As some Marxist or other pointed out recently, a shepherd in Burkina Faso leaves hardly any ecological footprint, while the CEO of Exxon leaves a global ecological footprint. It's not the number of humans, but what they do that matters—or to be more precise, it's where they fit in the system for which the planet is nothing but a profit engine.
This reminds me of a bit of dialogue in Edward St. Aubyn's novel Mother's Milk. Patrick Melrose is speaking to his wife, who has recently given birth:
"Do you know what my mother told me the other day? A child born in a developed nation will consume two hundred and forty times the resources consumed by a child born in Bangladesh. If we'd had the self-restraint to have two hundred and thirty-nine Bangladeshi children, she would have given us a warmer welcome, but this gargantuan Westerner, who is going to take up acres of landfill with his disposable nappies, and will soon be clamoring for a personal computer powerful enough to launch a Mars flight while playing tic-tac-toe with a virtual buddy in Dubrovnik, is not likely to win her approval."
Thank you. Wonderful, as ever. Your discussion of systems biology and mention of Robert Rosen leads me to ask, as I’ve wondered for some time, whether you’re familiar with and what you think of the work of Michael Levin (who’s recently been in several conversations with Iain McGilchrist).
Levin shows that morphogenesis is an intentional process and provides many examples of top-down causation and, of course, yet further compelling evidence against genetic reductionism.
- Caterpillar memories are retained in the butterfly, even though its brain is liquified during metamorphosis.
- A decapitated planarian’s regrown head and brain will retain its memories from before decapitation.
- Planaria can modulate specific genes to quickly adapt to survive in previously fatal environments that it had never encountered in its evolutionary history.
- Organs can develop into the same ‘target’ anatomy despite internal perturbations, even if they have to utilize different molecular mechanisms.
- Limb regeneration can be induced in animals that don’t otherwise regenerate just by changing their bioelectric ion channels.
- Xenobots, and self-reproducing Xenobots
All of it raises the obvious question of ‘where’ these memories and instructions are located that drive morphogenesis, and it looks increasingly like it’s somehow, at least sometimes, in the form of the thing the creature will become.
(One of many presentations can be found on YouTube by searching "Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces".)
Yes, the respectable Michael Levin--the biologist at Tufts, who must be an annoying presence to D. Dennett Esq.--as opposed to the evil Michael Levin, the racialist philosopher from Hell.
Levin writes only peer-reviewed articles, as far as I know, so much of his research is unknown outside the academy. But he's definitely at the cutting edge (though I have to admit that the whole phenomenon of xenobots is a little disturbing to me).
But Levin is still fundamentally a mechanist, right? He just thinks the computer program that Dennett wants to put in DNA is dispersed throughout the entire organism. Thus his lack of discomfort with building robots out of frog cells.
I think the Morphic Resonance hypothesis of Rupert Sheldrake has a certain explanatory power. For example, some of the morphogenetic processes described above provide evidence for the existence of Morphic Resonance. Of course, phrenology has a certain coherence and explanatory power as well. I note that a decapitated planarian’s regrown head and brain retaining its memories from before decapitation is related to an Alzheimer's patient regaining mental clarity shortly before death. It seems the mind and memory are not solely functions of the brain.
Hey, you can’t just tell people physicists don’t know everything—I need to eat!
I hope for an eventual Christian resurrection of the “kalendar”—the ebb and flow of sacred time has been very good for me, and I think it would be good for others as well.
I've long thought that E.O. Wilson was a better scientist than Richard Dawkins. However, I've noticed that the more deeply educated someone is, the more broadly they assume their expertise is. Bill Nye is an entertainer with a B.S. degree whose discussions of science vs. religion are semi-intelligible. At the far end are people like Neil deGrasse Tyson who have genuine academic credentials yet are more famous for popularizing than advancing science. Tyson is an expert in a very narrow field of astrophysics, yet is more famous for his pronouncements on areas outside his field of expertise (e.g. biology, chemistry, geology, and especially philosophy and religion.) Even smart people fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thank you very much for your writing. A few (sincere!) questions:
- If parents have a child today, e. g. in Northern Europe, how would you recommend they raise him/her, faithwise? I. e. baptize? which church? which traditions and practices?
- If you are a politican today, and there are suggestions in parliament about (continued) mass immigration to your own country (for both humanitarian or ideological reasons), from e. g. African and Middle Eastern countries, with the consequence of (among many things) also cultural and economical disruptions, how should this politician reason, and what choice should be made?
- In my country, the "pride movement" (and ideology) is coming for every municipality and school as we speak. There should be public pride flags in all of June, mandatory pride courses in schools and churches, a practical outlawing of counselling on gender etc. How should a politician respond to this, do you think - and on what philosophical basis?
