Quantum Non-Linearity: Should I really be laughing at this?

Monday, July 16, 2018

Should I really be laughing at this?

Alex Jones with a full head of steam

...trouble is I can't help but laugh. I have said it before and I say it again: As PZ Myers, the cleverly sarcastic, cynical and abrasive atheist confronts and comments on some of the cheerfully weirdest fish who float around on the web, I find a sublime form of comedy. I sometimes wonder if the anti-theist Myers is in a kind of hell already and is having paraded before him, for his utmost torment, some of the most annoying, frustrating and crankiest characters the world has ever produced. An endemic crackpotism seems to be part of the human predicament and Myers has a particularly low tolerance for it: Anticipating and watching his reaction and reading his comments as he is tortured by the latest extreme wackaloon who flits across the line of sight is some of the best humor I can think of. Perhaps I'm just sadistic.

Two of his latest stories don't disappoint (See here and here). Firstly there is the ever vile and utterly debased Alex Jones with a line of conspiracy theorism only rivaled and exceeded for crankiness by the deranged David Ike. Myers latest blog on Jones tells us that Facebook wants to crack down on fake news and yet is allowing Jones to remain on Facebook peddling his line in baroque fantasy. Quoting Myers:

Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?

I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.

I was aware of some of the daft delusions listed above, but not all of them. Nice to have a list for the record. Thanks PZ! Well, I might agree with Facebook actually; if you crack down on people like Jones you may be playing into their hands. That's the dilemma. In someways Jones, who professes a Christian faith, is a caricature of the fundamentalist Christian witness which has a tendency toward conspiratorial fantasy and a sense of being surrounded by total & utmost depravity. For example, Jones gross and fantastic stories are reflected by Kent Hovind and the like. See here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcV5acuYic

And of course Ken Ham does not mince his words when it comes to accusing even "fellow" Christians of heinous sin. See here.

The second post by Myers informs us that the Turkish Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar has been arrested by the Turkish authorities. Oktar is a rabid anti-evolutionist who appears to mercilessly crib much of his material from US creationism. Oktar doesn't have a large eye catching exhibit like Ken Ham's ark-shaped shed. No, Oktar has another way of catching eyes with a different kind of shape but nevertheless with the emphasis remaining on bows and stern: Viz:

Accompanying Oktar in this picture are, let's call them Oktar's "educational assistants". They help present his anti-evolution programs. When I watched one of Oktar's videos these assistants don't come over as people of independent conviction and frankly these videos are embarrassing and disturbing to watch. Bearing the scars of cosmetic surgery Oktar's "kittens" look like Barbi clones. They move and speak in an highly orchestrated and contrived way; they come over as awkward self-conscious bad actors who are performing under orders. Oktar makes a point of speaking highly of women, but is there more to this than a man speaking highly of the treasures he owns? These women have been turned into sheer ornamentation and yet they must, of course, have their own inclinations, ambitions and aspirations which, no doubt, have been corrupted and exploited by Oktar. I would cry buckets if one of these girls was my daughter.

One interesting little side-light is how Oktar repsponded when asked why he was being detained. See below:

dokuz8 NEWS

@dokuz8_EN

Jul 11

Leader of Islamic creationist cult Adnan Oktar and 235 of his followers have been detained with dawn raids in 5 provinces in Turkey.

"The British deep state has ordered the operation; I am not upset but surprised" said Oktar in an interview to Cumhuriyet during his detention.

....there is also this:

dokuz8 NEWS

@dokuz8_EN

Adnan Oktar was asked why he was detained while being taken to health inspection at Haseki Training & Research Hospital, "A game of the English deep-state"

I'm not quite sure why Oktar should think the UK "deep state" should be involved, unless it's something to do with Darwin being an upper crust English country gent. It may also be because the UK, along with France presided over the demise of the Ottoman empire.

Now compare Oktar's words with this: On Alex Jones' wiki page Jones is reported as follows:

In March 2018, Brennan Gilmore, who shared a video he captured of a car hitting anti-racism protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a lawsuit against Jones and six others. According to the lawsuit, Jones said that Gilmore was acting as part of a false flag operation conducted by disgruntled government "deep state" employees in furtherance of a coup against President Trump. Gilmore alleges he has been receiving death threats from Jones' audience.

Here we have two conspiracy theorists, one Christian and the other Islamic who share a similar paranoid theory about a "deep state". Remember also that Donald Trump hasn't exactly discouraged this line of thinking with his talk of the "swamp" he is going to drain. It is no surprise that Trump and Jones have engaged in mutual support. That Trumpism, Farageism and the appeal to an almost xenophobic nationalism have gained traction is, I suppose, evidence of a more general malaise, a malaise that in some quarters is far more extreme than even conceived by Trump and Farage. To the xenophobic paranoid conspiracy theorist the whole social system is knit together and controlled by covert malign intelligences (See relevant link I give at the end).

We seem to be living in times when a pathological tribal xenophobia is fertile ground for the fantasy narratives promulgated by the likes of Kent Hovind, Steve Anderson, Ken Ham, David Wolfe, William Tapley and various flat Earth fundamentalists and newagers, not to mention Jones and Oktar; it is noticeable that these are all men with a lucrative public power base to satisfy, a power base that competes to a lesser or greater extent with the state. They no longer trust that state and in fact see it as conspiring to pull one over on them and their followers. However, I believe it's not a safe policy to screw down on their delusions with censorship, for if anything the resulting sense of persecution helps justify their distrust and adds credence to their baroque delusions. Baroque these delusions may be but in whatever doctrinal dress they come, whether Christian, Islamic or new age they nevertheless have at their heart a simple us vs them tribalism which catches the disaffected and alienated mood of the day. This malaise can, I believe, eat away at civilization and bring the apocalypse for entirely different reasons:

Relevant links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/04/anti-conspiracy-theorism-theory.html

https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/inside-the-weird-world-of-an-islamic-39feminist39-cult/560c7b1d4fd5a3935ee01a40

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, July 16, 2018

Should I really be laughing at this?

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION