True Meaning

Posted on 2013-05-20 by TJ

A friend recently used the acronym “SMH” and I had no clue what it meant, so I looked it up via one of those search engine thingies all the cool kids are talking about. It linked me to an entry in the Urban Dictionary that was constituted by an argument between very, very thoughtful and intelligent people insisting that the “true meaning” of the acronym was variously “shake my head”, “so much hate”, “slap my head”, “suck my head”, and so on.

I used to care a great deal about the “true meaning” of words, but I got better.

It goes like this.

Back in the days before the World Wide Web we had a thing called “The Internet” which supported something called “USENet” via the “Network News Transport Protocol”. This allowed strangers from around the world–or in some cases from across campus–to argue vociferously about a wide array of topics, some of which actually mattered. The only things USENet was lacking was 1) scalability and 2) pictures of cats (although cats did figure in the longest-running cross-newsgroup discussion ever, regarding what happens if you strap a piece of toast, butter-side-up, to a cat, and drop them–since toast always lands butter-side-down and cats always land on their feet… what happens?)

The lack of scalability is generally fingered as the cause for USENet’s ultimate demise in the wake of the Endless September in 1995, I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t the absence of cats that didn’t do it in.

It was a curious experience while it lasted, and it was enlightening for the few of us who were in the right frame of mind. So far as I know, I am the only person who has ever changed his mind about anything as a result of a discussion on USENet, but that doesn’t preclude it happening others.

One of the things I learned is that people care passionately about the “true meaning” of words. I used to get into arguments about this. What does “freedom” really mean? Or “democracy”? Or “love”? It turns out people have different ideas about these and many other far more mundane concepts, and are more than willing to defend their particular preferred meanings quite… vigorously.

I eventually adopted a tactic of yielding the word to the other party, side-stepping the semantic issue entirely. I would say things like this, “Granted that we can use ‘freedom’ (or ‘love’, or ‘democracy’ or whatever) to mean just what you want it to mean. But there is this other concept, the one that I’ve been using the word ‘freedom’ (etc) for, and I want to talk about that concept. I don’t care what word we use for it. We can call it ‘bleen’ for all I care. But there is a concept there, and that’s what I want to talk about, not the ‘true meaning’ of ‘freedom’ (etc)”

The thing that I found when I did this is that my interlocutor almost always dropped the discussion. They didn’t care about the concept, only the word. So long as the arbitrary string of letters was “owned” by their “true meaning”, they were happy.

This “defensive epistemology” is a curious phenomenon. Who really cares what a word or acronym “really means”? They are symbols of convenience, nothing more. If someone wants to use a word to mean something bizarre, like “socialism” for “moderately progressive”, let them, in the context of discussions with them. Tell them that: “OK, you want to use the word ‘socialism’ to mean ‘moderate reformist tendencies within a system of corporate oligarchy’. Now, that’s not what most people use the word ‘socialism’ to mean, but I don’t care about that. I care about the bi-partisan use of warrentless wiretaps (which are often on wireless connections, so should be called ‘warrentless wirelesstaps’) and armed drones to kill people who someone in power thinks might be a terrorist suspect.”

This won’t likely lead to a more productive discussion, because there’s a limit to what you can discuss with someone who is completely addled by ideology, but you’ll likely find that if you do this, the individual in question will lose interest and wander away to annoy some less enlightened individual.

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Property, People, Parties

Posted on 2013-05-07 by TJ

Before the Chartists, Westminster-style democracies had parliaments that unequivocally represented property. There were property qualifications for voters, much less members. The upper house represented the aristocracy, which was different from mere wealth. This is a concept Canadians may have some difficulty grasping–I know I do. In England to this day there are people who are by constitutional fiat “more important” than almost everyone else. Weird, eh?

