Monthly Archives: February 2010

Morality

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Freedom is scary.

I’m an atheist who takes his atheism extremely seriously, so I’m very frequently bothered by the inherent philosophical difficulties which come embedded within an atheistic mind-set; I can see why God is an appealing solution to these problems for some people. Personally find it unsatisfactory, mostly because I’m somewhat of an Occamite; postulating the existence of an entity for which there is no evidence in order to paper over the cracks in my philosophy is something I find rather intellectually unappealing.

So of course you need alternative solutions to many of life’s problems; a very tricky one being the question of morality.

I would say that there is no such thing as objective morality, that morality is inherently subjective. This is what makes writing an atheistic theory of ethics and morality almost inherently a fool’s errand, because without the notion of a pinning moral authority, the whole edifice falls apart. This has a whole plethora of unpleasant consequences, including the notion that morality itself is meaningless, especially in the face of one’s absolute free will.

Why can I not do anything I want? Murder, steal, sing like nobody’s listening, rape, crochet, etc. whenever and however I feel?

Personally, I believe the solution to the conundrum is that one should form one’s own code of ethics which one should then follow; by that I mean to say that one should become one’s own legislator, judge, jury, and executioner. Maybe I should make the internal decision that I find crochet immoral, for instance.

Sin then becomes an essentially relative phenomenon, when you realise that you have, through temptation, transgressed your own moral code. The parallels there with conventional Christianity are obvious; I suppose there’s then the equally tricky question of the meaning of redemption without a redemptive authority; how can we forgive ourselves our own transgressions? Can we be absolved? Is absolution even a desirable concept?

I suppose one could appeal to a kind of biologically-derived social morality; that we have inbuilt ideas of morality as a society because it’s an excellent survival strategy, so our behaviours are biologically modulated to exclude murder and the like because such things are deleterious to our chances of survival as a group, whereas activities like crochet are of a much more neutral character.

Of course, this would seem to violate the principle of absolute free will; perhaps the concept of freedom is antithetical to the concept of morality.

I don’t know. I’m only an amateur philosopher, after all.

America, Part II

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The American mythologisation of their own political history is something I find fascinating, as evidenced by some of my previous writing on the subject.

The history of the US is to this day blighted by the legacy of slavery; this is not to say that other countries haven’t got their hands dirty with slavery too;  many countries bear the social ills of deprivation and poverty which can be traced back to the trade in people; nevertheless there is a definite tension to that particular racial history.

Which I find a little weird, frankly, because it was the Native Americans who got a lot more screwed by the incursion and growth of the European transplant American nation. At first contact, it’s estimated that there were around 20-50 million Native Americans; by 1890, there were only 250,000, and today there are but 2.8 million. They were ravaged both by the transmission of European diseases, and by deliberate policy to drive them from their lands and way of life.

The history of the relations between the Native Americans and the new nation show the hypocrisy with which the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were treated. 800 treaties were made between the United States and various Native American nations; 430 were never ratified by the Senate (though their conditions were still taken to be binding upon the Native Americans) and the United States violated provisions of the remaining 370 treaties which it did ratify.

When they said “all men are created equal” they meant: “all white, preferably Anglo-Saxon, males are created equal”. The consent of the governed meant nothing if you were black, or Native American, or god forbid, a woman. Black people were counted for 3/5ths of a person in determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives, for instance, and neither black people nor women could vote at all.

I should point out that the only crime displayed here is that of hypocrisy; the ownership of African slaves and the brutalisation of native peoples by colonial powers were entirely commonplace in the rest of the world, and a thing to be remarked on as abhorrent only in their totality; singling out any one nation only serves to obscure the collective nature of our guilt.

The extent to which the founding documents of the United States, and the men who drafted them, are venerated is totally incommensurate with their intrinsic worth. The trouble with this veneration is that it makes these ideas inviolate; one cannot hold these founding documents up to critical scrutiny, let alone revision, without committing blasphemy against this mad secular religion.

