Science belongs to every culture

I submitted this to Stuff Nation after this piece by one Bob Brockie, complaining about the New Zealand Royal Society’s choice to officially acknowledge the Treaty of Waitangi, came across my Facebook feed. They haven’t published it, so I guess I’m free to put it here.

Bob Brockie thinks that the Treaty of Waitangi is irrelevant to the scientific endeavour, and the Royal Society of New Zealand ought therefore to ignore it. I think he’s wrong, and I’ll show you why.

First of all, while the phrase “the principles of the Treaty” does sound worryingly vague, its twenty-year history in legal usage has pinned down its precise meaning. I don’t think Brockie is aware of this. The principles of the Treaty are often summed up as: partnership; protection; and participation. Partnership would mean granting Māori people and Māori institutions equal say with Pākehā in decision-making around science, such as what areas of research should be given priority over others. Protection would mean respecting Māori cultural sensibilities just as much as Pākehā ones in ethical deliberations over research on human subjects. Participation would mean ensuring that Māori and Pākehā have equal opportunities to become scientists and to benefit from science and technology. I can’t imagine that Brockie would object to any of that; so I presume he just didn’t know what “the principles of the Treaty” are.

Second, Brockie is simply wrong to assert that, in the humanities, “everybody’s opinions or beliefs can be of equal value and should never be challenged.” Of course, many humanities academics make the equal and opposite error of claiming that the sciences do not teach critical thinking, and therefore the humanities ought to be in charge. Nor are science and the humanities “parallel universes” with little to say to each other. To take just a couple of examples: history and archaeology greatly enrich each other, while literature and the arts contain a goldmine of long-term information about the human mind that can benefit psychology.

Personally I would go so far as to say that the humanities themselves constitute a science as rigorous and empirical as any other. As geology is the science of rocks, and astronomy the science of stars, the humanities are the science of meaning. I do share Brockie’s suspicion of postmodernist ideology, which in my opinion has greatly hampered progress in the humanities. But other scientific fields have also had their fads and fancies, such as behaviourism in psychology, or group selection in evolutionary biology.

Finally, while Brockie is strictly correct that traditional Māori belief “has its roots in the supernatural and vitalism”, he is mistaken if he thinks that this in any way distinguishes it from traditional Pākehā belief, with its heavens and its hell, its angels and devils and immortal souls, and its fixed Platonic or Aristotelian essences. I think Brockie here falls prey to a common confusion between two related, but distinct, meanings of the word “science".

If by “science” we mean any systematic endeavour to understand the world through strictly empirical investigation, then I quite agree with Brockie that this is the only source of reliable knowledge. But “science” in this sense does not exclude the knowledge of non-Western cultures, of which the traditional navigation methods that brought the ancestors of the Māori across the Pacific Ocean to these shores are a shining example.

If on the other hand by “science” we mean the body of knowledge that the West has gradually accumulated since Francis Bacon and Copernicus, then of course this tradition has drawn more heavily on European thought than on other cultures’. But “science” in this sense has no especial claim to be more reliable than other systematic, empirical traditions of knowledge.

I don’t claim to know very much about traditional Māori lore, and yet I can name four points on which it beat the West to the scientific punch off the top of my head:

• Western tradition gives the universe an eternally pre-existing God; Māori lore states that it began from nothing (Te Kore).
• Western tradition has God create plants and animals in separate kinds from the beginning; Māori lore acknowledges the familial kinship of all life.
• Western tradition puts the seat of consciousness and will in the heart; Māori lore puts it in the head.

And on a more mundane but practical note,

• When Western doctors were still cross-infecting patients left, right, and centre, Māori practitioners had long been guarding against sickness by washing their hands after dealing with blood.

I imagine it’s this sort of thing that the President of the Royal Society had in mind in recommending that scientists “embrace the research methodologies of multiple knowledge systems”, as Brockie complains. I can report that pharmacists are only now beginning to investigate traditional Māori healing practices (rongoā); an initial study found that many of the plants used contain pharmacologically useful substances – and that’s as far as they’ve got.

Obviously more progress needs to be made, and obviously it won’t be made by uncritically accepting whatever cultural traditions tell us. But it won’t be made by uncritically throwing them out either. Nor will it be made by walling off the different fields of knowledge from each other. “Sticking to one’s knitting” is not the way to go.

TERFs are wrong – why that’s a problem for the Left

“TERF” stands for “transgender-exclusionary radical feminist”. The term is very, very familiar to anyone who follows LGBT and feminist issues on social media, and probably quite obscure elsewhere. For what’s supposed to be a network for mutual support and protection, the online LGBT community spends an extraordinary amount of server space debating who belongs in it and who doesn’t. Nowadays it’s generally accepted that transgender people do belong; the big debate, online, is over whether asexual people do. But “generally accepted” isn’t the same as “universally accepted”, and the ones who don’t accept it can get pretty nasty sometimes.

TERFs don’t accept transgender people’s identifying gender, and in particular they don’t accept that trans women are women. Like other transphobes, TERFs read transgender women as “men pretending to be women” – a misframing which does real harm (an identity is not a pretence), but fundamentally a matter of perception rather than of fact. What distinguishes TERFs from other transphobes is the motive they ascribe to transgender women for this alleged pretence, namely “...so they can rape lesbians.” That is a matter of fact, and the facts are clear. Transgender identities are not motivated by a desire to rape lesbians. TERFs are wrong. I’m not debating this point any further. I’m not going to waste space rehashing here what I’ve already written about gender identity, when trans people are far more worth listening to on the subject than I am; and the rape accusation is preposterous, but the people who need convincing of that aren’t likely to listen to me.

So why am I writing this? Because, preposterous as it is, TERF ideology is a necessary logical consequence of three propositions which the Left today holds dear. Since TERFs are wrong, one or more of the three propositions must be false. We need to find out which one and stop using it – even at the cost of having to mince words like moderate liberals instead of making bold sweeping proclamations about overthrowing oppressors and remaking society. The three propositions are

1. Feminism. Women do not yet enjoy basic rights equal to men. This is due to men’s actions, and social structures upheld by men’s actions.
2. Social constructionism. Most, if not all, things we perceive as enduring realities are in fact products of societal roles and institutions – gender most pertinently.
3. Dialectical materialism. Institutions such as the state exist to allow powerful classes to exploit powerless ones. Classes are distinguished by having divergent material interests, and individuals act in their class’s interests, so the exploitation can only end if the powerless class overthrow the institutions.

See what follows when you put these together? Men, the powerful class, materially exploit women, the powerless class, by impregnating them. A woman is someone who can get pregnant and a man is someone who can make a woman pregnant; those are the material interests by which alone the two classes are meaningfully distinguished. Any other distinction is merely a gender role, socially constructed to maintain the power of men over women. If someone who can make women pregnant adopts womanly roles and calls themself a woman, it must be somehow a subterfuge to advance the interests of men, and the only way that makes anything remotely resembling sense is if they are trying to infiltrate the ranks of those women who have refused to act as brood-stock – i.e., lesbians. Hence TERF ideology. If we agree that the conclusion is preposterous (and if you don’t, please take the debate to a different post) then one or more of the premises must be false. Our remaining task is to find out which. Let’s examine them one by one.

Why abortion isn’t murder

A fertility clinic is on fire. In the storage area at the back of the building there’s a portable freezer unit containing 100 live human embryos. In the reception lounge at the front, trapped under a chair, there’s a screaming three-year-old child. You can save one, but as soon as you open the door and let in the oxygen the fire will take the building. Which one do you save?

