The Libertarian Alliance

I've perhaps picked up some prejudices toward Libertarianism from  watching its US incarnations!

Below are some comments that I added to a Facebook group in a thread about the The Libertarian Alliance,  a UK based Think Tank. These comments are my first reaction to this group. I've never really liked politics, mostly because its so messy. I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the subject as a consequence of the fundamentalist's attack on science being very much bound up with politics and the public vs. private polarization.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/public-vs-private-polarisation.html  

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Facebook Comments

The Libertarian Alliance: Maybe they've got the wrong name, or maybe I’m confused by our “we-don’t-do-things-by-halves” cousins on the other side of the Atlantic who have given the term “libertarian” what are for me some bad associations. If the LA called themselves “The Open Solutions Alliance” I’d be interested!

There is quite a spectrum of libertarian belief about the role of government (even anarchism!), but the general theme seems to be one of diffidence toward input from central government. It is perhaps ironic that Marx believed that once private ownership was abolished the state would become unnecessary; he saw the state as the protector of the owners of the means of production; in his view central government was a capitalist creation!

When I did my “Mathematical Politics” series I tried to take a measured view on the mix between government (government=responding centrally to centralized information) and business (business=responding locally to local information). But in the end I found that I couldn't anticipate in advance what that mix should be. 

In fact I ended up coming out against principled “catch-all” solutions - that is, solutions that depend on “universals” of the form “For every A then B”. The above discussion between James and James is indicative of an endogenous complexity and open endedness that makes principled opinions that cover all cases difficult to arrive at.

Catch-all solutions are attractive but they depend on a lack of exceptions to the rule. But our reality actually throws up connections like “For every A then %B”, where because of complexity %B is some percentage and not a certainty. The solution to this problem is that humans work as “complex adaptive systems”; that is, they are designed to work post-facto in an unpredictable world by responding after the data has come in and not in advance. Except perhaps in elementary physics there is little role for proactive predictive agents but a large role for reactive agents that respond intelligently as situations develop.

In any case it is my guess that governments are here to stay. In fact they are the fundamental systems theory manifestation of the balance between the use of centralized and decentralized information that one sees in adaptive organisms. Moreover, as was seen in the days of the Iron Age hill forts, governments engendered opposing governments in a regenerative feedback loop; it ends up as a choice between governments. Basically we’re stuffed if we don’t like governments! Another point I have made before: Decentralized information leads to nonlinearity and likely chaos; the information cannot be found locally to damp this chaos. Diffidence about government is up against deep systemic issues.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/.../mathematical politics part 1

Society, industrial society in particular, is a mesh of “feedback” loops e.g. inflation=>wages=>inflation…etc which very likely leads to nonlinear effects which in turn are going to give rise to the hazards of instability, chaos and power laws. Trouble is no one is selling and making an “economic stability” product that can be sold to whole societies and be selected for in a Darwinian way. This is a meta-issue that is too big for the decentralized paradigm of capitalism; there are simply not enough trials going on for a Darwinian trial and error dynamic to work. 

Clearly however, a free market is ideal for solving low level problems of demand and in fact the free market probably stimulates demand in a feedback loop. The old “command” economies fall-over at this level since their managers can never get enough information either in or out to solve the problems. In particular centralized economies can stultify technological innovation as you well know.

On the down side of free-markets is the fact that they lack the long/overall view and unleash insentient systemic effects that can be ruthless, uncaring and inhuman. Consider for example a game of chess; the two contenders are only playing at the level of the individual, seeking only their own victory; this in itself carries no guarantee that the game as whole will be exciting for viewers – it could turn out to be really flat and boring. People playing their own game are not seeing the bigger picture, by definition.

So my view is that there has to be a balance between the decentralized processes of the free markets and centralized (democratic) government management of economies, and between distributed intelligence and centralized intelligence; neither free markets nor government alone can solve all the problems.

An organism like the human body seems to also have this balance between local and global controls. Both are needed in my opinion.

Banning the Creationism vs. Science Dichotomy.

 State and Church stand together: In the UK the state church and the non-conformists can do business with one another. Here Rev Mark Tall of Norwich Central Baptist church talks with the Bishop of Norwich, Graham James. See here.

I’ve been reading reports that teaching “creationism” is to be banned in the UK’s publicly funded schools. According to UPI:

The government released a new set of funding agreements last week including clauses which specifically prohibit pseudoscience…….The funding agreement defines creationism as "any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution," and goes on to note that this idea is rejected not only by the scientific community but most mainstream churches as well.

Strictly I’d classify myself as an “Intelligent Design creationist” (or an “IDiot” as evangelical atheist Larry Moran puts it!) but I’m certainly not a fan of the two kinds of creationism which this ban is probably targeting. These two kinds of creationism are:

ONE) The creationist “science” of the Biblical literalists who push for a 6000 year old Earth/Cosmos. These people have in effect an anti-science agenda and this agenda is all too apparent in the flawed premise concepts with which they interpret scripture; in particular the ideas of mature creation and the bogus distinction between observational and historical science. This in turn leads them to mangle well established science such as the speed of light and cosmic ages.

Relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/mangling-science-part-4-worms-all-way.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/an-email-from-fundamentalist.html 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/arbitrariness-in-mature-creation-theory.html 

TWO)  The creationists of the North American Intelligent Design movement who in most cases accept that the Earth and Cosmos are very old. They have, however, raised some interesting and worthy challenges to evolution. (Although I must qualify that by admitting that I'm no biologist). Nevertheless, I believe that the underlying philosophy/theology driving North American ID is flawed; for instead of using their critique of evolution as a basis for enhancing theories of natural history they have by and large opted for a god-of-the-gaps dualism whereby the black-box-intelligence of God makes good what they claim to be failings in evolutionary theory. UD poster V.J. Torley is typical of this breed. This has led them to embrace a culture that is very anti-evolutionary and anti-public-academic-establishment, perhaps even “fighting” alongside YECs and rightwing politico-fundamentalists as allies. They have mostly ended up criticizing science and seldom being constructive. However, having said that I must add that Granville Sewell has recently posted a UD entry where intelligence is acknowledged as a process with a history rather than a catch-all-black-box; this is the first time I have seen something like this, so things might be looking up! But otherwise these creationists have muffed their opportunity in my opinion.

Relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/more-god-of-gaps-from-north-american-id.html 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/once-again-false-dichotomy-zone-god-did.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/public-vs-private-polarisation.html 

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The big problem with both these kinds of creationism goes right back to a point I picked up from Ken Miller when I first started studying the ID movement; that is, both versions of creationism proceed with an a priori background philosophy/theology that takes for granted a God vs Nature dichotomy. The consequence is that it casts the whole question of Divine intelligence into a science vs. theology mold, inadvertently helping to reinforce the old idea of science warring against religion. Theology (and Christianity) will be harmed if this dichotomy creeps in by the back door into the UK’s schools under the guise of “creationism”. Ironically it might thereby play into the hands of evangelical secularists. So, because of this I'm for the ban myself.

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Banning bad science and pseudo-science is one thing, but there is another aspect to this affair that is more disturbing. Right wing Christians have above average association not only with creationism (in the two senses defined above) but also with anti-taxation, anti-public domain, antigovernment and gun lobbying groups, not to mention the paranoia of the conspiracy theorists.  So perhaps not surprisingly we find the paranoiac vision of the Christian right, which is inclined to imagine malign intelligences with evil intent working behind the scenes, has a rather sinister outcome: They are starting to think about the violent overthrow of the state. Well, at least according to PZ Myers’ blog! Check out his links:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/16/since-when-is-overthrowing-the-government-constitutional/

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/16/patriotic-pratfall/

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/06/23/lets-just-call-them-traitors/ 

In fact we read:

I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States, where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren. (Republican Bobby Jindal at a conference hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group led by Christian activist Ralph Reed)

I wonder what he means by “hostile takeover”? Now here are some guys who have quite a clear idea about just what that means:

The worrying thing is that they are probably armed to the teeth with no shortage of ammunition!

The formation of North America was triggered by a taxation dispute spurred on by a genuinely democratic vision (and based on Christianity) that traces back to the English civil war. Moreover, European migration to America was often encouraged by ideologues with a vision of setting up a mini heaven-on-Earth as they reacted by escaping interfering governments and religious persecution (God help you if you were thought of as a “heretic” in one of these "heavens-on-Earth"!).  In fact my own church, Norwich Central Baptist, was historically against the British government’s war with the American colonists; not a surprising stance given that Norwich’s Baptists had been persecuted by church and state in the seventeenth century.  The legacy of all this today is that some people in North America have still yet to grow out of the bitterness and habits of mind engendered by the conflict between the state religion and dissenters. The creationism issue is, perhaps, in part a memory of this bitterness in as much as it represents high hostility against the government funded academic establishment.

Other relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-ultimate-conspiracy-theory.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/11/50-years-ago-kennedy-assassination.html 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/conspiracy-and-apocalypse.html

Both Cameron and Obama are openly Christian, but that won't convince the hyper non-conformists who will likely see them as malign influences, perhaps even Satanic!

Relevant link: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/right-wing-campaigner.html

On Pilgrimage! But no Sandwalk for me!

I’ve at last done my obligatory “pilgrimage” to Down House where the great naturalist Charles Darwin lived, worked and eventually died. Here’s the essential evidence that I was there:

My lasting impression of Down House is one of incongruity: Here, set in the idyll of an English Country Garden, surrounded by beautiful countryside, was a peaceful and largely happy home and yet Darwin, through his evolutionary theoretical filter, saw his setting as a place of continuous and endless strife:

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.  (Origin of Species 1859)

Search, find, reject and select! Darwin’s own poor health, and of course the death of his daughter Anna, would no doubt have help confirm his belief that life is a struggle and one that doesn't always end happily. It is also incongruous that Darwin’s ideas have led to much ideological strife, strife that Darwin himself would likely have shunned. Darwin’s diminishing personal faith over the course of his life has been well documented, although I'm left with the feeling that as a man given to restrained expression he would always have regarded out-and-out atheism with a measure of reserve; there is room for doubt about Darwin’s doubts right up until his death.

In 1860 shortly after writing the Origin of Species Wiki tells us:

In one 1860 letter to Gray, Darwin expressed his doubts about the teleological argument which claimed nature as evidence of god, though he was still inclined to vaguely believe in an impersonal God as first cause:

“With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.– I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I [should] wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.”

I interpret that to mean Darwin entertained an intellectual conflict over religion. This conflict was none other than the age old problem of suffering and evil: On the one hand Darwin couldn't see the work of an omnipotent loving deity in the haphazard and sometimes repugnant designs of nature and yet on the other hand this didn't sit well with an intuitive sense of the wonder at the universe and the enigma of man's conscious cognition. Darwin wonders if this conflict might be resolved by recourse to the concept of a deistical God who as "first cause" designed laws to modulate the operation of chance (A combination I refer to as Law and Disorder). But in the end he appears to throw his up hands and declare that he thinks the whole subject of ultimate origins to be beyond man’s intellect.

Thirteen years later (1873) in a letter to a correspondent at the University of Utrecht Darwin writes (See Wiki again):

I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty 

Here we find Darwin still facing a similar intuitive contradiction: On the one hand there is the wondrous universe beheld by the conscious sentience of man, facts which he feels are the chief argument for the existence of God (Although Darwin now expresses uncertainty as to the robustness of this argument). On the other hand set against this is a world full of suffering. Darwin also sees problems with the “first cause argument” for God, a view I would certainly share.  However, Darwin shows respect for those who find that they can believe, in spite concluding (once again) that the whole issue is probably beyond the mind of man. For myself, I applaud Darwin for his self-awareness and studied detachment from the problems he faced.

In 1879 and 1882, just before his death in 1882 the same Wiki article says:

Though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he responded that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a god, and that generally "an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."[7] He went as far as saying that [in 1882] "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."

The same old Darwin reserve is apparent here. His view that there has never been any revelation is consistent with a deistical concept of God. Presumably by “revelation” Darwin means some kind of special revelation (such as Christ); after all, Darwin’s previous statements (as quoted) are evidence of an intuitive sense of God’s cosmic presence, an intuition which could be construed as a form of general revelation.

Darwin’s slow slide into unbelief gives every impression of being entirely genuine; he really can’t find it within himself to form a strong conviction about the existence of God in general and the truth of Christianity in particular. The apparent genuineness and innocence of Darwin’s encroaching disbelief conflicts with fundamentalist opinion that accuses those who don’t follow fundamentalist proprietary observances of conscious rebellion against the Truth of God.*

It is ironic that the concept of one-off-creation-deism expressed by Darwin in 1860 is in fact not so far removed from the punctuated-deism of the likes of the Intelligent Design movement expressed by, say, V J Torley. Like Torley, Darwin is a dualist in that his theology takes for granted a “natural processes” vs. “Divine intervention” dichotomy.  In this theology processes guided by law and disorder are thought to proceed all but autonomously; at least when God isn't “intervening”. The difference is that, unlike Darwin, Torley sees God coming back every now and then to do his miraculous stuff. As I've said so many times before I'm moving further and further away from this Western dualist theology, a theology which stresses God’s eminence at the expense of His immanence.

Given my doubts about Darwin’s implicit dualist theology, not to mention my reserve about his legacy, it is perhaps only appropriate that I was blocked from entering the Darwin equivalent of the holy of holies; When I tried to do Darwin’s sacred and famous Sandwalk where all Darwin pilgrims get their picture taken and where Darwin did much of his evolutionary thinking I found the way was barred:

Danger: Path closed during tree lopping

The trees on the Sandwalk were in need of some urgent tree surgery! In fact one of the trees on the Sandwalk had become so dangerous that it had been cut down completely:

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There is an ambiguity in the Genesis Eden story as to whether the Tree Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are one and the same (See here). For fundamentalists Darwin’s Tree of Life is the Tree of Knowledge of Evilution, but for atheists it really is the Tree of Life! So, the theological ambiguity about the Tree of Life may be a rather fitting parable to ponder for our times!

Trees, it seems, can be dangerous things and a bit of drastic tree surgery on Darwin’s tree(s) might not be a bad thing! Even so, according to Mega-church Pastor Rick Warren**: “In God’s garden of grace, even broken trees bear fruit”. Time will tell.





Further photos from my “pilgrimage” can be seen here:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10204159154486944.1073741840.1468664406&type=1&l=6428e66d25 

Footnotes:

* Some fundamentalists misread Romans 1 as a passage about atheism when in fact a more careful reading reveals that it’s about Roman idolatry. But there is a rationale behind the fundamentalist’s belief that atheists are nasty people willfully covering up God’s existence in bad conscience: For if there were such a thing as an innocent and genuine atheism that in itself would not justify the automatic entry of atheists into eternal torment. But in fundamentalism's view atheism is a sign of a wilful sinful state that is enough to qualify for hell; therefore fundamentalists are likely to see atheists as people of bad conscience.



** Rick Warren is not popular among fundamentalists.

The Melencolia I Manifesto. Part 2

(See here for Part 1)

Human beings are complex adaptive systems and as such they have imaginations that can generate endless novelty to the extent that it matches the novelty they see around them.

(Note: Addendum below  added on 12/06/14)

In this post on Uncommon Descent IDist Granville Sewell links to one of his YouTube talks and says this about it:

I want to focus here on the second part, beginning at the 19:40 mark, which discusses the remarkable similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology……… Some people do not like the comparison, because (1) it may seem to bring God’s design down to the level of human design, and (2) they may say that Genesis 1 does paint a picture of creation by magic wand. With regard to (1), I would say that it does not bring God down to our level, because the things God has designed are so much more advanced than the things we design, but a designer must always get involved in the details of his design, no matter how intelligent he may be. And with regard to (2), although of course Genesis 1 is not an accurate scientific account of creation, even here we see a God who created one type of animal, “saw that it was good,” and proceeded to improve on it; that sounds a lot like the way we create things, though testing and improvements. And if all God had to do to create species was to wave a wand, why does the Bible say that on the seventh day, God “rested from all the work of creating that he had done”?

