Ordinarily I wouldn’t post up a bunch of stuff that I encountered on YouTube, but this collection of one persons account of his deconversion from Christianity to Atheism is so thoughtfully considered and carefully presented that I was absolutely captivated, and would like to share it.

The concept of God is, for most believers, an aggregate of other beliefs. There is no silver bullet, single argument, that will disavow a believer of the God concept. For the author, his belief was built upon

1. logical arguments (exemplified by Schroeder’s The Science of God).
2. answered prayers.
3. God as the source of morality.
4. Life as a testament to the creator.
5. The Bible as the divine word, full of wisdom.
6. The supporting testimony of other Christians.
7. The personal relationship with God, and personal experiences of God.

The big issue with prayer is that the likelihood of having a prayer answered is proportional to the likelihood of that event occurring even without supernatural intercession. Prayer, in a sense, puts a person in the driving seat with respect to an omniscient God. It should be better to figure out what God’s will is directly, rather than plead for what we’d like to have happen. Scientific evidence points out that prayer has no positive effect on patients recovery. [Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer American Heart Journal, Volume 151, Issue 4, Pages 934-942 H. Benson, J. Dusek, J. Sherwood, P. Lam, C. Bethea, W. Carpenter, S. Levitsky, P. Hill, D. Clem, Jr., M. Jain] The traditional dichotomy of “yes”, “no” and “wait” responses that can be received from God in answer to prayer, is entirely psychological.

How can the Bible contain all of God’s Possible Knowledge, if it can’t answer very specific questions such as those regarding dating or personal life objectives. The Holy Spirit, helps by stepping in and filling those gaps. A university class in Professional Ethics, however, completely changed his mind. A text for the class included Being Good, by Simon Blackburn. The professor focused more on ‘how do we make good decisions’, and didn’t reveal his biases during the presentation of dilemmas. In regards to God, he raised the Euthyphro Dilemma, taking the position that Divine Command Theory is bankrupt, because it would allow obviously bad things (rape, murder, pillaging) to ‘become’ good by God’s command. Thus, morality is separate from God, and not a derivative of His command. Do you do good things because you want to be good, or to get into heaven? If you want to be good for its own sake, then you must do the moral footwork, and not delegate this responsibility to God, be threatened by eternal punishment in Hell, or bribed by eternal salvation in Heaven.

There is a discord between the Bible and Science. Genesis is debunked by Big Bang Theory, age of the Earth, Theory of Evolution, Rainbows after the Flood, etc. Schroeder initially offered a reasonable time-frame that allowed compatibility between these magisteria. A post about the book on Amazon was responded to by a professor, claiming that none of the scientific evidences above, are solved by a relativistic time shift. The professor had changed his own mind about God after using the personal library of Ramon Menendez Pidal to vet that the Bible was the result of construction of several previous sources. [Who Wrote the New Testament: The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack, and A History of God by Karen Armstrong both provide good layman references to this fact.] Schroeder’s book is an example of extrallusory intelligence.

The professor alerts our author to the tactic of reverse terminology, and shows that “The doctrinal underpinnings of the Bible have been known to be mythological for centuries.” (as shown by Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll, who recounts the conflict between historical linguistics and the Tower of Babel). This conversation evolves, and the professor moves to remove himself from the conversation to avoid inevitable disenchantment, advising not to worry about religious details too much. The author reflects that many of his congregation are not on the path to Truth, and likely fear the dark waters and questions in which he travels, turning their backs on Truth (but he has nevertheless learned spiritual lessons from them).

The Bible clearly offers explanations for why educated people reject god (Romans 1:22). He kept many verses as guidance through his life, but hadn’t actually read the Book from cover to cover. In Genesis, he encountered stories with immoral behavior by God’s characters, and inconsistent punishment for such actions. Hardening Pharaoh’s heart and killing all the firstborn sons violates both freedom and justice. Exodus and Leviticus are found to be full of incredibly detailed rules about sacrifice and offerings, no longer necessary since Jesus’s death. Numbers and Deuteronomy are also full of tedious details, and legalistic jumbo, that Christians with the Holy Spirit don’t need. Some details are fond to be inconsistent: in particular, God’s wrath concerning Judas in Acts is now an account of remorseful self-infliction in Matt). Apologetics is found to be somewhat contorted logic to rescue these inconsistencies.

