Sunday, April 13, 2008

Omniscience

Twice in the last 12 hours I've encountered the concept of "omniscience."

In the first case, I was watching the film "The Lives of Others," which is set in East Germany before the Wall fell. The "stasi" had as its stated goal "to know everything." This was not the main theme of the film, but it is one that was highlighted frequently. In one example, the stasi are noticed by a nosy neighbor as they set up surveillance on a citizen. Unflustered, the lead stasi agent knocked on her door, referred to her by name, and threatened her with personalized consequences should she reveal that they had been there.

In the second case, Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts in her book "Infidel," being criticized by one of her teachers:

We were not true Muslims, Sister Aziza sadly informed the abashed and suddenly silent classroom. Allah did not look on us with delight. He could see into our hearts, and He knew we were not dedicated to him. The goal of prayer was awareness--constant awareness of the presence of God and the angels--and an inward submission to God's will that permeated every thought and action every day.

Sister Aziza reminded us of the angels we had learned about in school in Saudi Arabia, who hovered above each of our shoulders.  On the left and the right they recorded our thoughts, intentions, and ideas--bad and good. Even if we did cover ourselves and pray, that was not sufficiently meaningful for God. What counted was the intention. If your mind strayed--if you were doing it for the wrong reasons--God and the angels would look into your heart and know. (pg 80, hardback, emphasis in original)

The idea that struck me upon reading this is that the goal behind the concept of omniscience is the same: the utter subjugation of the individual to the ruling authority.

In the case of religion, omniscience is used as a threat to inculcate guilt for thoughts and feelings, thereby turning the individual into an informant against himself. In a religious context, omniscience is a mystical concept where some outside judges our privy to one's inner thoughts and feelings. One lives one's live in paranoid fear that some unbidden thought will come to mind and that Allah will hear it, and damn you for eternity.

In the case of the Stasi, omniscience is given a kind of metaphysical reality: the State spends enormous sums of money to spy on its citizens, to learn as much as they can about them, so that it can threaten them accordingly. Once again, the citizenry live their lives in paranoid fear that their private conversations might be overheard by a stasi informant. They are not even safe in their own homes, with their own spouses and children. True trusted friendships are impossible in a state where 1/3 of the citizens are informants, and the rest can be threatened into becoming informants.

Coming across these two examples in such close proximity to one another highlighted the way that "omniscience" is used in practice. It's not just an irrational concept--it's an irrational concept with a purpose.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Thought and Action

I thought about asking which is worse, this article, or the comments beneath it. A buddy of mine that grew up in Iran sent me the link in an email entitled "what a night of drinking and partying will get you in Iran."
There are a few things that deserve mention:
1. The idea of separation of Church and State is absent in Iran.
2. People in Iran gather in great crowds to watch the punishment (I can barely stomach the pictures).
3. The few commenters seem to have no conception of justice beyond simple obedience to authority; and this from people in Western countries.

Then there's this tidbit:

Amnesty International, which said it is "greatly concerned by continuing
human rights abuses in Iran", has highlighted figures revealing 117 people
were executed in 2006 with thousands facing floggings.
They included a woman, who had been forced into prostitution as an eight-year-old, receiving 99 lashes because of "acts contrary to chasity."

Disgusting.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Ayn Rand on The Iraq War

I was flipping through "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" today looking for some quote. The first thing I read was this:

Observe the terms in which the war in Vietnam is discussed. There are no
stated goals, no intellectual issues. But there are, apparently, two opposing
sides which are designate, not by any specific ideological concepts, but by images, which is appropriate to the primitive epistemology of savages:
the "hawks" and the "doves." But the "hawks" are cooing apologetically, and the
"doves" are snarling heir heads off.

The same groups that coined the term "isolationist" in World War II--to
designate anyone who held that the internal affairs of other countries are not
the responsibility of the United States--these same groups are screaming that
the United States has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of
Vietnam.

Nobody has proposed a goal which, if achieved, would terminate that
war--except President Johnson, who has offered a billion dollars as the price of
piece; not a billion dollars paid to us, but a billion dollars
paid by us for the economic development of Vietname; which means that
we are fighting for the privelage of turning every American taxpayer into a serf
laboring part of his time for the benefit of his Vietnamese masters. But,
demonstrating that irrationality is not a monopoly of the United States, North
Vietnam has rejected that offer.

No, there is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: it is a war we
should never have entered. To continue it, is senseless--to withdraw from it,
would be one more act of appeasement on our long, shameful record. The ultimate
result of appeasement is a world war, as demonstrated by World War II; in
today's context, it may mean a nuclear world war.

