Creation and Generation

This entry at Brandon's weblog Siris has a lot to think about. I went to write a reply just now, but I fortunately read the comments first, so I had to pause to think more. Now I've gone & made a fool of myself for sure with my comment.

Don't wade into philosophical waters when there are philosophers about. ;-)

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Words cannot be just air

On the weblog's right hand sidebar, a Blogger Plugin shows Plato quotes. I looked at it just now and read,

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

That reminds me of a verse I remember from a poem,

words cannot be just air
formed into pleasing sounds
if falsehood be their aim
then false is that which forms
what then what shall i claim
what refuge have i found
if words be merely air

I can't remember the rest. I it around here somewhere—unless it disappeared along with my book of Hopkins quotes—but that particular verse struck me as having merit. I wonder if the author was inspired by reading Plato.

I also wonder where Plato wrote this. It certainly sounds Platonic.

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The Monty (Python) Hall program

Brendan at Siris has highlighted and discussed an interesting fallacy, and his discussion of it reminded me of the Monty Hall problem, which has always gotten my goat. (Pardon the pun.)

I left a comment, and while thinking about it a few minutes later, it occurred to me to try the problem out in a computer program. This way, I could simulate several hundred or thousand games in less time than it takes to blink an eye. Ain't computers grand?

For this I turned to Sage, a computer algebra system that uses the programming language Python as its interface with the user. It would be very, very easy to write a Sage program that would run the Monty Hall problem many, many times, building a sufficiently large sample space that the correct answer would be obvious. Moreover, Sage is free software that can be run from a web interface found at the website linked above, so anyone can try it, mess with the code, and see it in action. Thus was born the Monty (Python) Hall program. (Pardon the pun.)

While writing the code and thinking about how to implement the problem, I (finally) saw something that I had never really grasped before. (To see the code, click on "Read more".)

def monty_python_hall_program(n=6000):
  switch_wins = 0
  stay_wins = 0
  doors = Set([1,2,3])
  for each in range(n):
    winning_pick = randint(1,3)
    initial_pick = randint(1,3)
    if winning_pick == initial_pick:
      stay_wins += 1
    else:
      switch_wins += 1
  print "Probability that switching wins:" , round(switch_wins*100/n,1)
  print "Probability that staying wins:", round(stay_wins*100/n,1)

What I I realized is that the information given by the host is essentially useless. It doesn't affect the end result at all, because to decide whether the player wins by switching, one simply tests whether his initial choice was the winning door! You see this in the following if statement:

if winning_pick == initial_pick:

This line does not depend on the host's action at all.

The probability of the initial choice being the winning choice is 1/3, period, full stop. The probability of switching to the correct door is 2/3. The host's revelation of a wrong door doesn't change anything.

Here are the results of the program:

sage: monty_python_hall_program()
Probability that switching wins: 66.0
Probability that staying wins: 33.0
sage: monty_python_hall_program()
Probability that switching wins: 66.0
Probability that staying wins: 33.0
sage: monty_python_hall_program()
Probability that switching wins: 67.0
Probability that staying wins: 32.0

That may look convincing, but it shouldn't because I designed the program to produce those numbers. The real question is whether the program is designed correctly, which depends on whether my "insight" is correct.

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining it, and I had read it a couple of times before. I "understood" it, but was too thick to grasp the explanation. I think (perhaps wrongly) that now I understand it.

I could be wrong, though! Perhaps the host's additional information does need to be implemented in a way that I didn't see. It's late at night, and I'm not a probabilist, so I beg your forbearance in that case. In any case, the code is here (again, click on "Read more"); feel free to leave a comment indicating any error. If you want to suggest a way to implement the host's information, first think carefully about whether it can be optimized out, especially since the player wins by staying if and only if the following boolean expression line evaluates to true:

if winning_pick == initial_pick:

…and that expression does not depend in any way on which door is opened by the host!

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The brain and the soul

At the First Things weblog, R. R. Reno has an interesting discussion of Brain Science and the Soul. I enjoyed reading his argument, because he talks about the soul in the Aristotelian sense, which is the classical Catholic sense, and not in the Cartesian sense. If any of my readers don't know what that means, Reno explains that

St. Thomas drew on Aristotle’s philosophy to define the soul as the form of the body. The soul is the pattern or highway system that organizes our bodies, including, of course, our brains.

