Olympic Conscience Wrestling

The thing you’ve been working for, all of your life?
That comes to fruition today?
The people in charge of this glorious time
Will turn you away if you’re gay.
Your colleagues, your teammates, your family, your friends,
(And you) couldn’t be more excited—
But if any of you has the wrong sort of love
Then—officially—you’re not invited.
You’ve worked all your life for this singular chance
But your hosts want to give you a choice
You can stand up and fight for the things that are right
Or compete, but keep silent your voice
I know what I want—cos I think of my friend—
You should stand up for her, and her wife…
It’s the right thing to do, which is easy to say
Since I haven’t worked all of your life.

I have known two (perhaps three, but I am bad with names, so am uncertain) Olympic athletes. One (maybe two) was my student. This student would have represented the US in the 1980 Summer Olympics… but that was the year of the boycott.

In my twitter feed, a simple and true statement: “When you tweet about Olympics, its like you’re tweeting about a party to which people like me were not invited. On purpose. By shitty hosts.”

For one person I care about, the Olympics are a once-in-a-lifetime chance, the ultimate reward (regardless of medaling) for decades of hard work, deferment of any sort of payment, and dedication beyond anything I have personally ever accomplished. For another person I care about, the Olympics are a slap in the face, a denial of basic humanity, an insult on a global scale.

And they are both right, and I can’t honor both.

It would seem easy to say that one is being hurt (if I take the other side), the other merely not advancing to a privileged peak beyond other peaks in what really is just a game. But that does not accurately describe my Olympians, really. They did not come from privilege (though, yes, the earlier Olympians did–only those who could afford to be “amateur” athletes were admitted). They worked incredibly hard, and got incredibly lucky. They are victims of the Russian hosts (not at all in the same sense as GLBT athletes, spectators, support, or citizens), not perpetrators of discrimination.

I’ve been an Olympics junkie since 1968. The politics is horrendous, but the athletes are able to rise above it–as, in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos showed. 1972 showed terrorism saw the Olympics as a target; 1980 showed that politics saw it as fair game as well. And while I’m sure there may have been athletes who embodied the nationalism, or capitalism or communism, or discrimination by race, gender, class, sexuality, or more, other (more? I hope so, but have no numbers) athletes have used the platform to protest, to advance, to overcome.

Yes, I’m an atheist, but I do still believe in the Olympic games. At least for now. The hosts are indeed shitty, but (I hope, I hope, I hope) it’s the guests that make a party. And they want everybody there–most of them do, anyway–and are working to make sure you get invited to the rest of the parties.

And… I am willing to be wrong. I know I am biased. So as much as I want to make this an Olympics-positive site (I know other FtB bloggers are less than enthused with the games), the comments are open for arguments that I am wrong, misguided, or simply full of shit. (or right, of course, but hey.)

Genesis II (Or III, or IV, or…)

A puddle full of chemicals
Was baking in the sun
When some combined a different way
And new life was begun
It replicated, once or twice
Till now there were a bunch—
They chanced on an amoeba, though,
Which ate them all for lunch.

Some inorganic molecules
Embedded in some clay
Began a new reaction, and
They sprang to life one day
They started reproducing
Was it brand new life? Well, yup…
Till they found a paramecium
Which promptly ate them up.

It is said, abiogenesis
Is really very rare
Perhaps it happens all the time
Without observers there
The only time we’ll know for sure
That brand-new life begins…
Is when it meets established forms
But this time, new life wins.

I don’t know where this one came from, but it took all of 10 minutes to write itself. A new, successful mutation, I suppose.

Are there any biologists reading this who can tell me if my thinking is off? It seems to me that the various abiogenesis experiments (think Miller-Urey) have one fatal flaw–they are miniscule in comparison to the real world. In the real world, we have the same, or similar, experiments happening all the time. There are theories of life beginning in tidal pools, or in a clay substrate, or in geysers or mudpots, or steam vents… well, why not all of the above, and more? The world is a big place; unlikely events happen all the time, in large enough populations. Of course, any abiogenesis event that happens now has a serious disadvantage: the parking spot is already taken. And so, of course we don’t see abiogenesis happening in the world around us; something else has already snacked on it–probably a bacterium.

