Friday Crab Blogging

They're starting to run soon. Ummmmm.
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Sans Snark

Nothing if not persistent

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"However, the teeny, tiny (not polka-dotted) bagel is a bee bagel. For that one, you must indicate the precise (and accurate) location of the "beginning" by doing the bee waggle dance." (emphasis added)

"People steadily crossed the yard carrying things that gave them a reason for being there - shopping, briefcases, musical instruments, library books, city maps or rucksacks..." (emphasis added)

Beeing the reason after the dance.

On the other hand:

I never nursed a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its dappled hide,
But when it came to know me well,
It fell upon the buttered side.

Now, was it Joyce or Elliot. I'm getting confused. You know, it is unclear that Thomas Moore was ever in Africa. How did he know about Gazelles?

“Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”

However, in four days we'll get to sing my favorite song of all time.

Bee is for Bagel

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I, of course, want to bee bloggerly* correct, so here is the link. However, the torus of all torae:


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The Bagel

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Libertarianism

As an old friend, Mr. W. says:

Since the late 19th century the term has often been used as a synonym for anarchism.

This is sort of sad, since I've always felt a little warmth at the bottom of my cold, deterministic heart for anarchy, not necessarily the bomb throwing kind. But, I am being unfair, That would be political libertarianism and what we are discussing here is metaphysical libertarianism which Mr. W. says is:

...a philosophical position in metaphysics with respect to free will and determinism. It entails the belief that human beings possess free will, that free will is incompatible with determinism, and that determinism is false.

The citation that Unreal Nature has led us to, is a review by Eric Carlsson of a book by Randolph Clarke called "Libertarian Accounts of Free Will"

As Unreal Nature states, we are all amateurs and, believe me, if there was ever the definition of amateur it would be:

"One who has trouble understanding Libertarian Accounts of Free Will."

I need to quote the first para of Carlsson's review to get you in the mood for this thing. Mind you, there are no chloride ions involved:

The purpose of Clarke’s book is to assess the conceptual adequacy of libertarian accounts of free will, i.e., accounts which assume that free will is incompatible with determinism. Clarke discusses libertarian views of three types; noncausal, event-causal, and agent-causal. All noncausal accounts are found inadequate, while the best event-causal accounts are adequate, assuming the truth of “merely narrow” incompatibilism, i.e., the view that moral responsibility is, unlike free will, compatible with determinism. Given “broad” incompatibilism, claiming that moral responsibility is also incompatible with determinism, only agent-causal accounts can, according to Clarke, be adequate. The adequacy of such accounts presupposes, however, that substance causation is possible. Clarke finds good, although not decisive, reasons to reject the possibility of such causation. He concludes that the possibility of free will is doubtful, given broad incompatibilism.

Alright, then, we have three positions to grapple with.

1. Non causal. This is, as Carlsson states:

Noncausal libertarian accounts maintain that free actions can be uncaused, and lack internal causal structure. In Clarke’s view, such accounts thereby fail to give an adequate characterization of the active control required for free will. Such control is, he argues, a causal phenomenon. “An agent’s exercising active control … consists in her action’s being caused by her, or in her action’s being caused, in an appropriate way, by certain events involving her, such as her having certain reasons and a certain intention” (p. 19).

How does one parse this statement from a neurophysiological standpoint? Events are caused by "actions" on the part of an animal. It is entirely illogical to assume the possibility of a "lack of internal causal structure." Perhaps this is the definition of a mad man? (I will certainly stay away from the booby trap of proposing that there could ever, in any way, even with former girl friends, be a mad woman.) There can be no physiologic activity (i.e. muscle activity including vocal muscles) without prior "internal causal structures," i.e. coordinated firing of neurons in the motor cortex. So, in my opinion, this is Libertarian pie in the sky.

2. Event-causal libertarian:

On event-causal libertarian accounts, a free action is caused by events involving the agent, such as her having certain beliefs, desires, reasons, or intentions. Such accounts differ from event-causal compatibilist accounts primarily by requiring that the action is nondeterministically caused by these events.

Whoa Nelly! There are just too many angels on the head of this damn pin. How can "beliefs, desires, reasons or intentions" not deterministically determine an action? Beliefs, etc. are neurophysiologic structures in the brain. Actions are actually reactions. The perception, analysis, reaction circuit is obligated to run through these structures. I am sure that there are vast reservoirs of thought behind the concepts bandied about here, but they should at least make physiologic sense.

Furthermore:

Clarke argues, first, that the absence of causal determination precludes neither that the agent exercises sufficient active control for her action to be fully rational, nor that there is an adequate rational explanation of what she does.

Again, at the end of the chain, we have the little supernatural homunculus in our brain determining our actions. It makes no difference how far back one places this activity. That is, "active control" presumes something that is not a result of the neurophysiological structures of the brain.

Therefore:

Some libertarians have tried to avoid this problem by locating the required element of indeterminism at an earlier stage in the causal process issuing in the action.

Now, what to make of this statement:

The “argument from luck” is another aspect of the problem of diminished control. If a decision is nondeterministically caused, this argument goes, it is a matter of luck that the agent makes it.

This is a fascinating concept that goes back to the ideas of the Fates, Pandora's Box, and even Karma, though one could argue about the latter.

Further on, Carlsson states:

If an account provides for the openness of alternatives, as well as for the positive active control required for moral responsibility, there are good reasons to conclude that it adequately characterizes free will.

Pardon me if I am perplexed. That is, why do I feel that this is just saying: "We have Free Will because we have Free Will."

Again:

However, the mere openness of alternatives, understood as the absence of a determining cause, cannot, Clarke maintains, make a difference as to whether an agent is morally responsible. (emphasis added)

And again, this is circular. What distinguishes "openness of alternatives" from Free Will? How can one possibly have "Free Will" and not have moral responsibility? It is this refusal on the part of philosophers to clearly define their terms (i.e. spell out differences in concepts) that drives one bonkers.

