Saturday Night Radio Play Second Feature - Elizabeth Moynihan - Quicksand

Quicksand

 

Otherness and isolation are universal experiences, but ones that some experience more than others. Quicksand brings to life the story of a woman who will stop at nothing to protect her son.

The play is partly inspired by the McKinnon case in Britain. In that case a mother fought for 10 years to prevent her son from being extradited after he obtained unauthorised access to US military sites on his computer.

Quicksand delves into perceptions of guilt, communication and love told through the story of a family faced with near-impossible odds.

The play contains some strong language.

Cast:

Donna Dent (Joy)

Rex Ryan (Joe)

Sound Supervision: Ruth Kennington.

Director: Zoë Comyns

Series Producer, Drama On One is Kevin Reynolds

 

I love modestly scaled two-handers, I love how the cheapness and ease of producing radio drama allows them to produce things that they'd almost never try to make into a movie and which stays closer to what the writer wrote. I love how easy it is to hear all kinds of shows that would never be made for movies or put on a stage, I like it when I like the story and the writer and I like the minimal cost in time and attention when I don't like them. 

 

I almost cheered when the kid said, "No one watches TV anymore," in this one.  

This one didn't show up in the Podcast list, I downloaded it to listen to it.   

Why Do You People Challenge Me On This Issue? Do You Think I Can't Back Up What I Said After All These Years?

SAYING THAT NATURAL SELECTION IS AN IDEOLOGICAL IMPOSITION on whatever legitimate science can tell us about the evolution of life, the origin of species, according to the co-inventors of natural selection, becomes obvious when looking for the ideological content of, especially Darwin's claimed evidence for it and that of his disciples, from the start up till today.   

 

I have dealt with it mainly in Darwin's and his disciples' imposition of it on the human species, so I have mostly concentrated on those things, especially in Darwin's second most important work on the subject, which scientists then and, to some extent, now identify as science, The Descent of Man of 1871.   You can find the most rampant of ideology, racism, white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, upper class snobbery and bias and, lest anyone overlook it, male supremacy on almost every page.   And good old fashioned Brit anti-Catholic propaganda as well.  Take this passage, which I'll analyze for that.

Who can positively say why the Spanish nation, so dominant at one time, has been distanced in the race. 

 

The insincere and false modesty of that (non) question is about to be seen in Darwin positively saying why, even though he obviously knows what he's going to say is hardly supported with anything like scientific method to back it up.  It is ass covering if someone challenges his unfounded claims, he does that all the time. 

 

The awakening of the nations of Europe from the dark ages is a still more perplexing problem. 

 

The assumption that Europe had awoken is debatable, I would imagine there were people in Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas who wouldn't think it had. I certainly don't concede that British law and society during the age described by Dickens and Thomas Hardy as being well lighted. 

 

At that early period, as Mr. Galton has remarked, almost all the men of a gentle nature, those given to meditation or culture of the mind, had no refuge except in the bosom of a Church which demanded celibacy (28. 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870, pp. 357-359.  

 

If that's the case then it is surely the fault of the civil authority who didn't provide what he claims the church did, though I doubt that Galton, who, like most of Darwin's inner circle hated religion, Christianity and Catholicism, probably in that ascending order, meant anyone to notice that.  I'll expand on this point later.

The Rev. F.W. Farrar ('Fraser's Magazine,' Aug. 1870, p. 257) advances arguments on the other side. Sir C. Lyell had already ('Principles of Geology,' vol. ii. 1868, p. 489), in a striking passage called attention to the evil influence of the Holy Inquisition in having, through selection, lowered the general standard of intelligence in Europe.); and this could hardly fail to have had a deteriorating influence on each successive generation. 

 

Yeah, that would be because a 19th century Brit Protestant  divine would be expected to be the most dispassionate exponent of the quite wicked, but not more noticeably prone to bloodshed than the civil governments of the time were. Yet the Catholic Church is singled out for blame in this most unscientific claim.  

 

During this same period the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn or imprison them. 

 

What the inquisition selected were people suspected of heresy, the imagining of them as "freest" is certainly open to question. I don't think that Savonarola would be considered a free spirit, I would bet that I could go through a list of those who were executed in Europe by the "Holy" Inquisition (did these Brits not know that it operated in places other than the Iberian peninsula?) and find lots of those who even Lyell, Farrah and Darwin would consider benighted, superstitious nutcases. Probably not a few who were too dumb to stay out of trouble or who were mentally ill (who Darwinists would consider no great loss to the human species) were among its more common victims.

 

In Spain alone some of the best men—those who doubted and questioned, and without doubting there can be no progress—were eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year. 

 

That is certainly nothing like a carefully made numerical claim, the large majority of those accused even under the infamous Spanish Inquisition WHICH, BY THE WAY, BY THE DEMAND OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, WAS ADMINISTERED BY THE SPANISH MONARCHY, NOT THE CHURCH, ITSELF, were acquitted.  The Encyclopedia Britannica on that topic says about the most infamous of the Inquisitors:

 

The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada’s tenure was exaggerated by Protestant critics of the Inquisition, but it is generally estimated to have been about 2,000.

