Hackers take on Scientology

This is amusing.

Petition against Scientology

Just found this petition:

Without compromise to freedom of thought or expression, the teachings and beliefs of Scientology, Dianetics and science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard must never be legally be accepted as a religion – regardless of any recent EU decision to the contrary.

We consider the ‘Church’ of Scientology is an exclusive business venture that by prohibiting access to scientifically-proven psychiatric therapy and medicine is effectively enslaving its believers.

You know what you have to do.

God, love, etc

I’m having an interesting email exchange with a colleague about life and love, etc. We I seem to be converging on reiterating the idea that often it doesn’t make sense to ask if a concept exists but rather what properties someone’s variant of a concept has. “Love” and “God” are labels for something; people don’t invent names for no reason, so the correct question is whether two people mean the same thing when they use the word “love”. By “meaning” here I mean a very organic set of feelings as well as linguistically expressible stuff. I can see how this extends to God. So the question is again not whether a god exists, but rather what properties someone’s conception of God has. But still even here you could imagine that someone’s God concept could be horrendously self-contradictory. Schopenhauer argues quite convincingly that one concept of a Christian God is unacceptable:

“… According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment. And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance. So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know. … Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all.”

I can’t recall if Schopenhauer takes the last step and declares the existence of the god he describes impossible, and in general who’s to say that a worst case characterisation is not true. The same can be said of love, and occasionally one hears mention of the impossibility of “true love”, or how it’s all “just” the action of various polypeptides, or how it just evolved to trick us all into reproducing, etc. These ideas could be correct.

One problem with discussing this stuff is perhaps solvable by making explicit the different ways psychological things are described in general. I like the idea of personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. So at the personal level you focus on feelings, people are in control of their actions, you focus on what it means to be a person, holistically. At sub-personal levels of explanation, upon which the personal level is built I suppose, you can talk about what influences (in a strong determininistic sense) behaviour and feelings. It’s crucial to make clear at what level of explanation one speaks to avoid making category mistakes (and more importantly to avoid making others miserable).

To elaborate further, I imagine it will never be the case that a therapist would sit a client down and say:

“Ah you’re depressed today. Well we inhabit a deterministic universe so a set of experiences beyond your control has caused you, together with genetic predispositions, to feel the way you do and to behave the way you have, including, thankfully for you, your inevitable decision to come to me today where I will (because of my life history and genome) tell you what I’ve just told you and begin a set of interventions where I’ll make you believe you’re in control of what you’re doing but actually that belief, that feeling of conscious choice, is just an unavoidable epiphenomena resulting from the deterministic but random process of evolution which brought us all here.”

This could, on some level, be a true characterisation of what’s going on, but the problem is that we feel we are in control regardless of what the physics says, and our language, including word-emotion relations, evolved accordingly. Back to love again, many of us have a pure and beautiful notion of love which comes mainly from feelings and can’t adequately be put into words and certainly cannot be adequately expressed by any (necessarily sub-personal) scientific theory.

This reminds me of empirical work. Laing, Phillipson, and Lee’s (1966) book Interpersonal Perception is on the very subject of trying to determine empirically if two people have a shared set of ideas about each other. They use questionnaires with questions like:

How true do you think the following are?

1. She understand me
2. I understand her
3. She understands herself
4. I understand myself

How would SHE answer the following?

1. “I understand him”
2. “He understands me”
3. “I understand myself”
4. “He understands himself”

How would SHE think you have answered the following?

1. She understand me
2. I understand her
3. She understands herself
4. I understand myself

The idea is that by comparing people’s answers you can predict stuff about their relationship. I imagine this sort of thing could be helpful to determine if two people or a group of people have compatible notions of love, God, life, the universe, and everything. But perhaps the more natural way to discover such things is the good old traditional technques of meeting people and having a wee chat…

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.)

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.