cheese it, the cops!

MMA: philosophy vs physics

I do see signs that physics is coming to its senses, or sort of trying to scrutinize its own Hegelian Idealism critically. It doesn't really have the tools, though. Man it's been a long sad tale of bald logical contradictions and 'we're-living-in-an-hallucination' horseshit. A few links from my back-in-the-day attempts to bodyslam.

what's gone wrong with physics

so, so wrong

miserably, horribly wrong. wrong.

did you know that reality itself is the result of an idealized observer stipulated by physicists? (plus they think they proved that by experiment or something)

Stephen Hawking: prince of a guy, miserable philosotaster

The sad thing is that philosophers deferred to physicists as authorities through the whole 20th century, and let them get away with murder, really, even when the jive was uberblatant.

I think the principle of theory choice has been, not: what is the most modest or plausible conclusion we can draw from these particles going through these slits, but what will make outsiders go "that's so cool! that's so trippy!" They're really good at math, though.

 

 

 

 

Philosophy v Science

Got an assertion for you: philosophy since the 17th century, even as it screams 'science science science' is completely incompatible with science and is fighting a rearguard action for spirit. I mean rationalists, empiricists, idealists, phenomenologists, positivists, etc. Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment science are not complements, but opponents. This is obvious above all in the 'idea idea,' that we're experiencing our own mental contents, not a world. It's a disastrous move, and a move directly away from the world studied by science. 

The most hilarious version is positivism: here's our contribution to science: you have to reduce every experience and all knowledge to 'auto-psychological objects' (Carnap). That has to do with absolutely anything but science. First step in the double-blind study: reduce it to the immediate contents of your own consciousness. Maybe you think the dream argument helped science. Or Hegel screaming obsessively insisting on the scientific status of Absolute Idealism. Or Hume's ideas and external-world scepticism. Maybe Kant's characterization of space and time as forms of perception helped someone's geology or something? (No but it led physics into screeching nonsense. Check 'Science' tab at right for much more). Or Spinoza's monism. Or Malebrache's occasionalism. Or Wittgenstein's language games. Philosophy has been at war with science the whole time.

Science presupposes a world outside of human consciousness which we can know. In fact, we all presuppose that. "Enlightenment" philosophy is mostly just an attempt to undermine this claim, or phutz with it for generations, trying to answer questions of its own manufacture.

I do a whole bunch of this in Entanglements: a System of Philosophy.

 

violence, violins, silence

one thing about 'science': surprisingly, the word seems to turn off all critical reasoning faculties. but of course you have to like the conclusion; then any argument is a good enough argument, as in this tissue of strange fallacies by lisa feldman barrett in the new york times, arguing that speech can be violence and that she has a scientific basis for distinguishing speech that is from speech that isn't.  

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

the argument runs like this: what causes physical harm is violence. stress causes physical harm. words can cause stress. so words can be violence. as usual, the neurology does nothing at all, especially if you already knew that stress can cause physical harm. but it describes the harm: stress = violence shrinks telomeres. so i wonder what else shrinks telomeres; it's all violence.

seriously, boiling down the argument, it's this: doing anything that stresses someone out is assault.  think about that for just a minute, alright? 

whyyyyyyy

i really don't have any twitter skills. i'd like to launch #whytheysuck, though. and in any forum, i'd like to hear your candidates: people who are more or less universally adored and horribly overrated, or who face untreated sucking issues. it's like an intervention; we're doing it because we care, for the suckers' own good. they will never stop sucking and start blowing until they admit they have a sucking problem

why stephen hawking sucks

why bob dylan sucks

@CrispinSartwell

please clarify

now, perhaps it's not clear whether hawking (or if he's getting feynman right, feynman) is actually asserting that every possible universe is actual, that is, asserting, for example, that all possible incompatible physical theories are simultaneously true, or that the universe is exhaustively described by newton's physics, and is not, or that stephen hawking both does and does not exist, and so on. (these would be entailments of the view.) going to need a long run at 'possible,' i think. but what hawking asserts is that each possible universe exists 'each with its own probability.' now i would really, really like to see him or someone pay off on that.

i know what might be meant by, say, 'santa claus probably exists.' this is epistemic probability: we have more reason to think he exists than not (as of course we do). but then, to say that he exists, but exists with a certain probability, or that he or indeed the universe, exists 72.3%: i don't know what that can mean. i wonder whether the sort of existence that this universe has is probable existence rather than actual existence? or is probable existence actual existence or actually not? whatever probable existence is, could something probably exist and not exist at all? 

anyway, 'existence' seems to me bivalent: one either exists or one does not. probably existing just isn't existing, probably? no idea what could be meant. but the formula is this: all possible alternative histories do exist, but each exists with a certain probability. good heavens! that they do exist entails that the probability that they exist is 1, doesn't it? for example, before the race, we might assign a probability of 5-2 to secretariat's winning. but after secretariat does in fact win the race, the probability that he won the race is 1. so if each possible universe does exist, then the probability that it exists is 1 (on a 0-1 scale). anyway...

against stephen hawking

on splice today: why they suck (2): stephen hawking. really the topic is contemporary physics, which i've been attacking on and off for years, with mixed success. hit the 'science' tab, below right, and scroll down for some of the discussion. 

the point of 'why they suck' is to attack people who have been placed above criticism, people who cannot be attacked (or their ideas, or songs, etc). i want to do critiques on things and people that provoke the 'you can't say that!' response. i think really we often engage in apparently-unanimous idolatry of members of our species that isn't good for the people treated that way and definitely isn't good for ourselves or our art or our ideas. sheer peer pressure is not a good way to form tastes or figure out what to believe. and when the whole world gets unanimous, it really is extremely likely that everyone will pretend not to notice or really will not notice the sucky part.

so, because it's hawking, or just any apparently super-genius physics professor, people happily swallow things they cannot and should not possibly believe: the universe has every possible history, all of which we produce by observation. you can't even begin to make that anything like coherent. and yet you're flummoxed by the blackboard of scribbled equations.

ok, just to nail a couple of things. 'the universe has every possible history' is a pretty crisp formulation, but it nevertheless runs maximally afoul of occam's razor: it postulates as many entities as any theory of anything can possibly postulate: every thing that could possibly exist has existed. i am not sure myself whether or to what extent the razor is a good principle of theory choice; it would be, in my opinion, only if more ontologically economical theories were more likely to be true. i don't see quite why that should be the case. but i know that hawking makes it his first principle of theory choice and then commits the strongest possible violation of it a few sentences later. that's a mistake by anyone's standards.

