1201. 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...

1202. 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...

1203. 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...

1204. 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...

1205. 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...

1206. 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).

1207. 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.

1208. 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...

1209. 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.

1210. 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.

1211. 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?

1212. 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...

1213. 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...

1214. 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 two other gay people I know both 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.

1215. 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...

1216. 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..."

1217. 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.)

1218. 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.

1219. 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.

1220. 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.

1221. 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?

1222. 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.

1223. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111045 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:54 am

Because overall the violent strategies are less successful and evolution has predisposed us to prefer the maximally effective strategies. We have been hard-wired with the tools to effect both competitive and cooperative strategies, because if we did not have both then we could not cope with short-term shifts where the one or the other were the best strategy, but given the choice of which to strive for we naturally prefer what has been the more productive strategy overall - cooperation. We are horrified at such atrocities as you mention because most of us are built to prefer cooperation and cannot see what gain there is in the atrocious behaviour. The Hutu authorities themselves managed quite easily to override the peace instinct because they could see a very obvious gain which appealed to other instincts of theirs, but those of us not involved do not have this clouding our perceptions.

Instinct has predisposed us to certain preferences, but instincts are only ever rules of thumb (albeit often very sophisticated ones) and do not work all the time. This is why morals sometimes conflict with instincts - especially given that modern urban society is vastly different from the tribal hunter-gatherer existence which honed our instincts in the first place.

1224. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111041 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:33 am

Oh, they were all so young back then...

1225. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111040 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:26 am

- Artful Dodger, comment #214,

Perhaps I should have been a bit less absolute in my phrasing, though in the interests of brevity that might not have been a good idea. I think it is fair to say that the most successful survival and prosperity strategies humans can adopt are cooperative ones which minimise violence and harm to one another. Yes, being aggressive, violent and bellicose might often have a greater pay-off, but the risks involved generally turn out to make it a less viable strategy on average. Turning competitors into cooperators always seems to yield a greater benefit in the end.

And the genetic impulses you mention drive toward the propagation of genes, not of individuals. A gene might survive and prosper most effectively by being selfish and eliminating the competition, but an individual human being or human society can almost always find a better alternative.

1226. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111038 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:19 am

Gay Byrne? He's about the only Gay who would...

1227. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111033 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:10 am

Who says a boyband is to be judged on the quality of its songs?! Some of us have rather baser aesthetic criteria to deploy...

1228. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111028 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 11:00 am

And that Boyzone comment was unforgiveable! Busted, now there was a boyband worthy of the name...

1229. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111019 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 10:50 am

As a contrarian teetotal latinist my preferred theory of truth is the old adage "in vino veritas..."

1230. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111006 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 10:44 am

Actually, come to think of it, I get the sneaking suspicion that the argument being had here is the semantic one and not the substantial one.

It seems that Henri Bergson repeatedly takes umbrage at use of the words "true" or "correct" to define a moral position and describes such truth or correctness as illusory and without basis in metaphysical fact. I think we all agree with him here - pretty much everyone has dispensed with absolute objective morality. But where the conflict arises seems to be in everyone else's desire to retain the word "moral" but to use it in a rather different sense (it might be a tad presumptuous to say in a sense close to how I have defined it) where "true" and "correct" and "moral" have a very different meaning indeed (i.e. "practically workable").

The real issue, as everybody knows, is of course how abysmal the music of Take That is, was, and looks likely to continue being. Maybe we should turn our intellect toward that now...

1231. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110993 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 10:32 am

If you define "correct" as "the only workable strategy for achieving a specified result" then yes it can...

1232. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110989 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 10:25 am

Precisely Mr. Bergson...

That was a simplistic example, but it was merely a starting point and the underlying principle is sound. Of course morality is more complicated than that.

war and conflict can indeed have a positive effect on survival and prosperity. I doubt anyone could argue otherwise. So we now have a "war and conflict" strategy to weigh up against our "get along and cooperate" strategy. There is also a full range of intermediate strategies with varying degrees of hostility and various caveats and conditions for violence, such as "only be hostile to those who have been hostile to me in the past" or "only be hostile to people who look different" etc.

