Cobb

Faith vs Reason: Will Atheists Eat a Christian Meal?

 

Q: Despite being a sinner, could a Christian still be honest and objective enough to examine the moral attitudes of atheist progressives and leftists, and form conclusions accordingly?

A: It’s almost impossible.

Look up my questions to atheists. You’ll find that I get opprobrium because ‘small a’ atheists tend to suggest that there is nothing more to their atheism than a denial of God and that for someone who practices faith essentially has insufficient moral standing to investigate their morality. This implies, basically, the Hitchens argument which is as follows. The presumption that the faithful can be forgiven their sins (by a non-existent entity) undermines every moral system the faithful can have. Because assertion of a falsehood as true implies anything is true. So anything clerics dream up as ‘the will of God’ can be justified regardless of its inherent good or evil.

The Hitchens argument is reasonable and absolutely nails hypocrites. But it doesn’t address the moral or psychological origins of the disciplines of faith. There are a lot of other implications here as well that it’s difficult to get atheists to discuss, but we can in the comments.

Progressives and Leftists. Well let’s start with Leftists.

‘The Left’ is essentially the Marxists or the Frankfort School devotees. I think they are overly materialist and tend to be authoritarian. Even ‘authoritarian’ in the way that German intellectuals can be, which is in that way of mastering a technical scrum and expecting that the less capable will fall in line. There is a certain lack of libertarian sentiment in that line of thinking as I see it. That is the difference between a Leftist and a ‘classic liberal’. So I tend to think of such people as incompatible with religious freedom in that they are not likely to accept more than one moral master, nor would they borrow or share. Again, this is a kind of totalizing sentiment.

Of course Enlightenment liberalism (and natural philosophy) are under a broadside attack from the Progressives. I see them as unilaterally shallow and completely dismissive of any idea that true freedom has ever existed prior to the years of their births. This would be ok if they had a decent track record of institutional reform. But I perceive that Progressives are more likely to be ahistorical in their attacks against Christianity and more than a little susceptible to anti-Semitic tropes.

What I would like to discuss with atheists is the usefulness of art which is wholly created out of someone’s mind as a symbol of moral teaching. Consider the moral universe of Star Trek. Can any science fiction be morally instructive even if it asserts the falsehood of faster than light travel? Can any fiction be morally instructive if its characters never existed in actual history? Doesn’t that make authors of fiction atheist prophets? I think some atheists fail to distinguish between facts and truth in that the search for truth doesn’t begin and end with findings of fact. To do so is to be shallow, moreover it is an admission to the trust of human instinct in all decisions that are unproveable. What is that other than faith? I try to draw the equivalence between cosmology and/or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the search for God. I set these equivalent. The will of God = the laws of nature = the inherent structure of the universe.

Given that equivalence there is no core principle of the existence or non-existence of ‘god’ that is relevant. What is relevant is the ethical and moral discipline of the schools and adherents. And I think a careful study of history will show the syncretism between Christian ethics and natural philosophy in the development of the West. To me, a proper vision into this shows no conflict between faith and reason. Just as there are fallacies of logic, there are heresies of faith. The existence of these don’t negate the ability of these systems to reveal truth.

I am interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m getting a clearer picture of what we don’t know about the ways in which we think. And I am convinced that a refreshing study of the history of philosophy and the history of religion can clear things up as we advance our understanding of what thinking actually is, what believing actually is, what conviction actually is. This being the core idea in pressing back the unknown, I tend to be dismissive of Progressives and Leftists who seem to have no positive use for any history before the 20th century or respect for the development of the humanism they claim.

I have been instructed in many forms of Christianity and I respect the historical idea of Christendom as well as the aims of Catholicism which means ‘universalism’ as well as the general idea of monotheism over polytheism. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Catholic church is not fundamentally evangelical, and the same holds true for Judaism. I am a student of the Tao, and I have essentially made peace with the universally understood mystery “Thou art that.” My contention is simple. Moral truth is like an excellent complex meal. It takes much skill to prepare it and generosity to serve it, but everyone will enjoy it and be nourished by it. We have all evolved in the same way, if we are not defective, it’s impossible for us not to.

