + + 

"Sean Connery's best line ever." 

+ + +

"Haters gonna hate." 

"Never give up." 

Pick your caption. 

STR notes for future reference...

I've read x about STR but not only still feel like I've read x minus x about it... and I also find it harder to grasp than GTR, which is odd, since the former is but a subset of the latter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/sr.shtml

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/relativity.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/RelativityOfSimultaneity/

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/specrel/lc.cfm

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_time_dilation.htm

http://www.relativity.li/en/resources/relativitytheory/

http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9909040

How the future shapes the past…

1. Retrodictively

2. Counterfactually (Retrodictively*)

3. Spatiotemporally

4. Ethically

In more detail…

1. Cf. Aristotle and Diodorus on the master argument.

What happens tomorrow makes true or false what you say today.

2. Cf. Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen, Hempel's theories, Musser's Scientific American article on free will, etc.

I think Musser's invocation of the block universe to explain retroaction is probably fallacious. I'd have to re-read the article, but the problem basically is this: the whole point of the (Minkowskian) block universe is that time is static, and therefore it's illicit to say action a at time t', after time ti, alters the conditions for action C(A) at time t. In a block universe, nothing changes.

Even so, it is not all that startling a claim that we can alter prior conditions. It is a possible property of our universe at time t-alpha (the putative origin of spacetime as we know it) that from the initial conditions Ci, there will occur X number of sandwich-eatings. It is also a possible property of the universe at time t-alpha that it will contain X' number of sandwich-eating events. If tomorrow I eat a sandwich, and then at some time t-omega the universe ends and the sandwich-eatings are tallied, I'll have brought the number to X. If, however, I don't eat a sandwich, the number will end up as X'. So whatever I do , I will decide a property of the universe at time-alpha, even though I am vastly far removed from it in spacetime.

His point about the impossibility of copying oneself, due to quantum indeterminacy, was, however, extremely apt. Down with Moravec! Down with Kurzweil! The singularity will not be televised!

Further, in any case, there is this worry: if a natural law's "authority" is based on its holding good at all times (i.e. ∃x∀t(Lx(t))), then a law can only said to be lawful if it holds at all times including all future times. Therefore, a law's putative lawfulness depends now on its holding-good at any and all future times. So a law's present status depends on future conditions.

In addition, Huggett discusses how a (hypothetical) future state of affairs (SoA), accessible by a time machine, would render certain SoA in the present impossible. E.g., my going into the time portal now at time t would be rendered impossible by my future self's persuading my past self not to enter the time portal at time t–x. Likewise, my entering the time portal in a red T-shirt at t would be rendered impossible by my future self deciding and succeeding to prevent my past-self-in-a-red-T-shirt from entering the time portal at t–1.

3. Some of what makes STR true is the general theory of relativity (GTR), but what makes GTR true is the total state of the cosmos at any formulation or enunciation of GTR. Thus, the truth of GTR depends on factors in the universe to which STR says no one can have access. In other words, we know GTR is true because it extends to the STR-relative states of the universe anywhere, but knowing GTR is true in that way transcends the limits STR says we cannot transcend. To be more precise, GTR's truth-being-made depends on factors operant in the cosmos even at times beyond which we could possibly observe. On earth we never see the sun immediately (without telescopes, etc.), but are always seeing it as it was about eight minutes earlier. This means the sun's current SoA is in the future relative to us. The same holds for cosmic factors even farther removed than the sun. GTR is true in the present based on the operant actuality of future phenomena.

4. What I do now can easily be modulated or negated by its impact on the future. Being green, for example, has (perhaps) everything to do with being ethically responsible towards our progeny (i.e. towards the future as an ethical condition on the present).

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

If whatever (B) happens actually only happens at times (t(n-1) + t(n-2) + … t (n-k)), then nothing happens at time t (i.e. ~∃x(Bx(t)). If no-thing happens at time t (i.e. ~∀x(Bx(t))), then nothing ever happens. If it is granted that "what happens at t" is B itself, then perdurantism is false. Otherwise, if there is no B, then there is no sense in speaking of parts of B.