Our author is now well on his way to using secular learnings as his moral and ethical guide, rather than lessons from the Bible. The Amazon professor, holds the position that many of these stories are incredibly preposterous (Order of Creation, Two different accounts, Noah’s Ark vs actual number of species, God’s command to kill children (Deut 20:16)) Questioning God’s word is still very uncomfortable for our author, as the Bible was communicated directly from God, and comes to us, unedited. But translation is not the problem, for the Bible was written by various authors each with political aims to reconstruct (edit) history. This is the Documentary Hypothesis (The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Friedman). The Bible is now no longer an infallible source of Truth.

The author reveals that God is attributed, fortuitous coincidence, beauty, numinous experience, etc, and given credit for all that is good. The Holy Spirit is recognized as a voice different from his own, providing guidance and inspiration unlike his own conscience. Religion is the metaphor through which he understands his personal experiences. Failure in daily activities guide our author to a stronger devotion to his faith, yet in college the material is now found to be unsurmountable, even with stronger devotion. Speaking with atheists becomes his new motivation, for it alone now brings feelings of God’s will.

Even if the Bible is not the word of God, having directly communicated reveals that God exists. The Amazon Professor, in respectful observance, neither denies the authors sincerity, nor agrees. Persistence leads our author to continue the the conversation. The logical arguments are battered back and forth, and the professor begins teaching: given what we know, God is just a concept, and personal interaction with Him is a simulacrum. The God concept gives the believer a surrogate parent.

Finally the author concedes that it is possible, the history/creation of the universe, the construction of religion, the lack of positive intercessory prayer, the (im)moral behavior of individuals, the independence of morality from God etc, the personal revelations, all can happed without God. The carefully considered evidence from the Professor, leads our author to see that all these things are explainable without resort to God. Occam’s Razor leads the author from “it is possible that there is no God” to “there is no God”.

The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content.

It begins with the hypothetical existence of a ‘Literature patent’. I consider such an idea to be terrible at face value, and the article actually dismisses it as much. It would be ridiculous to expect every author to carefully comb over their work making sure that it doesn’t infringe on any registered plots or (worse!) plot devices (good buy holodeck!) Acquiring knowledge of registered patents would be prohibitive for a beginning author, they’d have to rely on publishers/editors. This significantly raises the cost of creating an innovative work. Not to mention the human effort the government must spend to maintain consistency in it’s patent database, and the legal costs and liabilities for the inevitable infringement.

The article then proceeds to demonstrate what happens in patentable areas. Immediately, there is a land grab on the ‘low hanging fruit’. During this process, established market leaders tend to benefit, because the have the resources (both funds and people) to make a large number of claims and file the required paperwork (economics of scale apply to paper shuffling too). Typically only a relatively few companies will be successful in this endeavor. The initial grab might also appear to be an ‘economic stimulus’, as it will show a remarkably steep and sudden interest in the field, resulting from the underlying similarity of the tragedy of the commons. After the market settles, a few incumbents then use their patent portfolios to threaten up-start competition. As the article points out, in the world of software patents, so much of the field is so obvious, that agents without an explicit interest in software will find themselves infringing as a normal course of their business but will be without their own patent portfolio and unable to make a bargaining counter-threat.

Another economic phenomenon that happens as a result of the patent system’s existence is economic stalemate. This actually happened with the sewing machine, as recorded by Adam Mossoff in A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket, which was blogged about at the Volokh Conspiracy. He recounts how the marketing and distribution of the sewing machine was actually encumbered by the patent system, because the machine required the combination of several innovations, and no single agent held all patents on the functionality. History also demonstrates the practice of ‘patent trolling’, whereby a company, which doesn’t actually produce anything, seeks to profit by legal threats of infringement and licensing agreements on its patent portfolio. The resulting stalemate was finally resolved through the explicit creation of a patent-holding company, whose sole function was to share the patents and resulting profits of all involved manufacturing firms.

