21st-century Christian Philosopher

My last post was about how the brain-as-Turing-Machine doesn’t help and in fact, can be said to lose the notion of any objective concept of the word objective itself.

Casting the brain as a Turing Machine ( TM ) helps us understand our processing a little more, but only if we think of the brain as not a Turing Machine, first. (In other words, we must think ourselves capable of determining non-trivial properties.) Otherwise, whether we are thinking what we think we are thinking would become problematical.

Think of what I’m saying here: Even were “thinking” a precise and quantifiable process , we would never compute the TM: ComputesThinking because we could not ever tell which TMs would halt on the problem. Now, add to that picture, our ignorance of what thinking, or what we would quantify as thinking.

So to observe the brain as TM, the observer must be free from the rules of TMs, to some degree. Otherwise, we assume a bunch of stuff that is not provable: for example, that the brain TM computes the predicate “x is objective”

Of course, we cannot think as concretely about the processing power of the brain without this model. And perhaps, without it, we would flounder in the muddy waters of philosophy’s “Consciousness”. So whether or not this model fits, we will examine the brain as an undesigned computer.

InfiniteMonkeys.com

The brain, unlike the computer, is a black box. Sure, the computer is a black box to some. And sure, Information Technology advances with the value of limited knowledge.

The “value of limited knowledge” may sound like a confusing phrase. So let me try to explain in the next couple of paragraphs. (Anybody with a good level of understanding of computers, may find the next few paragraphs boring.)

The electronic-circuit-to-bit transformation helps to illustrate this concept of the value of limited knowledge. At the base of all computers, are electrons and their near-random behavior. Yet somehow, through the magic of circuits, those inconsistencies are smoothed out and produce the abstraction known as a bit. That’s precisely the way the machine looks at the product: They are bits—nothing more. They are abstracted above their mere circumstances and taken as something of a different kind.

The application of electronic circuits has an input and an output. We start from circuit technology. What we require from these circuits is that the wiring for a bit stays in the state in which it was put. It needs to change when it is instructed and keep the state until it?s instructed to change it. That consistency creates the output concept bit. Just like that every layer of technology layered on top of the basic machine, takes in it’s wild and woolly nature, and hands to other layers a simplified interface of that level.

Thus, you do not need to be an expert atomic physicist to design a circuit. And you do not need the knowledge to design a circuit to design a machine. And you do not need need the knowledge of somebody who designs an instruction set to program in machine code. (See abstraction at Wikipedia.org.)

And so it goes all the way up to you. Because of all the work that was done up to now, we require you only to know your way around windows, and perhaps the URL for Google. With all that you can make your way around the net, feeding your brain its own process.

So the computer is a black box to many and relies on the concept of black box to limit complexity of each task in almost all phases. But somebody knows each part. It’s all written down in a manual somewhere. So you can learn about electrons, and how circuits are made, and how circuits are turned into the abstractions of processors and storage devices (which is about the lowest level most of us Software designers ever tend to think about). And after moving on, you could learn how instructions are designed from bits. How software is composed from higher and higher abstractions.

If you could spend the time, and had the brains and money for it, you could know the computer from the electron to the CSS stylesheet your browser is using to tell it how to display this page. Theoretically, you could know it all. But you don?t need to.

Some offer us a sleek view: the brain as computer.

We have not mastered the brain, the way we have the computer. Some bits of the physics on which a computer runs are not fully grasped, perhaps. But they are known to the degree that they will conduct streams of electrons down circuits in a regular pattern and that these patterns will hold state information. We designed the computer, first on paper, and then in silicon, in a way that we could say that a electromagnetic state mapped to a state in the design.

Nobody designed the brain, they tell us. And on the testing goes. Meanwhile, engineers have designed machines to compute and have proved them Turing Complete—or ready to compute any number of problems. And in making a scheme and store for a set of instructions, made the machines flexible computation machines, by rejecting designs that locked the engineer in to one problem per computer.

We have mastered the computer, because we built it. It wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know what it was doing. Not so the brain, apparently.

We can imagine the brain as a computer, but that doesn’t make it one. The brain-as-computer model helps us make concrete observations about thought and computation. But taking the brain as a computer just doesn’t hold the value that people tend to think it does.

The computer is limited. It has bounds; it has a problem domain. The trick is to figure out how to convert your task, into a similar task that can be solved in the problem domain.

It is by numbers and lookup tables that a machine deals with characters. Characters comprise text and the contents of text provide the machines interpretation of the user’s purpose in providing these characters. It stores “cat” as the sequence 67, 65, 104. It doesn’t relate that string to anything other than what some other software will tell it to relate to it. It cannot even paint those letters on your screen unless some pre-designed scheme tells it how to draw something based on that number. Needless to say, we’ve done that work.

