Perhaps, as interaction between the several corners of the world makes it seem ever smaller and less mysterious, it increasingly seems an inadequate stage for the breadth of our imaginations and even of our immediate existences. Even the universe entire, for all its vastness, hardly seems, for the most part, a very enticing locale, being, apart from Earth, seemingly largely bereft of the resources needed to support our lives. Whatever the reason, I a strange renaissance in the oft-derided notion of alternative dimensions and universes, with the possibility of near-infinite parallel, and thus familiar, existences to our own. Currently the controvery over string theory has gotten back in the popular press because several physicists are airing their skepticism about the entire project through this medium. As far as I understand it (which is of course very little), string theory does not actually posit the existence of multiple universes, but it does call for numerous extra dimensions and other strange preconditions which cannot be perceived by us in any way. Since these elements are totally inaccessible no real experimentation, even observational, can be performed where they are concerned. A large number of possible models of the universe ensues, simply because of the ambiguities surrounding the elements of the universe’s structure which cannot be observed or experimented on. However, the hope is that the vast majority of these models would describe universes which would not support the very delicate balance of conditions needed to sustain life on our planet, and specifically ours (though presumably there are a lot of other delicate balances in the universe which such a model would have to account for). So if we eliminate all the models which describe alternative universes that do not support human life, hopefully only one possibility, or at least a manageably small number, will be left. Or, contra Dirk Gentley, when you eliminate the impossible, the possible left over must be the true answer.

To my untutored eye this all seems like a very convoluted and overly specific way of saying that a theory of the universe needs to account for everything that it exists and posit nothing that doesn’t, but I fully acknowledge my ignorance in these matters (though the laymen of the world are no doubt cheered by the recent discovery that, in judging the responses to questions about gravitational waves submitted by a sociologist and a gravitational wave specialist, a panel of physicists couldn’t accurately determine who was the professional and who the amateur). The critics of string theory often claim that since it supposes the existence of so many things which cannot be tested or measured, which string theorists don’t seem to dispute, it is not real science but rather mere metaphysical speculation. I find more interesting the seeming motives behind the growth of the theory.  Since so many parts of it seem to be intrinsically untestable, and therefore the theory is apparently unable to be verified, why bother with it? Its defenders seem for the most part to believe that even if it is unproveable as a complete, coherent model of the universe it has nonetheless a certain aesthetic, perhaps even spiritual, value. As long as it’s possible and doesn’t contradict that which we can verify it satisfies. Conventional physics, then, for where our hands and eyes can reach, and strings and curled-up dimensions for where they can’t. Of course, if we substitute “God” for “strings and curled-up dimensions,” intellectual religious people have been trying to do this for years, if not centuries, and how many physicists respect them for that?

Analytical philosophers, almost as bizarrely, have been indulging in speculation about alternate worlds and dimensions as well, at least since the days of Saul Kripke or David K. Lewis. Jerry Fodor pretty thoroughly, yet oddly deferentially, trashes the relevance of Kripke’s contribution. As far as I understand Kripke’s ideas, and Fodor’s critique of him, the basic problem with analytical philosophy is that it it is not an empirical discipline, but rather one predicated on definitions and logic, more like math (many of the first great analytical philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, were mathemticians and logicians).  The problem arises when analytical philosophers try to go beyond statements about the structure of language to making true statements about the world. Since they are not empiricists, they are limited to discovering a priori, or categorical, logically necessary truths. However, some influential critics, like W.V.O. Quine, contended that there aren’t any. Kripke then defused this critique by claiming that by positing a large number of hypothetical alternate realities you could determine what is logically necessary simply by analyzing whether it could be untrue or not exist in any possible world.

