The brave new world of finance-1

One topic that I have tended to avoid in my blog posts is the subject of economics. This is because the ‘dismal science’ is one of those subjects where I feel a little out of my depth. Whereas I can make sense of events in many other areas of everyday life, even to the extent of making modestly successful predictions about what should occur, behavior in the world of business and finance tends to defy my expectations. For a long time, I thought this was due to my weak understanding of the basics of economics. But now I am wondering if it is because the economic world is, frankly, crazy.

I am beginning to worry that the modern US and global economy has become untethered from reality or even basic common sense. French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to share my alarm when he recently said that we now seem to have a global “financial system which is out of its mind and which has lost sight of its purpose.”
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Emotion, belief, and reality

In the film Contact, the scientist Ellie Arroway who discovers the ETI signal (played by Jodie Foster) is an atheist/agnostic who has a romantic relationship with a theologian Palmer Joss (played by Mathew McConaughey). The film’s creators were clearly trying to strike a middle ground between these two competing views, presumably to not alienate any potential audience segment. So they tried to soften the agnostic implications of the novel by trying to find a way to put religious beliefs on a par with science. To do so, the film essentially resurrects the convenient (but dubious) argument that science deals with the physical world while religion deals with the spiritual world.

In one scene, Arroway explains to Joss why she does not believe in god. She says it is because there is no evidence of his existence. At that point, he asks her whether she is certain that she loves her late father and she says she does. Then he asks her to prove it. Of course she can’t and he looks triumphant, as if he had made a brilliant insight.

I hear this argument a lot and it frankly puzzles me. As a justification for believing in god it makes no sense at all. The argument seems designed to make the point that there are things that are real whose existence we cannot prove and that god is of this nature. But as a justification for believing in god, it is silly. The fact that the smart scientist Arroway does not promptly destroy Joss’s argument shows how far the filmmakers were trying to strike a middle ground between belief and non-belief.

I think of ‘love’ as the label we give to a complex mix of physiological and neurological phenomena that occur in our bodies and brains as a result of particular kinds of interactions that we have with other people in specific emotional contexts. So it is ‘real’ in the same way that other emotions like anger, pride, sadness, etc. are real. We can relate the emotion to actual physical phenomena.

But why is this an argument for the reality of god? All it implies is that when we talk about ‘belief in god,’ all we are saying is that it too is just a label we give to a ‘complex mix of physiological and neurological phenomena that occur in our bodies and brains as a result of particular kinds of interactions that we have in specific emotional contexts.’ If this is what people mean by believing in god, then I would agree with it. After all, there is no doubt that when people experience something they like to call ‘spiritual’, there will be some corresponding physiological changes in their bodies, as there is for any emotion.

But we cannot extend this to assert that just because our bodies experience a real physiological change due to a belief, that therefore the thing we believe in has a reality and existence apart from us. Just because belief in god is a real experience does not mean that god is real. It would be like arguing that the love (or whatever emotion) I feel for someone or something, because it is real to me, therefore also exists independently of me.

POST SCRIPT: Common single blue-eyed ancestor

The idea of descent with modification is central to Darwinian evolution, and it implies that as we go back in time we can expect to find common ancestors (sometimes just a single one) in which some feature originally appeared. This feature can grow in the population and spread even if it provides no specific survival advantage. But its rate of growth is much slower than if it had even a small selective advantage.

Machines Like Us reports on how researchers have concluded that the blue-eyes that some people have can be traced back to a mutation that occurred in a single ancestor who lived 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”

Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-4: What if we get a signal?

One of the big problems with ETIs is that it is very unlikely that we can make actual physical contact with them. One reason is just statistics, as I said earlier. While the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe need not be too small, the chances that any one ETI will cross signals or even paths with another is very small, due just to the immense size of the universe compared to the speed of our travel and communications.