 

That was for the entire period when he was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, from 1482 to 1498. I figure that was not something a British scientist of that enlightened milieu would have bothered to fact check. Ol' Chuck wasn't that big on numbers, truth be told.

 

The evil which the Catholic Church has thus effected is incalculable, though no doubt counterbalanced to a certain, perhaps to a large, extent in other ways; nevertheless, Europe has progressed at an unparalleled rate. 

 

Careful readers might have noticed this little bit of story-telling in order to claim natural selection at work as an explanation of the power of late medieval Spain having diminished in the period between then an Darwin's time is riddled with other, more general, more discrediting problems.  Just quickly occurring to me.

 

A. Spain was hardly the only place where the foremost (only,really) seats of learning and intellectual activity, including, by the way, mathematics, science, medicine, philosophy, literature, scholarship, etc. was in the Catholic Church, a large number of those engaged in intellectual pursuits celibate men - not a few of whom, though, managed to father children, which has uses for Brit anti-Catholic invective but not in Darwin's argument. What could have been said about Spain at that time was as true of Italy, France, what would become Germany, Austria, and, yes, England.

 

B. In this telling of things, what should certainly count in the Catholic Church's favor, THAT IT WAS THE SEAT OF LEARNING AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT FOR MOST OF THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD AND AFTER, as the civil authority had no interest in that, is turned into an occasion of abominable culpability.

 

C. As already alluded to, the Catholic Church was hardly the major killer of "the best of men" not a few of whom were members of the feudal order, families which provided not a few of those who became clerics and scholars. 

 

The death toll of "the best men," in Darwin's snobbish formulation, in the English Reformation is impressive for the accomplishment and intelligence of many of those killed. And they joined a far larger river of blood that was liberally and lavishly spilled by the Tudors, muchly during the Protestant phase of Henry VIII's reign but also under his children, including Elizabeth and under their cousins the Stuarts. 

 

That information would certainly have been available to Darwin and his colleagues named above at the time, the radical PROTESTANT William Cobbett was most eloquent and, not infrequently, more accurate in his condemnation of the viciousness of the reign of terror under the Tudors in his A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1827). The estimates of those executed under Henry VIII range from 57,000 to 72,000, and I believe that doesn't cover Ireland in most of the estimates I've read. His children, especially Elizabeth continued to be pretty bloody, though I would guess there were probably more people killed by the destruction of the social safety net which had, from medieval times been administered through the church, especially the monasteries and convents which Henry dissolved and looted along with the English and Scottish aristocracy resulting in the infamous Poor Law under bloody Bess. 

 

And the killing didn't dissipate in England after that. The British "enlightenment" brought in "The Bloody Code" which saw an enormous expansion of crimes for which hanging was the sentence, going from about 50 to more than 200 during those very years of "enlightenment" along with a great increase in the number of people hanged for being convicted of so little as stealing 12 pence worth of something.  And there was no legal aid.  Britain also, though, retained a good many of its more medieval practices such as drawing and quartering, especially for the expansive definition of "treason," not a few of those so butchered for spectacle men of intellectual distinction and accomplishment.

 

I am tempted to go on with this in the very next paragraph because it is, if anything, even more outrageous in its clear ideological, racist, etc. content asserted as scientific proof - along with one of Darwin's typical ass-covering possible disclaimers like the opening non-question. "Who can say how the English gained their energy?" he "asks" as if he doesn't know exactly how the rich white men who will read him will understand his claims.

The remarkable success of the English as colonists, compared to other European nations, has been ascribed to their "daring and persistent energy"; a result which is well illustrated by comparing the progress of the Canadians of English and French extraction; but who can say how the English gained their energy? There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best. (29. Mr. Galton, 'Macmillan's Magazine,' August 1865, p. 325. See also, 'Nature,' 'On Darwinism and National Life,' Dec. 1869, p. 184.) Looking to the distant future, I do not think that the Rev. Mr. Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says (30. 'Last Winter in the United States,' 1868, p. 29.): "All other series of events—as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to...the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west." Obscure as is the problem of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations.

 

I will point out, as I always do, that in his letters he looked forward to the Brits doing all round the world what the Nazis wanted to do in Poland and other Slavic countries, murder and replace the native population. Clearly Darwin and our current fans of things "Anglo-Saxon" share much in common.

 

And this is only the start of the ideology, racist, nationalistic, upper class favoring, sexist, religious, etc. of the scientists is inserted directly into the science of the study of evolution. I'd say it gets worse as eugenics developed as the consequence of a belief in natural selection but it's only a name for what Darwin was already doing before the word for what he did was invented.  It is an inevitable and still vitally active feature of Darwinism even among those who may disavow Darwinism.  

Update:  Oh, I forgot, one of the things that occurred to me in Darwin's little rant about Spain is that he leaves out that for a good part of its medieval history most of Spain was governed by Muslims who were generally a bit more "enlightened" than the barbarians in England.  The viciousness of the Spanish Inquisitions is a direct result of the monarchs to establish their unchallenged rule over the population, the Inquisition largely put there to enforce forced conversions, expulsions, secret observance of Islam and Judaism.  If Darwin had wanted to go for the throat on those more accurately condemned things, I'd have used another section of his abysmal book but they wouldn't have gotten him to the praise of non-Catholics and Anglo Saxons, which was his goal, along with claiming the issue for natural selection.