well, he doesn't say these are criteria of theory choice; they are standards for generating a 'real model'; if the 'model' is 'real' then it will have these features. just to quibble: by real he means 'true': the model is real, i suppose; there it is, expressed in the text or the equations. only it's incoherent and false. i would prefer to formulate this by asking what is a good explanation, which would also mean a true explanation. these are very vexed and complex issues, but they are handled by people like hawking in, let's say, a stunningly cavalier fashion. even the standards of theory choice he gives are sort of an eclectic checklist from the history of answers to these questions, giving you a little occam, a little logical positivism, and a little popper, along with that utterly vague and arbitrary thing about arbitrariness and adjustments (2).

i am aware that the book i'm reading is 'popularized': good heavens i'm choking on the sub-atomic particles as soccer balls etc.: a lot of this sort of writing has a very condescending quality. maybe there is much much more sophisticated thinking about explanation, theory choice, modeling, etc. underneath? but if there were, it wouldn't look this bad on the surface i think. hawking has argued - and many people, even philosophers, take this stance implicitly or explicitly - that science has replaced philosophy. i don't think so, because hawking and such so desperately need much more precision about basic terms, categories, and the ground-clearing assumptions. like: 'how do we recognize a good theory?' being a killer mathematician or a good collider of particles doesn't necessarily help you with these tasks.

but really it's the crazy, casual apparent subjectivism that i would most viscerally reject, and which is also incompatible with everything else (such as stating that the universe begins with a bang). it's just german idealism again, i tell you; dead as a doornail in philosophy, for extremely good reason.

 

edgar allan poe, the great philosopher

earlier in the year i did a series of entries on poe's eureka, which was published in 1848 (text of the essay here). i have really basted in it now, and am working toward some sort of illustrated edition with the wonderful artist (and beautiful lover) jane irish. i was saying things like 'reminds me of kierkegaard, but i'm not saying it's comparable to kierkegaard', etc. now, however, i regard the thing with kind of unbounded admiration, which i will express in the following terms.

there is no greater work in philosophy or in natural philosophy, in cosmology or in aesthetics, in the 19th century. i would say there is no more important work, but i don't actually believe that it had any influence, selling just a few copies. (one possibility: it might have leaked into european physics via baudelaire's translation?) 

 

[remark on the text with the image above: it represents a position that poe is ridiculing. there are no degrees of impossibility; something either is or ain't impossible. if it is impossible to imagine a limitless space, and impossible to imagine a limited space, they are exactly equally impossible to imagine. that's not the only spot where he sounds like a slash-and-burn analytic philosopher.]

eureka begins with a methodological essay, in the typically poean form of a letter from the future, found by poe in a corked bottle and dated 2848. in a semi-successful and sort of half-assed satirical way, it attacks rationalism and empiricism, or aristotelian and baconian science, on the grounds that the worst possible idea is to restrict methodologies before you even start your research. and he really attacks the idea that there can be only two roads to truth, or some sort of synthesis of them (as in kant and hegel).

human knowledge - including scientific knowledge - may come through careful observation/experimentation or plodding applications of logical principles to things already known etc. but the real breakthroughs are intuitive, or poetical, or aesthetic, and he quotes kepler among others as saying just that: i guessed these things. (cf einstein: there was little evidence for his biggest ideas when he put them forward: they were confirmed retroactively; they came in flashes of aesthetic/mathematical intuition.) 

then he proceeds to blow you away by doing it himself: he gives you extremely clear statements of big-bang-big-crunch cosmology, the cosmological principle, and the multiverse hypothesis. there are possible gropings toward dark matter, the curvature of space, black holes, and many other wild and possibly true notions. now, if anyone else was putting anything like that down in the mid-nineteenth century, i would appreciate someone telling me who it was. (he calls the method intuitive or poetical, but it also included reading all the science and philosophy coming out of europe, and poe read the european languages; the intuitive part comes after absorbing all the available science).

the big bang/expanding universe hypothesis is often attributed to georges lemaitre, in 1927. lemaitre groped much as poe did to name the origin: he used the term 'primeval atom'.  poe uses 'primordial Particle'. they conceive it on exactly the same terms. explanations run out for both when it comes to what forces caused this particle, containing all the universe's matter at an excruciatingly dense single point,to explode, but it did: and then matter and perhaps space itself exploded outward in a sphere. eventually the force of this explosion is expended and the dominant gravitational pull for each particle is back toward the center. then the thing crunches at an ever-accelerating rate, etc. after the first event, everything proceeds by regular physical laws. the whole picture is in eureka, i tell you.

that is not to say that everything he says is true or that physicists have come to every single one of his results. for one thing, he does not have sub-atomic particles. but who did? there could be no such things by the definition of 'atom' from the ancients (the smallest indivisible bits). he thinks all atoms are the same, for the universe is the utmost complexity generated by the most simple possible means (it is maximally beautiful in that sense). but perhaps it will turn out that quarks and hadrons etc compose all atoms, or even that they themselves somehow consist of the same sub-sub-atomic particles. also, he thought the universe was contracting rather than expanding at this stage. also his account of planetary formation was wrong, etc.

now, it will be more impressive to you that he anticipated einstein and hawking et al than that he anticipated me, but i have to find the latter impressive too. he should be read as holding that knowledge is merely true belief, deleting the justification condition. he has a relational ontology and an ecstatic vision of all objects as entanglements and of all things as in relation to all things (directly, by gravitational and repulsive physical forces). he centralizes aesthetics in human inquiry, and holds aesthetic properties to be real properties of the universe. (going the other way again, he also gives a clear statement of the coherence theory of truth, which i do reject completely.) (and, to throw in a bit more criticism: the title is unfortunate, and the quality of the writing is a mixed bag; poe's writing is a mixed bag throughout - quite wonderful at times, at others overwrought, clotted, over-elaborate.)

he ends in an ecstatic positive pantheistic vision, reminiscent of emerson, which is extremely surprising, given that he ragged on the transcendentalists mercilessly throughout his career. (the whole is an amazing combination of pointed rationality and epiphanic intuition.) i like this because - honestly - poe was extremely dark, and came by that out of an incredibly difficult life. but it makes me glad too, for that positive vision was almost the last thing he wrote before his death, passed out on the streets of baltimore.

 

then again, there are many anticipations of the ideas scattered among his writings throughout.

 

are you perfectible?

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity."

edgar allan poe

ps. eat me, emerson!

well, i share poe's pessimism on this, but the flat formulation is too strong. human exertion has had and will have many appreciable effects on humanity; think about longevity since poe's time, for example, though of course things can regress too. but what emerson and poe are talking about is human moral perfectibility. here i do not think that we have seen any significant improvement since we clawed like swamp thing up from the primordial ooze; nor do i expect to.

perhaps you are now thinking to yourself: well, perhaps we could work on the genome, or hit singularity, and be much much better than we are right now. what i might note is that the people futzing with the genes or the medications or the information technology will be us. these projects, to whatever extent they are pursued or pursuable, will be pursued by people who themselves are vain and venal, self-deluded, self-seeking, megalomaniacal, obsessive, thick as bricks, and hosts for the imp of the perverse.

say they come to believe that they know what morality consists in and impose it through genomics or software. (1) they'll turn out to have been wrong about the content of morality; (2) the actual implementation of this, as any human system, will benefit some and harm others, and perhaps exponentially increase human hierarchy. i myself regard that hierarchy as central to our evil; (3) implementation will be chaotic, flawed, back-and-forth, cowardly; for god's sake you'll have politicians involved and shit; (4) the unintended consequences will swamp the intended effects, leaving us extinct or at least profoundly puzzled and irritated.

no such thing as water

this npr commentary, in which the physicist adam frank does a very old thing - asserts that physics shows that "there are no solid objects" - really shows an endemic problem with science these days: let's go for the flashiest formulation while displaying the fact that reflecting on our own concepts is not exactly our strong suit. no, physics cannot possibly show that there are no solid objects, for that would entail, for example, that a chair can't actually hold up your butt, alright? now, what it shows, instead, is that solidity is surprising. we might say that it shows that what we meant all along by solidity is not exactly what we thought we meant. but it leaves all the objects in the universe with just the solidity they had before. it doesn't show, for example, that you could pass your hand through a tree after all, though that is quite how it sounds. when we found out water was h2O, we found out something about what we had always meant by 'water', for example, not that there is no such thing as water, right? surely you want to think about science as discovering things about this very world, not as showing that there is no this world after all.

it all came true

thought i might put up a few old op-eds, and then maybe i'll try to do some of the rock criticism too. this is from the philly inquirer, i'm going to say '96: let us together with confidence place our future on the broad shoulders of headless human clones

cant 2

one thing i would tack on to the anti-kant rant is this: usually in the hist of ideas you'd connect enlightenment philosophy to enlightenment science, as though philosophy drove the rise of modern science or perhaps emerged from it. at any rate they are supposed to be two sides of same development. it's not that there's nothing to be said for this, but i think the extreme tensions are more conspicuous. i think most of the philosophers of the era are fighting a rearguard action against the material world described in science and on behalf of the human spirit as the source of knowledge or, for heaven's sake, reality. one central piece of this tension is the representational theory of mind or the 'idea idea': the notion that we are only immediately acquainted with the contents of our own consciousness. that never helped anyone do any science, and establishing that you are not dreaming, for example, is not a scientific project: it's entirely irrelevant, say, to whether planetary orbits are elliptical or whatever. (same with any sort of logical positivist reduction of objects to sense contents, etc.)

but now we might think about berkeleyan or kantian or hegelian or schopenhauerian idealism in relation to darwinian evolution. if you take darwin seriously in any way whatever, then the 'forms of sensibility' have just got to be responses to the actual physical environment. creatures who constructed space, time, and causation and imposed them on the world, if there is a world - creatures who lived entirely in the forms of their subjective or collective sensibility - would be extinct. our senses, our experience, if natural selection is anything like true, are adaptations to a real physical environment. right? i think it was obvious that the thing was false before darwin, but kant's philosophy - to say nothing of hegel's - is entirely incompatible with any sort of scientific naturalism. that doesn't entail that it's false. but it does entail that you can rationally believe at most one of them.

 

poe the cosmologist

here is columbia physicist brian greene:

In an infinite universe [more precisely, I would say, in a sufficiently large universe], most regions lie beyond our ability to see, even using the most powerful telescopes possible. Although light travels enormously quickly, if an object is sufficiently distant, then the light it emits - even light that may have been emitted shortly after the big bang - will simply not have sufficient time to reach us. . . . The important point is that regions beyond a certain distance...lie beyond our cosmic horizon. . . .

Using a two-dimensional analogy, we can compare the expanse of space, at a given moment of time, to a giant patchwork quilt (with circular patches in which each patch represents a single cosmic horizon. Someone located in the center of a patch can have interacted with anything that lies in the same patch, but has had no contact with anything lying in a different patch, because they're too far away.... The same idea applies in three dimensions, where the cosmic horizons - the patches in the cosmic quilt - are spherical, and the same conclusion holds: sufficiently distant patches lie beyond one another's spheres of influence and so are independent realms. (The Hidden Reality, 32)

and here is poe, from eureka (1848).

We comprehend, then, the insulation of our Universe. We perceive the isolation of that - of all that which we grasp with the senses. We know that there exists one cluster of clusters - a collection around which, on all sides, extend the immeasurable wildernesses of a Space to all human perception untenanted. [This a spherical space, for Poe.] But because on the confines of this Universe of Stars we are compelled to pause, through want of further evidence from the senses, is it right to conclude that, in fact, there is no material point beyond that which have thus been permitted to attain? Have we, or have we not, an analogical right to this inference that this perceptible Universe - that this cluster of clusters - is but one of a series of clusters of clusters, the rest of which are invisible through distance - through the diffusion of their light being so excessive, ere it reaches us, as not to produce on our retinae a light impression - or from there being no such emanation as light at all - or, lastly, from the interval being so vast, that the electric tidings of their presence in Space, have not yet - through the lapsing myriads of years - been enabled to traverse that interval. . . [We have a right to infer] - let us say, rather, to imagine - an interminable succession of the "clusters of clusters" or of "Universes" more or less similar. (Library of America Poetry and Tales, 1328-29)

 

more poesy

alright, i'm grappling fairly seriously with poe's eureka. it is brilliant.

a few remarks about genre. there is evidently a theory abroad that it's some kind of parody or satire of a scientific paper. not at all. he called it a "prose poem", which really is a joke with a point. it is a completely serious and extremely profound essay in natural philosophy. and it is a very serious scientific treatise by someone who knows himself not to be a working astronomer or physicist, but who has assiduously studied the available writings of those who are. it is fully, pointedly, rational, and systematically presents arguments and proofs.

now, there is a fair amount of religious language, but it is used to express physical laws and events. i'm not saying poe didn't believe in god, but the god he uses here is a deist god, or is explicitly identified with the physical laws of the universe. if the religious language was read out completely, it would still work beautifully, but also there is a sincere undertow that betrays a certain profundity. understand that he's writing in america in 1848, alright? you're going to have to do some translation.

i am going to do a long entry on his method and epistemology, which are extremely sharp and interesting. also i will just remark that the metaphysics and the epistemology are similar to mine in entanglements (forthcoming). i think it is one of the great american philosophical essays. 

one question that robinson is asking in the nyrb piece and that others have asked is whether it anticipates bang-and-crunch cosmology. oh yes it does. but there is more. i don't know why i'm always talking about physics when i don't actually know very much about it. but some things are pretty frigging obvious. so, consider the 'cosmological principle' in 20th c physics. 

