Marat

There are also important advantages to individual ownership and control, however. If I have my own computer, I can decide to work on it when I want and I always know when it is available. Because it is mine, I take better care of it. There doesn't have to be any top-heavy administrative system to regulate access to it or supervise its use to ensure that proper care is taken. Those who most need certain things can determine by themselves what they need and acquire it, rather than people who don't need certain things having equal access to them, or some central administration having to decide who should have how much access to various items which are scarce or expensive. Many of these problems are discussed by economists under the rubric of the 'tragedy of the commons.'

The problem with the massive stagnation in clinical medicine over the last thirty to sixty years can best be pictured in terms of a jammed funnel. On the feeder side of the funnel there is a huge build-up of basic science data about the physiology of cancer cells, the pathology of vascular beds in diabetes, and the toxic effects of middle molecules in uremia, but then there is an extreme narrowing of the funnel which should channel all that basic science information into material for progress in clinical medicine. As a result you have a massive back-up with encyclopedias full of data on the biochemistry of lung cancer on one side and no change in the dismal cure rates for lung cancer over the last decade on the other. Perhaps science needs some creative superficiality rather than more basic science? When Copernicus developed the foundation of modern astronomy, the basic physics required to account for his picture of the solar system did not yet exist, and it wouldn't be developed until the work of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton ending two centuries later. When Newton adopted gravitational action-at-a-distance to account for the observed motions of the planets in his astronomy, there was no basic phyics to explain how action-at-a-distance was anything other than magical, because ever since Descartes the only acceptable explanatory model was particles in motion. When aspirin first began curing fevers in 1879 (and before that, its plant source had been used as a drug since the Middle Ages) there was no basic science to explain how it worked, and the full account was not worked out until the 1970s. What we see in all these cases is scientific progress being achieved by a brilliant connection, by the discovery of a pattern, operating purely over the surface of things, but with absolutely no idea of the basic science to support it. Perhaps our basic science orientation, with its dull, crabbed, compulsive assembling of more and more data about underlying causes and mechanisms, is in some ways counter-productive.

Western Europe is certainly experiencing a serious population decline, and China, with its one-child policy, should eventually start to lose population numbers. The United States is still gaining, but that is only because of immigration. Essentially, when neo-liberal economic policy became dominant in the developed world in the 1980s, middle class families started realizing that they could no longer maintain their standard of living with so much wealth being skimmed off by the capitalists that middle class wages were now stagnant instead of rising, as had been the case for generations. So they responded by having fewer children to help preserve living standards, and thus the population of the developed world began to decline. AIDS also contributed to some slowing of population growth in subsaharan Africa at the same time. To take a cruelly Malthusian view of the situation, however, I wonder if all the good work that the Gates Foundation is doing in wiping out malaria is going to create problems down the road when more people start surviving to adulthood in the Third World, producing children, and then creating a burgeoning population which the locally stagnant agricultural base cannot feed, so the Foundation just winds up trading off present deaths from malaria against future deaths from starvation.

The only good line in the New Testament comes when Pontius Pilate says to Christ, "What is truth?" A liberal society has to begin with the presumption that the truth is unknown, and that is why we all have liberty rights to pursue our own vision of the good, and also why we have a democratic system of governance, since the truth is not known in advance for all times, but constantly has to be reinvestigated and reinvented. So to limit what people can say by requiring their statements to be 'true' or by requiring that they demonstrate what a court thinks are 'good reasons' for their statement is contrary to the spirit of a liberal society. A better defense is having to show that the statements were made in good faith, since that properly subjectivizes the standard and avoids the communal majority from determining what people can say and what they can't. But in the current legal environment, where there are so many 'hate speech,' 'false news,' and 'Holocaust denial' laws, all of which assume that the state knows what is true and that individuals do not, the basic liberal foundation of the state is under threat. Essentially these laws simply recreate the old blasphemy legislation, only it has now been modernized to forbid insults to the new religion of political correctness.