But (because time is patient), isn’t it possible that one of these times, Life 2.0 will disagree with that bacterium. Then eat it. And its cousins. And establish a toehold on the planet. Could already be pockets of Life 2.0 v1-vn in places we have not yet looked. (Or maybe not; this is idle speculation.) It took a staggeringly long time for our own ancestors to get beyond that stage, so there is no reason to suspect we will be alive to answer this question… but rare things do happen. Not just a mutation of a current life form, but something altogether different. Wouldn’t that be astonishing? Wouldn’t that just scare you to death?

I gotta work on the screenplay.

In Which I Argue At Length With A MacArthur Genius

Strong-ily, wrong-ily
Neurophilosophers
Tout their position:
“The self as the brain”

Finding our cause in our
Neuroanatomy—
Sadly, it’s fictional:
Lemme explain….

(tl;dr–“brain as self” models are dependent on a particular philosophical model; the conclusions are more a factor of the requirements of that model than of the evidence.)

Mano presents a clip from the Colbert Report, in which neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland tells Colbert that neuroscience shows there is no such thing as, among other things, a soul.

True enough… but damn, does she have to say the brain is responsible for consciousness? That is just plain… well, dependent on a set of philosophical assumptions that are rarely if ever questioned. Which leads to bad questions, which leads to crap answers, which leads to “deep philosophical questions” that are a pile of horseshit.

“We (some mammals) have the same neural mechanism for pair bonding” (paraphrased from Churchland’s interview) is not at all the same thing as “the brain is responsible for pair bonding”. And the difference makes all the difference in the world. And, oddly enough, the difference is philosophical.

If you think that, say, a person could be replicated at a given moment—replicated down to the quark, or smaller if such things exist—and that this replicated being would possess all the qualities of the original… then you are a mechanist. The notion that your life history is stored, is somehow represented in the structures of your body, is mechanistic. The requirement that any change in your behavior is necessarily the effect of some immediate cause, some proximal cause stored in body or mind or wherever… is mechanistic. That is, these things which make so much sense, make sense because they are framed in terms of a mechanistic world view which you (not just you , of course) have been fed since you were knee high to a jackalope.

But, you see, mechanism is not A) the only philosophy you can use in such scenarios, nor B) the way you live your life and learn the terms used back in that mechanistic scenario. See, the thing is, events in your life unfold over time. And that time need not be compressed and represented as some instantaneous thing. Mechanism’s metaphor is a clockwork, and you can stop a clock, look at its gears, and infer what happens in present, past, and future. A clockwork represents all of that information in an instantaneous slice of time/space. That’s a requirement of the model. That’s not a requirement of reality.

You see, there are other models. A contextualist model recognizes the contributions that happen across time and across situation, and does not require that they be “stored” inside you, since they actually do exist outside you, and are part of the context of your actions. Your actions can only be defined as embedded within context—the environments that promote or suppress a given range of behavior, the consequences that select for or against a range of behavior…

In other words, what you do in a given situation depends on what has tended to work in similar situations. An evolutionary model, really.

“Fitness” is not stored within an individual; fitness is defined across populations, across generations, with respect to environments. Fitness is necessarily dependent on variables that are defined across extended time and space. To place “fitness” inside an individual, as the presumed cause of their success or failure at something (sex, say, or foraging), is to misrepresent the concept. (alas, yes, I have seen it presented this way—that is precisely the problem I am writing about.)

Ah.

The same, exact misrepresentation is constantly used in human behavior. There are concepts (again, like “fitness” in biology, and “consciousness” in behavior) that are only definable in a manner extended over time, and dependent on environment. Those wonderful brains that are the “cause” of the self? They have been shaped by the environment, in (at least) two very important ways, across two very different scales of time. One, of course, is evolution—this is at least given lip service in the “brain is self” camp, though it seems all too often as if they want to think of our modern brain as the ultimate product of evolution, rather than an ongoing work. But yes, over millions and billions of years, the environment has selected this behavior over that, and the brain structures that support this behavior have thus been favored. It is not, of course, the brain itself that is being selected for or against, but the behavior (and in our case, the flexibility in behavior) it allows.

