Explanation postulates, version 2

1. Justifications are always with respect to some underlying set of customs for what constitutes an adequate explanation. These customs aren’t a priori “correct” and differ between cultures and individuals. They have various meta properties, justified by some means (but note Postulate 1—there is no escape).
2. A justification custom may be shown to be inadequate for a task. For instance if I design a bridge, produce a guarantee of some properties, and on building a bridge closely following the design it’s shown that those properties don’t hold, then I may have to reconsider the customs I follow. (Cf. the Millennium Bridge comedy.) If I design a logical calculus then I may hope that from consistent premises it can only prove one of p or not-p: not both. So a proof of both from consistent premises would indicate that something is wrong. (Cf. Frege’s little error.)
3. Failure to justify oneself adequately, or failure to comply with customs in other ways, results in punishment or attempts at correction (e.g. imprisonment, detention under section).  (See e.g. Martin Kusch’s work.)
4. People often invent explanations of behaviour which are inconsistent with their behaviour or the actual causes of their behaviour. (See the large body of work produced in social psychology.) The “actual causes” mentioned here must be described in a framework for explanation (see Postulate 1).
5. Choosing a particular style of explanation does not rule out the possibility that one believes other styles of explanation are necessary and useful. Take the framework of “cognitive processes”. This emerged from the viewpoint that it’s helpful for explanatory purposes to abstract away from the exact medium in which data enters a human, so ignoring photons, neurotransmitters, ion flows. The other viewpoints relevant to human psychology include fMRI, animal studies, genetics, sociological theories. Many interesting studies combine multiple viewpoints.
6. Someone’s past experience and education may cause them to decide that, for them, certain classes of explanation are inadequate.
7. All models are incomplete, otherwise they’re not models. The map is not the territory (Korzybski). From a Koan: “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call this a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you want to call this?”
8. Theories aren’t used only to make predictions, they also give a framework in which to discuss phenomena with a common language. In particular this makes it possible to simplify and unify empirical evidence.
9. That something we enjoy, e.g. music, art, love, is given a scientific explanation does not necessarily mean that we can no longer enjoy experiencing that thing. A musician who understands the physics of sound propagation and the neuroscience of sound perception need not have a lesser enjoyment of music than someone who does not. However it could well be the case that sometimes scientific explanation destroys the efficacy of the phenomena under investigation. An example that comes to mind is the placebo effect, but I’m unaware of any evidence which suggests its effectiveness is reduced in an individual treatment when that individual is aware, at the more general level, of the existence of placebos. Another example could be the case of religious experience: it’s interesting to ponder what would happen if people discovered they could get the same sense of hope without reliance on the existence of a God Out There.
10. Evolution by natural selection does not explain why we are here in some grand metaphysical sense. It explains how organisms which reproduce, communicate (by genetic material as well as, e.g., via talking*, education*), and vary, can adapt within* and between generations to their environment and continue to reproduce.

* You may disagree with these inclusions. Perhaps I’m conflating memes and genes.

United by water charges

Seems the key thing to getting the DUP to talk to Sinn Féin was the threat of water charges.

So, a deal struck.  Slightly cringesome speeches, but not bad, considering how inept all the politicians in NI are.

Northern Ireland

From the Beeb:

Mr Hain told the BBC on Monday: “I’ve just had news overnight that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are meeting for the very first time in their lives – the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party, and Sinn Fein.

“This is something that defies the word breakthrough, it’s never happened before.”

Generally Norn Irish politics bores and frustrates me, but there’s something a wee bit exciting about this. I’d love to watch how it goes. Will they put chairs in the middle of the room, back-to-back, so they don’t have to make eye contact as they talk? Will Ian introduce himself with, “Look, I don’t like you, but Tony’s threatening to export me to Gitmo if we don’t talk.”

It would be lovely if they stopped all the silliness and got down to the business of politics!

I’ve seen one single piece of evidence that Paisley is capable of not being an idiot: his performance back in November 1996 when he was arguing that Northern Irish cows, given their geographical location, should be considered different to other British cows, and the ban on their export be lifted. He argued:

The only plan than we can adopt is realistically to face up to the fact that, if the ban is going to be broken, it will be broken only piecemeal. Hon. Members might not like to hear that. Nobody believes in the Union more than I do. The matter is not about setting one part of the United Kingdom against another. Frankly, if Scotland, England or Wales were in the position that we in Northern Ireland are in, I would be advocating that they immediately go ahead, start to move and get some water over the dam. If we get a break, we can bring others with us. Some hon. Members might not like Northern Ireland carrying the flag in this instance, but they will have to face up to it at the end of the day.

There’s another fragment which is easier to reconcile with the infamous Paisley accent:

I am not a vegetarian. I eat beef and like it. Beef eaters should eat Ulster beef, but if they cannot get Ulster beef, they should not forget Scottish or Yorkshire beef.

Now if only Adams and Paisley could focus on the things that matter and that presumably they can agree on—education, health care, the economy; that sort of thing—then maybe some progress can be made.

Editing God from the bible

There are some fun bits in the bible.  I’d like to collect them together and add the result to English Lit courses.  For instance:

“… the lips of an adulteress drip honey and her tongue is smoother than oil, yet in the end she is as bitter as wormwood, as sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet tread the downward path towards death, the road she walks leads straight to Sheol. She does not mark out the path to life; her course twists this way and that, but she is unconcerned.” (Proverbs 5:2-6)

(I love honey.)

