21st-century Christian Philosopher

It’s True!

Watch out!! They’re out there!! They look like people; they eat like people; they listen to music; they seem to feel emotion. But don’t let that fool you!

Some scientists, devotees and writers today talk about the “illusion” of free will. The choices that we seem to experience thousands of times a day, are really out of our hands. Perception of what we’re doing comes later. Some how observations that researchers make a couple dozen times a day, are different from our propensity to fool ourselves.

So we have a frequent and commonly agreed perception which as far as I know still continues to work, despite not having been confirmed by Science. Taking both facts and relating them we have ample evidence of the brain fooling itself. Yet a researcher is often spoken of as if they were a disembodied observer, somehow not barraged my the brain’s evident ability to confuse itself about what came first.

Sometimes, I can’t believe they are talking about the same brains that they are trying to convince us have fooled us all along.

The “proof” of this is, as the New York Times puts it (here) “A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.” Like other agents of this idea, they cite the Libet studies of the 70s and 80s.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html?pagewanted=2

Where was Libet standing? What was his body doing at the time. Was he looking at the monitor? Did his body just decide to point his head toward the monitor and he said, “Hey I want to look at the monitor”? Look how that worked out! He ended up seeing what it was his research to see!

Here’s another representation from Science Week:

Libet’s team measured [how?]two objective parameters: the electrical activity over the motor areas of the brain, and the electrical activity of the muscles involved in the wrist movement.

But Libet also found [any physical actions?] a surprising temporal relation between subjective experience and individual neural events. The actual neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by 300 to 500 milliseconds. Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move.

You gotta’ wonder if these scientists touch the floor as they are flitting about out of their bodies like this. They just “find”, “measure”, “correlate”, and “conclude”.

It Looks Bad for Our Heroes…

Sometimes, though, if you take a second look, you can spot the absurdity before your eyes. Take a look at the framework: (Again, from Science Week.)

In 1983, Benjamin Libet and his colleagues at the University of California San Francisco [did some stuff]. In this study, participants watched a small clock hand that completed one full revolution in 2.56 seconds. While fixated on the clock, a participant voluntarily flexed his wrist at a time of his choosing. After the movement, the clock hand continued to rotate for a random time and then stopped. Then, a participant reported the position of the clock hand at the time when she first became aware of the will to move.

Now such a things as “voluntarily flexed” and “at the time of his choosing” can’t happen, if it’s just the wrist moving and him deciding that he wanted to move it later. So it’s odd that Libet (provided he was rational) conceived of this experiment. Because the experiment seems to be a figment of his imagination as originally planned.

Why was the subject even conscious of his wrist moving? We can imagine a seen of a participant sitting serenely in a chair staring at the clock that his eyes and neck decided to look at, moving mostly just his wrist.

And, we can imagine the participants sitting serenely in the chair, because Tai-Bo or dancersize would kind of prove a distraction to judging when they decided to move that one part of their body.

So, what’s going on? Apparently his leg didn’t just fly up out of nowhere doing an imitation of John Cleese’s Silly Walks. But somehow his body just decides to do mostly only that which he was instructed to do by the researchers. Somehow his wrist, eyes, and neck decided to obey. As well as whatever firmware it is that tells time.

The experiment would be a joke if the doctors didn’t believe that they could plan (intend) to instruct a subject, that the subject could conceptualize it enough to code intentions to sit quietly and flex his wrist whenever it hit him.

So we have ample evidence of the instructions preceding the event. Instructions in the form of planning the test and explaining to the participant, and the participants odd feeling that he knew how to do all that and avoid his body doing something else.

If this is how the body acts, how could they in the preliminary trial even have trusted that the eyes would be in focus on the clock at the time the decision dialog box popped up? “Ding. You’ve got Movement.” We have to have a collision between the eyes just feeling like being in focus and the brain’s attempt to represent a time on the clock as the time.

He clearly intended to sit there (if he sat). He clearly intended to move his wrist and watch the clock. So what it seems to be the case is that the scientists can’t measure it yet.

