Here’s an important breakthrough:
Boys do better on tests of technical aptitude (for example, mechanical aptitude tests) than girls. The same is true for adults. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes a theory explaining how the difference comes about: the root cause is that boys are just more interested in technical things, like taking apart a bike, than girls are.
More on this startling result here.
Here’s Juan Williams, formerly of NPR, responding to the storm of criticism that Herman Cain has faced from liberal black commentators.
Everybody’s wondering who was behind the airing of the sexual-harassment allegations against Mr. Cain. I’m inclined to doubt that Barack Obama’s organization is responsible, because it would serve their cause far better to wait until the general election, in the hope that Mr. Cain defeats Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. Mr. Cain’s team blamed Rick Perry, but has since backed off. Could it be the Romney campaign’s doing? He certainly has the most to gain.
We note with sadness the death, at 92, of Andy Rooney. People tended to poke fun at him a bit in his later years, but I always liked him for his gentle humor and his plain-spokenness.
Today a friend mailed me a clipping from last Saturday’s New York Times. It was an Op-Ed by Charles M. Blow, in which Mr. Blow presented a chart summarizing a report ranking the world’s nations on their level of “social justice”. (I’ve reproduced it below the fold.)
The columns in the chart include an “overall social justice rating”, which rolls together such measures of “social justice” as, apparently, “environmental policies”. Mostly, though, they measure “poverty”.
Taken at face value, the chart would suggest — as Mr. Blow intends his readers to conclude — that the U.S.A. is clearly on a lower moral plane than the nations near the top of the list.
However:
Note the nations at the top of the pile: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg…
What do they all have in common? They’re all northern European nations with low ethnic diversity and correspondingly high social cohesion.
Low poverty in Scandinavia? Someone once pointed that out to Milton Friedman, and he replied: “That’s interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either.”
Just saying.
Looking At The Left‘s El Marco pays a visit to Occupy Denver, with notebook and camera. Here.
Nice: for a limited time, free access to Scientific American archives from long ago.
Have a look.
Our friend The Stiletto has a nourishing little parable for us, here.
A while back I wrote a post examining why a society’s need to maintain public harmony in the face of increasing diversity necessarily comes at the expense of meaningful liberties. George Will takes up the same topic in his latest column, Conformity for diversity’s sake.
We read:
Illustrating an intellectual confusion common on campuses, Vanderbilt University says: To ensure “diversity of thought and opinion’ we require certain student groups, including five religious ones, to conform to the university’s policy that forbids the groups from protecting their characteristics that contribute to diversity.
Last year, after a Christian fraternity allegedly expelled a gay undergraduate because of his sexual practices, Vanderbilt redoubled its efforts to make the more than 300 student organizations comply with its “long-standing nondiscrimination policy.’ That policy, says a university official, does not allow the Christian Legal Society “to preclude someone from a leadership position based on religious belief.’ So an organization formed to express religious beliefs, including the belief that homosexual activity is biblically forbidden, is itself effectively forbidden.
…Here, however, is how progressivism limits freedom by abolishing the public-private distinction: First, a human right ”” to, say, engage in homosexual practices ”” is deemed so personal that government should have no jurisdiction over it. Next, this right breeds another right, to the support or approval of others. Finally, those who disapprove of it must be coerced.
…The question, at Vanderbilt and elsewhere, should not be whether a particular viewpoint is right but whether an expressive association has a right to espouse it. Unfortunately, in the name of tolerance, what is tolerable is being defined ever more narrowly.
Although Vanderbilt is a private institution, its policy is congruent with “progressive’ public policy, under which society shall be made to progress up from a multiplicity of viewpoints to a government-supervised harmony. Vanderbilt’s policy, formulated in the name of enlarging rights, is another skirmish in the progressives’ struggle to deny more and more social entities the right to deviate from government-promoted homogeneity of belief. Such compulsory conformity is, of course, enforced in the name of diversity.
The point: as social diversity increases, commonality decreases. In a Venn diagram plotting beliefs, customs, traditions, and social mores amongst a society’s various groups, as diversity increases there will be a smaller and smaller area in which all the circles overlap. In terms of public policy, enforcing “non-discrimination” maintaining “harmony” means that everything outside of that dwindling region must be excluded from the public square — requiring ever-increasing restrictions on liberty. We are reminded daily by our ruling elites that “our diversity is our strength”, but the truth — a truth that was simple common sense in a saner era — is that it comes at a heavy cost. What is intolerable to an ideology that sees Diversity as the greatest possible good is the simple, natural fact that discrimination — meaning, at its most basic, “we are this and not that” — is intrinsic to, and essential for, the very existence of culture itself.
