851. Ken Ham in Leicester April 2008

Comment #115258 by Cartomancer on January 23, 2008 at 8:03 pm

What, those ladder-stealing bastards are still on the loose?!

852. The real danger in Darwin is not evolution, but racism

Comment #115254 by Cartomancer on January 23, 2008 at 7:57 pm

Electric Monk, comment #41,

The ORIGEN of Species eh? Oh how I would love to read a book about natural selection by a crazy self-castrating Hellenic theologian from the early centuries AD!

853. Islam in Europe

Comment #114947 by Cartomancer on January 23, 2008 at 8:45 am

I actually rather like these little diatribes - the sense of slightly exasperated, snide superiority, always bordering on the ironic, that they display is very close to my own demeanour when I get angry on matters of religion. It appeals to me greatly - I am a huge fan of talking down to people for whom I have little or no respect. For someone who, let's face it, is essentially just posting opinion pieces on the internet, I think the tone is just right. Though I do realise that a lot of the humour is very British in nature and perhaps does not go down quite as well overseas.

854. Ken Ham in Leicester April 2008

Comment #114943 by Cartomancer on January 23, 2008 at 8:30 am

Maybe I should round up the Oxford University Medieval Society and the medievalists of the Faculty of Modern History and take them along down to Headington for the planned lecture on medieval science education. I keep complaining that the topics of medieval science and medieval education don't get enough air time from the University's lecturers, so we should support this sort of initiative wherever we can!

What do you mean it isn't supposed to be a medieval history lecture?

855. Mandrake: Charles's letter in support of Islamic 'fundamentalism'

Comment #114396 by Cartomancer on January 22, 2008 at 6:35 am

I actually think the monarchy is a good thing in this day and age. It keeps these sorts of ridiculous, antiquated and useless people before our eyes as a dire warning of just how bad things would be if they actually did have any kind of real authority. Not a million miles away from the idea of the court jester really. Does anyone at all, I might ask, actually consider the opinion Prince Charles relevant or valid anymore? I have never met such a person even among the most rabidly conservative right wing naifs of the Oxford Union - and you can find some pretty odious reactionaries there let me tell you!

Likewise, by having a token Queen who, de iure, has ultimate legislative power but, de facto, has none at all, we protect ourselves from the possibility of a crazy political president who people actually do take seriously in terms of policy-making.

I would like to think we could learn these lessons from history without keeping the jug-eared drooling idiots on the payroll, but if history has taught us anything it is that we rarely if ever learn the lessons of history.

That said, my appreciation of the monarchy was tarnished considerably when the hitherto quite pretty Prince William hit his mid twenties and the horse genes kicked in...

856. The devilish church practice of exorcism

Comment #114243 by Cartomancer on January 21, 2008 at 3:58 pm

I wonder what a Church of England exorcist would do - offer the demons a piece of cake and a chat, then ask nicely if maybe they could tone down the jolly unsporting behaviour or, if they could, no pressure or anything, go and find somewhere else to play, thank you so much...?

857. Vatican slams California firm's cloning experiments

Comment #114060 by Cartomancer on January 21, 2008 at 9:40 am

Maybe I should run a book on how long this current catholic obsession with stem cells will take to blow over. First cloned Pope by 2108? Any takers?

858. Gay Jesus play blasted by bishop

Comment #114056 by Cartomancer on January 21, 2008 at 9:28 am

As a Gay man I feel deeply offended with this portrayal of Jesus as a homosexual. For millennia now the christians have been consciously subverting Gay values and Gay culture, trying to challenge our monopoly on liberal lefty politics and destroy the sanctity of Gay marriage. Now they have gone too far in trying to assume our sexual identity for one of their cultural icons. It is entirely unhistorical and bordering on the homophobic to portray the founder of this vile, bigoted confection of dangerous, fanatical doctrines as a well-rounded Gay man. It is almost saying that Gay people are responsible for founding major world religions and miring the world in facile unscientific nonsense. Have people forgotten the Gay Buddha fiasco of the eighties? Did we close down the Queer Mohammed exhibition for nothing?

I am disgusted. Come opening night I shall be protesting outside the New Theatre in my hot pants, knee length leather boots and ridiculously tight vest. We must not stand for this sort of filth on our stage!

859. The New Theology

Comment #114043 by Cartomancer on January 21, 2008 at 9:09 am

Brother John, comment #121

A simple assertion that one's views are not trite or mewling does not make them otherwise. You insult the intelligence of everyone here by making this claim. All your original post contained was a none-too-stylishly presented rehash of the old Anselmian garbage about ontological excellence and enough misunderstandings of science and philosophy to indicate deep channels of ignorance in need of restitution. And, worse, the arrogant temerity to think you are actually justified in bringing up these claims before an audience of intelligent people! My responses were curt and to the point because your claims were silly, poorly crafted, obviously wrong and lacking in any depth or profundity. If you detected anything trite in them it is because your arguments deserve nothing better than trite dismissal - we've heard that kind of bollocks a million times before, and it does not impress us because it is fundamentally flawed - the science simply does not support it and its epistemological basis is appalling.