So how much is this like “like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control”? The monkey might shake his head and convey that he’s going to sit still and only move the tiger’s wrist. But we don’t see him as being as effective at that as Libet (assuming he’s rational) saw in designing the experiment. I would suspect that no time-outs were planned for spontaneous Charlestons. The monkey on the other hand, will only say that he was intending the tiger to maul you, and he might decide later to move that wrist, but he’s mauling you now, and that’s kind of how things are going.

Real monkeys on the backs of real tigers (however unlikely that combination) have a connotation that we well recognize in providing the picture of futility. Real people planning, conducting, and complying with experiment plans also have an expected range of outcome. That provides the idea that Libet can even do this in the first place. (Provided he was rational in thinking that he could instruct anyone to move their body.)

In Clunk-clusion

It’s nothing like it at all. And both expectations (assuming Libet was rational) are likely to be highly successful. We can conclude a couple of things:

• Although scientist seldom touch the floor in their disembodied form, they can be very wrong about suggesting that they can pick up a pencil and plan how they are going test in experiments, and I’m guessing that because Science is not prey to brain illusions like I am that it is not a meat-forced error.
• Despite this unforced error, if Science don’t see it, it don’t happen.
• We should always live our lives by “best guess scenarios” which take lesser documented, alternate ideas off the table. Especially, if they don’t sound as “sciencey”.
• The same science that toasts your bread every morning, tells you that your legs have already figured out that your stomach wants toast.
• Wrists apparently listen real good. And even if we are riding around on a raging tiger, it’s wrists that we can expect to buckle down and complete the experiment.
• OR Science has a view that is limited by what has been proved before, but manages to turn that into a conviction that we can only accept what it can and has measured, no matter how much that conclusion ignores.

The Claim to Frame

It’s this last point that really makes it like Zeno’s most famous paradox. I resolve that one, not by playing along with the rules of the micro-game, but by contrasting it to its frame. If Hercules cannot win the race, having to pass through so many lines, then he can’t have gotten to the coliseum to stand at the start of the race just by walking at a slower pace. And nobody would be there to witness it (so there wouldn’t be a coliseum, where nobody goes) and nobody would know of anything called “a race” where movement that can’t happen happens.

Zeno may have had an academic point, but it is almost incontestable that that model was wrong for things known as races. Greeks will move and race, the tiger will eat you, the monkey won’t tell you stories, but people can be expected to execute a planned experiment doing something called “voluntary movement”. And that doesn’t change just because we can’t fit it all into a system or measure it.

This has been a presentation of my fingers.

Did you know the Bible computes the ratio pi wrongly?

Here’s the argument. 1. 1 Kings 7:23 says

[Soloman] made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference.

1. The text says it was round or circular. Thus, the ratio should have been pi and not 30/10 = 3.
2. QED: the Bible misrepresents pi! And the Bible is anti-science or some such.

But that’s ignoring the camel for the gnat. Did you notice that Solomon made a sea 10 cubits across!?!?! A 15-feet (by some measures of a cubit) sea?!?!

Is the Bible telling us that any body of water, about 7 feet deep and 16 feet across should be classified as a sea? How much did it roar? For “roar” is the root meaning of the word yäm, the word in Hebrew. Surely, we can see (or hear) what the ungodly geographers call a “sea” roar, but are we supposed to believe that a large swimming pool roared?

What are we supposed to believe?

That Solomon made a big bowl about 10 cubits across (which gives you an idea how big it is).

Arie Uittenbogaard of Abarim Publications, before he really gets rolling on page 2, deals with some attempted answers and rebuttals (here). One of the attempted answers is worded as so:

The Bible isn’t a science book. It’s more like a story. Like an analogy.

To which he replies:

But if the Bible isn’t a science book, it shouldn’t make a scientific statement. Now that it did, we see that it states a fallacy.

To which I reply, I can’t see one thing that makes this chapter anything more than a description about what was made. I don’t see it as a general statement at all. I can’t see that it qualifies as a “scientific statement” such as “it was 10 cubits across, thus it could not have been other than 30.0 cubits around.”

But that’s okay, Uittenbogaard needs to quickly move past other answers that he finds inadequate. I think he’s hasty here, because he’s on to something better in the next couple of pages. (Which I recommend.)

Still though, it’s not a scientific or mathematical point. The first part of the chapter details what Solomon built for his house, the second part what he built for the temple.

Some people describe this as “The Bible says that pi is 3.0.” Well, not really. Because they did the nose (Monty Python reference). You added a digit of precision that is not necessary meant in the text. From what I can see, it’s rounding to 5 cubits, just as 1 Kings 7:2, describing the dimensions of Solomon’s house seems to round to 10 cubits. And I doubt it’s a “architectural” statement.

1 Kings 7:14 already tells you how you get a “sea” the way described here: You hire someone “filled with wisdom and understanding and skill for doing any work in bronze.” Why doesn’t the Bible “tell the truth” about bronze-working skill right here? Would it help?

But lastly, the word yäm is used in the Bible 300 times as a sea with a shore and ships on it. Likely because the Mediterranean coast was to the west, it also took on the meaning of West, westward, western. The only time it refers to a sea that can fit in a building, is Solomon’s. But sea, skeptics can glide by realizing that language works by metaphoric extensions. Somehow, the idea of the Bible making an oceanographic or geographic definition doesn’t phase them. Just the math does.

Today, I surfed across an item from Skeptico, a blog billed “Critical Thinking for an Irrational World”. The target is the post Adopting Secular Religions (Or Not), dated June 12, 2007. It’s a critique of a post on TCSDaily, called Hitchens Is Not Great: An Atheist’s Defense of Religion, written by conservative atheist Karl Reitz.

He starts off on Reitz with…

Reitz is presenting us with a false dilemma – humans will either believe in God and religion, or they will adopt false secular faiths such as fascism or communism.

..while ignoring Reitz’ mayin the quote he cites for this:

atheists […] may only have a choice between living in societies that are traditionally religious or ones that have adopted secularized religions

Didn’t know it was a False Dilemma to present a dilemma that somebody else thinks is false…

But that is not the biggest thing. He loses the flow. The flow starts from Hitchens “secularized religions” of Marxism and fascism. Then, both the blogger and Reitz agree that you need to watch out for secular religions. But later down the page we see this from the blogger:

However, [Reitz] is missing the important area where most religions differ from secular religions – belief in God. This is important because, although people may feel free to disagree with the tenets of a secular faith, they cannot disagree with God.

Like everyone could disagree with Mao and Pol Pot?! Marx lauds the Revolutionary—the guy who goes out and shoots people—as greater than the Philosopher—the guy who decides who needs to be shot and why. Marx saw himself as the last necessary philosopher.

It compounds that with the awesome concept of dupe. If somebody innocently gets in the way of the shooting enough, he can be shot as a dupe of the system. Not for just shooting at you, but for disagreeing and slowing down the shooting. You can feel free to disagree with Marx (or Lenin, his prophet) but he’s told you who needs to be shot, and he’s based it all on materialism, so it’s no mumbo-jumbo. It’s plain who needs to be shot, so you need to go shoot them.

Both of these together blunt Hitchen’s point about how Marxism was implemented in Russia, as a state religion. Marxism was born the sort of I’m-right-you’re-wrong-and-everything-is-so-obvious (“SO SHOOT THEM NOW!!”) line that you see in the world of the rank-and-file atheists (and to some degree Hitchens). By creating the state religion, complete with Orthodox-style busts of St. Lenin, Lenin just shrunk the number of the people he needed to shoot. (Revolution or not, you should avoid the course where you need to shoot too many people.) It’s arguably a case of theory meets the application, and the anti-opiate becomes a little state religion … not to mention a lot of Vodka.

Sure, Marx and Engels likely did not shoot you if you disagreed with them. And from when the parties split in 1903 until the Bolsheviks outlawed the minority party in 1921, you were (mostly) allowed to disagree with the Bolsheviks about what to make of post-Tsarist Russia.