Read the whole column here.
Over at NRO today, Andrew McCarthy and Robert Spencer debate the distinction between Islam and “Islamism”. Mr. Spencer argues that Islam is in its very essence “Islamist”: that its core doctrines, on any coherent and broadly acceptable interpretation, are normative and prescriptive not only spiritually and socially, but also legally and politically. Mr. McCarthy insists that although this is generally true, that there are many Muslims around the world who choose not to embrace political Islam means that the distinction remains an important one.
It’s a substantive exchange, and worth your time. While I agree in principle with Mr. McCarthy’s point — that there are certainly, particularly here in the West, many self-professed Muslims who are not politically “Islamist”, and therefore the term is a useful one — the fact remains that a supremacist interpretation of Islam flows coherently, naturally, and persuasively from Muslim scripture and tradition, has been the “mainstream” interpretation throughout history, and continues to be so now. Wherever Islam goes, there will be “Islamism”.
Read the McCarthy piece here, then Robert Spencer’s reply here.
Note: I realize, of course, that to some of you this exchange will just seem like two black-hearted xenophobes arguing about how many jihadis can dance on the head of a pin. Feel free not to comment.
Here’s one for you, language weenies: can you think of an irregular English verb that becomes a regular verb when applied to a particular subject? (I’ll post the answer if nobody gets it in a day or so.)
The Social Security system is now cash-negative, as reported today in the Washington Post. The shortfall will henceforward steepen sharply, as hordes of my own demographic cohort enter the twilight decades of unproductive geezerdom.
Rick Perry was bastinadoed in the press for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”, but it’s hard to see in what meaningful sense he was wrong to say so. Walter Russell Meade elaborates.
I don’t know what to say about this, so I’ll just pass it along without comment.
Here’s an item for those of you with an interest in martial arts: the last surviving master of the Sikh fighting system shastar vidya.
It’s sad to see these cultural relics dying out. Good to see, at least, that Llap-Goch is still alive and well.
Are you a bluestocking conservative appalled by the ill-bred riff-raff on the GOP ticket? Worried that those Tea Party rabble are steering dangerously close to the wind, with too much sail and too little keel? You’re not alone — the same concerns have darkened cocktail-hour chats from Amagansett to Edgartown, from Princeton to Pawling to Penobscot.
You’ll be glad to know, then, that a new champion has taken the field to bear the standard forward in 2012. The influential commentator Iowahawk has kindly offered his prominent website as the venue for our candidate’s formal announcement.
Read it here.
Strong stuff yesterday from Andy McCarthy on our doings in Libya. Excerpt:
[A] throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!’ battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator ”” to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.
The murder was facilitated by NATO forces operating under false pretenses: Claiming they were merely protecting civilians, they set about hunting down Qaddafi, only to help usher in a new era of Islamist governance. The bill for NATO’s services was willfully footed by the Obama administration ”” which had previously funded the Libyan regime on the oft-repeated grounds that Qaddafi was a valuable counterterrorism ally, but which then initiated a war against Qaddafi in the absence of any provocation or American national-security interests. NATO’s war of aggression is already inuring to the benefit of America’s Islamist enemies. What’s not to celebrate?
More here.
It would be interesting to get Mr. McCarthy in a room with James Taranto, who a couple of days ago wrote this:
Writing on Commentary’s website, Max Boot has a useful corrective to some of the distraught commentary you’ve probably been hearing of late about the rise of Shariah in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring:
“Saying a country’s legal system will be based on sharia law is about as descriptive as saying it will be based on the Ten Commandants [sic] or the teachings of Christ. Like Christianity, Judaism or any other religion, Islam is subject to countless interpretations. Sharia law has meant many different things in many different countries across the ages. Even Islamic fundamentalists are not all alike. Wahhabis rule in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, yet liquor is readily available in the latter but not the former.
Islamist parties do not necessarily take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs. In fact, the failure of all three of those Islamist regimes”“in Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran–to deliver economic or social progress has done much to discredit them in the Muslim world. That doesn’t mean most Muslims are ready to embrace a strictly secular regime; but then even in Europe, Christian Democratic parties are common, and in the United States many political candidates claim to take their marching orders from the Almighty.”It’s also worth noting that a regime can be “strictly secular” and also horrifically oppressive, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted earlier this month in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:
” “I ask [law students], “Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in our Constitution that makes us what we are?” And I guarantee you that the response I will get–and you will get this from almost any American . . . the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes . . . those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.