This is part of the McGuire/Tiger hypothesis, that since religion encourages group cohesiveness in a way that few other things seem able to do, it has a unique value for human social organization, which is clearly an evolutionary advantage. At points McGuire and Tiger argue that the serotonin-promoting and happiness-enhancing powers of religion are values which cannot be replicated by any other kind of cultural artifact humans have invented. They also theorize that the reason why increased drug addiction seems to coincide with increased secularity is that people are seeking to replace the lost religious 'high' with the next best thing, which carries more negative side-effects for health than religion does with all of its potentially negative side-effects, such as increasing intolerance or religious wars, for example. But even if we accept all of this, I still think McGuire and Tiger are wrong, because they persist in the mistake that the goal of human existence is simply happiness rather than the achievement of intellectual dignity. Rats hooked up to a lever which stimulated the pleasure center of their brain preferred to press on that lever all day, every day, even to the extent of neglecting to eat or drink. But if the same device could be hooked up to all of humanity, with a few unlucky individuals selected to keep the machinery operating, would we be better off simply because we were now perpetually deliriously happy? There would in that case never be another Beethoven, Shakespeare, Plato, or Heisenberg, but the Angst of life would also be gone. I think the price would be too high. It is better to retain our critical faculties and our intellectual dignity, even if it means rejecting a religious view which would make us perfectly happy but also call into question our stature as critical thinking beings.

There is certainly a tension between the duty of U.S. states to give full faith and credence to certain assertions of other states and the primary right of each U.S. state to conduct its own election of Presidential Electors. Essentially the national election is actually an election state-by-state, with the results of all the state elections being determined only when the Electors meet and then later when the results are certified before the Senate. Since this gives a very high priority to the right of each state to set its own rules for its own election, that might incline a court to recognize the constitutionality of a state law governing the legitimacy of candidates. After all, each state sets its own criteria now for what candidates' names are printed on the ballot, and for a third-party candidate this can mean having to collect 3% of the registered voters' signatures in Massachusetts to get on the ballot and many fewer in another state. While blocking a candidate's name from being printed on the ballot by some special state rule might be easier, it could well be much more difficult to prevent votes written in on the ballot for that candidate from being counted in a state, since here the protections of voting rights in the federal Constitution would more clearly come into operation. While there is a general principle of state's giving full faith and credence to offical acts of other states, there are already recognized limits to this principle in private law. Thus an insurance company licensed in state X with a certain capital might be found insufficiently capitalized to be licensed in state Y, so the certification of state X would not be accorded credence in state Y. Similar problems have arisen historically with marriage, especially when some states recognized interracial marriages and others didn't.

With respect to the issue of the number of innocent civilian casualties caused by the purported intervention to prevent those casualties, which is the sole ground of NATO's intervention, in comparison with the number of innocent civilian casualties caused as an inevitable side-effect of Gadaffi's legally well-grounded enforcing of Libyan domestic criminal law which must allow the use of lethal force against those attempting to overthrow the sovereign power by force of arms, this is an issue which has to be assessed neutrally and objectively by an adjudicator. This is why the International Court of Justice, as I suggested earlier, should review the factual basis of the legitimacy of NATO's intervention. Unfortunately, as the situation now stands, a politically self-interested NATO now purports to review the legitimacy of the intervention at international law which it arm-twisted its way into getting from a very narrow majority of the UN Security Council -- 10 to 5 abstentions, one vote more than necessary for authorization of military action. Courts are expert at neutrally and objectively assessing facts to determine whether statutes come into operation or not. and since the ICJ can review Security Council action under article 24 of the UN Charter, it should do so.

A gentleman and a scholar! That combination is unfortunately getting rare in heated debates in this forum. Thanks, Zapatos. (Viva Zapatos!)