The Chartists were a populist movement whose aims were universal (male) suffrage, secret ballots, payment of MPs and redistribution to ensure more-or-less equally sized electoral districts or ridings. They were active in the 1840s as part of a broader movement toward parliamentary reform, and while they might not have seemed successful to the people of the time, a generation later their reforms were more-or-less taken for granted. Parliament represented the people, not property.

At the same time this was happening, parties were formalizing their existence within Westminster-style democracies. In Canada, particularly at the provincial level, this was a rather late development, with some provinces only adopting partisan systems well after they joined Confederation.

Parties are a political convenience, and as such should be viewed with the same suspicion that a sensible person views any convenience. We are a convenience-seeking species, and many of our worst failings as a species, from fast food to “reality” television, are directly consequent upon that.

The problem with parties is that, like any organization that is made of humans, it has a strong tendency to pursue the interests of the people who constitute it, in direct contradiction to the post-Charist principles of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy.

This is a problem.

Parties have become so pervasive and have so effectively parasitized our democratic systems that there are now entire nations whose governments are not based on representing people but purely on representing parties. Systems of this kind, which are typically given the misnomer “proportional representation” but which are more accurately described as “partisan representation” do not deliver notably good government, as small and tightly organized bizarre-interest groups have given disproportionate power.

Westminster-style democracy, thankfully, is not and cannot be of this kind, and while there is an argument to be made for supplying election officials with more information via ranked ballots, that is perfectly compatible representing people, not parties.

The overwhelming question for 21st century democracy in the Anglosphere is: how do we take back Parliament from the parties? There is a dense thicket of procedure and habit and even law that has grown up around the existence of partisan representation in Parliament, and it will take time and effort to cut through that.

The first thing is to force every prospective member of any parliament at any level of government to answer a single question when they stand for election: “Why should the members of this riding believe that you are going to represent their interests in parliament, rather than the interest of the private political organization to which you belong?”

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Plumper Cove

Posted on 2013-04-28 by TJ

Plumper Cove is a BC marine park on Keats Island, which is in the mouth of Howe Sound between Bowen Island and Gibsons.

The weather this April has been unseasonably cold and wet, but the weather forecast was good for Wednesday/Thursday of this week, so I took a couple of days vacation and Carrie and I took the boat up that way. This is the first time I’ve had Carrie out on an overnight trip, and while she was at one point wearing every single article of clothing she brought with her–including a pair of sweat-pants wrapped stylishly around her head as an extra scarf–she survived the cold. The wind wasn’t up to much, although we did get to sail part way into Howe Sound on the late-afternoon inflow winds.

The park itself is much more “improved” than Halkett Bay, where I went in March. There are a about a dozen campsites ashore, and numerous pit toilets, and a water pump (the handle wasn’t mounted, so I’m guessing the park is still technically closed.) There is a wharf and a number of mooring buoys in a well-sheltered bay.

Gulf Winds at anchor

Gulf Winds at anchor

Lessons learned: keep the line to the mooring buoy short, or at slack tide there will be a tendency for the boat and buoy to drift together (Bernoulli’s Principle reduces the pressure between boat and buoy if there is any wind at all, which draws them close in the absence of other forces) and results in things that go “clunk” in the night.

There was an old sailboat wrecked near the entrance of the bay that I scrambled out to and got some pictures of (and salvaged a hose-clamp off of, ’cause hey, free hose clamp!)

Dead boat

Dead boat

We saw a couple of schools of porpoises, a seal or three, more surf scoters (a kind of duck) than you can shake a stick at, and the usual cormorants, gulls, etc. I’m also starting to build up some local knowledge of this area,
which is nice: charts and guidebooks can only take you so far.

The night was cool, but quite lovely, and the Moon rising over Keats Island very beautiful.

Moonrise over Keats Island

Moonrise over Keats Island

It was an excellent trip for both of us, and hopefully the first of many, especially as spring progresses and we get more seasonal weather!