But there is another problem working against an actual meeting between an alien life form and ours. Although we believe that the laws of physics and chemistry are universal in their application, the laws of biology are not believed to be so. All the life forms on the Earth have evolved in its peculiar mix of oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, along with its abundance of water. Life on other planets would have evolved in completely different environments and are unlikely to resemble the forms we are familiar with except for the broad constraints laid down by the laws of physics and chemistry. It would be an absolutely stunning discovery if the life forms we encounter were also oxygen-breathing, water-drinking, cell-phone using beings like us. That would imply that the range of conditions under which life can occur is far more restrictive, and the laws of biology far more universal, than we had anticipated. It would also mean that the probability of life originating on other planets is even lower, since they would require environments similar to ours in many ways.

Even universal laws like gravity can cause problems. If an organism has evolved on a planet that has a gravity field much different from ours, that could pose problems for an actual meeting. Organisms that have evolved to survive in a field of a certain size would find it hard to move and maneuver in fields that are much greater.

In any event, even if the time-space-technology barriers are somehow overcome and an actual direct encounter takes place, any face-to-face encounter between an ETI and us will likely have to take place with either or both being encased in spacesuits that can simulate the required environment.

For an atheist, the discovery that ETIs exist, like any other scientific discovery, brings with it only wonder and curiosity. There is no dogma to be disturbed. But for religious people, questions about life and origins are inextricably bound up with religious doctrines and are bound to cause problems. Most religions, although making claims of universality, are really quite parochial, basing their entire theology on claims of what has happened here. There will have to be some scrambling to try and incorporate the new facts of the existence of other intelligences into an Earth-based theology.

Nowadays we tend to forget the fact that it was much easier during the pre-Copernican times to believe in a personal god with whom one was in direct contact. A finite and fairly small universe with the star-embedded heavens not too far away made it easy to think of god as a human-like entity keeping an eye on us from heaven. All such a god would need were heightened human powers, like extremely good eyesight to be able to see everything and some form of ESP to read our minds. Since the distance from heaven to Earth was not that great, it was possible for god to act quickly and easily everywhere.

The realization that the universe was vast and possibly infinite raised issues that were far trickier, and this has been dealt with by emphasizing more the notion that ‘god is everywhere.’ While this solves the problem of how god can know everything instantaneously, it also makes it harder to visualize a human-like personal god. The advance of science and the notion that everything must obey the laws of science has caused other problems for the idea of a personal, human-like god. For example, the restriction that no information can travel faster than the speed of light means that a god who is everywhere and knows everything ‘at the same time’ must be violating this law somehow, even if one overcomes the problem that simultaneity is no longer a universal quality under the laws of relativity. So we now have the conundrum of a god who violates his own laws. This is why religion needs to indoctrinate children into religious beliefs at an early age and surround them with communities where such questions are not raised, and where meaningless platitudes such as ‘god is everywhere’ are accepted as deep truths, beyond the reach of reason and logic.

It seems to me that if life were to be discovered on distant planets, and not just any old life but a society with vastly superior capabilities, surely the man-made nature of religion and god would be obvious to everyone?

But that may be just my prejudice. I suspect that the discovery of ETIs would cause theologians to put in overtime to come up with some rationale as to why this is consistent with whatever their respective religious texts say. Organized religion is too much of a profitable business for its beneficiaries to allow their cash cow to go under due to the emergence of inconvenient facts. They will dust off the writings of some previously obscure religious mystic whose words could be construed to mean that he had anticipated this discovery, and the mystic’s words would be used to show how the religious texts are correct and even prophetic and scientific. Thus the discovery of ETIs will be portrayed as a triumph for religion. This is similar to the way that St. Augustine’s words are now interpreted by some to suggest that he had anticipated the big-bang model of the universe.