I say it's almost impossible. What I really ask is will atheists eat a Christian meal?

The Axis of Magic

There is something which unites magic and applied science [=technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique. --C. S. Lewis

This week I happened on a conversation by @swardley, one of my favorite tweeters. He was describing magic in the realm of corporate desire. The thread is here: 

X : Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Me : Magic eats culture for lunch
X : What?
Me : I asked 20 tech executives - “Do you think your workplace is magical compared to others” and 40% said yes. Magic is real.
X : This is bullshit
Me : You started it with culture.

— Simon Wardley #EEA (@swardley) August 27, 2019

And the idea of magic occurs to me in two contexts. The first is the series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer. My review of the first book is here.

What a fun book, and what an exceptionally diabolical villain. Scott Meyer's protag is an ordinary bumbling, self-deprecated cornball of a 'Greatest American Hero'. All good intentions and smarmy sentimentality of a Millenial Charlie Brown, Martin Banks can't figure out a purpose for his life and becomes a marvelous fish out of water in the series. And having read the audiobook, one of the greatest voice actors in the business does a pitch perfect mentor in Phillip, the wise and conscientious mentor to Martin the Magnificent. But the true genius of this book is found in the character of Jimmy, social engineer par excellence. I cannot think of a villain who exemplifies so much of what is wrong in this world than this ruthless manipulator. He is the kind of glib evil that permeates so much of American society that recognizing the lengths he goes to is a revelation. 

The book is an excellent meditation on ethics and power, wrapped up in fantasy and fun, a brilliant and entertaining combination. Trekkies will immediately recognize the centrality of the Prime Directive in this work. 

But Lewis' is deeper. I remembered what he said about the expertise of technologists. He said that they cannot explain what it is they do, because they're all wrapped up in technique and their specialization has a necessary measure of opacity and obfuscation. I think I'm feeling this right now in my profession, and mustn't we all eventually? I mean if we really become proficient, we learn the underside of our business. Lewis said however, any child can understand magic. If you want to explain why all rockets don't explode on the launch pad, someone who understands all of the 735 components of the the rocket assembly couldn't explain it in a year. But if you say "it's magic", everybody gets it.

There's another tangent to this which is the explanation of the infinitely contingent nature of human decision making. Jordan Peterson made a remarkable impression on me in describing how humans handle tools. A car, for example, is just a tool to get you from point A to point B. It's only when the damned thing breaks that you bother to look under the hood. You will spend as little effort in using this tool as possible so you can accomplish your goals. When the tool begins to fail you, it becomes a problem and so you get into its innards, yet only up to a point. You then decide that all of its complexities are a waste of your time & money and you discard the entire thing. It is no longer relevant to your purposes. You find an alternative tool.  In that respect, it doesn't matter if your car runs on electricity, squirrel farts or vampire blood. It's technology you're never going to learn unless that is your purpose.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes in clarification of Lewis:

Science and religion both aim at conforming the mind to objective truth, objective reality (science conforms our mind to the nature of the universe, and religion conforms our mind to the mind of God and our will to the will of God).

Magic and technology, on the other hand, try to conform objective reality to the human will. That is why they both arose at the same time—not the Middle Ages but the Renaissance, not the Age of God but the Age of Man. Both are Faustian, Promethean. The difference is, of course, that technology works while magic doesn’t (usually). But their end, their goal, the purpose behind them, the human values and desires and state of soul that set them in motion, are the same.

What I need to think about is - oh never mind I just figured it out. Wow!

The abuse of religion always is involved in the establishment of the illusion of supernatural magic. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of approaching God, the sacred divine by objectifying God as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. The abuse of science always is involved in the established of the illusion of supernatural technology. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of practicing the scientific method by objectifying Science as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. 

Ecosystem Engineering

So if you can CRISPR an infertile mosquito and half of the worlds mosquitoes literally screw themselves into extinction you will have eliminated a lot of malaria. You will also have eliminated a lot of bird food. How many humans will live? How many birds will die? If you knew the answer to that question and network searched all of the ecospherically related questions, you might end up with something that ends up counting all sorts of animals of particular interest. The trick of course is to simulate an entire ecosystem, and having done so with a complex enough model, reduce the number of unintended consequences, or at least recognize some of them in realtime for the next iteration of the model.

