Bill's Big Stuff

An inadequate “Case Against Christianity”

2010-08-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

“The Case Against Christianity” by Michael Martin, (Temple Press, Philadelphia, 1991) is written by a capital “A” Atheist, one who evangelizes for atheism. Having been an atheist for thirty years prior to becoming a theist, I have no problem with someone publishing a book in support of atheism. However, I would have expected something better than this from a professor of philosophy. Despite the claims on the back of the cover, the scholarship is lacking to the point of appearing as intellectual cowardliness, the premises of the argument are set up to guarantee his “winning,” and he sets up a caricature of Christianity as being the whole or at least the majority of it. His technique could be described as episodes of particular specificity surrounded by large amounts of generality. I think the writing could be described as rhetorical not scholarly. He also depends on a lack of proof being taken as disproof of Christian positions, as he presents them. This of course is a logical fallacy, so is not explicitly presented but is implied throughout the book. It is exactly the kind of book, I in my atheistic days, untrained in philosophy and having only a smattering of scholarship in the area would have written. As such it does a disservice to all involved, Christians, atheists, and philosophers, trivializing centuries of debate.

Were it not for the current atmosphere of hostility to Judeo-Christian belief in our society, this book could be ignored. Considering that it is twenty years old and little or no mention has been made of it, that I have seen, it has been ignored. However, it is also an example of the kind of argumentation that can have persuasiveness to wannabe intellectuals, who read it as support of their adoption of atheism, without the knowledge to evaluate it uncritically. (Even those who should be critical apparently aren’t, given their support on the back cover.) Apparently being an Atheist, as opposed to an atheist, blinds one to ones own illogic and poor argumentation, just as Fundamentalism blinds one to the current status of science and scholarly religious discourse. This review is presented to make an object lesson of this book in how not to argue religious questions.

From the first, Professor Martin engages in the use of sweeping generalization of history, dismissing the first few hundred years of debate over what constitutes the correct Christian doctrines as a massive suppression of dissent by the church. He also sees the rise of Biblical Criticism and emergence of Science in the Nineteenth Century as an attack on Christian doctrine not as an attempt better understand the world. An in-depth study of both of these periods would show it to be much more complex than that.

At this point he justifies his book and presents us with these two paragraphs:

“Although some nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticisms of Christianity deserve praise for raising important critical questions and for continuing the work of the earlier critics, an adequate, systematic, philosophical critique has yet to be produced. The purpose of this work is to present such a criticism. Although I have elsewhere argued at length for atheism, this view will not be presupposed in what follows. Indeed, a reader can believe in God and accept everything in this book without being inconsistent.

“My object in presenting the case against Christianity is theoretical, not practical. I am not so naïve as to suppose that the arguments set forth here will induce many people to give up their Christian beliefs. My claim is simply that in the light of my discussion rational people should give up these beliefs.”

The claims being made here are breath-taking in their sweep and scope. First is his claim that the book is an “adequate, systematic, philosophical critique.” Second is that it is the first such critique. The third is that his discussion is correct and rational, and finally that his rationality of argument is sufficient to cause a reversal of belief. If one looks at the footnotes, his reputed critical sources are pamphleteers from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. There are no sources from the work of Higher Criticism that arose at that time. He places himself among poor competition from the start. But worse is his complete ignorance or active ignoring of the centuries of debate that started in the Seventeenth Century over Christian doctrine and its applicability. He is definitely not the first systematic critic. His last sentence is what is so wonderfully arrogant. Restated he says, “I am right and therefore you should change your beliefs. To not do so is to be irrational.” Rationality is based on premises that are given not proven. His premises have to be as convincing as those he is trying to replace, and the logic must flow without choices from those premises. Essentially he is making a claim to infallibility, since he creates an imperative statement.

He next establishes what he will call Christianity against which to make his case. He starts with the creeds, Apostle’s, Nicene, and Athanasian. His presentation of the creeds and their history is quite fair. He uses an obscure 1877 book by Phillip Schaff, who Professor Martin describes as a scholar of the creeds, to support his claim that they are accepted and provide a description of their purposes in mainline churches. In my mind this is pseudo-scholarship. The fact that the three creeds are in prayer books and hymnals and used at services in almost all Christian churches is sufficient. He is simply trying to create a gloss of scholarship on his writing here. He then compares and discusses the various beliefs stated in the creeds and from that creates definitions of the beliefs of a “Basic Christian,” a “Liberal Christian,” and an “Orthodox Christian.”

It is in creating his definitions that he uses a stylistic device that is apparently an attempt to create the impression of deep analysis. He uses formal logic to create the definitions. Example:
“Person P is a Basic Christian if and only if P believes that …..”
Or
“Person P is an Orthodox Christian if and only if P is a Basic Christian and P believes…..”
This type of formality is only used here and in one or two other places. Yet nowhere does the reasoning or discussion use these formalities. I have seen the same kinds of devices in my early writing when I was trying to pretend I was very knowledgeable. Unfortunately, I suspect the same thing here. He then introduces an extra belief statement that Jesus is the model of ethical behavior. He also adds to the definition that a Christian attempts to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus.

At this point, he appears to be reasonable enough, and one can easily accept his starting premises so far. Based on what occurs in the rest of the book, one has to be very careful. He is actually setting up a bait and switch. He will define Orthodox Christianity very rigidly, add biblical literalism, attack it in detail, then claim he has made a case against Christianity, when all he has done is point out the illogic of literal reading and interpretation of the creeds and the Bible.

In the Introduction which we are still considering, he states that these articles of belief are assumptions, and then raises some questions concerning them. Here is where we see some beginnings of tilting the argument in the givens. He divides the beliefs into three groups, historical, theological, and ethical. That of itself is not an issue, it is how he sorts them that starts creating concern.

He groups the existence of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion by Pilate, and the Resurrection as historical theses. He then states that historical methods are applicable to determining the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. He also makes the claim that historical research is relevant to the determination of the truth of the Second Coming, and in deciding whether Jesus was the Son of God and not a mere man. He also wants to use historical evidence in Jesus’ teachings about salvation and ethics. First of all, he is asking us to agree to the historicity of these events as determining their truth or falsity. These are articles of faith. To some degree they are based on historical events, but one does not make an argument strictly from history in these cases. Moreover, he is also making a claim that he can present a historical case for or against these. As we continue in the book, he does a poor job of it compared to the work I have seen written by true historians.

Considering that the issue of the Virgin Birth may possibly hinge on translation issues of the Koine Greek passages and on interpretation of other scripture, which is contentious in itself, it is hard to believe that historical analysis can provide light here. There have been many previous discussions of the Virgin Birth, and my former pastor said, “My belief is not based on the state of Mary’s hymen.” Of course this puts him outside the author’s definition of an Orthodox Christian, which, as we shall see, is what he is attacking. So the Virgin Birth is as important to our author’s case as it may be to some Christians. The literal Virgin Birth is essential to his case.

The Resurrection is still another issue that does not seem readily amenable to historical methods. The empty tomb may well be in the domain of history, but the explanations may not. The appearances of Jesus after death may be questioned, but ultimately one has not a definitive acceptance or rejection by logic and analysis, but a decision based on one’s own evaluation of the evidence for and against. It is a “fuzzy logic” decision. As for the Second Coming, it is a prediction not a historical event. What we shall see is that he wants to use the absolute, literal statements on when the Second Coming will occur to discredit it.

We shall leave the use of history to decide if Jesus was the Son of God and Jesus’ teachings until the author discusses them.

He then states that the assumptions of the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and salvation through faith in Jesus raise theological issues as well. He asks some example questions, some of which are immediately not literally true, and some of which have engaged theologians for centuries. He also questions whether Jesus’ ethical views are plausible and if they should be a model of ethical behavior.

The remainder of the Introduction lays out the overall approach of the book. He also mentions that he has two appendices on Divine Command theory of ethics and theories of Atonement. I am not sure why he includes these since he admits that Divine Command theory of ethics is not part of his definition of Christianity, and theory of Atonement is not part of any of the creeds.

This is an ambitious program, requiring the abilities of a historian, a theologian, and an ethicist. People have made a lifetime career of discussion one of the issues he raises, and he is going to cover them all. And, as we shall see, he believes that if one destroys these beliefs by the use of logic one must have destroyed a belief in Christianity or else be deemed irrational. What he forgets is that failure to prove is not disproof. He also is extremely dependent on a rigid, literal interpretation of the Bible, a view that is in the minority of Christianity today.

In the first chapter of the book, “The Basis of Christian Belief,” he asks the question, “Under what conditions should one believe Christian doctrines?” This is the first step in creating a tilted playing field for the discussion. He is assuming that belief is conditional, and that people arrive at belief via reason. For he then answers his question, “Surely the answer that recommends itself to reason and common sense is: Other things being equal, one should believe them only if there are good reasons to do so.” Of course his goal is to show there are no good reasons to do so. What is totally ignored is that religious issues are not decided solely on the basis of reason. They are more often decided on the basis of emotional perception and subjective experiences. Such inputs are not subject to reason and therefore “Other things” are never equal. He then creates a classification of reasons to believe into “epistemic reasons,” reasons that make the doctrines likely, and “beneficial reasons,” reasons that benefit the believer. He in turn creates two categories from the beneficial reasons, “moral” and “prudential.” He also considers interpretation of the answers either broadly, which includes all the reasons, or narrowly, which includes only epistemic reasons.

At this point we begin to see the outlines of his approach. The next sentence reads, “There is a strong presumption that one should believe Christian doctrines only on epistemic reasons.” He references his own prior book, Atheism: a Philosophical Justification to support the claim. Considering that epistemic grounds are those which can be demonstrated or supported with objective evidence, he has immediately created a bias in the rule set that eliminates any considerations other than physically evidential. If one buys that condition of the argument one has essentially ceded the battle before it starts. When he couples that with a demand for literal interpretation of creed and scripture, it is easy for him to claim that Christianity fails to be reasonable by his criteria. He waxes on in the paragraph about the unstated dangers of believing Christian doctrine on insufficient evidence. This begs the question: “Insufficient by whose standards?” He also makes a point of the possibility of being epistemologically irresponsible, which sounds good but has no useful meaning, unless one takes the time to define what is “epistemological responsibility.”

At this point he concludes: “…there is both a moral duty and an epistemic duty not to believe in Christian doctrines unless there are good epistemic reasons to believe them. It is indeed a strange view of belief that thinks it is totally subject to duty and reason. Like most fundamental parts of a person’s being, beliefs are built up from far more than just reason and physical evidence. Generally, in this author’s experience, belief is changed only by major experiential events or prolonged intellectual struggle, not some facile discussion of epistemic evidence.

He next discusses beneficial reasons. He states that beneficial reasons might be used when the epistemic evidence is even, i.e. as a tie-breaker. He also says that it is allowable for belief for beneficial reasons if the epistemic evidence is inadequate or, in very special instances when it goes against belief. His justification, however, for this approach is utilitarian, saying that the belief from beneficial reasons will result in benefits and not result in “long-term adverse effects on society, its institutions, and human personality and character.” He presents a couple of rather far-fetched examples of possible beneficial reasons to believe. He is attempting to make the decision to believe one of utilitarian choice, and finally states that there are no reasons to accept a Christian God over any other supernatural being, and that personal happiness is a decision based on individual background. It is interesting that in his discussion of beneficial reasons, he mentions Pascal and William James as having made beneficial arguments, but he simply dismisses them. The fact is that other than his straw men, he does not deal with any of the theological discussions over the ages concerning beneficial reasons to believe. It is a case of silence and tip-toeing by.

He then asks, “Cannot Christian doctrines be based on faith? “ He then looks at the discussions of faith by Thomas Aquinas, Søren Kierkegaard, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He uses them as stalking horses, considering them as representative of their type of faith arguments and states that if he finds problems with these then there will be problems with discussions that are similar. Of course he ignores the possibility that there might be discussions that are not based on the same ideas as these three.

I have not read Thomas Aquinas and therefore cannot judge the accuracy or the fairness of his summary of Aquinas’ arguments. Professor Martin states that Aquinas uses the existence of miracles the success of the Christian church, and the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy as evidence of the truth of Christian doctrine. He then proceeds to state that these are not adequate supports. Though I would have liked to see more of why he considers miracles a problem, in a generic sense I agree with that statement. His saying other religions are successful by the same criteria is true today, but in Aquinas time, the Roman Catholic church was the only major church. His disputing the Biblical Prophecies by pointing out the failure of the Second Coming, is to revert to Biblical literalism. On this last issue, even by Aquinas’ time it was being interpreted as symbolic rather than literal. The problem is that Professor Martin is disputing a thirteenth century discussion using modern perspectives. That is similar to arguing that a flintlock muzzle-loader is ineffective and useless because there are now automatic rifles. At the time the flintlock was used it was effective. It is the same for Aquinas. There have been many more modern discussions of faith since then, and many of them could be considered “traditional.”

The choice of Kierkegaard for faith is to choose one of the extremes of justification of faith. According to Professor Martin, Kierkegaard argues that a total commitment to a Christian God is necessary even in the face of all contrary evidence, that a belief in God is not justified by reason. Furthermore, Dr. Martin then identifies a Kierkegaardian faith as fanaticism, and discusses the dangers of fanaticism. Dr. Martin then states, “We know from history the incalculable harm that can be done by fanaticism,” and continues with a build-up of the evils of fanaticism. He then condemns Kierkegaard’s definition of faith as a vice not a virtue because he has equated it to fanaticism. At this point he has made several errors. First, he thinks that it is dangerous to be guided by blind, passionate faith. I would argue that it depends on what the guidance is. The example he uses is Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. That may have seemed dangerous for Isaac, but for Abraham, it would have risked an even greater danger. Professor Martin cannot have his cake and eat it too. If we are going to use utilitarian ethics to judge then don’t suddenly use absolutes of judgment. The discussion of the evils of fanaticism are out of place in the discussion of faith by Kierkegaard. Professor Martin has greatly oversimplified and then caricatured it as fanaticism.

I see no constructive reason why the author chose Wittgenstein as the third exemplar of faith. I know of no Christian doctrine or discussion that is based on Wittgenstein, and from Dr. Martin’s discussion it would not occur. All religions believe in words as common to all of humanity, not as special constructs for their own use. If Dr. Martin’s summary is accurate, Wittgenstein is a retreat from meaning to meaningless internal analysis. Professor Martin and I agree in his last paragraph in this section: “…Christian and non-Christian are really disagreeing and that there is a common language and common categories.” However, we disagree in what he has accomplished. He thinks he has undermined faith as a reason for believing in Christian doctrine. I think he has failed in this task because he chose an outdated discussion of faith, a caricature of faith, and a meaningless view of faith as his exemplars, and having disposed of them generalized it to all of Christian faith, a error.

Now he turns to Christian doctrines as basic beliefs. Using the ideas from the foundational approach to epistemology, one states there are beliefs that are accepted as is and not justified by other beliefs to avoid infinite regress or vicious circularity. Dr. Martin points out that foundational epistemology originally related to simple mathematical and logical statements and to sense experiences. He then discusses the extensions of foundational epistemology to belief in God according Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga supposedly holds that a belief in God is properly basic, i.e. the same as the foundational statements “2+2=4” or “a thing is one thing or not one thing but not both.” However, apparently Plantigna continues by saying that even though it is basic it has grounds for belief. Professor Martin considers this an error and from there to a description of what he considers the problems with Plantigna’s formulation. Finally, he states that Plantigna 1) violates the spirit and intention of foundationalism, 2) claims that no belief can become a basic belief, 3) it makes it too easy for a belief to be considered rational, and 4) that all Christians hold common beliefs that are basic and that they agree on the conditions that make them so. The validity of his arguments is tied up in both his reading of Plantigna and foundational epistemology, neither of which I can comment on. However, his fifth observation is that a belief in God is not appropriate for inclusion in the class of basic beliefs. This I strongly disagree with. To believe in God or not believe in God, i.e. believe in no-God, is of necessity the first choice. It is foundational. Once that decision has been made, everything else is justification for that belief. His discussion is fairly effective in disputing Plantigna on a belief in God as a basic belief. However, I think he has cherry-picked the philosopher he disputes for his particularly weak presentation.

I seriously doubt that Alvin Plantigna is the only religious philosopher to discuss belief, and to take Plantigna, a single example, and then consider the defeat of his arguments as defeating the entire concept of Christian doctrine as belief is analogous to taking out a Sergeant of a company and consider one has defeated the company. His goal in this chapter is to force the discussion of Christianity into a discussion of the epistemological basis of Christian doctrine. For atheists, myself included when I was an atheist, this is the easiest ground upon which to criticize Christian doctrine. However, that does not make it a slam-dunk. To base the entire case against Christianity solely on it epistemology is to ignore most of what religions are about. They are not solely about facts and logic but also the meaning of those facts, and the further implications when allied with personal subjective experience, and testimony of those one wishes to believe.

This essay will deal with the next Chapter in some detail since it concerns itself with the historical Jesus. Since the existence of Jesus is fundamental to Christianity, Dr. Martin’s treatment of the subject is important. This is an area in which I have done some study, so am slightly familiar with the literature and the scholars in the field.

Chapter 2, “The Historicity of Jesus,” begins with a very cursory overview designed to lead to the question, “Did Jesus really exist?” To quote the final paragraph of this peroration: “This chapter, then, considers the question of whether there is reliable historical evidence for the assumption for the historicity of Jesus. It will also ask if there is any historical evidence against this assumption.” To do this he draws primarily on one author, G. A. Wells, and does not discuss any work of the main scholars in the search for the historical Jesus (A review of the current activity in the field lists 19.) A reading of the end notes reveals a preponderance of titles indicating disbelief in the existence of Jesus. Considering that Gert Theissen and Annette Mertz published a major book (The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, Fortress Press, 1998) that was a guide to the literature on the historical Jesus and contained hundreds, if not close to or over a thousand references to the literature, Dr. Martin can hardly claim to have properly researched the topic. From my reading to date, there is much judgment in evaluating the evidence, and I think that Dr. Martin cannot claim any kind of impartiality here.

On with the review. Dr Martin opens the main thrust of his arguments with the common observations concerning the difficulties verifying independently the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. He generalizes the issue by saying, “Skepticism about the details of Jesus’ life can generate skepticism about his very existence.” He then claims that the most respected contemporary critique of the life of Jesus is G. A. Wells. He claims he is well known, and that his position is singled out by apologists for the historical Jesus. (A survey of the literature in my library, including authors that do not favor the current interpretations of Jesus’ life, do not list G. A. Wells as a source, despite Dr. Martin’s claim.)

Regardless of his esteem or lack of it, one still has to look at Well’s argument on its own merits. A proper presentation of Well’s argument is beyond the scope of this essay. It consists primarily of pointing to the Gospels as inadequate historical documents, Paul’s lack of mention of the details of Jesus’ life, the theological goals of the Gospels, the inadequacies of secular confirmation of the events in Jesus’ life, the inability to state dates accurately, and some reasoning on the sequence of appearance of certain narratives in the post-Gospel literature. Wells then concludes that Jesus was actually a myth based on the Jewish Wisdom literature. However, as one reads this summary, one finds that Wells exercises considerable judgment on what is and is not adequate evidence or mention of Jesus.

In discussing the criticisms of Wells, Dr. Martin quotes men that are not part of the mainline historical Jesus scholarship. He thus can be accused of trying to win his point by deliberately skewing the evidence. This area is so complex and difficult, that to try to treat it in a single chapter of 36 pages is not realistic. Based on the selection of scholars, the conclusion was foregone. Because of his own position and the goal he is trying to attain, Dr. Martin gives high credibility to skeptical positions and low credibility to affirmative positions on the existence of Jesus. Since there are figures in history from about the same time that are considered real on the basis of equivalent or even less information, it would appear that for Dr. Martin the stringency of proof for the life of Jesus’ is higher than for others.

The chapters on the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth and Second Coming, and The Incarnation deal with material that can be widely interpreted among Christians. Dr. Martin consistently requires a literal reading when referring to the Gospel stories, which literal reading is easily disputed and defeated. He uses his apparent destruction of a preceding doctrine as part of his case against the current doctrine under discussion. I am not going to discuss these chapters in any detail, as I would not present an effective discussion. I am currently working on my own formulations of the Resurrection and is sequels; I am partial to Mark, not Matthew or Luke concerning Jesus origins (unknown), I think the statements of the Second Coming has much to be discussed as to how and why they were recorded, and I do not believe in the Incarnation. However, unlike Dr. Martin, I do not consider these as reasons to discard Christianity or partial Christian belief.

I do think Dr. Martin’s discussion of Christian ethics warrants looking at in some detail. Though I don’t think it alone can make a case against Christianity, it does reveal some interesting overlaps between Christian and secular ethics.

Dr. Martin considers Jesus’ ethical teachings and example as essential to the case against Christianity. He also considers them important in substantiating the Incarnation. I directly disagree with this last statement. If Jesus’ behavior is to be emulated, to validate it by appealing to the Incarnation is to provide what I call the Divine Cop-out—how could we possibly be as good as Jesus, since he was divine? For Jesus to provide an example of proper human behavior, that behavior must come from someone who is completely and absolutely human while acting. Any other interpretation is to require behavior that is not possible for humans. From my point of view, Incarnation and Jesus example as a human are not related. Dr. Martin does consider the emulation of Jesus’ teachings and behavior as part of being a Christian, even the most liberal type of Christian, and in that I would agree.

The second paragraph of this chapter is a minefield full questions that can only be answered subjectively:

”Our first job is to try to become clear on what Jesus’ teachings were. As we shall see, this is not as easy as it may seem. Once we have some idea of Jesus’ ethics we must consider his gospel impartially and ask: Do Jesus’ teachings provide a workable ethics? Would a sensitive moral observer agree with what he taught? Was Jesus an ideal moral model? Would a sensitive moral person do what Jesus did? In addition, we must ask how Christian ethicists have interpreted Jesus’ saying. In so doing we must determine how Christian ethics differ from plausible systems of secular ethics and if Christian ethics have clear advantages over these secular systems.

His second sentence is a massive understatement. What Jesus said and what he meant by what he said is an active and controversial field today. Dr. Martin can only make his own evaluation of the issue, not a complete and overarching one that would allow him to make a clear pronouncement on Christian ethics. So from the start we have to take the position that he is discussing HIS interpretation of Jesus teachings. Dr. Martin makes a common mistake in the next sentence, the Gospels are not Jesus’ gospels, they are about Jesus not by him. This is a nit in one sense, but possibly important in how he deals with them. We must always keep in mind that the Gospels are what their authors wanted us to know about Jesus, and as such are not true biographies. Their purpose is to teach religious truth, not historical truth. The next four questions are completely open to subjective judgment—workable by what standard, what is meant by “a sensitive moral observer”, what is “an ideal moral model,” and what is meant by “a sensitive moral person?” The last two sentences actually have valid grounds for discussion, and a program of comparing the understanding of Christian ethicists to that of secular ethicists would be a topic for a major book in itself. I don’t doubt that there have been such books written. The one caveat that we must keep in mind for such a discussion is who are the Christian ethicists and who are the secular ethicists? One must be either very comprehensive or at least representative or the discussion becomes simply the comparison of two ethicists to one another, not a general comparison of Christian to secular ethics.

One of the major themes in the discussion of the historicity of Jesus, was that Paul and the Epistles, several of which were written prior to the Gospels do not quote Jesus’ teachings, even when in Dr. Martin’s opinion, it would be to the advantage of the writer to do so. He uses this a presumptive evidence that Jesus’ teachings were actually made up after the fact. This is a naïve representation of the issue, as the purpose of the Epistles was quite different from the purposes of the gospels. The analogy would be the Epistles are to the Gospels, as administrative letters are to the papers of incorporation of a company. The former does not necessarily need to quote the latter in performing their purpose. We must also remember that we do not know the complete context of any of the Epistles or the Gospels other than their internal content and the times in which they were written. There is far more room for selective interpretation than Dr. Martin would have us believe. However, Dr. Martin uses this argument to immediately cast doubt on Jesus’ teachings as being those of Jesus. He then chooses to continue his discussion as if the teachings as related in the Synoptic Gospels were the teachings of Jesus.

In developing his interpretation of Christian ethics, he acknowledges indebtedness to the following: An Atheist’s Values, by Richard Robinson, Atheism: The Case Against God, by George H. Smith, and “Why I am not a Christian” in Philosophy and Contemporary Issues, by Bertrand Russell. From the start he is using an interpretation from three atheists, not even his own interpretation. Immediately one wants to question whether he has read the Gospels himself or is simply taking someone else’s word for it. The remainder of the section quotes some of the most contentious and difficult of the Gospel verses—the so-called “hard verses”—because of the difficulty of preaching on them when taken literally. This, of course, is exactly what Dr. Martin wants to do, regardless of whether this is indeed what is commonly done in Christian churches. What follows is the playing of verses from one Gospel against another, without regard to any of the higher criticism that has occurred over the last one hundred years. This is the same kind of sophistry that Shelby Spong exhibited in one of his books, showing that literal interpretation of the Bible is contradictory. This is not news to any person educated in Christianity. This is where much of the intellectual work of biblical scholars, atheist, agnostic, and theist, has gone over the past hundred and fifty years.

When Dr. Martin discusses Jesus’ life as an example of his ethical teachings, he is selective in what he chooses and plays off the gentleness in Luke against the more judgmental stories in Matthew and Mark. He also accuses Jesus of anti-intellectuality because of his teachings that say to be as children, and to believe what he said. This ignores much of what Jesus said and did at other times, and definitely ignores the context of his teaching. One of the interpretations of his teachings is that he was working against the legalism of the Pharisees to get back to the spirit of the Law, not its absolute behavioral proscriptions. What comes out of the selections of Jesus behavior is more a caricature than a picture of him. His teachings are also evaluated by modern criteria rather than by the times in which he taught. Again, this time implicitly rather than explicitly, Dr. Martin is depending on a literal rather than a metaphorical or allegorical reading of the scripture. Such literalism is confined to only a subset of Christianity. In using a literal interpretation, he makes charges of unrealism and anti-intellectualism.

The section on “What Jesus’ Practices and Teachings Neglect” again depends on literalism in interpretation. Here is the opening of the section:

“Many Christians profess to find in the moral teachings of Jesus answers to all the moral questions of modern life. Needless to say, he explicitly addressed few of the moral concerns of our society today. For example, he said nothing directly about the morality or immorality of abortion, the death penalty, war, slavery, contraception, or racial and sexual discrimination.”

The implication is that since Jesus did not explicitly discuss these issues it is not possible to obtain moral guidance on them. In this case it is not scripture, but Dr. Martin that is being anti-intellectual. He fails to credit the reader with being able to extend a lesson beyond its examples.

Dr. Martin then continues stating that it is not clear what can be deduced from his sayings and activities. He tries to show that Jesus was inconsistent on the subject of poverty, and also condemns him for not explicitly condemning slavery. Such simplistic analyses do not belong in a serious book. These areas have been the subject of much comment and study over hundreds of years. When one considers that the evangelists that wrote the Gospels were selecting material to present their interpretation of Jesus and his teachings, and that they also had to work within a highly censorious atmosphere socially, not all topics would necessarily be quoted. Also slavery in Roman times varied in its causes and the way it was carried out. In fact, some slavery was voluntary. Our modern image of slavery did not necessarily fit the reality of Roman times in many cases. So not only has Dr. Martin depended on a literalism that is inappropriate, he also fails to consider the overall context of Jesus’ times vs. ours.

In the next section of this chapter, “Evaluation of Jesus’ Ethics,” Dr. Martin discusses specific “commandments” that form what he considers Jesus’ ethics. These “commandments” are a formulation by Richard Robinson, in his book, An Atheist’s Values The first is what he terms the Love of God and Faith in Jesus commandments. To quote the first paragraph:

The harsh otherworldly aspect of the Love of God Commandment is accepted by few Christians today. For example, only sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses hold doctrines approximating to the view that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that one should not be concerned about the future, that one should give up everything, including one’s family, to follow Jesus. Although these are clear messages of Jesus they are ignored by most Christians.

Yet he goes on to expand on this, claiming that Jesus was not simply pointing out that people need to focus less on the future and more on enjoying living, but that people should rely on God for everything. He admits that many theologians reject a complete dependency on God to do it all. But he cannot resist pointing what he sees as the error, even though it is not part of mainline Christian thought. Again his discussion depends on a simple literalistic interpretation of what Jesus was saying as if it were a stenographic quote of his words.

He dismisses what he terms the Faith in Jesus Commandment by saying that it depends on the truth of the Incarnation, which he considers to already be destroyed by his discussion of it. This so-called commandment is based on an interpretation of Luke, and is also heavily dependent on the translation being used to justify it. It concerns the belief that Jesus was the actual son of God and that he claimed to be the Messiah.

The next “commandment” is labeled the Purity of Heart and Language Commandment. This is not a direct commandment but is a synthesis by Robinson from the verses in Matthew 5:21-36. Dr. Martin then goes on to discuss how these are in conflict with modern psychology, leading to harmful repression, followed by a discussion in which he points out that following certain lines of thought can indeed be harmful. He then attempts to argue that modern discussion is based on consequences but that is not what Jesus was saying, that Jesus was arguing the thoughts were harmful in themselves. Dr. Martin appears to be following someone else’s discussion and has not created his own from direct reading. The discussion of this section is inconclusive, and actually is one of the more honest sections in the book.

The Commandment of Humility is also synthesized from sayings in the Synoptic Gospels concerning giving and praying in secret, and serving others. Dr. Martin tries to first show that taken to the extreme, being totally retiring can be foolish, using a crisis example. He also tries to say that public giving may be altruistic, that it depends on motive. He also takes the extreme position of not judging others to show it is also unrealistic. He considers it unclear if a less extreme position is what Jesus meant.

At this point, the discussion of Jesus’ ethics is based on another atheist’s synthesis of the commandments from the Synoptic gospels. It also appears to be based on an absolute literalism and an ignoring of both social, Biblical, and temporal contexts. To this point, Dr. Martin almost appears to want his cake and eat it too. He admits that few modern Christians accept the harsh literal interpretation he is condemning, yet still makes the effort to condemn it. It is almost as if he desperately need to score every negative point he can.

The remainder and bulk of the chapter is spent on a discussion of the Love Your Neighbor Commandment. Here is his opening paragraph:

Whatever problems there may be with the ethical teachings and practice of Jesus as they are portrayed in the synoptic Gospels, many Christians would insist that the essential core of the Christian message is the commandment to love your neighbor. Let us sample some of the interpretations of this commandment that have been provided by recent Christian ethical theorists and see if it is acceptable. It should be clear in what follows that some of these contemporary interpretations of Christian ethics have come a very long way from Jesus’ obscure and questionable pronouncements in the Gospels. Indeed, stripped of its theological gloss, recent Christian ethics has a considerable overlap with secular ethical theory. Thus, the question arises of why it should be preferred.

He chose as his examples, Paul Ramsey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gene Outka. He also mentions in a footnote a source for four other examples.

Dr. Martin considers Paul Ramsey’s Basic Christian Ethics to be “[o]ne of the clearest and most thoughtful interpretations of contemporary Christian ethics.” From the extensive quotes and discussion presenting Ramsey’s views, Ramsey interprets the scripture concerning loving ones neighbors as having an apocalyptic basis, but that basis is not necessary for them to be valid today. One of the points Dr. Martin makes is the dropping of the hellfire and damnation and vengefulness portions (as Dr. Martin sees them) from Jesus’ teachings. The emphasis is on Jesus mercy and kindness. Dr. Martin then says:

Non-Christians and even humanists can in principle accept Ramsey’s ethical teachings when they are divorced from their theological underpinnings, and despite Ramsey’s claim that Christian ethics cannot be separated from its religious foundation, they can be. There seems to be no reason why non-Christians and secularists could not hold Ramsey’s view about, for example, self-defense and the problems of utilitarianism. The crucial question is whether there would be any justification for them to do so.

But Dr. Martin’s payoff in choosing Paul Ramsey is that Ramsey preaches total non-resistance to anything, not even non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin then pounces on this to show that Ramsey is unjustified in his self-defense position and that his discussion of utilitarianism adds nothing to the criticisms of utilitarianism. He also points out that a justice principle might be an adequate substitute for the love of neighbor. To a secularist this may seem plausible, but not to a Christian. There is depth and implications to loving ones neighbor as oneself that go beyond a simple principle of justice. Dr. Martin also points out that ignoring indirect consequences can be harmful even if one is exactly following the principle of loving ones neighbor as oneself. He of course resorts to an extreme example, but then he has also selected an extreme example of an ethicist to discuss in the first place.

Dr. Martin’s discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr interprets Niebuhr as saying that Jesus preached an impossible ethical ideal that nonetheless has validity today as a guide to our own day-to-day ethical behavior. Niebuhr is taken as thinking that “we cannot live up to the ethical ideal of Jesus because of our human nature.” There is further explication on Niebuhr’s themes, and much of it appears fair. Martin then points out. “Although Niebuhr ties his ethical view closely to Christian religious doctrines there is no a priori reason to do so. Thus a non-Christian and even a secularist could maintain that although the ethics of Jesus is an impossible ideal, it nevertheless provides insights abut and serves as a source of criticisms of actual ethical systems.” He expands on this idea showing how a secularist might find the same ideals but with different justification.

Then Dr. Martin suddenly shifts to his belief system.

I have suggested that even secularists could accept the view that human beings are fundamentally egoistica and attempt to base their belief on the findings of history and the social sciences. However, I am skeptical that this attempt would be successful. Although the rindings of history and social science provide much evidence of human beings acting selfishly there is little reason to suppose that selfish human action is innate and unchangeable or that altruism on a worldwide scale is impossible. There is, after all, ample evidence of human beings acting on purely altruistic motives. We are far from knowing when and under what conditions, however, human beings act with unselfish motives and how altruism can be promoted.

Dr. Martin then considers that Niebuhr’s description of what the law of love amounts to as inadequate and providing clearly what it entails. On those grounds he rejects the interpretation and offers an example of having to chose whether oneself or ones neighbor dies, and the law of love providing no answer. I don’t know that any ethical system other than pure immediate self-interest does provide that answer.

The third ethicist is Gene Outka, who wrote Agape: An Ethical Analysis. Outka is shown to discuss agape as an equal regard for all humans, but a response that takes into account their needs and abilities. That despite regarding them as of equal worth, one responds and treats different people differently. Dr Martin dismisses the theological justifications for agape as being dependent on a belief in God. He does raise the idea that theological statements of is do not necessarily entail the ought of our behavior, and considers Outka to have inadequately addressed this.

Dr. Martin then briefly describes Outka’s comparisons of agape to contemporary secular ethical thinking. He then posits that there might not be any real difference between Outka’s agape and a principle of equalitarian justice combined with a principle of beneficence. His concluding discussions for this section dwell primarily on the issues of the is-ought gap, and also concludes that Outka does not generate more doubt for creating a secular version of agape than a religious one, and that the open question of how much overlap there is between secular and religious agape is not due to disagreement among philosophers but to a lack of evidence and clarity on the notion itself.

Dr. Martin then finishes the discussion of agape with the question of whether there might be times when it is moral to be selfish. He provides examples of situations where a short-term constant self-negation leads to long-term negative consequences. In this he is again taking an absolute literal extreme, which few take, as the attempt to discredit agape. He then posits that there are Christian ethicists that would not allow purely selfish action, action which does not at least indirectly carry concern for others.

He concludes the chapter with this statement:

I have argued that it is possible to develop a plausible secular equivalent to the Christian ethics of neighbor love that in this world at least may well have significant overlap with it. Uncertainty on this score reflects our ignorance over the consequences of our actions and the unclarity in the concept of neighbor love itself.

As a consequence I do not see where this forms part of a case against Christianity. I think he is trying to imply that, if one can form an equivalent ethics without God or Jesus, then why bother with either? Overall, however, I consider this his best chapter in the book. Though I question his choice of Ramsey and Niebuhr as model ethicists, suspecting that they were chosen for their ease of disputation, his presentation and discussion of Outka was quite enjoyable to read and made its points well. What comes from the discussion, however, is that making a choice of belief on the basis of ethical systems is not particularly useful, since almost equivalent systems can be constructed within and outside Christianity. In fact, I would argue that such equivalence is a point in favor of tolerance on the part of both non-Christian and Christian for the other.

I will not discuss the chapter on “Salvation by Faith” in any detail. Partly this is because I have my own issues with the doctrine, and partly because I do not see Dr. Martin as raising any new significant points. It does appear that in order for him to argue against salvation, he has an interpretation of an all-good God that implies there is no judgment of people if God is all-good. He also argues that if one accounts for the “scandal of particularity,” i.e. that the infidels that have no opportunity to learn of Jesus are condemned to Hell, then there is no need for salvation by faith in Jesus.

In his concluding chapter, “Christian Responses,” Dr. Martin picks a number of positions, the main one being nonliteralism. He selects Thomas Boslooper, Rudolf Bultmann, and Richard Braithwaite as his exemplars of nonliteral interpretation. The problem is, as Dr. Martin points out, once one rejects literalism, the field is wide open to an infinitude of interpretations. What he has selected are some of the easier ideas to reject. He also makes brief mention of other Christian responses. The commentary on those is based on his earlier arguments in the book.

His concluding paragraph is of importance:

There are alternatives to rejecting Christianity but either they do not seem promising or else they transform Christianity beyond recognition. It would be far more straightforward and rational to reject Christianity outright rather than attempt to salvage it. However, for most of the 1.6 billion Christians in the world rejection if not at the present time a practical possibility. They are either unaware of the problems of the Christian faith or because their training and background, they are believers nevertheless. I have no recommendations to make here about what can or should be done about this regrettable situation.

The Christianity that Dr. Martin would reject exists only for a segment of people calling themselves Christian, the Fundamentalists. Dr. Martin’s arguments rely on literal readings of the scriptures, and even there one could argue over meaning simply because of the many different translations. I have found in my own researches that all theologically important scriptures are translated to be compatible with the translator’s own beliefs. Among the nine translations I own, many passages are identical across all of them, and the critical passages are all different there being as many as nine different versions. The truth is that there are forms of Christianity that are an anathema to other forms of Christianity. It has already been transformed.