However, as far as I can tell, and as Fodor seems to feel, is that this doesn’t actually say anything about the world. Logically necessary truths don’t prove what exists in the world, they just prove the properties of what they describe. For instance, Fodor mentions as an example the fact that a king’s reign must last for some amount of time, because that is implicit in its definition. But that doesn’t prove that any king ever reigned anywhere. And, while everyone would probably agree that a reign must last some amount of time, unlike a mathematical quantity there are many possible definitions of what a reign might be. So the problem seems to be that the kinds of conclusions analytical philosophy produces in this way tend to be true but trivial, since we still rely on empirical knowledge both determine the meanings of words and statements in the first place and then to determine whether those statements are true.  Analytical philosophy, even as Kripke envisions it, doesn’t seem to do much more than ensure we don’t contradict ourselves.  This is the main reason I abandoned philosophy as an academic discipline in the American university. Well, that and the exceedingly annoying form of the syllogisms in analytical philosophy (“Water is the stuff that is in the Thames and comes out of the taps. The stuff that is in the Thames and comes out of the taps undeniably contains impurities (bits that are neither hydrogen nor oxygen nor constituents thereof). So how can water be H2O?”), which after a while becomes barely less grating than literary theory. Basically, both this field theoretical physics seem pretty stagnant, and because they seem to have reached a bit of a dead end relative to their more experimental brethren, they have attracted a lot of very abstract speculative types who in another time would probably spend much of their time banging a drum at a camp somewhere. Or maybe they do now.

I do not in general pay much attention to trendy political science theses, but I finally got around to reading the ever-topical End of History essay by Francis Fukuyama. It seems that any reference to this theory, like its near relative the “clash of civilizations” theory of Samuel Huntington, must be prefaced by a mandatory disavowal of it. The idea seems to be that on a global level the events of Sep. 11 and all the wars and terrorist attacks in its train proved the notion of a relatively harmonious global capitalist order devoid of any real ideological competitors to be fatally naive. But one could surely at least say that within Western society the collapse (or perhaps merely exposure of the absence) of any such viable alternatives has been one of the major, if somewhat unspoken, political themes of the last 20 years. Especially in America people often talk of the continued impotence and inertia of “the Left” and especially of the various socialist and post-socialist groups of all stripes, but it seems intuitively clear that the disbanding of the Soviet Union, the gigantic country that represented a clear statist alternative to the American system, created a huge void, even if only subconsciously. It is hard to summon much opposition to the status quo and the conservatives who defend it when it means living in by far the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. The only major alternative candidates, like Europe and China, seem to a greater or lesser degree to be converging with this system, especially in an economic sense.

Fukuyama’s basic thesis that liberalism is going to predominate for the great majority of the world seems like a pretty good description of the dominant trends of today. In what, sense, then, could recent terrorism and chaos in the Islamic world have unsettled the validity of the thesis? The terrorist attacks seem to have plausibly demonstrated a massive democratization of destructive capability. Implicit in Fukuyama’s thesis is that a large majority of the world’s people living in liberal society will greatly pacify the world, since he seems to assume that a rather large number of people, at least enough to govern and run a powerful nation, must subscribe to an aggressive belief system for it to threaten world peace. But if 20 people can kill 3,000 in a day with regular household supplies, it seems that the threshold for keeping the world a dangerous place indefinitely is rather lower. The statement probably most embarassing to Fukuyama in hindsight is the claim that:

“In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance. Other less organized religious impulses have been successfully satisfied within the sphere of personal life that is permitted in liberal societies.”

