Scottish Nous

God is Pissed

God is pissed - and he'll destroy millions of lives to prove it.  At least, that's part of the buzz amongst the faithful.  In other bizarre religious news, the tsunami is reportedly being taken as confirmation of the fundamentalist, non-preterist Christian worldview and has the religious unusually busy predicting the dawn of the apocalpyse and Christ's return.  Head over to Prophecy Update to convince yourself of the Bible's predictive power.  Per the Good Book:

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven...  and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring... And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. -Luke 21:11, 25, 27

And Christians aren't the only ones reflecting upon matters divine:

Not So Imaginary Numbers

The interesting zeros of Riemann's zeta function fall into one of two classes, or so Riemann famously intuited and then hypothesized.  Picture your standard graph with two axes, x and y.  Now let the x-axis represent the real numbers and the y-axis the imaginary numbers.  This is the complex plane.   

Now if you're a philosopher - particularly with nominalistic predilections - you might be afraid of normal numbers, not to mention imaginary numbers.  (Imaginary numbers are just normal numbers multiplied by i, the perplexing square root of -1.)  It was originally thought that i was just a useful tool for getting the math done, so long as it was discharged before the calculation was finished.  Yet matters appear otherwise.  Perhaps the following will serve to mitigate your concern.

Reasonable Disagreement: Cruel and Unusual

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has made his first post as this week's Leiter Reports guest blogger.  In an attempt to be less caustic than usual, I'll just say that his position is frightening in a very Humean way.  Rather than discussing the effects (my experience with so many indicates) too much Humean rhetoric can have on one's psyche, I'll instead focus on some ethical ramifications surrounding the epistemological issues of reasonable disagreement raised multiple times by Posner throughout his fascinating post:

You cannot convince a religious person that there is no God, because he does not share your premises, for example that only science delivers truths. There is no fruitful debating of God’s existence.

(I do hope that the highly suspect statement following the "for example" was only that - an example.  Since it doesn't look anything like the sort of belief that could be non-inferentially justified, it would be a very awkward assumption or "premise" for anyone to hold.)  In any case, when it comes to matters religious, Posner seems to think that disagreement goes "all the way down".  For purposes of this post, reasonable disagreement is defined any disagreement that cannot be resolved by appeal to reasons.

Idiots with Money

"I think some people have more money than sense," says Harry Griffin.  His near pun refers to "Julie", the  owner of the first ever cloned pet - a cat named "Little Nicky".  What kind of money did the rich bitch waste cloning her dead pookie-wookie "Nicky"?  A cool $50,000 USD.  "Julie" reports that "Little Nicky" is identical to the deceased "Nicky".  Of course, if the cats are identical, it follows trivially that their personalities are the same, as she claims.  But since she's such a stupid, irrational freak of nature, there's no reason to believe her.  I'd bet counterfactual money that had scientists kept her cash and substituted a cute little disenfranchised kitten from an animal shelter, she would have said the same thing.  And if she hadn't, newsflash... it wouldn't have mattered.  (Hopefully that's what they did.)  It would be cruel to wish the cat dies, so I'll instead hope that "Little Nicky" outlives "Julie" by the rest of his life.  And when she dies, she needs to be immediately incinerated so her genes can no longer pollute the world.  This from The New Scientist.

Ektopos is Occult!

So I'm back in the old hometown sitting in Panera to do some reading and writing over coffee, and I notice, to my surprise, that Panera offers wireless interent access.  Sweet, I think, let's check up on the blogs I read!  When I try to pull up Ektopos, I get this message:

This site is blocked by the SonicWALL Content Filter Service.
URL: http://www.ektopos.com/
Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Cult/Occult"

The secret is out!  Matthew Mullins has obviously been consorting with the devil.  I have confirmed this information by consulting with an oracle who informs me that Ektopos is really a front designed to seduce malleable young minds into following philosophy down the twisted path which ends at the gates of hell.  To be placed in SonicWALL's Cult/Occult category, your website has to be

sponsored by prominent organized modern religious groups that are identified as "cults" by three or more authoritative sources.  Sites that promote or offer methods, means of instruction, or other resources to affect or influence real events through the use of spells, curses, magic powers or supernatural beings.

Very interesting.  I suppose this site should be blocked as well, for linking to (promoting acquisition of) occult information. In other news, my favorite squirrel, Foamy, has been deemed Adult/Mature Content and can't be reached from Panera.  No Scarlet Teen either.  Not that I was dying to access Scarlet Teen, but do you think you can guess the forbidden category?  Sex education.