I disagree with his statement that it would be more rational to reject rather than to salvage it. Religion does more than provide a system of ethics and belief. It motivates social interaction and individual well-being. People appear to have an innate need to believe in something. In Dr. Martin’s case it would appear to be “rationality,” which he then uses to justify his belief in no-God, just as Christian scholars justify their belief in God. It is a sad commentary, however, that there are people of both types that feel they are justified in trying to force their views on the rest. What Dr. Martin fails to understand is that there is no value to educating non-questioning Christians about the problems with Christianity, as he sees them. He may have the time, energy, and ability to ask and analyze such questions, but most people do not. Even if they have the ability, they have neither the interest nor the time. Their religious beliefs are incorporated in their lives and form part of a behavioral “shorthand” when making judgments. This is of great value in day to day living. Though I question my religion deeply, I do not find other peoples beliefs regrettable. That they do not agree with me is perfectly fine. I don’t have a monopoly on the correct answers, and truth to tell, neither does Dr. Martin. His view of “1.6 billion Christians” is really quite arrogant.

This book is similar to other books of its type. It does everything it can to destroy Christianity, but fails to provide anything in its place. Overall, by the standards of what I have been reading for the past couple of years or more, this is really quite amateurish. It is a long version of much that I wrote when an undergraduate first becoming an atheist. It has an absolute dependence on literal interpretation of the scriptures, which in turn has a heavy dependence on the translation from which the words are taken. I don’t think Professor Martin would stand a chance in a discussion with a Jesuit, or many of the well-known Christian philosophers and theologians. That I, in my modest state of knowledge, could find it so easy to dispute his writing, is in itself a harsh critique of its quality. What we have here is Atheist Fundamentalism, a warping of the religious intellectual landscape to support his anti-Christian, atheistic belief structure, just as the religious Fundamentalist Christians warp the scientific intellectual landscape to support their beliefs.

Yet another discussion of Determinism and Free will, Part 3: Free Will

2009-06-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

Introductory Comments
As I have explored in my first attempt at this discussion, determinism can be approached from various levels, and to varying degrees of absoluteness. I explored physical, psychological, and situational determinism. However, when the issue comes up in such discussions as this one, the issue really relates to choice—“Could I have done otherwise?”—to quote from Daniel Dennett. Thus we see the entanglement of free will with determinism and their potential antithetical characters.

Having shown in the preceding papers that the problem of a deterministic universe is insoluble, we now arrive at the question of free will. In the discussions I have seen, the argument is simplified to “if the universe is deterministic there is no free will and if it is not, there is.” What I shall try to do in this paper is show that free will exists regardless of the deterministic state of the universe.

So how should we approach this issue? Do we consider free will as existing when we could have done otherwise but did not know of the other choice(s)? Or does it exist only to the degree of our ability to see the choices? In the day to day world, this is probably the most common concept of free will, though we often will later do a Homer Simpson (Say, “Doh!” And smack our foreheads.). For this discussion to even attempt to be conclusive or effective, we will adopt the definition of having a choice whether we see the choice or not. In saying we have a choice, we are saying that at the point of choice, there is no influence on the choice but our own real or potential considerations. But there is a subtlety here. We could certainly say there is free will if the choice can be made randomly, but the choices that mean something are not random.

This is the importance of the whole discussion, our ethical decisions. It is having free will that makes us responsible agents. If we do not have a choice, then how can we be held responsible for the consequences? However, as important as our ethical choices are, the issue is more general and deals metaphysically with all our choices. In other words do we have any choice at all, or is it just an illusion? Here much as our emotions and intuitions motivate the investigation of the question, they are not a reliable guide, because we naturally want our choices, and believe we have them.

The definitions of determinism are frequently assumed in these discussions, at least in the more casual ones. Since we are dealing with human choice we need to look at what determinism means in that context. Implied in all discussions of this question is that ultimately the choice is connected to the physical world and the question is one of, “Is the physical world deterministic?” If we accept the concept of a separate, independent soul[2], then the question becomes moot, because such a soul is not influenced by the physical world and therefore has free will in this sense. One can postulate other non-physical influences, but then we are into speculation and not philosophy. This is the dualism problem. The difficulty with it is, how does the soul exist in a physical body? So whether we accept having a soul or not, for our discussion here, whatever is making the choices is dependent upon our brain for the means and methods.

Though we haven’t proven it, the connection to physical determinism, if that exits, is at least plausible or probable, if not true. But at what level do we take that determinism. In my earlier writing, and here as well, I show that the psychological processes as mediated by the nervous system were inherently non-deterministic, and independent of atomic determinism even if that existed. But even if atomic determinism does not apply, and that might still be an open issue, can we argue determinism from our experiences? In the sense that our experiences create the knowledge base from which our choices are made, we might argue that our choices are determined by experience. (But this is not the same exact meaning of determinism we are trying to deal with.) To the degree that our knowledge is deficient we might have our choices constrained. But above I explicitly stated that having unknown choices constitutes free will. It is analogous to the legal standard that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for wrong behavior.

Actually I think we have here an actual disconnect from the ethical free will question and the metaphysical question of determinism. The metaphysical question does not make assumptions concerning the connection of the physical world to the mental one. It assumes the connection exists. But I have never seen the connection explicitly stated. Is it via the influence of physics and chemistry on the nervous system or is it via our experiences? In my earlier discussions I assumed the former, and we will have to explicitly discuss this connection below, but the latter changes the basis for discussion. If determinism is via our experiences, then the question is either moot or subject purely to our definition of determinism and free will. However, in the preceding paper in this series, I showed we cannot determine if the physical universe is or is not deterministic. Thus any discussion of free will must be in the context of universal determinism as being a moot question.

The Nature of Choices
One of the things that is important here is what actually constitutes a choice? In saying that free will is the capability to make choices, what do we mean by making choices? A compulsive gambler or a drug addict is said to chose to do what they do, and yet they appear to be constantly doomed to make the same choice over and over. That they can be cured, if not in all cases, shows that these behaviors are indeed choices. If we simplify the nervous system involved and look at a rat in a maze that is subject to conditioning, we see that even there the concept of choice applies. Over time the rat will chose to go the preferred route, but if the reward is removed, eventually it will chose randomly or by some innate preference, e.g. preferentially the right or left branch. In the case of the rat, the choice is more primitive, but there still appears to be some process by which a selection is made.

We are still assuming that we know what a choice is. But if we look deeper at it, the issue is less obvious. Choices are alternatives that can be taken in an exclusive sense, i.e. A or B but not A and B, or rather, A then C or D, or B then E or F, where at some point we can no longer take the alternative. Having followed or chosen one path, the other becomes closed. So how do we go about selecting among alternatives? Often, and probably most of the time, the process is not a fully conscious, logical one.

One way of looking at the process is that there is a large, complex set of desires, criteria, and aversions that we compare events and alternatives to, and based on the overall “score” against this set, we make the choice. To make it even more complex there are weights or importance attached to various criteria, which can cause a high value of one criteria to outweigh all the others. This type of selection process could be semi-automatic when the primary criteria are sensory. It may be almost completely sub-conscious when the decisions have a strong emotional content, e.g., falling in love. Ask someone why they love someone, and there will be all sorts of specifics mentioned, but none of them sound like something that would be overwhelming on the surface. Sorting out these sorts of unconscious choices is the basis of psychotherapy when the choices lead to detrimental behavior.

There are also choices made consciously that are either due to logic or the application of an overriding principle, regardless of the emotional state associated with it. Here we can introduce a factor that I will come back to later, prediction. Emotional states and choices are here and now. They are based on an instant summation of our lives to date with respect to the choice. Consciousness, however, can look at a situation and consider what might happen in the future as a result of the choice, and do so for various alternatives. In so doing, it may find that what is momentarily desirable, is not so in the longer term, and lead to a choice counter to the emotional desire. At other times, the emotional state wins over rationality. Here we see what might be considered true choices or the expression of free will.

However, deciding the question based on outcomes is wrong. So far we have done nothing to rule out or rule in determinism in the choices. After all, one could argue that the emotions are determined in one way and the rationality in another. Even if we consider the times we make a mistake on something that we normally do correctly, the question is not resolvable, since one can argue either side, we were not sufficiently aware to catch the mistake or see our error as it was occurring and consider inattention a choice, or that some event occurred that made the mistake inevitable.

The Nature of the Nervous System
Since we are stating that choices are a function of the physical brain, the question becomes more complicated because the central nervous system really can be seen to have three levels, brain-stem and spinal cord, mid-brain and limbic system, and neo-cortex or the grey and white matter. All the discussions I have seen focus on the neo-cortex for that is where our rational thinking occurs. But our emotions come from the mid-brain and limbic system, and the automatic functions that control our body and maintain its constant internal environment come from the brain-stem and spinal cord. The brain-stem and spinal cord are also the first stages in sensory input and the final stages in output. For our choices to be determined, we have to demonstrate determinism at all levels of functioning. In this discussion we also must not confuse constraint or lack of options as the same as determinism. For example, in an ideal world in a dangerous situation we might have the choices of dealing with the danger in one of several ways or simply fleeing. If we are physically incapable of fleeing or cannot for some external reason, we still have choices as to how to deal with it.

In any given situation, all three levels of the brain are making some sort of decision. The closest to determinism is the brain-stem and spinal cord. There behaviors are reflexive, i.e. a given stimulus will elicit a standard response. The integrity of the spinal column and peripheral nerves is what a doctor tests with a reflex hammer. The expression of reflexes can be over-ridden from a higher level, such as not flinching or not drawing away from pain, but the nervous pathways still are activated. There are some reflexes that cannot be over-ridden, for example closing ones eyes while sneezing. I’ve tried, more than once. So at the level of the brain-stem and spinal cord, we may say that behavior is determined, that there are no choices expressed at this level. All responses to stimuli are hard-wired in. In this case the determinism is that of a machine, which unless it breaks does the same thing every time to a given external input.

When we move to the mid-brain and limbic system, the situation seems to be less obvious. To some degree emotions seem to be inate or hard-wired in. Even new-born babies seem to express emotion, sadness, anger, and happiness. But these emotions are related to survival in the new-borne. They are a crude form of communication with the mother for needs to be met. As humans mature however, emotions become far more complex and nuanced in their expression. After puberty a whole new set of emotional responses becomes available, based on sexual capability. Emotional responses can be trained or conditioned, depending on the sum of our life experiences. But there are variations on this, for example, one single extremely emotional event can cause a life-long response to similar situations regardless of whether the outcome is the same or not, or a response may be built up over years of similar experiences with similar outcomes.

I also think this area of the brain is part of the source of our intuitions and snap-judgments. There is what is called archecortex. This is analogous to the rat brain of Skinnerian fame. It is at this level that conditioning occurs in rats and other lower level vertebrates. However, when one looks at conditioning experiments, one sees that they never achieve 100% success. There is always a small chance that the rat will chose the “wrong” pathway. If we look at the apparent nature of conditioning, the reason for this becomes fairly obvious. When a rat starts to negotiate a maze, it chooses either randomly or always preferentially one direction or the other. Over time the successful passages (the ones obtaining a reward) increase until they overcome the “randomness” factor. The archecortex seems to be a statistical sum of experience. If portions of it are removed from a trained rat, the performance in a maze is reduced according to how much cortex is removed.. [3] There are two points to be made here, that there is a fundamental choice mechanism that is overridden by experience, and that performance is never perfect. The longer a rat is trained the better is does, but it is never perfect. That is in the nature of statistics. If I have 10 bad events out of 100 there is only a 90% probability that I can make a successful choice. If it becomes 10 of 990 the probability becomes %99.0, and if 10 of 1000, it becomes %99.90. Note that I have to do ten times more runs to get the next order of magnitude of improvement and that I NEVER reach perfection. This is our first hint that brains may not be deterministic.

Note that we haven’t reached free will yet, but we seem to have reached non-determinism, which is a necessary condition for the existence of free will. However, behavioral observation have the same weakness as any other measurement—it is not proof. Even if all we do is hypothesize a random neuron firing that sometimes throws the choice mechanism off course , we have created a situation that is non-deterministic. We have arrived at a very important finding. The issue is not determinism vs. free-will, but determinism vs. non-determinism as the first step in the discussion. However, just because we have non-determinism, it does not mean we have demonstrated, much less proved, free-will, but we have made an important first step. Having a demonstration that it might be possible to eliminate determinism from our discussion (We haven’t done this conclusively. We will have to return to the issue at a more fundamental level.), we have at least acquired grounds to argue for free-will.

Now let us explore the wonderful part of the brain that sets primates off from other vertebrates, and in particular humans, dolphins and other cetaceans. Other than to state that from my readings, it appears that the huge neocortex of cetaceans appears to be specialized to the analysis of sound and location, rather like a huge biological GPS and radar system combined, I will not discuss the neocortex in other than humans. Though it may be interesting speculation, ethical systems and right and wrong in cetaceans has no importance to the current discussion, which has implicitly to this point, and from now forward explicitly, concerns only human free-will and its relationship to determinism.

Though we will have to come back to the question from a more fundamental level later, at the moment we have laid grounds to consider that the human brain is non-deterministic. That from time to time a random event will cause a “wrong” answer at the archecortex level. Just for a moment let us consider the importance of this to survival. Nature changes over time. Climates change, Earth undergoes geologic change such as mountain building or continental drift. What is a “right” answer now may become a “wrong” answer later and vice versa. From an overall survival standpoint, it is necessary to waste energy on an occasional wrong answer, in case it may suddenly become a right answer.

The neocortex or what we normally refer to as the “grey matter” first becomes important in the primates, and it is at this phylogenic level that we start seeing the evidence of what we call intelligent behavior. Humans have the most highly developed form of neocortex, with various areas of the neocortex showing different microscopic structure. This structure is extremely complex with five or six layers, depending on the area, with connections both internal to a given region and external to the rest of the body.

At the cellular level, all neurons behave the same. They receive impulses from other neurons and when enough impulses arrive within a short time span, the nerve fires with a given intensity. Note that additional impulses beyond the firing threshold do not increase the intensity of the firing. Impulses arriving for a time after the firing are ignored, and, in fact, once the neuron has fired it is actually refractory to further impulses, requiring more than the normal threshold, even after it has recovered from the firing. It appears that the neocortex is created with many more connections than it eventually has in the adult. During the first two years of life, these connections diminish but apparently in a way that provides a tuning to the environment the child is being reared in. So there appears to be no pre-determined hard-wiring in the neocortex as in the spinal column and brain-stem.

One of the important features of the neocortex is that a single event can provide retrievable experience for making choices. Unlike the archecortex, the neocortex maintains single discrete events in memory, not the statistical sum of those events. Not only that, but the memory of the event is usually very rich in information, not just the essential information. The detailed mechanisms by which this occurs are still an active area of research. So in the functioning of the neocortex which seems to be where our consciousness is centered, we have a very complex, interconnected network that, in principle, can retrieve any single event or datum that is desired or needed. This is the part of the brain that engages in rational thought, where we create logical arguments for choices or determine choices by some defined algorithm , e.g. writing pros and cons down on paper.

The neocortex can override the archecortex in the expression of behavior, but it is actually subject to the emotions more than we realize. Strong emotion will alter our perception of events, filtering and discarding data that do not agree with our emotional state. Strong emotion can skew our thought processes as well, leading to rationalization of what was not a logical but an emotional decision. In these cases we make the decision at the archecortex level, and then create reasons why we do what we have decided to do.

Looking at how the neocortex works, with no inherent programs and the capability to learn, each choice and its outcome become conscious data for the next choice. We can make nuanced judgments on results, quantifying them vs. a simple good/bad type of classification. We also bring into play many factors, not just the few that have emotional significance, and can override the emotional factors. Because we can recall single events, we can make a choice based on the single event instead of the sum of all similar events. But in all this apparent flexibility, can there be determinism?

In the sense of neurological determinism, no. The neocortex is not hard-wired, everything is a function of our experience. But in addition, the structure of the underlying archecortex comes into play providing an emotional ground for our thinking. As we have shown earlier the emotional ground is empirically non-deterministic, and we can create a rationale for this. In the case of the neocortex with its ability to constantly learn, every moment of the day is creating changes in its structure and connections. The same response to a given situation is not guaranteed the next time, because the brain making the decision is not the same. But can we say that given a set of experiences the choice is determined for the next time? Only if we can say that the responses of the brain to that set of experiences is the same. This condition is essentially impossible. It would not be possible to control all the environmental variables to recreate the same responses. Ultimately the question would be, if we put a person through the same set of events multiple times, would they react the same every time? As I have tried to show above, putting them through the same set of events sequentially would not give the answer, as each time through, the brain and the knowledge would change. Plus, how could one completely recreate the same set of events. The amount of sensory information the brain processes is enormous. The only way to answer this question is to return in time to the same set of circumstances with the brain in the same state. This is meaningless because the decision has been made before and is fixed in history.

Then can we ask the question in a different form? Does a given set of events cause a particular structure change in the brain from which comes a determined choice? Starting with the set of events, how can we adequately define them? Only in a tightly controlled environment would there be a true definition of the events. In terms of their impact on the brain and its structure and knowledge content, the prediction can only be in very general terms, i.e. the knowledge appears to be stored in a given area, but because of the impact of various emotional states and the undetermined nature of the existing connections to date, it is not possible to say that a particular structure will occur. Since we cannot determine a structure, we cannot determine behavior from the structure. This is not a question that can be determined empirically, because our knowledge will never be sufficiently complete to answer the question.

Though one might argue that if we knew all the connections, we could then predict the subsequent changes, knowing all the connections or for that matter any specific connections when the organism is living is not possible. Any measuring technique that could detect a connection without destroying the organism would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of connections, which is on the order of ten to a very large power. Also once one had the connections, there is still the matter of the firing state of every neuron, because that impacts the next firing. We cannot answer the question from a prediction-by-humans standpoint, but can we answer it on principles alone?

Let us start with a brain in a given instant of time with a particular structure and a particular neuro-electrical state. A complex stimulus is generated and the brain reacts. The stimulus first passes through the senses to the spinal cord and brainstem. It is processed reflexively there, and continues at the same time upward to the archecortex and the neocortex. In the meantime, those two structures are continuing to process earlier data. There is a lag time between stimulus and conscious response on the order of two-tenths to half a second. During that time millions of neuronal firings have occurred and the state of the brain has changed extensively. If those firings can all be shown to be determined then the response to the stimulus might conceivably be determined.

The factors that go into determining a single neuronal response include, the excitatory and inhibitory inputs and their order, strength, timing, and number. The body environment in which the neuron is existing also has an impact, a fever changes the firing and metabolism of the neuron, and different neurons will respond differently. An electrolyte imbalance will also create neuronal problems. Adding to the mix is the fact that nerves have varying propagation times. Some nerves are myelinated (in effect, insulated) and others are not. The myelinated nerves propagate their impulse faster than non-myelinated nerves. In addition, the synapses or junctions between nerves are not direct physical connections, but rather microscopic gaps across which a chemical (neurotransmitter) diffuses. The gap is small enough that the diffusion time is in the millisecond range, but still that microscopic environment is subject to molecular influences, which on an empirical level are random in nature and predictable only statistically for the total volume. In a sense our question then becomes are all these items determined, or in principle determined? And if they are determined for a single neuron, does that imply they are determined for the brain en masse as the summation of all the neurons?

With all the possible influences on a single neuron multiplied by the number of neurons and then by the number of connections, it becomes very tempting to simply state non-determinism in the brain as a fundamental premise. However, convincing as the appearances are, it is necessary to try to determine if those influences are themselves determined. With respect to the neurons, if one neuron is subject to determinism, then all are, and the network connections are also then determined in principle. This leaves the macroscopic and microscopic environments to examine. Actually we can argue that the macroscopic physical environment as a grand summation of the microscopic and atomic environments via statistical mechanics is determined if the atomic environment is determined. By this reasoning we are back to the idea that if the universe is determined on an atomic level then it is determined absolutely.

As I tried to show in the first paper of this series, we cannot demonstrate absolute determinism. We inherently have imperfect measurements, and to actually demonstrate determinism we must have perfect measurements. In the second paper I established criteria for determinism or non-determinism. We can apply these criteria to the nervous system as an entity.

It is easy to show that the nervous system is both irreversible and discontinuous, and thereby non-deterministic. Every nerve impulse is generated by an irreversible procedure. The sum of the various impulses from other nerves finally causes the membrane of a given nerve cell to become permeable to sodium ions. At this point there is a rapid influx of sodium ions that generates a voltage which propagates along the nerve. Any further inputs from other nerves have no effect for a period of time, and also do not enhance the impulse in the discharging nerve. The sodium is then relatively slowly pumped out of the nerve cell by metabolic pumps using energy to force the ions out against a gradient. Reversing this process would be similar to trying to reverse the breaking of glass in its required effort.

The structure of the nervous system is inherently discontinuous, being composed of discrete nerve cells, which do not actually physically merge into one another, but are connected by synapses which are microscopic gaps across which so-called neurotransmitters diffuse in a discharge. Nerve impulses can travel many different paths and are generated in many different combinations of nerves coming together at another nerve. Any nerve cell has hundreds of connections via synapses from other nerves and the total discharge of only a fraction of those are necessary for it to fire. When it does fire, it is a single impulse of the same intensity, regardless of how many stimuli led to the discharge. So not only is the nervous system physically discontinuous, but also electrically in it impulse propagation.

But having gotten to non-determinism does not automatically take us to free-will and responsibility. It lays some necessary ground-work, however.

From Non-determinism to Free Will
Undetermined responses are not the same as a choice. There may be multiple options for behavior at any point, but for them to simply be randomly followed does not constitute free will. Actually, it might be considered a form of determinism in that the individual is not accountable for the path chosen, it was chosen at random. Given what has been said above concerning the overall structure and working of the nervous system, we can proceed to a conclusion that individuals make choices and therefore have free will.

First, we can say that there is intentionality, in the sense that once a “choice” has been made, then action is taken to implement the choice. That can be as simple as wanting something within reach and reaching for it. It is the preceding events that we will deal with in discussing choice, but without the ability to act, whether or not constrained, choices are meaningless.

At the other end of the process are the inputs, and these are complex. Sensory inputs are fundamental, and the processing of sensory input goes through all the levels of the nervous system. Any of the five senses start with nerves at the outside of the nervous system, whose impulses first reach the spinal column or its cerebral equivalent the cranial nuclei. There the reflexive behaviors occur, if not suppressed. These in turn will produce some external events that are sense, and so on. Sensory events are also relayed to the mid-brain (the archecortex areas where the emotions are generated) and to the neocortex, both the conscious mind and unconscious mind.

Before we go any further with a discussion of what happens to the sensory inputs, we need to address and issue that causes a lot of discussion—where is the “I” in me, or where does the sense of self reside. Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness Explained” would have it as distributed throughout the brain and actually being the summation of all the brain activity. As he puts it, there is no Cartesian Theater, a place in the brain from where everything is observed and controlled. I argue from two standpoints that there is indeed a location at which the “self” effectively resides—the frontal lobes.

The first standpoint is that of physical structure. The cortex of the brain has specialized regions for each sense, the temporal area handles hearing and language processing, the back of the brain vision, the top center of the brain touch, the bottom front, smell. Taste is handled by the sensation area in close connection with the smell centers. The frontal lobes receive extensive connections from all of these areas, but no direct sensory information. This physically argues that it is some sort of coordination or correlation center. Also when the connections to this area are cut (the so-called pre-frontal lobotomy), the person typically loses most or all volition and becomes quite passive.

The other argument is from psychiatry. There is a disorder called dissociation, commonly known as multiple personalities. In this disorder, a person can assume a personality totally different from their normal or “host” personality. When the quest personality is active, the host has no awareness of anything. When they come back to control, it is as if there is a gap in experience, and they have no idea of what occurred during the gap. This indicates that there are definite foci at which a personality operates. There needs to be considerable research in brain activity of people afflicted with this disorder. It could be quite revealing in understanding how people are self-aware.

We need to also understand the input data to the ego or self that is used in making decisions or choices. There is of course the sensory data that is relayed from the grey matter areas that originally receive it. There is also the emotional data that is projected to the cortex from the more primitive areas of the brain, what has been termed the archecortex. The emotions amount to a summary to date of all experiences (weighted as to intensity) and the net reaction to them. However, they also tend to be a global, instantaneous average—how I feel right now about my existence, not just how I feel about the thing to be considered, unless it is of great importance. Unless we pay specific attention to them, they create a strong bias in the thinking.

Additionally there are some mental constructs that appear to be unique to humans, specific memories of events and abstract concepts. Specific memories include the sensory, emotional, and intellectual content of the event—what I thought, what I felt emotionally, what I heard, saw, touched, tasted, and/or smelled. We even seem able to focus on parts of the event in more detail, albeit with some effort. The vividness of the memory will depend to a great degree on the emotional involvement with the event. It is similar to the way archecortex operates on its summation of experience, weighting the impact of an experience more heavily, the more intense the emotion. In the case of the neocortex it is the amount of detail that is remembered.

Abstract concepts seem to be summaries based on experiences and/or other abstract concepts but without the sensory and emotional content. They may contain descriptions of the emotions or sensations, but not the memory of them. They are about events rather than being events or memories of events. Abstract concepts can also be rules or guides to behavior, and explanations of how the world works. It is part of the uniqueness of humans that they appear to respond not just habitually or from repeated training, but also on the basis of the application of concepts. It is this latter that leads to the idea of making choices, but we need to look at the processes a bit more closely.

There is a computing technique that has developed over the last thirty years called neural network processing. It is an implementation of a simplified model of a nervous system that is used to make decisions using data that is not necessarily well-defined. I have lost track of the details of its development over the last several years, but it is now a regularly used application, and apparently a lot of what was “art” when I learned about it is now more defined. Essentially it consists of inputting various bits of data relating to a problem and reading out from the output a solution. In between there are various “layers” of emulated neurons. Like a nervous system these emulated neurons have multiple inputs and multiple outputs. They also have a response that is all or none, just as real neurons do. Neural networks have to be trained by feeding them inputs and comparing the result to the expected output. This creates feedback to the network which then adjusts itself to get a closer answer the next time. The adjustment usually consist of changing the weighting that a neuron gives to its inputs in arriving at a threshold for “firing”. When I was playing with these, there was almost a magical quality about watching the adjustments. The same starting network would not create the same final network with the same training, even though the results were the same.

What is important about the above digression, is the concept of weighting of inputs—how much attention does a neural center pay to any given input. Apparently any input associated with an emotion carries a greater weight than either reason or a simple sensation. One of the strongest emotions is fear, and a perceived situation which has fear associated with it, leads to avoidance behavior, either conscious or unconscious. On the opposite pole, ecstatic feelings will lead to behavior which attempts to maximize the feeling, witness narcotic addiction. Despite these commonly occurring patterns, I would contend that there was a choice involved at every instance, and that the behavior becomes habitual only from a phenomenon similar to the training of neural networks.

In the discussion to follow, it is not possible to reduce the actions to the actual nervous impulses, though in principle it should be possible if we completely understood how the brain works. With millions of neurons continually discharging on other neurons and causing, in turn, those to discharge, the situation becomes extremely complex very quickly, especially since the number of connections in the brain has been estimated to be a pretty large exponent of ten. Nerve cells may connect with a few or with hundreds of other nerve cells. However, I still think the overall picture given below is correct in its outlines, given the current state of knowledge of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

Rather than try to deal with the extreme examples, let us look at more ordinary examples. Let us suppose we are standing in the kitchen, and it is time to fix a meal. The question is what to fix, and is it a reasoned choice, a random choice, or a conditioned choice [4]. Actually it could be any of the three, but still it is a choice. The situation is one is standing in the kitchen, it is time to fix dinner. To be decided is what to fix. Here one can take several approaches, open the pantry and/or refrigerator and see what is available to fix, remember what is available to fix, recall a desire for a particular food, look at a menu plan already created at a past date and time, look at the state of the kitchen and decide that regardless of what is cooked, it has to be cleaned up, ordered, or other non-cooking activity first. Even in this very preliminary step(s) choices are being made.

So let’s try to dig a little deeper into this. If one is standing in the kitchen one has sensory input that is continually being processed. One of the characteristics of the human brain is it is able to focus, in that it can filter from consciousness stimuli that don’t directly relate to the current interest(s). If we are in the kitchen to prepare a meal, we may ignore a curtain out of place, a book on a chair or table (at least until it is time to set the table or move the chair), or other such things that are at least theoretically sensible but not consciously registered. In effect there is an unconscious decision to ignore certain sensations or perceptions, but this is not choice of the type we are trying to demonstrate. However, we may pay attention to the fact that it is hot or cold outside, as that plays into preferences for food. In addition to the sensory data, there is also internal data, memories of food, associations with certain foods, either good or bad, emotions concerning eating both specific food-item directed and more general, self-concepts such as whether or not we are overweight, underweight, weight doesn’t matter, etc. Self-concepts such as “I can’t cook”, “I’m a great cook,” and self-awareness such as “I am exhausted”, “I am happy”, I am feeling sorry for myself.” There are also goal-oriented thoughts such as “I need to lose x pounds”, and evaluation thoughts such as “I can’t stand to eat pre-prepared frozen meals”. Even this kind of sketchy list of inputs is rich enough to show the complexity of the process to arrive at a decision on what to fix.

Based on the model of the brain I subscribe to, all of this is coming together at the frontal lobes. Interestingly enough, it is easy to see the same givens arriving at different decisions, simply depending on how priorities are assigned. Let us suppose that “I have to lose x pounds” has a strong support from emotion, possibly via a negative feeling about how one currently looks, or less support from an abstract notion that one’s current weight is too high. In most situations this leads to choices of what to fix that involve low-calorie, high-nutrient foods. However, supposed one’s emotional state is sad, or self-pitying. This may more than neutralize the emotional support from the negative feelings about one’s appearance. It is important to note that it does not negate the thought that one has a goal to lose weight.

Now let’s look at the materials available for preparing the meal. Assuming that one has had the goal of losing weight for a while, most of the food stuffs will be low calorie, high nutrient ingredients. However, it is possible the makings for so-called comfort food also are present. If we are feeling down in some way, then the comfort food avenue will be the preferred emotional choice. If in the past, that particular food was always associated with someone (usually a mother or grandmother) trying to comfort and make one feel better the choice may be to eat the comfort food. In which case one can argue this is a conditioned choice, as that is the nature of conditioning in the psychological sense—associating a given action with a desirable outcome emotionally or sensorially. In such a decision, the rational process may be subverted into creating rationalizations for the decision. In the event that despite the feelings, and the availability of the comfort food, one chooses the diet food, it could be called a rational decision. I however, there is no food that could act as a comfort food, and the emotions have no input to the choice, then it could well be a random choice. What one has is the first thing that one happened to see or grab.

Depending on upbringing, a person can control the amount of input emotion has to decisions. Though many times emotions control decisions, this does not have to be the case. One can see it in the “count to ten” type of situations, or the teeth-gritting situations, where the non-emotional part is in control. These would qualify as true choices, where the options were strongly opposed, and the weight is strongly on the emotional side. One could have done otherwise—beat the crap out of someone, or chewed them out.

At this point, it is not possible with current knowledge to chart the entire process by which thoughts occur or decisions are made or memories created and recalled. However, all these go into the process which interacts in the frontal lobes with sensations and emotions to produce the ultimate behaviors we see in people. It is possible to argue that even those instances where it appears that principle or reason is stronger than emotion is due to conditioning that came from the emotions giving negative results. However, it also can occur that a single exception to a pattern can permanently change behavior in humans to a different set of behaviors. If it were conditioning, a single exception would have little or no result.

In the last section of this essay I have tried to present the idea that the human brain makes true, conscious choices and therefore does, indeed, have free will. It does not negate the existence of free will if certain choices have extremely negative outcomes such as violent death. After all, early Christians knowingly refused to worship the emperor, and suffered death in the arenas as a result. One cannot argue that their belief system was rooted in conditioning, it was too new, and was strictly abstract. Though we often see choices as far different from those we would make ourselves, it does not negate their being choices.

Regardless of the state of the Universe, deterministic or non-deterministic, we as humans do have free will, and it behooves us to use it the best we can.

[2] Vallicella has looked at this question and wrestled with the problems of dualism extensively in his blog, (and elsewhere?)
[3] This has interesting implications with respect to the functioning of the archecortex. It says that the archecortex does not deal with individual events, but that experience is distributed over the entire cortex. This is in contrast to the neo-cortex, which we have not discussed yet, that deals with individual events.
[4] This is a potentially contentious category given all the history of Skinnerian conditioning. What is meant is a choice that has been weighted by either past history or by emotions.

Yet another discussion of Determinism and Free will

2008-08-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

Part 2: Metaphysical Reality

Introductory Comments
In working with reality from a metaphysical point of view, we are not as concerned with what we measure as in what we conceive as a result of these measurements. We deal with concepts and their implications as such. We are trying to work with their relationships and what they mean. In this case, we are dealing with absolutes or universals which science can corroborate but cannot prove or disprove. Only internal contradictions may disprove them, and they are proven only to the degree that we accept the truth of the original premises upon which they are based. Because of this we have to first of all decide what we are discussing when we discuss determinism and free will.

As I have explored in my first attempt at this discussion, determinism can be approached from various levels, and to varying degrees of absoluteness. I explored physical, psychological, and situational determinism. However, when the issue comes up in such discussions as this one, the issue really relates to choice—“Could I have done otherwise?”—to quote from Daniel Dennett. Thus we see the entanglement of free will with determinism. If everything is determined then we cannot be held responsible for our choices, but if it is not determined we are. Metaphysics impacts morality. In the third part of this discussion I will show that the two may become disentangled. I will show that whether the Universe is deterministic or not, has no bearing on Free Will.

For this part of the discussion however, I want to deal with the issue of universal determinism. To do this I will work with two concepts first presented in Part 1, reversibility and continuity. By developing the concepts of reversibility and continuity, we will be able to put some constraints on the problem. However, I conclude that the issue is actually moot, that we cannot determine the Determinism of the Universe. [Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.]

What is meant by Determinism
Absolute physical determinism
Absolute physical determinism is synonymous with absolute cause and effect—there is a complete, necessary, and sufficient cause for any effect being observed, or conversely, in principle, one can make observations of causes and exactly predict the resultant effect. This has nothing to do with measurement limitations. It is saying that in principle, without specifying the method, that all events can be exactly predicted.

One of the implications of such a statement is that, if one knows all the positions of the billiard balls in a specific formation, and the exact force used on the cue ball, as well as the configuration of the playing surface and the bumpers and their resilience, one could predict exactly where every billiard ball will go until they all come to rest. Taking it a level lower, if one could in principle specify the exact positions and momenta of all the particles of a collection of atoms or molecules, one can predict its ensuing history. This idea can be expanded to encompass the entire universe, taking into account that the universe is simply a large collection of atoms and molecules.

However, one consequence of such a formulation is, that if a single atom or even a sub-atomic particle moved differently, then the entire history of the universe would be different. (A version of this idea has been used in time-machine science fiction, where someone goes back in time and accidentally kills a butterfly and changes the present he returns to.) In the ensuing discussions, this is what is meant by determinism. This is the only determinism that can possibly be argued to have any implications on free will, as will be shown later on.

Approximate physical determinism
What appears to be more commonly referred to as determinism, is the determinism of science and experience, that under most, if not all observed, circumstances, certain events or actions are followed by other certain, corresponding events or actions—in other words, the epistemological definition of determinism which was invalidated in the first part of this series. This form of determinism will be discussed further later in this paper.

Continuity
A fundamental property relating to the determinism of the universe is continuity. This was discussed in the first paper in comparing the descriptions of the universe according to the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Relativity assumes an infinitely continuous universe, and quantum mechanics assumes a discontinuous universe, or one can say its assumptions lead to a description of a discontinuous universe.

One way to understand the difference between continuous and discontinuous is in simple mathematical equations. The equation ax + by = c can be solved for any, in the absolute since of any, values of x and y. There are no values of a,b,c,x,or y other than the undefined value of infinity (∞), for which the equation has no solution. However, the equation, 1/y=a, cannot be solved for the exact value of y=0. As y becomes smaller and smaller, a becomes larger, without limit. Exactly at y=0, a has no defined value other than the abstract one of infinity.

Another way to approach the idea, a way more like what we will discuss below, is to think of a set of boxes in a row, each one labeled with a unitary value, e.g., 0,1,2,3,…n into which objects will be sorted by weight. The objects can have any weight, but by rule one must either truncate the fraction to select a box, round the fraction, or take the next highest unit value. One has created a discontinuous environment for the sorting. Now let us add a second dimension, say, length. Now we need a row of boxes for the weight brackets for each length bracket. The sorting rules are the same, only now instead of a line of boxes we have a large area of boxes.

The concept can be generalized to as many dimensions as desired. The mathematics of physics uses six, three of space location, and three of energy as measured by momentum in three dimensions. From this we can say that the universe is discontinuous, if, at some very small scale, values must be separated by some amount. That amount can be an extremely small fraction of a unit, something represented only by a number with many negative exponents, but it is still a separation between the values of position and energy a particle may have. As a consequence any value falling between contiguous six-dimensional boxes is forbidden, particles must be in one region or the other, and cannot assume those values. However, it is also important to understand that once in a “box”, the object may have any value between the upper and lower limits of the box.

In contrast, if space is continuous, then no matter how small a value we choose to separate the dimensions of two items there can be still a smaller separation. There are no forbidden values. Any particle may assume any value, the only restriction being that no two particles may have exactly the same values. All objects in the universe change state in a smooth manner assuming all possible values between the starting and ending states.

Reversibility
Reversibility is the other property we will use in this discussion. The first part of this series had an extensive discussion of reversibility in relation to the discussion of entropy. Though the discussion was confined to observable physical systems both ideas of absolute and local (cyclic) reversibility can be generalized for the discussion here.

Local or cyclic reversibility applies to some subset of the objects in the universe. The earlier example of the billiard balls can be considered here. If the billiard balls are first racked and then broken by the cue ball, they scatter in various directions. One can immediately, or after the conclusion of a game, re-rack them, place the cue ball at the original position, and, in effect complete a locally reversible process, in the sense that the configuration of the billiard table was returned to a previous state. However, in order for the billiard balls to be returned to their previous state, outside agents (players) had to perform various actions that in themselves are not reversible. Even if the players returned to their exact positions, one can find a level at which there was a non-cyclical process involved, for instance, in the internal biochemistry of their bodies. This local type of reversibility is not applicable to our discussion of determinism, because at some point one always finds a point of irreversibility.

Absolute reversibility is defined as motion or action back through exactly the path that was previously followed. In the first paper this was discussed as a theoretical concept, and it is possible to envision local systems that are exactly reversible, though they require irreversible actions external to them. If we were to generalize the concept of absolute reversibility to universe as a whole, then we would find phenomena entirely contrary to our actual experience, water flowing up hill, glass coming together from broken shards, people coming alive and growing younger, etc. Though it is possible to persuasively argue that the universe in not reversible, for the moment I would like to keep the concept for the following discussion.

