Whenever I’m not feeling OK, I have a tendency to hit the philosophy. There’s something about contemplating the essential questions of existence that makes your everyday shit seem to be much less of a concern, and more like weird background noise. I’ve finished reading Nausea, my copy of Catcher in the Rye is back on the shelf, and hopefully things will go back to something approximating normal.
I hope I’ve learned something. It was probably something I’d hoped I’d learned before, and no doubt through my own infinite stupidity will need to learn again at some point in the future, but I hope that I’ve learned it for real this time.
Sometimes things end. It’s sad, and sometimes you just can’t understand why, or make sense of what happened, but you can’t howl into the wind and try to change the past with the power of your fury; you’ll just consume yourself in hatred and bitterness and nihilism. Some things just aren’t worth the time, effort or pain trying to fight.
Time to learn to let things end.
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In other news, there’s a Fairtrade Cheese & Wine party on Friday night, which I will certainly be going to, and there two events on Thursday I would like to attend but they’re mutually exclusive and I may not have time anyway: Fairtrade tea party, and ICU Election Hustings.
Act accordingly.
Andy out.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
As is customary amongst our people, I am going to tell you what it is I think about stuff that’s been going on.
On Wednesday, Apple announced, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that they were going to release a new tablet computer, monikered the iPad.
Gallons of ink and… what the fuck is the collective noun for pixels? I mean, you have a murder of crows, a parliament of rooks, a school of fish, a clutch of eggs… regardless, a lot of pixels have gone into describing every nook and cranny of the thing, so there’s no need to re-hash it; I always find that Engadget does a good job of coverage.
The real question is: is the iPad a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing?
I must confess that my initial thought process was, “Oh, it’s a giant iPod Touch. Who cares?” The iPhone OS is limited in a whole bunch of ways that are annoying if you’re used to desktop computers: there’s no filesystem, no multitasking, you have to get all your applications through the App Store, etc. and I felt that was just too limiting for a device that size. I also had ergonomic concerns, is it good for typing, for instance?
Then I sat down and watched the keynote video, watched the thing in action.
And I just can’t be cynical. I’ve wanted a device like this for probably more than a decade. And it’s better than the dream could ever be.
The iWork apps on there were, oddly, what finally convinced me. If you pair it with a USB keyboard, this becomes a practical work machine. It’s not a toy, it’s not a joke, it’s a perfectly-crafted touch device in a way you could never get by retrofitting multitouch into an existing OS, because every aspect of the experience is geared towards interacting with it with your hands. It’s utterly marvellous.
People say that it’s just a bigger iPod Touch. And it is, they’re not wrong. But then a Blu-Ray is just a DVD with more pixels. A Core 2 Quad is just a Duo with 2 extra cores. Heck, it’s really just a faster 486! The step up in experience that the simple doubling of the dimensions provides for is just going to be an order-of-magnitude better. Saying it’s “just” a bigger iPod Touch is like saying a Microsoft Surface table is just a bigger iPod Touch. The very nature of the form-factor makes it different.
So yeh, I’m very excited to head down to the Apple Store in 2 months and have a go at holding one in my hands. I might even go crazy and buy one, like a big sucker buying a 1st gen product.
There are niggles; it should be able to run at least one app in the background. Honestly, that’s all I need, or want. One background app for something like Spotify, and one foreground app to actually work in. The second thing is, they need to loosen App Store approval guidelines. There’s only one route to get software onto it, so it needs to not suck.
As far as Flash goes, I really don’t care. HTML5 Video and Canvas are going to wash it away, and the lack of support for Flash in the iPhone ecosystem is going to hurt Flash, not anybody else. Adobe looks pretty scared.
Still probably not ever going to get a Mac, though.
When it’s Doctor Who, usually. For a TV show where the lead character is a time traveller, there is very little regard for the implications inherent in time travel, and they’re usually presented in contradictory ways when they are mentioned.
For instance: I was watching The Shakespeare Code, wherein the Doctor explains to Martha that if they fail to foil the Carrionites’ plan, the world will be destroyed right then and there in 1599 and Martha’s world will cease to exist. This is surely in contradiction of the Doctor’s assertion in the Waters of Mars that some points in history are fixed, and must stand no matter what; if the world had ended in 1599, Adelaide Brooke and her base on Mars would surely have been wiped from history too. I realise this is probably a pedantic point, but it reaches to the heart of one of the really major failings of the Russell T. Davies (RTD) era of the show: that logic and consistency would be thrown out of the window in favour of whichever plot mechanic was found most expedient at that point. It’s an ultimately unsatisfying way of telling a story.
To some extent Doctor Who has an excuse for poor continuity, with the consistency of past events with current ones; as Paul Cornell (writer of the excellent Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter) point out, the effects of (to a greater extent) the Time War, and (to a lesser extent) time travel can re-write history, meaning that it’s not impossible to see two totally contradictory versions of events.
This provides no explanation, however, for the inconsistency in the nature of time travel itself; one would expect the laws of physics to be invariant under any sort of temporal abuse.
I’m greatly hoping that Moffat’s era will tread more carefully in this area, and the evidence presented by his old episodes show that he’s one of the few writers on the series who treats the time-travel mechanic as much more than a convenient plot generator; his first episode, The Empty Child, has a plot in which Jack Harkness runs self-cleaning scams, where the evidence is cleared away by a known historical event. Blink employs a non-linear narrative, where the Doctor invokes non-linear causality to justify him reading aloud from a transcript of a conversation he’s still having! This is all a great step up from the usual uses of time travel, which is to enter some historical period at the start of an episode, and then leave it again at the end.
Moffat’s stories show that it’s possible to tell compelling stories which are properly guided by their own consistent internal logic, requiring no great leaps of suspension of disbelief.
I was thinking about this in relation to an idea while reading the post by Paul Cornell I linked above, and combining it with my viewing of The Shakespeare Code; if time travel is re-writing history, would there have even been a threat to Earth in Shakespeare’s time if the Doctor had never gone there? Sure, he saved the day, but is just his presence in any point of history destructive to the timeline? Monsters and chaos and death seem to follow the Doctor, but is it coincidence or causation?
I think that would put a potentially interesting spin on the nature of the Doctor and the Time Lord’s policy of non-interference if the presence of time travellers was actually harmful. It would certainly put a dent into the Doctor’s otherwise impeccable morals.
I suppose this is slightly ruled out by Turn Left, in which we see the monsters would have come anyway, but I still think it would be interesting to explore.
You can tell compelling, emotional stories without totally fucking up your internal consistency. Y’know, unlike the ones told with unbreakable time-locks, for instance. Which are breakable if you want to risk going crazy. Or you can toss a diamond into a hologram as well as Timothy Dalton. I do know a lot of people who were confused by that reveal: “I thought the time lords were dead, not trapped in a bubble!”. The de-emphasis of the mechanics of time travel in the series is, I think, one of the contributors to that lack of understanding.
I do have to give RTD some credit, though. I am desperatly curious about what exactly the Could-Have-Been King and the Nightmare Child are. I suppose it’s easier to come up with cool-sounding names when there’s no requirement to ever actually have to depict them on screen!
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