Mo' Dernity, Mo' Problems

2007-02-17T12:23:00.000-05:00

There's a Bedroom in my Living Room

I came home on Wednesday night to find a new wall in my living room. Apparently the landlord and his brother are adding another room to the basement appartment, probably with the idea that a 4 BR is more profitable than a 3 BR.

2007-02-01T15:50:00.000-05:00

Inspiring.

2007-01-04T18:46:00.000-05:00

Looking for something besides Iggy Pop to listen to on your MP3 Player?

I've tried listening to a few of top rated podcasts, but found them all pretty dull. Instead, I would recommend the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin audio recordings of the Bible available here. Actually, I've only tried the Latin ones.

I also found out about Libri Vox, where you can download audio recordings of books and short stories for free. I've listened to a few so far, and would recommend "The Duplicity of Hargraves" by O. Henry... it's one of the stories in the first short story collection. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat" was trite, but there was one part that I want to quote here:

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart --one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

It seems like this understanding goes against the Church's understanding of sin. Take a look at this, from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

A pure or entire privation of good could occur in a moral act only on the supposition that the will could incline to evil as such for an object. This is impossible because evil as such is not contained within the scope of the adequate object of the will, which is good. The sinner's intention terminates at some object in which there is a participation of God's goodness, and this object is directly intended by him.

Seems like the character in Poe's story disagrees with Church's teaching. But what do you expect from a guy who splits open his wife's head with an axe?

2007-01-03T13:50:00.000-05:00

How to seduce the King of France

2006-12-20T18:20:00.000-05:00

Another clip from a friend's blog:

As far as I can tell, however, atheists and theists are equally entitled to believe in moral imperatives, because in both cases the argument should come down to the same premise: it is a fulfillment of man's nature (or "telos") to be moral.

Athiests look at things which are ordered and say, "No, this isn't a sign of God's handiwork, it's spontaneous evolution, or it's chance." Evolution gives a compelling account of why organisms have developed behaviors and traits which allow then to pass on their genetic code. Evolutionary theory may be able to explain altruism - the person who helps others is more likely to receive help when they need it. However, evolutionary theory is also likely to show that there are cases where immoral actions, like theft and murder, can be adaptive. If I can't get enough food any other way, stealing might allow me to survive and reproduce. If human telos is the result of evolution alone, I would expect that human telos would include some things that we consider moral, but others that we'd consider immoral. Sometimes the propegation of our genes may be served by moral behavior, but other times immoral behavior might be more effective.

2006-12-20T17:04:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine writes on her blog:

I cannot agree with the statement that man/woman has an original tendency towards hatred. To begin with, I have never been aware of a violent or passionate form of hatred that did not arise from a sense of having suffered injustice.

From this, it seems like the cause of hatred is always some prior act of injustice. But what motivated the prior act of injustice? Where does the evil ultimately come from? For Platonists, evil arises when the Demiurge tries to create the best possible world, but because he's working with chaotic matter he can only do a mediocre job. For Rousseau, society is the ultimate source of evil. For Marx, the economic system causes evil. For at least some atheistic materialists hatred is caused by the desire to destroy or incapacitate whatever might prevent us from passing on our genetic material.

But maybe I should be reading more carefully, since what's written is, "sense of having suffered injustice" rather than simply, "having suffered injustice." In that case, my issue is with the fact that people so often have a sense of having suffered injustice, even when they haven't been wronged. The child who freaks out because Mom won't give him the thing he wants or the man who feels that it isn't fair that all the Latinos have moved in and taken all the jobs. It seems that the tendency to feel wronged comes from our self-centeredness and our tendency toward tribalism.

Also, hatred isn't the only sin. How about the tendency to eat too much, to have sex with people we don't care about, and to use our money to purchase luxury instead of helping others? It seems that very often our desires are out of wack with what's actually the right thing. Just to use the eating example - food is good, but we desire more of it than is good. With self-centeredness, we are concerned about our own needs, which is good, but aren't sufficiently concerned about the needs of others.

I don't think we are born radically evil. But I also don't think that our desires always line up with what is really best. If these desires are continually indulged we can become truly monstrous.

The thing that disturbs me most about the author's perspective is that it doesn't seem to do sufficient justice to the reality of evil. Evil isn't just, "I want what's mine, and I'll do what I have to do to get it."

I consider that it is a form of self-hatred to think of oneself as "a sinner"--i.e. as primarily evil. I would also bet that most people have more good in them than evil.

When Catholics refer to themselves as sinners, they don't mean to say that they are "primarily evil." I'd like to hear why you think this is what we mean when we call ourselves sinners.

2006-12-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

From Christianity and Classical Culture

If it be true that Nicea put teeth into Christianity, it is equally true to say that, with Athanasius, the Church showed she could bite the hand that fed her.

2006-12-02T21:07:00.000-05:00

What We Learn When We Learn Economics

"Parkin’s warning, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to heed. Neoclassical economics smuggles a great many normative wares underneath its positive trenchcoat, both in its assumptions about how humans operate—as individuals rationally maximizing their utility—and its implied preference for “markets in everything.” Because neoclassical economics always presents itself as a value-neutral description of the world, its ideological commitments can be adopted by those who learn it without any recognition that they are ideological. Parkin’s warning, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to heed. Neoclassical economics smuggles a great many normative wares underneath its positive trenchcoat, both in its assumptions about how humans operate—as individuals rationally maximizing their utility—and its implied preference for “markets in everything.” Because neoclassical economics always presents itself as a value-neutral description of the world, its ideological commitments can be adopted by those who learn it without any recognition that they are ideological."

I was actually talking about this with a friend a few months ago... we were talking about the labor theory of value (things get value from the effort used in making them) and the subjective theory of value (things are valuable when they are useful and scarce). We noticed that the labor theory of value is a statement about how we should value things, whereas the subjective theory of value is a statement of how prices are determined in a free market. The labor theory of value is a normative statement (an incorrect normative statement), while the subjective theory of value is a statement of fact (a correct statement of fact). No sane person will argue that people will pay a lot for things they see as being really useful (useful broadly defined, to include useful as a status symbol) and are very scarce.

But often times this factual statement is treated as having normative significance - not only will people pay a lot for useful, scarce things, but the government shouldn't try to influence with prices. Often, I'd agree with this. But how about drugs? They are perceived as useful, and they are sometimes scarce, so people pay a lot of money for them. But does this mean they are valuable? Also, people often systematically overvalue their short-term happiness and undervalue their long-term happiness – like when they don’t put enough into savings. The subjective theory of value doesn't have anything to tell us about what to do when individuals misunderstand what is truly useful to them.

2006-11-27T13:23:00.000-05:00

Rome Post

General observations: Dirtier than NYC, although not ridiculously so. Lots of Churches, smoking, beeping, and scatters. The exchange rate stinks. The Romans transcend the bar /coffee shop dichotomy.

Aside from the scantily clad dancers, the gay dance club I went to was much less sketchy than the clubs I've been to in New Haven.

Staying in a hostel saved a lot of money, but there was a definite downside... Getting a good nights sleep could be a challenge, since people were making noise until well past midnight. And the people to bathrooms ratio wasn't so hot.

Next to St. Peters basilica there's a little Church that Pope John Paul II set aside for youth. Wish I'd found it earlier. I went to adoration, rosary, and part of a Mass there (mostly in Italian, but with some English and a bit of French) if you stay after Mass they have a social hour.

Saw the bones of St. Peter, went up the steps by St. John Lateran on my knees (as is required), saw the coliseum, tracings column, and the forums, went in the Pantheon and a number of other churches, visited a lot of Piazzas, and a few museums. Walked by the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated. Spent thanksgiving with some lovely folks from the Academy American, one of whom I'd actually vaguely known from undergrad. Would have liked to have done a day trip to assess, but I didn't find the time.