But then I tell them, “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy.” Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
Of course, it’s just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a “parchment guarantee.” “We are far from confident that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well. But if you start telling us that Libya is sure to be worse off than it was under Moammar Gadhafi, merely because he was “secular,” we will take you about as seriously as we took people who said the same about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
While I certainly share Mr. Taranto’s lack of confidence that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well, he misses the point here, I think. First, nobody is suggesting that secular regimes can’t be authoritarian. This is a non sequitur; of course they can. (I wonder also exactly what argument he seeks to advance by citing Justice Scalia’s remarks, which seem clearly to say that a nation’s freedom depends on the nature and temperament of its people — certainly true, but the precedent in the Maghreb, then, is not encouraging.) The point is that there is every reason to worry that a new Islamist regime in Libya will be a far worse problem for Western interests in the region (and, in particular, for Israel) than the continuation of a Qaddafi regime would have been. Mr. Qaddafi was despicable, and in his day fought actively against us, but in recent years he had been brought to heel, and had been given our assurances that as long as he behaved, he needn’t worry about U.S. interference.
As for Mr. Boot, the same applies: that he can buy a drink in Bahrain is no cause for optimism about the emerging Islamist powers in the area. They have replaced durable autocracies with whom we had stable working relationships, are tied to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and will almost certainly become hothouses for all manner of anti-Western, anti-Israeli perfidy. Already Libyan weapons are flooding toward Israel through Egypt (where their safe passage is possible once again thanks to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, also with U.S. support). It isn’t necessary for Islamist regimes to “take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs” to be antipathetic to our interests in the region and the world, though some of the new ones likely will. For them to take their inspiration from the core traditions and historical example of Islam itself, and from the prevailing sentiments of the regional ummah, will be amply sufficient.
People tell me I’m too pessimistic about all of this. I hope they’re right. We’ll soon see.
In Genesis 1:26, God promised Man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Here’s how it’s done.
Here’s an awkward item courtesy of my son Nick, who’s now a senior staffer over at Wish I Didn’t Know.
Don’t know about you, but I really hate it when this happens.
Over at the AEI blog, a new piece by Jim Pethokoukis calls into question some received wisdom about income inequality. Disappointingly, it carries a provocative title — 7 Reasons Why Obama Is Wrong About Income Inequality — but then, as one reader points out in the the comment thread, completely neglects to cite the particular claims of Mr. Obama’s that it purports to refute.
If our previous item wasn’t gloomy enough for you, here’s a dark assessment of the gathering storm beyond our borders, from the Center For Security Policy. A longish excerpt:
Muammar Gadhafi’s death last week prompted the Obama administration to trumpet the President’s competence as Commander-in-Chief and the superiority of his “small footprint,” “lead-from-behind” approach to waging war over the more traditional – and costly and messy – one pursued by George W. Bush. The bloom came off that false rose on Sunday when Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council, repeatedly declared his government’s fealty to shariah, Islam’s brutally repressive, totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine.
Among other things, Abdul-Jalil said shariah would be the “basic source” of all legislation. Translation: Forget about representative democracy. Under shariah, Allah makes the laws, not man.In short, the result of Mr. Obama’s $2 billion dollar expenditure to oust Gadhafi is a regime that will be led by jihadists, controls vast oil reserves and has inherited a very substantial arsenal (although some of it – including reportedly as many as 20,000 surface-to-air missiles – has “gone missing.”) This scarcely can be considered a victory for the United States and will probably prove a grave liability.
An Islamist party called Nahda seems likely to have captured the lion’s share of the votes cast in the first free election in Tunisia. While we are assured it is a “moderate” religious party, the same has long been said of Turkey’s governing AKP party. Unfortunately, we have lately seen the latter’s true colors as it has become ever-more-insistent at home on jettisoning the secular form of government handed down by Attaturk and acted ever-more-aggressively abroad. A similar transformation can be expected, later if not sooner, of any shariah-adherent political movement.
Meanwhile in Egypt, the agenda of the Islamists’ mother ship – the Muslim Brotherhood – is being adopted even before elections formally bring it to power. The interim military government has abetted efforts to punish and even kill the Coptic Christian minority. It has facilitated the arming of the Brotherhood’s franchise in Gaza, Hamas, and allowed the Sinai to become the launching pad for al Qaeda and others’ attacks on Israel.