Are all of these valid strategies for securing maximal survival and prosperity? No, they are not. Some work much better than others. "always attack everybody you see and nick their stuff" might be a fantastic strategy in an environment where everybody else uses "don't attack anybody and help out wherever possible", but if there are one or two who use a retaliatory strategy or that same total hostility strategy, it is statistically unworkable because sooner or later you will get caught out.

It's very much like selection pressure, except it has a significant conscious component. You can vary your strategy and so can everyone else - the environment is constantly shifting and your strategy shifts with it. Most environments, however, reach some kind of equilibrium because, once all the numbers are crunched, there usually turns out to be an optimal strategy which everyone should adopt for maximal benefit and which diverging from can only be deleterious. In the case of the human civilization environment that strategy looks very much like the basic rough and ready instinctive moral code we are born with.

The kinks and conundrums we encounter all the time with our morals reflect this. "killing is wrong" is the simplistic version. We can all think of examples where it might be justified such as self defence etc. but the rule of thumb still works. And because morals inasmuch as we have a choice to follow them or not (as opposed to instincts) are a phenomenon of consciousness, we do not need to keep following the rule of thumb all the time but actually can spend time pondering the minutiae and coming up with special cases and exceptional scenarios.

1233. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110977 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 10:07 am

Actually there is an objective basis for the "avoid causing harm to others" moral rule. The rule itself, as an ought, has no objective basis in fact, but the circumstances giving rise to it very much do.

Human beings can only survive and prosper, in the long run, if they avoid causing unnecessary harm to others and do not have unnecessary harm caused to themselves. Fact.

Human beings, generally speaking, want to survive and prosper. Fact.

Ergo, in order to achieve what they want, human beings need to adopt the "avoid causing harm to others" rule.

If we abandon objective metaphysical morality, which it seems all of us here pretty much have, then what we have left is precisely this kind of scientific strategy analysis. Granted, it's using the word "morality" in a somewhat different way to how it is traditionally used, but that's a different and purely semantic argument which need detain us no further.

1234. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110966 by Cartomancer on January 13, 2008 at 9:53 am

Morality might be part instinct, part culture, all subjective value judgement, but there sure as hell has to be an objective metaphysical reason for the unfathomable musical success of Take That! Brr... shudder... shiver...

1235. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110763 by Cartomancer on January 12, 2008 at 10:37 am

The thing about a purely subjective "morality" based ultimately on personal preferences is that personal preferences are, for the most part, neither arbitrary nor consciously chosen.

Human beings, indeed all animals, evolved naturally to prefer particular things to their alternatives. Perhaps the simplest moral rule "killing is wrong" is the obvious example. Apart from a very few individuals, whom we label psychopaths or some such, human beings very much prefer to survive rather than to be killed. It's been bred into us through millions of generations of selection pressure for pro-survival attitudes. As such we prefer to live in a world where unnecessary killing does not go on and express that preference as a moral rule for not killing unnecessarily. Similarly we are all bred with sexual desires, preferences for certain types of foods, the need for shelter and stability in our lives (originally a child-rearing mechanism to some extent) and so on. Of course these desires come into conflict - both within an individual and between individuals - so they must be regulated in some way. Animals lacking rational thought and consciousness simply follow their instincts and let nature take its course - eventually adopting successful and increasingly complex strategies over the generations as the genes and conditions favouring those strategies proliferate. Humans, however, have developed a very sophisticated set of machinery for weighing up and assesing their regulatory strategies, which we use alongside and informed by our more instinctual "moral" urges. This does not give us freedom to adopt any regulatory strategy we like with a guarantee of equal success however - some strategies will work much better than others to achieve the desired result.

My preferred definition of "morals" is "rules we use to create the sort of societies we want to live in" and scientific analysis - the application of reason to evidence - is the only way we can make progress in working out which combinations of rules will (with appropriate enforcement mechanisms) lead to which kinds of societies. Recently we have also made some progress, using psychiatry and psychology, toward working out the kinds of societies we are predisposed to prefer in general terms.