The latest electrical charge fired through the corpse of religion in the hopes of reviving it is the new book by Michael McGuire and Lionel Tiger, entitled 'God's Brain.' It's announced goal is to try to recover some respect for theists from atheists, on the reasoning that since 90% of the earth's population believes in some religion, it is inconsistent with biology to assert that such a large proportion of a successful species can be so defective as to be victimized by a merely stupid belief. The authors argue that there is naturally a huge amount of suffering connected with human existence, and that the natural way by which humans preserve their capacity for action amidst despair -- which is in their view the evolutionary purpose of the brain, not primarily thought per se -- is by increasing their serotonin levels and the capacity of their mind for anodyne self-soothing by the boost they get from religious experience. The authors support their hypothesis of the biologically beneficial effect of religion by considerable evidence from empirical psychology, and the conclusion they draw is that what makes people happy ought to be respected as a human virtue, so the faithful should not be held in contempt, as Dawkins and other atheists seem to do. But this entire line of reasoning makes two foundational errors in reasoning. First, just because 90% of people believe in religion does not make it respectable, since the vast majority of people are violent and lazy, which is hardly a reason for respecting those features. Among cultural institutions, an inclination to use intoxicating substances, even to excess, from Ancient Egyptian beer to North American Indian peyote, is also nearly universal, but that practice cannot claim respect just for that reason. Second, Kant once remarked that "Your life doesn't have to be happy to have value," and a famous problem in philosophy is usually stated as, "Would it be better to be a deliriously happy pig or an occasionally morose Socrates?" Since it would obviously be better to be Socrates, since humans strive more for value than for mere happiness, we have to recognize that the highest virtue for humans is to be creatures defined by their intellectual dignity and moral courage in the face of an honest confrontation with a world that resists their wishes and the meanings they seek to superimpose on it. Our proper goal is not to be entities submerged in stupid pleasure derived from deliberate ignorance or belief in an intellectually contemptable fantasy generated to protect people from having to face up to the true, existential challenges of a world where the only meaning humans can expect is one they produce for themselves, without some imaginary superstructure to guarantee for them that it is correct or that it guarantees some sort of reward.

Zapatos: I think my earlier post was an exact and highly technical response in terms of modern epistemology to your arguments, and I'm sorry you see them just as ridicule. I'll try to redirect your attention to the essential point of the discussion as I see it by picking up on one of the statements in your last post. You said there: "My position is simply that no matter where you stand [on the issue of whether God exists or not], you have no empirical evidence to support your belief." I think this seriously misrepresents how knowledge, belief, and human thinking proceeds. Imagine if I show you the Oersted experiment and explain to you why passing current electricity through a wire causes a magnetized bar to turn at a right angle to it. I demonstrate the effect and describe the cause as science always seeks to do -- by providing what is the simplest hypothesis possible to account for the empirical evidence actually observed. Now if you raise a doubt in response to that and say, "How do we know for certain that invisible fairies are not interfering with the phenomenon, so that even though the electrical current being turned on really causes the magnet to turn parallel to the current, that falsely seems not to be the case because the fairies turn it parallel outside our visual capacities to detect them," then I cannot empirically refute you. It seems that you have succeed in the statement I quoted from you above, that neither side -- neither Oersted nor you -- has empirical evidence to support its case about what current electricity really does to a nearby magnetized bar, since the action of the invisible fairies, whose presence and action are by definition beyond all empirical test, might always be producing some misleading interference which negates our empirical data. But then you have to realize that you have started an infinite regress which will paralyze all thinking. For then if someone else counters that equally invisible angels always act to negate the actions of invisible fairies, we also lack all empirical evidence for refuting that hypothesis. Then someone else adds a mystical and untestable Santa Claus who secretly transforms what merely appear to be magnetized rods into plastic in a way that we cannot detect, so yet another layer of scepticism enters into our capacity for assessing this experiment, and so on. But now we realize that if we admit that type of empirically undisciplined theorizing into our thinking, all thought collapses, since we can't even draw any reliable inferences from the very simple empirical evidence of the very simple Oersted result. Since it cannot be the case that all thinking has to be abandoned, it must rather be the case that empirically ungrounded thinking has to be deligitimated, since as this simple example has demonstrated, if we grant it any status it will act like a universal solvent which will dissolve all rationality. So a God-hypothesis which 'merely' escapes our ability to support it by ordinary empirical evidence is not presumptively an unknown X-reality which our methods of proof cannot get at, having this status just because you can assign a name or a definition to it, but is rather the class of fantasy hypothesis which illegitimately seeks support on a type of evidence whose admission into thinking would undermine all rationality. As an example consider this: Let X be the greatest number. Then X + 1 = X, since nothing can be larger than X, which was defined as the greatest number. So by subtraction of equals from equals, (X + 1) - X = X - X, so 1 = 0. How did we get this nonsensical result? By presumptively positing the existence of something, this X as the greatest number, merely because we could define it, yet without having any way to prove or construct it. The same problem arises from assuming that we have a God because we can define the concept, and then noting that the lack of empirical evidence by definition cannot disprove the existence of something so metaphysically transcendent as God. This illegitimately wraps God's presumptive existence into his definition, which cannot be done, since the existence is always a predicate outside of concepts which must await demonstration that they correspond to some real external thing before they can be said to exist. (cf. Kant, "Existence is not a predicate.") The essential circularity of your position is that you are saying "Let there be an X such that X's existence cannot be tested. Therefore, the proposition, 'X exists,' can never be refuted." In this case you define your X as God, but why can't I come along and define a Y with this property who is an invisible fairy, a magical angel, or a talking rabbit named Mike? This shows that that whole way of proceeding by positing empty defintions as presumptive existents prior to any empirical evidence being presented to give them that presumptive existence is false. Nothing can become a presumptive existent able to defy disproof because it requires mystical standards of proof to challenge it unless we already have good empirical and ordinary reasons to posit the presumptive existent in the first place, which in the case of God, invisible fairies, mystical angels, and talking rabbits we do not.

