Hermeneutic Heretic

On The Media I’m not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

…

Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He’s no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called ‘reductionism’.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science’s undoing. Wilson’s failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner’s reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky’s own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). ‘Truths’ exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don’t know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that’s not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it’s knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I’ve show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]

WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap and assuming women and men have been paid the same up to now – from now on till the end of the year women are giving their services for free. Fawcett’s Director Katherine Rake, Harriet Harman, Theresa May and Duncan Fisher from Fathers Direct discuss.

The interesting thing isn’t in this description but in the rationale Katherine Rake gave in the interview. She said that they are using the analogy of women working for free for over two months of the year because it is more meaningful to people than simply the fact that on average women are paid 17% less than men. Two related questions arise.

1. Is it really more meaningful? How do we measure the meaningfulness and impact of a description? Who is it more meanigful for? And what is the meaning it is full of? I suspect that the answers would be very complex. But perhaps she is simply referring to decision makers who might pay somebody less for any given day but would never not pay somebody at all for entire two months. So in a purely functionalist (meaning is action) sense, the second analogy is not more meaningful, it has a different meaning, which carries in it a commitment to different action. (Although these commitments are never as straightforward as the usual rhetoric suggests).

2. If the first point is valid then a more interesting question arises. How are the two different meanings different? Or better still how do the two statements differ in the sense that they end up carrying different meaning. From a purely mathematical prejudice, nothing happened. We simply restated one mathematical fact into another like 1/2 = 2/4. But the problem is that the original statement is a statement about populations whereas the second is a statement about individuals. And we know that groups don’t have the same properties as individuals but sometimes they mimic them (in a fractal self-similarity kind of way). This is an entirely open question: to what extent do social scientific truths about populations (groups of large sizes) apply to individuals (or groups of small sizes)? Does the fact that women earn 17% less than men mean that a woman is not being paid for two months out of every year? I suspect that it does in the sense on which a policy can be based but it doesn’t in the sense of a statement that we would consider a valid observation about the social world. Pragmatically, they may be the same thing but whereas policy decisions are generally not the foundational blocks of other premises about the world and statements purporting to be true about the world often are, it may matter quite a bit if universal properties of social groups are what we are interested in.

Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of… - The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt English essayist (1778 - 1830)

It’s always disconcerting to find that something I’ve been saying for years has been said a long time ago. At least, I can be consoled by the fact that I can make sense of it with a whole lot of new language and conceptual aparati.

Here’s the radically antimodularist bottom line: the same principles that make it possible for us to recognize that a given instance of a chair is a chair and we can therefore exercise all of the properties associated with chairs (e.g. sit on it), viz principles of categorization and framing, that are responsible for issues like racial or gender prejudice. However, and that’s something Hazlit’s aphorism doesn’t recognize is the opposite process, one particularly dear to this blog, viz negotiation.

So here we have two acts of reductionism going against each other. On the one hand, we can reduce everything to the same process of categorization (incl. framing, metaphors, etc.), and on the other hand, any cognitive process can be subject to negotiation.

Without these two seemingly incompatible processes, life would be impossible. We can reject the inferior status of other races in the process of negotiation but at the same time we probably need to use a lot of distinguishing characteristics to classify people as belonging to a certain social group, for instance to avoid insult. Likewise, not all chairs will always readily accept our buttocks in the same predictable manner and still remain chairs. ‘Watch out! That chair was  designed by XY.’ somebody will cry out to remind you that not all of the ‘chair frame’ readily applies.

Thus our life is a constant battle between freedom of spirit and the determinism of prejudice. And without this dualism, we would die!

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It’s the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change?

One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow, made the following prediction:

“We will know whether there’s a transcendent bit to the human mind by 2050, we will know exactly what cognition is and how we think and probably be able to emulate it.”

Well, here’s an alternative prediction. No, we won’t! This prediction assumes a lot about both the nature of cognition and mind, e.g. that they are objective phenomena as described by the language of our daily speech and the language of experts, and about our ability to come to grips with it, e.g. that we can easily capture it through the same tools that we are used to capturing information about the accessible and the not so accessible world. But if we look at the last 50 years of computers and mind research, we should radically limit our expectations of the next 50 years. While computer power (or rather its transistor prerequisites as described by Moore’s law) as increased geometrically, our ability to emulate human cognition has increased almost not at all. Let’s look at expert systems. It has been over 40 years since ELIZA and we would be very hard put to find a system that can do much more than that, today. The same goes for machine translation. Speech recognition has not progressed almost at all in the last fifteen years. Sure, you can now dictate and have Word open at the same time but that’s just tweaking. Accuracy has increased by a guestimate of 20%, usability 10 times while computer power in the same time increased 256 times. The mind boggles why it took computers so long to even draw with humans at chess. Why couldn’t a regular calculator do it decades ago? Computer speed simply isn’t the answer. My speech recognition teacher said years ago that we need a change of paradigm rather than an increase in computer speed and he was right.