Which is not to say, of course, that because we are predisposed to certain preferences they should be honoured and accommodated rather than fought against and reigned in. Whether preferences are "natural" or not is immaterial in weighing up their place in the grand scheme of things. The natural testosterone-fulled competitive urges of young males for instance, can be hugely destructive to social order and need to be kept under control, probably by directing them into beneficial and constructive activities rather than counter-productive ones. Nevertheless it is vital that we know what these urges are, why they exist, and how they can be dealt with effectively, and the science helps us out here. Another example is acceptance of homosexuality - science (primarily sociology and biology) has shown that it is a naturally occurring and broadly harmless phenomenon (certainly no more harmful than heterosexuality) which does not impact adversely on society at all, and thus there really is no good reason to restrict, discourage or oppose it (which have shown to be harmful, socially damaging and entirely unproductive "moral" strategies).

The big fear of theists and those who crave an objective metaphysical morality is that without one anything goes and, upon realising this, society will tear itself apart in a bloodbath of conflicting destructive impulses. This presumes, flying in the face of the evidence, that human biological impulses are essentially random, tend toward destructiveness and uncooperativeness and differ wildly from individual to individual. In reality, however, we basically all want pretty much the same things and are willing to cooperate to a very significant extent because it is the only way to secure those things.

Which is not to say, of course, that there are no moral dilemmas or tricky situations - the ad-hoc nature of human evolution and the dictates of circumstance account for this quite effectively. Nevertheless there is a tremendous degree of coherence on the basics.

1236. Richard Dawkins on The Late Edition with Marcus Brigstocke

Comment #110294 by Cartomancer on January 10, 2008 at 11:12 pm

Oh, and Roland_F_, above, it was Plato's cave, not Aristotle's...

Pedant's Revolt again. I apologise...

1237. Richard Dawkins on The Late Edition with Marcus Brigstocke

Comment #110289 by Cartomancer on January 10, 2008 at 10:24 pm

Wrought, comment #78,

Wow, that takes me back. I loved that cartoon! Funnily enough I seem to remember watching it during the same christmas break when I was 8 that Richard Dawkins' Growing Up in the Universe lectures were on. They just don't do atheist children's programming like they used to...

1238. Six Reasons to be an Atheist

Comment #110287 by Cartomancer on January 10, 2008 at 10:02 pm

Is it just me who can't stop laughing at the irony of a theist warning against obsessive habits of thought which isolate you from healthy interactions with other people and cause deep-seated psychological harm?

1239. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110276 by Cartomancer on January 10, 2008 at 8:40 pm

Epeeist, comment #107,

So true! and even then it's pretty much entirely Aquinas and Anselm they know anything at all about, maybe Augustine too if you're lucky. I have yet to encounter a theist who is not an academic theologian who can tell me anything at all about John Duns Scotus, Richard Kilwardby, Abelard or Gregory the Great. Hell, most of them don't even know anything about Aquinas or Anselm beyond the five ways and the ontological argument.

Mind you, the more I read of John Duns Scotus' work the more I am convinced he was some kind of advanced supercomputer operated by mischevious herons...

I have a sneaking suspicion that what we mistake for a reliance on Aristotelian science and medieval philosophy is actually nothing more than quote mining to support assertions grounded in mere common sense. Take your example of time for instance - the Aristotelian and scholastic view of time was essentially that it was an accident that measured motion - without motion there would be no time. They also had a load of pseudo-xenonian claptrap about the moving instant, successive entities, the angelic aevum, god's role in unifying time and space as the unmoving eternal immensity, arguments over the intra-mental perception of time drawn from Augustine, Arabic philosophy and late antique commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias etc.

All we generally get from theists these days is a bare bones "newtonian" picture of absolute time running through the other three dimensions. That's it. An intelligent eight year old could come up with that. Then of course you go back and cherry pick important sounding ancient and medieval thinkers to taste. It's pathetic...

1240. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #109793 by Cartomancer on January 9, 2008 at 6:08 pm

The illogical part of Anselm's Ontological Argument is the assumption that "existence" is in any way connected with "perfection". This emerges from his deeply classical belief that there is such a thing as objective ontological excellence, which there clearly is not. Dawkins says something very similar to this too. As does Russell I think.

1241. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #109784 by Cartomancer on January 9, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Aquinas would probably go wherever he could get the most pies, big fat ball of lard he was...