For instance, gun-lovers point to the second amendment to the Constitution almost like it was scripture, guaranteeing their right to possess arms as if it were holy writ.  The easiest way to solve the gun control issue would be to simply amend the second amendment itself, and remove the right to bear arms, or at least clarify the notion of a well-regulated militia.

Unfortunately, this will never happen; as a brief historical note, the first ten amendments constitute the American Bill of Rights, and are more-or-less contemporaneous with the Constitution itself, and can thus be considered as de facto part of it. The possibility of amending the second raises the spectre of amending the first (the right to free speech) or the fifth (the right to not self-incriminate). One wonders what the outcome will be when the language in which the Constitution is written becomes ever staler and divorced from the English of the day, and the meaning of the words is slowly shifted to something steadily more unrecognisable, the text left unaltered as the language evolves around it.

This is luckily not a problem in the UK; that great document of ancient English freedom, the Magna Carta, has been more-or-less entirely repealed and replaced with newer legislation, the most recent of which being the Human Rights Act. It’s never the document that’s important; the document is only a symbol. What’s important are the ideas, and the principles, and keeping those principles alive in the hearts and minds of mankind. Our documents should never be inviolate; our ideals should be.

Some facts and figures on Native American populations and treaties were drawn from the book “Why Do People Hate America?” by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. Others were from Wikipedia. Interpretation and conclusions entirely my own (terrible) work.

Imperial College Union Votes to Rename Bars: #phase3

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The Union is currently in the midst of a plan known as Phase 3 to modernise the Union’s bar and nightclub areas in place of the existing dBs and da Vinci’s to make them, y’know, actually decent places to have a night out. I will concede that da Vinci’s is alright, but dB’s is sorely in need of a refurbishment.

Anyways, the Union recently ran a competition to rename these new bars as part of the Phase 3 development, and they’ve just released the final shortlist of names, along with the opportunity to vote which names will be adopted for the new nightclub and bar.

Shortlist for the nightclub:

  • Iris
  • Lab
  • Metric
  • Neighbourhood
  • Theory

Shortlist for the bar:

  • Consort
  • Crown & Shield
  • Library
  • Quad

Now, I will be the first to admit that I did not submit any possible names; mostly this is because I’m ludicrously terrible at naming things. If I ever have children they’re probably going to be named by pasting pages from a baby name book onto a wall, then chucking darts until one strikes a name I like the sound of.

However, somebody at the Union seriously screwed up when they picked this shortlist. Some of the names are just plain terrible and others have the rather more significant problem that the collide with names of places already on campus; the most egregious example here is “Library”, which will have the rather unfortunate effect of making the sentences “Let’s meet at the Library” or “Let’s eat at the Library” ambiguous. I cannot possibly fathom how the brief enjoyment of a moment of irony derived from drinking in a bar called the Library could possibly outweigh the continuing irritation this could well generate for years and years.

“Quad” is broken for the same reason, although to a lesser extent. “Crown & Shield”, presumably drawn from the crown logo of the RCSU and the shield of the CGCU, is basically a massive fuck-you to the miners and the medics, the latter of which needs no further alienation from the rest of IC; it also makes it sound like a pub, which the new bar will not be, the pub niche is filled very well by the Union Bar.

The only half-decent name there is “Consort”, presumably drawn from the Prince Consort Road on which the Union sits, which possesses the fairly unique quality amongst the rest of actually sounding like a bar as well as being vaguely appropriate.

The names for the nightclub are mostly just plain awful. “Lab” is another unfortunate collision. The only decent one there is “Metric”, as you can tell by it being the runaway leader in the polling up to this point.

Speaking of the polling, it is rather severely flawed by the lack of an option to vote RON (re-open nominations) , something which is usually a central part of Union democracy. One wonders if President Ashley Brown‘s experience fighting the battle for election against RON left him with a grudge.

I jest, I jest. He’s been very good in engaging with the dialogue about this on Twitter, and that’s pretty damn admirable.