Since Islam, unlike say race, is an ostensibly universalist category, i.e. anyone could potentially join it, the statement that “[Islamic theocracy] has little appeal for non-Muslims” doesn’t actually prove anything. All the non-Muslims of the world could convert! And should the policy of “conversion by the sword,” possibly the primary source of Islam’s original growth, ever arise again as a popular policy, conversion and violence could go hand in hand. And even if not a single non-Muslim were to convert to Islam and the birthrate in the Muslim world, currently much higher than the world average, were not to significantly increase the Muslim share of the world’s population, over 1 billion, or about 1/6 of the world’s people, would still be Muslim. Given that Fukuyama is willing to consider fascism a legitimate historical competitor with liberalism despite the fact that Germany and Italy had less than 150 million people between them at the time (granted, the world as a whole was a lot smaller then), it seems a little strange that Islam cannot be considered a major political force when only seven times as many people follow it. Of course, they are not as centralized within such relatively powerful nations, but that goes back to the first point. Of course had Fukuyama simply confined himself to political analysis and disburthened himelf of the pointless Hegelian metaphysical nonsense he would have alleviated himself of the primary source of criticism, the misunderstanding-inducing phrases “the end of history” and “the last man” themselves. Because it is not like he believes that the Rapture would descend on us all if universal free trade were instituted; he makes pretty clear that ideological conflict could re-emerge at any time should a non-discredited ideology arise against liberalism, or even in a fit of boredom. Come, crazed bourgeois-loathing theorists of the world! The humanities professors of the world pine for you!

Laws among the bands of human beings walking to and fro across the earth at once both envision an ideal and impose a course of action to realize it. Yet cosmic laws, in the sense only of the laws of nature, not divine laws, do nothing of the kind. They only describe a reality as we perceive it, and aim only at, or at least are judged according to, the ability to predict the course of future natural events more or less. Yet despite their function in describing the complex, varied temporal reality, they still aim at the same universality as the timeless idealizations of the Law. Yet the 20th century, particularly in such areas as quantum physics, have brought a dark harvest: only an approximation of universality, with much greater uncertainty.

Paul Qunicey’s attempt to “normalize” quantum mechanics does a fairly poor job at explaining clearly, as opposed to merely alluding to, fundamental concepts like Planck’s constant, but from what I gather his point is something like the following: even in The Evolution of Physics Einstein wrote in a somewhat bizarrely wistful tone, given his own unavailing wrestlings with a Unified Field Theory, how sad it would be for everything in physics to become, to paraphrase Faulkner in Light in August, “as clear and barren as an empty corridor.” But the very concept of eternal physical laws that transcend space and time to some degree by their very nature presuppose a certain lack of mystery in the universe. Theoretically, the entire history of the universe should be able to be inferred if one knew the location and motion of everything in the universe at its birth. Until, of course, we get to 20th century physics. Quincey suggests that quantum physics, just like relativity, puts us back in our limited non-transcendent frame of reference, where place and time are relevant in a way they are not in classical physics. Strangely, it actually demonstrates structurally some intuitively obvious realities of everyday life: we cannot predict the future with certainty, certain places and events are not observable and hence not measurable. One could say that these limitations and uncertainties actually bring physics closer to the lineaments of human life, and are certainly more comprehensible than the arbitrary or gratuitious ambiguities often attributed to quantum theory.

As part of a continuing series of my wild speculations on virtually anything:

Doesn’t it seem possible, given its extreme prevalence in the human population, particularly among people past their reproductive years, that cancer is not some weird mutation of the cells, but in some sense a natural state, perhaps even one that preceded the more familiar restrained, cooperative behavior of cells in our bodies? Think about it: Richard Dawkins has already suggested that organisms may die for the most part not too long after they become incapable of reproduction because, after they cease to be fertile and their offspring are raised, there is not much adaptive value in their continued existence (although they may still be of help in raising the young in a group, especially their grandchildren), so there is not a strong selection pressure weeding out the fatal ailments that afflict them from the gene pool. Cancer is one of the major forms of these post-reproductive afflictions (though it of course hits the young sometimes as well). What I want to add is that, from what I know of cancer, it seems to make cells behave more like they would as single-cell or very simple organisms: they reproduce as fast as possible and try to wipe out all the other cells in the vicinity, as if they were competitors. Now for basically independent cells this strategy seems sensible from an evolutionary standpoint, at least until they start to overpopulate an area. But in a complex multicellular being, where individual cells cannot survive on their own and rely on other cells around them, reproducing onself at the expense of others can be fatal. So my hypothesis is that a form of cooperative behavior between the component cells of large organisms during the period of life in which they reproduce and/or raise offspring proved successful enough to replace the old competitive behavior, but that, among old organisms, the old behavior has been able to hold on and reassert itself simply because there is not much selective pressure against it. Of course environmental factors can induce, or at least favor cancer’s onset, but the very frequency of its appearance in the population seems to indicate its centrality to our genome. Perhaps there is even a positive evolutionary value in its killing off older organisms, insofar as it frees up resources for the younger and more vital generations. Just think how sustainable our biosphere would be if everyone lived to be 500 or older (not that I think such a project to be remotely feasible, but medical scientists who take as their goal the indefinite prolongation of human life might want to keep this issue in mind. While the world birthrate (except in a few places like Africa) has fallen enough to disappoint Malthusian fears, an ever-growing army of the near-undead could still prove them right).