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More Things That Are Not Arguments

Posted on 2013-04-22 by TJ

I recently had some interactions with anti-gun-control people (there is a lot of that about) in which one of them offered the following statement (which is not an argument): “if someone is really intent on hurting someone, even if they don’t have a gun they’ll find some other weapon or way of doing harm.”

Again: this is not an argument. It is a hypothetical tautology: “IF x THEN x”. “IF (someone wants to do damage ‘enough’[to overcome all obstacles]) THEN (they will do damage[regardless of any obstacles]).” Who could argue with that? No one, obviously, because unlike substantive tautologies this is a completely vacuous statement that only an idiot would offer as an argument for anything because it is true by definition given that the bizarre hypothetical happens to be true. If there was some invincible supervillian out there they’d be invincible, but so what? How exactly is that an argument against gun control?

Consider the equally valid claim, “IF (someone wants to defend themselves ‘enough’[to overcome all attacks] THEN (they will defend themselves[against all attacks])”.

Anyone who accepts the first hypothetical tautology as an argument must equally accept the second, which directly contradicts it.

Neither statement contains any facts, nor implies any ontological commitments, so they can’t be arguments for anything.

Arguments are based on facts (which are statements about the moments of statistical distributions, like the mean, the variance, the skewness, etc) or probabilities, and result in an increased plausibility for some propositions over others in the best Bayesian fashion.

Here is a basis for argument: “People with guns kill more people than people without guns.” This is a statement of fact, and I highly recommend it as a reply to anyone who says, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (which is an sophomoronic attempt at redefinition of commonly understood terms and uses, and as such amounts to an admission that the person uttering it has no actual argument for their position.)

Posted in epistemology, probability, psychology, religion, science | Leave a comment

Halket Bay

Posted on 2013-04-14 by TJ

Halket Bay is the eastern-most bay on Gambier Island, just past Bowen Island in the mouth of Howe Sound. There’s a marine park in that wraps around much of the bay, interrupted by some private land on the eastern shore.

I took “Gulf Winds” up last weekend for an overnight trip, and it was lovely. Good Friday was calm and I motored most of the way, spending some of the time watching the starters in the Southern Straits Classic drift out of Burrard Inlet on the tide. A friend who crewed in the race told me they did finish, although it took 24 hours rather than the projected 16.

On the way up I passed the Coast Guard hovercraft servicing a light. It’s the first time I’ve seen it not underway, and I didn’t realize how little freeboard it has when the skirt is collapsed. It rides a metre or two above the water on a rubber skirt when underway.

Coast Guard Hovercraft

Coast Guard Hovercraft

Anchoring is still an art I am learning. “Gulf Winds” has an all-chain rode, which means there is less feedback from the anchor as it goes down and hits bottom. You’ve got to pay more attention to how much chain is going out, as it’s going to hang straight down regardless. The nice feature of the boat is that the winch has controls aft, so dropping anchor single-handed is trivial. Even given that, I managed to anchor a little shallow on my first attempt, and moved out a bit immediately. Always a tad embarrassing with other boats in the area, but the only really stupid thing you can do it fail to correct a problem for fear of looking foolish.

The day was cool but the anchorage sheltered, and I dropped hook close to the eastern shore and so got the evening sun. It was lovely:

Halket Bay, looking south.

Halket Bay, looking south.

Barbarqued steak for dinner and an early night were the order of the day. There were half a dozen other boats in the bay despite how early it was in the season, but there was enough room that a quiet night was had by all.

Late the next morning I lifted anchor–another interesting exercise, as based on the angle of the bottom I was over a scree slope that had a tendency to grab the chain–and motored out of Howe Sound along the north-west side of Bowen Island:

Looking back into Howe Sound past Bowen Island.

Looking back into Howe Sound past Bowen Island.