Ate too much gellato.

On Friday night I stayed out dancing until around 3:30 AM, and I had to wake up at 6 to go to the train station. I also came down with a case of laryngitis, so that combined with the lack of sleep made the last bit of my trip pretty excruciating. Couldn't wait to get on the plane so I could pass out.

On the flight I started reading Christianity and Classical Culture. It looks at what the Augustan age attempted, both politically and intellectully, and the changes that occured under Constatine and after. So far it's a fun read... I know very little about ancient Rome, and this gives a good overview, connecting literature and politics.

The best thing I saw in Rome: Usually we only get to see the bottom 1/2. Doesn't have quite the same impact when it's just displayed on a monitor.

2006-11-09T13:43:00.000-05:00

Excerpt from an Email Exchange

I wrote this in response to someone who asked why God doesn't make his presence more apparent.

Difficult questions. This line of questioning always makes me squirm...it's like - "Hmmm... you believe an all-powerful and all-loving being who never talks to you? Pretty ridiculous." A friend of mine who's an atheist often complains that faith is non-falsifiable... "Something good happened? God's will. Something bad happened? Also God's will! You haven't experienced God? That's because he's a still, small voice. So still and small it might just be your subconscious."

One thing that's helped me is the realization that things get more mysterious as we move up in the chain of being. At the bottom of the chain of being is pure abstraction - logic and math. We can know logical and mathematical truths with a certainty that's otherwise unattainable. When we study physics or biology we have to use adifferent method for finding truth - the scientific method. When we obtain truth using logic we call it a proof, when we obtain truth using science we call it a theory, or, if it's mostly held true over a long period, we call it a law. With science there's always the possibility that a later experiment will show our previous theory to be wrong, and it's possible to imagine the laws of the universe suddenly changing. Moving up to ethics - the human soul is higher in the chain of being than matter, and therefore it's harder to study. You can't conduct an experiment to show it's wrong to lie. Although it's blindingly clear that we've made progress in science, it's a lot less clear that we've made progress in ethics, and this is at least partly because ethics isan inherently more mysterious than science. So I think we can say as a general rule that the more being a being has, the more difficult it isfor the mind to know it. God, having the most being, is the most mysterious.

God could manifest himself to us and explain his will. Why doesn't he do that? Christ asked us to go and preach the good news. If God directly and incontrovertibly manifested himself to everyone, what wouldbe left for me to do? God could have used his omnipotence to convertmankind, but instead he uses broken instruments.

I'll close with a quote from Chesterton - "Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

2006-10-10T13:42:00.000-04:00

I totally didn't know that anyone had successfully flown with a jetpack.

2006-04-18T14:45:00.000-04:00

Voltron is coming to DVD in 2006!

Will this seem as amazingly cool as it did when I was ten years old?

2006-03-03T12:39:00.000-05:00

Learning English from the Indians

I work with a lot of Indians, some in the US and others working from offshore. I've picked up a couple of their favorite expressions - "I have a doubt" and "I have a query." And we use the phrases "my side" and "your side" - if there's a task that needs to be done, we'll say things like, "Most of the work will be on my side." But I have yet to start using "Until and unless."

2006-02-12T12:31:00.001-05:00

I pressed button for the 7th floor, but for whatever reason the elevator doors didn't open until the 8th. It was just me and another guy in the elevator. He was a trenchcoated, long-haired, scruffy, medium sized guy... he could have been in Mallrats.

I turned to him and said something about how it was odd that the elevator had gone to the wrong floor. He extended his arms and shouted "FUCK" in a tone that was some combination of annoyance and glee.

2006-02-02T12:08:00.000-05:00

Cute

It bothers me when women refer to men as cute. Ours is a terrible beauty... cute is for puppies and babies.

2005-11-23T15:32:00.000-05:00

The Best Moment in Harry Potter Number 6

Overall I wasn't particularly digging Harry Potter 6, but one line will stick with me forever. In book 5, Harry and a bunch of others formed a group called "Dumbledore's Army" (or the D.A.), in order to practice defense against the dark arts, but they stopped it in book 6. Speaking about their time in the D.A., Luna said wistfully, "It was like having friends."

2005-10-26T10:04:00.000-04:00

What does this say about my Soul?

From 18 to around 25, I smoked a half a pack or a pack a day, depending on how stressed I was. On the one hand, I liked that fact that it was self destructive and rebellious and smelly. I also really liked this story that a friend told me about how on some television show, this guy went down to have a smoke with some of his co-workers. Returning to the office, one of the ex-smokers realized where he'd just been. The ex-smoker said something like, "You were just smoking, weren't you? I know you were, because you look sick and happy, and that's how smokers always look - SICK and HAPPY." On the other hand I wasn't too keen on dying of lung cancer, nor did I like the expense. Also, I felt bad about the fact that this was one sinful habit that I wasn't succeeding in fighting.

You'd think my aversion to spending money, my desire to be healthy and not smell bad, and my desire to rid myself of sin and addiction in order to be free for Christ, would be enough to motivate me to quit. Nope. Not even when I used the nicotine gum/patch. I tried to have my brother be a "quitting coach," but that always turned into:

Me: You forgot to ask me if I'd been smoking.
Bro: Have you?
Me: Yes, but I'm going to try to quit again pretty soon.

The Solution: I found that a simple bet did the trick. I bet my coworker that whoever smoked first would have to buy the office pizza. That would have put me out 60 bucks and it would have been definitely embarrassing. My co-worker lost after like 5 months. Once the bet was over I went a few more months, then started smoking again. I tried to quit, and again failed, so I bet my brother $100 bucks. If I smoke at all before April 2nd, I've got to pay him, but if I can go until April 2nd then he doesn't have to pay me anything. So far this strategy has worked completely. The idea that one cigarette would cost that much money gives me enough incentive to stay away. I was severely tempted last weekend, but I just couldn't bear the thought of having to pay my brother 100 bucks just to smoke one cigarette. I also knew that if I broke down and smoked, then I'd just have to make an even bigger bet next time around to be sure that I had an even bigger disincentive.

I first heard about this quitting strategy from a bartender at Rudy's. The bartender told me that he made a bet with a buddy that whoever smoked first would have to pay the other 50 bucks. The bet lasted 6 months - the day that the friend smoked and had to pay was the most difficult day for the bartender, because that was when the outside incentive was lifted. But, of course, it's easy to set an arbitrarily high incentive with a family member or whoever - as long as you make the bet one-way (you pay if you lose, nothing happens if you win).

2005-07-27T12:35:00.000-04:00

A Lonely Minority: The Modern Story of Egypt's Copts by Edward Wakin

My Grandfather is a Copt (he lived in Egypt, went to medical school in France (where he met my Grandmother), and immigrated to the US). So my brother read this book and I decided to get in on the action.

Seems like the Copts have some things in common with the Jews in Europe & the Chinese in Asia - they're a minority group that faces discrimination because they are more educated and productive than the ruling majority. An unfortuntate twist, though, is that while a Chinese cannot switch to being Malay, a Copt can switch to being a Muslim. And because Egyptian law gives certain additional rights to Muslims, they're a built in incentive for conversion. The author seemed to think that many Copts converted to Islam so that they could get an easy Islamic divorce.

2005-07-16T11:06:00.000-04:00

The Teaching Company

I've been borrowing audio lectures from the New Haven public library.

Robert Lee and His High Command Taught by Gary W. Gallagher

A very enjoyable lecture series. Most of the lectures have a biographical focus, and Gallagher avoids going too much into troop movements.