Likewise, simply claiming that you don't do wish thinking does not mean that you don't do it. All your original post was is wish thinking. In fact you say that, either there is some kind of ultimate justice or there isn't, setting up a valid logical dichotomy, and proceed to solve it to your own (and nobody else's) satisfaction by crude, emotive arguments that the world would be better if this were so than if it were not. Wanting the world to be in the better of two states is wish thinking, no two ways about it. Assuming that it must then actually BE in this state carries no other description than delusion. If you are as interested in the truth as you say then I can only conclude that your understanding of how to reach said truth is deeply inadequate. What you have done is the equivalent of saying "my life would be better if I had a million pounds in my bank account, therefore I must have a million pounds - drinks are on me forever"!

This is why, unlike the patient and considerate elder statesman of this site Steve Zara, I feel no compunction in ridiculing and insulting you to the best of my ability. You have abandoned any credibility you might once have had through such a blatant demonstration of irrationality, and proud irrationality at that. I am glad you feel insulted - it goes some way to redressing the gross insult the rest of us feel when you come thundering in here with your poor arguments and faulty epistemology and assume simply by fiat that they are the equal or the superior of reasoned, rational, considered scientific discourse. So feel insulted. Stew and boil and suffer in the blithering indignity of your wounded pride - the sweet schadenfreude of it is most pleasing to me.

And don't think I haven't noticed your gratingly obvious attempts to tar us with the same brush as yourself, asserting that we use arguments from authority and assume our propositions to be true simply because we want them to be true. In actual fact, and this might surprise some people, in many ways I don't want some of these propositions to be true. I actually think that life would be a whole lot easier and more pleasant if there were some kind of extremely powerful and extremely benevolent superbeing who looked out for my welfare unceasingly. It would be great if I could just invoke the aid of this creature when I am lonely or ill or unhappy to salve my woes. It would be great if I could live in assurance that justice will ultimately be done. Of course, it would take much of the struggle out of life, and diminish its dramatic potential markedly, but, at bottom, I'm a lazy bugger who likes being comfortable and safe more than anything so I'd probably take it were it offered. However, just because the world would be nicer that way does not make it that way, and I am not so gullible and foolish as to think it does. I try to decide what to beleive in based on evidence and analysis, little more. Sometimes I credit people with greater knowledge and understanding of matters than myself with the benefit of the doubt, that's only natural, but the one thing I do not admit to my epistemology of the real world is wish-thinking. To indulge that whim I write - short fantasy stories and mournful love poetry in the main. The two are separate enterprises.

Who is the one wearing the rose-tinted spectacles now then? I have always been lucky enough to have had 20/20 vision, but in your case I am guessing that vision is nigh on impossible without the aforementioned optical aids, as well as a pair of cerise binoculars, a selection of fuschia spyglasses and a giant magenta telescope...

860. Stop revisionist Christian nation House Resolution 888

Comment #113871 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 8:38 pm

Welcome to the Creationists of my world!

861. We're All Going to Hell (Music Video)

Comment #113866 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 8:11 pm

Is that our dearly beloved Sir Richard of Dawkins and St. Christopher Hitchens depicted over the peculiar and deeply frightening harlequin lady's shoulders between 2.40 and 2.50 minutes in? I do hope not...

And Steve Zara, I take it all back, I'd much rather listen to Take That's greatest hits for all eternity than put up with another round of this...!

862. Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone HIMSELF

Comment #113845 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 6:29 pm

Indeed the scientific revolution brought about some changes in church thinking, but as far as official dogma goes the extreme anti-abortion-at-any-point sentiments are comparatively recent. The church has traditionally refrained from expressing dogmatic CERTAINTY on the issue of ensoulment before the early thirteenth century, but speculations and theories on the issue have been very thick on the ground among scientifically minded churchmen.

Homunculus theory (after Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Nicholaus Hartsoeker I beleive) indicates a shift in preferences toward conception-based ensoulment along with contemporary science, but the argument was old long before the end of the seventeenth century. Even with homunculi, or fully rationalised physical bodies of any other sort, there is still the Anselmian theological objection that an ensouled stillborn was never given the opportunity for baptism (though this tenet itself was rethought by some during the reformation). Whether or not a homunculus had a soul throughout its development was an issue just as hotly debated as whether or not a classical Aristotelian foetus had one.

