Naw, it wasn't Simps. I doubt he remembers who old Bertie was, if he ever knew.
As to what he said over there, if he exhibited signs of understanding what I'd written I'd have to go back and check it because if he could understand it it's probably false. He is reality resistant unless someone said it in the Village Voice or some once upon a time kewl venue.
If the people who send me hate mail sent stuff that isn't full of false invective, especially about other people but even about me, I have no problem with posting it. But I will not post lies and I'm not under any obligation to post content I don't want to. That doesn't mean I don't get to refute what it accused me of, especially when it's posted elsewhere. I have found very few atheists who are mature enough to make an argument without making it personal and false.
Update: Simps didn't like what I said.
Well, if he meant that Lovecraft, in one letter, revoked his long term anti-semitism but not his even more vicious racism, only that's not what he meant. I told you that he was reality resistant.
Why would he think what they do on a TV show would bother me? Those Murdoch shows with the very sexy Yannick Bisson? He must be getting a bit old to play the part by now, isn't he? I mean, he's no Rich Hobson, these days. I like Bisson and he is certainly eye-candy but I haven't watched one of those in years. As to Lovecraft showing up in one? When did he ever get to Canada? Or did Murdoch move to Providence? As he didn't start writing until the late 1910s, it's kind of a major anachronism to have him doing so around the turn of the century. I doubt he even thought of writing at the time that show was set. Though as so many of the writers for that show did the steam punk junk, that wouldn't stop them from that kind of a stretcher.
I will say that much as I like Yannick Bisson and Helene Joy (I liked her as a victim of syphilis in the movie of Under the Dragon's Tail where the very good Peter Outerbridge played Murdoch), and I like Johnny Harris quite a lot, the show is kind of silly most of the time. I have, actually, read some of the Murdoch novels by Maureen Jennings and, while she did a fair job with period accuracy and writing her characters believably into the time period, they were good to fair. They took major liberties in Under the Dragon's Tail and some in Poor Tom is Cold in the movies, though, Except the Dying made the transition pretty much intact. The book of Dragon's Tail seems to me to carry a lot more of the seediness and grittiness of the 1890s demimonde than the shows. They're way too clean. Murdoch wasn't a scientific tinkerer sleuth in the books, either.
L.R. Wright's Canadian mysteries are pretty good. The Suspect is the best of those I've read.
Update 2: Nope, never heard that Lovecraft went to Quebec once, I can't find anything about it online. Though, looking to fact check it, I found this.
But, more broadly speaking, Lovecraft’s ascendance has also brought an uncomfortable truth into the spotlight: He was a virulent racist. The xenophobia and white supremacy that burble beneath his fiction (which may have gone unnoticed, had he remained anonymous) are startlingly explicit in his letters. Flip through them and you’ll find the author bemoaning Jews as “hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens” with whom “association ... was intolerable”; New York City’s “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers”; and New England’s “undesirable Latins—low-grade Southern Italians and Portuguese, and the clamorous plague of French-Canadians.” In 1922, he wrote that he wished “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” of New York City’s Chinatown, which he called “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh.” In another letter, he wrote, “In general, America has made a fine mess of its population and will pay for it in tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.”
Sounds like Steve Banon could be his bastard great, grandchild. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft procreating. Now, aren't you glad you poked that hornet's nest? To claim that Lovecraft was a great traveler would seem to be a major fib. Unless you count his brief period in NYC surrounding his marriage, its breakup and his failure to get a job or live a normal life before he fled back to Providence.
Notice that he was another Anglo-Saxon fan of murder by mass gassing well before the Nazis started doing that. In the literary tradition of H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
Lovecraft was a piece of crap who wrote crap for people who don't read much but crap.
Update 3: When H. P. Lovecraft lived, was the same period when the great anti-lynching crusader, anti-segregationist Ida Wells Barnett advocated people vote Republican because the Democratic Party contained the segregationist Southerners who prevented the anti-lynching and other civil rights legislation from becoming law. In the depression, as Lovecraft hoped, as so many in the arts and those on the outer fringes of it, hoped for help from the New Deal, he overcame his previous inclinations to support FDR, to some extent on that basis. So, dopey, if you're going to look at history with the same standards as those who write for the Murdoch TV show, you're going to come to the opposite of understanding it. Not that that would bother you if you liked the fiction that resulted.
The Republican Party today, the Party of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, would have a lot more in common with Lovecraft the xenophobic racist and gay hater (yes, he was one of those too) than today's Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson pushed through laws he would have absolutely hated.
Last Update unless the dolt say something really hilariously clueless (from the same link as above),
But as vexing as Lovecraft’s racism is for fans, his views are also one of the most useful lenses for reading his work. In March, Leslie Klinger delivered a lecture on Lovecraft at Brown University’s Hay Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Lovecraft papers and other materials. Toward the end of his remarks, Klinger—without excusing or defending Lovecraft’s racism—refused to separate it from his achievements. Lovecraft “despised people who weren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” he said. “But that powers the stories ... this sense that he’s alone, that he’s surrounded by enemies and everything is hostile to him. And I think you take away that part of his character, it might make him a much nicer person, but it would destroy the stories.”
The comics writer Alan Moore picks up this subject, as well, in the introduction to Klinger’s book. But first he reminds readers of the seismic social changes that occurred during Lovecraft’s life: women’s suffrage, advances in mankind’s understanding of outer space, the Russian revolution, new highly visible LGBT communities in American cities, and the largest wave of migrants and refugees the U.S. had ever seen. Moore writes,
"In this light it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generate Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world."
Me, I always thought he was a crap writer for people who mostly read crap.
OK, Stupy did it. Simps, I've pointed out that you have absolutely no understanding of how time works but unless Murdoch invented a time machine, that Lovecraft might have visited Quebec (Murdoch is set in Toronto, there is a bit of a difference) three decades after the Murdoch series is set would sort of make my point that having him show up in the series is kind of a stretcher.
Didn't they ever tell you anything about how time works? That some things happen after other things and those things didn't happen before they did? Just how permissive were they in your first grade years?
Sunday, April 9, 2017
How Dare You Say That About Bertrand Russell - Really Pissy Hate Mail
If you're not going to bother to read the links to things I write about to see if they provide support for what I said, don't claim they don't show what I claim they do. Bertrand Russell's dishonesty in attributing even the atheist, anti-religious, priest and nun murdering Soviet Communist dictatorship to religion instead of its materialism, its atheism and its scientism is obvious from the first paragraph of that chapter treating the subject, that's why I gave a link to it. I will go through it and the following paragraph to point out his blatant double-speak and his hypocrisy.
The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
After saying that a "materialistic conception of history" is due to Marx, and underlies his whole Communist philosophy BUT, even though it "profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics" you could, somehow, accept Communism without accepting what it's based in. Let's guess, he wanted to claim that those murders that had already started accumulating under the materialist-Marxist dictatorship of the Marxist, Lenin, weren't really attributable to their materialist view of human lives. At least that's a tacit claim in what he said. The double-speak of that continues and is intensified in his further desire to get the materialism which the foundation of his own faith off the hook for what was developing into a horror that would make the Reign of Terror look like a practice run.
The name [materialism] does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that all the mass-phenomena of history are determined by economic motives. This view has no essential connection with materialism in the philosophic sense. Materialism in the philosophic sense may be defined as the theory that all apparently mental occurrences either are really physical, or at any rate have purely physical causes. Materialism in this sense also was preached by Marx, and is accepted by all orthodox Marxians. The arguments for and against it are long and complicated, and need not concern us, since, in fact, its truth or falsehood has little or no bearing on politics.
Notice that as soon as he denies that Marx's materialist conception of history is the same thing as (his) philosophical materialism (which he later admits is a monist ideology which denies that there is anything which is not thoroughly material) he that that Marx shared his materialist ideology and that he even "preached" it and that such "philosophical" Marxism is accepted by all orthodox Marxians". He goes on
In particular, philosophic materialism does not prove that economic causes are fundamental in politics.
Of course it doesn't "prove" that economic causes are fundamental in politics, as an eminent pure mathematician, Russell knew that such proof would be impossible as it is in everything but mathematics, but that doesn't mean that a materialist could believe that economic causes are fundamental in politics without those economic causes, themselves being a material phenomenon. Not much farther along at on the same page, but in a later paragraph, he said:
For another reason, also, the attempt to base a political theory upon a philosophical doctrine is undesirable. The philosophical doctrine of materialism, if true at all, is true everywhere and always; we cannot expect exceptions to it, say, in Buddhism or in the Hussite movement.
However, shortly before that Russell certainly wanted to get the ideology of materialism off the hook for the results of those Marxists who as "philosophical materialists" must believe that "The philosophical doctrine of materialism" which they held in common with him "if true at all, is true everywhere and always". That insistence that materialism is true everywhere and always is absolutely basic to all materialism. It is to materialism what the belief that God created the heavens and the Earth, all that is visible and invisible, is to theism.
Russell admits that, materialists as materialists "we cannot expect exceptions to it". He even used the first person. He finishes by saying that a materialist cannot even expect that Buddhism or the Hussite movement are exceptions, according to the materialist all must be based in the material substance of the physical world but he started by claiming that though orthodox Marxists were philosophical materialists, as was Marx, but that Marx's materialist conception of history, explicitly called that by Marx, was not attributable to the philosophical materialism he shared with Bertrand Russell. That is typical of Bertrand Russell's style of double speak when dealing not only with materialism and it results but is something he applies in compound form when speaking about what he really loathes, religion. That is something he shares in common with almost all atheists who speak on such matters - off hand, I'm hard pressed to name an exception.
You can see more of it as he continued that second paragraph in the chapter.
The view of Buckle, for example, according to which climate is one of the decisive factors, is equally compatible with materialism. So is the Freudian view, which traces everything to sex. There are innumerable ways of viewing history which are materialistic in the philosophic sense without being economic or falling within the Marxian formula. Thus the "materialistic conception of history" may be false even if materialism in the philosophic sense should be true.
The slight of hand by which Russell lets materialism off the hook, by him removing "economic motives" as defined by the materialist monist Marx from the exclusively material universe that he admitted all philosophical materialists insisted to be the only reality, doing to "economic motives" what he admitted that a materialist couldn't really believe of Buddhism or the religious doctrines of Jan Hus. All he's doing is diverting attention from the fact that the Marxist concentration on, one hand, a materialistic conception of economics by pointing out that other materialists concentrated on other supposedly material phenomena. It's stage magic, deception to dupe his audience to not notice something he doesn't want them to notice.
Bertrand Russell, in full polemical mode, is very good at covering up his frequently audacious dishonesty but you get the feeling he was always expecting a close reader to catch him, eventually - he was a pure mathematician, after all - and he wanted to be able to point out something to claim that he'd admitted what he obviously wanted a less careful reader to not notice as he swayed him to his preferred conclusion. Especially when he, himself, knew what he wanted was unsupported by the actual evidence and rigorous consideration of the issues. A really good example of how audacious he could be in a long stream of double-talk from later in the chapter
Treated as a practical approximation, not as an exact metaphysical law, the materialistic conception of history has a very large measure of truth. Take, as an instance of its truth, the influence of industrialism upon ideas. It is industrialism, rather than the arguments of Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers; now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women. Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came, leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed, because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art, and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.