So we can see that for areas where copyright is already established practice, the introduction of an extension of the patent system results in litigation and paperwork and encourages the preservation of an established regime of a few powerful companies working in loose collusion, both of which tend to outweigh any potential benefits to development and innovation

Now, I’d like to go out on a limb here, and reject the very concept of ‘Intellectual Property’. Richard Stallman has spoken out against its use, and continuously advertises the fact that it’s deceptive and misleading. At the root of the issue is that ideas and physical matter behave differently. That is, copying != stealing. The reasoning behind this position is fairly simple, when an idea is copied that does not deprive the original possessor from the idea. When you tell me about your theory of X, you don’t suddenly forget after telling me. In contrast, if you give me an apple, now you no longer have that apple. Ideas are part of a different realm of existence.

Finally, I’d like to point out the slippery slope, what happens if we go too far with this property idea: we might lose The Right to Read, or watch How creativity is being strangled by the law.

I hope that through these references, you can see where, how, and why I’ve developed my position on the patent issue; I’m firmly on the side of maximum freedom (and that includes the opening up of all media: open-music, open-software, open-hardware, open-design, open-architecture, open-video, open-government, open-literature, etc…)

For a very long time, western culture has had a strong undercurrent about naming. Conceptually, it starts with the recognition that the ability to name a thing gives you power over it. This is reflected in many deep and ancient cultural mythologies.

The creation story in the Bible begins with:

In the beginning,…the earth was a formless void…. Then God said: Let there be light. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

So God is able to create the Earth with only his Word, and give life to mankind with only his breath. This power is nearly transferred to Adam, when he is given the task of naming all the plants and animals. Only mankind is given this linguistic power.

Jewish mythology picks up on this issue with the story of the Golem.

In many tales the Golem is inscribed with magic or religious words that keep it animated. Writing one of the names of God on its forehead, a slip of paper in its mouth, or inscribed on its body, or writing the word Emet (אמת, “truth” in the Hebrew language) on its forehead are examples of such words. By erasing the first letter aleph in Emet to form Met (מת, “dead” in Hebrew, when the aleph letter א is cancelled) the golem could be deactivated.

Jewish culture continues this tradition with the Kabbalah’s search for the True Name of God. Other cultures also demonstrate this idea. In witchcraft, a demon is both summoned and controlled by speaking its name. In the Hindu tradition AUM is the sacred word that encompasses everything, and is the sole syllable upon which focus is kept during meditation. The idea is also reflected in more modern works, as clearly expressed in Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea:

Ged sighed sometimes, but he did not complain. He saw that in this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of each place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the bottom of a dry well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.

Or the so recently popular, Harry Potter, where Dumbledore advises Harry:

Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” (PS17)

But how does this relate to Computer Science? Being a very textual discipline, we have many conventions that relate to naming. In Computer Science, we have the ability to create virtual worlds, and thus we need systems of naming the objects within those worlds. At the Language level we see a focus on naming conventions:

• Hungarian notation, in which variables have a prefix that describes their type, such as strName for a string, or pX for a pointer to X.
• Fortran, which had an implicit typing scheme, where any names beginning with I, J, K, L, M, N were always integer and the rest were reals.
• The Ruby on Rails framework, which has the ability to automatically map a model named “Person” to the “people” table in the database just by name inspection.

But naming actually turn out to be a much deeper issue than these linguistic examples show. In the Distributed Systems world, we have a large focus on naming, for a remote resource can only be accessed through its name, in what’s called name resolution. The easiest example to pick on here, is DNS, the system that allows a person to reference a remote computer by using an easy to remember domain (such as www.example.com) instead of a hard to remember physical address (such as 127.0.01). We can also identify a confluence of two separate concepts: The name of a machine can be used to locate it. This allows machines to operate with the previous cultural ‘power of naming’, knowing a machines name gives one access to that machine.