I remember a few months ago hearing what seemed a somewhat astonishing claim, that a 2005 poll had revealed Africans to be the most optimistic people of any region in the world, and I after googling it in I found a story about it here. Given that it seems to be more or less taken for granted in the places that I have lived that Africa is some sort of gigantic morass that requires some fairly radical overhauls before the majority of its people will be able to enjoy even a reasonable standard of life, this is bound to seem a little strange. Not that those two things are necessarily contradictory, and on further reflection I think there might even be some positive correlation between them.

I remember reading somewhere that four out of the six “universal” human emotions are negative, and intuitively it would make sense that it probably does not behoove individuals locked in a never-ending struggle for life to be overly serene about the future. A certain amount of fear or at least apprehension, coupled with a healthy discontent regarding the future, as long as they do not degenerate into fatalism, might perhaps be more useful on the whole for identifying and then solving problems. I am not saying by any means that Africa is a relatively poor and ill-governed region because its inhabitants are, for whatever reason, on the whole more optimistic than people from other areas, I simply mean to point out that there are some logical reasons why one might expect to see such a correlation. And obviously if such a correlation were to be established (if it ever could be, definitively), it would raise a lot of intriguing questions as to the worth of the relative trade-offs between mental tranquility and material well-being.

Crash 2
Originally uploaded by shonk.

On the plus side, that guy probably didn’t need any coffee for the rest of the day.

Different Angle.

A piece purporting to explain why soccer is now supposedly popular among American intellectuals. Yet the most obvious explanation is only barely hinted at in a single sentence: “Perversely, it seems easier for an American soccer fan to make common cause with Italian mobs, who might happen to be shouting pro-fascist chants, than with someone from Alabama, who might happen to be a Republican.”

I played soccer competitively through high school, and occaisonally on club teams in college, and for a while I was definitely very engaged as a spectator with international soccer. So I think I can say that at least personally a large part of the appeal was the snob factor–this was something that “sophisticated” Europeans were obsessed with, and one could consequently feel superior to all the American yokels that ignored soccer in favor of football, baseball and NASCAR. To be fair, many Americans have just as ostentatiously rejected soccer for ideological reasons, considering it the sport of wussy European socialists, so supporting it can have political connotations of a internationalist nature–opposing the “unilateralism” of the U.S. that also rejects the Kyoto treaties, the chemical weapons and land mines treaty, the International Criminal Court, etc. At the same time, watching soccer because of its indirect signalling of one’s political outlook definitely has a whiff of the pseudo.

So I am sympathetic to people that genuinely like the sport, having played it for a long time myself. But let’s be honest, it’s a fairly mediocre spectator sport: definitely more entertaining than baseball, but only about equivalent with basketball and considerably less so than football or hockey, in my opinion. And let’s be honest, given that many international clubs not only put big corporate logos right across the chest of their jerseys, which is something no American professional sports team does (with the exception of the tiny jersey-maker logos), but also outright sell star players to other clubs, without even making the pretence of trading for other players, which is pretty much de riguer in America, let’s just say that I’m skeptical of the argument that soccer is somehow purer and less governed by money and marketing than American sports.