Anyway, I would suggest scrapping this poll altogether and starting a new one from scratch before this one is allowed to run on too long. Most people I’ve spoken to about these names share my opinion that they’re terrible. All I can say is, I don’t want to see this become a presidential election issue when the presidential candidates publish their election manifestos for next year. I can’t imagine anything quite as ignominious for the current president as to have his successor immediately strike down the voted-for Phase 3 names chosen under his stewardship.

Anyway, as the poll probably isn’t going to be called off, go here and vote for the least bad options. Thank you.

Against Mystery

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Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams

This post began as a response to Jenny’s article, but it got a little tangential.

I just watched the first in a series of programmes on the history of the Bible, presented by the novelist Howard Jacobson:  “Creation”

I’m wary of entering religious discussions, because they rarely, if ever, go well unless you’re already in agreement with the person with whom you’re discussing.

Nevertheless, I feel, as an atheist, somewhat denigrated by that programme. I feel almost cast as if I was an robotic automaton, in thrall to the iron certainty of my science, of “mere fact”, so blind to art and literature that I would come out of a performance of King Lear and wonder if the man really existed.

They complain about the so-called “New Atheists” campaigning against the straw-men of religious believers; I say that they’re talking about straw-men atheists.

Personally, I love myth, and legend. If we weren’t called atheists, I would love to call ourselves Prometheans, stealing fire from the jealous gods for the benefit of Man. I love reading the modern myths of an author like Neil Gaiman, spinning stories of Dream and Death. I love the musings of Hamlet on death and existence, and I read the philosophy of Sartre and Nietzsche, trying to get to the nature of existence and the human condition.

I see no reason why Genesis should be venerated over and above, say, the Theogony, or the creation tales of the Shintoists, or any other work of literature. The artistry is incredible, but I see no reason why I should be compelled to find truth in it, other than the truths it reveals about the people who wrote these stories.

I find myself most agreeing with the wonderful A.C. Grayling; people wrote these stories to find agency, meaning, in a disordered universe. There’s a good reason most of them start with the division of disorder into order! Jacobson recoils when the ancients were described as ignorant, as if it’s a perjorative; the truth is that they were, they simply did not know then what we know now, after years of struggle and careful experiment. Newton was ignorant of quantum mechanics; that’s hardly a slight on his genius.

As usual, the non-scientist’s misunderstanding of the nature of science is dredged up; that we possess a cast-iron certainty, blind to everything else.

This is bollocks of the absolute highest order. Science is doubt. Science is questioning, science is about looking at the universe and admitting that our understanding of it is fragmentary and incomplete, and that we should rectify that.

Take, for example, particle physics. We have this awesome theory, the Standard Model, that describes to a truely astounding accuracy the behaviour and interactions of every known fundamental particle. It’s a staggering intellectual achievement. We’re not sure about it yet; one component of it (the Higgs particle) is still as yet unobserved, and we know that the theory will break down at higher energy scales.

This isn’t blind certainty, it’s a diligent quest to know and understand more.

What men like Jacobson and his hero, Keats, fear is that all the important things in life lie in the gaps between our knowledge, and that as science carries on it will stitch up those gaps one by one until there is nothing transcendent left in the universe, because something can be transcendent only by being unknown and mysterious, clouded in haze. They fear that the God-of-the-Gaps will be driven out.

One, if your faith is only in a God-of-the-Gaps you deserve to be driven out. What does your faith really mean if it must be constantly modified so that it isn’t obliterated by the encroaches of science? The only way I can see that ending is in a God that has been so declawed as to be nothing more than a vague spirit, not even finding a refuge beyond space and time or after death as he does now.

Two, they ignore the beauty in the truth that science reveals. The inconceivable age of the universe, the bizarre era of the condensed quark-gluon plasma, the last fading microwave echos of the time the universe was opaque, the twisted time and space of a black hole, the wonderful mad complexity of life, the nuclear-powered twisting fury of the Sun, the emptiness in the heart of the atom… the examples of wonderful ideas that come out of science and mathematics are innumerable.