For me this development on UD is extremely interesting on at least two counts: Firstly, I also don’t believe in creation by magic wand. Secondly, thoughts like this are not entirely new to Uncommon Descent. In fact in March 2008 I broached a similar subject in one of UD’s discussion threads, a thread which can be seen here:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/biology/bird-brains-gnc-and-id/

My comments to this thread and those who responded to me (Paul Giem, Gpuccio and Jerry) can be downloaded from here (See the “file” drop down). My first comment wasn’t understood (probably because I hadn’t made myself clear enough) and this was compounded by a tendency for UD’s ID interlocutors to assume that any challenges to their position comes from straight evolutionists, “materialists”, “naturalists” or atheists; in fact YEC Paul Giem seemed to think I was arguing from an atheist position – he refers to “your naturalistic friends”.  However, I must add that on the whole I have found the UD people, whether Old Earth or Young Earth, to be nice intelligent people who aren't in the “heretic burning” mould; it is probably that which sets them apart from the stricter fundies whose personalities favour stick rather than carrot. However, UD fans are going to listen to Sewell as if he is saying something completely new; after all, he’s one of their gurus and, moreover, they are likely to have a "not invented here" attitude.

In May 2009 I made a shorter but similar comment on this UD post:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/johnny-cash-on-evolution/#comments

This comment I reproduce below:

Timothy V Reeves 05/16/2009 9:23 am

I enjoyed the song but “One piece at a time” may not be so far from the mark.

The wheel, the wheeled chassis, the leaf spring, glass, various electromagnetic devices, pistoned heat engines, bulbs, not to mention agriculture, cities and writing which set the social base for industrialization etc, were all invented/discovered without the car being conceived or envisaged as a goal. This example sets the precedent for a form of reducible complexity at least to an extent which allows limited human intelligence to make advances with a piece meal divide and conquer strategy, and achieve results beyond that available to a single act of inventive foresight and goal formulation.

The artifacts generated by human culture must form islands of innovation in “configuration space” sufficiently close together to unable limited human intelligence and prescience (let’s represent that by “i”) to jump the gaps between these islands of functionality.

Now I would not be so brazen as to suggest that “i” could be reduced to zero and hey presto you have mindless, goalless evolution (I realize there are lots of robust challenges to that, thanks to you excellent folk), but the human technological model does indicate that limited foresight and goal perception can generate functionality beyond itself if some measure of reducible complexity holds in “technological morphospace”. If this were not so then human technological progress, with its ability to create unforeseen, unimaginable artifacts well beyond single quantum flashes of inventive genius will come to a standstill, limited by its ability to see ahead and formulate goals. Such is the Creator’s grace bestowed upon finitely endowed humanity.

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So what are my conclusions here?  Whenever I have looked at the North American ID community’s concept of intelligence it has always come over as a “black box” notion of intelligence – that is, as an inscrutable ancillary agent of causation that stands a dichotomy apart from so-called “natural processes”,  an agent invoked when we can’t think how “law and disorder” processes have generated a pattern. At least Sewell is, as far as I can tell, starting to look into that black box; at last someone on UD is hinting that intelligence is a process and in fact a process that looks a little like evolution itself! It is this immanent aspect of intelligence that is the subject of my current researches. Below I list the salient areas of this research. The following is my broad brush manifesto: of this research.

1. Intelligence is not a highly located phenomenon and least of all is it something precisely focused in a small black box. Rather, intelligence is a distributed phenomenon that cannot be identified in low level parts but only at the high system level. The low level parts are, however, essential component contributors by way of their mutual configuration. Therefore intelligence is both immanent as well as eminent to any local sub-system.

2. Intelligent problem solving activity has a common structure that constitutes a very general heuristic of intelligent action; namely, search, find, reject and select.

3. In a search, find, reject and select computation there may be a separation between explicit outputs and implicit computations between outputs. It is this difference between hidden background processing and ostensive foreground results that can convey the wrong impression that intelligence isn’t a process and that it somehow arrives at results by magic wand.

4. Searches can be enhanced with mathematical constraints in order to improve speed of result.

5. Searches can be enhanced with expanding parallelism to improve speed of result.

6. Points 3 to 5 have isomorphisms with quantum physics leading me to speculate that the universe has a declarative computational structure involving constraints guiding a Search and Find process.

7. Randomness is not an event but a class of pattern that has certain mathematical properties in terms of its statistical form and its intractability to algorithmic generation. These kinds of patterns have an important status in the search for life; for if life’s configurations can only be expressed in compressed form as random patterns then it follows that the ordinary parallel processing of standard evolution will not find life in realistic times.

8. In our universe with its declarative computational structure - that is, it is a highly constrained search - there is no such thing as “random and unguided” processes; the guiding hand of constraint is ever present and operative.