More generally, should a Christian step out of politics altogether and let the "post-Christian" society "run its course" (with concomitant consequences, good and bad) - is this your stance?
I intend to read more about your suggestions on "future types" of Christianity - your writing is most helpful.
LOL so you are opposed to the widespread societal celebration of the humanity of gays, lesbians, trans people, etc., in the wake of centuries of brutal oppression—which is ongoing! How many times does Jesus discuss same-sex sexual relations, my dude? Paul says two things on the subject (which most likely do not even mean what anti-gay "Christians" think they mean).
Hello, Michael. I have my thoughts and ideas on the issue, but I have not shared any of them here. In the first part I am merely stating what is actually happening in my country, i. e. in the institutions, in laws. (I could have chosen a different verb than "coming for"; but in many ways, the verb is also pertinent. I. e. flags, courses etc. are made mandatory; neutrality is hardly an option).
My question to David was: "How should a politician respond to this, do you think - and on what philosophical basis?" There will be different answers to this question, depending on who one asks, but this time I asked prof. Hart.
I was simply responding to the language you used, which is not neutral. You refer to Pride as an "ideology"—the ideology, one presumes, of not condemning people based on whom or how they love, or on their determinations regarding their own gender. And, yes, "coming for" implies some nefarious purpose. I suppose, as a bisexual Christian among whose closest friends & family members are several queer & trans people, all of whom exhibit far more compassion & empathy than many Christians I have encountered, I would ask: why on earth would you *want* to be "neutral"? Jesus did not counsel neutrality as a response to oppression & bigotry.
I see what you are saying, and I could rephrase the question and the wording etc. But in any case, I am not really interested in presenting any ideas or convictions of my own, I am wondering about *his* answer to the question at hand.
Apropos to your concerns about a "post-Liberal Christian future" is James Lindsay's developing thesis that critical theory is in essence a Gnostic heresy representing a shift - thanks to Hegel via Marx - from the transcendental to the social.
A view I regard as nonsense. For one thing, it’s based on a ridiculous misconception of gnosticism; for another, it’s a childish misreading of both Hegel and Marx.
What, you mean Lindsay's background in mathematics, New Atheism, and writing hoax gender studies papers didn't qualify him to deliver astonishing new insights on critical theory? Shocking.
I'm not very deeply learned either. So take with a grain of salt whether the following question is even valid. Do you think the modern day culture wars are at last partly attributable to a war of metaphysics between critical theory and platonism, very broadly speaking, of course?
Your objections are tending toward the ad hominem (as are those of the other commenters here). The notion of gnostic elements in Hegel and Marx appears to have worthy proponents and probably deserves a more substantive response. I merely make the observation without any intention of burdening you with another writing assignment!
In fact, I've already dealt with the matter at length, in this newsletter and in the book You Are Gods. I ran a series of articles on gnosticism and modernity--seven, I believe, but my memory may be faulty--back in the first year of Leaves. You can still find the series in the archives here.
There could not be a more anti-gnostic system than Hegel's, or a more anti-gnostic thinker than Marx. But that's only part of Lindsay's misstatements. This entire line of argument about "critical theory" is just a cartoon of an issue that requires more subtlety than Lindsay accords it.
Re the debt ceiling problem: The 14th Amendment’s public debt clause ensured the Union war debt would be honored, but not Confederate war debt. Nothing in the language or in the circumstances of its enactment supports any argument that the President can override duly enacted laws such as the debt ceiling, nor do they render enacted limits on debt unconstitutional. What they clearly did accomplish was to prevent the U.S. from passing a law that invalidated prior public debt (i.e., “Hey, China, remember when you bought all those bonds we issued? Well, we don’t like you now, so we passed a new law saying we’re not in debt to you....”) Also, the bar on questioning the “validity” of public debt would not be implicated by a default caused by failure to agree to new debt limits. That is, if Congress and the Executive fail to agree on new borrowing and spending such that the U.S. defaults on public debt, the validity of such debt will not have been questioned. It would remain quite valid. If one fails to pay his credit card bill, he has not invalidated the debt but only defaulted on a valid obligation. First and foremost, the debt issue is political, as it should be. How much the government extracts from the private sector, how much it spends, and how much it borrows are all matters our system intends for Congress and the Executive to debate and resolve, however messily and no matter how much extremists of the Left or the Right are frustrated by the process. The Constitution does not permit Congress to spend without Presidential approval, nor does it permit the President to act on budgetary matters without Congress. We should be glad for the occasional stasis this entails or we assuredly would have invited chaos of a more dangerous kind.
And yet my point remains: when the congress produces a budget, it has already determined the debt ceiling, so that particular issue has been unquestionably answered. The president doesn’t have to override any duly enacted laws; the congress has, per that pesky amendment, already contravened the legislation. Logically the validity of the debt demands its own ceiling.