1242. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #109734 by Cartomancer on January 9, 2008 at 3:18 pm

I think we have something of a glut of anti-religious books by scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and their ilk at the moment. As a medieval historian myself I want to see more from the humanities end of the spectrum - Hitchens is probably the only major author who springs to mind here.

When I finally finish my doctorate (if the world hasn't fallen into dangerous theocratic oblivion by then, and given how slowly the damned thing is going that is highly likely) I might try my hand at such a work, pointing out how ninety-nine per cent of theists' arguments rest on premises drawn straight from ancient or medieval world views that they themselves do not lend credence in any other sphere of life but religion. The first cause argument is a very good example.

But looking at the history of it, medieval historians are perhaps the first critics of religious thinking in that we pointed out all the nasty things done during the crusades, inquisition, etc. Nobody takes us seriously anyway, so why should theists be any different. Generally they just gabble "Hitler! Stalin! Pol Pot!" like children with wounded pride, and play on the unspoken assumption that modern historians are to be taken seriously whereas medievalists are not. Anyway, how dare an atheist study a very religious period of history! (I was once asked by a fellow medievalist how I can study theological ideas without believing in the Christian god. I replied by asking how she can study Aristotelian ideas withot believing in Aristotelian physics).

A "new atheist" book by a theologian, now that's what I'm looking forward to.

1243. New attempt to end blasphemy law

Comment #109723 by Cartomancer on January 9, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Go Evan Harris! I knew I voted for him as my MP for a reason...

Ironically both he and Rowan Williams are alumni of my college at Oxford, Wadham. I can remember one occasion when they were both invited to dine at high table and the warden rather wisely decided to put them at opposite ends...

1244. US 'doomed' if creationist president elected: scientists

Comment #108847 by Cartomancer on January 7, 2008 at 6:11 pm

These American presidential candidates frighten me. All of them. World's doomed. Time to curl up and pretend the New World was never discovered in the first place...

And all these northerners all over the boards! I get back after Christmas and suddenly they're everywhere! As a dyed in the wool southerner (born in Kent, raised in Somerset, University in Oxford for the last seven years) I find the Grim North, which in my estimation starts somewhere near Banbury, to be a strange and upsetting place. It's basically a freezing tundra where the inhabitants eke out a sub-tribal existence, with barbaric fertility rituals and kicking yetis to death. I visited the peak district once and found the local shopkeepers suspiciously interested in what I was up to. I find such over-familiarity most intrusive - certainly not what an effete denizen of austral climes expects of encounters with tradespeople! And black pudding! Ye gods! They must be mad!

I have resolved never to go back without hired mercenaries to protect me and a proficient translator so I know what their whiney nasal patois means.

Brrr! it's giving me the creeps just thinking about that horrible place!

1245. Jesus ad angers church groups

Comment #100634 by Cartomancer on December 19, 2007 at 2:54 am

If three swarthy babbling astrologers from the east turned up at my house with gifts of money and toiletries I would be a tad suspicious as well I think. Well, tell a lie, in Glastonbury this sort of thing happens more often than not...

I'm not sure why anyone considered the Magi to be "wise men" in the first place though. Even the most brainless stargazer in the first centuries AD knew that the stars and other celestial phenomena were effectively at optical infinity (fixed to the outermost celestial sphere no less)and following them was a complete waste of time. And if they had known what kind of a reception astrologers and astronomers would get from the church a millennium and a half later (which, being astrologers, they should have seen coming) they would probably have smothered the delusional little monster at birth.

1246. THE FOUR HORSEMEN - Available Now on DVD!

Comment #100442 by Cartomancer on December 18, 2007 at 3:54 pm

Interesting, isn't it, how the anti-smoking meme must be faith-based while the pro-smoking meme isn't eh? You might like to try telling that to my dead cousin some time. Maybe I've got a faith-based anti-murdering meme and a faith-based anti-rape meme too?

So my claims go far beyond the science do they? Well, it's just about possible. I am not a medical scientist and have not kept up to date with all the literature. Nevertheless, I do trust those who are medical scientists, and they seem to have come to pretty much the same conclusion as I have. But maybe they're biased too? The circumstances would seem to indicate very much to the contrary.

