Looney

2012-01-24T18:21:00.000-08:00

Pliny the Elder: Rebutting the Flat Earthers.

I don't have a decent online link for the text of Pliny's Natural History. The text is an encyclopedia of classical opinions covering every topic imaginable. In some areas it is fascinating as it talks about the relative size and distance of the moon and the sun, along with the nature of eclipses. But then he includes remarks that lightning descends from Jupiter and the vapors of the earth effect the starts. It is quite a mixed bag. Astrology and omens get a lengthy section of praise in all this.

He expends much of a book proving that the Earth is a sphere and giving all sorts of arguments. The timing of the visibility of eclipses from different parts of the globe is part of this. Differing lengths of the days in summer and winter at different latitude also are noted and the fact that a sun dial which is correct for one locale will not be useful if it is moved too far. Similar arguments are based on shadows since in the northern parts they never face south, while near the equator they are sometimes north and sometimes south. Then there is Aswan in Egypt which is always to the north, except for one day of the year. Pliny asserts that sailors have longer days sailing west than east. The oddest, however, is a claim that some lights which were set during the day were visible elsewhere at night. As to whether or not anyone actually believed a flat earth notion, Pliny doesn't say directly. No one specifically is mentioned, nor does he quote anyone.

2012-01-19T06:59:00.000-08:00

How to study a foreign language.

While working. First, make sure your kids are grown up and out of the house. The next thing to do is to have a class with an ambitious program. Mine is a three semester sequence to learn Biblical Hebrew that will cost a bundle of money. This guarantees that my wife will keep me motivated to stay with the program and get my money worth out of it.

The next is to study every moment possible. Waking up the first thing to do is work on some pronunciation before heading off to work. Lunch means more study. As soon as I am home, it is study and homework again except for dinner time and a walk with my wife. A bit more study and it is time for bed. The weekends are the time to catch up on the schedule.

Skipping church to learn Biblical Hebrew or cutting out church activities would be defeating the purpose, thus, the need to squeeze all these activities in with the study time. There is also the possibility of listening to language recordings while commuting, which I might do this morning. What I have already been doing is to pull out a verb conjugation chart and look at this while waiting at red lights. No law against this - yet!

2012-01-17T06:24:00.000-08:00

Slow Blogging

My apologies to all those I usually check in with.

The semester of learning Hebrew is getting very busy. Together with work and other obligations, this means that something has to be cut, and that is the blogging time.

2012-01-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

Gregory Nazianzen (329-390AD), Bruce Willis and The Fifth Element.

These orations are roughly as convoluted as the movie. I would not have thought there was any connection, but it seems I am wrong, so here goes:

"But if we are to assert that He is immaterial (as for example that Fifth Element which some have imagined), and that He is carried round in the circular movement ... let us assume that He is immaterial, and that He is the Fifth Element; and, if they please, let Him be also bodiless in accordance with the independent drift and arrangement of their argument;..." - Gregory Nazianzen, Oration XXVIII.

In the movie, the Fifth Element that saves mankind is Love, while the Fifth Element that Gregory is referring to is God. The Bible then connects the two:

" ... for God is love." - 1 John 4:8

Before we get too carried away, however, it must be noted that Gregory is condemning the notion of God being composed of the Fifth Element along with the related baggage as being a heresy. What makes Gregory's orations convoluted is that he somehow feels he needs to itemize and condemn every possible error known throughout the history of mankind in addition to that the of the Eunomians who were the ones who got him going in the first place. An apt sentence begins this series of long-winded lectures:

"For there are certain persons who have not only their ears and their tongues, but even, as I now perceive, their hands too, itching for our words; who delight in profane babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called, and strifes about words, which tend to no profit; for so Paul, the Preacher and Establisher of the "Word cut short," the disciple and teacher of the Fishermen, calls all that is excessive or superfluous in discourse." - Oration XXVII

There are still several hours of this set for me to listen to. But now, it is time for me to end my own profane babblings and cease engaging in excessive and superfluous discourse. Good Night!

2012-01-08T21:39:00.000-08:00

Cicero (106-43BC): On Old Age.

This was written when Cicero was 62, although he is using another person, Cato, as his spokesman who is supposedly 84. There is something that I enjoy as I get older which is quite eloquently spoken of here:

"But I have known many of them who never said a word of complaint against old age; for they were only too glad to be freed from the bondage of passion, and were not at all looked down upon by their friends. The fact is that the blame for all complaints of that kind is to be charged to character, not to a particular time of life. For old men who are reasonable and neither cross-grained nor churlish find old age tolerable enough: whereas unreason and churlishness cause uneasiness at every time of life." - On Old Age

I find that less agitates me as I grow older for which I am quite thankful. Some people look with despair on old age as a time when there is nothing to do. My hope is to be able to be more mentally and physically active as the demands on my time become less. To this Cicero writes through the mouth of Cato:

"We see Solon, for instance, boasting in his poems that he grows old “daily learning something new.” Or again in my own case, it was only when an old man that I became acquainted with Greek literature, which in fact I absorbed with such avidity—in my yearning to quench, as it were, a long-continued thirst—that I became acquainted with the very facts which you see me now using as precedents. When I heard what Socrates had done about the lyre I should have liked for my part to have done that too, for the ancients used to learn the lyre, but, at any rate, I worked hard at literature."

This was written about the same time Cicero gave his Philippics against Mark Anthony that eventually got him killed. I wonder if he wasn't deliberately trying to go out with a bang. Cicero also wrote On The Nature Of The Gods which I have read. It has different characters arguing for different philosophical viewpoints. My initial view was that he was a Stoic, while others claimed that he founded the Latin skeptics. To this I will add some of the finishing thoughts of Cicero on the immortality of the soul, and that the belief in the soul's immortality is a factor in how men behave:

"Do you suppose—to take an old man’s privilege of a little self-praise—that I should have been likely to undertake such heavy labours by day and night, at home and abroad, if I had been destined to have the same limit to my glory as to my life? Had it not been much better to pass an age of ease and repose without any labour or exertion? But my soul, I know not how, refusing to be kept down, ever fixed its eyes upon future ages, as though from a conviction that it would begin to live only when it had left the body. But had it not been the case that souls were immortal, it would not have been the souls of all the best men that made the greatest efforts after an immortality of fame."

2012-01-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

Sending wishes up to heaven.

There was a little village in the Taiwan countryside that specialized in this business. People would write their wishes or whatever all over the paper balloon and then send it up to the sky. One person was hoping that his job would go well. Another that someone name Jenny would learn to drive safely. Some had firecrackers attached which would start going off when the balloon was high up. It was quite a sight when a number were drifting up through the sky at the same time. I am wondering how many environmental and flight regulations this would violate in the US.

2012-01-07T17:11:00.000-08:00

Basil of Caesarea (329-378AD): Reflecting on Nature.

My first reflection is that the hills are mostly brown, which they shouldn't be this time of year. The Snowpack survey puts us at 19% of normal for January 3rd and there is no rain in the ten day forecast.

Basil's Hexaemeron is a collection of long sermons on the creation. The context thus causes him to engage all his rhetorical skills in the discussions of nature, which means touching on a great number of subjects involving science and geography. For this reason it is a treasure trove of ideas that were accepted in his lifetime, while also giving us insights into the state of caution that he maintained with respect to science. There are a few oddities such as a claim that the full moon significantly effects things like humidity and rates of decay, while neglecting tides. A condemnation of astrology is included and complaints about superstition.

I have been collecting notes related to the flat earth theory. Basil gives us a collection of the views that circulated in his time:

"Those who have written about the nature of the universe have discussed at length the shape of the earth. If it be spherical or cylindrical, if it resemble a disc and is equally rounded in all parts, or if it has the forth of a winnowing basket and is hollow in the middle; all these conjectures have been suggested by cosmographers, each one upsetting that of his predecessor. It will not lead me to give less importance to the creation of the universe, that the servant of God, Moses, is silent as to shapes; he has not said that the earth is a hundred and eighty thousand furlongs in circumference; he has not measured into what extent of air its shadow projects itself whilst the sun revolves around it, nor stated how this shadow, casting itself upon the moon, produces eclipses. He has passed over in silence, as useless, all that is unimportant for us. ..." - The Hexaemeron, Homily IX.

For reference, a furlong is about 200 meters, so 180,000 furlongs is roughly 36,000 kilometers, compared to the modern measurement of about 40,000 kilometers. An interesting discussion is where Basil argues for the great size of the Sun and Moon given that they have the same apparent size in India as in Briton. To this he compares a great ship which looks tiny when viewed from a mountain. At this point the Darwin Worshipers and Big Bangers will immediately chime in that there is nothing in this that should conflict with the infallibility of their doctrines. As if Darwin Worshipers and Big Bangers weren't known to Basil! These are the first gnostics that he deals with:

"... Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules and ducts, form, by their union, the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies only owe their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion: a true spider’s web woven by these writers who give to heaven, to earth, and to sea so weak an origin and so little consistency! It is because they knew not how to say “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance." - The Hexaemeron, Homily I.

Something curious in the Genesis account of Creation is that the plants are created on the third day, but the Sun and Moon are created on the fourth. Basil's explanation is as follows:

"The reason why the adornment of the earth was before the sun is the following; that those who worship the sun, as the source of life, may renounce their error. If they be well persuaded that the earth was adorned before the genesis of the sun, they will retract their unbounded admiration for it, because they see grass and plants vegetate before it rose." - The Hexaemeron, Homily V

My end conclusion is that I would like to listen to more of Basil's lectures. Hopefully more recordings will go up onto Librivox.org.

2012-01-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

Back To School.

When I was working in France many years ago, we were having a dinner party. One of the French engineers asked me how to translate "Bon Appétit" into English. My immediate response was "Dig In", which caused a Dutch engineer who had spent a lot of time in the US to burst out laughing. There was also a 40-something French lady there who was an English teacher. She took some offense at my translation, but did not offer any alternatives.

The problem here is simple: Both "Bon Appétit" and "Dig In" convey the instruction to commence eating, while the former is intended to be polite, and the later is an instruction to a group of swine who certainly need no such instruction. The literal translation of both phrases would mean something even further removed from the subject. This highlights the problem of translation from one language to another: It is invariably ambiguous and there really isn't a single correct translation.

My school registration is for distance learning with Western Seminary. This commences with Biblical Hebrew starting on Monday. There is already a bit of ambiguity developing as I started pre-studying the Hebrew alphabet. Do we use the Masoretic pronunciation? Or the modern Hebrew pronunciation? Using the modern Hebrew would add some utility to this exercise, but the Masoretic would be more true to the ancients and seems to involve more subtle distinctions. Will I succeed? It means my after work hours will be quite busy and I may need to reduce time both blogging and reading other bloggers, but we will see. Then there is my regular book reading which will need to be reduced. Life is changing.

2012-01-06T22:25:00.000-08:00

An Episcopal Funeral.

A former colleague passed away and some of us went to his funeral today. Lots of memories were brought to mind. He is in the Lord's hands now and my prayer is that God would provide comfort to his wife, children and grandchildren.

What I wanted to comment on was the Episcopal service, this being the first one I have been to. Compared to what I am used to, it strikes me as being fairly traditional with the clergy wearing robes, making strange signs with their hands and using magical water to sprinkle things. Then there was the liturgy based on prayers and readings done word for word from a liturgy pamphlet. The funeral service ended with a mass, which is also something that I had never seen before.

The tradition was a bit intermittent, however, as the music was of a modern composition and the clergy were all women. I brought a copy of the liturgy home and probably should go through it a bit more carefully. Something to highlight immediately is the version of the Lord's prayer:

"Father-Mother, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name." - Liturgy

Hmmm. The King James Version of this is:

"Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name." - Matthew 6:9

I am wondering if "hallowed by" instead of "hallowed be" is a typo. It completely changes the meaning of the text. The last verse of the Lord's prayer is missing from the liturgy pamphlet. This is the part that says:

"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen." - Matthew 6:13

A common theme that fundamentalists will pick on when looking at a modernist worship is the sense of what the gospel of Christ means to us personally. Fundamentalists say that it begins with acknowledging sin - my sin - not someone else's. There is an acknowledgement of sin in the liturgy, but it is of a vague and collective nature:

"All say
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us. -repeat 3X- " - Liturgy

And what the primary concern is:

"Mostly, Lord, help us to open to You the places in us that are injured, hurt, and traumatized." - Liturgy

I have prayed such things too, but what should traumatize me most is my own sin and not the thrashing I received at someone else's hands. Shouldn't the thrashing I gave someone else be more bothersome to my conscience than what someone did to me? As part of the Lord's supper, there is this definition of what is going on:

"This is the Lamb of God, who opens His and Her hands and pours upon us all that we need, so our lives may be whole and holy." - Liturgy

Of course the Lamb of God is Jesus, who is definitely not a Her. Stepping back and looking at the entire service, it was certainly an educational experience.

2012-01-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

African Monarch

This was part of a visit to a flower garden spot in the Taiwan countryside. With the nice weather and flowers, this was a good place to find some butterflies.

Here is one that caught my attention because it looked so familiar. At first I thought it was the same Monarch butterfly as we have here in California. Maybe a migrant?

A list of Taiwan butterflies caused me to change my opinion to a slightly different critter - the African Monarch or Plain Tiger.

This is a picture I took in Fremont, California of a regular Monarch Butterfly for comparison. They are always eye grabbing.

2012-01-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

Planet of the Apes: Monkeying with Aesop's Fables.

Yes, I stooped to watching a movie on the airplane heading home from Taiwan. My brain was too fuzzy to listen to more theologians. With The Rise of the Planet of the Apes being set in my home area of San Francisco, I get to ponder whether the plot is more or less gloomy than the expected reality. Not quite sure, but it is good to see that the apes exploit the fog bank in their rebellion. That they would cross the Golden Gate and settle in Marin County is hardly surprising. There certainly was too much competition at Fisherman's Wharf for them to set up a street act.

What struck me most, however, was a scene where the hero-ape of the story, Caesar, was trying to break a bundle of sticks. This was at point where he was trying to convince the newly educated apes to join together in a rebellion. Clearly Caesar had been reading Aesop:

Father and Sons

A certain man had several Sons who were always quarrelling with one another, and, try as he might, he could not get them to live together in harmony. So he determined to convince them of their folly by the following means. Bidding them fetch a bundle of sticks, he invited each in turn to break it across his knee. All tried and all failed: and then he undid the bundle, and handed them the sticks one by one, when they had no difficulty at all in breaking them. "There, my boys," said he, "united you will be more than a match for your enemies: but if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you."

Union is strength. - Aesop's Fables.

I am told that this is a Chinese fable also, but involves a bundle of chopsticks. Regarding whether or not the movie as a whole is a fable, I will leave that question to someone with more insight.

2012-01-03T07:01:00.000-08:00

Home again ...

There are many more pictures which I will be uploading from this trip. Yesterday the six of us headed off for Taoyuan airport from Kaoshiung. We spent 1 hour, 38 minutes on the bullet train, hopped a bus to the airport, and then had to say our good byes as half the group went to LAX and the other half to SFO.

Each train can seat 989 passengers and moves along at almost 300 km/hour (~190mph). The French TGV comparison info is here. Each bullet train has 12 cars, whereas the TGV is either 8 or 10.

List of trains heading north. We can't take an express train because they skip Taoyuan station which is nearest the airport.

Waving to Delirious' daughter. This is the earlier trip south as we pass Taichung.

The bullet train arriving. Again, this is the trip south a few days earlier and we are at Taoyuan station.

2012-01-01T19:20:00.001-08:00

The Old Country Church

2012-01-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

Buddhism + Modern Construction + Wealth = ?

This is a monastery in central Taiwan that looks to have been funded by some wealthy businessman. The scale can't really be seen from the photos, but it is huge and most likely had a price tag in the hundreds of millions of US dollars. There is one room after another of giant images. Compared to the older temples, this lacks much of the garishness and is simpler, although far larger in terms of scale. The entire outside is faced with polished marble to make it more impressive. Much of the structure is for large numbers of hotel like rooms that are for the monks who live there. Traditional Christian monasteries provided for the livelihood of the monks by working the adjacent land. This clearly wasn't being done at this monastery, which leaves one wondering what the source of their income is.