Every problem that lies outside the given problem domain of the computer will need to have a set of designed steps which tells the computer how to transform each part of the problem into the problem domain of the computer. Needless to say, we’ve done a lot of work there.

Now, as much as I have been schooled in computer architecture and computability theory, I do not hold every scrap of knowledge about the computer. Very few application designers know the instruction set of a machine anymore. It is almost impossible to understand the high-level view of software, by thinking in terms of machine instructions.

It is better that a compiler handles these details and that our minds are set free to recall how to turn boxes that we drew on the page into patterns of text called “source code”. The compiler will then use the text to create instructions. I should not have to know how an “object” is composed in memory in order to design objects. All computers these days will need some scheme to represent the “object” so the charge to the compiler designer is “Thou shalt represent objects!”

So a computer doesn’t even begin to solve your problem, until you solve the problem of how it’s going to represent the state of your problem. The brain, on the other hand, solves problems—or so we think that’s what it is doing. We don’t know for sure.

The computer is sometimes called a Turing Machine, This term names the mathematical model of an algorithm (set of computational steps). But more specifically, the computer is more properly an example of a Universal Turing Machine. Programs, like your web browser, are also a type of Turing Machine, only more specific to the problem of retrieving text from the web and displaying it to you. The Universal Turing Machine takes a mathematical representation of another Turing Machine and processes it with an input. That is the universal TM (computer) takes the code for a specific TM (browser) and processes your input.

Now, in the field of Turing Machines (TMs) we have a thing called Halting Problem, which roughly says that there is no definite way for a universal TM (computer) to decide whether the input TM (program) will completely process a given input or even stop.

As well as having no precise specification of the brain or how my the sight of my mouse is “input” into my brain. But were there such a representation, we have no way of knowing whether the brain would have definitively processed, say the input of the eyes. And the shadow of Rice’s Theorem suggest that a non-trivial property, say “sight-processing” can never be determined by an exact algorithm—including, perhaps the algorithm the Brain-TM uses to analyze TMs.

So were the brain a TM, Computability Theory tells us that stating on-trivial properties of that TM are impossible by algorithm, which is all that the brain as TM can do. We come to a place where the brain either is a TM and if the universe is computable, then the TM cannot say non-trivial things about the universe with any certainty that could be checked by another algorithm.

Thus objectivity breaks down.

Take it in this way: We take the Universe-TM as input and we process it within our Universal TM. Provided that we could specify exactly the process we came up with to process the computable universe, no one could ever check our math” with an algorithm, that is their brain. They could not “run” our brain and pass the universe in as input and conclude any fixed thing. Nor could it be computed that we should ever fix any one things about the brain by following the steps of our brain.

In fact to say we could ever verify the statement brain₁ = brain₂ is to remove our mooring to fact. And again, with Rice’s Theorem, “processes like brain_x” is non-trivial and remains problematic for a brain or a computer to decide this.

Next: The Black Box Brain II

It says you’re a Fundamentalist Christian. You don’t sound much like a fundamentalist Christian to me. In your last post, you have a section called “No God Either” and you’re talking about how human life has no value. What’s going on here?

(As I’m getting no comments at the moment (original date: November 10th, 2004), I thought I’d supply my own.)

Because I understand that some people would be confused about what I’ve been saying the past couple of posts. I am a fundamentalist Christian, but I also am a self-styled philosopher. I say in a previous post, that it is easy for me to believe in value, because I believe that value is set by the Objective Observer, God.

It requires no additional maneuvers to add belief in value to belief in God—in fact it coincides with what we understand as the details of value. Value is an opinion of worth that lives in the beholder.

What I try to outline in my second-to-last post is that constructing objective value for the unbeliever is harder, because using similar rules to (and dodges of) atheism, we can construct an Invincible Ignorance argument which denies value based on lack of evidence and wide disagreement.

For the progressive in our society, evolution is a simple fact. I’m not talking about firmness of belief, or whether they are willing to question it. I’m talking about the simplicity with which they take it into their worldview. It is, to some degree, compartmentalized.

If we are primates, what is the nature of primates? If we are animals, what is the nature of social animals?

Do not the males of a social species vie for dominant status? Yet, the progressive thinks dominance and status something to be rooted out. And he or she thinks that showy male behavior is a backward trait. It’s just silly, something we need to root out.

Is it not one of the distinctives about primates that they are sexually dimorphic? Yet the progressive thinks that we should rise above the sexism of brutes. “There is no gender” says one type of progressive.

Are not many animals territorial? Is it not true that the “sweet song” of the birds in the trees is simply the refrain of, “Get out of here! This area is mine! Don’t make me come over there! You’ve been warned! Get out of my yard!” Yet the progressive says “property is theft” without stopping to consider how deeply ingrained in us that “theft” is.