Some fun things I didn't imagine - prior to the Civil War, one of Lee's generals (Jubal Early, maybe, I can't remember) argued against secession on the grounds that the Constitution already provided adequate protection for the right to own slaves. I'd always assumed things broke down into pro-Union/anti-slavery and pro-Slavery/anti-Union.

Also, there were some basic facts about the Civil War that I just didn't understand until listening to this course. First, since there were about 5 million white Southerners against 20 million white Northerners, there was never really even a possibility that the South would take assistant and win an outright victory. Instead, the idea was to put up a good enough fight that the Northern Copperheads would vote Lincoln's side out of office and agree to allow the South to keep slavery.
Another very interesting thing - people often see the Confederacy being all about state's rights. But there's good reason to question this interpretation. Because the Confederacy existed in war time, the government had to assert quite a lot of national control. For example, they instituted a national draft before the North did. And they mobilized material resources on a national scale.

Robert Lee recommended promising blacks their freedom if they fought in the war. This proposal was refused, but it's an interesting paradox - offering to free slaves who fought to protect the institution of slavery.

Lee's generals were a fascinating bunch. Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Jeb Stuart, & all the rest. Good times.

Buddhism taught by Malcolm Eckel

I've got to admit that this course did very little to give me any insight into Buddhist philosophy. Here's an example - Eckel said something like this - "If Heraclites taught that a man couldn't step into the same river twice, then the Buddhists taught that a man couldn't even step into the same river once." Wacktastic!

But I did enjoy the history of the different schools of Buddhism, and the odd tales of great Buddhist teachers of old. My favorite tale is the story of Angulimala, who's name means "garland of fingers." You see, his teacher told him that he had to collect the fingers of 100 people in order to receive instruction. He tried hiding the fingers in the woods, but it was hard to keep track of them, so he made himself a gruesome necklace.

Historical Jesus taught by Bart Ehrman

This course is taught from the perspective that the are earlier sources (like the Q document) that have a non-orthodox theology, and that only in the later Gospel sources do we get a Divine Jesus. The theory about Q is, as far as I can tell, based on the fact that Matthew and Luke have a lot of things in common that they don't share with Mark. Ehrman doesn't spend much time debating the strength of the Q hypothesis (and he offers no explanation at all of the alternative views), but instead basis his analysis on his belief that Mark and Q are earlier than Matthew and Luke.

Previously I'd spent a little while learning about the OT from a similar perspective. The OT course I took from Stuebenville assumed that there were 5 different authors cutting and pasting things into the Pentateuch and that Isaiah was written by at least 3 people. It's a really really boring way to read Scripture, because every time you find an incongruity in the text you explain it by postulating more authors instead of by, like, thinking about the text.

2005-05-13T13:42:00.000-04:00

20 years ago I...
1. ...found Lego and Matchbox cars fascinating.
2. ...hoarded coins and Halloween candy.
3. ...pretended that strategically placed pillows constituted a fort.

10 years ago I...
1. ...listened to Led Zeppelin like it was my job.
2. ...was a Boy Scout.
3. ...spent my free time in Karate class.

5 years ago I...
1. ...got a D in Discrete Math.
2. ...contemplated dropping out of college and joining the army.
3. ...spent the summer working for GE and living in the Rocket House.

3 years ago I...
1. ...earned money by working for the Yale Dining Hall and the Yale Library and by volunteering for lots of studies.
2. ...spent 10 months living in the BOSH house, some of the time with a compulsive liar.
3. ...commuted on the BQE .

1 year ago I...
1. ...lived on the 3rd floor of a mansion-become-school.
2. ...contemplated grad school.
3. ...printed a playbill for the Mikado.

So far this year I...
1. ...quit smoking.
2. ...learned PL/SQL .
3. ...recieved honorary membership in the Yale undergraduate class of 2008.

Yesterday I...
1. ... discovered that soup eaten straight from the can is not only easy, but not all that disgusting.
2. ...listened to Murders in the Rue Morgue on my $7 walkman about 8 times, despite the fact that this required flipping the tape over and fast-forwarding since the thing has no rewind button.
3. ...went to bed around 9:30.

Today I will...
1. ...make last minute bug fixes to my code before the 5 PM deploy.
2. ...feel guilty about not going to the gym.
3. ...drive from New Haven to Yorktown.

Tomorrow I will...
1. ...hike at Mohonk Preserve.
2. ...catch up on some reading.
3. ...hang with my family.

In the next year I will...
1. ...get a job title more exalted than "Intern."
2. ...move to a dump to save money.
3. ...learn to cook something other than curry.

2004-11-09T14:26:00.000-05:00

Ethnic America: A History by Thomas Sowell

A fun read (if you're a nerd). Thomas Sowell looks at the history of various ethnic groups - asking questions like, "what occupations did they go into? did they intermarry? were the people who immigrated generally upper, middle, or lower class? what oppression did they face?"

Lots of very fascinating stuff. For example - American slavery promoted a culture of laziness, since a slave is not paid for the work he does. If I do not see any of the fruits of my labor, I have no incentive to work hard. On the contrary, I may as well fake injury, ruin equipment, and generally goof around, since I get the same "pay" in either case. This culture of laziness did not immediately disappear after the end of slavery - it takes time to develop adjust to the new economic freedom. However, in slaves in the Caribbean were given a small amount of land that they were permitted to farm themselves. This small amount of land was enough to give Caribbean slaves a culture of ownership - and therefore prevented the kind of laziness that was fostered by American slavery. Even though West Indian slavery was more brutal than American slavery, the property rights of the West Indian slaves allowed them to maintain a healthier work ethic.

2004-08-02T19:41:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Ampersand for a thoughtful post on his website. I'm not offended by the fact that he mistook my gender - it's my own fault for choosing a doofy pseudonym. Here is the link: http://amptoons.poliblog.com/blog/week_2004_07_04.html

One reader pointed out that I was wrong about what the title of professor meant historically - it meant giving lectures at a university, rather than doing research. Fine, but no matter - the point is that society gives titles to people in order to encourage certain behaviors - we call people mothers to honor those who care for children in a certain way, even though some mothers are abusive.

The meaty bit of Amperstand's post comes at the end:

Years before the gay marriage controversy encouraged many folks in the marriage movement to write op-eds declaring that children conceived through heterosexual intercourse is the sole purpose of marriage, some of those same folks had a more sensible view. Asking "what is marriage," they said that "marriage is..." a legal contract; a financial partnership; a sacred promise; a sexual union; a personal bond; and a family-making bond. This approach - recognizing the reality that marriage can, does and should serve multiple functions, and can even serve different functions for different people - is far more intelligent and realistic than the "one purpose" analysis most anti-SSM folks have been forced into by their need to exclude homosexuals.

This attacks a position I never attempted to uphold. I did not say that marriage exists solely for the procreation of children, and I can't imagine anyone would seriously hold such a view. Rather, I argued that the possibility of procreation is a defining component of marriage. Society rewards married couples because it recognizes that marriage provides certain social goods: the procreation of children, mutual aid between the spouses, lower rates of domestic violence between the married couple (as compared to the cohabitating couple), and the higher rates of economic productivity and lower rates of crime for married men.

However, there are many ways that we could lower crime rates and raise productivity, but we do not call all of them "marriage." We do not say that a college educated male, because he is less likely to be a violent criminal and more likely to earn above 20,000, is suddenly married. And neither should we say that simply because two men live together, care for each other, and do sexual things together, they are suddenly married.

If marriage is to be defined, as Ampersands would like, as "a legal contract; a financial partnership; a sacred promise; a sexual union; a personal bond; and a family-making bond," then we should allow more than just gay marriages to be called marriages. We should certainly allow polygamy. And why not call a buisness contract a marriage? Or long term roomates? I'm friends with two sisters, one of whom is a single mother. They bought a house together, and they both help out with taking care of the child. Why should be be as flexible in our definition of marriage as Ampersand would like, rather than more flexible or less flexible?