In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the distribution of matter in the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act uniformly throughout the Universe, and should, therefore, produce no observable irregularities in the large scale structuring over the course of evolution of the matter field that was initially laid down by the Big Bang. (Wikipedia)

(then they go on, sadly, to define it in terms of observers. poe is aware that he is trying to describe the distribution of matter in the universe, not his own or someone else's mental images. i don't figure he deserves a lot of credit for that; physicists' mistaking their own discipline for psychology seems like an extremely difficult mistake to make.) but anyway, not only does poe formulate it, he formulates it beautifully. and he is arguing for it on the grounds of spherical expanding universe originating at an infinitely dense point of unity. in 1848. he calls what makes it bang a 'divine volition', partly to signal that his own explanation runs out there. here is poe: 

I mean to say that our solar system is to be understood as affording a generic instance of these agglomerations [other solar systems, galaxies, and so forth], or, more correctly, of the ulterior conditions at which they arrived. . . . We shall be inclined to think that no two stellar bodies in the Universe -- whether suns, planets or moons -- are particularly, while all are generally, similar. Still less, then, can we imagine any two assemblages of such bodies -- any two "systems" -- as having more than a general resemblance. (It is not impossible that some unlooked-for optical improvement may disclose to us, among innumerable varieties of systems, a luminous sun, encircled by luminous and non-luminous rings, within and without and between which, revolve luminous and non-luminous planets, attended by moons having moons -- and even these latter again having moons.) Our telescopes, at this point, thoroughly confirm our deductions. Taking our own solar system, then, as merely a loose or general type of all, we have so far proceeded in our subject as to survey the Universe under the aspect of a spherical space, throughout which, dispersed with merely general equability, exist a number of but generally similar systems.

Let us now, expanding our conceptions, look upon each of these system as in itself an atom; which in fact it is, when we consider it as but one of the countless myriads of systems which constitute the Universe. Regarding all, then, as but colossal atoms, each with the same ineradicable tendency to Unity which characterizes the actual atoms of which it consists -- we enter at once upon a new order of aggregations. The smaller systems, in the vicinity of a larger one, would, inevitably, be drawn into still closer vicinity. A thousand would assemble here; a million there -- perhaps here, again, even a billion -- leaving, thus, immeasurable vacancies in space. And if, now, it be demanded why, in the case of these systems -- of these merely Titanic atoms -- I speak, simply, of an "assemblage," and not, as in the case of the actual atoms, of a more or less consolidated agglomeration: -- if it be asked, for instance, why I do not carry what I suggest to its legitimate conclusion, and describe, at once, these assemblages of system-atoms as rushing to consolidation in spheres -- as each becoming condensed into one magnificent sun -- my reply is that mellonta tauta -- I am but pausing, for a moment, on the awful threshold of the Future. For the present, calling these assemblages "clusters," we see them in the incipient stages of their consolidation. Their absolute consolidation is to come. (this is at page 1323-24 of the library of america poetry and tales)

as explicitly as possible, he argues that the matter is roughly evenly distributed through the universe if you consider it at a large enough scale and so it can be described mathematically, but if you zoom in to any region, you see radically uneven distributions of matter, each local region being unique.

 

 

Daniel Dennett and Free Will and Salon

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper
And I was free. -- Ray and Saliers

When I turn to philosophy and pick up a new work, the technical stuff makes me think that perhaps the idea to burn the Great Library of Alexandria was not such a bad one after all. Langugae that serves only to drive the potential reader away deserves to be forgotten. Of course, doctoral disseratations don't succeed so much by provoking new thought as by providing variations on an accepted theme of bullshit. The great thinkers succeed in reaching us by doing other things that producing tomes suitable more for tombs that thought, realization and excited discussion.

Daniel Dennett is an interesting and provocative thinker; while I like his simile about human beings as "moist robots", he seems here to be edging away from that. The robot part takes us so far, and then there's an entirely different set of functions,problems and issues. Two things I liked here is the issue of intentionality -- free will requires philosophical intention, that is, conscienious direction and awareness and it requires the ability to recognize and prevent manipulation. The moral actor has to go into situations with eyes wide open and a poker face. The other, which I think is implied, is that the initial reaction to radically new perspectives seems to be to regard it as either naive or cynical, until you think about it.

My other thought is simple. I find Dennett's technical philosophy, the neuroscientist-philosopher stuff incomprehensible, but when he writes or speaks to communicate with actual living people, he's very good indeed. Is that a trend? Crispin's thought is much the same way, although since he doesn't babble about neurons and synapses and blood volume and all  the rest, he's more approachable. Sartre was the same way -- you can read "Being and Nothingness", or you can read "The Words" or "No Exit and three Plays" and  the first will drive you to distraction, solitary despair and  isolated absinthe sucking through a sugar cube; the others will engage, provoke conversastion and maybe...cause thought. 

Maybe even in Salon...it's a thought. 

 

idealized

one thing about the assertions of the observer-dependence of reality in physics: they are not about any actual observers or human beings, but about idealized or stipulated observers. so, wigner's mathematical reconstruction of observer-dependence cannot and does not engage with actual observers. he says, for example, well if this person has a sense impression in this situation, then so does that person, in the same situaton. he even stipulates that two of his perople will answer the same to queries: did you see a flash? yes. otherwise you can't mathematize this at all. but look, any actual particular person in any actual particular situation might be asleep, or hallucinating, or blind, or distracted, or psychotic, etc. and of course actual people respond all sorts of different ways to questions, and if you asked an actual observer whether they saw a flash, you might get, "who's asking?" or "eat me" or "do you think shirley hates me?" or "christ, what is it with you and flashes?" we stipulate idealized observers who have the same experiences and the same responses in the same circumstances.

now, think about that for a moment. these people are asserting flatly that the universe literally depends ontologically on idealized observers we just made up. space and time, what are they? they are aspects of non-existent experience in the non-existent heads of non-existent people. the fictional characters we just invented are the actual creators of reality. it would be hard to come up with a more bizarre, mmmm, religious hypothesis: reality, including we ourselves, originates in and depends on the fictional sense experiences of characters we created.

now why do we stipulate identical observers, or make up idealized observers? because actually, we do believe in an external world, and we can't deal at all with the entailments of the subjectivism we stumbled so incompetently into. if you were serious about the idea that reality was dependent on actual observers, you could not do science at all, nor should you. so, because we are stuck in this idea of observer-dependence, we have to try to get something like a world out of subjective experiences so we can do science at all. so then we just stipulate idealized observers to make observatiion tantamount to objectivity. i can't tell, but i think wigner's equations might work fine even if a flash is a burst of photons rather than a sense impression in a stipulated subjectivity: something happening out there rather than in the nowhere head of nobody. i've got this funny feeling that even wigner believes that there could be actual photon bursts happening outside his own mind.

