Another inconvenient truth

As a card carrying atheist, I find it very uncomfortable to say this, knowing that if our knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundamentalist cousins find out, they'll think they've won a great victory, but my conscience compels me to say it anyway: The theory of evolution by natural selection is not a scientific theory at all. It makes no testable assertions at all; there is no experiment or potential observation that could possibly make it false. On the contrary, the central point, that nature kills off individuals that are less well adapted to their environment at a greater rate than individuals that are well adapted, is so bleedin' obvious that it's closer to logic or mathematics than to empirical science. How could it conceivably be false?

There are some very good theories about evolution -- Mendelian genetics and molecular biology come to mind -- that have genuine scientific stature. With robust and fertile theories like these, who needs natural selection in the toolbox?

Natural selection is not the only sacred cow in the history of science. The Darwinian revolution came a little more then three centuries after the Copernican revolution. Copernicus boldly suggested that the earth goes in circles around the sun, rather than that the sun follows a complicated trajectory around the sun. He was wrong, of course. The complicated geocentric trajectory gave a much better account of the real observable data than the circular heliocentric one. But that didn't matter much. Copernicus's change of perspective made things much simpler to understand. Sure enough, after a little while, Kepler swapped circles for ellipses, preserving the essential simplicity and enormously improving the accuracy of the heliocentric perspective.

Copernicus's theory was provably wrong on the facts. Darwin's theory seems to have had nothing at all to say on the facts. So what's so important about these guys that justifies their place in the scientific pantheon? What makes them special is not the details of their theories, but the changed perspectives that they offered. In the case of Copernicus, it's easy to identify the change: from geocentric to heliocentric. In Darwin's case, it's a little harder to state, but the essence of the change comes down to this: Darwin just pointed out the stark, staring, obvious fact that death comes quicker to those who are at a disadvantage in their environment, and that this, together with the fact that different places have different environments, is essentially adequate for explaining the existence of many species. Or more simply: There is a simple perspective that allows us to escape the clutches of the worthless notion that God created all the species that there are.

That's not science, and in the real world scarcely any working scientist makes any use of the theory of natural selection at all. Molecular biology is where the action is.

So the theory of evolution by natural selection really doesn't have a place in the high school science class, but it's ideally suited to the critical thinking class, where "intelligent design" could be used for comparison, showing how otherwise intelligent people can be made to wander around in the dark for thousands of years when they find themselves trapped by a silly, barren perspective.

Western meditation on eastern meditation

I recently read Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham, and I judged it a bad book because it could only be understood by someone born and raised as a Buddhist in Tibet, despite its being written with English words. I was surprised a little later when my cognitive therapist -- yes, I need one, just as you suspected -- recommended that I read Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression. A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, by Zindel V. Segal, J. Mark G. Williams and John D. Teasdale. It was largely the same stuff, but this time written by English-speaking professional psychologists. Gone were all the symbols drawn from Tibetan culture. There was no windhorse and there were no "laws of karma". But the essential exercises of meditation were just the same.

So, being enthusiastic about preventing relapse, I gave it a shot. What's required is to sit still for a while, "focusing on the breath", i.e., paying attention to one's own breathing, while merely noting or "acknowledging" sensations, thoughts and feelings that occur. For the first few seconds, this is pretty easy: Air comes in. Air goes out. Air goes in. Air goes out. Why am I doing this? Doesn't it seem pretty silly for a grownup occidental to pay attention to his breath? What's really interesting is getting all the access switches on the 9th floor patched redundantly to the central distribution switch. But that's hard because ... Whoa! What am I doing? That's a thought, and it was sweeping me away from my focus on the breath. OK. I acknowledge it. Nice thought. We'll think about it later. For now, air goes in ....

Of course we can't help having thoughts creep in. It's how minds work. But after a little practice, we can catch the thoughts before they've taken us on a long side trip, and more importantly, we can notice the feelings that are associated with the thoughts. The thought, the feeling, the sensations and the breath are all part of the present moment, and that's where we're trying to learn to live. The theory is that focusing on the breath and living in the present moment will let us calmly and dispassionately recognize the negative feelings associated with some of our thoughts, so that we can stop them before we get swept along in a raging torrent of increasingly depressing thoughts.

What's wrong with this picture?

Wait. Don't answer. I'll tell you. The problem is that we can't focus on the breath and think at the same time. What we're thinking just is what we're focused on. There can only be one focus. We can meditate or we can think, but not both at once. For Buddhist monks, meditation can occupy the whole day, but as for the rest of us, we've got thinking to do.

And yet, ... it works! I've actually had the experience, while thinking about network switches, of noticing that I was getting anxious and upset by the feelings associated with my thoughts -- not while I was focusing on my breath and living in the present moment, but while I was wondering how much traffic a particular switch could handle. Having noticed my agitation, I was able to withdraw from the subject for a little while and take a minute to relax. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. The question is: How?

I think the answer is that meditation isn't really intended to focus on anything. On the contrary, it's intended to obliterate focus and allow the peripheral mental events -- the ones on which we don't focus -- to be noticed in their context. With a little practice, we begin to develop something akin to the peripheral vision that allows a gazelle to notice an odd movement in the tall grass even though she's focused on grazing; it's barely noticeable, but it's enough to shift her focus for a moment to make sure it's just the wind. Those of us who aren't monks can work at occupations that demand our sharply focused and undivided attention, but with our newly panoramic vision, we're primed to notice little things we aren't paying attention to, such as frustration, cheetahs, resentment or little bits of joy, any one of which might make a big difference to our day, depending whether we shift our gaze or not.

So when we "focus on the breath", what we really do is cross our mind's eyes so that they can't focus on anything at all, but are still sensitive to anything that passes. If we cross our eyes often enough, contrary to what our mothers said, our vision may improve.

Freedom's just another word for driving in reverse

What follows is a very strange idea, perhaps even an original idea, though probably not; I just don't know whose idea I'm stealing. Anyway, it should be viewed with great suspicion and certainly not taken on faith. In all probability it's just plain false, but I've thought about it till my brain hurts, and I want your brain to hurt, too.

In the traditional view of the three-dimensional world in which things change with the passage of time, the doctrine of "determinism" has gone something like this:

For any event e, there exist other prior events such that, given the laws of physics, e necessarily follows from those other events.

and "freedom" has meant something like this:

In at least some circumstances, agents (usually people) originate their actions by their own will, uncaused by antecedent physical events; i.e., they can act as it turns out that they do, or they can act otherwise.

Clearly, there is at least an apparent incompatibility between the two, and philosophers have exercised their art quite a bit on the issue. Roughly, they've gathered into three camps:

1. those who insist absolutely on determinism and deny freedom;
2. those who insist that we have direct experience of freedom, and that determinism must therefore be false; and
3. those who argue that that the two are actually compatible, but that freedom is actually a weaker thing, consisting only in the ability to do what one voluntarily decides to do, even if that voluntary decision itself was necessarily determined by the laws of physics and the prior state of the physical universe.

There's something more than a little stinky about the last group. To put it simply, they're cheating. If freedom is just "not being bound, gagged and locked in a windowless cell," then it's not quite the same thing you'd have in mind when you said "I'm free to go to a movie tonight, or not, as I choose," is it? So really, once we've thrown out the fraudulent option, we're left with the simple question, "Are we free, or are we determined?"

To a "hard" determinist, the indeterminist view just seems false on the facts. We do not directly experience freedom. At best, we experience the motion of our body parts, and the agreeable feeling of approving of that motion.

To an indeterminist, on the other hand, determinism has all the earmarks of a religious dogma. Sure, physics has accomplished a lot of cool stuff since Galileo and Newton took the stage, but did anyone ever prove that every event, down to its finest detail, happens necessarily because of the operations of the laws of physics on antecedent events? If we can't get accurate weather reports beyond a few days, what entitles us to such certainty about everything in the universe? Doesn't our admittedly vague feeling of freedom count for at least as much as scientists' spotty record of identifying causes?