That we let ourselves be trapped into a situation of this kind, is the
consequence of fifty years of a suicidal foreign policy. One cannot correct a
consequence without correcting its cause; if such disasters could be solved
"pragmatically," i.e., out of context, on the spur and range of the moment, a
nation would not need any foreign policy. And this is an example of why
we do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an ideology. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic
premises on up, is what today's anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The
worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign
policy is bipartisan.




("The Wreckage of the Consensus", Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, pp 225-226)

This is from a lecture that Ayn Rand gave at Ford Hall Forum in Boston on April 16, 1967.

Everything she said about Vietnam applies equally to Iraq today.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Dead End of Epistemological Skepticism

When I first read Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," I enjoyed the book immensely. It is chock full of interesting information about the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, though it focuses mainly on the dogma of the Catholic Church. My basic problem with the book, however, was a quality that I had noted before in Richard Dawkins, and many other modern so-called defenders of reason: epistemological skepticism. 


The skeptic begins his criticism of religion with the premise that we must start with a tabula rasa plane of ideas, and that the religionist must demonstrate through logic that there is reason to believe in God. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. After all, what is science if not the process of postulating hypotheses and setting out to prove or disprove them. On this view, the religionist should be required to offer evidence in support of his claim before being taken seriously, right? So what's the problem?


The problem is in the starting point--the Skeptic takes his skepticism as a given, but is unable to support why one should start with skepticism, nor why reason is the method that we should use to discover truth. Further still, underlying phenomenon that the skeptic takes issue with in the religionist is not fundamentally the religionists's mystic fantasies--it is the religionist's sense of certainty. The religionist's sense of certainty does not come from any kind of rational process--it is based on Faith; or in real-world terms, their own conviction that an "I Wish" is better than an "It Is." The modern Skeptic's view of certainty is that "absolute certainty" is impossible to achieve about anything, but as we acquire evidence, we can move asymptotically closer and closer to "the real truth." This opens the Skeptic to the argument that their confidence in reason is itself an article of faith; thus reason fails, and faith is really all we have to go on.


As Henry Petroski puts it in his book, "To Engineer is Human":



 A scientific hypothesis is tested by comparing its conclusions with the reality of the world as it is. Yet, no matter how many examples of agreement one may collect, they do not prove the truth of the hypothesis, for it may be argued that one has not tested it in the single case where the theory may fail to agree with reality. On the other hand, just one instance of disagreement between the hypothesis and reality is sufficient to make the hypothesis incontrovertibly false. That honeybees always build their hives with hexagonal cells is a hypothesis that has accumulated so much verification that it is hardly called a hypthesis anymore. It is assumed to be a fact. But let some apiarist discover his bees making octagonal cells, and not only would the hypothesis that bees always use the hexagon be forever smashed, but there would also be quite a bit of excitement among the world of honeybee experts. That the sun rises each morning may also be considered a hypothesis, and our experience that indeed this happens day in and day out serves to confirm--but not prove--the hypothesis. Yet all it would take would be a single "morning" without a sunrise to make the contention that the sun rises every morning categorically false. While it may be behond our comprehension that this could ever be the case, it nevertheless remains true that our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is basically a matter of faith rather than of rigorously established fact.


At this point, the debate ceases to be about reason vs. faith, and becomes one about what kind of world you'd rather live in--one in which nothing is knowable, morality is unjustifiable, and man in merely a mite of dust in the cosmos, or one in which the Truth is revealed, morality is the province of a Just and Loving God, and man is the centerpiece of the universal table.


Since reason has been discredited as just another form of faith, and since the only choice is which "I Wish" you're going to treat as an "It Is," which one do you find more attractive?


As Em and I were listening to Hitchens' book in the car, I pointed out how a competent religionist could completely discredit Hitchens' approach by attacking him through his Skepticism. That's exactly what happened.


On November 1, 2007, I found a Fark headline linking to an oped by Dinesh D'Souza attacking Hitchens on exactly this point. From "What Atheists Can't Refute"


 



This atheist attack is based on the Fallacy of the Enlightenment. It was pointed out by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn't been breached since. His defense relies on the only framework that today's atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know: reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover.

In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient?

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or "take" on it. Kant's startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

...

Ours is a world of appearances only, in which we see things in a limited and distorted way - "through a glass, darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians. The spiritual reality constitutes the only permanent reality there is. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, it cannot on its own fully comprehend that domain.

Thus, when Mr. Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.

[emphasis added]


You should really read the whole thing. You need to be able to defeat this argument in order to properly defend reason.