As far as official Catholic policy goes, there was little change throughout the six hundred years before Pius IX's 1869 Bull "Apostolicae Sedis" which extended pontifical opprobrium to all abortions from any point in foetal development. The earliest official papal pronouncement we know of on the subject was that of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216), who, as a good Aristotelian, decreed that the ensoulment occurred when the mother first felt the child move in the womb, and only abortion performed after this event was punishable by canon and civil law. Sixtus V (r. 1585-1590) extended this to cover all abortions from any point after conception, but his immediate successor Gregory XIV (r. 1590-91) changed it back again. Other than this blip, that's about it.

863. Stop revisionist Christian nation House Resolution 888

Comment #113834 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 5:50 pm

So history has become a democratic political discipline now has it, where progress is made by taking a vote among people who are not professional academic historians and going with the majority opinion as the truth?

Will all matters of historical debate be settled this way in future then? Must I now submit my doctoral thesis to a board of elected politicians rather than a board of specialist examiners, and get it enacted into law rather than published? And will matters of debate in the sciences and the other humanities subjects be following this procedure too?

First they came for the Communists...

864. Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone HIMSELF

Comment #113830 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 5:31 pm

The idea that the human embryo has a soul right from the moment of conception or even beforehand was not the position of the church until quite recently. In fact it is a twentieth century dogma and actually runs quite contrary to Catholic thinking on the subject throughout the Middle Ages. I've recently finished a chapter on this very topic in my thesis as it happens, so hearing silly stuff like this from catholics who have no idea just how far they are diverging from traditional dogmas makes me very amused indeed.

Most patristic and medieval discussions of this issue leave it as an unanswered question of physics that is open to doubt. Augustine made quite a fuss of not knowing whether the soul is present from the beginning or arrives once the body is sufficiently able to recieve it. Many medieval commentators took the mosaic law in Exodus 21:22 as evidence that the soul does not arrive for forty days, or even up to six weeks, after conception.

The shadowy Honorius Augustodunensis even theorised that if a foetus is killed before this point then the matter of it will be resurrected as part of the mother rather than as a separate human being at the day of Judgement. Anselm suggests that the rational soul (the important bit as far as salvation is concerned) does not take root until after birth even, so there is still a chance to baptize the infant before it has a chance to sin and die unbaptized, and thus to avoid punishment in the afterlife.

The main impetus for thinking a soul was present from the beginning was actually not Scripture or the Church Fathers, but Aristotle and the Galenic medical texts translated from the Arabic at Salerno / Monte Cassino and Cordoba in the twelfth century. Essentially this scientific tradition posited that all growth and augmentation in living bodies is caused by intermediary generated spirits that actualise the powers of the soul in the physical world. Without the presence of a soul, and hence these spirits, the embryo could not grow at all and hence they must be present from the beginning. Of course Aristotle's soul was not quite what the Scriptures had in mind (it was the substantial form of the body and little more), but the concepts merged in time.

As to the state of twins with regard to their souls, this matter was actually considered a very tricky one by medieval thinkers. You constantly find it in collections of thirteenth century quodlibetal questions, which are one of the best ways to guage what was considered a burning topic of discussion at the time because they are disputations on questions fired at the disputant university master blind, and without a set topic ("quod libet" means basically "[ask] what you wish"). Generally medieval solutions pointed out that to tie the generation of an immortal soul to the physical processes of the body was a form of the traducianist heresy (basically making the soul dependent on the body and thus inferior to it, rather than directly dependent on god). Thus the body might split in half, but god is still able to put a separate and entirely different soul in each part when the time comes to do so.

865. Mandrake: Charles's letter in support of Islamic 'fundamentalism'

Comment #113819 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 4:58 pm

If this is the best "defender of faiths" the opposition has to offer, I can't really see what we offenders of faith have got to worry about...

866. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #113816 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 4:49 pm

This isn't a digression, it's getting back on topic - you should see some of the weird things gay people do with their money in these places...

867. Honour Killings

Comment #113811 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 4:45 pm

Keep digging Mr. Ahmad, and if you wear out your shovel I will get you a new one.

Sickening and worthless individual...

868. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #113804 by Cartomancer on January 20, 2008 at 4:21 pm

Some people here are (un)lucky enough to have visited such venues and still failed miserably to score!

869. The New Theology

Comment #113359 by Cartomancer on January 19, 2008 at 11:22 am

I take it you mean the avatar photograph rather than the creator of the universe and eternal source of ultimate justice?

Yeah, that's me... why?

870. The New Theology

Comment #113349 by Cartomancer on January 19, 2008 at 10:56 am

- Brother John, above:

Just because an idea is comforting does not make it true.

Just because you want there to be some kind of ultimate justice does not mean there actually is or ever will be

Just because you want all your tears wiped away and a long conversation with Marie Curie doesn't mean you are going to get one

Just because you don't want to live in the same world as Saddam Hussein and Hitler doesn't mean you get the option not to.

That must rank as just about the most trite and mewling piece of credulous wish-thinking I have ever encountered...

871. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #113339 by Cartomancer on January 19, 2008 at 10:14 am

Listen to the man. Anyone who has a face drawn by Yoshitaka Amano is definitely worth listening to...

872. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #113321 by Cartomancer on January 19, 2008 at 9:31 am

I am so glad that there are people out there possessed of such remarkable skills in prophecy and clairvoyance as to be able to predict every possible outcome to a situation, understand every possible factor contributing to it and draw back the curtain of human uncertainty such that the causal machinery of the world is laid totally bare and life becomes a purely mathematical exercise in rational decision-making. Such awesome skill in the unerring manipulation of the future deserves tremendous respect.

It puts my meagre skill with the cards to shame so it does...

One wonders what it is that makes these titans among men truly happy...

873. The New Theology

Comment #113306 by Cartomancer on January 19, 2008 at 8:57 am

Actually the notion that the miraculous bit was the conception of Jesus and no more suspension of the laws of physics was required henceforth is not quite accurate. According to medieval speculation, it was theologically necessary not only that Mary conceive as a virgin but give birth as a virgin also, and remain virginal for the remainder of her mortal life on earth. To this end it was widely agreed that her hymen remained intact throughout the birthing procedure and Jesus magically passed through it in much the same way as he passed through a closed door in the doubting Thomas bit of the easter fable. This got medieval physicists quite worked up in their attempts to provide an explanation of how something could break the Aristotelian axiom that two bodies cannot share the same place at once - because even medieval theologians admitted that god's omnipotent power could not conceivably extend to creating a logical contradiction.

If that doesn't show you how ridiculously man-made the whole virgin birth fairytale is I don't know what will...

874. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #113195 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 9:07 pm

With regard to the above:

a) Tetratornis is not suggesting that the universe as we know it is, in fact, eternal but that an eternal universe is just as good an explanation (a better explanation even, because more parsimonious) for all the things that tiresome theists invoke gods to solve. It is just as counter-evidential as the god hypothesis, but just as effective in logical terms. If you admit to the possibility of gods, or anything eternal, then logically you must admit to the possibility that the universe itself has such characteristics.

b) I say "The Universe as we know it" because it might very well be the case that the universe existed in some fashion we know absolutely nothing about beyond the event horizon of the "big bang" and the beginning of time. (I want to say "before" the big bang, but that would be an inadequate linguistic term). In what fashion it might have existed (and might yet exist again) we have no idea, but that it is beyond our perception of time, and thus in any real sense "eternal" seems highly likely. This is another place where commonsense everyday notions of physics fall down utterly and anyone without significant expertise in cosmology really should avoid comment on.

c) The Universe as we know it is not a candle or a star, which will use up all its finite amount of fuel and eventually "burn out" - it is the sum totality of all energy that there is, and this can neither created nor destroyed according to the first law of thermodynamics. The universe might eventually collapse in on itself through gravitational conditions or some such, causing all kinds of peculiar phenomena, but it need not be infinite to continue indefinitely. It might very well end up just drifting apart forever.

d) Simply defining a word in a certain way does not make that definition valid, nor that word possessed of some objective existence outside human thought. "god" as defined in the Abrahamic faiths may well be eternal, but as defined by, for example, Japanese Shinto animism, gods (kami) are neither eternal nor omnipotent nor beneficent. In fact most of them are barely existent, potent or sentient at all. Similarly, Elessar, King of Gondor and Arnor, is definitionally the king of Gondor and Arnor, but that does not mean that either he, nor his kingdoms actually exist. To borrow Sam Harris's example, the lump of marzipan at the centre of the sun is definitionally at the centre of the sun, but that doesn't mean it's really there.

You will find definitions of many things in your handy pocket lexicon. Try looking up "phlogiston" or "hobgoblins" or "Xanadu" or one of a host of other fictional things...

e) Evolutionary theory is as much a fact as the fact that I have two arms, two legs and a decreasing amount of patience with all the muddle-headed theistic morons of this world like yourself. There are mountains of evidence for it and nothing has yet emerged which falsifies it, despite the fact that it would be trivially easy to present such a thing should it in fact exist. This "only a theory" bunkum has been done to death all over the place, not least in The God Delusion, so I will not reiterate it here.

f) Humans have souls do they? Where is your evidence for that?

Avaunt Troll! Back to Mordor with you!