In piling on a large number of issues, not as real phenomena in real lives of real people living in communities within countries or in any detail but as icons, as static tableaux or as Hogarth would have drawn them, chosen and distorted for polemical purposes, not in an honest attempt to understand them, Russell is a good example of that style of argument and ideological advocacy. It is totally dishonest, not infrequently appealing to reliably present superstitions and prejudice, and you would expect someone with any regard for the idealized obligations of scientists to match their evidence to the phenomena in the physical world they are characterizing to do better at it. But that scientific ideal is exactly what was broken down by the materialist - atheist hijacking of science for their ideological purposes, even as they performed the pantomime of elevating science to the position of ultimate authority with total potency. That is ever more true as the complexity of what is treated with such atheist-scientistic polemics grows.
The fact of having huge amounts of the writings of many of the major figures in the recent past available, online, for free, in convenient, easily searchable form has had a radical effect on my opinion of many of them which I got from the presentation of them in secondary literature, often polemical as well. The idea I maintained of some, like Emma Goldman, who I admired when mostly known to me by some well chosen, radically clipped aphorisms, has shattered completely upon reading a large amount of what they wrote. She was hardly a great egalitarian, a great humanitarian, she was a rather vicious, entirely impractical, snobbish zealot and more than slightly blood thirsty. When, at the end of her life, on seeing the rise of the Nazis, she asked some of her friends if she had wasted it on her insane, irrational and absurd anarchism, the only honest answer was that she had not only wasted it, her political irresponsibility had hurt the cause of workers and others. Finding out that such a person could be an admirer of the proto-Nazi misogynist and ultimate denier of equality, Nietzsche, was an enormous shock to me and showed me how much of the lefty catechism I'd absorbed through the pseudo-lefties was complete bull shit.
The other major iconic figure of my youth and early middle-age to fall was Bertrand Russell who I now regard as a, perhaps, less violent but equally dishonest intellectual. He was a far more subtle liar and hypocrite when he, so often, operated in that vein. And most of his writing that was influential on the alleged left were exactly those things which were the most dishonest. I see him as just being an especially skilled practitioner of the British-aristocratic style of social commentary, a very traditional aristocratic style British polemicist of the kind who had a distaste for Christianity because it impinged on both their privileges and their preferred social and ideological expectations. Not to say a dislike of anything but that which was materially advantageous, the real basis of that style. As such he was one in a line of Russells of that sort. He made the most of a show of noblesse oblige, as suited the aristocratic British artificial substitute for liberalism that the putrid, cruel or at least cold and horrible Fabians did and still practice.
I might take what Russell says about mathematics as authoritative, the rest of his stuff doesn't much stand up to close review and fact checking. I think I mostly admired him for his opposition to nuclear weapons, one of major contributions of the hard sciences during his life time. I'll grant him that much.
The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
After saying that a "materialistic conception of history" is due to Marx, and underlies his whole Communist philosophy BUT, even though it "profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics" you could, somehow, accept Communism without accepting what it's based in. Let's guess, he wanted to claim that those murders that had already started accumulating under the materialist-Marxist dictatorship of the Marxist, Lenin, weren't really attributable to their materialist view of human lives. At least that's a tacit claim in what he said. The double-speak of that continues and is intensified in his further desire to get the materialism which the foundation of his own faith off the hook for what was developing into a horror that would make the Reign of Terror look like a practice run.
The name [materialism] does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that all the mass-phenomena of history are determined by economic motives. This view has no essential connection with materialism in the philosophic sense. Materialism in the philosophic sense may be defined as the theory that all apparently mental occurrences either are really physical, or at any rate have purely physical causes. Materialism in this sense also was preached by Marx, and is accepted by all orthodox Marxians. The arguments for and against it are long and complicated, and need not concern us, since, in fact, its truth or falsehood has little or no bearing on politics.
Notice that as soon as he denies that Marx's materialist conception of history is the same thing as (his) philosophical materialism (which he later admits is a monist ideology which denies that there is anything which is not thoroughly material) he that that Marx shared his materialist ideology and that he even "preached" it and that such "philosophical" Marxism is accepted by all orthodox Marxians". He goes on
In particular, philosophic materialism does not prove that economic causes are fundamental in politics.
Of course it doesn't "prove" that economic causes are fundamental in politics, as an eminent pure mathematician, Russell knew that such proof would be impossible as it is in everything but mathematics, but that doesn't mean that a materialist could believe that economic causes are fundamental in politics without those economic causes, themselves being a material phenomenon. Not much farther along at on the same page, but in a later paragraph, he said:
For another reason, also, the attempt to base a political theory upon a philosophical doctrine is undesirable. The philosophical doctrine of materialism, if true at all, is true everywhere and always; we cannot expect exceptions to it, say, in Buddhism or in the Hussite movement.
However, shortly before that Russell certainly wanted to get the ideology of materialism off the hook for the results of those Marxists who as "philosophical materialists" must believe that "The philosophical doctrine of materialism" which they held in common with him "if true at all, is true everywhere and always". That insistence that materialism is true everywhere and always is absolutely basic to all materialism. It is to materialism what the belief that God created the heavens and the Earth, all that is visible and invisible, is to theism.
Russell admits that, materialists as materialists "we cannot expect exceptions to it". He even used the first person. He finishes by saying that a materialist cannot even expect that Buddhism or the Hussite movement are exceptions, according to the materialist all must be based in the material substance of the physical world but he started by claiming that though orthodox Marxists were philosophical materialists, as was Marx, but that Marx's materialist conception of history, explicitly called that by Marx, was not attributable to the philosophical materialism he shared with Bertrand Russell. That is typical of Bertrand Russell's style of double speak when dealing not only with materialism and it results but is something he applies in compound form when speaking about what he really loathes, religion. That is something he shares in common with almost all atheists who speak on such matters - off hand, I'm hard pressed to name an exception.
You can see more of it as he continued that second paragraph in the chapter.
The view of Buckle, for example, according to which climate is one of the decisive factors, is equally compatible with materialism. So is the Freudian view, which traces everything to sex. There are innumerable ways of viewing history which are materialistic in the philosophic sense without being economic or falling within the Marxian formula. Thus the "materialistic conception of history" may be false even if materialism in the philosophic sense should be true.
The slight of hand by which Russell lets materialism off the hook, by him removing "economic motives" as defined by the materialist monist Marx from the exclusively material universe that he admitted all philosophical materialists insisted to be the only reality, doing to "economic motives" what he admitted that a materialist couldn't really believe of Buddhism or the religious doctrines of Jan Hus. All he's doing is diverting attention from the fact that the Marxist concentration on, one hand, a materialistic conception of economics by pointing out that other materialists concentrated on other supposedly material phenomena. It's stage magic, deception to dupe his audience to not notice something he doesn't want them to notice.
Bertrand Russell, in full polemical mode, is very good at covering up his frequently audacious dishonesty but you get the feeling he was always expecting a close reader to catch him, eventually - he was a pure mathematician, after all - and he wanted to be able to point out something to claim that he'd admitted what he obviously wanted a less careful reader to not notice as he swayed him to his preferred conclusion. Especially when he, himself, knew what he wanted was unsupported by the actual evidence and rigorous consideration of the issues. A really good example of how audacious he could be in a long stream of double-talk from later in the chapter
Treated as a practical approximation, not as an exact metaphysical law, the materialistic conception of history has a very large measure of truth. Take, as an instance of its truth, the influence of industrialism upon ideas. It is industrialism, rather than the arguments of Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers; now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women. Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came, leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed, because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art, and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.
In piling on a large number of issues, not as real phenomena in real lives of real people living in communities within countries or in any detail but as icons, as static tableaux or as Hogarth would have drawn them, chosen and distorted for polemical purposes, not in an honest attempt to understand them, Russell is a good example of that style of argument and ideological advocacy. It is totally dishonest, not infrequently appealing to reliably present superstitions and prejudice, and you would expect someone with any regard for the idealized obligations of scientists to match their evidence to the phenomena in the physical world they are characterizing to do better at it. But that scientific ideal is exactly what was broken down by the materialist - atheist hijacking of science for their ideological purposes, even as they performed the pantomime of elevating science to the position of ultimate authority with total potency. That is ever more true as the complexity of what is treated with such atheist-scientistic polemics grows.
The fact of having huge amounts of the writings of many of the major figures in the recent past available, online, for free, in convenient, easily searchable form has had a radical effect on my opinion of many of them which I got from the presentation of them in secondary literature, often polemical as well. The idea I maintained of some, like Emma Goldman, who I admired when mostly known to me by some well chosen, radically clipped aphorisms, has shattered completely upon reading a large amount of what they wrote. She was hardly a great egalitarian, a great humanitarian, she was a rather vicious, entirely impractical, snobbish zealot and more than slightly blood thirsty. When, at the end of her life, on seeing the rise of the Nazis, she asked some of her friends if she had wasted it on her insane, irrational and absurd anarchism, the only honest answer was that she had not only wasted it, her political irresponsibility had hurt the cause of workers and others. Finding out that such a person could be an admirer of the proto-Nazi misogynist and ultimate denier of equality, Nietzsche, was an enormous shock to me and showed me how much of the lefty catechism I'd absorbed through the pseudo-lefties was complete bull shit.
The other major iconic figure of my youth and early middle-age to fall was Bertrand Russell who I now regard as a, perhaps, less violent but equally dishonest intellectual. He was a far more subtle liar and hypocrite when he, so often, operated in that vein. And most of his writing that was influential on the alleged left were exactly those things which were the most dishonest. I see him as just being an especially skilled practitioner of the British-aristocratic style of social commentary, a very traditional aristocratic style British polemicist of the kind who had a distaste for Christianity because it impinged on both their privileges and their preferred social and ideological expectations. Not to say a dislike of anything but that which was materially advantageous, the real basis of that style. As such he was one in a line of Russells of that sort. He made the most of a show of noblesse oblige, as suited the aristocratic British artificial substitute for liberalism that the putrid, cruel or at least cold and horrible Fabians did and still practice.
I might take what Russell says about mathematics as authoritative, the rest of his stuff doesn't much stand up to close review and fact checking. I think I mostly admired him for his opposition to nuclear weapons, one of major contributions of the hard sciences during his life time. I'll grant him that much.
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Doherty - A Golden Triangle
The accidental intersection of three unlikely folk living in present-day Dublin - a curmudgeonly widower, a ladette in a wheel-chair, and a jobless Pole mauled by the Celtic Tiger in its death-throes - constitutes a curious trinity in a touching thumbnail sketch of disheartenment, desire, and eventual deliverance.