The complexity of human cognition is such that we don’t even know how complex it is, the factors of its social embeddedness are another unknown. My prediction is that we will be as far from being able to model cognition in 2050 as we are today unless we find a way of modelling it as it is rather than modelling it on the back of our incredibly reductionist description of it. Some of the work done on bottom-up robotics seems to point in the right way. Google’s stochastic processing of prestige is also pretty good. We can pretty much keep up wih the increase in the amount of information but I doubt that we will be able to achieve a corresponding increase of knowledge as defined by the speaker. He goes on to draw the following analogy:

If we look at the amount of knowledge that the human race produced and think of it as a nice simple analogy that you have a sheet of cloth about thousand stiches by a thousand stiches. Let’s call it a megabyte which is about a telephone directory’s worth of information. Everything humanity did in 1920 was a bedsheet to cover the Island of Mauritius, by 1940 it had got to Madagascar, by the 1950s it was the Congo, the whole of Africa by the 60s, all of the continents of the planet by the mid-1980s. By 1990 we had a duvet cover of information produced every year to cover the whole planet by 2020 we’ll have about 1800 planets’ worth of information.

The problem is that information and knowledge are very different. Information is a property of matter (inkblots on paper, magnetic charge of hard drive platters, etc.) while knowledge is a property of individual human beings embedded in the situational constraints of their social existence. Or possibly, it’s a property of the social group that can be shared and enacted by its individual human members. The maintenance of information requires relatively little effort (keep the books dusted and the CD-ROMs safe), the maintenance of knowledge requires tremendous cognitive (remembering, organizing, communicating) and social (putting into context, speaking to the right people, maintaining prestige, …) effort. Just like with the speed of computers not being commensurate with their ability to emulate cognition (let alone social cognition), the amount of information available (encoded in some storage devices) is not commensurate with the “amount” of knowledge, in least because it’s not even certain that knowledge can be measured or even that it can ‘increase’ rather than just being shifted around and refocused.

Let’s illustrate on this debate itself. The one thing we already do know about the mind and cognition, is that the mind is not at all like a computer: it doesn’t have memory that works as a storage or repository of information, and it does not apply serial algorithms to the information it works on. It is not independent of the body in which it exists and it is most certainly not something that can be easily transferred from one context to another. The problem with this ‘information’ is that it is the knowledge only of a limited group of people in the AI, NLP and general cognitive science community, and even the communities and individuals that do ‘possess’ this knowledge are not sure how to act on it. Kurt Vonnegut expressed it best: “Hi ho!”

When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment :
In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, philosophy etc… (from OUPblog)

This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison’s book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language’s structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? (from Amazon description)

There is an interesting evolutionary scenario often proposed by linguists studying the decline of languages. Language preserves cultural knowledge, it is kind of like a cultural DNA. And just like with our crop species we need to preserve as much diversity as possible and should therefore try to keep smaller languages from disappearing. And similar arguments are posed by proponents of multiculturalism. We need as many perspectives of the world as possible to help us survive. And, frequently, the metaphor holds up. Jarred Diamond makes a very convincing case in ‘Collapse’ for the diversity of perspective as being vital to the survival of social groups under changing environmental (and other conditions). A local categorization can easily be used to uncover something about the flora and fauna. However, a disappearing tense system (while a tragic loss for linguists) or a morphological complexity is unlikely to make much of a difference (no matter what Whorf’s misinterpreters try to claim).

And there is an even deeper paradox hidden in this claim. One part of a ny language is a system of prejudice and discrimination. Should we try to preserve that as well. How about the disappearance of ‘diachronic dialects’? Should we try to preserve the teenage language of the 1980s? Or should we try to preserve the old language of racism and sexism that has been slowly transforming into a new language of racism and sexism more palatable to current mores? Is keeping Huckleberry Finn in the libraries enough? Should we try to support enclaves of racist and homophobic speech? This becomes even more invidious when applied to culture? Should we keep some cultures that subjugate women and practice female genital mutilation just on the off chance that their practices might come in handy one day when the climate changes and we need a new social order?

