Category Archives: atheism

Oct 19 2021
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atheism, climbing, philosophy, psychology, theism

The Auto Belay Auto Da Fe

“Even if it is certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has any place in this. A person of character does not think of victory or defeat, but instead rushes recklessly towards an irrational death. Do this and you will awaken from your dreams.”

-Yamamoto Tsunetomo

“If you die climbing, you negate everything else you’ve ever done in the mountains”

Don Whilans

“The nature of fencing is defeating an enemy in a fight, nothing more”

Miyamoto Musashi

Once upon a time on the Iberian Peninsula, the three Abrahamic religions tried to live together. Of course, they were no better at peaceful coexistence in antiquity than they are now, so the whole thing fell apart and then got nasty.

And as usual, when it came time to persecute the Other, Christians took the lead. The whole anti-comity campaign which ensued is known as the Inquisition. The name is genius. It captures every aspect of the project, while offering an implicit defense of its acts.. The Church was simply asking questions, of the society and of the individuals who professed a different faith.

The inquisitors wanted to know what the society was willing to do in the name of Christian purity. Of the individuals, the officers of the church finally wanted the answer to a single question multifariously – what are you willing to do to keep us from torturing you to death?

The answer to both of the church’s questions was the auto-da-fé. The words themselves mean “act of faith”, by which the perpetrators wished to indicate a demonstration of repentant zeal on the part of the evangelized. In practice, the act of faith meant participation in an elaborate show trial, in which the accused were broken of their prideful resistance, and then paraded to the grounds of judgment dressed in humiliating costumes representative of their particular crimes. Upon arrival, officers of the church meted out sentences and administered punishments. Some of the penitents were burned in effigy. Some were burned alive. Some were simply tortured a little bit. And some were pardoned, just to keep everyone guessing. The whole thing was a great object lesson regarding the power of the Church, and a big hit as public entertainment.

The Inquisition is long gone, but the spirit of auto da fe survives in odd corners of society. The climbing world, for example, has preserved it by means of a device called an “auto belay”. An auto belay is a locking carabiner attached to a spring-loaded spool of nylon webbing, which is further equipped with a clutch mechanism. The whole thing hangs from the top of an artificial climbing wall and allows a climber to ascend the indoor crag without the need for another person to hold a safety line. When the climber comes off of the wall, the clutch mechanism engages and lowers them gently back to the ground.
The whole setup resembles a giant, upside down yo-yo. For many people, it is the only partner they will ever know. It allows the curious to experience climbing with almost zero skills in their toolbox. Once a gym employee has properly fit them in a harness, a tourist to the sport merely needs the capacity to open and close the gate on a carabiner, and they can get themselves 30 to 40 feet off the ground and back down in safety.

Despite an orientation which includes a demonstration of the auto belay’s effectiveness, the majority of first-time climbers cower below the top of the wall for a few minutes before mustering the courage to wager their spinal column’s integrity on the reliability of a length of yellow nylon tape, and whatever it is in the round plastic box tethered to the ceiling. Some are simply unable to carry out the act of faith, and require staff to rescue them.

An auto belay makes indoor climbing accessible to the uninitiated, but they are not the only ones who use it. Experienced devotees also clip into the device. For them, employing the auto belay is an act of faith as well, but more along the lines of the original auto da fe. In the same sense, it is a desperate act.

A committed climber who attaches themself to an auto belay may object that they are in need of conditioning rather than just desperate to climb. Climbing on auto belay is a kind of training. It is just not very good training. Equipment such as the hang board builds finger strength better. Likewise with campusing, which also improves arm strength. Climbing outdoors yields vastly superior improvements in technique. The “training excuse” for using an auto belay needs its own excuse.

There is no excuse though, only a bit of the truth. And the truth is that a committed climber using the auto belay is much like poor Tsunetomo, who never fought a battle or lived to enjoy an irrational death. To endure the misfortune of his birth into an age of peace, he contemplated the edifying nature of combat and loyalty to one’s commander. He wore the vestments of a warrior, and scrupulously practiced a warriors rituals. A climber on auto belay is no different. Their movement over a route devised by a technician is a pitiful homage to a real course charted across natural features. It is a weak gesture of devotion to the thing that it imitates.

Like the confessions extracted in the auto-da-fé, climbing on auto belay is hollow, and doing it means that you share the desperation (though likely to a lesser extent) of those poor bastards marching towards an uncertain fate along a dusty Spanish road. Yet there was another aspect to the inquisition’s ritual humiliation and forced confession. Taking the point of view of the persecuted, a real spiritual test lay beneath the cynical choreography.. The persecuted were faced with a question bigger than the church’s inquiries: can you get through this? They received the same unsettling revelation as did Musashi, who survived 60 duels. Once you make the choice to be a fighter or a survivor, all the rest – technique, appearance, profession – becomes subservient. In that way, the auto da fe was an act of faith, just not the faith which the church wanted. It was not a faith in God, but a faith in chance. For the penitent marching towards the grounds of judgment, living just a little bit longer meant that there was still a chance of coming through the whole ordeal, to better chances on the other side. Wear the costume. Accept the accusations. Endure the beating. Each deprecation is a little more time and another chance. If you have chosen to survive, you’ve committed to taking those opportunities.