Author Philip Doherty earns his second such award [ First Place in the the P. J. O'Connor Prize] with the interrupted monologues that make up A GOLDEN TRIANGLE; and a parallel double deployment in production features a distinguished father-and-daughter team, Brendan and Neilí Conroy, along with actor Gerry McCann, in the casting of the trio. Mattie was played by Brendan Conroy, Jill was Neilí Conroy, Edek was played by Gerry McCann
It's another Irish national radio production, which means you have to download it to listen to it.
__________________
I listened to an interview with the late Edward Albee last week in which he said that he thought most plays were too long. Listening to this, I wondered if that's one of the reasons I like radio plays so much, they tend to be an hour or less. Another reason is that you get to hear a lot of plays by writers you'd never, ever see in a stage production or acted out in a film. It's so much cheaper to do a play this way, especially a non-conventional kind of play. I don't miss the visuals.
Charlie Pierce Is Capable of Greatness
His piece from yesterday about Trump's smoke screen* attack on a Syrian airbase Friday, Washington Is Void of Any Sense of Restraint, and the politics of authorizing war is certainly one of the five most important things I've read this year, perhaps this decade.
If you don't have the time to wade through my piece below, Charles Pierce's piece is more important and much shorter.
* Is it true that they warned the Assad regime so they could remove anything they didn't want to get blown to smithereens? I can point out that in 2013, Trump and other Republican-fascist-racists were accusing Barack Obama of going to have been guilty of doing exactly what it is so obvious that Trump did. I still wonder if it might not have been set up by Putin, getting one of his lesser assets, Assad, to provide his major asset, Trump, with a way to deflect attention from the treason of Trump and his regime with the Russian oligarchs.
If you don't have the time to wade through my piece below, Charles Pierce's piece is more important and much shorter.
* Is it true that they warned the Assad regime so they could remove anything they didn't want to get blown to smithereens? I can point out that in 2013, Trump and other Republican-fascist-racists were accusing Barack Obama of going to have been guilty of doing exactly what it is so obvious that Trump did. I still wonder if it might not have been set up by Putin, getting one of his lesser assets, Assad, to provide his major asset, Trump, with a way to deflect attention from the treason of Trump and his regime with the Russian oligarchs.
"The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory"
"Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form." Eugene Wigner
The atheist religion needs to believe in something that no sensible person, including many atheists, would ever believe, that just because someone, somewhere can think of an equation for something that that means that that equation is about something real in reality. Which, as superstition, ranks right up there with the Republican-fascist conspiracy theories about what happens in the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement. Yes, someone didn't like what I wrote about that last week.
I think it's possible that what physicists actually found when they couldn't make their equations come up with an absolute measure of the position of an electron in quantum physics was probably a hard fact about using mathematics as a powerful but, ultimately and inevitably a limited tool for addressing physical reality. When you press the tool to that limit, perhaps you will find that it doesn't reveal the hard, solid, dependable view of the universe that constitutes a classical concept of objective reality that is external from the observer. Which isn't some huge shock, it's been known to be true of the act of measurement ever since people started using standard measuring conventions, most obvious when trying to apply those standard measuring conventions against some physical object or, say, a plot of land or, especially, something which changes in dimension.
There has always been a built in margin of error in any act of measurement, sometimes you can't even really measure or even really estimate what that margin of error is. That those exist in more sophisticated acts of measurement involving more than one possible vector in which those discrepancies between the act of measurement to cloud the issues isn't really shocking. That it shocked the physicists who had gotten into the habit of believing that the impressive physics that Newton and his successors came up with showed us a solid, reliable, and, most cherished of all by them, an OBJECTIVE view of reality only shows that what they were using physics for up till that point could work within the range of uncertainty that it always had included. That range of uncertainty was always acceptable in terms of the human use of knowledge. It was always there, the idea that what classical physics gave was an objective view of reality was, itself, an accepted fudging of realty.
An aspect of how that faith in the objective reality of what physics showed us was through the physicists' often very useful practice of reducing the complexity of what they studied and observed, either through choosing a very simple object and a few aspects of its movement to study or though ignoring the range of possible influences on it movement. As the means of measuring the objects they were studying and aspects of the objects became sufficiently precise and sophisticated in the later 19th century, problems with the imprecision of measurement became more relevant and important. And, as it forced them to address the fact that the previous standards didn't actually give the absolute, total, and entirely dependably objective view of reality, it impinged on their most cherished beliefs gained by the really impressive usefulness of those practices up till that point. I can imagine for people who were raised with, trained with and had a professional and, most of all a huge emotional stake in that faith in the potency of physics, facing those discrepancies was extremely painful. Some, like Plank and Einstein, started doing physics which took the newly faced imprecision of measurement into account and did physics a new way. But the need to maintain the, yes, if you want to put it that way, "religious" faith that what they were doing provided the kind of objective view of reality that was the cherished belief of physicists and their fans in the lay population persists.
I think the multi-verse phenomenon among physicists, perhaps the string theoriests, the M theorists, etc. are all trying to push against the limits of physics and coming up with all manner of bizarre ways to do that. It reminds me of the epicycles and other things that late classical and medieval astronomy came up with to maintain the earth-centered cosmological system they liked so much only on both speed and acid. I think the social sciences, trying to measure things, especially social phenomena that couldn't be reduced or really located and which were not static reality, has come up with many even more decadent claims presented as if they had any reliability at all when they don't. Even trying to come up with a mathematical view of one human being, even just their physical body, runs up against limits almost at the beginning.
And if you think that's far fetched, while writing that I remembered that it was something which Eugene Wigner implied in his famous paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences
Let us consider a few examples of "false" theories which give, in view of their falseness, alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena. With some goodwill, one can dismiss some of the evidence which these examples provide. The success of Bohr's early and pioneering ideas on the atom was always a rather narrow one and the same applies to Ptolemy's epicycles.
Only, if you're going to consider a few examples of false theories which give a few of "alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena" you certainly should consider the many examples of people with the habit of believing in the ultimate potency of mathematical descriptions, especially in phenomena that are far more complex than what Bohr or Ptolemey's studies dealt with. When what is allegedly being measured and, so described is far more complex, the chances that what is produced will turn out to be alarmingly inaccurate though the faith in science will lead people to believe it to be reality until reality bites back. In the biological sciences of the late 19th century until even today, that faith has gotten millions of people killed, oppressed, discriminated against. The next time you hear some behavioral scientist talk about the "difference" between "female and male brains" gender groups, races, ethnic groups, etc. when you read a sociological survey or anything that relies on reported responses of subjects, such as an opinion survey, you're just hearing that faith being pushed entirely past where it is warranted at all. The "success" of some of it, such as the recently tested faith in the efficacy of polling in predicting presidential elections was most likely always an illusion based in that old and baseless faith in the ability of numbers to give you an objective view of reality.
Then there is this, from the end of Wigner's paper.
If viewed from our real vantage point, the situation presented by the free-electron theory is irritating but is not likely to forebode any inconsistencies which are unsurmountable for us. The free-electron theory raises doubts as to how much we should trust numerical agreement between theory and experiment as evidence for the correctness of the theory. We are used to such doubts.
A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. Mendel's laws of inheritance and the subsequent work on genes may well form the beginning of such a theory as far as biology is concerned. Furthermore,, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth." The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency. Indeed, it is this writer's belief that something rather akin to the situation which was described above exists if the present laws of heredity and of physics are confronted.
As a physicist and mathematician, Wigner may have had a very naive view of the complexity you fast run into when you're studying living beings, even in some of their simpler aspects. For those of you who may not have read the post here from a few weeks back, I'll point out what the eminent biologist Lynn Margulis said about an exchange she had with the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin about mathematical modeling in genetics which runs up against the discrepancies and the limits of that faith in the efficacy of mathematics a lot faster and more consequentially than happens in studying electrons.
When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
And I'll point out, they're dealing with something far simpler than the massively more complex whole organisms and stupendously more complex species and ecological systems in which those genes exist. The reason to believe that reductionist practices and mathematical modeling will work in studying and understanding, even in a partial or general way, those far surpasses unreasonable belief. As I recall Margulis called it "religious faith" somewhere, I think that much religious faith is far more modest and far more reasonable. A more apt, accurate and honest comparison wouldn't be to religion, it would be to pseudo-scientific ideologies which sprang up in the 19th and 20th centuries among those atheists who had that faith in the ultimate power of mathematics and science which has led their fellow atheists (and others) in science astray, as well.
I think the creation of jillions and jillions of universes by physicists frustrated with the fact that they can't have an objective view of reality is sort of like the ultimate expression of what led Ptolemey to come up with his means of making things work when they didn't. Only he was addressing things that could be seen to be there and so he couldn't come up with magic to make it work. Modern physics reached a point after World War Two when it chose to allow that. I think if Bertrand Russell in the late 1920s hadn't used his hatred of religion to make an analogy to the decadence he feared modern physics would lead to, he might have been more accurate about the nature of that decadence. And it's a quite materialistic and quite atheistic decadence, based on faith in a far different, far more human and totally material set of desiderata.
* I'll quote the mathematician René Thom, again
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.
And refusing to face that has brought science into complete decadence.
Hate Update: I think the stuff Comte and Marx came up with was pretty bad and the political-social-legal application of natural selection was far worse. The ultimate decadence among atheist-materialists today, the demotion of the mind to being a product of chance, random events, randomly present chemicals and physical phenomena in our skulls, the demotion of our minds into the total impeaching of the significance of our thoughts - though, they insist, out of any rational coherence, not their own thoughts - is just more of the same misplaced faith that is the theme of this post. Science works best when it is honestly applied to things it can honestly be applied to and the claims made for the results are honest about the range in which those are reliable and the limit within which it is reliable. Very little science is presented with that honesty. A hell of a lot of what is included within "science" today is an atheist equivalent of the "astrology and necromancy" that Bertrand Russell talked about in the wake of the robust belief in the Roman Catholic church.
When the robustness of the Catholic faith decayed at the time of the Renaissance, it tended to be replaced by astrology and necromancy, and in like manner we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions.
Only the very faith that Russell had in the total efficacy of science and mathematics had already produced far more dangerous and far more potent superstitions which were already piling up corpses. That pile had started in the Reign of Terror carried out as part of the very "enlightenment" Russell feared was passing away. He had seen more of it in his disillusioning visit to the Soviet Union nine years before he wrote that article, though his faith in science and his a-historical upper class Brit hatred of religion led him to entirely mischaracterize the incipient horrors he already saw forming under Lenin in his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. But that would take an even longer post to go through. Whatever you can say about the horrific results of Marxism, it wasn't religious superstition that it was based in, it was ultimately based in the very faith in the efficacy and monist potency of materialism and science Russell held that produced it. And the same can be said about Nazism which was based, entirely, on a belief in natural selection and the eugenics which blamed civilization and the morality of the Golden Rule as impeding its violent, brutal culling out of the "weaker members" of the human species.
Hate Update 2: Bertrand Russell's chapter treating The Materialistic Theory of History is absolutely full of double-talk, ahistorical garbage, bigotry, etc. He literally contradicts himself throughout it. His motive wasn't honesty about the developing horror of Soviet Marxim, it was to attribute everything about it to things he didn't like. You can still read similar stuff with similar motives on the atheist, alleged left, today.
The atheist religion needs to believe in something that no sensible person, including many atheists, would ever believe, that just because someone, somewhere can think of an equation for something that that means that that equation is about something real in reality. Which, as superstition, ranks right up there with the Republican-fascist conspiracy theories about what happens in the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement. Yes, someone didn't like what I wrote about that last week.
I think it's possible that what physicists actually found when they couldn't make their equations come up with an absolute measure of the position of an electron in quantum physics was probably a hard fact about using mathematics as a powerful but, ultimately and inevitably a limited tool for addressing physical reality. When you press the tool to that limit, perhaps you will find that it doesn't reveal the hard, solid, dependable view of the universe that constitutes a classical concept of objective reality that is external from the observer. Which isn't some huge shock, it's been known to be true of the act of measurement ever since people started using standard measuring conventions, most obvious when trying to apply those standard measuring conventions against some physical object or, say, a plot of land or, especially, something which changes in dimension.
There has always been a built in margin of error in any act of measurement, sometimes you can't even really measure or even really estimate what that margin of error is. That those exist in more sophisticated acts of measurement involving more than one possible vector in which those discrepancies between the act of measurement to cloud the issues isn't really shocking. That it shocked the physicists who had gotten into the habit of believing that the impressive physics that Newton and his successors came up with showed us a solid, reliable, and, most cherished of all by them, an OBJECTIVE view of reality only shows that what they were using physics for up till that point could work within the range of uncertainty that it always had included. That range of uncertainty was always acceptable in terms of the human use of knowledge. It was always there, the idea that what classical physics gave was an objective view of reality was, itself, an accepted fudging of realty.
An aspect of how that faith in the objective reality of what physics showed us was through the physicists' often very useful practice of reducing the complexity of what they studied and observed, either through choosing a very simple object and a few aspects of its movement to study or though ignoring the range of possible influences on it movement. As the means of measuring the objects they were studying and aspects of the objects became sufficiently precise and sophisticated in the later 19th century, problems with the imprecision of measurement became more relevant and important. And, as it forced them to address the fact that the previous standards didn't actually give the absolute, total, and entirely dependably objective view of reality, it impinged on their most cherished beliefs gained by the really impressive usefulness of those practices up till that point. I can imagine for people who were raised with, trained with and had a professional and, most of all a huge emotional stake in that faith in the potency of physics, facing those discrepancies was extremely painful. Some, like Plank and Einstein, started doing physics which took the newly faced imprecision of measurement into account and did physics a new way. But the need to maintain the, yes, if you want to put it that way, "religious" faith that what they were doing provided the kind of objective view of reality that was the cherished belief of physicists and their fans in the lay population persists.
I think the multi-verse phenomenon among physicists, perhaps the string theoriests, the M theorists, etc. are all trying to push against the limits of physics and coming up with all manner of bizarre ways to do that. It reminds me of the epicycles and other things that late classical and medieval astronomy came up with to maintain the earth-centered cosmological system they liked so much only on both speed and acid. I think the social sciences, trying to measure things, especially social phenomena that couldn't be reduced or really located and which were not static reality, has come up with many even more decadent claims presented as if they had any reliability at all when they don't. Even trying to come up with a mathematical view of one human being, even just their physical body, runs up against limits almost at the beginning.
And if you think that's far fetched, while writing that I remembered that it was something which Eugene Wigner implied in his famous paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences
Let us consider a few examples of "false" theories which give, in view of their falseness, alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena. With some goodwill, one can dismiss some of the evidence which these examples provide. The success of Bohr's early and pioneering ideas on the atom was always a rather narrow one and the same applies to Ptolemy's epicycles.
Only, if you're going to consider a few examples of false theories which give a few of "alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena" you certainly should consider the many examples of people with the habit of believing in the ultimate potency of mathematical descriptions, especially in phenomena that are far more complex than what Bohr or Ptolemey's studies dealt with. When what is allegedly being measured and, so described is far more complex, the chances that what is produced will turn out to be alarmingly inaccurate though the faith in science will lead people to believe it to be reality until reality bites back. In the biological sciences of the late 19th century until even today, that faith has gotten millions of people killed, oppressed, discriminated against. The next time you hear some behavioral scientist talk about the "difference" between "female and male brains" gender groups, races, ethnic groups, etc. when you read a sociological survey or anything that relies on reported responses of subjects, such as an opinion survey, you're just hearing that faith being pushed entirely past where it is warranted at all. The "success" of some of it, such as the recently tested faith in the efficacy of polling in predicting presidential elections was most likely always an illusion based in that old and baseless faith in the ability of numbers to give you an objective view of reality.
Then there is this, from the end of Wigner's paper.
If viewed from our real vantage point, the situation presented by the free-electron theory is irritating but is not likely to forebode any inconsistencies which are unsurmountable for us. The free-electron theory raises doubts as to how much we should trust numerical agreement between theory and experiment as evidence for the correctness of the theory. We are used to such doubts.
A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. Mendel's laws of inheritance and the subsequent work on genes may well form the beginning of such a theory as far as biology is concerned. Furthermore,, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth." The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency. Indeed, it is this writer's belief that something rather akin to the situation which was described above exists if the present laws of heredity and of physics are confronted.
As a physicist and mathematician, Wigner may have had a very naive view of the complexity you fast run into when you're studying living beings, even in some of their simpler aspects. For those of you who may not have read the post here from a few weeks back, I'll point out what the eminent biologist Lynn Margulis said about an exchange she had with the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin about mathematical modeling in genetics which runs up against the discrepancies and the limits of that faith in the efficacy of mathematics a lot faster and more consequentially than happens in studying electrons.
When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
And I'll point out, they're dealing with something far simpler than the massively more complex whole organisms and stupendously more complex species and ecological systems in which those genes exist. The reason to believe that reductionist practices and mathematical modeling will work in studying and understanding, even in a partial or general way, those far surpasses unreasonable belief. As I recall Margulis called it "religious faith" somewhere, I think that much religious faith is far more modest and far more reasonable. A more apt, accurate and honest comparison wouldn't be to religion, it would be to pseudo-scientific ideologies which sprang up in the 19th and 20th centuries among those atheists who had that faith in the ultimate power of mathematics and science which has led their fellow atheists (and others) in science astray, as well.
I think the creation of jillions and jillions of universes by physicists frustrated with the fact that they can't have an objective view of reality is sort of like the ultimate expression of what led Ptolemey to come up with his means of making things work when they didn't. Only he was addressing things that could be seen to be there and so he couldn't come up with magic to make it work. Modern physics reached a point after World War Two when it chose to allow that. I think if Bertrand Russell in the late 1920s hadn't used his hatred of religion to make an analogy to the decadence he feared modern physics would lead to, he might have been more accurate about the nature of that decadence. And it's a quite materialistic and quite atheistic decadence, based on faith in a far different, far more human and totally material set of desiderata.
* I'll quote the mathematician René Thom, again
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.
And refusing to face that has brought science into complete decadence.
Hate Update: I think the stuff Comte and Marx came up with was pretty bad and the political-social-legal application of natural selection was far worse. The ultimate decadence among atheist-materialists today, the demotion of the mind to being a product of chance, random events, randomly present chemicals and physical phenomena in our skulls, the demotion of our minds into the total impeaching of the significance of our thoughts - though, they insist, out of any rational coherence, not their own thoughts - is just more of the same misplaced faith that is the theme of this post. Science works best when it is honestly applied to things it can honestly be applied to and the claims made for the results are honest about the range in which those are reliable and the limit within which it is reliable. Very little science is presented with that honesty. A hell of a lot of what is included within "science" today is an atheist equivalent of the "astrology and necromancy" that Bertrand Russell talked about in the wake of the robust belief in the Roman Catholic church.
When the robustness of the Catholic faith decayed at the time of the Renaissance, it tended to be replaced by astrology and necromancy, and in like manner we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions.
Only the very faith that Russell had in the total efficacy of science and mathematics had already produced far more dangerous and far more potent superstitions which were already piling up corpses. That pile had started in the Reign of Terror carried out as part of the very "enlightenment" Russell feared was passing away. He had seen more of it in his disillusioning visit to the Soviet Union nine years before he wrote that article, though his faith in science and his a-historical upper class Brit hatred of religion led him to entirely mischaracterize the incipient horrors he already saw forming under Lenin in his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. But that would take an even longer post to go through. Whatever you can say about the horrific results of Marxism, it wasn't religious superstition that it was based in, it was ultimately based in the very faith in the efficacy and monist potency of materialism and science Russell held that produced it. And the same can be said about Nazism which was based, entirely, on a belief in natural selection and the eugenics which blamed civilization and the morality of the Golden Rule as impeding its violent, brutal culling out of the "weaker members" of the human species.
Hate Update 2: Bertrand Russell's chapter treating The Materialistic Theory of History is absolutely full of double-talk, ahistorical garbage, bigotry, etc. He literally contradicts himself throughout it. His motive wasn't honesty about the developing horror of Soviet Marxim, it was to attribute everything about it to things he didn't like. You can still read similar stuff with similar motives on the atheist, alleged left, today.
Friday, April 7, 2017
GYÖRGY LIGETI - Sonata for Cello solo
Mathias Johansen - Cello
The Same With The Score
Arranged for Guitar by Kostas Tosidis
Kostas Tosidis, guitar
The Sonata has an interesting story, the first movement composed as an imaginary dialogue between a man and a woman - written for a cellist Ligeti was in love with but who he never told he was in love with. Later in 1953. another cellist asked him to write a piece so he added the second movement the Cappricio to it. However, when they applied to the Hungarian Composers Union (or more honestly Soviet occupation composers censors) they banned its public performance and publication, allowing only a recording for radio which was never played. The piece was put aside and forgotten when Ligeti walked out of the Soviet bloc and began what he considered his mature compositional period free of censorship. The piece was revived and received its first concert performance in 1983 and was published in 1990.
I assume Kostas Tosidis had either Ligeti's permission to make the transcription or that of his estate. I think it's pretty successful.
Having Putin's Puppet in the Presidency Makes Things A Lot Crazier Than They Would Be If A Traitor Wasn't President
It is one of the insane things about having the Republican-fascists in power under the patronage of Vladimir Putin that who knows what's possible. The ever increasing knowledge of how far he went to put Donald Trump in office means that he obviously sees him as an asset. With the unprecedented and open corruption of Trump and his ties to the Russian mafia that runs the country it is clear that he is a partner with Putin.