You see where I’m going here, right? This sort of question is bread and butter for moral philosophers: think of a scenario where the answer is obvious, then extrapolate principles that can be applied to situations where the answer isn’t obvious. Most people choose to save the child. From this it must follow that they don’t value an embryo’s life the same as a child’s, or even at one-hundredth the price.

Try asking a pro-lifer this question and see how they respond. I’ll tell you how they don’t respond, or at least haven’t lately in my many arguments with them since joining Tumblr: they don’t answer “I would save the embryos, of course. It’s very sad about the one child in the reception lounge, but it would be immeasurably sadder to lose all the children in the freezer.” Instead the answer you repeatedly get is “I would probably save the one child, but that’s an emotional response and doesn’t have anything to do with right and wrong.” And you have to prod them to get even that much. Generally they evade the question until you’ve asked it three or four times.

First off, if morality isn’t about emotions, what is it about? Most moral philosophers will tell you that morality isn’t objective, because you can’t get from an “is” statement like (in this instance) “A child is in danger” to a “should” statement like “I should save the child” except by calling in another “should” statement like “One should always protect children”, and if you try and prove that second “should” statement you just go around the circle again, and so on forever. Without rational proofs or empirical backing, all you have to call on is your moral instincts. And here they’re pretty clear.

Pro-lifers, as a rule, seldom get their morality from philosophers, but they are disproportionately likely to pay at least lip service to a certain 1st-century populist rabbi who will be found to have said (following Rabbi Hillel) that morality is an expression of love and consists of doing for other people what you would want for yourself, and obviously love and empathy are both subjective emotional states. But religion doesn’t break the circle; “You should do what God says” is just another “should”.

Personally I think the philosophers are overly pessimistic. A “should” statement can, in fact, be objectively true if it rests on an “I want” statement; if I want functional teeth then I should cut back on sugar, if I want to sleep tonight then I should get off the internet. (To use more technical language, “should” statements may have no truth-value, but they do have utility-value.) Might there be some “should” statement that applies to any possible “I want”?

Well, if we’re really pedantic about what counts as “possible”, then no there won’t be, because for any “should”, someone can always say “I want to do the opposite of that.” But there are some “should”s that at least apply to any plausible “I want”, and one of them is “You should not destroy anything you might need”, and one thing you can count on always needing is other people’s trust. And it just so happens that our moral instincts evolved to allow us to trust one another. I have made a longer, but not necessarily clearer, case for trust-based morality here.

Now if you want to earn people’s trust, you can’t weigh every decision separately according to how much it’ll make them trust you, because then they have to worry that one day your calculations might tell you to harm them. You have to behave in a way that allows them to predict you won’t do that. Your actions must not only be benevolent, but clearly and consistently benevolent. For an individual, that means practising virtues – kindness, fairness, courtesy, charity, patience, and so on. For an institution or a society, it means treating people according to a consistent code of rights. And this is where we can start to buckle down to the abortion problem, because here it seems that one person’s right to life conflicts with another person’s right to bodily autonomy. It’s conflicts like this that send us looking for a deeper principle that can resolve them, and I say that principle is trust.

The pro-life position is that abortion is murder. Murder is the breach of the human right to life, and I do hope I don’t need to explain how that might erode trust between people. Two questions arise here. First, who or what has the right to life, and who or what does not? Where do you draw the boundary? And second, if you have to choose between one person’s right to life and another’s right to bodily autonomy, which one should win? Always life, always bodily autonomy, or sometimes one and sometimes the other?

Oh, the humanities

My employers’ employer, the University of Otago, has decided to cut staff positions in the humanities. Music is going to be hit the worst. As usual, the justification is money. It’s been suggested that maybe the University should ease off on its endless construction drive if it needs to free up some cash. (In twenty years I’ve never known the campus be without a big hole in the ground somewhere. Face it, Otago, the Richardson Building is a plug-ugly wodge of concrete and no amount of landscaping around it is going to change that.)

