Let's hope the space chickens aren't watching

In the SF-of-my-youth-is-coming-to-pass category, this seems straight out of Heinlein or Frederick Pohl:

From space, extraterrestrials and astronauts can look back to earth and see The Great Wall of China -- and KFC's Colonel Sanders.

The KFC Corp. on Tuesday launched a rebranding campaign with an 87,500 square-foot image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert which the company says makes Kentucky Fried Chicken the world's first brand visible from space.

"If there are extraterrestrials in outer space, KFC wants to become their restaurant of choice," KFC President Gregg Dedrick said in a statement.

Or maybe it's out of Douglas Adams.

Personhood theory

I inserted myself in the middle of another fruitless debate, arguing against both sides. This one was primarily between Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist at the Discovery Institute (!), John Derbyshire, and Josh Rosenau over "human exceptionalism". My comments are here and here. A lot of hear and not much light, as usual. But it introduced to me a useful term, personhood theory. This is used by some bioethicists to describe the process of deciding who is or isn't a "person" under law and ethics. It makes sense to me that there should be such theories, although they may vary widely. For instance, I (and most sensible people) don't consider a 16-cell blastocyte to be a person, but many of the religious do.

But to Wesley Smith the very idea of "personhood theory" is anathema. He doesn't merely offer a competing definition of person, he regards the entire topic as an occasion for bluster and obfuscation. I can't quite understand why generally anti-science conservatives are wedded to the idea that it's 46 chromosomes that define a person.

The two main theories in play seem to be either genetic (the right-to-life conservative view) or based on some kind of cognitive quality such as self-awareness or language use). Smith's entire output seems devoted to warning that the latter criterion is perilous, leading us down a variety of slippery slopes to euthanasia, infanticide, and all manner of horrors. He's got a point, this stuff is very problematic. But throwing up hands and refusing to think about it does not strike me as a useful or interesting approach.

Marvin Minsky once proposed (jokingly, I think) that you aren't fully human until you can speak in sentences with subordinate clauses, which would allow infanticide up to age 3 or so.

It is obvious (to me at least) that "person" is a social construct. Some societies permit infanticide, others don't. The default for tribal societies seems to be to consider everyone outside of the tribe as somewhat less of a person than those within. The desire of conservatives for some kind of moral absolutism based on biology is doomed to failure, as is obvious from the glaring inconsistencies in their position. Given that, personhood theory should be a subject of intense interest.

Voices from the whirlwind

This is a neat hack, in an artsy sort of way:

CYCLONE.SOC brings together two contemporary phenomena:

• severe weather, the project uses weather data that charts the emergence and progress of hurricanes.
• the polarized nature of debate that occurs in certain online newsgroup forums.

The project maps textual conversation taken from the political and religious newsgroups to the isobars of a dynamic, interactive weather visualization of hurricanes - whose complex structures are used to visualize the conversational churn and eddies of the newsgroup conversations.

Post-election

Wow. Distributed self-correcting systems can work. Too bad the feedback cycle takes so long though. Glenn Greenwald:

The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists — well-intentioned though they may be — need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one's beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn't be replicated).

Karl Rove isn't all-powerful; he is a rejected loser. Republicans don't possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can't magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don't have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their "San Francisco values" and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody). It simply isn't the case that we are doomed and destined to lose at the hands of all-powerful, evil forces.

On the other hand, Pelosi is wimping out from the get-go by declaring impeachment to be "off the table". That is another element of the constitutional feedback system, and an important one. Politically, even the conservatives are ready to turn on Bush, so putting his feet to the fire is the right thing to do.

First in the hearts of his countrymen

Clever researchers reveal that the ordering of names on a ballot gives the first candidate a significant advantage of between 2 and 9%, nicely quantizing the degree to which the democratic process is influenced by complete cretins. I don't quite understand how (or why) these people manage to figure out where the voting booth is.

(via Billmon)

More pussyfooting

I don't know why I am so obsessed with trying to stake out a militantly moderate position in the atheism wars. It seems both easier and more fun to just skewer the godly (shooting Jesus fish in a barrel). I guess I like a challenge.
Here's a excellent comment by john c. halasz in yet another huge Dawkins thread. The first part just makes the fairly commonplace points:

1) Dawkins' tendentious style mirrors in some ways the chauvinism and narrow-mindedness of his opponents. Militant atheism has some of the same flaws as militant religion.

2) Science, which is about the natural world, should leave itself out of metaphysics.