so, on this account, physics is not about the universe or reality or something, it is about the 'experiences' of fictional characters. is that really how you guys want it? that's your most considered account of what you are doing? because surely it would be sensible to lose interest in the whole thing at that point.

but even if that's what some of these folks say they are doing, due to a series of confusions, it's not in fact what they are doing. they are studying the actual universe as it exists out there; otherwise this stuff would have no practical application, etc. what's really wrong is not what's going on in the collider, but the super-half-assed framework it's being jammed into. i'm just betting that we can do better at reconstructing the basic conceptual structure around the actual experiments and results. lee smolin and others are trying, i think.

wigner 2

i realize that i am getting a bit pissy and obsessed, but man i just feel this wigner thing is wacky at a hundred junctures. he defines the "wave functions" that describe the universe as being concerned exclusively with "sense impressions": given an impression of a flash at t, there is x probability of an impression of a flash at t1. oh man i don't even know where to start on this. first of all, i don't believe in sense impressions, and there is a whole theory of perception here which is controversial, unargued, and for which there can be no scientific evidence in my view. i'll send you to j.l. austin's sense and sensibilia: then you can watch the flashes as the idea of sense impressions explodes. but anyway, if you just define science at the outset as being concerned exclusively with sense impressions, you again don't need anything else to establish observer-dependence. only it is an unbelievably wrong characterization of science, or at a minimum one that i believe wigner cannot get anywhere close to establishing.

'i have direct knowledge only of my sensations', writes wigner, at the same moment austin was blowing this up. so, would you say i have no direct knowledge of my cat? or i don't know it's raining; i know only that i am having certain sensations? funny but in the usual case i have no beliefs about, much less knowledge about, my own sensations. but i do know it's raining out there. it is not raining in my head, because little drops of water cannot fall from the sky in my head. here's an assertion: i know that it is raining outside as directly as i can know anything.

materialism, argues wigner, is 'incompatible with quantum theory'. why? because we can doubt the existence of the material world but we can't doubt the existence of our own consciousness and the sense impressions allegedly contained therein. i don't even know where to start here either. that surely has nothing to do with quantum theory; it's just descartes or epistemological foundationalism based on sense contents in a representational theory of mind. i believe this whole position has been exploded within philosophy, but even if it hasn't been, surely we can see that wigner (a) isn't doing science, (b) is deploying uncritically a series of highly problematic philosophical claims, and (c) does nothing at all to defend those claims. (to defend them, if they were not indefensible, would take a whole career.)

hammering wigner 1

i'm going to pull a little physics back out of comment threads to the top. i am in quite the little dialogue with my cousin boaz nash, who is a physicist. the paper by eugene wigner that boaz brings my attention to is a really clear statement of the process by which physicists got from experiments to absolute idealism. of course, in my opinion there is no possible legitimate move from one to the other. i am going to gear some comments to quotes.

"The statement that [something] 'exists' means only that: (a) it can be measured, hence uniquely defined, and (b) that its knowledge is useful for understanding past phenomena and in helping foresee future events."

this is an extremely clear example of what i am complaining about. so, where did eugene wigner get his his theory of existence? it should be completely clear that he brought it to and did not derive it from science: no empirical data bear on this definition of existence at all. also, this is just not what anyone, including eugene wigner, does mean by the claim that something exists. i exist, eugene, can i be measured and uniquely defined? is that what it means to say i exist? (b) is just the pragmatic theory of truth again, and i say that it is wrong. but even if it isn't, it is not any sort of scientific result.

now, wigner came up with a series of important equations for quantum mechanics. but, his definition of 'existence': how much critical scrutiny has he subjected it to? has he considered any objections whatever? not to put too fine a point on it, but is he any more competent to define 'existence' than i am to generate important equations? does he give any argument for this? and is anything else necessary to make the world dependent on consciousness? he is doing philosophy, but carelessly, incompetently, and without any actual work to make the definitions and theories stick. he is so not entitled to these assumptions, and i think that in their absence, none of this other stuff about consciousness and reality follows at all.

if 'exists' means 'can be measured', the observer-dependence of absolutely everything follows immediately, ok? the science is neither here not there. 

when a scientist starts defining notions like 'existence', 'truth', 'reality' and so on, they often want to be taken to be sort of informal: like, this is what i practically mean by 'truth', so now let's go on. it's almost like it's a trivial assumption: here's what i'll mean when i say something exists: it can be measured etc. like it's a practical, hands-on characterization of scientific procedure, or the underbrush you have to clear out to get to the actual work. only, no it's not: it's an entire metaphysical theory of the universe for which there is no argument, and it governs the way the results of experiments are formulated. in general, everywhere, this is the problem with science: the assumptions one brings very very often control the results and are very very often accepted uncritically.

honestly, i want all the physicists in the world, starting with hawking, to withdraw these claims immediately in their entirety and go back to what they can actually do. i just kind of wish i was a macarthur genius or a nobel prize winner. then i would publicly demand that the claims of observer-dependence be withdrawn until the totally-destructive objections can be answered. this really is a very long and very bad mistake, i think!

observers and meanings

i don't seem to be able to interest any physicists in squabbling, but let me give a primary example of the sort of thing i mean. so, one idea is that time is relative to an 'observer', specifically because of time dilation, in which time is measured differently by different observers depending on their movement relative to one another. now, this appears to be a quasi-kantian assertion: time is dependent on perception; it is a mental phenomenon or necessarily has a mental or subjective aspect.

but however, as far as i can see, the thought experiments that drive this have absolutely nothing to do with observation. two clocks travelling in different directions display the phenenomen. two plants would age at different rates relatively to each other, or two samples of the same element would undergo radioactive decay at apparently different rates. the thing is no more observer-dependent than radioactive decay in a single sample.

probably physicists must know this; there is no place for observers in the equations and so on. so from one angle it is just a terminological convenience. but i would think of it as a globally misleading terminological mistake. it freaks people into accepting an informally subjective universe as though that was a matter of course. obviously, i completely repudiate the sort of metaphysics that makes time relative to observers. but it rather irritates me that a whole century would assume something like that just because of an abuse of words. one asserts that time is observer-relative. perhaps 'what one really means' is true or something. but what one really said is false. words don't mean whatever you want them to mean.