So I’m back on the grid after a long absence.  I apologize if anyone has been eagerly expecting my presence for the last month-and-a-half, although I suspect there is about a 2% chance of that.  In addition to the explanations that my brother has already provided, I would add that I have been trying to distance myself a little from this project to think about what I want to do with it and perhaps re-orient myself a little.  The major thing is that I would like to make my presence a little less reactive, not just responding to things I’ve read but also pushing the cart of my own volition, though of course most things I think about are sparked by some outside stimulus.

 One thing I’ve thought about a lot lately is the pragmatic basis for a lot of our ethics.  I’ve always thought that morals should be able to stand and fall on their own basis, but I have to admit that most of the time they owe a lot to communication.  What I mean by that is not any particular principle, but just the difference between how we apply our ethics to, for example, other adult people versus, for example, animals or children.  I don’t intend to claim that this this form of discrimination is a bad thing or a good thing, but I would like to simply observe one or two things.

It is usually presumed, at least in our society, that all adult people in the world have essentially the same moral rights.  Yet this does not really seem to me purely a matter of principle.  Partly we grant rights to others out of a fear of what they or their allies might be able to do to us if we do not, and also out of a desire to secure the possible benefits of their goodwill.  Because intelligence and communication greatly amplifies the ability of an individual or group to affect those around them, no matter how isolated or oppressed.  In short, being social animals, cooperation is generally the best strategy for us from a purely self-interested point of view, although even this often comes at the expense of certain other individuals.  This is obviously not the case with, for example, animals (even the relationship with useful animals like dogs or horses canno be considered cooperative in the same way).

 With them it is basically ethics in the abstract.  Whether we treat them well or badly is not likely to have much of an effect on us.  Maybe an individual will lash out if threatened or in pain, but they are not likely to coordinate their efforts or make use of technology to harm us in any significant or prolonged manner.  Sure, people are wary of animals that can harm them, either as individuals or in packs, like bears or bees or army ants.  But even in this case it is only within an immediate context.  There is little fear that wiping out a nest of hornets with a can of Raid will result in the incident’s being remembered in the collective hornet memory and avenged by other groups. 

 Even with children, despite the ability to mutually communicate, the risk of retaliation, due to smaller size and experience, incomplete intellectual formation, strong attachment to parents, etc. make them much less likely to band together in any sort of menacing way.  It is generally claimed that children enjoy less rights because they need to be protected and guided until they attain adulthood, and I think there is a good deal of merit in this.  But one could nonetheless legitimately turn this around and claim that is is because they are inexperienced and vulnerable (and small) that it is possible to get away with granting them fewer rights.

 By none of this do I mean to claim that ethics is just a fraud, or that animals should enjoy rights commensurate with humans, or that parenting is just a rationalized subjugation.  I simply mean to point out that perceived principles often conform remarkably closely with rules of behavior which are in aggregate simple self-interest.  With a number of animals, for example, we are essentially programmed to eat them, not cooperate with them.   This may be explained away, generally by reference to their (perceived) lesser intelligence, but I would simply point out that lesser intelligence is not generally an admissable criterion for discrimination in ethical debates.  But my whole point is that whether this is right or wrong seems a bit academic, since the fact of the correspondence (whether causal or not) between self-interest and ethics more or less ensures that it will continue for the most part, whether the Spanish government tries to grant rights to the great apes or not. 

After many months of almost superhuman laziness, I have finally loaded the majority of my photos from last year in Europe on to the site–just go to the “Photographs” link at the top of the page (or click here for anyone who is as lazy as I am) and scroll to the bottom of the page, where the last five albums cover most of my year, and I should have two final albums, covering my trips to England and Germany/Switzerland/Italy up in a couple of days.

“It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

“But God isn’t dead!” –student at Patrick Henry College

“It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this.” –William Faulkner from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech