I recently heard of a new documentary via Cosmic Variance called Expelled, about how the science establishment routinely beats up on the intelligent design folks, denying them tenure and whatnot. Trailers can be seen here.

One of the points damning evolution the movie makes is that evolution is responsible for the Holocaust (among other things). I admit I have a bit of a soft spot for intelligent design people. By all means I think they should continue to work on their theories as much as they want, and if they come with something vaguely scientific that the rest of us should consider then good for them. In the meantime…

If you claim we should reject evolution because it caused the Holocaust, you might as well claim that nuclear physics is a fiction since it caused the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The laws of nature don’t change just because you think it would be nice! Evolution, like the inner workings of an atom, is not a legislation that we can repeal once we realise that bad guys can use it to their advantage.

As an aside, a similar argument is sometimes used for the existence of god. Upon discussing my atheism with some missionaries at my door one day, the subject of the afterlife came up. One asked what I think happens when we die, to which I said something along the lines of “Nothing. We just die, and that’s it.”

Surprised, he asked, “And you’re okay with that?”

Does it matter if I’m not? If God doesn’t exist, if there is no afterlife, would he spontaneously come into being just because a lot of people think Heaven would be nice? Sure, I admit, it probably would be nice. Who wouldn’t want to have the possibility of everlasting peace and happiness instead of an absolute end? (Not that you’d care once the end came. You’d be dead, afterall. Sometimes I think people picture sitting around in a dark room being bored until the end of time.) Better yet, if God did exist, could we kill him by wishing he didn’t? I would have thought the all-mighty creator would be a bit tougher than a fairy in Never-Never Land.

The fallacy of the argument is even more obvious in the case of evolution. Go ahead and say evolution (or more to the point, genetics) caused the Holocaust if you want (I won’t believe you, but go ahead and say it). It doesn’t mean you can declare that evolution is incorrect to make up for it. Even if it is wrong for other reasons, this certainly isn’t one of them.

Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An off moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable.

– from Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre

How true it is. This afternoon at three o’clock I was definitely not doing anything I wanted to do—that was about the time I hit the 30 minute mark in the Hour of Power, which from that point forward became the worst erg piece I’ve ever pulled. Though that’s not quite the same feeling of Nausea that Sartre was talking about.

I think my Existentialism professor would be, not disappointed, but slightly uncomfortable, with how I’ve taken to the class. No, I haven’t latched on to everything said by Sartre, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, Fanon, or Camus, but a lot of what existentialism talks about is very seductive. I’ve written that already. The evidence is that, when having conversations that start to draw on philosophy, I start to draw on arguments made by those philosophers. It happened the other day standing in line at Tim Hortons, when the topic turned to racism, and I found myself referencing Fanon. When discussing sexual identity, I tend to think of bad faith. I’ve even used the term “bad faith” in a conversation by accident, and ended up accomplishing nothing but confusing the other person. Oh dear.

Though I must admit, it’s been happening with my other philosophy class as well. Logic and mathematics. Alarm bells still go on whenever someone says “concept”, and I’m getting very particular about defining what exactly the assumptions going into a problem are.

We’re now four days into the exam period. My first and only exam isn’t until the 19th, though in the meantime I have one take home exam (which is much like a 10 page paper) and an astrophysics paper to write. One of these days I’ll start working on them. With proper time management, there’s no reason for me to be in any stress at all this month. Yet, I still always find myself at three o’clock, too late to still be sitting around in pajamas. Too early for the evening workout. Too little time in between to do any work. Hopefully monday, when 7 AM workouts become part of the schedule again, I’ll be able to handle that particular form of nausea a little better.

The situation is this: I am writing a paper, at the last minute of course, for my class on existentialism. At the same time, I have been rowing almost every day for seven weeks or so in preparation for a regatta this weekend. As I write the paper, I am conscious of the fact that it’s far past my bedtime, and if I have any hope of being able to get up and go to crew practice at 5 am tomorrow, I need to wrap things up and go to bed. With about half the paper left to write, I’m starting to get desperate for material, so I turn back to the text and start reading:

The empirical image which may best symbolize Heidegger’s intuition is not that of a conflict but rather a crew… It is the mute existence in common of one member of the crew with his fellows, that existence which the rhythm of the oars or the regular movements of the coxswain will render sensible to the rowers and which will be made manifest to them by the common goal to be attained, the boat or yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled on the horizon.