But the same can be said of Christianity. Jesus nor the apostles came with Inquisitors to tie you to a rack and force confessions from you. Paul did not go around stoning everybody who didn’t believe him, he preached to them, and lived among unbelievers as a “tent-maker”.

They might have “looked down their noses” at the “filthy heathens” and made them feel all icky inside, but I doubt that the Greeks and Roman’s didn’t “feel free” to disagree.

The blogger is right that you can’t “disagree” (successfully) with God. But you can feel free to disagree with any god you don’t believe in that doesn’t smite you because of it. But, more than that, you can disagree under the principles of the common faith. You can argue, say, that the free grace of God is more in keeping with given scripture than paying indulgences. In my opinion, Luther did not so much as disagree with God as disagree with a negative and not very well substantiated practice. (Which the Catholic Church later repudiated as well.)

“Feel free” is such a weasly, empty phrase, anyway. Sartre would insist that I’m as free as I dare to be. Indeed, Bonhoeffer did not rely on his feeling free to disagree with the Nazis. He just did. But the Inquisition, the Fascists and the Marxists—the very “secularized religions” named by Hitchens put the same pressure on you and you were as free as you dared to feel.

He later cites Communism-as-Lysenkoism as self-limiting (despite its habit of killing off a lot of people fast.) However, the link he points to on Wikipedia says “Lysenkoism … began in the late 1920s [under Stalin] and formally ended in 1964. I’m surprised, because it sounds like we never had to worry about the Communists shortly after 1964! How the death of Lysenkoist policies eventually brought down Communism—by producing greater crops with agricultural policies that worked—is a story I need to hear!

Of course, Lysenkoism, is very easily explained as a material rationalization of what materialistic Marxist wanted to accomplish. The idea that members of a species are not intra-competitive was just what the Marxist utopia called for. If humans were in fact intra-competitive than stratifications and governmental divisions weren’t injustice as much as they were human nature. The idea was to see a natural, non-moral proof of utopian sentiment evidenced in nature, to motivate Marxian ideal that property was “theft” which was as wrong as the “theft” the culture did not approve of.

Of course, at least Lysenko saw the need to naturally justify some misgivings that shirking revolutionaries might have been having about the Master Plan to Shoot People. Modern utopians just hand-wave, “Morality is out there somewhere. If it exists, it is natural; and thus, separate from religion.”

But excursion into Lysenko would only be on target if Communism were clearly limited by the self-limiting factor of Lysenkoism. It would be like me citing the self-limiting quality of Shakerism as a proof that Christianity has the same self-limiting forces.

The self-limiting quality of components does not argue for the self-limiting quality of the thing itself. I could call Composition Fallacy, here, if I thought he was trying to make this point. It’s much more likely a confused point than an actual attempt to use Composition.

I could also shake a finger and gravely pronounce “Propter-hoc fallacy!” because he seems to link the fall of Lysenkoism with the fall of Communism, 30 years after it had increased crop yield (proving the adaptability of Communists themselves!). But, he most likely didn’t think it through. Which is why the fallacy game is a stupid game.

In fact, I have good reason to believe he’s just confused here. Despite that many atheist maintain that religions come in two forms, one of which is “secular” or “secularized”, and in particular Hitchens’ point is that they do. The blogger uses religion almost constantly in the non-secular form: “God and religion” vs. “secular faiths”.

…religion tells us that its rules are the way God says things have to be.

Really, even “secular religion”?

…it’s the certainty that God-belief provides that is the reason religion is so dangerous.

Really? That’s what made secular religions so dangerous? And the hyper-efficient killing machines of “secular religions” are comparatively benign by their lack of a God-belief because you could question Pol Pot?!

Of course, I’m picking on him here a little bit. And, I have no reason to believe that he confuses these terms any more than many other atheist bloggers. On that note, Reitz is actually more on target with his take that all religions are scary because all faiths are scary.