3. Agent causal: For this Carlsson says:

Clarke moves on to consider whether an agent-causal libertarian account can provide such positive active control. He argues, first, that no account postulating the agent as the sole cause of a free action is adequate. Like noncausal accounts, such pure agent-causal accounts fail to provide reason-explanations of actions. Instead, he suggests an “integrated” agent-causal account. On this account, a free action has a nondeterministic conjunctive cause, one conjunct of which is the agent herself, and the other is her having certain reasons, etc. (emphasis added)

What I really need a definition for here is "Agent." To wax philosophical, one cannot have a conjunction of two dissimilar objects, i.e. two "things" that are not of the same philosophical strata. In this case, the "agent" is either the same as the "reasons" or, as in my little homunculus, different. From a neurophysiological standpoint, we would argue that they are the same and these arguments have no real meaning. This argument holds for this statement also:

Clarke finds, however, fairly strong reasons to reject the possibility of such causation. The most serious difficulties concern causation by substances in general, rather than causation by agents in particular.

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I'm sorry, I can't go on. The jargon is just too much for me. I knew I was in trouble when I read this:

“Effects are caused to occur at times, and it might be argued that this can be so only if their causes likewise occur at times—only, that is, if their causes are directly in time in the way in which events are but substances are not” (p. 201). It can be replied that if a substance causes an event, then it does so in virtue of having a certain property at a certain time. The temporality of causation is thus accommodated in an indirect way. (emphasis added)

Because I immediately thought of this guy:


Amazing how he is able to pick up that Church!

And he made me think of Transubstantiation:

The Council of Trent defined transubstantiation as "that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood – the species only of the bread and wine remaining – which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation".[4]

But that, of course, led me to:

Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate

And to think this guy was a Prof at Harvard, MIT and Wellesley (during the time Hillary was there).

Deja Vu All Over

Once the investment trust was the remarkable invention that brought the small and innocent investor the precious benefits of skilled investment advice and the promise of high earnings and rich capital gains. Now we have the mutual funds. So precious is the financial genius provided by these that companies are organized to supply it to the companies that actually invest the money. The profit from the sale of this genius and also the cost of selling it being considerable, it would be illogical to assume that the investor gets the counsel at low cost. When the next collapse comes, quite a few who have committed themselves to contractual plans for investment - to putting so much money in a mutual fund each month - may discover that much of their money has gone for the genius, and the other costs, and not much remains in the stocks.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929. Time Inc Book Division. 1955. p. xxii-xxiv

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Note: I got Galbraith's book when in college, many, many years ago. It has sat on my shelf since then. I always assumed it was boring. On the other hand, every single other book in the Time reading program of the early 60's was interesting when I finally got around to reading it (including Bend Sinister by Nabokov which got me hooked on him.) So, I read The Great Crash - 1929 last fall for obvious reasons. Galbraith's book is extremely well written and funny. I know. I know. Funny economics is an oxymoron. Go figure.

Gaza Day 43

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How quickly we forget. The common refrain these days is "nothing to see here," "move along, now." The thousands of children who died needlessly in Iraq. The children of Lebanon and the cluster bombs. And now the almost forgotten 437 slain children of Gaza.

The child in this picture did not survive. She was buried alive by the debris from a bombing attack, as detailed in surgical coldness by Paul Rogers:

The war started with an intense aerial operation involving 88 Israeli strike aircraft attacking 100 pre-planned targets in under four minutes. 400 more targets were hit within the first week of the war...

Mr. Rogers of the Oxford Research Group, continues on with his aseptic analysis of the situation in January. As an American, I find the following paragraph chilling:

It is certainly the case that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had undertaken very detailed planning and training for a major air and ground offensive to be directed at Hamas, including a substantial increase in infantry training for urban warfare. Much of this was concentrated at a new facility, the National Urban Training Centre, the mock Arab town of Baladia in the Negev complete with refugee camp. This was built for the IDF by the US Army Corps of Engineers, financed largely by US military aid and has been in operation for the past eighteen months.

Think about this for a moment. This operation, with its devastation of the civilian population, was planned in model of a civilian facility (a "mock Arab town" and a "refugee camp") built by the American Army. The American Army is financed by my tax dollars.

One of the most powerful armies in the world plans, for many months, to attack a civilian population and trains for it not by combating simulated soldiers, but by practicing attacking a refugee camp. To do this it is equipped by the U.S.:

... F-16 strike aircraft and the Apache helicopter gunships are seen as US aircraft in Israeli markings, and there is the memory of the airlift of military supplies from the United States to Israel at the time of the 2006 Lebanon War.

You might say that this is real politik. But why then do we view what the General Ratko Mladić did in Sebrenica with such moral outrage?

Slowly the world starts coming around to confronting the fate of these children. It is difficult to review the pictures, particularly when one shares the guilt, without wondering where we all are heading.

Pearls from Pauline

A Correspondent raises the following questions about You Know What:

-Do mind, soul, free will differ in source?
Comment: These three concepts all arise in the human brain, if that is the meaning of the question. While many have tried to make distinctions between mind and soul, in my opinion these are semantic issues.

-Does someone who denies free will, necessarily deny concept of "soul"?
Comment: Again, one would have to ask what the word "soul" denotes. There is "soul music," "soul food," and full or empty milk bottles (Baltimore Catechism circa 1950). There are Buddhist concepts, Hindu concepts, those of Aristotle and Plato. Thomas Aquinas, I think, was big on souls. I once heard of a high school student who tried to buy other student's souls (she was a witch). This would be the soul of Goethe. In summary, many would say that the soul is a life spirit, but, in the end most people assume that other's think of a soul the same way they do. It is an intuition.