The wind was fitful, and while I put up the jib a couple of times it was never reliable enough to do anything with. I was late enough in the morning that the outflow wind wasn’t enough to overcome the north-westerly from the strait, but once clear of the sound the sailing was pretty good, and I raised the jib and made an easy 4.5 – 5 knots toward Point Grey:

Headed toward Point Grey under sail

Headed toward Point Grey under sail

I’m a very lazy sailor, and when single-handing I rarely fly more than one sail. In this boat, if the wind is high it’s the main, and if the wind is low it’s the jib, which as a 180 is more than enough to move things along nicely, and quite a lot to handle by myself in more than a moderate wind. The wind in the strait was 10 or 12 knots with fairly frequent whitecaps but no spray to speak of. Running before it with just the jib was an easy sail, and the autohelm took care of most of the steering. Like any boat of her era, “Gulf Winds” tends to screw and wallow a bit in a following sea, but it was actually a pretty comfortable ride.

Getting closer to home I passed a couple of freighters with this sort of capsule lifeboat on some kind of complex davit system at the stern. Although I’m pretty sure the whole thing just swings out and lowers the boat down in a fairly boring and conventional manner, doesn’t it look like the lifeboat is ready to launch like a rocket down into the sea?

Ready to launch?

Ready to launch?

Both days were really clear and sunny, and I was a bit sunburned by the end of the trip, but the clear air gave a good view of Mount Baker, far to the south. If there’s ever a major natural disaster in these parts the odds favour a volcanic eruption in the Cascades.

Waiting to explode?

Waiting to explode?

It was a lovely trip, and the boat performed well in all respects. I’m pretty much up the learning curve with this boat now. I’ve maintained most of the easily maintainable things (haven’t changed the water pump impeller yet) and run all the sails through their paces except the second jib. I’m happy with the boat and looking forward to a long summer of cruising, both in the Gulf Islands and points north.

Posted in life, sailing | 2 Comments

Scary Creatures

Posted on 2013-04-03 by TJ

Behold the scary creatures I have known
on land and sea and even in the air:
a shark or two, sea-lions and a duck
whose hurling form came headlong at my face
in level flight. My eyes could see so deep
into its quacking gullet I just froze,
unable to engage in duck or deke,
until it dipped a wing and awkwardly
avoided fat collision with my skull.
I dodged that bullet made of meat, that duck
shot straight into my eye by cruel fate
who laughed at us, a homo sapien
and an Anas platyrhynchos, fast
through hot and humid windy summer air.

While startling I do admit to fear,
though not much to compare with other times
when deep beneath the winter sea I saw
swirling from the bode of Neptune’s dark
a trio of sea-lions, Stellar’s kind,
each weighting quite a quarter-tonne or more,
three female hunters of the vasty steppes
that dwell in the abyss. They looked at me
for one long timeless moment in the deep,
then turned away and vanished in the dark,
leaving me to wonder in their wake
that such grace any beauty dwells within
the Ocean Stream where monsters “Here There Be”;
my awkward fins and tank mark me as one:
a monster of the deep for all to see.

Then too there was a shark that swam below
my suited form full-prone across the sand:
when I looked down it matched me head to toe,
and then beyond by half or more again!
I started in the shallow water then
and twisted to the side to get away…
it started too and easily out-ran
my feeble fumbling in the water’s way.

There’s never been a creature I have feared
that’s not a deal and more afraid of me,
and fair enough: my kind is known to kill
far more than any other, so it be.

This is just a sketch, an experiment. I’ve been playing around with some long-form poetry ideas and wanted to experiment a bit with these images. This is neither a polished or a complete poem. But the core of English poetry is blank verse: unrhymed or semi-rhymed iambic pentameter, and any English poet is going to come back to it again and again, to see what the form allows.

One of my goals as a poet is to maintain an accessible, conversational style, which diminishes some of the images unless I’m really on the ball. I’ll likely rework this over time and see if it comes up to some more interesting standards.