Analysis of Reversibility, Continuity, and Determinism
If we consider the following pairs of ideas, reversible-irreversible, continuous-discontinuous, deterministic-non-deterministic, we can set up eight symbolic representations of the possible relations and discuss them. The value of this is that it will lead to some interesting constraints on the idea of a deterministic universe.

Representing reversible-irreversible by R r , continuous-discontinuous by C c, and deterministic-non-deterministic by D d, we can set up the following possibilities:

R + C = D
r + C = D
R + C = d
r + C = d

R + c = D
r + c = D
R + c = d
r + c = d

We can discuss these in turn.
The first generalization I would like to make is that R and c are incompatible, that it is not possible to have and absolutely reversible system with a discontinuous universe. Note, however that the inverse is not true—it is possible to have r and C. The idea can be fairly easily illustrated. If we have a set of objects moving from one “box” to another, when one reverses the direction, how does one “choose” which box the object should return to. It is not enough to simply state “the one it came from” because while in the newer location, it might be able to have values that are forbidden in older location, so when moving backwards it will have to move into a “box” that may not have been the original, because in a discontinuous universe, objects may have any allowable value in the range that defines the current location, or the newer location has at least one value that is forbidden in the older location.

This simplifies our eight relations to six, as R + c = D and R + c = d are both false by the above discussion.

If we look at absolute reversibility and continuous as a combination, then the universe is deterministic. Whether moving backwards or forwards in time, any position is, in principle, determined by a prior position. There is nothing to disrupt the paths of the objects. This removes another relation as false, namely R + C = d, and says that one way the universe may be deterministic is if it is absolutely reversible and continuous. However, though logically true, I believe that we can dismiss this option in reality, because it can be argued that the universe is not absolutely reversible, as it leads to contradictions to reality, as stated earlier.

This leaves us with the four relations involving r or irreversibility, and these are definitely more interesting.
r + C = D
r + C = d
r + c = D
r + c = d

Let’s start with the idea that the universe is continuous (C), that is, every state change is gradual or potentially gradual and, in principle, every object can assume any value. Though we used this to show that combined with reversibility, the universe would be determined, without reversibility, that is not necessarily so. It is possible for an object to have an arbitrary interaction and divert from its projected course in a smooth manner. In a continuous universe, both time and space are absolutely smooth in the sense of continuous, and any change can happen to the ultimate degree of fineness in transitions. And we can argue that if the universe is continuous, then in principle all interactions can be defined and therefore predicted—thus determined. So if the universe is irreversible and continuous we can argue that it could be deterministic.

Can we argue that it could also be non-deterministic if it is continuous? This would be saying that as an object moves along its space-time trajectory, at any next infinitesimal point, that point could possibly be of more than one overall value. There is such a possibility when the trajectory encounters a natural split in the energy of the environment. We can conceive of it as similar to a ridge, one with a knife-edge. In one sense, this is a discontinuity and violates our assumptions, yet in another sense it is consistent in that there are differential equations that can describe such a circumstance. If the mathematical surface is a saddle, that is a smooth curve , then there is a continuous flow, and the object will follow one way or another, or possibly move along the top of the saddle for some time. However, if it is a knife-edge, an infinitely sharp edge, then it is a discontinuity, and the object cannot reside on it, it must fall one way or another.

This argues that if the universe is continuous then it is deterministic. It also argues that if the universe is discontinuous (c), it is non-deterministic, as the object has a value that suddenly is not allowed, and there is no way to predict which way it will go. What we have done with this discussion is to restate our problem to say that if the universe is continuous, then it is determined, and if it is discontinuous, then it is non-determined. The problem now becomes one of determining (!) if the universe is continuous or discontinuous. The first paper in this series showed that though quantum mechanics argued for a discontinuous universe observationally, relativity assumed a continuous universe, and both arrive at confirmable results. That paper also concluded that science cannot answer a metaphysical question in the first place.

Perceptible Reality
Because of the inherent nature of measurement, any state is discrete, plus or minus some error. This does not matter whether it is an instrumental or a direct sensory measurement. At the same time we perceive motion as continuous, not jumping from state to state. At any instant of time, if we measured the state of an object it would have an error, but overall, the process appears continuous. There are a couple of interesting consequences of this.

If the universe is continuous, then we can never measure it exactly, and we can never have perfect prediction of the next state of an object. As a result, we might conclude, incorrectly that it is discontinuous or non-deterministic. If the universe is discontinuous, then it is at a level that we cannot measure, or we would observe the discontinuity. Quantum Mechanics makes the claim of measuring this discontinuity, but that is only at level accessible to measurement by photon. By our first paragraph of this heading, and by arguments in the first paper in this series, it may only be measuring its own inherent error and not the discontinuity of the universe.

We as humans consider the universe to be generally predictable. If the universe is non-deterministic then how can this be? According to earlier discussion, determinism and predictability are tightly coupled. This can be explained if we do not observe the universe at the potential level of non-determinism. All of our observations, at least the common ones, are on very large-scale aggregates of objects—planets, trees, people, rocks, galaxies, etc., all of which consist of massive collections of atoms, which in turn are possible collections of objects described by Quantum Mechanics. Using the same kind of reasoning as Stephan Boltzmann, the state of our perceivable objects are the sum of all the states of lesser objects of which they are composed. In any collection of similar objects, extreme members balance themselves out in all dimensions, though not exactly pairing one-for-one. It is these slight differences that accounts for such things as a pure block of iron eventually rusting—some few iron atoms on the surface will be in a state to interact with the atmosphere, especially if there is a trace of moisture, and form iron oxide which then causes an imbalance in the object and catalyzes further oxidation.

We measure and observe the overall sum of the constituents in the behavior of objects, and it is this sum upon which we base our predictions. However, due to both the imprecision of our measurements and the potential state changes of the constituents, our predictions always have some error. As we make more and more observations and predictions, we take into account more and more components of the object and its environment, but nonetheless, we are never perfect in our predictions. Hence we often cite either a margin of error or a statistical percentage on the goodness of the measure. [Carl Popper has an excellent book on the implications of statistical measurement in science, The Logic of Science.]

Large scale aggregates tend to be overall very stable, so that our predictions are generally quite good. However, there are dynamic phenomena that are subject to changes that are of a finer grain than we can measure. This has been discussed under chaotic dynamics in the first paper of the series. In such cases, our predictions only hold for relatively short periods of time. Also, if our theories by which we create our predictions are incorrect, we will also see unpredictable behaviors.

Summary
There are several major points to be re-emphasized from this installment in the series. First, if the universe is continuous it is deterministic, and if it is discontinuous it is non-deterministic. Second, we cannot decide if it is continuous or discontinuous by measurement. Third, the scale of potential discontinuity is far below our level of perception, even with instrumental enhancement. This last point will be explored from a totally different standpoint in the next installment, which will look at the interaction, or the lack there of, between the universe and free will.

Though this paper concludes one cannot decide if the universe is deterministic or not, the problem has been constrained, to whether the universe is continuous or not. The analytical framework from this installment will be used in the next installment to discuss free-will and determinism the goal of this series.

Yet another discussion of Determinism and Free will

2007-12-29T04:46:00.000-08:00

PART 1: SCIENCE AND REALITY
Introduction
This will be a three-part set of essays discussing determinism, non-determinism, and free-will. Science, in particular theoretical physics, is often used to justify stating the universe is or is not deterministic and that free-will does or does not exist, based on whether the universe is deterministic or not. The first part of this discussion will show that such claims are beyond the boundaries of science. Science is epistemological, not metaphysical.

The second part will discuss determinism as a metaphysical concept. It will also put some constraints on the issue of whether the universe is or is not deterministic. In doing so, we will use two ideas that were developed in the first section, continuity and reversibility.

Finally we will turn to the question of free-will. As I shall try to show, free-will is actually not contingent on the determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, and also that non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for free-will. [This, in a sense, was the thrust of Daniel Dennett’s, Elbow Room] To do so, we will look at the nature of the brain and touch on the mind/body problem.

Scientific Reality
Science is one of the major sources of arguments for determinism or at least the desire that determinism is true. This is probably because the precision of the mathematical descriptions of natural processes and the discovery of natural laws can easily be extrapolated into a belief that if they are just good enough everything would be described and predicted—in other words, the universe is determined. The fundamental problem with science, however, is the failure to remember the following:

Measurements are noting some property or extension of reality not reality itself. They are limited by various theories of measurement and inherent limits in the techniques. Of necessity, they are a greater or lesser distortion of the actual value measured.

Somewhere along the way the indirectness is forgotten, the limitations become considered a part of the thing measured, and scientists start talking about their measurements as if they were the actual reality. Part of the examination in this section will discuss some of these misstatements.

There is also the tendency in the world of science to create an accurate mathematical model of some aspect of reality, and then, because of its success, start thinking that the model is an explanation rather than a description. I commented on this a year or so ago, with respect to an article on leaf growth in American Scientist, in which the author showed how leaf growth could be described by a certain mathematical relation, and the started discussing other patterns of leaf growth saying the relation controlled the growth. This kind of thinking is very prevalent and contributes to the problems being addressed in this essay series.

Predictability
The strength and success of the scientific method is that all theories make predictions that can be measured, and based on those measurements the theory is either falsified or supported. This is the general high-level statement that is made to explain the success of science. However, there is a lot hidden under the covers here and it needs to be looked at in detail.

Let’s start with a very important historic experiment, Galileo dropping two iron balls from the Tower of Pisa. There were two competing theories of gravity, one that said a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter one, and the other that said that all objects fall with the same speed. The smaller of the two balls was several times lighter than the heavier one, in order to find a strong difference in falling speed, if one existed. We know of course that the two balls hit the ground at the same time. But hidden in even this simple experiment is the idea of a measurement and its limits. Galileo was not using any sophisticated measuring tools, simply the eye of the ground-level observer. The human eye can perceive changes on the order of 10/second, so any difference of greater than 0.1 seconds should have been observable. Just to make certain, Galileo favored the theory to be disproven by creating a heavier weight that was multiples of the lighter one. The Tower of Pisa is about 80 ft high, so it would take about 2 1/4 seconds[1] for an object to fall the distance. If there were an effect due to mass difference, the heavier one would strike in about 2 seconds and the lighter one in about 10 seconds if the weight ratio were 5:1. Even if it were not directly linear but say some fractional factor, the factor would have to be smaller than 0.3 to not make a noticeable difference. Since the theory that proposed heavier objects falling faster also believed everything was in the nature of whole numbers or their ratios, such a fractional factor would not have been proposed.

The important point to be emphasized here is that the differences in the two theories were measurable and a decision could be made within the accuracy of the measuring system—the human eye. Thus either theory could be falsified within the experimental errors.

However, it is fairly easy to find problems in our simple experiment as soon as the measurements are refined. If we fast forward to the twentieth century, we can use photo-optic timing devices that would detect differences in a thousandth of a second or less. As soon as we do this, we will see a discrepancy in the timing of the landings of the two balls. Which one strikes first? If it is the heavier we may be tempted to say, “Ah Ha! There is a difference due to mass,” but if it were the lighter? Do we postulate a negative effect (anti-gravity) due to mass? Somebody suggests repeating the experiment. Maybe we get a different answer. We do this multiple times, and we start to think that there might be some problems in the experiment itself, as we are constantly seeing different arrival times. Over time we may make corrections to insure the two balls are released exactly (within our measurement error) at the same time, and perhaps eventually dropping them in a vacuum because of differential air resistance, or making them the same size but of different materials, etc. But then what happens when we get to the point that we are seeing effects due to variations in the measuring device? Usually what happens is that we say that two objects fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, towards the earth, and that variations we see are due to experimental error, especially if they vary about a value, sometimes greater sometimes less. After that we forget about the experimental error part, and simply state the theorem as an absolute. We generalize our measurements to a metaphysical statement that is greater in scope than the data supports.

Having looked at comparing two theories by their respective predictions and the actual results measured, let us now look at a situation where the theory may have over-defined our ability to measure the real world.

Chaotic attractors
Physicists usually describe objects, in particular moving objects, by differential equations. These are mathematical descriptions of the behavior of an object that describe its position and motion with respect to time. In principal, if one knows the starting values for an object, then by solving the equation for the time duration, one can predict where the object is at the next time and what its motion is at that time. An important example of this is the equations of motion for a naval artillery shell. These are usually solved for the distance to be fired so that the proper aiming can occur.

An important characteristic of differential equations is that they assume that space is infinitely divisible. In other words, no matter how small I take the distance between two points, there exists a still smaller distance. This is the essence of calculus, and a most powerful tool it is. In general, since most differential equations describe fairly simple motions, eg. one-way paths such as the ballistics example, or simple cycles, we solve them and if the observations agree within a measure of error, we consider the equation a correct description.

However, there is a class of differential equations that do not fit this model—the equations that describe chaotic attractors. There are quite a number of these equations, usually in three dimensions, that when solved give a different answer depending on the values substituted into the equation, and they are extremely sensitive to the values. Overall, it can be said that the solutions to the equations will fall within a three-dimensional volume called an attractor. For example a donut twisted into a figure eight and then given a ninety-degree twist encloses a volume of space that is an attractor of a particular differential equation—all possible solutions to the equation fall somewhere within the volume. However, predicting exactly where the solution will fall is essentially impossible. That is because the solution is not infinitely divisible. In other words, if I solve for a value of x=1.001, keeping the other variables constant, it is possibly a radically different path through the attractor than 1.0001 or even 1.000000000001. And there can be a great difference between 1.0000000001 and 1.00000000002. There are an infinite number of paths through the attractor, and we can only solve for a small subset of them that include the limit of our calculation precision. Any change in values smaller than the precision cannot be determined, so in effect we have the value that we calculate with an infinite string of zeros in the less significant decimal places that we cannot explicitly specify. If we try to compare our calculations with measured phenomena, we may find frequent agreement, but other than saying all observations fit within the attractor, we cannot predict any one path—there are an infinite number we cannot specify to predict them.

Here we have something that is completely determined, in principle, but in practice cannot be reliably predicted. But can we say that we have described a true property of any part of reality? The assumption of infinite divisibility is very crucial here. Just because the equation or model assumes it does not mean that it is truly the nature of reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity, both special and general formulations, assumes space is infinitely continuous or infinitely divisible. However, quantum mechanics leads to a space that has an ultimate granularity at an order of scale of Plank’s constant. In other words space, according to quantum mechanics, is not infinitely divisible. If this is so, then differential equations are not a correct model of reality. [Which may reflect an underlying incompatibility that prevents the development of a theory of quantum gravity, or any reconciliation of quantum mechanics and relativity.]

Modern physical measurements
Having mentioned both quantum mechanics and relativity, it is a good point at which to look at the limitations of their measurements. Both theories have at their base starting points that deal with the nature of light. In the case of relativity, the statement that light always has the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of the respective velocities of the emitting and receiving points, leads to a number of counter-intuitive ideas, including the inter-convertibility of mass and energy—the famous E=mc2 equation. There are quite a number of apparent paradoxical results, all of which have been experimentally verified, and some of which may not have been correctly analyzed [It is not the place here for the analysis, but I believe the so-called pole-barn paradox is not paradoxical because an implicit assumption in the conditions is in error.]. However, it is important to point out, that the theory predicts what we will measure if light moves at a constant speed in a vacuum. That we measure what the theory predicts means that is has done its job. However, that does not mean it has described reality, but only what we will see when we measure it. Part of the underlying effects are, that when working with relativity, we only consider events as perceived. A important part of the presentation of relativity is the difference in perceived space-time events between two observers moving at different velocities. This is used to argue that absolute simultaneity does not exist. With respect to measurements this is true, but with respect to metaphysics, it is not. One of the confusing things about relativity is that there is no absolute reference coordinates in space time, only one or another set as a point relative to which everything is measured.

Quantum mechanics has a different limitation, based on the energy of a photon of light. The relation is the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle which mathematically says, ΔpΔx=ћ/2π. This says the error in measuring the energy of a particle (its momentum, p) times the error of the measurement of the position is a constant. Or, the more accurately you measure position, the worse the accuracy of the energy and vice versa. In other words there is an inherent limit to measurements using photons. Since everything else is even more coarse-grained, this puts an ultimate limit on the precision of any measurement using photons. Once again, this has been very thoroughly verified experimentally. And again I want to point out that it is a measurement theory that is very good at predicting measurements. To put an earlier argument in the reverse direction, if quantum mechanics predicts granular space because of the inability to measure more precisely than a certain value, then how do we not know space isn’t infinitely continuous as assumed by the Theory of Relativity?

Limits of measures and what they tell us about predictability
One of the best illustrations of the limits of measures is the statement that ‘a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane.’ The problems with this statement are many, but let’s first focus on what the probable origin is. In weather prediction, there is a certain inherent error in both the measurements that form the basis of the predictions and in the calculations that use them. I have commented above on both kinds of problems. What is occurring is that if one starts with a particular point in time and a set of measurements for it, that using current theory and the best calculations, the propagation of errors, as one progresses through increasing time intervals, will eventually lead to a prediction of a hurricane, or [which is never stated because it doesn’t make as good a press] a total calm.

The reason is that the error in measurements is always in either direction. That is why one always sees a ± in front of an error number, if the error is unbiased, or a + some value and – some other value if the error has a bias. So if the errors propagate in the positive direction, the miniscule puff of air from the butterfly, or rather an error that is of that magnitude will amplify into a prediction of a hurricane through recursive calculation. But if one follows the negative error there will be eventually no effect at all, or one of suppression of weather. The truth is that at some point, usually between five and ten days, the prediction becomes meaningless because of the accumulated errors.

This type of situation occurs in all mathematical models. There are limits on the accuracy of the input data and in the precision of the calculations. It does not matter what scale is being used. In weather, we either use the small-scale data of local temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, etc., which then fails to predict beyond five to ten days, or we use the large scale patterns of El Niño and the like which will tell us what a season of the year will be like in general, but cannot predict day-to-day weather. But even data such as the large scale data has limitations. Such data do not provide valid predictions beyond a year or so. No model of the weather has accurately predicted the weather as little as five years in the future in any detail, much less twenty or more.

It is necessary to be very wary of predictions. They are only as good as the data going in and the methods used to process them. It is also necessary to be very careful when stating a prediction is validated. One accurate prediction is not enough. There is no way to distinguish the validity of the prediction from chance. Multiple correct predictions start creating validity. But then the whole issue of error comes up again. When we make a prediction we have to put boundaries around it, stating a margin of error. Poll results in the paper do this all the time, e.g., 45% ± 3%. So, if a result falls within the range 42-48% we can consider it a confirmation of the theory, right? Not quite. The measurement we use to validate has an error. Let us suppose a theory says that 40% ±2% of the population will have a mole. We take a sample of the population and find that 39% of the people in our sample have one or more moles. There is a missing piece here, the error in our sample—in this case lets say it is ± 3%. So anywhere from 38-42% are predicted to have moles but our sample predicts that if we measured the entire population 36-42% would be found to have one or more moles. So can we say our theory is good? It all depends. The discipline of statistics has rules for comparing numbers like this and stating whether they are really different or not depending on how sure we want to be. In this case our theory is probably (!) correct. This illustrates very nicely the problem of predictability. The result we compare a prediction to has its own limits, and may in itself be a prediction since it is a sample and not the entire set.

Apparent predictability
Are there situations where there appears to be predictability but actually there isn’t? Certainly, life is full of them or we wouldn’t be surprised. The causes are many, insufficient input data, incorrectly formed theories, improper calculation, improper measurement of results, and randomness. What will occur is a string of fulfilled expectations with sudden departures. It is the departures that provide new knowledge. Usually when a theory fails to predict, it is considered a failure of the theory, IF the failure is consistent. Remember that we discussed above that both the prediction and the measurement of the results have errors around them.

There are also situations that are so complex that we cannot form meaningful theories in detail about them, and resort to simplifications. Simulations are of that nature, where not every element in a simulated environment can be simulated due to the excessive complexity, but rather assumptions or estimates are made about the less significant features to allow the calculations to proceed. The most well-known (in the sense of notoriety) simulations are those associated with the global-warming controversy. Here the simplifications are so extensive and the constraints so severe to even allow calculating them at all, that it is a good question as to whether they even represent any part of reality. None of the models can predict or even properly use sea temperature or cloud data, nor can they predict the weather data used to create the models.

Does non-predictability equal non-determined?
At this point we can say by the definition of determined that something that is determined is predictable in principle. From the discussion above I have shown that, though something might be determined in principle, it may not necessarily be predicted accurately in practice. Somewhere an inherent limit is reached in the process of predicting, whether it is the precision of the input data, or a theoretical limit such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In saying this, we in essence answer the question, that non-predictability does not mean something is not determined. It merely means that it cannot be shown to be determined within our ability to measure and predict.

Another question that arises at this point then is what are we going to mean by determined? Do we mean that there is an absolute answer that we measure or predict imperfectly, or do we mean that, because we approximate a prediction that comes true most of the time, something is therefore determined. This latter definition is generally the working definition for practicing scientists, but when the results are discussed outside the context of their experimental acquisition, the former definition is inappropriately assumed. There is often unjustified generalization on the grounds that if the measurements become refined enough we will get the answer we are assuming. Given the discussion above on measurements and predictability, this is definitely incorrect reasoning.

Reversibility
Another view of scientific reality and determinism is found in the concept of reversibility and why it cannot be observed in an absolute sense in the real world. It also serves as an explanation of why time moves in only one direction.

One of the classic illustrations of reversibility is billiard balls caroming around on a table, then running the picture backwards to show that supposedly the process can be reversed in principle because the equations that govern the motions can have either plus or minus signs and still be valid. Taken to the ultimate conclusion, it means that the universe could run backwards (to us) instead of forwards. Yet the minute we consider this in any detail, it seems totally ridiculous. Here we have a case of oversimplification. As long as the concept of reversibility is applied to the mathematics, it is correct. Applying it to a real system it fails to take into account all the variables. Reversibility implies that one can completely return to a given state. In effect, genuine reversibility would imply absolute determinism, since a return to a state implies all changes from the state and back to it are exactly determined.

However, even if there were no uncontrolled changes in the billiard balls, the environment, which forms part of the system, does change. It has to do with the direction of energy flow. The queue stick imparts a sudden burst of energy into the group of billiard balls which is then dissipated by rolling on the table top and bouncing against the cushion. We have a very hard time imagining the accumulation of energy from the table top and the cushions back into the billiard balls, to the queue ball, which then hits the stick and shoves it back. In fact it will take more energy to put the billiard balls back together than was expended in dispersing them. The difference in energy is what is meant by the concept of entropy, often loosely referred to as the amount of disorder. When the origin of the movement is considered, the movement of the billiard balls is actually an irreversible process.

The concept of entropy is the explanation from thermodynamics for irreversibility. [When one first looks at thermodynamics, it appears to be making metaphysical claims. However, these are kept explict by always referring to a hypothetical “ideal gas” in generating theory and formulas. When dealing with actual measurements, they are carefully isolated to the system under discussion.] Entropy was first defined as the result of studying the efficiency of heat engines and heat pumps. For a system that was cyclical, the change in entropy for the complete cycle was zero. Entropy was found to change with the energy content of a system and therefore with temperature, the higher the temperature the greater the entropy. According to the ideal gas laws, this meant that entropy also increased if the volume increased at constant temperature and pressure, and the inverse for pressure.

Working with the thermodynamic laws (rules) and equations, two classes of changes were established, reversible and irreversible. In the case of reversible change the process was done so smoothly that it was, in theory at least, possible to get back as much heat as was put in, or the work done by the system or to the system equaled the change in heat content. This was the ideal. It was also found that the change in entropy for a reversible process was zero. When looking at system where the process was irreversible or “permitted”, the useful work obtained was less than the change in energy content, or more work was expended than the energy extracted. In both irreversible cases, the entropy increased.

In cyclical systems the change in entropy is zero, but it is actually at the expense of an increase in entropy of the surroundings, because cyclical systems are not reversible in the thermodynamic sense. Spontaneous reversal of systems is never seen, and therefore a negative change in entropy is accompanied only by local work input that increases the entropy of the surroundings. Since reversible systems are an ideal, not a reality, entropy became associated with the irreversibility of processes. Thus by generalization, it was concluded that the net entropy of the universe is increasing and by extrapolation over time, the universe would die an “entropy death” when spontaneous change was no longer possible.

Entropy was simply the result of balancing thermodynamic equations until Ludwig Boltzmann created statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics is a mathematical tool that relates the quantum description of atoms and molecules to their large-scale, thermodynamic properties.

It is useful to at the concepts of statistical mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that all energy changes in steps or quanta, and that an atom or molecule would have a state defined by the number of quanta of each type of energy (electronic, vibration, two kinds of rotation, and translation or motion in space). In a collection of molecules there will be a proportion of the molecules in one state, a proportion in another, etc. What we measured is the average of all the molecules in all the states. The theory is very successful. It predicts the values of entropy and other thermodynamic values from which all thermodynamic functions can be calculated, in very good agreement with values measured by other means. For our discussion the importance is that a theory created at the atomic scale can be related to large-scale measurements.

The implications for our discussion are that for a system to reverse, energy had to come from outside the system. Since the concept could expand to include the universe, which is a closed system, it implies that as a whole the universe is irreversible. However, we must be careful, because Boltzmann is assuming one of our issues under discussion, discontinuity. So at best, his work implies that if the universe is discontinuous, it is irreversible. Be aware though, that such a generalization is far outside the bounds of statistical mechanics, since statistical mechanics stope at a container of fluid or gas. Actually all that is valid to say is that a hot object will not spontaneously become cold and release its energy in a form to be utilized for work, or a broken object reform itself into a whole again. Such things would require energy to move from a lower to a higher state spontaneously, both intuitively and theoretically impossible.

Experimental Science, Theory, and Reality
As a summing up, let’s look at the interactions between experimental science, theoretical science, and what it does or does not tell us about reality. Theoretical and Experimental science were always deeply inter-twined until the late twentieth century when theory outran the ability of experimental science to verify.

Humans have been making measurements as far back as we can determine. Primitive cultures counted seasons, years, and possessions. They made measurements of distance and area. As mankind became more civilized these measurements became more critical and means were created to make them more accurate. While mankind measured his daily life, he also invented explanations for its existence. All human cultures have some myth of where-it-all-started. Myth does not mean something totally unreal or fictional, and certainly does not mean something meaningless. Myths have to have some allegorical or actual truth, or both, or they do not survive. The modern myths are the Big Bang and Evolution. [I am not negating these or putting them down, I am simply pointing out a function that is often ignored.] It is important to understand that the myths come from what humans already know about their environment and express a desire to explain it.

It also seems to be a human characteristic to test what one is told against what one knows. This is the core of the scientific method. Useful theories make quantitative predictions that are then verified or falsified by experiments and measurements. These are of course subject to the experimental errors discussed earlier. There are two approaches to this testing. One is to take the myth or theory and say, “If this is so, then I should see…..” The other is to look at results and realize they cannot be explained by current theories. From these comparisons arise new theories, which are then tested and retested, both against current knowledge and against new knowledge as it is acquired. They are also analyzed to create new predictions which are then verified or not.

Often theories become a part of a larger more comprehensive theory. The history of astronomy and physics provides an excellent illustration. The original myth said that the universe revolved around the Earth in concentric spheres for the stars and orbits for the planets As time went on measurements of planetary motion became more and more troubling. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus would sometimes move backwards in the sky. A simple orbit around the Earth would not explain the motion. So, epicycles were postulated to explain it. This only sufficed for a while, and finally Copernicus put forth the idea that it would be easier to calculate if one assumed the Sun was the center not the Earth. At the time this was an heretical idea, and Galileo was tried for heresy for claiming that it was the reality. Once the idea was accepted, it still used circular orbits. But measurements soon showed that was wrong, that actually the planets moved in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one of the foci, and that the planets motions followed a specific law that said their movement along the orbit swept out equal areas of the orbit for equal times. It was all of the careful measurements that helped establish the credibility of Newton’s laws of motion. His laws were able to correctly calculate the orbits of the planets as measured.

The interesting part of this is that myths and theories are metaphysical and the experiments are epistemological. Myths tend to be very broad in scope such as the various Creation myths of all cultures. These are often easily shown to be imaginative and unsupported by further discovery as the culture advances. However, theory is a different type of statement. Most theories arise in response to measurements that cannot be explained, either as to their character or their exact quantity.

Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics fit in this group. Relativity arose from failures to find the predicted ether that was supposed to vibrate as light passed through it. It is based on the fundamental statement that light always travels at the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of the velocity of the source. It first took the mathematics from Lorentz to predict what we would measure, based on this fundamental idea, and then later used Reimann geometry to formulate the predictions in more general terms. Relativity does an excellent job of predicting what we will see based on measurements using light, [electrical fields, magnetic fields are all related to light] but it does not tell us anything about the nature of a reality that has such a limit. It also says nothing can travel at the speed of light [except light]. It is necessary to be careful here. It doesn’t say that it is impossible to travel faster than light, but we can’t measure it, if it occurs. It runs into a metaphysical problem with light only traveling at the speed of light, because it states that light has no mass otherwise it cannot travel at the speed of light, but yet light has energy and mass and energy are inter-convertible in relativity. Quantum mechanics calculates a mass-equivalent of light, but does not state that light has mass. As a description of what we measure, relativity is excellent, especially for very large distances.

A point at which the Theory of Relativity fails to describe events is inside a black hole. Black holes were predicted by the work of Chandrasakur that extended relativity to the environment of very massive stars. A star that is about 20 times the size of our sun can collapse upon itself as its fuel finally burns out. Its gravity becomes so strong as it collapses that it destroys all known forms of matter and creates what is called a singularity. The gravity around the singularity is strong enough that not even light can escape, hence the name. Although quantum mechanics has been applied to black holes and would indicate that they can evaporate after a sufficiently long period of time, there are no current theories to describe the singularity. Relativity fails here because it depends on the continuity of space-time and a singularity by definition is a discontinuity.

Quantum theory arose from observations relating to measurements of atoms at the turn of the twentieth century. It gets its name from the fact that measurements of radiation seem to fall into discrete levels. An example would be the spectrum of hydrogen when excited by a spark. When the light from excited hydrogen is passed through a prism, it is found to be a series of lines, not a rainbow, or part of a rainbow. What’s more the series of lines can be mathematically predicted if one states certain amounts of energy as a starting point. Then the lines form series where each line in a series is the same amount of energy or quantum away from the next line. Also the various series are separated from each other by specific amounts of energy. Einstein even discussed this quantum effect in his paper on the photoelectric effect, though his work was not related to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics turned out to be an excellent description of what we measure at the scale of atoms and molecules and smaller. It is an extremely precise predictor of the values of molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic phenomena.

One of the major problems with quantum mechanics is that when it is attempted to relate it to the world as we know it, many contradictions and paradoxes occur. Part of it is due to the way it is formulated. In quantum mechanics, light can be handled either as a wave or a particle. In fact, both formulations are in the same equation, and one chooses which way one calculates depending on the problem. Here is a major illustration of the difference between science and metaphysics. Science simply says it can be either depending on the circumstances, and goes about its business of calculating the results of measurements and predictions. There is no attempt to explain why light can be both a particle and a wave. Similarly Relativity cannot explain either why light can only move at one speed in a vacuum, or why light can have energy without mass.

From the start, quantum theory was devised based on observation. Because light can behave as a particle under some circumstances and a wave under others, the formulas have elements of both in them. The wave parts are used when light behaves like a wave and the particle portions when it behaves like a particle. When applied to atomic and molecular chemistry—very successfully in fact—it becomes a system of statements of probability of location for electrons and energy levels fro various motions.

Extensions of quantum mechanics to sub-atomic phenomena have been successful in their predictions, but very non-intuitive and difficultly comprehensible when related to the world as we know it. It could be said that it describes the number of ways collections of energy in the form of “particles” can be broken up. Because there are a finite number of ways observed, the break-up patterns are extrapolated backwards to hypothesize entities that are never seen outside the nucleus. From this author’s perspective, the entire system is beginning to be analogous to astronomy just prior to Copernicus. The proliferation of cycles and epicycles to attempt to explain the motions of the planets in the sky using earth-centric notions, seems similar to the proliferation of particles to explain the observations of other particles.

Because of the success of quantum mechanics at predicting sub-atomic, high-energy events, it was applied to cosmological questions. Astronomical observations seem to indicate that every object is receding from every other object in the universe, i.e. the universe is expanding. Extrapolating backwards, current estimates say that universe began as a point or singularity approximately fourteen billion years ago. Quantum mechanics comes into play, because it can be used to describe possible changes in the very early universe as the energy levels cooled to where first forces separated then particles were formed and finally atoms, as the universe expanded. Though much can be explained and compared to observation the theories are incomplete. One major problem is the failure to explain the distribution of galaxies, or in some cases why they formed.

The discussion in this essay is not complete without looking at the theory of evolution. In its complete form it says that all living things have come about through gradual change over time starting from simple atoms and molecules of gases, e.g. hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon, and their combinations, water, carbon monoxide, cyanide, ammonia, and methane. Experiments have repeatedly shown that these gases in greatly varying proportions can easily give rise to the simple molecular building blocks of life, sugars, amino acids and nucleotides. All that is required is provide energy in the form of heat and/or electric sparks. These simple molecules have been detected in spectra of planets and stars as well. Here on earth the mechanisms of mutation and evolution from gene recombination have clearly been demonstrated. However, the gap between molecules and life has not been experimentally bridged, though it is continually narrowing.

The entire theory of evolution remains hypothetical, in that, the mechanisms are demonstrable, but their actual concatenation from start to finish is not. Evolution is plausible, and to trained scientists, more plausible than competing explanations. Evolutionary paths are determined by physical measurements and comparison of fossils and living organisms. Based on similarity of patterns in records over time, evolutionary trees of speciation have been built. The newest techniques use comparison of DNA between species. As this technique is refined, it is changing some of the accepted evolutionary paths, confirming others, and now is having its own problems. It turns out that DNA can be exchanged between species, which causes confusion in some evolutionary lines.

Science and Determinism
In the next part of this essay series, determinism will have to be more carefully defined and discussed in and of itself. For the moment, however, a reasonable working definition says the universe is deterministic, if at some point in time, it is completely defined, and then can in principle be predicted forever after. Against this definition scientists often place quantum mechanics as proof the universe is non-deterministic.

As I have tried to show, all sciences fail immediately on the issue of predictability. They can only predict to a limit and verify to a limit. Quantum mechanics is based on the inherent limit of measurement. To use it as a “proof” of non-determinism is to beg the question.

Relativity is explicitly a measurement theory. The most striking evidence of this is the issue of simultaneity. In relativity, events are simultaneous relative to when and where measured, whereas metaphysically they can be absolutely simultaneous. Though relativity assumes a continuous space, which we will show in the next essay is necessary for determinism, like all other sciences it is subject to the errors of its measurements and the limits of its predictions.

Finally, evolution is the least able to be used to argue for determinism. Demonstrating the existence of the mechanisms and processes does not prove inevitability of any result; much less a particular result.

Though science cannot be validly applied to the metaphysical question of whether the universe is deterministic or not, it does provide two key concepts that will be useful in the next essay, Reversibility and Continuity. The first was discussed primarily in the context of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The second underlies much of the discussion of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. When we use reversibility in the next section, it will be in an absolute sense, that one can exactly retrace events in a reverse flow from their occurrence. When we use the term continuous, we will mean absolutely, infinitely continuous as vs. there being discontinuous states with abrupt change between them. Or in terms of this section Relativistic vs. Quantum in nature. These concepts will provide constraints on the question of a deterministic universe.

[1] s=1/2(gt2) ; 80=1/2(32 t2) ; 80 = 16 t2 ; t2 = 80/16 = 5 ; t = √5 = 2.24

Marriage and Homosexuality

2007-12-03T18:56:00.000-08:00

I have posted on this topic before, but think it is time to revisit it with a different emphasis. In some ways the topic of homosexual marriage is a perfect storm. There is the constant pressure to not only tolerate homosexuality but also to accept it and consider it equivalent in every way to a heterosexual relationship. There are the biblical literalists who state that homosexuality is a sin, and that there is only one definition of marriage, a man and a woman joining together, and finally there is the problem of the interaction of religion and government.

Before we get started let’s make things clear for the ad hominum crowd: I am heterosexual. I have and have had in the past homosexual friends. I have had homosexual strangers try to flirt or hit on me and didn’t freak out over it. Actually I found it funny for me, sad for them. I am married and I attend an Evangelical Lutheran Church. However, I have unorthodox religious views, and you have to see my religious archives to know them. I think homosexuality is both innate in some cases and acquired in others. I do not see homosexuals as victims. Honi soi qui mal y pense.

Note that my comments are moderated. If you post a comment that is an attempt to make a point however clumsily, and it is obviously your own thought, not something parroted, I will let it be posted regardless if it agrees or disagrees with me. I may or may not post my own rebuttal or extension. You must deal with my arguments and observations, not attack me. ANY name-calling or denigration of me or another commentor in response to this post will go into the bit bucket. I will also reject any comment, regardless of value, that has R-rated language. I encourage discussion and expansion of knowledge, not emotional bashing—that is reserved for theatres of war.

Cultural Aspects of the Issue

One of the most powerful forces in this whole issue is the combined cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. Let’s start with a simple fact, homosexuals are a minority. This alone creates a set of attitudes; those who are out to protect the underdog immediately want to find some way to protect them or become their champions. Those who hate difference, abhor them simply for their being different. This leads to calling them deviant or perverted. And in the middle are the great mass of people that are anywhere from uncomfortable to fearful with known homosexuals and the idea of homosexuality.

Simply being different is not sufficient explanation for attitudes, however. The attitudes towards homosexuals are every bit or more vicious than those towards different races or religions. Inter-racial and inter-religious relationships have always existed though often hidden and are now quite common. But one rarely, if at all finds relationships between homo- and heterosexual people. This is because we are dealing with THE fundamental drive in all humanity – the drive to reproduce. If there is any purpose to life outside the meanings that God or our own egos give it, it is to “be fruitful and multiply.” It is arguably the fundamental life force. Animals including humans are known to endanger their lives in order to attempt to reproduce.

Given that sex and reproduction are so fundamental to life, it is little wonder that homosexuality, which is sterile biologically, can evoke such strong emotional responses and antipathy. Before I am accused of justifying “homophobia”, let me state that reasons and explanations are not excuses for behavior. Because as humans we have the power to observe and judge ourselves, we can control our behavior and in some cases re-educate our emotional responses. Let me also state that outside of questions of sex and reproduction, whether a person is or is not homosexual should be meaningless.