-If humans have souls, and non-human animals do not, when in evolution does soul enter humans?
Comment: Very good question. For some very interesting discussion of this see Unreal Nature. I now see that this goes back to your first question. That is, are soul, mind and free will all part and parcel of the same "thing." I don't know whether there is an answer for this since it is impossible to get a definition. However, many would say that there is a "life force" in higher animals that leaves at death. It is hard not to say that a chimpanzee, who shares so much DNA with humans, and who seems almost to be a human, doesn't have a "soul" in the same way that people say humans do. The existence of this question and the lack of a viable answer is a big challenge for Free Willers.

-Do animals have a mind?
Comment: See above.

-How do humans and non-humans differ regarding brain and electrical activity? is there any?
Comment: Other than absolute number and complexity of the circuits, they are, to the best of my knowledge, exactly the same (same neurotransmitters, same ion gates, same action potential, etc.) I say this because most of the defining research in neurophysiology was done on animal models.
The interesting thing here, if you are of a galactic bent, is wondering what the human mind will become in 100,000 years. For starters, everyone would have to be born by Cesarean Section, since (and I can assure you of this) the current human female birth canal is barely able to cope. (See The Singing Neanderthal for an explanation of this development). While I hold no hope for telepathy or teletransportation, the ability of a humanoid mind twice our capacity for aesthetic appreciation must be unbelievable.

-What is the source of emotion: affection, compassion, misery?
Comment: Buddha would be proud. The source, as best as I understand this of emotion is a complex interaction between a very primitive part of the brain called the limbic system and the higher area called the neocortex. Note that whales have compassion, dogs are affectionate (arf, arf Julie). The only emotion that I am aware that is unique to humans is embarrassment. As Mark Twain said (paraphrase), "Humans are the only animals that blush; and they are the only animals that need to."

-And what about humor, language, intelligence measured in animals?
Comment: Very good question. It is debatable that animals have humor that is at all on the spectrum of humans. Doggies and kittens are certainly playful. I think that primates have something similar. Language, on the other hand, is a uniquely developed human facility that has evolved over millenia. Closely allied to language is an appreciation of music. See the aforementioned "The Singing Neanderthal" for a comprehensive exploration of this topic. As for intelligence, a colony of ants shows intelligence (see Unreal Nature and this New York Review of Books item on The Superior Civilization)

-How do neuron patterns differ in non-humans and humans? and do they?
Comment: Again, I assume that the patterns in a human are more complex, just because there are more neurons. For instance, we have color vision but dogs do not. However, it is probably a question of degree. This is an interesting question that cannot be answered yet.

-Who chose the word "animal"?
Etymology: Latin, from animale, neuter of animalis animate, from anima soul. So, there you have it, its those damn Romans.

Pauline says: One last comment on the chimp who made headlines recently. It boggles my mind that ONE chimp gets shot for ONE attack on ONE human. Never mind some humans "freely choosing" to kill thousands of Iraqis in an unconscionable war. But that's another whole matter.
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Some of these questions make one go back and think very, very hard about what was said. I must confess that my comments are just what I think and do not represent any orthodoxy.

A question of legitimacy - II

Far be it from me, carrying the sports metaphor beyond bounds, to suggest that Unreal Nature was involved in "sledging." No, no, no, we welcome all opinions on the subject, even if they be in Ingush. (Some of us have trouble with the l's.)

To rephrase the question:
Are there "rules" that govern literary (textual) criticism?

If there are, who determines them?

If there are not rules per se, are there, as Unreal Nature would suggest, "rules" about rules? To use the sports metaphor, are there some things in common with all sports that everyone agrees on? (The aforelinked article on Sports Ethics seems to suggest so. However, I find it hard to fit boxing into that framework.)(He coins the words "aforelinked" and "aforeblogged". Thank you.)

If there are uber-rules, do they extend to all art criticism?

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Consider the graphics that our favorite mermaid sings about: A CT scan of metastatic lung cancer (very familiar, I wonder where it came from), the running of the bulls in Minos (I almost said cretin cattle, but bringing up the subject of Iodine deficiency would be diluting the discourse), an incomprehensible phrase, and a poem about how I feel these days.

CT scan:
Now, to my eyes, an entirely different picture. But to the anthropologist? The mermaid? Dr. Rorschach?

The comment I guess I am driving at is that we respond to any text or work of art in a structured way. That is, while layered with many concomitant emotions from the limbic system, we still interpret things (criticize) in the way that is structured by our memories and inherited mental structures. To the extent that the latter are common to all humans (a very long discussion about evolutionary psychology here,) there probably are uber rules. We could not be caught in this discussion if there were not.

So, I bow to the wisdom of my colleagues. I will pack up my lance and leave the field. At least I don't have a lance through my eye.

A question of legitimacy

It was a difference of opinion that led to horseracing.
- Mark Twain quoted in South Australian Register, 10/15/1895

Unreal Nature has an interesting piece up about art as communication (mainly textual, i.e. creative writing, but should be the inclusive definition: writing, painting, photography, etc. See Vehicle for Intentional Communication). In her usual modus operendi, she quotes from a Review (frequently, of late, The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) and follows with pithy comments and discussion.

From the Review by David Osipovich of Arts and Minds, by Gregory Currie, comes this seminal quote:

There is one essay, one of the previously unpublished ones, that is not only interesting in its own right but also deals explicitly with the book’s general theme of aesthetics’ dependence on other philosophical and empirical disciplines. The essay is entitled “Interpretation and Pragmatics”, and argues for author-intentionalism – the highly contentious view that interpretation of narrative art works involves deciphering in some way the intentions of the work’s author. (emphasis added)

And:

Currie believes that aesthetics must be informed by other philosophical and empirical disciplines, that aesthetic activity is a psychological activity. And the act of aesthetic interpretation is a species of communication generally.