The problem is that this mourning of the death of languages (and as a linguist I say keep as many as possible) is based on an imperialistically romantic notion of the noble savage and finding “beauty” and “wonderment” in forgotten places. But from a purely investigative perspective there’s no huge need for that. Here’s an idea for a project: “English as an exotic language and Anglos as an exotic peoples” - somebody get on with it.

Language Log: Keeping “wrong grammar” off the air

A program will be assigned a “PG” rating if it shows “people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects).”

The article doesn’t say who gets to be the “grammar cop” — some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem to a clerk. There’s potential for a comic novel here. Usually it’s self-appointed language mavens who get to make up arbitrary prescriptions. Imagine, however, being a young company clerk in Bangkok, endowed with the power to decide (say) that dai “get, be able to” can’t be used with compound verbs, or that theung “although” should never be used to start a sentence. And given the general Southeast Asian areal interest in subtleword-play, you could even invent some politicially subversive grammatical prescriptions.

In a casual conversation, my linguistics teacher and friend ZdenÄ›k Starý, once remarked that it is important to see language purism (a historical phenomenon in the development of Czech) as part of linguistic competence, as indispensable to the functioning of language as the ability to produce syntactically well-formed sentences. Another Czech linguist, J. V. Neústupný has written about the importance of the language area as being in some ways greater the the genealogical relationships among languages. I’ve been trying to explore the consequences of this ever since and I’m always reminded of this when linguists criticize language mavens, such as the one above. Not that the mavens don’t talk a lot of nonsense about the “good” use of language. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine the functioning of language without linguistic conservatism of which the mavens are one of many instantiations. Of course, the progressives (among whom you will find most theoretical linguists) have the same right to enter into this discussion, because language innovation is as important as linguistic conservatism. In fact, the consensus that is linguistic usage emerges out of the conversation between conserving and innovating tendencies.

The broader question that applies to academics outside their ivory towers is what should the linguist who knows this do as a political actor. On the one hand, she is aware of the complexities of language as a social as well as cognitive and textual phenomenon, but on the other, she cannot escape being a member of the linguistic community. Should she suggest conservatism or innovation? What status should her familiarity with the ’science’ of language afford her in the political context? All this speaks to the tension between academic knowledge and political action. Sociologists, educators, policy analysts all have this problem. Enacted knowledge (and an act of publication is a kind of enactment) itself becomes subject to academic inquiry. Does it cease to be academic?

Quote Details: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy is a battle… - The Quotations Page
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian philosopher (1889 - 1951)

Two interesting things about this quote. First, that it was posted in the first place. It’s on a list of quotations that I glance at occasionally in my Google-Reader-provided fun feeds. Unless it is an oversight, there must be something in this statement that resonates with the folk vision of the imperfection of language as a means of expressing thought. Not being able to express a thought (or once expressed, the expression not resembling the thought) is a common experience reflected on by many conventional means (’it sounded better in my head’, ‘I cannot express…’, ‘words fail me’, ‘I don’t know how to say this…’). On the surface, it goes against some other folk theories of language and intelligence, e.g. intelligent people are better at expressing themselves, etc. Of course, the other bit of folk classification of common experience is that language can be used to paint a pretty picture of ugly things, conceal the truth, and deceive (e.g. naming of US laws). So given that, this statement reflects both of these assumptions.

Second is the philosophical content of the quote itself. I don’t know and care how it squares against the early/late Wittgenstein divide (assuming it’s a Tractatus thing) but it shows a distinctly modular vision of language and intelligence. Intelligence is, implicitly, equated with algorithmic and digital logic whereas language is seen as only imperfectly expressing these abstract ideals. Of course, a piece of pith like this can be taken to mean many things, which is part of its power, but its implications and assumptions can be identified with a certain level of accuracy. For me, it is mostly symptomatic of how little most philosophy of language differs from folk theories of language.

Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg
Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctnessâ€? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis’ suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

D. A. Schön’s concept of “generative metaphor” (or the productive ‘displacement of concepts’) describes the conscious (if not deliberately algorithmic) elaboration of local metaphorical mappings between two concepts with the express intention of discovery (his example is ‘paint brushes are really pumps’) of new properties of one of the domains. It is generally implicitly assumed that the changes of understanding will mostly concern the target domain (e.g. the brush example will reveal much about brushes but nothing about pumps). However, particularly in more global contexts, the changes in conceptualization happen in both domains. This is sort of a special case of blending where the resulting blended spaces contains almost the entire input spaces separately but with changed properties — this needs to be investigated in some depth. The “Liberal Fascism” blend is a great example of this. It is global - i.e. it covers almost every aspect of the uses of both word; extensive - i.e. it is elaborated over a significant stretch of discourse with great intertextual potential; it is deliberate and most importantly it seeks to alter the conceptualization of both input spaces. The new ‘blended space’ has very interesting properties.

However, on the other hand, even though the argument is made in a book-length volume, the title and a brief blurb alone are enough to make most of the point. As the end of the Amazon blurb suggests:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Here’s an example of one of the liberal “howls of indignation”:

tomgpalmer.com: This is Nuts!
I know that authors don’t always come up with the titles or covers of their books, but they do get to veto them. This one is so utterly stupid that I hope that Goldberg is ashamed to show his face in public.

Of course, as this comment assumes, there is something ridiculous about the “liberal fascism” analogy given our current understanding. So the interesting question here is, what of the truth? Where does the concept of truth play a role in this discussion? In fact, it is mostly replaced by plausibility and credibility (or “aptness”). Here are some of the comments on the the critical blog post cited above that illustrate how plausibility and credibility are negotiated. First, defensive elaboration of the mapping:

Jonah doesn’t mean Whole Foods shoppers and people in the industry are sympathetic to national socialism. He’s pointing out how Nazis were at the forefront of modernity’s urge to go back to the land.

The point is that National Socialism (which did self-describe as ’socialism,’ after all) was originally conceived as a leftist movement, and forgotten aspects of fascism are still current in today’s left. He would surely admit that well known aspects (such as nationalism) are current in the right.

Second, offensive - questioning the very credibility of the mapping approach.

Goldberg’s response is at http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/
?q=ZjBmYmNmN2Q0NjkyYTNmOWQzNjU4YWJiOGRiZmM4NTk=

It’s pretty lame. The Nazis were into organic food, so if you’re into organic food, you’re a Nazi. Fish can swim. Jonah can swim. Jonah is a fish. That is pretty stupid.

Anyway, it says “the totalitarian temptation,” but were the Communists into organic food? Not that I recall.

Here’s a whole exchange regarding the appropriateness of mapping and some folk theory about the nature of meaning:

So the idea of aptness (both procedural, rhetorical and social) is intensively debated but the idea of truth simply doesn’t come up. It will certainly be applied to the book’s treatment of both domains once it comes out (almost six months from now) but ultimately the judgments will focus on all the kinds of appropriateness of the analogical mappings contained and implied.

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail
If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

Who would have thunk it that the person to get closest to this whole New Atheism would be the right-winger Peter Hitchens of all people, writing in the Hitler-supporting Daily Mail of all rags. He skirts the issue of ‘Atheism is just another kind of faith’ rather artfully, perhaps thanks to the privileged access he has to the other Hitchens’ background, but he gets it right about the constant debate what is a greater source of ‘evil’ faith in God or no God. (It, of course, is ‘faith’ in general. It is rather hard to commit evil without faith in one absolute or another, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding. One of the more deadly absolutes seems to be the faith in the sanctity of human life, probably because of the definitional indeterminacy of both ‘human’ and ‘life’ (and ’sanctity’ too when it comes to it).

But P. Hitchens even hints at the much more interesting source of faith and religious action, viz social cohesion (more but not that much more than peer pressure). All religion has a social dimension, and, as Milgram has shown so incisively (also see Bauman on the holocaust), it is with reference to social authority that unpleasant acts find their most inventive representations.

Not to be too nice about Hitchens, he does resort to the annoying kind of middle-class agnosticism that declares uncertainty about the less palatable sections of the scripture while spouting the sickeningly sweet belief in something greater and better out there.

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.

This kind of polite agnosticism is no good to anyone. Personally, I am a complete atheist with respect to any possible God so far or yet to be conceived by the religious mind. There is no faith or reason involved in this, the possibility of faith in the flying spaghetti monster simply displaces the possibility of any seriously revered deity (the only good argument Dawkins and his buddies bandy about). I am, however, agnostic when it comes to science. I am pretty sure that 2+2 is indeed 4, but I wouldn’t stake anyone to the cross over saying that it is really 6. The mathematical regularities (’laws’) of the universe are too neat for my taste and I know too much about the processes of scientific discovery to sacrifice at its altar. I am even more agnostic about what I see with my own four eyes or conceive of with my brain. If somebody wants to find a circularly defined God(dess) in this space of doubt, be my guest.