Ampersand's response is (I'm paraphrasing), "Marriage creates a family bond between people. But siblings already have a family bond, so they cannot marry." But of course he doesn't really defend this definition of marriage - in fact the defintion seems custom-built to include homosexual couples but exclude siblings. In any case, I could point out that the sibling-sibling marriage would be establishing a DIFFERENT family bond than that which existed before. Why not be flexible about this, and let people add/change the nature of their family bonds?
Of course - because Amptoons has crafted a definition that excludes sibling/sibling marriages but includes male/male and female/female marriages. If you scrap the tradition, you'd better have very strong reasons for whatever system you seek to set up in its place.

2004-07-03T22:55:00.000-04:00

The Origin of an Urban Legend

IMHO, this is the ultimate guy story. 3 friends find a surplus rocket engine and come up with the idea of building a rocket car. Truth is stranger than fiction.

2004-06-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

Lingva Latina: Familia Romana, Hans H. Orberg

This text teaches Latin without using any English words. Instead of giving you declension charts to memorize, it jumps right in with "Roma est in Italia," and goes from there. Each chapter contains a story, and the stories form a narrative about Roman family.

2004-06-20T11:34:00.000-04:00

Symptom of the Universe, Black Sabbath

This double CD set is worth buying simply for the booklet that comes with it. The booklet starts off with Ozzy complaining that when he saw This is Spinal Tap, he thought it was a documentary.

Here's an excerpt:
At the time, Butler was living in a one-bedroom apartment that he'd painted black. "I was getting into, like, black magic," he explained sheepishly. "Everybody was into all that stuff back then, it was just the thing. . . . I had all these inverted crosses all around the place and all these poster of Satan and all that kind of stuff." Not because he intended casting any spells or performing any strange rituals there, he said. It was more because "all the love and peace thing had gone, the Vietnam War thing was happening, and a lot of kids were getting into all kinds of mysticism and occultims."
Then something happened. "One night," Butler began, with no trace of a smile, "this thing appeared to me at the foot of my bed, and it frightened the bloddy life out of me! I was just lying in bed one night, and I woke up suddenly, and there was, like, this black shape standing at the foot of my bed. And I wasn't on drugs or anything, but for some reason I thought it was the devil himself! It was almost as if this thing was saying to me, "It's time to either pledge allegiance or piss off!"
He was so shaken that he immediately repainted the apartment orange and "took all the posters down, put, like, proper crucifixes in there, and started wearing a cross. We all did. But that's how Ozzy came up with the lyrics for 'Black Sabbath.' It wasn't a song about summoning up the Devil, though, as a lot of people still think it is. It was actually, like, warning people against Satanism and stuff."

2004-06-18T09:41:00.000-04:00

Before Abraham Was: A Provocative Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis by Isaac M. Kikawada, Arthur Quinn

Terrific book, though unfortunately out of print.
Some might be tempted to say, "Who cares whether the Penteteuch was written by one author or by five, since either way we know it's the word of God." But it does make a difference - the documentary hypothesis claims that inconguities in the text can be resolved by posulating several authors. This means that the exigete no longer needs to attempt a synthesis. For example - if the magesterial God of Genesis chapter 1 and the anthropomorphized God of Genesis chapter 2 are the work of two distinct authors, then we shouldn't expect that the human author of Scripture had a vision of God transcending both chapters. Instead of trying to find a deeper meaning in the apparent incongruities of the text, the Documentary Hypothesis postulates multiple authors with divergent purposes.
Modern exigesis, according to a friend of mine, is obsessed with "efficient causality." It's interested in who wrote what when, and in minute details of language, rather than in the obvious questions that confront the reader.
Before Abraham Was argues that Genesis 1-11 has a unity of purpose, and therefore cannot be seen as a haphazardly assembled collection of the work of several authors.

2004-06-18T09:32:00.000-04:00

Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Rauch
Rauch takes a number of conservative positions - he admits that male-male couples are likely to have higher rates of infidelity than male-female couples, and he recognizes that cohabitation and divorce are bad for children.

No one believes that childless marriages are illegitimate... (109)
Depends on why they're childless. If they are childless because of infertility, then they're legitimate. But the Catholic Church teaches that a couple must be open to having children in order to marry.

we honor and celebrate marriages whether children are in the picture or not (109)
My parents aren't very religious or very conservative, but they certainly found it odd that some of their friends chose not to have children. I remember my father mentioning that one of his co-workers said to him, "We have dogs instead." He found this sentiment somewhat humorous. I think his response is typical.
Infertile couples are a different case. We generally feel sorry for them. We honor their marriage, if they adopt we admire their generosity, but we also see their infertility as a hardship.

Their real position is that the possibility of procreation defines marriage when homosexuals are involved, but not when heterosexuals are involved. To put the point more starkly, sterility disqualifies all homosexuals from marriage, but it disqualifies no heterosexuals. (112)
I think this is the heart of the pro-gay-marriage case.
One response draws on the "teleology of the body" thing - even though some couples are sterile, they're nevertheless ordered towards children. I suspect this argument might be made to work, but in our contraception-friendly society I don't think people accept the necessary premises.
This is the argument I prefer: Society benefits enormously by having heterosexual couples commit to stay together before having intercourse. This is because heterosexual intercourse often results in conception, and when conception occurs it is preferable that both biological parents are committed to taking care of the child. We give special status to committed heterosexual couples because we want to encourage biological parents to be committed to taking care of the children they've concieved. We don't expect that every couple will produce children, but we want to make sure that those which do produce children are married.
Sounds great. But there's a snag. Rauch says that if we believe marriage is ordered towards procreation, then we shouldn't allow post-menopausal women to marry. We might respond that they're allowed to marry because prohibiting them from marrying would be too invasive - we don't want the government administering fertility tests. But this seems like a really lousy answer. We do not want to say that post-menopausal women are only allowed to marry because we don't know that they're post-menopausal, because if we did then we'd be saying that post-menopausal women really shouldn't marry, even though it's legal, and that we should discourage infertile women from marrying.
At first, this appears absolutely devistating to the anti-gay-marriage case. But on second thought, Rauch's argument turns out to be an argument against making any distinctions of status, except on the strictest bases of merit. For example, if you say, "We call people 'professors' in order to indicate that their work is of a higher dignity than those people we call 'teachers.' This is because professors teach more sophisticated concepts and are do research." But one could reply, "Yes, but there are some teachers who teach higher level classes than some professors. And teachers some teachers do original research. Lack of original research disqualifies all teachers but no professors. So what we have here is blatant anti-teacher bias. To correct this bias, we should allow all teachers to be called professors." The point is that even though some professors contribute less than some teachers, we are still justified in making a general distinction of rank.
More to the point, Rauch's argument can be used to undermine his own claim that "If I had to pare marriage to its essential core, I would say that marriage is two people's lifelong commitment, recognized by law and society, to care for each other" (24) and "prime-caregiver status is the sine qua non of marriage" (26). First, this means that two spinster sisters or a single mother and her single daughter should be able to marry if they make a lifelong committment to caring for each other. Second, I reply, "So therefore if the spouse is not the prime-caregiver then the couple isn't really married?" In traditional Chinese society, the eldest son has primary-caregiver responsibility for his aging parents. It may be the case that a friend or relative does more to care for a person than the spouse does. So the primary-caregiver distinction doesn't always work.
If Rauch points to infertile couples and says that this shows that marriage is not really about fertility, then I can just as easily point to uncaring marriages or open marriages to show that marriage must not really be about caring for each other or about fidelity. Marriage is promoted in order to encourage mutual-caregiving, fidelity, and procreation, even though particular marriages may not attain those ends.
Nominalism begets relativism.