Posted in blankverse, iambic pentameter, life, poem, poetry | Leave a comment

Supernatural Explanations

Posted on 2013-04-01 by TJ

Before talking about supernatural explanations, it’s a good idea to say something about explanations in general.

An explanation is a causal account of a particular situation based on general principles, laws or abstractions. Causal accounts are general, explanatory accounts are specific: gravity causes things to fall, the Earth’s gravity explains why this rock landed on my foot.

Causality–that what a thing is now causes what it does now–is the glue that holds together our notions of being and action. We know things through how they act, and we form concepts of what they are on that basis. Explanation runs the causal chain in the other direction: we know what things are, and we explain their actions on that basis.

So when my cat meows at me in the early morning, I explain it by saying he’s hungry, because I’ve learned via various well-known inductive methods that when he’s hungry he meows, and that he’s often hungry in the early morning (early by my standards, at least.)

So to be an explanation a thing must also be a cause, and to be a cause a thing must have explanatory power. This symmetry is nicely captured in Bayes’ rule, which can be viewed as relating causes (hypotheses) to effects (evidence):

P(Cause|Effect) = P(Effect|Cause)*P(Effect)/P(Cause)

That is, the probability a cause exists given some effect is equal to the probability of that effect occurring given the cause is active times the probability of the effect in general divided by the probability of the cause being active.

In a world of purely mechanistic causation where any effect can only have one cause and any cause always produces exactly the same effect, this would be boring: 1 = 1. That is not, however, anything remotely similar to the world we live in. There are a tiny number of special cases where such mechanical causation occurs, but they are few and relatively uninteresting. In most cases causes and effects are related by rather broad probability distributions.

An explanation in this view is the inverse of Bayes’ rule:

P(Effect|Cause) = P(Cause|Effect)*P(Cause)/P(Effect)

A “good explanation” is the one that maximizes the left hand side of this equation: it identifies the cause that is most likely to produce the observed effect in a specific instance. In the case of my cat in the morning, P(Meowing|Hunger) is greater than P(Meowing|Confused), P(Meowing|Cuddly), P(Meowing|Angry), etc, so I’m comfortable saying his hunger explains his meowing.

So on the one hand Bayes’ rule allows us to infer abstract causes from specific events (“Hunger is a cause of cat’s meowing”) and the inverse form allows us to explain specific events in terms of concrete causes (“My cat’s meowing in the morning is explained by his hunger”).

Causality and explanation, like differentiation and integration, are inverse processes, and the symmetry of Bayes’ rule captures this.

To understand what this has to do with “supernatural explanations” we need to first consider what is meant by “the supernatural”.

Different people likely mean different things by it, but I take it to mean something that is “beyond the laws of nature”… that is, inaccessible to precisely the kind of causal inference I’ve been talking about here. We can’t infer the existence or nature of God from empirical evidence, for example, using perfectly ordinary Bayesian reasoning, because God is “beyond all understanding”. We are told by scripture that “God loves us” and are likewise told by Church commentators that any ordinary inferential process concerning earthquakes, famines, plagues and the like that might contradict this claim are ruled out of court because God simply isn’t amenable to such causal inference.

But… as I’ve shown above, causality and explanation are two sides of the same coin. If we can use God to explain an effect, we can use the effect to infer about God. There is no getting out of this, and the formal invertiblity of Bayes’ rule makes it clear that to deny this is to deny rudimentary algebra. If you say, “God’s wrath explains this hurricane” then I can legitimately infer that God is a wrathful being who does not love those he has killed in storms and plagues and other “acts of God”.

If you want to invoke God as an explanation then you are giving me license to study God and learn about God via perfectly ordinary causal inference: God does X therefore God is Y. There is nothing “beyond the laws of nature” about this. As soon as God–or any other purportedly “supernatural” entity–is invoked as an explanation, the invertibility of Bayes’ rule tells us that that entity is equally subject to study via the inverse process, which brings it fully within the scope of natural processes.

