Reminder: Podcast Sunday!

It’s going to get interesting this weekend: we will have Brownian, Louis, Jen McCreight, and Rebecca Watson on a Google+ hangout on Sunday, 5pm Central time, to talk about the limitations of the current skepticism and atheism movements, and how Third Wave Atheism/Atheism+/Sniny New Atheism should and can extend our reach.

A lot of people have been writing me asking to join in, but notice that Google+ has a ten person limit to hangouts, and I’ve already booked five of us. I’ll be sending out invitations to the primary guests first, and I’m going to let them talk for a while before maybe sending out a broader wave of invitations for the limited spaces left. I may also ask the late-comers to limit themselves to a short comment or question and then step out to let others in.

You will be able to watch and listen live on Google+ and youtube, and I’ll keep my eye on the comments for good questions to pass along to our panel. I’m afraid this one might get swamped with people clamoring to join in; don’t be offended if you’re not allowed in, I will try to pay attention to comments during the discussion!

What does it even mean to pass the mirror test?

The mirror test is a well known indicator for some degree of self-awareness: surreptitiously mark an animal’s face, show it a mirror, and see if it recognizes that the reflected image is of itself by whether it reaches up to touch or remove the mark. We see that behavior and infer that the animal has some knowledge of itself and can recognize that the mirror image is not another animal.

But now robots are being specifically programmed to pass the mirror test.

Ow. It makes my brain hurt.

So this is a computer that has no other indicators of consciousness or awareness or autonomous “thought” (whatever that means…my brain is hurting again), and is being coded to respond to a specific kind of visual input with a specific response…to literally pass the mirror test by rote. Does that really count as passing?

I think that all it actually accomplishes is to subvert the mirror test. It’s always been a proxy for a more sophisticated cognitive ability, the maintenance of a sophisticated mental map of the world around us that includes an entity we call “self”, and I don’t think that training a visual processing task to identify a specific shape unique to the robot design counts.

I’d also like to see what happens if two identical robots are made and put in the same room. To recognize “self” you also have to have a concept of “other”.

Dead squid can dance

Take one squid. Pin it down in a dish. Dissect out one of the peripheral nerves innervating the fin. Plug it into your iPod, and stimulate the nerve with the speaker output while playing Insane in the Membrane. Record the behavior of the chromatophores.

You have my permission, once I’m dead, to run any kind of patterned electrical signal through my nerves to see what my corpse will do. I don’t have the nice chromatophores, but maybe you could get some interesting twitches.

You minorities need to stop feeling so damned sorry for yourselves!

Whine, whine, whine. That’s all minorities ever do. Steve King (Racist, IA) would like you all to man up, act white, and join a church.

I went to the Iowa State website and […] I typed in “multicultural” and it came back to me, at the time, 59 different multicultural groups listed to operate on campus at Iowa State. It started with Asians and it ended with Zeitgeist, so from A to Z, and most of them were victims’ groups, victimology, people that feel sorry for themselves and they’re out there recruiting our young people to be part of the group that feels sorry for themselves. […]

And then, you’re brought into a group of people that are–have a grievance against society rather than understand there’s a tremendous blessing in this society.

Multiculturalism is a dirty word. There is but One True Culture, and you will shut up and be assimilated. There’s something wrong with you if you have any grievances against Steve King’s society.

Hey, Iowans, how do you keep electing this moron? And as long as you’re doing that anyway, can we send all of our Bachmann supporters south to live in his district?

Texas is about to get worse

I usually avoid Texas political news because it makes me ill, so I’m a little late to this…but would you believe the Texas legislature took a turn to the right in the last election? The Tea Party led a wave of new lunatics right into the halls of power in that state…and what they want to do as a top priority is follow the Louisiana path of demolishing public education and vouchers, vouchers, vouchers.

State Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the outspoken voice of the far right in the Senate, said he will be pushing vouchers that parents of school-age children could use for charter schools, online offerings or additional alternatives to the public schools.

"To me, school choice is the photo ID bill of this session," the Houston lawmaker said. "Our base has wanted us to pass photo voter ID for years, and we did it. They’ve been wanting us to pass school choice for years. This is the year to do it, in my view. That issue will do more to impact the future of Texas and the quality of education than anything else we could do."

If you haven’t heard about this photo ID bill, it’s a racist law passed to suppress minority voters by requiring photo ID at the polls. They say it’s to prevent voter fraud, but since that’s a nonexistent problem, you know what it’s about: preventing poor brown people from voting. It’s one strategy the Republicans have to stay in office, and that’s by suppressing voter turnout while making it easy for well-off white folks to make their preferences known.

So it’s telling that this dingleberry and his base so value fucking racism, and that now their next priority is to screw over education. That’s the second prong of the Republican strategy: keeping people stupid. They know that anyone with a brain will turn away in revulsion from the Tea Party policies, so they have to make sure no one in the electorate develops one.