Rock Paper Scissors for the 21st century

Recall if you will the classic Rock Paper Scissors game.

“1…2…3″
Rock [symbol]!
Scissors [symbol]!
(Rock wins)

“1…2…3″
Paper [symbol]!
Rock [symbol]!
(Paper wins)

An update for the 21st century: instead of being limited to rock, paper, and scissors, you name a crime, any crime, and the most serious crime wins. For instance

“1…2…3″
Petty theft of a mars bar from a corner shop [symbol]!
Unlawful acquisition of an OAP’s liver [symbol]!

Here “Unlawful acquisition of an OAP’s liver” is more serious and thus the player who threw that would win.

Early players of the game have observed problems. One is that now you have to learn signs for arbitrarily complex crimes. BSL users would find this okay, I guess, or you could just write the crimes down on some paper. Another problem is that it may sometimes be difficult to determine which crime is more serious. This is easily solved by employing a team of legal experts to adjudicate.

On first glance there is a more serious problem: initially players will throw signs for relatively reasonable crimes, e.g. arson, but after an iteration or two will head towards nuclear holocaust and other impossible to defeat acts, thus making draws inevitable. This is actually a crucial feature of the game and not a problem (cf. Kahn’s Escalation Ladder or Blair’s views on Trident or Iran’s situation or Korea’s situation).

“I love my previous one”

A few months ago, Linus Nilsson and Vadim Dubrov, students between IT universitet and Konsthögskolan Valand in Gothenburg, Sweden, designed a project which explores the meaning of the word “love”. They wrote software which searches blogs for sentences including the phrases “I love” and “You love”, and randomly displays them every few minutes on a couple of screens. Simple but amusing. I like.

(More photos.)

Should we rid the mind of God

The video of the debate between Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, is now online over here.

Thought experiment

I’d be intrigued to hear what you do to judge the truth of the following propositions.  Also when and where do you run into trouble?

1. There is no table.
2. There is no chair.
3. There is no mind.
4. There are no colours.
5. There is no tafdghkjjks.
6. There are no ghosts.
7. There are no gods.

On Religion

Atheists annoy me. I reckon they should learn to pass over in silence or embrace a logic with more than two truth values rather than run about exclaiming how “God Exists” is an obviously false proposition. The universe is a big and complicated place and just because not every sentence in the Christian bible is true, doesn’t mean that they’re all false. It doesn’t mean that there is no God-like thing Out There, nor even that no religion gets it right or close to right. I don’t see why giving a proposition a value of neither true or false is any more demanding or dishonest than saying it’s false because there’s no evidence for its truth. Does God exist? Mu. I don’t know. I’m not even sure how to define the concept of God.

I dislike Russell’s teapot argument, brought up by Peter Atkins in the debate on Tuesday at Edinburgh University. (I quote Russell here from Wikipedia, so this could be utter fiction.)

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.”

No sensible person would believe it’s feasible that there is a teapot floating out in space between us and mars, so we jump immediately to the truth value false, not a fencesitting don’t know. To me the crucial difference between this and a proposition about the existence of a god is that we have a rather thorough notion of what kind of a beast a teapot is: its habits, its interests. Teapots are constructed by humans and the most likely way a teapot could get into orbit around mars is if a human put it there. It’s unlikely NASA ever launched a teapot orbiter probe, therefore it’s fairly safe to conjecture that there is no teapot. (Though if I worked for NASA I’d probably sneak a teapot into a probe if I got the chance.) But the existence of a something that constructed the universe, something we don’t understand, not necessarily a white-cloak semi-Santa Claus figure, is a somewhat different artifact. We don’t know a lot about that kind of thing, other than that (if it exists…) it/he/she/them makes universes (and presumably recursively makes itself).

Even if there were a God like thing Out There, what’s to stop us studying its properties? In science often an object is conjectured to exist to try to make sense of some phenomena before it’s understood. Religion isn’t inconsistent with science or modern philosophy.

Religions also have their own evolution—intriguingly enough given how they’re often associated with anti-evolutionary ideas. One needs only look at the increase in the number of female and gay ministers (from zero to greater than zero) in the Church of England, for instance. Views change. Interpretations of the bible evolve.

I would like to build a structural equation model where God is a latent variable (or two, or three, or…) and the manifest variables come from various religous texts’ specifications of their deities. I haven’t yet found the time to do this…, but in the meantime here’s an interpretation of the Christian Holy Trinity that I formed a while back. The gist:

• Father
• Son
• Holy Spirit

As a first approximation, map these to:

• Originator and transmitter of genetic material
• Recipient of genetic material
• Conscious magic stuff

So, I argued, the trinity is actually a specification of all humans (animals? organisms?). God is everyone and everyone is god. This specification seems hippy-friendly, which is a good thing I reckon. One problem is that not everyone reproduces, and I don’t want such people (for the moment I am one of them) to be seen as second-class organisms, so let’s generalise the genetic material to “information”.

I tried this idea out on a few hardened atheists and they didn’t seem too impressed. They do take their belief very seriously.

More on Richard Tomlinson

The Criminal Prosecution Service has decided not to prosecute.

“the CPS, assisted by advice from independent counsel, decided that the evidence did afford a realistic prospect of conviction. However, informed by the views of the SIS, its view was that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute.”