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Judith Thompson - The Kissing Way

 

The Kissing Way  

 

After-work drinks become a terrifying fight for survival when a young woman’s coworker turns out to be an unhinged psychopath.

 

Hardy T. Linem - Phillip

Nikki Godanni - Barbara 

With: Brenda Webb, Karen Woolrich, Malika Mendez, Bruce Febrina,  Michael Reilly

 

I transcribed the cast names from the recording and probably misspelled most of them, anyone want to correct me, put it in the comments.  

 

It takes about a minute and a half for it to get going, setting the scene starting with a movie theater at the end of a movie and then a bar is a little confusing but it's worth waiting for.  This isn't a light-weight one.   Judith Thompson plays a pretty rough game and she doesn't give you the outcome you expected.  This one is extra rough.

 

 

Sincere Thanks But Limited Ones

THANK YOU CHRIS HAYES for having Michael Daly on yesterday to talk about the Rudy Giuliani that the electronic and more up-market press covered up for all during his public career.   

 

 

It is a real shame of the most highly self-regarding of small locations in the United States, New York City, that they elected this asshole Mayor twice, on the basis of what his media operation suckered The People of that city with.  I love the claim that Rudy owes his life to parole because he was conceived when his criminal daddy was on parole, I would bet that this real reporter did his math.  

The exposure of this is also the exposure of the corrupt status of the American media, the "press" that the First Amendment gives the corporate privilege miscalled a "right".   There's nothing that exposes the generally shameful way that the media uses that "right" to promote lies and sensationalism because it makes them money (remember what Les Moonves said about Trump,  "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS."   Trump was a result of the American free-press, just as Reagan was, just as Republican-fascism is.  I wish the likes of Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers, would admit the role that the current interpretation of the First Amendment has played in the plunge of America into gangster governance.   The story used to credit TV coverage of the Civil Rights Movement with moving the country past Jim Crow - as if the largely Black Civil Rights Movement didn't do all of the heavy and deadly struggle in that - but the media more than took back what it never really gave to start with starting as soon as the Supreme Court allowed them to lie with impunity about Democratic politicians, liberals and entire races and other groups.  

"Miracles" Are Happening Every Day When Atheist-Materialists Do What They Do - Only They'll Never Admit It

I SHOULD HAVE probably included the last paragraph in section IV of Eddington's The Concept of Structure but left it out to avoid an even longer post and because I wanted to make a point about it.

Thus, when you tell me that you hear a noise, the information imparted is represented in my knowledge by (a) a general concept of a heard-noise, i.e. a concept of something of similar nature to my own awareness of noises and (b) a structural concept of a heard noise, i.e. a part of the structure of the physical universe which we describe as an electrically disturbed terminal of an auditory nerve. Of these two concepts of a heard-noise, the one refers to what it is in in itself, the other refers to what it is as a constituent of the structure known as the physical universe.

It is given as an illustration of what Eddington said in the last paragraph posted here yesterday:

The disturbance at the nerve terminal is generally the result of a long chain of causation in the physical world. In familiar thought we usually leap to the far end of the chain of causation, and say that the sensation is caused by an object at some distance from the seat of the sensation. In the case of he visual sensation caused by a spiral nebula, the object is not only remote in space but may be millions of years distant in time. Causation bridges the gap in space and time, but the physical event at the seat of sensation (provisionally identified with an electrical disturbance of the nerve terminal) is not the cause of the sensation it is the sensation. More precisely, the physical event is the structural concept of which the sensation is the general concept.

The statement taken modestly is not outrageously speculative, though I have never known anything in this area being taken as a careful or modest statement remaining in bounds. If I were able to question Eddington about it, I would ask him if he really believed his description bridged the gap between the passive sensory reception of the sound and its active presence in the mind which would then, match it or put it into a context involving its previous experience, its memory of sensory stimulation because I think someone of his experience would admit he has absolutely no means of describing what happens. What happens there is something which I believe no one can say, I believe it is exactly what gets left out in the famous Sidney Harris cartoon in which a term in an equation on the black board is "Then a miracle occurs," which is, I guess, supposed to be a condescending gesture to religion from the true disciples of science and rationalism and modernism.  That's certainly how it was used on this Pinterest pirating of it.  Only whenever they talk about this in terms of science, they always do exactly that.  There is no way to bridge that gap that will make what they can describe in in the general way of modern science, in equations, and the actual experience of consciousness.  

 

It is exactly the same thing I confronted in asking my questions taken so badly by atheist-materialist would be science-rangers about how the brain would know how to make the physical structures that it would have to make to produce their miracle of a material mind, how would it know how to do ALL OF THE THINGS INVOLVED WITH THAT BEFORE THE ACTUAL IDEA OF THE THING THE BRAIN NEEDED TO MAKE WAS IN THEIR BRAIN TO TELL IT WHAT TO DO.  

If you are going to insist that the mind is a product of material causation and operates in accordance with the limits of physical materials and forces then you will run up against that gap because you can't explain how a brain could do what would need to be done to do what we experience as our minds.  I remember that I teased them by pointing out that even if they resorted to one of the list of things on their Index Of Forbidden Ideas, extra-sensory perception, they would still have to explain exactly what it is that was perceived and that would get them into the tangle of what a perception was.  