Tourists come in and look at the images one-by-one before moving on. Many take pictures like I did. A few will offer up a prayer and throw in some money. Comparing to European tourism of cathedrals, there is some of the same sense as tourists would look at images of the apostles or other Bible scenes. What is different is the lack of a hall for congregational worship, and the occasional pipe organ concert.

The reason for this post relates to the atheists. I have heard atheists claim on multiple occasions that Buddhism is much more compatible to atheism than Christianity. The pretext is that Buddhism is more philosophical and less superstitious than Christianity! This temple is the simplest of the ones I have seen. More common was one I saw in the city center where a large number of people were lined up to get their fortune told.

2012-01-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

Augstine (354-430AD): The Enchiridion

Enchiridion means something like handbook, thus, it is a concise version of some of Augustine's other teachings. What stands out the most is the discussion of good and evil, which goes for a few paragraphs. One of the conclusions is this:

"Thus, there can be no evil where there is no good."

He is arguing that nothing can be created evil, but rather that evil can only come about as a corruption of good. This is a more philosophical work on good and evil. The century that included Augustine produced a lot of Christian writings, so I will be reading from various writers to get a flavor. The list includes Basil of Caesarea (330-379AD), Gragory of Nazianzen (329-390AD), and Leo the Great (391-461AD).

2012-01-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

Aesop's Fables (~600BC?).

Other than hearing the story of The Tortoise And The Hare, this collection is something I had never read. I listened to the entire set while traveling and was surprised at how many expressions in English - and one in Chinese - come from Aesop's Fables. What was more surprising was that a few seemed to be out of the Bible. The ones that most directly are in the Bible are:

Physician heal thyself.

This is from The Quack Frog:

Once upon a time a Frog came forth from his home in the marshes and proclaimed to all the world that he was a learned physician, skilled in drugs and able to cure all diseases. Among the crowd was a Fox, who called out, "You a doctor! Why, how can you set up to heal others when you cannot even cure your own lame legs and blotched and wrinkled skin?"

Physician, heal thyself.

The Bible passage is Luke 4:23

Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’” “I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.

The second is Those who will not work deserve to starve, which is from The Blacksmith and His Dog. This is invoked by Paul in 2 Thessalonian 3:10:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: 'If a man will not work, he shall not eat.'

There are other similar usages, but they seem to me more of principles of wisdom that are common to humanity while the language or imagery isn't quite enough to draw attention. One peculiar exception to this is the farmer who lights a fire to the tail of a fox seeking revenge. The conclusion is "Revenge is a two-edged sword". In the book of Judges, Samson also lights fires to the tails of foxes as part of his revenge.

2012-01-01T06:06:00.000-08:00

Searching for snakes ...

I finally found where they are hiding. The characters mean "snake meat". It was in front of a restaurant serving things like snake soup. No wonder snakes are elusive here in Taiwan.

2011-12-31T21:57:00.000-08:00

Some spiders.

2011-12-31T04:19:00.000-08:00

On Preaching: Westminster Catechism, 1647

Being in Taiwan, I get to see many temples. Besides all the images, the main thing that strikes me is that none of them are set up for teaching. If I compare with a Christian structure, the main design feature is the gathering hall where people can listen to an oration. (Note: Soka Gakkai is a Japanese Buddhist sect which does have the meeting rooms and preaching.) Meanwhile, I am listening to orations that are recorded as I am shuttled here and there. The following instructions struck me as being pertinent to this subject:

Q. 158. By whom is the Word of God to be preached?
A. The Word of God is to be preached only by such as are sufficiently gifted, and also duly approved and called to that office.

Q. 159. How is the Word of God to be preached by those that are called thereunto?
A. They that are called to labor in the ministry of the word, are to preach sound doctrine, diligently, in season and out of season; plainly, not in the enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and of power; faithfully, making known the whole counsel of God; wisely, applying themselves to the necessities and capacities of the hearers; zealously, with fervent love to God and the souls of his people; sincerely, aiming at his glory, and their conversion, edification, and salvation.

Q. 160. What is required of those that hear the word preached?
A. It is required of those that hear the word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer; examine what they hear by the Scriptures; receive the truth with faith, love, meekness, and readiness of mind, as the Word of God; meditate, and confer of it; hide it in their hearts, and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives. - Westminster Larger Catechism.

2011-12-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

Old England, Taiwan.

I would have chosen something with a bit more local flavor. Anyway, this place reminds me of Hearst Castle. If I understood correctly, the owner brought 360 containers full of artifacts and deconstructed buildings to Taiwan from Europe to make this mansion in the clouds. We are at 1,700 meters elevation where things are a bit coolerr. Pictures below are from my room.

2011-12-29T02:48:00.000-08:00

Engineering Tourism.

One of my previous tasks involved Earthquake Engineering methodologies. Thus, this place was truly a special treat. Look at the pictures carefully!

The structure was built over eight years beginning in 1990. A year after completion an earthquake did the damage above. The Taiwan government decided to preserve this crumpled temple as a monument to the quake. I heard some snarky remarks, but was too busy inspecting columns to even think about such things.

2011-12-28T04:59:00.000-08:00

5,000 Miles Away From Home.

In Le Midi, which is a hotel in 溪頭 (shitou = headwaters). My wife's parents would bring her here to the countryside when she was a young girl. The family had relatives from this area. It has now become a bit touristy with Monster Village nearby and some beautiful hiking trails that we won't quite have enough time to enjoy. The local cuisine is bamboo with some venison and mushrooms thrown in. Nice. A group from the Philippines entertained us singing American songs, the first of which is linked below. Here are some pictures.

Evening sky from a hotel window.

Monster Village.

A view out our hotel room window.

Bamboo steamed rice - a local favorite.

Another local dish???

And what the band was singing:

2011-12-28T01:38:00.000-08:00

Apollonius of Tyana (15?-100?AD): Searching for Ramana.

Regarding his trip to India:

"Apollonius himself describes the character of these sages and of their settlement upon the hill; for in one of his addresses to the Egyptians he says, " I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the riches of all men." He may indeed be thought to have here written with too much subtlety; but we have anyhow the account of Damis to the effect that they made a practice of sleeping on the ground, and that they strewed the ground with such grass as they might themselves prefer; and, what is more, he says that he saw them levitating themselves two cubits high from the ground ..." - The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus (170-250AD)

This is a peculiar book of sorcery, wizardry, dragons and talking trees that gets mixed up with philosophy in what was intended as an attack on Christianity. Some of Tolkien's imagery for the Lord of the Rings may trace originally to this work, but I would not want to make any definitive statement. What I learned is that wizards were presumed to use black arts that involved human sacrifice and consorting with demons to accomplish their magic. Apollonius denies the charge of being a wizard, but accomplishes the same things through "philosophy". Hmmm.

Anyway, it is quite a yarn that includes a lot of strange tales of Babylon, India, Egypt, and other areas around the Mediterranean Sea. What is true, false, or mixed is so uncertain that I wouldn't use it for a source for much. For example, if Philostratus is to be believed, the Indian sages of 2,000 years ago spent most of their time studying Greek mythology and discussing Greek philosophy, except when they were engaged in sorcery. The comments about Nero and other Roman emperors agree with the character discussed by other historians, but the anecdotes regarding cities like Ephesus and Antioch are not something I would trust. The linked work includes a response from Eusebius (263-339AD), bishop of Ceasarea which ends with a theological statement comparing the Fates to the Christian view of man. This last bit is something of interest to those inclined to study the history of the theology of these matters. This work as a whole would be of interest to those who study the background that caused the emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363AD) to unleash the last major persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire in the name of philosophy and the pagan gods.

2011-12-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

Some scenery.

Missing my tripod.

2011-12-26T04:46:00.000-08:00

California Gold Rush - Taiwan Edition

A railway worker from California made his way back to Taiwan and discovered gold while panning in a stream in 1890. Thus, a boom was started. Now imagine the television series, Kung Fu, in reverse: A half-Chinese, half-White goes from the US back to China with a six-shooter and dispenses red-neck wisdom everywhere he goes.

Amazingly, the park was free and very well maintained. Restorations were still in progress. Taiwan has certainly progressed in terms of moving upscale with tourism. Today was a cool, windy and rainy day, so most of the visitors were scared away. My photography is having some difficulty with the lighting, so it won't quite do justice to the park.

The usual mining rail type scenery is here. They had some heavy duty Ingersoll Rand equipment like we see in California, but better preserved.

This is the story of the discovery.

What to do with gold? Try to live forever!

Some newbie dwarves. I think they should have issued them a long beard and a battle axe instead of the helmet.

The residence built for the crown prince of Japan. This was done during the Japanese occupation. The posters said that more than 1,000 English soldiers worked here as slaves, in addition to the Taiwanese and Filipinos.

A view of the hills where the mining took place.

2011-12-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from Taiwan!

Taipei 101.

We went to the "largest bookstore in Taiwan", which is Eslite bookstore. This building has about 9 floors each of which is fairly large. The collection of books is rather large, but almost entirely in Chinese with a smattering of English and Japanese. Each floor had at least one place for coffee or tea, with a totally mobbed food court on the bottom and nicer restaurants on the top. What was surprising is that this is really a department store that specializes in books. The sold all kinds of kitchenware, clothing, luggage, coats, boots, and a plethora of other items. We enjoyed browsing around but didn't buy anything.

2011-12-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

The locals warm up.

2011-12-23T18:02:00.000-08:00

Arrived.

The first chore was to fetch a cell phone so that we can stay in touch with the relatives while we are here. The slang for a cell phone is 大哥大, which on the surface means "big brother calls". "Big Brother", however, is the name of the head of a gangster group. It was a stereotype when the cell phones just came out that only gangsters had cell phones, and their answering one meant that they were getting a call from the chief. Thus, the origin of the common term for cell phones - at least here in Taiwan.

2011-12-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

On the move again ...

2011-12-21T19:39:00.000-08:00

Smithsonian: Jurassic Park vs. Darwin

This article has to do with soft tissues that are being found in dinosaur fossils. The general metanarrative is that all soft tissues would have been removed from bones that were millions of years old and replaced with minerals, leaving only an outline. Unfortunately for Darwinistas, and fortunately for Jurassic Park Rangers, this is not the case. It has been a long time since I had a shouting match with one of the Darwin Worshippers, but this article at least acknowledges the existence of those who think that preserved soft tissues from dinosaurs implies a problem. I am of the general opinion that the Darwin worshippers used a ouija board to settle on the ages of dinosaur bones in the 19th century, and then (a half century or more later) concocted radioactive dating formulas to confirm what was necessary for their religion.

2011-12-17T17:30:00.000-08:00

John Calvin (1509-1564): On Civil Government

Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is mainly a rebuttal and correction due to the various errors he sees. Thus, we could argue that the work is essentially reactionary, although the same could be said of almost all philosophy and theology, and indeed of all the thoughts of man. This section is a reaction to the Anabaptists. A most curious accusation develops right away, that the Anabaptists believed that they alone were spiritual enough to administer their own government:

"Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Chapter 20.

This part of the discussions seems more than a little bit ironic as we consider the discussions of Separation of Church and State as phrased by Jefferson in his discussions with the Danbury Baptists. Calvin spills a lot of ink arguing for the need of Christians not only to obey civil government, but to give honor to the offices of that government.

"The first duty of subjects towards their rulers, is to entertain the most honourable views of their office, recognising it as a delegated jurisdiction from God, and on that account receiving and reverencing them as the ministers and ambassadors of God."

As for types of government, Calvin mentions the classical three types: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy. His preference seems to be some sort of Aristocracy:

"I, for my part, am far from denying that the form which greatly surpasses the others is aristocracy, either pure or modified by popular government, not indeed in itself, but because it very rarely happens that kings so rule themselves as never to dissent from what is just and right, or are possessed of so much acuteness and prudence as always to see correctly. Owing, therefore, to the vices or defects of men, it is safer and more tolerable when several bear rule, that they may thus mutually assist, instruct, and admonish each other, and should any one be disposed to go too far, the others are censors and masters to curb his excess."

Then there is Calvin's argument for Liberty, for which I am now tending to view that our modern notions probably derive from him, albeit he undoubtedly learned these notions from the classical Greeks:

"And as I willingly admit that there is no kind of government happier than where liberty is framed with becoming moderation, and duly constituted so as to be durable, so I deem those very happy who are permitted to enjoy that form, and I admit that they do nothing at variance with their duty when they strenuously and constantly labour to preserve and maintain it."

With that I have reached the end of Calvin's massive work, although I now must go back and listen to a few sections from book III that I skipped.

2011-12-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

"Kind of wobbly, isn't he?" - Thumper, from the movie Bambi.

I have done some walks regularly, but today is the first time that I have gotten my heart rate up, done some hard breathing and gotten all sweaty in nearly three months. A bit of coughing accompanied me, but it was good to be on the mountain again. Just as I was preparing this, however, my swimming team reminded me that there are additional responsibilities. Some of our club members are planning a relay to swim from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There is still some recovering to do before I contemplate swim events.

Our family Bible readings are reaching the end of Deuteronomy which tells of the last thing that Moses did:

"Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land ... " - Deuteronomy 34:1

But he descended rather than dying on the mountain, so it says:

"And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is." - Deuteronomy 34:5

2011-12-16T21:28:00.000-08:00

John Calvin (1509-1564): The Apostasy.

This section is a long winded critique of the Catholic Church's form of the Lord's Supper. Calvin begins with a complaint of the symbolism that is advocated by the papists:

"By these and similar inventions, Satan ... blinded almost the whole world into the belief that the Mass was a sacrifice and oblation for obtaining the remission of sins." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Of the Popish Mass

The problem is that the Christian view is that there was only one sacrifice - the sacrifice of Christ on the cross - and the Lord's Supper is a celebration of this and a distribution of Christ through the Holy Spirit. Earlier Calvin condemns the doctrine of transubstantiation - the notion that the bread and wine become the literal flesh and blood of Christ when we partake of the Lord's supper. With that error, however, the papists make it out that each Mass is a sacrifice anew of Christ, but this deprecates the one true sacrifice that was performed. All the paraphernalia associated with this re-sacrifice of Christ is thus condemned:

"Another iniquity chargeable on the mass is, that it sinks and buries the cross and passion of Christ. This much, indeed, is most certain,—the cross of Christ is overthrown the moment an altar is erected. For if, on the cross, he offered himself in sacrifice that he might sanctify us for ever, and purchase eternal redemption for us undoubtedly the power and efficacy of his sacrifice continues without end. Otherwise, we should not think more honourably of Christ than of the oxen and calves which were sacrificed under the law, ..."

Related to this is Calvin's complaint against the papists for presuming to set up a new category of priests:

"But those who sacrifice daily must necessarily give the charge of their oblations to priests, whom they surrogate as the vicars and successors of Christ. By this surrogation they not only rob Christ of his honour, and take from him the prerogative of an eternal priesthood, but attempt to remove him from the right hand of his Father, where he cannot sit immortal without being an eternal priest."

Some of the above relates to the belief that the flesh and blood of Christ are physically present at the Catholic Mass. If Christ be one body, and is present being sacrificed at the mass, then how can he also be at the right hand of God in Heaven? Much of this is new to me. I had always assumed that the office of Catholic priest was a hangover from paganism, but had not considered that they were trying to symbolically crucify Christ again each time a Mass is performed, thus, needing a priest and an altar. My description here is quite simplified compared to Calvin's actual practice of considering all known arguments, along with rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, ...

2011-12-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

John Calvin (1509-1564): On Baptism.

"Whether the person baptised is to be wholly immersed, and that whether once or thrice, or whether he is only to be sprinkled with water, is not of the least consequence: churches should be at liberty to adopt either, according to the diversity of climates, although it is evident that the term baptise means to immerse, and that this was the form used by the primitive Church." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, section 19.

I am shocked. Yet I am in agreement. I wouldn't have thought to have heard this from Calvin, but there it is. Although I don't agree with Calvin on everything and he is condescending in his attitudes, there is much to be praised in this section. For example, having listened to it I have a sense that every objection that could be conceived of to various forms of baptism - especially baptism of infants - has been itemized in its strongest form with an attempted refutation. This is in contrast to modernist intellectuals who do everything in their power to deny the existence of dissent, and then misrepresent it when they must face it.