9. My overall working assumption is the strong anthropic principle;  that is, the cosmos is contrived to find life.

The above manifesto may well be a flight of the imagination; in fact it probably is, but it's my best shot (hence comic sans). But one thing is clear: The following statement by PZ Myers is typical of a failure to appreciate the miracle of evolution: 

Darwin’s great insight was that you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution — that local responses to the environment will produce efficient responses that will yield a pattern of descent and diversity and complexity. To replace “intent was unnecessary” with “God provided intent” does deep violence to the whole theory, and completely misses the point.*

Any process that has generated life as quickly as has the cosmic process is certainly “guided” in the sense that it must be highly constrained and/or employs the methods of expanding parallelism. We might speculate that there must be some “meta-explanation” for this state of affairs, but such an “explanation” could only employ yet more mathematics of “law and disorder” and in effect we would simply be embarking on a “Turtles all the way down” regress; or as it is expressed in its usual modern form “multiverses all the way up”! Science may be less about "explaining stuff" than it is understanding and describing the status quo.

Footnote
* See Myer's post "How to argue for evolution" dated 20 May

Relevant link:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/from-spears-to-jet-fighters.html  

Addendum 12/06/2014

In a blog post entitled Multi-component, schmulti-component and dated 10 June I was interested to note that PZ Myers has latched on to this parallel processing idea:

Evolution isn’t sequential. It’s massively parallel. Massively. Humans have about 20,000 genes, and all of them are evolving at once, with trial runs in about 7 billion individuals.

To me, that still classifies as ordinary sequential processing, as it simply involves adding more sequential processors. Unless somehow physical constraints sufficiently narrow down the search space a priori, up front (which is possible I suppose) a "small" parallel processor is not going to find those viable self-perpetuating, self maintaining organic survival solutions. Unless these highly constricting physical constraints exist, adding processors whose count is measured in only a few tens of digits (that's what I mean by "small") is utterly inadequate. After all, the search space has dimensions measured in millions if not billions of digits. PZ Myers intuitions about the adequacy of a parallel processor are far wide of mark. 

I said "expanding parallelism," a method that creates far more trials; if somehow quantum expanding parallelism can be exploited we're there. But either way Myers has an a-priori brute-fact issue; either hugely constricting constraints and/or huge numbers of trials facilitated by some kind of expanding parallelism. I'm putting my money on the latter, although the former is a possibility.

Consider also this: 

Evolution is not teleological. An organ like the eye is not being assembled to a set of specific, detailed instructions — it just has to work, or the organism is at a disadvantage to other organisms with better eyes. So a hodge-podge of solutions is accumulated, and the end result has all kinds of complexity. But you don’t get to argue after the fact that the details imply some specificity of purpose.
For example, here’s a number: 343767. It’s kind of big, you might be tempted to argue that it’s a fancier or more complex number than, say, 300000 (you’d be wrong), or you might want to argue for the significance of individual digits, or find a pattern in it. Humans tend to do that. But the reality is that I just went to a random number service and asked for a 6 digit number. Similarly, eyes wandered through a random space constrained by functional requirements and ended up at a somewhat arbitrarily complex configuration — and different lineages followed different paths.

Fair enough; the only requirement for an organism is that it has self-perpetuating/self maintaining stability given its particular environment; that's likely to lead to "hodge-podge solutions". But a cosmic generating system that is not prepared a-priori via expanding parallelism and/or up front constraints simply isn't going to find even hodge-podge solutions! Those stable organic "potential wells" in which the seeking fingers of quantum signals eventually accumulate are lost in a space unimaginably large - by comparison the visible universe is absolutely tiny!

Tough luck PZ; the cosmic "search algorithm/hardware" looks highly a-priori and anthropic to me!

Relevant Link:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/configuration-space-via-mathematical.html 

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society on Creation

To complete my recent series on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their governing organ, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, what could be more appropriate for this blog than a couple of articles taken from the March 2014 Awake! Magazine containing instructions from the Watchtower telling JWs how they should think about creation. Please find below photos of the articles concerned, and very revealing they are too.

The Watchtower tells JWs what to believe on creation (Click to enlarge).

Here are my comments:

ONE) Notice that the WT articles disparagingly refer to “creationists and fundamentalists” as if the WT and their followers aren't creationists and fundamentalists themselves!  The WT are every bit as fundamentalist, as say, Answers in Genesis and more: In fact, I would refer to them as fundamentalist++! The reason for the “plus plus” is that the WT and their followers constitute a cult in as much as the WT claims to have exclusive rights to the autocratic theocratic management of Christian observance. They carry out this management using the spiritual and psychological duress common to cults (See my first post of this series). As a rule you will find that fundamentalists are unable to see themselves reflected in other fundamentalist cultures and will completely disown these cultures as wilfully in error. They can do this without seeing the irony because they have a complete and unself-critical conviction that their brand of fundamentalism is set apart from all them others because, needless to say, they claim to have The Absolute Truth.

                    

TWO) Notice that the WT accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth. Is this a good thing or bad thing? Probably a bad thing because this will put them in an advantaged position as compared to the crackpot science of YECs like AiG:  JWs can smugly and plausibly claim that they are not anti-science! So anybody of a fundamentalist frame of mind can become a JW and perhaps feel a bit better about it. After all, it seems that the YECs are in an eccentric minority even in America: As YEC Ken Ham of AiG has recently admitted in one of his blog posts, old-Earth Christians have a position regarding Genesis [that] is the norm and not the exception among Christian academia today. So the WT can claim to be on the side of the broad swathe of academia in contradiction to dime store pundits like Ken Ham.