If you choose to believe that the mind is most sensibly explained as non-material an, so, not limited to what a materialist will call "the laws of physics" or "natural law" because those only can deal with what they are formulated to deal with, the observable physical universe, then you will not only not need to come up with an explanation of that, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO COME UP WITH ONE AND SHOULD NOT EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO COME UP WITH ONE.  If science has its limits, which it so obviously does to anyone who thinks about it even not very hard, human language has its limits too. 

Eddington began this lecture by pointing to the virtue of his mathematical-structural approach to the physical universe that it can be communicated one mind to another mind precisely and, if done well, without a host of ambiguities or controversies.  The many controversies in theoretical physics are, I think, largely a result of them reaching far past where observation of particles give them a secure, common understanding of those observed things, that's certainly the case in the most fashionable of theoretical physics and cosmology today and it is in those areas that most of the public ideologues of scientism among scientists seem to congregate.  But they achieve that non-controversial level of minimal ambiguity by leaving out things and looking only at the kind of limited things that can be treated mathematically.  As soon as you put those back into it or you try to extend your method past where those can be carefully applied, the reliability goes and the controversy starts. 

 

If you want to call my approach a resort to religion, "miracles" go ahead, I can't stop you but I can point out that such "miracles" are not only happening every time you think of something, they are intrinsic to all of our conscious activity, including science.  I don't suppose that was Sidney Harris's intention to put his finger on that but I don't think a scientist could get from one end of an equation to the other without ignoring that the unexplained and, if I'm right, unexplainable is what gets them through it.  Equations are, perhaps, even more an act of pure consciousness than the hearing of a sound, all of that fitting them into a structure based on previous conclusions about previous ideas is far more a complex act of consciousness than the mere hearing of a sound and far more removed than the act of identifying it as the falling minor third of a black-capped chickadee's Spring song that I'm hearing as I type this out.

 

Carla Bley - Old Man Dancing

 

Chet Doxas - Clarinet and Saxophone, 

Carla Bley - Piano,

 Karen Mantler- keyboard, 

Steve Swallow - Bass 

Directed by Gareth Hughes, 

DP Sean Brennan 

Below are the performance notes that accompanied 

 

Ms. Bley's score for "Old Man Dancing": Chester is a bit late and looks at his watch and gives an apologetic little bow, then unpacks his instrument and plays a few notes, then dusts it off with his handkerchief and plays a few more. The band looks at him expectantly, and he calls “Old Man Dancing.” He does a little shuffle step and points to himself. The musicians indicate they have the parts and are ready to play. With just a head nod, Chester starts to play. Everything goes beautifully for a few minutes, even when Chester stumbles a bit and almost trips. But during the next chorus, during an especially expressive moment, he actually loses his balance and falls against the piano. He pulls himself up up with some difficulty, peers at the floor, checks his horn, then continues to play without missing more than a few beats. He takes a short, sweet solo, then gestures for the bass to take over. During the bass solo he does some steps while enjoying the music, and flirts with the ladies in the audience. The song’s main theme returns and all goes well until Chester plays a wrong note. He stops playing and looks accusingly at his horn. He picks something off his mouthpiece and replays the phrase. The band does its best to follow him. But Chester has lost his confidence. He gives the musicians a sign, and they break into a few phrases of “Goodnight Ladies.” Everyone puts on a smile, and Chester waves goodbye…

Carla Bley's official website says this is what she and the other prisoners (WATT is a prison) have done while in quarantine.  

Tim Scott Is A Big Fat Liar There's NO Reason To Give Him Credit For Anything Else So Why Do Democratic Adviors Do It?

CNN IS NOT my go-to source for news, neither is NPR these days but wanting to listen to some reaction to the appallingly dishonest response to President Biden given by the NC Senator Tim Scott, I listened to a discussion that included Obama's chief strategist and Senior Advisor David Axelrod and I learned more about why Obama's early administration gave away so much it didn't need to, so knee capping itself.   

David Axelrod is one of many former Democratic power guys who should never be allowed to get close to any Democratic administration or Congressional office.  His instinct is to make the case for Republicans not to attack them.  If I don't stop this now it will turn into a rant.   I'm still bitter about that voluntary surrender during the Obama years and the similar surrender as a result of Bill's stupid self-indulgence during Clinton's administration. 

I hope the DNC is working to get rid of the first place Iowa and New Hampshire caucus and primary because they have been a disaster for Democratic politics.  Something else I might start ranting about.

Perhaps in those circles lessons things not learned by the likes of Axelrod have been understood because this reminder of what a liar Tim Scott is appeared today in response to his whoppers told last night. 

Update:  Contrast this response to Republican Tim Scott from George W. Bush administration member Nicholle Wallace with the voluntary weakness and "bipartisan" bullshit approach of David Axelrod. 

Leaping Is An Inadequate Metaphor For What Science Tries To Do When It Addresses Minds - Eddington Should Have Known Better

IN THIS SECTION Eddington goes far out of his field and gets into trouble.  I think some of his trouble is based on his faith in the more than primitive psychological and neuro-physiological claims of his time.  I told you, watch out for trouble when you see "neuro-" in front of something.

