What, Why & How do we Know ?
Dave Gurteen has a stream of daily quotes on KM subjects, and this one from Dave Snowden always catches my eye when it comes round.
“The way we know
is not the way
we report what we know.”
Dave Snowden
That is so true, and pretty fundamental to the Psybertron agenda “What, why and how do we know?” The way we know things is invariably complex, but we inevitably express it (or are expected to communicate it) in rational objective terms.
Good piece by Mark Lewis in Time.
Yes, in terms of the individual (multiple) crime, the victims and Norway’s liberal justice system the sentencing is right and safe. If he doesn’t “reform” his view of events, or get terminated by an insider, he’s there for life. The curtailment of his liberties – imprisoned with limited outside communication – is about protecting society from him and his worldview until such time as he is rehabilitated (if ever), not about punishment.
We could argue the pros and cons of punishment, and whether it’s a good thing or not that a liberal justice system shuns it, but one reason to have a proportionate penal element is “pour encourager les autres”. A message to the world, beyond Utoya, beyond Norway, beyond 2011/12.
The real issue here goes beyond the specific case to future cases of “nutters” rationally justifying mass killings or other “evil” in some personally perceived cause or other, even before any actual action. Insanity is a grey scale, a spectrum disorder. Frankly, I don’t accept the importance of any distinction between evil and less than sound mind. Surely most capital crimes are neither, even pre-meditated (murder) killings, are culpable but circumstantial lapses of good order. Evil and/or insane are surely the minority case. Rational justification of evil is madness. Rational justification of human killing by an individual is evil.
(Case in point – uneducated mouthy lout in a bar last night “Can’t see what the fuss was about – they were all liberal lefties. Should’a been acquitted.” and “Can’t understand why they were calling him a Nazi, he didn’t kill any Jews.” Breivik needed the smirk wiping off his face. Strong messages are needed to educate.)
[Post Note – in terms of my own agenda on what makes for a sound mind, when it comes to rational morality, if rehabilitation includes the offer of therapeutic help with his mental disorders – coming to terms with the rational madness of his motivation and justification – then the achieved outcome matches my preferred outcome. The only downside is that whilst not being formally “insane”, the fact that his not being completely sane really does benefit from psychotherapy, becomes effectively invisible.]
Mad or bad:
#breivik will be sentenced tomorrow.
He wants prison.
Prosecution wants compulsory mental healthcare
Right thing is – he’s guilty (culpable, responsible, rational, aware) and insane (morality based on narrow rationality alone). He gets (more we get him, it’s not about him) imprisoned for the protection of society (life or until deemed not dangerous) – he gets offered therapy for his mental health. If he doesn’t see his problem he declines the offer, when he does, he gets the therapy. No risk to society, he’s in prison.
If choice is enforced – then “mad” is the best option – so long as the the mental institution is actually as secure as a prison, and the sentence is still “life or until not dangerous” – with some good checks and balances on any non-dangerous decision. Once deprived of his freedoms (*), don’t see why the “health care” should be enforced – offered yes, enforced no.
(*) This is the real question – what human “rights” does this kind of criminal have ? Very little external communication so long as he remains “dangerous” clearly. Being declared insane – or with his sanity suffering from a specific disorder or two – against his wishes, is part of the rights-deprivation punishment – depriving him of the right to be considered sane.
[Post Note : As claimed earlier, Breivik’s defence  confirm today that he will appeal if found insane, but not if found plain “guilty”. A fact which confirms – ie no surprise – that insane is the greater punishment for him, depriving him of one important satisfaction. Be interesting to see if the judges rationalise that guilty is the better verdict simply to avoid the ongoing limelight of an appeal – but I hope not. Provided for the victims the less than sound mind verdict doesn’t relieve him of any culpability, then the world needs the insane verdict – insanely culpable, culpably insane.
Mad, bad and dangerous enough to be in prison.
Mad, bad and dangerous enough to be guilty.
Mad, bad and dangerous enough to be of less than sound mind.
Mad, bad and dangerous enough to be offered therapy.]
[Post Note 24th – Verdict – Guilty / Prison and of Sound Mind. Typically Norwegian bureaucratic sentencing, with no “judgement” by the judges, just a list of penal code sections and subsections applicable.
Boy does the world need a redefinition of “sound mind”.]