what happens here is that you perform a thought-experiement: imagine that you were traveling east; now imagine you were traveling west; you're looking at a clock, etc. but you got confused between describing a thought experiment and descibing describing a thought experiment, so that you put the thinker you imagined yourself to be into the imagined world as though it were a necessary feature of that world. you imagined imagining an experiment, when you should have just been imagining an experiment. you made the consciousness which is necessary to perform any thought experiment necessary to the results of that experiment. i do think philosophy might have helped with some of this!

but this reading of relativity and also the subjectivist or phenomenalist reading of the uncertainty principle and so on, is also part of physics pr. it's so wild! only in its false form it's not that wild; it's just warmed-over german idealism. so try to state it in its true form.

what's gone wrong with physics

in my continuing quest to kill physics, let me speculate about what has gone so terribly wrong and led to routine claims such as these.

reality is observer-dependent

the principle of non-contradiction is false

the universe has every possible history

truth is what works in prediction

the unobserved past is indefinite

and so on. not that every physicist accepts these particular claims, though they are all asserted by hawking, e.g. but it is also the style of the claims: metaphysical, entirely non-empirical, sweepingly philosophical, wildly paradoxical, and so on. i am going to flatly assert this: no experimental data and no mathematical equation can serve as any evidence at all for any of these claims. you did not get to these claims scientifically; you could not have, and that is obvious.

i speculate that a lot of the super-genius physicists of the twentieth century had a philosophy course or two before they decided on their major, and i speculate that these were often taught by last-gasp german neo-kantians or late-blooming hegelian idealists. these were big metaphysical doctrines that they brought to their research.

then they presented their research as supporting these claims. on a generous reading, they are trying to express difficult science and reaching for big metaphors or something. and what i'd suggest there is: go back and develop another vocabulary, one that more literally or flatly or without hyperbole expresses what you're observing, perhaps. gravitate toward the minimal rather than the maximal formulation, the clearest rather than the coolest statement; surely this is what your own supposed method would supposedly suggest?

but they were also creating a sensation. every kid who has been exposed to these interpretations of quantum mechanics or string theory has thought that is so super-cool and trippy!  and the claims cannot be challenged, because you supposedly have to be a mathematical super-genius even to understand how they got there. but i would propose to demonstrate this, prove it every which way and as decisively as anything can be proven: they didn't get there at all, couldn't have. 

here's what i might mean by my claim that i can prove these things false or unmeaning, or demonstrate that you do not have evidence for them: when i'm done you will have to revise them extremely; you will quickly reach the point at which you will admit, perhaps with a tight smile, that you never meant any such thing, and that once we re-interpret all the terms in which the claims are couched, they turn out to be, for example, meaningful and internally coherent, which, as they stand, they so palpably are not. that, to anticipate the endgame, is what i mean by refutation; you couldn't defend what you said, or you didn't mean it at all because then you'd be talking nonsense. if you mean something else, then i will have go at that, but something tells me that just here things are going to sink into deep obscurity. what at first seemd bold and wild and clear will suddenly be shrouded in mathematical murk. at this point it will turn out that we just don't understand what you're saying, but we should rest assured that, if we did, we'd see something or other. just not the sort of stuff you hooked us with.

it is no wonder that people have connected twentieth-century physics to taoist or buddhist mysticism, for you are going to have to shatter your rational mind for good and all even to take a stab at believing it. on the other hand, one very badly misunderstands taoism if one thinks it holds that space and time are forms of consciousness or whatever it is that heisenberg declared. however, dropping a cat in a box and then asserting that it's neither alive nor not alive and both alive and not alive and neither dead nor not dead and both dead and not dead does have the quality of koan. one purpose of a koan is to break your affiliation with reason completely. you'd think it would be hard to keep doing physics after that repudiation. and then, your zen master is going to break open the black box of your skull with a stick and let the cat out.

i don't doubt that the universe is wild and surprising; i just doubt that it is so wild and so surprising that it is logically impossible. but once you've proven mathematically that it is, you have surely relieved yourself of the task of inquiring into it empirically. pick up your nobel and go home, bro.

one thing that i think will end up being a theme when we look back on the intellectual history of this period is that people really did start doing 'science' a priori. to discover continents or planets people had to move around and look. to conclude that there are 11 dimensions or infinitely many actual histories or exactly 44 universes, it's now enough to sit at home scribbling symbols. i wonder whether, looking back on it, we will believe again that actual universes can only actually be discovered through exploration out there. perhaps we just went through an ironic period in physics, an anti-scientific period. "abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe", write hawking and mlodinow. now, that is an example of the sort of approach that had to be overcome in order for science to be possible. also i don't think the logic is workable.

really it is quite amazing how smoothly this has apparently gone down for a century; when fichte made such claims, schelling refuted him 48 hours later. but plenty of people who could not possibly believe this stuff or even understand what it would mean to believe it, just start nodding along as soon as you say 'physics'. the super-specialization of the hands-on scientists and the genius image of the high-end theorists kind of stupefy dissent: they know what we cannot. it is a bad epistemic situation for people like hawking: there really isn't enough of an external critical community to put a check on the flights of fancy.

in particular, it is shocking that the great analytic philoosophers of the period just looked at sentences like that and tried to nod along. when heidegger issued gnomic triple-contradictions or t.h. green traced the whole universe to mind or something, g.e. moore and a.j. ayer gave them nothing back but ridicule: look here are pseudo-propositions addressing pseudo-problems that vanish like a poisonous mist if you start clarifying the terms. but they'd look at the same sentences produced by physicists and defer to their degrees. hawking has declared philosophy dead. awww, sometimes you just don't want to talk smack. 

stephen hawking, the takedown and against physics and more

 

physics or metaphysics?

i am going to speculate that high-end physics/cosmology has gone very far off the deep end. so, for example, stephen hawking has concluded on the basis - i guess? - of mathematics that "the universe has every possible history", and we're way into multiverses, infinitely many different spaces, and stuff. 

Dr. Tegmark, in his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” turns the idea on its head: The reason mathematics serves as such a forceful tool is that the universe is a mathematical structure. Going beyond Pythagoras and Plato, he sets out to show how matter, energy, space and time might emerge from numbers.

now, i'm afraid i do not understand the claim that the universe is a mathematical structure. does that mean that physical objects are abstract objects? well, you'll need to grapple with the fact that that cannot possibly be the case, given that abstract and concrete objects have extremely different sorts of properties, and hence cannot be identical. where is the number 5, bro? inside that star?

now it may sound crass to say it, but isn't whether there are other universes - whatever that means - an empirical question? (if not, i wouldn't think it's a scientific question at all.) you can stipulate universes, or invent them - but you can't discover them except in the usual human way: by actual experience. i should have said it's quite like insisting that you know the number of planets before looking at all, maybe from a biblical passage, or just by thinking about it real hard. a few decadesago  we called that "the dark ages".

the piece says that they're going beyond plato and pythagoras, but maybe they're just going back to the little stage where people were worshipping abstract objects and trying to view the physical universe either as an illusionistic scrim over the numbers and concepts, or as actually being made out of them. like i say, that's not just a puzzling formulation. if you tell me a wall is made of bricks, i understand what you're saying. if you tell me it's made out of 16 and 137, or emerges from them (causally?) it's going to take a lot to convince me that you mean anything at all. 

maybe, just perhaps, this stuff isn't science whatsoever. it certainly isn't science that involves things like experiments and systematic observation. perhaps we're back to the wildest metaphysical speculation. there's a lot to be said for that, i think, but that is also not the way it's being presented. indeed, hawking, for example is (a) doing philosophy all the time, (b) doing it very very badly, (c) denying that he's doing it at all. but if you want to believe whatever he says, go right ahead, because even if everyone believed that the universe has every possible history or whatever it may be, that will have no effects at all on this one.

more hawking

whore mocking

daddy, let's play science says!