 

The first sign of that is in the next paragraph, "Our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind; but approximately enough for most purposes we may take it to be a set of electrical impulses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves." There was no "probably" about it.  Being very careful with words, he doesn't go whole hog and say he's identifying the physical basis of "the mind" but " a sensation in someone's mind" as so many others might or have. One of the more common non-answers I got to my questions about how the brain made the physical structure to give an accurate idea of something external to it, how it even got started with that, wanted to use the Neo-Pygmalianist fetish that our brains are like the computers which were created to mimic what our minds do, an infinite recursion which is no more of an answer than "DNA" or "natural selection" or "random chance," . . .

Eddington gets deeper into trouble later in the passage by equating things that really are not the same thing, wanting to give a mechanical model of our minds by just jumping from the physical to the mental, a metaphor that would work - though I doubt they'll ever successfully make it to what the mind is even then - if the mind were, in fact, a material artifact. If those of us who doubt that the mind is a material entity are right, you might jump at something but you'll never reach the mind and all of our metaphoric imaging won't tell you why because all of them are based in the experience of physical reality. We have no language to do what would need to be done because all of our language is based in our address of the external world, which we experience as sensations through our senses and the other living beings whose internal minds we, as well, can only know on an articulate basis through those same senses. To reach beneath those in addressing other people and animals is based on what seems like a leap of faith and at least in what can be articulated in words and by metaphor, it is that. And that is not susceptible to scientific method or language or modeling.

Here, addressing The Concept of Structure, Eddington the mathematical physicist is showing that even that supposedly most determinedly objective of endeavors leads even the most careful of scientific thinkers to mistake what works in their address of physical reality, under the right conditions, with the right prerequisites met, done honestly and carefully AND MODESTLY is not guaranteed to work for everything, not even on a theoretical basis. If I am right that minds are not merely physical but something else, then it is just a hard fact that science and the human practice of language is not going to give it the intelligible, communicable explanation that Eddington rightly noted was the sole achievement of the mathematical address of physical experience. It was quite clear in a lecture that Eddington gave nine years earlier,* that he should have known that.

After this general synthesis of structure, we are in a position to describe any particular portion of the structure in the terms in which physical knowledge is ordinarily expressed. This will provide an alternative (physical) description of the original sensation, and this structure has been incorporated in the structure which constitutes the physical universe, we can describe them in physical terms. Our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind; but approximately enough for most purposes we may take it to be a set of electrical impuses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves.

I certainly would question this passage first because, "our physiological knowledge is probably insufficient to specify the exact physical event which is also a sensation in someone's mind," is putting it mildly even now, not to mention more than seventy years ago. We have no way to make the jump between the event and the experience, the sensation of it in our consciousness. No more than we have to get from "is to ought," Sam Harris pretending he has done so is a more comic version of Thomas Hobbes claiming he'd squared the circle. 

 

What Eddington does here is common enough, describing an assumed physical mechanism of what he assumes happens in the brain, but he equates that with both the experience and the sensation when it's no more of an explanation for either than the world round transmission of a Youtube, its content as put there by its maker or for the understanding of it by the viewer by this fascinating description of the role erbium plays in that transmission.

His claims about what "approximately enough for most purposes" is not an approximation, it is an explanatory model for something that may well not be susceptible to model making. If that is true to take a "set of electrical impulses occurring at the brain-terminal of a bundle of nerves" to BE the conscious experience of external things is wrong.

It is important to notice that the interpretation of sensory experience, like the interpretation of a cipher, includes tow distinct problems. "Interpreting a cipher" may mean the procedure of discovering the code, or it may mean decoding a particular message with the code already known. In the same way, the procedure of interpreting our sensations as information about an external world may refer to the problem, which stands at the beginning of physics, of associating the fragments of structure in consciousness with the structure of an external universe; or it may refer to the particular information obtainable from each new sensation when we apply our accumulated physical and physiological knowledge. In regard to the initial problem a single sensation is no more informative than a single letter in a cipher of which we have not the key. But after the initial problem has been solved, we are able to interpret sensations individually as a cipher is decoded letter by letter. A sensation of noise informs me of an electrical disturbance of a particular nerve-terminal - which, of course, does not mean that it informs me that this is the correct physical description of what has occurred. The description is provided beforehand by the solution of the initial problem so that it is ready for use when the sensation informs me that an event has occurred to which it is applicable.

The disturbance at the nerve terminal is generally the result of a long chain of causation in the physical world. In familiar thought we usually leap to the far end of the chain of causation, and say that the sensation is caused by an object at some distance from the seat of the sensation. In the case of he visual sensation caused by a spiral nebula, the object is not only remote in space but may be millions of years distant in time. Causation bridges the gap in space and time, but the physical event at the seat of sensation (provisionally identified with an electrical disturbance of the nerve terminal) is not the cause of the sensation it is the sensation. More precisely, the physical event is the structural concept of which the sensation is the general concept.

Here even the very careful, precise and honest Eddington makes the typical mistake of a scientist of thinking that what works in the their modeling is as a physical description of something which, if not physical, is no more real than the explanations of the Just-so Stories, it is a bad habit in a physicist, it is the common everyday practice of the pseudo-scientific lore about minds, behavior.  I really think in these last sentences Eddington was slightly guilty of the same kind of eliminative reductionism as the contemporary Behaviorist school of psychology was guilty of, dismissing things that they couldn't or didn't care to address, dismissing their importance. The logical positivists in philosophy, too, come to think of it.  I think that is bound to happen when science runs up against what it can't deal with, certainly the case in modern philosophy, less so in many older ones.  Modernism is wedded ideologically to what leads to dishonesty. 

Sensations are not merely general concepts for plugging into an imaginary structure, they are the totality of what someone's mind can know of things external to it, even the very body of the person whose mind is the totality of their experience of everything.  Including structure.  Our sensations of the external world AND OUR OWN BODY is far more than what Eddington reduces it to for purposes of saying things about it and fitting it into his quite brilliant explanation of the practices of what is taken of as the hardest of physical science. He wants to make that leap because the issues that arise from the fact of it being our individual minds and, collectively, the minds of scientists turn out to be inseparable from the human activity of science. Minds started impinging on the activities of physicists in a way that couldn't be ignored early in the 20th century, exactly in physics. It certainly was not the only science that was true of but in the others the role that the human minds who were the ones doing the science didn't need to be directly addressed by scientists in their formal work, though it certainly should have been addressed in the so-called "behavioral sciences" and in all of science that relied on the creation of scenarios and stories, evolutionary science is absolutely dependent on that risky practice. I think that a good percentage of the trouble that those sciences have generated, the psudo-sciences and the real ones that have a huge amount of human ideological content such as evolutionary biology, cosmology, just about anything with "neuro-" or "cognative" in its label come from ignoring that fact, it makes them a lot less careful and immodest in their claims. In the case of natural selection, which is intrinsically a matter of made up stories, it led to genocide and the blighting of the lives of hundreds of millions and likely billions. That was coming to a head even as Eddington was giving that lecture, it was happening in just about all of the English speaking countries in a prelude to that.

* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as son as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.

 

Science And The Unseen World: Swathmore Lecture 1929

 

I wonder if Eddington's lectures on these two occasions differed because in 1938 he was talking to his fellow scientists and in 1929 he was, I assume, speaking to an audience of his fellow Quakers. If that's the case then I think this passage from the earlier lecture is far more defensible as an honest statement of fact. 

Second Time Round For This Game - Having Fun With Atheist Ideology

THINK OF THAT RAREST of vintage cars, an Edsel made of rutherfordium with an interior accessorized with leather made from Orloxonian stodontodons. Think of a brown one with orange trim. The car is in near mint condition, with a small dent in it put there by a collision with a tricycle.

There, you've just thought of something which never existed in the entire history of DNA, rutherfordium being an artificial element which is extremely radioactive and which in its longest lasting isotope would not last long enough to make much of anything with, certainly not more than a few molecules of an oxide or something. It was not discovered or, made, really, until 1964, well after the last Edsel rolled off the short-lived line in the 1950s.

Stodontodons are a dinosaur I just made up (if there has been something called that already, I mean the other species that goes by the same name) and they have never been found in fossil form on Orloxonia, which I also made up by letting my fingers type out some letters without thinking about it.

Tell me you didn't have an idea of a car that couldn't have existed in your experience or in the history of DNA. Now did "DNA" know how to make the object that is the material basis of the idea you now have in your head?

"DNA" in most of the uses of the term is one of the many atheist gods of popular imagination, it is something that does things that DNA in reality has never and never will do, among other things having that omniscience that it would have to have to answer all of those inconvenient questions I asked of the atheist-materialist "brain only" model of consciousness. There are lots of such atheist gods created out of the necessity of them coming up with unevidenced, all inclusive explanations of phenomena that they can't account for otherwise, "natural selection," is certainly one such god to which all manner of unevidenced, unexplained powers of creation are given. Two of the other most often resorted to by atheist ideologues in science and out are "random chance" and "probability".

Atheists are always making up gods without admitting that that's what they're doing. "Natural selection" is certainly the creator god of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, to name only two.  

 

Update:  Oh, yeah, I forgot about that, the update. 

 

I am under no obligation to come up with a replacement for "DNA" or "natural selection" as an explanation of how consciousness happens,  your demand that I do is not out of a requirement of criticism of the idea, there is no obligation of a critic to come up with a replacement in order to point out the problem of a proposal that doesn't work.   

I don't believe that minds are material entities.  If that is right there is no way to limit them to meet the requirements and stay within the boundaries of what we imagine as physical causation.  If consciousness, the mind, is not material or physical (they don't necessarily mean the same things) there is every reason to expect would have properties that lie outside of physical causation or they would not be something else.  The reason that materialism, atheism, "physicalism" or "naturalism" (to cover as many of those dodges as I know are in current use) cannot deal with "the hard problem of consciousness" is that their insisted on framing is not adequate to account for the human experience of consciousness and thinking.  If I'm right there is no way that science will ever be able to do that, though scientists and the true believers in atheist-materialism will pretend it has, or lie about it. 

Friggin' Blogger ate my morning post and I can't find it.  Luckily I've still got a draft in my text editor so I'll redo it for later.  That is if it doesn't reappear mysteriously. 

Taking This Occasion To Think Of Jimmy Carter

THERE IS INTERNET speculation that the announced visit by Jill and Joe Biden to Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter is a sign of the immanent death of the greatest ex-president in the history of the country.   I don't think it's necessarily that, if there's one thing that is obvious, the Bidens are a very gracious couple and I'm sure they would take the chance of visiting the Carters even without it being a sign of doom. Though when you get to be well into your 90s, the chances are that you're nearing the end even when you're in good health.

I voted for Jimmy Carter once, being an idiot, then secular, lefty angry with him for him falling victim to the media-DC insider campaign to knee cap him, I stupidly voted for Barry Commoner as a stupid protest vote in 1980.   I did that only because I knew that Jimmy Carter was not going to win the election, if  I thought he could have won it I would certainly have voted for Jimmy Carter.    

I voted for non-Democrats twice, once that year because I was certain Jimmy Carter had been successfully eliminated from a second term by the media and in 1996 when I knew that there was no way Bill Clinton would not be reelected and so my stupid protest vote was even stupider because it was cast for that black hole of egotistical selfishness worshiped by the secular-lefty media,  Ralph Nader, who went on to be the tool of the Republican-fascists in Florida and on the Supreme Court to install the second worst president in our modern history, George W. Bush. The worst of ours is no match for the worst of theirs in their own field.  

Jimmy Carter, in his own intentions, would have been a great president if he'd known the Washington DC ropes better and if he had not depended so heavily on people he brought there from Georgia, just as Bill Clinton, also a governor and never a member of Congress brought people with him he shouldn't have.  Seeing them and Barack Obama as opposed to the two other most recent Democrats in the office,  Lyndon Johnson and, now Joe Biden, I would never support another person for the Democratic nomination except someone with extensive experience in the Congress.  The presidency is no place for on-the-job learning, a presidential administration isn't an entry level job.

I'm not sure Clinton had in him what Carter did, Bill Clinton's post-presidency has certainly not been the model of generosity and wisdom, the greatness that Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn Carter made of his from.  I am certain that their serious belief in Christianity was probably the determining factor in what made them the greatest of ex-Presidents and ex-First Ladies.   I am not convinced of the same level of commitment to The Gospel and the Apostolic teachings in the New Testament in any of the others, certainly not in Barack Obama, though perhaps he'll start to do something in that direction that proves me wrong.  I hope he does but I see no sign of that.

None of us are guaranteed our next breath at any age.  I recently read about the second oldest religious sister in the United States, Sr. Francis Dominici Piscatell. who at 108 is twelve years older than Jimmy Carter.* She is quoted as saying, "I'm just living a normal life, thinking normally, reading and doing things an old lady would do." Maybe that's a clue as to how to live to that age, just doing what you do. Twelve years is like an hour, or like 12 years, depending on how you live it or look at it. Who knows, maybe there are still good things to come from Jimmy Carter, we don't know. It would be inspiring if the Carters managed it but they've already been an inspiration in their work and lives. I could still do with emulating them, it's better than what I do. Maybe it would honor them more by looking for a good, on hands volunteer opportunity today. So I'll be asking around. 

 

* And there was the story of the 117 year old French nun who survived Covid a few months back.  

 

Tavella told French media earlier this week that Sister André tested positive for the coronavirus in mid-January but she had so few symptoms that she didn't even realize she was infected. Her survival made headlines both in France and beyond.

"When the whole world suddenly started talking about this story, I understood that Sr. André was a bit like an Olympic flame on a 'round the world tour that people want to grab hold of, because we all need a bit of hope at the moment," Tavella said.

When Tavella talked to her Thursday about celebrating her next birthday in 2022, she replied: "I won't be here next year," he quoted her as saying, adding: "But she has been saying that for 10 years."

By strange coincidence, Tavella celebrated his 43rd birthday on Thursday.

"We often joke that she and I were born on the same day," he said. "I never tell myself that she is 117 because she is so easy to talk to, regardless of age. It is only when she talks about World War I as though she lived through it that I realize, 'Yes, she did live through it!'"

 

And I might drop dead as soon as I type this out. Better call the food bank to see if they need floors swept or something.  

 

"It is right that the importance and difficulty of the question should be emphasized" So I'll Emphasize It again

Now, you may complain that this is not what you mean by “existence”. You may insist that you want to know whether it is “real” or “true”. I do not know what it means for something to be “real” or “true.” You will have to consult a philosopher on that. They will offer you a variety of options, that you may or may not find plausible.

A lot of scientists, for example, subscribe knowingly or unknowingly to a philosophy called “realism” which means that they believe a successful theory is not merely a tool to obtain predictions, but that its elements have an additional property that you can call “true” or “real”. I am loosely speaking here, because there several variants of realism. But they have in common that the elements of the theory are more than just tools.

And this is all well and fine, but realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.

Sabine Hossenfelder: Does The Higgs Boson Exist

Back to the Eddington, Section IV

 

The mathematical theory of structure is the answer of modern physics to a question which has profoundly vexed philosophers.

"But if I never know directly events in the external world, but only their alleged effects on my brain, and if I never know my brain except in terms of its alleged effects on my brain, I can only reiterate in bewilderment my original questions: "What sort of thing is it that I know" and "Where is it?"