Well, we know that NATO has already admitted bombing rebel forces at Brega, so if they can't even distinguish their allies from their enemies, the odds that they can distinguish civilians from military personnel when they bomb a city -- especially in a rebellion where there are still no military insignia of the rebel army registered with the International Red Cross so that it is even theoretically possible to distinguish civilians from rebels according to the criteria of international law -- seem miniscule. But unless NATO can guarantee that it is not itself killing civilians, it is in violation of the only grounds at international law for its intervention, so all the NATO leadership could be arrested and charged as war criminals. The fact that this issue is not even being debated in the West simply shows how meaningless the distinction is between countries with a free press and free speech, but where the thought collective simply confines every media to the same narrow dogma, and those with official censorship which more clumsily and obtrusively accomplish the same thing. It is also a rather obvious case of stage-managing public information that there is now the hysterical story of Libya using cluster bombs at the very moment the NATO mission is morphing in extreme violation of international law from protecting civilians to regime change. Just as the 'French air attack on Stuttgart' and 'French cavalry incursions into neutral Belgium' were cited by the Imperial German News Service in 1914 to excuse the invasion of Belgium and France, and later, the Allies screamed stories about the vicious Huns raping Belgian nuns on their march through Belgium, these fantasies all do their job for the short span of time they are required to mobilize public opinion into its preferred mode of stupid, self-satisfied outrage, and then when the stores are later all proven false, it is much too late for those historical footnotes to have any substantive political impact.