The canonical example for (but really just "in") perdurantism qua entailment of the theory of special relativity (TSR), is a train collision, or mutatis mutandis a train passing a station. The point is supposed to be that there is no unique time in which "the train T passes the station S", rather that there are only time slices which correspond to relative observations. If so, then those observation-slices are themselves divisible into "smaller" slices, and don't exist in their own right. If it is granted that observation is instantaneous, then we're getting all Thomistic.

What is a "unique" time? There is no "singly valid" (unique) observational standpoint on perdurantism, so, by extension, there is no singly valid (unique) event. That is fallacious, however. Chalk it up to my abiding worries about woebegone simultaneity and truth-makers as a metaphysical family secret. Plus my profound dissatisfaction with perdurantist (ethical, logical, etc.) entailments.

∃ is {& exist;}
∀ is {& forall;}
↔ is {& harr;}
≡ is {& equiv;}
∴ is {& there4;}
□ is {& #9633;}
◊ is shift+alt/option v (auf 'ner deutschen Tastatur) or ◊ {& loz;}
∩ {& #x2229;} (Where members of set X are members of A both and B.)
U is… U (Where members of set X are members of either A or B.)

Naturalism as philosophy?

Naturalism fundamentally amounts to the claim that there is no "philosophical" or "metaphysical" theory or data which may, or even need, be added onto our knowledge of the world apart from "the scientific picture" of it.

Since, however, science itself can only get off the ground in virtue of antecedent philosophical commitments, there are ineluctable data which metaphysics brings to our picture of the world, no matter how empirically scientific it may be.

Therefore, naturalism is fundamentally false.

The necessity of ideals...

... and the relentless erosion of idols.

Prayers failed. --> God doesn't exist and religion is bunk.

Justice failed. --> Truth doesn't exist and virtue is bunk.

The experiments failed. --> Nature doesn't exist and science is bunk.

Depending on one's biases, none of the negative aspects of the above dimension of human life will seriously undercut the overarching value and reality of their subjects. Every experiment, to paraphrase T. F. Torrance, is like a prayer to nature, in order to seek if our intentions and actions (hypotheses and experiments) accord with the will of nature. Every legal effort is, or should be, in the pursuit of justice, and even when justice is abused, we must fight that much harder to (literally) rectify things. The power of religion lies in its efforts to bring the inner and out worlds, so to speak, into alignment with the highest reality. The myriad failures in such an endeavor are the fuel for an even greater fire, to be caged only by humility and hope. "[T]he historical development of a science is seldom rational" (J. P. Burgess, _Philosophical Logic_, p. 47). Likewise, the historical development of a religion is seldom spiritual.

Spectacles on a spectacle…

Ah, the spectacle of Darwinists on the one hand undermining various human conventions on the grounds that said conventions exist merely because they promote health and longevity, yet on the other hand defending The Theory on the grounds that it's true even beyond its survival benefits.

+ + +

Nature is, allegedly, a human construct, but naturalism holds that humans are natural creations.

Ease as mark of truth…

"I decided to be a determinist because it's just easier. I can stop analyzing "why" I did this or that and simply accept the fact that my willing at any moment is the confluence of countless prior influences, conscious and unconscious. In a clip of Christopher Hitchens discussing global warming, notice how the phrasing of the question––"missing the boat"––leads to him using the word "boat" in his reply (or should I say leads him to using the word?). If challenged about his lack of rhetorical ingenuity, Hitchens would probably just shrug and say, "Well, there's determinism for you." Determinism, therefore, is true because it allows us to mesh most naturally with our environment."

Class, discuss.

I will suggest the following, though: the above comments make what I think is the deepest ontological error in determinism, namely, the claim that there is some puny, passive subject, which is constantly influenced by its environment, yet which does not add anything to that environment. The "self" in determinism is like the beam of light reflected in a mirror: a reality which allegedly only exists at its entry and exit points in the visible spectrum.

