Hate Mail - Only One More Before I'm Caught Up

THAT SHORT VIDEO on the paradox that Bertrand Russell found that made the strategy he and a group of other mathematician-philosophers were engaged in to ground arithmetic in logic and so close one of the great unanswered questions of math and science, what numbers and, I'd guess, the basic operations of math are, a paradox that as Jeffrey Kaplan said "blew up the whole project" was only one of several such problems for materialist-scientism that were discovered in the early 20th century as the search for an absolute grounding of human mathematics and science intensified. The uncertainty principle discovered by Heisenberg and the famous wave-particle character of matter seem to have found similiar limits to human understanding in atomic physics.  I have to wonder if maybe God inserted those little tricks into both the human mind and the nature of physical being so that especially arrogant atheists will get their comeupance.  

As I've noted before, when A. S. Eddington laid out some of the conclusions derived from Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s, Russell gloomily predicted the end of science when what he was really mourning was the impossibility of having his kind of faith in materailist-atheist-scientism.  It didn't, though, keep him from retaining his faith which he never abandonned that I've seen. As far as I know, Eddington kept on being a Quaker even as he became one of the first and major figures in the revolution in physics.  

I'm not as conversant with the thinking of the others involved with him to know what their motives were but I know Russells through his volumenous writing and know he, as is typical of Brit and English language atheists, wanted most of all to put the final nail in the coffin of God. When you come to think of it, it is rather amazing how that obsession of materialists has so often been inserted into their supposedly scientific quest for knowledge.  I think that lies behind the current manifestation of the same thing, the materialist-atheist-scientistic cosmologists who keep telling us they're on the verge of finding a theory of everything.  That the principles of physics named above would seem the best available proof that physicists will never have complete, comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of even one electron, the idea that they are any day now get one of all of the electrons and all of the other bits of the entire universe, now, in the past, in the future and for all time, seems a bit premature, why, you might almost be tempted to say that their claims violate the laws of physics.  

Eddington and Einstein both tried to do the equivalent of coming up with at least more complete physical theories and both failed, in their own way. The huge advances in physics in their youth may have gotten them into the habit of thinking that with just enough theory they might break through on that problem.  It doesn't seem to have happened yet.  I think it should never go without saying that one of the results of that physics was the creation of atomic and nuclear bombs and pollution from nuclear power, it was not a perfectly harmless boon for humanity, it may end up killing us all.  

The problem that Russell was working on was in math deals only with "objects" which have no physical existence that we can discern and would seem to reside only in the conscious minds of, primarily, human beings and a few animals who have learned something of human language. As Kaplan pointed out, one of the goals of Russell, Frege and others was to banish the suspicion that numbers are a creation of human minds.  How their contention that something which is not material has a place in reality doesn't blow up materialism in a basic way maybe should be considered.  On top of that theoretical physics deals with objects as abstractions that can be treated mathematically with some regularity and reliable replicability, though, in some cases, with physical confirmation or refutation of theories.  It is certainly a revealing irony that such are some of the most devoted of materialists there are, so much so that one of their champions, Stephen Hawking, in his last years demanded that untestable equations, composed of nothing but numbers and operations be granted, by fiat, the status of scientific truth.  Though they are hardly the only ones demanding everything they can think of for their materialist ideology or their wild claims about securing the entire realm of reality for it.  The life sciences have their own branch of that ideology based sciencing. 

PS I found a paper on the "theological" thinking of Frege shortly after posting this so I will probably add more after I've read it a few times.   It wasn't pretty.

Physical bodies of organisms may be constructed of molecules, some of which are so complex that the mathematical treatment and study of them reaches another limit on the other end of mathematics* and, as is becoming increasingly clear, an attempt to reliably understand entire organisms or even what we pretend can be isolated systems within organisms** with the legitimate methods of science largely surpasses possibility.  Organisms are extremely complex and the reliability of treating them purely as scientific problems falls off rapidly as the complexity increases. To a good extent what you come up with is more a product of hope than of physical confirmation. Compared to the most complex of molecules, living beings are many orders of complexity more complex.  There is no part of an organism which can function or operate for long as an isolated unit no more than an object can escape the gravity of other objects.  Their form and operation are dependent on the whole organism, not isolated as part of an organism isolated to subject it to study. Things such as the cell-line of breast cancer taken from a Black Woman more than a half a century ago is certainly not the maintanence and reproduction of an organism.  It is a highly artificial application of human intelligence to keep it alive and reproducing well after the woman it was taken from has died.  I wouldn't be surprised if such dolts exist but I've never heard a biological scientist who worked on someting important make a stupid claim that what may well be the most studied cell-line in the history of science was in any way totally understood by scientists.  In my experience biologists dealing with real things that they can study instead of speculating about things they not only can't study but will never have enough (often any) material necessary to make such a useful or even reliable study, such as the whole of evolution, have such comprehensive understanding.