Now, let's look at the situation a little more closely shall we? Pretty much the entire medical establishment is vehemently anti-smoking across the world. Arrayed against them are a small number of self-interested pro-smoking groups made up of people who do smoke (find me one "friends and families of smokers" campaign group, made up largely of those who do not smoke but support the habit in others, analogous to the fflag type organisations in the gay world for instance). Oh, and the huge vested interests of the multi-million pound tobacco industry, mustn't forget about them.

Now what, I ask myself, might be the reason for medical professionals to exaggerate the harmful nature of smoking? Are they greedily trying to pretend that they need more money from the government to deal with the problem so they can cream off NHS money and go for holidays in the Bahamas at taxpayers' expense? Or even, the fiends, to spend on better hospitals for everyone? If that were so then why do they unanimously want people to quit smoking? What possible vested outside interest can the medical community have in opposing smoking, save that it is a very dangerous medical problem and deserves urgent attention?

Now turn the tables and ask what the tobacco industry and smokers themselves have to gain from downplaying the facts and trying to smear the conclusions of the science. Lots of money to lose and the chemical-addiction fuelled sense that they are not doing anything wrong and not harming their own health voluntarily. Sounds like a powerful incentive to distort the truth to me.

And it might just be "one fag" to Hitchens, but as a PR image it is a contribution to the worldwide acceptance and respectability of smoking, which prolongs the suffering and death that the habit brings. The PR issue is pretty much the only thing we are talking about here anyway. The science and the culture cannot and should not be separated here - we have a laudable anti-smoking culture nowadays precisely because the science has shown how deadly it can be. Fifty years ago we had a pro-smoking culture because this information was not widely available. Back then taking an anti-smoking standpoint was all about the ghastly smell and choking fumes, and most polite people did simply go into another room to register their displeasure. Nowadays the issues at stake are far more significant than that.

So I shall continue with my zeal thank you very much. Zeal is a good thing when you have something worth being zealous about. If only more people were as zealous as me on this issue then the world would be a much better place and my extended family might be a little bit larger today.

1247. Happy Newton Day!

Comment #100420 by Cartomancer on December 18, 2007 at 3:26 pm

BJohn,

Theologians do use both faith and reason to reach their conclusions, it is true, but that's precisely the problem. Faith and reason are mutually incompatible. Well, they are from the side of reason anyway. You can believe whatever you want on faith, whether it is rational or not. You can simply have faith that gravity exists or that 1+1=2 without bothering to reason it out, but rational argument falls down if even one component of it is derived from an irrational source.

Credo ut intelligam, "I believe that I may understand". Yes, but WHAT do you believe that you may understand. One can pick any starting point you like, take that on faith, and make some kind of theological argument from it. I could believe, on faith, that the invisible goblins on roller skates from my last post do, in fact, exist. Then, armed with this premise, I can employ my reason to argue that they must be responsible for the motions of physics we see around us - the parabolic arc of a thrown ball is simply the goblin carrying it moving it down slightly as he gets tired of holding it above his head while roller-skating away from you. These goblins must exist, because my faith tells me that they exist, so all that is left is to work out precisely how they do what I beleive them to do in the first place. Through the theological method I now know more about kinetics and kinematics than any living physicist. Aren't I clever?

Where my point about the necessity of believing in every god and monster that might possibly exist comes in is that this is the logical corollary of accepting non-disprovability as a criterion for believing that something actually exists. It was a reductio ad absurdum rather than a caricature, and it points out that picking one faith over another is purely a matter of arbitrary whim. Where theological arguments take their cue is in selecting one or two items from the vast smorgasbord of the possible, pretending they exist by fiat (the faith stage), then working up a system on this foundation. If you pick Yahweh as your premise, you come up with one set of results on the question of "Ultimate causes". If you pick Krishna you get another. If you pick unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster you get a third. Many of these results will be mutually contradictory, so logically they can't all be true.