Finally:

Currie further refines his argument by differentiating two basic claims made by author-intentionalism: “1) We use the text, together with various other things, to come up with the best ideas we can about what the author intended to convey; 2) legitimate interpretations are exactly those that correspond with what the author intended to convey.”

Unreal Nature goes on to quote the reviewer of this work, David Osipovich:

Isn’t it simply enough to say that a legitimate interpretation must be supported by the text? Why is it necessary to add that an author must have been capable of reasonably intending any legitimate interpretation? What does talk of intentions gain us here?

And:

And yet Currie talks about distinguishing “legitimate” interpretations from “illegitimate” ones, which is clearly an axiological concern. Does the empirical study of how people really interpret the things they hear and read explain what interpretation is and must be, or does it help us distinguish good interpretations from bad ones?

(Axiology: the study of quality or value; I had to look it up)

This criticism, i.e. that one cannot demand THE interpretation of a text to be the one the author intended, seems to be agreed to by both Unreal Nature and the Osipovich. Yet there still remains "good" interpretations and "bad" interpretations.
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Once, when I was a kid, our 7th grade class was put out on the new football field at recess time (in the South, Football was God's game). The field had a lot of small rocks on it and our task was to pick up these rocks and heave them into the woods on the one side of the field (little mind that one classmate heaved it through the woods and onto a passing car, to much fanfare.) But, before this latter incident, we had an interesting development. One colleague had tried to pick up a rock but discovered that it extended down into the ground. Of course, this prompted an attempt to dig around the rock to remove it. Of course, you know what happened, digging around the rock simply uncovered vast new vistas of rock. This was the primal rock. We felt it was likely that the rock extended to the center of the earth if not to China. Eventually, the bottom was found. A back hoe removed it and we went back to class.

Moral 1: When you start digging, bring lunch.
Moral 2: When commenting on something from Unreal Nature, bring lunch.
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I am, of course, not certified to comment on this topic, but I will. (I am certified, but that's another story.) And that brings up the question as to who, exactly, is certified to comment on the interpretations of textual and, we certainly must include, other art. I am vaguely aware that since I studied things formally in college there has been a revolution in textual analysis (Derrida, etc. I could not resist this quote about deconstruction: "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air.")

From all of this, one might assume the Critics are the only ones with legitimacy in interpreting art. Critics being those who, we assume, have extensively studied works in the particular field of the art work. However, this would leave us with very few valid commentators or, on the other hand, if one considers the genre of the popular novel, anyone who reads it. In particular, I would wholeheartedly agree with Unreal Nature and Osipovich the there is not one interpretation and that the one that the author/artist intended. (Actually, I would go much further, latent sixties radical that I am.)

Why does any of this matter? I don't imagine anyone reads a novel or other creative writing with the idea that he/she will enjoy the work only by discovering what the author was trying to "say," as if there were a gigantic rock of meaning below the text of which we mere mortals can only uncover a pebble. The fact is, when we read something, we have no choice as to how we interpret it. It is possible, after the fact, to go back and interpret it differently (e.g. all those college English courses on Shakespeare's Sonnets), and we might say, ah ha, this might have been what Shakespeare meant. But, in the initial pass, again, we have no choice.

We bring to any work of art a whole panelopy of different beliefs and emotions. It even makes a difference where we read something (on a plane, in your chair) and what you ate for dinner.

Now, to legitimacy in this endeavor. If an interpretation is legitimate, it means another interpretation is illegitimate; something is the "wrong" interpretation. This is a rather pejorative thing to hoist onto the poor reader, particularly one who has really no choice in the matter. But, I suppose it is an age old situation. The teacher always asks the student what the author "meant" when he/she said something. Woe to the student who thinks Oedipus is just randy.

Of course any argument I make for unfettered thought has its pulldown on the other side. I guess I would recommend Nabokov's (1980) Lectures on Literature. These were lectures delivered at Harvard. Made me sit up and think about Jane Austen.

Friday Crab Blogging

We've been so innundated with the flu that I had to reach back into the crab archives. (where did Noah keep his bees? In the Archives. Yuk.)

Beware a.d. XVII the Nones of March

Free Will Redux-III

WARNING: READING THIS MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR YOUR SANITY

Oh my! I have stirred up a cyclone in someones Guinness mug.

Five Lashes With the Whip of Philosophical Jargon

and more recently:

Free Will, and the meaning of loaf

I never was good at rear guard actions as the main body wanders off into the sunset. However, stinging from the unmerciful whip of jargon, one must rebut.

Galen Strawson. Interesting guy. (Anybody who goes to a Dragon School and is not named Harry Potter is probably interesting in his own right. But, clearly, his mum and dad wanted him to be a doctor.) In any case, Swanson states:

"We do what we do, in a given situation, because we are what we are."

I like pithy sayings, particularly if they involve circular logic. This ranks right up with "Know Thyself." Since neither statement is grounded in the real world, except that it is a collection of synapses, it has to be an idea. I love ideas, but they are very pliable. Einstein's theory of relativity was just a very good idea until 1919 when it received observational verification. Everyone seems to know what "responsibility" is, but it is an abstract idea like all the rest. Therefore, Swanson's syllogism (1-5) cannot be tested in reality. One has to have the same mental construct (i.e. "believe" the same things Swanson does) to "agree" or even "disagree" with him. (Since I hate people who use quotes, particularly "air quotes," I'll stop right there.)

I guess what I am saying is that it is hard to argue with the philosophers because we do not share a common language.

(As an aside, Swanson's Argument is included in discussions by the philosopher Harry J. Frankfurt (frequently referred to in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) but who is best known for an essay (and book) On Bullshit. I remember reading an essay/review of this in the New Yorker. Yea and verily, I walketh in the valley of BS. )

Onward. From Ms. Cat-o-nine tails, we read a review of Tomasz F. Bigaj's work: Non-locality and Possible Worlds: A Counterfactual Perspective on Quantum Entanglement. The review is by an interesting guy named Michael Dickson. Here is an example of my difficulty understanding the philosophical language:

the role and proper application of counterfactual reasoning in proofs of Bell's Theorem and related theorems.

