From my friend Jess Kaplan comes a link to the text of a 1966 speech by Robert Oppenheimer about Albert Einstein, whom Oppenheimer of course knew for decades. It is a fascinating glimpse into the personality of the great man, and readers are encouraged to take a look. (It is also far less controversial and provocative than recent links provided herein.)
I’ve sparked more than a few arguments in these pages over the last couple of years by my support — primarily on moral grounds — for the ouster of Saddam, and by taking very seriously the threat to the West presented by Islamic extremism. While I’m not the right-wing moonbat that some folks seem to think I am (one blogger called me a “Republican, war-loving Fela fan”, when the truth is I am neither war-loving nor Republican, though the Fela part is correct), I do hold several views that are indeed more common on the Right than on the Left. Among them are the view that the threat posed by radical Islam is very real, and very grave, the view that Western civilization is a noble achievement and worth preserving, the (apparently highly controversial) view that the United States is not responsible for all the world’s ills, the view that the US is both historically and morally justified in using its strength and influence to promote its core values of freedom and democracy, and the belief, buttressed in particular by examining the history of the twentieth century, that self-flagellating placation and appeasement of ruthless opponents is a prescription not for harmony, but for disaster.
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The New York Public Library recently hosted a debate between The Reverend Al Sharpton and the journalist, author and gadfly Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, in case you hadn’t heard, has recently mounted the increasingly crowded atheist soapbox — joining, most prominently, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett — with his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If nothing else, the title, at least, is bound to take a little heat off Dawkins, whose title for his own salvo, The God Delusion, seems by comparison an attempt at conciliation and bridge-building.
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There’ll be nothing in this space today about dualism, Darwin, Iraq, religion, or any of the rest of the tedium that usually plumps up these pages. No, today was a day to set all that dull and dreary business aside, because the Incredible Casuals were kicking off their 27th season at the legendary Wellfleet Beachcomber.
Nobody sounds quite like these guys — as their Wikipedia entry explains, they “meld a passion for 60’s garage rock and surf music, pop hooks, brilliant lyrics and beach life into their own completely distinctive sound.” And there is no better place to see them than the ‘Coma: an old Cape Cod lifesaving station, sitting high atop a sandy cliff, this raucous bar overlooks Cahoon Hollow Beach and the mighty blue Atlantic from one of the easternmost points in the USA (which is why Guglielmo Marconi chose Wellfleet for the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission, back in 1903).
Anyway, the Casuals — Chandler Travis, Johnny Spampinato, Rikki Bates, and Aaron Spade — tore the place up, as expected. There’s more to life than consciousness.
We welcome two new additions to the waka waka waka sidebar tonight. The first, called Mixotrophy, is a brand new blog by reader and commenter Andrew Staroscik, a bacteriologist and oceanographer. The other, recommended by Andrew, is the blog Sandwalk, which is the website of one Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto.
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I’ve had a long drive, at the end of a long day, to wrap up a long week. So for tonight I’m just going to leave you with a wonderful short story by the great Isaac Asimov — an old favorite that I just found online. It’s called The Last Question, and it’s a gem. Enjoy.
Here’s an addendum to our previous post (which was in turn a comment upon a recent post, at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website, about atheism and morality).
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Dr. William Vallicella, in a recent post, considers the following quote from the atheist author Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 38-39):
If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral.
Dr. V., no fan of the recent crop of books promoting atheism, takes issue with Harris’s formulation. Let’s have a look.
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A few days ago we directed waka waka waka readers to a Wall Street Journal piece by Bernard Lewis, in which he explained the psychological boost and doctrinal validation that a US abandonment of Iraq would give to our jihadist foes. Now that article is followed by a politically brave item by the Democrat Bob Kerrey, in which he makes several related points.
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Say what you like about New York City, there’s always something going on. At lunchtime today I walked into Grand Central Station, which is only a hundred yards or so from my office, just as some of the world’s top “competitive eaters” were about to begin a buffalo-wing smackdown. My sense of journalistic duty awakened, I forced myself to watch, with the same mix of horror and fascination that grips us as we pass a gruesome pileup on the highway.