How do we determine which one actually is true? How can we approach an understanding of "Ultimate causes"? The only reliable method humanity has ever devised for assessing the likelihood of propositions is the scientific method, and that means evidence. If you can't bring any evidence to bear then what you have is a meaningless proposition that is beyond the scope of human reason to fathom, and should be discarded as an imponderable. Unless you have a valid method that produces reliable conclusions you cannot say anything at all, and theologians most certainly don't have one.

This is not license to fill our uncertainty with whatever story we like the sound of. The only sensible approach to something you will never know and cannot even begin to access is to ignore it completely. Inasmuch as it affects your life, it might as well not exist - even if in some entirely unpercievable fashion it does.

Theology cannot reach valid conclusions as long as it incorporates the irrational element of faith. If it does not include that element then it is not theology but science, broadly defined as the application of reason to evidence. Inasmuch as "Ultimate causes" are scientific propositions, science can fathom the likelihood that they are a certain way. Inasmuch as they are not, they are imponderables and can be summarily dismissed. Even if science (again, defined broadly, incorporating history, philosophy etc.) cannot tell us everything about the universe we live in, we possess no other discipline that can tell us anything about it, because no other discipline can reach valid, reasoned and objective conclusions.

Our putative Grand Cosmic Hedgehog is unreasonable because it is a bad scientific hypothesis. We know that hedgehogs exist because we can see them, and we know they don't create universes because we have never detected them doing so. We have never seen evidence for a supreme being of any kind either, so naturally we conclude that they too do not exist - they are a similarly bad scientific hypothesis. If we can dismiss the powers of the Grand Cosmic Hedgehog because we have never seen them, we can dismiss the existence of a supreme being for the same reason. Whatever one of those might look like. Similarly, if we can say "but there are questions that need explaining and a supreme being can explain them, so one must exist, why can we not say "but there are questions that need explaining, and attributing hedgehogs with the power to create universes can explain them, so hedgehogs must be able to create universes"?

And you say that there are, by necessity, no uncaused causes in physics, yet in the next breath you go on to say "so there must be an uncaused cause outside physics". Why not just assume that, maybe under special conditions (like the beginning of the universe when the laws of physics as we know them don't apply in the same way) there can be uncaused causes in physics? It's the same argument, but doesn't conjure some imaginary meta-dimension above the real universe to achieve the same effect. Put more succinctly, if god can be uncreated or self-created we are admitting to the possibility of uncreated or self-created entities, and if we do that then why cannot the universe itself be uncreated, or self-created? Why must we end the infinite regress of causes one step above the universe rather than with the universe itself? Why can't the quantum effects Dr. Benway describes be the "uncreated" self-movers?

The human mind cannot even begin intuitively to fathom what conditions were like at the beginning of the universe. We simply weren't built to do so, and all our intuitive judgements and everyday prejudices about things such as progressive causation must be suspended when dealing with it. Why should causation as we understand it apply to the beginning of the universe? Why should simple Aristotelian causation be a universal rule applicable absolutely everywhere, even in the furthest and most extreme conditions imaginable? We know that time and space were not the same back then, so why should causation be, especially given that causation as we understand it requires time (and for Arisotle it required motion, which time is the measure of, so essentially the same thing).

As for science working on faith, that is simply disingenuous. Yes, it is rather difficult to explain why the scientific method works, but empirically it most certainly does work, and everyone in the world treats it as if it does work by making rational decisions and utilising the products of science and technology. Science aspires to use as little faith as it is humanly possible to use, which is very little indeed. The tiny puddle-jumps of faith required to believe that evidential reasoning is valid are nowhere near the cavernous leaps required to believe in non-evidenced propositions. Puddle jumps they might be, but they're not walking on water.

As for objective metaphysical morality, might I direct you to the "you can't be moral without god" thread on the debate points section of this site? Or even to The God Delusion again. Briefly, morality is not a metaphysical absolute at all, rather it is a subjective human construction designed to regulate societies as those societies wish to be regulated. The only reason it seems universal and transcendent is because all humans share the same basic needs, instincts and desires and so naturally come to the same conclusions over what they like and what they dislike. Morality is a matter of arbitrary personal preference in the final analysis, but the arbitration is hardly ever done on a conscious level, rather, it is conditioned to a very great extent by our instinctive and acculturated social needs.