What, you might ask, is counterfactual reasoning?

In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, Counterfactual definiteness (CFD) is the ability to speak meaningfully about the definiteness of the results of measurements, even if they were not performed.

Got that? And Bell's Theorem? Go here.

All of this to address the conundrum proposed by Einstein and his colleagues in 1935.
Out of this arose Bell's Theorum (mentioned above).
Out of this arose, finally, measurements and experiments on quantum entanglement. One of the latest is quite impressive: World's Largest Quantum Bell Test Spans Three Swiss Towns.

Aha, Dr. C., now we are getting somewhere, you say. Finally someone is going to do a physical experiment that is relevant to your concerns.

No, unfortunately, because what proceeds in the review of Biagj is, to me, almost totally incomprehensible. It assumes a deep emersion in this field and, try as I did to understand it, I must admit I am got lost at the second Swiss Town.

As a final observation, what takes place in the brain is on a mesoscopic scale and not, as far as I can tell, susceptible to the wiles of quantum intanglement, in spite of some spectacular speculations by the anesthesiologist, Hameroff.

Punishment accepted. Uncle cried. Position vanquished.

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Now for the Growlery. I take much of what he says to hear. I particularly am impressed with the idea of applying "Gödel's incompleteness theorem.....that we cannot completely analyse the system from within, using its own rules." Perhaps my tiny spacecraft has sailed too close to the Sun and my arguments have fallen like so much wax and feathers. (I hate mixed metaphors).

In any case, It is time to put the question to rest.

Free Will Redux-II

The subject of Free Will is immense. In fact, it is all encompassing. One stands in awe. So, awestruck, I will try to address some of the points in the comments to the first post.

One issue that both commentators mentioned was the vast number of nerves and synapses in the brain would seem to argue against the proposition that an action was determined by a single molecular event (opening or closing an ion channel.)

In order to address this issue, please consider what is the function of the brain. First and foremost it is a reaction organ. It is a more sophisticated pathway, but exactly similar in function, to other reflexes such as the knee jerk. Incoming information is processed (fires through neural networks) and a response is triggered. Again, the Either/Or of General Loan comes to mind. Either he pulls the trigger or he doesn't. There is no in between state.

It is true that this is most likely not a sequential process. That is, there are probably many neural pathways firing in parallel. However, we would argue that the outcome of the billions of synapses still must funnel through the final common pathway and this, in turn, depends on one ion. (I cannot argue that the threshold for the action potential might not be different at different times. In fact, it is doubtful that exactly the same physical pathway is followed with each action.) What is important, though, is that it can only be one final nerve firing. If the nerve fires, the action takes place. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It makes no difference if there are billion or a trillion nerves involved. It is much like nuclear fission. There has to be the threshold of a single neutron between no reaction and boom.

On the other hand, if one agrees that the primary purpose of the brain is to generate reactions to external stimuli, then it would make evolutionary sense that the same stimulus would generate the same response. (The difference between a squid axon response and a human's response to Beethoven's Apassionata is merely a matter of degree.) Thus, it does not bother me that the threshold of a single nerve might change. As long as the outcome is consistent (not that humans are ever consistent.)

Now I appreciate the creativity of a scenario that invokes broken determinism. However, the real point of the argument for Free Will is that it is something transcendental that determines something physical, i.e. the biochemical reactions of the neural network. Now clearly not all of these neural reactions could be under the control of something transcendental. For instance, you would exclude synapses in the peripheral nervous system including the eye (which, as we showed before, does some primary processing of visual input in the retina.) But how deep of a level do you go in the brain to invoke the interaction? Where are the synapses that are under transcendental control? In the pineal gland (thank you Rene)? (I have the same problem with miracles).

For instance, while it might be true that the recognition of a molecule in the nose might involve quantum mechanical tunnelling, the transduction of that signal almost certainly involves G proteins just as in the eye (see posts on this in the Information series). Or if you are really interested:

The process of how the binding of the ligand (odor molecule or odorant) to the receptor leads to an action potential in the receptor neuron is via a second messenger pathway depending on the organism. In mammals the odorants stimulate adenylate cyclase to synthesize cAMP via a G protein called Golf. cAMP, which is the second messenger here, opens a cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channel (CNG) producing an influx of cations (largely Ca2+ with some Na+) into the cell, slightly depolarising it. The Ca2+ in turn opens a Ca2+-activated chloride channel, leading to efflux of Cl-,

Let them eat chloride ions.

Yes, I suppose that Chemistry is a subscience of Physics. Being trained as a chemist I just don't want to think about it (those uppity physicists). However, pertinent to this discussion, when physicists start talking about Free Will and Quantum Theory, they argue in the abstract. They do not talk about real things, at least in my opinion. I recognize to a degree the restraints put on determinism by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. And, I have much to read on this as suggested by Unreal Nature. So, I consider this an open discussion. Interestingly enough, Steve Wolfram has something to say about Free Will. We can all get in the ring.

Finally, let us propose a gedanken experiment. Take all the nerves in the brain involved in a given outcome (alright, General Loan pulling the trigger). Array those nerves along a time axis. There may be billions at first, but as the "decision" point is approached, the number will decrease until there is only one neuron left. We can say this because we employ the Laplace demon to slice time in such a way that every single (re)action in the universe occurs at a different time. Along the time axis going forward after the single neuron there is either no impulse (i.e. didn't make the gate), or an increasing number of neurons firing to produce the result.