An adulterous spouse is not a good spouse but, in the eyes of most people, would be a flawed spouse rather than a nonspouse. What would lead me to think of someone as a nonspouse? Only, I think, abandonment. (25)
Not everyone agrees - in Brideshead Revisited Lady Brideshead refuses to give her husband a divorce, despite the fact that he has abandoned her. She considered him a flawed spouse rather than a nonspouse.

Rauch convinced me of one point. Prior to reading this book, I thought the "if gay marriage, why not polygamy" argument was solid. Rauch gives reasons for opposing polygamy, independent of the gay marriage issue. He points out that since wealthy/high-status men in polygamous societies marry several women, poor/low-status men are left without any women to marry. These low status men tend to create lots of social unrest. We see this in Africa and the Middle East. So it seems like the reasons for outlawing polygamy are distinct from those for outlawing gay marriage. Accepting the arguments for gay marriage does not mean that one should accept the arguments for polygamy.

No-fault divorce dealt a severe blow till 'to death do us part,' which was certainly an essential element of the traditional meaning of marriage. (167)
What does Rauch think of no-fault divorce?

People predicted that bad things would happen if contraception became legal and widespread, and indeed bad things did happen, but that did not make legalizing contraception the wrong thing to do, and, in any case, good things happened also. (167)
What are these mysterious "good things" and "bad things"?

2003-12-24T13:09:00.000-05:00

How to decrease the new cases of HIV in Africa

I've long felt uncomfortable about the possibility that the Church's opposition to condom use might increase the spread of HIV. Of course, one can say that just as one shouldn't make murder safer, one shouldn't make extramarital sex safer. There's something to that perspective, on the other hand what about all of the orphaned/infected children?
In any case, the links below argue that the case of Uganda shows that that discouraging extramarital sex has proven more effective than condom distribution for limiting the spread of HIV.

Senate Testimony

What Happened in Uganda?

2003-08-10T22:20:00.000-04:00

The Courage to Be Chaste by Benedict Groeschel

Serious people, such as those who read books on chastity, frequently have an excess of anxiety.

2003-08-07T11:38:00.000-04:00

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

Coolest soundbite from this book: ancient philosophy begins in wonder; modern philosophy begins in doubt.

Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition and of drawing conclusions. Intellectus on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.
This reminds of Cardinal Newman's distinction between notional and real assent. Ratio is the distinctively human means of attaining knowledge. We are embodied beings, beings made up of distinct parts. As such, it is natural for us to understand things as being made up distinct parts which are built up into larger structures. Analysis breaks the structure into its parts, deduction and synthesis build up a structure from components. But we are also spiritual beings, and spiritual beings are not made up of distinct parts. Therefore, we are capable of understanding things with direct simplicity.

Overall I found this book very intruiging, but I didn't quite get all of Pieper's arguments. I'm not sure how he arrives at the conclusion that, What is true of celebration is true of leisure: its possibility, its ultimate justification derive from its roots in divine worship. Leisure, for Pieper, means a time of freedom from the utilitarian concerns of the workaday world and an openess to the transcendent. A person who relaxes merely in order to prepare to go back to work is not enjoying leisure at all. But I don't see that there is anything inherintly contradictory in the idea of leisure as an opportunity for men to enjoy communion with one another. I'm not quite sure why Pieper thinks that without divine worship all leisure must degenerate into idleness.

2003-08-06T01:10:00.000-04:00

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I've read it twice so far. The first time around I was mostly just delighted that someone wrote a book that contained a bachanal and made the classics sound exciting. This time I paid more attention to the psychology and social dynamics.

The longest section of the book deals with the question, "How do you feel after you and your friends commit a murder together?" I think Tartt is probably right that after people commit some really huge sin, they don't initially feel any guilt at all. Instead of feeling guilty, they just have a sense of seperation from their crime and from the world in general.

2003-07-28T18:31:00.000-04:00

Sextus Empiricus: Selections from the Major Writings on Skepticism Man and God by Hallie, Sextus

I'm not even 1/2 way through, but a couple of interesting things have come up so far. First, it drives home the fact that scepticism did not begin with Descartes. For example, Sextus notes that men disagree about questions of theology and ethics, and argues that we have no means of deciding which of two beliefs about the gods, or about ethics, is correct. Because of this, Sextus believes we should suspend judgement. This looks surprisingly like today's moral relativism, which is supposed to be one of the hallmarks of modernity.

It's also interesting that Sextus protects himself from one of the classic cases against scepticism. Some would argue, "Well, if you don't know anything, then how do you know that scepticism is true?" Sextus would respond by saying that he is claiming to have proven that truth is, in general, unattainable. Rather, he would say that, "I'm not claiming to know that truth X is undiscoverable. Rather, I'm arguing that the basis by which people claim to hold X is insufficient."

Sextus is similar to Hume in that he believes skeptics should trust their experiences and the traditions of their society. As far as trusting experience, he does this by creating a sharp dicotomy between sense impression (which deals with externals) and metaphysical theory (which deals with the unseen, and therefore unprovable).

2003-07-17T17:37:00.000-04:00

Masturbating may protect against prostate cancer
Grrrrrr.....

2003-02-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed

A simple, readable overview of Catholic theology. A lot of it I'd already learned in conversations with Catholic friends, but some of it was new to me. Good stuff on the Trinity, on the distinction between imaginability and concievability, and on man as a unity of body and soul.

My only problem with the book was that Sheed seems to make too much of the argument from first cause - he claims that the existence of a first cause somehow implies an infinite and personal God. As far as I can tell, the argument from first cause cannot prove anything definate about the nature of the first cause.

Imaginability and Concievability
On this, Sheed points out that often people act as though there is no distinction between that which is imaginable and that which is concievable. People often assume that if they cannot imagine something, it therefore cannot exist. For example, if a person cannot come up with an image of how free-will works, they will sometimes falsely assume that free-will is impossible. The mind can imagine the cause and effect relations between neurons in the brain, but it cannot in the same way imagine the human person as a cause, since after all one cannot make a mental image of the human person. But the unimaginability of free-will does not imply that free-will is inconcievable.

Mind and Body
If you want to know what a rational animal is, study man; neither animality nor rationality will be the same when the two are wed: the marriage does strange things to both of them. Rationality functioning in union with a body is not just rationality, animality is so ennobled by its marraige with spirit that no mere animal would know what to do with it. The way to find all this is to meet man and think hard about the experience. (Page 377)
This statement is completely on the money, provided we define rationality to be something beyond simply logic and mathematics. As embodied creatures, we are forced to ask ourselves questions like, "Where should I live?" "Who should I sleep with?" "Should I bother to exercise?" and "Why did that guy give me that funny look?" In a disembodied world, our means of relating to others would be greatly impoverished. You could say, "I love you," but you couldn't buy roses for your wife, or offer soup to your sick child.
This is why I have trouble understanding why some people get excited about transhumanism. Basically, transhumanists want total technological control over the human body. They want to be able to jettison it at will (by uploading the brain onto a computer), or modify it (bigger muscles with no effort, 200 year lifespan). This is all fine and good, assuming that you believe that man is essentially rational, and only accidentally animal.

Nature/Persons distinction helps us understand the Trinity and Incarnation
St. Augustine took the words "person" and "being" to be mere placeholders, so that when we say that the Trinity is, "Three persons and one being," we really just mean, "three somethings and one something else." Sheed, however, believes the terms "person" and "nature" can give us a useful way into understanding the Trinity. He writes: "Nature answers the question what we are; person answer the question who we are" (Page 92). The person is the part of a rational being which choses to act through the nature. So in the case of the Trinity, we have three rational actors acting through a common nature. In the case of the Incarnation, we have one rational actor acting through two distinct natures.