However, this wouldn’t fix the bigger problem, which is the government’s attitude. Statements from the Ministry make it clear – education is for fitting young people for the workforce; anything else is an indulgence. Here’s the official position in their Tertiary Education Strategy.

Skilled, knowledgeable individuals are essential to the success of businesses and other organizations. Access to skilled workers allows businesses to increase the value of their products and services and to pay higher wages. In turn, people are better off, healthier and happier, and New Zealand is a more attractive place to live and work.
For most young people, achieving a tertiary qualification is a crucial milestone towards a successful working career. Whether they study at a university, polytechnic, wānanga, private training establishment, or through an apprenticeship, a qualification gives them a concrete record of knowledge learned and skills gained that they can use to move up the employment ladder.

And in the Minister of Education’s own words, prefacing that document:

The new Tertiary Education Strategy 2014–19 has been developed to... contribute to the Government’s focus on improving New Zealand’s economic outcomes. The “Building Skilled and Safe Workplaces” programme of the Government’s Business Growth Agenda aims to materially lift New Zealand’s long-run productivity growth rate while maintaining our high rate of labour force participation. This requires tertiary education to better equip individuals with the skills and qualifications needed to participate effectively in the labour market and in an innovative and successful New Zealand.

Sure enough, Priority 1 in the Strategy is “delivering skills for industry”. There is nothing anywhere about developing insight or critical thinking. Public education, to this government, is solely a means of polishing up new cogs to slot into the commercial-industrial machine.

My instinctive response to this is a string of expletives, but that’s not the way to build a counter-argument. If you want rational debate, start by taking your opponent’s concerns seriously. Education costs society money; don’t we then have a responsibility to pay that money back? Granted that some people derive personal value from knowing all about, say, the anti-imperial politics encoded in the Book of Revelation or the practice of cannibalism in indigenous South American funerary rites, shouldn’t they stump up their own cash for it?

Identity politics and its limits

First up, sorry it’s been so long between blog posts. What happens sometimes is I get a post past the planning stage and I think, OK, I’m nearly done, I’ll have it finished tomorrow. Only the next day it’s not done, but it’s so close to done that I know I’ll have it finished the day after that, no big drama, no need to find something else to post about while I’m working on it. Sometimes, and this was one of those times, this can go on for weeks. And then just as I was finishing I came down with an unusually virulent upper respiratory tract infection, which kept me at home, away from the internet, for nearly a week. Content note: I discuss racism, homophobia, and ableism below, including repeating some slurs.

If you ever need confirmation that there’s more to politics than Left versus Right, utter the word “transphobia” in a reasonably broad left-wing forum and stand back and watch. (I’m not sure what the equivalent would be in a right-wing space; libertarians and conservatives take different views on how many gender identities and sexual orientations are legitimate, but they seem to agree that oppression only counts if it’s the government doing it.) If you do try the experiment, you can probably then count down under your breath how long it takes until somebody starts muttering about “identity politics”.

I don’t know. Maybe this was more of a thing five or six years ago, at least in this country, when the Left was still busy looking for something to blame the Right’s then-recent victory on. One thing a lot of people fixed on was the prominence of queer and feminist interests in the broad Left portfolio, which many claimed was a fatal distraction from the real troubles of the poor and the working class. Because, apparently, only bourgeois women mind being hit on by creepy men, and only the bourgeoisie ever feel attracted to their own gender or identify as a gender that doesn’t match their genital anatomy at birth.

But I think that was one manifestation of a wider political trope that goes: “Social justice struggles A, B, and C were about equal rights for everybody, but social justice struggles X, Y, and Z are about special rights for a bunch of whiners.” Struggles A, B, and C aren’t always in the past tense, at least not among the Left, but that’s the usual pattern. The “special rights” part is where “identity politics” comes into it. The idea is that the social justice movement gives people special rights according to their identity as women, or as people of colour, or as queer people or as trans people or disabled people or whichever one it might be today. And that, say the critics, isn’t justice. Lady Justice wears a blindfold.

Yes, but Lady Justice also carries a pair of scales. If one person misses out on a benefit that others are enjoying, when they’ve made no less effort to deserve it than those others, then that’s unfair. If the benefit is a basic human right, then that’s injustice. And if lots of people are missing out on it because of some aspect of their identity – be it cultural identity, gender identity, sexual identity, whatever – then Lady Justice’s blindfold has slipped. Fixing it will be measured by whether people of that identity are still missing out, and if you didn’t realize they were missing out then fixing it will look like “identity politics” to you.

An atheist reflects on death

I’ve mostly tried to keep my personal life out of this blog, because that’s what I use Facebook for. But this post was prompted by the recent, unexpected death of my friend Brent. Brent had cerebral palsy, which in his case limited his movement to his head and one arm, slurred his speech, and also affected his cognition. (I never heard the official diagnosis until his funeral on Wednesday.) We met through a volunteer outfit called FriendLink about eight years ago; since then we’ve had a weekly appointment to visit museums and art galleries and libraries in town to look at art or books together. I think he preferred the art, which allowed us to move around and meet people rather than sit in one place as we would with books. Brent was a sunny, sociable person who would say “Hi” to just about everyone we passed.

But he was also sensitive. He could tell if someone had had a bad day, and it would distress him. He would worry, if I coughed or sneezed, that I was “sick”. He commented on death and dying from time to time. Once I remarked that my cat was at the vet, and this reminded Brent that his dog had not long since gone to the vet and then, as he put it, gone to Heaven. He cried. Sometimes, he had questions I couldn’t answer. This past April there were WWI-related exhibits everywhere, and Brent asked me two or three times “Why do they have wars?” I doubt I’m the only person who’s been stumped by that question. Museum displays are often about people who lived a long time ago, and sometimes it would bother Brent that they were dead. He would say things like “I’m sorry to hear that,” or “Oh no, that’s terrible,” or “How did they die?” – the way one speaks of people who have just recently died, who still have people mourning them.

He was right, of course. Most of us partition off the people of the distant past in our minds. They were people, obviously, but we don’t think of them as people people. Well, when I say “we”, it differs between cultures – the dead seem to be much more present to Māori than they are to Pākehā, if my limited cross-cultural observations can be trusted – but there comes a point when we shrug it off. That was the olden days, what do you expect? But the reality is that every name fading in a dusty genealogical manuscript, every fragmentary human skeleton dug up from under two metres of sand, had someone somewhere who grieved over either their stilled body or their absence. Everybody has somebody to say goodbye to them. (Fortunately the dead cannot suffer from our dehumanizing them, making this probably the most benign instance of that disastrous human habit.)

The last time I saw Brent he was in hospital, but that wasn’t all that unusual given the impact his disability had on his health, so I was not remotely expecting the phone call the following morning telling me he had succumbed to a suspected stroke or heart attack some time between eleven and midnight. This kind of bad news takes a long time to go into your head. For those first few minutes I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling, because Brent’s departure left a gap in my mind that no feeling filled – though it did gradually fill up with grief over the rest of the day. I guess when people say they’re “blindsided” or “dumbfounded” or “numb” in the wake of tragedy, that’s what they’re talking about. And there is some part of my mind that still doesn’t quite believe it, thinking of things to talk about when we meet up as usual on Thursday. After all, that’s what I promised him the last time I saw him.

Ships that pass in the night

If I ever get my hands on a working time-machine, the first thing I shall do is organize a public debate between C. S. Lewis and Steven Pinker. Not (I’m sure they would both protest) that it would be an especially momentous encounter compared to what you could do with a time-machine. If all goes well, rest assured I will also talk to Shakespeare and Virgil and Homer and the author of Beowulf, document the Polynesian conquest of the Pacific and the first people in the Americas and Australia, film mammoths and indricotheres and dinosaurs in their natural habitat, witness the origin of life, and all that other guff. But the Lewis-Pinker debate will serve as a proof of concept.

Why those two in particular? Because they are so different and yet so similar. Both are fascinated by language, and by what it reveals about the mind. It seemed a little too good to be true, a few years ago, when a manuscript was discovered containing Lewis’s opening contribution to a planned collaborative work with J. R. R. Tolkien, to be entitled Language and Human Nature. Sadly, Seven magazine, which I gather printed the fragment, hasn’t uploaded it to the web. It was never completed because Tolkien was as bad at finishing things as I am, and also he was bogged down in The Lord of the Rings at the time the project began. But that tantalizing title could be the subtitle for most of Pinker’s popular works. On language, Pinker and Lewis nearly always agree.

Hegel has a lot to answer for

Writing this post is making me a little edgy. Most of the friends I’ve made since leaving high school, I met through student activism in one capacity or another. Which means a lot of my friends are people who hold Marxism dear. That makes criticizing Marxism a painful thing for me to do. And it’s not as if I have to do it, exactly, I could just meander to the back of the crowd and mumble insincerely when my political coalition voices opinions that I find problematic in support of the positions that I am trying to help them defend. But I don’t feel that that’s entirely honest, for one thing; and also, unexamined assumptions in my worldview niggle at me. They keep me awake at night. So before I even start on what the problems are, let me talk about the parts of Marxist theory which I do agree with.
In fact, I’ll start with one that will most clearly establish where my loyalties lie. With the Marxists, and against free-market economic theory, I think that profit in a capitalist economy depends largely or wholly on the exploitation of labour. But this is going to make me look like an economic naïf if I don’t explain a bit. Which I don’t mind doing, because although I’ve said it a few times before, I think it’s one of those things that needs to be said again and again until people get it.

The Last Battle

        

Up far beyond [Jove]

Goes Saturn silent

in the seventh region,

The skirts of the sky.

Scant grows the light,

Sickly, uncertain

(the Sun’s finger

Daunted with darkness).

Distance hurts us,

And the vault severe

of vast silence;

Where fancy fails us,

and fair language,

And love leaves us,

and light fails us

And Mars fails us,

and the mirth of Jove

Is as tin tinkling.

In tattered garment,

Weak with winters,

he walks forever

A weary way,

wide round the heav’n,

Stoop’d and stumbling,

with staff groping,

The lord of lead.

He is the last planet

Old and ugly.

His eye fathers

Pale pestilence,

pain of envy,

Remorse and murder.

Melancholy drink

(For bane or blessing)

of bitter wisdom

He pours for his people,

a perilous draught

That the lip loves not.

        

Imponderable III: The Self

I was a curious kid. I wouldn’t have been more than eight years old when I learned that green things are green because they absorb the light that isn’t green. Not that I’m claiming I understood it fully. For some time I was mystified as to why green cellophane didn’t make things look red when you looked through it, because I thought absorption was basically light going into the object while reflection was basically light bouncing off the object, so that light going through the object was more like absorption than reflection, because it didn’t bounce off, so if green objects absorbed red light then how come...?
In case you are puzzled by this yourself, absorption isn’t about light “going in”, it’s about light going in and stopping (because its energy has been captured and redirected elsewhere, always at least partly into raising the object’s temperature). The primary distinction is between light that stops and light that keeps going; the latter category is secondarily divided into light that passes through and light that bounces off.
However, at least some of my high-school chemistry classmates had evidently missed this information, because when our teacher explained how the red dyes in a plastic ANZAC Day poppy absorbed shorter wavelengths because the electrons in the iron atoms jumped up a couple of valence shells, or something, one of them exclaimed “So it’s not really red? It’s just that it absorbs the other light?”
This isn’t the Imponderable on consciousness, that’s still to come, so I won’t here speculate on why our experience of colour feels so removed from the Newtonian interpretation of light wavelength and frequency. The point here is this idea that photon absorption is somehow cheating – that there must be a “real red” somewhere which isn’t faked up out of all that physics-y stuff. Because people who have got past that, and are perhaps even now chortling at my sixteen-year-old classmate, are still susceptible to the idea that there might be “real” fear, “real” anger, or “real” love floating around in amongst their synapses and neurotransmitters.

In which I argue with myself about abortion

I’ve written on this subject before, but that was a couple of years ago and I’ve had time to think about it more since then. Especially since a lot of the bloggers I read are passionate about it. Mostly on one side but some, including some of those closest to me, on the other. Though – don’t get me wrong – I have firmly picked one side, I’m more convinced than ever that the two sides are talking past each other.
What I’d really like to see is for people from both sides to sit down and have a civil conversation about it, but that’s not looking likely. The last time I saw a debate on the subject, it ended with someone ragequitting Facebook. Failing that, I decided to write a dialogue between a pro-choice character and a pro-life character. It’s been done before, of course; Peter Kreeft’s The Unaborted Socrates was one of the formative books of my childhood. And that brings up the next problem, namely writing a dialogue honestly when you disagree with one side. Who gets to stand for the Wrong side and get zinged? How long will it take before they become a blatant strawman?
Well, in my case I have the perfect candidate. This is an issue on which I have changed my mind; therefore, my interlocutors will both be myself, on either side of the change. I’m not claiming that everybody – or anybody but me – on either side holds the opinion I present on their behalf here. I do promise that they both honestly represent my opinion on the subject at different times in my life. I know myself well enough to know that if I were to meet myself I would ignore any topic to hand and try to figure out how the time loop I’d obviously run into worked. Therefore, the dialogue takes place over the internet and neither side is aware that they are the same person.
TheHatMan is approximately me at age 19, but I haven’t pinned him down to an exact point in my life. Also, he’s magically clued-up on things like Google which weren’t around in 1997. However, a content note: he is even less mindful of privilege than I am and at one point makes an inappropriate rape analogy. VeryRarelyStable is obviously me now, except that wherever TheHatMan discusses things in his own life VeryRarelyStable has conveniently forgotten them (and vice versa).

My brother is wrong

Just in case this is the post where I pick up a reader outside of my circle of family and close friends: My brother’s name is Patrick, he’s five years younger than me, he used to have a LiveJournal but I presume he isn’t using it any more because he posted this as a Note on Facebook instead. It’s set to “public”, so you can read it here as long as you have a Facebook login, but you needn’t worry if you haven’t because I’m going to quote the whole thing in sequence through this response. (Although, as you’ll see, he does take after me to a certain extent in the general area of philosophical wibbling, he doesn’t write to quite the kind of length that I do.)
Patrick’s Note is uninformatively titled “A few ideas” and begins as follows:

In the beginning, the universe was created.
There are two things that together convince me of this:

1. The physical law of entropy; and
2. The philosophical ‘First Cause’ argument.

Imponderable II: Free Will

I began the first Imponderable by bagging on Jim Flynn’s ideas about free will. I’m terribly sorry to give an unbalanced impression of Flynn, who is a first-rate political theorist, but I’m going to have to do it again. Some day I will do a political blog post which pays proper tribute to Flynn’s immense positive contributions to human understanding. For now, I’m afraid Flynn’s very clarity and force of expression make him the best starting-point for exposing the confusion in the traditional Western concept of free will.

The concept of free choice is perfectly coherent and easily stated. Free choice, to the extent that it is real, would be an uncaused cause. It is the opposite of what we call an epiphenomenon. A good example of the latter is the reflection of a tree in a pond: if you cut down the tree, the reflection disappears; but if you drop a rock on the reflection, the tree is unmoved. An epiphenomenon is all effect and no cause. If free choice exists, the present self has a genuine choice between (at least) two alternatives and creates a future that would not otherwise have existed. If we decide to pick up hitchhikers as an act of charity at a greater risk to our lives, the world will be different: more hitchhikers will get to their destinations quicker and some extra lives will be lost. Free choice breaks the flow of the world from past to future and thus the result is what philosophers call “metaphysical discontinuity”.

Jim Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? p. 265

On running videos backwards

Not so easy, of course, with DVDs. You can search backwards, of course, but it skips back in little still-frames, you don’t see the action run backwards as you could with a video cassette if you rewound it without stopping it first. We didn’t have a TV at our house, let alone a video, but we got to watch a movie on the last day of school one year (I think it might have been Herbie Goes Bananas) and they ran the tape backwards when it was finished and we six-year-olds just laughed and laughed, it was all so funny.
I’ve heard, though without any titles or names that would help me Google it, that someone once actually made an entire movie that way – acted everything backwards, and also filmed everything backwards, so that when it was played things happened forwards but everything was subtly weird. But what makes it weird? What were we all laughing at when I was six?

The Dawkins debate

(Originally published 20 December, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
Yes, I've been arguing on the internet again.  I guess I'll never learn. 
I try not to spend too much of my time debating other people's religion -- it's very hard to stop once you start.  In general these days I take a live-and-let-live approach: if you believe in God, that's fine, we can agree to disagree.  Provided, that is, that you aren't doing one of two things: (a) accusing others of wrongdoing on insufficient grounds, or (b) setting yourself up as a guru dispensing wisdom.  Either of those, I take as a licence to ask probing questions until the requisite evidence is forthcoming. 
And, of course, if you do want to talk about whether God exists and why I think he doesn't, then I'm ready and willing to reply.  This is more or less what happened recently, after someone I know posted a Facebook post that fit (b), above, pretty well. 

Induction Exhumed

(Originally published 23 March, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.)
Will the sun rise tomorrow?  Will electricity still work?  Will the next piece of bread I eat be any good as food?  Are there such things as laws of physics, or is the universe just winging it?  Since 1758 the answer to these philosophical questions has been "We can never know" -- as explained by David Hume, in what has come to be known as the Problem of Induction. 

If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have formerly eat, be presented to us, we make no scruple of repeating the experiment, and foresee, with certainty, like nourishment and support.  Now this is a process of the mind or thought, of which I would willingly know the foundation...  As to past Experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognizance: but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar; this is the main question on which I would insist.  The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers?  The consequence seems nowise necessary. 

Formally, we can express inductive reasoning as follows:

• Bread nourished me on Monday. 
• Bread nourished me on Tuesday. 
• Bread nourished me on Wednesday. 
• Bread nourished me on Thursday. 
• Bread nourished me on Friday. 
• Therefore, bread will nourish me tomorrow. 

The conclusion is not a necessary consequence of the premises.  Hence, inductive reasoning is invalid.
Since not only all of science, but every move we make in our daily lives, is based on inductive reasoning, this is a bit of a worry.  Naturally, a number of people have proposed solutions, or at least workarounds.  To date, none have been entirely satisfactory.  The best is a position called "probabilism", which basically replaces the conclusion to the above with

• Therefore, bread will probably nourish me tomorrow.

...which is not too bad, considering.  We have a very large historical statistical sample of incidences of people eating bread, and it correlates very strongly with nutrition; so that gives us pretty good confidence in there being a connection between the two.
Provided, that is, that we know there is some kind of underlying order which we just have to find.  If there isn't, then the probabilist is in the position of the superstitious gambler who has yet to figure out that "winning streaks" end randomly and without warning; that no matter how many times in a row a coin comes up heads, the chance of its coming up heads next time remains precisely 0.5.
I don't want to make grandiose claims... but I think I have solved this 253-year-old problem.  Not all on my lonesome, obviously; shoulders of giants, and all that.  There are three critical mental tools, all taken from much greater thinkers than myself, without which I couldn't have come near it.