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Today was a long day down at the kung-fu school: junior testing all morning — which means that we instructors sit and watch some very nervous beginners wobble and fidget their way through the Gung Ji Fook Fu Kuen and Fu Hok Cern Ying forms — followed at one p.m. by a five-and-a-half hour Dim Mak seminar given by Master Yee.
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In the wake of the tainted-pet-food story, folks are starting to take a closer look at what sorts of filth, exactly, the Chinese have been dumping on our markets. The story isn’t pretty: in fact, it’s revolting. You can read it here.
Last Wednesday The Wall Street Journal featured an article by Bernard Lewis, perhaps America’s foremost scholar of Islamic history and society. The article is entitled Was Osama Right?, and carries the following subheading:
Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won’t change their view.
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There was a provocative item in yesterday’s Times. It concerned one Andrew Feldmar, a psychotherapist from Vancouver, and what happened when he tried to enter the US to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport.
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There’s a quirky little item in the science news today: some researchers in Germany have been studying fruit flies, and have observed that their behavior seems surprisingly flexible.
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We note that Jerry Falwell, the prominent religious extremist, sanctimonious prig, and bigot, has died. This is the man who, on September 13th, 2001, said:
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”
Civility discourages me from further comment.
Toodle-oo, Jerry. Don’t let the door hit ya where the dog shoulda bit ya.
As long as I’m shirking serious duties here today, I offer another amusing item, courtesy of my son Nick.
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Here in Gotham, where we have the best of everything, we flatter ourselves that our great city is America’s premier culinary destination. Not so; we have been eclipsed, for the moment at least, by Elderon, Wisconsin (pop. 189), home of the Testicle Festival.
Learn more here.
Making good once again on my offer of weightless froth, here, with a hat tip to Jon Mandell, is a preposterous little item, involving a police officer who confiscated some marijuana, baked it into brownies, and shared them with his wife. Hilarity ensues.
Q: Should one attempt to write a post at the end of a long and active day, when one has just got home, at 11:15 p.m., from taking one’s elderly mother-in-law to a lavish and bibulous birthday dinner at a delightful Manhattan restaurant?
A: No.
One of the advantages of being a well-connected Internet sort is that people are constantly sending me interesting tidbits. From my friend Nick, who also provided yesterday’s Polka Floyd item, is one I hadn’t run across before (don’t know how I missed it, as it is right in amongst all the sorts of things I am always nosing about in).
It’s called the “simulation argument”, and it makes the case that there is a very good chance that we are living inside a computer program. This is not the same as the Matrix, exactly, because that is a trick being played on existing physical brains, whereas the claim here is that we may be nothing more than conscious programs running on a vast computer. It’s a fairly simple argument. We are given three propositions, and the author (Nick Bostrom, of Oxford University) asserts that at least one of them ought to be true. Here they are, as given in the abstract of the paper in which the argument was originally presented:
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Well, I promised you all some froth, and here it is. Tonight we have, courtesy of my childhood friend Nick Nicholes, who now lives in a scenic vale in remotest Montana, a polka band that does Pink Floyd covers, and pretty well too. No quadrophonic mixes, though; you’ll just have to use your imagination.
Here’s an interesting item. It seems that neuroscientists are getting around to a more detailed study of attention, a topic that, as I’ve previously mentioned, has been known to be central for inner work in meditative traditions for a long, long, time. (It is also a sort of universal human currency, as I argue here.)
The researchers studied subject trained in Vipassana meditation, and found that the capacity for attention is not fixed, but can be increased with practice. This is not news, of course, to students of Eastern disciplines; in my own schooling in such matters, effort directed toward the control of the attention was always the most important part of the work.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Western science is taking up a rigorous examination of these phenomena. Attention is closely linked to consciousness, and an empirical examination of how the brain organizes itself to direct our attention is likely to be a useful angle on the deeper problem of what consciousness is, and how the brain creates it.
I’ve finally had a chance to get back to considering Titus Rivas’s paper, in which he and Hein van Dongen argue that the mind-brain model known as epiphenomenalism — which says that subjective mental phenomena are indeed ontologically real, that they are “irreducible” to physical processes, and that they exert no causal influence on the physical world — is false. In a previous post I agreed that their principal objection, which has to do with how the brain might ever come to express a belief in subjective mental phenomena in the first place if epiphenomenalism were true, is a good one. But if we are to discard epiphenomenalism, what alternatives are we left with? Rivas and van Dongen see only two alternatives: eliminative materialism and interactionist dualism — but I think they narrow the field unnecessarily. I’d like to go over the paper in some detail, and see where there might be implicit assumptions that could be leading us astray — a job that will require several posts (and which, given my lack of free time at the moment, may unfortunately be a slow go). Readers can find the original here.
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We are back home, and this week, with a slightly freer evening schedule, might offer some quiet time for serious study and comment, I hope. In addition to other pending items, I have just read, finally, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and ought to say a thing or two about it here.
I see that the estimable Deogolwulf is in much the same pinch that I am: his employer cheekily presumes to insist that in exchange for his daily crust, D. is expected to devote considerable time and mental resources to various duties and tasks. Such an expenditure is dear indeed, for those of us who are of a certain age; I’ve observed with depressing regularity that the result, at day’s end, is a marked depletion of one’s cognitive puissance, exhortatory fire, and forensic stamina; or, as D. puts it in this recent post:
Tiredness and a state of tedium have ensued, and hence reading, writing, posting, and even that small degree of thinking in which I occasionally dabble, have been ”” and will remain ”” curtailed.
This is the problem exactly, and it is not going away anytime soon. But this weekend was a good little rest, and I do think I might get at some of waka waka waka‘s backlog this week. And if not, I promise, at the very least, a continued supply of weightless froth and forgettable rubbish, all provided entirely free of charge.
Today was, like yesterday, a day to set aside introspection, brooding and contemplation; a day to live life rather than examine it.
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We are back in Wellfleet today (having driven up from Gotham late last night), and it would be hard to imagine more clement surroundings. It is still too early in the season for there to be many people here on the outer Cape, and for those who had the good sense to be here, today was about as good as it gets: warm May sunshine, the air fresh and clear, the trees and flowers blooming, and the sky and water complementing one another in gorgeous shades of limpid blue. I had planned to catch up on some writing, but it was just too lovely outside; we spent the day moseying from pond to beach to wooded lane, and the effect was restorative indeed. So rather than that critical examination of Titus Rivas’s paper that I have been too long in preparing, or some thoughts about Kevin Kim’s Water From A Skull, or Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion — both of which I have been reading, and plan to comment on in these pages — all I have to share with you this evening is a fuzzy cell-phone snapshot of Long Pond, taken at about two this afternoon as Nina and I enjoyed a picnic lunch beside its crystal-clear waters. It will have to do.
We’re traveling again tonight, so for now I’ll just offer readers an uplifting news item, in which we are told that South American doctors can immediately spot male patients who have been bitten by the Brazilian wandering spider. Apparently, their symptom precedes them.
Learn more here.
P.S. We wish to reassure you that this post’s proximity to the duck story a couple of days ago is mere coincidence, and is in no way indicative of any refocusing of waka waka waka‘s editorial priorities.
With a tip of the waka waka waka tam o’shanter to our old friend Jess Kaplan, we have further evidence of the beneficial effect of religion upon the world.
Today the spotlight is on one Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who in a sermon on Friday offered an inspiring example of faith-based tolerance and love. Here’s an excerpt:
‘You will be victorious’ on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] ‘you will be victorious,’ but only ‘if you are believers.’ Allah willing, ‘you will be victorious,’ while America and Israel will be annihilated. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah…
…Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.”
Nothing to be concerned about here; I don’t know what that horrid Richard Dawkins, and his equally vicious pals Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, could possibly be talking about. Aren’t they awful? So full of themselves. And they’re just so darn pushy…
We will return to weightier matters as soon as time permits, but meanwhile:
You may think you know plenty about duck phalluses, but you have nothing on one Dr. Patricia Brennan, who has made the study of the anatine willy her life’s work. Most male birds, in fact, are entirely ajohnsonal, but ducks buck this trend with a most unusual and creative arrangement: not only is theirs a long, spiraling affair, but they lose it in the fall and grow a new one in the spring. The female has a correspondingly remarkable structure, of opposite phase, and the whole business seems to be the result of an interesting evolutionary struggle. Learn more here.
April 30, 2007 – 10:34 pm
We’re back in Gotham, and will be resuming normal operations shortly. We were away on a whirlwind trip to the Midwest for the happiest of reasons: the graduation, with honors, of our daughter ChloÁ« from the University of Michigan.
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April 27, 2007 – 11:56 am
With a tip of the hat to Dennis Mangan, here are some striking public-service posters from France, warning of the dangers of AIDS. Shocking, perhaps, to some, so caveat observator.
As mentioned below, waka waka waka will be off the air until the weekend is over. We’ll be on the road, and I won’t have a computer along, which is, frankly, quite a pleasant prospect.
April 27, 2007 – 12:39 am
It’s been a very busy week indeed, and there has been scant time for writing, or for that matter, even thinking, it seems. I’ve had not a moment to join (for which I apologize) Titus Rivas and Bob Koepp in the excellent discussion that followed this post, and I’ve also had no time to prepare the thoughtful response that I would like to make to some of the arguments that Titus has put forward in this article. Little snippets and lightweight froth have been all I’ve managed, and it won’t be until next week that things quiet down a bit, as we are traveling this weekend, and I expect to be fully occupied with auspicious events in the real world until Monday evening at the earliest. We’ll get back down to business around here after that.
April 24, 2007 – 10:35 pm
There’s lots of interesting news these days from really faraway places; if you’re interested in such things, you should subscribe to two of the newsletters I get: one published by NASA, and the other from Spaceweather.com.
There are three stories I’ll mention tonight.
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April 23, 2007 – 11:06 pm
The noted computer scientist David Gelernter has been working on what he believes will replace the World Wide Web. He calls it the Worldbeam. Learn more here.
In remarking on a recent post, commenter Titus Rivas offered a link to a paper he and Hein van Dongen wrote in 2001, in which they launch an assault on the mind-body model known as epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism is the view that the subjective, conscious mind is a causally impotent byproduct of the physical activity of the brain — that it only witnesses our cognitive processes, without having the ability to influence them in any way.
I’ll admit that I have found epiphenomenalism attractive myself; it squares nicely with, to pick one example, the experimental results of Benjamin Libet, which seem to show that we act on our decisions before we are conscious of them. But it has its difficulties, too, and I think Rivas and van Dongen have mounted a successful refutation, which I will summarize here, of this philosophical position. It’s also worth mentioning that they stand in agreement on the insupportability of epiphenomenalism with philosopher Daniel Dennett ((see Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp 398-405)), and when you have two committed dualists in firm agreement with Dennett that a particular mind-brain model doesn’t work, you have good reason to be skeptical of it.
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Readers are encouraged to have a look at this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kim, in which he examines freedom and responsibility in the wake of the Virginia massacre.
An item in today’s Times reports a new and important result from a major European research facility. After years of painstaking investigation, the Vatican has announced that Limbo, an area where the souls of unbaptized babies and of the multitudes who lived before the time of Christ were previously understood to dwell — not in communion with God, but enjoying “eternal happiness” nevertheless — has been found not to exist. This significant discovery has presumably been announced only after extensive peer review.
Further research may be necessary to determine the status of the individuals thereby displaced; as of now, the provisional theory consists of a “prayerful hope that they reach Heaven”. Heaven itself, of course, is still presumed to exist, barring experimental disconfirmation, occupying as it does a central position in what might be termed the “Standard Model”.
April 20, 2007 – 10:43 pm
Peas as Large as Beets! Hot and Cold Air from Spigots!
…I haven’t the time this evening to disgorge any of the usual tendentious bloviation, so I thought I’d share with you a breezy little item I stumbled upon this morning, when I should have been working.
Man Will See Around the World! No Foods Will Be Exposed!!
These are just a few of the predictions made in 1900 by the domestic sybils of the Ladies’ Home Journal about what the world of 2000 would be like.
Store Purchases by Tube! Vegetables Grown by Electricity!!!
They actually did a fair job of it; you can judge for yourself here.