And finally, my world coming slowly to the upside up state I prefer it in, Hithens cannot help but descend into the nasty Daily Mailism that makes me instinctively recoil from the gentle elderly couples I see sharing pages of this rag on trains hurtling through this sceptered countryside.

They [inner city thugs, termed practical atheists] would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.

Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.

It is almost as if he hadn’t read himself. Faith is no good as a restraint of action (didn’t he say the same thing only a few paragraphs before). With respect to evil, the only safe inner conviction I know of is utter moral relativism. Proper moral relativists have no time for evil on a grand scale because they are too busy working out all the variables of difference. It is when they glimpse shimmering fata morganas of certainty that the world is in real danger. (As to the interesting small evil of petty self-interest, moral relativists are probably no better than anyone).

What he speaks of nicer parts of this country he is referring to the savagery of conformity that places everyone in their place (foreigners with tans preferably on the outside of it) defined by the social propaganda of fiction found in Wodehouse, Dad’s Army and other faded reminders of post-Edwardian aesthetic.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

This ‘faith-vacuum’ cliché is a fitting conclusion to this journey of near self-discovery Hitchens undertakes.  It is not, on its own, an uninteresting hypothesis. Is there something in the human make up that requires certain mental, bodily and social configurations typically described as faith? If so, what do they look like, what is there purpose and are some faiths better than others in fulfilling that purpose? But even if we postulate some sort of ‘faith universal’, it is still not a good argument for the existence of God. It is merely an instance of Voltairian hypocrisy: “I don’t need to believe in God but I like it that my servants do lest they steal from me.” A world built on this premise may lend itself better to idyllic depiction but seems of no deeper virtue than the “pre-medieval savagery” dispensed in the “harsher parts of our great cities” by the “strong, violent people” whose darker complexion and difference is so instinctively afeared by many of Hitchens’ readers (if not by himself).

The problem, to repeat myself, is the reliance on virtue, goodness, and life as transcendent absolutes (of God or upbringing) rather than a considered choice. It may not result in much real-world difference and possibly in no difference at all but I would prefer that those who matter make a conscious decision to consider others less human as a matter of practical expedience rather than spend time justifying that denying someone’s humanity (in the sense of equal rights to those one expects of herself; in the same sense that armies justify killing) as part of an absolute truth. If for no other reasons than that the parameters of expedience are more easily changed than faiths on which individuals and nations have staked their sense of self-worth.

digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm
Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg.

There are two ways to look at this statement. One is to take it as evidence of ‘folk theory’ of the nature of the world. If Penrose and others are right, there is an infinity of phenomena that cannot be described adequately by an algorithm of the type that can be represented by a flowchart.

However, it is also possible to take this statement at face value and speculate that in fact there is a level of magnification at which everything (although we’ll need to be caution about what a thing is in the everything) can be actually shown through an algorithm. But that algorithm may not be very useful for most of the ways that ‘thing’ is relevant to us. A good example would be language and communication. At some level they are easy ‘to flowchart’ but these flowcharts are not easy to ‘zoom in’ on or if we can magnify them we find them not being accurate anymore or even resemble the data. Level of magnification, then, is the key (taken from fractal theory). Now, the really interesting question is how can we make the different levels of magnification interact and does the fact that a certain kind of description/perspective/looking glass produces ‘bad’/irrelevant/incorrect data/results/stuff when magnified (positively or negatively) mean that we must reject that perspective in its entirety? If not, and my vote would be for not, how can we marry two useful but incompatible perspectives that each produce results at only one or just a few levels of magnification? (Such as generative and cognitive grammar? or quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics?) My favorite example is the flat earth theory. Which is great (indispensable) for walking and traveling to Australia but breaks down once we zoom out (or go sailing or build tall buildings). Round-Earth theory is useless to us in 99.999% of our daily activities (although we might benefit from its consequences with radio, satellites, weather and such) but it is an inescapable fact (and we would consider anyone suggesting a flat Earth backward and simply wrong). In that same way, for instance, typical generative grammar doesn’t sustain the behavior of language in almost any normal communicative situation but at a certain magnification it may be just as real and relevant as other approaches to grammar (although, here I personally believe its sphere of relevance to be negligible). This certainly bears exploring further.