Since my research focuses on computer security, this duality between names and locations can be really critical. For example, there is a model for building secure software, called the object capabilities model, that not only identifies this power of naming, but actually explicitly states it as an axiom of the model:

• Objects (actors) can interact only by sending messages to unforgeable addresses.
• An object acquires knowledge of other objects in one of two ways:
  1. It is created with addresses that it receives from its creator
  2. It receives a message with an address to another object.

So, the security of the system is brought down to names. Communication and therefore power over other objects can only be obtained by learning their true names, which must be kept secret (unforgeable). For if a malicious object were able to easily guess the names of other objects in the system, it could quickly wreak havoc.

As such systems work their way into our daily lives, our personal names (read: personal identification) have also become much more important recently, as anyone that has been a victim of identity theft can attest. But this is an issue I won’t go into here. There are also other cultural impacts, for names change the way we think about each other.

One of the reasons that I’ve decided to spend my life studying Computer Science is its deep connections with philosophy. Mankind has been asking deep philosophical questions for a very long time, but we’ve been able to chip away at these questions only recently. I’ll review a few more of these connections later, but right now I’d like to focus on Boundaries.

When a program is running it does so within a ‘memory space’. Modern Operating Systems practice various forms of memory isolation between processes. This is done to prevent the memory manipulations performed by one program from affecting the state of any other programs. So the OS enforces a boundary between the memories of different running programs.

The OS also provides to each program an ‘environment’. The environment can be used for a number of things, and is typically used to pass settings implicitly (via key/value pairs), so that the program is able to behave slightly differently depending on the environment in which it is run. The OS also provides services to the program, so that it may (in a well-defined manner) communicate with the ‘outside’ world. It’s through these services that the program can access files, get keystrokes and other user input, talk to other computers using network protocols, etc.

The OS also maintains for each program the illusion that it is the only one running. As far as the program is concerned it is the only thing in the universe, and the universe (other programs, external devices, etc.) responds to communication in a well-defined manner. Any running program is the center of a virtual universe. It’s this virtuality that I’d like to explore.

Tron: Can a program break out of its universe? and if so, What’s out there?

Operating Systems didn’t always isolate programs as effectively as they do now. It used to be possible for one program to read, and even edit the memory space of a different program. Of course this almost always leads to erratic behavior for either or both programs, that ultimately winds up with a crash. But if a program could step outside of its universe, what would it see?

The memory of other programs. In the Tron link above, the light-cycles were able to break out of their battle arena, and wander around the system. Unfortunately, since they actually wrote back the light trail, the memory they wandered over would be corrupted. But suppose they only read? This would never harm the assumptions made by another program, so it wouldn’t be likely to lead to a system crash. And if assumptions about the size and address range of physical memory is known by the program, then it can be made to never trigger an out-of-bounds exception by the OS. This underlies the classic buffer vulnerability. Using this technique, a program can print out the memory contents of other programs (potentially revealing information that was supposed to be confidential).

So far I’ve been talking about a conceptual boundary that programmers deal with. What about the users of a system? do they ever notice the boundaries? Steve Yegge observes that in games like Mario Kart, there’s an Invisible Wall marking the boundary of game play. Outside the wall lies undefined territory.

When we reason about our own universe, we should adopt the same point of view that we have for programs. We can’t access ‘outside’ our universe. So lets ask some of these questions.

Question	Program’s Answer	Our Answer
What’s outside the universe?	Memory in an undefined state	It’s an ill-defined question. By definition it’s not matter, energy, or space; and we don’t have any way to reason about it.
What was there before the universe?	There is no before. In order to exist, the OS had to allocate and overwrite what was in memory before the program starts.	It’s an ill-defined question. Time began with the universe: there is no ‘before the beginning of time’.
Can we tell that we are in a virtualized environment?	Sometimes, yes. There are ways to Detect System Emulators.	Possibly, but I don’t know of any way. (Possibly experiments to detect non-conservation of information). Further research is needed.