April 19, 2007 – 11:55 pm
There is quite a ruction, as we might expect, over the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding a Federal law barring “partial birth” abortions, and even the justices of the Supreme Court seem quite angrily divided. This is law at its most difficult, in which separating the rights and interests of the parties involved — in fact, even defining how many interested parties there are — depends not on simple, practical considerations, but upon metaphysical intuitions for which there is no demonstrably correct answer, and about which people’s beliefs vary diametrically.
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In the wake of the horror at Virginia Tech, folks around the world, and here at home, are expressing a predictable variety of responses. The Left is calling for stricter gun control, the Right for stricter immigration, the Europeans are criticizing our violent culture, and all sorts of people are focusing on the Asian-ness, or more specifically the Korean-ness, of the shooter. (For the Korean viewpoint, I recommend that readers pay Kevin Kim a visit.) President Bush, with breathtaking clumsiness and insensitivity, prefaced his first remarks to the nation with an oafish assertion about his position on gun ownership. News anchors are cautioning us against racist outbursts; there will undoubtedly be some. (The Wall Street Journal today carried a level-headed editorial that readers may find of interest.)
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A few days ago the New York Times offered a revealing glimpse of the august body of solons by whose sage and impartial judgment New Jersey law is made.
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April 16, 2007 – 11:58 pm
We’re back in Gotham, delayed for a day by the immense storm that has battered the Eastern Seaboard. We sat out the tempest in Wellfleet, Massachussetts, which is situated on a narrow spit of land twenty-five miles out to sea, and which took quite a pounding, as you might imagine.
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Back in early March I called readers’ attention to Colony Collapse Disorder, which is the name given to an alarming development: bees abandoning their hives, never to be found. This ominous phenomenon, which presents a major threat to our food supply, is already a serious problem — here on the East Coast, it is estimated that 70% of commercial bee colonies are already depopulated. So far there has been no explanation, but now my friend Jess Kaplan has sent me a news item announcing that a European researcher, one Joachim Kuhn of Landau University, has identified a possible culprit: cellular phones. The idea is that the electromagnetic signals given off by mobile phones are interfering with the bees’ navigational systems, and that the bees, unable to find their way home, simply wander off into the wild, there to die alone.
It will be interesting to see how the Colony Collapse Working Group responds to this suggestion.
This is an extremely serious problem; Albert Einstein (who was, admittedly, not a trained agronomist) is quoted in the story as having said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”. Well, they are indeed disappearing, and fast.
Read the article here.
April 13, 2007 – 12:05 pm
Today is Friday the 13th, an occasion that many folks regard with a wary eye.
Not me, though: as it happens, I was born on a Friday the 13th, 51 years ago today. So whenever they pop up I always think of them as auspicious. Of course, as a man of science, I realize that’s just superstitious nonsense, but there it is anyway. It happens to the best of us.
There’s a story about the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr: apparently he was greeting some visitors at his country house, and one of them was surprised to see a horseshoe hanging over the doorway. When asked what it was doing there, Bohr said that he had heard it brings good luck.
“But professor! Surely you don’t believe in such things!”
“Of course not,” said Bohr. “But they say it works even if you don’t believe in it!”
We’ll be on the road today, and Internet access will be spotty over the weekend, so content may be thin over the next couple of days.
April 13, 2007 – 10:38 am
Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus. Imus Imus Imus. Imus Imus Imus, Imus, Imus Imus Imus Imus Imus!
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If you’ve ever set up a wireless home network using Windows machines, you know what a vexatious task it can be. David Pogue, tech reporter for the New York Times, shares his personal adventure here. It appears there is room for improvement.
April 12, 2007 – 12:24 am
My friend Duncan Werner has just alerted me to the sad news that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Duncan’s note contained the following passage from Cat’s Cradle, which seems as apt as anything I might say:
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
Today’s Wall Street Journal features an informative piece by Mideast scholar Fouad Ajami on the changing balance of power in Iraq. An excerpt:
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April 10, 2007 – 11:13 pm
If you follow such things, you might be interested to read about an effort by a University of Washington researcher to demonstrate what is known as “quantum retrocausality” – in other words, backwards causation.
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