I actually do hope that we receive a signal from outer space. To my mind, it will confirm what I have long held: that all the differences that we dwell on here such as ethnicity, religion, geography, nationality, are just tiny and superficial and largely artificial, not worth fighting and killing over. Furthermore, it should give us hope that societies can deal effectively with advanced technology and need not end up destroying themselves with it, either by blowing themselves up or by slowly strangling their own planet, the way we are currently risking things.

But while that is my hope, that may not happen. It is possible that while there may be a spurt of such forward thinking in the immediate aftermath of receipt of a signal, eventually that knowledge will become part of our background knowledge. When people realize that there is going to be no practical consequence to this discovery and that we will not be able to actually meet the aliens, they will go back to their usual ways, listening to their preachers explaining how all this fits in with god’s mysterious plan, and why their own group of people is still very special in god’s eyes, so special that killing people who are different is a virtuous act.

The only benefit we may get from receiving ETI signals might be if we could decipher the signals to get information that might provide some insights into new scientific and technological breakthroughs that might help us deal with some problems on Earth, such as global warming or the rapid depletion of energy and other natural resources.

That is not as exciting as being able to meet and chat with other intelligences, but it is not an insignificant benefit.

POST SCRIPT: The deep mind of George Bush

British comedians John Bird and John Fortune explain how everything is going according to George Bush’s grand plan.

Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-3: The most likely contact scenario

What is likely to be our reaction if we did receive an unambiguous signal that there existed ETI somewhere else in the universe?

The reaction would be hard to predict because it is not a topic that is not publicly discussed much. This is a bit surprising because it is not such a stretch to think that we could wake up one morning to find out that we have received some signal from an alien civilization. I suspect that the reason why we don’t speculate on this question is that any such occurrence might be extremely difficult for most people to absorb into their existing worldviews, so they avoid thinking about it.
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Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-2: The chances of ETI existing

I thought of ETIs because of recent sudden reports of their appearance. About 40 residents of the town of Stephenville in Texas reported seeing a UFO a few weeks ago. And then the website Machines Like Us highlighted the reception of a mystery signal by a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Nothing definitive has been said about the source of either signal, leaving the field ripe for speculation by ETI believers.

Now I think it is likely that there is life somewhere out there in the universe. The huge number of stars in the universe seem to imply that as long as the probability of life emerging spontaneously is not zero (and we know this is true since we are here), then we should not be surprised at it occurring in other places, perhaps in many places. The catch is that given the size of the universe, the probability of any one of these forms of life encountering another is very small. The most likely way that we will detect their presence is by accident, if they happen to send out a signal strong enough in all directions so that is it detectable by us even at these huge distances. Even then, although we would know the direction from which the signals came, it would be hard to know how far away they are. The premise of Contact was that a planet fairly close to us (near the star Vega just 25.3 light years away) containing ETI had received our old TV signals, thus discovering our existence, and then decided to reach out to us.

But although I think that it is likely that ETIs exist, what I am really skeptical about are the usual reports of UFOs and other sightings, where alien spacecraft dart hither and thither at high speed, playing peek-a-boo with us. If intelligent life evolved near other stars long enough ago that they could travel the likely millions of years necessary to get to Earth, they must be possessed of a vastly superior science and technology than us simply in order to even find us.

After going to all that trouble, why would they then start playing the fool, scaring the daylights out of rural Americans? And why is it that it seems like it is mostly rural Americans who get these visits? Why don’t they drop in on Central Park in New York City?

While it seems likely that the present kinds of UFO sightings are nothing more than misidentifications, the idea that we could receive a signal from ETIs is intriguing and worth mulling over. The most likely thing to happen is that we do get some sort of identifiable, non-noise, intelligently created electromagnetic signal from outer space, broadcast by the inhabitants of some distant planet without any specific intention of contacting anyone, just the way our own radio signals have been beamed out to the universe for the last 100 years or so and TV signals for about 70 years. Electromagnetic waves have some huge advantages as communication devices: they can carry detailed information, can travel through the vacuum of empty space, and travel at the fastest possible speed allowed by the laws of science, which is the speed of light. But that very fact shows how limited our reach is, since it would take about 100,000 years for these waves to just cross our own Milky Way galaxy.