Honour among thieves – and you don’t steal innocent young lives. Bring me the head of Anders Breivik – the subject is London gangster Danny Wollard (who?). Technically insane or not, Breivik is guilty / responsible, and he’ll need solitary confinement if he expects, or we expect him, to live on the inside. Hat tip to Trygve Sorvaag. (Topical because the sentencing is tomorrow 24th August).
BBC Magazine piece on the recent US poll on religious belief comprising (mainly) two comments by religious conservative Ron Dreher and moderate atheist David Dickerson.
I’m constantly baffled that sexual orientation and marriage is a central issue on both sides – surely it takes all sorts, and normal is a numbers game that needn’t be a judgement, just fact that “abnormal” has to be a minority by definition. Fidelity to norms – conservatism – is as fundamental to evolution as the fecundity of new opportunities. Just not even contentious. More to the point, surely we have bigger moral fish to fry?
Some interesting interpretations of the numbers – now and in the direction of youth becoming the future population. Good to see the atheist pointing out that the new atheist / four horseman effect is probably minimal and not representative of majority atheist positions – hear hear.
What’s more, as a person who has read Harris and Dawkins—who both treat saying grace at dinner as if it were morally adjacent to slapping Galileo—you can hardly claim that the New Atheists have mounted an unusually empathetic charm offensive. I give them credit for a 1% atheism bump, max. Maybe two.
Absolutely. My mantra – constant fighting “against” doesn’t win friends and influence people – evolving constructive long-lasting added-value.
It was only when three of my friends came out of the closet in one month that I was forced to look at the consequences of my theology. It was “The Literal Bible As I Understood It v My Friends”, and my friends won. Historically, friends always win.
Or as I say “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?”
(The source of the survey is David Kinnaman’s book “unChristian“.)
[Post Note :]
Woodrow Wilson (1919)
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
“We are citizens of the world. The tragedy is that we do not know this.”
Paul Ryan genuinely fell out of love with Rand …. and that comes with age.
“Atlas Shrugged was a very exciting book to read when you’re young but then you grow up …. she massages the egos of juveniles.”
Same message as the last mention.
Terrible flirts both of them, but great to see the chautauqua tradition continue. Humans having intelligent conversation that educates. Larry is moved to say:
Most things humans have written over the ages (mythological or otherwise) contain some “wisdom” …. Science isn’t wisdom – just one of the raw materials.
Wow. He’s good. A chameleon who works with his current audience. And he does distinguish himself from Dawkins and from Gould. Distinction between science informing and the doing, the application being more than science. Even the Q&A with sceptics works well. Whatever works for you! Wow, as I said.
[PS – Re  previous post – he admits his something from nothing arguments are about “redefining” nothing.]
Disappointed in finishing Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing”. He makes some good points (see previous post) but nothing entirely new – quantum fluctuations, big bang, matter asymmetry, inflation, flatness, cosmological constant, CMBR distribution – and most of the newer stuff is very speculative. If this is new to you then he is a strongly recommended read. (An updated Charlesworth & Gribben’s 1990 “Cartoon History of Time” for me; it’s proven hard to beat despite the amount of reading since.) He is a witty read, a cosmologist eyeing the funding of particle physics:
Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced only one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space about which we understand virtually nothing. However particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!
The fact that a credible scientist takes anthropic indications seriously without dismissing them as mere truisms is a major leap forward. Of course as a good scientist, he’s always looking for the plausible speculations that may suggest or be suggested by empirical tests, however indirect, and obviously at these levels “evidence” is a hugely accumulative, constructed concept with the occasional empirical landmark. But, the bad taste is that the agenda is so clearly intentional and directed towards the anti-God agenda. Totally unnecessarily IMHO. The breathless afterword and sleeve notes from Dawkins, Harris and more compound the impression. Perhaps Larry is angling to be the 5th horseman, to replace Hitchens who died before he could write a foreward. Even philosopher Anthony Grayling describes it as
” … a triumph of physics over metaphysics (and theology) … “
Only Martin Rees (the “quisling” according to Dawkins, remember) is more neutral
” … deeply fascinating speculations … “
Ultimately, despite constantly saying he is talking about something from literally nothing, his nothing is a field of energy potential, a “quantum haze” – neutral zero energy “essentially”, as he keeps qualifying it, with balancing quanta and anti-quanta popping in and out of existence, blurred to “essentially nothing” within quantum time-scales. This “nothing” is inherently unstable, hence the existence of something other than this nothing. Whilst he liberally quotes heroes of science Feynman (his) and Bronowski (mine) his philosophy doesn’t progress beyond Plato and Aristotle. His faith (which I share) that science will constantly push back the boundary of where the first cause within physics can be described, however speculatively, is not a reason to deny the existence of the literally nothing boundary as a logical, metaphysical starting point. In fact he is effectively saying, it’s just not an interesting stance to take – it doesn’t tell you very much. True. In fact that’s a large part of my agenda, that there is little to argue about here. It’s just not contentious. So why turn it into an argument …. against …. anything else?