THREE) But the WT is not happy about evolution and only allows variation within “kinds”. Well, admittedly evolution’s power, when it is badly sold as a something-for-nothing process that “poofs” organized structures out of a huge sea of pure randomness is not only counter intuitive, but is actually wrong, so it's not surprising if the WT achieve some traction here. In fact, we find that like many of the writers on the “Intelligent Design” website Uncommon Descent the WT's reasons for rejecting evolution are dualist. Quoting from the Awake! article:

The theory of evolution is also embraced by many who claim to accept the Bible as the word of God. They believe that God produced the first burst of life on earth but then simply monitored, and perhaps steered, the process of evolution. That however, is not what the Bible says….According to the Bible, Jehovah God created all the basic kinds…..”

The foregoing is based on an implicit and false dichotomy between the actions of God and the processes of the natural order. These views of the WT are comparable to the views expressed by Uncommon Descent’s V J Torley. (See here)

***

Regarding creation, on the whole the JWs look a lot better (unfortunately!) than the panicked anti-science YEC fundamentalists who gained some ground during the 1960s when Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic started to face some strong intellectual challenges and a sense of alienation and marginalization set in. It is probably not a coincidence that the JWs date their restoration of “The Truth” back to the late nineteenth century long before the age of the Earth was noticeably on the agenda amongst Christians; in fact the original early 20 century fundamentalists did not by and large believe in a 6000 year old Earth.* In the late nineteenth century when the JWs were forming end time prophecy seemed to be the hot issue and not creation. However, it is interesting to note that the WT’s specialism on date fixing was something they “caught” from Adventist Jonas Wendell. Perhaps it is significant that today’s fundamentalist YECs also “caught” their views from an Adventist: George McCready Price.

Footnote:

* According to Wiki the Watchtower’s founder Charles Taze Russell’s production “The Photo Drama of Creation”:

….purports that the seven creative 'days' in the Book of Genesis equal 49,000 years, based on Russell's belief that each creative day lasts 7,000 years. It further claims that 48,000 years had already passed, such that the final thousand years were "near at hand".

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Photo-Drama_of_Creation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taze_Russell 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McCready_Price 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Wendell 

Systems Theory and Religious Cults.

Rule by Divine Right:"Theocratic" is one way to spin "autocratic"

This post follows on from my last post on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m going to hark back to the 70s and 80s when I was scrutinising the cult world. At that time I produced many rambling hand written notes on a systems theory approach to cults. In this post I want to boil some of that down to its essentials.

As I investigated the world of Christian cults and the strict regimes of observance they imposed on their personnel I started playing with the idea that cults constitute a kind of organism whose basic unit of construction were human beings. My thoughts went as follows:

Cults are in effect “collective identities” in as much as their unit building blocks (people in this case) are highly organised in terms of their uniformity of practice and belief. It is this high organisation that gives cult personnel a collective pattern which sets them apart from their environment. We know from our studies of organic structures that this kind of organisation requires cybernetic circuits to be in place in order to maintain the organisation in the face of the randomly perturbing and disrupting effects of the environment. Biological organisms not only need the instructions found in DNA but also a controlling nexus of feedback circuits necessary to read and implement those instructions and thus preserve bodily identity. These two cybernetic features also appear in cults, as we shall see.

To us as individuals the collective identity of our myriad bodily cells is bound up with our conscious survival as sentient beings; in fact as far as human values are concerned we would probably agree that the individual cellular units, like the individual insects of an ants nest, serve the greater whole rather than the whole serving the units. In fact in order to maintain the much valued collective identity of our bodies, cells grow, serve and die; but that doesn't matter as long as the integrity of the body remains intact. This means that if it were a choice between the overall identity of the body and the survival of the myriad individual cells, the corporate body comes first. In terms of human values cells are there only to serve the corporeal system identity whereas the high level corporeal system only serves the cells in so far as they continue to provide effective service that preserves the overall bodily identity. In a sense the body is a kind of meta-level parasite on the life of cells, cells which live and die for the body not unlike the individual ants of an ant’s nest. The body has an identity by virtue of its organised pattern but the individuality of the cells that make up this organisation is all but immaterial; you could replace huge numbers of cells but the essential organised identity of the body would remain. The human body in this sense is a bit like a data pattern where the exact medium on which that pattern is impressed has a limited relevance.

If we now set these basic ideas up against the cults we find, ominously, something similar; the cult collective identity seems to have precedence over the interests of its basic units of construction, that is, its personnel. This personnel serves the system, and the system only serves the personnel in order to facilitate their active maintenance of the whole. The collective identity of the cult has a kind of moral precedence over its unit member’s quality of life. The cult identity is therefore a meta-level parasite that embraces its hosts rather like the human body is a “meta-parasitic” on its host cells.

It was thinking like this that started me wondering if cult systems almost constitute a new form life, a form of life made up of human units. This notion isn't entirely new; the idea that ant’s nests form a super-organism has been mooted before and my idea about cults had a similar look about it. As with organisms like the human body, the individual units of  a cult only count in so far as they promote overall system identity and as such their quality of life is not paramount: Cult personnel are fed a deceptive and often a very intimidating line in order to keep them in place and serving well. In bad cases these personnel lose all their freedom of choice and can almost become slaves. But a collective group pressure and group think keeps them in place.