A “supernatural explanation” is therefore an incoherent concept. Insofar as something is an explanation, it can be subject to perfectly ordinary study as a natural object. Insofar as it cannot be subject to such study, it cannot be invoked as an explanation.

This is not to say there cannot be things that are unknowable, like whatever lies beyond the quantum veil. But those unknowables cannot be used to explain anything, nor can any means whatsoever allow us to know about them (or else they would be knowable, not unknowable.) Anyone who claims knowledge of unknowables is trying to sell you something.

There is nothing that has explanatory potential that lies beyond the realm of scientific inquiry, because as soon as we invoke something as an explanation we have coupled it to a causal chain that allows us to draw perfectly ordinary inferences about it. The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be used to explain anything, and anyone who tries to do so is living in a state of contradiction and confusion.

Posted in epistemology, god, probability, psychology, quantum, religion, science | Leave a comment

The Art of Arbitrary Choices

Posted on 2013-03-26 by TJ

Engineering is more like art than people think. So is science. The key to all of them is the same: making arbitrary choices well.

On the face of it, an arbitrary choice ought to be, well… arbitrary. It shouldn’t matter what choice you make. But it does. “Making good arbitrary choices” should be an oxymoron. But it isn’t.

It works like this. There are a huge number of situations where we don’t have any clear, good or easily articulated reasons why it’s better to do things one way rather than another, but we have one way or another found “safe” choices that seem to do the job.

For example, I’ve been doing a lot of embedded development over the past few years, and the field is full of arbitrary conventions. Where do you locate this or that kind of data in the (often quite limited) memory map of the machine? Why choose the A register rather than the B register for digital inputs rather than I2C interfacing? And so on… There are typically dozens of ways of doing things, all unconstrained by the hardware.

There are conventions for these things. Conventions, plural. There are the engineering equivalent of cultures: collections of conventions for making choices that don’t otherwise have anything in particular to guide them.

The same is true in the sciences, as it is in the arts.

Learning the conventions of a field are the first steps to mastery. It doesn’t matter if you’re studying engineering or one of the sciences or one of the arts. Painters learn conventions. Poets learn conventions–this is one of the reasons why so much confessional free verse is crap: the people who write it aren’t up on their conventions.

The point of learning the conventions, though, is not so you can slavishly follow them. It’s so you can violate them in interesting and useful ways, and in the best of all possible worlds create new conventions in doing so.

Conventions are the “received wisdom” of a field, what I call the “the Lore” in any area of science: the internalized, frequently quite arbitrary conventions that have been built up over time as empirically useful but not necessarily backed by any strong formal testing. They are not to be dismissed lightly, but to achieve greatness as an artist or a scientist or an engineer they do have to be dismissed. But only by those who have mastered them.

When exploring a new field, the making of arbitrary choices is one of the key disciplines because there are no conventions to guide you. This is one of the scariest parts for a young person who stumbles upon a new field… not a “new to them” field but a “new to humanity” field.

It’s also surprising: we learn from our professors and assume that in the end we’ll be given the Keys to the Kingdom and understand why the arbitrary choices are made they way they are. It’s a bit of a shock to discover that they’re made the way they are because that’s the way the people who first explored that ground made them, for reasons that must have seemed a good at the time.

And then we make them the same way, in any new ground we explore ourselves, feeling the weight of responsibility on our shoulders. It’s fun. Really.

But it’s arbitrary. And if we’re honest about it, we admit to being nagged by doubts. There are “ways of doing things” that I’ve taught people over the years that are good ways, and ways I believe in. Ways I’ve either learned or invented myself. But are they the “best” ways? This is the always-open question, and it’s a good question. Because this is the nature of arbitrary choices: it’s likely there isn’t a really deep optimum, but if there is, discovering it is a game-changer. If you can find one, you’ll be famous, at least amongst the few dozen people who care about such things. There are worse ways to be remembered.