That makes what's been going on in Syria especially strange because Putin is also the biggest backer of the Syrian regime and an active participant in the war of Bashar al-Assad. Then there was the recent attack in the St. Petersburg subway which, at least several days ago was believed to have been retaliation for what the Putin regime is doing in Syria.
I would find it hard to believe that al-Assad would commit the atrocity of the gas attack this week without at least consultation with the Putin government. It's even possible that he would want to get the OK from Putin to do it - if, in fact, it was his regime that did it and not the terrorist groups who are known to have chemical weapons in Syria.
What is especially insane is that any scenario you can think up is possibly true. I was wondering earlier this morning if Putin decided that a gas attack, allowing Donald Trump to launch a military attack might reduce the pressure on what must be his major asset outside of Russia, the Trump regime. Americans are as stupid about rallying around any Republican military action as Russians have been for Putin. He's used those kinds of things, including terror incidents some believe his own government staged, to consolidate power. Maybe he's decided that Trump can get him more of what he wants than Assad, though he might be figuring on keeping both.
Does that make more sense than that Assad would do something he would have to know risked major involvement with the biggest military in the world? Something that would prove that he and possibly he and the Putin regime lied about him destroying his chemical weapons stockpile?
Or maybe Putin had no involvement in any of it. Who knows? I doubt anyone in the American media does. One thing I do know is that a lot of the craziness comes from us having a person running the government who is an asset of Vladimir Putin, who also has assets leading the State Department and who are in other places in the Trump regime. If they weren't there, some of the issues making this so crazy wouldn't be there. If Trump and his cronies weren't in place, so many of them with ties to the Russian kleptocrats - including his son-in-law, the de facto Secretary of State, his daughter and his sons.
Update: Says the guy who was stunned to find out in recent weeks that 90 year olds dying is, you know, a thing. I wonder what he said when Irwin Corey died at 102. I can imagine that came as a huge unfair shock to him as well with a good dose of histrionic complaint.
By the way, these are the same people who accuse religious people of fearing death - that is when they aren't saying that religion is a death cult. Heads I win, tails you lose is the standard operating procedure for these dolts. Never let them get away with it.
That makes what's been going on in Syria especially strange because Putin is also the biggest backer of the Syrian regime and an active participant in the war of Bashar al-Assad. Then there was the recent attack in the St. Petersburg subway which, at least several days ago was believed to have been retaliation for what the Putin regime is doing in Syria.
I would find it hard to believe that al-Assad would commit the atrocity of the gas attack this week without at least consultation with the Putin government. It's even possible that he would want to get the OK from Putin to do it - if, in fact, it was his regime that did it and not the terrorist groups who are known to have chemical weapons in Syria.
What is especially insane is that any scenario you can think up is possibly true. I was wondering earlier this morning if Putin decided that a gas attack, allowing Donald Trump to launch a military attack might reduce the pressure on what must be his major asset outside of Russia, the Trump regime. Americans are as stupid about rallying around any Republican military action as Russians have been for Putin. He's used those kinds of things, including terror incidents some believe his own government staged, to consolidate power. Maybe he's decided that Trump can get him more of what he wants than Assad, though he might be figuring on keeping both.
Does that make more sense than that Assad would do something he would have to know risked major involvement with the biggest military in the world? Something that would prove that he and possibly he and the Putin regime lied about him destroying his chemical weapons stockpile?
Or maybe Putin had no involvement in any of it. Who knows? I doubt anyone in the American media does. One thing I do know is that a lot of the craziness comes from us having a person running the government who is an asset of Vladimir Putin, who also has assets leading the State Department and who are in other places in the Trump regime. If they weren't there, some of the issues making this so crazy wouldn't be there. If Trump and his cronies weren't in place, so many of them with ties to the Russian kleptocrats - including his son-in-law, the de facto Secretary of State, his daughter and his sons.
Update: Says the guy who was stunned to find out in recent weeks that 90 year olds dying is, you know, a thing. I wonder what he said when Irwin Corey died at 102. I can imagine that came as a huge unfair shock to him as well with a good dose of histrionic complaint.
By the way, these are the same people who accuse religious people of fearing death - that is when they aren't saying that religion is a death cult. Heads I win, tails you lose is the standard operating procedure for these dolts. Never let them get away with it.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Kenneth Gaburo - Maledetto
"Lingua II: Maledetto" by Kenneth Gaburo performed by Stephen Miles, R. L. Silver, Kartina Amin, Lisa Pokorski, Jason Rosenberg, Steven Jones, and Nadia Stegman at New Music New College's Speech Acts concert, November 18, 2000 in the Mildred Sainer Pavilion at New College of Florida.
I'd only ever heard this on the old CRI LP recording of a performance from the 1970s. I hope it's been performed since then. It's been way too long since I went to an avant garde music concert. Though Gaburo wasn't exactly that since I don't think he sparked a movement. He was a really interesting composer-theater creator.
I was looking for something to curse the Republican-fascists with, this isn't exactly what I had in mind but it will do for now.
The Shade of Roger Taney is Smiling From Hell
I remember when I first went online and I started condemning the Supreme Court as a corrupt instrument which has, with the fewest of exceptions, been a secure means of preventing equality and justice, a lot of liberals got really upset, nervous, skittish. The older ones invoked the Republican-fascist campaign calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, bill boards and all. The friggin' Supreme Court had a little burp of liberalism for a few years in the later 1950s and 60s and people wanted to pretend that was the status quo of the most undemocratic branch of the government.
Well, along with the nuke the Republican-fascists set off today, including the skank from my home state, Susan Collins, I say the days of treating that thoroughly politicized body with kid gloves is well over and good.
Neil Gorsuch has to be exposed every time he does the slightest thing that can be turned against the Republican-fascists who put him on the court, he will give us lots and lots to use. He will regularly vote to screw the majority of people on behalf of the oligarchs who begot and nurtured the fascist, the Federalist fascists, the American Enterprise Institute, etc. And the oligarchs.
Democrats should feature his every outrage in a constant stream of political messaging that will turn him into the most hated Supreme since the putrid Roger B. Taney of Dred Scott infamy. He will probably do everything he can to bring us back to that period.
There should also be a move to limit the term of Supreme Court members to ten years. For any great justice who you would like to keep on for life there have been many times more who should never have been there to start with. The Founders were total novice and amateurs who could never have imagined a ruling elite with no sense of honor, such as the one we have in power now. They couldn't have imagined the kind of scum such as Gorsuch, Thomas, Scalia and Alito could be put onto the court, and if they could, they were not only naive, they were jerks.
I Approve This Message from Samantha Bee - We Told You So: Russian Hacking
It's a real sign that American democracy is in a fatal tail spin when the "free press" only tells you the truth in the context of a comedy show. I really friggin' hate the free speech - free press industry that let the media lie us into fascism. Oh, yeah, and we had to have a Canadian tell us. Damn, I wish I'd moved there when my Latin teacher tried to talk me into it.
I Think Jay Semko's Mouse In A Hole Is Great Musical Theater In Six Minutes
Let me guess, you don't like it because he's not from New York or LA and has worked mostly in Western Canada. I don't care. Your comment dismissing his song reminds me of the story that his friends told about Charlie Parker who would feed coins into jukeboxes listening to Hank Williams songs. When his friends complained asking him, the ultimate - no far more than ultimate hipster how he could listen to that corny country stuff he told them to listen to the stories.
Yeah, I do think Jay Semko's song is better than that rehash of Civil War sentimentality - which I finally listened to and, while it isn't exactly tripe, I've heard it all before, many times. It suffers from being safely in the sentimentalized past not the present with all the dangerous issues involved. I think, by the way, that Semko's fellow Canadian Robbie Robertson's act of imagination as heard on The Brown Album is ever so much more impressive.
For anyone who missed it below here's a link.
Update: Dopey is railing at me that I only listened to the words and ignored music in the.... um, "masterpiece, he railed at me about for most of the past week. He's wrong. If I had to judge it on the music I'd note that it's the same stuff I heard in the 1960s rehashed for the past half century thousands of times instead of the mere dozens of times I've heard the same ....un.... literary content. Banal junk.
Update 2: Here's Semko singing it with just his guitar at a house concert in Victoria BC. Notice all of those different voices you thought were different voices were, actually, his. Yes, it is great musical theater.
Update 3: Uh, Stupy, I hate to disappoint you but you're not the only idiot who tries to spam up my blog comments. Maybe you can go back to Baby Blue and hunt down your rival. I think I'll keep up the ban on posting your comments as well as your buddies' unless I can use their content. I might get to the point where I don't bother at all with them. What a loss of attention that will be to you.
Yeah, I do think Jay Semko's song is better than that rehash of Civil War sentimentality - which I finally listened to and, while it isn't exactly tripe, I've heard it all before, many times. It suffers from being safely in the sentimentalized past not the present with all the dangerous issues involved. I think, by the way, that Semko's fellow Canadian Robbie Robertson's act of imagination as heard on The Brown Album is ever so much more impressive.
For anyone who missed it below here's a link.
Update: Dopey is railing at me that I only listened to the words and ignored music in the.... um, "masterpiece, he railed at me about for most of the past week. He's wrong. If I had to judge it on the music I'd note that it's the same stuff I heard in the 1960s rehashed for the past half century thousands of times instead of the mere dozens of times I've heard the same ....un.... literary content. Banal junk.
Update 2: Here's Semko singing it with just his guitar at a house concert in Victoria BC. Notice all of those different voices you thought were different voices were, actually, his. Yes, it is great musical theater.
Update 3: Uh, Stupy, I hate to disappoint you but you're not the only idiot who tries to spam up my blog comments. Maybe you can go back to Baby Blue and hunt down your rival. I think I'll keep up the ban on posting your comments as well as your buddies' unless I can use their content. I might get to the point where I don't bother at all with them. What a loss of attention that will be to you.
The Clearest Thing In The Republican Attempt To Cover Up For Trump Is Republican Racism
The list of Republicans piling on the smoke to shield Trump from his lie that President Obama spied on him and his traitorous thugs in Trump Tower all comes together in their decision to blame everything on Susan Rice. Trump, his thugs, Lindsay Graham, Deven Nunes, Fox, the Breitbarts and even such crap as work for the corporate media like Bloomberg chose her for the same reasons they went after her over nothing in regard to the Benghazi pseudo-scandal during the Obama administration.
The reasons they are trying to create another in their decades of political pseudo-scandals is that she is a, Black, b. a Woman, c. a Democrat.
Republicans made a decision after the passage of the monumental Civil Rights legislation that they would take in those racists and segregationists who would never accept the equality of Black poeple, and others covered by those acts and that tactic, the "Southern Strategy" of the criminal Richard Nixon has served to empower Republicans and to move them from main-stream, still quasi-democratic corporate servants ever farther into the Republican Party turning from corporatism to fascism. From the party of inequality to fascism. From the party of Eisenhower to the party of Nixon - Trump. All Republicans in 2017 are the servants of racism, of fascism, today. They went from trying to harness racism and racists as a tool to those racists dominating and entirely running the party and, with them in power, the United States.