Even if we did get such an unambiguous signal about the existence of an ETI from some source and could decipher it, there is little that we could do with it, just the way that a distant civilization would be baffled if, millions of years from now, they were to pick up the weak signal from a broadcast of American Idol. We would not be able to communicate back and the long times involved in sending and receiving messages would sap the enthusiasm of the most ardent believer in ETI. In science fiction, this limitation is overcome by invoking speculative scientific exotica like black holes and worm holes that enable space travelers to circumvent the speed-of-light limitation and somehow ‘tunnel’ to distant locations in very short times. But while that meets the plot needs of authors, there is no hard evidence that such things exist or, if they do, could be used for such kinds of travel.

But if we leave all these kinds of exotica aside, what intrigues me is what would happen if we simply experience the absolute minimum, which is the receipt of some signal that unambiguously indicates that somewhere out there, however far away and unreachable, there exists intelligent life. Would that change anything here? Would it influence the way we think and behave amongst ourselves, even if there was no possibility of actually communicating with that intelligent life? Or would the novelty soon wear off, and we go back to our usual practice of killing each other?

Next: How should we react to receiving a signal?

POST SCRIPT: Wisdom beyond any price

What would be do without our profoundly wise national commentariat?

Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-1: Getting a signal

In the years 2002 and 2003, during the peak of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement, I was invited to a few meetings of that movement to provide the opposing view. This was the time when the IDC side was promoting such debates as a means of increasing visibility for IDC ideas.

During those meetings I heard over and over again about the significance of the film Contact, based on the novel of the same name by astronomer Carl Sagan. This surprised me because I knew Sagan was a self-described agnostic. Why was the work of such a well-known skeptic being shown so much love at gatherings of religious believers? I was intrigued by this question but didn’t get around to reading the book or seeing the film until I did both last month.

I now understand the IDC people’s fascination with Contact. The book and film deal with extra-terrestrials making contact with people on Earth. The signal of their existence is that radio telescopes on Earth start receiving a series of pulsed signals from outer space that are the sequence of prime numbers, which are numbers that can only be divided by themselves or one. (i.e., the numbers, 1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,…)

While prime numbers are a source of great fascination for mathematicians and are used by them in a wide variety of ways (cryptography being one), there is no naturally occurring physical process that generates those numbers. Hence the reception of prime numbers is an unambiguous signal of a real intelligence out there manufacturing these artifacts, unlike the earlier false alarms created by the detection of pulsars in 1967. Those earlier signals consisted of regular pulses of energy with very precise times between each pulse and initially were thought to be signals sent by an extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) but were later found to be caused by rotating neutron stars. But one would be hard pressed to find naturally occurring physical explanations for signals that had the pattern of the prime numbers

The IDC people used this idea from Contact to argue that the existence of certain biological systems could not occur naturally and hence were similarly unambiguous signals for the existence of an ‘outside’ intelligence. While this intelligence could also be extra-terrestrial (as postulated by the Raelians), the IDC people preferred to believe that it was caused by god. This was the Paley’s Watch and Mount Rushmore metaphors modernized.

I found both book and film interesting but mildly dissatisfying. Sagan’s weaknesses as a novelist show, though his knowledge and command of science help to make the book readable.

All books and films that deal with contact with ETIs suffer from the same problem, that the really exciting part is the thrill of discovering the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence and the anticipation of what aliens look like, are like, and their attitudes towards us. But we just do not have any data at all on which to base our conceptions of these alien beings, so any choice the authors make is bound to be seen as deficient. Whatever the creators dream up about the actual encounter cannot help but be a bit of an anticlimax.

All the novels that I have read on this topic (admittedly not that many) suffer from the fact that the plot’s dynamic requires a revelation of the ETI at the end but the actual realization of the concept is almost always disappointing. I don’t see any way around it.