But this is worth quoting (emphasis added):

Contemporary right-wing Christian fundamentalism is not just some sudden and inexplicable outburst of irrationality and ignorance, whatever its historical antecedents, but rather a deliberately crafted and manipulated phalangist movement. Attacking religious belief per se, rather than the distortions and instrumentalizations of its normative contents, which are less about the cognitive understanding of the natural world than the social ordering of ethical relations with respect to collective fate, not only badly misses the point interpretively, but serves to re-enforce what it ostensibly opposes, precisely by blocking off any communicative understanding and deliberation, any search for, broadly speaking, rational common ground.

Yeah. It's not that Dawkins is wrong but that he's fighting the wrong war. Reducing all religion to fundamentalism and attacking its belief system misidentifies the enemy. The enemy should not be religious beliefs, which are too deep rooted to eliminate and not really addressable by rational argument anyway. The enemy is the (mis)use of religion in service of a right-wing political agenda.

Even religious conservatives (see David Kuo's recent book) are starting to feel uncomfortable with their alliance with the Bushite authoritarians. So why not try to persuade then and others in the muddled middle to support the hallowed wall of separation?

We militant moderates need a name. hopefully better than "brights". I propose "NOMAds" after Stephen Jay Gould's acronym for Non-overlapping Magisteria. OK, that won't win any marketing awards either.

Thoughts from Kansas makes similar points, here and here.

Asymptotically approaching religion

Good stuff in the atheism discussion.

John Wilkins points out that religion is a human institution, and like all such is responsible for a lot of good, evil, and none of the above. Ascription is difficult to impossible, and because religion is an inextricable part of human culture and psychology, it won't go away just because some scientists don't like it.

Sean Carroll has a very interesting post where he (starting from Terry Eagleton's negative review of The God Delusion) dissects the standard Western idea of God into its component parts: the abstract, impersonal, and universal god of the Greek philosophers, and the personal tribal deity of the Hebrews. This post, more than any other, is resonating with my own semi-articulated thinking, so I'll jump off with it.

The one idea in my head that won't go away is this: God is not an existing object, like a chair or a person or a teapot orbiting Jupiter. Whatever the word "God" means, it's not that, not this. Whether you are an atheist or theist, it seems clear that whatever kind of existence you believe in, it's not the kind of existence engaged in my ordinary objects, but something else, something that ordinary language fails at capturing.

There are other things we think about that have an existence of a kind other than chairs and teapots; things which are real (in some sense) but not material. These would include concepts (like the number 2) and fictional characters (Harry Potter), as well as religious concepts like gods, spirits, and souls. It is at best misleading to say that these either exist or don't exist. My strong intuition is that both theism and atheism, at least in their naive forms, are philosophical mistakes.

Of course such intellectual games satisfy nobody. The faithful don't believe in abstractions, and the skeptical don't want to be bothered with sophistry.

Carroll points out out a deep flaw in Eagleton's argument. Eagleton chides Dawkins for having a naive concept of God, as opposed to the more abstract kind preferred by sophisticated theologians. Fine, But then Eagleton goes on to attribute anthropomorphc properites like love and creativity to what was until now a vague abstraction like "the ground of being". I may as well quote Carroll at length:

The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like “Does `the condition of possibility’ exist?” would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by “God,” nobody would much care. It doesn’t really mean anything — like Spinoza’s pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it’s just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn’t affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called “the condition of possibility,” knock yourself out.

But — inevitably — Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than “My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism.

Carroll goes on with an excellent analysis of the incompatiblity of these two concepts of God, which is entirely worth reading, but I disagree with his conclusion that the incompatibility and incoherence of these ideas means that God doesn't exist. As I said, both existence and non-existence seem inapplicable predicates.

I believe that "God" is a coherent idea (or meme if you will), as it seems to be, since both theists and atheists seem to have a rough agreement about what they are talking about, and just disagree on its ontological status. It's not coherent in the philosophical sense (as Carroll shows), but coherent in the sense that its a stable idea, a mind-virus that thrives in the environment of human culture. Is it an idea like "Harry Potter", that is, purely fictional and arbitrary? Or is it more like a mathematical idea, like pi or the Pythagorean theorem, immaterial objects that seem to have a real existence outside of human culture and invention? Harry Potter is likely to be forgotten in a thousand years (well, maybe not...) but God is likely to stay, despite the best efforts of people like Dawkins.

My intuition, which I can't yet articulate, is that there is something about the concept of God that can almost be captured in a formal mathematical way, something that makes it a necessary concept of minds that are conscious and have agency. God's ontological status is somewhere between Harry Potter (wholly fictional and arbitrary) and pi (an apparently inevitable aspect of some deep structure of reality). Or so my flailing intuition tells me.