Now that I see that Calvin accepts immersion, I am wondering what his complaint is with the Anabaptists:

"This confutes the error of the Donatists, who measured the efficacy and worth of the sacrament by the dignity of the minister. Such in the present day are our Catabaptists, who deny that we are duly baptised, because we were baptised in the Papacy by wicked men and idolaters; hence they furiously insist on anabaptism."

I do wonder if the issues was the "dignity of the minister" or the paedobaptism, but we will leave this alone. What is curious here is that Calvin as a fierce protestant is defending the validity of a papist baptism. Thus, he does not require someone to be re-baptized if they abandon Catholicism for Protestantism. His point is that the validity of the baptism is by Christ and not by the presiding clergy. This would amount to an admission that the papists do in some way - however inadequate it might be - acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and savior and direct their flocks towards Him. Calvin also claims that the anabaptists believe that any sin committed after baptism is not forgiveable. Such a viewpoint would make heaven inaccessible to just about everyone.

At this point I should note that Calvin argues for an efficacy of baptism with regard to sin that is considerably stronger than I was taught:

"Thus first John baptised, and thus afterwards the apostles by the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, understanding by the term repentance, regeneration, and by the remission of sins, ablution."

He specifically dissents from the teaching of Augustine and other church fathers on this. Those who take Calvin's view usually also make baptism mandatory, since it is more than a mere symbol. Given the assumption of baptism being necessary for salvation, it then follows that in life threatening emergencies either the laity or women might step in to perform baptisms. Calvin disagrees with all these options. Regarding laity:

"The practice which has been in use for many ages, and even almost from the very commencement of the Church, for laics to baptise, in danger of death, when a minister could not be present in time, cannot, it appears to me, be defended on sufficient grounds."

and women:

"Of the same thing we have a sufficient witness in Epiphanius, when he upbraids Marcian with giving permission to women to baptise. I am not unaware of the answer given by those who take an opposite view—viz. that common use is very different from an extraordinary remedy used under the pressure of extreme necessity—but since he declares it mockery to allow women to baptise, and makes no exception, it is sufficiently plain that the corruption is condemned as inexcusable on any pretext. In his Third Book, also, when he says that it was not even permitted to the holy mother of Christ, he makes no reservation."

So what happens to those who weren't baptized but died?

"By far the better course, therefore, is to pay such respect to the ordinance of God as not to seek the sacraments in any other quarter than where the Lord has deposited them. When we cannot receive them from the Church, the grace of God is not so inseparably annexed to them that we cannot obtain it by faith, according to his word."

Regarding baptism of infants, Calvin defends this with extensive arguments equating baptism to circumcision. The most famous objection to this is that an equivalence with circumcision would imply that only the baby boys should be baptized. Calvin bravely enumerates this argument and tries to deal with it, but he is clearly faltering so that his answer is uncharacteristically brief. My main observation is that Jesus was circumcised, he was held and blessed as a baby, and he was baptized later. Calvin asserts that these are all equivalent, which begs the question as to why they should all three have been done for Jesus.

Some years ago I had sought a book outlining in detail Christian theology regarding baptism. This portion of Calvin's Institutes is the best I have seen, since it covers so many doctrinal variations and arguments both pro- and con-. Even Baptists can benefit from it.

2011-12-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

A glance out the window.

2011-12-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

Calvin (1509-1564): On Love.

"If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing." - 1 Corinthians 13:3

Everyone loves 1 Corinthians 13 - the chapter on love - including non-Christians. As for me, I have to wonder if people have really processed what it is saying. Is it possible to give all your possessions to the poor, commit yourself to doing things for others, become a martyr in the process, and still not have love? The answer is sadly yes, because it can be some sort of pride or vanity that is propelling the actions rather than a genuine concern for the people. Calvin invokes the above verse (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, On Vows) as he addresses the issue of monks, who he considers were decent enough in former ages but had become utterly vile creatures in his own age. Calvin next considers the rich young ruler to whom Christ says:

"Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”" - Matthew 19:21-24

Calvin explains that the reason the young man went away sad was that he had realized that he had not kept the law - that he had not loved God beyond all else. The command Jesus gave to give his wealth to the poor was for no other reason than to make it clear to the young man where his heart - and love - were really directed.

2011-12-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Times They are a Changin

I had some physics/engineering topics of interest that I wanted to study more. One of my handy references, a Physical Chemistry book, is falling apart due to the cheap bindings that were used for the overseas publishing. The book was probably purchased in Singapore, but I may have gotten it in Taiwan. The brain is all fuzzy now. To remedy the situation, I took a trip over to Stanford University bookstore today. In the past this was always a treat as I could find all kinds of exotic technical books on subjects like Hypersonic Flow in Extra-Terrestrial Atmospheres. Today's visit, however, featured a technical book section limited to one row bookshelves. The bookshelves devoted to trashy novels now exceeds the technical books. Admittedly the history section had some interesting works such as a History of Venice by Pietro Bembo (1460-1547). With too many works to listen to on audio, however, I decided to pass on these. A good number of Loeb classics were there. I would have bought the works by Julian, but they only had volume II and I wanted volume I. In the end, I purchased nothing and left shaking my head at the decline of technical books. I would prefer to thumb through the books first before making a choice, but this is not to be.

2011-12-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

Calvin: Separation of Church and State

"Some, in imagining that all these things were temporary, as magistrates were still strangers to our profession of religion, are led astray, by not observing the distinction and dissimilarity between ecclesiastical and civil power. For the Church has not the right of the sword to punish or restrain, has no power to coerce, no prison nor other punishments which the magistrate is wont to inflict." - Institutes of the Christian Religion

This section continues over a large number of pages as Calvin tries to trace out the developments from the simpler times when the church was distinct from the civil power to the time of the popes. The types of the abuses involved in confounding civil and religious authority were systematically enumerated. That the issues of civil and ecclesiastical power grabs are two way is noted by Calvin also:

"Never did any bishop, so long as any true appearance of a church remained, think of usurping the right of the sword: so that, in the age of Ambrose, it was a common proverb, that emperors longed more for the priesthood than priests for imperial power."

2011-12-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

Great Courses: Jay Garfield regarding Kant

This is a series of lectures on various philosophical and religious ideas throughout history. As part of our weekly get together at work, we listened to his lecture on Kant. I was looking forward to this to get a different take on Kant and wasn't disappointed.

The first thing that really demands a comment is Garfield's claim that there were no teaching philosophers in the West from the time of Aristotle to Kant. Huh? That covers more than 2,000 years, but I think we can argue the exact opposite: From the time of Aristotle to Kant there was no period without teaching philosophers. In the classical era, the pagans had such professional teaching philosophers as Seneca, Epictetus and Plotinus. Early church fathers all studied and taught philosophy along with theology. For those who would claim that philosophy and theology are distinct, Aristotle most adamantly denies this in his Metaphysics. It is only in the modern era that such a notion has been peddled, while even professor Garfield makes no such distinction as he deals with Eastern religious teachers. We needn't, however, spend so much time on those things as to consider a graduation ceremony where the professors put on some medieval style robes and the most distinguished students are awarded the Philosophiae Doctor (Doctor of Philosophy), or Ph.d. The European university system developed from the 11th to 13th centuries for the purpose of teaching philosophy, while Kant lived in the 18th and 19th century. Clearly professor Garfield is lecturing from an alternate dimension! A distinguishing mark of the modern era, however, is that most recipients of the Doctor of Philosophy will never have taken a single class on philosophy nor will they have read a single work of a philosopher.

Having laid a foundation of error, Garfield then proceeds to construct an edifice on top of it as he explains Kant. The work that he focuses on is What is Enlightenment? Kant rants against religions as being forces of dogmatic ignorance in this work while calling on people to use their brain independently of everyone else. Fast forwarding to our current era, we can note that religious dogma has been removed from the schools. At the same time, our current era has the greatest level of philosophical ignorance since the illiterate barbarians swept away Rome. In spite of this, political correctness still demands conformity of opinion to its dogmatisms while encouraging people to challenge everything else. Atheism insists that it alone possesses philosophy, apparently referring to such great atheist philosophical republics as North Korea. My final observation is that only the most dogmatic of the western dogmatists, the Catholics, have several philosophy classes as a requirement both to get a college degree at a Catholic school and as a prerequisite for theology programs.

At this point I should link to Ramana's post on Idiot Culture along with the article that described Idiot Culture. It seems to me that Kant and Garfield have taken the traditional modernist line that everyone who wrote before The Enlightenment was an ignorant dogmatic fool. I tend to view the earlier thinkers as people who made some contributions within the constraints of human frailty. By dismissing them while offering nothing as an alternative, the enlightened Modernists are the ones who paved the way to our current Age of Idiocy. Yet here I am falling into the opposite error: From the time of the misnamed enlightenment, reason has degenerated into nothing but dogmatic ignorance with professors waving their credentials to defend their views rather than providing sensible arguments.

2011-12-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

Calvin (1509-1564): On the infallibility of the Pope.

Book IV of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion has been the easiest to listen to as Calvin tells various stories. There is a very long section on the history of the Papacy which would at least compel an atheist to believe in the existence of the Devil, even though he might still deny the existence of God. The origin of the notion of the infallibility of the Pope can't be traced, but the 16th century featured its constant invocation against the Protestants:

"Roman theologians cease not to boast that by special privilege our Saviour has provided that the Pope cannot err, because it was said to Peter, “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not”(Luke 22:32)."

What strikes me as curious here - that I hadn't considered before - is that Calvin claims (in the same paragraph) that this doctrine is emanating from the mouths of atheists:

"The first head of the secret theology which is in vogue among them is, that there is no God. Another, that whatever things have been written and are taught concerning Christ are lies and imposture. A third, that the doctrine of a future life and final resurrection is a mere fable. All do not think, few speak thus; I confess it."

The formal justification being a non-sequitor, the only plausible explanation for the doctrine of infallibility is that the atheist bishops and clergy were simply looking for any way conceivable to maintain their control over the church treasury, hence the fabrication of the doctrine of infallibility. There is a footnote regarding Erasmus who notes persecution for unfaithfulness in Germany, but not in Rome:

"Erasmus, in a letter to Steuchus, says, “It may be that in Germany there are persons who do not refrain from blasphemy against God, but the severest punishment is inflicted on them. But at Rome, I have with my own ears heard men belching out horrid blasphemies against Christ and his apostles, in the presence of many besides myself, and doing it with impunity!”"

2011-12-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

Thomas More (1478-1535): Utopia.

Yes, Utopia is the title and More is the originator of the meaning that we now have for the word. It is hard to imagine this strange bit of fiction being written 500 years ago. It begins with a lament of consumerism, but picks up on ideas from Plato's Republic and the stories of the founding of Sparta, mixes them up with other notions, and gives us a new island nation in the New World which he calls Utopia - which actually means nowhere. More's Utopia isn't intended to be understood as perfect; just much better than the current European societies.

One of More's laments is the practice of executing people for theft. More's Utopia is much more humane in that any thief is made a slave and forced to do hard work for life, which he is grateful to have because his life was spared. This reminds me of the laments of Victor Hugo in Les Miserables.

An intriguing bit in Utopia seems to prepare the way for the much later political writer, John Locke, of whose work I have recently listened to:

"But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence." - Utopia

The point of similarity between More and Locke is the "law of nature" and the derived arguments about unproductive use of the land, but More's work predates Locke's by more than 150 years. The Just War notion is also tied into both works. The path from More to Locke might be a strange one, but it seems clear that there must be such a path and that Locke wasn't the originator of many of the ideas I had presumed him to be the author of.

2011-12-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): What is Truth?

Thus, the question that Pilate gave to Jesus is finally to be answered by Kant:

"To know what questions we may reasonably propose is in itself a strong evidence of sagacity and intelligence. For if a question be in itself absurd and unsusceptible of a rational answer, it is attended with the danger—not to mention the shame that falls upon the person who proposes it—of seducing the unguarded listener into making absurd answers, and we are presented with the ridiculous spectacle of one (as the ancients said) 'milking the he-goat, and the other holding a sieve.'" - The Critique of Pure Reason

Thus, Kant claims that the entire question is absurd, preparing the way for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason is this:

"If truth consists in the accordance of a cognition with its object, this object must be, ipso facto, distinguished from all others; for a cognition is false if it does not accord with the object to which it relates, although it contains something which may be affirmed of other objects. Now an universal criterion of truth would be that which is valid for all cognitions, without distinction of their objects. But it is evident that since, in the case of such a criterion, we make abstraction of all the content of a cognition (that is, of all relation to its object), and truth relates precisely to this content, it must be utterly absurd to ask for a mark of the truth of this content of cognition; and that, accordingly, a sufficient, and at the same time universal, test of truth cannot possibly be found."

This is unfortunately an argument that all universals are absurd, since they can only be inferred from particulars, yet each particular is different, so that the universal can never be deduced. In the case of Kant, however, he has taken an opposite view in the case of time, which he has insisted is an a priori concept that is part of the human faculty of reason. But then we arrive at time the same way:

"I cogitate therein only the successive progress from one moment to another, and hence, by means of the different portions of time and the addition of them, a determinate quantity of time is produced."

We could also use a mode of argument from the scholastic era that time seems to pass differently depending on what you are doing, whether sleeping with or without dreams, and depending on work or play or waiting or listening to a long, tedious sermon. Thus, it seems to me that Kant would have a hard time defending the thesis that "What is truth?" is an absurd question, while "What is time?" is an a priori part of human reason.

But this does have me pondering whether or not truth might be a priori, whereas I still don't believe that Kant's argument that time is a priori is convincing. Besides the simple definition that Kant has given above, we all know that there is something more. When a child has been up to no good during the past hour, and his parent asks "what have you been up to?", the child immediately considers everything he did during that hour. Then he answers something like, "I have been studying", because he spent 5 minutes on homework during that period. This meets the philosopher's standard for truth, and perhaps gives the child relief from fear of punishment, but hardly comforts the conscience that truth has been honored. Truth is more than mere factual correctness, as our conscience loudly proclaims.

Going back to Kant's framework, this would lead one to deduce that truth, being clearly related to the moral law, is an a priori principle of the Practical Reason. On the other hand, the notion that truth is the accordance of a cognition with its subject is still there, so that it would seem to me that truth is known both to the Pure Reason and the Practical Reason. Thus, I don't think that Pure and Practical reason can be so cleanly separated, and truth is a unifying force.

Of course the example of the child is subject to a rebuttal; that the information the child provided was deliberately designed to make sure the parent's cognition was not in accordance to the facts, thus, the original definition of truth is sufficient. But going back to Kant's argument for time, he claims that time is an a priori reality because no event can be conceived outside of time. I would likewise claim that no moral judgment can be conceived outside of truth, just as the case of the child and parent above is centered on truth.

Having said all that, being a Christian, I should quote a few of the verses that are important to my understanding of truth:

"'You are a king, then!' said Pilate.
Jesus answered, 'You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.'
'What is truth?' Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, 'I find no basis for a charge against him.'" - John 18:37-38

"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me'" - John 14:6.

2011-11-30T22:10:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Theory vs. Reality.

The full title of the work is "The Popular Judgment: That May Be Right In Theory, But Does Not Hold Good In The Praxis".

Since I like to gripe, my main gripe here is that Librivox links to the works of Kant under Constitution.org. This work does have a significant political content, yet it was written in 1793, several years after the US Constitution was complete. To even suppose an indirect influence on the US Constitution of his earlier works is to stretch the limits of credibility.

Kant's political writings mostly seem to be echoes of Locke, although he references other writers who also seem to be echoing Locke. The only distinction I can see is that Locke was an advocate of revolution as soon as a government appeared to no longer be working, whereas Kant wants more loyalty, patience and an orderly transition to avoid anarchy. Kant argues that the position of immediate overthrow is one based on the philosophy of Happiness as the end goal of humanity, whereas his philosophy of Duty to the Moral Law requires a different response.