875. Two Ex-Jehovah Witnesses to Tell Why They Became Atheists

Comment #113190 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Unfortunately the Blood Donor Service does not want the foul black ichor that flows through my veins. Apparently because I prefer to sleep with boys it has become poisonous and filthy to all humankind. Maybe this has something to do with that sexual immorality mentioned in Leviticus and the Acts of the Apostles, hmm?

876. The New Theology

Comment #113186 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 8:11 pm

A world that doesn't actually have any gods at all maybe? I'm sure I came across one of those somewhere today...

877. Questions Delay Creationist Master's Degrees

Comment #112927 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 9:35 am

Sure, go ahead...

In Soviet Russia, Flavius Josephus quotes me!

878. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #112906 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 9:12 am

In Soviet Russia, Choice makes you!

879. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #112893 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 8:39 am

There are some things people genuinely need to be saved from...

880. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #112835 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 6:57 am

Baeoz, Comment #332,

You got "rem" right, though in this case it is more specifically "matter" than "thing", but "tetigisti" is second person singular perfect indicative active of the verb to touch "tango, tangere, tetigi, tactus" (i.e. "You touched") and "acu" is actually the ablative case in the singular of the fourth declension masculine noun "acus" which means a needle (though you are right in pointing out the connection to sharpness, but the adjective is acutus, not acus). In this situation it is an ablative of instrument, so "using a needle" or "with a needle".

Thus the correct reading is "You have touched the matter with a needle", which is more similar to "hit the nail on the head", but still not quite the same.

Apologies for my compulsive pedantry. And I wonder why I'm still single...

881. Ben Stein Bribing Schools to See His Anti-Evolution Movie 'Expelled'

Comment #112713 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 12:53 am

Actually, Goldy, people did pick up on it quite early on. Egypto-Syrian Gnostic Christianity, which drew on earlier dualistic and Platonic ideas, made a great deal of the inconsistencies of the genesis narrative. They claimed that the book as we have it, rather than confusing two earlier and incompatible creation accounts, actually tells a dualistic tale of two gods - the true, good one who created pure spiritual beings and his evil twin who made matter and imprisoned the spirits within it. He then tried to pass the both of them off as the same being. Obviously their views were considered dangerous and heretical by the established church (most widely known in their Manichaean form), which is probably why they have been relegated to a footnote in the history of schism and forgotten about. It's not the sort of thing the religious establishment really wants to draw attention to...

882. Gigantic fossil rodent discovered

Comment #112711 by Cartomancer on January 18, 2008 at 12:32 am

Rodents, from the latin "Rodentes", nominative or accusative plural present-participial adjective meaning those involved in chewing, gnawing or biting. And with teeth like that I think this one pretty much exemplifies the order.

These ancient giant rodents frighten me. Make them go away...

883. Questions Delay Creationist Master's Degrees

Comment #112707 by Cartomancer on January 17, 2008 at 11:53 pm

Ironically my own masters degree involved, and my doctorate currently involves, quite a lot of "creation science" literature - such magisterial opera as Thierry of Chartres' Heptateuchon, The Dragmaticon Philosophie and Glosses on Timaeus of William of Conches, and Robert Grosseteste's Hexaemeron. The University of Oxford even considered my masters thesis worthy of distinction too.

Thing is though, I study the intellectual history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rather than a science subject...

884. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111471 by Cartomancer on January 14, 2008 at 5:19 pm

What can I say? I have a thing for younger men... (winks coquettishly in a feeble attempt to appear mysterious and alluring, then falls over).

885. George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS

Comment #111459 by Cartomancer on January 14, 2008 at 4:58 pm

I do not believe in god - there is no good reason to do so.

I do, however, believe in man - and for good reasons to keep doing that I think we need look no further than yourself Mr. Scales.

886. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111455 by Cartomancer on January 14, 2008 at 4:42 pm

Steve Zara - Comment #252

Ok, I should have said "perfectly intelligible to us", rather than just "perfectly intelligible". All I was on about was the validity of metaphysical universals as a scientific hypothesis.


Artful Dodger -

"Universals" are yet another piece of the metaphysical baggage we left behind in the middle ages. Peter Abelard had pointed out the unreal nature of universals in his philosophy of linguistics well before 1200, though this still didn't stop the greatest minds in Europe spending the entire fourteenth century arguing over whether they actually existed or not.

In arguing for the real existence of universals you are adopting the position of John Duns Scotus and his followers (interestingly it is from these people that the word "dunces" derives, though quite unfairly given the equally absurd Thomistic ideas of their detractors). Vintage somewhere around 1310. Philosophy has moved on quite a bit since then, not least with Scotus' main contemporary critic, one William of Ockham, the main proponent of the "nominalist" philosophy which would have universals as merely names used to describe similar things (as opposed to Scotus's "realism" which gave universals real metaphysical existence independent of any physical instantiations of them that might or might not have existed). Or at least that's a very, very basic account of their positions.