Isn't censorship great?

Cosmic Censorship and Your Non-Existent Grandfather

The weak cosmic censorship hypothesis states something to the effect that we are insulated from the effects of the breakdown of our scientific theory's ability to predict events.  Where events are in (scientific) principle unpredictable, they are locally confined so that they can have no effect upon us whatsoever.  The hypothesis is weak because it permits such confined local breakdowns of predictability to occur at any time.  The strong cosmic censorship hypothesis states that such unpredictable - though utterly isolated - events can only occur at the beginning and end of time.  See this post (and you might note the circularity) for what it means, in science, to say that time has a beginning and an end.

Regarding the cosmic censorship hypothesis, my second favorite Lucasian Professor of Mathematics has some very funny (and equally ridiculous) stuff to say.  Here at Scottish Nous we don't like censorship, cosmic or otherwise, but Hawking argues that we should root for it.  To wit, he expresses his hope that either strong or weak cosmic censorship holds because, due to the possibility of time travel near naked singularities, someone could murder your great-great-grandfather if they survived a close approach to an unclothed object of infinite density.  Let's hear him on the matter:

It is greatly to be hoped that some version of the censorship hypothesis holds because close to naked singularities it may be possible to travel into the past.  While this would be fine for writer's of science fiction, it would mean that no one's life would ever be safe: someone might go into the past and kill your father or mother before you were conceived! -Hawking, A Brief History of Time

That is truly terrifying (mostly just because the infinitely dense should keep their clothes on).  So the idea is this:  I should hope for cosmic censorship so I don't have to avoid personally instantiating, as a victim, the grandfather paradox.  Only if the cosmos violates certain event's rights to free expression can I be saved from the dreadful prospect of something travelling back in time to kill my ancestors!  How about this instead: the events described by the grandfather paradox are logically impossible!  Then, since it is not possible to travel back in time, I don't have to worry about someone presently altering the past.  Whew.  Big sigh of relief.  I suppose that now I should be ambivalent with respect to cosmic censorship.  (N.B. Science fictions writers do not care whether or not time travel is logically possible.)  Finally, what the hell is a naked singularity?

Eddington thought it was simply not possible that a star could collapse to a point.  This was the view of most scientists:  Einstein himself wrote a paper in which he claimed that stars would not shrink to zero size. -Hawking, Op. cit.

Good for Einstein and Eddington.  It doesn't seem at all reasonble to suppose that you could line up, next to one another, infintely many naked singularities of infinite density (ignoring the alleged gravitational effects of point-"sized" objects) and there still not be some distance between any two of them.  The problem is not the naked singularity.  After all, if it were possible to line up infinitely many naked singularities in the manner described, then a naked singularity would just be a point.  But points do not have infinite density.  In fact, points do not have a density.  Points do not possess gravitational fields, nor float in a liquids with higher specific gravities.  I believe the appropriate response to talk of the specific gravity of a point involves the two words "category error" - although "$%@*   )!!&#(@" might be included for ad hominem emphasis.  Physics, like philosophy, has gone off the deep end.

Read Weatherson on Vagueness!

Brian Weatherson has a rough draft of a new paper on vagueness.  He takes as his target a few recent proposals to offer definitions of vagueness, that is, schemas which purport to yield necessary and sufficient conditions for a term being vague.   One such schema, Eklund's, runs as follows:

______ is vague iff it is part of semantic competence that some small enough difference never affects the justice with which ______ is used/applied to an object/etc..., while there always exists some large enough difference which does so affect said justice.

The general problem Weatherson notes with such schemas is their dependence upon attitudes taken by speakers towards linguistic entitites (sentences, propositions, terms, predicates, whatever...)  Whether or not a term is vague, thinks Weatherson, is independent of the knowledge or semantic competence of a speaker.  I'm inclined to think that by taking this angle, which appears to severely divorce the meaning of terms from their use, he's able to insert some linguistic presuppositions into the debate that might not be very pleasing to some of the philosophers whose definitions he is trying to undermine. 