Using an auto belay mirrors the inquisition’s act of faith in this too. Because, clipping into that yellow webbing requires a confession. The penitent has to look at the painted plywood crag with its harlequin plastic holds and the upside down human yo-yo hanging over them and conclude that it is all still climbing and that, as a climber, they will climb, rather than not climb.

In what must be history’s strangest convergence, both Tsunetomo and Musashi ended their days in monastic contemplation, Musashi because he could no longer justify the killing, and Tsunetomo because he was ultimately betrayed by his own devotion. His master forbade him to commit ritual suicide in honor of the Masters death, which would have been the definitive act of faith, and a very irrational death.

Though they came at their problems from opposing starts, both of the samurai seem to have come to the same conclusion as they contemplated their lives. They both stopped thinking about their accomplishments, or lack thereof. They both stopped worrying about the meaning of death. In their final state, it is easy to imagine either one of them standing in front of the auto belay, shrugging their shoulders, and clipping in.

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May 14 2021
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atheism, consciousness, philosophy, psychology, theism

The Sustaining God

Once upon a time, at the height of the Mughal empire, a man of great intelligence and refinement sat on the throne. With his nation at peace, he used his wealth to gather around him every sort of beautiful thing and interesting person. He ruled wisely, and the populace venerated him. He pursued whatever inspired him, to his complete satisfaction.
At last, the Mughal Emperor looked around himself and saw that all his wishes and ambitions had been fulfilled. Now, he only had one fear: that he must one day leave his perfect life.

He became obsessed with the thought that he must die and leave it all behind. So, he sent emissaries to seek out the secrets of immortality. They sought up the rivers and across the mountains, for many years, in vain.

Until one day, one of the Emperor’s agents came upon a village at the foot of a mountain. The villagers told him that a Daoist priest lived in a cave below the peak and that the hermit had found a way to defeat death.
The emissary climbed up and found the priest, a shoeless man dressed in a tattered robe. On behalf of the Emperor, the agent begged the priest to come to the Mughal capital and teach the Emperor how to defeat death. The agent offered power and riches to persuade the priest, but the priest refused all enticements outright. He agreed to make the journey and to teach the Emperor without cause or condition.
The priest and the emissary traveled back across the mountains and down the rivers until they arrived at the palace.
The Emperor summoned the priest to him immediately.
Once ensconced in the his chambers with his guest, the sovereign asked the question which had overcome his thoughts entirely.
“How do I defeat death?”
The priest made no answer, so the Emperor tried again.
“I’ve been told that you’ve discovered the secret to immortality. Tell me, how do I live forever? What chants, rituals, potions or salves must I employ?”
The priest sighed, “I am sorry, but you cannot live forever. There is no chant, ritual, potion or salve which will sustain you. You cannot defeat death in that way. But there is another way. If you allow me, I will teach you to lighten up. And if you follow my teachings to their conclusion, you may become so light and insubstantial that death cannot grasp you.”

Here, the record ends.

What happened with the Emperor and the priest? After the priest delivered his news, did the Emperor nod and move on untroubled, or did he have the priest killed? Maybe the Emperor split the difference.

Maybe he nodded without moving on. He might have feigned acknowledgment while nurturing the desire for life in secret. Perhaps he devoted himself entirely to the Master’s lifestyle, becoming more and more consumed with meditation and asceticism until he starved to death rather than have death ambush him.

We may imagine something even worse too. When the priest explained how the world was just one story (as he would have done, since “Dao” indicates “just one story”, nothing more and nothing less), maybe the Emperor grasped at the metaphor. Rather than seeing past the priest’s analogy, the Emperor quickly laid upon it a driving plot, necessary characters, and a storyteller who he symbolized with the image of a book.
Soon, a shrine housing a statue of a Golden book stood in every house in the land. The Emperor wore an amulet in the shape of a book around his neck. At the end, he clutched the symbol tight in his fist while beseeching the storyteller to keep writing his lines.

But since we do not really know the end of this story, why not be more hopeful? Why not make the story more interesting too? Because our stories usually are much more interesting than the story of instantaneous enlightenment at the end of a short lesson, or summary execution.
Let us imagine that the Emperor parted with the priest in a state of doubtful curiosity.

He went back to his duties and avocations watchfully. As he had his moments of fear, triumph, and satisfaction, he tried to see those moments as elements of just one, complete story, rather than belonging to his personal narrative. He got better and better at adopting the single-story viewpoint. In doing so, he dropped the possessive perspective – a collector’s perspective – which had previously obscured his experiences with the demands of ambition, pride, and disappointment.