When you say that 'you don't know that God doesn't exist,' the problem is that you can apply that phrase, from the perspective of the highly metaphysical way you are using words like 'know,' 'faith,' and 'doubt,' to anything. Thus we also don't know with 1000% certainty that Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck are not at this very moment conspiring in a dingy hotel room in Paramus, New Jersey, to take over the world. But if we were to permit such metaphysical 'I don't know for certain that it is not the case that ...' statements significantly to detain our thinking or to create important puzzles and hesitations for our thinking, all knowledge, rationality, science, and human activity would collapse into paralsis. For when scientists are testing drugs for purity and potency before releasing them for use on desperately ill patients, they would have to admit that they don't know for certain that the world is not a dream, that they have not gone suddenly insance, that everything has not suddenly become an illusion, so they cannot be certain that the drug is safe to release for administration to patients. This is just to show that we don't use the words 'doubt,' 'knowledge,' and 'certainty' in the sense you are proposing -- and have to propose -- in order to save the God-hypothesis from disproof. With respect to the real use of the word 'faith,' we would not ever really say that we have 'faith' in any significant sense of the word that the floor of the ordinary building we are about to walk on will not collapse, because that possibility is so rare in a developed society with professional engineering standards that we don't even seriously entertain a doubt. We do have faith, however, if we see a deteriorating wooden bridge in front of us with a sign, 'Cross at Your Own Risk,' that it is safe to cross, since it hasn't yet been closed. Here we have good empirical reasons to enter on the doubt/faith intellectual excursion. But to consider the third and more extreme, metaphysical case of the use of the word 'faith,' no one sensibly has 'faith' that the Moon is made of green cheese or that everyone else in the world is really just a robot with no genuine self-awareness, for just as extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary evidence to be proved, so too extraordinary doubts require extraordinary evidence to be motivated, so unless we have some empirical prompting, we cannot meaningfully use the term 'faith' as a bridge to embrace the hypothesis. You complain that scientists are unwiling to look at things from the perspective of theists. But the ordinary test for distinguishing truth from illusion is to subject things to an independent empirical test, and this is really the only clear, operationalized definition we have of testing something. If you want to use 'proof' or 'test' in some special, metaphysical way, so that it can distinguish an illusion from a fact by other than empirical means, then that is really just overextending words beyond the only context in which they are substantively defined, although it falsely appears to be legitimate because the words still sound and look the same, even though they are now so far removed from their operationally real contexts of definition that they are just empty shells, purporting to carry their original meaning into spheres where in fact they lack it. Before we can adopt the special perspective of the theist, given our grounding in everyday reality, we need an ordinary, empirical reason for admitting that that perspective itself is a valid one to adopt, and none has been provided. If we are both in the desert dying of thirst and come across a bottle of what appears to be water, we might test it to determine whether it is poisonous by watching what happens when an animal comes by and drinks from it. But if I were to propose to you that you abandon your scientific perspective and adopt my mystical way of seeing things in terms of analogies, metaphors, and intuitions, and suggested that instead of that empirical test we decide whether the fluid was poisonous based on the color of the container, with red suggesting danger while blue suggested safety, I'm sure you wouldn't be willing to adopt my special perspective unless there was some evidence that was not only good but also ordinary and empirical, such as the fact that there was a convention for labelling fluids by these colors to indicate danger or safety. You wouldn't accept my metaphysical perspective itself as the reason for adopting a correspondingly metaphysical perspective for evaluating my hypothesis, since that would just be an attempt to lift the hypothesis up by its own bootstraps. You might be interested to read a short, pithy. epigramatic book by Ludwig Wittgenstein entitled 'On Certainty' covering all these issues.

Since NATO is now bombing the city of Tripoli, and there is no way that you can drop bombs on a major urban area -- from the bombsight a plane flying 400 mph at an altitude of 30,000 feet while trying to guess at how windspeeds are going to affect the trajectory of the bombs as they fall -- without killing innocent civilians, all we have now are two opposing powers fighting over control of Libya while killing civilians. NATO just said that they want Gadaffi to go in order to ensure that civilians will not be hurt, but since Gadaffi already accepted a ceasefire in which civilians also would not have been hurt, the only people who have chosen to continue fighting and risk civilian casualties are the rebels, whom NATO is now militarily supporting. By militarily supporting the only side in the fighting which does not want a ceasefire, in the full awareness that all military action inevitably kills innocent civilians, NATO is guilty once again of violating the UN mandate. which is its sole legal authority for action at international law.

This discussion about some people having 'another way of proving things' or 'a different concept of truth' reminds me of an anthropological account I read once about Europeans encountering a Native tribe who had all sorts of magical beliefs. The Europeans decided to test the Native reasoning by doing something that the Native shaman would curse them for, since when the shaman cursed disobedient Natives, they always became severely ill, and the Natives refused to believe the European explanation that this was simply psychosomatic. But when the shaman cursed some Europeans for being bad and the Europeans didn't become ill, the Natives simply explained away the ineffectiveness of the curse by one of the many dodges which ware familiar whenever people give excuses. "The spirits were not listening to the shamans power that day because it was cloudy," "the Europeans were not really all that bad," "the shaman was not serious because he wanted to be generous with people of a different tribe," etc. But it was never possible to pin them down to a test case. However, the superiority of a cultural system which cultivates objective testability of its hypotheses over one which does not has to be clear to all, since if you really want to develop a vaccine against polio, you can't just say that your vaccine works even though everyone taking it still gets sick, and the failed results can all be explained away by various ad hoc factors, such as it probably doesn't work when taken on a cloudy day, or for people with blue eyes, or for those with surnames in the second half of the alphabet, etc. Unless you are willing to submit your beliefs to tests which are independent of the theory being tested and all the theory structures which might be called upon to explain away negative results, you are really not, as Wittgenstein would say, "playing the language game of genuinely testing anything to find out if it is real." Before you can legitimately use words like 'real,' 'proof,' 'tested,' 'objective,' etc., you have to use them as commonly defined rather than as metaphysically imagined, and these common definitions of the terms being used require the real to meet the standards of an independent test.