The real debate is what it means for a “universe” to “start” and what kind of universe you’re talking about, and the core of this question is how you respond to the anthropic “fine-tuning” in this universe. (That or radically non-intuitive models of causation and time.) If we’re talking totally disconnected (zero-inter-communicating) multiverses, where each may have totally independent physical laws, constants and boundary conditions – then we’re in the realms of pure metaphysical speculation as far as this universe is concerned. We just happen to be in the universe we are in, which happens to be the one in which we can come to exist, and the others just provide us with the convenient statistical population. (It still leaves first cause unanswered or any mechanisms outside any one universe that explains / causes the individual universes.) If we’re talking causally connected universes as part of one super-multiverse with common physical laws with constants and boundary conditions set by historical causality, then we have a meaningful physics story as to how universes arise each with their particular properties. (Still no first cause of course, which is why this is a separate non-science question.) This is Peter Rowlands stance in “From Zero to Infinity”
Again, we must reject the idea that a single cosmic creation event has structured the laws of physics in a particular way, and that they could have been different in different circumstances. The idea could, in principle, be true, but then we would have no abstract subject of physics, no generality, no absolute mathematics, and no meaningful concept of conservation, the process which makes physics universal. The very idea that we could discover a unified theory of physics is impossible in such a context. Physics is fractured in the very act of creation. In addition, such explanations have the habit of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. We simply refer difficulties to special conditions that occurred in the ‘early universe’, and deprive ourselves of understanding fundamental physical phenomena which ought to be valid at all places in all epochs.
[Update April 2014]
Taking a snip from the NYT review of Krauss book (linked by Rick in the comment below) confirms the view that not only is something from literally nothing a preposterous claim for science, but the act of writing the book, and acquiring hyperbolic endorsements from fellow horsemen simply exposes how utterly puerile their Science vs God agenda really is.
… it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, …. to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
Agreed. Dumb and dumber. The pity as I said is, that as a read in terms of popularising bleeding edge physics it does have some excellent content and style, marred by disingenuous claims, a puerile publishing agenda and a denial of the actual (scientific) questions raised.
[Post Note 2018: A 2012Â Piece by Sean Carroll summarising the “kerfuffle” around criticisms of Krauss here. Starts from the same NYT review mentioned here.]
I’m reading “A Universe From Nothing” following this post, and am 80% through already. Some quick notes summarising significant points he makes:
Apologies for the headline, but since I tend to use Dawkins as my prime example of the arrogant scientist who doesn’t get the value anything other than science (and objective / deterministic logic), but by way of balance, this conversation with Larry Krauss from February this year, has some excellent content.
It does of course still have some cringeworthy moments – like the gratuitous mocking accusations of hypocrisy and madness of people, even scientific people, literally holding mythical truths – or that fact that the title “Something From Nothing” is completely misleading – they never really get past complexity from simplicity, or “matter” out of “nothing” (*) – but anyway … The nature of alternate life evolving anywhere other than life as we know it on earth; serious references (by both Dawkins and Krauss) to the Anthropic Principle and more. (Ordered Larry’s book on the strength of it.)
Krauss – Cosmic Humility. Excellent. Dawkins take note. At least Dawkins has the humility to admit his physics is 19th century.
(*) In fact Krauss does push back the nothingness … towards metaphysical cosmogeny (ie What’s this nothing from which something might come?). Good. Last time I majored on Krauss and Anthropic Principles was here: One of my more important posts.
Physics is science,
and cosmogeny is metaphysics or theology again.
I’m pretty sure Krauss gets it and there is some hope Dawkins listens to him.