So while the question "Are we free or determined?" is simple enough, the answer isn't.

At least it isn't in the aforementioned three-dimensional world of things changing in time; but what if we step out of time and take a wider perspective, looking at a four-dimensional block universe where time is on a par with space, not having a privileged direction? The laws of physics seem to have remarkably little preference for one direction of time over the other, so maybe this approach will lead us somewhere promising. One thing worth noting immediately is that there's no principled reason for supposing that causation can't work backwards. Sure, the thought induces nausea, but so does the Norwalk virus, and it's real enough, so let's not let that scare us off.

As I mentioned in another post the famous fuzziness of quantum mechanics can be made to disappear if one admits bidirectional causation. The fuzziness need not be interpreted as an inherent feature of the particle being studied, but can instead be seen as a result of the fact that a future event (e.g., an observation by the experimenter) is determining the particle's present state. If this is true, then determinism, as I stated it above, is certainly false, because it implies that causation works exclusively in one direction -- from past to future. But let's be nice, and recast the determinist doctrine in temporally neutral language:

For any event e, there exist (in a timeless sense of that word) other events such that, given the laws of physics, e necessarily follows from those other events.

Given this statement of the determinist thesis, every event still has a physical cause, but the physical cause may be a complex of other events, some earlier and some later. But this is very definitely not the determinism your mother told you about. In particular, it's not predeterminism, which is, I think, what raises the hackles of the devotees of freedom. Remember that we've now stepped outside of time; we're looking at the universe and the laws that govern it from a timeless perspective. From that perspective, it no longer makes sense to insist that causes must precede effects; in fact, that insistence is essentially identical to the insistence that time has a preferred direction, and that's just what we're denying. It will take some conceptual readjustment to get used to the idea that causes need not precede their effects, but it's not impossible. One simply needs to conceive of the cause-effect relation as a necessary one imposed by physical laws, without regard to temporal precedence -- or rather, without any presuppositions about temporal precedence. A deterministic universe in this sense is just as implacably fixed as a predeterministic universe. In our new-style deterministic universe, the "future" is as (timelessly) real as the "past." What's new is that the future not entirely determined by the past. In fact, the past is partly determined by the future, and conversely. To be quite strict, the whole lifetime of the universe -- past, present and future -- is tied up in a knot of necessary causal relations working backwards and forwards such that only one lifetime is possible.

Is this revised sort of determinism compatible with a genuine freedom? Not if genuine freedom requires that the future be "open;" i.e., not yet real, but awaiting our choices. On this view, the future is real. just not a function of the past. But if freedom requires only that our future not be fixed by our past, then, yes, it is compatible with determinism in this sense.

How does freedom fit in? Pretty nicely, I think, but with a surprising twist. We can now say that a free act -- say, shooting an arrow at an apple on one's son's head -- is (timelessly) caused by one's self-confidence as a marksman, by a threat of execution if one doesn't do it, and by the flight of the arrow. The combination of all the antecedent factors, together with all the laws of physics, are insufficient to cause the decision. The flight of the arrow is strictly required, and working backwards from that, the release of the bowstring, the drawing of the bow, etc., all of which have a perfectly respectable causal nexus, respecting the letter of the laws of physics. The act is free because at least one of its causal factors doesn't precede it.

Interestingly, the act would be no more or less free if one missed, because the subsequent causal chain of a missed shot leads back to exactly the same event -- shooting an arrow -- as the subsequent causal chain of the successful shot.

So, if any of this makes sense, we have strict causal determinism (admittedly still dogmatic, but awfully attractive for all that), and genuine freedom for agents whose acts are undetermined by antecedent conditions, not just the bogus freedom of people who aren't in jail, and all we had to pay for it was backward causation. There is still one problem to address, though: freedom, as it's characterized here, doesn't seem to let the agent say "I did what I decided to do, but I could have done otherwise." In the four-dimensional block universe, the future is (timelessly) as real and as fixed as the past, the power to do otherwise than one actually will do is illusory. However, the agent can still say "I did what I decided to do, I did it for my own reasons, and I wasn't destined to do it by past conditions." Maybe that's good enough.