He had been treating his life like a gilded scrapbook. He came to understand the impossibility of having an experience; one could only experience an experience. He finally managed to set the scrapbook aside.

From that moment on, all the little details were illuminated as never before. He could feel himself lightening up. And at the end, when all the experiences were over, he felt himself possessed of no substance, with none of the associated, substantial troubles.

Maybe that was what happened. But he probably killed the priest instead.

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Mar 13 2020
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atheism, climbing, philosophy, psychology

Analytic Truths (and all the other stuff)

There are, in climbing, certain analytic truths. An analytic truth is something which is true by definition. A statement like, “Dan is tall”, refers to some fact external to the criteria for Dan and height. The statement depends on Dan’s relative height, and is not an analytic truth. On the other hand, “A unicorn has one horn” is an analytic truth. It doesn’t require any supporting facts. In the United States, climbing’s analytic truths pertain to the Yosemite Decimal System, or YDS, as its devoted followers refer to it.

The YDS is one of several numerical rating systems for climbing difficulty. All of them would make Francis Galton proud, because they are all consensus systems. Numbers get assigned based on the collective experience of those who have travelled the route. But unlike Galton’s casual survey of fair-goers, the YDS has normative power as well as statistical power. Nobody wants to be the arrogant prick who over-rates his route. Nobody wants to be the arrogant prick who under-rates his route, or worse, downgrades someone else’s route. Because the number-ratings themselves are synthetic – they refer to facts in the world regarding rocks and people – the moralizing can only go so far. The internal consistencies of the system have no rails, though, and frustrated moral instincts often seek fulfillment among the system’s analytic truths.

Some of climbing’s more problematic truths include: “5.11 is harder than 5.10.”, “A 5.9 climber can climb 5.9.”, and “A 5.9 climber cannot climb 5.10”. Now, the latter two statements may appear to refer to some actual climber or climbers, even if they are hypothetical. Admittedly, the statements could be interpreted that way. For instance, if Dan says that he is a 5.9 climber, then his colleagues may reasonably expect that he can get up a climb rated 5.9. But that interpretation is rarely used. Instead, the statements are taken to be strictly consistent. At best, the definitions have to be realigned to fit. In other words, if Dan fails on a 5.9 climb, then he is not a 5.9 climber.

At this point, some examples are in order.

This is 5.9:

This is 5.9:

You got it, 5.9:

Let me emphasize the human factor in these photos. Some of the people shown climbing some of these routes have absolutely no hope of climbing any of the other routes (not me, of course, as I am a 5.11 climber).

But, if I am a 5.9 climber, shouldn’t I be able to climb 5.9? If I don’t climb that 5.11, am I still a 5.11 climber? Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with the rating? Or am I equivocating between a synthetic category and its logical extensions?

The YDS axioms do not really sort climbers, nor do those truths-by-definition really sort routes. Yet the climbing community still takes the YDS formulas seriously, as prizes, urine marks on the wall and occasionally, inspirations.

As inspirations, logical consistencies are particularly treacherous.They can be like the funny little man at the rollercoaster entrance with a big smile and beatific expression, his finger pointing at an invisible line in the air.

“You must be this tall to ride”, he says, “and if you can’t make it today, maybe come back a little later and you will be up to it.”

But formulaic aspirations can flip without warning. The little man can turn nasty. He can suddenly point his finger at you and screech, “This is how tall you are, bitch. This tall and no more. Now go away!”

In the end, the climb goes or it doesn’t. Paying attention to the numbers themselves can help a person figure out what is worth the effort. Sometimes, the numbers can even keep a person out of trouble.

The truths about the numbers’ internal consistency are another story. Those get gummed up with ambitions and insecurities in no time. They are, like all analytic truths, entirely uninteresting in themselves, be they ever so ripe for projection.

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Feb 18 2020
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atheism, biology, consciousness, philosophy, psychology, theism

The Other Minds

My dog loves me. Despite his creaking hips and back, he heaves himself up and comes to greet me when I return home each night, with his tail wagging. Yet I wonder if I am right about his feelings about me. After all, I am just interpreting his behavior as representative of mental and emotional states which I would have in similar circumstances. And, he has been bred over centuries to be a veritable human-pleasing machine which exhibits a set of behaviors that, among other things, is calculated to make me feel that he feels like I am the best thing since kibbles. Come to think of it, he does not wag his tail while he eats, and he never met a kibble he didn’t love.

If only he could tell me that he loves me, then I would know for sure. On second thought, I could not know for sure. I can’t even know for sure when another human reports their feelings or perceptions or any other personal, qualitative aspect of their experience to me. In any such case, the experience that I attribute to their report may be radically different from what they are actually experiencing. At least, that’s what the Inverted Spectrum teaches us.

The Inverted Spectrum is a thought experiment. It was not devised to tackle the problem of other minds. It was devised to demonstrate the ethereal nature of qualitative properties. But like any good thought experiment, it illustrates multiple aspects of the target issue.