Where problems arise culturally, it is due to the fear and ignorance of homosexuality, because it is different and unknown to heterosexuals. That fear often leads to the idea that homosexuals are constantly looking to prey upon heterosexuals or children to bring them into their way of life. With extremely rare exceptions, nothing could be more wrong. In cases where this occurs, it is probably more due to the same kinds of forces that lead to heterosexual molestation rather than something specific to homosexuality. It has more impact on perception due to the emotional attitude around homosexuality in the first place.

There needs to be a side note on homosexuals in the military. The military is a sub-culture that has its own mores and perceptions. It also has to have much more stringent behavioral requirements due to the life and death nature of its work. There can be no emotional impediments to its functioning. Further contributing to this particular question is the fact that military duty in its primary function is the ultimate in male behavior – the destruction of threats. Coincident with that is the very strong categorization of what is acceptable and not acceptable, with no questioning. These things are essential to the military as no time can be spent on reasoning when instant reaction is necessary to protect life. To the military mind, the risk that a homosexual will not respond in the accepted way in a combat situation is too great to be risked. The survival of a unit depends on every one of its members.

To a civilian, this way of thinking is not comprehensible, and leads to the constant criticism of military policy on homosexuals. To a civilian, it doesn’t make any difference in most cases what a person’s sexual orientation is. To the military, it does. Just as the military does not allow heterosexual couples to belong to the same unit, so they cannot allow two homosexuals to belong to the same unit. The primary loyalty is to the partner, not the unit. There is a further difficulty in that the hyper-heterosexuality of the other members of the unit will exclude any known homosexuals. This is where the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy fails. A covert homosexual member of a group cannot be protected from reprisal until it is too late. As long a homosexual member of a unit is unknown and can act completely as a member of a unit, he/she can survive. Once they are found out, it will completely disrupt a unit. The military takes the stance that such disruption cannot be tolerated, especially if it occurs during hostilities, and would prefer to prevent homosexuals from being part of the military. This is a utilitarian issue. Regardless of what would feel good to civilians or seem right, the military is a separate culture with a far different function from the rest of society. This is not an issue subject to reason. It operates at a more primitive level. That is hard for non-military people to understand, especially intellectuals, who think reason can control everything.

Another side note: the most asinine use of the English language I can think of is to call a male homosexual gay. It is demeaning because it emphasizes the stereotypical feminine behavior that many heterosexuals ascribe to homosexual males. (It also is meaningless in the normal sense of the word, gay.) For that matter it is equally wrong to refer to heterosexuals as straight. This carries an implied value judgment of heterosexual right, homosexual wrong (bent).

All asides aside, let’s get back to the original discussion. (OK, I simply couldn’t resist that bit.) One of the unfortunate consequences of our federal system, that was built mainly by Protestant Christians, is an outlawing of any sexual behavior in many states not considered oriented towards having children. This has nothing to do with homosexuality, it just gets swept up with the rest. States have outlawed oral and anal sex, and, consistent with this, have also outlawed homosexuality. I think it is important to realize that the outlawing of homosexuality is part of a general attitude and NOT just specifically for homosexuals. That this has led to a persecution of homosexuals is a very unfortunate consequence.

Since we are at the persecution of homosexuals, lets visit the persecution of Senator Craig. This is almost a mini-perfect storm in itself. We have the press howling about a Republican who has been accused of homosexual behavior. There is no examination of the issue as to how the accusation occurred, nor is there any attempt to have sympathy if he is a homosexual. This is in direct opposition to the general stated view of most media that homosexuality is to not only be tolerated but to be all but extolled, being considered the equivalent of heterosexual behavior in any normative judgments. The law in Minnesota outlaws homosexual behavior, and so we have cops that patrol for it. There is something very sickening about a cop that spends his time trolling for homosexuals in the public restrooms. First of all, the behavior he is looking for is so arcane that only another homosexual or he would recognize it. In such a circumstance, where is the crime, other than on the law books? If another homosexual is the only person to read and respond to such signals, then it is definitely a case of mutual consent. So where is the defense of personal and private behavior? It disappeared in the name of politics. A man who may, or may not, have been an excellent Senator has been destroyed over something that has nothing to do with his political accomplishments or lack thereof.

As a result of this persecution of homosexuals and others who are on the margins of sexual behavior, we see the rise of the RESCUER. This is a person or group of people who for various reasons make loud and public displays of defending homosexual behavior, even to the point of demanding special privilege for it, similar to affirmative action. I think the rescuers fall into two major groups, those who are using the homosexuals as a way to advance their own search for power and those who buy into the drama triangle, the most compelling psychological trap I know of, and a minor group, the constant sympathizer who oozes feel-sorry emotion over everything, rather impotently. The first group is the most easily discussed, they are the ones that always are wanting to pass a law. Notice that the law always takes away freedom somewhere by either restricting behavior or by restricting the expression of thought. The most notable example is hate crimes. These are simply various crimes that have been singled out for extra punishment if one can project onto them a state of mind of hatred for an oppressed group and a desire to hurt members of the group just because they belong to the group. The behavior is already illegal as behavior. The imposition of additional punishment is brought about by what amounts to mind-reading in some cases. Of course there are obvious cases where slogans are sprayed onto walls, stones, etc., but there are also other cases where the argument is made that the crime occurred simply because the victim was a member of a protected class. This becomes a perverted form of entitlement—victims are avenged more forcefully if they belong to a particular group, not because of the heinousness of the crime. The net result is a restriction in both behavior and thought, as evidenced in Canada where biblical verse has been deemed hate speech when it is the biblical condemnation of homosexuality. The net result of the imposition of hate crime is a loss of freedom of both speech and behavior, because the intent is what is perceived in the mind of the enforcer not the mind of the actor, and intent is the means to establish hate crime. This is the most dangerous of the three groups because they can easily co-opt the other two to accomplish their ends.

To discuss the second group, we must first briefly describe a drama triangle. The drama triangle consists of a victim, a persecutor, and a rescuer. From the names the roles and their overall behavior are obvious. What is not so obvious is that the roles are fluid and a rescuer can become a persecutor, persecutors become victims, and victims become rescuers or persecutors. Those are the most common switches, but any role can become one of the other two—not always in the same triangle. A rescuer needs a victim, and if there is one ready-made will fasten on it, and if there is not one at hand, create one. I think homosexuals fall into a mixture of the two, in earlier times they were actually victims, but now are really placed in the victim role by those wanting to be rescuers. The problem with rescuers is they don’t want to right wrong, they want to avenge it, self-righteously of course. They make demands in the name of the victims that more than correct the persecution. In effect they want to set the victim higher than the persecutor. Often the victim joins in the retribution, and the persecutor becomes a victim of the combined persecution of the victim and rescuer. The deadliness of the triangle is that every one gets a clandestine emotional payoff. The victim wears the victimhood and milks it until such time as he/she can become vengeful. Then there is the payoff of having made the persecutor PAY. The rescuer has the heady satisfaction of RIGHTING A WRONG, and the illicit pleasure of justifiably (in their own mind) really taking it out on the persecutor. The persecutor has of course the feeling of power from being the persecutor, but when he/she becomes a victim can save up the resentment of being persecuted for when she/he is once again a rescued victim and persecutor.

In the context of this discussion, the rescuers want to create homosexual marriage. It serves a dual purpose, it slaps the face of the perceived heterosexual “persecutors” who don’t want the idea of marriage to change, and it elevates homosexual partnerships to legal parity with a heterosexual family. The rescuers also readily go along with the idea of so-called hate speech being punished. In effect we are left with a double standard in which heterosexuals can be criticized about their sexual and cultural practices, but homosexuals cannot. The problem is that in their zeal to tear down what to them is a symbol of oppression, they are ignoring the internal conflicts in the symbol and the unintended consequences that will ensue.

The third group of people are best exemplified by the quote from the Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, that was posted by one of my good blogging friends:

“As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage”…” In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships -- their very lives -- were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana.” [emphasis in source of quote, bk]

To some degree we see a bit of the rescuer in perceiving homosexuals as victims—less important, less worthy, less deserving—but the emphasis is more on the feel-good, the empathy. There is also the muzzy-headed thinking that somehow relationships get their meaning from what they are called—form is more important than substance. I think what is more important to understand, is that he is totally unaware of the conflicted nature of the word marriage as it is used in our society.

One other cultural issue occurs. Until recent times it was acceptable for 14-years old men and women to marry. When life was simpler and the knowledge needed to survive was learned by age 14, this was a reasonable situation, especially if two 14-years olds were involved. But it also led to situations not tolerated today. Older men would out-live several wives and continually remarry young women, often encouraged and accepted because of the burden of raising children beyond 14 years. In cases where a bride-price or dowry was involved, a young girl could represent a major economic asset to a father, if she were essentially sold to an older successful man, who could pay well to have a young wife. This has definitely changed with modern society, due to the desire to keep children out of the labor force, the longer education requirements, and in the last century birth control. States will now allow marriage before 18, age 16, with parental consent, but in some cases a court approval is still required. Only two states allow marriage before the age of 16, both with court approval.

The Nature of Marriage

In thinking about the nature of marriage, it is useful to consider some of the things it is not. It is not simply living together. Many couples live together, but they do not qualify as married. It is not having children. Unmarried parents have children. Especially in this day of easy and effective contraception, marriage is not a necessity for sex. Yet all of these things are part of marriage. Biblical approaches to marriage will be discussed below, so for now we will confine the discussion to the human and secular aspects of it.

First of all, at its ideal, marriage is a lifetime union. Even in societies with multiple wives, the unions are for life. To my knowledge, separation and divorce are not part of primitive societies. It seems to be something that comes with civilization. One of the primary benefits of this union is survival. It allows the division and specialization of labor so that less energy is expended for two together than for two individuals. Or alternatively, it allows for a better life for two when they expend the same energy as they would singly.

A benefit to the male is the saving of the energy that goes into courtship. In almost all mammals and birds, there are courtship rituals. These can require the expenditure of considerable energy, and in fact become a survival selection factor—those with the most energy win the mates and pass on their genes. It also provides security for the passing on of genes—life unions mean that offspring are given the chance to grow to maturity. In contrast, look at lions. When a new male takes over a pride, the first thing he does is kill all offspring that are not his. Besides humans, there are other species that mate for life. I have heard geese and wolves, and there are others. Interestingly, not primates; they seem to form extended clans ruled by a few males.

For females there are the advantages of protection and no longer the need to select a new mate every season. In humans it also allows for being able to work at home and still have the nutrition that hunting brings in. It also assures assistance or at least protection and food while children are young and unable to assist with the tasks of survival. [Modern society has changed much of this, and we will discuss that a bit later.]

So, one of the attributes of marriage is commitment to the union. The motivations for that commitment were simple at one time but become more complex with civilization. Reproduction is the primary purpose of species (Regardless of our wonderful intellectual powers as humans, we have to reproduce.), and a permanent union is the way to maximize that in humans. Part of this is the length of time it takes to raise a human to independence, about 12-14 years. If the average lifespan before civilization was about 50-55, then a menopause at 40 or so made sense. The last baby would have parenting to independence.

In addition to commitment then, we can add reproduction. In fact in the days of high infant and childhood mortality, women had to basically be baby factories in order for families to flourish. The changes that civilization has made on this grim scenario are far-reaching in their consequences.

As a first approach then, marriage is a formalizing of this committed union. Because marriage evolved in the days when survival of families via their offspring was paramount, the formalization created security for the children. First through religion then through law, marriage became a binding commitment of the two adults to each other and a commitment to the offspring of the union. Rules and laws were generated that said the property was owned in common, or not, who acquired what property in the event of death of a partner, and what children inherited what property (e.g. primogeniture in Great Britain).

This is a good place at which to bring up the romantic side of marriage. First and foremost is sexual attraction. It is the driver in male-female attractions that do not develop from long-standing friendships. It can be an overwhelming lust, an overwhelming non-specific attraction, a mild attraction that grows with interaction, a sudden idea that another person may be “fun” to know. How the attraction is expressed is a function of the person expressing it and the receiver. The variations are as great as there are couples. At some point the attraction becomes strong enough that the couple wants to have sex together. There are several ways this occurs [socially, OK?]. They may simply find a secluded location and mate. This is common in teenagers. They may go to one or another apartment or a hotel room. This is more common in the employed twenties. They may decide to live together, unmarried. Also common among the twenty-years olds, and older couples. They may decide to wait until they are married, which is less common now than earlier. At this point, with the sexual pressure off, they may become closer, stuck in a rut, or break up.

Of these options, all may lead to marriage. However, the success of the marriage may depend on the nature of the interactions before the marriage. Avoiding the inclusion of the casual, one-night stand or casual once-in-a-while relations, the longer the couple is together with or without having sexual relations, the more likely they are to become married, unless they break up in the meantime. At some point they decide to become married and the relationship should change. They need to become serious about how they will solve problems together, how they approach money, kids, etc. This is in addition to maintaining the “fun” of courtship. Regardless of the form it takes this is a courtship phase. Because the commitment is lifelong, the courtship is longer and more grueling on both participants. However, they do eventually get married.

Marriage generally invokes a ceremony. It may be simple or it may be elaborate. Generally it is designed to announce to the world the commitment of the couple to each other and to advertise their social standing. As a side note, from my experience, the size of the ceremony bears no relation to the durability of the marriage. The ceremony is a social event designed to show off and to celebrate. If the commitment and the adjustments during the engagement are good, the marriage will survive regardless of the ceremony or lack thereof. But it is important to note that despite the implied cynicism about the purpose of the ceremony, there really is an element of the bride being her most beautiful, the groom his handsomest, and the wedding the high point in their lives. As much or more as any ceremony marking the change from childhood to adulthood, the marriage is a life-event. It is supposed to happen only once in one’s life, and it is to be as wonderful as possible.

Legal Aspects of the Issue

Marriage law was applied to both the formal religious ceremony, and also in many states of the US to couples that had been together for long periods of time—common-law marriage. I would suspect that common-law marriage grew out of a desire to protect the wife in the event of the death or disappearance of her spouse. By having shared their lives together, she was considered to have earned a part of the assets. Marriage law has many aspects of contract law in spelling out the rules of ownership of property and custody of children. Because marriage became a legal entity, when it fell apart then there had to be laws to deal with that as well so came about divorce law, describing when and on what grounds divorces could occur and how the material goods of the marriage were to be divided.

So another attribute of marriage is a sanction, in this case from the governmental side of the society, and, as we all know and will discuss below, from the religious side as well. These sanctions and rules run counter to the loud politically correct statements of militant feminism, and it is useful to look at them a bit. One of the things that seems to occur in the process of civilizing humans is that at some point males become overly-dominant. A modern extreme is Islam in the Middle East, where the woman is no better than a slave. I think this occurs because as survival becomes less difficult, the role of the woman in the partnership becomes less critical. The man still goes out from the home, but the woman becomes more and more dependent on him for sustenance as her role in providing shrinks from agricultural husbandry, cooking, food preservation, and manufacture of clothing, to simply caring for children and housekeeping. She no longer has a bargaining chip of survival skills. The male can purchase everything he needs.

Conversely, in our modern society, a women is no longer dependent on a man to raise her children, in the survival sense. She can earn an adequate living while hiring others to watch over her child(ren). She can hire housekeepers to maintain her home environment. What is lost is the emotional support of a male which is actually needed for the proper upbringing of a child.

But society has not caught up with feminism, if, indeed, it has too. Let us look at current marriage and divorce law, from a very high level. The approach is one that the male is the earner of the money, and the woman the home-based care-giver, and that marriages should be discouraged from breaking up. From this comes the concepts that the mother is the better custodian for the child, that the father should pay child support and/or alimony, and the concept of fault or reason for a divorce, establishing blame. Though it may have meant that in many cases the husband could buy his way out of a marriage and the wife might have to find a cause to divorce her husband and obtain support, the general intent was to support marriage, even when unpleasant (yes, more so for the woman than the man), and prevent the total loss of home for the woman and the children if the marriage broke up.

But note that most of the function of marriage law is analogous to, and can be provided by, contract law. This is something I want to return to later.

In regard to protecting those unable to protect themselves, the law also forbid unions between humans and animals, and adults and children. In both cases it can be seen as not between two entities capable of informed or knowledgeable consent. But the problem is that these laws come from a generally common concept of what is and is not a marriage and not from an express desire to protect the defenseless. As a consequence unions between persons of the same sex are forbidden.

The Religious Approach to Marriage

Most of what we think about when we consider marriage comes from religion. The ceremonies, the statement of sanction, the formalizing of the union with admonishments to be faithful all come from religion. Missing from the religious approach is any explicit statements concerning property or children. This is because religious marriages are assumed to be lifelong, and such issues should not arise.

Religion wants to secure its believers to itself and binds them with rules and regulations on how to conduct their lives. Hopefully these rules and regulations are actually good guides to living, though sometimes their interpretation in years after they are made can make them detrimental. The members of a religion come to believe they have the only right answer, and often wish to enforce their rules, not just on themselves, but also on the rest of their society. Sometimes the motivation is not one of self-righteousness but one of defensiveness—remove temptation by outlawing it civilly. One is less tempted when no one can do something and is more motivated to abstain if it is also illegal.

Religious rules are designed to promote the stability of the family. They are also designed to maximize the creation of more children—“be fruitful and multiply” as a divine command. To this end, any form of sex other than that which can create children is considered sinful. This includes masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, and homosexual sex. It also encourages or demands virginity at the time of marriage. After all, if the first time one has sex is in a marriage, then it will be a powerful force for validating the marriage, because it then is through marriage that one of the most powerful sensations humans have is experienced. In addition, divorce is forbidden or at the least discouraged for obvious reasons. There is also a public health factor in marital virginity, virgins will not have contracted an STD. Other issue arises around virginity. When daughters were considered property, and a man seduced a virgin daughter, the economic value of the daughter was greatly diminished. The father was then entitled to money equal to the economic loss.

It is from religion that the whole concept of marriage derives. From religion we get the sanctioning of the union and the public proclamation that puts the weight of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple behind it. Like everything else in religion, laws and rituals developed to solemnize the promises made, and the promises were worded to be as binding as possible.

One can argue with the apparent unreality of religious proscriptions on marriage. However, as long as we had a predominantly agrarian society, they generally worked. First of all, survival was sufficiently challenging, that there was little energy for other than the basics. Husbands and wives were grateful to survive another day and if one had annoying manners, strange behaviors, a bad temper, or any other bad trait, it was small compared to the survival of the family unit.

In many cases, love never entered into it after the courtship. I am always reminded at this point of the song from “Fiddler on the Roof”, “Do You Love Me?”. The dialogue in the song is done humorously, but there is a definite underlying reality—“Do you love me?” “Do I WHAT?” “Do you love me?” Do I love him? For 25 years I cooked for him, …..for 25 years I milked the cow, after 25 years, why talk about love now?” etc. They never met each other until their wedding day, and then were joined for life. The marriage was arranged by a match-maker. “Fiddler” has a lot of poignancy simply because it was culturally true, and there are close parallels in all early cultures, not just Russian Judaism.

Religious marriage became the model for secular marriage, and as long as we were predominantly a Judeo-Christian society there was little conflict. The forms of Protestant Christian marriage became the forms of secular marriage. The pastor, priest, or rabbi was replaced with a judge or magistrate.

Conflicts and Possible Resolution

The current conflict lies in the overlap of the religious and legal aspects of marriage. The legal portion is the registration of the marriage to validate the rights of the participants and their offspring. After all, in a dispute it is important to show that there are grounds for the dispute – namely a valid marriage, whether ceremonial or common-law. In the case there is not a valid marriage, e.g. palimony suits, then different law must be applied. The law that is applied has as its purpose the best outcome for all parties, though often this is not achieved, simply due to the inability or refusal of lawmakers to craft good law.

From a legal perspective marriage is actually a contract. The problem stems from the fact that the conditions of the contract are being created piecemeal as necessity appears to dictate. With the original model for marriage being religious, with its attendant lack of legal detail, it left to lawmakers to spell out such detail. Generally such efforts, rather than starting from scratch, simply apply more law to existing law, and leave it to the courts to sort it out.

The religious aspects are the ceremony and the sanctions. There is also the specific requirement that a marriage be between a man and a woman. It is not contractual, it is the fulfillment of a divine command, and the command is very specific in its requirements. As noted above, the purpose is less to provide a wonderful life for the bride and groom as to provide a stable environment for the offspring. Superimposed on this was also the early cultural requirement for many offspring. AS mentioned abov this created specific rules as to what was a suitable partner and what was acceptable sexual behavior.

[I just realized there is a whole class of marriages I have not touched – political marriage, e.g. Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. These fall under the legal contract rubric, and the sanctioning of the church to these unions was not one of its finest hours. ]

What has occurred as a result is that priests, pastors, and rabbis have become ex-officio officers of the state, filling out and validating the legal documents of marriage. Conversely, the state enforces law that mostly stems from religious doctrine. What must occur is the separation of the legal and religious aspects. The state must get out of the marriage business, and the church must quit legally validating unions.

The emotional impact of the word, marriage, carries all the religious sanctions and constraints in the mids of most people. As witness to this, is the number of state constitutional amendments that specifically state marriage is to be between a man and a woman. That is not a problem – the problem is when civil unions are forbidden. Then we have a case of religious doctrine dictating to the state – something I discussed at length before. If the state did not recognize marriage as a legal term, the problem would be moot.

The state laws need to have a definition of civil union that applies to ALL couples, male-female, male-male, female-female. It is important that it disallow child-adult, animal-adult, or any oter contracdt that involves on party not being legally competent. I also think that states should dis-allow both polygamy and polyandry, simply because the enforcement of such contracts would be a nightmare. [Note: business should be free to recognize such unions as the owners or stockholders see fit. Business is private property and not subject to the same restrictions as government. For those who think EEO is good, remember that forcing employment will lead to resentment from the employees and inefficiency. Those companies that are able to see past the stereotypes will harvest a wealth of talent. My own impression is that some very creative people can belong to single-sex unions, and the companies that also see it will compete by offering partner benefits vs. married couple benefits. ]

Churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques would then perform a ceremony called marriage, or in the case of atheists, they would create their own ceremonies as they see fit. If a church chose to solemnize a homosexual union, it is their choice and not a legal requirement, keeping church and state separate. If it chooses not to, the couple is still a legal couple.

Given the emotion surrounding the concept and term “marriage”, I don’t have much hope of an easy resolution. However, I think two things would help considerably. First, keep the legal issues at the state level; do not amend the US Constitution with a definition. Second, and this has been recommended before, create an exception for the legal definitions of marriage and civil union to the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution, allowing each state, in the best tradition of Federalism, to determine their solution to this issue. One solution will never fit all in the foreseeable future, but with fifty possible solutions, some good solutions may evolve.

Homosexual relationships can be as fully committed as heterosexual ones. They should be allowed their chance to flourish. At the same time, trying to expand the term marriage beyond its common meaning is the wrong approach. Make it an issue of equal rights and privilege under a common term of civil union, and there will be a greater chance for equality.

What's wrong with transportation today

2006-02-19T16:55:00.000-08:00

Some Comments on Transportation and Its History in the US

This essay has as its primary purpose to record my thinking about transportation in this country. I think it is a mess compared to what it ought to be, and we are going to get bitten by its contradictions sooner or later. Since this is quite long, the longest essay I have posted to date, I recommend that anyone wanting to read it, print if off and do so from hard copy. (It runs to about 15 pages of 10 point type in MS Word.) I invite any an all discussion. If you have facts to counter anything I have said, please pass them on. If you have further amplification or clarifications, those are also welcomed. If you wish to make an opposing argument, keep it civil and reasonable, and I will be glad to entertain it. That does not guarantee agreement with it. Any ad hominum attacks will be deleted. Transportation is critical to our country whether we pay attention to it or not. Right now it is in the hands of politicians, and that rarely leads to anything but ultimate disaster. With this essay, I am hoping to both present my thinking to date and to encourage further discussion.

Transportation is where the desire for entitlements meets capitalism, and with the government on the side of entitlements, capitalism loses, and when capitalism loses, so does economic freedom, efficiency, and diversity. Since I am a rail fan, I have a perspective that sees the railroads as having suffered the most from all this, and ultimately the public, despite Vanderbilt’s famous quote, “The Public be damned.” This is not to say the railroads are victims. To a great degree they made their own beds and now have to lie in them, just as automakers and airlines did vis-à-vis their unions.

So let’s start on this journey (pun intended) with a broad-brush view of the history of transportation.

When the US was first settled, transportation was by foot, or by horse-drawn vehicles on streets. Long-distance travel was by ship, boats on rivers, or over wilderness trails by foot or horseback. As the US and its cities grew, trails widened to wagon roads, and streets became paved with more horse-drawn vehicles. With the exception of the streets the thoroughfares, paths and roads, were unmaintained except by the travelers themselves and were in the commons. They were considered a part of the given environment and everyone used them for “free” in the sense of no payment of fees for use. I think that to some degree this became an embedded model in our culture for all of transportation, that somehow it should always be free of usage fees. That we should simply walk or ride out our door to where-ever we wanted to go.

At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, canal projects were advanced, along with the development of horse-drawn carriages on rails and toll roads. Most of the projects were private, but underlying all of them was government permission. A piece of paper called a Charter had to be issued to enable a private entity to create a means of transportation. They had to have the permission of some government agency to try to make money by creating a service. [The problem of regulation has always been with us, it has just gotten worse over the years.] This becomes more important as railroads were developed, where charters had the potential to be political shakedown tools. This is still true today with Amtrak, but more on that later.

In the early 19th century, canals and riverboats had their heyday, while the railroads were developing strong enough locomotives to haul economic loads. Once steam had been harnessed to work as motive power, the railroads took off. Despite the costs of creating roadbed, laying crossties and rail, building steam engines and cars to ride on the rails, railroads were so economical for the amount of work they did, that they rapidly displaced all long distance canal projects. Part of it was that railroad right-of-way was cheaper to build and maintain than a canal. Most canals required a right-of-way that was several tens of feet wide, but a railroad could push a right-of-way through in as little as ten feet wide. But part of it was the traffic density that could be maintained. A single locomotive could pull a train of as few as two or three passenger cars and carry more passengers at less cost than one canal boat pulled by a horse team. And it could do it faster and to more places.

The northeast rapidly became criss-crossed by many small railroads, that might connect only a few settlements together, as well as by larger roads that often grew by purchasing other lines. As railroads became longer and connected more remote markets, the economy grew. Farmers found that there were markets more removed than their local markets that would pay more for their products. They too wanted to ship by rail, but for some reason, farmers played the victim card from the very first, supported by journalists. Railroads were presented as necessary to their survival, and that the rates being charged were hurting them. Since much of the US was rural in those days, farmers carried tremendous political clout [the vestiges of which still remain today, despite farmers being a tiny portion of our economy and population.] Part of it was sheer numbers, and part of it was their being presented as providing part of our general survival—food. Part of it was the romantic notion of the family farmer—how could we hurt them? It would be too awful.

Some of the problem was the desire for something for nothing. After all it would be so much easier to go to a distant town by train than by walking or riding a buggy or a wagon. (But why should I have to pay so much for the privilege? I think the rate is too high.) So the farmers organized and pushed for regulation of railroad rates. Once that became politically viable, of course manufacturers jumped on, seeing a potential reduction in costs that could go to the bottom line. At the same time they, the manufacturers, forgot that regulation of one industry, namely railroads would lead to their own regulation in the future. [Just like the old quote, “First they came for …then they came for … finally they came for me.] Railroads were profitable enough, and their management naïve enough, that they put up only token resistance, because it took away profit, but didn’t create a loss. [Just like gradually heating a frog, by the 20th century it was too late, and regulation almost killed the railroads.]

Somewhere around the 1830’s and 1840’s the expansion west beyond the Mississippi river took off, with a tremendous impetus by the gold rush of ’49. The only way to get to the west coast was either by ship, around Cape Horn, a long and dangerous journey, or overland by wagon, another not quite as long and but just as dangerous journey. Once there were enough people in San Francisco, communication became paramount. First there was the Pony Express, an institution that was so politically incorrect that it employed 14 years-old boys to risk their lives as riders. It cost $25 to send a sheet of tissue paper from St Louis to San Francisco, with no guarantee it would get there. But it took days instead of months as would be by ship. The riders rode day and night as fast as a horse could travel under the various conditions. As far as I know this was a private operation, and never fell under the auspices of government regulation. However, at the same time, the telegraph was being built, and once it spanned the nation, the Pony Express folded.

The expansion and the Civil War created a perception in government, that to strengthen the Union, the West coast had to be joined by rail so that people, goods (especially gold and silver from California and Nevada respectively), and mail could travel coast to coast in a few days, instead of months. To implement this policy, the government needed to encourage the railroads to build in what was obviously uneconomic territory. To provide the necessary encouragement, the Federal government created a land-grant program. Railroads were to be given title to one square-mile of territory on alternating sides of their right-of-way for each mile of rail they built. Eventually this land would have value, it was assumed, and could be used as collateral for the loans necessary to purchase the materials and equipment for the construction, as well as eventually generate enough income to pay off the loans. The Central Pacific, starting from California, and the Union Pacific starting from Kansas City began construction and finally met at Promentory Point, Utah, in 1864.

There were other railroads that also took advantage of this program, eg. the Santa Fe to Los Angelos. All railroads that participated in the land-grant program eventually declared bankruptcy at least once, and some several times. This can be traced to the fact that the value of the land grants was not realized either in time to pay for the construction loans, nor did the settlements behind the railroad provide enough business to pay for them either. For a contrast, Jim Hill built both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific railroads from Chicago to Seattle and Portland. He took no government offers, building the railroads on the business he generated as they were built. Neither railroad ever went into receivership.

Government policy did indeed bring the West and East coasts closer together in time of travel, but at the price not of those who set the policy, but at the cost of the owners and users of the railroads. One can argue that the policy was good in its goals, but its means left much to be desired. It was certainly a case similar to today, where the Federal government dictates a policy then forces its payment not from those who benefit but from those who have the deepest pockets. This does not absolve the management of the western railroads from having made some choices that had bad consequences twenty or thirty years in the future, but typical of today, even back then politics created unrealistic and unprincipled, large-scale programs.

During the second half of the 19th Century after the Civil War, the United States went through the most amazing economic growth the world has ever seen. Business was relatively unregulated, and the boldest of the business thinkers created phenomenal wealth, wealth as measured in capital resources, not dollars in banks or prices of shares. At the same time the railroads prospered and competed in a most cut-throat way. Owners of one road would try to take over other roads, not by purchase of the capital infra-structure directly, but by purchasing control of the outstanding stock, similar to the hostile take-overs of today. However, it was much more exciting, with some of the fights being quite open and spectacular. One way to fight was to water the stock, that is issue so much stock, as fast as possible, so that it becomes impossible to purchase enough shares to gain control.

These were not the only financial shenanigans occurring; the stock market was wide-open and there were many speculators. The railroad owners were some of the more obvious, and they came to the attention of the Yellow Journalists. There have always been the equivalent of the left/liberal media, those who have the desire to destroy or control that which they cannot create themselves and of which they have a monstrous envy. In order to survive, the railroads and other companies had to provide a product or service that was affordable, even if it seemed high. If it were too high no one would purchase it, and if it were priced too low, the demand would outstrip supply, leading to shortages and service problems. This is, of course, standard supply and demand economics. Over and above the provision of such services, the owners fought their high-finance wars publicly, and the Yellow Journalists decided to make hay of it.

They termed the railroad and company owners, Robber Barons, and the term stuck. Simply by creating such a name for them, they automatically positioned them as evil in the public eye. There was no need for someone to think. “Cornelius Vanderbilt? He’s a Robber Baron, a bad guy.” [Does this sound familiar?] Never was there a clear case of from whom they stole. They did nothing criminal, but because they had daring, vision, and a willingness to fight for what they wanted, they obtained wealth and appeared to be more free than the rest of the people. They had no more legal freedom than anyone else, save when politicians were willing to sell political favors, and often were held up to legal extortion on charters, and regulations. Their apparent greater economic freedom was earned by their willingness to take risks. It was not stolen from anyone. They were wealthy because they created wealth with the increasing efficiency by which goods were created and delivered. But a lack of understanding of the difference between creating wealth and taking money led to their castigation. [The heirs of Yellow Journalism today make the same mistakes, but are more widespread in the MSM.]

As a consequence, one of the worst governmental regulatory agencies was created during this time, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Believe it or not, two of the most powerful railroads actually went along with the deal. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were intensely competitive, servicing much of the same territory in parallel. As a consequence they were often involved in rate wars which caused major cash flow problems. They actually wanted the ICC to restrict their competition to save them from the rate wars.

Never mind that other solutions were available. One example: There were three passes over the Allegheny Mountains, the northern along the great lakes which the New York Central (NYC) used as the main route to Chicago, the central pass which the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) used for the same purpose (the pass is the site of the famous Horseshoe Curve), and a southern pass, over which the Pennsylvania Turnpike was built. The southern route was the shortest route to central Ohio and Indiana, but it was the worst in terms of grades and tunneling, requiring at least six tunnels and grades of over 2% (rising 2 ft for every 100 ft of distance) in places, which in railroading is extremely steep. As part of an attempt to compete, the PRR was trying to establish a northern route because of the low gradients, and in reply the NYC started building over the southern route. Both attempts would have exhausted the two railroads and probably ruined them. In addition the extra capacity was not needed. So J. P. Morgan the financier, had the owners of the two railroads in for a weekend get together and apparently put some sense into their heads, because the NYC and PRR abandoned their efforts. Notice there was no government intervention, no regulation, just some level-headed financial advice from one of the great bankers of his day. [American Heritage magazine, many years ago published an article on how J. P. Morgan averted a stock-market crash single-handedly in the 1890’s.]

At the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century, the US was an economic giant and still growing. There was no income tax; custom duties were so great that the government had a surplus which led to its own excesses, which are outside this discussion. Industry was highly profitable, and the overall standard of living was increasing, more so in cities than in the rural areas. The automobile was already starting to be developed, and the Wright Brothers were working on flight. These two are very important in a few years, but I want to look at city transit for a moment.

One of the kinds of examples that are continually ignored in looking at the effects of politics on transportation are the fare regulations of urban transportation. When the New York subway system was first created, the fare was a nickel. As it grew and aged, the owners wanted to raise the fare to provide capital for improvements and extensions. The hue and cry that was raised led the city fathers to forbid the fare raise. Again, this is something they should not have had the power to do in the first place. As a consequence the New York subway system eventually was unable to operate efficiently and was taken over by the city, with the results we have today. There are people that never seem to understand how markets work, or if they do, they don’t want to have to pay what something is worth. They are the natural supporters of all the politicians that want to control everything. In general, urban transit has become a great cause for collectivists who like people to be treated as masses. It is not profitable for a number of reasons, some of which are caused by the governments that try to promote them, and for historical reasons. By now, they all run either under government ownership or control and are subsidized by taxpayers in one way or another.

Returning to automobiles, they were first a novelty. Driving an automobile was both relatively expensive and an adventure if one left the city. On the paved streets of the city
Automobiles became useful transportation, but for any long distance travel, the train was still the mode of choice. It was not until the 1920’s and 1930’s that any attempts at developing a national highway system were begun. Once Henry Ford made a car for “everyman”, the pressure was on to provide highways. However, it was still an adventure to go any long distance, and even when I was a kid in the 1950’s to travel 500 miles in a day by car was a major accomplishment. The automobile provided freedom in a way that nothing had before. It allowed people to live away from the crowded cities, yet still work in them. It allowed them to go where they wanted to, when they wanted to, not where a train or streetcar went or to when it was available. It still remained a mostly local form of transportation, highly flexible for short distances but still challenging for long ones.

The airplane continued to develop, being at first, as was the car, a novelty. Lindberg showed its feasibility for long distances, and as planes became larger and capable of greater distances, more people rode them. However, they were expensive to fly, and only those with a great desire and the money did so. A cross country trip often took almost as long as a train ride, and it was not nearly as convenient, there not being food in the air except box lunches or restrooms. Planes usually had to make several hops to cover long distances.

During this same time the railroads kept innovating better and better service for both passengers and freight. The late 1930’s were the beginnings of the big name trains, and the first commercial diesels on railroads. Diesels led to the streamliner concept, and the image was so powerful, that several railroads put streamlined sheathing on their top passenger steam engines. Southern Pacific, B & O, NYC, and Norfolk Western come to mind as outstanding examples. It was a great image, being art deco in flavor at a time when art deco was big.

World War II saw the airplane develop rapidly for military purposes, and after the war those developments became part of the civilian air fleet, the Boeing Stratocruiser, the DC-7, and the development of the Boeing 707, the first jet passenger plane, an offshoot of the B-47/B-52 development. It was followed quickly by the DC-8 and the Convair 880. The distances planes could travel were now long enough that coast-to-coast non-stop flights were possible, and the planes were big enough to offer restrooms and food on board. It was now possible to go across the ocean by air instead of by ship. [Jet lag existed even then.] However, planes were still the province of the well-to-do and rich. People who could afford to pay the premium for the speed. Already air transportation was heavily regulated by both the FAA and the CAB. The former dealt in safety and maintenance standards, and the latter set the rates the airlines could charge. The CAB caused a major distortion in the airlines structure and competition, actually restricting it so that the airlines did not compete with their rates.

After WW II, cars were very common, as were urban transportation systems. Long distance busses were making money with the lowest prices, though slowest times, to destinations all over the US. There were paved national highways and some were four lanes wide in places. People used cars to get around their local area far more than streetcars, trolleys, and busses, and as a result the old interurban systems became extinct. Only in the largest metropolitan areas did urban transit remain a successful business, and in many of those locations there were heavy subsidies to keep it running.

Railroads were at the peak of their impact. The war had been good to the railroads in the sense that the working plant had priority on steel and other rationed materials to keep rails and equipment repaired. The railroads were recognized as vital to the war effort and so did not suffer a degradation of their infrastructure. After the war, the railroads used the lessons learned from having to stretch their plant so thin to work fast and effectively. Freight traffic was high and growing as the country started to rebound from the scarcities of the war, and passenger traffic became a major competition. The heavy-weight cars of the thirties and forties were being converted to a streamlined look, and the newest cars were made of lighter weight stainless steel using designs that derived from the stressed-skin designs for aircraft. Railroads were investing in passenger traffic and competing for business. Passenger service was paid attention to by management, because the image of a railroad was its passenger service. Dinners were always high-class restaurants with full linens and table service. Some trains had table cutlery and dishes that could only be used on those particular trains. Always it advertised the railroad, with logos and often scenes from the right-of-way. For the railroads, life was good, as it was for automotive manufacturers and for airlines.