There are many jobs which robots could either never do or never do as efficiently as human labor. I'd hate to read a new novel, listen to a new song, or look at an original work of art done by a robot. Also, ever since the 1930s robots have been touted as a solution to the world's drudgery jobs, but even now they are still so clumsy and require so much technology just to go up and down stairs, they just wouldn't be practical for much of the work humans do. There are in addition numerous tasks which require greater or lesser degrees of human inventiveness, and a computer program for a robot intellect simply wouldn't be as effective at anticipating all the potential novel solutions to complex interactions with strange or volatile environments as a human brain would. Service professions of all sorts, like lawyers, accountants, physicians, nursemaids, prostitutes, university professors, judges, politicians, performers, artists, etc., could at most be partially computerized and so would still require human labor, and it is now the service industry which is the rising source of employment in developed countries. A further difficulty is that without overcoming the problems implicit in friction and the conservation of energy theorem, robots would always be using up some form of energy either for their required repairs, their continued activities, or their replacement, and this energy would have to be extracted from somewhere in processed in the endproduct required. Much of this work couldn't conveniently be done in turn by yet further robots.

It is interestingly ironic that the richest province, awash in oil money, which is also the most right-wing province, is also doing so poorly in sustaining the public healthcare system. That shows how little the problem of healthcare funding has to do with the demand for services getting out of control and how much it has to do with underfunding because of right-wing politicians. A dialysis center where I was working once hired a new nurse from Alberta, and one day I heard her chirping full of self-satisfaction to one of the patients about how healthcare was better in Alberta, because the patients were responsible for paying more of their own care since many services had been de-listed from the public healthcare plan. "This teaches them to be more responsible for their health!" she exclaimed, standing next to a patient dying from polycystic kidney disease, a condition 100% genetically pre-determined. The thought of strangling that nurse passed my mind, but I decided it would be a bad career move.

While there seems to be only a very small possibility that we will contact some alien species in the next few centuries, within that small possibility it seems that there is even a much smaller chance that the alien species we encounter will a) be friendly and interested in contact, and b) will even be able to communicate with us. Quine has suggested in his 'gavagai' problem that there may be tribes on earth which have such radically different linguistic priorities and intuitions of the natural way to formulate things that we suffer a 'radical indeterminacy of translation' when we try to talk even to these humans. So imagine if we contact alien beings whose idea of language is primarily to identify objects by their subjective feelings about them rather than by any of their objective features, or who find it absurd to call any object 'the same thing' if it is seen in a different context or against a different background. How would we ever decode what they were saying?

There may well be some evolutionary hard-wiring to frame certain similarity spaces into which sensations are preferentially packed rather than others, and Chomskians might want to call this a 'depth grammar' that constitutes a sort of proto-language we are born with to make language use possible. Certainly there must be some fact about the nature of the brain which causes all speakers of languages around the world to factor the scene of a forest into numbers of brown tree trunks against a green background, rather than into just two large but discontinuous objects, one a predominantly vertically arrayed brown object and the other a laterally arrayed green object. But to be truly self-aware of ourselves as subjects of experience, or of the outside world as something different from us, or to use word names consistently over time, seems to require something more. Psychologists often maintain that when a baby cries, it believes that by this crying it feeds itself, since it does not yet have the conceptual apparatus to distinguish itself and its wishes from the outside world, so since it is regularly given milk when it cries, it believes that crying is a self-feeding device.