Here’s how it goes: Imagine that you have a best friend named Fred, who you have known since you both could walk. Unbeknownst to you however, whenever you both look at something red, Fred does not see red, he sees green instead. This is not to say that Fred is color blind. On the contrary, he sees all the colors that you see, and he quite happily calls the red object “red”. He just sees it as green. The two of you could go through your entire lives discussing painting and picking out Granny Smiths instead of Red Delicious at the grocery store, without a hitch. The basic qualities “red” and “green” do not influence function; we happily operate the same way with the qualities flipped.

The implications of the Inverted Spectrum may seem bizarre, dramatic and disturbing, but closer examination may shrink the menace. If I assign you and Fred to sort red and green beads into separate boxes, the two of you will complete the task in no time with no mistakes. That’s because what we all call “red” designates the same set of beads, even though they produce in Fred what you or I would call a “green” experience. To take it a little further, if I assign the two of you to tell me the color of sour things, sweet things, hot things, dangerous things or growing things, you and Fred will give me the same answers in French, English, Fulani, or even just by pointing. All secondary associations are flipped along with the reds and greens.

The jolt from this thought experiment comes when we imagine our experience of Fred’s experience, with all of our secondary associations still in place. But that’s completely off base. What we have run down with this thought experiment is an account of Fred’s experience with all his own secondary associations attached. The point is that there is some irreducible personal element to it all. But then, where does that leave Fred’s “red” or his “green” or his any other what-it-is-like aspect of experience?

Having seen what it is like to see what it is like to experience what Fred sees from your viewpoint, you may have trouble explaining your horror to him. You will insist that the apple is red, as are hot things and dangerous things, and he will heartily agree. You can desperately insist that he is deluded and is pervasively mistaking red qualities for green ones. He will reply that he is not and will ask you to prove it, which, as the thought experiment demonstrates, you cannot. What remains to his personal, qualitative experience, stripped of all the secondary associations, is just its personalness.

If you were to truly step into Fred’s skin with all its secondary associations in place and your own secondary associations set aside, you would have to admit that Fred’s “red” is indeed red; it is just not your red.

My dog may be an automaton. He may be a human-pleasing machine who wags his tail on the basis of a genetic algorithm and just acts in a very convincing way, like he means it. But if so, as the Inverted Spectrum illustrates, he does mean it, just as Fred really means red when he says “red”. All the secondary associations are in place. I may rightly conjecture that what it may be like to be him may not be what it is like to be me, but I knew that before he wagged his tail. He loves me, as sure as I know what love is.

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Jan 06 2020
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atheism, consciousness, philosophy, psychology, theism

A Few, Very Specific Things

People are always asking me, “What do you believe?”

Nah, nobody actually asks me that, but I tell them anyway, just like this:

When it comes to consciousness, it comes with identity, and therefore locality.

When it comes to cause, it causes identity.

And, of course, that’s about it for classical theism.

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Dec 31 2019
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atheism, politics, psychology, racism, theism, Trump

Q Confessions

I must confess that I have not been completely honest with all of you. It is with a heavy heart that I admit this, but it will soon become too difficult to maintain the charade anyway. Some of you may have guessed the truth already, and to you I offer congratulations. You really are the clever ones after all.

To start, I am, and all along have been, working with the Clintons, the FBI, the Jews, and all the rest of the deep state apparatchiks who seek to undermine their own positions by bringing about a New World Order. All this even though I am a Black Muslim.

You may wonder why I am coming clean. But you must know by now that we villains are at once diabolically clever and thoroughly incompetent. We can concoct airtight and elaborate schemes, but can’t seem to help telegraphing our every move.

I think we fail because of our unconscious guilt. We know we are wrong, deep down, and so we confess just in time for the upstanding to foil our plots. But it will be too late this time.

As I write this, our operatives in the CIA and FBI are assembling the guillotine in a secret House chamber, as Rep. Schiff and Hillary herself drag Donald from his nest in the West wing. Moments from now, Pelosi will give a perfunctory reading of charges and then pull the trigger, with the ceremonial rape of Our Great Leader’s headless corpse to follow immediately thereafter ( I am told that the last bit will not be televised).

Once the deed is done, I will at last be free to pursue my true motive in all this. In this final hour, I will reveal the secret desire, formerly known to just one other, behind all my machinations. I have manipulated both my loyal Americans and my co-conspirators in pursuit of one, grand prize: Melania.

Dearest Melania, It has all been for you, all along, just as I promised. Soon we will walk in the light of day, together, and Baron will finally know what he must have suspected. For how could such beautiful wine ever come from such soft and withered grapes moldering near to the ground?

All of this shall come to pass momentarily, my loyal friends. Then you will have the Truth, and the reassuring feelings which go along with having been in on it all along. And if nothing happens, then all of you will know that this has been a triple-double cross, in which case, you are still the clever ones. Even better than church, isn’t it?