You say that recognition of a characteristic and the use of words to describe that characteristic presupposes the existence of that characteristic in reality as a metaphysical universal. No it does not. All it requires is a collection of objects which display apparently similar characteristics. "Redness" is simply a product of reflected light radiation at a particular wavelength. Things are red inasmuch as they reflect light at this wavelength. When we encounter red things in nature we notice that they look similar because they all share this characteristic and we arbitrarily assign a sound to denote that characteristic - in English it is "red". All that is necessary to come up with this idea of a universal is the existence of a collection of real things that impress upon our brains a sufficiently similar sensory stimulus. We see red as red (most of us, anyway) because our eyes and our brains are made in a particular way. The next time we see something that reflects light at that wavelength we now have a word which can be applied to it to mean "it looks like all those other things I noticed similarities between earlier".

You say:

"Description of random data requires categories like "redness", "bigness", "oneness" (etc). Therefore, as I see it, to say that abstractness grew out of empirical encounters with nature makes little sense."

You are confused here. Were the data completely random then it would not be amenable to categorisation. But it is not. The red things are red, the green things are green and the big things are big - all by virtue of their physical properties. Our empirical encounters with nature show this to be the case - nature herself provides the "universals" we pick up on in the similarities between the external physical forms. That, and broadly the same sensory and cognitive mechanisms across the species, are all you need for "mutual understanding re the nature of the signified".

Our abstractions play with what we see in nature and try to cut them down to essentials. We change bits round, combine things which we have seen separately together into forms we have never seen them in. But what we absolutely cannot do is imagine something that has absolutely no connection with reality whatsoever - for that would be to imagine something beyond our capability to understand. Sure, we can dream up centaurs and chimeras and three headed men, that's just transposing the bits we know about. We can apply characteristics from one to another to imagine invisible men or giant omnipotent gods, and we can go further to just about imagine quantum universes where the laws of physics work in very different ways - but we cannot come up with words and concepts that have no grounding in what we know at all, that would be impossible.

I think it was Bronowski who said that all gods really are are men writ large - we experience long life, so we extend it to imagine eternal life, or as close as we can get. We understand the potent, so we can just about conjure up a vague idea of the omnipotent, and so on. But we cannot imagine gods so utterly alien that they are completely beyond our understanding. More succinctly, Tolkein's description of Sauron's limited creative powers fits the bill nicely as far as human creativity goes - he can mock but he cannot make, all his creations are but the twisted shadows of the things he has seen.

Getting back to your philosophy of language questions, yes, I do think that the physical shape and form of a word are connected to its meaning only by arbitrary convention. This is why you actually have to learn a language in order to understand it - to internalise the arbitrary conventions - rather than being able to pick up on the meaning from some innate representative correspondence in the sounds or symbols.

As a translator your job would be a hell of a lot easier if there really were metaphysical universals underlying the languages you use! Every awkward phrase that doesn't quite work, every cultural reference that is difficult to transpose, every misleading false analogy you can't avoid should demonstrate just how much language is an ad-hoc human cultural construction.

Oh, and if anyone were to say "I am gay" I would usually respond with "are you attractive, under 25, and interested in going for a drink with me some time", but I guess that's not quite what you had in mind...

887. George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS

Comment #111442 by Cartomancer on January 14, 2008 at 3:32 pm

I don't believe in god - there is no good reason to do so.

But I do believe in man, and if ever good reason were furnished for that, I think we need look no further.

888. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111283 by Cartomancer on January 14, 2008 at 8:25 am

What convinces you that words and numbers do have an existence independent of their physical instantiations? The world is perfectly intelligible without this unnecessary theory. A word exists as coded electrical messages or whatever in the brains of everyone who recognises it, as well as stored in books, computers etc. Numbers are similar, except they are abstracted from observations about the world around us and the laws of physics we encounter, which seem to have a mathematical basis as far as we can tell. They might not exist objectively outside our brains, except as the underlying physical properties of matter, but our brains are real, physical objects so, in a sense, ideas, words and numbers do exist - as coded electrical patterns. These patterns can be transferred from one brain to another through communicative codes such as language and writing, but nowhere in the process do you need anything remotely metaphysical to do it.

I would not say that metaphysical is necessarily the same as supernatural, though I do think metaphysics an entirely defunct discipline because it has no valid method of inquiry and so cannot reach conclusions, however provisional.

889. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #111167 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 8:27 pm

Roland_F - Comment #51,

I can well believe that given what I have seen in the four years since I came out and started visiting gay venues, though over 500 sexual partners does leave me pretty awestruck. Nevertheless I too have felt the beast within calling to me, so I can see how it is done.