Egypt’s transitional regime also helped broker the odious exchange of over 1,000 convicted terrorists held by Israel for a single soldier kidnapped and held hostage for five years by Hamas. Upon their release, even the convicts with Jewish blood on their hands received heroes’ welcomes even as they affirmed their desire to destroy Israel and called for the seizure of still more Israelis to spring their comrades still behind bars. This does not augur well for either the Jewish State or for our interests.The increasingly mercurial Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has announced that – despite the long-running, immensely costly and ongoing U.S. effort to protect his kleptocratic government – in a war between Pakistan and the United States, Afghanistan would side with Pakistan. The magnitude of this insulting repudiation of America is all the greater since Pakistan is widely seen as doing everything it can to reestablish the Taliban in Kabul.
And in Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has touted his success in thwarting Washington’s belated (and half-hearted) efforts to keep a significant number of U.S. forces in his country after the end of this year. Already, his coalition partner and fellow Iranian cats-paw, Muqtada al-Sadr, is boasting that he will also drive out the American contractor personnel who are, for the moment, expected to provide a measure of security after the military withdraws. In that case, we may well see the mullahs’ agents take over a U.S. embassy for the second time since 1979 – this one the newest, largest and most expensive in the world.
Alarmist? Over the top? Perhaps, but not by much, in my opinion. Read the whole thing here.
Streetlights are supposed to dispel gloom, but the new-and-improved ones described in this item are having the opposite effect on me, I’m afraid.
A great wave of tsunami debris is heading east from Japan, it seems. Here.
On Piers Morgan’s show last night, the pinguid propagandist Michael Moore insisted that that he is not a member of “the 1%”.
According to IRS data, in 2009 the top one percent of earners reported an adjusted gross income of $343,927 or more. Mr. Moore is worth an estimated $50 million.
Just in from ABC News: Obama warns us that if he loses in 2012 the US could be facing a “painful era of self-reliance”, and that we Americans would be “on our own”.
If that frightens more people than it elates, this nation is doomed.
Update: In this afternoon’s Best of the Web, james Taranto comments on the same item:
Oh no! Horror of horrors! Obama is the only thing standing between us and having to rely on ourselves! And do you know what they call people who rely on themselves?
Adults.
…Obama explicitly rejects the American ethos of self-reliance. He sees dependence on government not as an evil, if sometimes a necessary one, but as a goal to be pursued.
Among the snazzier features of the new iPhone is a voice-activated assistant called Siri. My daughter has one of the new phones and gave me a demo the other day, and I was duly impressed (although this is obviously a technology that is still in its infancy).
Apparently, though, Siri is having trouble adjusting to life in my ancestral homeland. Story here.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have persuaded the Universe to disclose another of its secrets: the origin of Jewish humor. Story here.
What’s that you say, boychik? You lack familiarity with the subject matter? Well relax, you’re mishpocheh, so for you, no charge. Look below the fold for a few free samples.
Startlingly, it appears that the new government in Libya will be an Islamist arrangement, based on Sharia law.
Vlad Tepes has a video clip, with translated subtitles, here.
OK, folks, I have what you’ve all been waiting for: the new Bohemian Rhapsody video from William Shatner — featuring John Wetton, no less.
Here’s an entertaining link: a collection of outstanding stop-motion animations.
In Afghanistan, enemy fighters routinely shoot at our MEDEVAC helicopters — which, as a matter of Defense Department policy, fly unarmed, in conformance with Geneva Convention guidelines. The war correspondent Michael Yon has written an open letter to the President and the DOD arguing that this policy is absurd, and must be changed.
Read it here.
It appears that the late Muammar Qaddafi was the richest person in the world, worth over $200 billion. Here.
Sam Harris has just published a follow-up post about the mystery of consciousness. He is frankly pessimistic that any conceivable advances in neuroscience — and he is a neuroscientist — can ever lead us to the bridge we seek between our ever-richer model of the physical world and an understanding of subjective awareness:
It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object””its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding’ can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible””and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be “like something’ to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.
For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions””and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.
While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something’ to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand””that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character””is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious doctrines, but it does offer a deep foundation (and motivation) for introspection. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly, or not discovered at all.
For all this gloom, though, about the possibility of our ever understanding the nature of consciousness, Dr. Harris does not seem to doubt that consciousness is indeed, somehow, the product of the living, physical brain. (It certainly isn’t as if he thinks human consciousness is a splinter of the mind of God, or something.)
