Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding [...]]]> Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote:

Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding of the brain. In fact, to advance their ideas, these authors have to be almost completely unaware of neurology and neuroscience.

I don’t know nearly as much cognitive science as I should, mostly because the school system completely avoids the edifying motto “Know Thyself”. What I have learned has been purely motivated by my own curiosity and experience. To that end I’d like to elucidate why I think this article’s above quote is spot-on.

One of my friends has been diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Which is, despite it’s outward manifestations, is a brain disorder, not a psychological one. I strongly suspect that the disorder arises from a breakdown of one (or more) of the mental agents responsible for maintaining the illusion of a unified mind.

I conjecture that a normally functioning brain is still composed of many different opinions, desires, wishes and goals, all in a trade-off war for satisfaction. If the agent responsible for weighing these differences breaks down, then the illusion of a unified mind can also break down. This is exactly the behavior that you’d expect if the brain were the hardware that runs a ‘Society of Mind‘.

For those that are willing to look, there is a mountain of evidence from behavioral psychology and cognitive science that supports the view that I have from studying computer science: The brain is hardware that runs the software of the mind. The mind (what some wish to promote to a soul) simply doesn’t survive damage to the hardware of the brain. And if you think otherwise, you are deluding yourself. You are, in fact, a self-referencing software loop.

The concept of God is, for most believers, [...]]]> 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”.

It begins [...]]]> 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…)

The creation story in the Bible begins with:

In the beginning,…the earth [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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.