C.E.M. Joad, Aristotelian Society, Supp. vol IX, p 137

What sort of thing is it that I know? The answer is structure. To be quite precise, it is structure of the kind defined and investigated in the mathematical theory of groups.

It is right that the importance and difficulty of the question should be emphasized. But I think that many prominent philosophers, under the impression that they have set the physicists an insoluble conundrum, make it an excuse to turn their backs on the external world of physics and welter in a barren realism which is a negation of all that physical science has accomplished in unraveling the complexity of sensory experience. The mathematical physicist, however, welcomes the question as one falling especially within his province, in which his specialized knowledge may be of service to the general advancement of philosophy.

The phrase "if I never know my brain except in terms of its alleged effects on my brain" vividly, if not altogether accurately,* describes the conditions under which we labour. But it is not very alarming to the physicist, whose subject abounds with this kind of cyclic dependence. We only know an electric force by its effects on an electric charge; and we only know electric charges in terms of the electric forces they produce. It has long been evident that this is no bar to knowledge; but it is only recently that the systematic method of formulating such knowledge in terms of group-structure has become a recognized procedure in physical theory.

* A more accurate form would be: if I never know any brain except in terms of its alleged effects on a brain." [N. B. Eddington's footnote, not mine.]

The bewilderment of the philosophers evidently arises from a belief that, if we start from zero, any knowledge of the external world must begin with the assumption that a sensation makes us aware of something in the external world - something differing from the sensation itself because it is non-mental. But knowledge of the physical universe does not begin in that way. One sensation (divorced from knowledge already obtained by other sensations) tells us nothing; it does not even hint at anything outside of the consciousness in which it occurs. The starting point* of physical science is knowledge of the group-structure of a set of sensations in a consciousness. When these fragments of structure, contributed at various times and by various individuals, have been collated and represented according to the forms of thought that we have discussed, and when the gaps have been filled by an inferred structure depending on the regularities discovered i the directly known portions, we obtain the structure known as the physical universe.

* I mean the logical starting point, not the historical starting point, of a subject which has grown out of crude beginnings. [Again, Eddington's footnote, not mine.]

 

I would never bring myself to question the description of a mathematical physicist of the accomplishment and clarity of thought like Eddington when they describe their experience of how their understanding of the physical universe developed in their lives, so I won't. I doubt that other eminent members of his profession would put it the same way, especially those under the influence of more recent claims from neuro-biology and its even more baldly ideologically influenced fields of study (alas, watch out whenever you see "neuro-" put on something these days). But I would note that as Sabine Hossenfelder points out, physics, even particle physics, these days, is not immune from indulging in the realism that Eddington warned of as a temptation to the philosophers of his day. It's rampant in all areas of culture, science no less so than any other general area of life.  I would note that she was right, that when you consult philosophers on such things, you will still find they still produce "a variety of options, that you may or may not find plausible". The problem is that philosophers are not the only ones who do that, scientists do, physicists do, theoretical physicists more so than those who deal with observable things (at least that's my impression) cosmologists are positively addicted to the practice (with a very, very few exceptions, in my experience) and even more so when they venture outside of the formal, mathematical form of discourse into commenting on things their professional expertise gives them no more expertise in than anyone else. 

 

I would note that theoretical physics has turned round Eddington's criticism of philosophers "turning their back on the external world of physics" and demands that their own unadmitted philosophical speculations, ideologically motivated assertions and writing science fiction in equations are the proper study of physical science, though there is no demonstrable physical something to be there at all. 

 

People who are long term readers of this blog will know that in 2015 I went through the exercise of asking "brain only" materialists, the kind that just about all materialist-atheists are, how the brain would know how to construct whatever physical structure that would, then give rise to the epiphenomenon of an idea of something in the world external to the brain. 

 

How would a brain know:

 

-it needed to make a structure to represent a new idea before the structure to "be" that idea existed in the brain, 

-what that structure needed to be to produce that idea in the brain,

 

-how it was to make that precise structure so as to BE that idea in physical form in the brain which had not previously contained such a structure,

 

-how it would judge that it had made the right structure to do that BEFORE THE STURCTURE TO "BE" THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THAT IDEA and not some other idea

 

And, to add to that problem, how it would do that continually, with the speed in which we learn new things, from the most complex such as Eddington seems to only consider right down to the seemingly most everyday like that car that just appeared in an intersection you just came to or the wrinkle in the rug you stepped on when you woke up this morning.  

 

I asked that for more than a year and the most the idiots could come up with were the magic formulas that were no answer at all "natural selection" and "DNA" the latter being the stupidest of all because "DNA" couldn't do it fast enough to account for the phenomenon of the speed of ideas arising in the mind and which would have had to give that molecule the power of an all-knowing god capable of producing all of the varied knowledge human beings (and animals) came up with, the structure and means of producing those, as well. 

 

I haven't thought it out entirely what Eddington said in this passage but I think any model, formal or as informal as the one described here, that depends on "the brain" as the locus of all of that activity we probably more reasonably consider as happening in the mind than in an organ of our body is not going to get you far. 

 

I'll go on with this tomorrow, ignoring the howls of Darwin's Defenders during the duration of this series.