It's also self-evidently an opportunity for partisan grandstanding rather than the system working as intended. The debt ceiling became a periodic political crisis only with the rise of 24-hour cable news.
The debt ceiling was enacted as a statute in 1911. It was supposed to draw out what Congress can and cannot spend. It's not an inherent part of government budgets. Some have thought that one could use the fourteenth amendment to override the debt ceiling, since it states public debt is valid. That's unlikely and it has pretty strong precedent supporting it.
Oh, I see where you are going. The debt ceiling, as the name indicates, caps the amount the government can borrow. To spend money, Congress and the President need to agree, but budgeting (or let’s say approving spending) doesn’t necessitate borrowing, even if that’s what we seem to do endlessly. The government can implement a budget by raising taxes and/or cutting spending. It avoids these hard choices by borrowing. In order to borrow more (rather than controlling spending) when it hits the debt ceiling, it must separately raise the debt ceiling. It’s this step which each party has used to try to force concessions on taxing and spending. Just proposing or even passing a budget doesn’t create debt or require borrowing to fund it in particular.
I am a lawyer albeit not a US one, but since you asked about a jurists' opinion ... Does the US budget set a debt ceiling or a deficit? Because if this the latter, I can see the difference. The planned deficit is just a financial projection where where the spending is supposed to outweigh the revenues. The excess spending could be funded by additional debt, true, but also by increasing the revenues through other means (for instance, higher economic growth resulting in more taxes, confiscation of illegal assets, privatization, taking more dividends from state companies, etc.). While the debt ceiling simply limits the government ability to take loans. In many countries these processes are separated, although they don't necessarily work with debt ceiling concept, but their parliaments approves the state loans.
I guess, however, that in USA it is a bit more complicated like almost everything else.
I would not even presume to interpret Section 4 of the 14th amendment in any authoritative way, as I guess it has a rich history of precedents and I my law training is outside USA, but still to me it primarily says that USA should honor its debts if they are lawfully assumed. And then we come to the question how the debts are lawfully assumed. You seem to think that the state budget with its financial provisions for payment of, say military costs, salaries, and pensions, is assuming of such a debt, and in the broad sense of the word you are right since in civil law every bearer of an obligation is called a debtor. But perhaps in this case the law means only the financial loans which are taken to finance such obligations, i.e. the credits taken to fund the deficit that is not covered by the planned revenues. So, from that point of view, we have a second level of debt for which the congress must give addition consent.
I think your prediction about gnostic christianity coming into prominance is a sound assessment. It seems nowadays we have the opposite problem of the ancients: ever increasing data. For myself, this has caused me to abandon dogma in favor of searching and experiencing God. I just recently picked up the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which I find fascinating. Due to Elaine Pagels I'm very much intrigued by the Gospel of Thomas.
Have you written about or engaged with the so called gnostic manuscripts?
The “aimless” scholarship in question was not concerned with gnosticism, but with the manuscripts. So far, the palaeographic scholarship has told us little.
I did spend some time reading the very long 'James the Brother of Jesus' by Robert Eisenman. He also has many vids on Youtube. Ultimately I couldn't really see what the big deal was...apart from the Essenes being warlike...
I love how Thomas Pynchon handles Maxwell’s demon in “The Crying of Lot 49”!
“As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.
‘Communication is the key,’ cried Nefastis. ‘The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.’
‘Help,’ said Oedipa, ‘you’re not reaching me.’
‘Entropy is a figure of speech, then,’ sighed Nefastis, ‘a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.’”
That seems to be his bigger idea. It's much more process oriented. And he seems to be using emergence with a strange nuance but we'll see. It reminds me in part of Christos Yannaras' relational ontology and McGhilchrist's unitive approach.
Dr. Ogas created a theoretical framework for the interdevelopment of matter and mind. He attempts in Journey of the Mind to create a narrative and theoretical framework for the science of consciousness using Grossberg's mathematics.
Oh, right, I recall. Journey of the Mind. Another emergentist theory. It can't be right, of course, though it might get the sequence of the episodes correct.
Oh, a topic on which I have some professional expertise. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you here. The thermodynamic link between information and entropy is really quite absolute and straightforward. It takes matter & energy to store information, and quantum mechanics provides a theoretical minimum mass/energy for a given quantity of information. The little demon cannot continue sorting molecules without at some point 'forgetting' his previous actions, and this forgetting must of necessity generate a minimal but finite quantity of entropy, whatever physical 'hardware' he is using. It's really quite a beautiful and elegant theory, and no known system, engineered or in nature, breaks it. If something did, you can be sure quite a fuss would be made, as it would provide a spectacular counterexample to our current understanding of the laws of physics.