By contrast, the Cartesian view of the soul has been called the ghost in the machine. An excellent example of cultural bias, and the power of definitions, is that the Cartesian notion of a "soul" is what comes to most Americans' minds when they hear the word. It was a complete (and pleasant) surprise to me to learn the Thomist view in seminary, which like many things Thomist derives from the Aristotelian point of view.

The most interesting and plausible part of Reno's article is the review of the science. I worry that his speculative aspects carry him to far, but it's a weblog, so that's fair. I'll try to summarize the science, with my own added interpretations, trying not to be speculative.

We all know that the brain has to be trained to develop skills and behaviors. You can have all the inborn mathematical talent in the world, but if no one teaches you anything or trains you in the discipline, you won't find the proof to Goldbach's conjecture.* Scientists have now found concrete evidence the brain needs training even in the moral realm.

Past research has suggested that other primates, like chimpanzees, have an innate moral sense: when they see that one "worker" is rewarded more than the others, they refuse to work, as if they see the treatment as "unfair". Whether the chimpanzees really have a moral sense or are merely engaging in collective bargaining, the human moral sense develops by cutting off connections to a "primitive" part of the brain.

Subjects with a high degree of neural activity linking the brain stem to the frontal lobe tend to allow emotional responses to override rational assessments of moral dilemmas. Subjects make more rational decisions, he reports, when the neurological activity from the primitive part of the brain is blocked from interfering with the frontal lobe.

This sounds a lot as if people think more clearly about moral issues when they engage in repression of certain instincts. Whodathunk it? Lots of people, actually, which is probably why they call us "repressed". (At least, I've been called that a lot. A couple of girlfriends said I was so repressed that I qualified as "mentally ill.")

It gets better! The brain can be trained for a certain morality, but eventually appears to fix on a certain point of view:

Cohen then concludes that these patterns of open and blocked communication are not fixed by nature. They solidify over time. Our brain patterns are vulcanized, as he puts it, and this occurs by the constant repetition of these patterns. The river cuts its channel.

Put differently, parents who indulge, or at least ignore, a boy's penchant for filching candy, allow these channels between desire and release to strengthen, helping the boy grow into a thief. Parents who encourage, or at least refrain from refraining, a boy's penchant for hitting other children, help the boy grow into a violent man. The tendency to a particular vice may be genetically determined, but not its actualization.

Sexual mores can be harder to modify:

It turns out that sexual desires are closely associated with the primitive, pre-cognitive part of the brain that Cohen has shown can build durable pathways to the frontal lobe. These durable pathways threaten to flood our capacity to reason with lots of seething, unsettling neural activity more suited to instinctive life than rational reflection. (emphasis mine)

Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with human sexuality will nod in agreement. I always found the following quote from Sophocles in Plato's Republic amusing:

[M]ost gladly have I escaped [love]; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.**

Reno isn't interested only in sex; he points out that vices are linked; that is,

neural patterns between the frontal lobe and the brain stem do not know nice distinctions between the private morality and public morality.

In other words, it is biologically difficult to maintain morals in one field while compromising them in another. People who indulge their financial appetites will likely indulge other appetites as well. Lorenzo Scupoli discusses this in The Spiritual Combat when he encourages the reader to focus on developing just one virtue; all the other virtues will follow.

The original article, which sadly lacks any images of the brain-scans to which the author refers, is available here. (Oddly, it's a paper on neuroscience, but published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Maybe if I read more of it, I'll understand why it's there.)

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*The fact that no one else has found the proof to Goldbach's conjecture is beside the point. For those not in the know, Goldbach's conjecture is the deceptively simple assertion that every even natural number larger than two is the sum of two primes: 4=2+2, 6=3+3, 8=3+5, 10=3+7, 12=5+7, 14=3+11, etc. Everyone believes it, and no one knows how to prove it. If you want instant fame and attention, prove this!