So in the fifties, one rode around locally in one’s car or if one didn’t have a car in some form of urban transportation. If one wanted to go a long distance there was the bus if you weren’t in a hurry and didn’t have much money, the train which was faster and more comfortable and cost more. One could even have a bed on a train. And for those in a great hurry and/or the money to pay for there were airplanes. Now fifty years later, there are almost no long-distance passenger trains and the ones that exist run on infrequent schedules that are often fiction. The airlines are having trouble finding enough places to land planes, and people drive their cars on long trips on interstate highways and sit in traffic jams during city rush-hours, while much of the nation’s freight moves across country by truck rather than train. What happened?

A discussion of what happened will necessarily be very sketchy. The events of the 1960’s through the turn of the century into 2000 are quite complicated, and I don’t have all of them in hand. I have ideas and views on them from having lived through the times and having done a lot of casual reading related to transportation, and those views are what will be developed. Let’s start by looking at some of the economics of the various modes of transportation along with some further history past the fifties.

Automobiles were very common by the fifties and well-paved streets and highways had been built and were continuing to be built. City streets were financed by city tax revenue, and the highways by the taxes on gasoline. The concept was that the gas taxes only affected the users of highways, and the more people drove the more they paid—a seemingly fair preposition. The only problem is that it was administered by the government, and that eventually led to the complete decoupling of gasoline taxes from highway usage.

One of the first pressures to decouple highways from gas taxes occurred in the fifties, the beginnings of the Interstate Highway System (IHS). Much as we all now benefit from the existence of the HIS, it not only led to the politicizing of highways, but also created a major distortion in the transportation world. The IHS began under the administration of President Eisenhower, and it was one of the major programs of his presidency. When Eisenhower was an officer after WW I, he had to take a convoy across the country, from somewhere in the East to the West Coast. It took him 68 days, over mostly unpaved highways. From that experience, he determined that there should be a national highway system so that one could drive coast to coast without a stoplight or any other hindrance. [I can’t resist a snarkey comment, why didn’t he load the convoy up on a train and have it transported across the country in a few days? That is what later occurred during WW II. It is a good thing he had a decent staff during the planning for D Day or had learned by then, else we would have seen GI’s swimming across the Channel to invade.] The cost of the IHS required more funds than could be provided by gasoline taxes. Thus began the appropriations for Federal Highways. Today, we see the results of this in allocations for “The Bridge to Nowhere,” and other pork-barrel projects.

Parts of the IHS require paying tolls, but the greatest part has no fees-for-use. It is the development of such highway systems, that encouraged people to travel further in their automobiles, and for trucking companies to start up. It is during these fifty years that trucks ceased to be merely local delivery systems and became long distance haulers. Both the owners of private cars and the owners of trucks came to receive a major subsidy in the form of “free” highways. Though truckers pay high user fees to various state and federal agencies for use of the highways, I have been assured by a civil engineer that those fees nowhere near pay the total bill for wear and tear on highways caused by trucks.

Starting as a means of domestic travel for the well-to-do or those in a hurry, airplanes were protected from competition by the CAB as mentioned above. Airports were still small but were generally administered by local governments. Airports still are under government control today, under the auspices of airport authorities. These are government bodies with the power to issue bonds and act much as a business without the risks of a business, since they have the backing of the local government to honor their debts and decisions. Airlines are charged fees for landing, and terminal use, but I have never seen a comparison of the income from the charges to the actual costs of providing the facilities. Since airports are non-profit entities, I wonder at whether or not they constitute a subsidy to the airlines. There is another subsidy that occurred in airline history—mail, but that is to be discussed later on since it has a major impact on all transportation.

Airlines have always had high maintenance costs, and today fuel costs and personnel are the two major expense items. One saving grace for airlines may be that they do not have the costs of right-of-way. They fly through the air which has no maintainable structure associated with it. Since the physical routes are shared by all airlines between any two cities and controlled by the FAA, is there actually a hidden cost of right-of-way that is not normally seen and not charged for? Or even if there is no direct cost, should the air routes have charges applied due to their economic value? Certainly the landing slots have been mentioned in this regard. Because airports are governmentally run, there is the usual egalitarian attitude that all slots are the same to all users. Thus the landing fee during rush hour is the same as during slack time, and the cost to land a fifty passenger regional jet is the same as landing a 747 jumbo or an Airbus. Since the economic value is not the same for all slots, airlines have tried to utilize every available minute of landing time at certain prime times, 8-10 in the morning and 4-7 in the evening. As a consequence there is no room in the schedules for any sort of delay, so any time the weather forces spacing-out landings, there are ripples all over the US as flights are delayed, or even cancelled.

In effect, airlines have been partially isolated from economic pressures and realities for fifty years, and we now are reaping the harvest in the bankruptcies of the major carriers. With the demise of the CAB in the eighties, airlines had to start price competition. Until that time the major carriers were still able to pretty much set prices and grant union demands almost unchallenged. All major carriers were fully unionized, with pilots’, flight attendants’, and mechanics’ unions. The demands of the union at one airline were acceded to, since it could be assumed that the other major carriers would also grant the same concessions, and the CAB would rubber-stamp it. With the closing of the CAB came fare competition, and the less efficient airlines started failing or were bought up for their routes or gate access. Eastern airlines fell early on as did Republic, and Pan Am began a downhill slide. About the same time as this was occurring, there were also major changes in the handling of mail. Again that is for later in this discussion. With the advent of airlines such as Southwest with a totally different operating philosophy, the real competition began. The large carriers were forced to cut fares further and further, and finally with the massive rise in fuel prices they became uncompetitive and fell into bankruptcy, one after the other. The stronger merged with or purchased the weaker, and then went bankrupt themselves. We are still seeing the shake-out.

There is a major irony in this. Just as the airlines were handed the mail contracts from the railroads, the truckers were then handed the mail contracts from the airlines. The saving grace for the airlines was Express and Priority mail. Those were in competition with UPS and FEDEX, and provided a continuing source of revenue from the Post Office. And now we pay record rates for first class mail with slower service than in the 1950’s. The USPS is a classic example of a monopoly. It is maintained by law, as it is illegal to compete directly against the Post Office for first class mail delivery, as several entrepreneurs have found out.

Now we will turn to railroads. In the fifties when railroads ran their own passenger service that had their name on it, passenger trains ruled the schedules. All freight was secondary to a passenger train. This was not because the carrying of passengers was that profitable. Considering that it required a car 80 feet long to carry 54 passengers in a comfortable chair car or about a fourth that number in a Pullman sleeper, plus a diner and baggage car, the economics of carrying people alone were not compelling. However, the fact that those people judged the railroad by how they were treated, and they were all potential freight shippers or receivers, it really did matter that passenger trains were fast, comfortable, and generally enjoyable. The main costs of maintaining the infrastructure were covered by freight. The amount of freight the railroads carried was continually growing.

Passenger trains were not loss-leaders, however. By adding Rail Express Agency cars and mail cars to the front-end of passenger trains, enough revenue was obtained in addition to the passenger fares to make passenger trains cost-effective if not profitable. In addition, the local passenger trains carried local small merchandise shipments in the baggage car(s). When I was a child, I remember riding a passenger train at night from St. Louis to Mitchell, Indiana. It stopped at every station, and was referred to as a milk train. This came from the earlier practice of picking up milk from dairy farmers at every stop and carrying it to processors further on down the line. These local trains served the same function as cars, busses, and delivery trucks do today.

During the late 1950’s the Post Office decided to put all long-distance mail on airplanes. This supposedly was to provide better service on long distance first-class mail. Instead of five or six days to go coast-to-coast, it would now take 2-3. This was the beginning of the end for passenger trains, and a major subsidy to the economics of passenger flight. The passenger trains no longer were able to even break even financially, and the railroads wanted to drop the service, understandably so. Meanwhile the airlines were able to lower fares and still make a profit due to the money from carrying mail. This began a period of intense airline competition with many new entries into the regional and local airline market. They made their fixed expenses, all or in part by carrying mail, and then used passengers to put them over the top into profitability. At the same time the IHS was growing rapidly causing a net drop in passenger traffic on trains as well.

Railroads also suffered at that time from over-regulation. It became impossible to set rates that brought in sufficient income to maintain infrastructure, much less improve the infrastructure. During the 1960’s the two great eastern rivals, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania started looking at merging since the traffic was falling to the point that they did not see they would have enough business to support two railroads. Part of the cause was the increased use of trucks for shipping freight over the four-lane IHS. As profits diminished, the railroads began decreasing service, especially to the smaller shippers of less-than-carload lots, or only one or two carloads a week. They would prefer to use two or three semi-tractor-trailer rigs to one box car. The service was better and actually amounted to cheaper, since the highways were paid for by gross tax revenue instead of the direct users.

As the small, local shipping diminished, railroads started shedding track as fast as they were allowed, as well a dumping passenger service where possible. The large railroads worked to keep the long-distance freight since it was the only service that had a hope of being profitable with large trains to spread the overhead on. Maintenance became more and more deferred. The state of many roadbeds was such that it was impossible to run trains at a decent speed for long distances. Slow orders abounded. Rates were regulated and not allowed to rise as necessary to provide the needed money for infrastructure repair. Everyone still considered themselves entitled to rail service at the price they wanted to pay, not the value of the service. It was as if the image of the Robber Baron was still operating. As we shall see, it is still operating in our current President.

Finally the disaster that was the Penn-Central occurred in the late 1960’s. Despite considering the merger for several years, neither railroad prepared for it out of pride and stubbornness. They had incompatible computer systems, and operating philosophies, as well as rules. It finally failed at the end of the decade, and provided the motivation for the creation of another monstrosity—ConRail. [In my mind the emphasis should be on the “Con”. ] At the same time its smaller twin—Amtrak was also spawned. There was a happy ending for ConRail. It would appear that is not to be for Amtrak. Both organizations were created as corporations with government subsidies to meet expenses that were not covered by revenue. At that point the similarity ends. ConRail was pretty much left alone to operate, but Amtrak has been torn one way and another by conflicting dictates from politicians.

Conrail was created with the idea that six wrongs can make a right. Six bankrupt railroads, the PennCentral being the greatest part, were combined into a so-called corporation, backed by the government, to provide freight service in the North East, at politically advantageous prices, in other words, not what the service might be worth or cost, but what would make a good deal for the shippers and create their gratitude. Ostensibly, the corporation was to eventually be profitable. Under ConRail, a number of desirable things did occur. A lot of unused, or almost unused right of way had the rails salvaged and was then abandoned. Much of it was immediately acquired by municipalities and counties and turned into bike trails. In other cases, the bridges, overpasses, and underpasses these routes required were removed or filled in. Now that the government was in control, there were no obstacles to doing what needed doing years before. In some cases, regional railroads were either formed or expanded, to use the surrendered track, being able with a much leaner staff and more flexible business policies to make a profit where a class I railroad couldn’t. In my opinion, ConRail was more of a shaking out and maintenance of the status quo than a viable railroad.

The problem with ConRail, was that it controlled the heart of the rail infrastructure in the Northeast, and both CSX (Chessie System, the former C & O) and Norfolk Southern (a merger of the Norfolk and Western and the Southern) both wanted into its markets. Somewhere around 1997 or so, CSX made a bid for the entire ConRail System. NS got wind of it and made counter proposals and was able to halt the progress of the CSX bid. The outcome was that in 1999, ConRail was split between CSX and NS, with CSX getting what was primarily the old New York Central plant, and NS getting the former Pennsylvania. Looking at the resulting route maps for the two railroads, we see the resurrection of the old NYC/Pennsy competition, only this time strictly in freight where price and reliability of service count. The days of the contests between the Broadway Limited and the Twentieth Century Limited are not to be revived.

All the Class I railroads have struggled for years with the competition from trucks, even in goods that might move in car-load size lots. Two of the ways they have competed are Road-Railers (trailers that have re-enforced under carriages and can be converted to run on rails, directly connected to each other as a train) and contracts with long-distance trucking companies to carry cross-country loads as trailer-on-flat. With the growth of container service, railroads are increasingly carrying intermodal freight. In some cases, multiple container trains carry entire shiploads of goods from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast. The goods are in bond the entire time. The purpose is to bypass using the Panama Canal. The time is much faster for delivery to Europe that way. With the imposition of new rules on truckers and the reduction in hours a day allowed to drive, there is even more interest in trailer-on-flat, or container service within the US.

Though the outlook for freight looks fairly good at the moment, the history and outlook for Amtrak is more akin to a horror show. Amtrak had the same initial conditions as ConRail, a corporation formed to run passenger trains throughout the US, with government support until it was profitable. The goal of profitability was held much higher for Amtrak than for ConRail. Throughout its history, Amtrak management has been criticized for not showing a profit. Looking under the surface, however, we see that politicians in both houses have continually made various conditions mandatory on Amtrak. Senator Byrd of West Virginia is one of the more notorious, requiring Amtrak to run a train through WV if they expect to get their government money, but having almost no traffic in terms of ridership. From the beginning Amtrak was given far less than sufficient funds to maintain their equipment, much less purchase new. Over the years the inventory of equipment needing or under repair has increased as the demands for service have stretched the resources thinner.

Amtrak has a further handicap in that they own only the track they run on in the Northeast Corridor. Elsewhere, they have track rights from the Class I railroads. Despite the lip service to passenger service being given priority, from the first, passenger trains have been frequently delayed waiting on freight. This was especially bad in CSX territory, as CSX has often had operating issues with considerable congestion for their own freight, much less trying to accommodate passenger traffic. Regional routes survive on Amtrak because of state subsidies. The State of Pennsylvania subsidizes the Pennsylvanian which runs from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, via Harrisburg on the old Pennsylvania route. The cross-country trains from New York to Chicago and St Louis, and from those to locations to the West Coast are under constant pressure to be disbanded by politicians and those who dislike Amtrak, for whatever reason.

Amtrak has never been the equal of the passenger services it replaced. It reduced schedules and over time reduced on-board services. Even when it was first started, I can remember riding on Amtrak and finding a drop in service compared to when passenger service was run by the railroad owning the tracks. Funding is the major hurdle for Amtrak. They are continually given mandates then not given the money. Congress seems to take great pleasure in shrinking a budget that is smaller than the cost of many earmarks, as an act of virtue. The continual whine is that they are subsidizing something that still isn’t showing a profit. The truth is, under the conditions of its existence, it will never show a profit, the exception being the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak’s Board of Directors seems geared to cause the enterprise to fail. They just fired the most effective president that Amtrak has had in my memory. My cynicism says they did it because he might have succeeded.

The long term outlook for Amtrak is that it will probably be ended. What will happen to the pieces that are still useful? That is anybodies guess. Amtrak runs a lot of high speed rail for other owners, especially in California. It also has a successful high-speed Northeast Corridor. There will probably be a purchaser for it. The regional lines are a big question. Many operate only by virtue of state government support.

To summarize, we have automobiles carrying one to four people at a time over highways that cost far more than the gasoline taxes collected to provide them. At the same time, the maintenance of the highways is become a major problem, especially bridges. I have seen articles saying that bridges are degrading faster than they can be maintained, repaired or replaced. At rush hour in major cities, the movement of people becomes almost non-existent at times, with average speeds on highways designed for 70 mph, being less than 30 mph. Building highways to relieve congestion often has the opposite effect, because the new highway attracts more traffic than it was designed for, if not immediately, in the near future as the areas near the highway become developed. Long distance travel by car is almost as expensive as flying. Top legal speed in most places is 70 mph which means a cross-country trip will require 40-plus hours of driving time, plus rests, plus motels, plus meals. People do it for the flexibility of being able to stop when they want, take detours along the way, or for privacy.

The airlines are carrying most of the long distance passengers now, into airports they do not own or have to keep up, but they are having problems with the economics left from earlier non-competitive conditions and also finding landing slots. Planes are becoming larger, but larger planes require bigger runways and new passenger facilities at airports. Airports are running out of room to expand in many areas. A single wide-body may carry as many people as three or four streamlined passenger cars on the railroad. However, there is a physical limit on how many wide-bodied aircraft can be landed in a given time at a given airport. Also, the bigger the plane, the longer it takes to load and unload. Three cars is nothing on a passenger train that could be as long as 20-plus cars. When it reaches the station, each car of 50-60 people can unload independently. Increasing the size of a train does not increase the turnaround time for the passengers, and does not increase the turnaround for the train itself in proportion to the size increase. a

Unless one can fly first class or business class, airplanes are miserable to ride on. Everyone is required to remain seated for the first 15-20 minutes and the last 15-20 minutes of the flight, and sometimes much longer if there is turbulence. The seats are as small and as close together as can be done and still get 90+% of the people in them. My term for it is cattle-car territory. There is one large open cabin and any miserable baby is required to remain in that area. There is no lounge for the mother or father to retire to in order to comfort the child. Airline food has always been the subject of derision, but in all fairness, under the circumstances, the airlines have done pretty good. It just can’t compare to a meal cooked to order. It is, however, generally better than TV dinners, which it is a version of. Thanks to the jihadist fanatics, security now is a major consideration in air travel, and we pay for the privilege by foregoing some of our civil rights concerning search and seizure, and presumption of innocence.

In its own way, rail travel via Amtrak has also become a bad dream. I don’t think it has reached the nightmare stage. With the exception of local high-speed rail, the frequency of trains is very low, often only one or a few a day, to one every other day or less. This cannot be considered as convenient. Despite the low fares (e.g. Indianapolis to Chicago, round trip is $34 by train, and over $200 by plane), the lack of convenience and scheduling argues against it. Yet, despite the decrease in service, riding a train can be enjoyable. When one gets a good car, the seats are wide; there is ample leg-room; one can carry-on bigger and more bags than on an airplane. From the minute one steps on the car, one can walk around, though it is best to be in ones seat while tickets are collected. Food service is an iffy proposition according to my reading.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that railroads receive no subsidies and not only have to maintain their own physical plant but pay taxes on it besides, they are beginning to see some genuine profitability. Part of that is the growth of the economy creating demand for the products that move in car-load quantities, as well as a huge growth in intermodal traffic, both trailer-on-flat and container. There are major expansions and upgrades of infrastructure occurring all over the US, especially the West. The major problem now, is Chicago, where plans to ease congestion and the interactions between rail and street traffic are on stall due to promised government money now being diverted. This, by the way, might be cautionary tale for the Norfolk Southern. The State of Virginia has considered subsidizing a third rail for the mainline of the NS because it would be ten times cheaper to do that than add another lane each way on I-81. It may be that the NS should finance the expansion themselves, considering the fickleness of governments. Having the increased capacity will allow them to draw more traffic.

One of the incidental lessons from all this is that genuine monopolies exist only when the government enforces their existence. Amtrak is an example, the US Postal Service is another, as was ConRail. One of the main lessons is that where ever the government has put its stamp, something became broken. The arbitrary moving of mail contracts from rail to air to truck is an example. The arbitrary rules of the ICC and the Transportation Board are others. The government bailouts of the airlines, yet not railroads or truckers, is also egregious. As a nation, we now have most of our eggs in one basket—airlines. We have no backup, if for any reason there was a major, long-term (over two weeks) disruption of air service. The impact on traffic, gasoline supplies, and productivity would be massive if everyone had to drive. There is no equipment available for the railroads or Amtrak specifically to increase traffic to carry such a load, and there are no longer terminal facilities to handle that many people. The great Union Station in St Louis is now a shopping facility where once it had 40 tracks into its platform area. Union station in Cincinnati is a museum, and the one in Indianapolis is an entertainment and shopping area.

The mistakes we have made in the past are easy to see. The first and most damaging was the enforcement of the monopoly of first class mail by the USPS. The second was the ICC. The third was the CAB. After that there are a host of mistakes to chose from. One of my favorites is regulating the railroads then arbitrarily shifting mail from rail to air without economic justification. This whole history is filled with examples of the damage politicians do in the name of good intentions, or more accurately, with the motive of vote buying. It was a symbiotic relationship developed over the entire history of the railroads when passenger and freight moved on the same rails in the fifties. Actually railroads started by hauling people then switched to goods. Now they only haul goods, and it would be nigh impossible to go back to their handling people again. They have abandoned the physical facilities to do it, and don’t have the room in their freight schedules to allow for the kind of passenger traffic that used to occur.

Railroads and truckers are beginning to reach a working arrangement. The strength of trucks is the smaller quantities they can haul economically and the flexibility of pick-up and delivery. The strength of railroads is bulk goods and the economics of long-distance service. The major truck fleets are entering into arrangements with the railroads to take advantage of the respective strengths to improve service. This is a bright note in this whole story.

In urban areas, rail provides essential transportation needs. That it does not do so at a profit may be partly due to the distortions of the economics of commuting by the highway subsidies. To get commuters onto the trains and off the highways requires pricing that is less than actual cost. Governments subsidize this, because they can’t afford the cost of dealing with more cars on the local streets and highways.

Airlines strength is speed. They can cover distances much faster than any other form of travel or shipping. The problem is that the price of the service may not be as high as its value, or conversely, the cost of the service may be higher than can be charged to maintain the current demand. In either case the airlines are in a situation where the demand for services is greater than they can economically provide, because the cost to the purchaser is less than the total economic cost of the service. Somewhere, someone is making up that difference, either in losses to the airline, taxes from the tax payer to subsidize the airline directly or to pay for the terminals they use.

The automobile is pretty much at the top of its usefulness. It is being subsidized by the massive highway systems that are built at a cost to the public at large and not just those driving on them. Probably the only reason that there is not more outcry on this, is that almost everyone does use them at one time or another.

If I were writing fairy tales for grown-ups like one of my favorite authors does, I would create a world in which the railroads still owned their passenger service and as many or more people rode railroads long distances as flew. Flying was primarily for those in a hurry especially going coast to coast, or Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans to the west coast. The small regional planes that are now so common would not have had an empty market to move into with the demise of the passenger train. People would own cars, but if they worked in a large city they took rail transportation, and if they wanted to take a trip generally took the train, unless it was a leisurely vacation with many detours and stops. In time of stress, any one of the three modes of transportation would be able to undergo some expansion to accommodate increased demand.

But that is a fairy tale. The reality is that for moving goods our transportation systems are working quite well. But for moving people, our politicians and the unreasoning demands of the public have destroyed one of the potential backup modes of travel. I think that domestic air travel will become worse over the years as will traveling by highway. Having destroyed the passenger train, Congress and the President (any Congress or any President, not just the current versions) are not about to put it back together. States will continue, one way or another to keep most regional rail travel, but cross country travel by rail will not exist in a few years. I think that the chances are good, that there will be some event that causes air travel to shut down for a long period of time. When that occurs all the chickens will come home to roost, but the blame will fall everywhere but where it belongs. In the space of a short period of time we will cobble up some patches and perhaps start fixing the problem properly. It will take a large-scale national emergency to provide the motivation, and even then we may forget within a couple of years what we are doing and why.

Normally, I consider myself an optimist, but having put together what I know about this into a cohesive document, I don’t have much optimism about this issue. Somewhere down the road we are going to have a massive shock. Our goods will get anywhere but we won’t be able to without major effort. The best I can hope for is that we will realize why and do something about it.

A Design Argument From Cognitive Reliability--My response

2005-09-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

This post by the Maverick Philosopher appeared a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I commented that it was a very different type of argument for ID, and was worth studying. I affirm my original statement, having studied it. This is definitely a new, at least to me, type of argument for an intelligent designer. It has the virtue of not depending on distortions or abuse of data. In a way it reminds me of St Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of your presupposition that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of the presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Why do we take the rock piles as more than natural formations? Because we are taught over the years that nature is not perfectly regular. Nature is not grouped, does not display rigid patterns, does not have true straight lines or smooth arcs. Nature is fractal. Subdivide and then expand a subdivision to the original scale, and it will appear similar to the original whole. We are taught to consider anything regular as being man-created. In addition for the cairns to have meaning, we have to have all the knowledge of trails and the concept of trail markers. Without that we might consider them man-made but not know the purpose.

Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.

This particular example is so unlikely as to be considered impossible. In a vague, abstract sense it might be considered possible that two piles of three rocks could be formed some distance apart. But that possibility is so unlikely based on what we are taught that we are automatically led to think they were purposefully built. But the purpose is not necessarily as certain. Suppose the piles were merely the result of child’s play? Then as trail markers they have no value to the hiker though they were purposefully built. A converse would be if the observer had no concept of cairns as possible trail markers. He would perceive the regularity but not the purpose. However, it is quite likely that a purpose, though unknown, would be assumed, simply because of the properties of the object.

So what constitutes design? Already we have two parts to it, the object and the purpose. Generally we consider the object to have been created to meet the purpose for which it is to be used. So whenever we talk about design there is always the concept of purpose contained within it. As we shall see below, we often include function as a proxy for purpose when discussing design. If something functions in some way, we often accept the idea that it was designed to function that way. Yet, as I will show there are cases where there is no purposeful design in the function, or else we are led to consider everything is designed. So yes, the appearance of design does not entail design.

There is one other problem with using the word design. It often brings up an image of metadata controlling the assembly of parts, i.e. some super blueprint that states precisely the location of each component in the assembled organism. Even scientists use this analogy when explaining to laymen how DNA is the master code for the body. Actually it is not an analogue of a blueprint.

All genes do is code for the creation of proteins. These proteins in turn are either enzymes that create other biochemicals, or form part of the structure of the organism. What is also needed is a timing mechanism, that turns the genes on and off. Nature is very parsimonious. There is a constant reuse of some protein or structure on larger scales for new purposes in new species. The various mutational and gene replication and mixing processes create the opportunity for totally new processes and proteins and constantly new combinations. Survival is then the means by which these are weeded out. As noted above those things or combinations that create a slight advantage will, over time, become fixed and dominant in a population.

It has now been shown that 90+% of human DNA is common to chimpanzee DNA, yet there are vast differences in capability, behavior, and appearance. I would submit the major differences between humans and chimpanzees are the timings of gene expression, especially during development. If this is so, then rather than a blueprint, DNA is a program which has subroutines that are keyed in response to external events.

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.

The concept of “meaning” is introduced here and is the only place in the post that it is mentioned. Here the use of meaning is very clear, it is what the two piles of rocks are to communicate to anyone seeing them. At this point we are talking about inanimate objects, objects that do not change except from an outside influence. In this case it is very clear that any meaning must be from that put into the objects by their creator and perceived by the observer. To anticipate what is coming, how do we attach meaning to our senses and cognitive facilities? Is meaning necessary to being designed? If so what is the meaning of a motor, or a table, or a house? Meaning is a complex process of mental effort on an individual being represented in the exterior to be perceived, comprehended, and interpreted by another individual. If there is meaning, there must be design, but design does not necessarily convey meaning.

Meaning is something our cognitive facilities extract from external and internal perceptions. The coming argument is going to imply that extracting meaning cannot be trusted unless the object doing the perception and extraction is designed. But extraction of meaning is not the same as representing meaning, and the analogies to the rock piles fail on this account. The two are not the same type of phenomena. The extraction of meaning may be a process that is the culmination of millennia of winnowing of both physiological and mental processes that started with simple stimulus response, and as the responding organism became more complex so did the responses, with various refinements along the way to make them more selective or useful in a survival sense. Our pets have simple forms of comprehending meaning. If we get angry, they sense it and act in a subordinate or “whipped puppy” way. To them the meaning of our anger is “I am in trouble” though not in those words. Accepting that idea means that it is plausible that our concepts of meaning have evolved over time to something much more abstract.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

Here the apparent design derives from the function. I would take the phrase cosmic accident as connoting something different from evolutionary theory. In a technical sense the phrase can be considered correct in that anything that occurs without an accompanying purpose could be considered accidental. However, the phrase cosmic accident tends to bring up an image of a rare occurrence and a totally fortuitous settling of random processes. Actually I would argue that the processes though not directed by some outside intelligence, are actually more ordered than random, in the sense that competition for survival in the overall organism provides a direction. If some complex form is more suited to a given set of environmental conditions, then the closer an organism comes to that form, the more successful it will be. Given thousands or even millions of generations, the smallest incremental improvement will eventually become the dominant form. Note that the probability of that particular current form occurring from the random combination of all its separate components is vanishingly small, but that is not how it occurs now or how it occurred in the first place. Because it now occurs from the control of a DNA program it is highly likely to be in the form it is.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

Here is where I see the argument as being flawed. The connotations of cosmic accident are taken into a normative context, when they were defined in a factual context. Here there is an equating of an accidental collocation with an evolutionary process. The two are not the same at all. A collocation of rocks is a truly random process. Nothing selected for the collocation, it just happened. An evolved organism has been subjected to constant pressure to survive. That it is the sum of events that occurred randomly once and now are conserved and controlled by the internal environment of the organism places it in a different category altogether.

To use the idea of relying on our senses as if there were a choice takes us to very difficult territory. First of all there is an implied circular contradiction. After spending our lives relying on these senses we then look back and say we had a choice? But did we? If we did not rely on our senses what other option was there?

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations? [emphasis in the original, bk]

How is justification necessary here, and why is it invalidated by the source of the senses if they are not designed? Let’s take an example of a highly reliable phenomenon that actually is more reliable than many human characteristics, Old Faithful Geyser at Yellowstone National Park. This geyser has been erupting at approximately one-hour intervals for hundreds of years. Within a given precision, we could rely on it to mark the passage of time. The cyclical nature of its behavior is due to an intricate plumbing network underground over a plume of hot magma. The magma plume underlies all of Yellowstone and is the source of the heat for its spectacular features. Ground water trickles into the plumbing and is heated. The pressure of the depth of the plumbing and the stillness of the water lead to superheating of the water, a metastable state. At some point, a small amount of the water finally boils over the lip of the geyser, presaging the eruption. This relieves pressure on the next lower amount which rapidly turns to steam and starts the eruption in rapid succession deeper and deeper layers of water flash into steam hurling the remaining water out the top of the geyser. When all the water is expelled the eruption dies and the cycle starts anew.

So was this designed? Since it is a particular instance of a general pattern for geysers, one can say it occurred as the result of the operation of geological processes which ultimately derive from physics. But it does function, in the sense that it does something dynamic at regular intervals. It is also quite complex. But is it purposive? The National Park Service relies on Old Faithful as a central part of its programs at Yellowstone. How are they justified in such reliance? The quick answer is that it has always done as expected. The deeper answer is that the processes that produce Old Faithful are understood, and can be seen to extend to the foreseeable future.

So the next question is, “Why is the source of an object a problem for justifying relying on it?” Implied is that anything accidental or unplanned is not to be relied on. Yet we rely on many things that might be considered accidental, tides, seasons, geysers, etc. As is noted, we rely on our senses. Yet they can occasionally mislead us, as the example of a stick being mistaken for a snake shows. In our reliance we do not concern ourselves with whether they were created by random processes being incorporated into organized larger processes, or by intention. They work and have always worked, with the exception of the congenitally sensorially deprived. We do not have a choice as to whether we rely on them or not, and starting in infancy we learn to rely and use their inputs to comprehend and subdue our world.

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:
. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

I would reply to this, how is it not rational to rely on something that for every individual for millions of years has provided reliable input to the organism? How does its origin in random processes that have been selected, combined, and contained in a program that provides replicative fidelity, so that it no longer is a random accident in its occurrence, automatically make it unreliable or make its reliability unjustifiable?

This suggests the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

Actually, I would say it is impossible not to rely on our cognitive and sensory facilities to provide access to truths external to them. There is no other way to access them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Or conversely, if an object is not designed it is inherently unreliable. I have tried to show that we rely on many things that may not embody the purposes of an intelligent designer. Unless we place our cognitive facilities in a special class of objects, then we rely on them regardless of their origins as well. I do not see a valid argument that places moral strictures on the origins of something vs. its actual behavior and existence. In human terms it is similar to punishing the sins of the father unto the seventh generation, or condemning a person for where he came from not for who he is.
I would say, “It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties because they work.”

Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.

To make reliability a normative issue, is to take something that functions at a less than perfect level and state it must have absolute moral value in its reliability, and that only by being designed can it have that. I have tried to show that whether it appears at first irrational, on deeper inspection, it is not irrational, that our cognitive facilities may have arisen over time from the accumulation of processes that occurred at random, but once having occurred became fixed and controlled, and therefore not random. We are therefore justified in relying on them.

To place this at a very simplified abstract level, in order to invoke a designer, there is an attempt to place reliability on senses and thinking in a normative context, when to rely on them is a necessary given to live. It is placing a normative value on something about which there is no choice.

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize

2005-09-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sent me this essay which had been forwarded to him. In light of the questions concerning the rebuilding of New Orleans this is well worth reading. I don't have the complete citation information. If anyone does, please send it to me so I may update this.

UPDATE: The reference is here. Thanks to my friend Peg for finding the link.

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.

Search for Extra-terrestrial life and junk science

2005-01-23T18:16:00.000-08:00

One of the tasks of all the Martian probes is to look for signs of water and by implication, life. In fact, several years ago, the first Martian lander created quite a stir for a while, when gas evolved from the addition of water to some Martian soil. It was later thought to be inorganic reactions from chemicals that were stable only in very dry environments. There have also been efforts to find extra-terrestrial life using the Arecebo radio telescope and a large network of home computers to analyze radio data for possible patterns of intelligent communication. These efforts are serious attempts based on the best knowledge available.

This week, in the Wall Street Journal, for Friday, January 21, in the Marketplace section (B) there was an article entitled: “Search for Other Life In Galaxy May Require A Broader Outlook,” under the byline of Sharon Begley. The article is based on a journal article in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. Having studied evolutionary chemistry and given a lot of thought to the issue of non-carbon-based life, I consider the WSJ article, and by implication the journal article, to be junk science. The remainder of this post is both a fisking of the article and a further exposition of the factors that are not being considered that are required for living organisms to exist.

START OF ARTICLE AND THE FISKING:
Maybe we’ve been just a little too provincial about this whole life-beyond-Earth thing. Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers now working overtime on Mars, scout for minerals that form in the presence of water, which is assumed to be essential for life. Telescopes scanning the heavens for “biosignatures” look for wavelengths characteristic of organic compounds (those made of carbon), the building blocks of life on Earth. And of the 135 planets detected beyond our own solar system, the ones that get astronomers’ pulses racing are those rarities that orbit close enough to a star to receive the solar energy thought to be crucial for life. We’re like foodies who search out great meatloaf—and won’t look twice at anything that doesn’t, like our own version, contain ketchup.

This type of derisive tone to describe sincere efforts based on the best extrapolation of current knowledge is uncalled for. To reduce serious science to a quest for a common food, is disrespectful of the intent and the efforts being made. The appeal is not to the intellect but to snobbery and emotion.

“The question is, is our search for life too Earth-centric,” says chemist Steven Benner of the University of Florida, Gainesville. “If some aspects of life on Earth are historical accidents, there could be other chemical solutions to the problem” of building life out of nonliving chemicals. Or, as the Huygens mission to Saturn’s moon Titan may well show, just because life on Earth is built out of carbon, encodes genetic information in DNA, and uses water as a solvent to get chemicals close enough to each other to undergo biological reactions doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do any of these.

To describe the evolution of life on Earth as the result of historical accidents is to trivialize the billions of years of chemical and biological evolution. The Earth underwent many temperature and climate changes of a very extreme range in its history, and the number of different environments available for various chemical options to occur were many. Thus I would characterize the resulting chemistry as being the most suited to life rather than an accident. If Prof. Benner considers our Earth to be a historical accident, the burden becomes his to show the Earth’s evolution and pre-planetary environment to be exceptional rather then normal. Actually it would appear he is making the statement merely to set the stage for his own speculative ideas. The second half of the paragraph, is essentially a tautology, and useless since no one has made the claim that they are the only way to control life, just that they are the only building blocks that seem reasonable based on current knowledge.

The statement has some inaccuracies in it as well. Water is not only a solvent allowing the close association at the molecular level of biological molecules, it also participates in the reactions in critical ways. The hydrogen and hydroxyl ions that spontaneously form in water participate directly in reactions and catalyze them, and help form hydrogen bonds that hold proteins in their configurations. It is also the presence of water that leads to hydrophobic bonding, or bonding due not to electrical charge but to an expulsion of water from areas of molecules forcing the amino acid side chains closer together.

Take the challenge of getting the raw materials of living things close enough to undergo life-sustaining reactions. If they are sitting there on your desk that’s not likely to happen. But dissolve them in a drop of water and you’re in business. “You need some kind of solvent to facilitate biochemical reactions,” says Prof. Benner. But does the drop have to be water?

Probably not. As Prof. Benner and his colleagues write in the journal Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, ammonia “is a possible solvent for life.” Even sulfuric acid supports chemical reactions, in particular reactions that form the bonds between carbon atoms. Sulfuric acid is a main ingredient of the clouds above Venus.

The consideration of ammonia as a solvent for life takes into account its bipolar nature, and certain similarities to water, a pair of electrons as an unbonded node and the ability to form hydrogen bonds. However the temperature regime of ammonia is much below that of water, and the entire chemistry of the analogues of nucleic acids, proteins, and cell walls would have to change. Where currently there is hydrolysis of bonds, there would be ammonolysis with the substitution of the nitrogen of ammonia for the oxygen of water in the reaction. This then leads to the question of what happens to proteins when oxygen is replaced by nitrogen? The properties change completely.

Once you break out of the water-or-bust mantra, all sorts of environments look friendly to life—perhaps even Titan. When the hubcap-shaped Huygens probe parachuted onto Titan a week ago, astronomers kept an eye out for oceans filled not with water but with methane or ethane.

First of all, no one is using a water-or-bust mantra. Science bets on the most likely things, with an eye to possible exceptions. To imply that there is some sort of straight-jacket on thought about alien life forms is to misrepresent the situation. It may be to the naïve that think as long as there is liquid there could be life, but so far the real data indicates that only water environments seem to be effective. There is more on this below.

Both are simple hydrocarbons, or molecules of hydrogen and carbon. And in the Titanesque cold, both are liquid. Organic chemicals are just as happy to undergo biochemical reactions in methane and ethane as they are in water, notes Prof. Benner. In fact they might form some bonds even more readily in methane and ethane than they do in water, and be less likely to fall apart.