Susan Rice did nothing illegal, improper or unethical. After they've dragged her through dozens of more hearings in addition to all of those the Republican-fascists subjected her and other members of the Obama administration to, they will come up with nothing. I am confident of that because they came up with nothing on anything else. If there has been something dependable in the Obama administration, it is that the people who were in it don't commit crimes because they intentionally choose to not break the law. You can say the exact opposite about Republicans. And you can be certain that just as the criminal Bill O'Reilly went after Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the reason they've gone after Susan Rice it is to rally their racist, fascist base.
Update: Just looked, you can add the genteel, Ivy Leaguer, Federalist fascists to that list, the ones who sponored Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court. They're supporting the Trump traitors cover up on their website, too.
The reasons they are trying to create another in their decades of political pseudo-scandals is that she is a, Black, b. a Woman, c. a Democrat.
Republicans made a decision after the passage of the monumental Civil Rights legislation that they would take in those racists and segregationists who would never accept the equality of Black poeple, and others covered by those acts and that tactic, the "Southern Strategy" of the criminal Richard Nixon has served to empower Republicans and to move them from main-stream, still quasi-democratic corporate servants ever farther into the Republican Party turning from corporatism to fascism. From the party of inequality to fascism. From the party of Eisenhower to the party of Nixon - Trump. All Republicans in 2017 are the servants of racism, of fascism, today. They went from trying to harness racism and racists as a tool to those racists dominating and entirely running the party and, with them in power, the United States.
Susan Rice did nothing illegal, improper or unethical. After they've dragged her through dozens of more hearings in addition to all of those the Republican-fascists subjected her and other members of the Obama administration to, they will come up with nothing. I am confident of that because they came up with nothing on anything else. If there has been something dependable in the Obama administration, it is that the people who were in it don't commit crimes because they intentionally choose to not break the law. You can say the exact opposite about Republicans. And you can be certain that just as the criminal Bill O'Reilly went after Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the reason they've gone after Susan Rice it is to rally their racist, fascist base.
Update: Just looked, you can add the genteel, Ivy Leaguer, Federalist fascists to that list, the ones who sponored Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court. They're supporting the Trump traitors cover up on their website, too.
Even More Hate Mail - "The Greatest Minds In Science ....." (blah, blah, blah)
I don't know. If we're supposed to believe that this multi-universe option to solve the atheist-materialist conundrum caused by modern physics is legitimate, on the basis of the equations they come up with to determine all possible positions of electrons, what would the equations dealing with all possible aspects of my typing out that "M" at the beginning of that sentence in my question below be like? I would suspect that, while it would be impossible to calculate something like that, it would have to come up with far more possible values for all of the myriads of variables in that one physical act (never mind intentional choice) than those dealing with an electron. All of them requiring a universe in which all of those possible variations in the variables would be expressed in a concrete material form. And you think the Genesis story* - even taken as a figurative, instructive description, not as young earth creationist "science" - is absurd.
At least I'd like a really good explanation that all of the many physicists who insist on that multi-universe agree on as to why my question on that matter isn't relevant.
Or, maybe, to get around the problem of my experienced choice in typing that "M" being determinative, they'll claim that I didn't really choose that but that it merely exists in their stupendously infinite and concrete mega-supreme multi-universe system which, by the way, we don't even know exists except within their imaginations - none of them really being able to fathom what they've imagined, I'd guess no two physicists imagining exactly the same ensemble. In which case where did all of those infinite universes come from and why they exist as they do? And, yes, there is the problem that if the equations that our multi-universe creating physicists dream up are so efficacious as to either create or expose other universes, there would certainly have to be other universes in which other physicists have come up with the disconfirmation of their conjectures.
I think the most parsimonious explanation is that those other universes exist as nothing but wishful thinking by atheists who have proved how decadent they are willing to make science in order to impose their atheism on science. That has happened in cosmology, in neuro-science, in biology, and certainly in the social sciences over and over and over again since at least the advent of modern science. There is no magisterial wall between atheist ideology and science as there is, in fact, one that keeps religion out. Neither religion founded in the supernatural nor atheism based on vulgar materialism really have any place in science, though I'm afraid a lot of people who get paid to write papers and publish them would be hard put to come up with something to get into the journals and to show their departments to try to get tenure if such a wall against atheist religious preference was enforced. They would be hard put to come up with something to do that with if atheist-materialist faith were kept out of science. I think the current faculties of the social sciences, neuro-sciences and cosmology would largely have to be put out on the dole if that were done.
Hey, maybe firing them all would tip the political balance in favor of liberalism, assuming they haven't talked themselves out of ideas like equality, equal justice, and our equal moral obligation to give them to everyone wasn't obliterated in their materialist wishful thinking due to their atheist faith in natural selection. I think Horowitz and Putin are good examples of what so often comes out at the end of atheist materialism. Vulgar materialism and the monumental greed and depravity that constitute its morals and sacraments.
Hey, maybe firing them all would tip the political balance in favor of liberalism, assuming they haven't talked themselves out of ideas like equality, equal justice, and our equal moral obligation to give them to everyone wasn't obliterated in their materialist wishful thinking due to their atheist faith in natural selection. I think Horowitz and Putin are good examples of what so often comes out at the end of atheist materialism. Vulgar materialism and the monumental greed and depravity that constitute its morals and sacraments.
* I'm really tired of rehashing the first few chapters of Genesis along with the story of the flood. I think the story of Joseph at the end of the book is far more worth going over. Especially considering the points Brueggemann makes about him acting as an agent of Pharaoh instead of according to the Jewish tradition is both a lot more important for us today and far more interesting. Especially as Brueggemann point out, you've seen one Pharaoh you've seen them all and a lot of them are around today.
Materialism Is Entirely A Product of The Primitive Emotional Preferences Of Those Engaged In It - Hate Mail
I really wish that instead of railing at me and other commentators you would go read Adam Frank's excellent article. Read the very clear, very concise description of the alternatives of taking either the position that the wave function, itself, is a picture of reality or the one we happen to measure being what it would seem to be, the measure's perspective on reality and not an objective reality itself. The first one, the stubborn insistence that what is obviously not a concrete view of reality comes with a huge price, as Frank says, it insists on the really crazy results of the ever expanding multi-universes that turns the "turtles all the way down" line atheists love to use against religious folks on its head and turns equations into creator gods on the say so of contemporary physicists. I have always wondered how the tiny little actions we take generating new universes would square with the materialists' ideas of force and power needed to do things could be fit together but if there's something like that within the theories, I've never come across it. It would seem to be that we, like the young witches in Harry Potter, are unconsciously doing far more impressive magic. All the time, Every one of my keystroke while I write this have, I suppose, created universes in which someone doing exactly what I did typed every single other available wrong letter or character or left out every one of them, or something like that. Try describing every alternative to even one tiny act you take and imagine what alternative universes would be generated to constitute every possible variation on it.
The multiverse theory that is so influential in pop culture and in university departments would seem to turn us all into unconscious creator gods far more potent in their creation than God in Genesis. Only, the materialists can comfort themselves that we're not creating by intention but through the power of their equations. I wonder if there are universes in those all other possible universes where physicists come up with equally potent equations that cancel out the power of our physicists, disproving the multi-universe conjecture. If our equations can have such power, why not theirs?*
Of course the other view, that the the many (infinite?) possibilities of the wave function collapsing into some kind of imposed reality when someone makes a measurement also has consequences of the people measuring influencing the actual physical reality. Or at least what we choose that to be.
From what I understand you can either choose to have our and everyone elses' every act generating entire new universes continually or you can choose to say that whatever reality we can have of the physical universe being, in a real way, the result of our our minds, our decisions, and choices but NOT the classical idea of it being an "objective" "real" view of a hard material reality. I think the decision of which one is chosen is, as Frank says, entirely dependent on which one you like and really not on anything else. I've read physicists, mathematicians, and others involved in these issues note that which one is chosen probably has as much to do with the geographical location of where you went to grad school and which view dominated which department granted you your degree and which also gave you a professional and, likely, financial stake in your chosen denomination of physics. Which is just another undermining of the classical-materialist belief in a solid, scientifically certain, material reality which comes with this.
For the attempt to turn the mind into another material object, governed by whatever forces under whatever laws whichever ideological scientist might prefer the problem is far more basic. And here I think Frank put it very well.
Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole materialist perspective. A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.
And, for the atheists in the audience, don't pretend that both of the choices available to materialists, either the elevation of the wave function into an ever expanding, multi-universe reality or the one that admits that, for human purposes, our own choices govern what we will ever have as reality, whatever we can coherently or incoherently talk about matter being, BOTH OF THOSE ALTERNATIVES ARE dependent on our minds, our choices. There is no old fashioned, comforting, classical view of a solid, dependable universe available to you if you, as you also will, insist that the reality of the material universe is uniform at every scale of its existence.
The price for pretending otherwise is that ultimate decadence of pretending that our minds are an illusion which not only collapses the variables in an equation those meaningless minds come up with, it collapses the possibility that any of it has significance and produces any knowledge of any truth or reality. The mind only become a "hard problem" when atheists want to force our minds out of what they are and into a narrow, classical physical world that died in the early 20th century. It is in every way irrational, every way anachronistic, in every way as much a product of the emotional preferences of the materialists who are engaged in that because they just can't stand anything that implies that our intuitions derived from the reality of our minds not being like physical things implies that there is a God.
God ain't going away, dear, there is not a coffin big enough and no lid strong enough. People will not ignore the problems with materialism as long as they think and the materialist hegemony that clogs universities and the media isn't going to stop that. It can't even stop people believing in the stuff CSICOP railed against, there are probably more people who believe in those things than there were in the mid 1970s. It's materialism, in the high-brow form, that's in trouble, though, as we can see from the product of indoctrination into hard-core materialism in the old Soviet Union and China, the vulgar form of it and the fascism that comes with that are flourishing. Materialism always seems to collapse into that. Look at David Horowitz. That high-brow materialist-atheist view of life is merely a matter of snobbery by people with degrees or those who would like to be taken as such without the work. It is a product of social and class coercion and vulgar economic-social aspiration as much as anything else that people figure will get them ahead.
* Maybe a finger typed out every other possible "M" at the beginning of this sentence in a slightly different place on the key, and in some of them they forgot to capitalize it, or maybe they don't capitalize at the beginning of sentences in some of those universes. Maybe they choose different type faces.... It almost immediately becomes absurd.
Hate Update: What's an ignorant, middle-brow, blog babbler like you to do?
The Humanities Major Atheist Solution
Though never a whiz with the math,
And so on to science, no path,
I'll fake it with attitude,
Materialist platitude,
And pseudo-historical wrath.