The case of Raymond Franz (ex JW governing body member) reveals a lot about the cult dynamic in this respect. It shows that a cult can tolerate a turnover of membership even in high level personnel and yet the cult identity remain in place - just as there is a large turnover of cells in the body and yet the overall identity of the body remains stable. If the human hosts of the cult become a problem and threaten cult identity, then provided these problem personnel don’t exceed a certain threshold in number, the cult can excrete them as waste as can be seen in the Raymond Franz case. But in spite of Raymond Franz’ loss to the JW organisation his contribution to it in terms of the many anonymous articles he wrote in support of the Watchtower during his enthusiastic and loyal tenure probably remain there to this day. In other words he has left the cult a supporting legacy which can still be used to mobilise and galvanise gullible recruits. The cult, therefore, has life of its own, apart from its individual recruits.

The teachings and doctrines of which governing body member Franz was a major contributor are the equivalent of the DNA of the organisation; they provide instruction on the expected belief and practice of its members. This observance based faith is essential to the structural integrity of the organisation; after all it is ultimately the collective behaviour of the cult's personnel that defines the cult's collective identity. This essential observance is maintained by a reporting and discipline system that aims to keep transgressions within the standards of the cult. The information that comes from headquarters also provides the valuable service of responding to the philosophical challenges faced by Kingdom Halls in their local and national context. Instruction on how to think about the hot issues of the day are found in the Awake and Watchtower magazines and in the many Bible study aids all of which are sold by the Watchtower to its Kingdom Halls; in short, the Watchtower followers have to buy the information that keeps them in line. As my accompanying pictures show the JW system is very hierarchical and this facilitates the up and down flow of the information which promotes a strict uniformity of belief and practice between Kingdom Halls. This two way flow of information up and down the hierarchy constitutes the cybernetic circuits of the system.

In as much as the essential organised pattern of the cult is maintained by its internal systems it is a self-perpetuating pattern that sucks in the lives of its host human organisms. The cult is, as it were, a kind of “wave” form that travels through its human media impressing its pattern on this medium at least for a while and then, may be, “excretes” this medium from its back end when it has finished with it. In the face of an inevitable membership turnover it is the corporate identity that is the meaning of life, the universe and everything as far as the cult is concerned. That identity lives to survive and survives to live; it is stuck in a self serving feedback loop. But as a parasite on human life it can have the effect of degrading their quality of life and can turn them into wretched slaves of the system.

In the light of these considerations I gave up on any notion that the cult is some kind of conspiracy complete with an illuminati whose aim in life is to deceive and control those they rule. No, the leaders of the cult, as Franz has shown, are just as taken by their own propaganda as the rank and file; that the cult’s leaders genuinely believe their own teaching makes them far more persuasive. The concept of a controlling illuminati is a human attempt to personify what is in effect entirely impersonal, namely the cult system, a system that is a huge parasitic pattern praying on familiar human weaknesses and fallibilities Those weaknesses and fallibilities are legion; human epistemological limitations, and human traits like the need for security, belonging to an elite fellowship of confidants, paranoia, pride, vanity, self centred ambition, sleaze, ignorance and incompetence.

The kind of conspiracies envisaged by conspiracy theorists is in one sense far too moral in an inverted way to explain the success of a cult. A cult with an illuminati conspiracy at its head would require a very disciplined integrity of purpose amongst them, albeit a purpose directed against non-initiates. It is ironic that the grand conspiracies envisaged by conspiracy theorists are in a sense too “moral” for the untidy, erratic and oft self-centred behaviour of human beings. It is ironic that the real enemy is not some highly intellectual conspiracy which in terms of looking after its own interests is also very moral, but rather the impersonal chaoskampf *or chaos monster of insentient beast-like systems that so easily seduce and corrupt us by appealing to the baser aspects of our nature. All those apparent conspiratorial cover ups have a ready explanation in terms of our common human  failings and the temptation to cover up our own fallible nature and make good our pride. The conspiracy theorist seeks to personify otherwise difficult to comprehend forces that exploit fallible human nature. The cult model is a warning paradigm for all those cases where we feel alienated from systems which aren't serving us well and instead we feel that we are serving them.

Footnote:

* The idea of chaoskampf leads us into a connected complex of ideas in mythology and legend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaoskampf#Chaoskampf 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion#Dragon_or_Serpent  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_monster  

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society

The JWs: Genuine, kitschy but not authentic

By 1985 I had been studying the Jehovah’s Witnesses intermittently for over five years. This study had included visits to the local Kingdom Hall, and the JW assemblies at Norwich City football ground, along with talks and correspondence with Kingdom Hall members. I can say straight away that all I saw left me with the overwhelming impression of a culture that reeked of flawed human motivation. I saw a repertoire of unconscious and self-inflicted tricks exploiting the human vulnerability for soaking up typical conceits and self-deceits: In particular a “swallow whole and digest slowly” world view was served up on an enticing plate. Like so many other religious package deals this included promises of banishing ambiguity with spiritual authority and of being part of a spiritual elite who have turned their back on the cold evil outside world and are now moving in the warmth and security of a caring off-the-peg-community. That community is overseen by a presiding patriarchy claiming to be in touch with absolute Truth. All one has to do in return is to sell up (figuratively speaking, but sometimes literally as well) and let that patriarchal spiritual authority do all your thinking for you. All you need think about is trying to understand the message proffered and to become a proficient single minded salesperson of the sect.  Basically it’s the same old, same old story repeated again and again by every Christian sect/cult between here and Salt Lake City. All these cult people no doubt mean well, but in the final analysis it’s the usual story of epistemically challenged humanity throwing up their hands, abdicating epistemic responsibility and seeking the security of clear cut, definitive and authoritative answers; and of course there’s no shortage of egotistical religionists (sometimes boarder line mentally ill) who claim to have those answers and will loudly pronounce everyone else to be fundamentally wrong! These religionists offer an all-or-nothing faith package none of which is negotiable. Any persistent attempt to negotiate any part of it is taken as a sign of disobedience to the Almighty himself. One is required to accept the whole package without argument or else be damned!