If this is true, then — that in some way our conscious minds really do arise from, and depend for their existence upon, the workings of our material brains — then I have to ask once again, as I always do when this subject comes up: why should our inability, as yet, even to imagine what a true theory of consciousness might look like be taken as evidence that such a theory will never be forthcoming? If what appears to be happening really is what is actually happening — that a process in the physical world gives rise to a phenomenon we can all observe — why should we be convinced that we shall never be able to explain it? Nobody had the slightest inkling how to answer the riddles that tormented the physicists of the late 19th century until the radical — and, what is more to the point, breathtakingly, unimaginably counterintuitive — insights of Einstein and his contemporaries shattered and reconstructed the intellectual landscape. It was Einstein who, when all around him were baffled and losing hope, did exactly what Dr. Harris is calling for here: he imagined “what sort of idea could fit in the space provided”.
I understand the argument that in principle we could describe the working of the brain down to a fare-thee-well and still only have physical, not subjective, facts in hand. But so far, we are nowhere near even to understanding the correlates of consciousness in exhaustive microscopic, neurological, chemical, quantum-mechanical, or computational detail. From an engineering, heuristic perspective, that’s the least we need: to be able to identify with predictive certainty exactly what physical states, processes, and above all, changes correlate precisely with particular effects in consciousness. Is that enough? No, and that’s the point that all skeptics raise: you can have all that, and you still haven’t said what consciousness is, or why those correlations are what they are. But it will only be when you have reduced the facts, the correlations, down to that level of detail — when you can say this bit of matter entering exactly this state, or this pattern of activity across the whole brain, is both necessary and sufficient to cause this effect in consciousness — that you will have focused the problem to the point where some indefatigable genius, some Einstein of the mind, may be able to insert his crowbar.
Can I know this will ever happen? No, of course not. Perhaps I’m too optimistic. Our capacity to understand the world may limited in ways we can never even conceive of, and the answer to this riddle may simply be beyond our powers of imagination. But by the same token, nobody can possibly know that it won’t.
Muammar Qaddafi is dead. As we await the flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in Libya, let us pause to offer our condolences to senators Lieberman, Graham, and McCain.
Interesting item from New Scientist: the global corporate network that dominates the world’s economy.
Here.
The Texan pastor Robert Jeffress caused quite a ruction last week with his endorsement of Rick Perry for the GOP nod. Mr. Jeffress said that he thought all good Christians should prefer a Christian as their president, and that in his opinion this disqualified Mitt Romney — because the “cult” of Mormonism is something other than real Christianity.
These entertaining remarks seemed to bother just about everybody, as far as I can tell (except other evangelical Christians, of course.) Not me, though: I like a man who comes right out and says what he thinks, and I thought Pastor Jeffress was making perfectly good sense. Why wouldn’t a Christian like him want a Christian president? Why wouldn’t an evangelical Baptist think Mormonism is a bizarre perversion of Christianity? (It certainly seems that way to me, and I’m just a Hell-bound, godless heathen.)
Anyway, the Washington Post has lent Mr. Jeffress its pulpit, and he has responded with what I think is an excellent riposte. You can read it here.
Despite his strong position in the polls, Herman Cain may suddenly have a real problem on his hands. According to this item in the New York Times, his behavior has clearly strayed beyond what is approved and permitted for a member of his race. (Even beyond running as a Republican, I mean, which is of course bad enough.)
Just so you can avoid any unpleasantness, here’s a simple rule of thumb: if you find yourself disinclined to vote for four more years of Barack Obama, you’re probably a racist. And if you find yourself liking Herman Cain, ditto.
Remember: all crimes begin with a thought!
My friend and neighbor Danny Fisher started a website a few months ago called Wish I Didn’t Know. Here’s an item that really measures up.
The captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit was released today, after five years of imprisonment by Hamas. His ransom? It included the release of 1,027 prisoners, many of them terrorists.
Will some of the released prisoners commit further acts of terror, meaning that Shalit was ransomed with the blood of Jews yet to be murdered? Almost certainly so. Will the Israeli government’s willingness to pay this thousandfold ransom embolden Hamas to commit further abductions? Again, almost certainly so.
Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick makes these points, and more — including another term of Shalit’s ransom you may not have been aware of.
Here.
Consciousness not mysterious enough for you? Well, NASA’s got 600 other puzzles for you to chew on.
Here.