The biggest problem with this will be scaling moments. What happens with the death of 20 billion mosquitoes may be a completely different phenomenon than what happens with the death of a mere 2 million. This is a field of endeavor that I imagine. Look how primitive putting a wristband on the leg of a condor is compared to this.

I cannot see that the ethics of this are any more significant than the ethics of farming. Farming is certainly exactly that same thing - ecosystem engineering, in which the DNA and destiny of any number of organic species is manipulated and subordinated in a controlled manner to yield benefits specifically for the dietary requirements of humans. You control the territory. Map off a piece of the earth and subject it to human science, technology and other fiddling.

I recall some research done a long time about about wolf populations somewhere in the colder bits of Canada. At the time people could not believe that these arctic wolves could survive without eating livestock, and so farmers were shooting them. Only one researcher was brave enough to hang out at those latitudes away from supermarkets for months to study these wolves. As he came close to starving, he found himself regularly dining on roasted rats, and suddenly it became clear that large mammals could survive indefinitely on such a diet - which nobody believed before his documentation. Since then this has always been a part of my thinking and threw a great number of monster movies under the relentless logical bus in my mind. How can anything so huge survive to be strong enough to knock down buildings if all they are going to eat is a tiny human or two?

These are the matters of caloric thermodynamics to be considered. It takes energy, and these paths of energy are what should be measurable to enable such tracking of ecosystem dynamics. I don't know what shortcuts are taken in the supercomputing simulation of nuclear detonations, but there is a clue in there somewhere.

Global Warming Isn't Dangerous

This is essentially what I've been saying. Read Dave Burton's answer to Did 30,000 scientists declare that climate change is a hoax? on Quora One of my favorite excerpts.

Sea-level rise is supposedly the worst of the negative effects of anthropogenic global warming, but the measurements prove that’s nonsense. Here’s a particularly high-quality, 110-year measurement record at Honolulu, showing a very typical sea-level trend. Sea-level is rising about 1½ mm/year (6 inches per century), with no acceleration in nine decades or more:

The Case for AirPods

#1 They fit better than any other earplug, because they're not plugs. They don't stopper your ears, so they have the best of both worlds - audio transparency to the air, and good bass like an earplug.

 

#2 Stereo mic. They work better than the line-based mic in the old wired Apple headset. It's as good a mic as any for everyday non-professional use.

 

#3 As a wireless device, they last all day easily.

 

#4 Actual, very good sound quality. I miss nothing from any headphones I would take outside. So I don't count my Grados.

 

#5 At first I felt stupid wearing airpods in public, now I feel stupid wearing 'DJ' headphones in public. On a plane, maybe less so. But I expect noise cancelling airpods are coming.

 

#6 The wireless convenience is real. Popping back and forth with the bluetooth pairing is simple and painless. They are light - perfect for running, hiking, etc. They are so comfortable you can wear them for hours without a problem.

 

#7 They are actually easier to keep track of. You never forget the case is in your pants because it's expensive. But it's something you don't take for granted, you tend to treat it like an expensive watch. I would easily ruin 3 pairs a year of the old style.

 

#8 The big plus comes if and when you get the Apple Watch. The coolness of being able to leave your phone at home cannot be overstated. There are a lot of things that just make more sense with the watch and headphones.

 

On this point and #5 I can see that me being in the IT industry and being a gearhead make me more flexible. But I also do pay more attention to human factors than the ordinary Joe. I kind of hate that the Apple Watch has made me, practically, less of a watch guy. My other 12 are sitting jealous. And I still feel that it's a little less cool than goiing two fisted like i used to with my Fitbit. But for the health monitoring, the Apple Watch is such a huge advantage that it's worth it. So I have really transformed my subtleties in going out in public with my electronics.

 

The interesting thing is that I treat my phone as a bit more precious. And now I see that some apps, like weather and health monitoring and music are just more appropriately done on the wrist. I'm liking messaging on the wrist too, which demonstrates to me that it's rather overdone elsewhere.

 

I really hope Signal makes a watch app.

Global Warming: So What?