I would like to know what biochemical reactions can occur in ethane and methane. None of the hydrolytic reactions will work properly or else have to have water introduced from some other molecule. The problem with forming bonds more readily and more stably is that life depends on a balance between stability and instability. Cells must be able to tear down structures and replace them in order to grow. If components are too stable cells will die from inability to renew. If they are too labile they will not be able to exist for long enough to properly reproduce.

“A hypothetical form of life living in a Titan hydrocarbon ocean would not need to worry as much” about its bonds being ripped apart, Prof. Benner noted in his recent paper. “In many senses, hydrocarbon solvents are better than water. …As an environment, Titan certainly meets all of the stringent criteria” for life. Astronomers weren’t expecting to see little green men holding up a welcome sign when Huygens landed on the squishy surface under a tangerine sky, but those hydrocarbon seas bear watching.

I have already commented on bond stability as not necessarily being desirable, but the statement about meeting all the “stringent criteria” for life is a stretch. What criteria? This is a very deep philosophical question, because in order to have criteria, one has to have definition of life. I will comment below on some of the operational issues concerning life.

In a life-friendly environment, all you need are the right ingredients. Again, we may have been too parochial in what we mean by life’s ingredients. Life on Earth is built of DNA and the 20 amino acids that make up proteins. But clever chemists have made many more amino acids than nature ever did. Prof. Benner says they could be the building blocks of “hypothetical proteins in hypothetical alien life forms.” Some of the 20 amino acids have been found in meteorites, showing that Earth isn’t the only place that has them. But if we widened the search for amino acids beyond the standard 20 there would be even more basis for suspecting that we are not alone.

Let’s start with the amino acid issue. Of the twenty amino acids (actually I believe there are over that number naturally occurring, but 20 are what are normally found in proteins.) quite a number of the simpler ones are found in meteorites as stated. Thus to look for our normal 20 would be likely to detect novel proteins since some of the amino acids appear to be common throughout the solar system if not the galaxy. I see no reason to expand beyond the common 20 unless one hypothesizes that alien proteins would not contain ANY of the common 20, even the ones found in extra-terrestrial sources.

Not even DNA is sacrosanct. Scientists have created synthetic DNA by substituting different molecules for those that form standard DNA. For instance, Prof. Benner’s team has come up with 12 alternative “letters,” beyond the four that make up the DNA in all life on earth. The result is “DNA” that is quite adept at copying itself, just as real DNA is. Equally important, the synthetic DNA makes copying mistakes—mutations—that are the raw material of evolution. So alien DNA would be capable of that key aspect of life, too.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what was done. From what is stated, the purine and pyrimidine bases of normal DNA were replaced with other analogs. The backbone structure of the DNA still was there. In order for these synthetic DNA’s, which were true or real DNA’s, just not natural ones, to act the same they would have had to have the same configurational changes due to various bond migrations. Thus all the mechanisms of natural DNA would operate, and there is nothing particularly profound with respect to alien life. The significance is that so many of the DNA properties appear to be due to the fundamental structure and not the specific “letters” from which it is formed. The final sentence totally negates any attempt to remove DNA as a necessity of life. As I will note below, that has implications as well.

Life may not need water, or DNA, or the 20 amino acids that make up life on Earth, but one thing is nonnegotiable: a sourc of energy. Scientists had long assumed that only planets bathed in a star’s light could support life. But there is another source of life-giving energy, namely, heat generated by radioactive elements.

So far I fail to see that the necessity for water has been refuted, and the DNA’s discussed were still DNA, just with different bases, and even if one doesn’t use the same 20 amino acids, the chemistry of proteins is still being assumed. But in keeping amino acids and DNA, one has to keep the chemistry that uses them which is water-based. There is no mention of any experiments with life materials in any solvent than water.

The heat generated from either radioactivity or from the sun, has as its value the raising of temperatures high enough for the chemical reactions of life to take place. Note that life uses chemical reactions which produce excess energy in the form of heat. They do not take heat and convert it into other energy forms. When life processes in plants trap sunlight, they trap energetic photons and use their energy to drive reactions that convert Carbon dioxide and water into plant sugars and oxygen. This is not the same as taking heat and producing a life process from it.

That means that planets wandering the galaxy far from any star might be perfectly able to cook up a little life, suggests planetary scientist David Stevenson of he California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “Such planets might hold the vast majority of life in our galaxy, all living without a sun on the decay of radioactive nuclei,” says Prof. Benner. If he’s right, then weird life quite different from Earth’s might be just as possible as meatloaf without ketchup.

Given the heat from radioactivity makes water liquid, the above scenario is perfectly valid. In fact a version of it occurs on the ocean floors of Earth at the rift zones in the mid-Atlantic, where the upwelling rock, heated by radioactivity in the core and mantle heats the water, dissolving minerals that provide energy sources for bacteria that then form the first layer of a deep-sea food chain. As for the final sentence, the weirdness is far less than might be thought when one looks above at how little different the supposed differences were.

END OF ARTICLE AND FISKING

START OF COMMENTARY ON NON-TERRESTRIAL CHEMISTRY

Many of the clues on extra-terrestrial chemistry come from experimental work on evolutionary chemistry. The landmark experiment by Urey and Miller in 1953, was the start of a continuing field of research into the pre-biotic chemistry. They filled a sealed globe with a hypothetical atmosphere of early Earth, and then heated it and passed electrical discharges through it to simulate volcanism and lightning. After some time there was a lot of tarry residue built up. When the residue was analyzed, it contained amino acids, simple, five carbon sugars, purines and pyrimidenes, and hydrocarbons. These molecules are the simple building blocks of living organisms. Research since then has shown that these molecules can form polymeric structures similar to those seen in living organisms today, and under primitive conditions can even form cell-like objects. The same results occur given a broad range of starting conditions.

As early as 1970 I attended a paper at a conference that analyzed the organic materials from meteorites, and showed they were amino acids and other precursors of life compounds. The presenter was a scientist from NASA and his final conclusion was that given the early conditions of the solar system and Earth, life could not help but form. But why did it form as it did? Why do we not see any nucleic acids using other than the five bases, Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine in DNA, and Uracil in RNA? Why do we not see more than the 20 amino acids we do? Nature had almost a billion years to experiment before life was extant on the surface of the Earth, and probably had more years after than in some environments. Without going into an analysis I cannot support at the present, I would speculate based on my background knowledge that these compounds are energetically favorable to form and remain stable over a broad range of conditions. This would imply that many of the analogues proposed are not as energetically favorable, not as stable, or require much more effort to form.

One of the characteristics of life that has always struck me, since studying biochemistry in graduate school, is that energy is produced in steps. About 35% of the energy contained in sugars and lipids can be recovered as useful energy for the cells use. If this were done all at once, the cell would incinerate. It is done under stepwise degradation. There is nothing at all strange about this. If one considers that over the billions of years that organisms evolved before becoming multi-cellular, first one bit of energy is obtained, and as survival pressure mounts over time, then the next bit is obtained by some mutation, and so forth. Over time a long chain of reactions is built up. Some organisms have the complete chain all the way to carbon dioxide and water. Others stop at earlier places in the chain. Some use sulfur instead of oxygen as an electron donor. But the common thread is that at each step of the way energy is obtained in usable pieces, and in a common currency, ATP or Adenosine Tri-Phosphate. ATP is used in every reaction that requires an energy input, being broken into either ADP, Adenosine Di-Phosphate and a phosphate ion, or AMP, Adenosine Mono-Phosphate (Also a potent cellular communications medium in a modified form) and a diphosphate ion. So when we discuss the possibility of alien life forms, we need to consider the requirement of energy supply. The energy must enter the form in a compact way and then be broken down in discrete steps. The steps must be small enough that the waste energy in the form of heat does not destroy the host. It also means that there has to be some common currency for handling the energy, a chemical bond that can easily form and be broken as necessary depending on the energy flow.

When considering possible solvents for life processes, it is necessary to keep in mind that the solvent is not just a carrier of the reactants, but is a necessary partner and participant in the reactions. Amino acids condense into proteins releasing water, and are hydrolyzed by the addition of water to the bond between the carbonyl and the amine, recreating the original carboxylic acid and amine groups. At the same time the solvent needs to be liquid throughout a useful temperature range—the colder the temperatures, the slower the kinetics of the reactions. Some reactions will not even go if the temperatures are too low. There is insufficient energy in the bond vibrations for them to reach a breakage point energetically. If the temperatures are too high, then competing reactions to destroy or alter the structures become important.

Despite attempts to claim otherwise, with various other elements that form polymers, carbon has no true analogues. The bonds it forms and the energy to form and disrupt them are unique. Silicon has sometimes been proposed as a possible life-form base, but its polymers are much more stable, and the analogous compounds don’t necessarily behave the same. Sulfur polymerizes but it is more suited to a role as an oxygen analogue.

In thinking about alien life-forms, I restrict myself to the most primitive. The wonderful diversity of species we have on Earth started from single-cell organisms. Once their chemistry was worked out, it became the base of all other biochemistry on Earth. I do not consider this as accidental, that one type just happened to succeed over other possible types of biochemistry. Nature is not particularly choosey. She lets all the organisms fight it out and the best will win to continue to reproduce and make more of themselves. Thus I consider the biochemistry we see on Earth to be likely anywhere that water existed for a period of time. We are looking for conditions that would produce primitive forms in our current explorations.

As for solvents other than water allowing the evolution of life, the entire chemistry would have to change. There would have to be different protein analogues, different DNA functional analogues, completely different energy utilization. When the solvent is different everything else must be different also. Considering that we don’t see precursors for other than water-based life in extra-terrestrial sources (No, we do not close our eyes to the possibility and not look for them.), it appears extremely unlikely to the point of impossibility that non-aqueous based life exists. The chemistry is too adverse.

Determinism and Free Will – a fisking

2005-01-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

The following article appeared in Tech Central Station, December 13, 2004. I have posted a couple of times on this topic, the second time more validly than the first. This particular article strikes me as a piece of garbage, glib sophistry trying to pass as philosophy. The comments it drew at TCS were definitely against the position he took, but I found them to be about as badly flawed as the original article in different ways. I have really two threads of criticism of the article. The first is stylistic—he has the tone of a huckster or con-man, not a professor. He talks down to his audience, making the insignificant important and the important insignificant in order to slide it past our examination. The second is, he is plain wrong about some things. The title is misleading, since he asks if we are free then discusses Free Will. The two are not the same.

Are You Free?

By Max Borders Published 12/13/2004

This article is the outgrowth of a debate on objective morality between Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center and me, which took place at George Mason University Law School. During our debate, we touched on the question of Free Will. Followers of Ayn Rand -- indeed most folks -- believe we have Free Will. I, however, am not so sure. "Am I free?" you may ask. First, the bad news: no, you're not.

What you call making choices or exercising your Free Will is an illusion. I realize this seems highly counterintuitive, even absurd to suggest. But the following considerations may convince you that
you are not, indeed, free.

He is making the stand that what we believe to be free-will is an illusion and that we are not free. Right off we have a problem in that being free and having free will are not equivalent. To be free is to be able to act. To have free will is to be able to make choices. I may have free will in the sense of seeing choices that I might make and yet being constrained in my actions by my environment. I can make a choice now that may not be implemented until it is no longer constrained. I in effect make a secondary choice not to attempt the execution now, but rather later. It is also possible that I have no constraints, but am aware of no choices. Does that mean that I have no free will to make choices simply because they are not apparent? Free will is a permanent property of ones existence. To be free can be quite transitory or can be prolonged, but is a consequence of circumstance, not a property of the individual.

First, we must agree that your body (and brain) is made up entirely of physical atoms and molecules. In other words, there is no supernatural essence like a "spirit" that animates your physical
body. If we cannot agree on this, the rest of this article is moot.

This is pompous junk. Apparently he thinks that a valid argument against determinism can be made using some sort of non-physical “spirit” or essence. Even if one does try to postulate such an entity, it falls apart as an argument very quickly in the pits of Cartesian dualism—how does the immaterial soul control the material body? Actually the paragraph reminds me of the magician that is busy showing you that nothing is up his sleeve—he is going to be a hard-core physicalist here.

Now, all of those atoms that make up your body are subject to certain regularities we might call the laws of nature. These are the same sorts of regularities that are exhibited when you pick up an
object and it falls after you let go (as you would reasonably expect it to). Or, if you were to push your hand against your coffee cup, you would expect it to move along your desktop. We think similar "nomic" or law-like regularities apply to human beings, as we are a part of the universe by virtue of being physical in our makeup. Another way of talking about all of this is the familiar language of "cause and effect."

Here is the start of the con. With all the verbiage, he is disguising that he is making the assumption of the first premise of his argument, that human bodies are subject to the laws of nature. Rather than stating it, he is oozing into it, hoping we will go along because it all seems reasonable.

There are no causeless effects, it seems -- at least at the macro-level we live in from day to day. Chairs don't fly up into the air and coffee cups don't move across desktops unless some force acts upon them -- "causing" them to move.

The first five words here assume the rest of the argument. What he is planning to do is make everything an effect and thus make it have a cause. But as we shall see, he will equate causes as being absolute determinants of the resulting effects. This statement is so sweepingly broad that it fails to allow for the partially determined events or non-determined events.

So, our bodies and brains are subject to causal laws, as well. Even though the myriad cause-and-effect chains happening in the human body are extremely complex, it is not possible for us to break these causal laws just because we're human. The same can be said for apes, cats, chickens, bugs and bacteria, as all are creatures that belong to the causal-physical world.

This is an attempt to persuade without logic. He has already said humans are subject to cause and effect above. Why he chose to include all the other species is a mystery to me. They are never part of a discussion of free will. Is it an attempt to persuade by making all “God’s creatures” subject to cause and effect? I also love the term “causal-physical”. It implies three other terms, non-causal-physical, causal-non-physical, and non-causal-non-physical. Do the rules change in the other three worlds?

Another way to define causation is to say: everything that happens is a result of some antecedent event. That means every single thing that happens in our bodies, from neuronal firing to DNA replication,is an event that is caused. If we were to extend these processes backwards in time, we would find these same regularities hold, otherwise the universe would have turned out to be a place of complete disorder and we would never have evolved.

Hold on to your wallets, here is the “touch”. By invoking an antecedent event for everything that happens and then saying it is caused, he is implying, but not saying, that there is no non-determinism, that absolute determinism is true, and that there are no optional events. If you accept his argument this far, the rest is a cake-walk for him.

Here's the problem. In our everyday language, we say we "choose" tea over coffee, or we "make a decision" to turn left or right. But since all of our so-called decisions take place in our physical
brains, we are confronted with a very deep problem. When we say we make a choice, aren't we committing ourselves to what I call "self-starter theory?"

We do say we choose, and the decision does take place in our physical brains, but he fails to show the deep problem. Instead he invents a theory that supposedly commits us to “causeless” effects. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to attempt to point out the logic of his argument, that physical brains have every firing of every neuron caused by antecedent events, and therefore any “choice” that comes from such firings must therefore be determined. If the argument is stated that clearly, it is then refutable by a consideration of both neurophysiology and of the nature of cause and effect itself.

Self-starter theory violates everything we intuitively know about cause and effect. That is to say, such a theory commits us to causeless effects. If causeless effects were the norm in the universe we live in, it would be a very strange universe, indeed. Chairs would slide around without any force acting upon them. Coffee cups might float to the ceiling. Gravity might appear to switch on and off at random. But when we say that we have Free Will, we are committing ourselves to the existence of such a strange universe. We are saying that we are somehow able to step outside the causal nature of things -- and the atoms that make up our brain and body simply self-direct, i.e. "self-start." And that's just crazy.

This whole paragraph is nothing but an ad hominum argument, of the fallacious kind. Notice he describes a ridiculous universe and then says, without proof or demonstration, that Free Will implies it. He is unwilling to consider that despite the laws of nature that they may not be absolutely deterministic. I haven’t shown why yet, either.

"Ah ha, Max!" you might be thinking. "I don't have to commit to a self-starter universe, because I have read my Heisenberg (particle physics). I know that at the micro-level, things exhibit very strange properties. In fact, the particles' behaviors aren't deterministic, but probabilistic. For example, there may be a 60 percent chance that a photon will curve to the left, and a 40 percent chance it will curve to the right -- if, say, fired from a particle accelerator."

This is a straw man. He is using an epistemic issue to deal with a more fundamental metaphysical issue. He of course did this so he can demolish it in the next couple of paragraphs. One of the things I avoided in my earlier discussions of free will was the use of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) to argue for free will. Even if HUP were a metaphysical truth, it is non-deterministic, and not necessarily allowing for free will. A lack of determinism does not necessarily admit the existence of Free Will.

The idea behind this tale of micro-probabilities is that the universe may have a different set of causal laws at the level of the very small. Let us, for the moment, set aside the idea that this may
be an issue of our observational limitations and not differing causal-physical laws. Even if the universe were probabilistic at the subatomic level (and that very same subatomic universe were able to exert itself all the way up to the level of people making their so-called "choices"), it would still be very strange to claim that people have Free Will.

Why? I call this the roulette wheel theory of human action. How is it that we have choice, if our choices are the result of probabilities not unlike heads or tails on a nickel? That's not free at all. That would be like claiming that, when asked to choose between tea and coffee, you flipped a coin and assigned heads with
tea and tails with coffee. The only difference is that "the coin," as it were, would be inside your head. Again, how is that free?

So, we're back to the drawing board.

As I stated above, since he created this straw man to demolish it, he has done so.

"But Max," the astute reader might ask, "haven't you ever heard of Schroedinger's Cat?" The notion is that in many of the cases where micro-particles are observed, observation itself seems to determine the outcome of the probability. It often seems the case that if we look for -- say, the photon -- to curve left, it goes left. Likewise, if we look right, it curves right. But until we make the observation, the probability stays 50/50. Observation, in some sense, "breaks" the probability limbo (ex poste facto we're at 100 percent, i.e. it happened). If this is the metaphysical reality at the micro-level, couldn't we say that human subjectivity -- i.e. experiential awareness and introspection -- is the observational component that breaks the subatomic probability limbo within our brains?

At this point he departs completely from any correspondence with reality. The idea of subatomic phenomena holding all the way to the macro level or that subjective experience operates in an analogous manner is patently ridiculous. I want to discuss this below. However, for Max it is useful in that it allows him to banish it as if it were a valid argument.

This approach forces us between the horns of a very strange dilemma: commitment to supernatural spirits on one hand, or to what I call a "matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress" on the other. In the first instance, subjectivity of experience is conceived of as a soul or non-physical essence, which somehow causally exerts itself in the physical world. This is rife with problems of Cartesian Dualism in the philosophy of mind, which we will dismiss here as mere metaphysical spookies.

I don’t think these are the only two ways to look at this. I don’t even see the logic that gets to the supernatural. However, once he gets there he can dismiss it as “spookies”. I really like the new term he introduces, "matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress". The next two paragraphs then dismiss it as well. But then its purpose is to be dismissed.

On the second horn, however, we have to take seriously the notion that mind and body are intimately connected, and that our experience isn't something spooky. More specifically, in order to be materialists, we have to believe that human subjectivity depends for its existence on the causal-physical goings on in the brain (e.g. why depressed people feel better when they take Prozac). Enter the
matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress.

If observation breaks the probability limbo between two "choices," whatever it is that is doing the observing must be a physical thing -- like a homunculus sitting above our brains and breaking
probabilities limbos for our choices. But since that homunculus is also a physical thing subject to causal laws, it too must "choose" whether to observe one option or the other in order to break the
probability. Since that probability limbo needs to be broken, we must postulate another observer, i.e. a homunculus, to break the probability. Each homunculus is nested within the next (like a matryoshka) ad infinitum. Now you can see the regress. And of course, this is an absurd result.

Yeah, Zeno composed a similar paradox about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. It has to do with the way it is posited in the first place.

So what do we do?

Why don’t we do some decent metaphysics?

It seems our subjective states force us into the illusion that we are making choices. The unitary nature of consciousness is set up so that, whatever causal track we're riding on, it darn well seems like we're actually in control. But what if we really aren't? If we really aren't in control, how are we to be considered responsible for anything we do?

This is the payoff for all determinists, a moral free-pass.

I'd say we simply have to live in the illusion. We get on with life as if we had Free Will. Many political forms don't depend too much on a presumption of Free Will for their power. But even if they do, we do a pretty good job of living without the idea that everything is somehow predetermined. Political freedom is still good for us. Maybe it was even preordained that I fight for it. And since there
is no way to function outside of the illusion, I may as well get on with life. Besides, it's fun to pick on Ayn Rand for her "axioms." (Sorry. I had no choice, Ayn.)

Let’s see, an illusion that we have Free Will by which we live as if it were reality. Seems pretty close to a definition of insanity.

(Note: here is a decent discussion of Free Will by the blogger on Fly Bottle.)

I checked out this discussion and it is basically a subjective statement that free will is my perception of having choices. Not very helpful in the metaphysical sense, but it doesn’t contradict his statements. In fact a significant portion of the material he uses came from that post.

The author is Program Director, The Institute for Humane Studies.

There are two areas that this whole argument fails on, infinite regress of causes, and mechanisms of neural action.

In the case of infinite regress of causes, as one pushes further and further back into the past to determine the causal lineage, the allowable range of behavior of an antecedent cause becomes smaller and smaller, because any slight deviation will cause cascading deviations in effects. At some point the allowable deviations are smaller than the components from which the cause is made, e.g, smaller than subatomic particles. Additionally, if one looks at the history of the universe as currently proposed, things started out simpler and got more complex. In effect, Max’s despised “self-starter theory” can be considered true, where the condensation of energy to atoms created greater complexity and the condensation of atoms to dust clouds, galaxies, stars, etc. created even greater complexity. Additionally, the rules by which such condensations occur, as currently known, cannot predict or determine the structures we see today. In effect, the universe is non-deterministic. This of itself does not create an argument for free will, but it definitely destroys his argument for determinism.

Neural action is far more complex than Max allows for. Nerves are most interesting summation devices, anything short of not enough stimulus from other nerves or sensation, and the nerve does not fire. Anything more than just enough doesn’t count. Information is lost in both ways. In the first it is discarded, and in the second ignored. The rules by which nerves fire are definitely deterministic, but the outputs are non-deterministic. If one were to attempt to make the firing of nerves deterministic not only would there have to be the ability to define in principle every input and sequence of inputs but also consider that many nerves are inhibitory to other nerves and even in some cases themselves. There are both positive and negative feedback loops in neural structures, and many of the areas of the brain work independently of each other and the results are gathered for output continuously. The notion of Free Will can arise in such an environment, because the brain is a self-controlling structure. The outputs, that we call consciousness, can and do, modify, directly and indirectly, the inputs and outputs for other brain processes.

For those interested in my other two posts in this area here are the links (earlier, more recent).

Post Script: I have been deliberately as hard as I can be in this post. Part of it is because I used to engage in the same pseudo-intellectual crap, and recognize it for what it is—pretentiousness. Another part of it is because I don’t believe one should let something this bad go unchallenged. Stuff like this has been given a free pass for too long. Sure there is a lot of it out there, but it doesn’t take much challenge to cause major retreats to silence or smears, both of which reveal the emptiness of the original positions.

Naturalism and ethics

2004-12-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Maverick Philosopher posted a link to Dallas Willard’s paper, “Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will,” I printed it, and read it. I immediately realized it was both important and dense. I finished reading it and then reread it, this time slowly with a pen in my hand, underlining and making margin notes. What follows is the outcome of that exercise.

This sentence received my first thought:

one can say that Naturalism (in the modern sense of the term) has presented a problem for morality, and has seemed to many to undermine any prospect of a moral basis for individual or collective human life.

Then it would be immediately apparent that there is a problem with Naturalism since our perceptions of reality are that moral issues are real and resolvable.

In reading his first section on the four ways that Naturalism and Ethics would interact:
The first understanding has a risk of stating a tautology—Naturalist ethics is natural. However, this is Willard’s preferred approach to ethics and Naturalism. The second understanding underscores the idea that Nature and Naturalism in the context of this conference is strained compared to more common understandings. It also highlights the problem that moral properties may be first principles in themselves. The third understanding is used to do a superb job later on in the paper to show the limitations of the “scientists” arguments. And demolishing the fourth understanding is the main thrust of the paper.

In the second section, this statement was very evocative of comment:

modern Naturalism is often specified simply in terms of an exclusive application of "scientific method" in all inquiries. But how can that method support claims about the nature of reality as whole. For example, one might state that the only realities are atoms (quarks, strings, etc.) and derivatives thereof. But how is he to support his claim?

I generally consider this problem as one of the nature of science being epistemological—measurements and how we know things, not metaphysical—stating the nature of reality. But if science is epistemological in nature, then how do we arrive at metaphysics? I think it comes from our desire to “make sense” of things, to discover patterns behind what we observe and measure. This means that the fundamental nature of science and the fundamental nature of metaphysics are totally separate. Findings from science can motivate the alteration of statements in metaphysics , but metaphysical statements are not derivable from science. For example quantum mechanics and relativity are both based on statements of measure. Metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy in general are attempts to provide a shorthand for dealing with the world and to create ways to deal with new situations by having generalizations that work outside the data from which they came. There is a tension between science and metaphysics. Metaphysics can generalize and say what science should see. Science looks and either sees or does not, with a resulting impact on metaphysics. Science in the above comments is the sum of individual sciences applied individually or collectively as appropriate.

I then went on to find that the entire second section was a much deeper and more precise statement of parts of the above comment. A summary would be that Willard argues very persuasively that science cannot make metaphysical statements.

In the section “The Dilemma of Naturalism” Willard shows the inadequacy of science and scientism to provide a grounding for Naturalism. However it would appear that the following reasoning all but destroys Naturalism as metaphysics.

For these reasons I take it that the appeal to science cannot serve to specify naturalism. There are, then, good reasons to be a "Puritan" if you want to advocate Naturalism. Naturalism has to be an honest metaphysics; and that metaphysics has to be "unqualified physicalism" as referred to above. But then a thinker who would be naturalist would feel pressure to have recourse to some specific apriori analyses to render his ontological specification of Naturalism plausible.

…
In addition to the difficulty of coming up with the required a priori analyses, however, to turn to such inquiry as might produce them would (as I have already indicated) be to break with the epistemological monism essential to Naturalism and introduce something like a "first philosophy." This would be discontinuous with the empirical methods of the sciences. In showing its justification through apriori analysis, Naturalism would simply give up the game.
In specifying what Naturalism is, therefore, one seems to be faced with an inescapable dilemma. Either one must turn to apriori (non-empirical and extra-scientific) analyses to establish its monism (which will refute Naturalism's basic claim about knowledge and inquiry), or its claim will have to rest upon a vacuous appeal to what "science" says.

Willard then rescues Naturalism in the form of a straightforward physicalism for his arguments as a proposal rather than a philosophical claim, and asks,

What are the distinctions, with the corresponding properties and relations, that Naturalism (as Physicalism) would have to account for if it were to encompass the field of ethics successfully?

Willard then summarizes the history of ethics, pointing to Hume’s emphasis on epistemological considerations. He makes the following observations:

The emergence of non-cognitivism in ethical theory was, I believe, quite inevitable, given the ascendancy of Empiricism to dominance in the theory of knowledge and the domination of ethical reflections by the theory of knowledge. Naturalism is the current reformulation of classical Empiricism. One might easily suspect that if Empiricism is the correct analysis of knowledge, there will certainly be no moral knowledge, because the substance of the moral life is not empirical. It is not something that is feeling or sensation or is of what can be felt or sensed.
… But the urgency of those demands did not resolve the underlying issue. Namely, the issue of the nature of moral phenomena and knowledge thereof. Those issues are still hanging fire today, and that fact also makes the problem of understanding the connection between ethics (or the moral life) and naturalism difficult to state in any satisfactory way.
…
Richard Brandt in his Ethical Theory (1959) says: "The essential thesis of naturalism is the proposal that ethical statements can, after all, be confirmed, ethical questions answered, by observation and inductive reasoning of the very sort that we use to confirm statements in the empirical sciences.... [T]he meaning of ethical statements is such that we can verify them just like the statements of psychology or chemistry." (p. 152) That is, they refer, in the end, to sense-perceptible or at least 'feelable' facts (such as desire or pleasure or pain or social behavior). The appeal to rationality as the ultimate point of reference in moral judgment might with some justification be seen as the most recent effort to "save" moral phenomena for Empiricism, currently called Naturalism. By it moral phenomena are completely externalized.
Well, but one might also say that this is only "saving" moral phenomena by abandoning them altogether and substituting something else. (Like "liberating" villages by destroying them.)

The implied understanding is that moral principles have been replaced with behavioral and sensory objects which are erratic guides at best.

His final comments on this approach to ethics in effect state that it will not work, and that one must change direction to reach a debatable issue. And here he returns to Hume, but this time we are to depart from empiricism to discuss moral quality.

"The external performance," Hume says, "has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality...." (T 477-478) I agree. For him, the moral distinctions fall between what he calls "qualities of mind." These are his virtues and vices. Not actions but the sources of action in the human system are the fundamental subjects of moral appraisal. Moral appraisal is not basically about what people do, but about what they would do, could do. What they actually do is, from the moral point of view, of interest primarily because it is revelatory of what they would or would not do, could or could not bring themselves to do, and therefore of their moral identity.

He also notes Kant:

But Kant was not so restricted and he identifies the central moral phenomenon as the good will. This, he famously says, is the only thing good without qualification, good regardless of whatever else may be true. Again, I believe he was entirely correct about this. The good will is the primary moral phenomena. … and he insists in his doctrine of virtue that the good will has two a priori (non-empirical) ends: one's own moral perfection and the happiness of others. These are the material ends of the good will for Kant, imposing obligations in their own right.

He mentions Hume and Kant because:

It was a tradition that focussed upon the will and the role of the will in the organization of the "ideal self." The 'ideal self' was, of course, the good person, which everyone finds themselves obliged to be.

Here is his definition of a morally good and a morally bad person:

The morally good person, I would say, is a person who is intent upon advancing the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, in a manner that respects their relative degrees of importance and the extent to which the actions of the person in question can actually promote the existence and maintenance of those goods.

The person who is morally bad or evil is one who is intent upon the destruction of the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, or who is indifferent to the existence and maintenance of those goods.

He notes that to make the distinction of good and bad will is something no one appears ready to discuss, mainly due to the ethical theories currently in vogue. Yet he says this distinction is one we make daily. In addition, through his quote from Aquinas, he makes the good will the foundation of natural law. In so doing he basically has already answered the question he will pose. He has defined morals as non-empirical and a priori from the start in distinction to Naturalism which requires all things to be empirical. His clarifications are well-said.

His final argument is so well-written and compact that I include it intact, with some comments of my own.

The Argument--Finally

Can the moral identity of the good (or evil) person be captured within the categories of Naturalism as Physicalism? I believe it clearly cannot. The argument against it is an old and simple one.

Suppose that we have an acceptable list of physical properties and relations. We might take them from physical theory, as the properties and relations corresponding to the concepts of current physics: location, mass, momentum and so forth. (Who knows what the future or ultimate physics will look like?) Or, moved by the above doubts about what philosophy can soundly derive from the sciences, we could turn to the "primary qualities" of Modern philosophy, and, for that matter, add on the "secondary" ones as well: color, odor, etc. I don't think we need, for present purposes, to be very scrupulous about this list either. Let us agree that whatever goes on such a list will count as physical properties, and that narrow Naturalism is the proposal to confine our inquiries and conclusions to whatever shows up on the list and combinations thereof.

The argument, then, is simply that no such physical property or combination of thereof constitutes the basic components of the good will or person, such as intentionality, knowledge, choice or the settled intentions that make up moral identity and character. At the simplest level, none of those properties or their combinations constitute a representation of anything, or qualifies their bearer as being of or about anything. The properties of those properties (and of combinations thereof) are not the same as the properties of representations (ideas, thoughts, propositions, beliefs, statements), much less of intentions, decisions and the permanent inclinations that make up character. If this is correct, and if the narrower Naturalism admits only these "physical" properties, then there are no good or bad wills or persons in the world of the narrower Naturalism.

Of course if there are no representations, there is no knowledge or choice, and if there is no knowledge or choice, there are no settle intentions with reference to anything, much less the goods of human life. The logical relations required in thought, knowledge and choice also will not show up in the world of Naturalism. The ontological structure of the good will therefore cannot be present in the world of narrower Naturalism--nor, for that matter, in the world of the actual sciences as now commonly understood. [In other words, science is amoral, a point I have argued before.]

Note that my claim is that such physical properties never constitute the good (or bad) will and its sub-components. I say nothing here about the latter not emerging from the physical properties of, say, the human brain. This is not because I think they may so emerge, although some form of interaction between them and the brain, body and social world, for example, surely does take place. Rather, it is because I can only regard talk of the emergence of irreducibly mental properties from the brain or the central nervous system as mere property dualism cum apologies. I accept that emergence can be employed as a valid and useful concept in numerous domains, e.g., chemistry, sociology and the arts. But its valid employment requires some degree of insight into why this emerges from that. Such insight is lacking, in my opinion, in the case of the brain and experiences generally, and certainly with respect to the substructures of the morally good (or bad) will. [This last statement would be subject to argument by Daniel Dennett. His qualification to morally good will, might be valid. However, there is also the issue of good people turning bad and vice versa. Is that structural? And if so, how?]

Finally, Naturalism as a world view lives today on promises. "We are going to show how all personal phenomena, including the moral, emerges from the chemistry (brain, DNA) of the human body." And, of course, the actual sciences (specific investigative practices) have made many wonderful discoveries and inventions. But after 300 years or so of promises to "explain everything," the grand promises become a little tiresome, and the strain begins to show. And anyway, nothing in actual practice by scientists going about their work depends upon the grand promises--which can and do force sensible people to say things that have nothing to do with sense or science. A justifiably well regarded worker in the field of cosmology was heard to say at this conference: "It all begins in a state of absolute nothing, which makes a quantum transition to something very small, and then 'inflation' sets in...." What which?

He summarizes his argument as follows:

Really, all I have said in my basic argument is that a close adherence to science as that would be commonly understood, or to Naturalism as a "first philosophy" (Physicalism/Materialism), has the effect that the primary structures and properties of the moral domain--those involved in the good (or bad) will--are lost sight of, and hence cannot function in the coherent organization of either the understanding (ethical theory) or the practice of the moral life.

And further states:

They have vanished at present, and that has led to the current situation (deplored by Anscombe and MacIntyre) where there is no moral knowledge that is publicly accessible in our culture, i.e., that could be taught to individuals by our public institutions as a basis for their development into morally admirable human beings who can be counted on to do the "right thing" when it matters. This is what I call "The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge." That disappearance is now a fact in North American society.

Here we have a clear statement of our current cultural status—rudderless morally, and how it came to be that way.

Summary comments:
In effect Willard has defined Naturalism not as an effective metaphysical philosophy but as a proposal. He then showed that Naturalist attempts at empirical ethics were ineffective. He then establishes what he considers a correct approach to ethics and shows that it cannot be obtained within Naturalism. Yet because of the supremacy of Naturalism in current thought it must find an ethical theory within itself. He does not expect Naturalism to find a moral ground and establish a moral culture regardless of how much it needs to. If his arguments are correct, and they are very persuasive, Naturalism may have reached its peak. If so, it will fail from its inadequacies and be replaced with something more robust. From my comments above on relative morals, however, the desire will be strong to ignore the failures, since they allow unbridled desires to rule.

My final comments:
This paper supports my thesis that science and religion are co-equal and not competitors or contradictory to each other.

I do wonder though, let us start with primitive brains and evolve. Could not morals evolve as does mental capacity? Could not observations of what is most efficacious for man’s well-being become a “Good Trick” a la Dennett, and passed on? However, just because they may have evolved with mankind, does not make them empirical in the Naturalistic sense. A mental construct is not a physical constant. It may have a physical basis, but is not necessarily a stable structure. Also even though the result of moral or immoral action may be pleasure or pain, respectively, the outcomes may act as feedback but they are not the determiners of morality. That would depend on whether one is a utilitarian or deontologist, and for that distinction to even occur argues that morals are not Naturalistic.

Birth Control, Abortion, and Adoption:

2004-07-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

These three topics are tightly tied to marriage, family, and other sex related issues but those are topics in themselves.

All three are intimately (pun not intended) interrelated, but are continually discussed out of context with each other. Anti-abortion movements ignore the factors that lead to abortion, lack of birth control, lack of support for adoption, lack of knowledge of sex as a relationship. In addition, many anti-abortion groups consider any form of birth control other than abstinence as sinful. With their determination to suppress sex outside of marriage, they also do not discuss sex in any context, including that of permanent relationships.

Abortion proponents fail to consider that abortion occurs in a context of a father and a mother, even if the parents are immature teenagers. They also fail to consider the father as having any input to the decision. They also fail to consider that the fetus is not just a fetus prior to birth. They use a very simplistic discussion on fetal rights (The existence of which is a very emotionally charged question, and not adequately discussed.). Abortion proponents refuse to consider the larger implications of the act of abortion. They purposefully try to remove the moral, ethical, and religious questions in the issue. Abortion proponents generally support birth control, but they view abortion as just another form of birth control, not a serious moral issue. For that matter, infanticide through the ages has been "just another form of birth control" for many of the poorest people. This was pointed out in an article in Scientific American about twenty years ago.

Adoption used to be the outlet for unwanted children. If a girl became pregnant and was not old enough to marry and take care of the child, or could not keep the child for any reason, the child was "put up" for adoption. Adoptions were permanent. Also, abortion was less accepted than it is today. Girls were expected to deliver the child. Unless the girl was married or about to be married, she was discouraged from keeping the child. Today, much has changed. Abortion is looked at as a preferable option to carrying and adopting out a full term child. Children that are put up for adoption can be taken back by the biological parents years later. Every roadblock possible is placed in the way of adopting parents. There seems to be the revival of the myth that the biological mother is the most suited to raise the child[1]. In the cases where the mother bears the child, until recently, welfare paid her to keep it. It didn't guarantee that the money went to the child's benefit, and it frequently didn't. Many girls and young women made their living by having babies for the welfare money.

Birth control via the pill created a major furor when it was introduced. It is condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and praised and/or used by most fertile couples and a lot of fertile singles. Because of its certainty compared to other forms of birth control, and because it gave women more control over conception, it created a major stir. It has been blamed for the so-called sexual revolution, though I don't see much of a revolution, just people less afraid of the consequences of doing what they were doing all along.

My solution proposed to this mess has a couple of easy parts, birth control and adoption and one very difficult part, abortion. In between there are some gray areas that could be highly contentious. Just to make the issues easier to discuss, I will restrict the current comments to birth control in a marriage context. Birth control and unmarried sex belongs in a different discussion.