In his latest blog post, Sam Harris comments on the mystery of consciousness, and vaguely stakes out a position. One thing he does make quite clear is that he cannot accept what his friend Daniel Dennett seems to be saying, which is that consciousness is just some sort of illusion. In this he’s in good company, because neither can John Searle, David Chalmers, Bill Vallicella, or just about anybody else, including me. The very assertion seems to contradict itself, and even after having read a great deal of Dennett over the years I can’t get my head round what he’s trying to put across in this regard. I fully understand, and agree with, what Dennett says about our being fooled into thinking our conscious experience is far more continuous and plenary than it really is, but there remains the undeniable fact that we have conscious, subjective experiences, and I quite agree with Sam Harris that “Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.” I think Harris oversimplifies when he says “either the lights are on or they are not” — I would say that the truth involves something like a dimmer switch — but yes, at bottom there is a binary fact of the matter: an organism has some sort of subjective experience or it doesn’t.
The rest of the post is just a throwing-up of hands. After pausing to remark on the current disfavor of “mind-first’ ontologies fashionable in the mid-20th century in favor of reductionist materialism (with his apparent approval), he goes on to say that the currently prevailing view — that consciousness emerges from the activities of certainly types of matter, suitably configured — is “incomprehensible”:
To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the evolution of life doesn’t give us an inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.
I believe that this notion of emergence is incomprehensible””rather like a naive conception of the big bang….[T]he idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive””which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course””“consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.’ We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles’ and “2 plus 2 equals 7.’ But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.
Well, I don’t know what it means to Harris to “properly” conceive an idea, but it seems to me that the idea that consciousness emerges somehow from the activity of our brains (a distinction needs to be made here between what our biological brains do and mere “information processing”, I think) is surely conceivable, and not incoherently or incomprehensibly so, despite our ignorance as to how the trick is done. It may be that the answer will elude us forever; to fully understand it may even require intelligence, or ways of modeling the world, quite beyond what our modified ape brains are capable of. But the hypothesis itself is comprehensible enough, and given all the evidence that consciousness is supervenient upon the physical brain — and the fact that the only loci of consciousness that we know to exist are our own supremely complex brains, which came into existence through a gradual process of evolution from inanimate matter — I don’t think it’s about to go away anytime soon.
But I will admit: it’s a poser.
You can read Harris’s post here.
Here’s a real treat: the great Gary Brooker at the peak of his powers, in this live performance of A Salty Dog from 1977.
It’s been a long busy day, with no time for writing. I did run across this little item, though, just now: a new approach to sorting out the various authors of the Bible.
As I write, my friend G. Orcalimbo Jones at WOMR is playing Side 2 of Zappa’s One Size Fits All. What an incredible record.
I was looking at this website’s administrative “dashboard” yesterday, and noticed that I’ve accumulated 438 entries in the “Drafts” folder. I suppose it’s not uncommon for daily bloggers to build up a back-log in there; we’re always on the lookout for something to write about, and tend to become packrats. Whenever I get the germ of an idea for a post, or notice something interesting online, if I’m near a computer I’ll pop open WordPress and stash it away in a draft.
438 entries is a lot, though, and I think it’s time to do a little tidying up — so you might see some rather out-of-date items popping up here for a while as I go through them all, post what’s worth posting, and throw out the rest (with the exception, of course, of those posts for which the world simply is not yet ready).
Here, then, is an item from 2009 that somehow never made it to the big time: the Lung Flute.
We note, belatedly, the death of the great Scottish fingerstyle guitarist Bert Jansch, who exerted a formative influence on a great many better-known musicians. One in particular was Jimmy Page; I think you’ll hear the connection in this video clip. Another was Paul Simon; readers of a certain age may recognize this Jansch song from long ago.
Here’s a short video from Ray Kurzweil, in which he outlines his view of our progress thorough six “epochs” of the evolution of intelligence. I’m inclined to think he’s overlooking or ignoring some serious possible impediments to this progression, going forward (not to mention some unwelcome possible outcomes), but this is of course just a very brief clip.
I’m working a long day today, so for now, just a few links:
A fold in the brain seems to have something to do with distinguishing reality from imagination.
A collection of “coffins” — math problems with relatively simple solutions that are hellishly difficult to find — used by Soviet schools to keep out Jews.
22 miles straight up in 90 seconds.
An interesting item about Zucotti Park.
A detailed examination of blackboards in porn.
Oh, and a plug for yours truly at 8:00.
Just ran across this clip, and enjoyed it too much not to post it here: Richard Thompson playing his classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightning.
What a voice. What a song. Enjoy.