I swear, when I read this paragraph from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, I actually thought I was hallucinating.

At the beginning of this semester, my Existentialism professor said to us that she has had people come up to her at the end of the class and say that it has changed their life. Said the professor to us, “Honestly, that worries me a little bit.”

So, it’s not supposed to be a self-help seminar, but at times it definitely feels like one. Going into it I was expecting the discussion to be about whether or not things actually exist, and instead we’ve been talking about how we interact with the world and other people. Though the syllabus disappointed me at first, I’ve actually been enjoying the class a fair bit.

Sure, there are things about the philosophy that I would change. Sartre goes on and on about how our consciousness is not identical to itself, which I think is baloney. Nonetheless, as long as you are able to gloss over all this talk about being something in the mode of not being it, he actually makes some good points about it. Existentialism is about how we constitute the meaning in the world. If we are sad, it is not because the world itself is bleak, but because we interpret it as bleak. The world is still out there—we can’t create a chair in front of us by deciding that there is one there—but how we see it is at some level completely in our control.

Sartre’s way of talking is pretty depressing, always talking about things like anguish, bad faith, and shame, but I definitely see how taking up this kind of outlook can result in a positive and optimistic outlook. That is, if you can maintain it without falling back into bad faith. Oh those unstable equilibrium points.

Somebody told me today that I write in too many paragraphs. I had just sent him an email telling him he uses too few.

Meanwhile on Facebook I’ve changed my religious view to “Optimistic Nihilist” in some attempt at revitalising my profile. I was going to put a reference to existential in there too, but I thought I should wait until the class ends lest there be any nasty surprises. Nihilism also has this depressing quality about it, but I think it’s a great excuse to climb trees and look for squirrels.

A nihilist outlook doesn’t change the fact that I’ve still got a philosophy paper and an astrophysics assignment to finish in the next hour or so. I want to make a phone call, but can’t justify such active procrastination. (Writing this is better since at least I’m at my computer with equations at my elbows.) Instead I’m hoping there will be an incoming call and I can let procrastination find me…

I never feel more masculine and heterosexual than when reading about feminism and queer theory. I don’t say that to brag (because what kind of thing is that to brag about? and how seriously can you take someone who’s bragging about being masculine on his blog while baking vegan banana bread in the background anyway?) even though it may come off that way. What I mean is just that I don’t find any sympathy in myself for what people write about under those headings.

The final assignment in one of my philosophy class asks me if feminism is dead, so naturally I go look up some papers on the topic and start reading. Feminism is something that a lot of people have concerned themselves with quite a bit for decades, yet nothing in any of the papers I looked through was in the least bit interesting. There were no poignant philosophical debates. No ethical dilemma to ponder. No greater meaning to comprehend. Sure, sexism is bad, but does that necessitate an entire philosophical framework to believe?

At many points it bordered on what I have heard termed “queer theory”, by talking about social constructions of gender, etc. From my earlier post on hetero-normativity, it’s probably pretty clear that I don’t have much sympathy for these questions either. It’s not that they don’t deserve to be answered, it’s just that the answers aren’t very interesting.

Yet reading these articles make me feel not only that a prerequisite to being feminine or queer (neither of which describes me) is to believe that these issues are, in fact, issues at all, but that if I don’t think these things are important then I must be misogynist and homophobic (queerphobic?). I’m inclined to think that the South Park quote on that same earlier post applies to these topics as well. Regardless, I find it disturbing to think that in order to identify with, say, the queer community, I must identify their causes with my own, even when they border on being militant phobias in their own right.

I’m sure in most cases it isn’t as antagonistic as that. It’s quite likely that the vast majority of people who write about feminism or queer theory, certainly in academia at least, do so because they are interested in these topics. It is the same reason that I would tend to write about religion and cosmology and study astronomy, even though I’m certain many people out there don’t care about the particular features of the big bang might be. The difference is that to be an astronomer you must learn about astronomy, but you need not learn about feminism to be female.

In the end I’m faced with the same dilemma of writing about feminism in a moral context where I believe that it not only has nothing to do with morality but also nothing to do with philosophy at all. At best it is mere cultural studies, as is queer theory. Attempts to define either of them and give them some context are lost on me. I can only hope it’s more for the same reasons Stan and his friends didn’t find the South Park flag racist than the alternative.

What the hell does “hetero-normative” mean anyway?