Married couples have always tried to practice choice in having children. During the times when countries are developing, the choice is to have as many as possible, preferably boys. But as countries become more affluent, the birth rate per couple goes down. Choice is obviously being practiced. Until the development of the contraceptive pill, the choices were uncertain, inconvenient, and often interfered with the couple's pleasure[2]. There are two main forms of biochemical birth control, which are the most effective methods, the prevention of ovulation, and the prevention of implantation.

Prevention of ovulation is analogous to the various methods of preventing fertilization either mechanical or chemical. I see no moral issue here, despite the Roman Catholic Church. To me it is a crime to bring unloved, unwanted children, that will have a miserable physical and psychological existence, into the world, and not a crime to prevent their creation. To argue that they will be loved after they are born is to engage in wishful thinking. There are too many cases of infant abuse to validate that hope.

Prevention of implantation (the so-called morning after pill) is a much more contentious[3]. The argument stems from the belief that once the egg is fertilized, it is fully human, and therefore preventing implantation is the equivalent of abortion. Using my argument that the soul grows with the person, a fetus can have no soul until it develops a nervous system. At the time of implantation, it is a ball of 4 or 8 undifferentiated cells. There has also been recent research to indicate, that there are a large number of fertilized ova that naturally do not implant. The natural fetal wastage, if you will, is very high. To prevent implantation is merely an extension of a natural process, and by my arguments does not lead to the death of a human. Yes, a fertilized ovum is a potential human, but so are all those that naturally fail to implant, and all those that miscarry.

One of the consequences of the practice of birth control, is the relief of pressure on either abortion or adoption as alternatives to unwanted children. I strongly recommend that married couples have all the information on birth control and the means available to them to use it. This is one area where I believe that welfare and relief agencies can do some of the most good. It is much easier to prevent an unwanted birth than to deal with it afterwards. One of the biggest advantages of the biochemical forms of birth control is that they put their use in the hands of those most impacted by birth, the woman. The woman is the most motivated to use birth control, especially if she is educated in its proper use.

I see a stigmatizing of adoption in our country recently. There are horror stories becoming more common of parents that adopt, and then either go through years of uncertainty while the adoption is challenged in court by either the biological parent(s) or grandparents. This appears to be the result of some very sloppy thinking concerning parenting, and a perversion of the rights of parents under law. It used to be that a woman that was going to put a child up for adoption would never see the child at all. She would give birth, and the baby was taken immediately to another room. Nature does create a strong urge in new mothers to take care of the child and nurture it. Under normal circumstances where it is reasonable for the mother to keep the child, this is the desired result. However, hard as it is, there are circumstances where keeping the child would be detrimental to the mother, the child or both. In those cases, adoption is the answer. However, the adoption has to be permanent and untraceable. Harsh as it seems, it is better for the mother to form no attachment from the start, than to allow the attachment to form and the child be adopted. At the same time it is cruel not to give the adopting parents the certainty that the child is theirs. Considering the scrutiny to which we subject adoptive parents, they are better qualified to be parents than most biological parents. There is an argument that medical history is grounds for finding biological parents and linking them to the child. If this can be done without the biological parents finding out anything about the adopted child, then well and good. However, if it leads to a connection of the biological parents with the adopted child then it should not be done. Until adoption is made secure, adoptive parents will be much more inclined to adopt the children from other countries.

There is another pressure to adopt foreign children, the lack of available babies. The large number of abortions performed in this country, greatly reduces the number of Caucasian babies for adoption. In addition, adoption agencies do not encourage adoption between races. Thus black babies go unadopted and white would-be parents go childless because of officially sanctioned racism.

Now we are to the hard part of this discussion, abortion. Current law on abortion is based on a reading of the biological literature by Justice Blackmun in Roe vs. Wade. As such, it paid no recognition to any of the moral issues raised by religious groups. The issue is one that is so difficult to define that it is probably not possible for law to adequately deal with it, because it requires the definition of a human being. If a fetus is a human being under law, at what point does it become human? The Roman Catholic Church and most fundamentalist groups define it at conception. In effect, a human is defined by 46 chromosomes. But if that is so then any living cell is a human being. Of course, there are many other unstated conditions around it, but the definition is the most restrictive possible.

In dealing with this issue, I’d like to back into it from either end. Because of advances in medical care of neonatal children, the stage of development at which a fetus can survive outside the womb is increasingly being pushed back. To me this says that any abortion that kills a fetus, that could have survived outside the womb, is murder. This places me in agreement with those opposed to the so-called partial-birth abortion procedure. Medical risks to mother aside, then one can make a strong argument that once a pregnancy progresses to that stage, the mother must carry it to term, and if it is unwanted, put it up for adoption. I would support programs that assist mothers that are required to do that, and insure that they have adequate prenatal care, to provide the most healthy baby possible.

Coming at the issue from the other end, if a ball of cells that implants is not a human, at what point does it become human? Within the first month, the ball of cells elongates, becomes hollow, then a layer of cells invaginates and forms an interior group of cells from which organs differentiate(gastrula stage). At the same time the trace that becomes the nervous system is laid down. By the third month, the fetus has differentiated into something that looks human. It has a beating heart and circulating blood. (Antiabortionist make great emotional hay over this. The image is compelling). It also has a working nervous system, and in terms of humanness, this is more important. Based on my concept of the soul, the fetus is growing a soul at this point, and that makes it human. Where is the line then between the gastrula stage and the three-month stage that defines human? I draw it at the point at which the first nerve cell fires. This creates an electrical field that then grows and produces a soul.

In theory then, prior to the firing of the first nerve cell, abortion does not kill a human. However, in practice, this stage occurs early enough, that if there is any doubt about the time of conception, it is possible that awareness of the pregnancy could occur after that stage is reached. As a real-world issue, this effectively rules out abortion being considered non-sinful.

So then the question becomes, can we make a case to outlaw abortion? Yes and No. Partial-birth abortion that kills a fetus that might otherwise survive could probably be outlawed. Those who don’t agree with the religious stands on an absolute ban on abortion, could possibly accept the ban on this type because it is based on secular arguments. Banning the abortion of fetuses that would not survive would be much harder, because it is based on religious arguments. This is where the case for birth control and adoption with assistance to the biological mother can help. Prevent as many unwanted pregnancies as possible, and do everything possible to ease the birth of those that aren’t prevented.

I still have to deal with the tough cases, pregnancy due to rape and incest[4], and cases where the pregnancy is dangerous to the mother. The morning after pill would deal with the rape issue, unless the rape is reported too late. The earlier this is dealt with the better. To me it is cruel in the extreme to force a woman that has been raped to carry the result of that rape to term[5]. For nine months she would be forcibly reminded of the event, as if the memory isn’t horrible enough. However, if the pregnancy progresses to the point of fetal viability outside the mother, it should either be delivered by Caesarean section, or carried to term. Rape does not justify murdering the innocent product. (Murdering the rapist may be another question. ? ) I don’t think there is a single definitive answer to this one. The gray area beyond the morning after pill, and before the external viability of the fetus presents many difficult questions, very similar to the ones applying to maternal health.

I have a lot harder time justifying aborting the result of incest. I do not find the inbreeding argument particularly persuasive. There have probably been more healthy than unhealthy offspring of incest. The effects of inbreeding require several generations to show, generally. Where an incestuous pregnancy was not due to willingness on the part of the mother, or the mother was mentally inadequate to understand, it reverts to the rape standard. Where it is the result of willing, knowing partners, then I tend to come to the stand that it should carry to term[6].

The messiest area of all is that of inadequate maternal health or mental capacity, and severe fetal defects. I knew a couple that had a son and a daughter, both so severely retarded that they were barely trainable to do simple daily tasks. They kept the house segregated, a female side with female bedrooms and bath and a male side with male bedrooms and bath. One of the questions he had to deal with was what to do with the girl as she approached puberty. She was incapable of understanding or taking care of herself when menarche hit. One of the recommendations he had received from a doctor was to give the girl a hysterectomy before puberty. This example is very illustrative of the kind of issues being addressed her. What do we do about mentally defective girls and women that become pregnant? In some cases, it would terrify them to see themselves change over the months of pregnancy. What would she think the first time the baby kicked her? If her disability were genetic, would the baby also be mentally challenged (to be politically correct)? What would she think and feel as labor began? Though I don’t pretend to have an answer, much less one that would cover most situations, I tend to think that with great remorse, one would opt for an abortion. And even if there have been examples of a severely retarded person giving birth to a healthy baby, how many more counter examples exist?

What if the mother becomes too ill to properly carry a baby to term? I am not talking about a woman that is unhealthy and becomes pregnant. She should have been practicing some sort of birth control to start with. Ultimately, I think that is between the mother and God. Only she can decide if the baby is worth more than her life. The decision is compounded with the inclusion of the husband and other children in the mix. What does he value? Of course he values his wife, but he will also value the unborn child. Is he capable of allowing her to reach a decision that is right for her, and can he live with it? If there are children already, what impact do they have? They will value the mother over the baby, most likely, and with good reason. From their vantage point, if the mother dies, they lose a caregiver, and have to become caregivers for the baby. They receive injury added to injury. Generally I think these decisions go with saving the mother, but that is not an automatic choice, nor should it be. It is the horrible circumstance that at least one life will be lost, regardless of the decision.

As I was contemplating posting this essay, WSJ Opinion Journal came out with this story:

MAMA MIA: If the children of Gianna Beretta Molla put their mother on a pedestal, the Toronto Star suggests that they may have a better reason than most. A mother who knowingly sacrificed her own life in 1962 so that she could carry her baby to term, Mrs. Molla, an Italian doctor, was canonized by Pope John Paul II in May. In most ways, St. Gianna--who loved Parisian fashion, skiing in the Alps and zipping down the roads in her sporty Fiat--hardly fits the saintly stereotype. Yet the Star says that her three surviving children "may be the only people in the world who can say it without fear of stretching the truth: My mother is a saint."

Finally, what about fetuses that are deformed or have defects such that they can never live normal lives or will live truncated, miserable lives. Here there has to be some careful discrimination. There are defects that can be over come, e.g., thalidomide babies, club foot, other skeletal deformities, phenylketonuria, defects that cannot be overcome, e.g., anencephaly as the extreme example, and a large number of defects that might be overcome, e.g., various heart defects. The first category appears to me to be a no-brainer—carry to term. The second category also appears to be a no-brainer—terminate as soon as possible. It is the third category that will cause the agony and indecision. Sometimes events resolve themselves, the baby is stillborn. Other times, the baby is born and lives a short, painful life, subjected to surgery and other therapy to compensate or repair the defect(s). Again, it ultimately is the parents and God that must decide. I know I could never judge someone that had to make that decision, regardless of how they decided and what the outcome was.

As a closing observation on this discussion, though it is not possible to prevent all cases like the difficult ones presented above, more can be done with preventing their occurrence. Acknowledgement of pre-existing conditions unfavorable to pregnancy, and the application of appropriate birth control can prevent many horrible decisions from having to be made. A more realistic approach to the whole subject of sex in our culture would also help. It would increase the use of non-abortive contraception. By not condemning the victims, it could more effectively get rapists off the streets. By educating, it would give men and women true choices, not lesser or greater fears.

footnotes: ========================================================================
[1] It is one of the great ironies that the modern feminist movement has led to a reversion to behavior and attitudes associated with more repressive times. It appears to be a general attitude of all the modern "isms," that older times were some golden age, e.g., the environment was better, the natural mother is best suited to raise the child, small communities are better than large ones.

Problem of parenting being defined biologically not relationally--creates adoption issues in US.

[2] Since biologically reproduction is very much to be desired, the sex act is one of the most pleasurable. We are “wired” that way. The issues that arise or ones of when, and where, and with whom, and what are the consequences. Many people try to avoid the real issues by condemning sex itself. To me this is the equivalent of condemning life itself.

[3] I wonder which is more the cause of contention, the morning-after quality or the prevention of implantation. The morning after effect allows the avoidance of negative consequences of unprotected sex. To many this is a further invitation to engage in such activity. Inside of marriage, this argument is of no consequence, and I am saving the situation outside of marriage for another discussion.

[4] Properly rape and incest are outside the marriage context, but the discussion is more appropriate to the abortion question than to the unmarried sex question.

[5] The one possible exception is marital rape. I consider marital rape as rape just as much as non-marital rape is, but the context of marriage places a much different context on keeping the child. This is a very messy area, and I don’t have any answers.

[6] The evil of incest needs to be explored further. How and why is it sinful? I suspect it is a livestock type of argument—prevention of inbreeding

Communion

2004-06-13T14:30:00.001-07:00

Proof of communality, one never eats with one’s enemies. Powerful image of sharing a single cup of wine.

It is very difficult to deal with the concepts of body and blood in the Elements. One commentator in the Abingdon Press commentary, noted that those words did not show up in the service until the second century or later. In my mind, it seems to be of a piece with the scapegoat nature of the interpretation of the crucifixion as the payment for our sins. Taken literally, it smacks of a symbolic cannibalism, whereby the virtues of the eaten are conferred on the one eating.

Did Jesus make some significant gesture at the Last Supper? Certainly. Was it as quoted in the Eucharist? Very possibly not.

At a personal level what am I to do with this? Communion seals the sense of community of the members of the church, and with Baptism is a most important reconfirming of belief. I cannot accept communion at the face value of the liturgy.

Several weeks later….

I have been working with this question for the last couple of weeks, and think I finally see the way clear.

The process was to read all the general commentary on the New Testament in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, as well as the passion week commentaries on all the gospels, and C.F. Wood’s general commentary on the Pauline letters in Peake. Of course I also have read the pertinent passages from the Gospels and Epistles. I also went back and looked at the commentary on the Eucharist in the Abingdon Press commentary, and found that unlike Peake, its commentators were willing to discuss the symbolism of the Eucharist, at least to limited degree.

I think I will present a collection of quotes with some notes to illustrate my path of reasoning.

First, as best as I can from memory, in the Eucharist,
“On the night in which he was betrayed, he took the bread and and, after he had given thanks, broke it. He gave it to them saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this as often as you shall do it in remembrance of me.’ Likewise, after supper, he took the cup and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink you all of this. This is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins.’”

At the end of the Eucharist,
“May the body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, strengthen and preserve us.”

At this point, the words give a literal image that is very much at odds with the church teachings, and there are no context clues to help with the symbolism.

Next the passages from the Gospels. (I am using a college edition of Jennifer’s that is probably an edited RSV)

Mark 14: 22-25
“As they were eating, Jesus took bread and asked God’s blessing on it and broke it in pieces and gave it to them and said, ‘Eat it – this is my body.’ When he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it and gave it to them; and they all drank from it. And he said to them, ‘This is my blood, poured out for many, sealing the new agreement between God and Man. I solemnly declare that I shall never again taste wine until the day I drink a different kind in the Kingdom of God.’”

Matthew 26: 26-29
“As they were eating, Jesus took a small loaf of bread and blessed it and broke it apart and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take it and eat it, for this is my body.’ And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks for it and gave it to them and said, ‘Each one drink from it, for this is my blood, sealing the New Covenant. It is poured out to forgive the sins of multitudes. Mark my words – I will not drink this wine again until the day I drink it new with you in my Father’s Kingdom.’”

Luke 22: 17-20
“Then he took a glass of wine, and when he had given thanks for it, he said, ‘Take this and share it among yourselves. For I will not drink wine again until the Kingdom of God has come.’ Then he took a loaf of bread; and when he had thanked God for it, he broke it apart and gave it to them saying, ‘This is my body, given for you. Eat it in remembrance of me.’ After supper he gave them another glass of wine, saying, ‘This wine is the token of God’s new agreement to save you – an agreement sealed with the blood I shall pour out to purchase back your souls.’”

What finally registered, was in the general commentary on Paul, that Wood pointed out that in 1 Corinthians, Paul records the words used in the early Eucharist, and that this writing predates Mark by at least 10 years.

1 Corinthians 12:23-26
“For this is what the Lord himself has said bout his Table, and I have passed it on to you before: That on the night when Judas betrayed him, the Lord Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks to God for it, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, ‘Take this and eat it. This is my body, which is given for you. Do this to remember me.’ In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new agreement between God and you that has been established and set in motion by my blood. Do this in remembrance of me whenever you drink it.’

Note that in Paul’s letter, the wine is NOT the blood but the recognition of the new covenant with God. An early Christian version of “I’ll drink to that,” which comes from a practice of using a communal cup to seal an agreement. This leaves me with the bread as the body. Considering that by the time this was recorded, the early church was already thinking of itself as the body of Christ, with Jesus as the head, the original bread was not intended to be the literal body of Jesus, but representing the body of people who share the common beliefs, and that the sharing of the bread is the proof of communality. One does not eat blessed bread with one’s enemies.

If I were to take communion, I would approach it as sharing bread as a member of the church community, and drinking the wine to remind myself of and to renew a covenant with God.

Pherigo’s commentary in the chapter on Mark in Abingdon, concurs with the above considerations, at least with respect to noting the changes between Paul and the synoptic Gospels on the interpretation of the wine.
Apparently the issue of the body is not an important concern to the scholars I have read. To me it is/was, and my exegesis is that Jesus said something to the effect that the bread was the body of believers of which the disciples were part and in which they shared, and the eating of the bread was the confirmation of it.

Communion

2004-06-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

Free Will:

2004-06-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

[These issues have been addressed by Daniel Dennett in “Elbow Room” and “Consciousness Explained” which I read after writing this. Sometime in the future I will rework this in light of those works.]

Introduction:

Free will is usually presented in the context of either free will or determinism as opposites, and that there can be only one or the other. In the psychological/moral/ethical world the issue is free will vs. determinism. But in the physical world, the issue is determinism vs. non-determinism. Since the psychological world depends on the physical for the working of the brain, if the physical world is deterministic then the psychological world is also, despite the appearance of free will or choice. Physical determinism is not compatible with the existence of God, unless we conceive of Him as a deistic God that created the universe and its laws, set it in motion, and then did nothing forever after.

Before delving into the discussion, I want to discuss the meanings of determinism and free will. [To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, 'A word means what I want it to mean, no more no less. It is a matter of who is master.'] Determinism can be used in both a physical context and in a psychological context. The idea of physical determinism is that if one knows all the inputs, one can predict exactly what will happen next. Determinism carries an implicit concept of the passage of time as part of its meaning. This applies to events in what we perceive as the forward direction of time. Because of the nature of physical processes, it is possible for a given subsequent state not to indicate all its precursor states. There are frequently several ways to arrive at a given state. Now there are two approaches here to physical determinism, current physical theory, and an attempt to arrive from first principles. The question to be answered is, "Is there some physical state that cannot be predicted from the precursor states?" The nature of the prediction can be either very specific such as, "Will a given atom disintegrate in the next N seconds," or more general such as, "Does a subsequent state have more complexity than it is possible to determine from the preceding states?" Determinism may be a macroscopic phenomenon due to the apparent unidirectional motion of time. It is important to realize that physical determinism or non-determinism may not be provable at the microscopic level. If we consider the macroscopic levels to be a summation of the many microscopic states, then that same non-provability will apply.

There are really two approaches, macroscopic or what we see in the everyday world, and microscopic or what is described at the particle and subatomic particle level. Macroscopic determinism is fairly easy to deal with. One can use the concept of constrained paths. This will be discussed in Section 3. The microscopic world is much harder, and since it underlies the macroscopic world, there is an implication that the macroscopic world is the summation of the microscopic world, and is actually determined by the microscopic world. If that approach is taken, then one must demonstrate determinism or its lack at the microscopic level.

If we look at current physical theory, quantum mechanics has a built-in imprecision. It states by the nature of the theory, it is impossible to make any measurement that has an error smaller than Plank's constant divided by 2?. This immediately creates non-determinism, since no prediction can be more precise than that error. By the time that error figure is propagated through several generations of calculation, the possible range of answers is very large. Both quantum mechanics and chaos theory have this property in common. Also as a consequence, much of quantum mechanics is expressed as probabilities rather than absolute position/energy statements. Though it fits the observed physical world very well, it cannot predict certain events, such as the disintegration of a particular atom in a collection of radioactive isotopes. As is discussed below, it does predict the overall time course of the collection quite well. Based on current theory, at the most fundamental levels, the universe is non-deterministic.

However, since current theory is a mathematical model and not the exact description of the underlying reality, it would be nice to find an approach that manages to indicate, if not prove, determinism or non-determinism from consideration of the nature of reality rather than the nature of the description. That is the thrust of the discussion on physical determinism in Section 1, below.

At the personal level, free will vs. determinism is usually presented as the existence or non-existence of choice, that given two or more alternatives, we truly are able to choose one or another of them, based on a chain of reasoning or conceptualization. When we take the mental mechanisms of choice to their more fundamental physiological levels, we are looking at the firing of neurons. This leads to two approaches to the issue of free will on the personal level, the outer level, or the moral/ethical level discussed in Section 2. My working definition in this context is the power/ability/capability of making choices between good and bad (or good and evil). There is also the physiological level discussed in Section 4. There free will is the ability to make a choice that is not exclusively the sum of the neural configuration and the input sensations.

1. Physical determinism at the theoretical level

a. Expansion of Universe

All of observational and theoretical astronomy and cosmology agrees that the universe is expanding, and, with the exception of Fred Hoyle and his followers, concludes that the universe started from a singularity-- a conceptual point at which no laws or matter as we know it existed, but contained all the mass of the universe in the form of energy. From observing the current distribution of galaxies in the universe, and applying current laws of physics, astronomers and cosmologists have been trying to arrive at a picture of the universe at earlier and earlier times. The difficulty is finding theories that account for the current evenness of the distribution of galaxies. The implication is that matter had to be distributed extremely evenly very early in the history of the universe, yet have a certain amount of irregularity on a "local" scale to provide the source of current structure. There is the speculation that at certain points in time, certain structural features became fixed. However, prior to that time they were completely fluid, and there was no structure. There is a definite arbitrary flavor to the fixation, in the sense that if everything was fluid, at the time of fixation it was non-deterministic what the details of the final structure would be.

The current complexity of the universe is not a problem. Current theory on a macroscopic scale has shown that in non-equilibrium and non-steady state conditions, complexity can arise spontaneously.

b. Entropy is the equivalent of information

The increase in entropy implies an increase in information. But that in turns implies that something comes as an unpredicted, non-deterministic event. The expenditure of energy creates entropy, but can it be considered to be determined?

c. Atomic and Sub-atomic level

Some scientists look at Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal (HUP) and say that proves that the Universe is not determined. Most emphatically, NO. HUP is a mathematical representation of the world, and makes a statement concerning its measurability. It is not a description of the underlying reality. It works for physics, because it describes the limits that physics reaches and the resulting observable universe. It is also used as a wild card in some theories, allowing “borrowing” of energy to accomplish something desired as long as it is paid back within the time limit based on HUP.

One can use two approaches to this question. The first is, "Is there some process that in principle cannot be predicted by what has gone before?" Possible examples are radioactive decay, and spin resonance decay. The second is, "If we approach physical phenomena as chaotic processes, where there is a determined outcome, but the inputs can cause extreme variation in the outputs, can we use a form of physical reducto ad absurdum that shows the determining input has to be so infinitesimal that it is smaller than any possible physical input, and therefore not possible?" Both approaches tend to indicate the same answer, that the physical world is indeterminate.

Another way to ask the question—is it ultimately possible to predict which atom in a collection of radioactive atoms will disintegrate and in which direction the particle will exit? Radioactive decay is exponential, it is a Poisson function. This is most important, because a Poisson phenomenon is one that is considered “memoryless.” It makes no difference what has happened before to the probability of what will occur next. Thus every radionuclide can be characterized by its half-life, the time it takes for one-half of the nuclei to disintegrate. It does not matter at what point in time the original count of nuclei is made, it will take the same time for half of them to disappear. For example, if we count 1000 nuclei of an element with a half life of 50 days, in fifty days there will be 500 atoms, in another 50 days, 250 atoms, in another 50 days 125, etc. If we came back before fifty days, say when 600 atoms were left, then it would take another 50 days for there to be 300 left. However, if we have one atom, we cannot predict when it will disintegrate. We can calculate a probability of when, e.g. a 50% chance that it will happen within 50 days, but never exactly when—with current theory at least.

At least on the surface, there appears to be no determinate of when an atom will disintegrate. It does not relate to its length of time of existence. All the nuclides created in an atomic explosion, the nucleosynthesis phase of which lasts microseconds or less, decay according to the above law. Each decays with a half-life characteristic for it. Also the disintegrations do not occur evenly over time. The law applies to collections of atoms. There becomes a minimum collection at which the law would appear not to hold, but this is because there are so few atoms left that they must be treated individually.

To tackle the problem from this approach, let us take as an example radio-iodine, or iodine with an atomic weight of 131. This isotope has a half-life that is measured in days, about seven, and it emits a high-energy beta particle. We could use just about any radionuclide as an example. A gram atomic weight of Iodine-131 contains an Avagadro's Number of atoms, or 131 grams has 6.023 X 10exp23 atoms. (That's 6.023 multiplied by 10 followed by 23 zeros. Every atom will disintegrate at a different time. If we were to use the quantum mechanical concept that an emission occurs when the wave function for the beta particle reaches a peak, then it implies that every atom is created with a different position of the wave function. The creation of fission products is dependent on the energy of the reaction mass. This is the sum of the energy of the incoming neutrons plus the instant configuration of the target nucleus. Iodine-131 would be formed in a given range of energies, so that creates a restriction on the available configurations immediately after formation. It seems rather difficult to imagine enough different energy configurations to account for 6.023X10exp23 different levels to allow that many different decay modes. And further more, as the number of atoms of Iodine-131 increases, so does the apparent number of decay modes. In effect there is a potentially infinite number of possibilities. The implication is that any single given starting configuration must either have an evenly distributed, potentially infinite number of configurations or must give rise to multiple decay modes. If the latter is so, then one cannot predict a single atom uniquely from the precursor conditions. The former cannot be true, since it violates the Poisson behavior of radioactive decay. The necessary condition for Poisson behavior is that every atom is totally independent of the others. Yet to evenly distribute the possible configurations across all the atoms in a collection implies they are mutually interdependent, in order to arrive at the even distribution.

Now let us approach the problem from the chaos theory viewpoint. One of the misquotes from chaos theory is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can create a hurricane in the Atlantic. NO, what was said was that an error equivalent to the energy of a butterfly flapping its wings in China would extrapolate into a result with a potential error as great as a hurricane in energy. This can be restated into to say that a very small change become a very large change, or in reverse, the more delicate the change or the farther back in time, the smaller must be the variation in the process that produced it. The time scale of the butterfly statement was over about seven to nine days, the period it takes for weather to move over half-way around the world. The change being discussed is on the order of 10 orders of magnitude (10,000,000,000 times change). This is over seven days. Another seven days back and the change that would produce a change the size of a butterfly's wings would be another 10 orders of magnitude. And so forth. The exact numbers are not as important as the concept. If the universe is 15 billion years old, or so, then it is about 5 trillion days old. Since we are working with seven day periods in the previous example, that would be 782 billion periods or about 8x10exp11. Given the rates of change in the above example, the total order of magnitude of change from the beginning of the universe would be 110. One of the books I have covered the entire range of the known universe from the limits to the most submicroscopic, and required about 70 orders of magnitude. This implies that to completely determine changes from the beginning would require 10exp40 times more change than has occurred in the universe from the beginning.

The above argument is not realistic, however, but it indicates a way of looking at the problem. In reality, most changes are subject to damping from other forces and changes. This complicates the picture, but also has the potential to make the argument easier. This means that large changes require a form of recruitment to occur, unless they are catastrophic in nature. But at some point, a large change is not immediately effected by incremental small changes, but yet they can eventually have an effect. Can the timing and size of extremely small changes have an eventual large impact? For example, would the impact of an atom on the Earth eventually make a change in its orbit? Probably not, because its effect is overwhelmed by other, larger effects such as the gravitation of the Sun, Moon, and Jupiter. But in a deterministic universe, such an impact would lead to an eventual measurable effect. At some point, and impacting object would have a noticeable effect on the Earth, but it would have to be of some minimal size to do so.

Without being rigorous, I am going to conclude that the Universe is not deterministic within any useful definition of the concept.

2. Individual free will
Individual behavioral free will, a macroscopic manifestation, subject of much philosophical and religious debate.

Assume that the world is not physically determined, at least on a quantum scale, and consider the debate between Erasmus and Luther. (Luther would be much more at home with modern Christian Fundamentalism than with mainline Protestantism) [This essay is the result of reading a history of the debate between Erasmus and Martin Luther on this subject.]

Both missed the boat on the definition of free will. My working definition in this context is the power/ability/capability of making choices between good and bad (or good and evil). Erasmus mentioned, but didn't really follow through well, the Biblical story that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Given that we have that knowledge, it follows, but not necessarily, that we can use it to make choices. The idea of good inherently indicates it is desirable and bad that it is not. The effect of perceiving good and bad almost automatically gives direction to behavior. If knowledge were all that were required, then our behavior would always be good. That it isn't and, that Man sins, is due to a lot of complexity. Here is where both Erasmus and Luther were on the right track, but I don't think either really saw what was there.

The other point that Erasmus made, but Luther ducked, was that if we do not have a choice about being good or sinning, then why is there forgiveness? If we cannot help but sin, then the whole concept of forgiveness has no meaning. One does not forgive a dog for chewing up a slipper--the dog can't help it. One just goes on. There may be a swap with the slipper to try to discourage further such behavior, but the concept of forgiveness doesn't enter here. (Or does it? In a sense, not holding a grudge against the dog for destroying a slipper is a forgiveness. The act of disciplining or trying to create aversion to such behavior indicates an effort to instill a primitive responsibility. This is close to what would be the form of forgiveness according to Luther. Since we cannot help sinning, and cannot do anything on our own except sin, then God's forgiveness is of this nature.)

However, humans operate on a different level than dogs. We do have choices and the ability to perceive the possible consequences of our choices. Actually our choices can be quite complicated. I see a continual conflict between our emotional, evolved-from-animal side and our intellectual human side. Most of the time they are in agreement, when dealing with the normal day-to-day stuff. However, the conflict arises when there are emotionally-charged events and choices. Our intellect may indicate that one course of action is preferred, while our emotions rage that a harmful course of action is desired. This is where Luther sees the necessity to sin vs the reception of grace. To perceive and receive Grace is an emotional more than intellectual event, and therefore Grace will change the desire to do wrong. Where I disagree with Luther, is that because we do have the ability to intellectually discern good and evil, where there is strong self-discipline, or the intellect has been made primary in behavioral choices, one can chose to do good. This may or may not be in conflict with the emotional choices. The important point is that even with choices being made emotionally, they are choices, and as such constitute free will.

3. Large-scale phenomena

Constrained Choice energy requirement of many choices so high as to make them, in essence, impossible.

In the everyday world, where measurements and observations have very small errors compared to the events being measured, and we can observe things directly, it is much easier to understand why there appears to be determinism and choice is often constrained or considered not available. Ultimately everything requires energy to occur or exist. We spend our lives acquiring and expending energy in growing, learning, raising children, following careers, playing , and all the other activities we engage in. The energy takes many forms. Generally, we make our choices based on minimizing the amount of energy we will have to expend to achieve our goal. This can be a very complex decision, since different inputs of energy can often have different outcomes, or we find certain outcomes are more desirable and worth the expenditure of more energy. Sometimes the choice is short-term, such as what to eat for dinner, with the choices constrained by what is available in the home, what money is available to spend, how much time is available, how tired one is, and how close is a restaurant that has something appealing. Other times the choices are long-term, such as what career to follow with the constraints being much more complex, and including such things as talents and skills, preferred activities, money, available careers, location. In many instances, the exertion of extra effort (the expenditure of extra energy) will overcome a constraint. For example, the person who studies harder to attain a grade in school than someone with greater mental powers.

From this description, we can conceive of our lives as similar to walking in a complexly-shaped trough. The walls of the trough vary in height and thickness, and from time to time there are open areas with multiple troughs leading from them. Based on our perceptions of the thickness of the walls and their height, and our desire to reach another path, we may from time to time try to jump from one trough to another. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes not. At other times when we reach the open areas, we have the chance to make a relatively easy transition from one path to another.

Some walls or barriers are so high as to be impossible, for example, a person with tone-deafness would not have a reasonable choice of becoming a musician, and would probably fail if they insisted. Conversely, if we are not aware of the points at which choice is easy, we may drift through without taking advantage of the opportunity. If in retrospect we realize what we did there may be remorse and self-recrimination, but by that time the walls and barriers have arisen again, and the effort to make the change becomes much greater to impossible.

One other point, when we reach choice points, we may not like the choices available. However, any suite of choices is predicated on what has gone before, or else came from outside our control completely. Example of the latter is deciding to rebuild or move after being flooded or burned out.

On a macroscopic scale, we appear to have both choice and free will and to be subject to determination by outside circumstances. Frequently those outside circumstances are of our own doing. Sometimes we desire it that way, when we try to change our environment to cause us to change behavior rather than change ourselves to change the behavior.

4. Physiological Free Will

The firing of neurons based on their configuration, reaction to inputs, and current state. Is there room for choices as we know them in the conscious world?

As constructed, the nervous system cannot react to anything faster than a few thousandths of a second. In addition, many processes operate in parallel. How they reach our conciousness is not clearly understood, but we believe we can selectively recall and process events and memories. The question is, "Are our selections and choices truly free or are they unconciously determined?" The latter state is in agreement with Skinner's work with rats. However, rat brains are analogous to the more primative parts of our brains, not to the gray matter we do our thinking with. In rat brains, choices are conditioned by the repetition of events leading to structures in the brain. These structures extend over the whole brain. When part of the brain is removed in a rat, an equivalent percentage of performance is also removed. However, events are stored in humans both as discrete events and possibly as summaries over time similar to rats. If a portion of the cortex in humans is damaged or destroyed, the losses are very specific.

Various inputs to the human mind occur in parallel, and asynchronously. We frequently have trains of thought interrupted, the most famous being Samuel Taylor Colredge's Person from Purlock. When we try to recapture the event, frequently the thought train cannot be recaptured. This implies that we don't have total control over our minds, but at the same time it does not say that they are totally out of our control. I think in the case of humans, the mind is inherently non-deterministic, but not completely controllable, either. The non-determinism comes from the fact that the same stimulus does not necessarily create the same response every time. Part of the mind, the reticular activating system (RAS) acts to filter repetitive stimuli as being "non-important" so that the mind doesn't become over burdened with constant stimuli. Even the point, at which an event is ignored, changes with emotional state, other events, and history. The RAS can also chose events to pay extra attention to. These frequently are those things which are emotionally important or are related to survival.

At the neuronal level, events are not all or none. Nerves respond to inputs with a threshold. Nerves connect to one another by synapses which are distributed over the surface of the neurons. Some are stimulating and some inhibiting. A nerve fires based on whether the sum over time and space of the inputs reaches a threshold. It then fires. The response is the same when it fires regardless of the strength of the various inputs. Increased strength of response to an outside event is due to more nerves firing, not to the same nerves responding more strongly. After a nerve has fired, it remains in a refractory state for a period of time, during which it will not respond at all. With billions of neurons and trillions of connections, all of them firing at various times and to varying degrees, there is an inherently non-deterministic environment. With practice, control over our minds can be increased. This is the goal of Yoga, both mind and body control.

Much of our thought as conditioned by emotion. In some persons this conditioning is so strong that they appear to operate only from emotion, not from reason. In others it is so weak that they appear icy, operating only from their reasoning. Most of us are somewhere in between, and the strength of emotion vs. reason on our ideation varies. In summary, psychological free will is similar to gross physical freewill, a form of constrained freedom.

Privacy

2004-05-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

I was unable to make a post yesterday. We had company last night, and too much preparation had to be done to make the time to blog. However, I was able to begin these comments on privacy.

The latest issue of “Reason” magazine had 40,000 custom-printed covers were created for the run of 60,000 issues. My cover had an aerial picture of my neighborhood, the inside had some statistics about my community, the inside back cover had a plea to write to my Congressman by name who had voted no on the medical marijuana bill, and the back cover had a bulldozer with the caption “condemned” with my address. The point was to make visible the amount of information that was available publicly about me. The theme was that the loss of privacy was good. I think there is an internal contradiction here, with libertarian philosophy, and I want to expand on the types of privacy and who should or should not have access to information.

First of all there are two types of information gatherers, commercial/private and government, and they must be treated separately. Much of the press condemns private information and then accepts government information when they should be doing the opposite. The crucial difference is that private information is gathered from voluntary submissions and generally is used only for the purpose gathered. On the other hand government information is gathered under law (ultimately this means at the point of a gun. A topic for another post sometime), and there is only the choices of providing it or going to jail. Oversight of private information is relatively easy, if it is misused, lawsuits result. Oversight of government information is next to impossible. Security concerns, bureaucratic delays, and the general acquiescence of Congress guarantee that government information will be used arbitrarily in addition to the proposed uses.

The information that produced my magazine cover was commercial/private information, and as internal articles pointed out, providing such information makes my life easier. Merchants will supply me credit. Advertisements can be focused to my potential needs instead of my having to wade through tons of inappropriate junk mail, or junk whatever. With the proper analysis, my wine merchant could target promotions for the type of wines I prefer, varietals and price range. My grocery store can provide me with a select pack of coupons to get me to cross-buy products from other suppliers. I see these things, not as intrusions, but attempts to create a win-win for me and the merchant. I am not paranoid about the information I give to a merchant. He only wants to use it to increase his sales, and to misuse it could cost him money.

The government on the other hand, is a different situation. Because of convenience and government edict, we have, in effect, a national identity number even though it is not a formal smart card. It is our social security number. Try doing anything without it. As soon as a child is born, it is assigned a number. This is no different in concept than the much decried National Identity Card. It is a relative of the tattooed serial number given to Jews in Nazi Germany. It is also the poster child for the failure of government promises. When first proposed, this number was criticized exactly for the risk of what it has become, a national ID. At the time, it was passed because the government “promised” that it would be used only for the dispersement of benefits. Once it was found that almost everyone had to have one, it was a natural move to use it as an unambiguous identifier for non-governmental transactions, with the blessing of the government.

Here is the loop-hole in our privacy. With the SSN as a key, the government can obtain any commercial information on us, if required by law. I will try to come back to this in either this or a later post. First we need to discuss government information.