Judge Christianity by its Saints
All that stream of truth and grace, flowing through every channel that Christ made to carry the flow to men's souls, does not go for nothing. But if we want to form to ourselves some notion of the richness of the stream, we must look not at the Catholics who make no use of it, nor even at good average Catholics, but at the saints. If you want to know how wet the rain is, do not judge by someone who went out into it with an umbrella. Most of us are like that in relation to the shower of the truth and life. We do not give ourselves to it wholly but set up all sorts of pathetic protections against the terrifying downrush of it. But the saints have gone out into it stripped. There, but for the resistance of the grace of God, goes every one of us. (Page 310)

Neato
The act itself is so easy, so effortless. And it gives a kind of reassurance to the battered and discouraged ego. For many a person it seems to mark the only time when he is acting as himself, doing what he chooses, expressing his personality, being someone, being at once himself and lifted above himself. It is only a seeming, of course. In fact, it means a further dispersal of man's powers, leaving him less and less master of himself. It rewards him little, but gets a terrible grip on blood and bone. (Page 392)

2002-10-15T20:03:00.000-04:00

A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Can we chose to ignore our conscience? That's the question posed by Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Creepy, philosophically intense, and gripping.

Dorian's friend, Basil, paints a picture of Dorian. Dorian, for the first time recognizing his own physical beauty in the painting, wishes that he might remain forever young and beautiful, and that the painting might age instead.

His wish is granted.

After this, Dorian attempts to enjoy all the pleasures of life, paying no attention to the harm he causes on the way. His wealth and ageless physical beauty allow him to get away with murder. But he is haunted by a constant reminder of his sins: the face in the painting bears the marks of his sins. Dorian's face remains forever boyish and innocent, while the face in the painting grows more and more wrinkled and cruel.

The painting prevents Dorian from forgetting about his sins. I'm not sure what this means for men in general. It could either mean 1) unless you have a magical painting, it's easy to ignore your sins, but they are nonetheless real, or it could mean 2) even if you think you can ignore your sins for a while, they end up haunting you. Probably, the meaning lies in some combination of (1) and (2).

Once you admit that (1) sin is real, (2) sin can't be ignored or erased by offering and apology and being extra nice in future (you were supposed to be extra nice in the first place!), and 3) you are a sinner, you're at least 2/3 of the way to converting to Catholicism.

And Oscar Wilde did convert, although for some reason Dover publishing didn't think that was an important enough fact to be included in the introduction to the text.

2002-09-28T22:20:00.000-04:00

The Great Mysteries: an Essential Catechism by Andrew M. Greeley

Although I think some of this book may be infected with liberal garbage, a lot of it is very cool.

Take this, for example:

Religion is grounded in human experience. In the midst of the frustrations, the ambiguities, the sorrows, the pleasures, the joys, the uncertanties of our lives, we occasionally sense that there may be something else going on. For some people, this "something else" is encountered in a dramatic, overpowering, ecstatic way. But for most of us it is perceived briefly and dimly: in the smile on a child's face, the glory of a sunset, or a day of pleasure and joy with good friends. At such times we feel at one with ourselves, nature, humanity. We know, of course, that the smile will vanish from the child's face, the sun will set and darkness will cover the earth, and our friends will go home, leaving us alone. We know that our perceptions of good things will end with our own death; but in that fleeting glimpse of the possiblity of "something else" being at work in the world, we get a hint - sometimes very strong - that there is something else in the universe besides our own brief and fragile life. It is out of those elements that humankind fashions religion. (Introduction, xi)

This passage illustrates the method of the book. Greeley observes an aspect of human experience, and then uses this to shed light on an aspect of religious truth. The religious truth, in turn, illuminates our experience.

This passage also illustrates Greeley's liberal tendancies - "humankind" rather than "mankind."

2002-08-26T09:55:00.000-04:00

Reader Response
A reader responds to my post on Chamler's Conscious Mind:

Dear C. Eater,

Re your post: "My question, then, for the atheists is this - why does the universe have laws which dictate that physical states produce conscious states, when such laws just as easily might not exist?"

I don't think that is a question that an atheist is required to answer. I think he could reply, instead, simply that he starts by accepting this universe as it is.

How do you decide which things require an explanation, and which things may be taken simply as given? It seems to me that, if the reader is correct, then no characteristic of the universe would ever require an explanation. Even if the words "MADE BY GOD" were imprinted into all the rocks on the planet earth, the atheist could reply "Well, sure that's a little wierd, but I simply take the universe as it is, so I don't need to offer any explanation for the phenomena."

Think about the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellegence) program. The program works on the belief that if we recieve a transmission which cannot be reasonably explained as randomness, or by some physical phenomenon, then we should assume that the transmission comes from extra-terrestrial life. For example, if we recieve a transmission of the first 5000 prime numbers, there's good reason to believe that the transmission was sent by space aliens. In that case, we don't say, "I simply take the transmission of prime numbers as a given, I don't look for an explanation." Instead, we say, "Wow, that's odd. Maybe space aliens are the cause of the transmission. That seems like a reasonable explanation." If some facts of the universe might be well-explained by the existence of intellegent life outside the earth, it might similarly be the case that some facts about the universe can best be explained by the existence of God.

I should note, though, that I do not believe everything requires an explanation. There must be some first cause, some necessary being, and this first cause or necessary being does not itself have an explanation. The atheists believe that the first cause is some physical system, while the theists believe the first cause is God. The atheists don't have to explain why the universe exists unless the universe gives the appearance of being designed.

2002-08-20T13:29:00.000-04:00

The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Liseux and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
Both women are Carmelite Saints, and yet I cannot find any major similarities between the two, other than the fact that they both lived out Christian heroism. This brings me to a question - is there some sort of Carmelite spirituality present in both of these women, and if so, what does it look like?

2002-08-15T14:15:00.000-04:00

Simple Rules for a Complex World by Richard A. Epstein

Epstein asserts that any complication in the law should produce sufficient benefits to justify the costs of complications in enforcement and litigation. I think Epstein is a bit too much of a utilitarian, but often his method of applying economic analysis to the legal system is often very useful.

Example: the law forces auditors to be legally responsible for errors in calculation, at least in some circumstances. This has the effect of forcing the auditor to provide both auditing services and auditing insurance. Why not, Epstein says, allow the auditor and the client to set the auditor's liability via contract? Maybe some companies will get outside insurance against auditing errors, while others will have the auditor only responsible up to a certain level.

Example: In auto accidents, current law tries to calculate the degree to which each party is responsible (80% person A, 20% person B). Epstein argues that it is very complicated to calculate exact percentages, especially since the courts are rarely opperating with perfect information. Instead, he suggests that the courts should simply ask whether person A and person B are both partially responsible, and if they are they should automatically have to pay damages 50/50. This will simplify and shorten court proceedings and save money.

2002-08-15T13:52:00.000-04:00

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

A wonderful presentation of pride and humility.

2002-08-15T11:02:00.000-04:00

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Cardinal Newman

I read this book pretty fast, so I didn't absorb the whole thing. But I'll comment on what I thought were two of the most interesting nuggets.

Protestants: A lot like Arians
Newman discovers suprising similarities between Protestants and pre-Reformation heretics. Similarities 1) Sola Scriptura (interpreting the Bible without the aid of Church tradition and papal authority) 2) A tendancy to de-mystify certain doctrines (Arians eliminated the mystery of the Trinity, while many Protestants eliminate the mystery of the Eucharist) 3) Preference for literal interpretations of Scripture over allegorical interpretations.