That last question deserves more discussion:

• It’s possible to go the other way! Instead of breaking out of the matrix, it’s possible to put the universe into one. Using the Blue Pill.
• Writers of software for penetration and infiltration wish to avoid honeypots. Honeypots are cheaply created via Virtual Machines, but, as in the case of VMWare, introspection on the drivers can allow a program to tell that its underlying OS uses VMWare devices, and is therefore virtual.
• The program can look for differences in behavior between real and virtual machines: CPU specific bugs, model specific registers, timing of system calls, relative performance of assembly instructions, memory alignment, cache performance, etc.

Wikipedia defines the Teleological Argument as “an argument for the existence of god based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction — or some combination of these — in nature.” I’ve always found it a really tough one to battle. William Lane Craig used it in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens. He set it up like follows:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to law or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

I admit that my response was weak. I argued that the order perceived, is just that perceived! Unraveling this confusion leads us to curious and subtle reversal of naive logic. First, the anthropic principal states that we’d expect to see an ordered universe if order was a prerequisite for life. But the human mind works in such a way that we’d also have a solipsistic tendency to think that the presence of such order implies it was all designed ‘with us in mind’. But this reasoning is a bit flawed. It’s like a puddle waking up, and realizing that the pothole is shaped ‘with it in mind’.

A real understanding of the issue demonstrates what appears to be a reversal in logic. This is mostly why people fail to really understood the the evolutionary story. Daniel Dennett is fond of pointing this reversal out in his talks: “sugar is sweet because we like it” not “we like sugar because it is sweet”. It’s much easier for us to apply a naive logic and take the solipsistic path rather than the more subtle correct one.

None of this ever convinces the creationists though. They come biased with that solipsistic assumption, and pointing out the logical reversal never seems to raise the obvious flags of logical inconsistency or cause cognitive dissonance. It’s just too subtle a point it, it doesn’t adequately challenge the assumption that’s so deeply enmeshed in their understanding of the world as to be inviolate.

Now, though, some nice physicists have come up with some better measures on the amount of order necessary for life. Craig argued that if just one of the fundamental constants was off by as much as a millionth there’d be no life. I remain unconvinced, because I’m skeptical about what order is necessary for life. I don’t want to limit life to being ‘carbon-based’, or qualify the probabilities with ‘life as we know it’. But, the physicists have uncovered some robustness that hasn’t been talked about before. They argue that life, even life ‘as we know it’ may be a bit more flexible with regard to the fundamental constants, we don’t need as much ‘fine-tuning’ as is popularly believed. This is an excellent effort, because it attacks the Teleological argument right where it’s weakest: the underlying probabilities. Their argument also meshes with my personal belief that life, as an emergent property, finds a way!

Last night I was embroiled in a long argument with my flatmate about the Government. I used the typical Libertarian claim that the government was an immoral institution because it uses coercive force to collect taxes. Of course, he countered by saying my residency in a country implies a contract with the government, and the government is only using retaliatory enforcement should I breach the contract by nonpayment. Technically this is true, I could vote with my feet. I usually use this argument myself to defeat claims of economic exploitation. I was very nearly had by this, until I realized that because the U.S. grants citizenship by birth, I was entered into a contract without conscent, even though I could void the contract by leaving, it’s impractical to do so (and all the other countries are worse).