The multiverse theory that is so influential in pop culture and in university departments would seem to turn us all into unconscious creator gods far more potent in their creation than God in Genesis. Only, the materialists can comfort themselves that we're not creating by intention but through the power of their equations. I wonder if there are universes in those all other possible universes where physicists come up with equally potent equations that cancel out the power of our physicists, disproving the multi-universe conjecture. If our equations can have such power, why not theirs?*
Of course the other view, that the the many (infinite?) possibilities of the wave function collapsing into some kind of imposed reality when someone makes a measurement also has consequences of the people measuring influencing the actual physical reality. Or at least what we choose that to be.
From what I understand you can either choose to have our and everyone elses' every act generating entire new universes continually or you can choose to say that whatever reality we can have of the physical universe being, in a real way, the result of our our minds, our decisions, and choices but NOT the classical idea of it being an "objective" "real" view of a hard material reality. I think the decision of which one is chosen is, as Frank says, entirely dependent on which one you like and really not on anything else. I've read physicists, mathematicians, and others involved in these issues note that which one is chosen probably has as much to do with the geographical location of where you went to grad school and which view dominated which department granted you your degree and which also gave you a professional and, likely, financial stake in your chosen denomination of physics. Which is just another undermining of the classical-materialist belief in a solid, scientifically certain, material reality which comes with this.
For the attempt to turn the mind into another material object, governed by whatever forces under whatever laws whichever ideological scientist might prefer the problem is far more basic. And here I think Frank put it very well.
Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole materialist perspective. A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.
And, for the atheists in the audience, don't pretend that both of the choices available to materialists, either the elevation of the wave function into an ever expanding, multi-universe reality or the one that admits that, for human purposes, our own choices govern what we will ever have as reality, whatever we can coherently or incoherently talk about matter being, BOTH OF THOSE ALTERNATIVES ARE dependent on our minds, our choices. There is no old fashioned, comforting, classical view of a solid, dependable universe available to you if you, as you also will, insist that the reality of the material universe is uniform at every scale of its existence.
The price for pretending otherwise is that ultimate decadence of pretending that our minds are an illusion which not only collapses the variables in an equation those meaningless minds come up with, it collapses the possibility that any of it has significance and produces any knowledge of any truth or reality. The mind only become a "hard problem" when atheists want to force our minds out of what they are and into a narrow, classical physical world that died in the early 20th century. It is in every way irrational, every way anachronistic, in every way as much a product of the emotional preferences of the materialists who are engaged in that because they just can't stand anything that implies that our intuitions derived from the reality of our minds not being like physical things implies that there is a God.
God ain't going away, dear, there is not a coffin big enough and no lid strong enough. People will not ignore the problems with materialism as long as they think and the materialist hegemony that clogs universities and the media isn't going to stop that. It can't even stop people believing in the stuff CSICOP railed against, there are probably more people who believe in those things than there were in the mid 1970s. It's materialism, in the high-brow form, that's in trouble, though, as we can see from the product of indoctrination into hard-core materialism in the old Soviet Union and China, the vulgar form of it and the fascism that comes with that are flourishing. Materialism always seems to collapse into that. Look at David Horowitz. That high-brow materialist-atheist view of life is merely a matter of snobbery by people with degrees or those who would like to be taken as such without the work. It is a product of social and class coercion and vulgar economic-social aspiration as much as anything else that people figure will get them ahead.
* Maybe a finger typed out every other possible "M" at the beginning of this sentence in a slightly different place on the key, and in some of them they forgot to capitalize it, or maybe they don't capitalize at the beginning of sentences in some of those universes. Maybe they choose different type faces.... It almost immediately becomes absurd.
Hate Update: What's an ignorant, middle-brow, blog babbler like you to do?
The Humanities Major Atheist Solution
Though never a whiz with the math,
And so on to science, no path,
I'll fake it with attitude,
Materialist platitude,
And pseudo-historical wrath.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Jay Semko - Mouse in a Hole - Answer To An Angry Rant
I am really, really not big on rock. Once in a while I hear something I think is worth while. As far as I can remember this is the last thing like that I heard, it was posted eleven years back so it's since then I've heard it.
Makes me wonder how many mass gun murders there have been in North America since it was written.
Makes me wonder how many mass gun murders there have been in North America since it was written.
And speaking of meat-heads. He's still going on and on about my lying about not knowing about a band I never heard of or heard, going on three days .... or is it four?
I don't know, is he still doing so on his vacation to Stockholm? As I said, if I'd spent all that money to go on a vacation I can tell you, answering the numb nuts at Eschaton wouldn't be how I'd be spending my time. I'm guessing his girl friend was off enjoying herself while she left him to drool into his phone. I hope so, it must be bad enough to be traveling with him.
An ancient rock critic in Sweden,
Just couldn't stop blogging or tweetin'
His raging, OCD
Attention grabs, needy
Would come even while parked in Eden.
(I'll confess, this one took seven minutes, not the under five I limit myself to when limericking.)
Update: "in bed while using hand held devices".
Oh, please, I don't ever want to think of you in bed using a "hand held device".
I don't know, is he still doing so on his vacation to Stockholm? As I said, if I'd spent all that money to go on a vacation I can tell you, answering the numb nuts at Eschaton wouldn't be how I'd be spending my time. I'm guessing his girl friend was off enjoying herself while she left him to drool into his phone. I hope so, it must be bad enough to be traveling with him.
An ancient rock critic in Sweden,
Just couldn't stop blogging or tweetin'
His raging, OCD
Attention grabs, needy
Would come even while parked in Eden.
(I'll confess, this one took seven minutes, not the under five I limit myself to when limericking.)
Update: "in bed while using hand held devices".
Oh, please, I don't ever want to think of you in bed using a "hand held device".
Materialists Are The Atheist Equivalent of Young Earth Creationists
Reader, rustypickup sent me a link to an interesting article by the University of Rochester astronomer, Adam Frank about the persistent problems for the materialist model of reality in face of the persisting problems of modern physics. Much of what he said will be familiar to people who've read my blog posts on the relevant issues, as good a way of any to show what there problems which Frank says physicists don't like to talk about, especially with outsiders, is to give a few quotes.
When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.
Like most physicists, I learned how to ignore the weirdness of quantum physics. ‘Shut up and calculate!’ (the dictum of the American physicist David Mermin) works fine if you are trying to get 100 per cent on your Advanced Quantum Theory homework or building a laser. But behind quantum mechanics’ unequaled calculational precision lie profound, stubbornly persistent questions about what those quantum rules imply about the nature of reality – including our place in it.
Those questions are well-known in the physics community, but perhaps our habit of shutting up has been a little too successful. A century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.
Sorry, that's one of the problems with doing these topics. The ideas involved don't lend themselves to being disposed of in a few aphoristic statements designed for easy consumption by even college-educated TV trained consumer of them. And as Adam Frank notes, it's apparent that some of the biggest names in science, even the physicists whose own field can't escape the vicissitudes of these hard and inconvenient truths don't seem to be willing to really acknowledge that they are there, they are real and the insurmountable hurdle they present for their materialist-religious ideology are there. And for materialism, since its replacement for God is the physical universe and the laws constructed by science about those, those insurmountable problems are fatal to materialism in a way that they are not for non-materialist religion.
Take the very first problem in that, that the real and effective modern understanding of electrons doesn't actually define WHAT they are, they present them in terms of the properties that physicists have assigned to them. When they are talking about electrons, they aren't talking about a thing they're talking about what they believe an electron does. And that problem is only more exacerbated by the fact that modern physics doesn't talk about an actual thing doing things, it can't do anything but present those "things" as a series of probabilities, none of which can be definitely assigned to the "thing" they're talking about.
For physicists, the ambiguity over matter boils down to what we call the measurement problem, and its relationship to an entity known as the wave function. Back in the good old days of Newtonian physics, the behaviour of particles was determined by a straightforward mathematical law that reads F = ma. You applied a force F to a particle of mass m, and the particle moved with acceleration a. It was easy to picture this in your head. Particle? Check. Force? Check. Acceleration? Yup. Off you go.
The equation F = ma gave you two things that matter most to the Newtonian picture of the world: a particle’s location and its velocity. This is what physicists call a particle’s state. Newton’s laws gave you the particle’s state for any time and to any precision you need. If the state of every particle is described by such a simple equation, and if large systems are just big combinations of particles, then the whole world should behave in a fully predictable way. Many materialists still carry the baggage of that old classical picture. It’s why physics is still widely regarded as the ultimate source of answers to questions about the world, both outside and inside our heads.
In Isaac Newton’s physics, position and velocity were indeed clearly defined and clearly imagined properties of a particle. Measurements of the particle’s state changed nothing in principle. The equation F = ma was true whether you were looking at the particle or not. All of that fell apart as scientists began probing at the scale of atoms early last century. In a burst of creativity, physicists devised a new set of rules known as quantum mechanics. A critical piece of the new physics was embodied in Schrödinger’s equation. Like Newton’s F = ma, the Schrödinger equation represents mathematical machinery for doing physics; it describes how the state of a particle is changing. But to account for all the new phenomena physicists were finding (ones Newton knew nothing about), the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had to formulate a very different kind of equation.
When calculations are done with the Schrödinger equation, what’s left is not the Newtonian state of exact position and velocity. Instead, you get what is called the wave function (physicists refer to it as psi after the Greek symbol Ψ used to denote it). Unlike the Newtonian state, which can be clearly imagined in a commonsense way, the wave function is an epistemological and ontological mess. The wave function does not give you a specific measurement of location and velocity for a particle; it gives you only probabilities at the root level of reality. Psi appears to tell you that, at any moment, the particle has many positions and many velocities. In effect, the bits of matter from Newtonian physics are smeared out into sets of potentials or possibilities.
All of this led some of the most philosophically sophisticated physicists such as Eddington to state and even some of the most dedicated atheist-materialist philosophers such as Bertrand Russell to admit that modern physics had pretty much destroyed the old materialism which was fast becoming the standard religion of atheist-scientists. It is the old-time religion that still holds sway among even physicists whose own field undermined the possibility of them believing in it professionally.
Materialist - ideologues among modern physicists would seem, to me, to be the equivalent of biologists or geologists who held with young-earth creationism.
Frank goes into some of the truly bizarre stuff like even the most extreme versions of multi-verse theory which is found to be more acceptable to these materialists than just stating the obvious, that materialism is an inadequate model of the physical universe at even the level they can study with any kind of confidence. Never mind the insistence that the efficacy of their religious cosmology can be extended from quantum physics concerning electrons into complex chemistry, biology and even reliably reducing the minds that can't really grasp what electrons are or where they are with absolute certainty into computers made of meat.
I have noted how, on reading Eddington's lectures that Bertrand Russell predicted that science was entering into a decadent phase. That was nearly ninety years ago. What has obviously reached a stage of decay is the fields of cosmology, some branches of physics, the elusive and absurd and blatantly announced attempts of scientists to define consciousness, mental activity, etc. into nothing but chemistry and physics, something that some of the big names in popular science such as Michio Kaku claim is inevitable - Frank has critiqued him on that count, as well.