Interrelatedness of Doctrine
If you don't believe in the incarnation, you probably won't believe that Christ is physically present in the Eucharist. If you don't believe Jesus Christ is God, you probably won't believe that Mary is the mother of God. Newman points out quite a number of connections between doctrine which hadn't previously occured to me.
This point is significant because it explains why some doctrines takes time to develop. First the Church had to come to agreement that Christ was "one in being with the Father," and only then could it understand that Mary is the mother of God.

2002-08-14T11:51:00.000-04:00

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chamlers

I read this book quite a while back, but it was on my mind the other day and so I thought I'd blog a bit on it.

The basic claim that Chamlers makes is that consciousness is real, but non-physical. This claim is made in contrast to the claims of Daniel Dennett and other strict-materialist, who claim that the mind is identical to the brain. Chamlers defends his claim with several arguments. In one, he argues that there is nothing logically contradictory about a human which is physically and functionally identical to a normal human, but which has no consciousness. In another (my favorate) he asks the reader to imagine a neuroscientist who has studied the brain, and knows everything about the way in which it processes the color red. But also imagine that the neuroscientist has never actually observed the color red. The scientist could know all about the brains processing of red, but still lack the actual experience of seeing red.

So consciousness is non-physical, although it does seem to be correlated with physical states. Chamlers believes that the laws of nature dictate that any structure which processes information causes a corresponding mental state. He believes that calculators and even thermometers may possess primitive consciousness. He does not, however, think that a given mental state causes any changes in the physical world. When a person wills to walk down the street, that willing does not cause him to walk. Rather, the physical processes in his brain cause him to 1) will to walk down the street and 2) walk down the street. Chamlers takes this position in part because he realizes that if mental states could be an independent source of causation, it would undermine determinism.

Now, let me see if I can't use Chamlers to serve my own ideological agenda. I think that Chamlers has is right in his claim that strict materialists, who believe that the mind is identical to the physical brain, are just straight-up obviously wrong. Chamlers has a more defensible determinist position, so my first move in the argument is to discredit strict physicalism using Chamler's arguments. Now, let's see what this implies. If Chamlers is correct, then it follows that consciousness has NO survival value at all (since consciousness has no causal power, it certainly can't help a person to survive). So although we might say that man's digestive system, or his opposable thumbs, developed because they allowed him to reproduce his genes, we can't say that consciousness developed because it allowed man to reproduce his genes. Instead, consciousness is a side-effect of man's evolution.

So it's not true to say that the universe began as a mere bunch of chaotic matter and energy which self-organized into planets and stars, and eventually into life. From the beginning, the universe was governed by laws which ordained that when physical systems of information processing developed, conscious states would arise from them. Thus, complexity was present from the beginning. It was present in that from the beginning, the universe had laws that would kick into effect once physical systems which processed information developed.

If this argument holds, then it refutes the atheist's claim that the universe began as chaos and then organized itself. If the universe has laws which dictate that physical systems which process information produce corresponding conscious states, then we may ask why such laws exist. The atheist would like to reply that no explanation is necessary. But it seems to me that while chaotic randomness needs no explanation, complexity always does. Complexity can be explained in some cases by arguing that it emerges from chaos. But in this case, the complexity exists from the beginning of the universe, in the laws of nature which dictate that physical systems of information processing cause conscious states. That complexity can, in my view, be best explained by belief in a designer.

One possible way out of this, however, is to argue that even the most basic physical systems have some sort of proto-consciousness. But one can only directly observe one's own consciousness, so validating or invalidating this hypothesis looks near impossible. Since this theory seems at least possible, it is possible that the laws governing proto-consciousness/consciousness would come into effect before the universe began to self-organize. In that case, the designer argument I was just spinning falls apart.

Still, though, since we can argue that there is nothing illogical about a universe that is physically identical to our own, but where physical states do not produce conscious states. My question, then, for the atheists is this - why does the universe have laws which dictate that physical states produce conscious states, when such laws just as easily might not exist?

For another take on Chamler's book, see Steven M. Barr's review on First Things.

2002-07-04T02:07:00.000-04:00

Continued Commentary on Saint Augustine's Trinity (Translated by Edmund Hill)

Filioque Correction
I missed something on the filioque post. As it turns out, Augustine says that while the Son is born of the father, the Holy Spirit comes forth "not as being born but as being given" (29 V), and the Church teaches that the Holy Spirit "proceeds, not by way of generation, but by way of spiration, from the Father and the Son together, as from a single principle." So the Son and Holy Spirit can be distinguished by the way in which they originate from the Father.

Unfortunately, at present I'm unable to comment further, as someone sent me a link to Vladimir Lossky's "The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine", and it's going to take me a while to process it.

2002-07-02T15:48:00.000-04:00

Commentary on Saint Augustine's Trinity (Translated by Edmund Hill)

I'm not going to comment on Augustine's arguments against earlier Trinitarian Catholic theologians (who did odd things like speaking of the Son as the inherintly visible part of the Trinity) and the Arians, since those beliefs have basically died out.

Three Persons, One Being
Christians believe that God is three persons in one being. But how are the persons to be distinguished in a way that will permit us to see them as one in being? We can't say that the Son differs from the Father in terms of some attribute (for example, the Son is the Father's power), because God is perfectly simple and has no attributes. And we can't say that the Son is different in substance, because then we'd have two gods rather than one. Augustine has a super-cool explanation. The Son does not differ from the Father attribute-wise or substance-wise, but rather relationship-wise. He is different from the father only because he proceeds from the Father, while the Father proceeds from niether the Son nor the Holy Spirit. Similarly, the Holy Spirit differs from the Father and the Son because he proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Now, you might say that Augustine is making up a bogus distinction between relationships and attributes or substances. But I think the distinction turns out to be valid. You can see this, as Augustine points out, by noticing that before God created angels, he was not yet Lord (a Lord requires a servant). Yet he did not change in substance by becoming Lord.

Filioque
Now, a question for all my Greek Orthodox readers out there. What is the difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit? Both the Son and Holy Spirit proceed from the Father (in Greek Orthodox theology). So there is no difference relationship-wise between the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely, there is no difference substance-wise, since that would mess up divine unity, and there is no difference attribute-wise, since that would mess up divince simplicity. So all 'ya all need to convert.

The Father is Greater than I
Augustine also showed me something that can cause confusion in reading the New Testament. In the Scriptures, we find Christ spoken about as either God or Man. For example, "In the beginning, there was the Word" and "My Lord and My God" and "The Son of God" refer to Christ's divine nature, while "The Son of Man" and "The Father is Greater than I" refer to Christ's human nature.

Man is the Image of God
If Man is made in God's image, does man's being in some way contain an image of the Trinity? Augustine thinks so, and he searches for this image and attempts to explain how it is distorted by the Fall.
Something obvious which I hadn't thought of - if man is made in the image of the God, then there is a connection between knowing one's self and knowing God.

Aristotle
According to the translator's notes, Augustine disliked Aristotle because he wrongly believed Aristotle considered the soul to be a material substance.

2002-06-25T18:10:00.000-04:00

Continued commentary on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff

The Relationship Between Survival and Happiness
"In existential terms, the moral man's reward is life. In emotional terms there is another reward, a concomitant of the first, which also requires study: happiness." (324)
I was always a little unclear about the Orthodox Objectivist view of the connection between survival and happiness. Sometimes people have made it sound like you persue 3 goals - survival, happiness, and the preservation of other people's rights. But actually, Peikoff is pretty clear that this is not the case. Instead, he says that people ought to pursue survival, and when they do so, two things will happen. By selfishly pursuing survival they will 1) end up respecting other people's rights, and 2) achieve personal happiness.
Does this imply that health/fitness nuts are happier than the average person? They very self-consciously work to to increase their survival, so according to Peikoff you'd expect them to be happier than average.