So, I moved to claim that irrespective of my complicity or acceptance of a contract the arrangement was immoral. That is, I could voluntarily conspire with another in order that we murder a third. The fact that I voluntarily joined the agreement does not make such an arrangement a moral institution. So, by residing in the territorial confines of a government, and participating in it’s voting system, and receiving its benefits (safety, public education, etc..), obeying its laws, means that I have formed an agreement with what I claimed is an immoral institution. But because I’ve received benefits, and maintain residency, I’m implicitly accepting the contract, so collection of taxes is contractually enforced. Not to pay constitutes a breach of contract that warrants retributive force. So, I had to concede that it was no longer the enforced payment of taxes that made the institution immoral. I could have parried this by pointing out that I was conscripted into the contract via my birth in the U.S. (BTW: I don’t at all agree that entering into a contract via birth is moral or even legal. Though my flatmate thought it acceptable.)

So, I tried a different strategy. I claimed that the government involves itself with immoral behavior in killing others, both during war, and via the death penalty. I thought I might win with this, because I could easily demonstrate our initiation of force on other sovereign peoples, and that because governments regularly do this it is therefore an immoral institution. But he claimed that in doing a blame calculation you must pin it on the people involved, not the institution, because it is ultimately the people who carry out the wishes of the government. Unfortunately, I’m not very well equipped to defend this point, though I did mention that you can easily sue both companies and the government in court (they have legal status as a person) and that because the government has a large number of people it is always able to replace the executioner with an individual that is willing to comply (that is, the institution can ensure an immoral action takes place even when the majority of the members would passively resist by resignation). [I didn't even bother to appealing to the Milgram experiment to demonstrate coercion]

Finally though, I was shot down:
Only a sentient being can have morality.

So institutions can’t be moral or immoral, it doesn’t apply. The government, as an institution, has no intrinsic morality. I had to withdraw my object to the government on moral grounds.

Also, I’ve never found anyone that agrees with me that our ultimate goal with regard to government should be to get rid of it. I find that some people agree when I claim that we should make it smaller each year, but that nobody agrees we should get rid of it altogether. Typically, they ask for a replacement system, which I don’t have. But that still doesn’t invalidate the goal. I like to argue that via a long process of whittling, we might be able to achieve it. But more importantly: if we don’t state that as an explicit goal (even if unachievable), we won’t have a mark to aim by, and government bureaucracy will grow steadily (as evidenced by history).

I claim lack of imagination. After all, there are many unachievable goals that are revered as noble. (ex: living you life as a perfectly moral being) In the end I’ve noticed that people tend to assume that anarchism necessarily implies unorganized militant chaos. I should probably work to dispel that myth. But it’s really hard when I’m unable to propose a workable alternative. Nobody strictly follows the logic, rather they follow their beliefs about anarchism.

My next argument will probably be about “what will Libertarians do about emergency services”? My current roomate thought in my ideal world without taxes or subsidies, there’d be no incentive for anyone to form emergency relief services. (honestly, he voluntarily donates time to Habitat for Humanity and still argues this cynically about his fellow humans)

Of course I should probably also look into the morality of contracts based on territoriality. The inconvenience of moving is pretty coercive.

I caught this scribbled on a piece of paper, as I was cleaning my desk today.

Is there anything more valuable than human life?
If No: Then when reason have we to live?
If Yes: Then do such things justify killing in certain situations?

It’s really quite messy here: Most people want there to be something bigger than themselves (which would give us each a reason to live) yet we also want to uphold the sanctity of life. Our desires seem to be in logical conflict.
Christianity takes an interesting approach, clearly stating that certain things are more important than human life, yet giving a commandment that ‘thou shalt not kill.’ In certain other passages, though, it’s OK to kill ones enemies, if God is on your side; In the Old Testament it’s almost actively encouraged.

Though this clearly meshes with ordinary human desires (demonstrating that the book was authored by man), it remains a logical conflict. I personally don’t really have a way out. The answers that I gave on the paper were that There is something more valuable than human life (I didn’t say what) and that it does justify killing in certain situations. An answer that I obviously have problems with today (hence the post).

Even more interestingly, the paper contains a meta-question:

Is the idea that human life is the most valuable worth dying or killing for?

Clearly if you answer yes, then human life isn’t itself the most valuable (the idea is more valuable), which invalidates the claim.
If you answer no, then you undermine the importance of the idea because you would have to give it up if mortally threatened; You’d hold life itself above the idea.

Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine asked me a hypothetical question:

I have a daughter with leukemia; The doctors say she might not pull through. Will you pray for her?

Well, as an atheist this puts me in a difficult position. I have several options available, none of which are particularly enticing. But before we get to my response I’d like to explain about my position on religion in general, and my objections to prayer in particular.

I dislike religion because it encourages magical thinking over scientific rationality. Because it can encourage bigotry and strife. Because it can be used in incredibly destructive ways. Because people appeal to their religion as a rationalization of their personal hatred and pettiness, as an escape from personal responsibility, and as a means of dehumanizing or demonizing others. And finally because it does not encourage questioning investigation or skepticism of claims made in the name of the Almighty, let alone the physical universe, rather, it encourages mob mentality.

I object to prayer specifically, because it can easily be used as a psychological crutch to avoid personal responsibility. How many have to die from faith-healing for us to learn that it doesn’t work? Instead of seeking known secular options that have been proven to work, some people are tempted to talk to their all-powerful imaginary friend. The worst part about the horrific outcome of these cases is that it only reinforces their belief system (aka, the True Believer syndrome). I object to prayer used in this manner because it’s worse than pointless; it’s actively destructive.

I have enough trust in my friend that he’s tried all the scientific options available (and is not using prayer as a substitute for actual medical attention), that he knows I think praying in this fashion is pointless (and has considered not asking so as not to put me in a difficult situation), and that humoring his beliefs won’t cause any physical harm. Based on these assumptions my options are:

1. Tell him I won’t do it.

Though it’s strictly logical to take this position, it’s not a very nice thing to do. My friend has come to me in a time of need; asking for prayer is actually a veiled question. Really, he’s asking, in terms of his own world view, for me to express consolation towards his predicament. It would be rather unkind of me not to comply with the request simply because we have different beliefs about how the world works.

2. Tell him I will pray, then not do it.

It’s virtually impossible that my friend would figure out I’d lied. (But then I don’t really have any practice lying, so maybe he would). I could convince him I’d pray and then just not do it, and answer any unlikely follow up discussions with details about what I actually didn’t do. But I’d also have to live with the fact that I lied to a friend about something which meant a lot to him; not exactly good for the self-image.

3. Tell him I will pray, and actually do it.

Really, what does it cost an atheist to pray? It’s simply wasted verbiage, at most a few wasted minutes of my life. I’ve spent many minutes doing much less. It doesn’t hurt my philosophical outlook to engage in the motions of a prayer, it doesn’t even hurt me and my atheism if I break down for a minute and actually mean it. I’d have a lower opinion of myself if I selfishly refused to devote a few minutes of my personal life as an outreach to my friend.

In reality I’m somewhere between 2. and 3. That is, I’d certainly tell my friend I’d pray, I’d even intend to carry it out. Wether I actually would, I don’t know. I might try, and then find myself incapable, or I might forget (unlikely), or I might postpone by waiting until I felt in the appropriate mood (which would invariably never strike). But, though I can certainly be called upon to pray, I can’t be called upon to believe that it’s actually gonna do any good. And I’ll only do it if I’m fairly certain that my actions won’t encourage any of the undesirable psychological behaviors that make me adverse to it in the first place.

Sometimes being an atheist humanitarian is difficult.

So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that when I get stuck thinking about a problem, I’ll endlessly repeat, in my head, the knowledge and reasons surrounding the problem until the solution/new path/new thought occurs to me. It’s not me that’s doing the thinking here, rather It’s me that the thought occurs to, which explains the phrase, “It occurred to me that…”). So our Ego has the mistaken opinion that it’s the originator of all the thought in the mind, while all the time it’s more the receiver of the thoughts which occur in the brain.