But I would still like to see studies on actual proper relationships that involve more than just sex. Somebody must have done them surely?

890. Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?

Comment #111165 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Somebody mentioned scholastic latin in this thread and I missed it! Oh how cruel life can be sometimes...

891. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #111162 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 7:55 pm

Yeah, I know what you mean. To be honest promiscuity is rife among the gay community I know of here in Oxford (though they all steer clear of me for reasons unknown!) though it is far from universal. Promiscuity does not lasting relationships make of course.

As for beer... well, as I have a severe anaphylactic reaction to all alcohol that's something of a no-no in my case! I would think, though, that retaining full use of one's critical faculties would be an advantage in the mating game. After all, drunk people are seldom attractive and opportunities might be missed in a haze of ebrious delirium.

I think I've just veered off into one of those little private conversations that rub the good Professor up the wrong way. Apologies kind sir...

892. Why people believe weird things about money

Comment #111158 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 7:23 pm

- DasSquid, comment #26,

Do homosexuals find it easier to attract one another than heterosexuals? Hmm, I'd love to see a study done on this, if only to assuage my raging insecurities on the matter. I want to think that the answer is a resounding no - after all, we make up approximately 3-6% of the population and once you've put aside the ones who are too old or to whom you are not attracted that's a far smaller field to play than heterosexuals get. The chances that there will even be someone who is both attractive to you and attracted to you at all are much slimmer. Assuming homosexuals account for 5% of the male population, and about 1% of the female population, that means that even before the "old and ugly" deductions are made I have at most 5% of the male population to choose from as opposed to my heterosexual twin brother, who has 99% of the females. As a sheer numbers game I seem to have been placed on a difficulty setting many orders of magnitude higher than him by virtue of my sexuality.

Or, at least, I keep repeating this mantra over and over to myself so I don't feel so depressed at the fact I haven't managed to find a boyfriend in my life. The four other gay people I know all seem to have managed to attract long-term partners with no greater effort than the seven heterosexual friends I have, or at least to do so within the same time period. Whether this is because they have simply settled for the first person to come along or whether my own experiences are somewhat unusual I cannot say.

One corollary of the 5% / 99% imbalance is that, upon meeting an attractive individual of the appropriate gender, there is only a 5% chance that they will even be capable of being interested in me, so the casual assumption must be that no, they are not of my persuasion and should be ignored for the purposes of the partner search. My heterosexual opposite number on the other hand can be 99% certain that any prospective female he is interested in does not fall at this first hurdle. The practical implications of this are huge - homosexuals cannot trawl the general population at large in pretty much any circumstance for prospective partners, whereas heterosexuals certainly can.
It could perhaps be argued that by flocking together in gay pubs and clubs we can increase the chances and stack the odds more in our favour, but all that does is bring some of the field closer together and has no effect at all on the occurrence of attractive individuals to whom we are ourselves attractive. Besides which, these places are generally not the sort of locales in which easy familiarity grows and a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere proliferates. And that's putting it mildly!

As for money being a powerful attractor, well, I can't say I have ever been attracted to a man because of it, or anyone has ever been attracted to me for the same reason. It does seem to have too good a Darwinian explanation to be dismissed out of hand however.

893. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111096 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 2:55 pm

Actually a computer does "reflect" on the numbers and signs to the extent that it calculates with or otherwise manipulates them, thus producing all the applications and functions that we expect of it. Whether human brain functions are simply very high-level versions of these processes or have a distinctive and unique aspect of their own which does make them qualitatively different, we cannot yet say definitively. The analogy is sufficiently valid given our current level of understanding however - to bring up a recent example from this site, think of Deep Blue and the EMi music composing machine - both of these can produce effects very similar to human cognitive functions in playing chess and composing music. That there is not at least some overlap in the way they do it seems highly unlikely.

As for paper and ink, true, that does not perform calculations and cognitive functions by itself, but that's no reason to go assuming, by personal fiat, that therefore there must be some kind of metaphysical reality behind its information storage capacity. Does the word exist independently of its physical form? What happens if I make up a word, write it down along with the meaning I have invented for it, then burn the paper and kill myself so nobody can find out from the copy in my brain what it means? Have I conjured a new word into metaphysical existence then banished it back to oblivion just as convincingly? What if I kill myself but don't burn the book, though nobody reads it for a very long time. The only copy of the word is the paper and ink copy - is its metaphysical shadow still there, waiting to be released if someone comes along and chances across my lexicographical opus? What if they can't read English? Is there some kind of metaphysical barrier there to the transmission of knowledge? What if everyone in the world who can read English has died and there is no longer a way to decipher the word? Does it still have metaphysical presence or did that evaporate with the last person who could have understood it? What if a tree were, by sheer accident, to grow a particular pattern of notches in its bark that spelled out my word and its definition, or indeed any word? Would that be accidental generation of a metaphysical entity? How can we test whether any of this is true?