Kant also claims that the current society is greatly improved morally compared to earlier centuries and that improvement in the future can be realistically be hoped for. He then describes a global government - a bit like the UN - which would raise moral standards to a higher level. I wonder how he would feel about those of us who have lived to see the UN, but then view it as a drag on the morals of civilization.

2011-11-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

California Whooping Cough Epidemic.

I have now completed two months of coughing and should only have one month remaining to recover from this undiagnosed ailment, presuming it really is whooping cough. A few people have asked me how it is that someone as old as I am could get a children's disease. My answer is that I am still young at heart.

2011-11-29T21:53:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Reconsidering Kant.

"The doctrine of Christianity, even if we do not yet consider it as a religious doctrine, gives, touching this point, a conception of the summum bonum (the kingdom of God), which alone satisfies the strictest demand of practical reason." - The Critique of Practical Reason

What more could I hope for? Kant's reasoning that begins with the moral law - the knowledge of good and evil - leads him straight into Christianity. Well, not quite. Although Kant asserts the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and a universal moral law that we have a duty to obey, and acknowledges Christianity alone as having already realized this, it is still a long ways from Christianity. The reason being that Christianity takes all that as givens that everyone is supposed to know by instinct before Christianity is introduced to them. Back to this later.

Kant reiterates the fact that the classical philosophers had all viewed happiness as the end moral goal, although they argued that this was best attained through virtue. Martyrdom to achieve happiness? Augustine provided the best refutation to this in one book of City of God using empirical arguments, but Kant prefers a priori reasoning, should this be possible. For this, Kant has earned some respect from me.

I am not sure precisely what the following means, but I take it to mean that Kant does not believe that a science of ethics is possible:

"By the methodology of pure practical reason we are not to understand the mode of proceeding with pure practical principles (whether in study or in exposition), with a view to a scientific knowledge of them, ..."

There are a great number of items that Kant hasn't dealt with that would seem to fall under his notion of Pure Practical Reason. Sin and guilt are at the top of the list. Elsewhere Kant asserts that a deity that would punish us for not obeying the moral law that he gave us would be an evil deity. No derivation of this is to be found here. To be fair, Kant noted that his work was "preliminary" and there were a great number of topics that he had to pass over.

One bothersome point in all this is Kant's notion that there is a Pure Reason involving logic, math and physics leading to the empirical that is totally disjoint from Practical Reason that involves the morals. As such, it almost seems like he is opening the door to the bipolar views of modernists who want to embrace a Christian world view for their internal moral consumption and something contrary for everything else. That could be a bit unfair to Kant.

Kant finishes with this simplistic shot at the history of mankind:

"The contemplation of the world began from the noblest spectacle that the human senses present to us, and that our understanding can bear to follow in their vast reach; and it ended- in astrology. Morality began with the noblest attribute of human nature, the development and cultivation of which give a prospect of infinite utility; and ended- in fanaticism or superstition."

2011-11-29T07:03:00.000-08:00

Norway news: Breivik declared insane.

Anders Breivik was the mass murderer who planted a truck bomb and then shot up a bunch of children after years of careful planning. It seems to me - noting that I too have been called insane on many occasions - that Breivik's crimes are a good candidate for the death penalty, but this post is about the nature of insanity. Thanks to being declared insane, Breivik will spend his life under the guidance of psychiatrists rather than prison wardens.

Breivik had wanted his country to discuss the implications of open borders and culture, but instead Norway will be absorbed in the discussion of the concept of insanity. The insanity of the psychiatric profession is one candidate being discussed already, but also the belief of the far left that any one who has an opinion that deviates significantly from their own is necessarily insane. There is the possibility that insanity is a mental disease that has multiplied in the modern era. But then again, maybe an unwarranted broadening of the definition of insanity has simply drawn so many people into the net that we are all deluding ourselves that we are really descended from the Addams Family.

My philosophy of insanity starts with cats. Cats are all insane, yet between them they have no such notion of insanity. Whether they treat each other with respect or disdain is thus not effected by whether they hold the opinion that the other cat is insane. Humans likewise should consider that we are all more or less equally insane, thus removing insanity as a factor in our consideration of the relative merits of one human compared to another. An insane philosopher would then proclaim, "If my theory of insanity were embraced, all mankind would live in harmony". I don't believe such, but it would certainly allow for more serious discussions if there was less discussion of insanity.

2011-11-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Sneaking Creationism in through the back door.

"Pure reason is practical of itself alone and gives (to man) a universal law which we call the moral law." - The Critique of Practical Reason, VII Fundamental Law of the Pure Practical Reason.

Kant's entire moral system is predicated on the belief that all men are born with a conscience that teaches us the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. This is not something derived from experience or imparted by teaching, but truly something that we all have a priori. But then Kant takes this a step further and asserts that this moral system that is in every human's conscience is universal. This is the part that grabbed my attention.

As to whether or not mankind's moral compass could have occurred naturally or not, this is one of the critical defects in Darwinism. All of us know people who have been both morally deficient and have done quite well in the survival of the fittest game so that the belief that our conscience evolved is hopeless. "Not so!" they retort, because evolution has unimaginable supernatural powers. Accepting that for the moment, we then face the observation of Kant: The conscience that evolution has supposedly given the human race is universal, regardless of where the particular human was born and into what tribe and without any regard to where that tribe was from. The Inuits who lived for countless generations in the arctic regions have the same moral law as those who came from the jungles or deserts along the equator. It is a moral law that shows no significant deviation regardless of the particular species of human, yet we observed all kinds of other differences among men. How is it that the various tribes of men could have evolved the same conscience in parallel? The different environments would necessitate different arrangements among the members of a tribe for reasons of efficient exploitation of resources, and this would undoubtedly cause differences in the evolved conscience. This we observe in all kinds of animals which exhibit different behaviors even among closely related species.

If we temporarily assume that - contrary to the beliefs of the Darwinists - that evolution doesn't have unlimited supernatural powers, then must seek some other explanation for how all members of the human race should be subject to the same conscience and that the moral law can thus be universal. The Bible famously proposes that this was something that was given to Man when he ate of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as described in Genesis chapter 3. We might also postulate that the reason that mankind has the same conscience is that it is transmitted to us directly by the Holy Spirit. Lest I be accused of neglecting possibilities, we could also suppose that space aliens came to Earth and reprogrammed the DNA of humans to have this conscience. To simplify, we must either propose that mankind was universally programmed to the same moral law at some point or that some external force is imposing a universal law in spite of evolution.

2011-11-27T21:20:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Freewill and conscience.

"Freedom, however, is the only one of all the ideas of the speculative reason of which we know the possibility a priori (without, however, understanding it), because it is the condition of the moral law which we know." - The Critique of Practical Wisdom.

With the above and many similar statements, Kant imbibes a great deal of the philosophical framework of western theism and separates himself from Hume as well as the Epicureans and Skeptics. The belief that the moral law - that is the knowledge of good and evil - is a priori is something that Christians receive in the beginning of the book of Genesis. Undoubtedly Kant knows this, but doesn't mention it. I should also note that this is one (of many) key difference between Genesis and the similar Babylonian writings.

After the above quoted sentence, Kant provides the following to make sure I am thoroughly confused about whether he is a theist, and atheist, or both:

"The ideas of God and immortality, however, are not conditions of the moral law, but only conditions of the necessary object of a will determined by this law; that is to say, conditions of the practical use of our pure reason."

I should probably be careful to decipher this. My sense is that he is saying that although God can't be shown to exist, the moral law effects our will in a way that causes us to need a notion of God. Maybe he will clear thinks up more later.

2011-11-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Rebuttal to Looney.

"Nothing worse could happen to these labours than that anyone should make the unexpected discovery that there neither is, nor can be, any a priori knowledge at all. But there is no danger of this. This would be the same thing as if one sought to prove by reason that there is no reason." - The Critique of Practical Reason, Preface.

Yikes! He foresaw my argument!

My view on science, however, is best described by Popper's theory of falsification, which simply has no need of a priori knowledge. Regarding the classical Skeptic school, they rejected all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori as dogmatic ignorance. My sense is that Hume, wanted to be known as both a Skeptic and a Scientist at the same time, thus he decided that he could safely admit tautologies as permissible a priori knowledge and use this as a basis for scientific inquiry that didn't conflict with skepticism. For those of you who don't know what a tautology is, I will let Doris Day explain it since she is quite clear and eloquent:

A tautology is guaranteed to be true always, but avoids any potential risk of being wrong. What will be will be, will be. What is, is. Man is a social animal because he is social. Hume thus explains all of human nature by referring to what is, while steadfastly rejecting a purely empirical foundation to science, thus, attempting to keep his Skeptic credentials intact while providing a very long winded illusion of science of human nature. To Hume's method the label of empiricism is given, thus causing intellectual confusion that reigns to this day. Of Hume's science of human nature - and the wisdom of Doris Day's mother - no matter how much time is consumed studying it, you will know nothing more when you are done than when you started, which is the nature of tautologies.

I still have a lot to learn about Kant, but it is clear that he wants to not only include tautologies in his a priori catalog, but also all of classical logic and mathematics. At the same time, in this preface to his work on practical reason he seems to be honoring empirical reasoning with a status that is worthy of respect while noting that it is entirely distinct from pure reason. Wondering where all this leads ...

2011-11-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

"I saw a man being beaten with my eyes." - Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations.

Ambiguous gems like this provide a bit of entertainment while reading this work. If you hope to be a lawyer earning a living by making specious arguments, or fear that you might have to deal with such people, then this is the handbook.

2011-11-25T20:57:00.000-08:00

Got lemons?

This is the lemon tree growing in my backyard. I have taken about 40 or 50 lemons off the tree this season already, but it is still loaded. Tomorrow I need to harvest another big load of them.

2011-11-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Then a miracle occurs.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant starts out being dismissive of all dogmatic proclamations of metaphysics. He then moves into his transcendental doctrines where I soon found myself overwhelmed with distinctions that relate to the same general topics that are included in the collection of dogmatics known as Aristotle's Organum. Yikes! This is problematic since I can't process the material at the speed of the spoken word and clearly need to do some remedial work, starting with completing my own reading of Aristotle's Organum. It is also problematic because Kant's Skeptical starting point is not capable of deriving anything, yet he is effortlessly deriving all kinds of stuff. Thus, the cartoon. The other thing I need to do is to read some commentaries on these works to make sure I am processing things without deviating too far from the correct understanding. More work and all for a good cause ... if only I could define 'good' and 'cause'.

2011-11-24T22:05:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Space and Time.

Kant certainly deserves great praise for his ability in choosing profound sounding section headings. One that I am looking at is entitled "Transcendental Exposition of the Conception of Space". What could be more profound than that?

A bit earlier Kant writes:

"From this investigation it will be found that there are two pure forms of sensuous intuition, as principles of knowledge a priori, namely, space and time." - The Critique of Pure Reason

To this I must complain that space and time are not known a priori, but rather from experience. The reasons for this are many, but my professional experience of using n-dimensions and non-Euclidean spaces is partially the reason, while the fact that a computer must be explicitly programmed with things to represent space and time in the same manner as any other quantity has destroyed any hope of me thinking this way. Einstein is under a bit of pressure recently due to the famous neutrino experiments, but his conception of space and time is radically different from the one of Kant. At the sub-atomic particle level, new dimensions are apparently required for the experiments. As such the concept of space and time is ambiguous, being subject to a variety of conflicting representations with Kant's preferred a priori one being known to have many deficiencies. Thus, I conclude that our conceptions of space and time were derived from our experience as children just as we learned of color, smell, texture and other properties. Finally, my Christian viewpoint says that time and space are created entities, thus, it is impossible to conceive that they could be a priori realities.

As a further note, the handling of space and time in the Metaphysics does seem to me to be a bit removed from this so that it admits to more than one way of defining space and time. Rather than space, for example, Aristotle chooses extension, while time is replaced with a sequence of causes.

2011-11-24T19:20:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Analytic vs. Synthetic; a priori; Science

Kant begins with some definitions that he deems important. Analytic and synthetic are clearly critical concepts to understand what follows, thus, I will give them some attention. These two terms relate to "predicates", which is to be understood as descriptions of objects.

"Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A; or the predicate B lies completely out of the conception A, although it stands in connection with it. In the first instance, I term the judgement analytical, in the second, synthetical." - The Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, Of the Difference Between Analytical and Synthetical Judgements.

Since I have read Aristotle's Metaphysics, it seems quite clear that what Kant has defined as Analytic pertains to what Aristotle defined as Essence, whereas Synthetic pertains to what Aristotle defined to be Accident. Thus, we see that although Kant condemns all prior metaphysical speculation as having been the work of babbling idiots, he proceeds to embrace the same concepts in verbal disguise.

a priori

Kant's definition of Metaphysics is that it involves the things which stand on reason alone utterly apart from human experience. Reason that is independent of human experience he labels a priori, meaning that its truths are prior to experiment and not dependent on artificial hypotheses. He asserts that this is of the utmost importance:

"As regards certitude, I have fully convinced myself that, in this sphere of thought, opinion is perfectly inadmissible, and that everything which bears the least semblance of an hypothesis must be excluded, as of no value in such discussions. For it is a necessary condition of every cognition that is to be established upon a priori grounds that it shall be held to be absolutely necessary; much more is this the case with an attempt to determine all pure a priori cognition, and to furnish the standard—and consequently an example— of all apodeictic (philosophical) certitude." - The Critique of Pure Reason

As for examples of a priori reasoning, we have this:

"Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences which have to determine their objects a priori. The former is purely a priori, the latter is partially so, but is also dependent on other sources of cognition." - The Critique of Pure Reason

At this point I am certain that the notion of a priori is hooey - hooey being an Analytic predicate. The reason is that mathematics derived from experience. Number theory undoubtedly started with the counting of fingers. The rules of geometry became apparent most likely from architecture. Algebra and calculus were the result of physics. Logic itself, although seemingly the most obvious candidate for a priori, is also something we initially understand through experience. Thus, I reject the notion of a priori with only one exception:

"And the Lord God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever'." - Genesis 3:22

Thus, the only candidate for a priori reason in humans is the knowledge of good and evil, but to make such an assertion would be to reject all of modernist notions of philosophy.

Science

"Thus, the critique of reason leads at last, naturally and necessarily, to science; and, on the other hand, the dogmatical use of reason without criticism leads to groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can always be set, thus ending unavoidably in scepticism." - The Critique of Pure Reason

Again, we must highlight the difference between skepticism and true science with the notion of falsification. The original leader of the Skeptic school, Pyrrho, was noted for needing to be saved by his friends when he was about to be run over by a cart. Being a Skeptic, he could find no reason to determine if the cart was real or not, thus, he could not justify stepping out of the way. Skepticism is - literally - intellectual suicide. It is on this foundation that Kant proposes to establish the theory of science.

2011-11-24T11:06:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The Critique of Pure Reason, second edition.

This is 17 hours of audio, so I will be at it awhile. The preface covers a huge amount of territory as Kant insists he has refuted Aristotle's metaphysics and invented an entirely new one that revolutionizes the concepts of human understanding. Kant has preempted any criticism by noting that his age (then 64) precludes using the rigor needed to avoid all inconsistency, but the overall thesis is unassailable.

The skeptic mode of anti-reasoning is still employed, so that we see this kind of statement:

"This is of course very easy; as the same arguments which demonstrated the inability of human reason to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being must be alike sufficient to prove the invalidity of its denial."

Needless to say, the proposal of a skeptic philosopher to develop an unassailable science of metaphysics should cause the classical philosophers to engage in uncontrollable fits of laughter from their graves. Unlike Hume, Kant does seem to have an interest and familiarity with the progress of true science as he discusses Copernicus and Bacon along with the ideas of Newton without naming him. I am anxious to see how far he succeeds in this work.

Professionally, I also have an interest in this subject. My job being scientific and engineering software development, the understanding of human cognition so that I might understand and map the abstract mental processes onto a computer implementation is something that I constantly face. Thus, whether I agree or not with Kant's conclusion, the intellectual engagement will undoubtedly stimulate me to something better.

There is one statement in the preface which has me scratching my head a bit regarding Kant:

"Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injurious—as well as of idealism and scepticism, which are dangerous to the schools, but can scarcely pass over to the public."

Is he speaking of scientific criticism? Or the critical methods of the skeptics? These are mutually exclusive, so it cannot be both. That Kant here asserts atheism to be "injurious" begs the question of in what manner his doctrines differ from atheism.

2011-11-23T21:48:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Call to Duty.

This is a review of The Fundamental Metaphysics of Morals. This work has a promising start as Kant observes that the greatest good is that of a good will:

"Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will."

At this point he should have acknowledged the existence of John Calvin and the doctrine of Total Depravity, but this was not to be. Instead, the topic is pontificated about a bit and then dropped. A big problem for the neo-Epicureans is that the only moral code they were able to draw upon was one of enlightened self interest, but Kant is smart enough to see that this won't work. Furthermore, even if enlightened self interest causes someone to do what is right, because he did it for self interest we do not credit him with having done anything morally significant. Kant hits upon the notion of duty as being the missing item. To this end the notion of duty is developed with Kant's version of the Golden Rule. Another admonition involves treating men as ends rather than means which also seems to me to be a well intended but faulty rework of "love your neighbor as yourself".

A smirk is in order here because Kant is clearly drawing on theistic notions of duty to patch up a failed atheist system. The rewording is necessary to avoid giving too much credit to the source. One point that I especially like in Kant's system is that he requires a notion of free will, even though atheism explicitly rejects free will:

"A rational being must always regard himself as giving laws either as member or as sovereign in a kingdom of ends which is rendered possible by the freedom of will. He cannot, however, maintain the latter position merely by the maxims of his will, but only in case he is a completely independent being without wants and with unrestricted power adequate to his will."

This free will is much less than most Christian theologians, since it is a free will that is only effective until an animal impulse kicks in and we start craving something.

Having stolen his system from theists, Kant somehow thinks it good sense to condemn the author of the system that he plagiarized:

"Amongst the rational principles of morality, the ontological conception of perfection, notwithstanding its defects, is better than the theological conception which derives morality from a Divine absolutely perfect will. ... the only notion of the Divine will remaining to us is a conception made up of the attributes of desire of glory and dominion, combined with the awful conceptions of might and vengeance, and any system of morals erected on this foundation would be directly opposed to morality."

Or to put it another way, the speed limit is immoral if there are police driving up and down the highway ticketing scofflaws. Kant is unable to face the Doctrine of Total Depravity. The problems with the atheist duty model are the exact same that Plato noted: There is no one to whom our duty is obligated and there is no controlling legal authority. No matter how many eloquent words are put in print, it all adds up to nothing.

Back to the self-interest vs. duty topic: At the beginning Kant asserts that these two motivations alone represent all possible motivations for moral behavior. To this I must also object and cite a Bible verse:

"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." - Romans 5:8

The problem is that God's saving of mankind was neither self-interest nor duty, yet God chose to do this anyway. There is a higher and purer form of ethical behavior that Kant cannot conceive of, much less explain its metaphysics.

2011-11-23T19:57:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Question Authority.

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another." - What is Enlightenment.

Maturity means never listening to someone else's opinion, but formulating ones own whether one is capable or not. Immaturity the reverse. If only it were so simple! Given that errors come in far more varieties than truth, and Kant's formula prizes deviation for the sake of deviation, it would seem that his quest for enlightenment should be realized to the same degree that error increased. Aristotle gave a three-fold split regarding opinion: There is philosophy, sophistry and dialectic. Sophistry is the deliberate fabrication of wordy but erroneous arguments, while dialectic is about being nitpicky to the point that nothing gets accomplished. Aristotle believes only philosophy is valid, although sophistry and dialectic are by far the most common. Kant doesn't seem to know about such distinctions.

There is another point of interest:

"In the same way, a clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. But as a scholar, he is completely free as well as obliged to impart to the public all his carefully considered, well-intentioned thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those doctrines, and to offer suggestions for a better arrangement of religious and ecclesiastical affairs."

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but given the surrounding words I understood Kant to mean that a clergyman, though employed for the purpose of imparting Christian doctrine, has a higher duty to teach atheism, destroy the faith and corrupt the morals of the congregation. No doubt he would deny this, but I still see it as a call to seminary professors, preachers and other teachers to make war on Christianity and civilization in general while speciously claiming that they are under an unshakable moral obligation to do so.

To express it a different way, I would consider an Islamic cleric teaching Jihad. I may think this wrong, but to the degree that the cleric's teaching and life were in conformance with his genuine belief, I would not condemn. For an atheist to pretend to be a legitimate Islamic cleric for the purpose of gaining money and disturbing faith, however, I would consider more reprehensible than a deluded, but sincere terrorist.

Enlightenment: Enlightenment is the process of going around a town at dusk, pouring gasoline everywhere, soaking flammables into every structure, and then striking a match.

2011-11-23T17:40:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Occupy Earth.

In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, Kant is in a bad mood. Everywhere he sees injustice, violence and war. How to fix it?

As with the current occupy crowd, he sees it in political reform, but somehow gets things backwards. Regarding direct democracy he says:

"Of the three forms of the state, that of democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all," who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."

Instead, Kant's sole hope is in the establishment of Republics that conform to natural law. Theoretically the US would be the prime example. (It should be noted that Kant's statement is a rephrasing of identical ideas from Plato and Polybius.) In our current age, even this hope is gone, but I generally wonder why such a hope sprung up anyway. The first appendix has one statement that jumped out:

"Then it may be said, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason and its righteousness, and your end (the blessing of perpetual peace) will necessarily follow.'"

We should compare this to the Biblical reference from which it is taken:

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." - Matthew 6:33

'God' has been changed to 'pure practical reason'. Noting that I haven't yet gotten to Kant's peculiar definition of 'pure practical reason' in my readings, this still seems to be putting man in God's place. I have a sense that Kant views pure reason as something inherently good morally, and to this I strongly disagree. The reasons include the fact that good people frequently have less intelligence than the wicked and as others have pointed out many times, reason in its most intense form is too often observed taking the lead in evil deeds.

The second Appendix struggles to end on a positive note after all the negative ranting, but it doesn't seem particularly convincing.

"If it is a duty to make real (even if only through approximation in endless progress) the state of public law, and if there is well-grounded hope that this can actually be done, then perpetual peace, as the condition that will follow what has erroneously been called "treaties of peace" (but which in reality are only armistices), is not an empty idea. As the times required for equal steps of progress become, we hope, shorter and shorter, perpetual peace is a problem which, gradually working out its own solution, steadily approaches its goal."

2011-11-22T22:32:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The ~~Golden~~ Tin Rule.

"So act that you can will that your maxim could become a universal law, regardless of the end." - Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, Appendix I

And for quick reference this seems to relate to the Golden Rule:

"Do to others what you would have them do to you." - Matthew 7:12

And the inverse form used by Plato and Confucius:

"Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you."

I have heard Kant praised for his form but - being hopelessly biased - I find it highly problematic. As C.S. Lewis noted, the form that Jesus gives us is the only one that provides guidance for positive action. We could argue that Kant's view does permit positive maxims, however, we would only be able to justify them if we felt it reasonable to compel all of mankind to do the same. This is a non-starter.

A separate complaint is that Kant's rule presumes someone of a universalist philosophical mindset. Practically speaking, the vast majority of people aren't so inclined. The Golden rule and the rules of Plato and Confucius have the benefit that they can adapt themselves to the circumstances of localities. Kant's rule cannot, unless we want to add vast quantities of fine print. Anyway, when I was healthy my maxim was to start swimming in a cold lake at 6am twice a week. The world is undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief that I have not followed Kant and imposed this as a universal law.

What would have been helpful is if Kant had listed the Golden rule and its variants beforehand and then defended his version in contrast to the others. This was the method of Aristotle and the better Scholastics, but the style has shifted so that this kind of preparatory work in philosophical writing is passed over.

2011-11-22T17:36:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The Injustice of Illegal Downloads.

The actual title is The Injustice of Counterfeiting Books. Kant argues that the counterfeiting of books is a violation of elementary moral principles. The part that stood out to me relates to distinctions between art, inventions and books. For example:

"A drawing, which any one has delineated, or got engraved by another, or executed in stone, in metal, or in stucco, may be copied, and the copies publicly sold; as every thing, that one can perform with his thing in his own name, requires not the consent of another." - The Injustice of Counterfeiting Books.

and in contrast:

"But the writing of another is the speech of a person, and whoever publishes it can speak to the public but in the name of this other, and say nothing more of himself, than that the author makes the following speech to the public through him."

I was inclined to agree with Kant when I started this, but the more I listened the more I disagreed, since statements like the above seem to be brought up with no basis other than to fluff up the argument.

When books could only be copied by hand the notion of counterfeiting in copying wasn't even dreamed of. If one person could copy a book faster than another, he would be praised and no one would care if he had a right to make a copy. Why is it that the ability to copy a work at costs that are hundreds of times less expensive than a hand copy should result in the creation of a new act of injustice? The only possible reasoning is that the ability to make cheap copies of books generates new economic activity that we deem beneficial to society, and counterfeiting threatens this new economic activity. Society must, however, make a decision that the new economic activity is something that it values first. An argument from natural law is impossible, since we accept trashy novels along with publications that are good and wholesome with no distinction under this counterfeiting rule. It seems to me that Kant should have first begun with an argument that professional writers and publishers protected by copyright laws are beneficial to society, but he has completely ignored this point.

2011-11-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716): Monadology

This work is more like a table of contents for a larger work. What I am gathering is that there was some effort to try to bring physics, psychology and the human soul, together with theology all into a single grand theory of everything. The atomists were one school with their notion of very small, infinitely hard spheres. Leibniz considers that this would be insufficient and proposes something he calls monads which have more complex behavior. I won't pretend to understand all this, giving the excuse that I have been doing a lot of kinetic theory derivations and simulations recently so that the monadal makeup of my soul is not capable of harmonically resonating with that of Leibniz.

What strikes me after reading many 16th-18th century philosophers is the effort expended to formulate the Theory of Everything. Aristotle famously tries to cover everything while the Epicureans flattered themselves that they actually achieved knowledge and understanding of Everything. As philosophy revives with the scholastics, the emphasis is on theology with man as a secondary part and God the primary. No attempt is made to fully derive the psychological makeup of man, while physics is a given. I haven't read the middle scholastic writers, so can't comment, but the Theory of Everything seems to be resurfacing as I read Descartes and especially Spinoza. Bacon discusses all three elements also, but doesn't seem to try to unify them. Locke supposedly gets the ball rolling further with his works that I haven't read, while Hume - not knowing the difference between a scientific theory and a tautology - conceitedly proclaims to have developed the science of human nature in a manner that explains everything. My next destination is about 40 hours of recordings of Immanuel Kant's writings.

2011-11-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

After the rain.

My wife and I had a nice outing in Sunol Park this morning. The cough accompanied us, but we are thankful to the Creator that we still had the energy. Fall in northern California is when the dry season ends. Some trees start shedding their leaves, but the rains start turning the grasses from brown to green.

2011-11-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

John Locke (1632-1704): Religious Toleration.

John Locke wrote A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689, the same year he wrote Two Treatises of Government. Both of these works are important to the founding of the United States. Reading these two works essentially together, it is clear that they have a unity of thought that would make it suspect to try analyzing their principles separately. Locke's view of civil government is one that is extremely limited and subject to being rescinded at any moment by the people. A "church", as Locke has defined it, is similarly a voluntary association of individuals who join together for purpose of religious ceremony. Within this framework there is considerable room for separation and Locke gives us this:

"This only I say, that, whencesoever their authority be sprung, since it is ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the bounds of the Church, nor can it in any manner be extended to civil affairs, because the Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other." - A Letter Concerning Toleration.

Keeping in mind that the governments of the 17th century were necessarily limited for reasons of technology and economy, the above assumption that church and civil society had no need to bump into each other might not be totally implausible. Still, he allows for some friction between the two and outlines what appear to be sensible principles for arbitration. A question that is completely absent from both of Locke's long dissertations is how to handle education - whether this fall under the civil or church authorities.

Locke's view of toleration is that all religions should be permitted to worship both privately and publicly. This would include papists, Mohammedans, idolators, Jews, etc. Between all these groups, he allows for persuasion of all kinds to be used with no limits set by the civil authorities. In this matter, however, he identifies three exceptions:

1. "I say, first, no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But of these, indeed, examples in any Church are rare. For no sect can easily arrive to such a degree of madness as that it should think fit to teach, for doctrines of religion, such things as manifestly undermine the foundations of society and are, therefore, condemned by the judgement of all mankind; because their own interest, peace, reputation, everything would be thereby endangered."

In our day and age, we do have groups which deliberately work to undermine the moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society. At the same time they make false accusations against those who would preserve the morals that they are actually debasing them. Oh well.

2. "Again: That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince."

Having listed Mohammedans and papists as ones who deserve religious toleration, Locke then lists the same two as violating this principle.

3. "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist."

The problem here is that there are atheists who - in spite of their beliefs - are truthful for reasons of custom or conscience, whereas there are examples of religious folk who have no regard for God and lie anyways.

2011-11-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

Watch Out.

It was inevitable. After several days of missing my watch and finally writing a blog post lamenting the fact, there came a bit of whimpering sound from under my desk. A careful search followed and my beloved watch was found. How could this happen?

I have been sick for nearly two months with what is probably whooping cough. Periodically the coughing picks up to the point that I pass out. Twice I woke up on the floor, but usually I collapse in my chair and onto the desk. The best I can figure is that in one of those fits I knocked my watch onto the floor and kicked it away. She was hurt, but promised to try and not take it too personally. It is important to be forgiving in relationships.

2011-11-19T05:41:00.000-08:00

John Locke (1632-1704): Power to the People!

Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government Book II is a must read for anyone who would hope to be a Teaparty member in good standing. It outlines the branches of America's current government and provides the arguments for which this design was chosen.

Locke begins with a discussion of "natural rights" and the affairs of American Indians. The Indians held great tracts in common, yet their greatest leaders were poorer than a common laborer in England. Locke claims that the reason that the extreme wealth of the English compared to the poverty of the Indians was centered in property rights: The English had the power to work there own land in security, thus, increasing output a hundred fold. He then compares a miser who hoards up tremendous wealth but doesn't use it to the Indians who held vast tracts but didn't sensibly employ it. His end conclusion is that the first and foremost purpose of government is to establish and preserve property rights so that the people will flourish. Inheritance of property rights is also fundamental.

As for the kind of government, Locke believes that a commonwealth - actually a Democratic Republic - is the only legitimate kind where a group of individuals consciously choose to live together under common laws. Fear of tyranny is a key part of this, so checks and balances are discussed involving the three branches: Legislative (which has the primacy), Executive and Judicial. Those who legislate may not judge, and vice versa. This rule is to insure consistency in the rule of law and minimize corruption.

A theme running throughout his writing is hostility to inherited title and lordship over others. He asserts that each person is born free and this is undermined by notions that someone can inherit lordship. This principle cuts two ways. Locke asserts that someone can legitimately be a slave having had a Just War waged against them and having been defeated and forced to submit. But just as lordship cannot be inherited, so it is also that slavery cannot be inherited either. Thus, Locke lays out an argument against both monarchy and slavery in the same text.

Locke has a number of classical references including Plato's threefold discussion of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. A weakness is that Locke has mainly waved his hands over the problems that Plato highlighted - that the end of democracy was the people voting to steal each others property. Locke tries to remedy this by asserting that the commonwealth has a right to dissolve itself and reconstitute a new government in any case where tyranny has taken hold. So what do we do if populist madness overcomes the Democracy and use their authority to appropriate the property of their neighbors? Or the opposite - that the slightest injury from the government is taken to be proof that the government has descended to a tyranny that violates natural rights? The formula seems to me be something that leaves the nation always on the edge of upheaval. Thus, the second amendment.

2011-11-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

Timeless.

This post is to lament the disappearance of my Casio Pathfinder watch. If it had been a mere Rolex, I would not be in mourning, but a Casio Pathfinder is something different. The altimeter and compass accompanied me over countless mountains in the fog, letting me know where I was and what direction I should go. She accompanied me on swims to and fro around Alcatraz and on bicycle rides for great distances. We have trekked through scorching desert heat and gone to frozen mountain summits. Even on the airplane she provided me with additional data regarding the ascent and descent of the plane together with information about the cabin pressure management of different aircraft.