There are two misleading sources for the strong suspicion in many people's minds that God exists, or that disproving his existence is significantly difficult, and thus enhances the possibility that he might exist. The first is simple and easily dismissed. We worry about the possibility of God existing and struggle with efforts to disprove his existence because we exist in a culture which, for purely contingent, historical reasons, has for millenia given strong credence to this myth, so since it is culturally not only real but also very important, it appears also to have some serious claim to objective existence. But the latter of course does not follow from the former, so we really shouldn't let ourselves be misled by the arbitrary contents of our cultural inheritance when we are trying to think seriously about objective reality. The second problem is more subtle. People when thinking about the existence of God begin with the unjustified but unnoticed assumption that we are already provided with a logical space in which God might exist, so the question about the reality of his existence amounts to the very difficult quest of penetrating that mysterious, metaphyical realm of 'things existing outside ordinary experience.' Since it is very tricky to gain access to such a shrouded, transcendental realm, proving for certain that there is nothing in it which answers to the definition of God is essentially impossible. However, a scientific approach to the problem should begin with a challenge to the very notion that such a sphere of a 'transcendental reality outside of normal experience,' such as would be necessary to house a God who eluded the normal criteria of proof or disproof of ordinary objects, itself actually exists. In fact, of course, we have no evidence that there is such a sphere of hiddenness and darkness which, even though inaccessible to investigation, still significantly exists. So since we have to admit at the outset that we have not even proved the existence of a logical space in which to hide our transcendent and invisible God, the fact that we can't find him is merely consistent with there being no reason even to carve out a possible realm for serious questioning of his existence or non-existence. The result of all this is that unless God meets ordinary criteria by which his existence can be positively established, he lacks any status or warrant to pretend that he really does exist and it is only our deficiency that we cannot get at the evidence for his existence. We need to have a reason in terms of normal empirical evidence even seriously to wonder about his existence, much less to lend it any credence.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of language is once again useful here. 'Certainty,' defined by the way we ordinarily use it in everyday contexts, rather than by the highly artificial, metaphysical way some philosophers try to misuse it, refers to the security of knowledge we have after it has been tested by ordinary means socially deemed appropriate to its confirmation. In this sense the true meaning of 'certainty' is very close to what a real-world institution like a court means when it instructs a jury that it must be certain of the accused's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not mean beyond a metaphysical doubt, requiring certainty that the whole world is not a dream, that the jury members are absolutely certain they are not the drugged victims of some laboratory experiment in induced hallucinations, or that they are not insane and suffering from the delusion of being in a court room while in fact they are languishing in an asylum. It means rather that by tests ordinarily used to assure ourselves of the reality of things -- such as confirming that Australia exists because it can be located on maps of the world made by recognized and reputable publishers -- it is what we generally mean by 'certain.' Doubt is itself only defined in a context where real certainty is possible, so it makes no sense to destroy all certainty by some universal, radical doubt of a sort that would never be accepted in ordinary practice and outside of a philosophy seminar as constituting a real reason to be sceptical about something, such as for example whether you have just read this internet posting.

Thanks, sesos. Some phenomena are so overwhelmingly obvious when you have experienced them every day for 13 years, it is astonishing the way people try to pretend they don't exist. There is even a well-known phrase, 'the English lisp,' but I guess like 'the Spanish guitar,' 'the Gallic shrug,' or 'Russian vodka,' it is just meant to confuse people, since it doesn't correspond to anything real.

The problem is that archeology hybridized with a heavy dose of political correctness now assumes that the distant racial descendants of important archeological finds which happen to be human burials are vitally concerned about what happens to these remains. The result is that the remains cannot be disturbed and knowledge for the entire world cannot advance because some people who are only theoretically linked to the remains are deemed to have some sort of legal or moral interest in the bodies' 'sacredness,' even though their own religious views would be anathema to those of the mummies and the people who buried them. So for example, before disturbing an ancient burial site sacred to the ancient Incas you now have to beg the local Roman Catholic Native people for their permission, which they often refuse to give after you explain to them what an Inca mummy is and they get the idea that you think it's valuable. A major mistake in ethics is made by assuming that the sacredness of humans, which no one should dispute, involves the sacredness of the human body per se, which is erroneous, since what we really value morally in humans is their freedom, their autonomy, and their lives, not whether every bit of their body is intact even if they no longer want it, or their corpse is treated as though it still had the noble attributes of a genuine human. Every time you defecate you shed some tiny skin cells in your feces, so you might as well preserve your turds in a sacred human tissue museum as require the equally imaginary 'sacredness' of a rotten corpse to inconvenience science, medicine, or the advance of any other area of knowledge. I would extend the point further and say that we should freely disinter the corpses of famous persons to solve various historical mysteries with no qualms about getting the consent of their relatives, such as had to be done to open the tomb of President Zachary Taylor recently to settle the issue of whether he was poisoned. Historically important knowledge belongs to the world, so its empirical sources do as well, and not just to the relatives of the dead. The Russian government has recently refused to let the grave of Tsar Alexander I be opened to settle the important mystery whether he was really buried there or in fact slipped away to become a Siberian monk after faking his death, and this just superstitiously impedes the advance of knowledge.