**Today's television advertisements illustrate that not everyone is so relieved by this escape. I recently had to explain to my son what is meant by Erectile Dysfunction. At least he was born after Bob Dole introduced the world to his "little blue friend."

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Zen or stoic?

I heard a woman on the radio mention that she was just "zen" about something bad that happened. I've seen it used that way online, too, and seen it on television.

Meanwhile, I can't remember the last time I heard someone say that s/he was "stoic" about something bad that happened.

I find myself wondering if people now use "zen" when they mean "stoic", and if these people even know what the term "stoic" means.

I start to wonder whether I ever knew what these words meant.

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Deal or no deal?

I wonder how many sermons and homilies have been preached, based on the television show Deal or No Deal. I also wonder how many of these sermons have been informed by the learned writings of a philosopher who had something to say about losing the ultimate deal.

One of the more pleasant aspects of graduate study was having the time to read the best Christian books by the best Christian authors.* Among these was Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy.

What do I always remember when I think of this book? This photograph:

Do not let this photograph give you the wrong idea; I finished and appreciated very much Boethius' take on life. It had just been a long day, and I was beat.

So who is this Boethius character, and what does he have to do with Deal or No Deal? Simply put: If you think your life is unfair, well, you're right. Life is unfair. Boethius' life was unfair, too.

However, Boethius fancied himself a Christian philosopher, so rather than complain about how his life was so unfair, he whiled away his time in jail trying to understand why, if the world was ruled by a just and reasonable God, it seemed as if a capricious goddess named Fortuna ran the show instead. He describes his thoughts as a conversation with Sapientia, that is, Wisdom personified as a woman. Actually, if my memory serves, the conversation tends to be dominated by Sapientia, who occasionally scolds Boethius for being so shallow.

That's rather remarkable. Boethius was a learned man in an age where learning had become rare. One of his life's great works was an attempt to preserve the ideas of Greek philosophy by translating them from Greek into Latin, making them more accessible to Westerners who were less and less likely to understand Greek. The premature end of his life cut that short, but I understand that the completed aspects of this project had an immense influence on the Middle Ages.

Yet Sapientia scolds him for being shallow. Why? For remarks like this:

In omni adversitate fortunae
infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem.

(In every adversity of fortune,
the most unhappy kind of misfortune
is to have been happy.)

To this, she replies,

Adeo nihil est miserum nisi cum putes, contraque beata sors omnis est aequanimitate tolerantis. Quis est ille tam felix, qui cum dederit impatientiae manus statum suum mutare non optet?

I will observe that nothing is miserable unless you should think it so, and to the contrary a blessed lot is for all who endure calmly. What man is so happy, that when the hand of insufferability causes his status to change, he is delighted by it?

It's been too long since I've read this; I remember the spirit of these quotes, but I found them online, traced them back to the original Latin (also online), and translated them.

Anyway, what brings him to mind when I watch Deal or No Deal? The profound unfairness of the game, actually. It's a game based very much on chance: you have to be picked to play, you have to pick the right cases, etc. No skill or merit is involved at all. If that doesn't look a lot like how many of us start our lives, I don't know what does.

Even in the course of the game, the outcome can be determined by capricious chance. A few weeks ago, they had some spinwheel that could double, triple, or halve your earnings. One contestant's modest winnings were halved; another's were doubled. Why? Because the wheel of Fortune stopped that way. They couldn't very well affect its outcome deliberately.

Last week, meanwhile, they had a bizarre contraption where a woman picked a ball from the air, and that ball determined how many million-dollar cases she received. That strikes me as grossly unfair to all the players who came before her and had only one million-dollar case to shoot for (and often lost it quickly).

So, yeah, life's unfair to losers, and this awful television show really drives that point home. It's not particular fair to winners, either; Boethius for example spent most of his life as a successful civil servant, public citizen, and scholar, only to end up losing his head on account of a king's paranoia.

Strangely, I can't really remember the point of the book, except that Sapientia tells Boethius that if he wishes to enjoy the fortunes of Fortuna, he can hardly reject her misfortunes as well, as that is her nature. But Sapientia gives, gives, and gives again; with every new gift, more becomes available, even at the moment of death. From Boethius' Christian perspective, of course, Sapientia is not merely human wisdom, or philosophy, but is informed and enlightened by the wisdom of God.