Doubts are OK. They are what confident people feel in the small hours of the night. They don’t keep us awake, but they do give us something to think about while we’re awake for other reasons.

Doubts are the handmaiden of curiosity, and curiosity is the handmaiden of knowledge. Doubts are to be met with a wry smile, and an inquisitive mind. That’s how we make arbitrary choices the right way.

Posted in life, poetry, science, writing | Leave a comment

What is Art?

Posted on 2013-03-03 by TJ

Art is an act of communication between two human beings that involves intentionality on the part of the creator and inference of that intentionality on the part of at least one impersonal experiencer. By “impersonal experiencer” I mean one who is not known to the artist, or who is deliberately focusing on the art as art, not as a personal communication by the artist. When I say “Hi there” to my girlfriend it doesn’t involve art. When I tell her I love her it doesn’t involve art (where is the non-trivial inference?) When I write her a poem, it is art.

The intentionality may be banal or profound. The inference may be implicit–”I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like”–or explicit: “Holy fuck the artist has made me feel this way by doing xyz…”

Art does not have to evoke feelings. A good piece of software documentation can be properly considered “a work of art”: it expresses the writer’s intentionality in describing the system, and readers can infer this intentionality from the experience of the work.

So this definition of art is intended to be as broadly inclusive as possible. There’s not a lot of impersonal human communication that isn’t art by this definition, and that’s OK. It side-steps a lot of whinging about what “is” or “is not” art and focuses on whether the art is any good.

Art can be bad in many ways.

The artist’s intentions can be banal or wrong-headed or poorly executed. Ambiguity and non-objectivity in art are both fine by this definition, but not incompetence.

Since art is an act of communication, it can fail on both ends. The best talker can fail to communicate to a bad listener. So a bad artistic experience may as well be investigated from the point of view of the experiencer as artist. Artists could as easily write reviews of critics as critics of art, and perhaps they should. They could hardly be more bizarrely surreal than the inferences critics make about artists.

There are certain things that cannot be art, by this definition: acts that have no intentionality whatsoever. We have departments of literature and painting and drama and dance at universities, but not departments of waves or mountains or falling leaves, although all of the latter are beautiful and may evoke profound emotions. This is because there is not one scintilla of intentionality behind them, and while all it takes is a scintilla, it must be present.

A picture of a falling leaf is art because it was created intentionally. A knowing subject must have made choices that produced the picture. Those choices, those very deliberate, explicit acts of intentionality may have been to do certain things randomly: where the camera would be located and triggered, for example. But to deny that such a picture is the result of intentional acts is to simply fail to understand that the meaning of an intentional work: it does not mean the entire work is intentional. How could such a thing even be? Does a painter control the precise position of every bristle of their brush down to the Planck length? It means that some aspect of the work is intentional, that there was intentionality involved in it’s creation, even if that intentionality was simply to choose to hang it on a wall or publish it for others to experience. That single, tiny, trivial and uninteresting intentional act is sufficient to create a (tiny, trivial and uninteresting) work of art, so long as someone looks at it.

Like science, art is made by being public. A novel that is not read is not art.

Some people have difficulty with the notion of intentionality, and ask what they think are “deep” questions about the artistic status of “random” poetry, for example. They fail to understand that to create a “random” poem the artist had to decided to do so, decide what random generation process to use, what vocabulary to limit themselves to, what font to use, and so on. Even if all those things were themselves selected randomly, the choice to do that was intentional. You can’t get away from it: if a human being created something and made it available for others to experience and make inferences about their intentionality, there was intentionality involved.

Whenever anyone holds up “random” art of any kind as purported proof that art can be non-intentional, the relevant question ask is: “Who chose the random process and why? If the random process was chosen randomly, who made that choice and why? If that was chosen randomly, who made that choice and why?” It cannot be randomness all the way down, or it would be a falling leaf, not a work of art.