And yet it is the progressive who is most likely to say that others are absurd for not being able to embrace the fact of their animal nature. Who are they fooling? They can’t even look the beast in the eyes.

Faced with the items on the menu, they want to ask for another menu. “No thank you, I’d like a different human nature, please.”

So let me get back the main point of this post: I want to illustrate to people the evolution that they forget so easily in their narrative of Ascendant Man v2.0. Cultural “evolution” was furthered the most by transcendent, catholic faiths, which in the face of the visible inequality of man asserted the theoretical equality of man, consistent of their view of overcoming the flesh. Today’s progressive has co-opted the course of overcoming the flesh, without even an understanding of how or why, and a partial doubt that it can be done.

Meanwhile, the atheist communists have killed 100 million of our species throughout the 20^th century, because fellow humans refused to de-stratify themselves and surrender property to the group, as if that could be expected of any animal. This is not a general charge against atheists. Just because I have an atheist living next to me, does not mean that I need to fear being dragged to a re-education camp or purged. All I mean it to say is that some atheists are drastically naive about their own worldview.

One note, I should make here is that some view evolution in harmony God. I am not really challenging this view. I deal with the concept of creator-redundant evolution, or evolution that makes any creator redundant.

Next: The Black Box Brain

My last entry talked about the “value code word” and the relation between value and religion.

I wrote about a woman that seemed disturbed that somebody would say they voted from “moral values” in last week’s election. The issue of values seems always to invite[¹] (#fnote1) the question, “Whose values?”

It’s a good question.

This one talks about something that I call A-value-ism. The idea is that there is no such a thing as value outside of human thought.

I propose an idea of A-value-ism. It is the cognate of Atheism. In other words just as Atheism is a simple lack of belief in God, avaluism is a lack of belief that things have innate value—or that value is a fuzzy concept that should be viewed akin to the Logical Positivists, that is a meaningless cipher.

Some of you are convinced already. You’re on your own from here. Skim down or stop reading as you please; almost all of the rest of this is a challenge to valuism.

No God Either

The case proceeds by assuming that the common conclusions of Atheists are correct and will make a parallel case based on the soundness of the following principles.

1. It is a lack of belief, not a belief, and so therefore does not need to be supported with argument.
2. It makes no specific claims and therefore the burden of proof falls on those who want to prove value. (This itself is not a claim, however much it resembles one.)
3. Nobody has ever seen a value—price tags do not count. They are statements of an existing supposition of value.
4. Ancients write about values, as well as “the Good” and a bunch of other ideas that express a personal preference for unseen things.
5. Humans disagree so much on what has value, if anything did. That we cannot be clear that we are speaking about any one thing.
6. Value is a pseudo-objective projection of personal preference. It runs similar to the statement that “Nickelback rules!” from a fan, suggesting that one’s musical tastes are better than those of another.
7. The universe is a big, scary place. (Boo!)
8. Wishing doesn’t make it so. The number of people who innately believe something doesn’t make it so.
9. Any fuzzy notion that can kill a great number of people is dangerous and best abandoned.
10. By Ockham’s razor (or the Common Atheist interpretation) the negative claim should be preferred absent positive evidence.

I really rest with points 1 & 2. As long as I maintain ignorance—some would maintain that’s an invincible ignorance—and refuse to put forward a claim. What I’m saying in points 7 and up will become evident below.

But from here, I would guess that I can suggest how many millions of people have been killed for not sharing the same values as others. All deaths of the Church and Crusades can be put in here.

But as well, Marxist revolutions of Russia and China, the atrocities of Pol Pot, and even ethnic cleansing currently around the world, can be put on the shoulders of the notion of one person judging human life according to his or her values. And if we cannot decide whether or not to place Hitler’s dead at the feet of religion (wrong) or scientism (right), we can still put them at the feet of having a value in the “aristocratic principle of nature” and value Hitler placed on tribal culture.

Are we dying for a basic confusion about our natural world? (9)

How many people have died for other people’s values?

But that should only worry us if people had a value.

Modern Construction

Modernists have tried to assemble an idea of the value of a human life because we prefer to live. I think that is a fact whether or not we believe that humans have value, actually. That has to do with the ability to parse sentences, and has nothing to do with whether we actually have value. Much of what humans say, if I am to understand the Logical Positivist urge, is meaningless and emotional. The problem starts when we project our preferences out into the world.

The universe is a big scary place (7), believing that humans have value is attractive in the face of a universe which belies that idea. But it can’t really be established and our preference for our life may be counteracted with the preference of a vast number more for our death. So my value as a human being is at best questionable.

The idea that I have any value outside of someone’s preference would require an objective standard. And again we have no evidence that such is the case. So I think that we should require all subsequent discussions about “innate human value” to start with the assumption that there is none, because via #10, it is preferable, more reasonable, etc.

In fact, arguing that human’s have value is bizarre in the face of all the deaths caused by the unnatural concept of value. Perhaps the expression of objective value is nothing but the intolerance for a different preference, as it appears it has operated such a way in the past. It seems doubtful that we should ever trust the impulse that lead to the Inquisition, Crusades, Stalinist purges, Pol Pot, and the deaths of 9/11.

Modern Construction, v 2.0

Okay, let’s take another run at it. Some want to say that it is a way to mitigate between claims of value. But do we really want to mitigate between claims of imaginary creatures? And if we do, what about those who do not? Mitigating is one preference, fighting it out with bloody weapons is another. Saying that we’re all trying to mitigate is ignoring what many in the world are trying to do. So again, the preference to mitigate seems to accept, at base, an idea of human value, where each person’s claim has as much value as it can hold.

But if we get real and translate value back to preference, then we find that popularity of preference is about all the value that we will ever be able to get a claim to hold. That is, a popular preference is more likely to have people fight for it as an outward expression of value, than an outnumbered value which seems to degrade the more popular preference.

Preference fully explains”value” in an economic setting. I have a preference for the way to spend my time. People have a preference for whose hard work has value to them. The more people who are willing to buy my product as an expression of their preferences, the more products I can buy that indulge my preferences, the more time and capital I might prefer to spend producing that product.

Now, my economic rival may prefer that I not squeeze him out of the market, fairly or unfairly. He may also prefer that I not buy the time of certain skilled workers to kill him. But in a real world any of these three outcomes can help me indulge my preferences. Thus we see how it can be a real competitive advantage, used with discretion, to realize that the value of other people’s lives, when they do not provide an ends to our preferences is entirely a fiction.

People tend to put value on the death of other individuals as well. The dollars paid to a hit man or the military belie the idea that the death of others does not have a preferential value.

But wait! Is there no case that the people who provide the means for us to indulge our preferences have value? Well, I never said they didn’t. People who provide us the means to express our preferences are very valuable to us. We prefer them to live, because replacing them is an unsure thing.

But what is this to the Militant anti-Westerner who sees my very preferences as imperialistic or the height of decadence? He may prefer my death to the challenge to his sainted value. He may find me an infidel or a dupe of capitalists to be removed in the jihad, revolution of the people, or retribution of their slain.

I prefer to live, sure. And that may be something to someone who shares my “values”, but my ability to live depends on what I or others are willing to forgo to keep me alive and what the opposition will forgo to kill me. If we prefer butter, we might not have guns. And if other prefer guns to butter and our death to our life, well (who can doubt that) that’s the way things go.

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1. not beg see Begging the Question “prompt” might also be a acceptable choice.

This week I watched a discussion about the press and the US election on CSPAN. Though I like to avoid writing about politics, I wanted to reflect on the question raised by one lady that “values” was a new “code word” for religion.

First, I think that I can break it down a little better.

The pollsters offered five labels for voters to choose among. Any voter could have chosen to place their vote in the moral values bucket. But it seems that more conservatives than liberals chose this label, 4 to 1.

Calling it a “code word” ignores who made up the labels. The pollsters did not offer “religious belief” as a category. The voters didn’t describe their vote as much as they picked among descriptions.

Second, I think there is something to what she said.

It seems that people—even those who squirm at religion—can sense that religion and “value” are connected. We religous believe in value the way that we believe in a god. The concept is no more mystical than God. At base, we mean the same thing as economists: the value placed by a person or a group of people. Thus, God beholds all things and we observe the value He places. We need only believe in the beholder.

Skeptics call this opinion or even illusion. To them, you can only speak of the value people place on things, not of value as if it were an objective attribute. We make up claims of value. It’s something that I make, and then something that you differ with, and then something that a certain group of people hold in common at roughly the same level. Popular opinion is the only final arbiter of value.

I can see why a reasonably advanced skeptic might stop using the word “value”. Plus, you might also see why a believer or even a follower would gain an idea of value consistent with faith. But can we accept that a “code word” can be used for the same thing on both sides of the political divide—unless it means simply “Yes, things have value from the supreme beholder of value, God himself.”

I’ve gotten myself a “blog”!

Now, I can throw half-digested thoughts out there. Now all can see contents of my mental “stomache” as my weak constitution could hold it back no longer, splashing onto your web screen.

However, I’m prompted here to remember what Pascal wrote in Pensees 152:

Most frequently we wish to know but to talk. Otherwise we would not take a sea voyage in order never to talk of it, and for the sole pleasure of seeing without the hope of ever communicating it.