I appreciate anyone sticking with me this far. I agree with The Growlery, it is an exhausting exercise. I know I have not truly addressed the objections. But then:

You say daemon, I say demon,
You say tomato, I say tomatoe

D. Quail

Different Standards

Perhaps I'm missing something here:

"A senior British diplomat has been arrested after he allegedly launched an abusive tirade against Israel and Judaism at a London gym, police said Tuesday," the Associated Press reports.

The AP adds, "Rowan Laxton, the 47-year-old head of the Foreign Office's South Asia desk, was held on suspicion of inciting religious hatred - an offense that carries a maximum jail term of seven years. He allegedly used foul language as he criticized Israel's conduct during the conflict in Gaza at a fitness center at the London Business School last month.

According to the Times of London, "The diplomat, 47-year-old Rowan Laxton, allegedly shouted 'f***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews' while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza last month." (emphasis added)

It seems that one man's emotional outburst against a foreign country warrants arrest whereas the slaughter of 400 children in Gaza is a ho hum.

However, the more serious problem that this exemplifies is the almost complete melding of Jews and Israel. Over and over again this has been successfully used to suppress any real discussion of the ongoing savagery of the IDF. (e.g. dropping a million cluster bomblets in Southern Lebanon on the last day the the 2006 war.)

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard someone in America condemn Muslims and/or Arabs. A whole population grew up thinking that the words Palestinian and Terrorist were the same thing.

And then there is this:

"The report showed a 26% rise in racist incidents against Arabs in 2007, with twice as many Jews claiming feelings of hatred against Arabs. 74% of Jewish Israeli youth believe Arabs to be “dirty”. And 78% of the adult Jewish population in Israel does not think that Arab political parties should be included in the government." (emphasis added)

Free Will Redux

Q: What are the consequences of accepting the proposition “There is no Free Will” as true?

DrC: Immense.

Q: Of course you must explain yourself.

DrC: I’ll try. But first let me refer you back to a series of posts, initiated as a reply to Felix Grant’s comments on information handling in robots, that attempted to show that decisions made by a human could be narrowed down to the firing of a single neuron. These comments were much discussed in 2007 and a list of the posts can be found at:

http://doctorc.blogspot.com/2007/07/information-thread.html

This firing of that neuron could be further narrowed down to one, single chemical interaction (the closing or opening of an ion channel). That interaction could be finally narrowed down to the statistical chance that a bimolecular reaction would exceed the energy barrier (Gibbs Free Energy) of the reaction and go to completion. This initiated a chain of reactions which resulted in an action (muscles contracting). We used the example of General Loan.

Since all of these processes are based on classical molecular chemistry and do not involve or invoke the uncertainties of quantum mechanics (e.g. tunneling), it is difficult to conceive how this framework could be influenced in any way by some non chemical, perhaps “spiritual or psychic” force. Such a force would invoke interactions with classical, chemical reactions that have not been seen in any other system.

An important observation by neuroscientists that inflects on this scheme is that it can be shown that humans, when they make a decision, have already initiated that decision before they are conscious of it. (These observations come from observations of subjects picking between alternatives while being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging or PET scanning.)

Q: So, Dr. C., you would propose that if you were a LaPlace Demon you could predict the decision of any human being? That is, if you had instantaneous knowledge of the status of every ion channel of every neuron in the cerebral cortex, and you knew the neural pathways of every reaction circuit in the same, you could predict what any human would do in any situation?

DrC: Yes.

Q: Does that mean that, when confronted with any decision, that a human will choose that path which is determined by the electrochemical state that exists in the brain?

DrC: Yes.

Q: So, back to the original question, how does this proposition impact our conception of human behavior?

DrC: This proposition impacts every area of human behavior in the legal, political, social and personal spheres. It is hard to imagine an area that it does not impact. While I cannot speak to civilizations other than the Western (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Indian, etc.) and then only minutely, the concept of Free Will is integral to our current society in America.

Q: That is a rather dramatic assertion, Dr. C. Could you give us some examples.

DrC: I’ll try. Think for a moment about our legal system. This system is based entirely on the proposition that a human has “responsibility” for his or her actions. That when confronted with a decision, e.g. whether to steal a loaf of bread from a bakery, that we pick to do so even though we know that it is “wrong.” What is “wrong” is codified in Laws, which often have to do with property rights. Society, using the instruments of the police and courts, will apprehend us and punish us for committing a crime. A rather dramatic scenario of this situation is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

While the Courts will frequently try to determine “motive,” it is still felt that the human has a free choice when confronted with the decision. In the case of Jean Valjean, he stole the bread because his sister and her children were starving. We would argue that Jean Valjean did not have a choice in the matter. The decision was automatic and would have been made in this case no matter what. The information from Valjean’s senses (eyes, ears, etc.) interacted with the underlying configuration of the neurons in the cerebral cortex to produce the response. A Laplace Demon could have predicted it as Valjean stood outside the shop window looking at the loaf of bread within.

Q: That is an interesting contention, Dr. C. But surely you are pulling at our heart strings as did Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. You can’t possibly mean that there is no personal responsibility, can you?

DrC: Yes, I do believe that, in the way that we view it, there is no personal responsibility, even though I try and act as if there is so in my daily life. That is, if I perform an action that is detrimental to society, I should be held accountable. But this is not because I am personally to “blame” for the action. It is simply necessary for actions that are detrimental to be corrected, otherwise society could not function. I would ask you to look overall at our legal system, particularly in the United States. We have more people incarcerated per capita than any other place in the World. We also are the most litigious society and, until recently, the most wealthy. In order to keep such a structure functioning, there has to be an extraordinary amount of legal action. Do Americans have the same Free Will as everyone else? If so, why so many crimes? If Free Will were intact, every single instance should be a de novo assertion of this in the decision making. The only argument that will not assign personal responsibility (i.e. not guilty vs guilty) is insanity. And insanity assumes that the subject does not have free will, a circular argument. Yes, judges may use mitigating circumstances (upbringing, first crime, etc.) to determine the degree of punishment, but no one would currently argue in court that a sane person did not have free will.