Posted in epistemology, language, poetry | 2 Comments

Why Isn’t the Germ Theory of Disease Mentioned in Scripture?

Posted on 2013-02-24 by TJ

My text for the day will be the Gospel According to Lister, in which he recounts the revelation God gave to His beloved prophet, Pasteur:

And in those days there was a great sickness in the land, and the people were sore afflicted, and God came down and spoke to his prophet out of a puddle of brackish water, saying, “I am the Lord thy God and I tell thee straight, this disease and many others like it are caused by tiny animals, too small for the eye to see and having diverse and marvelous shapes–spherical and rod-like and tentacled like the beasts of the sea–which dwell in foul waters like this the one I am speaking to you from, and which can even spread through the air like dust in the wind, and grow on feces and the dead matter of animals and meat that has been left too long in the sun, and this is why salt preserves such meat, for it makes it difficult for such animals to grow.

Not all disease is so caused, but much of it, and any pestilence that spreads like this plague that currently afflicts you is certainly caused by such tiny creatures, for the plague spreads as the creatures do, from sick person to sick person, by air and water. Even a person who does not yet appear to be sick can be a carrier of disease, so in times of plague cover everyone’s face with a veil that they boil every few days in water, and let all my people wash their hands several times a day with strong soap.

Take care to preserve the cleanliness of your water supplies by keeping dead animals and feces out of it, and dispose of your night soil far from your dwellings and keep your preparers of food clean, and the places they work, and all of this will greatly reduce the effects of sickness amongst you.

Think long on this truth, O My Prophet, and see what other clever ideas you can come up with to turn this knowledge I have revealed to you to good purpose. And spread my truth far and wide amongst men, that no one may ever forget this simple fact: much disease is caused by tiny animals, too small for the eye to see, although there are many other such animals that cause no harm.”

There is no concept in there that could not have been understood by an educated, or even uneducated, man of the bronze age.

So why doesn’t this simple fact–that much disease is caused by tiny animals, too small for the eye to see, that dwell in water and wet matter and can even be blown through the air like dust on the wind–mentioned anywhere in any scripture ever?

If God so loved the world that he did all this crazy stuff to manage our fall and redemption you’d think He might have mentioned something that was easily understood but hard to discover, and would have saved untold millions of lives?

There is obviously nothing preventing Him from doing so, because Scripture tells us God is all-powerful, and nothing–not even logic–can prevent an all-powerful being from doing anything. That is, I take “all-powerful” to mean “capable of instantiating a contradiction”, which doesn’t make sense, but we are told quite clearly that God “passes all understanding”, so “not making sense” is hardly an objection any devout believer would raise, if they are honest and consistent. Since nothing–absolutely nothing–can prevent an all-powerful God from telling us about disease while at the same time experiencing everything we need to experience then there is no reason for Got not to tell us, unless either a) He can’t be bothered or b) He doesn’t exist.

Let me emphasize: sometimes believers say that “God has to let evil exist because of free will” or “God must permit human suffering so we can redeem ourselves” and similar nonsense. Such people do not believe in an all-powerful God. They believe in a technologically superior space-alien who has taken a sadistic interest in human affairs.

An all-powerful being is not subject to necessity. That is, as soon as you say God “must” or “has to” or “necessarily” does anything, you are saying God is subject to a higher power, because only a higher power is capable of placing limits and constraints on something that make it necessary to use certain means to bring about particular ends.

An all-powerful God could stand the sun still in the sky, or knock down the walls of a city, or have a child born of a virgin even though every one of those requires contradictions to basic fact as extreme as the existence of free will without evil. An all-powerful God can make contradictions real. Incomprehensibly, granted, but that is what all-powerful means.

So my question stands: why isn’t the Germ Theory of Disease mentioned in Scripture?

The answer cannot be any statement of the form, “God could not mention it because…” unless you deny that God is all-powerful. An all-powerful God could do anything, even if it involves making a contradiction real.

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