WWG1WGA

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Nov 30 2019
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atheism, biology, Moral Anti-Realism, moral realism, philosophy, psychology, theism

A Bucket of Wings and a Pitcher of PBR with the Baby Jesus

The first time that the Baby Jesus talked to me was at YMCA Summer camp. I heard him on assignment, lying on my bunk in a group cabin while the cicadas droned outside. Us campers had been sent back to our quarters after an evening devotional to listen for a message from God. Around the campfire, our counselors had had admonished us to listen with humility. We had to silence all our selfish desires if we hoped to perceive a divine whisper. We even had to relinquish our hope to hear a whisper from the Lord, if we hoped to hear a whisper from the Lord.

As I lay with my eyes open in the darkness, I was having more trouble tuning out the insects than the cacophony of my selfish desires. The cicadas’ ballad seemed to come from the darkness itself. I had long practice ignoring the undulating buzz, having grown up in the South with no central air and therefore reliant upon open windows for enough cool to allow Summer sleep. With no clamor in my head, the bug song rose from the suppressed depths of my consciousness to make a noise again. I tried to block it out while not trying to block it out, or trying to try to block it out, and so on, until my attention became exhausted and let go of the sound.

Just then, something happened. A voice, or maybe just a feeling, told me not to worry. The speaker was there. Everything was going perfectly according to plan. I felt great. Maybe I even let go a few tears of joy that night. In any case, I soon fell asleep and when I woke the next morning, the world seemed to have a fresh scent, like it had been sprinkled with the lavender water of permeating divinity. The divine freshness lingered for a couple years, but from the moment of spritzing, it was doomed to fade. It could not be reconciled with events on the road to camp.

Our family had set out with a very aggressive vacationing agenda that year. We had left home two weeks prior on a mission to visit my grandmother and Disney World, both a day’s drive away. We would then loop back up to drop me at Summer camp, while my brother would go on to baseball camp, leaving my parents with a week of real vacation for themselves. The schedule was tight, and my father was not pleased when we pulled up behind a row of parked cars on a two lane road in the flatlands of North Florida. When we stepped out of the car, we could see an object blocking both lanes in the distance. Other people were getting out of their cars too, and it was quiet. We walked forward with all the rest.

On the opposite side of the road, about 30 yards up, a distraught elderly couple sat on the ground by their car. The car had a dent in the hood and its windshield was caved in. A few yards beyond lay a mangled bicycle. It was nice, or it had been. I had wanted a BMX bike like that for a couple of years, and I would have done with it what I imagined its rider was doing when the old folks hit him: jumping the banks on either side of the elevated roadway. The boy lay a dozen yards beyond his wrecked bike, diagonally across the lane lines. He was on his side with no apparent injury, from a distance, but with a puddle of blood around his upper body.

Standing over the boy, one could see that the blood was coming from his ears. His gaze fixed on something impossibly distant and his breaths came halting and deep. We circled around him as he died. Someone remarked that an ambulance was on its way, A nurse in the crowd screamed at the rest not to just stand there, but to run and get a blanket. She was upset to a degree beyond what the collective paralysis of the bystanders merited. She may have been wondering how Baby Jesus could allow such a thing. As a child, I knew that adults had their reasons and that those reasons were sometimes unfathomable. I just assumed that the same was true of the Baby Jesus.

I saw no injustice, but I saw his stare. Surely, the distant thing upon which the boy’s gaze fixed was his own death. Yet he would never get to that far place. If he just snuffed out, then he just snuffed out, like when the dentist gave me anesthesia to remove my wisdom teeth and asked me to count to ten as the drug took effect. I didn’t even fail to count to eight. I counted to seven and that was it; there was no experience of looking back on an unsuccessful effort to count to eight, only a memory of seven, then nothing. Likewise, if he saw a light at the end of a tunnel or rose into the ether to look down on his inert body, then he experienced a metamorphosis. He got yanked away from those final moments of physiologic cessation just like the anesthetic yanked me away from counting to eight.

If I had asked any of my fellow onlookers gathered around the body that day, I’m sure they would have spoken of death as a thing which might bear a scythe and a cowl. They would have named it an independent reality. But after that day on the road, I slowly came to see that they were wrong. I fantasized about what would happen if the boy could tell us about leaving his body. Jesus’ disciples were said to have had that very experience, when Jesus returned from the dead to speak to his inner circle. Yet they were only twelve meeting The One. I imagined a world where meetings with the dead were common. I imagined ghosts at first, but engaging in spectrology proved an unnecessary complication. The situation was the same if what happened to Jesus happened to everybody. Your bodily functions stopped. You went up into the clouds. You got a bit of a rebuild. You came back down.