Q: In what other instances do you see the impact of your proposition?

DrC: Well, the most contentious, of course, will be religion. And, in spite of the American Constitution definitively separating Church and State, this separation has been extensively eroded in recent years. At the very core of many Western religious sects is the assertion that man freely chooses to believe in a non-material godhead and, in many cases, a human emissary (Christ) who may or may not have been divine. Since these beliefs are illogical, one has to choose to believe them based on faith. But, again, the choice to believe, i.e. the exercise of Free Will, is felt to be available to every sane human. Furthermore, as in the legal system, if one does not choose to believe, one might well wind up experiencing eternal punishment. (the sort of proposition faced by Calvin and Hobbes.)

Once again, as in the legal system, a human is assumed to arrive at the decision to believe in a pristine state. That is, no account is taken for the commitment to be made under mitigating circumstances (e.g. children raised in an agnostic environment). A person is felt to be entirely responsible for their decision to accept or reject salvation at every instant this proposition is made. If one “accepts Jesus as your personal Savior” then one doesn’t have to go to the bad place after death. Interestingly enough, there is no talk of someone later “rejecting Jesus as your personal Savior” since the overwhelming majority of people in the World could care less. (Note to self: is the plethora of religions in the World, all contending their validity, an argument against Free Will?)

In the end, Western religion is deeply tied in with personal morality. This is almost certainly a result of the Jewish God Yahweh or Mony Python’s Jehovah Who definitely liked things to go His way.

Other religions, e.g. the Greeks, seemed to take a more population based stance vis a vis the gods. Since there was more than one god, and it was the population that was under consideration, the idea of a personal morality wasn’t very important except for occasional guys like Prometheus.

I guess one could make an argument that Socrates was leaning towards personal morality as he appears in some of Plato’s more moral dialogues. Perhaps I should reread Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
including the pursuit of Eudaimonia, i.e. the good and virtuous life. Eudaimonia is constituted, according to Aristotle, not by honor, or wealth, or power, but by rational activity in accordance with virtue over a complete life. This, throws another clinker into the argument as we wonder whether rationality demands Free Will.

Q: All this is really hard for me. I don’t know what the words “responsible, guilty, conscience, virtue, grace, right, wrong, blame or sin” mean anymore. Do I need a new dictionary?

DrC: You betcha.

Bipartisanship?

Every man/woman (Senator) an economist:

THE $780 BILLION stimulus package deal reached by a bipartisan group of senators and the White House Friday was the culmination of a frenzied week that reflected two strains of politics. One embraced President Obama's attempt to rise above the partisan squabbles that too often have paralyzed Washington. Another made it clear that the old ways will die hard.

For any rational observer this is just totally bizarre. It is exactly the policies espoused by the Republican majority for eight years that got us into this mess to begin with. Why is it that more of the same will get us out?

But the real question is that now that Democrats hold a clear majority in the House and the Senate, plus the Presidency, how can the Republicans continue to wield such power? This inability of the Democrats to govern (i.e. implement the will of the majority of Americans, the basis of our government) just makes one want to scream. Apparently Republicans are looking forward to 2010 and 2012 instead of looking at the mess right before their eyes that they, in large part, created.

Politics. The Original Sin of a Democracy.

Friday Crab Blogging

Calvin, Hobbes and Pascal

I get all my philosophy from Calvin and Hobbes these days.

The Year 1952

1952 was an interesting year. Seven years after the end of WWII, America was still at war in Korea (until July, 1953). But, the outlines of post War society were starting to firm up. In particular, some writers were beginning to sense that the trajectory on which America was headed was not necessarily utopia. Two books that I just read, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, are extraordinarily prescient in this regard. One should couple these two with a recent article in the New York Review of Books on "Google and the Future of Books."

To refresh your memory, in Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Guy Montag, is a fireman who burns books, since they have been determined to be dangerous to the functioning of this future society. It is highly likely that Bradbury was influenced by the spate of book burning that occurred in Nazi Germany at the end of the 30's. Of note is that both immersive television (whole wall or the ultimate wide screen) and tremendously silly advertising hold sway in this dystopian society. The ideas that occur in classic books are felt to be dangerous when held up against the society of the future. What is disconcerting is how much that future society resembles ours!

It is the same with The Space Merchants where it is business, or more to the point the advertising business, that has taken over the dystopian (by our standards) world. There are a number of allusions to large companies that are very powerful (such as Bendix) that now no longer exist. There is even security firms (Brinks and Pinkerton) that resemble our Blackwater.

How can it be that so many writers from that era (Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948) are attracted to the dystopian future? How is it that we did not listen to them in the least and plowed right on screwing up the planet and its people? I guess it is the ability of the human being to believe in anything, even the most outright fantasies.

The other issue that is touched on in these books and the NYRB article is, interestingly, the fate of books. I like to read. But I think that the habit of reading is rapidly disappearing in the population as a whole. Some children do aspire to read; but most are much more interested in Wii.

For thirty years (until 2006)I subscribed to Pediatric Clinics of North America. This was an essential resource in my practice. I confess that I have not looked in the 120 books of this series that I have since that time. If I have a question, I google it.

Thirty years ago if one had something to say, one would try to get it published. Now, we write it on a blog. What we write on the blog goes off into cyberspace. The fact is, as I have discovered in the past few years, there is incredibly interesting discussions (e.g. here and here) floating around in this world. No one, even the old Neuromancer himself, saw this coming.

Friday Crab Blogging

This one reminds me of M&M's.