The second sort of environmental influence, I don’t think I have ever seen credited in a “brain is self” claim, although it is every bit as important as the evolutionary history. Every brain that a researcher runs through a PET scan, CAT scan, X-ray, FMRI, or EEG… is part of an actual person, a whole organism that has been interacting with an environment, including a culture, for all of its lifetime thus far. This brain is part of a person who behaves—over time, and with respect to environment (including social and cultural environment as well as physical environment)—and whose behavior can only be seen as unfolding across time.

You cannot slice open a person’s leg to see where they have walked. A person’s accent is not stored in their vocal cords while they are not speaking. Where they have walked, and how they talk, are dependent on where, and with whom, they lived. We speak of stored abilities, or traits, or habits, but these things are only seen unfolding across time, and their “storage” is not observed but inferred under the assumptions of that clockwork model. The inference comes as a requirement of the model, not as an obvious part of the behavior—where is my walk stored, when I sit down?

Consciousness does not arise in the brain. It is a property of our interactive behavior, unfolding over time. Everything about what it means to be conscious, what it means to be aware, takes place across time and in interaction with an environment; to say it is caused by some brain part is to neglect the history of the environment shaping the brain. “Brain as self” is, functionally, as dualistic (and as wrong) as Descartes’s substance dualism. The brain does not control the body; the brain is part of the body. If there is metaphorical puppetry going on, it is not the brain as puppet master—rather, the environment (across genetic time as well as individual learning) is the puppet master, and the brain acts as the strings.

Thank You, Ken Ham

Thank you, Ken Ham—

“What would change your mind?” was the question… and Ken told viewers that the bible would stand up to critical examination. Thank you, Ken Ham.

My own pastor, back all those decades ago, was a true believer, one who believed that the most skeptical investigation will support the truth of the bible. It is, in part, because of the encouragement of my pastor, that I continued to question the things I had learned in the church. My pastor encouraged me not to believe the bible simply because he did, and because he said it was true; if the bible is true, you will be able to look at all the evidence—not just a cherry-picked subsample—and the story laid down in the geological record, the story laid down in the fossil record, the story laid down in the astronomical record, the story laid down in Genesis, will all, must all, agree.

It was in part because of my pastor that I am an atheist today. I thank Ken Ham for his earnest answer, because it will lead to more atheists.

The Templeton Foundation’s Big Bad (Really Bad) Questions

If you’re listening to the voices—
Those that no one else can hear,
Just a disembodied speaker
When no mortal soul is near—
If you’re listening to the voices
And you think they’re in your head,
There’s a Ph.D. with Templeton
Who thinks it’s God, instead.

If you’re listening to the voices
And you know that you’re alone
You could claim “hallucination”—
Such phenomena are known—
Or a slight misapplication,
An heuristic acting odd;
Or, it’s rational, says Templeton,
To think it could be God

These heuristics often help us;
They’re some helpful rules of thumb
We ignore them at our peril,
So denying God is dumb.
Hearing voices in the static
Seeing faces in a cloud
Why, of all the explanations,
“Cos it’s true!” is not allowed?

If you’re listening to the voices
And you think it’s just your mind
There’s another explanation
That we’d like to help you find:
If you want to say you’re hearing God
But logic says you can’t…
Call the Templeton Foundation
And they’ll offer you a grant

Sometimes I hate my aggregator. It’s one thing when I see ignorant comments in comment sections; it’s quite another when people who should know better are spouting ignorant nonsense; it is still worse when this spouting ignorant nonsense is precisely why somebody is giving them money.