What are you disagreeing with? I didn’t invent the theory. I don’t think anyone believes Maxwell’s demon is a real possibility, or that thermodynamics can be thwarted. But as a thought-experiment it led to a way of thinking about information that has been surprisingly fruitful.
By the way, how would you define information? I mean, how would you define its physical status? I ask because I have never gotten the same answer from two different physicists.
Leo Szilard's approach is what I would point to. He imagined a box containing a single gas molecule, with a movable wall which could partition the box in two. The box can be in 3 states: partition removed, partition in the middle with the gas molecule on the left, and the partition in the middle with the gas molecule on the right. We could use this box to store the result of 1 binary observation, say, whether a coin toss was heads or tails. Before the coin toss, the partition is removed, and the molecule could be anywhere. If the coin toss is a heads, we could slide the partition in from the right hand side, so we know the gas molecule is trapped in the left half of the box, and if we get a tails, we similarly trap the molecule on the right hand side. Later, someone else could inspect our box, determine which side the gas molecule is on, and know the result of our coin toss. It follows just from classical thermodynamics that 'storing' this 'information' (i.e. going from the state where the partition is open, to the new state where the gas molecule is on one side or the other) decreases the entropy of the system by S = kB*T*log(2), where kB is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature. Furthermore, and much more interestingly, it turns out that if a second machine for storing this same information existed, and if the process of storing the same information led to a smaller decrease of entropy in this second machine than kB*T*log(2), then we could construct a little cycle between that machine and the box with our gas molecule, which would allow us to indefinitely produce work from heat, breaking the second law. So kB*T*log(2) is a fundamental limit - any physical process which can 'encode' three different states - no measurement, measurement A, or measurement B - must be such that the state encoding 'no measurement' has at least kB*T*log(2) more entropy than the measurement A/measurement B states (we're assuming some symmetry here). I'm not really qualified to say how this notion of 'information' as 'encoding the result of e.g. a binary experiment in physical matter, in a way that a future observer could decode' compares with more philosophical notions, but in my experience it's certainly how working thermodynamicists think of it.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I know how information can be quantified. I meant something far more abstract. I was thinking more or less along the lines of Paul Davies asking whether new laws of physics need to be enunciated with regard to information like those that can be formulated for mass and energy—principally to delineate basic laws that will explain how organisms process information to create and sustain life.
Yeah, I tend to see this kind of thing as philosophy at best and pseudoscience at worst, but in either case not really much to do with physics. I mean, how would such a theory be mathematically formulated? That's really the hallmark of physics - a simple, elegant mathematical formulation. If you don't have that, you might be doing something interesting, but you're not doing physics. From a physicist's perspective, quantum mechanics is about manipulating differential equations, entropy is just applied statistics, and relativity is a simple problem in differential geometry. An abstract theory of 'information' divorced from notions of 'information storage'... I can't imagine the math.
Largely my own point. That’s why I say above that “laws” of information would not be nomological rules of physics but rather logical or metaphysical rules of life—and would really be just form and finality.
Gosh, these sentences are sound: “A society becomes incapable of any innocent return to the convictions and intellectual habits and moral appetites of the past not because its members are consciously aware of the difference between those vanished forms of historical existence and logically necessary material conditions, or even between custom and nature, but simply because the ubiquitous values and conceptual paradigms of the present have been shaped in part by a shared rejection of those of the past. As I have noted before, whatever takes leave of a culture as faith can return only as irony.”
As some Marxist or other pointed out recently, a shepherd in Burkina Faso leaves hardly any ecological footprint, while the CEO of Exxon leaves a global ecological footprint. It's not the number of humans, but what they do that matters—or to be more precise, it's where they fit in the system for which the planet is nothing but a profit engine.
And of course the people in the global south bear the brunt of the effects of climate disasters.
This reminds me of a bit of dialogue in Edward St. Aubyn's novel Mother's Milk. Patrick Melrose is speaking to his wife, who has recently given birth:
"Do you know what my mother told me the other day? A child born in a developed nation will consume two hundred and forty times the resources consumed by a child born in Bangladesh. If we'd had the self-restraint to have two hundred and thirty-nine Bangladeshi children, she would have given us a warmer welcome, but this gargantuan Westerner, who is going to take up acres of landfill with his disposable nappies, and will soon be clamoring for a personal computer powerful enough to launch a Mars flight while playing tic-tac-toe with a virtual buddy in Dubrovnik, is not likely to win her approval."
Thank you. Wonderful, as ever. Your discussion of systems biology and mention of Robert Rosen leads me to ask, as I’ve wondered for some time, whether you’re familiar with and what you think of the work of Michael Levin (who’s recently been in several conversations with Iain McGilchrist).
Levin shows that morphogenesis is an intentional process and provides many examples of top-down causation and, of course, yet further compelling evidence against genetic reductionism.
- Caterpillar memories are retained in the butterfly, even though its brain is liquified during metamorphosis.
- A decapitated planarian’s regrown head and brain will retain its memories from before decapitation.
- Planaria can modulate specific genes to quickly adapt to survive in previously fatal environments that it had never encountered in its evolutionary history.
- Organs can develop into the same ‘target’ anatomy despite internal perturbations, even if they have to utilize different molecular mechanisms.
- Limb regeneration can be induced in animals that don’t otherwise regenerate just by changing their bioelectric ion channels.
- Xenobots, and self-reproducing Xenobots
All of it raises the obvious question of ‘where’ these memories and instructions are located that drive morphogenesis, and it looks increasingly like it’s somehow, at least sometimes, in the form of the thing the creature will become.
(One of many presentations can be found on YouTube by searching "Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces".)
Yes, the respectable Michael Levin--the biologist at Tufts, who must be an annoying presence to D. Dennett Esq.--as opposed to the evil Michael Levin, the racialist philosopher from Hell.
Levin writes only peer-reviewed articles, as far as I know, so much of his research is unknown outside the academy. But he's definitely at the cutting edge (though I have to admit that the whole phenomenon of xenobots is a little disturbing to me).
But Levin is still fundamentally a mechanist, right? He just thinks the computer program that Dennett wants to put in DNA is dispersed throughout the entire organism. Thus his lack of discomfort with building robots out of frog cells.
I would imagine so.
I think the Morphic Resonance hypothesis of Rupert Sheldrake has a certain explanatory power. For example, some of the morphogenetic processes described above provide evidence for the existence of Morphic Resonance. Of course, phrenology has a certain coherence and explanatory power as well. I note that a decapitated planarian’s regrown head and brain retaining its memories from before decapitation is related to an Alzheimer's patient regaining mental clarity shortly before death. It seems the mind and memory are not solely functions of the brain.
Interesting. Perhaps. Here's Levin with his thoughts on that association:
https://youtu.be/acHXtT-H_KY
Hey, you can’t just tell people physicists don’t know everything—I need to eat!
I hope for an eventual Christian resurrection of the “kalendar”—the ebb and flow of sacred time has been very good for me, and I think it would be good for others as well.
I take it back.
Reading you is kind of like strolling for a day among Dutch tulip fields (which I’ve never done). Thanks.
If I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me...
I've long thought that E.O. Wilson was a better scientist than Richard Dawkins. However, I've noticed that the more deeply educated someone is, the more broadly they assume their expertise is. Bill Nye is an entertainer with a B.S. degree whose discussions of science vs. religion are semi-intelligible. At the far end are people like Neil deGrasse Tyson who have genuine academic credentials yet are more famous for popularizing than advancing science. Tyson is an expert in a very narrow field of astrophysics, yet is more famous for his pronouncements on areas outside his field of expertise (e.g. biology, chemistry, geology, and especially philosophy and religion.) Even smart people fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thank you very much for your writing. A few (sincere!) questions:
- If parents have a child today, e. g. in Northern Europe, how would you recommend they raise him/her, faithwise? I. e. baptize? which church? which traditions and practices?
- If you are a politican today, and there are suggestions in parliament about (continued) mass immigration to your own country (for both humanitarian or ideological reasons), from e. g. African and Middle Eastern countries, with the consequence of (among many things) also cultural and economical disruptions, how should this politician reason, and what choice should be made?
- In my country, the "pride movement" (and ideology) is coming for every municipality and school as we speak. There should be public pride flags in all of June, mandatory pride courses in schools and churches, a practical outlawing of counselling on gender etc. How should a politician respond to this, do you think - and on what philosophical basis?
More generally, should a Christian step out of politics altogether and let the "post-Christian" society "run its course" (with concomitant consequences, good and bad) - is this your stance?
I intend to read more about your suggestions on "future types" of Christianity - your writing is most helpful.
LOL so you are opposed to the widespread societal celebration of the humanity of gays, lesbians, trans people, etc., in the wake of centuries of brutal oppression—which is ongoing! How many times does Jesus discuss same-sex sexual relations, my dude? Paul says two things on the subject (which most likely do not even mean what anti-gay "Christians" think they mean).
Hello, Michael. I have my thoughts and ideas on the issue, but I have not shared any of them here. In the first part I am merely stating what is actually happening in my country, i. e. in the institutions, in laws. (I could have chosen a different verb than "coming for"; but in many ways, the verb is also pertinent. I. e. flags, courses etc. are made mandatory; neutrality is hardly an option).
My question to David was: "How should a politician respond to this, do you think - and on what philosophical basis?" There will be different answers to this question, depending on who one asks, but this time I asked prof. Hart.
I was simply responding to the language you used, which is not neutral. You refer to Pride as an "ideology"—the ideology, one presumes, of not condemning people based on whom or how they love, or on their determinations regarding their own gender. And, yes, "coming for" implies some nefarious purpose. I suppose, as a bisexual Christian among whose closest friends & family members are several queer & trans people, all of whom exhibit far more compassion & empathy than many Christians I have encountered, I would ask: why on earth would you *want* to be "neutral"? Jesus did not counsel neutrality as a response to oppression & bigotry.
I see what you are saying, and I could rephrase the question and the wording etc. But in any case, I am not really interested in presenting any ideas or convictions of my own, I am wondering about *his* answer to the question at hand.
I’m an anarchist. My advice to politicians is to get respectable jobs.
As for Christians, my advice is: have charity for all, welcome refugees, and baptize your children if you want them to be Christians.
Thank you for this answer. I will have to ponder this.
I sincerely hope that whatever comes after the beast slouching towards Bethlehem is something like the Federation, but wishful thinking, I realize.
Starfleet is a colonial military regime.
TOS and SNW Federation, that is. This is samsara, man. We take what we can get.
In all seriousness, I assume the future will be mostly bad.
I love Strange New Worlds.
It’s how you get to them that raises questions of legality.
Apropos to your concerns about a "post-Liberal Christian future" is James Lindsay's developing thesis that critical theory is in essence a Gnostic heresy representing a shift - thanks to Hegel via Marx - from the transcendental to the social.
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/02/gnosticism-in-the-modern-west/
A view I regard as nonsense. For one thing, it’s based on a ridiculous misconception of gnosticism; for another, it’s a childish misreading of both Hegel and Marx.
What, you mean Lindsay's background in mathematics, New Atheism, and writing hoax gender studies papers didn't qualify him to deliver astonishing new insights on critical theory? Shocking.
Thank you for your astonishing insight.
Lindsay isn't exactly what one would call deeply learned.
I'm not very deeply learned either. So take with a grain of salt whether the following question is even valid. Do you think the modern day culture wars are at last partly attributable to a war of metaphysics between critical theory and platonism, very broadly speaking, of course?
No.
Even* not when
Your objections are tending toward the ad hominem (as are those of the other commenters here). The notion of gnostic elements in Hegel and Marx appears to have worthy proponents and probably deserves a more substantive response. I merely make the observation without any intention of burdening you with another writing assignment!
In fact, I've already dealt with the matter at length, in this newsletter and in the book You Are Gods. I ran a series of articles on gnosticism and modernity--seven, I believe, but my memory may be faulty--back in the first year of Leaves. You can still find the series in the archives here.
There could not be a more anti-gnostic system than Hegel's, or a more anti-gnostic thinker than Marx. But that's only part of Lindsay's misstatements. This entire line of argument about "critical theory" is just a cartoon of an issue that requires more subtlety than Lindsay accords it.
Ah, the series ran from 3 September to 1 October 2021; five articles and two supplements in all.
In You Are Gods, the chapter called "Geist's Kaleidoscope" deals with the issue at some length.
True: whenever I meet an idiot I call him Lindsay. (I think I'm following the grammar of your remark correctly there.)
Wilson's 1984 book, Biophilia, perhaps best exemplifies what you appreciate most in his work.
Re the debt ceiling problem: The 14th Amendment’s public debt clause ensured the Union war debt would be honored, but not Confederate war debt. Nothing in the language or in the circumstances of its enactment supports any argument that the President can override duly enacted laws such as the debt ceiling, nor do they render enacted limits on debt unconstitutional. What they clearly did accomplish was to prevent the U.S. from passing a law that invalidated prior public debt (i.e., “Hey, China, remember when you bought all those bonds we issued? Well, we don’t like you now, so we passed a new law saying we’re not in debt to you....”) Also, the bar on questioning the “validity” of public debt would not be implicated by a default caused by failure to agree to new debt limits. That is, if Congress and the Executive fail to agree on new borrowing and spending such that the U.S. defaults on public debt, the validity of such debt will not have been questioned. It would remain quite valid. If one fails to pay his credit card bill, he has not invalidated the debt but only defaulted on a valid obligation. First and foremost, the debt issue is political, as it should be. How much the government extracts from the private sector, how much it spends, and how much it borrows are all matters our system intends for Congress and the Executive to debate and resolve, however messily and no matter how much extremists of the Left or the Right are frustrated by the process. The Constitution does not permit Congress to spend without Presidential approval, nor does it permit the President to act on budgetary matters without Congress. We should be glad for the occasional stasis this entails or we assuredly would have invited chaos of a more dangerous kind.
And yet my point remains: when the congress produces a budget, it has already determined the debt ceiling, so that particular issue has been unquestionably answered. The president doesn’t have to override any duly enacted laws; the congress has, per that pesky amendment, already contravened the legislation. Logically the validity of the debt demands its own ceiling.
It's also self-evidently an opportunity for partisan grandstanding rather than the system working as intended. The debt ceiling became a periodic political crisis only with the rise of 24-hour cable news.
The debt ceiling was enacted as a statute in 1911. It was supposed to draw out what Congress can and cannot spend. It's not an inherent part of government budgets. Some have thought that one could use the fourteenth amendment to override the debt ceiling, since it states public debt is valid. That's unlikely and it has pretty strong precedent supporting it.
Oh, I see where you are going. The debt ceiling, as the name indicates, caps the amount the government can borrow. To spend money, Congress and the President need to agree, but budgeting (or let’s say approving spending) doesn’t necessitate borrowing, even if that’s what we seem to do endlessly. The government can implement a budget by raising taxes and/or cutting spending. It avoids these hard choices by borrowing. In order to borrow more (rather than controlling spending) when it hits the debt ceiling, it must separately raise the debt ceiling. It’s this step which each party has used to try to force concessions on taxing and spending. Just proposing or even passing a budget doesn’t create debt or require borrowing to fund it in particular.
I am a lawyer albeit not a US one, but since you asked about a jurists' opinion ... Does the US budget set a debt ceiling or a deficit? Because if this the latter, I can see the difference. The planned deficit is just a financial projection where where the spending is supposed to outweigh the revenues. The excess spending could be funded by additional debt, true, but also by increasing the revenues through other means (for instance, higher economic growth resulting in more taxes, confiscation of illegal assets, privatization, taking more dividends from state companies, etc.). While the debt ceiling simply limits the government ability to take loans. In many countries these processes are separated, although they don't necessarily work with debt ceiling concept, but their parliaments approves the state loans.
I guess, however, that in USA it is a bit more complicated like almost everything else.
Well, the complication is simply the wording of the 14th amendment. It seems to imply that whatever debt congress contracts is by definition valid.
I would not even presume to interpret Section 4 of the 14th amendment in any authoritative way, as I guess it has a rich history of precedents and I my law training is outside USA, but still to me it primarily says that USA should honor its debts if they are lawfully assumed. And then we come to the question how the debts are lawfully assumed. You seem to think that the state budget with its financial provisions for payment of, say military costs, salaries, and pensions, is assuming of such a debt, and in the broad sense of the word you are right since in civil law every bearer of an obligation is called a debtor. But perhaps in this case the law means only the financial loans which are taken to finance such obligations, i.e. the credits taken to fund the deficit that is not covered by the planned revenues. So, from that point of view, we have a second level of debt for which the congress must give addition consent.
I think your prediction about gnostic christianity coming into prominance is a sound assessment. It seems nowadays we have the opposite problem of the ancients: ever increasing data. For myself, this has caused me to abandon dogma in favor of searching and experiencing God. I just recently picked up the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which I find fascinating. Due to Elaine Pagels I'm very much intrigued by the Gospel of Thomas.
Have you written about or engaged with the so called gnostic manuscripts?
I've written about gnosticism, but the manuscripts are a different matter. There the scholarship can be a bit aimless.
I think there's some emerging feminist scholarship on Gnosticism that's not aimless (because they have a specific aim, in fact).
The “aimless” scholarship in question was not concerned with gnosticism, but with the manuscripts. So far, the palaeographic scholarship has told us little.
Hm yes, I see. Is there a way i can proceed, though, with my quest?
Yeah. Don’t worry about manuscript scholarship.
I did spend some time reading the very long 'James the Brother of Jesus' by Robert Eisenman. He also has many vids on Youtube. Ultimately I couldn't really see what the big deal was...apart from the Essenes being warlike...
I love how Thomas Pynchon handles Maxwell’s demon in “The Crying of Lot 49”!
“As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.
‘Communication is the key,’ cried Nefastis. ‘The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.’
‘Help,’ said Oedipa, ‘you’re not reaching me.’
‘Entropy is a figure of speech, then,’ sighed Nefastis, ‘a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.’”
Thomas Pynchon, “The Crying of Lot 49,” page 100.
It's a good scene.
Any chance of interview with Ogi Ogas or Stephen Grossberg?
Well, I know who the second fellow is. I don't know him personally, but it's thought worth pursuing.
That seems to be his bigger idea. It's much more process oriented. And he seems to be using emergence with a strange nuance but we'll see. It reminds me in part of Christos Yannaras' relational ontology and McGhilchrist's unitive approach.
I’ll give it another look.
Dr. Ogas created a theoretical framework for the interdevelopment of matter and mind. He attempts in Journey of the Mind to create a narrative and theoretical framework for the science of consciousness using Grossberg's mathematics.
Oh, right, I recall. Journey of the Mind. Another emergentist theory. It can't be right, of course, though it might get the sequence of the episodes correct.
Oh, a topic on which I have some professional expertise. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you here. The thermodynamic link between information and entropy is really quite absolute and straightforward. It takes matter & energy to store information, and quantum mechanics provides a theoretical minimum mass/energy for a given quantity of information. The little demon cannot continue sorting molecules without at some point 'forgetting' his previous actions, and this forgetting must of necessity generate a minimal but finite quantity of entropy, whatever physical 'hardware' he is using. It's really quite a beautiful and elegant theory, and no known system, engineered or in nature, breaks it. If something did, you can be sure quite a fuss would be made, as it would provide a spectacular counterexample to our current understanding of the laws of physics.
What are you disagreeing with? I didn’t invent the theory. I don’t think anyone believes Maxwell’s demon is a real possibility, or that thermodynamics can be thwarted. But as a thought-experiment it led to a way of thinking about information that has been surprisingly fruitful.
By the way, how would you define information? I mean, how would you define its physical status? I ask because I have never gotten the same answer from two different physicists.
Leo Szilard's approach is what I would point to. He imagined a box containing a single gas molecule, with a movable wall which could partition the box in two. The box can be in 3 states: partition removed, partition in the middle with the gas molecule on the left, and the partition in the middle with the gas molecule on the right. We could use this box to store the result of 1 binary observation, say, whether a coin toss was heads or tails. Before the coin toss, the partition is removed, and the molecule could be anywhere. If the coin toss is a heads, we could slide the partition in from the right hand side, so we know the gas molecule is trapped in the left half of the box, and if we get a tails, we similarly trap the molecule on the right hand side. Later, someone else could inspect our box, determine which side the gas molecule is on, and know the result of our coin toss. It follows just from classical thermodynamics that 'storing' this 'information' (i.e. going from the state where the partition is open, to the new state where the gas molecule is on one side or the other) decreases the entropy of the system by S = kB*T*log(2), where kB is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature. Furthermore, and much more interestingly, it turns out that if a second machine for storing this same information existed, and if the process of storing the same information led to a smaller decrease of entropy in this second machine than kB*T*log(2), then we could construct a little cycle between that machine and the box with our gas molecule, which would allow us to indefinitely produce work from heat, breaking the second law. So kB*T*log(2) is a fundamental limit - any physical process which can 'encode' three different states - no measurement, measurement A, or measurement B - must be such that the state encoding 'no measurement' has at least kB*T*log(2) more entropy than the measurement A/measurement B states (we're assuming some symmetry here). I'm not really qualified to say how this notion of 'information' as 'encoding the result of e.g. a binary experiment in physical matter, in a way that a future observer could decode' compares with more philosophical notions, but in my experience it's certainly how working thermodynamicists think of it.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I know how information can be quantified. I meant something far more abstract. I was thinking more or less along the lines of Paul Davies asking whether new laws of physics need to be enunciated with regard to information like those that can be formulated for mass and energy—principally to delineate basic laws that will explain how organisms process information to create and sustain life.
Yeah, I tend to see this kind of thing as philosophy at best and pseudoscience at worst, but in either case not really much to do with physics. I mean, how would such a theory be mathematically formulated? That's really the hallmark of physics - a simple, elegant mathematical formulation. If you don't have that, you might be doing something interesting, but you're not doing physics. From a physicist's perspective, quantum mechanics is about manipulating differential equations, entropy is just applied statistics, and relativity is a simple problem in differential geometry. An abstract theory of 'information' divorced from notions of 'information storage'... I can't imagine the math.
Largely my own point. That’s why I say above that “laws” of information would not be nomological rules of physics but rather logical or metaphysical rules of life—and would really be just form and finality.
Gosh, these sentences are sound: “A society becomes incapable of any innocent return to the convictions and intellectual habits and moral appetites of the past not because its members are consciously aware of the difference between those vanished forms of historical existence and logically necessary material conditions, or even between custom and nature, but simply because the ubiquitous values and conceptual paradigms of the present have been shaped in part by a shared rejection of those of the past. As I have noted before, whatever takes leave of a culture as faith can return only as irony.”
"Not only is that Christianity not an exhausted historical possibility; it scarcely ever entered into history to begin with."
Do you suppose things would have gone drastically differently had Valentinus of Alexandria become Pope? Is it true that that nearly happened?
Well, there was no “Pope,” but yes, he would have been a very different sort of bishop of Rome. But I wasn’t really thinking of actual Gnostics.
Mea culpa. Forgive my imprecise language use.