It was in 1985 that I came across Raymond Franz’ book “Crisis of Conscience”, a book published in 1983. Franz was onetime governing body member of the Watchtower publishing organisation. It is this organisation that provides the JW Kingdom Halls with detailed instructions about their observance of belief and practice. Franz’ book tells the story of his disillusionment with this organisation and his eventual break with it. As with all religious cults that try to envelop their members lives so totally, breaking with them can be a painful  business as Franz’ book confirms. I can recommend this book to all cult watchers.

In order to capture what I myself had got from the book in 1985 I typed up a five page summary of my personal take-home lessons. This article is now in computer readable format, and can be downloaded from here.

.  It picks up on some general characteristics that as it turns out are common to all cults/sects and even, I’m bound to add, characteristics that can be found (albeit in a less pronounced precursory form) amongst fundamentalists and perhaps even some moderate evangelical Christians.

I have to admit that having been a long time watcher of Christianity in its cult forms I find the whole phenomenon disturbing; in fact I’m reminded of the sinister legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. That story probably has a basis in some real event, an event which prompted a Hamlin town chronicler to record in 1384 the macabre entry: “It is a 100 years since our children left”; if as some have suggested this was a reference to the Children’s Crusade it is all the more appropriate to my case*. The idea behind the Pied Piper legend is that of some kind of spell being worked to make people leave their homes apparently voluntarily. But with today’s communications secrets are difficult to keep even in the control freak atmosphere of a cult and so the spell that these cults work on their members can be scrutinised and analysed. I think it important to emphasise the metaphor of a “spell”; for I believe it is wrong to accuse cult members of lying as they appear to have been seduced by a self-deceit.

My article has four sections that, as I have subsequently learned, describe features common to other cults and which are part of the cult dynamic. So here then is a brief summary of those sections which are admirably exemplified by the JW Kingdom halls and their controlling publishing organisation, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

Section 1: Unaccountable authority: The sect leaders think of themselves as stewards of an institutional authority that should not to be gainsaid.

Section 2: The clash with reality: The account that the cult provides of the world around them often does not match up well against reality itself. In the case of the Watchtower this is seen in the repeated failure of their anticipated end time history to correspond with real events. (Since writing my article in 1985 I note that the Watchtower has given up on its prediction that “the end of this system of things” would come within one generation of 1914)

Section 3: Spiritual spin: The leaders have to find a way to account for the intellectual dissonance that may result of their failure. They therefore engage in what today we might call “spiritual spin”, that is, they give the story a spin that in the first instance attempts to explain the failure away. After that they rely on silence and short memories; new recruits are not informed of the failures since nobody talks about them.

Section 4: Character defamation. The sect/cult believes that world beyond their community is depraved and in particular those who take a robust stand against their observances are thought of as especially depraved. It is therefore a very natural part of the sect/cult mind-set to believe that those who attack them must do so because they are sold-out to the darkness of evil and are on the wrong side of the Almighty. They therefore feel entirely justified in abusing detractors by accusing them of heinous sin. For people outside of the cult this equivalent of name calling may be just water off a duck’s back, but for members  who are held thrall to the cult spell and whose lives have been so thoroughly socially immersed in the cult this is a real threat: It provides a frightening example of what will happen to you if you contradict the cult authorities; one is cast into the outer darkness, or "hell" if you like. This moral abuse, I feel, is an important part of the cult dynamic. For cults that don’t have economic control over their subjects this social control is the main means of coercion; one is effectively “burnt” with words of moral disapprobation, the equivalent of the heretic’s pyre! In this connection, whenever I approached JWs about Raymond Franz I found that they automatically concluded he was a sinner and liar. The upshot was that this completely blocked even so much as a cursory examination of the evidence. So let’s be clear: Unless cult members proactively seek you out there is probably little point in you trying to “de-convert” them: To them you are guilty until proved innocent. If they do seek you out it may be a sign they are already having doubts. So let them take the initiative first, but be ready for them when they come your way.

Postscript: At the time I was studying the WT and other cults I was moving in evangelical circles. What began to disturb me in those early days of my faith was that the sort of thing I was seeing amongst the JWs and these cults I also found, albeit in milder form, in some of the stronger versions of evangelicalism and especially in evangelicalism’s fundamentalist communities. For example, I note that AiG supremo Ken Ham is very much into 4 above… those who disagree with him he will paint as morally flawed compromisers. But that is another (long) story.

Relevant Link:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/knock-knock-who-is-there-je-who-vahs.html

Footnote:
* If 1284 is the date when the Children of Hamlin left, then this is actually too late for the Children's crusade story which is dated circa 1212. Another theory is that the Children were lost to "Dancing Mania", a social phenomenon that occurred in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries (according to Wiki). As I read up on the subject it is clear that once again we are ham-strung by epistemological limitations.