If universal resurrection came to pass, the first generation affected might continue to speak of the Grim Reaper. But as the reportage of the pierced, crushed and disintegrated became commonplace, no one would refer to Death as a thing in itself. There would be misadventures and resurrections, and all would be properly seen as aspects of our total experience. Eventually, no one would even talk about Life anymore.

Though I did not appreciate it at the time, the considerations which began on that roadway in the Southern plains generated a frictional heat, which would finally evaporate the lavender water of permeating divinity. Over years, it dawned on me that Eau Divine had already transcended itself if we could put a name to it, even if we just spoke metaphorically. Like life and death, the scent arose from a great continuity of experience, which we could never look back upon from a discontinuous beyond. It was a slow drying out, and I did not even miss the scent until the next time Jesus spoke to me. That final time, I was sitting in a bar at lunch, far from Christian Summer camp, when the voice of the Lord came to me from a bucket of wings.

I don’t know why I ordered the wings. I was at a crossroads career-wise, so maybe I felt a little unstable and subject to whimsy. As I stared into the jumble of battered and fried appendages however, I recalled why I had become a de facto vegetarian. I felt sick as I imagined all the capabilities which those little wings had possessed in life, reduced to the mess before me on the plastic table cloth. But it was too late by then. I understood my place in the supply chain (having ordered) and besides, I could not leave food uneaten in my financial circumstances. Luckily, there was cheap beer on tap. I asked the bartender to bring me a pitcher.

I took a solid gulp of the rice-brew swill before having a second look at the wings. That’s when the voice, or maybe it was more like a feeling, came to me out of the bucket. It told me not to worry. Life had been given for life. It was all going according to plan. I could eat those chicken wings with a clear conscience, because that’s how it was meant to be. The essence of life got passed on, said the voice, and carried on from the poor little chickens to me. I stared at the crusty wings, and was not reassured. Those bits of bone and muscle that had been, could be taken for almost anything now. But they could not be taken out of circumstance or consequence, anymore than that boy on the road, Life and Death, plans both mortal and divine, or the voice of the Baby Jesus, coming, as it did, from the bucket, or the ether, or any other relatively distinguishable source.

I downed the remainder of the swill and pushed back from the table. Somebody else got the wings, and that was the last I heard from the Baby Jesus.

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Jul 22 2019
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atheism, Moral Anti-Realism, moral realism, philosophy, psychology, theism

Good Snake, Bad Snake

One bright Spring morning, Karen opens her front door and steps onto the porch to take the morning rays. She lives on a cul-de-sac, and in the middle of the traffic circle just beyond her front yard, she sees a large rattlesnake. No one else is around, but she knows that the neighbor kids will soon be out to play in the street. She must do something. Karen likes snakes (she considers them beautiful, graceful creatures) so she shoos the animal into the underbrush well off the travelled way, posts a homemade, “Danger Snake” sign on the path to the underbrush, and knocks on her neighbors’ door to warn them of the danger to their kids.

The following morning, Karen sleeps in, but her other neighbor, Kate, is up early and out to her porch. Once again, the rattlesnake sits in the traffic circle. Kate does not like snakes, so she promptly chops its head off and disposes of the body in the underbrush. Not long after, Karen appears, having heard some commotion. They stand together, regarding a small bloodstain on the pavement.

Unbeknownst to Kate and Karen, Marsha, the nosey insomniac who lives 2 doors down, has been observing the events of the last two mornings. Marsha feels moved to acknowledge the noble actions of her neighbors, so she promptly goes out to present each of them with a card of appreciation which reads, “Thank you for your good work in your good works.”

It is pretty clear what Marsha means by the first “good”. She thinks that each of her neighbors, given their purposes, acted in a manner to most effectively realize the ends of those purposes. The first “good” is instrumental; it describes the effectiveness of a means to an end. It may be tempting to say that the second good is just the same. For instance, one could propose an argument from evolutionary psychology: We seek to bring about good circumstances and avoid bad ones because such efforts improve our odds of survival. Assuming the viability of an evolutionary account. we are still left with an elephant in the room. We have no explanation of our valuation of life. It is easy to claim it as a logical tautology: Living things live because that’s what makes them living things. But living is an activity. To live is to strive to survive, so to speak. The motivation to carry on this activity is intrinsic to the activity and if living is self explanatory, then so is the life-motive.

Closely examined, all motive looks this way.* When I reach for a beer, for instance, certain neurons have responded to environmental cues. The activity of those neurons causes in me the notion that I want to have a beer, which turns on other circuits in the prefrontal cortex, spinal cord, neuromuscular junction, etc. At the end of it all, I have a beer and an exhaustive explanation. The story of my obtaining beer is a story, still. It is representational. The story exists as the result of a desire to tell stories, and the desire to tell stories has its own, exhaustive reduction. But all the branching stories of motives are fixed by an active orientation, which I also indicate when I say that I want a beer.

And as Hume, among others, observed, when we talk about moral goodness, we don’t just tell a story containing an end and its means, we do also refer to a motive directly. Good, if it is something, is something which we ought to do. Even when we speak of evil acts, we don’t simply mean acts which are ignorant or negligent, we mean acts which somehow fail in their motivations. Marsha’s two ‘goods’ do mean two different things. The first meaning is instrumental. The second is something – else.

To get at what else a moral value may be, it may be instructive to examine how Karen evaluates the snake. For her, the snake elicits a sense of beauty which weights her moral calculus. She has a moral obligation to the neighbor kids, and aesthetic obligation(?) to the snake. Nor do those values seem bound to the snake; they seem to be bound to the beholder. Kate certainly does not attribute the same value to the snake. We must look to the motivation of the evaluator to account for the snake’s aesthetic value.

We can attempt a functional account of the discrepancy in snake esteem. The snake has symmetry, color contrast, impressive venom, etc. which the human brain finds attractive, and which Karen has the proper sort of history regarding snakes (a history which Kate lacks) to allow an appreciation of snakes on the above grounds. The reduction can give us an instrumental evaluation of the snake’s aesthetic value. For instance, we will have a pretty good idea of where Karen’s line is when it comes to snake rescue – will she risk her life to save one, or just suffer a little inconvenience. We will not have a good account of why the line is where it is.

George Moore refers to the analogous moral problem with his open question. He noted that we can identify an act as good, but we cannot find an attribute inherent in the act itself which makes it good. When we say something is morally good, we don’t seem to be able to go on and say that it is constitutive of good, so that any morally good thing contributes to our knowledge of good. We speak as though we already know it, even when we have changed our minds about what is or is not good! It is the same with the line demarcating the limits of snake-appreciation for Karen; we start behind it and cannot pick apart a final source of its position in the facts we have about the line. The value attribution seems to come from within the person making it, and their motive.

Moore postulated a moral intuition to explain the whole moral mess. We have a faculty which responds to events by arousing Good and Bad sentiments in us. With a moral sense, it all occurs in the heart, which is only stimulated by events past and current.

Aesthetic sentiments also occur ‘in the heart’. A urinal in the bus station moves very few, while the same urinal in a gallery moves many – and beyond its representation. In fact, part of what the gallery urinal represents is the significance of aesthetic disagreement. The difference, the urinal reminds us, occurs in the heart and its appreciation of white porcelain curves, beyond any differential understanding of context and symbol – the instrumental aspects of art.

So it is with morality, as well. Aesthetic evaluations and moral evaluations prove difficult to distinguish, because they share a structure. But aesthetics are appreciated, not by the stimulation of a mysterious, aesthetic faculty, but by an operational method. When we consider the urinal in the gallery, we take in its given structure and attempt to align the proper elements of that structure in terms of our given motive. The sense of appreciation that we enjoy after the act of appreciation may be mistaken for the appreciation itself, but the sense is merely a tale of reminiscence.

The appreciation of the child/snake situation occurs in the moment, too. When we look back on it, we can analyze the process, but the analysis is not the process. It leaves facts in its wake, but the facts are not the act, and the act is what we wish to indicate when we speak in moral terms. We feel comfortable with this sort of arrangement in similar cases of activity, like painting or juggling. We understand that instruction in painting or juggling does not effectively capture the act, and we do not expect that a manual detailing the performance of the activity, even if the manual were complete in every detail, would enable us to paint or juggle the first time, every time or even any time.

The intuitionists got it right regarding our moral situation. Moralizing occurs within the speaker, and the speaker’s report inevitably misses a key element of morality when the report attributes moral properties or refers to moral facts. But what seems to be going on is not the inscrutable machination of a non-natural moral sense. Instead, it looks like the enactment of a method.

______________________________________________________________________________* I think that is because all motive devolves to a single motive – der Wille zur Macht.

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Jun 11 2019
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atheism, biology, medical ethics, medicine, philosophy, politics, theism

No Clarence, You Do Not Have Clearance

Justice Thomas recently wrote a 20 page concurrence to a decision about an abortion law. Someday, this exposition will be renowned as the most extensive, inside-out examination of the genetic fallacy in history. Every textbook will cite it, eventually. To hasten its ascendance, I will make these observations on the Justice’s writing.

First some background. The law at issue is one which restricts abortion in a number of ways, only one of which really got the Judge going.

“This statute makes it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in Indiana when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics. §§16–34–4–1 to 16–34–4–8; see §16–34– 4–1(b) (excluding “lethal fetal anomal[ies]” from the definition of disability).”

We’ll get back to the “child” verbiage. What’s the upshot of this provision, the one which provoked such logorrhea from Thomas?

“Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.2”

Wow, that is a big claim, and it is going to need a lot of support. But what he brings is: “Eugenicists are bad. Things Eugenicists like are bad. This is the sort of thing Eugenicists like, so it is bad.”

On the surface, his argument is just bad, mundane, and not even original. But he is a supreme court justice, so he digs deeper, and we get to see all the sub-strata of the genetic fallacy, and so why it, like all informal fallacies, merits its label.