Gaza Day 30

One of the commentors on Gaza Day 24 had this to say:

And don't forget, Hamas counts in it's rank of warriors, small/young children and women. It is entirely possible that one or more of the cute faces you depict as "victims" is actually a Hamas suicide bomber.(emphasis added)

To that sentiment I only have this to reply:

Of Bats and Angels

I was struck this AM by this note on the recent plane crash in the Hudson river. As you will recall, the airliner (is this archaic?) took off from LaGuardia airport and ran into a flock of birds (migrating geese, I had assumed). After a spectacular landing in the river and rescue of all aboard, the NTSB (National Transportation and Safty Board) proceeded to spend large amounts of money recovering the engines from the bottom of the river.

Now they say:

"....they visually examined the left engine after it was finally pulled 65 feet from the river bottom but saw no evidence of organic material.

The safety board also said the left engine, which was recovered on Friday, had dents on its inlet lip and broken and missing guide vanes.

Earlier this week, the safety board said the right engine also revealed evidence of "soft body damage" and that "organic material" was found in that engine and on the wings and fuselage. A single feather also was found.

The board sent samples of the organic material to the Agriculture Department for a DNA analysis. (emphasis added)"

For crying out loud, do we need to spend taxpayers money on DNA analysis of dead birds? After all, they found a feather in the engine. Where is Sherlock Holmes when we need him.

What other "soft body" could have impacted the engines? Maybe a softball got loose from a presidential press conference. Scratching my brain I could only come up with one other alternative, an angel.

One has to be impressed with the extent of these wings. As many have commented, it takes one set of pecs to move them. On the other hand, given the current cosmology, I guess it could have been a devil.


Now I think we have Milton to thank for all of this angel and devil stuff. At least this example of the devil has a decent set of flappers. Not to be compared to the weenie ones seen on a more typical "devil."

I suspect that angels evolved from something like eagles and devils, of course, from bats. This is of course a corollary of a 6,000 year old creation since the fossil records say bats came along about 50 million years ago. Ergo, they predated angels and devils. Now this is unfair to bats who comprise 1/5 of the worlds vertebrate species (and someday we should talk about my favorite, the vampire bat). But bats are off the hook in taking down a jet engine; they don't have feathers.

To be continued.......

Friday Crab Blogging

Gaza Day 27

It is not at all clear that at least part of the reason Israel invaded Gaza wasn't to recover a single prisoner. Please recall that Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, (causing multiple civilian causalities and destroying a large amount of its infrastructure) because of the attack on its border soldiers.

The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hezbollah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border.

Fast forward to 2009:

Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn't let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free Schalit (an Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit, captured by Hamas in 2006. ed).

In line with the vast discrepancy of injuries and deaths in the current Gaza crisis (well over 1,000 Palestinian deaths, many of them children, vs the Israeli death toll at about 12, at least three from "friendly fire") we have Israel obsessing over a single soldier. In the meantime:

Many Palestinian families have relatives in Israeli prisons and prisoner releases are of supreme importance in Palestinian society. Israel holds some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in all. (emphasis added)

Doesn't this bring to mind a prior conflict?

The War of Jenkins' Ear was a conflict between Great Britain and Spain that lasted from 1739 to 1742. Its unusual name relates to Robert Jenkins, captain of a British merchant ship, who exhibited his severed ear in Parliament following the boarding of his vessel by Spanish coast guards in November 1739. This affair and a number of similar incidents sparked a war against the Spanish Empire, ostensibly to encourage the Spanish not to renege on the lucrative asiento contract (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America).

We have not come very far, if at all, since 1739.

The Perception of Reality

Multiple posts on the Growlery, Unreal Nature and JSBlog refer to pictorial and photographic framing, and the perception of reality. This is interesting because one reports what one perceives about perception.

One post referred me to the work of artist Carl Laubin. Please follow the link to his Home Page. Once there, click on the Gallery link and you will see:



If you click on the icon that the arrow is pointing to, it will open up to a fascinating interior architectual landscape. (I did not show the picture here to avoid copyright infringement.) There are multiple classical buildings in the nave of a much larger building. Whether the buildings are themselves the size you would expect, or merely models, is a matter of perception.

However, when I first saw this picture I was immediately reminded of the ruins at the head of the Keet Seel trail: Other Anasazi ruins:



Or Mesa Verde:


What fascinated me about these pictures is the concept of a shelter within shelter. It is also interesting to speculate on the Freudian postulate that whatever comes into your mind when a subject is presented (visually or aurally or, I suppose, in print) is usually the true association in your mind. This pertains more to the emotional/sexual, of course, but I think it may still be valid for the everyday.

At one point, many, many years ago I remember an exhibit at a museum in New York. Scattered about the museum, in corners and on shelves were tiny models of adobe dwellings. It was very striking.

Maybe I am insecure because I desire shelter x 2!

Gaza Day 25

I have no photos of injured children today. I simply note that Gaza has all but disappeared from the headlines. The people of Gaza bury their dead and survey the wreckage. The people of Israel celebrate a victory.

The problem, of course, for the World, is that Israel has atomic weapons. The behavior of its Army in Gaza indicates far better than any proclamation by its government their willingness to use overwhelming force against a literally defenseless enemy.

The time when this becomes an issue is fast approaching. Israel will confront Iran. Iran is not Hamas. Will Israel use nuclear weapons against Iran? There is an increasing likelihood that they will.

Our new president, Barack Obama, will have many problems in the near future. I wish him the courage to do what is right for children.

Gaza Day 24

What can one say?

Gaza Day 23

There is a cease fire in Gaza. Inevitably, the World's attention will be focused elsewhere. How are the children of Gaza now to survive? There is little water or food. Shelter, as can be seen in the picture here of a destroyed home, is in ruins.

At least the fighting has stopped.

Please consider reading several other blog entries on the tragedy in Gaza:
From the Growlery: here, here, and especially here.
From Unreal Nature: here
And from Thinking Through My Fingers: here

The fallout from the last three weeks has not even begun. How Barack Obama confronts this issue will be decisive for how he will begin his four years as President. His and Hillary Clinton's unwavering support of Israel makes one very afraid.