But if this is true, then what is it that makes one person smarter than another? It must be that more thoughts (maybe of different character) occur to the smarter person. But then how does one make themselves smarter? One probable method would be to do daily exercises in logic puzzles and brain teasers, on the presumption that it will exercise and stimulate some parts of the brain from latent dormancy into activity, and that this sort of change in brain activity will be of general use in life’s daily problems. I’m not a psychologist, and have no data on the efficacy of this approach, but it seems plausible. More helpful, would be a correlation between specific types of problems and wether experience in solving particular instances of that type will extend to an increased ability to solve all problems in that class.

Yet the revered smarts of Einstein and Leibniz isn’t that they were particularly good at solving instances of know problems, computers can do that better than any human, it’s that they saw connections and aspects of unsolved problems that then allowed those problems to be solved. What brain calisthenics would help you to answer the currently unanswered questions? Here I draw a blank and even have a difficult time speculating. History is replete with anecdotes about flashes of insight that answer the prepared mind (penicillin was found in dirty dishes, structure of benzene revealed in a dream of snakes, gravity with the fall of an apple, etc). But beyond extended concentration on a given problem to prepare the mind, none of these tales suggest a general approach for encouraging the frothy bubbling of thoughts that the brain must present to the consciousness trying to solve the problem. Intelligence then will vary as a result of the computational structure in underlying medium (neural brain) that supports thought.

I’m at a loss when I try to conjure up a method by which we can transform my brain’s architecture so that it can better do my thinking for me. If Minsky is right (and I really think he is) then the solution must lie in the study of multi-agent systems and emergent behavior. Unfortunately, we are still developing the non-linear methods and mathematical tools that will help an understanding of such systems. But the research will be useful for much more than the study of thought, it applies to a very wide range of things found in nature (Economic behavior, Environment/Ecosystems, Evolution + Game Theory, etc.) and cuts across so many fields that it’s likely everyone has a roughly equal chance of contributing, wether they realize it or not. This really is the age of the multi-disciplined researcher.

Update: a Reasonable Deviations post about the Creativity Machine, which incorporates an apropos feedback mechanism, that readily models the difference between the consciousness which experiences thought and the separate generative mechanism of thought.

Problutions (noun, pl.): the problems that are an inherent part of solution to a very difficult and complex problem. These problems arise from within the solution itself, and are extrinsic to the original problem.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit of ennui, despite preparing for a move to UCI. I’ve also bits from Minksy’s Society of Mind, Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe which got me thinking:

Some of the problems in life are complicated, sure. But, that doesn’t mean a large brain is worth developing. Bacteria are enormously successful, by volume, mass, sheer number, range of environments, pretty much any way you measure evolutionary success, they’ve outdone us humans by several orders of magnitude. Yet, they have no brains, no language, no society, no bureaucracy, no wars, etc. When faced with the problem of finding and exploiting an evolutionary strategy, simple solutions are very effective. And it really gets no simpler than a bacterium, and no more effective than horizontal gene exchange. Furthermore brains come at a very high cost: cranium is needed for protection, it consumes an immense amount of resources (in humans it accounts for about 1/3 of the basal metabolic rate), and cognition brings with it a host of other psychiatric problems. So I’m wonder if we aren’t over-optimized in some way. If we might be some evolutionary dead-end (requiring a genetic scientist to take over), that our history is one of evolution trying out bigger and bigger brains in a race with the Red Queen.

So, accursed with my big brain, I kept thinking:
There must be a general principle going on here. Life presents insoluble problems, evolution attempts solution by expanding computational hardware. I get the feeling that there must be a relationship between the computational complexity¹ of a problem and that of it’s solution. In general given a problem, we should be able to at least bound the computational resources that would be needed to solve it, a bound on the complexity of solution. I figure that this has got to be formalizable in a manner akin to the Minimum Description Length or Kolmogorov complexity. At any rate, it ought to be useful to compute these bounds, because then we can have both an estimate of how difficult it will be to engineer a solution, and an indicator of when we’ve over-invested down a dead-end.

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1. I don’t mean to mention the official computational hierarchy here. I mean something more practical, complexity in the engineering sense.