We first met each other at a watch store in the mall near the University of California, San Diego. My daughter had just started there in 2004 and we were accompanying my daughter to get her settled in. As we were shopping we came upon a little shop where my eyes were somehow drawn to the Casio's beauty. It was love at first sight. The band was just the right kind that I could be comfortable with. The display large enough to be clearly seen in various lighting conditions. It was heavy duty. The store keeper told me how this watch was the kind that was issued to US soldiers and that one and had helped keep him alive. I purchased her and brought her home with me.

The relationship continued faithfully for many years. All the other watches that had been in my life I put aside and cherished this one alone. So it continued until my beloved watch became sick about two years ago. I took her to a nearby repair shop to see if the battery replacement would solve things. The repairmen looked at it and informed me that this kind of watch has four batteries and would need additional cost to repair. With this input, I knew why it was that she had seemed so electrifying, so I immediately said "fix her whatever the cost". This done, we went our way and cherished two more years of intimate companionship.

But now she is gone. Oh how I miss her! My wife pulled another watch from the drawer which my son inherited from me, but then gave back. This is a Polar heart rate monitor watch which is also good for sports, but lacks the compass and altimeter. Somehow I can't bring myself to go back to this earlier acquaintance. Yes, the Polar watch still has the appearance of youth and beauty like when she was new, but it is hard to move on when my heart still yearns for my true love.

2011-11-15T21:19:00.000-08:00

David Hume (1711-1776): Burn it!

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, final concluding thought.

The above quoted sentence is from Hume's sequel to his earlier more massive work on human nature. Now that I have gone through more than 1,600 pages of Hume's metaphysics, I am prepared to answer those questions that Hume proposes - with the caveat that "experimental reasoning" I will change to "scientific experiments", since most of us have had enough of politicians engaged in "experimental reasoning".

Did Hume do any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? NO! Did he perform any scientific experiments concerning matter of fact and existence? NO! 'nuff said.

2011-11-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

David Hume (1711-1776): Proud as a Peacock.

"It is plain, that almost in every species of creatures, but especially of the nobler kind, there are many evident marks of pride and humility. The very port and gait of a swan, or turkey, or peacock show the high idea he has entertained of himself, and his contempt of all others. This is the more remarkable, that in the two last species of animals, the pride always attends the beauty, and is discovered in the male only." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part I, Section XII

I suppose my pride is like the pride of a male peacock, but what of my wife? Anyway, it struck me that all male peacocks are proud in the same way at the same time for the same reason - and this is driven by a natural instinct related to the preservation of the species. What do we make of a person who is proud of his Rolex watch? The variety of things that humans are proud of is breathtaking, yet just about everything we are proud of can also be a source of shame. Hume notes this and declares that the strength of his system is that it can explain all that. This may be true but - as with evolution - it never achieves more than 0 digits of precision. Like evolution, Hume's psychology also accepts all possible outcomes so that falsification is impossible. Back to the peacock, however, and I will put my skeptic hat on to declare that a male peacock has no concept whatever of his pride or his contempt of others. He is simply overwhelmed with hormones and behaving in a way that is devoid of consciousness. As soon as the hormones are gone, so will be the pride. This is totally different from a grandparent's pride in a grandchild. There are no hormones driving anything.

Hume does seem to have some stimulating thoughts at times, and one is with regard to the relationship between passion and reason:

"Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. ... In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will." - Book II, Part III, Section III

Of course Hume - being a skeptic - has no positive principles, so he can't show anything. Yet at the same time, this is certainly a concept worth pondering. First, I would note that in all Hume's science, there is not a single tool or instrument at his disposal that wasn't available from the beginning of humanity. We observe character and make judgments, yet what we (OK, just I) judge seems to be as often completely wrong as right. Classical philosophy did identify passions as bad and reason as good, although Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods has an Academic character who argues that reason can be an independent source of evil in itself. To this there is a remark by the Apostle Paul in Romans that would seem to apply:

"So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" - Romans 8:21-24

I don't think things need to be so neatly packaged. Reason can be for both good or ill. Passions in the most primitive state are certainly neutral, yet I believe that human passions are reinforced or trained for good or ill by experience so that they move out of the morally neutral condition. Hume seems to acknowledge this also as he tries to hit every possible angle of his philosophy of psychology. So which is the controlling one? I feel this is a bit like asking whether a zebra is white with black stripes or black with white stripes. It is hardly worth disputing. That we are composed of both passions and reason is simply a fact. That we have conflicts or agreement between passions and passions, between reasons and reasons, and between passions and reasons is much of what makes psychology intractable to science.

2011-11-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

David Hume (1711-1776): The consequences of the doctrine that "All Opinions Are False".

"Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer?" - Book I, Part III, Section VII (Conclusion of this book)

My advice to Hume is to stick to your principles. How do we know that all those metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians and theologians even exist? Is this view of existence of intellectuals not merely a product of custom? And how can we discern an insult from a complement? If such entities as logicians exist and are always wrong, would they not be offended at a true conclusion so that an insult was merely conclusive proof of the truth of Hume's system?

There is only one puzzle for me to sort out, which is why Hume - who rejected the truth of all opinions - should have wanted so badly to make a career out of publishing and teaching opinions. Reading the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) article on Hume, it appears that Hume escaped much criticism for the simple reason that few bought this massive book and even fewer cared to read it.

2011-11-09T21:10:00.000-08:00

David Hume (1711-1776): Regarding Cause and Effect.

"According to the precedent doctrine, there are no objects which by the mere survey, without consulting experience, we can determine to be the causes of any other; and no objects, which we can certainly determine in the same manner not to be the causes. Any thing may produce any thing. Creation, annihilation, motion, reason, volition; all these may arise from one another, or from any other object we can imagine. Nor will this appear strange, if we compare two principles explained above, THAT THE CONSTANT CONJUNCTION OF OBJECTS DETERMINES THEIR CAUSATION, AND [Part I. Sect. 5.] THAT, PROPERTY SPEAKING, NO OBJECTS ARE CONTRARY TO EACH OTHER BUT EXISTENCE AND NON-EXISTENCE." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section XV

In other words, correlation can be observed, but causation is a myth - or at least causation is something that Hume believes that human understanding is not capable of discerning. I have already listened to Hume lecture for several hours, so I must recall back to an earlier comment:

"Ideas produce the images of themselves in new ideas; but as the first ideas are supposed to be derived from impressions, it still remains true, that all our simple ideas proceed either mediately or immediately, from their correspondent impressions." - Book I, Part I, Section VII

Here Hume seems to be saying that there is a strict order of cause and effect where impressions give rise to ideas that give rise to other ideas. Based on the fact that those who are born blind never have an impression or idea of color, he also argues that no idea can come into being without there being a corresponding impression. Hume does allow for some possibility of ideas not caused by impressions, but then gives us this:

"I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions; though the instance is so particular and singular, that it is scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim."

It seems we are reaching a point where Hume asserts that Cause and Effect are concepts easily demonstrated for the science of human opinions, but not for mechanics. We can go further and say that Hume claims that human's are subjected to the laws of Cause and Effect, but otherwise nature is not. Another note is that Hume is quite adept at discerning cause and effect regarding human opinions in other subtle ways:

"Custom has two original effects upon the mind, in bestowing a facility in the performance of any action or the conception of any object; and afterwards a tendency or inclination towards it; and from these we may account for all its other effects, however extraordinary." - Book II, Part III, Section V.

Given the amount of ink spilled on like topics, it is tempting to say that Hume's philosophy is an effect where the cause is a desire to employ political rhetoric as a substitute for the scientific method. Political rhetoric is full of ad hominems such as "my policy proposals are correct because my opponent is a womanizer". Thus, the various ad hominems of political rhetoric are categorized, dissected and presented in a long winded manner as if they are the only means whereby humans form their opinions.

Book I Part III Section XV does outline a few criteria for determining Cause from Effect, but they are such as to be no more than what the simplest of humans will deduce, while providing us no guidance for anything of moderate or greater difficulty. In this manner I feel that Francis Bacon writing 120 years earlier was by far the superior scientific philosopher.

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

David Hume (1711-1776): A Treatise Concerning Human Nature.

To understand the title, we look at the introduction:

"It is evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature: and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even. Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.

And as the science of man is the-only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation."

Good to start things off on a confident note. Hume declares that psychology is the most basic of all sciences and precedes all others. He then declares that he will invent the science of psychology which had been hitherto unthought of and thus explain morals, philosophy, physics, etc. To found this new science, Hume begins by talking about Cause and Effect in a manner that clearly derives from the second movie in The Matrix. He asserts that human relations are the result of cause and effect, just as the motions of the heavens are. As I was starting to get my hopes up that Hume would answer the ultimate question of human nature, however, he throws this in regarding the dynamics of human relations:

"Its effects are every where conspicuous; but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to explain. Nothing is more requisite for a true philosopher, than to restrain the intemperate desire of searching into causes, and having established any doctrine upon a sufficient number of experiments, rest contented with that, when he sees a farther examination would lead him into obscure and uncertain speculations."

I have a sense of the space shuttle beginning a liftoff with a glorious flame only to stall one inch off the pad. The next phase of the book is a disputation with mathematicians over Euclidean geometry. As all humans know, however, it is unnatural for humans to look into geometry with too great inquisitiveness, thus, I am in some doubt as to how this path will get us to an understanding of what is natural for humans. The work is just starting, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for Hume to get himself back onto the flight path.

2011-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

John Locke (1632-1704): Two Treatises of Civil Government.- Book I

Masochism. This is the only diagnosis for someone who reads this book. Except for Insanity. The background is the English civil war(s) where the monarch, Charles I, was dumped and executed by the parliament. About that time, a stupid publication came out regarding the "Divine Right of Kings" which argued that the only form of governance approved by God was the monarchy, and this was easily found in scriptures in the description of the fatherhood of Adam. John Locke then wrote Book I of A Treatise Concerning Civil Government to rebut this stupidity on a sentence by sentence basis. This worked out to 5.1 hours of lecturing in the audio version. What I learned was that John Locke has a good knowledge of scripture and was able to get down to the level of parsing the Hebrew to point out fallacies.

Having thus corrected a position that no one had ever held either before or after the English civil war, we are then left with all the same uncertainties that we always had: Does Christianity prefer Monarchy, Oligarchy (as the English parliament was) or Democracy? If two or more parties are fighting for the right to govern exclusively, which party do we support? If the leadership is totally corrupt, is there any way to reconcile a coup to God's command to obey the authorities? Maybe I will find out the answers to this in Book II, but it will be awhile before I get back to this subject.

2011-11-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

Still sick ...

The doctors aren't telling me much. I got sick at the end of September with something like Whooping Cough. After a few days getting worse, I settled in to two full weeks of non-stop coughing both night and day. At the end of that time the doctors decided something might be wrong with me and gave me an antibiotic. Until now I have been subjected to fits of coughing off and on all day with only a gradual improvement from one week to the next. I am told there is another name for Whooping Cough: Hundred Day Cough. If it continues at this rate, I could conceivably take a full 3 months to recover.

2011-11-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Finishing Novum Organum Scientiarum

The second book of this work covers a lot of ground as Bacon pontificates about many scientific topics. He deserves credit for the scope, yet a few things get a heavy emphasis: Gunpowder and expansion, the magnet and optics. His thoughts fall into a number of categories. Here is an example of the most confused sort:

"The motion of rotation in missiles, as in darts, arrows, musket balls, and the like, I refer to the motion of liberty."

Admittedly I still have trouble with gyroscopes and their equations of motion, so I won't throw too many darts at him. There is a note that seems to anticipate plate tectonics:

"The very configuration of the world itself in its greater parts presents conformable instances which are not to be neglected. Take, for example, Africa and the region of Peru with the continent stretching to the Straits of Magellan, in each of which tracts there are similar isthmuses and similar promontories, which can hardly be by accident."

There is a single call for instrumentation in science at the beginning:

"Certainly if in things mechanical men had set to work with their naked hands, without help or force of instruments, just as in things intellectual they have set to work with little else than the naked forces of the understanding, very small would the matters have been which, even with their best efforts applied in conjunction, they could have attempted or accomplished. ..."

In this matter Copernicus (1473-1543) and Kepler (1571-1630) were well advanced, although Bacon seems opposed to the Copernican view of the solar system. The work includes a useful call for creative experiments along with their documentation, but misses some of the key elements of the scientific methods. These being careful observation, measurement and the use of mathematics.

A final remark that is needed is that of optimism. New inventions were changing Europe during Bacon's lifetime and there was much hope for what was to come. This gets into a bit of silly rhetoric for which Bacon is not unique:

"It remains for me to say a few words touching the excellency of the end in view. Had they been uttered earlier, they might have seemed like idle wishes, but now that hopes have been raised and unfair prejudices removed, they may perhaps have greater weight. Also if I had finished all myself, and had no occasion to call in others to help and take part in the work, I should even now have abstained from such language lest it might be taken as a proclamation of my own deserts. ...

Again, if men have thought so much of some one particular discovery as to regard him as more than man who has been able by some benefit to make the whole human race his debtor, how much higher a thing to discover that by means of which all things else shall be discovered with ease! ... so assuredly the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion, is in itself more worthy than all the fruit of inventions."

In this matter I am in doubt. A modern Ph.d. knows more that is correct, but we still receive their notions of science in the same manner and order that was previously used for superstition and imposture.

2011-11-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Inventing Science?

Having recently listened to the next three philosophers, Descartes (1596-1650), Pascal (1623-1662) and Spinoza (1632-1677), it would be negligent of me to ignore Bacon. I am listening to Novum Organum Scientiarum which is essentially a declaration of war on Aristotle, Plato, ignorance, superstition and all that stuff. It would be unfair to quote Bacon's criticism of anyone in particular for the simple reason that he criticizes everyone indiscriminately. I have a little sense of an urban planner who advocates nuclear war so that he will have greater opportunity to practice his trade. As for what he promotes, that is inductive reason without any regard to the opinions of others, since if too many people agree on something then it must be wrong. Bacon did not invent "Peer Review". Otherwise, things are too scattered to generalize. The only people who manage to get some praise from Bacon are the ancient Greeks like Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Democritus, whose work comes to us in such a fragmentary state as to preclude criticism.

Since I am also listening to John Calvin (1509-1564), it is worth noting that Calvin likewise finds fault with just about everyone at one point or another. On the other hand, Calvin seems to find many with worthy opinions even if sometimes wrong. The other item of note is that Calvin is more interested in defining and affirming a coherent system rather than simply tearing everything down.

2011-11-01T06:59:00.001-07:00

Zero.

That is the number of trick-or-treaters who came to our house last night for Halloween. Guess that means I will have to finish all the candy by myself.

2011-10-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

Cicero's (106-43BC) Philippics: Resistance is Futile.

This being resistance to save the Republic. This is a series of speeches given in the Roman Senate against Mark Anthony. If we are to believe Cicero, Mark Anthony is one of the worst politicians ever. Accusations of every kind are made ranging from forging laws for money to selling Roman provinces - all for his own gain. The money never lasts too long, however, since debauchery and payoffs are expensive. Cowardice is another recurring theme. Cicero helped raise up Octavian as a rival to Anthony, only to have Octavian become the emperor who finally put an end to the Republic. Cicero didn't live to see this, however, as Anthony murdered him first. The transition of the Republic to the Empire took about 20 years with all kinds of struggles and changing of loyalty. The main lesson I learn: Keep your head low during a civil war.

2011-10-26T22:10:00.000-07:00

Indian Festival in Fremont: Diwali

My wife and I were taking a stroll around the neighborhood this evening and noticed many houses with candles along the walkways leading to the front entrance. They were mostly at houses that I recognized as having Indians living there, although I noticed the candles at both Hindu and Sihk houses. Arriving back home, I did a quick search and found that today is the Diwali celebration. The linked article gives this explanation for the practice:

"It is said that Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth, roams the earth on this day and enters the house that is pure, clean and brightly illuminated. Therefore, people, before exchanging gifts and bursting crackers, offer prayers to the deity."