I think I'll read that book again. Don't know how I'll find the time, though.

It turns out that I should refer to him as St. Boethius. I had forgotten about that.

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*In may case, of course, it may be said of me what President Lincoln is reputed to have said after hearing a lecture by a scholar of his day: Never has anyone dived so deeply into the wells of knowledge, and come up so dry.

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The Appeal to Experience

Thank God my mother doesn't read this weblog, or I'd never hear the end of this entry.

For some reason I started thinking the other day of the common statement a parent makes to his or her child, "Don't do this. It is a mistake. I am your mother (father), listen to me." Sometimes—well, usually—the parent shortens this to the infamous four-word phrase,

Because I said so!

Many people will gladly inform you that this is a logical fallacy called the appeal to authority.* I suspect that my children will remind me of this quite often once they become teenagers. My son hasn't caught onto that yet, at least not to my face.

From a logical point of view, I concede that this is true. From an ethical point of view, it can be seen as hypocritical. Parents sometimes use this argument when ordering their children not to pursue activities that they themselves did when they were young. I, for example, made a lot of mistakes in my youth that I would very much like my children not to repeat. My wife, being much smarter & in general a better person than I, made many fewer mistakes, but from what I can tell she'd still like her children not to repeat them.

That line of reasoning led me to wonder if there isn't merit in the argument from another point of view: that is, the appeal to experience. By "experience" here I mean "lived experience". For example, a father who started by shoplifting and eventually ran into trouble with the law might have very good reason to tell his child not to shoplift, even if he doesn't have the wits about him to formulate a logically coherent argument supporting his position. Likewise, he might not wish to reveal a past life of crime to his child. In this case, "Because I am your father and I said so" strikes me as a convincing argument. It may not be logical, but the child would be a fool not to heed that kind of advice. Things can look very attractive to children, while a parent can see deeper than the glitter on the surface. Chazz Palmintieri developed a great film based on this point, A Bronx Tale.

I want to highlight this phrase, even if he doesn't have the wits about him to formulate a logically coherent argument supporting his position. Most parents don't have the time to formulate logically precise arguments explaining the rationale behind every decisions. (Or so I'm told. If any parent wants to correct me, I'd love to know how you manage.) Most parents don't even have the educational background to formulate logically precise arguments explaining the rationale behind any given decisions. That does not ipso facto make their decisions any less worthy of respect and submission.

This may be why children exhibit deference to their parents' decisions, even accepting the justification, "Because I said so." They may grumble along the way, but most children I've known will defer to a determined parent. I did, anyway, well into my teenage years even, with the concomitant grumbling. My mother was very determined, more than most. If I were foolish enough to attempt a rational discussion of the question, she would invariably conclude the discussion with Mark Twain's ironic comment,

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

My kids also seem to accept my decisions. Well—not the 4 month-old, but she doesn't accept much of anything lately, not even the pacifier. We've wondered if she's started teething.

Of course, I would like my son to make some mistakes. He needs to gain experience, too. I just don't want him to make very bad mistakes. I have found experience to be the best, if the hardest, master. I suspect that our culture fails to appreciate this. How else could a major survey on sin fail to ask about honoring one's father and mother?

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*Some go so far as to classify as bullying the phrase, "Because I said so". I refuse to dignify that attitude with any rational argument. It isn't bullying, you hear? Why not? Because I said so.

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The greatest self-contradiction in cinema?

My son was watching Revenge of the Sith the other day, and I caught a few moments of it. It reminded me how the following exclamation of Obi-wan Kenobi stunned me:

Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes!

My jaw dropped even when hearing it the third time. In every Star Wars film, it is the Jedi who deal in absolutes. The Sith deal in selfishness and "points of view", far from the absolutes of good or evil. Palpatine's seduction of Skywalker, using the tale of Darth Plagueis, illustrated this brilliantly.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Obi-wan Kenobi reverts to Jedi form:

Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!

That is an absolute, and Anakin reverts to Sith form:

From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

Kenobi's reply is splendid:

Well then, you are lost.

But isn't it a little late for absolutes of this sort? Who can blame Anakin for being lost, Kenobi can't figure out which side deals in absolutes?

I've wondered if Mr. Lucas deliberately placed this self-contradiction in order to highlight the moral degeneracy of the Jedi, that they deserved their near-extinction, or if the rumors are true that he was taking a shot at the current president. If so, it was not very effective, IMHO. I'd like to think that he meant that "only a Sith Lord deals in false dichotomies" and after grasping too long for the right word moved on; that would have been a very effective response, IMHO, and apt, too.

I guess I'll never know, and after such a glaring self-contradiction I no longer care. Ben Kenobi was my favorite character of the series, and still is to an extent. Alas, I am lost.

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Free will and baby

I went to play with baby a while tonight. It was fun. One of her favorite games is when I hand her some toy, and she attacks it savagely with her mouth. At times like this, she reminds me of a dog: if she can't fit a thing in her mouth, caress it with her tongue, and gnaw it, then it has no value to her, and she will toss it away. Come to think of it, she usually tosses it away before too long, anyway. Nothing seems to satisfy an infant for very long.

I had a ball. The funny thing is, I wasn't too keen on it at first. I wanted to come down to the study, waste time on the internet, write in the weblog—you know the drill. Anything but deal with baby. It's not that I don't like playing with baby; it's that I wanted to do something else that I like, something that would provide me with a superficial, easy-to-grasp pleasure rather than a profound one that requires effort.

It was hard to choose the right thing, and I'm not proud of the fact that it took such effort to choose it. But there's no question in my mind that I chose.

This isn't a rant on free will, but rather on what free will is not. Earlier today, I read the following:

In heaven, it seems, all tears will be wiped away and we will be free of pain and suffering. We will also be free of freedom—necessarily so, because if freedom were to exist in heaven, we would merely replicate our lives on earth and start doing terrible things to each other again.

(Proponent's name left out, but it was quoted from an article on the excellent Religion and Science Yahoo! mailing list.)

Well, no, it's not necessarily so.

Does the fact that I chose the right thing earlier this evening mean that I wasn't free to choose the wrong thing? I don't think so. It certainly didn't feel so. There have been too many occasions where I was in exactly the same situation and didn't choose the right thing. If one accepts freedom of the will, then that freedom does not depend on how often one chooses the wrong thing. It simply means one has the freedom to choose.

I chose to spend time with baby because I knew my wife wanted a break, and I love my wife. Does that impinge on my freedom? Some would argue yes, because I did so to gain a reward from it—namely, the knowledge that I would please my wife, a knowledge that is pleasurable in itself—and people do things for the purpose of pleasure. But I didn't think about gaining pleasure at all; I thought about my responsibility to her, and the implications of love. As I noted above, I most certainly did not gain as much of one kind of pleasure from playing with baby that I would have gained from tapping away on the weblog. This is why there are so many irresponsible fathers; they choose one kind of pleasure, easy and immediately rewarding, over another, difficult and delayed in reward (if it is ever received).

The problem with talking about free will is that people have forgotten what it means. I even suspect that a secondary cause of many of the world's ills (original sin being the primary) is that people have the wrong idea entirely of what it means to have a free will, and because of it many people have become determinists. It's the same as a lot of atheism: I'd reject that notion of free will, just as I'd reject that notion of god.

Let me admit frankly that I don't know how to explain it very well. I'm not really competent to argue it, which is why I'm exploiting my baby for the analogy. ;-) One year of philosophy in a Catholic seminary, and a clumsy paper comparing and contrasting the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas on free well, may make for a learned-sounding blowhard, but they do not a learned philosopher make. Nevertheless, I do insist on the following:

• free will is not the same as either chaos or randomness, a position put forth in one argument I read to justify free will, comparing it to the unpredictability of quantum mechanics;
• in some Catholic thought, free will is damaged by sin, including by original sin, so that our sins make us less free (I seem to recall that St. Augustine put this forward in De Libero Arbitrio);
• similarly, God's grace makes us more free, because it enables us to choose what is right, which we cannot always do when we are under the domain of sin;
• a man chooses evil because of his self-love, but chooses good because of his love of God or of neighbor.

In heaven, therefore, when we have been purified from sin and are truly free, we can still reject God, but we don't, because our love has been purified. I suppose a more philosophically correct statement would be, "our will has been purified", but as I said, I am not that much of a thinker, and I wish to emphasize the fact that we do what is right when we truly love others, rather than seek to gratify ourselves. My personal conviction is that temptations remain in heaven—God forgive me if I am speaking heresy—but we are finally free to reject them, and we always will, because we love God purely in heaven—and, since we see God as he is, it is not difficult at all to choose him over those lesser things that now, blinded by sin, we misjudge as better than they really are.

There. Now, if you want some serious philosophy by someone who knows what he's actually talking about, go to Brandon's weblog.

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Vote on the best philosopher ever

Picked this up from Verbum Ipsum, a weblog that I'll have to add to my links at right before too long.

The BBC is having a vote on the greatest philosopher. You can vote for one of the twenty in the "short list". To facilitate your informed vote, they have a short summary of each philosopher on the list, both written and audio files. The list includes (in parentheses, something that each is famous for):

• T. Aquinas (Aristotle, meet Christianity; Christianity, meet Aristotle; Averroism, so long)
• Aristotle (logic, ethics, how to do study nature)
• R. Descartes (dualism)
• Epicurus (philosophy of pleasure)
• M. Heidegger (I should know, but I don't, and from what I read, I would fall asleep trying to find out)
• T. Hobbes (man is born in a state of warfare with other men, and the king must keep peace)
• D. Hume (light-hearted skepticism)
• I. Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)
• S. Kierkegaard (Christian existentialism)
• K. Marx (communism)
• J.S. Mill (utilitarianism)
• F. Nietzsche (insanity — seriously! — also the Will to Power; actually he's one of the most fun philosophers to read)
• Plato (dialogues, immaterial forms)
• K. Popper (who?)
• B. Russel (the book Why I am not a Christian, also a theory of materialism whose name eludes me)
• J.P. Sartre (atheistic existentialism)
• A. Schopenhauer (all I know is that the classmate who reported on him found him very, very depressing)
• Socrates (the gadfly who asked uncomfortable questions; "I know that I don't know")
• B. Spinoza (patheism)
• L. Wittgenstein (I should know, but I don't)

NB: So: looking at the list, I'm disappointed. It's not a bad list, but:

• John Locke is far more important than Hobbes: no contest. Hobbes really shouldn't be on the list, in my opinion.
• Without question, Jean-Jacques Rousseau should be on the list, if only because Victor Hugo was so enamored by Rousseau's ideas that Hugo punished us by rambling in favor of them through half of Les Misérables.
• Augustine should be on the list. What Aquinas did for Aristotelianism, Augustine had done 800 years prior for Platonism.
• Epicurus should not be on the list; his philosophy was important and influential, yes, but hardly as wide-ranging as Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, etc. If Epicurus is on the list, his main (and somewhat more influential) competitor Zeno of the Stoa should be on the list, too.
• What? no Ayn Rand? Heh, heh, heh. Throughout the Western world, a dwindling army of Randian faithful are outraged.
• Francis Bacon should arguably be on the list before some of these clowns.
• Maybe it's because I haven't studied them sufficiently, but Schopenhauer and Mill don't strike me as important enough. Jeremy Bentham should be on the list instead of Mill, since Bentham was a genuine utilitarian (poetry equals push-pin), whereas Mill watered utilitarianism down to the point where it was indistinguishable from more sensible philosophies (better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied).

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An atheist praises Aquinas

Christianity under siege in Europe... or is it? Catholics can't agree. The usual Vatican spokesmen and spokes-journals make it clear that the magisterium thinks so; progressives argue otherwise. Meanwhile, a Swedish Protestant pastor serves one month in jail for preaching on the biblical belief that homosexuality is wrong.

In the midst of this assault on faith, a German philosopher lauds the dogma-based theology of Thomas Aquinas for its "seriousness and consistency", especially as compared to the "regressive tendency of post-metaphysical thought." Did I mention that the philosopher is an athiest who delights in being criticized for his favorable views on religion?

Article here.

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