I get the feeling that there should be some negative connotations associated with the term “talking heads”, but I can’t figure out why. What else should heads do? What else should be talking?

I had to write a paper on feminism last Friday. I couldn’t do it. All I could think of were those stereotypical types, “nazi-feminists” as a friend of mine called them. The kind of people who use words like “hetero-normative”. I can’t stand it.

I just read a novel, published online, called Lockpick Pornography. It’s fast, dirty, and angry. Full of what can only be described as “nazi-homosexuals”; the main character at least is militant and wild in his hatred of anything “normal”. It is a rant about gender issues, and though I do agree with some of the points, I could barely stand reading it. How can a person be angry at the heterosexual beauty myth? What does that even mean? I survived through it with the help of Mrs. Hubert and Michelle.

“Tough like set theory, but easy like Home Economics.” I’ve heard that line before. In different words, from a different author, but it’s the same line.

I sometimes think that I need to be a black transgendered woman in order to understand what people get so upset about sometimes. I am a middle class white male; such people have no clout in matters of discrimination. How are people offended by words? By actions, even? The things that offend me most are people trying too hard to be politically correct or non discriminatory. Sexism for the sake of sexism is probably wrong in most reasonable moral theories, like racism and homophobia, but these discriminatory “isms” can be only a consequence of some incidental correlation.

I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert. He claims on his show that he doesn’t see race, and in doing so, sounds racist. That’s the beauty of it. I think it’s completely realistic. Ignorance of your own racism and not being racist at all, at times, converge to the same thing. That’s not to say that racism (sexism, etc) is right or justifiable, it’s just that people often perceive things as racist when they’re nothing of the kind.

South Park. Episode 4×08. Chef Goes Nanners.

Chef: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You just missed the point entirely.

Children: Huh?

Chef: I’m not mad because the flag shows somebody getting killed. It’s because it’s racist!

Children: Racist?

Chef: Children, don’t you even know what this argument is about? That flag is racist because a black man is being hung by white people.

Children: Ooooh

Chef: Oh?!

Children: We didn’t really see it that way.

Chef: But that’s a black man up there.

Children: Yeah but, colour of someone’s skin doesn’t matter.

Chef: But of course it matters when… oh my god.

I’m definitely aware that I might be accused of just being ignorant of the subtleties of the issue—of racism, feminism, the social construct of gender, all of it. But I think it’s equally possible that it’s all the subtleties that are social constructions. Something for us to direct our anger at. Social construction as a social construction. It’s not something I’d be able to argue for if someone assaulted me on the street accusing me of conforming to hetero-normative expectations as they do in Lockpick Pornography, so I reserve the right to change my mind about the whole thing, but my intuition tells me that it’s a philosophy that could be developed further.

Lately I feel I’ve been playing Devil’s Advocate quite a bit. I just hope nobody’s been offended. I have a habit of disagreeing with almost anything anybody says. I do it for the sake of conversation, to flesh out the forgotten assumptions, and see how well people have really thought about what they say. And in the cases where someone is talking about something I actually believe in, I still do it, pointing out the same little problems that I struggle with to get some insight on how they might be resolved, for my own sake! I think I’m just being genuinely curious, but I have a feeling the other person sometimes thinks I’m just doing it because I’m an ass.

Here’s an extreme example but a real one, for the sake of argument if you wish. I only read this online (on a facebook group about the Rape of Nanjing) but haven’t had an actual conversation, electronic or otherwise, with a person about it so this is all new material.

Numerous powerful politicians in Japan have openly denied the incidences of wanton rape, torture, and unprejudiced slaughter. In fact, the current prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi still visits the war shrine that houses the souls of some of the leaders of the perpetration of the Rpae [sic] of Nanking. To put this in perspective, imagine someone like Angela Merkel, or any powerful German politician, denying the Holocaust. Or as in the latter example, Mrs. Merkel visiting a shrine that commemorated Hitler, Himmler, or Hoess. Ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral to say the least.

First of all I admit that as far as I can remember that I had not heard of this massacre before this past Sunday night, although while living in Japan I did hear about two controversies involving it: Japanese history textbooks glossing over the actions of the Japanese military during the war and Koizumi’s visits to the war shrine. As I said, I knew very little of the former, but I didn’t understand what the fuss was about in the case of the latter. This is in part because I didn’t know anything about it beforehand, and quite possibly because what I was told about it was told to me by my Japanese family and friends through an only semipermeable language barrier. My instinctive reaction to the above quoted paragraph was to disagree completely. Even now, having read more about the Nanjing massacre and the Sino-Japanese war in general, I still don’t see Koizumi’s visits to the shrine as either ridiculous or disgusting, and certainly not immoral.