Specifically, several of his arguments involve the moral term "good", the precise definition of which, though unknowable by humans is knowable by God.  This is somewhat perplexing, because it looks like there's an assumption here, which may not be readily granted, that the language God is using is the same as our language or that the term God is using is the same as our term.  Is it?  When we use the term "good" in English, is it possible that its reference is fixed precisely as "obeying x number of God's commands" even though we couldn't know that?  Minimally, doesn't this presuppose a contentious theory of meaning and reference-fixing?  Perhaps also that the meaning of a word is only its referent - not its sense?  Surely the word "good", as it is used in the English language, could be vague even if the absolute good is precise?

This is all very confused, and I only glossed the paper tonight, but I hope to get into it tomorrow and have some better comments.  In any case, it looks good.  Read it!

Time's Beginning

Would life be as dear, or philosophy so sweet, without your daily dose of positivism?  I learned last night, according to Hawking, that the claim that "time had a beginning at the big bang" amounts to nothing more than this:

In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite.  This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang.  Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand.  As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe.  We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.  -Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I had previously thought scientists were saying something more controversial.  All Hawking is saying is that we can't have pre-big bang time in our scientific model since any propositions or sentences referring to it would not be subject to empirical verification through the testing of predictions.  Ok, fine.  But that says nothing about whether or not, before the big bang, time was around (it was), when I ask the "outside the model" question like a normal human being (or a scientist before his pet theory sucks his life out of him).  It only says what our model can tell us.  Fortunately, philosophy can tell us some things that scientific models cannot.  (I hope you agree.  If not, post a comment!)  This book is filled with positivistic quotes - maybe I'll post some more later.

The Toilet Speaks

Chuck Shepherd always comes through.  Mr. Zisek has got to be kidding.  Unfortunately, I think many students believe this is what philosophers do.  Some of them even aspire to it.  From News of the Weird:

In a September issue of the London Review of Books, trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zisek made the point that the essential ideological differences in German, French and British-American societies, as noted by G.W.F. Hegel and others, can be represented by their countries' respective toilet designs. The German toilet's evacuation hole is in the front, facilitating "inspection and analysis," but the French design places the hole in the rear, so that waste disappears quickly. The British-American toilet allows floatation, which of course signals that society's "utilitarian pragmatism." Zisek described his theory as an "excremental correlative-counterpoint" to a framework identified with French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss. [Boston Globe, 9-12-04]

Is the framework identified with Levi-Strauss supposed to be "structuralism", or the "search for unsuspected harmonies" between deeply imbedded culturual notions and toilets?

Pain, Pain, Go Away

It's the middle of the night, and I'm up waiting for more Percocet to kick in.  Not that you care, but do you see those pufferfish?  If that kid was holding them  a wee bit closer to each of his cheeks, that's about what I'd look like right now - one pufferfish for each cheek.  A quick internet search indicates that the pufferfish is a banal description for people who just had their wisdom teeth pulled, but I don't care.

So here are some useless quotes that have recently made the news.  Since it's the middle of the night, and I'm on drugs, I refuse to reflect upon them.  In other words, draw your own conclusions.

"'If you look deep into our [Iraqi] history, 7,000 years of history, we never, ever had a single incident of unrest built on ethnicity or sect or religion,' said interim President Ghazi Ajil Yawer on NBC's 'Meet the Press' last month." -Here

"'The school district's decision to prohibit even instrumental versions of classic Christmas tunes shows that those who claim to speak for tolerance are, in fact, the most intolerant,' Mr. Lonegan said... Mr. Hinckley said the ban was 'silly' but newsworthy only because 'it's unusual, not because it's becoming a norm.'  He decried 'the way some commentators are waving it around as evidence that a large crowd of secularist liberals is trying to throw all God-fearing Christians over the side of the American ship.'"   - Here

"The internet may be fuelling an increase in suicide pacts. In the past two months, 26 people in Japan have killed themselves after meeting online and planning their deaths using websites containing instructions for committing suicide...  Suicidal people, and those who look after them, must be made aware of the dangers of these sites, Rajagopal told New Scientist." - Here

In recent vocabularly building news, and pursuant to my pursuit of pedantry, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) is a "florilegium" - or, per WordNet "an anthology of short literary pieces and poems".

"Freegans see harm in all consumer goods while vegans only see harm in the products from animal sources or products tested on animals. Therefore, freegans choose to buy as little as possible of ANY good and instead live off the massive waste of modern capitalist society. In so doing, they avoid giving any labor or resources to a system based on destruction, suffering, and oppression, while at the same time playing a small role in reducing waste." -http://freegan.info

I recommend the above link to the Freegans if you want to read a tutorial on dumpster diving.  And now back to bed.