The necessary practicality that forces us to temporarily ignore that so SOME study of them to, for example, treat diseases or injuries can be undertaken too often leads us to believe that that integration isn't always a factor in the actual existence and function of those aspects of the organism. I doubt that it is humanly possible to really achieve reliable and replicable knowledge of the whole of any such integrated organism with the best, most honest science on a scale that it is currently impossible and likely will always be impossible to achieve. For one thing, living organisms are constantly changing due to environmental and internal changes, maturation, aging, illness, etc. How could anyone think they could have comprehensive knowledge of that kind of moving object? There is no calculus that can simulate it, certainly none a human can calculate. I think if they tried to use computers to do it they'd have to ignore that they wouldn't even be able to program it to really simulate so many known and unknown vectors and the changing relationships among them. And if they could the results would probably surpass any human beings ability to comprehend it.  

I have to wonder why the alleged study of evolution is considered a part of the same thing as biology done about things that can be observed, some honest attempt at measuring and analyzing them made, BECAUSE WHAT THEY ARE STUDYING IS AVAILABLE TO THEM. Though such science may reference some of what evolutionary lore tells them, I wonder if in many cases, the theories they rely on being of such questionable reliability, that might not be better not used.  The study of evolution has an entirely inadequate percentage of what it would need to study the whole thing to come to any kind of real understanding of it. I don't know how many zeros you'd have to write to the right side of the decimal point to come up with the real figure of what part of one percent of the stuff of evolution they have to study but I'd guess it's at least dozens of zeros before you'd get to even a 1.  3.5 billion years and who knows how many trillions of organisms of unknown to little known character would have to be accounted for in the denominator of that number.  You know it's a tiny fraction, we don't even know enough to know how vanishingly small that number is.

I do know why something of such little practical use has gained such outsized attention and emotional import in culture and that is entirely due to its usefulness to religiously disillusion those who were brought up in a culture of Biblical fundamentalism which insists that the first chapters of Genesis must be literally true.  I think that works best against those branches of Protestantism that hold that as an article of faith and that's hardly most of Protestantism.  It works less well on Catholics who, if they had any knowledge of that tradition, don't tend to be much bothered by the idea that Genesis is neither biology nor is it history.  I never for a second had any problem with acknowledging that evolution pretty much certainly is the explanation of the present diversity of life on Earth, an explanation of the fossil and geological record (such as that is) and ties in well with the ability to explain genetic similarity between what are otherwise apparently entirely different lines of life. As I have learned more about the supposed science of evolution, the less impressed I am with it making any kinds of sweeping claims of knowledge.  Though I suspect it can come up with some plausible claims of limited issues, even those are mostly without actual physical evidence in the fossil record and are probably better considered lore than science.  A lot of science is far more based in the characteristics of lore than the claimed methods of science.

If a "young earth creationist" has no other malignant political or ideological infections, I consider "YACs" to be rather harmless and quaint.  As to their insistence on having their unscientific, in my opinion wrong-headedly religious ideology taught as science, I have a problem with that.  I have a pretty big problem with the pretense that Fundamentalism is Christianity and that pushing it like that will discredit the real thing among those who are ignorant of the real thing.  

But I have a bigger problem with the propagation of natural selection as science. I am not as conversant with the literature and history of "young earth creationism" as I am with Darwinism but I have never seen anything tying it to, in the quintessential example of such "applied science," something like the Nazi genocides.  I have traced the direct connection of natural selection to that genocide and to the attempted genocides by less dramatic means, the eugenics programs in the United States, Canada, etc. We English speakers like to pretend that such eugenicists as Dr. Perkins who was hell bent on wiping out the Abenakis of Vermont were not doing the same thing as the Nazis were in an even more ruthless and brutal fashion, but such Americans were, actually, working towards the same goal of eliminating racial and ethnic groups from the human future.  And we American's don't like to think of it the way it really was but Dr. Perkins was trying to wipe out the Abenakis with the support of the Supreme Court, in the infamous Buck v. Bell  decision written by the confirmed Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.  Holmes explained his motives in unmistakably Darwinist terms.  He said of all his rulings he thought that one got closest to the heart of the matter.  I have a far stronger problem with what is a shoddy scientific theory with its history of producing genocidal attempts being propagated in public schools JUST AS I WOULD HAVE THE SCIENTIFIC RACISM, ALSO BASED IN DARWINISM, THAT WAS FOUND IN THE VERY TEXTBOOK SCOPES WAS ALLEGED TO HAVE TAUGHT IT FROM in the famous Chamber of Commerce, PR staged "monkey trial."  It was that kind of science that those who champion science in that historical drama were upholding as an historical fact though if one in a thousand of them understood that, I'll eat Mencken's hat.   Darwinism is a far greater danger on a far more important issue than the silly idea that Genesis 1 and 2 yield reliable biology and physics lessons. As I've pointed out, it is the basis for Kevin MacDonald being able to insert the crudest antisemitism directly into the literature of science for decades without his fellow scientists objecting decades after the Nazi genocides were made known to the world.

