Wednesday, 29th of March, 2006

The science vs religion articles continue. Michelle Bunting of the Grauniad has mightily pissed off the atheist blogosphere with an article in which she claims that Dawkins and Dennett (& co) are unexpectedly helping the intelligent design cause (”giving succour to creationists”) by implying that evolution “ineluctably” leads to atheism. This is, of course(!), terribly wrong-headed, but rather than waste time at work (oops - it is lunchtime though!) or at home going on about it myself, I’ll just give you linkage:
Dan Jones has an excellent essay at his blog, The Proper Study of Mankind (which I have added to my watched feeds, yay!)
PZ has a response here

Tuesday, 28th of March, 2006

Get it before their service provider gets threats from Jack T Chick’s lawyers!
Here is an excellent parody of a Chick tract, in which a girl who’d been caught up in an evangelical Christian cult learns the error of her ways! Lotsa fun.

Sad news: Stanislaw Lem has died, aged 84. His science fiction, which was hugely philosophical, was a great inspiration to me in my school years, and I’ve been collecting second-hand editions of his various fictions recently.
His Cyberiad, bits of which were used by Hofstadter & Dennett in their mind-blowing collection of philosophy texts and short stories The Mind’s Eye, was no doubt one of the works which helped push me towards cognitive science (not that I ended up working in that area), and also gave me an idea of the power of science fiction (and how much fun can be had on the way).
Meanwhile, anyone who loves the sortof meta- and intertextual games Jorge Luis Borges played would love Lem’s reviews of, and introductions to, imaginary books.

He hadn’t written science fiction for many years (since the dissolution of Eastern-bloc communism apparently) but his legacy is huge. Chris Lawson has a beautiful obit post at his newly-minted Talking Squid group blog, which I recommend sticking on your blogroll post haste.

Monday, 27th of March, 2006

The Singularity: sooner than you might think.

via Crooked Timber

Thursday, 23rd of March, 2006

This is awesome… Someone from Answers from Genesis (who I won’t dignify with a link, even a rel=”nofollow” one) has used the Bible to define life, and PZ from Pharyngula is most upset (haha) that his beloved squid are not considered living. Pretty cockeyed definition, as you can see, resulting in the wonderful sentence:

So the logical conclusion can be made that a “living” creature is one that contains red blood.

Hm yes, logical.
But what’s awesome is that as PZ points out:

human embryos do not develop red blood cells until about the 5th week of development, and therefore the early embryo, by their own definition, is not living. Heh.

Heh indeed. Say no more.

Thursday, 16th of March, 2006

The NY Times has published yet more outraged letters re Wieseltier’s horrendous review of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, which I blogged about back here. Lots of good stuff. In particular, I can entirely endorse this:

To the Editor:
In his review of “Breaking the Spell,” Leon Wieseltier couldn’t resist the reflexive accusation that building a worldview on a scientific base is reductive, and as is often the case, he trotted out the existence of art to capture our sympathies. As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces. Unlike Wieseltier, I do not find it difficult to “envisage the biological utilities” of the “Missa Solemnis”; it merely requires a chain with more than one link. Art, particularly religious and nationalistic art, has powerful social effects. Human beings have achieved their stunning success by becoming master cooperators, and emotions that drive us toward shared experience are prominent among the inspirations and outcomes of everything from grand public art to intimate love songs. Our emotion-filled social lives are the direct result of biologically endowed capacities for communication, from language to the delicate network of expressive muscles in our faces, and even our private imaginations bear the imprint. Awareness that I’m participating in this chain of capabilities in no way deprives music of its wonder; it enhances it.
SCOTT JOHNSON
New York

Thank you, Scott Johnson. Speaking as one who creates and plays music myself, I have bumped into this attitude on various occasions (effectively, “How can you be a (scientific) materialist in the face of beautiful music?”, “How can you make such wonderful, moving music and still believe that?”). There’s no contradiction. Face it, guys. Next time anyone says that, I know how to respond. “As a (composer|musician|artist) I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces.”

I hate personality tests. They’re so full of shit.
Which is why I quite enjoyed this one. This might be me:

Your Personality Profile

You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs. For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong.

Tuesday, 14th of March, 2006

A pretty good interview with Dennett over at the Guardian. Nice to see him talking about US foreign policy among other things. Amusing finish:

Where, I wonder, does he think that all of his profound, often thrilling, intellectual confidence comes from?