The Randian Version of the Fall of Man
"Nothing but a false theory of concepts can explain the worldwide scorn today for the conceptual guidance offered by principles... As long as men reject reason in epistemology, they will necessarily reject it in ethics." (334-5)
Translate this to read "War, rape, theft, murder, bad art, and elevator music are all a result of the dominance of a false theory of concepts." Now, I agree that men are unethical in part because they use their powers of reasoning incorrectly. But I don't think that's sufficient; something else is involved. I think human beings naturally have disordered desires, and they are tempted to distort their ethical and metaphysical beliefs in order to fit those desires.
This gets at one of the key differences between logic and philosophy. In logic, one is seldom tempted to produce the result one desires. When one is evaluating the truth-value of an abstract expression, one doesn't desire a particular result. But in philosophy, one might desire a particular result. For example if Johnny doesn't like to feel obligated to his friends and family, Johnny would be more likely to adopt an ethical system that devalues loyalty. Because Johnny has an unethical desire (to abandon friends and family) he brings a bias to his study of ethics. Or, to use an example from the Objectivist context, it would seem natural to say that men sometimes fall into ethical errors because they are too lazy to be virtuous ("I don't want to have to do the hard work of being productive, so I think I'll just be a moocher or a looter.")
But Objectivists disagree with the Christian claim that man's desires are naturally disordered. This puts them in the awkward position of having to argue that all ethical errors ultimately stem from errors of rationality, and not from man's disordered desires.

Fighting the good fight against those pesky Manichæans
"Intrinsicism... holds that love is a relationship between two souls that is not to be sullied by connection to the body." (346)

Redefining Terms
" 'Pride' is the commitment to achieve one's own moral perfection." (303)
Great. St. Thomas's sister wrote him, asking him what she needed to do to become a saint. His response was only two words: "Will it."
"An ethics that extols humility is a self-contradiction. It is the advocacy of a code of behavior, along with the demand not to practice it fully." (309)
Again, using St. Thomas: "The virtue of humility consists in keeping oneself within one's own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one's superior" (Summa Contra Gent., bk. IV, ch. lv, tr. Rickaby). Humility certainly doesn't mean saying, "Well, I'm pretty lame, so I'm not going to try to do good." If one says that, one is guilty of spiritual sloth.

2002-06-14T15:13:00.000-04:00

Continued commentary on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff

Invincible Robots Cannot Succeed
". . . a robot, not facing the alternative of life or death, requires no action to sustain itself. It is 'an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything. . . which cannot be damaged, injured or destoyed.' Imagine for a moment that this sort of entity were possible. What values could it act for?" (209)
"Can abstract knowledge, say, be a value to it? What for? The robot has no use for knowledge as an aid in achieving its ends; so far, it has no ends." (210)
The argument, as I understand it, is that life/survival is the only valid end in itself, and that therefore an entity which cannot die has no basis for action or for chosing values. If someone were to suggest to Peikoff that the robot could value math, and therefore might decide to take an algebra course, he would respond that the robot would have no reason to pursue algebra, since it would not aid in his survival. The assumption here is that a value is only valuable if it contributes to one's ability to remain alive.
But why is survival the only valid end in itself? Why not declare that abstract knowledge is an end in itself? Or pleasure?

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Stayin' Alive
"On the physical level, as Ayn Rand observes, 'the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex - from the blood circulation in the body of a man - are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life.'" (189-190)
This is simply absurd. Organisms do not maintain their life through reproduction. Reproduction in most cases actually makes it more difficult for an organism to survive, as it's resources must be directed to the young. The only exception might be humans, since sometimes parents are able to get their children to take care of them in their old age.

2002-06-12T19:34:00.000-04:00

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff

A is A, therefore causality, therefore Hume is wrong
Peikoff writes, "Given the facts that action is action of entities, and that every entity has a nature-both of which facts are known simply by observation-it is self-evident that an entity must act in accorance with its nature." And he goes on to quote Rand, who declares, "The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the anture of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature." (15)
This, he thinks, amounts to an argument against David Hume's claim that man cannot know causality. Hume does not claim that objects sometimes act in contradiction to their natures; rather he argues that man cannot use induction to gain knowledge of an object's nature. One cannot say, for example, "The ball has bounced on the first 100 trials, and that proves that its in the ball's nature to bounce when drop on a hard surface." It might be in the nature of the ball to bounce on the first 100 trials, but not on the 101. This does not contradict the Objectivist axiom "existence exists."

If you feel warm and fuzzy, check your premises.
"There are four steps in the generation of an emotion: perception (or imagination), identification, evaluation, response... To many people... it seems as if men perceive and then feel, with no intervening factor. The truth is that a chain of ideas and value-judgments intervenes." (156)
I agree with this. For example, if you buy into leftist ideology, you'll be more likely to feel sympathetic towards leftist organizations.
"Emotions are automatic consequences of a mind's past conclusions, however that mind has been used or misused in the process of reaching them... The fact that a man has a certain feeling means merely that, through some kind of process, he earlier reached a certain idea, which is now stored in his subconscious; this leaves completely open the question of the idea's relationship to reality." (159)
This seems like an empirical claim, but I don't see Peikoff providing any evidence. It seems to me that biological and chemical factors must also play some role in man's emotions. For example, an individual tends to experience different emotions when he's drunk than when he's sober, despite his subconscious ideas remaining unchanged. And even leaving out the drug example, it seems at least reasonable to think that empathy is partially rooted in biology/chemistry, and it would be ridiculous to say that romantic feelings aren't partially rooted in our biology. Subconscious ideas may influence our emotions, but I doubt very much they are the sole cause of our emotions.
Peikoff wants to defend Rand's claim that "emotions are not tools of cognition." But if subconscious ideas are only part of the cause of emotions, and biological factors are another part of the cause, then emotions do have a cognitive function. They tell us what things accord well with our biological nature and which do not. For example, when my brother was younger he would throw tantrums when his blood sugar got too low. He realized he needed to eat more often than most people in order to remain in a good mood throughout the day. Another example - two people with the same mathematical ability might get different amounts of enjoyment out of solving math problems. Maybe person A loves doing math problems, while person B takes great joy in composing music. Both person A and person B can be completely rational (as an Objectivist would understand the term), and yet in this situation it seems like person A should chose a career that will involve math, while person B should to try to eek* out a living as a composer, or work on scores in his spare time.

Man's only purpose is to live. Suicide is noble in certain situations.
"Objectivism says that remaining alive is the goal of all values and of all proper action." (213)
"Suicide is justified when man's life, owing to circumstances outside of a person's control, is no longer possible; an example might be a person with a painful terminal illness, or a prisoner in a concentration camp who sees no chance of escape. In cases such as these, suicide is not necessarily a philosophic rejection of life or of reality. On the contrary, it may very well be their tragic reaffirmation. Self-destruction in such cases may amount to the tortured cry: 'Man's life means so much to me that I will not settle for anything less. I will not accept a living death as a substitute.'" (247-8)
A living death - talk about A being not A. Objectivism boldly declares that man's purpose is to remain alive, and then says that in some situations you should kill yourself to avoid a "living death." But there is no such thing as a living death. Objectivists might say that Rand/Peikoff meant that it's acceptable for a man to kill himself in order to avoid an unhappy life, but if Rand/Peikoff put it that way they would contradict the basis of Objectivists ethics (man's purpose is to remain alive). It would be more consistent with Rand's writing on suicide to say that man's purpose is to seek long-term happiness, but Rand/Peikoff don't want to say that because it would make them look like hedonists.

*its supposed to be spelled "eke." Thanks to Eve Tushnet.