Governments collect information as part of their functioning. The government has a detailed history of my life until the 1980’s and my fingerprints. This information exists at the FBI and probably the Dept of Energy. This is legitimate and is the result of my needing to have access to an atomic weapons facility to fulfill my job requirements. The government rightfully did its best to insure I was who I said I was and that I presented no threat to the United States.

The government has collections of fingerprints for a large number of its citizens. These are a result of military enlistments, criminal investigations, and security checks. We are now starting to demand these of foreign nationals that come to the United States. As such these would appear to pose no threat, and for the most part do not. Occasionally there are mis-identifications, mostly from partial prints and when less than best technology is used to obtain them. The latest case was the lawyer in Oregon who was confused with an Algerian. A fingerprint was found on materials related to the Spanish terrorist attack that was first ascribed to the American. Unless one is either in a witness protection program, or deliberately trying to be anonymous as possible, fingerprints are one of the least worrisome pieces of information the government has.

Census data is of more concern. The census has the Constitutional function of enumerating the population for purposes of apportioning the House of Representatives. In operational terms, this means going to every abode and simply counting the number of people living there that are US citizens. With the rise of the welfare-state and with other government programs based on head-count, the census has become a major data-gathering operation, trying to classify people with respect to government interests on income, race, occupation, number of children. The forms run four to ten pages depending on whether one is selected for the detailed samplings or not. With so many programs based on head count, it is no wonder the results of the census are hotly contested every time. Someone’s favorite constituency has a risk of being undercounted, and therefore under-granted. The irony is that the money doesn’t flow to the people being counted as potential recipients. It flows to the governing agency that might have jurisdiction over them.

Census data is of concern, because it contains information that in a less free country could be used against a person. Suppose we became so socialistic that everyone with an income of over $100,000 was to be penalized. Census data would provide a starting point for that. (So would IRS but they come next). Suppose we became so racist that all persons of a given race, say Caucasian were not to have full citizenship (just the inverse of the days of slavery). The census would provide a starting point here, also. The problem with census data is that in order to validate the data, all linkages to individuals have to be maintained. Individuality cannot be lost in the averaging process. It has been almost five years now, but try to remember some of the questions on the census form. How do they relate to apportioning our representatives?

The Income Tax is by definition Constitutional, because we passed an amendment to allow it. In the spirit of the Founding Fathers, I think it is most unconstitutional. With the administration of the Income Tax as currently done, we lay our innermost financial issues bare to a government employee or set of employees if we want to minimize our taxes. Not only that, we lose our right to not incriminate ourselves. No matter what we do, unless it is file every year and tell the truth, we will be subject to criminal sanctions by administrative rule. We can fight it in court, but that can be an expensive and chancy process. If we don’t file, we can be penalized. If we file and lie, because it would incriminate us, we can be penalized, if we file and tell the truth, and we have illicit income, we will be arrested. I am not advocating illegal means to obtain money, but I see the income tax as theoretically violating this right. In addition, if we are audited, generally there are no subpoenas issued to obtain our records. We are expected to turn them over voluntarily. Refusal to do so can be criminalized. The information in tax returns can be used in ways not even related to taxation. Currently the IRS is being requested to find 34,000 reservists that the military has lost track of. Obviously it is thought to be more worrisome to not file taxes than to keep ones military unit informed of whereabouts.

DNA records are proving to be useful to both prosecutors and defense. Though not the magic bullet that many had hoped for in either direction, a number of miscarriages of justice have been prevented or rectified by DNA analysis. However, there have been moves to try to make this a standard data item on any person arrested, and thereby build up a data bank of DNA analyses for future comparison. This violates three important principals, in my opinion, innocence until proven guilty, non-self-incrimination, and no warrantless searches. To proactively require a DNA sample for future use for any case besides the current charge is to automatically imply that the person will be guilty of something. It is either an assumption of guilt or a waste of resources – DNA analysis is not cheap. DNA is a part of the person and the supplying of a sample can be considered equivalent to going through personal papers. In the latter case, a warrant is required, and relevance to the current charges are necessary. The same should hold true for DNA samples. There are various subterfuges that have been used either in real life or on television, but a good defense attorney should be aware of them and fight them.

I see a potential scientific abuse of a DNA database. The temptation will be great to mine the database for relationships between the DNA of various criminals or criminal types and other characteristics that are inheritable. The problem is that it may be possible to make political hay from the results, which will be inconclusive at best, since there will be no specific controls. It is quite possible for DNA to appear to be different in some way compared to the normal population when measured in those arrested, that is due only to the fact that one is sampling those arrested. To me it would be a desperate scientist, indeed, that wanted to try to indicate that some DNA anomaly would lead to a propensity to be arrested. (Note that DNA comparisons are carried out not on the genetically active portions of DNA but on certain nonsense sequences.)

While composing this essay, I realized that there is a third type of personal information, medical information. This data is in the records of our insurance companies and health-care providers. This is most sensitive and personal. It can include such things as having been treated for an STD, or being HIV positive, or having been treated for a mental condition. It can include embarrassing information on congenital malformations.

The problem I have with the interchange of information is not so much within the various types of information as between them. The worst I can see coming from merchants exchanging information about me is a greater selectivity on what advertising I receive, or either restriction or relaxations on my credit opportunities. When health information is exchanged, I can experience increased costs if my insurer decides that I have a condition he doesn’t want to cover, and I need secondary coverage or else have to pay for it myself. That is the nature of insurance. I might mean that doctors may not take me if I am considered slow-pay, poor-pay or don’t have the right flavor of insurance. That is just good business judgment on their part. They do need to make a living, and despite the propaganda to contrary, we do not have a right to health care.

With the government there needs to be a bit of discrimination. I have no difficulty with law-enforcement agencies exchanging information on suspects. I do have difficulty with the Department of Defense trying to track down reservists through their income taxes. If we have ceased paying them for reserve time, then where is the contract? If it is a promissory note in concept, then use another means to track them, the same as one would for a bad debt.

The exchange of health information with commercial information has concerns. Suppose it were possible to obtain health information while signing a house mortgage. Would the loan company lend to someone with chronic heart disease? With a history of mental illness? With a family history of an inheritable disease that is fatal? (Huntington’s chorea comes to mind) With a positive HIV? Currently these risks are buried in the overall risk rate that determines the mortgage terms and conditions. Separating them out would greatly restrict opportunity for arbitrary classes of people. The problem becomes that if reduction of risk takes precedence over maximizing profit opportunity (and it can), then many people will be removed from the housing or other markets.

The sharing of information between the government and either commercial or health information sources is the most fraught with danger. We already see the attempts at this with the Patriot Acts. Here the government is both reducing the barriers to its gathering information via traditional means, as well as attempting to open up new sources of information – libraries, banking, and credit card purchases. It has become essentially a crime to conduct business in cash, any large amount of cash is taken as prima facie evidence of wrong-doing and the bank must report it. The beauty of cash is it is not traceable, and many people prefer to remain anonymous, and not for nefarious reasons.

Commercial information on purchases is also being desired for ostensibly security reasons. The theory is that certain purchasing patterns would reveal evil intent. The problem is that they could reveal evil intent or simply be innocent. What recourse will the innocent taken as guilty have to defend themselves? When the hounds are literally at their door who can they call? What will protect them? They will have their day in court and when the case is dismissed or the charges are dropped, will they be able to recover all the lost time and money of the false accusation?

Finally, think of the Third Reich and the Jews. Generalize the situation to anyone with a chronic medical problem and consider what government access to medical records could do. More currently realistically, consider Great Britain’s socialized medicine system that has now instituted a policy of futile life to speed up the demise of the terminally ill. It is only a short step from that to euthanasia for anyone considered unfit to contribute to society.

When we consider privacy issues, our first thought should be that the Constitution protects us from the government, and secondarily from force and fraud from each other. Our privacy priorities should be the same.

Right to have children

2004-05-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

My friend, Peggy Kaplan, at What If?, posed a difficult question earlier this month: “Is the ability to procreate a right? Or a privilege?” Just to quibble a bit with the English, what I think she is asking is, “Is having children a right or a privilege?” I posted some related material on this back in April.

As best as I can deduce from her post, which uncharacteristically did not give a link, a couple addicted to cocaine, and ordered to counseling, had conceived another child, with three at home, all testing positive for cocaine, and the judge jailed the mother, stating, "This court believes the constitutional right to have children is overcome when society must bear the financial and everyday burden of care."

Peg’s well-placed concern is for the rights of the children and the unborn child. This is quite a can of worms, but I think an interesting can of worms. We have the rights of the children, who are innocent, conflated with the crimes and sins of the parents.

An underlying assumption in all the following discussion is that abortion as an option has either been refused or is not to be considered. This discussion deals with full-term babies. Abortion does an end-run around all this, but it has so many difficulties that I want to leave it alone for now. Also I don’t think the state has the right to command a woman have an abortion – it would be state sanctioned murder to too many people, myself included.

Ultimately the question becomes where does the ability of the state to protect the rights of the defenseless, in this case unborn and born children, end and the right to have children begin? I am not sure there is one single answer to fit all situations but I think there are some possibilities to discuss.

Let’s start with a very obvious case, a woman for what-ever reason born congenitally mentally defective. The defects are severe enough that she is most likely unable to take proper care of her hygiene at menarche much less take care of an infant or even understand pregnancy and childbirth. In such a case her guardians would surgically sterilize her before menarche.

Right away there are going to be echoes from the past of eugenics and genocide. I was very careful to spell out the conditions of this situation. Genetics had nothing to do with the givens. The potential mother is totally incapable of properly exercising the right to have children. Just as we place other mentally incompetents in institutions or give them limited responsibility commensurate with their mental capacity, so we are limiting this one person’s options.

Now let’s look at another extreme. Two parents, both of them mentally competent, possibly highly intelligent. There are no incompetency reasons for them to avoid having children. However, one or both of them has a genetic defect that can potentially doom any children, or cause any children to have defects requiring large amounts of medical care. The easiest case is, if they know of this problem. The moral decision here would be to not have children and either remain childless or adopt. If only one of them has the defect, then modern fertilization techniques could produce a child with half its genes from the non-defect parent, and the other half from a donor of their choice.

Let us now suppose they do not know of this defect but have a child. If the child lives to birth and beyond, what happens then? If the parents are financially capable, they would provide necessary medical care as long as is possible. They would assume the responsibility for their lack of knowledge. But suppose they had financial resources to raise a normal child, but not a severely disabled one? Ultimately they still have responsibility, but they would require outside assistance. My preference would be for private assistance, but unfortunately that is unlikely and the state will somewhere get involved.

In the case of private assistance, strings can be attached to the money, such that the parents would find out why the child was born disabled, and measures (such as sterilization or at the least birth control) would be required to prevent further such births. With private money, there is a choice by the parents to accept under those conditions or not. If the state becomes involved the issue is much thornier. If the state puts such conditions on assistance, assuming a civil rights lawyer doesn’t prevent it, then there becomes a coercive element as illustrated by the example that started this post. If the state simply provides the assistance with no conditions then it is pure unqualified welfare, and taxpayers will have to support all instances with no hope of relief. (I haven’t provided any answers yet to the question, I am still scoping out the territory.)

So far the hypothetical situations do not involve any wrong doing on the part of the parents, the children are being provided with the best care possible under the circumstances. When we look at parents that have children but are unwilling or unable to care for them or willingly engage in behavior that is harmful directly or indirectly to their children, it gets much messier.

First of all, let’s acknowledge that the proper care of children is not a money question. It requires care, love, attention to what they are doing, consistent rules, and adequate nutrition. All of those things can be supplied on a lower class income, and even on a poverty level income with some assistance for food and necessities such as medical care. In fact, I personally know of situations where a middle-class family has physically and mentally abused their children (and unfortunately gotten away with it).

Starting with a parent or parents that have a child that they 1) don’t know what to do to raise it properly, and 2) don’t seem to be able to learn. In this situation, one way or another, authorities or private agencies were notified and have tried to intervene. Nothing seems to help, and the child is being raised in unhealthy conditions with poor nutrition and no caring or love. At some point, the child must be removed from the environment for its own protection. It usually is placed in a foster home. After that the future gets cloudy, to quote the fortune teller. We’ll return to this in a bit.

In the case of parents that are convicted of criminal wrong-doing, the conviction supercedes any parental standing. The children have to become either sole custody of the innocent parent or wards of the state. Their future is also cloudy.

Now let’s take the situation of an addicted mom that would not quit her habit during pregnancy. This is the messiest of the situations so far, because the fetus is impacted by her behavior and will require considerable extra care as an infant and probably through its lifetime. The odds are it will be deficient in some learning abilities, as well as having other problems. My first reaction to this scenario is that she has already proven that she is an inadequate mother, and the child should be removed from her custody at birth, permanently. However, there are those who would argue that if she cleans her act up, she should have the child back. My reply is, if she didn’t clean it up when pregnant and the worst damage occurs then, what chance is there for her to clean it up later? My attitude is, if she cleans up her act and then has another baby, stays clean, and cares for it – she gets to keep it. In this case motherhood has to be earned. Here I begin to see some potential answers for this issue.

Parents that use drugs should be treated the same as parents that are criminals. Note that I personally do not see the need for the drug war, and with the exception of the impact on parenthood, see no reason for drug users to be criminalized.

So far, we have considered various scenarios where parents are inadequate for their children for differing reasons, some innocent and some morally corrupt. In the process of explicating the situations I am beginning to see some possibilities of answers. In the case of genetically deficient parents, once they know, they are morally obligated to have no more children. Where they fail to live up to that obligation, the responsibility of caring for the child if it survives will be further deterrent. In general, though in specific cases I can see it leading to great inequity, I do not see a compelling reason for the state to step in with punitive measures. Where the parents become unable to care for the child and it becomes a ward of the state, I can see that the state then does gain a compelling interest. We’ll discuss that further below.

For parents that are inadequate from the get-go, criminal parents, and drug abusers while parents, we have children in foster homes that need a future. This is where I get hard-hearted, and say that they forfeited their parental rights, and the children should be placed for adoption. [I do not mean adoptions in the current meaning of the word where biological parents can retrieve the child years later to the detriment of all (blog topic?) but a hard and firm adoption where the biological parents are given no opportunity to ever find the child again. This should occur early in the child’s life, not later]

When we get to the case of a pregnant, inadequate mother, how do we protect the fetus with minimum of destruction of the rights of the mother? If the mother is inadequate to care for the child, but can provide a healthy prenatal environment, (her health and nutrition are adequate), then nothing needs to be done. The fetus is protected, and the law can be responsive rather than proactive. In the case of criminal mothers, prison can provide adequate prenatal care. When the child is born, either the other parent has custody if able, or the child is put in a foster home or up for adoption (again in my sense of the word), depending on the remaining length of the prison term.

A pregnant, substance-abusing mother (drugs or alcohol) presents an especially difficult case practically, but not necessarily theoretically. The practical problem is that substance-abusers will be very crafty at hiding their pregnancy and will avoid medical care. The theoretical side is that this person is endangering her unborn child, and the rights of the unborn child can become compelling, especially as the mother is also endangering herself. The self-endangerment in my thoughts is not sufficient for the state to step in, but because it is conflated with the welfare of the fetus, adds additional merit to state action. At the point at which a substance-abusing pregnant woman is detected, she should be institutionalized until her child is born. During that time the best medical care should be used to optimize the withdrawal effects and enhance the life-chances of the fetus. Once the child is delivered, the mother can be allowed to go back to whatever life she wants, and the child placed for adoption. If the mother claims to want to keep the child and raise it, then let her have a very long probationary period in which she is given the opportunity to do just that. She blows it, and the child is gone.

What has come from this discussion is that I do not see grounds for the state to interfere with the right to HAVE children. However, I see that the state can and, in some cases, should interfere with KEEPING children once they are born. This comes from the fact that once the child is born, it is a legal entity in its own right and is capable of living physically independent of the mother.

Prevention in the form of mandatory birth control or sterilization is not practical nor in the hands of the state safe. Birth control depends on the cooperation of the person taking it, and given the intensity of all species to procreate is not reliable, especially with those persons who see a baby as the only thing of value they might produce. With the exception noted at the beginning of congenitally unfit parents, sterilization is not to be considered. Emotionally and politically it is out of bounds.

I think, at this point, that I have two dangling threads, the first is foster children from formerly adequate parents, that can no longer care for them. In this case a determination has to be made if the situation is temporary or permanent. If temporary, then foster care with the children later placed back in the home is recommended. If permanent, and not solvable with the various private and public assistance programs, then instead of playing wishful-thinking games, the child(ren) should be placed for adoption.

The second dangling thread is the parents that produce mentally or physically disabled children, knowing that having (more) children would lead to this. I don't know that there is an answer for all situations. Nothing seems to provide a "right" answer. Letting them have children will expose the potential children to lives of greater or lesser difficulty or even misery compared to normal. Mandatory sterilization has extremely bad political connotations. Offering a choice between sterilization and going to jail or some other consequence may have merit, but I really don't have an answer here.

Returning finally to the case that started this exercise: the judge should put the children in foster homes with a view to adoption, and the mother in jail until the child is born, at which point the child is put out for adoption and the mother and father can go to Hell in their own particular way.

Vengeance

2004-04-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

While traveling yesterday, I had a wonderful discussion with my seatmate. Among the things he told me about was a novel Stone Kiss, by Faye Kellerman, that takes its theme from a Jewish tradition. When Jacob and Esau were reunited after all the years, Esau was to give Jacob a fraternal kiss, ostensibly to declare his love (despite having been cheated of his patrimony). When he gave the kiss he did not kiss the cheek but kissed the neck, his purpose was to bite the jugular vein and thus kill his brother. According to the tradition, at that moment, Jacob’s neck became stone and Esau broke his teeth—He was not to have vengeance.

This tale inspired me to post this essay that I wrote about two years ago for my own clarification.

Vengeance, Retribution, Justice and Mercy:

These four words form a continuum of consequences for wrong action. Starting from left to right, they go from the harshest to the most gentle. They also go from the most personal to the most impersonal with justice, then back to personal with mercy.

VENGEANCE

Vengeance is an intense, personal response to perceived wrong or threat. Generally, vengeance is used in a context of wrong being done to the individual or those close to the individual. It is guided by anger and a desire to inflict more damage to the wrong-doer as he did to the victim. "I'll make sure he never does that again." Vengeance always tries to exact much more than the damage done originally. As a consequence it leads to a series of escalated responses usually culminating in blood feuds between individuals, families and/or clans or political units, that can last for centuries. Witness Romeo and Juliet or the Martins and McCoys on the family level, and Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia on the political level. As individuals, we often drawn to look approvingly on vengeance, and it forms the basis of many novels, including one of my favorites, The Count of Monte Cristo 1. At the group level, vengeance is vigilantism, the least-just form of punishment, and is often misguided, punishing innocent people. Generally, vengeance has no rationality to it. It is pure emotion run rampant. It is often called getting even, but its results lead to far more than "even." Very often vengeance desires the death of the wrongdoer. The emotional base for it is very fundamental to our makeup as humans and probably stems from our desire to protect our loved ones and our territory and possessions. It is easily preyed on by demagogues wishing to inflame people to a course of action.

RETRIBUTION

Retribution is a less emotionally driven form of punishment. It would come under the general heading of punishment, where vengeance generally does not. Retribution is an attempt to create a punishment equal to the original crime--an eye for an eye…. There is still a strong personal satisfaction motive, but it is more in the form of a desired outcome than a call to action. Retribution requires planning and more detached behavior. It is an attempt to get exactly even. Death is not a desired outcome unless death was the original resulting injury. The danger with retribution is that exact reparations are almost never possible, and the tendency is to err on the side of vengeance rather than justice. The conflict in Israel today is retribution that has become vengeance. Events have caught up with the writing of this document. Retribution is impossible for the disaster at the World Trade Center. The exact perpetrators are dead from committing the crime, and their leaders that planned, bankrolled, and supported it can only die once, not 3,000 times.

JUSTICE

Justice is one of the bases of civilization. Justice is a recognition, that it is impossible to make every punishment exactly equal the damage inflicted, and that there needs to be a reasoned, graduated response to wrongdoing. The goal of justice is as much prevention of further occurrences as it is punishment and reparations. Some systems of justice are still very harsh with dismemberment and execution being used as punishments for many crimes. Others are very lenient, with varying imprisonments and fines being the only forms of punishment. Over time, punishments have become less severe in many societies. At one time in England and Europe, executions were a great public event. Now many European countries do not allow execution as a punishment. In the United States, stocks and whipping were acceptable at one time, but no longer are.

Because the primary goal of justice is deterrence, many punishments do not begin to equal the crime for which they are exacted. A man or woman embezzles several million dollars from a company and goes to jail for several years. If the money has been spent or extremely well hidden, they do not even make restitution of the stolen amounts. The idea of the punishment is to discourage someone from trying to do the same thing. For must people it appears to work. Few people are willing to equate jail time as a trade-off for the chance to make several hundred thousands to millions of dollars, especially since they realize they would rarely get to keep the money. Most criminals think they won't be caught, or don't think, period.

Justice as an ideal is administered via very specific rules and in courts where the process attempts to remove emotional bias from the determination of guilt or innocence or the existence of civil damages. Granted that attorneys do their best to get around that attempt, but when they become too flagrant, they can be stopped with the judge's considering their remarks as inflammatory. By having a hopefully diverse jury, their deliberations will be even-handed. In general it works. Juries do not always bring the expected result, but if you talk to them afterwards, it was based on a genuine consideration of the evidence. I have been on jury duty, and it does work. There have been notable exceptions, but, in general, criminal juries do work. It's the civil ones that produce some strange results. Probably because they can more easily identify with one or the other of the parties in the case.

Again in the light of current events, justice for the WTC will not be in the form of courts of law. There are some attempts to use courts to deal with the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 disaster, and the embassy bombings, but in the case of the WTC, the crime was too heinous to be dealt with as a crime and is being dealt with as an act of war. This is proper since Osama Bin Laden has declared a Jihad against the US 2.

Biblical justice, and especially Old Testament justice tends to be more retribution than the abstract form of justice under law as described above. And in some cases it is vengeful. Today our calls for justice often are no different. We demonize acts and persons we don't like. In some cases we can argue justification, such as Jeffery Daumer, Timothy McVeigh, or Ted Bundy. These are people who are indeed evil. They chose to do evil when they knew it was wrong. In fact, they obviously preferred to do evil.

MERCY

Mercy is the most misunderstood and misused term of the four. It has been used to justify failure to exact justice as well as undeserved forgiveness on the personal level. It has been used as a form of wishful thinking--that being lenient will create goodwill and a willingness to do better on the part of a wrong doer. (No, it just makes one seem like a pushover.) An essential part of mercy is forgiveness, but it is not just forgiveness. It is forgiveness that truncates or short-circuits the punishment of justice. The legal form of mercy is clemency. A shortening of punishment without forgiveness is not mercy, it is either an implied quid pro quo, e.g., plea bargains and states' witnesses, or a payment for an apparent change in ways, e.g., parole for good behavior. Like forgiveness, mercy requires remorse on the part of the wrongdoer or a realization of the one granting mercy that continuation of punishment will create a damage of its own, e.g., clemency for a lifer with very little time left to live and no chance to commit further wrongs. Mercy can come from a realization that the logic of punishment is not meaningful in some context, and that the prescribed punishment is of no value and perhaps harmful. Case in point is the fact that insanity is an acceptable defense in a murder trial. Legally insanity is then defined as the ability to tell right from wrong. A legally insane person is not able to understand the nature of a trial. Understanding the nature of the proceedings is essential to justice.

The above discussion applies mostly to formal, legal mercy. At the personal level, mercy can come from a willingness to forgive when observing true remorse. It can also come from a realization that punishment serves no value; it will not correct the wrong that was done, nor prevent it from occurring again. It is not an excuse for avoiding moral decisions. To not believe in the death penalty because it "makes us as bad as them" is not being merciful, it is being an intellectual, ethical, and moral coward. To not believe in the death penalty because one does not believe it serves a useful function, is merciful. Especially if one was the target or bore the pain of the murderous act.

There is another side to mercy, the rendering of unobligated help, or the desire to help, just because help is needed. This comes from a genuine caring about other persons, whether they are close, such as family or friends, or distant strangers. It can have a flavor of justice about it, perceiving that the victim did nothing to deserve his/her fate.

In the case of God's mercy, we definitely engage in sloppy thinking and belief. We really presume on His mercy--"Christians aren't better, just forgiven,"--bumper sticker. Go to church every Sunday, tithe, give to the poor, etc., and you will be chosen. (Never mind whether you really care or not, just do it. The Pharisees are still with us and are us.) We also tend to think it is reserved only for his chosen, Jews if we are Jewish, Christians if we are Christian, and Muslims if we are Muslim. I don't think God cares which faith one belongs to as much as He cares what kind of job we do with that faith. There are Pharisee, Levite and Samaritan equivalents in all faiths, and all faiths have strong teachings about being kind to one another. God is merciful to those who are merciful. He is also merciful to those who are truly sorry for what they have done wrong and make a genuine attempt to change.

1. I just realized the irony of the title. Translated it is the Count from Christ Mountain--a person dedicated to vengeance from a place named after the least vengeful human that has ever existed. However, looking at the overall plot and flow of the novel, it gets its success from the fact that personal vengeance was a catalyst, not the ultimate justice. The three main evil-doers, were destroyed by their own evil in the end rather than merely by the cruel conspiracy that imprisoned Edmond Dantes. Cadarousse murdered a diamond merchant after being rewarded by Dantes (the reward was a devil's reward--undeserved and served only to bring out Cadarousse's true nature). Villefort was undone by his own attempted murder of his illegitimate child by another woman. Ferdinand de Morcef was undone by his treachery to the Ali Pasha that led to the death of the Ali Pasha and the selling into slavery of his wife and daughter.

2. Jihad in this case is being grossly distorted by Bin Laden. The emphasis in Islam is primarily on spiritual war within oneself or ones country to overcome evil. It is not a justification for the random killing of innocents. However, since Bin Laden has chosen to stretch the meaning to cover his actions, the use of the term war makes his behavior acts of war to be dealt with as such.

LS Carrier and the War in Iraq--The final installment

2004-04-13T16:40:00.000-07:00

Dr. Carrier has replied to my last post with two lengthy letters. My reading of them indicates that we have come full-circle in the discussion. He is saying what he has said either to me or to others in AnalPhilosopher's blog. I would start repeating myself to answer further. What I see is a case where, in general, neither of us accepts most of the facts or interpretations of fact that the other is using, and, in the cases where we do agree on a fact, our interpretation of it is totally different. If we were to look at this as an attempt to convince either of us as to the correctness of our position, the analogy I would draw is this: We are two people on opposite sides of a chasm, yelling to each other to come over, with no means by which to build any sort of bridge.

I appreciate Dr. Carrier's efforts and time to have engaged in this discussion. I have found it personally valuable in that it has helped me develop my ability to read and write critically. I think it is generally valuable because it has laid out clearly, the differences between the conservative and liberal positions on the issue of the Iraqi war. With all that said, like Bill O'Reilly (whom I no longer watch, because I rarely, if ever, watch TV), I will let Dr. Carrier have the last word.

Here is his first letter:

Thanks, Bill, for your response of 4/9 to my earlier criticisms. Rather than rebut your replies seriatim (although I am prepared to do that later, if you wish), I think it more germane to the discussion to concentrate on your attempt to give me the argument that I asked for, the one with the conclusion, "The invasion of Iraq was morally justified."
Let me reconstruct your premises for this conclusion:
(1) Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger to us and the world. (I'm assuming here that this means that he was likely to attack us or other countries.)
(2) Saddam was an evil dictator.
(3) The removal of sources of support for terrorism is required for the world's safety.
As it stands, your argument is not valid. It needs an additional premise, which is:
(4) If (1), (2), and (3) are true, then the invasion of Iraq was morally justified.
The question now turns on the truth of (1), (2), (3), and (4). If any one of these is not true, or lacks credible evidence, then the argument is not sound.
Let me grant you the truth of (2) and (3). The success or failure of the argument now turns on the credibility of (1) and (4).
Let's take (4) first. It seems clear that (4) can be true only if (1) is true. That's because (2) and (3) alone are not strong enough to make an invasion morally justifiable. The fact that someone is an evil dictator plus the fact that we need to remove support for terrorism are too weak by themselves to justify a full-scale war, even if a connection could be made between the evil dictator and support for terrorism. There are plausible alternatives to war, including diplomatic pressure, monetary restrictions, restriction of trade, freezing of assets, refusal to allow sales of military equipment, and the marshalling of world opinion against that nation. War is generally considered to be a last resort.
The sole support for your argument thus comes down to (1). You have three grounds for asserting (1): (a) Saddam used WMDs in the past and may have hidden them; (b) Saddam was connected to al-Qaida and other terrorists; and (c) Saddam used oil to con Russia, France, and the U.N. to support his regime.
Take (c) first. Even if (c) were true, it provides no grounds for supporting (1). Take (a) next. Even if (a) were true, there is no connection between having WMDs (which included only those messy gas, biological, and nerve agents that might be just as dangerous to their users), and having the ability or the intention to use them on us or our allies. Since the first Gulf War, Saddam never threatened to use such weapons on us or on other nations.
This leaves us with (b). I dispute your claim that there was any operational connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. The most that can be said about any such connection is that Saddam and bin Laden had reached a practical understanding between thugs: if you don't operate on my territory, I won't operate on yours. I challenge you to produce that "increasingly visible paper trail" you refer to. I can't address what hasn't been presented. Who are these other terrorists Saddam supported? He might have given money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, but there is no evidence that he gave money to any suicide bomber before the fact.
So I can't see that you've given me a sound argument. Our disagreement turns on matters of fact. If you have any more evidence to support (1), please state it. Until then, I remain unconvinced that our invasion was morally justified.
You also alluded to a possible humanitarian argument for that conclusion, when you said it was "a justification in its own right." But you never did give the argument. Just what are the premises of that argument? I really would like to examine it.
By the way, my best students usually ended up with beliefs different from mine. I'd like to think that it was because I challenged them to think on their own. I discouraged views that parroted what I had said in class.
Len Carrier

And his second:

Bill,
I know that you're busy and probably haven't had time to look at my last post to you.
I did want to outline, however, some salient points of disagreement between us that you alluded to in your long post of 4/9. I don't expect you to post these further comments, but you are certainly welcome to do so, in whole or in part, as you please.
(1) I disagree that I was being immoderate in my estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties. I got the figures from MEDAC, the British medical team, as well as from the non-profit Iraqbodycount.org. The figure of 10,000 killed to 20,000 wounded is on the low side, if you figure that our own military holds to
a 1:3 ratio of killed to wounded for military personnel. MEDAC figures that as many as 55,000 casualties had resulted from the war at the end of last year (including Iraqi military, who were pretty much ground up into hamburger--according to one U.S. commander).
(2) I disagree with your claim that only a strong application of force will calm the "zealots." Violence begets violence. A friend's son is an army colonel who commanded a unit of the 82nd Airborne surrounding Fallujah. He argued strongly, to no avail, against the Marine tactic of breaking into civilian homes there. Apparently, some civilians were inadvertently killed during one of these raids. What followed was the killing and mutilating of the Blackwater security guards by Iraqi guerrillas; and what followed that was the Marine retaliation and the killing of more civilians. Arabs have their code of honor. They aren't afraid to die for what they consider affronts to their dignity.
(3) I don't think that I confused justification with motivation. I was talking about consequences, and one of the consequences was that Halliburton and Bechtel would get some business. They have got that business, although it's costing them more than they originally thought--just like this war has cost us more than our administration originally thought. (Remember Cheney's claims that we would be greeted as liberators?)
(4) I don't think you responded to my claim that we used (and are still using) the wrong means to achieve the proclaimed goal of Iraqi liberation and freedom. Mao claimed that justice came from the barrel of a gun. You seem to be claiming that freedom comes from the same source. Too bad we can't ask all those whom we've permanently "liberated" how they feel. You say rightly that Saddam was "a foul dictator." We knew this, and we also knew that his kind might hide behind human shields. Did that stop our bombing? No. It is a perverse logic that assumes that Saddam had to be replaced, regardless of the consequences, and then blames him for the innocent civilians that we foresaw would die. I'm reminded of Rumsfeld's complaint that Iraqi soldiers were being supplied with night-vision goggles from Syria to protect themselves. Not fair, said Rumsfeld, since it makes them harder to shoot.
(5) I disagree with your assessment of Findley and McCloskey. It comes close to committing the "no true Englishman" fallacy. Whichever name is mentioned of a conservative Republican who speaks out against the policies of our administration, the complaint always seems to be, "Well, he's no true conservative." Why is that? "It's because he doesn't support our policies." I think that sort of argument is disreputable.
(6) Your claim about "what the Arabs want" doesn't seem realistic to me. I've got friends who have worked in the Middle East, and their assessment is the one I gave you. Rumsfeld's view that we have to teach them democracy the way a parent teaches a child to ride a bike is arrogant. What we seem to want is a phony democracy--one in which a crook like Ahmed Chalabi runs things the way we want them run. But if we really wanted them to be liberated, we went about it in a strange way: not protecting their antiquities, not respecting their mosques, not imploring the U.N. to assume political control to allow a large peace-keeping force to be assembled, and continuing to arrest, detain, and humiliate suspected terrorists--even when they were not at fault.
(7) As to the Realpolitik reasons for war, these can be found, as I said earlier, in the Project for a New American Century, with supporters that included Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith--the architects for the Iraqi war. You claim that the Israelis don't say they want to subjugate the Palestinians. They don't have to say it; they're doing it. The Sharon government--with our acquiescence--is withdrawing from Gaza while protecting more settlements on the West Bank. This is a nasty situation in which Israel has all the cards: nuclear capability and a well-trained army. They also had their share of "terrorists" against the former British rule in Palestine. Now the Palestinians are resorting to the same tactics, and worse. President Bush could stop it by suspending aid to Israel until they withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. This would make Bush a hero and probably win him the election. Will he do it? Not a chance. The Zionist lobby in Washington wouldn't permit it. Incidentally, Hamas was originally supported by Israel as a counterweight to Arafat's PLO. How times have changed.
(8) You ask who would control Iraqi oil. We would, by setting up a government in Iraq that would not go against our wishes about where the oil would go. I wasn't referring to more "gas at the pump" for Americans; I was referring to oil as a strategic weapon. As you probably know, China will be needing an enormous supply of oil in the next decade. With a compliant government in Iraq, we could dictate terms to the Chinese. So it's not financial gain that's the issue, it's military and strategic gain. The problem with this is that Iraqis might not go along with our grand plan--just like they eventually didn't go along with the British plan in the 1920s. You might remember that Eisenhower warned against the plans of the military-industrial complex, but maybe he wasn't a "true conservative," either.
(9) You refer to documents substantiating al-Qaida links with Saddam's regime. Where are these documents? The only ones I know of have since been repudiated. You also say that Arabs have secretly hated us all the time. I see no evidence for this. I have spoken to Arabs while in Egypt before the war, and they expressed a great admiration for the United States. I don't think that's true anymore. You say that the uprising in Fallujah is being suppressed. Don't hold your breath. I don't doubt that people disperse when they see one of our gunships approaching. You're darned right they're afraid. I think that creating fear in a population might keep them at bay for awhile, but it's a strange way to show that we're liberating them.
(10) On the question of Saddam's paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, I think that you show disrespect for Palestinians as human beings. Would you as a father urge a child of yours to commit suicide to get rich? Why think that Palestinians are any different? You've got to remember that the families of the bombers probably had their houses destroyed--a regular tactic of the Israeli army.
(11) I disagree with your assessment on WMDs. Almost everyone now agrees that there weren't any. I don't know why you think that Iraqi scientists now under U.S. military protection would be afraid to talk. Your saying that it is "very likely" that Saddam hid WMDs and killed those that hid them is simply bizarre. Where do you get these probabilities?
(12) As to your challenge concerning what else, besides war, was left to us, I think it commits "the only game in town" fallacy. This inductive fallacy is committed whenever someone can't think of another alternative, and so latches on to the one which is readily available, viz initiating a war. But there was another alternative. The U.N. inspectors were doing their job and would have issued a final report of no WMDs. But President Bush then warned them that he was about to attack, and they had to leave. Bush was determined to have "regime change," no matter what the cost. I agree that twelve years of sanctions did not help the plight of Iraqi citizens, but neither did "shock and awe." Surely, if we really had the best interests of Iraqis at heart, with all the smart people in our government, we could have thought of a less ham-fisted approach.
(13) You say that my belief in the efficacy of the U.N. is idealistic. Well, tit for tat. The efficacy of using our soldiers and marines as peacekeepers is even more idealistic. These men and women were trained to fight, not to keep peace. The same goes for the civilian "security guards," who have been recruited from the ranks of ex-military personnel. You say that Bush worked to get teeth put in its resolutions, then went to war. Does that mean that, since Israel has flouted all the resolutions against its policies, it's then all right to initiate war against Israel? If we really were sincere in bringing democracy to Iraq, we wouldn't continue to go it alone with our threadbare coalition--some of whom are not liking being put in combat areas. A returning Iraqi vet told me last week that he never saw any "coalition" forces, since they were all in safe areas. Now things might change.
(14) You spoke of cheering crowds when Saddam's statue was pulled down. Closer examination of that event shows that it was probably a created "photo-op." The ones doing the cheering were the exiles who came in with our troops. Doubtless, many are glad Saddam is gone. But that doesn't mean that they're happy with us. A man who is head of Pepsi-Cola operations now in Iraq was interviewed recently, and he said that Paul Bremer was ruining his country. This was a man whose father had been killed by Saddam, and so he was predisposed to like Americans. The main thing he held against Bremer was that he disbanded the Iraqi army but let them keep their weapons; and then he cut off their pay! That sounds to me like the height of stupidity. But Bremer has done more dumb things since then, like shutting down the Shiite newspaper that led to more riots. It seems to me that press censorship is inconsistent with the liberty that we're supposed to be providing.
(15) Your definition of "mass killings" must be different from mine. You seem to prefer the euphemism "collateral damage." That's such an antiseptic phrase. I call the deaths of 600 people in Fallujah a "mass killing," especially since the guerrillas who mutilated the Blackwater civilians had reportedly left town.
(16) By the way, if you think I'm talking through my hat about war and killing, I should let you know that I was an Air Force officer before I became a philosophy professor.
Cheers, Len Carrier

I welcome any correspondence on this though time and accessibility constraints may preclude long answers or timely answers. As the title implies, I am closing this thread. There are many other things I want to comment on, and I thank all of you who have continued to come and read this blog, whether for this or any other postings. There will be much more.