There, now you take an aspirin.

Priority access to persons with disabilities

In a building near the one where I work, the title of this post is inscribed next to every elevator door on every floor: "Priority access to persons with disabilities." It makes my skin crawl. It's wrong in every way and on every level. If Satan himself had set out to debase human communication so as to prevent us from working together, I sincerely doubt that he could have found a more apt device than the one he posted there. How is it wrong? Let me count the ways:

We'll start with the grammatically trivial: "Priority" is, or was until recently, a noun. No need to risk a hernia consulting the OED; even Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary says "priority" is a noun. Is this vile sign a harbinger of things to come? Is "priority" the new "quality?" One shudders, sighs, and moves on.

"Access" is fair enough, and "to" seems harmless, so let's move on to "persons." The author, if I may use that word to describe the person who wrote this, presumable thought the elevators might be robust enough to carry more than one person, and struggled valiantly to find a plural. Sadly, though the struggle was valiant, it was in vain. "Person" does actually have a plural in English. Yes, that's right; it's "people." So where does "persons" come from? Well, it actually is a word in English, but not in the sort of English that's suited to discussing the skills and talents of the occupants of elevators; its use is properly restricted to legal discourse. Legal "persons" come in two flavors: natural persons (i.e., people) and artificial persons such as governments, corporations, trusts, estates and other arcane inventions that are deemed fit subjects of rights that can be defended in court. Microsoft is a "person" in this sense, and so is Iceland, but even the lawyers who devised this strange sort of personhood didn't have the effrontery to call them "people;" hence, "persons."

Much as I honor and respect Microsoft, and Iceland even more, I draw the line at surrendering my place on a crowded elevator to either of them. Even if poor MIT had all of its legs amputated after a horrific accident that left WalMart dead and my grandmother's estate on afterlife-support, I would still not let the hobbled technical institute have my place. It can wait for the next elevator for all I care.

That leaves us with "disabilities." Disabilities are in plentiful supply. Let's see; there's blindness, deafness, stupidity, Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, cleft palate, attention deficit disorder, coma, stuttering, stammering, cerebral palsy, bad judgment, astigmatism, anorgasmia, and, oh yes, there's being crippled, too. People -- sorry, persons -- with any of these afflictions get to jump the queue for the elevators. Well, most of them can jump the queue. The crippled ones just have to ram the queue with their wheelchairs, or clear some space with a few strokes of the cane.

One wonders, though, why all these variously imperfect persons should have "priority access" to the elevators. Do the blind really have a better claim than the rest of us to vertical transportation? The deaf? I suspect not. In fact, I suspect that the sign was really only intended to give special consideration to the crippled, but the authors dared not say so in English, because "crippled," as a word describing an undesirable condition, is an undesirable word, and not fit for use in public. To the various problems that plague the lives of the crippled, we add one more: They're banned from polite discourse, to be hidden away in a crowd of other nondescript persons with disabilities.

In one final irony, the building in which the sign appears is managed by forward thinking people who are always on the lookout for ways to improve the work environment of their human resources. One very bad thing that may occasionally happen in a work environment is that someone might smoke in it; not out in the open, of course, but hidden away in the stairwells. So the managers nipped the problem in the bud; they locked the stairwells, making the stairs accessible only in case of fire. By this simple and considerate act, they have put us all on the same plane together. The blind, the stupid, the crippled and the mountaineer are all equal persons in their disability; none can get to the fourth floor without an elevator, and thus, our cherished sign -- "Priority access to persons with disabilities" -- is rendered absolutely meaningless at every level.

Morality: What's religion got to do with it?

Churches (not to mention mosques, synagogues, temples and revival tents) are generally quite keen on morality. That's a good thing; everybody should be keen on morality. But the interest in morality displayed by a church is typically quite different from the interest displayed by, say, a hardware store; churches seem to behave as though their interest is proprietary. Why is that? What special qualifications does a minister of God have to hold forth on good and evil, right and wrong? More importantly, why should a minister of God have a greater say than a bus driver in determining what children are taught about good and evil, right and wrong?