So, yeah, the Templeton Foundation is behind “Big Questions Online“; the current Big Question is “Is Atheism Irrational?”, by Kelly J. Clark. It begins with a misunderstanding of the nature of atheism (which, as you know, is a privative category), conflating it with positive belief. It proceeds with an exploration of “belief in God” (rather than “belief in a god”), as if the perceptual heuristics he speaks of are all leading perceivers to observe the same thing, when in fact the people who claim to be listening to God disagree tremendously. He suggests at one point that atheists don’t see God because we, like autistics, have a cognitive deficit with regard to those heuristics:

If there is a God, one who occasionally speaks to people, then in at least some cases of unbelief, there may be a plausible scientific explanation. Autistic individuals lack, to varying degrees, the ability to impute thoughts, feelings, and desires to personal agents. This undergirds their lack of empathy, which hinders, to varying degrees, their ability to enter into normal interpersonal relationships. The loving parent may speak to them, reach out to them, and embrace them, but the autistic child may be incapable of recognizing and responding to them.

In short, some autistic individuals may be incapable of cognizing a personal God (if there is a God): some are as constitutionally incapable of recognizing a personal God as they are of recognizing a friend.

Recent studies demonstrate a correlation between atheism and autism—one is vastly more likely to be an atheist or agnostic if one is autistic. The higher up one is on the Autism Spectrum, the more likely one is to be an atheist.

(mind you, this does not explain those of us who came to our atheism after decades as believers) (also, I am really doing my best, but now failing, to not mention the correlations between schizophrenia and religious ideation)

And now, the crux:

According to a culturally influential narrative, religious beliefs are irrational because they are caused by unreliable cognitive mechanisms, whereas atheism is rational because it is the product of rational reflection on true beliefs. We have debunked a portion of the narrative: atheism, at least in some cases, is correlated with and mediated by a cognitive deficit.

Some atheism is the product of rational reflection. It’s not at all a requirement, though. Some disbelief in gods (depending on the gods) is shared with religious believers (I’m fairly certain Clark shares my disbelief in Thor). Some is an accident of birth. Some comes from an understanding of physics, or biology, or psychology–but only of one science, and not the others, or perhaps of all. There simply is no single path to atheism, so Clark’s “culturally influential narrative” is a straw man.

Yes, some people have personal experiences that are very moving, and in the absence of a complete understanding of the cultural, biological, and psychological factors involved, those people might rationally decide that their experience is evidence of a god. It would be, too, in precisely the same manner as the face in the clouds is evidence of a man in the sky, or that a tornado is evidence of an angry storm-entity.

But we do know about these cultural, biological, and psychological factors. It is not that the individual following personal experience is irrational, it is rather that he or she is missing the parts of the puzzle that would allow a natural explanation. Given their available evidence, they are quite reasonably arriving at a conclusion that just happens to be wrong when more evidence is brought to bear.

And while individual atheists may be rational, irrational, reasonable, or unreasonable, atheism itself, as a privative, is “none of the above”. This “Big Question”, strangely enough, has a very simple answer: “Mu“.

Which Team Is God’s Team?

You can hear the pundits prattle
Over Denver and Seattle
As they set off to do battle
In the Super Bowl today

And I’m left a bit befuddled
Cos the logic’s gotten muddled—
As I see the players huddled
Not for football, but to pray

Seems a strange thing in this setting,
But I think what I’m forgetting
Is, the Super Bowl means betting
So they’re working on the odds

We can’t tell at the beginning
Which team’s virtuous, which sinning,
But they’ll show us all, by winning,
So we’ll know which team is God’s!

As we approach game time, and every conceivable bit of trivia has been milked for its own 2-hour sports-TV retrospective, one of the variables examined is the role religion plays among the players. Yesterday’s NJ.com article “Super Bowl, 2014: Religion runs deep for many NFL players and teams” examines the phenomenon:

Each Friday afternoon, about 10 players from the Seattle Seahawks gather around Karl Payne in a room deep inside the team’s headquarters in Renton, Wash. They come carrying Bibles, notebooks and pens, dressed in their team-issued blue-and-gray sweatpants and T-shirts for an hourlong Bible study.

Payne might lead a discussion on the Book of James, outlining lessons about controlling what you say, how the price of your soul is the same as the next man’s and how challenges can either bury people or spring them to success. Or he might open a discussion, inviting the men to share their thoughts and talk about the issues they are confronting.