Also, while there is some truth (!) in the pragmatic thesis that "the true is the workable", since goodness is an analogue of being and both are unified in truth (and vice versa in all three directions), the very difficulty of "working out" certain interrelated claims is a sign of their truth (quantum mechanics, trinitarian theology, the "place" of the will [as if it were a spatiotemporal entity to begin with!], etc.). Further, the harmony, the functional resonance, which we experience in grasping the true does not mean the true is the useful; for some things are known to be true by their beauty, a beauty which of itself preempts pragmatic lechery. What is "it" good for? Shut up, philistine, and accept that its pragmatic vacuity is precisely the sign of its alethic dignity. A remaining snag is how to meet the utilitarian claim that even the "purely beautiful" is 'useful' in the utilitarian sense. Then again, that seems to be so much a concession to the classical view of beauty qua truth qua goodness as to be more a surrender than a challenge to metaphysics.

P.S. A clue that pragmatic success does not amount to truth: doping in the 1980 Olmypics.

A Freudian proto-argument against abortion…

"A fetus lacks sufficient neural abilities to function, and therefore to 'count', as a human person. More to the point, a fetus is basically unconscious, so it doesn't suffer conscious pains if it is aborted. Therefore, fetal abortion is not immoral or cruel."

Reply:

According to Freudian theory, a human functions in three psychic dimensions: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the dominant, fundamental dimension, comprising the most basic somatic drives. The ego is just the "tip of the iceberg" in human behavior. The real engine is below consciousness. Human nature subsists in its unconscious functions. Delving into a person's subconscious is delving into the person's real character. Conscious behavior is by and large a lattice of pseudo-drives and confabulation constructed to protect one's id or even to protect one's own ego from one's own id.

In so far as a fetus is an unconscious humanoid, it is an archetypal Freudian agent. It displays all the somatic drives that an ego will eventually gild: homeostasis, nutrition, expansion, crude stimulus response, etc. Just because the fetus does not (presumably) consciously feel pain during an abortion does not mean the abortion is not being performed against a human subject. Indeed, just because a psychiatric patient is not consciously aware of his innermost drives does not mean those drives are not human drives.

Therefore, a fetus is a true human person and abortion is cruelty against an unwitting subject.

Hooray for Einstein!

New "epic" test adds to confirmation of the theory of general relativity.

May 4, 2011: Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. … An expert in Einstein's theories, [Clifford] Will chairs an independent panel of the National Research Council set up by NASA in 1998 to monitor and review the results of Gravity Probe B. "One day," he predicts, "this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics."

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple. … Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space in 2004 to check. …

Put a spinning gyroscope into orbit around the Earth, with the spin axis pointed toward some distant star as a fixed reference point. Free from external forces, the gyroscope's axis should continue pointing at the star--forever. But if space is twisted, the direction of the gyroscope's axis should drift over time. By noting this change in direction relative to the star, the twists of space-time could be measured.

The four gyroscopes in GP-B are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren't so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.…

"We measured a geodetic precession of 6.600 plus or minus 0.017 arcseconds and a frame dragging effect of 0.039 plus or minus 0.007 arcseconds," says Everitt.

For readers who are not experts in relativity: Geodetic precession is the amount of wobble caused by the static mass of the Earth (the dimple in spacetime) and the frame dragging effect is the amount of wobble caused by the spin of the Earth (the twist in spacetime). Both values are in precise accord with Einstein's predictions.

"In the opinion of the committee that I chair, this effort was truly heroic. We were just blown away," says Will. …

"Because it was based at a university many students were able to work on the project," says Everitt. "More than 86 PhD theses at Stanford plus 14 more at other Universities were granted to students working on GP-B. Several hundred undergraduates and 55 high-school students also participated, including astronaut Sally Ride and eventual Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell."

NASA funding for Gravity Probe B began in the fall of 1963. That means Everitt and some colleagues have been planning, promoting, building, operating, and analyzing data from the experiment for more than 47 years—truly, an epic effort. …

Updates!

Important news via The Duhem Society blog about some of Fr. Jaki's posthumous works and the statutes of a new Society. Ad multos annos!