About 2,400 years ago, Plato took up this issue in a dialog called The Euthyphro. There, he asked the question -- paraphrased to give it a slightly more modern feel -- "Is something good because God loves it, or does God love it because it's good?" If it's good because God loves it, the implication is that God has no moral opinions whatsoever; we just have to do what he says because that's the way he likes it, and we'll be in big trouble if we don't do what he says; that's a pretty degraded God, and decent people should be ashamed of worshiping Him. On the other hand, if God loves something because it's good, the implication is that its goodness is totally independent on God's attitude towards it; God recognizes it as good for some reason, and He has no privileged access to that reason. We can understand it, too, with no help from the Almighty; His opinion on moral matters is no more decisive than yours or mine (or, to restore a proper balance, Yours or Mine). That's a knockout punch to the whole idea that we need religion to instruct us in moral matters. If you do things just because God tells you to do them, you're just cowering before the snarls of the biggest bully on the block. You'll burn in Hell if you don't truss up your son, cut his throat and set his body on fire? A moral person, unlike the patriarch of three great religions, will choose Hell every time.

Religion has certainly done a great deal of harm since it was invented. Oceans of blood have been spilled, and thanks to the special appeal of fire to western civilization, millions of acres of skin have been burned off living bodies. Nevertheless, there may still be a point in keeping religion around a little longer. It seems to be a source of comfort, meaning and perspective to people who would otherwise be lost in a vast, uncaring and impersonal universe. However, it is about time that we stopped letting religious leaders -- priests, imams, rabbis, yogis, lamas, televangelists and celebrity Scientologists -- tell us what our moral obligations are. Their profession gives them no expertise in these matters, and we owe them no special deference on account of their position -- just the same decent consideration we owe equally to every concerned person.

We're number one!

Just how is it that I manage to see that red Lamborghini Countach I'm planning to buy as soon as my luck turns? Pretty much everyone agrees that when I see it, I must have some sort of representation of it, but how does that work, exactly? I don't have an exact copy; the Countach is not a big car, but it's still too big to park under my skull. Nor is it a miniature. I'm quite sure there are absolutely no tires in there, however small. No, the representation has to be done in neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, action potentials and such -- all very much unlike a red Lamborghini Countach -- but that's okay, because the symbols involved in a representation don't have to resemble the things they represent; they just have to play their part in the overall scheme.

There's still a problem, though. In general, any sort of representation can be fleshed out by showing how the various symbols in the representation refer to the things being represented. This "fleshing out" is called an interpretation, and it means pretty much what it seems to mean -- an assignment of meanings ("referents") to symbols: the name "George" refers to George, the word "snow" refers to snow, etc. Very simple stuff. Once a collection of symbols is given an interpretation, we can see whether sentences composed of those symbols are true in that interpretation. If "snow" refers to snow, and "white" refers to that very pale color, then the sentence "Snow is white" is true.

This works very nicely when we're dealing with nice public stuff like snow, because we have no trouble assigning referents to the words we use: Here's some snow. When I say "snow," I'm referring to stuff like that. But now we're asking a trickier question: "How is my internal representation of the external world to be interpreted?" The problem here is that I'm in no position to give an interpretation. All I've got is the representation. I don't have any access to the external world except by way of the representation. So any interpretation might be as good as any other! My "internal" Lamborghini Countach might refer to a really fantastic car, or it might refer to a pile of bat guano, and there's no way I can tell the difference!

Maybe it's not as bad as all that. Interpretations are not all created equal. Some -- maybe most -- just don't fit with the representations they interpret; they don't fit in the sense that the sentences we form just can't be true in those interpretations. For example, if "7" means the number of days in a week, "5" means the number of corners on the Pentagon, "12" means the number of months in a year, "=" means identity, and "+" means the subtraction operation, then the sentence "7 + 5 = 12" is false. Clearly, that interpretation isn't very useful or interesting. So let's agree to consider only those interpretations in which our beliefs -- i.e., sentences in our representations of the world -- are actually true. (These interpretations are called models of our beliefs about the world.) That should cut the problem down to a manageable size.