You have to be careful saying that "Lamarckian inheritance is wrong," since the real Lamarck whom historians of science know is not the cardboard villain of evolution that textbooks make him out to be. In fact he stated many theories which look quite Darwinian.

How big is the U.S. debt really? Let's just address the problem in terms of some ballpark figures. The debt is about 80% of one year's GDP. The U.S. now collects 28% of GDP in taxes every year, which is freakishly low for a developed country, since Canada (34%), the United Kingdom (39%), Germany (40%), and France (46%) all take very much larger tax bites out of the GDP of their countries and seem to do all right economically. Suppose the U.S. were to raise its taxes to an intermediate rank level among the developed countries and to take the same tax bite out of the economy as Germany does, devoting all the taxes taken above the normal level for the U.S. to debt reduction. This would then allow us to reduce the national debt of 80% of GDP by 12% of GDP each year, so with more rapid amortization of interest payments we could probably eliminate the debt in just 6 years, and do so while leaving all social programs plus the bloated military budge intact. But since the military budget is insanely over-inflated for any realistic self-protection needs of the U.S., we could easily draw another 1% of GDP off of that in savings per year, and thus pay off the debt even faster. There was also an interesting solution presented by Donald Trump the first time he ran for the Presidency, which was to have a one-time tax of 14% on all personal bank account holdings above one million dollars, which he claimed would pay off the national debt in itself. I don't know whether his assumptions were right at the time or whether they still are, but this would be another painless way to accomplish this goal of debt reduction without harming the poor or the middle class. In short, if you are willing to address the debt problem by increasing taxes to levels which would be normal for the typical G8 country, the whole issue could be quickly and painlessly solved. The problem comes from the ideological premise that the only possible way to tackle the debt is by gouging programs that ensure a basic level of humane treatment for the poor, the aged, and sick, while sparing any cost to millionaires and billionaires. Even on the expenditure side, there are interesting ideologically motivated choices which create unnecessary budgetary stresses. Thus it seems that while there is always a spare trillion dollars available to spend opposing the highly questionable threat that Iraq not only has weapons of mass destruction, but that the threat is so immediate that we must act before the Blix investigation is complete, and Saddam somehow can mobilize these weapons against the U.S., and also sees some advantage in doing so, there is now no spare cash around to preserve the very real services provided by Medicare.

Jimmy: I think Wittgenstein would essentially agree with you. All capacity for generating stable rule use, which is of course the basis of having a usable language or determinate words as names for anything, is derivative of having experience of an outside world of other intellects who can make our rule use determinate by the pressure of mutual consensus. If I'm living alone on a desert island, perhaps I might want to make up a word for 'palm tree,' but then what stabilizes my conception of the meaning of that label as I encounter felled palm trees, floating palm trees, burned palm trees, and large bushes that look a lot like palm trees? Do I retain the same word or abandon it? Only in a community of speakers, each with his own independent rationality, is the rule use fixed, and thus rule use itself is parasitic on the prior existence of other people. This already means that Descartes' "cogito, ergo sum" can't be the primary certainty, since he couldn't even formulate that in language unless he already knew of other thinkers besides himself, so the logical primacy of his own consciousness is lost. Similarly, the confused fugue of sensations which constitutes our inner states could never appear even to us as a determinate object, which we call 'the self,' unless it were framed into determinateness and stability by something lasting and determinate being given which was opposed to it. So our knowledge of the self is itself logically parasitic on our knowledge of the outside world. Again, this disproves Descartes' argument, that knowledge of the self is the first certainty.