To all my atheist, scientific friends who can't stomach the 'denial' of global warming. Speaking for myself and the friends of mine who consider themselves conservative, our primary dissent is based on economic reality. To wit, you cannot force the Second World to not want cars and plastics and all those industrial processes that generate greenhouse gasses. Folks like me say that there will not be a political solution to 'global climate change', there will be an economic response which finds your idealism naive and wishful.

Into that mix of realpolitik consider the following video, consider a little touch of Sartre, and ask yourself why anybody should really care to support your terrafoming fantasies. 

 

Now who's the religious fanatic?

Implications of the Boson

Apparently, we've all been living in the Higgs Field. This week it has been proven beyond the shadow of five sigmas. That's the kind of knowledge I prefer - I can take my time and absorb it, it's not going to shimmy away or change its stripes. 

And yet now the Higgs throws us the long anticipated curveball, extending the chart of subatomic particles rather as the periodic table kept marching on through our lifetimes.  The Higgs is now sticking out there making all of the previous standard model graphics out of date and breaking their symmetry. 

So now what? The Higgs boson (and what letter shall it get?) now shows why fermions have mass, but it is not the graviton. So that search will have to continue. We understand that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but.. if the universe is not moving does that make it have infinite mass? And why exactly does every field have a particle? Well, those are physics questions and they are interminable.  

There doesn't seem to be any immediate practical benefit from this new confirmation as far as I can see. The Higgs only acts, apparently, on these fermions and only at Plank lengths. And there has to be further study on exactly what this boson does when it decays. Making it show up has taken lots of energy, so now they're going to continue to explode atoms and see how the boson goes on. 

I'm even further intrigued by quantum confinement which is the theory that explains why three quarks that weigh only 8GeV when separated, weigh more than 50 times that when squeezed into a the tight space of a neutron. Quantum mechanics are frightfully non-intuitive.

What has all of this made you (re)consider? 

Eclipse

Infinite Universal Convergence

If the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory holds, then there are essentially infinite universes. In fact, there would a very huge sort of infinities of universes. If it's based upon the idea that every possibility of every quantum particle interaction instantiates itself in another universe, that's zillions created in every fraction of a second. It can only make sense that these universes overlap, otherwise I'm creating a universes outside of this universe, each a universe away just by typing. So if the universes overlap that means there is interference from every universe impinging on every other universe at once. 

Taking the example of the Moravec thought experiment. If it's a one in a million chance that you don't die from the electric chair, then in one universe you are alive but in a million others you are dead. (technically speaking 999,999 vs 1). So you're never really dead, you are mostly dead with the accumulated weight and energy of 999,999 universes keeping you dead. It is the momentum of the accumulated likely universes that keeps time flowing in one direction and preserves causality. And so it makes sense to say that the momentum of the zillions of likely universes converge reality into a single path objects in which can only escape that overwhelming force at the quantum level.

I think of it as what happens if the Washington Monument toppled over and fell flat on top of you. Well, it's a fact that there is a .50 bullethole in one face of it that was never repaired. When the monument falls, that part of you that fits in the bullethole is not dead, and was never touched.

Straight Dope on Fukushima

...given the lack of transparency, given the lack of implementation of the design changes, given some of the other shortcomings that we've heard of in terms of radiation suits and radiation badges, I don't think it's unreasonable to question if TEPCO should be allowed to continue to operate nuclear power plants. Now, I'm not yelling, I'm not screaming, but I don't think I can be any clearer in saying that I don't trust TEPCO, and I'm not sure anybody else should either based on what's happened during this accident. "
-- Cdr. Mark L. Mervine, Nuclear Engineer (USNR, Ret.)

Following up on my Radioactive Fish investigation, I've been trying to find some better, and now the best information I can find on regular updates from Fukushima. Something that's comprehensive, expert and not dumbed down. So far I have found Mark Mervine who has recorded 19 or 20 interviews that can be found on Vimeo. That's going to be my first source.

I found nothing good at INPO and the USNRC that satisfied me. I knew INPO because I put together a reporting system for them for a power company that operated nukes in CT back in the 90s. Anyway, here's the blog.