I realise this may offend people, so let me reiterate—I am not saying that the massacre is nothing to get upset about. It was an incredible display of human cruelty to say the least. But (the problems of revisionist histories aside, which are wrong) can we really say that visits to the shrine are “ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral”?

Let’s look at the analogy offered of visiting a shrine dedicated to Hitler. This is fallacious in that Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine honours almost 2.5 million people who died in the name of the emperor, wartime or otherwise—it is not a shrine specifically to the architects of the Nanjing massacre or even the war in general. However, there are about 1000 convicted war criminals included in their ranks, so maybe it is a minor point. The question is this: Would it be immoral to visit a shrine to Germany’s wartime dead, Hitler, Himmler, and Hoess among them, just as we honour ours on Remembrance Day?

The difficulty is in that the Germans and Japanese were the aggressors in the war, fighting for a cause which we consider to be immoral today. But even with that, I would suggest that remembering the dead, regardless of who they are, doesn’t carry with it approval of what they may have fought for. Perhaps it just sounds like I’m preaching forgiveness for all sins. Maybe I am. At the very least we should remember that young men with families and friends and lives ahead of them die on the enemy’s side just as easily as on ours and that that loss is no less lamentable. I would go as far as saying that there is nothing immoral in visiting even a shrine to Hitler, the de facto archetype of immorality himself, if only to remember the atrocities he, like the Japanese military, committed so that we might better ourselves for it.

So, as Douglas Adams said (in an entirely different subject but a debate nonetheless), “That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!” Or, since this is the internet, let the hate mail roll in!

With one contradiction, you can prove anything.

In logic, it’s called the Inconsistency Effect. Given some set of assumptions, if you can deduce a contradiction from them, then it is possible to deduce any arbitrary statement. Maybe it’s just abstract concepts and symbols, but I can see two important applications.

Immediately I was reminded of the article “Science and God” by Robert J. Sawyer, where he (implicitly) uses this idea addressing the question of intelligent design:

For instance, one creationist wrote to tell me I should believe in God because “of the awesome complexity in the universe, proclaiming God’s handiwork.”

I countered that in fact the human eye is incompetent handiwork. Not only is it prone to myopia, but it has a blind spot because of the way the optic nerve passes through the retina — and we know it didn’t have to be this way, since octopi and squids, whose eyes evolved independently of our own, don’t have blind spots.

My correspondent’s response? “God made it that way to remind fallen mankind that we don’t `see it all’ or `know it all’!”

Nonsense. If both perfection and imperfection are taken as proof of God’s existence, then the whole idea of proof simply falls apart.

But of course, if you believe in intelligent design, then you don’t see that as a probem.

The more problematic application of the inconsistency effect is in moral theory. This is a completely hand wavy argument and may be complete junk, but bear with me here.

Any moral theory needs a foundation of moral truths. Principles we can live by. Unfortunately, if these underlying principles ever lead to a conflict, then they can be used to say any arbitrary statement is moral.

But a set of moral principles that don’t lead to a conflict is notoriously hard to come by, if such a thing exists at all. More to the point, getting such a set that also agrees with our intuition about what is moral is notoriously hard. I almost suspect that avoiding moral dilemas isn’t as hard as it seems, but more often than not enough people are uncomfortable with the solution (justified or not) and refuse to accept it, opting instead to leave it undetermined.

If we ever want to have a rigorous moral and ethical framework for society to function upon, we’re going to have to stop depending solely upon our intuition, which has the inconsistencies built right into it. Otherwise conflict will be unavoidable.

This past Thursday evening I attended the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium. It’s a highfalutin name for either a very important or completely useless question, depending on who you ask. The audience in the package Leacock 132 lecture theatre, I would guess, consider it to be the former.

The topic was this: Why is the universe just right for life? There are various approaches one can take in an attempt to answer it. One speaker broke it down into three possibilities:

1. The universe must be the way it is, and it’s just lucky that it supports life at all.
2. There are an infinite number of universes, so one suitable for humans was bound to show up eventually.
3. God did it.