Coincidentally, news of the rapidly increasing wealth gap is pouring into my house today. We find the gap is greatest in Atlanta while nearby Oakland had their Occupy Protest over Lakshmi's distribution choices disrupted by tear gas. What to make of all this? It is tempting to conclude that the reason for the increasing wealth gap is because people aren't cleaning their houses like they used to, while the Occupy protesters are clearly lagging on this account. It is embarrassing to mention what has happened to purity in recent years. On the other hand, I am really just a know-nothing novice on these issues having first heard of the Goddess of Wealth today. Obviously these events are related, but I would appreciate the insights from someone more familiar with the details of how this wealth distribution mechanism works and why Lakshmi is becoming more discriminating.

2011-10-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Calvin: Christian Liberty.

Given that Calvin is the Doctor of Predestination, his discussions on this subject are somewhat of a surprise to me. I am still listening to the section, but might go over it again. Here is something at the start:

"...for the moment any mention is made of Christian liberty lust begins to boil, or insane commotions arise, if a speedy restraint is not laid on those licentious spirits by whom the best things are perverted into the worst. For they either, under pretext of this liberty, shake off all obedience to God, and break out into unbridled licentiousness, or they feel indignant, thinking that all choice, order, and restraint, are abolished." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III.

The overall doctrine is that Christians aren't under a long list of laws that we must follow. We have Liberty to make choices while the course we choose isn't set for us. Our modern viewpoint is that this allows us creativity to pursue any direction, but Calvin tempers this with the claim that we are only to pursue our freedom within the life-role that we have been assigned by birth and upbringing. My view is that the purpose of Christian Liberty must be centered around Christ and our desire to do good with our life, while also being thankful for the blessings God has given us. For those who can't understand this, however, the relationship of liberty to licentiousness becomes the focus. So far Calvin seems to be dwelling on the errors and abuses of Christian liberty more than the purpose, but I will need to go through the entire section to form a more complete opinion.

One thing that is becoming clear to me is that Calvin believes in predestination, but it does not seem to be of the "everything is deterministic based on atomic theory" style predetermination of modernism. There is something different, but I can't quite describe it yet.

2011-10-24T21:23:00.000-07:00

"Moderate Islamist Party Set to win ..."

This post is not about Islam. It is about using the adjective "moderate" to characterize a religious group.

"To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ... I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to spit you out of my mouth." - Revelation 3:14-21

What I am wondering is if any religion honors those who are "moderate" more than those who are zealous. Certainly Christianity doesn't, although mainline churches have done a great job of emptying their pews by encouraging their flock to be "moderate". That is, the preachers teach their listeners to be slackers in the faith.

The counter argument is that the "moderate" here is really a virtue taken from the philosophical notion of "all things in moderation". This can be dispensed with quite quickly, however, because those who support the notion that religion should be done in moderation never call for abortion to be done in moderation. There is no call for the depravo-religions to tone down their lawsuits nor for moderation from the PETA folk nor the one-worldwide-totalitarian-government-to-stop-global-warming crowd. To give examples from the opposite extreme, no one praises a group for being "moderate fascists" or "moderate racists". Anyway, philosophy is not unanimous in its claim that moderation is a virtue:

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom." - Ecclesiastes 9:10

Xenophon praised Socrates as being one who cheerfully endured the greatest hardships of any Greek soldier. The extreme or the extreme. Would Aristotle's name have been remembered if he had pursued learning in moderation? Which of us chooses to read a philosopher on the basis of the philosopher having a reputation for being mediocre? Um ...

My general view is that to call someone a moderate Papist or a moderate Buddhist or a moderate follower of religion Y is to insult him. We are referring to him as a slacker who wants to have some affiliation with the religion, but really doesn't care. Islam is likewise a religion that has no praise for moderation, except as a tactic for furthering its ends. Thus, regarding the western journalists that use this description, the only decent response is ... ptttuuuiii.

2011-10-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

My nephew ordered a new shirt. What could it possibly mean?

Just to clarify, the characters literally mean "white person see no understand", which probably best translates to "white people can't read".

2011-10-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

Calvin: Regarding faith.

Calvin's comments on faith constitute a long section with many thoughts, so the one I highlight below should not be considered characteristic of the whole. Still, it jumped out at me:

"Here, however, a question might be raised as to the view to be taken of Sarah and Rebekah, both of whom, impelled as it would seem by zeal for the faith, went beyond the limits of the word. Sarah, in her eager desire for the promised seed, gave her maid to her husband. That she sinned in many respects is not to be denied; but the only fault to which I now refer is her being carried away by zeal, and not confining herself within the limits prescribed by the word. It is certain, however, that her desire proceeded from faith. ..." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, chapter 2.

Rebekah proceeded with outright deceit. Thus, we are left in a bit of a problem. Christian salvation is through faith, yet certainly not faith in just anything. Faith in our material goods? Faith in a political leader? Faith in another religion? Thus, Calvin acknowledges that Christian faith can never have a perfectly clear view of the object to which Christian faith is directed, namely God and His promises through Jesus Christ. Thus, Calvin concludes:

"These examples certainly show that error is often mingled with faith; and yet that when faith is real, it always obtains the preeminence. For as the particular error of Rebekah did not render the blessing of no effect, neither did it nullify the faith which generally ruled in her mind, and was the principle and cause of that action. In this, nevertheless, Rebekah showed how prone the human mind is to turn aside whenever it gives itself the least indulgence. But though defect and infirmity obscure faith, they do not extinguish it. Still they admonish us how carefully we ought to cling to the word of God, and at the same time confirm what we have taught—viz. that faith gives way when not supported by the word, just as the minds of Sarah, Isaac, and Rebekah, would have lost themselves in devious paths, had not the secret restraint of Providence kept them obedient to the word." - Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, chapter 2.

This is related to something I have thought about for sometime: No human has as clear a view of God as Satan had, yet humans can come to God through faith, while Satan cannot. It is clear that perfect theology is not a requirement, but rather something more fundamental regarding the human soul.

2011-10-19T21:49:00.000-07:00

Plutarch: Regarding the rule of law.

This is from the story of Solon who was a mythical founder of the laws of Athens. A foreigner, Anacharsis, takes an interest in Solon's activities:

"Solon, somewhat surprised at the readiness of the repartee, received him kindly, and kept him some time with him, being already engaged in public business and the compilation of his laws; which, when Anacharsis understood, he laughed at him for imagining the dishonesty and covetousness of his countrymen could be restrained by written laws, which were like spiders' webs, and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but easily be broken by the mighty and rich. To this Solon rejoined that men keep their promises when neither side can get anything by the breaking of them; and he would so fit his laws to the citizens, that all should understand it was more eligible to be just than to break the laws. But the event rather agreed with the conjecture of Anacharsis than Solon's hope." - Plutarch, Lives, Solon

2011-10-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

Pascal (1623-1662): Deism, Descartes, prophecy, etc.

Pascal's entire work is dedicated to proving Christianity to non-believers. With Spinoza, we find that atheism and deism can be identical, but Pascal does not think so:

" ... And on this ground they take occasion to revile the Christian religion, because they misunderstand it. They imagine that it consists simply in the worship of a God considered as great, powerful, and eternal; which is strictly deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which is its exact opposite. ...

All who seek God without Jesus Christ, and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form for themselves a means of knowing God and serving Him without a mediator. Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things which the Christian religion abhors almost equally. ... " - Pensees.VIII

What I imagine from all this rhetoric is that while there was considerable fussing going on between catholics, protestants, anabaptists and other separatists during this era, atheism and deism were stewing in the background among the intellectuals.

Having completed Pensees, it is now somewhat clear what Pascal's dispute was with Descartes:

"I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God." - Pensees.I

Descartes and Pascal are both down on the utility of pure reason, especially when trying to get a word in with sophists running everything. Descartes tries to find a simpler, less disputable position to stake his reasoning on. Pascal turns to the Bible - scripture - and then starts sounding more like a Calvin (who he also doesn't like):

"There are two ways of proving the truths of our religion; one by the power of reason, the other by the authority of him who speaks.
We do not make use of the latter, but of the former. We do not say, 'This must be believed, for Scripture, which says it, is divine.' But we say that it must be believed for such and such a reason, which are feeble arguments, as reason may be bent to everything. ...

It will be one of the confusions of the damned to see that they are condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion." - Pensees.VII

After this Pascal largely devotes himself to enumerating in detail the prophecies about Christ while explaining the character of Christianity at the same time. One section I like comes from Daniel 11 where a prophecy that seems to point to Xerxes is given and the sequence of kings in the prophecy only works if you include kings that aren't listed in the Biblical account:

"'The angel said to Daniel: There shall stand up yet,' (after Cyrus, under whom this still is), 'three kings in Persia,' (Cambyses, Smerdis, Darius); and the fourth who shall then come,' (Xerxes) 'shall be far richer than they all, and far stronger, and shall stir up all his people against the Greeks.'" - Pensees.XI

I had come to the same conclusion after reading Herodotus. It is nice to see someone else had obtained the same result. What is clear from reading Pensees is that Pascal had read widely from classical literature up to his present time and was familiar with various Jewish writings in addition to the Bible.

A few curious things are in the final chapter where Pascal praises the pope and condemns the Jesuits. The writings of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola, I seem to like, but this is a century afterwards and Pascal leaves me the impression that this group has a very different purpose at that point in time:

"You the Jesuits, what you wish is a Christ not crucified, a religion without miracles and without wisdom." - Pensees.XIII

My take is that the later Jesuits wanted the reputation of being the church, but not the substance. Pascal clearly sees a long list of enemies tearing the church apart, yet the church still grows.

2011-10-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

Pascal (1623-1662): Regarding boredom and retirement.

"Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair." - Pensees.II

2011-10-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Pascal (1623-1662): Regarding philosophy.

"To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher." - Pensees.II

Pascal further explains why I study philosophy:

"Lastly, others wear themselves out in studying all these things, not in order to become wiser, but only in order to prove that they know them; and these are the most senseless of the band, since they are so knowingly, whereas one may suppose of the others that, if they knew it, they would no longer be foolish." - Pensees.II

2011-10-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Pascal: Ethics and the Immortality of the Soul.

"It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. And yet philosophers have constructed their ethics independently of this: they discuss to pass an hour. Plato, to incline to Christianity." - Pensees.III

If it seems awkward, Pensees is a collection of rough notes that Pascal made for writing a book, but he never wrote the book.

2011-10-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

Justice with Michael Standel.

This is a series of 12 hour long videos going over many of the topics of philosophy that I have been reading. The class is given at Harvard and PBS recorded them. A number of moral theories are discussed along with some discussions and examples of how they might apply. The series seems to me to be a good overview. The explanations of Aristotle's Politics was quite helpful and forced me to give this work a review. Mills work on Utilitarianism is what motivated me to finish watching this series. There are a few unfamiliar names. Familiar names that I haven't studies are Bentham and Kant.

Listening to these lectures and the student interactions reminded me of the problem I had earlier with the academic ethics of Stanley Hauerwas: Facts. In one of the earlier debates in the Justice videos the respect for the wealth of Micheal Jordan was considered relative to taking his money and using it "for the greater good". The first part of this bargain strikes me as concrete: Micheal Jordan has money that could potentially be taken by the government. The later, however, is not only fuzzy but potentially completely misleading. Everything the government does is labeled "for the greater good", even if it is merely paying drunks to go to the bar. The fact is that virtually everything the government does comes with some sort of moral hazard. A few items like Polio Vaccination are mostly good, but even they come with moral hazards since the vaccine companies - or the lawyers who sue them - can find plenty of ways to inflate their costs. If "for the greater good" turns out to mean "rewarding the crony capitalists", then the entire discussion collapses.

Another factually problematic area involved the famous denial from Bill Clinton regarding an affair. This was deemed to be a white lie, in spite of the angry demeanor that he took on in the video clip. It was also deemed that white lies are of little harm. Not to go into a lot of detail here, but the worst lies consist of information that is 100% true.

The last item had to do with "gay marriage". This topic involves so much political correctness that getting the facts straight is a crime against the constitution and humanity. The students mentioned the notion that the government had an interest in procreation, but then stopped. Will any procreation do? Of course not. Governments have traditionally concerned themselves with procreation that produced a mentally and physically acceptable next generation, thus, there is an interest in marriage where the government provides subsidies and rights. Our own government is said to have sterilized the mentally challenged so that they could not produce offspring, just as a farmer might do so also. The key moral issue, however, is between legitimate and illegitimate families. The latter have a strong tendency to produce citizens who are mentally and socially dysfunctional. If you want to get into Harvard, you need to have had a more stable upbringing and this means that most of the kids grew up with both of their biological parents. In the case of same sex marriages, there can never be legitimate children, thus, the problem. An infertile heterosexual couple, on the other hand, can adopt a child and raise that one so that it is relatively well adjusted mentally and socially. All this relates to the facts of human biology and psychology.

This series also reminded me of Aristotle's claim that only the old and experienced should study philosophy, because they are the only ones who have sufficient life experience to process the meaning. Half of moral philosophy is getting the facts right, like Solomon did in the story of the two woman fighting over the child. Ascertaining the true facts that exist behind the wall of rhetorical fog takes experience.

2011-10-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

John Mill (1806-1873): Utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a view that all ethics derives from a need to maximize the total happiness of mankind. Mill lists the originator of the theory as being Epicurus (341-270BC) who was an atheist with pretenses of scientific understanding. This caused a lot of hostility towards the view and Mill is mainly hand waving his rebuttals to the various complaints. I will refer anyone interested to the first lecture from Michael Standel to get a modern view of the subject.

For this review, I will highlight a few notable quotes, but first I would note that there seem to be multiple John Stuart Mills! Having listened to On Liberty one day, The Subjection of Women on a second, and Utilitarianism on a third, there is a major consistency problem. On Liberty asserts that the only one who knows what is best for an individual is that person. Other knowledgeable individuals can only have the vaguest of notions and to say what is best in any more general way is wildly conceited error. Utilitarianism asserts not only that what is best for others can be known, but insists that this knowledge must be put to work at all levels from school indoctrination to legal systems. The Subjection Of Women asserts that laws we have today are inherited from primitive times when selfish interest by petty warlords created laws by brute strength. Utilitarianism asserts that laws are the cumulative product of human wisdom derived from centuries of experience and philosophical pondering. On Liberty claims that principles of conscience and ethics are so varied and conflicting as to preclude any hope of sensible moral legislation by a community. Utilitarianism asserts that conscience and the various ethical systems all derive scientifically from the one fundamental principle of maximum utility - i.e. happiness - and thus all provide guidance for the grand legislation of utilitarianism.

The one thing that I view as constant among liberals is that whatever sacred, irrefutable argument they employ today will be a direct contradiction to the sacred, irrefutable argument they used yesterday and both of these will hopelessly conflict with the sacred, irrefutable argument that they will use tomorrow.

The end of poverty and disease:

"Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences; while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe." - Utilitarianism, chapter 2.

Thanks to the social welfare state, the west has indeed eliminated many forms of poverty and much of disease. Many other social ills have, however, risen to take their place, while one shudders when imagining what happens when the obviously unsustainable social welfare state starts collapsing. This again highlights the modern notion of unidirectional progress in civilization compared to the classical one of cycles.

That Happiness is a scientific quantity:

"If there is any anterior principle implied, it can be no other than this, that the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness, as of all other measurable quantities." - Utilitarianism, chapter 5.

The engineer in me got excited about this. We can write equations for happiness, program them on a computer, and then use optimization procedures to perform the maximization! But what, precisely, is the equation for happiness for an individual? Are there any constraint equations? And what precisely is the domain that we are integrating? Mankind as currently alive? What about the unborn? What do we do if the result of the optimization is that the computer tells us we should exterminate a subset of the population to achieve a higher overall happiness? Perhaps I should give Mill a visit and ask him some questions. Anyone want to join me on applying for a DARPA grant for this? I can handle the equations and have the super computer resources. Just need someone with some knowledge of the formula for happiness.

Utilitarianism vs. Christianity

"In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality." - Utilitarianism, chapter 2.