Next: More on ETIs.

POST SCRIPT: How to become a New York Times columnist

All you have to do is be consistently wrong.

Anniversary reflections on this blog

Today’s post will mark the completing of three years since this blog began. Although I tend to ignore anniversaries of any kind, they do provide convenient points at which to step back and look at the big picture, to reflect on what was achieved, what was not, and where one should be going.

I have been on a regimen of writing five op-ed type essays a week, resulting over the last three years in over 700 essays and close to 900,000 words. The blog has registered about three million hits.

While it is not easy to produce this level of output, it is not that hard either, provided one is interested in what one is writing about. One of the consequences of producing this output is that I now have extreme contempt for most of the well-known columnists (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Charles Krauthammer, David Broder, Richard Cohen, etc.) that occupy the pages of newspapers and magazines. Many of the better known ones are employed full time and have paid researchers to help them gather material for their columns. Given all those resources, it is remarkable how vapid and lacking in content their columns are.
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Review: God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

I finally got around to reading Hitchens’ book debunking all forms of religion. I must say that I found it curiously unsatisfying. It is hard to put my finger on the reasons since I agreed with almost all the things he said.

The book seeks to show that religions (he focuses mainly on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism) are basically frauds initiated by charlatans and con-men, perpetrated on gullible people, and perpetuated by huge religious vested interests that either make a lot money out of the religion racket and/or use it as a form of coercion to suppress dissent (both in thought and practice) often in collusion with corrupt governments.

The book looks at the sacred texts of these religions (Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon) and shows how they are riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies and downright barbarisms, are very parochial in their thinking, of extremely doubtful historicity, and the product of many writers and editors, polishing and changing to suit their own needs and to achieve largely self-serving political and social goals.

The book also looks at the founders of these religions (Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Joseph Smith) and either finds little or no evidence for their actual existence (no evidence at all for Moses and little for Jesus) or if they occurred later enough that their existence could be at least partially corroborated (Muhammad in the 7th century) or fully corroborated (Joseph Smith in the 19th century), contemporaneous records indicate that they were likely self-serving con-men who founded movements and doctrines that conveniently coincided with their own interests and personal gain.

All this is well and good and I have no quarrel with any of it. I think that what bothered me about the book was the unevenness of its writing, coupled with a certain amount of pretentiousness. Everyone, including critics of his views, says that Hitchens is a brilliant writer and I get the feeling that this has gone to his head, so that he tries too hard to live up to that reputation, dropping esoteric references to erudite works and inserting unfamiliar phrases in French and Latin without translations. I find him to be a good writer when he is in good form but have never been overwhelmed by his alleged brilliance. In this book, there are some very good passages mixed with others that seem to lack coherence, a product of either laziness or bad editing.

He also has some annoying verbal tics. For example, he frequently refers to human beings (especially those he does not approve of) as ‘mammals’ instead of ‘people’. This is, of course, true but it is still jarring to read.

The book also flits from topic to topic, not going into much depth, and taking shots all over the place. It is a polemical book, which is fair enough. But it seems to be simply a collection of pot shots taken at religion. Let’s face it, religion is an easy target: it is full of internal contradictions, free of evidence for its preposterous claims, lacking contact with reality, riddled with barbarities, profoundly anti-science, and its history is awful. Taking broad swipes at it as Hitchens does is bound to hit the target somewhere, just like firing a shotgun at a dense flock of birds is sure to bring down something as long as one aims in the general direction. But it is not pretty.

I personally prefer the rapier skills of writers like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or Victor Stenger. They are the authors of more tightly argued books, which carefully lay out the premises and claims of religion, and then proceed to systematically demolish them.

Perhaps it is no accident that these other writers are scientists while Hitchens is not, and I am partial to science-based critiques of religion. I believe that it is science that is steadily demolishing the case for religion and god and thus scientists are best situated to deliver these blows. Science is advancing all the time, explaining the previously inexplicable and giving ever more reasons to not believe in god. In contrast religious apologists have no new arguments and still trot out those proposed by apologist religious philosophers from centuries or millennia ago, people who could only plausibly claim make their cases at a time before Newton and Darwin and Einstein, when the world seemed a lot less comprehensible than it does now. Even then, these philosophers’ claims have to be reinterpreted and limited to take into account modern scientific developments.

So while Hitchens’ book is a quick and easy read (I finished its nearly 300 pages over a weekend) and I can recommend it, it is not a book that will be on my reference shelf to be periodically sought for fresh insights.

When reading a book I like to mark out for future reference good passages that make a point tellingly. There are some in Hitchens’ book that are very good and I have used them in previous posts. But sadly, he had only a very few passages that struck me as worth preserving.

God is Not Great is a good book, worth reading, but I expected much better. Perhaps that is my fault.

POST SCRIPT: Dan Savage in South Carolina

Dan Savage reports from South Carolina just before the Republican primary, and then has an amusing discussion about his experiences there with religion on Bill Maher’s show.

Our inner fish and other evolution fun facts

Even though I am not a biologist, I find evolution to be an endlessly intriguing subject, constantly throwing up intriguing new facts. Here are some recent items that caught my eye.

Stephen Colbert has a fascinating interview with evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin, discoverer of the fish-land animal transitional fossil Tiktaalik, about how much of our human biology came from fish. In his 2008 book Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Shubin points out that although superficially we may look very different, many of our human features can be found in to have analogous forms in fish and thus probably existed from the time that we shared common fish-like ancestors with them. (Incidentally, Shubin was one of the expert witnesses in the Dover intelligent design trial in which he discussed the theory of evolution and the role that Tiktaalik played in clarifying the link between fish and land animals.)
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Religion and gullibility

Here are some video clips of people claiming to have supernatural powers.

In the first, magicians Penn and Teller debunk a person who claims that she can talk to dead people. (Language advisory)

Notice how, when she interviews the black man at the end about whom she has no inside information, she resorts to inferences based on racial stereotypes and simple hereditary similarities in order to make her guesses. She is clearly hoping that he has a father, uncle, or other father figure who died from heart disease. Such ‘mediums’ often play the odds this way.

In the next clip, Penn and Teller take a look at someone who claims that she can talk to animals using telepathy

In the third clip, Penn and Teller and fellow magician James Randi debunk Nostradamus-based predictions.

In the final one Penn and Teller take a look at an exorcist at work. (Language advisory)

What do all these things have in common? They all share one feature and that is that unscrupulous people are taking advantage of people’s gullibility about the existence of the supernatural and using their emotional needs to con them. A lot of people would love to talk with their dead loved ones, they would love to talk to their pets, they would love to know what lies in the future, they would love to think that their problems are caused by demons that can be removed by a simple procedure. Thus they are only too eager to believe charlatans who promise them that they can do these things.

But all this rampant naïve credulity about the supernatural has to have a source. Why are there so many people who are so willing to believe things for which there is no evidence? I think that it is because religion has softened their minds up since childhood, weakening their powers of reasoning and logic. It has taught them that there are mysterious things out there that are beyond the reach of normal logic and evidence and science, and that one must simply believe in them. Such people are easy prey to all the charlatans out there, out to make a quick buck.

It is necessary for their very survival that religious organizations cultivate a deliberate naivete in their flock. They may say they appealing to the virtues of unthinking faith for noble reasons but they are effectively making their religious followers susceptible to fraud.

In Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, he describes how religions depend upon and take advantage of people’s credulity.

It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact. (p. 160)

Without people being indoctrinated early on by religion, these other fraudsters would have a much harder time making a go of it. They depend on the dulling of reason and the intellect produced by religion in order to ply their trade.