1248. God rest you merry atheist

Comment #100010 by Cartomancer on December 18, 2007 at 4:05 am

mmurray,

Thank you for that. I did think it sounded a little far-fetched to be honest, though the principle is still sound. Just goes to show that you can find meaning and profundity in traditional stories even if they don't happen to be true...

1249. God rest you merry atheist

Comment #99996 by Cartomancer on December 18, 2007 at 3:25 am

I will admit that perhaps there are circumstances where a public display of christian sentiment might bolster the confidence of the christian movement, which would be counter productive. Maybe in America this is more pertinent than where I live - after all, in England hardly anybody believes seriously anyway by comparison.

The "line", however, is not drawn universally and for everyone. There really isn't, nor should there be, a handbook for atheists on these matters. We are individuals, and our non-belief in gods is expressed in different ways. Each of us draws the line where he or she feels comfortable, and generally we go along with those traditions we enjoy or see some social and ritualistic value in. We do not, for a moment, believe that those are the only cultural forms such traditions can take, just that those are the specific forms we are used to. If we cannot see the point in something like a christening or getting married in a church then we will not do it, but if we think it is a nice opportunity to mark an occasion then we might well, though we will politely ignore all that guff about jesus and the like.

The two impulses - to follow our own personal cultural predilections and to deny religions hold on society - could very well run counter to one another I admit, but that is a question of priorities. In the case of Professor Dawkins I doubt very much that anyone is in any doubt where his sympathies lie.

But it can work the other way as well. During the second world war in occupied Denmark all jews were required to wear the usual yellow star to mark themselves out. The King, in a heroic gesture, rode out wearing a yellow star himself, and many others followed suit, thus rendering the symbol meaningless as a badge of jewish identity. This is what we are doing with christian cultural forms. By proudly and blatantly adopting them as atheists we are subverting and rubbishing their sincere meaning. We are demonstrating to the world that we do not treat them with hushed reverence and respect, that we can enjoy them without reference to sincerely held belief. We are, in effect, actively reclaiming our culture from the christians, and it has been happening for centuries. Just as goths today wear what five centuries ago would have been considered powerful occult symbols, and the oriental yin-yang has become a ubiquitous pattern with little real content for most westerners, so too do I foresee a world where crosses can be worn for their aesthetic value and carols sung by all as quaint historical relics. Actually I don't need to foresee that world, it is here, now, today. No longer does wearing a yellow star mark you out as a jew.

How does one conjure a meaningful sense of tradition and history if one does not use cultural forms that are, in one's own imagination, already traditional and historic?

1250. THE FOUR HORSEMEN - Available Now on DVD!

Comment #99989 by Cartomancer on December 18, 2007 at 3:02 am

Oh, and yes, I would agree that were it possible to entirely isolate the smoker from his surroundings and other people then he should be permitted to indulge his nauseating habit - I am not opposed to suicide on moral grounds, though I do think it rather a waste of life. This is often not possible however. Thankfully public buildings and workplaces in the UK are now smoke-free, but what if you happen to be unlucky enough to live with inveterate and inconsiderate smokers, over whom you have no corrective power (such as your parents, or an inconsiderate housemate who insists on smoking in the house?). What about people who smoke in the streets and pollute our communal air supply?

The freedom of choice issue is not quite that simple though. Yes, it is a voluntary decision to begin smoking (if things like peer pressure at school are not taken into consideration), but when chemical addiction takes over it is often difficult to stop, however much the smoker might wish to do so for health reasons. This is why we criminalise addictive and dangerous drugs such as heroin and cocaine, and ensure that access to addictive medicines is strictly controlled. Apart from the few indignant self-pitying smokers who persist in their contrarian quest to live by the ethics of the 1940s most smokers genuinely want to kick the habit. Making them feel disgusted and antisocial by it is a powerful remedy to the grip of chemical dependence - it produces strong brain chemicals of its own that might just counteract the cravings where an attempt driven only by vague good intentions would fail. Fear of not fitting in and fear of death are much more powerful motivators than mere guilt or aspiration, and if governments take the health of their people seriously (which they undoubtedly should) then it behoves them powerfully to take effective steps in this regard.