The discussion largely ignored the third option, which was fine by me. As for the first two, though, there were some interesting points made. As many people see this question as being highly controversial, especially with you involve intelligent design, I found the most significant statement of the night to be “There is no controversy, only questions,” from Leonard Susskind.

Fine tuning of the universe is a significant part to the problem, and is often used as proof of intelligent design. One of the scientists on the panel (I forget which) made a good analogy to water. We often talk about how if ice were heavier than water (as is the case with most other substances) all the oceans and lakes would be frozen solid and life wouldn’t be able to survive here. Whether that’s true or not, it’s based on the idea that the densities are parameters we could have arbitrarily set. However, now that we have more knowledge of atomic physics than a hundred years ago, we can see that water and ice density is not an arbitrary parameter at all but a consequence of something more fudamental. Thus, it’s quite likely that the many arbitrary parameters people point to to claim fine tuning are just manifestations of something deeper that may yet be explained and nothing special at all.

Similarly, one panelist (either Susskind or David Gross) provided an example that two years before the discovery of DNA, someone published a paper proving that there was no way enough information could be coded in a cell to be passed on to create new generations. With a little more understanding this biological miracle isn’t so miraculous afterall. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the water molecule analogy is apt here as well, to explain the supposed irreducable complexity of biological systems. Yes, proteins and their functions are incredibly complicated, but it’s all just atoms and fundamental forces scrammbled together in chemical reactions. As Douglas Adams said of evolution, “We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it’s not a mystery.” No controversy, only questions.

However, I noticed a complete lack of addressing the question of (in the case of number two) where the infinite number of universe came from in the first place, or why, if there is a single unified theory (as implied by number one), it’s that particular unified theory and not some other. Well, Paul Davies did address it for a moment, but only to acknowledge the problem — that no matter which position you took there still seemed to be a appeal to something outside the universe.

It actually boils down to the question of why there’s something here at all and not nothing. A few weeks ago my dad posited at the dinner table that the most important question people ask themselves is “who am I?” or something of that ilk. My reply to that wasn’t a well formed philosophical question and nothing interesting could come from asking it. I still believe that. Interestingly, the response David Gross gave to the question “why is there something and not nothing?” was that it wasn’t a well formed physical question and nothing could come from asking it. “What is nothing?” he asked.

Originally, I posed that question as being much more important than simply “who am I?” and it probably is the biggest question there is, in a sense, but I realise that Professor Gross is right in his suggestion that there’s no point in thinking about it yet since it is so far outside the realm of what science can say. Perhaps sometime it will be within reach, but not today, and probably not for a long time.

That was the subject of a debate I saw tonight. But of course the question remains unanswered, at least in any sort of unanimous way. These debates rarely, if ever, result in anything else.

The theist position was actually very well presented. The speaker had a lot of presence on the stage, lots of fancy slide transitions in his slides, and impressive animations. He spoke with a lot of authority and communicated his arguments well.

The atheist, too, was a good speaker, but in a completely different way. While the theist’s presentation was comparable to a physics colloquia, with the atheist I felt like I was listening to Stuart McLean read a story on CBC’s Vinyl Cafe. No, there was no narrative per se, but he did speak directly to his audience as if it were one-on-one, merely talking about the nature of religion without presenting an argument. It was almost hypnotic.

But we were not there to judge speaking styles. I thought it was almost ironic that, at least as far as opening statements, the theist’s sounded more scientific (at times). However, every argument he made I found either horribly exaggerated, naive, or based on false assumptions. The only argument that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable addressing with any sort of strength was the biochemical one, but of course just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean I need appeal to God (although I admit it could turn out that way).

I was disappointed, though, in the atheist response to his arguments. He certaintly dismissed them all, but I think some of them required more attention than he gave them. Objective moral theory and evidence from scripture are two that I have no problem waving away, but the cosmological and biochemical ones are perhaps not so easy. The atheist did make a good point about cosmology, but it served to show that the theist’s argument that there could only be one God and not “gods all the way up” was not sound, rather than that there could be no God at all. It was certainly a valid point, but only one direction of many he could have used to approach it.

So, I guess I did learn a little something. I also got two free books and a CD from it, and you can’t knock free books. Sure, one is the New Testament, of which I already have one copy, and the other is about Jesus, which is really the least of my concerns, but they’re books nonetheless.

(Incidentally, this is the 500th post in this blog, which surpassed 100 000 words last month, and in a few days will be 5 years old. Happy birthday.)