Thursday 13 March 2008 @9:31
On most days, I am an extreme rationalist and philosophical materialist, but I have one major weakness. Any ‘delusion’ that inspired (for example) J.S. Bach to compose the Mass in B minor is definitely worth maintaining.
I recognize the fallacy. In Bach’s culture, credo in unum deum was the only game in town. Apologists may claim that without it, the Bachs could have been a family of bakers. And perhaps their panem diem would have been divine too, but centuries later we could not partake.
At counterpoint is the old sentiment that an ordinary person must be thoroughly trained to excel, but we’d have to train a prodigy not to. Who is to say what Bach could have composed if he grasped our deep and ancient connection to all life on earth, or perceived the majesty of the cosmos as we understand it today?
Still, what a tragedy it would be not to have the Mass in B minor.
Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.
Dona nobis pacem.
Friday 7 September 2007 @10:00
One (ca. 1988): As a teenager, I believed in ghosts. I was a big fan of the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series. Ouija, witchcraft, psychic phenomena — these were themes of my adolescence. One morning following a sleepover, a friend’s father ridiculed us pretty harshly for believing such nonsense. Then later that day he attended mass and professed belief in virgin birth, miraculous resurrection, and divine retribution. Even then, I recognized this as deep hypocrisy.
It’s not that belief in one impossible thing necessitates belief in six more (before breakfast). But when you’ve abandoned objective tests for truth, the distinction between cherished belief and childish myth is arbitrary and personal. So there’s not much point in ridiculing someone whose classifications differ from yours.
Two (ca. 1991): As I went off to college, I read more widely and experienced a wider world. I quickly grew to dislike fantasy novels and started reading popular science, by the likes of Weinberg, Hawking, Sagan, and Dawkins. I gained an appreciation of “god as nature,” a concept that I learned went back to Spinoza (ca. 1670), and was endorsed by Einstein. This is not in any sense a ‘personal’ god; it does not intervene in the world, and does not even receive prayers. In other words, it’s a god even a budding rationalist can believe in.
So for many years, I was happy with Spinoza’s god but agnostic about a personal god. I didn’t really accept the label ‘atheist’ because I thought it implied a certain arrogance: we don’t know everything about the universe, so how can we rule out god?
Three (ca. 1996–7): Gradually I realized that if you define ‘god’ however you want, then claiming belief in it is meaningless. When most people speak of God, they refer to a supernatural creature of some sort that hears prayers and intervenes in the world. If you think this is a falsehood, you’re an atheist. Spinoza’s god is just a philosophical construct; conceiving of god as a set of physical laws and constants does not constitute theism.
Four (ca. 2003) A health issue landed me in the hospital for 3 nights. While not exactly a brush with death, being the youngest patient in the cardiac ward did provide an opportunity to ponder my own mortality. I seriously considered whether I was on the right track, or whether I should maybe loosen up on the rationalism. But I got through it with the help of amazing (but non-miraculous) science and technology. Later I found some thinkers who provide ‘spiritual’ healing and inspiration without the hocus-pocus. Carl Sagan wrote the following as he was dying from cancer. It brings a tear every time:
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
Five (ca. 2006–7) A greater awareness of atheism as a political stance has arisen. Partly inspired by excesses of the Bush administration, I joined the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Inspired too by recent books of Dawkins and Dennett, I joined the Council for Secular Humanism and subscribed to Free Inquiry and the Skeptical Inquirer. I regularly listen to the podcasts Point of Inquiry and Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. If moment #3 was about self-acceptance, then this one is my coming out.
Thursday 28 September 2006 @10:33
In AI yesterday, I began describing genetic algorithms, a.k.a. evolutionary programming. I thought it important to get the essence of Darwinian evolution on the record too: descent with modification plus selective survival. I find that even among people who are generally supportive of evolution, and science in general, there is a lot of misunderstanding about how it works.
By watching the reactions on my students’ faces, I began to realize how brutal the whole thing sounds. Evolution has an enormous death toll. Lots of critters must die in order for the average fitness of the population to increase. This carnage, resulting from competition for scarce resources, is not optional; it’s essential.
It sounds all the more sinister when I mention that we will impersonate gods by applying our own selection criteria to the population. This isn’t natural selection, it’s artificial. You get to live and reproduce because you came closer to solving my problem than your peers did. In contrast, natural selection seems like a harmless truism: those who are good at surviving and reproducing are more likely to survive and reproduce.
Again, I tried to make the lecture more interactive with props. And nothing represents the concept of chance better than dice. Ideally, for an in-class demonstration, I’d like to leave nothing to chance. But in this case, I gave the dice to my students, put the success of my demo in the hands of Fortuna, and thus demonstrated my own ‘faith’ in the evolutionary process.
We ran through a simulation on the board, where I wrote 6 random 6-bit strings, and computed their fitness as solutions to a 0-1 knapsack problem with 6 elements. As my students passed and rolled the dice, we went through tournament selections, cross-overs, mutations, etc. The average fitness score of our offspring were clearly increasing compared to their parents. And I thanked Fortuna when, on the final roll of the die, a mutation flipped precisely the right bit to produce the optimal solution to the problem. (If that didn’t happen, I’d either have to go on to a 3rd generation, or be content with demonstrating just an increased average and max fitness.)
Thursday 15 June 2006 @19:19
Nothing that new or amazing, but fun all the same: the church sign generator. Found via god hates shrimp.
Wednesday 31 May 2006 @15:24
To me, one of the great things about the explosion of writing on the Internet is that we don’t need to formulate our own opinions on anything anymore. No matter what opinion you’d produce, on any topic, most likely someone out there has already expressed it; all you need do is adopt it.
This leads to a kind of shopping experience: whenever you encounter a new topic of debate, rather than carefully considering the facts and drawing your own conclusions, just Google for others’ opinions and decide who you agree with. Easy peasy!
Take all of the above as facetious, if you prefer. I’m not yet certain how serious I am. (Which reminds me of The Simpsons: in Homerpalooza, one teenager says to another, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don’t even know anymore.”)
We may think it would be a better world if everyone’s opinions were independently researched and thoroughly considered, but that is unrealistic. And shopping around for opinions from diverse sources is perhaps far better than getting all your opinions from one source, whether it be your church, parents, political party, or home-town newspaper.
Example: I’m basically pro-choice, but mostly because people I trust tend to have that point of view. Personally, I have a hard time caring about the issue much either way. I will never get pregnant because I don’t have the right apparatus. And I will never get anyone pregnant because, well, I’m a Kinsey 6 and in sexual terms, women are about as appealing as Jabba the Hutt. Pretty effective contraceptive, that.
If anything, maybe parents ought to be permitted to extinguish their children until they’re 3 or 4 years old. Ah, but I jest. (I think.) And anyway, many folks who do slaughter their kids appear to be the same brand of fundamentalists who get all huffy over abortion.
This all started with me browsing magazines on amazon.com, and wondering if I am missing anything by relying solely on the Internet and not subscribing to opinions in print. It might be nice to receive some glossy monthly tome packed with various atheist-progressive-rationalist-libertarian-humanist-determinist points of view.
There are a few candidates, but it’s hard to tell which I would like best: Reason, Free Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic, American Atheist, Mother Jones, Liberty, American Prospect, etc. I should try to skim some of these next time I’m at the book store.
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