I think if we as a species continues long, eventually natural selection will be seen as being the biological equivalent of Ptolemaic cosmology, a stab at coming up with an explanation of what limited evidence there is that, likewise, got stuck in a basic framework that doesn't work. Only that ancient cosmology was based on physical observation adequate to support it if you kept modifying it, natural selection is not and it, as well, has had to constantly be patched and renovated.  And I don't know of any genocides directly attributable to Ptolemaic cosmology and there are genocides directly linked to natural selection.  About the worst that can be charged against the ancient cosmology was that its last champions got Galileo in some trouble when he dissed the Pope and was given a rather plush term of house arrest with travel to get medical care.  He had plenty of time for writing writing his last and maybe best scientific work.  he conducted a fairly free correspondence, including with his daughter who was a nun.  I doubt any of those who were victimized through natural selection would not have changed places with him in a second. Though  Brecht never wrote an ahistorical play about any of them.  That wasn't on his agenda.

English language college grads are so superstitious about these things.  

* The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry.   The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.)  of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.   René Thom

Who Is Following Scientific Method More Closely And More Modestly? - Hate Mail

PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN is someone I love listening to and he's someone I think is a real intellectual.  He was one of the early scholars who benefited from and, if I'm not mistaken was kind of in on the project of using a concordance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct the text and so break the stranglehold embargo that the intellectual gangsters in control of them enforced.  They kept the materials from being largely accessible for decades.  His colleagues reproduced the texts by carefully piecing them together word by word, document by document in a real feat of enduring boredom. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a text from a concordance and they reproduced more than one. After that the gang keeping them hostage was shown to be disreputable and that freed the texts from their control.  The rather nasty antisemitic remarks of one of the scholar-gangsters helped, unintentionally.  It's incredibly ironic that texts presumed to have been generated by a cult of super-pious Jews, for whom other Jews weren't Jewish enough were in the control of an antisemite.  How anyone expected honest scholarship from that is worth asking.  

That's not to say I necessarily agree with everything Schiffman says, agreeing with everything anyone say about something as dependent on filling in missing information while interpreting the extant evidence of first century Jewish and early Christian culture and literature and religion, politics, etc. is unwise.  The art that such scholars engage in should always be considered to be highly contingent and susceptible to new evidence being found, new interpretations of what is there, new assumptions being inserted and taken out of the mix on the basis of newer thinking and honest criticism. As is seen in the period of the embargo, if you don't do that you are apt to impose your own agenda on top of the agendas of those whose work you're supposed to be explaining.  

A lecture he gave on "The Dead Sea Scrolls Judaism On The Eve of Christianity"* at the Pontifical Gregorian University is a good example of that.  I want to focus on one small detail in his lecture, what he admits is his assumption that some of the literature found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was general literature which was in general use and not peculiar to the Qumran community, assumed to be the origin of the library found in the scrolls.  His assumption is based on twenty two tiny fragments of the same texts being found in the ruins of Masada where the famous last stand of Jewish resistance when the Romans sacked Jerusalem to crush the revolt around 73 CE.  

The honesty of Schiffman's vigorously asserted conclusions on that includes a statement of why it has to be considered a conclusion based on fragmentary information, he pretty much inserts such conditioned statements all through his lecture.  Which is typical of the good scholarship in that area.  I'm listening to a lot of the Jewish study of the origins of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity lately and am finding it really interesting and provocative and helpful. The fact being that both religions rose at the same time and the assertions that far from the one copying the other, both of them were a product of the most intimate interaction and reaction to each other.

All of this is, as already admitted, based on fragmentary information. Those twenty-two tiny fragments of parchment or paper that as eminent a scholar as Shiffman bases a quite consequential conclusion on are something he calls "bits of nothing".  However, in comparison to the majority of the fragmentary information on which the scientific and, even more, the allegedly scientific study of evolution is based is far less informative about the phenomenon of evolution than those fragments are about what Professor Schiffman says about them.

The literary fragments have a far more reliably known semiotic content than any fossil will have.  Texts are intentionally written to impart dense information, anatomy preserved by chance and the other fossil record is not constructed with the purpose of informing anyone of anything. And not only the actual literary content of the fragments of text.  Those fragments carry evidence of the ethnicity of the people who produced them, the time they lived, their language, their general biological relations, their more extended biological relatedness, it certainly identifies their species with complete specificity and the location the people who produced them lived in or were in at the time the texts were left where they were found.  Given the contents of some of them, the gender of those who produced them is far more reliably guessed at. It's possible they can give you a good guess at the level of education or, possibly, intellectual capacity of those who had those thoughts and ideas and are a good clue into their moral and intellectual intentions.  They show things that no fossil can show, their thinking, what they thought was important enough to write it down.  