The bottom line is that adding this extra layer of explanation is entirely unnecessary when the same thing can be explained satisfactorily using purely physical means. Ockham's Razor claims another victim...

894. Bah, Hanukkah

Comment #111090 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 2:33 pm

I think Hitchens' might say that Hellenistic religion was basically cosmopolitan, polytheistic, and rather more tolerant of differences of opinion and practice than the incessantly tribalistic jewish faith at the time. And the personal "special relationship" with the gods is something most classically minded Greeks would have scratched their heads and looked puzzled over. Time and again the message of Greek thought on the gods is that they do what they like and we are the ones who suffer it.

Actually though, that's somewhat missing the point. Hannukah celebrates the old maccabaean inunction against Hellenic culture full stop, not just the supplanting of Semitic religious observations by Hellenic religious observations. It very much was a case of "stuff all this philosophy and literature and aesthetics and architecture and drama and ethics and science - all we need in our society is goat sacrifices and warbling pentateuchal ignorance thank you very much..."

895. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111087 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 2:02 pm

Precisely. I think most people would agree that a computer is an entirely physical entity, yet that stores a multitude of numbers, concepts and ideas as patterns of ones and zeroes in little silicon switches. You could think of those ideas as functions of the physical properties of its construction - a book would be the same only with its patterns made from paper and ink. If you can have ideas stored physically in paper or silicon chips then why not in a soggy pulsing lump of carbon and salt?

And as for the evolutionary origins of our societal strategies you're assuming a teleological need where there was none to begin with. Our instincts evolved along with the rest of us, slowly, gradually and blindly. They "figured out" which survival strategies were the best through trial and error - those individuals who happened to hit upon a combination of brain processes that gave them a working societal strategy survived while their less fortunate fellows did not. Gradually the strategies became more sophisticated, the better ones more ingrained, and somewhere along the line consciousness, reason and imaginative thought came in, giving us another way to tackle the problem.

You could, if you like, say that the optimal strategies were there all along in the laws of physics before living creatures existed. Animal behaviour can, in the final analysis, be reduced to particle interactions and the basic building blocks of physics. Should the laws of physics work the way they do then it follows that a clump of particles arranged as an animal is arranged will interact with its environment in certain predictable ways (at the supra-quantum level anyway). Hence the interactions of a whole load of different particle clumps (animals and their environments) will be similarly predictable, and all the possible strategies, including the optimal ones, for achieving certain ends in this space are already mapped out. Even if there were, for instance, no aardvarks and no ants in existence, the use of long noses to suck up small crawling things for food is still a potentially valid survival strategy under the right conditions. (add in appropriate modifications to take emergent systems into account, etc. etc.)

896. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111079 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 1:02 pm

I think "consensus" is not a good word to use here. What I am talking about is a) our instinctive understanding of how best to structure our societies, and b) our rational understanding of the most effective strategies to employ in structuring society. Both of these contribute to our moral decision making.

a) is an evolved characteristic and largely unconscious. b) depends entirely on logical deduction from the characteristics and desires we have at a given time, though since evolution works on such a massive timescale compared to human history the changes from our savannah days to now are broadly negligible. There certainly was a time before we had evolved these instincts and characteristics, but that was the prehuman period in our history. Things have been comparatively constant on these fronts since recognisable homo sapiens have been on the scene.

897. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111074 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 12:41 pm

It's quite simple really. We may have spread across the globe into all sorts of climes from our original home on the savannahs of Africa, but essentially surviving and prospering as a human being is pretty much the same task wherever you are. We all need food and shelter and stability in our lives, we all have desires for sex, companionship etc. Certainly as far as organising our social groups is concerned the same priorities are in effect and the same strategies seem to work pretty much everywhere, which is why we pretty much agree on what the basic ground rules are.

898. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111068 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 12:24 pm

I'm not a huge fan of metaphysics and other disciplines you can't really find any evidence for. They don't seem to contribute a great deal to our explanations of things.

899. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111061 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 12:12 pm

Yes, it was an objective reality - the optimal survival strategy in the real world which governed the evolutionary path we took. Do you want something spooky and metaphysical on the side too?

900. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111053 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 12:04 pm

I wouldn't say there is an "ideal standard of civilized behaviour", certainly not an all-encompassing and rigorous one, but I would go as far as to say that given the instincts we find ourselves with and the circumstances we find ourselves in there is a basic set of ground rules which we innately recognise.