Everywhere I've looked, when a scientist starts out with the clear intention, generally overtly stated, to support the materialist model of reality, the results have been utterly decadent, utterly dishonest and the science it produces has often crashed catestrophically. In a lot of my blog writing I have dealt with the most deadly of those, eugenics, which the Darwin inner circle in Britain and Germany believed in as a part of the "material monist" view of life which they believed natural selection confirmed. I have noted a number of times that in his book, The History of Creation, which had Darwin's full support, Haeckel credited him and that theory with the "final triumph" of "material monism" to Darwin. The current crop of materialists in cosmology, in neuro-science and other fields which are trying to nail the final nails in the coffin of what they take as the main rival of their religious faith, a belief in God, are engaged in the same entirely extra-scientific effort.
Rustypickup sent me the link to the piece in my piece noting Stephen Jay Gould's willingness to forego his entire, decades long criticism of the Just-so story telling of sociobiology and evo-psy in the one instance where they disposed of the "vexing problem" of "altruism" on behalf of natural selection. I can't claim that my longstanding affection for Gould didn't take a big hit with that article and, especially, that particular lapse in his scientific integrity. And for the same reason, ultimately, that led the original generation of Darwinists to refuse to note the problems with their universal ambitions for the theory of natural selection. That someone as humane as Gould was willing to do that in the 1970s, two years after he noted that sociobiology risked a revival of eugenics and all of the possibilities we in the post-war period know with such horrible certainty shows how dangerous materialism really is.
It's mighty tempting to go into all of the problems of materialism that Adam Frank sets down in his article but I'll give you his conclusion, which I can agree with, sort of:
Rather than sweeping away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter, we can begin to move forward by acknowledging where the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics leave us. It’s been more than 20 years since the Australian philosopher David Chalmers introduced the idea of a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Following work by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, Chalmers pointed to the vividness – the intrinsic presence – of the perceiving subject’s experience as a problem no explanatory account of consciousness seems capable of embracing. Chalmers’s position struck a nerve with many philosophers, articulating the sense that there was fundamentally something more occurring in consciousness than just computing with meat. But what is that ‘more’?
Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case.
While the materialists might continue to wish for the high ground of sobriety and hard-headedness, they should remember the American poet Richard Wilbur’s warning:
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
Oh, well, I can't keep myself from noting that if the mind is not material then there is no way to apply any of the methods of physics or even biology to it because those can only have any reliability at all in so far as they reveal properties of matter. If the mind is not material, it will certainly have qualities which the methods of science can't approach. To anyone who objects to that idea, modern physics has certainly shown to a high degree of reliability that the methods of science can't even reach all of the qualities of the physical universe. As I will brag, once again, I once got the arch-materialist, arrogant physicist Sean Carroll to admit that there was not a single object in the entire physical universe that physics had defined comprehensively and exhaustively. Something about even the most studied object in the universe, "simple" and observable as that might be, has eluded the most exigent methods of science.
When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.
Like most physicists, I learned how to ignore the weirdness of quantum physics. ‘Shut up and calculate!’ (the dictum of the American physicist David Mermin) works fine if you are trying to get 100 per cent on your Advanced Quantum Theory homework or building a laser. But behind quantum mechanics’ unequaled calculational precision lie profound, stubbornly persistent questions about what those quantum rules imply about the nature of reality – including our place in it.
Those questions are well-known in the physics community, but perhaps our habit of shutting up has been a little too successful. A century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.
Sorry, that's one of the problems with doing these topics. The ideas involved don't lend themselves to being disposed of in a few aphoristic statements designed for easy consumption by even college-educated TV trained consumer of them. And as Adam Frank notes, it's apparent that some of the biggest names in science, even the physicists whose own field can't escape the vicissitudes of these hard and inconvenient truths don't seem to be willing to really acknowledge that they are there, they are real and the insurmountable hurdle they present for their materialist-religious ideology are there. And for materialism, since its replacement for God is the physical universe and the laws constructed by science about those, those insurmountable problems are fatal to materialism in a way that they are not for non-materialist religion.
Take the very first problem in that, that the real and effective modern understanding of electrons doesn't actually define WHAT they are, they present them in terms of the properties that physicists have assigned to them. When they are talking about electrons, they aren't talking about a thing they're talking about what they believe an electron does. And that problem is only more exacerbated by the fact that modern physics doesn't talk about an actual thing doing things, it can't do anything but present those "things" as a series of probabilities, none of which can be definitely assigned to the "thing" they're talking about.
For physicists, the ambiguity over matter boils down to what we call the measurement problem, and its relationship to an entity known as the wave function. Back in the good old days of Newtonian physics, the behaviour of particles was determined by a straightforward mathematical law that reads F = ma. You applied a force F to a particle of mass m, and the particle moved with acceleration a. It was easy to picture this in your head. Particle? Check. Force? Check. Acceleration? Yup. Off you go.
The equation F = ma gave you two things that matter most to the Newtonian picture of the world: a particle’s location and its velocity. This is what physicists call a particle’s state. Newton’s laws gave you the particle’s state for any time and to any precision you need. If the state of every particle is described by such a simple equation, and if large systems are just big combinations of particles, then the whole world should behave in a fully predictable way. Many materialists still carry the baggage of that old classical picture. It’s why physics is still widely regarded as the ultimate source of answers to questions about the world, both outside and inside our heads.
In Isaac Newton’s physics, position and velocity were indeed clearly defined and clearly imagined properties of a particle. Measurements of the particle’s state changed nothing in principle. The equation F = ma was true whether you were looking at the particle or not. All of that fell apart as scientists began probing at the scale of atoms early last century. In a burst of creativity, physicists devised a new set of rules known as quantum mechanics. A critical piece of the new physics was embodied in Schrödinger’s equation. Like Newton’s F = ma, the Schrödinger equation represents mathematical machinery for doing physics; it describes how the state of a particle is changing. But to account for all the new phenomena physicists were finding (ones Newton knew nothing about), the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had to formulate a very different kind of equation.
When calculations are done with the Schrödinger equation, what’s left is not the Newtonian state of exact position and velocity. Instead, you get what is called the wave function (physicists refer to it as psi after the Greek symbol Ψ used to denote it). Unlike the Newtonian state, which can be clearly imagined in a commonsense way, the wave function is an epistemological and ontological mess. The wave function does not give you a specific measurement of location and velocity for a particle; it gives you only probabilities at the root level of reality. Psi appears to tell you that, at any moment, the particle has many positions and many velocities. In effect, the bits of matter from Newtonian physics are smeared out into sets of potentials or possibilities.
All of this led some of the most philosophically sophisticated physicists such as Eddington to state and even some of the most dedicated atheist-materialist philosophers such as Bertrand Russell to admit that modern physics had pretty much destroyed the old materialism which was fast becoming the standard religion of atheist-scientists. It is the old-time religion that still holds sway among even physicists whose own field undermined the possibility of them believing in it professionally.
Materialist - ideologues among modern physicists would seem, to me, to be the equivalent of biologists or geologists who held with young-earth creationism.
Frank goes into some of the truly bizarre stuff like even the most extreme versions of multi-verse theory which is found to be more acceptable to these materialists than just stating the obvious, that materialism is an inadequate model of the physical universe at even the level they can study with any kind of confidence. Never mind the insistence that the efficacy of their religious cosmology can be extended from quantum physics concerning electrons into complex chemistry, biology and even reliably reducing the minds that can't really grasp what electrons are or where they are with absolute certainty into computers made of meat.
I have noted how, on reading Eddington's lectures that Bertrand Russell predicted that science was entering into a decadent phase. That was nearly ninety years ago. What has obviously reached a stage of decay is the fields of cosmology, some branches of physics, the elusive and absurd and blatantly announced attempts of scientists to define consciousness, mental activity, etc. into nothing but chemistry and physics, something that some of the big names in popular science such as Michio Kaku claim is inevitable - Frank has critiqued him on that count, as well.
Everywhere I've looked, when a scientist starts out with the clear intention, generally overtly stated, to support the materialist model of reality, the results have been utterly decadent, utterly dishonest and the science it produces has often crashed catestrophically. In a lot of my blog writing I have dealt with the most deadly of those, eugenics, which the Darwin inner circle in Britain and Germany believed in as a part of the "material monist" view of life which they believed natural selection confirmed. I have noted a number of times that in his book, The History of Creation, which had Darwin's full support, Haeckel credited him and that theory with the "final triumph" of "material monism" to Darwin. The current crop of materialists in cosmology, in neuro-science and other fields which are trying to nail the final nails in the coffin of what they take as the main rival of their religious faith, a belief in God, are engaged in the same entirely extra-scientific effort.
Rustypickup sent me the link to the piece in my piece noting Stephen Jay Gould's willingness to forego his entire, decades long criticism of the Just-so story telling of sociobiology and evo-psy in the one instance where they disposed of the "vexing problem" of "altruism" on behalf of natural selection. I can't claim that my longstanding affection for Gould didn't take a big hit with that article and, especially, that particular lapse in his scientific integrity. And for the same reason, ultimately, that led the original generation of Darwinists to refuse to note the problems with their universal ambitions for the theory of natural selection. That someone as humane as Gould was willing to do that in the 1970s, two years after he noted that sociobiology risked a revival of eugenics and all of the possibilities we in the post-war period know with such horrible certainty shows how dangerous materialism really is.
It's mighty tempting to go into all of the problems of materialism that Adam Frank sets down in his article but I'll give you his conclusion, which I can agree with, sort of:
Rather than sweeping away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter, we can begin to move forward by acknowledging where the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics leave us. It’s been more than 20 years since the Australian philosopher David Chalmers introduced the idea of a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Following work by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, Chalmers pointed to the vividness – the intrinsic presence – of the perceiving subject’s experience as a problem no explanatory account of consciousness seems capable of embracing. Chalmers’s position struck a nerve with many philosophers, articulating the sense that there was fundamentally something more occurring in consciousness than just computing with meat. But what is that ‘more’?
Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case.
While the materialists might continue to wish for the high ground of sobriety and hard-headedness, they should remember the American poet Richard Wilbur’s warning:
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
Oh, well, I can't keep myself from noting that if the mind is not material then there is no way to apply any of the methods of physics or even biology to it because those can only have any reliability at all in so far as they reveal properties of matter. If the mind is not material, it will certainly have qualities which the methods of science can't approach. To anyone who objects to that idea, modern physics has certainly shown to a high degree of reliability that the methods of science can't even reach all of the qualities of the physical universe. As I will brag, once again, I once got the arch-materialist, arrogant physicist Sean Carroll to admit that there was not a single object in the entire physical universe that physics had defined comprehensively and exhaustively. Something about even the most studied object in the universe, "simple" and observable as that might be, has eluded the most exigent methods of science.
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