Especially such texts as Schiffman was talking about which can tell you at least something about what may have motivated their behavior in life if not carrying absolutely certain clues that make assumptions about how they may have lived more secure than almost any if not any fossil will show about the minds and behavior of the individuals or those closely related to them. If they include personal information that can tell you things that no fossil can.  Any humanly written and readable text will probably carry enormously more information than any fossilized organism, the farther back in the history of life on Earth, the more unlikely that guesses about those things, even the actual anatomy of the organism, will be as securely knowable. I learned a lot from reading Stephen J. Gould's book Wonderful Life (which I still love) about the creatures whose distorted remains are found in the Burgess Shale and then reading other paleontologists who disagreed with the  spectacular reconstructions of them presented by Gould.  Thinking back, that was one of the milestones in my increasing skepticism about the pretense that is the possibility of having the kind of  comprehensive knowledge of most of evolution the popular presentation of it claims is had.  That's something I didn't remember having that reaction to until writing this post.   I still love Gould so many years after his death, even as I have some profound disagreements with some of his contentions and conclusions.  The Mismeasure of Man deserves to be considered a classic of scientific criticism, something there is too little of.   You can learn a lot from going over who it was who slammed the book and looking into their decidedly non-scientific motives.

In so many ways the scholarly study of the field that Professor Schiffman works in with far more extensive information than much of the allegedly scientific study of evolution relies on demands that an honest person consider it closer to the methods of science than much if not most of what is now called "science" which is published in reviewed journals and shares in the "rights and privilege of membership" in the Science Club.  The conclusions drawn by good scholars in the field are often so much less of an overreach, so much more modest in their claims, so limited and expressed so contingently. Perhaps it is fortunate that Professor Schiffman doesn't get to call what he does "science" because it's possible he wouldn't practice the virtue of honest modesty over what he does if he did get to call it that.  

What he does is entirely more scientific than almost anything ever done as psychology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, etc. I don't feel in the slightest bit embarrassed to have pointed out that the tiny, tiny, bits and pieces, that evolutionary science has in the way of actual physical evidence for almost all of the billions of years of life on Earth is a minute fraction of one percent of all of it. The idea that Darwin in 1859 was able to identify THE "mechanism" of evolution is an absurd overreach.  The scientific nature of the theory of natural selection is pretty slight and highly influenced by the fond wishes of the almost entirely white, rich, aristocratic or aspiring to that status guys who had control of biology for most of that period.  As I noted Galton was quite shrewd in using the family histories of the families of eminent men of science to support his contribution to the effort in promoting his cousin, Charles Darwin's theory that inspired his eugenics.  Of course if you start by flattering their families in a feudal class-system like that of Britain, it's going to give your bogus theories a leg up.  If you can believe the British Royal Family is an example of superior breeding, and there is probably no family in Britain with a more carefully selected blood-line, you can buy such bogus science when it tells you what you already wanted to hear.  In America, it was sold through appeals to our native form of fascism, white supremacy.  It is maintained through the belief that it is a bulwark against religion and for atheism.  I can not understand how it could have, otherwise, gained the position in intellectual culture that it has.  It is a putrid morality destroying faux scientific theory that is directly responsible for genocides conducted after 1860.  It always will as long as it is maintained as the required framing of evolutionary thinking.

* I can't find a url to the Youtubes that will function as a link to the video and I can't get it to come up on Blogger from that channel, I have no idea why that is, I've never had that problem before.  Sorry you'll have to look them up at Youtube by the title. I wish they'd do a better job of editing these lectures for their content because if you don't skip to the lecture you start wondering if you should skip the video as the minutes wear on.  And there's another one from the same channel, "Did Rabbinic Judaism Emerge Out Of Christianity by Professor Israel Jacob Yuval, which I alluded to about the cross-fertilization of the earliest Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism.  I don't fully endorse all of the conclusions, I haven't read or listened enough to know how reliable any of their conclusions are, but they are well worth listening to and looking for more information on the topic.

The biggest reason that they are well worth listening to and taking seriously is the stated intent that what they believe will lead to mutual respect for those who belong to both traditions, whose experience and personal commitments lead them to choose to believe in one or the other and, by extension, those who choose to believe in other traditions.  

I've been doing a lot of off-line listening as I have very limited time with an internet hookup, probably less than three hours a week.  I download and listen or read offline.  I don't know when I'll have in-home internet again. It feels kind of like I remember the 90s as being. I guess internet cafes are about as much of a thing as video-rental places now.