Well, no, not really. It's a consequence of the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem -- trust me -- that every theory (set of sentences) that has a model, has a model whose domain (the set of things to which symbols refer) is the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, ...). So if our internal representation of the world has an interpretation that makes it true -- a model, it also has a model where the "world" consist of absolutely nothing whatever except for natural numbers!

"Big deal," I hear you cry, "who cares if such a model exists? That's not the interpretation I'm using, so it has nothing to do with my representation of the world." Oh yeah? How do you know? Everything you know about the world comes from your representation of it. You can't escape the representation to point out what your symbols mean. So, I'm afraid, you have no reason whatsoever to imagine that anything other than natural numbers exists!

This is ridiculous, of course, but it follows from the assumption that my "access" to the external world is by way of representation. I don't know about you, but I'm not prepared to believe with Pythagoras that "all is number," so I'm giving up the representation idea. The external world and I have a much more intimate relationship than that. When I figure out what it is, you'll be the first to know.

The Buddha was one hoopy frood

Gautama (The Buddha) spent his life trying to understand why there was so much suffering in the world, and his great realization was that the source of all suffering is desire. No desire, no suffering. So the whole point of the religion is to learn how to free oneself from desire, and thus attain eternal peace. Meditation is part of that -- a technique that you can learn, not so much to stop thought altogether, but to stop planning or preparing for things, because these only make sense in the context of desires. The ultimate goal ("Nirvana") of complete freedom from desire is damnably difficult to reach, though, because as soon as you realize how blissful that state would be, you desire it. Oops! Back to the beginning. When enlightenment does come, it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise -- the Zen version hits you with a stick for good measure. You just have to be prepared for it.

Meanwhile, in physics, time is just a dimension, pretty much like the three dimensions of space, and nothing more. The three spatial dimensions have no natural direction; that is, there's nothing about left that makes it more "special" than right, and similarly for up and down, and backwards and forwards. What's especially important is that there doesn't seem to be anything about the basic laws of physics that has a preference for one temporal direction over the other, either. A movie played backwards is just as consistent with the laws of mechanics as the same movie played forwards.

Most physicists (not all) believe that spacetime is like a four-dimensional container of events, as opposed to a three-dimensional container of things that change over time, and doubt that there's any fundamental distinction between past and future, at least as far as laws of nature are concerned, even if the two really look different to people.

One of my favorite books (Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point, by Huw Price) makes a really good (but rather complex) argument that time really and truly doesn't have a direction at all. Price doesn't say this explicitly, but this seems to be where he's going: The reason for the "uncertainty principle" of quantum mechanics, and for all of the associated fuzziness, is that the determinants of an event are not all in the event's past. Some are in the event's future, effectively backwards causation. (This is 100% consistent with all known physics, so it's not a new physical theory, just a new philosophical perspective.)

The problem for people is that they can't think this way. We're "agents," which means that we plan things, arrange things and do things, always with a view to the future. You can't make any sense whatever of a reversed life. What makes death more frightening than birth is that death puts a stop to our status as agents; that's it, you're not doing anything more, so stop planning.

So, to tie all this together before the reader's eyes glaze over, in the real world of physics, the freedom presumed by all our planning and preparation -- the "power" to do things -- is illusory; it's just a curious fact of human psychology that we can't help thinking we're free. From the four-dimensional perspective, with directionless time, you exist (in a tenseless sense of the word), with clear boundaries in spacetime, which define your entire life, and it doesn't really matter which way you look at it, east-to-west, death-to-birth, it's all the same. But this really hurts a person with desires. Desires make death look like a terrible ending when there are still things you want to do. To be at peace in the real universe, you have to come to grips with the fact that "agency" is nothing but an illusion; that is, you have to "overcome desire." A difficult trick, but at least the Buddhists have the right idea. (Prayer-wheels and incense don't help much, though.)