Um, no. Utilitarianism is a macroscopic or global law that specifies the end result. The means doesn't enter in, except to the extent that it would be deemed more or less desirable as a precedent for obtaining similar utilitarian results in the future. The Golden Rule is a microscopic or local rule that is aimed at individual transactions, but presumes nothing regarding results on a global scale. They are independent principles. Mill does note that many have objected that Utilitarianism is a non-theory, but tries to rebut this by cleverly claiming credit for real theories.

2011-10-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

John Mill (1806-1873): There are no known biological differences between men and women.

The Subjection of Women (1869) argues that for a woman to be a wife and a mother is to be a slave. If we combine this with his other work, On Liberty, it is clear that society has an obligation to invalidate any voluntary contract of slavery entered into, while Mill makes it clear that wives face a situation worse than slaves, hence it should be even more compelling to do away with the stench of marriage. It is doubtful that those who are satisfied with their marital arrangements would be left in peace. The wives have not had their eyes opened to the possibilities available to them through Liberty, while the husbands are brutal and manipulative slave masters of their wives who are so comfortable with their brutishness that they have lost all ability to judge sensibly.

Well, Mill didn't quite put it that way and he surveys a large number of opinions on the subject. The driving force for Mill is that Liberty is the sole end goal of humanity, while the sole function of liberty is expression, either of the philosophical, political, artistic, or scientific sort. Reading between the lines, anyone who chooses to marry has rejected their calling as a human. I would describe it as an adaptation of the call to the monastic life being purloined by someone who had contrived that Liberty should be the sole deity to whom our allegiance is required.

The book starts out with long sections regarding the extreme abusive husband and the ideal submissive wife. Laws regulating marriage are then discussed in the context of this extreme - but sadly all too common - case. I would characterize most of his arguments as being of the ad hominem type. All his opponents are biased, hence, there reasoning is fallacious. The next bit deals with an argument based on "progress", with the notion that women were originally brought into slavery by brutish men who used violence. As civilization advanced, such crudities were understood to be evils, but the legacy lived on. This view isn't sourced. Having cited many views from classical times, I will note that Mill does not make any mention of the views of Aristotle, Plato and others that democracy and freedom would turn Liberty into a cult that would cause civilization to degenerate into its most brutish forms.

The latter half is dedicated to the argument that marriage does away with 50% of the talent of a civilization. The capability of women relative to men was a subject that wasn't taboo in this era. Mill's argument here is that we can never know what observed differences are due to nature or nurture, thus, all observed differences are due to nurture (Quod Erat Demonstrandum). As for specific change, Mill highlights a few laws but leaves things vague as to what to change beyond this. Mill lists a number of jobs that he thinks should be open to women, including that of a soldier. I am having difficulty imaging women doing an 1860's style bayonet charge. That a complete re-engineering of civilization is required can easily be inferred.

Looking back at this book from our modern viewpoint, it is useful to see how Mill's vision has played out as it has been forceably put in place.

Economic: The US saw great increases in economic output during the 40's to 60's as women were drawn into the work force. This would seem to vindicate Mill somewhat, except that it has come at a price. Career women do not produce enough children to sustain the population on average, hence, shrinking populations are the norm in many modern countries.

Creative: Per Mill's theory, unleashing the creativity of women should result in a female Newton or Einstein for every male one. One check would be the Nobel Prize list. There are some women in literature, but not much else.

Happiness: This is more difficult. Mill says that the liberated woman will be happier. There are many kinds of happy and unhappy women, but I would say that those who had a healthy, stable traditional marriage are the happiest. As in the 19th century, there are some abused ones. Then there are the Code Pink liberated types who generally give me the impression of being pathologically angry. Then there is White Trash. Those are the ones who had no sensible family upbringing so remained in the feral (liberated?) state.

My overall opinion is that Mill's theory has been tried and failed miserably. The counter argument is that Mill's theory hasn't yet been tried, because there are still vast amounts of traditional marriage in society. Unless this is completely erased and converted to the new, post-marriage system, we have not given it a proper try. Regardless, scientific arrangements for society must take precedence over stone age practices based on violence.

For me, the book was quite an eye opener. I hadn't realized that the destruction of the marriage/family relationship was considered to be a major goal by intellectualoids in the mid 19th century.

2011-10-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

John Mill (1806-1873): It ain't botherin you none so shut your trap up.

John Mill apparently is the founder of modern liberalism, which should not be confused with the classical notion of liberalism. I listened to his work, On Liberty, which is a 19th century take on libertarianism. There are many memorable statements in the book, but I was in a rush and so will just highlight the following one that seems to provide a justification for the Opium wars:

"On the other hand, there are questions relating to interference with trade, which are essentially questions of liberty; such as the Maine Law, already touched upon; the prohibition of the importation of opium into China; the restriction of the sale of poisons; all cases, in short, where the object of the interference is to make it impossible or difficult to obtain a particular commodity. These interferences are objectionable, not as infringements on the liberty of the producer or seller, but on that of the buyer." - On Liberty, Applications

Mill is pro gambling, pro strong drink, pro prostitution, and apparently pro every vice with the exception of slavery, although how that is squared with prostitution isn't quite clear. Even in the case of selling poisons mislabeled, Mill has some doubt. As for Christianity, Mill finds little to praise. According to him, Christianity has no moral code and thus makes no contribution to ethics. I will thus throw in the Apostle Peter's rebuttal to Millism:

"Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God." - 1 Peter 2:16

"They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity - for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him." - 2 Peter 2:19

Thus, Mill argues the modernist line that unless you are free to indulge in any vice, you have no freedom. Christianity claiming to the contrary that anyone controlled by vice has no freedom.

On education I find Mill's views generally things I like. That ideas which are accepted should be argued against forcefully is something I believe in strongly, yet the modern liberal is well known for being the least tolerant towards competing notions of any group in history. Mill believes in a competition of ideas which suits me quite well - and would an Augustine also. Mill has no problem with sectarian schools, but a big problem with government schools. The government does have an obligation to check standards, but only so far as undisputed facts are concerned. Based on what he wrote here, he would not be at all happy with America's government education system which leaves kids completely incapable of judging good and bad ideas.

Elsewhere I noted that David Hume was trying to be both a classical Skeptic and an Epicurean. The Epicureans were an extreme gnostic atheist sect, whereas the Skeptic denied any knowledge, thus, his philosophical world view was fundamentalist oxymoronism. Mill claims that Platonism was a great success - which is historically not true, and tries to be both a Skeptic and a Platonist or Stoic. This again is in the same category as kosher pork, since the Platonists and Stoics considered it a duty of the government to impose standards of civilization and religion on society, while the Skeptics wouldn't be sure if society, religion or government even existed. Mill's views don't derive from any of these classical views - even in part.

A purist liberatarian strand is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want (with some caveats about not neglecting one's family) but they must also accept the consequences. It is these consequences that get to be a bit tricky. According to Dr. Wiki, Mill came to embrace socialism later in life, which forces society as a whole to join in paying for the consequences. I wonder if he would have revised any of his opinions on liberty.

2011-10-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

Doctors making house calls again.

The house call went into disuse perhaps a century ago, but I experienced one today. I have been coughing for a week and finally stooped to calling the clinic to make an appointment. They asked me if I could accept a house call. Cool. About 30 minutes later the phone rang and I picked up and gave a very pathetic sounding "hello". The doctor then cheerfully asked if Sharon was there. "No, I'm Looney, not Sharon" I corrected. He realized he had a list of names and numbers that corresponded but in no particular order. Thus, he asked if he could call me back when he got things sorted out. No problem. Five minutes later he called again. Two house calls in one day. Wow.

2011-10-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

I'm Me, Therefore I Am.

As Descartes said, spending too much time in the past causes you to be alienated from the present. This Judge Judy video shows that philosophy has made great evolutionary progress since simpletons like Aristotle roamed the Earth.

2011-10-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Fiscal New Year Resolution: Trying to improve Chinese conversation.

The government's calendar runs from October 1st through September 30th. Traditionally the government keeps everyone in suspense by delaying the bills that are due October 1st until January 1st, thus, it has become a tradition for the new year resolutions to be made on January 1st when things are more certain. Being a bit impatient for a change of pattern I have decided to take action now.

It was 32 years ago that I began studying Chinese while taking my engineering classes. With all the Chinese relatives, it has improved a bit in spurts over time with some of my learning taking place as I listened to my children chattering in Chinese when they were little - having learned it from their mother, grandmother and baby sitters. There was a time that I worked hard trying to memorize characters, with the result that I recognize a few hundred of the thousands and misread countless more. For a White to speak some Chinese is a novelty, but really completely useless in this country. Chinese students and professionals who live here are good at English, or else they are trying to improve their English so speaking with a foreigner in Chinese is a waste of time. Thus, long ago I gave up trying to improve my Chinese from what is perhaps the standard of a 6 year old to something more substantial.

Stages in life change. Now I am more likely to encounter a different class of Chinese. The church I go to is primarily Chinese. Many of them are in the latter stages of career like I am and have their parents living with them who no longer bother to speak English. One non-English speaker in the group conversation changes the dynamics so that Chinese must necessarily be spoken. Thus, there appears some hope that what I learn might actually be used. Onwards ...

2011-09-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

Atrahasis.

The Babylonian flood myth continued. Following are a few excerpts:

"Roof it like the Apsu so that the Sun cannot see inside it! Make upper decks and lower decks. The tackle must be very strong, the bitumen strong, to give strength. I shall make rain fall on you here ... He invited his people [ ] to a feast. [ ] he put his family on board. They were eating, they were drinking. ...

The flood roared like a bull ... for seven days and seven nights the torrent, storm and flood came on."

The [] indicate missing or unintelligible text. The ... is where I dropped out detail to emphasize things. Apsu is listed as the roof of a particular temple in the glossary. For comparison, the Biblical account is in Genesis chapters 6-8.

The important thing in doing a comparison is to highlight both the similarities and the differences. It is invariably the case that the differences are not highlighted when this is presented to the unsuspecting student. The flood in Atrahasis is the last of seven catastrophes inflicted on mankind. The reason:

"Ellil organized his assembly, addressed the gods his sons, 'You are not to inflict disease on them again, (Even though) the people have not diminished - they are more than before! I have become restless at their noise, sleep cannot overtake me because of their racket! Cut off food from the people ...'"

Each time it seems that some of the lesser gods thwart Ellil's plan, resulting in conflict among the gods. Note that the "noise" here is due to man working on the canals and the like, and this work is what the Atrahasis story claims that mankind was created to do. Thus, we find the blame being heaped entirely onto Ellil for the catastrophes, whereas the Bible gives us this reason for the destruction:

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time." - Genesis 6:5

and

"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence." - Genesis 6:11

Atrahasis has no mention of the rainbow that is mentioned (God speaking) in Genesis 9:13-16 -

" ... Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth."

It is an irony that the rainbow was chosen as the symbol by certain groups that worship promiscuity and boast that every inclination of the thoughts of the heart are evil all the time.

To summarize, the Bible describes God as good, while man is evil - hence mankind's deserved punishment. The Babylonian myths portray man as doing what the gods required, yet the gods are nuts and plotted evil against them anyway. There does seem to be some relationship between the two, yet I will stick with my view that the Biblical account is the original and a new atheist from 4 thousand years ago did some editing to make the Babylonian version.

2011-09-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Atrahasis.

This is a Bablylonian flood myth. When I was young I heard the argument that the Bible's flood story must be true because such stories are distributed all over the world. Plato includes one also - I believe in The Republic. The intellectualoids have a different viewpoint: there was only one flood myth related to the Bible, and this flood myth was much, much, much earlier than Moses, who they claim didn't exist, while the Biblical story - they claim - was written about the 4th century BC. The implication is that the Biblical account is a cheap plagiarism. Atrahasis is the Babylonian story discovered on cuneiform tablets. The intro to this claims it to be from the 17th century BC, although this is unclear. Is that the oldest stone in the city? Or what? Anyway, Atrahasis begins like this:

"When the gods instead of man did the work, bore the loads, the gods' load was too great. The work too hard, the trouble too much, The great Anunnaki made the Igigi carry the workload sevenfold. ..." - Atrahasis I

This continues for several pages as the gods engage in a revolution. Then a solution is determined:

"'Belet-ili the womb-goddess is present, let the womb-goddess create offspring and let man bear the load of the gods!'" - Atrahasis I

Thus, man was created specifically to work due to this revolt among the gods.

It would appear there is a relationship to the Biblical story:

"To Adam he said, 'Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, "You must not eat of it," Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.'" - Genesis 3:17

The Bablylonian account claims that man's need to work is due to the perfidy of gods who clearly aren't all powerful. The Biblical account takes the exact opposite view: a single, omnipotent God creates everything good, while man is cursed to work due to Adam's willful disobedience. My general observation is that the account with the serious message predates the spoof, rather than the other way around.

2011-09-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753): More on the Red Pill vs. the Blue Pill.

"Hylas - ... I freely own there is no other substance, in a strict sense, than Spirit. But I have been so long accustomed to the term Matter that I know not how to part with it. To say, there is no Matter in the World, is still shocking to me." - 3 Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Taking things in order, Descartes argued that each man is his own substance, but the spirit is distinct from the body. Spinoza argued that the entire universe is one substance, while spirit does not exist, only body which is a part of matter. Berkeley takes an opposite view that spirit exists, as is plain to all of us, but matter is merely an allusion.

A common thread in all this is the stated need to oppose atheism. Spinoza speciously tries to claim he is a theist by twisting the definition of god to fit into atheism - and then denies atheism. Berkeley argues that matter itself is something that plays into the sophistry of the atheists, thus, the concept of material distinct from God should be dispensed with. To some extent this seems to be built on top of Descartes' view of "I think, therefore I am". Descartes does this as a thought experiment but doesn't try to deny material reality in the end. Berkeley goes all the way to insist that what we consider material reality is just an illusion.

2011-09-17T19:48:00.001-07:00

Downsizing and a sore back.

With the kids having all left home, we periodically go through the house doing a cleaning. That means unused clothing, school books and other things get sifted through as we search for recycleables. A scrap metal and electronics pickup was scheduled for the morning, so I pulled out some old rusty bicycles and wheels, along with two large cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors. The monitors are still good, but the resolution is low, energy usage is high, and we really don't need so many monitors. A number of computers remain that are unused, but I can't bring myself to dispose of them quite yet. Dozens of books went out too which were mostly old computer manuals. It was a good cleaning.

The patterns of empty nesters deserve a little reflection. Some seem to want to grow the house and furnishings so that it can house all their descendants under one roof. Others keep things pretty much as is. A difficult challenge is to reduce the unnecessary belongings to something that is sufficient for two people. When we were just married everything we had could fit in one room. It isn't quite like that now, but the feeling of slowly having fewer things cluttering the house and garage is quite pleasant.

2011-09-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

Descartes: The Red Pill or the Blue Pill?

The final chapter of Descartes Principles of Philosophy discusses what is known about the nervous system in the human body. The machine like characteristics start to become apparent as cutting a nerve in one place removes feeling in another, while disturbing a nerve can sometimes make a sensation of pain somewhere else. This draws Descartes to the conclusion that the mind is real, but sensation is imposed on the mind by some device. Thus, his belief that everything in reality must be questioned. It is only his belief in God that forces him to conclude that perceived reality is actual reality, since God would not deceive us.

One statement at the beginning caught my eye. For those who find my blog difficult to understand, Descartes has the ready explanation:

"It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, - a conclusion usually come to by those whose experience has been limited to their own country. On the other hand, when too much time is occupied in travelling, we become strangers to our native country; and the over curious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present." - Discourse on Method.

2011-09-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

Descartes: Falsification

I have heard about Descartes and his memorable statement, "I think, therefore I am". Having read his work, I now have a completely different view of his intent. Descartes claims that the most important characteristic of his philosophy is doubt - the question "what if I am wrong?". Thus, the first proposition of Descartes' The Principles of Philosophy is this:

"1. That in order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things." - The Principles of Philosophy, Human Reason.

This philosophy reminds me very much of Popper's notion of falsification and the standard for science. In our modern era we have to question whether such a philosophy is feasible. The incredibly large amount of opinions and technology that are presented to us almost precludes any hope of questioning.