"Scientists currently view our whole identity as something we construct, one fraction of a second to another.You are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative." that's from this week's radiolab (a public radio show; this bit kicks in at 18 minutes). also, it is extremely typical of the approach of that show, and, i say, of our culture in general at the moment, which is like a giant game of 'science says': hahaha you believed that one but science didn't say it!' and, very very often if you thought for just one second about what science says according to super-bourgeois media outlets such as, say, npr or the excruciatingly banal new yorker - you would wake up and smell the horseshit. so i wonder how science has demonstrated that 'you are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative'.

amazingly, science has coincided with fashionable literary theory and selfesteem guides for white women (at least as they stood in 1993, when the scientists were in grad school) , yet again. so: no doubt they saw your self in an mri (it's located in the pineal gland), and when they zoomed in close, they saw the stories; oh maybe they read the little novels in there, or watched, second by second, your neurons portray characters in the movie that is you, or the little-bitty construction crew putting up the stage set and then nailing together the construction that is you, tearing it down again second by second and then putting it back together. (please don't understand me to be arguing for an essential soul or integral self; what i'm saying is, for one thing, that they're saying that science is saying things that it could not possibly test, in terms that cannot be clarified or rendered empirical. at any rate, both scientists and radio hosts are unbelievably bad at giving the meaning of, or giving a meaning to, the basic terms they're using, a deficiency which, tragically, makes the whole thing collapse like a...tower of mud. so: 'you are just a narrative you are constructing minute by minute': start by stating your conclusion coherently, son, in a way that could possibly be true, and then we'll get to how empirical evidence might bear on it. what is constructing what?)

so: this isn't unique to radiolab, though they do it all the time, and i'll grab more examples as we go on. i don't think that you should sit there going "science says that? then it is irrational to doubt it'. instead, think about the jive they're claiming science says and about how science as you understand it could possibly show any such thing. ponder the question of why science is confirming whatever's fashionable in the social groups frequented by the scientists or interpreters of science (the sciencesaysers). contemplate the function of Science as a marker of social prestige and claim to ultimate authority and as a sheer, and obviously irrational, faith. think about how you are being manipulated by the game of science says, and to what ends. think about the picture of science as a Person, speaking with a single Voice, and how well that comports with the alleged nature and purposes of science itself. cogitate about what you would have believed over the last couple of centuries if you believed what 'science says'.

show a little pride and resolve to regard yourself as someone who is capable of rudimentary independent ratiocination. stop believing whatever the authorities are telling you to believe, on the grounds alone that they are telling you to believe it. francis bacon and richard feynman would tell you the same, man. Science is to us what God was to the 'dark ages', and lord knows these are dark ages. science has proven that.

go, petey, go!

re-reading through peter kropotkin and the history of anarchist theory generally, i conclude again that he is a very impressive person and a very wide-ranging intellectual, as well as the best theorist that anarchism has produced, by quite a ways. one excellent set of moments in modern science and anarchism, is where he gently but definitely points out that the claims of various political theorists - especially those influenced by hegel - to science, are ridiculous. he has a go at the 'dialectical method', for example, which many people took seriously and took to be scientific. well, he is puncturing the pretensions not only of marx, but of proudhon, for instance. all you have to say is that the thing is not driven by observation or experiment: it is a purely a priori conceptual structure into which data are jammed. or fourier, or comte: that their views constitute science is their most characteristic assertion, but lord knows what they can possibly mean by 'science': they certainly do not mean that their results are based on systematic empirical observation that is open to whatever is actual. when they foretell the future, and it happens to be the future they want, they call that science (marx is the very most extreme case of this). when their opponents disagree, they just respond that you can't argue with science. it's quite disingenuous or self-deceived, and it is certainly ridiculous.

now kropotkin appeals to science too, but he was actually a distinguished geographer and naturalist. his own deployments of science - for example in the utter refutation of social darwinism/hobbesian justifications of state power in mutual aid - have their own difficulties, or their own slippage between the descriptive and the normative - but they have something to do with actual science, and he has thought long and hard about what that actually means.

we live in an era of renewed scientism, conducted on an extremely primitive level: the left accuses the right of not believing what science says. or any disagreement with the latest study, contradicting the last one and the next one, is savaged as irrationality. man if you look at the history of science and then believe whatever 'science' 'says' right now, you really have failed at basic induction. and the idea of 'what science says' - as though science was a person with a voice - is a mere appeal to the authority of scripture and a mysterious priesthood. and of course people are still claiming the mantle of science for whatever politics they want, or making it equivalent to the political program of the democratic party or something. if you disagree with al gore's plans for a world regulatory regime, you don't accept 'science'. or a candidate for office might actually be asked whether he 'believes in science', for pity's sake. science is something with a definite set of assertions and values that you accept or reject, quite like - or more than merely like - a religion. 

the first thing to say about science - actual science - is that it is open to criticism: critically, independently assessing the results of science is science. if you have to accept whatever psychologists or brain boys or string theorists say on pain of being irrational = heretical, then science is impossible. the people who beat this drum are killing what they purport to love. and if people are interpreting scientific results as entailing their own pre-existing political positions: well, you should regard everything else they say with extreme scepticism. it's definitely not going to be actual science that tells you what to do or who to vote for or what policies to prefer, so if someone is saying that it does, they've got nothing to do with science except as its betrayers.

research this, bitch

i'm all up in the comments in this review of the worst line of "scientific" "research" ever pursued. you'd think it would be impossible to be as disingenuous and doltish as "scientists" of this stripe, but at least they have achieved self-fellation.

Doom, despair and agony oh me...

In which Crusader AXE avoids the snark to reflect semi-seriously on how the current attitude toward science research, funding and community will kill us all thus saving future generations from the problem of debt because they'll never be born or all be dead. 

Problem solved! Gomert-Paul in 1016!errr...2016.

 

it's science, bitch

oh my god. 'science' has been back and forth and up and down on coffee every ten minutes for decades. one thing i really hate is irrational people who don't accept science as the only arbiter of human belief. in this case as in so many others, rationality consists in changing your mind all the time and believing contradictions. well, believing what 'science' tells you at least requires a healthy continuous deferral to evidently arbitrary authority, which, as all obama supporters acknowledge, is the key to a future of relentless and extremely unfortunate progress, understood here as chronic confusion that makes you run around in circles.

for evolution, what is an individual?

here's a notion. what if natural selection works on an eco-system basis (as opposed to, or in addition to, the level of genes, or individuals, or species)? earth's climate has been highly volatile throughout. so, eco-systems that are very specifically dependent on very specific climate conditions collapse as a whole, including more or less all the individuals, genes and species that are exclusive to it. the system is mutually interdependent, so on some occasions the whole system more or less has to stand or fall, adapt or die together. say if there are no trees the squirrels die (oh and stipulate that somehow without the squirrels the trees die; this seems unlikely, but if you took it through a few species steps...): well, then, the two are one evolutionary unit, engaged in mutual cooperative selection; they stand or fall as species together, or we might say for the purposes of natural selection they are one thing, a primary individual as fundamental as any particular squirrel or tree, or all the squirrels together or all the trees together. but climate is only one factor: we might think of invasive species, for example, and in general what happens when successful ecosystems meet or touch or overlap. that is, we might say the unit of evolution is all the species in a system insofar as they are mutually interdependent for life.

mit blasphemes against science

guardian on aaron swartz:

The trial was due to begin next month. He faced 13 felony charges including computer and wire fraud. Prosecutors accused him of stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the intent of making them freely available.

honestly, whatever the fam might think, i don't believe you can blame mit for his suicide. but the actions of mit could not possibly be more antithetical to the supposed purposes and values of mit: mit taking heroic measures to restrict access to scientific research is like the lutheran church taking extraordinary measures to repress the scriptures. right, mit hates the whole idea of science insofar as it is incompatible with $$$ for the corporate interests of which they are a client.

born every which way

the idea that science has shown that you can't change your sexual orientation is a very nice example of the fact that academic social science is often mere political ideology. really scientists of whatever sort might work at a university, but their results on this matter are exactly as empirical as lady gaga's, though infinitely less compelling and well-written. they will demonstrate to be true whatever helps their bit of the political spectrum, or whatever people like themselves say they believe this week. actually, offhand, until i have overwhelming reasons to do otherwise, i would accept anyone's account of her own sexuality, and you should think about what taking the opposite approach - though of course only with regard to people whose story is politically inconvenient  -  has actually done to people who are not straightforwardly, as it were, heterosexual. so you tell me you're bisexual. i have a theory according to which that's impossible, complete with brain scans or questionnaires; it really pisses me off that you can't make up your mind, etc. or: no one is really homosexual; their natural heterosexuality has gotten screwed up by their moms.

this approach, where someone is telling you what his experience is and you're waving around your diploma and telling him that that's scientifically impossible, is just exactly the same. and the evidence for it - which will appear very compelling to people who who are already entirely certain because that's what everyone they know says - is just going to be laughably inadequate.

anyway, maybe homo and hetero are going to turn out to be in your genes or your brain, though that strikes me as extremely unlikely. (but i imagine the nazi regime would have been happy to find a genetic marker, for example.) perhaps human sexuality is actually quite fluid and complex, and we won't actually know anything about it unless we listen to people, even christians. geez don't y'all remember what the scientific establishment said about these things twenty, or forty, or eighty years ago? how'd that shit turn out? twenty years ago, if anyone brought up what they said forty years ago, they just blandly believed of themselves that they had it right now. at every stage they drove a political/religious/aesthetic agenda in the baldest way, and only the next generation became aware of it, which is a pretty large failure of basic self-awareness and self-criticism, if you ask me. just because it's swung left doesn't mean it's gotten any truer. anyway, if you take seriously anyone's claim to have any science on this, you need to stop being bewildered by people's academic degrees and job titles; stop the irrational deference and show some gumption; haven't you learned anything by now?

we may eventually reach the point at which gay folks can say something better than 'it's not my fault,' and very suddenly science will reach startlingly different conclusions. indeed, many gay people say much better or much else, the reason for which, whatever his drawbacks, we need more david halperins.

perhaps today's social scientists accept a particular version of the pragmatist theory of truth? that is, whatever leads to desirable social transformations (an end to bullying, e.g.) is true. to turn this from an insane abstract theory of truth to a practically useful insane theory of truth you need the premise that what people like me think is a desirable social transformation is, beyond the possibility that a good objection might someday arise, a desirable social transformation. now, the way to create the desirable social transformation is by manipulating people into believing whatever would help, which has the added benefit of making it impossible for such objections to be raised. so, whatever sentences you produce that would serve to manipulate people into doing what you want them to do are also true. very possibly this is the most ridiculous series of thoughts that has ever occurred to a human being. also it is evil. but it is very inspiring!

darwin refuted!

if the theory of natural selection were accurate, people would be, on average, much more sexually attractive than we actually are. just as, if we were the product of a benevolent god, we'd be substantially better morally than we actually are. it's chaos out here, baby!

splanatory

People have given many explanations for the massacre in Aurora. Gun control laws, lack of compulsory universal use of psychiatric medication, the effects of red hair dye on the human brain: all have been explored with that stunning mixture of certainty and stupidity that only the social sciences provide.

Here at Crispylabs, however, we have solved the problem. With a very high degree of probability, we can declare that climate change is the culprit. 

We came up with this hypothesis because we can't stop thinking about climate change. That people we agree with about everything called it a national security crisis made us realize that climate change is to blame for everything and anything: it's a universal crisis: the cause of everything that goes wrong. 

To test our stunning conclusion, we stuck precisely a passel of extremely cute babies - a diverse population of black and white, male and female, punk and preppy, straight and gay (born that way) babies - in a room and slowly increased the heat to 136 degrees fahrenheit: yesterday's high temperature in northern Greenland. Before they expired, the babies got super fussy. Imagine what would have happened if we had issued them assault rifles! It would have been baby armageddon, just like last time.

As the world grows ever hotter, flatter, and more flatulent, things continue to be really fucked up. Coincidence? We think not, and our regression paralysis confirms us in our speculation.

If things continue at the rate established by James Holmes at 12:28 AM, everyone will have shot everyone else by 2051.That said, the tipping point will very frankly be a disconnect, or The Disconnect: a yawning abyss in which all that exists is annihilated utterly, as though by the anti-will of the inverse of God.