 

Spinoza's God & Evolutionary Convergence

 "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." -- Albert Einstein

There are two notable takeaways for me in reviewing this video by Steve Paulson. The first is the extent to which notable thinkers have used the term 'Spinoza's God'. The second is the alternative evolution.

I rather like the idea as expressed by one of the interviewees, that humanity is inevitable. I believe that the term that he used was evolutionary convergence. It gives me something to consider that both supports and refutes aspects of Vinge's & Kurzweil's Singularity. 

On the one hand, Iain Banks has already determined a very plausible evolution between human and thinking machinery. What we will continue to do is to enjoy what it is our bodies will want to do. That is to say that no matter what consciousness emerges from AIs, human beings will still be trapped in human bodies and most of what we do with our brains will have to do with the combined experience of our sensations and compute ability. Consciousness beyond the context of the human body is something that may give us a sense of contentment, and it may deliver for us the sort of focus needed so that we might compute something useful in our minds. But those things will always serve to deliver us human contentment which will always be in the same shape, as we are shaped by the physical bodies in which our brains are embedded. Along those lines, one of the more fascinating predictions of Culture are the additional glands that can be bio-engineered and put under control of the mind. If you could excrete into your own body at will substances that could alter your moods and emotions with precision, why would you waste any time calculating sums, or solving logic puzzles?

Humanity being inevitable, there is something inherently valuable in conscious intelligence. We may still yet be on the road to our own evolutionary destiny but it won't necessarily be the Singularity. Is the fact that we all wear clothing some sort of singularity between ourselves and cotton? Or are we in a singularity with our own microbes? The alternative evolution in all of the interviews was very earth focused, but it is the mind-body conscious intelligence that makes the difference - that is the profundity. But to play a hand in that evolution, as we build AIs like we build houses and other domains and augmentations puts us in control. It will not be until we are capable of transcending our senses that we evolve.

The highlight was the notion that humanity is the epitome because we incorporate that which is advanced in every other species. Respiration is an evolutionary component. The 'miracle' of design is in these components. Vision is an evolutionary component. Hearing, touch, digestion, echolocation. All of these remarkable biological subsystems are what evolution is about. Having redundancies in combination with a broad selection of these subsystems are what makes us dominant. We are accelerating evolution just by eating. We have more of the subsystems, more of the failsafes, that's why we win.

Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly

Iain Banks' latest Culture novel 'Surface Detail' is on the street and in my Kindle. I'm a few days and approximately 28% into the book and the stage is set for the drama to come. It has moved along rather nicely and gives us yet another view into Banks' galactic historical drama, and it is satisfying although a bit lighter than I recall his other books. Despite the fact that I have already visited one of his Hells, perhaps there are even murkier events to come.

The ambit of this venture into our galactic future involves the afterlives. Banks whose 'Notes on the Culture' I have just discovered has gone and done something rather bold. He has held up the idea of Hell as an option. What if your civilization was so advanced that it could preserve all of the thoughts of a human being into such an arrangement that you consciousness could be maintained essentially permanently? To put it crudely, put your mind into the Matrix and keep your self alive without the goofy provision that if you die in the Matrix that you are actually dead. Would your civilization choose for there to be Hell as well as Heaven? Is there actually a good reason for Hell? What could anyone possibly do in life to deserve eternal punishment & torture? If you had godlike power, or if your civilization could contract out for a godlike power, why would you create, staff and maintain an inescapable Hell?

With this premise, Banks brings us into a story that seems to be headed for some smashing revenge - a woman who essentially comes back from the grave to avenge her own murder; the murderer being the rough equivalent of an evil Richard Branson, the most powerful, wealthy and charismatic man on his planet. But of course it's much more than that, since this man has become significant in the multi-civilizational *virtual* war over the morality of Hells that now threatens to become a real shooting war.  The anti-Hell side lost and the Leviathan Culture, although anti-Hell, decided not to interfere in the virtual war. Now that a real war is possible, the rules may change.

Banks' Culture, which I have been considering at length now reveals the author in his experimental purposes. As a large set of fictions, his Culture novels reveal more and more of the optimism of moral intellect which is part of the essential design of science fiction.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.

The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.