On November 5th, 2007 I found out from the Principles in Practice blog that there had actually been a debate between Hitchens and D'Souza. You can watch the debate on www.youtube.com -- the first part starts here. You should really watch the whole thing in its entirety. D'Souza completely dominates the debate. Every time Hitchens attempts to argue reason vs. faith, D'Souza argues that reason is faith, and redirects the debate toward which side you'd rather have in control. When D'Souza pointed out that more deaths have occurred under atheist regimes (Soviet Union, China) than Christian ones, Hitchens attempted to argue (correctly!) that allegiance to Communist propaganda is itself a form of religion. He was unable to make his case effectively because he was never really able to frame the debate in reason vs. faith terms.

If reason is going to win out over mysticism in our culture, what is needed is for scientists and leading intellectuals to drop epistemological skepticism, and embrace an objective foundation of reason. Nothing less will do.

 

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Good Citizen

The University of Delaware apparently has a mandatory program on how to be a Good Citizen. This article is well worth reading.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

More on Public Education

I found this article on one person's take on public schools.

I also ordered Kaffir Boy after reading about how it had been banned in a public school. I didn't get very far (less than one page!) into the book when I had to do a little research on apartheid in South Africa. What do you think I found? That South Africa, by way of the Bantu Education Act, used the public school system as a tool of oppression.

Of special note: "The National Party now had the power to employ and train teachers as they saw fit. Black teachers salaries in 1953 were extremely low and resulted in a dramatic drop of trainee teachers. The policy of Bantu (African) education was aimed to direct black or non-white youth to the unskilled labor market, to ensure white control and prosperity."

This is reminiscent of the laws in the Old South that forbade teaching blacks to read and write.

So, if you're following this, a government school banning a book led me to read the book about a government that used the school to oppress its citizens, which in turn reminded me of how the government in this country used its control of education to keep some of its own citizens under the thumb of oppression.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Follow up on public schools

It seems that schools are more interested in policing haircuts than in educating students.

The cost of free schools

Read this article.
Pay attention to this line:
"In 2005, DCPS spent $118 million to send 2,283 special-ed students to private facilities."

Let's see: 118,000,000 / 2283 = $51,686.38 per student, per year.

According to Steven Greenhut by way of the Washington Post, the school district spends on average "$12,979 per pupil each year."

Actually, you would do well to read the entirety of the Washington Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/09/AR2007060901415.html

That school district has 11,000+ employees, and they teach 55,000 students. That's one employee for every 5 students. When class sizes are approximately 1 teacher to 30+ students, that equates a lot of overhead.

Even the administrators themselves are frustrated by the amount of overhead:

Walking down the hallway recently, Vega stopped and commented: "Hear that
singing? Coming from the gym?" said Vega as a lone voice echoed down the
hallway. "That's my literacy coach." The coach "was given to me" by the central
office, Vega said, adding that the coach does not work with students, and, in
Vega's view, doesn't contribute much to the school. "That person is totally
useless. . . . That $80,000 is something I could have used for my
students."
The coach, Cheryl Mabry, said she has been with the schools for 34
years and has been trained to help teachers work with students who are
struggling to read and write. She said she was sent by the central office to
Powell because, like most D.C. public schools, it did not meet academic
targets.
"As far as what I'm doing, I think I'm making an impact," Mabry
said, but she does not expect to be back next year. "Ms. Vega has other ideas. I
don't think I fit into her plans."
The principal charged with running the school is not allowed to make staffing decisions--which means she has the responsibility of running the school even after being deprived of the most basic authoritative power she should have to do it.

The headline of this article says it all: "Pittsburgh schools drop 'public' from name to boost image"

Charter schools are subject to the same oversight and testing standards that public schools are, and are engaging in the same cheating tactics that public schools are. If government money is involved, you are going to see these same kinds of problems regardless of who administrates the school system.

Part of the problem is the contradictory goals that people have for the school system. Many regard the purpose of public schools to "socialize" the young--which is a euphamism for "make Good Citizens" out of students. For others, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic are of paramount importance. For still others, it's important to teach "Intelligent Design," so as to preserve a place for religion in public schools. For still others, the purpose of schools is to provide students with the experience of "diversity." For still others, it's purpose is to provide children with a sense of self-esteem. In the founding day sof public schools in Massachussets, it's purpose was to undermine Catholicism by retraining the children of Irish Catholic immigrants as Protestants. In dictatorships, it is often noted that the first thing the dictator does is sieze control of the newspapers; it is not often observed that the second thing he does is sieze control of the schools.

I will do another post later about why this drive toward indoctrination is inherent in the nature of public schools. This post should give you a bit to think about now.

All the best...

Monday, August 20, 2007

More Absurdity from the Drug War

http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_229223032.html

Just look at the destruction the drug war has wrought in this man's life. When is this culture going to wake up and end the drug war? Jeez, you can't even get decent cold medicine any more.

Hat tip: www.fark.com