Why I am an atheist – Matthew Pocock

It is difficult to explain why I am an atheist without starting at the beginning. I was born in the mid-70s in rural Oxfordshire, England. My parents where Born Again Christians of the ‘burn your Beetles records’ variety, and believed with all the passion and transparency of youth that they where blessed and anointed to do the Lord’s work. They met at a Christian youth event and that has set the tenner for the rest of their lives together. Needless to say, my siblings and I where raised to treat Jesus as the other member of our family, albeit an invisible and all-powerful one. Jesus was firstly the saviour of our family, and only then the saviour of our church, country and the world. It was an intensely personal faith. Our parents believed in strict parenting. Child-rearing and the training of working dogs could be accomplished using essentially the same approach, although children seemed to have longer memories and where better at dissembling than hounds, and while the dog got a newspaper on the nose, we got the cane. It was enough to know that we had done wrong; there was little need to explain why. They loved us dearly (and still do), but I felt we always came a distant third behind Jesus and my parents to each other, in that order.

[Read more…]

Another level of Catholic corruption

Hypocrisy is apparently a sacrament in the Catholic church. A German bishop has been living an extravagant lifestyle — flying first class (at a cost of €7000) to tour Indian slums where poor children eke out a living breaking stones. He’s also been constructing a multi-million euro mansion while the churches in his diocese crumble.

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 52, doesn’t only embrace luxury when he travels to India to visit poor children and nuns. He also puts a premium on a pleasant standard of living back home in Limburg, one that befits his status. His new, multi-million-euro bishop’s residence right next to the city’s cathedral is about to be finished. But the complex has sparked a mix of amazement, rage and resignation among the 600,000 Catholics in the diocese. Many cannot comprehend how they are supposed to live in want while their bishop splurges.

Tebartz-van Elst preaches to his flock to sate their thirst with water not wine. "Renewal begins where the efforts toward making due with less are made," he has instructed them. "The person of faith is dirt poor and rich in mercy," he once said in a Christmas sermon. And on the Assumption, he declared: "Whoever experiences poverty in person will discover the true greatness of God."

Meanwhile, funds are tight or insufficient across the diocese. There isn’t enough money for the upkeep of churches, parishes are being consolidated and funding for Catholic day care centers is being slashed. All of this is part of the bishop’s tough cost-cutting measures.

I don’t get it. Do Catholic bishops have no accountability to anyone?

At least there are no stories about this guy raping children.

Nice article on Atheism+ in the New Statesman

Most of it’s really good and gets it right.

On one level, this is just the logical culmination of the huge upsurge in interest prompted by the so-called "New Atheists" and the growth over the last few years of a recognisable community or movement based around ideas of atheism, scientific scepticism and a progressive political agenda. While atheism is, by definition, no more or less than a non-belief in God, in practice it clusters with a variety of other positions, from pro-choice to campaigns against homeopathy. People who espouse "liberal atheism" as it might be called, oppose religion for political as well as philosophical reasons, just as the forces of religion seem to line up – though of course not exclusively – behind seemingly unconnected issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and, in the US, gun-control.

Atheism+ is, at its most basic, an attempt wrap things together more formally, to create a movement that prioritises issues of equality and does so from an explicitly non-religious perspective. Some would say that such a philosophy already exists in the form of humanism. Others prefer the label Skeptic. Atheism+, however, seeks to capitalise on the sense of identity that has grown up around the word "atheism" during the past few years. One supporter of the idea, Greta Christina, celebrates the term as "a slap in the face that wakes people up."

The only problem? The figure caption.

Atheism+ is a reaction against the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins.

Nope. The body text had it right: it’s “the logical culmination”, not an opposition to the New Atheism. I’m actually doing a talk on just that next week in Denver — as the New Atheism was the incorporation of science into atheism, Atheism+ is a synthesis of social justice into the New Atheism.

Playing with the Drake Equation

The BBC has put up an interactive web page with the parameters of the Drake equation that lets you tweak numbers and estimate how many alien civilizations might exist. It’s informative because you should quickly realize you can make up any old numbers you want for most of them — we simply don’t have data for most of them, so you have to reach up into your colon to pluck something random out.

They have various presets, including a modern “skeptical estimate”. I just looked at the section on life, and found it weirdly inconsistent. Apparently, the % chance a habitable planet develops life is guessed at 13% (I don’t buy it; that life arose so quickly on Earth after its formation suggests that it may be relatively easy — I’d jack that up to something high), while the % chance that life develops intelligence is pegged at an absurd 50%. We’ve got one planet with tens of millions of species for a data point, and our kind of intelligence popped up once in 4 billion years. It makes no sense to argue for that degree of inevitability for a weird and unlikely adaptation like intelligence…why didn’t it arise in the Mesozoic, then?

Their worst estimate (which looks ridiculously optimistic to me) ends up with only about one civilization per galaxy. That’s also with a conservative estimate that a civilization only spends about 400 years trying to send signals outwards…which would mean that a brief effort to talk to some other civilization within a disc 100,000 light years in diameter is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even in their most optimistic model, with tens of thousands of technological civilizations in a galaxy, stars populated by intelligent life are still about 600 light years apart.

At least the web page makes it obvious that the Drake Equation is like a Ouija board, with the tinkerers just pushing the numbers around until they get the answer they want.