It only takes a slight tweaking of mind to understand the possible beauty of an evolved planned economy. After all, isn't this what working for the best company is all about? Nobody doubts that an enterprise such as Steve Jobs' Apple Computer exists in a free market, but inside of Apple the economy is planned. Your salary as a programmer doesn't have labor market volatility inside the company, only outside of the company. Inside the chaos is reduced to with reasonable, planned limits. Apple is a great place to work because the plan is generous and wise - that Apple as an entity must compete at a higher level doesn't mean the external dynamics must bet transcendent. The ability for Apple to exploit the market does not translate. The same thing applies to Google, Cisco and other large, cash rich and employee friendly corporations which are now the most successful in America. It is as Banks suggests the post-scarcity future of space-faring civilizations will be, chaos outside but socialism inside. (Cue Intel jingle).

Granted, there are a number of assumptions that must be engineered in order for such things to be held together in his fiction. I might come around to scrutinizing them after I've digested the whole of his Notes. The Culture series is so damned entertaining, suspension of disbelief is entirely enchanting and easy. Especially for gearheads like myself. But I expect to understand with greater capacity why it is that scientists and technologists tend to be more than ordinarily compelled to beleive in Leviathan. With an future that might be as stunningly attractive as life in the Culture it's not hard to see why for surface reasons, but the deeper reasons are more revealing, and I believe that Banks has considered most of them. I call this the Virtual Utopia Problem:

The problem of the virtual utopia is then, a dilemma of choosing whether or not to believe if human progress is inevitable. The proper life, is it to be pursued with the assumption that we enable the achievable utopia? Or should we relent and live in the relative utopia of today?

If it is possible to alleviate suffering through the establishment of a better society, is it more noble to accept those betterments achieved by prior sacrifice or to make additional sacrifices in the attempt to make what's already good better still? At what point does it all become hubris? Should we make plastic surgery affordable for everyone, so that everyone can look beautiful, or is the very idea a conceit? Should we make university education affordable for everyone, so that everyone can be informed and smart, or is that chasing rainbows? Should we strive to improve air quality so that nobody will have their life cut short by lung disorders or are we playing God here? One man's trash is another man's treasure, on man's floor another man's ceiling. And it's all here, all now, merely unevenly distributed. We have a scarcity problem. Some people are already living in utopia.

I pose this as a problem of 'utopia' rather than as a problem of class because I am thinking of the possibilities of a post-scarcity world. Americans, for example, have no scarcity of calories. Pollan spells it out. As the nature of work and learning is undergoing massive change, we cannot necessarily depend on our current understanding of class. There are conspiracies afoot to make many things post-scarce. Surely the upper classes will see them first, but as they pass through society, they lose their class significance. As they become commodified, they lose their marginal significance. Like ATM cards. 30 years ago, almost nobody could get cash out of the bank on Saturday. Electronic funds transfer is a commodity today. So is Viagra, something men have killed every beast, plant and fungus possible to find.

Banks solves this problem by removing human agency from the dealings of galactic sized problems. He steps us into a world where the Leviathan is already established, the wars already won, the technology already developed and the human already acclimated to the utopian regime long ago accomplished. His Leviathan is the community of Ship Minds that run the Culture. He takes the term 'good ship' to the extreme. Godlike all-knowing minds that manage the affairs of billions of humans and sentient creatures in giant volumes of space and still have time to speak to you on an individual basis exist in his world. They are powerful enough to destroy worlds, and yet ethical enough not to read your mind without your permission. They are fundamentally respectful of millions of years of history and yet work democratically with peer-minds. What's not to love? This is profoundly enhanced by the understanding that humanity had something to do with their creation millions of years ago. It makes us creators of our own God and it validates on a galactic scale that the sort of intelligence we possess is indeed part of the singular sort that requires moral consideration. Our intelligence is our soul and the nature of the universe's laws (at least to the extent that humans can exist in its various space-time dimensional combinations) is consonant with our will. We are indeed on a path of destiny.

Whatever that path, humans will be humans, and our nature is well taken care of in Banks' imagination. There seems to be no avenue of human behavior he has ignored or given short shrift. Given what the Culture is, his situation of humans in it is perfectly natural. That is why his take on internal socialism is important. Once again to his theory:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

This idea was also encountered in some recent sci-fi I read. The premise was reversed. Some powerful creature had reduced humankind to living on a large flat disk whose gravity and enormous size precluded space travel, global positioning or communications. It was the perfect prison.

So space remains the final frontier with the greatest promise of liberty, there has got to be enough Uranium out there, perhaps planets full, that someday we might use to fuel the dreams of trillions of humans. Until then, we read on.

A Skeptical Triumph Over Global Warming Fraud

I don't know exactly how long I've been skeptical of the great hoax that Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) has proven to be, but a thoughtful researcher might check the archives of Cobb to make the point. They have always been open. Here's a classic quote from me:

My mind is made up on global warming. If it takes 100 years to move the planetary temperature up one degree, it will take 100 more years, or at least 50 to change it back. In the meantime, nothing that serious is happening. We need to focus on what people do. The Planet is fine.

I know that the ice cube analogy doesn't include land, but 17 feet of sea rising is not going to happen. Again, the fate of the Earth is not a political priority. Hurricanes don't kill six million Jews.

As it happens, I've been searching Slate's archives to find more editorial cartoons from Tony Auth who penned one with the subtitle "Obama's Believe It Or Not". The picture showed troops in Afganistan on an escalator directed by Obama. On the side of the escalator was the word 'Escalation', but at the top of the escalator was the sign 'Exit'. I think that oxymoron and the subtitle encapsulates the Obama presidency quite well - as well as the press infatuation with the idiot socialite party crashers to a state dinner at which strategic alliances with India should have been the subject of coverage.

In that search, I found a couple things to be true. After having watched about 50 cartoons, the first thing that can be said is that they are a perfect form of infotainment and are rarely reliable about anything except the simplest of public opinions. They never fail to make obvious and two dimensional, a multidimensional issue, and in that they can be a useful shorthand for the popular, conventional, unexpert and mass opinion. When applied to the matter of AGW that becomes overwhelmingly clear.

Before I show the killer example of this, I want to bring to your attention the importance of the ability for the President to articulate the policy and direction of his Administration in a similarly two dimensional way. It should be clear and continuous so that a person following that Administration gradually gets a 3d picture. In every snapshot of Obama's articulations, we get blur. We did not have that sort of evasion with GWBush. And so with that, consider the following editorial cartoon by Stuart Carlson:

It should be obvious by now that the theory of AGW is based on a fraud. The Telegraph has a very useful article by Christopher Booker that gives a clear sketch of the history and the culprits and the implications of the deception.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

As I started this essay, I thought about entitling it 'The Natural Advantage of Conservatism' but I tire of politics, and I didn't want to imply with any relish that this revelation is a big win for my political side. Politically speaking, it's going to take just as long to unwind the 'thinking' and money invested in all this green hogwash as it did ginning the whole kaboodle up in the first place. (But I am selling my chromium futures).

I simply want to be correct. And that is why I am curious and skeptical and analytical. I don't have any need to play gotcha, even though it is entertaining to have one's skepticism rewarded. But I am looking at the language of this article in the Telegraph which names the names of the culprits behind the hugely anti-scientific deception and obstruction of Mann, Briffa et al, who had previously been given the honorific of being portrayed as a literal tidal wave of truth. You don't get that kind of reportage on a daily basis. We suffer from lazy reporters and their dimbulb language, which is why people like me filter news through intelligent bloggers. It has been over 15 years since I got my news from television, and at the time it was strictly Charlie Rose and before that only the Sunday morning interview shows, and before that only the Nightly Business Report. The last time I trusted the likes of Wolf Blitzer and George Will, who were among the best TV had to offer, was 1989. I sometimes forget how unusual that makes me.

Still the point remains that people who are engaged in professional pursuits of Progressive political interest tend towards debasing their profession in search of the revolutionary while calling it Progress. Just this week I hear of a revolution in Mammography. C'mon. These things actually take time. I'm thinking that perhaps I ought to coin another rule about being wary of people who claim to be on the bleeding edge of anything.

The late Michael Crichton had the right idea. He tantalized us with the possibilities of what's next and reminded us always of human fallibility in his novels, and he was a skeptic of AGW as well in his speeches. 

PS. To Laurie David: Drop dead.