He thinks for a moment, smiles a little. ‘Well, being right helps, I guess,’ he says.

Just the sort of response to enrage his opponents, but hey, I think he is right, mostly. Even on the “brights” thing, while I deplore the choice of term, I think the idea of a new coinage for atheists, people who don’t believe in the supernatural, is a fine one. It’s just way too in-your-face to use a term which, as an adjective, has an established meaning as “intelligent”. I would’ve liked the interviewer to confront him with it, but interestingly it was discussed without any negative implications in the article. Fair enough.

Meanwhile, still with the English papers there’s an interesting review by Marek Kohn at the Independent. Somewhat sympathetic, it levels some criticisms which I will have to bear in mind when I finally get to read it (it’s out in Australia in April, and I don’t know that I can be bothered ordering it from Amazon just get it a week or two earlier…)

And heading north to Scotland, the Sunday Herald has a great interview/review by Stephen Phelan, which is well worth a read.

Saturday, 11th of March, 2006

I think I’ve maybe mentioned Chris Roberson in passing in this blog before, as a writer to watch. You may know him as the co-publisher of MonkeyBrain books, who put out Jess Nevins’ two volumes of annotations to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not to be confused with the abominable film of the same name) and more recently the same author’s Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana.

But Roberson is primarily a writer of science fiction, and a very fine one at that. I therefore draw your attention to two stories you can read FOR FREE online (or, hey, paste into a word processor, clean up a bit, print out, and read on the train if you like. Also for free!) Both come from a sequence that will eventually be released as Fire Star: A Novel of the Celestial Empire, based in an alternate world dominated by Imperial China. I think it’s Roberson’s best work yet, and I’m very much looking forward to the next entry, a novella called The Voyage of Night Shining White to be published by the excellent PS Publishing in the middle of the year.

So go read these two: First off, O One (not the clever binary pun), about computation in ancient China, and a foreigner who comes to the Emperor with a very curious gift.
Then there’s Red Hands, Black Hands, a hugely impressive mid-future tale of Imperial China on Mars, with some great riffs on socialism, art and culture. Highly recommended - great to see Infinity Plus putting it online.

Friday, 3rd of March, 2006

Postscript to my previous Dennett post: Some more Dennetty goodness over at Prospect Magazine, with an exchange between Dennett and the theologian Richard Swinburne. In a way it’s a bit unreasonable, but also quite apt, to put Dennett up against a theologian, since obviously a theologian is going to take the existence of god as the starting point for their argument. Here’s Swinburne (who unfortunately gets the last word, but then one of them had to):

I do of course agree with you that, if I am to persuade you that there is a God, I have to begin from a neutral position that presupposes no God and prove to you that I am right. I’m trying hard!

But the same applies in reverse—you have to begin from a neutral position that does not presuppose that there is no God and prove to me that you are right. And, to repeat, my worry about your book is that it advocates investigating the origins and consequences of the practice of religion with an atheistic presupposition.

This puts, in stark relief, one of the problems of debate between religionists and atheists; that is, you end up playing burden tennis. (Burden tennis: when the two philosophical combatants pass the burden of proof from one to the other, never agreeing upon whom that burden rests.) Naturally I disagree with Swinburne that atheists are required to begin from a “neutral position” that does not presuppose that there is no god. There is nothing in the observable universe to suggest to a mind uninfected by religion that there is a god. Am I ever going to convince a religious person of this? Probably not.
I do ever so wish that religious people would understand the same about me though: you have to give me a really good reason to even entertain the thought that there is a god at all before you’re going to convince me to begin to entertain the thought of considering your religion to be tenable. Without pre-existing faith, I have no reason to consider religious reasoning in the first place.

So I don’t think it’s a symmetrical relationship; I think the burden of proof rests firmly on the shoulders the purveyors of religion - but then I’m an atheist innit? But I’m not an evangelical atheist. I just want the religionists to:
a) not tell me that science has to stay off “their turf”, whether that’s the holy mysteries of the mind (and you don’t have to be a “religionist” (I’m loving this word today, sorry) to believe that consciousness is off-limits, but fie on you if you do), the existence of morality, or, hey, the existence of god;
b) not try and convert me to their particular brand of superstition; and
c) not smarmily, snidely, or straightforwardly suggest that I’m arrogant, an empty shell, missing something deeply True and important, not truly moral, or whatever else, because I happen to be an atheist.

Is that too much to ask?