The first purpose of the genetic fallacy is to shut down one’s opponents. By nature, it contains an accusation of guilt by association, not only for the position which it seeks to defame but for any advocates of that position as well.

Quite a bit of Thomas’ concurrence enumerates the deplorable sayings of Galton, Sanger, Stoddard, etc.. These are people to be reviled and feared. Galton originated the notion of social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest. Thomas provides this example of Stoddard’s toxicity:

Stoddard feared that without “artificial barriers,” the races “will increasingly mingle, and the inevitable result will be the supplanting or absorption of the higher by the lower types.”

But, wait a minute. If the higher types and lower types can’t keep it straight, then how are they ‘types’ at all? This kind of contradiction permeates eugenics, especially when it comes to the use of birth control to advance the cause. If a woman chooses to use birth control to give her children a better economic heritage, or to spare her child a brief and impoverished existence, she would seem to have met the superior-type criteria. Which brings us to the real problem with eugenics: It inevitably classifies on phenotype, with an assumption that the genotype follows. Furthermore, even their assessment of phenotype is hopelessly crude, because it includes social status as big part of the phenotype’s constitution. The blond hair and blue eyes come with a 3-piece suit.

It turns out that the eugenicists are just a bunch of crackpots who don’t really understand genetics, not the scary, evil geniuses referenced in Thomas’ argument. And that’s one problem with the genetic fallacy in general. To taint a position, the associated villains must have some potency to their poison – they must be right to some extent, or at least attractive – yet they must also be wrong, to discredit the position, and repugnant. In the end, you can’t have it both ways.

But the Justice does not stop in the upper layers of the genetic fallacy; he is digging for gold. Underlying every good deployment of this fallacy, there is a slippery slope argument as well. Usually the slippery slope remains implied. It risks being overlooked, in that case. Justice Thomas is not about to let that happen.

If “the masses” were given “practical education in Birth Control”—for which there was “almost universal demand”—then the “Eugenic educator” could use “Birth Control propaganda” to “direct a thorough education in Eugenics” and influence the reproductive decisions of the unfit. Propaganda 5. In this way, “the campaign for Birth Control [was] not merely of eugenic value, but [was] practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.”

If you thought Sanger was bad, just wait. She was merely the vanguard. who aimed to soften us all up for the real assault.

And with today’s prenatal screening tests and other technologies, abortion can easily be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics. Indeed, the individualized nature of abortion gives it even more eugenic potential than birth control, which simply reduces the chance of conceiving any child. As petitioners and several amicus curiae briefs point out, moreover, abortion has proved to be a disturbingly effective tool for implementing the discriminatory preferences that undergird eugenics.

We are looking down a black diamond run. The last bit, however, brings us to the deeper reasons for rejecting genetic fallacies. In the course of his exposition, Justice Thomas reveals a profound misunderstanding of fetal anomalies, prenatal testing, and worst of all, Freakonomics (he must not have listened very carefully to the episode referenced on page 17). The genetic fallacy generally serves to smooth over such rough spots for its user. For Justice Thomas, it is a smoke bomb which he hopes will cover him while he slips past the implications of words like “child” tossed in to refer to – what? Does he mean zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus? What are the physiologic correlates of childhood? Or is it possession of a soul, and if so, just what the hell is a soul, and by what means do we know of it? He concludes:

Although the Court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever. Having created the constitutional right to an abortion, this Court is dutybound to address its scope.

Indeed, you can’t hide forever.

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May 20 2019
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atheism, intelligent design, philosophy, psychology, theism

The Dilemma of Divine Purpose

It is often said that God is the source of human (and indeed, animal) purpose, and that without God, there is no purpose.

But what is God’s purpose, and who can say?

Let’s dispense with the common confabulation offered in response: God’s purpose is to do  just what he does and to be just like he is. Of course, this response defines the difference between an explanation and an assertion, and when it is stated as an explanation, it makes a very tight circle.

When God acts, he manifests divine will.

God created the world, so the world is meant to be a manifestation of divine will. In other words, it is meant to be just what it is.

Any questions?

But there is no real answer within the common confabulation. Maybe the question can be reframed to elicit a precise response.

Can God say why he created the world?

This is not to say that he need explain himself to us. Is he able to explain it for himself ?

If creation was instrumental to some purpose for God – perhaps a cure for loneliness – then creation is actually dependent upon some set of determinants of divine will, i.e. circumstances to which the divine will responds.

If so, whence those cicumstances? Even if God can say, we all (us via God) are beholden to those circumstances. For all of us, the circumstances simply exist, and therefore, all of us simply exist.

But what if creation was not instrumental? Let’s say God simply willed it. In that case, there is no divine insight in principle – not even a Muse to blame – and again, all of us simply exist.

So,  we all simply exist, God too.

 

 

 

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