Keats blamed Newton for destroying the poetry of a rainbow by explaining it; I say that a rainbow is still as beautiful today, and I think more so because I understand it; I understand how light is refracted through a drop of water, reflecting off the back surface of the spherical drop. I think that’s beautiful. I think that the solutions of the Maxwell equations of a dielectric interface that describe the reflection of light are beautiful.

Jacobson and Keats would have us give up. To throw our hands in the air, and declare that some things should be unknown, un-sought for. Thank goodness nobody listened to Keats; I dread to think where we would be if Newton’s ideas had been suppressed. This is why we should never, ever give in to irrationality. Some things are far too important.

I think our own origins as creatures who have evolved and transcended our ancestors, who have toiled against the odds to create our civilisation and our knowledge is a far more beautiful story than any that could be told by a religion, and I feel that it is ever the better because it’s what actually happened.

The title of this post is a reference to John Bell’s paper “Against Measurement” which you can read if you happen to be on a University campus. It is a piece of essentially scientific doubt on the admittedly dubious interpretation of the concept of measurement in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

An Outlet for Possibly Misplaced Rage

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The door in the library cafe this post is about.

See that little sign? MOST PEOPLE CAN'T.

Today, somebody nearly opened a door into me.

This was immensely irritating for two reasons:

  1. This door is made of glass. Not frosted glass, either, but honest to goodness clear window glass. You have to be a really extreme species of troglodyte to not see somebody on the other side of a goddamn glass door.
  2. This door has a sign next to it saying it’s not an exit. Furthermore, it has a sign on it saying that it shouldn’t be used as an exit. People go ahead and use it as an egress anyway. To express my rage at this I’m sadly going to have to break out of the confines of this numbered list.

Ah, that’s better. Anyway, if there’s something I absolutely fucking hate it’s when people decide that instructions like that are not for them;  people who commit such hubris, who believe that such instructions are for somebody else, not somebody wonderful and important like themselves.

Get the fuck over yourselves and spend the damned thirty seconds walking the long way around.

Oh, and what’s worse is when bottom-feeding scumbags use that door and then not close it after themselves, letting in a continual draft of glacial air. Pack of absolute selfish twats.

To  the transgressors I say this:

You are not special. You are not important. Your time is not more important or more special than mine. You do not have the right to decide that rules do not apply to you in order to satiate your own laziness.

Oh, and look where you’re fucking going! There’s a fucking pavement on the other side of that door!

Music Piracy and Star Trek

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This is one of those absolutely bizarre ideas that one has completely inexplicably, but then feel the need to share with the world.

Once upon a time, music was scarce. It was all bound up into a physical item: a vinyl record, a tape, or a CD. If you wanted a copy of the music, you’d have to physically remove that item from the possession of someone else. There was no such thing as piracy; there was only theft.

What has happened since then is that technology has ensured that music has become a post-scarcity commodity; once a piece of music is in existence, it costs almost nothing to reproduce and transmit it. As most of you are aware, this has caused the music industry to collectively shit itself; it’s not their fault, really. The people at the top were too old, and too stuck in their ways to understand that the economics they were used to were fundamentally gone, replaced by something that nobody had ever really seen before.

Which makes me wonder what will happen if something like Star Trek replicators are ever invented. To the uninitiated, a replicator allows any item to be duplicated as long as one possesses the raw materials. This of course leaves some scarcity, as the raw materials will still be hard to come by, but it raises the spectre of a world in which, say, an Audi or an iPhone can be duplicated as easily as the latest Muse single.

I have no conception of how such an economics would impact society. Imagine if the histrionics of the music industry were repeated everywhere, from every sector and corner of society.

The shame of it is that living in a truly post-scarcity society would probably be like existing in utopia. Although, there’s probably a reason that “utopia” means “not place”.