I have heard fairly often about the strong role of religion in sports–from controversy over prayers before games at public high schools, to a recent article on a very religious college coach in Connecticut, to Tim Tebow–but it seems to me a subject with more popular than scientific writing. The above quote, for instance, describes what the article calls a team where, in particular, several players are driven by their religion. But in a nation of 80+% Christians, the 10-player bible study group represents under 20% of the 53-player roster. Naturally, more players are Christian than attend the study group, but is having a couple handfuls of very devout players unexpected? Or simply reflective of the population from which players are drawn?

Clearly, not all NFL players are Christian, or even religious. Tebow’s requests for others to join him in prayer have not always been welcome, for instance. I have not been able to find, in any journals of sport, psychology, & religion, any information as to actual numbers–are professional (american) football players any more religious than anyone else? (Vyse reports that superstition is more prevalent among better athletes–more chances to pair success with a superstitious behavior, so no surprise there–but there are good reasons to suspect that athletic superstitions are quite different from institutionalized superstition.)

I have written before about this silliness. At least, I always assumed it was silliness to think that praying about football would matter–especially when fans and players on opposite sides desire opposite outcomes–but no less than William Lane Craig assures us that nothing is too trivial for God:

I think the overriding thing I want to say is God’s providence rules all of life, even down to the smallest details. Nothing happens without either God’s direct will or at least his permission of that event. That includes every fumble, every catch, every run. All of these things are in the providence of God, and therefore, we should not think that these things are a matter of indifference. These are of importance to God as well even though they seem trivial.

And I don’t want to hear about praying for everybody to be safe and uninjured, and to do their best. If you wanted them safe and uninjured, enough to do more than to pay lip service, there are real world things that can be done. As is, the very hits likely to be cheered the most also happen to be the ones most likely to cause brain injury.

Which cannot be treated with prayer.

Rendering Unto Caesar

A little-known sacrament, hidden from view,
But it’s there if you happen to search…
Is the sacred ability—really, God’s right—
For a renter to park at a church.

The law is the law, and the rule is the rule,
Though enforcement has been, well, relaxed…
For over a decade, they’ve taken in money
But this year, their profits are… taxed!

University parking is scarce as can be;
The demand far outstrips the supply
Local businesses often will lease out some spots—
If they’re taxed, they don’t often ask why.

But churches are used to more delicate treatment
They’re not just a business, their business is God’s
And churches, of course, enjoy tax-exempt status—
It’s not like the faithful are frauds!

The church provides parking, on tax-exempt land,
That sits empty the rest of the week
So it’s “render to Caesar”, and time to pay up,
The end of their non-paying streak

They’re grudgingly paying their taxes this year;
The power of Christ can’t compel—
I still have a question they don’t want to hear:
Can we sue for back taxes as well?

Oh, the little things that show up in my aggregator! A couple of churches had been renting out parking spaces in a university town, and are shocked–shocked, I tell you–to receive a tax bill for their commercial and non-religious enterprise.

Two churches in downtown Durham that rent parking spaces to students and other motorists received an unpleasant surprise last year: A property tax bill.

Leaders of St. George’s Episcopal Church and Community Church of Durham say they’ve leased parking spaces for more than a decade without issue. Both plan to challenge the $2,737 assessment.

Ten years of windfall profits! If they didn’t expect to be taxed, they couldn’t have been making much money from them–as churches, this was probably very nearly a charity, right?

Durham Tax Assessor Jim Rice discovered last year the churches were not being taxed for the parking leases. At the time, he said, each church leased 30 spaces for $600 each.

Rice set the value of each church parking lot at $90,000. Based on that figure, the churches owed $2,737 for the 2013 tax year. Both have paid the tax bills.

“For whatever reason, they were never assessed in the past,” Rice said of the church lots. “There is no reason the taxes should not have been assessed.”

Other non-profits in town are taxed when they profit from leasing property–including another church that leases office space. No persecution here, just a case of presumed privilege, and an assumption that the rules don’t apply.

Frankly, ten years worth of back taxes would likely help the town… I doubt very much that they will go after the money, though. Even if it is legal, it will be viewed as attacking churches.