21st-century Christian Philosopher

Lumpy's Contribution : Part 2 - A Reply (rev II)

2004-12-20T05:30:00.000-05:00

This post is the second in a series. The last post dealt with my writing goals and my regard for feedback to refocus the discussion. In this one, I reorient the topic to deal with comments that Lumpy Pea Coat made.

Although I write this page to give an answer to Lumpy’s points of dispute, I have to give him his due. You’ll find Lumpy quite accurate in what he says (here and here). Plus, at the time of that exchange, I read some posts on Lumpy’s blog that lead me to think that he might be a graduate student in a related field. It adds to it that I really cannot find fault with the facts as he represents them.

So how I can I answer him? Well, I knew quite a bit of what he gave as the factual basis. He wrongly assumed that I did not. I get that because I used shorthand, he assumed that I thought in shorthand. While, I don’t think I know Turing Machine Theory, the Church-Turing Thesis, and Rice’s Theorem to the level that a graduate student in this field would, I do have some basis for my case.

At least, I think I have a case. But if that be so, it should become clear here.

More than Facts

At first, he took me to task about the lack of precision I used to describe the Turing Machine (TM) and the Halting Problem. His seems to point out that the brain is not a TM (here), as I may have implied. But, in theory, we have a method to show that it is like one. The limits of the brain, as concerns the Halting Problem, didn’t spring from its being a TM. Instead, Halting (short for “The Halting Problem”) imposes a basic limit on every kind of computation, even human.

As I stated last time, I wrote the portions about TM theory in Black Box Brain (BBB1 and BBB2) posts because I hadn’t seen signs that people knew about what Computability Theory (CT) implied. I wanted to cursorily mention it and move onto my main concept which continues on the theme started here.

To BBB1, Lumpy wrote, “The brain is no better than a universal TM as far as computation ability goes.” So were this true, what was the brain no better than? A “Universal TM”? What the heck is that?

And how was it no better than whatever that is? What did that say about the limit of “computation ability” in the human brain?

More to my reason for mentioning it: Did the wide public know that viewing the brain as a computer gave it limits? Did they know that the brain had limits—regardless of what they were!

It is my witness that the public does not talk about the limits of brains or computers. I’ve never heard the Halting Problem talked about other than in my Computer Science classes (with the possible exception of Roger Penrose’s book, The Emperor’s New Mind.) Yet I’ve heard the idea that the brain is just some kind of computer from throngs of materialists. So I thought to discuss, on the same level of the simple model of brain-as-computer, what that implies.

As I noted, Lumpy’s objection contained the charge that brain was limited via the Halting Problem. If this is so, wouldn’t it be nice to know what the “Halting Problem” is? Has anybody ever told you that computation is limited? If you think it would be nice to know and nobody has ever told you, then you are the reader that I am talking about.

But Lumpy’s charge of gloss rings a bit hollow: I gave links to more in-depth treatments on these things in case somebody wanted to learn a little more about these terms. When I had drafted pages on this kind of topic for my former site, I had usually inserted my own expansions of the details in them, but since I have discovered Wikipedia, I can reuse work that has already been done there.

But by and large, most people are just not going to want to read those texts. Does that mean that they should be kept in the dark about the matter? Does that mean that nobody should add these facts to the materialist narrative?

Lay or initiate, we tend to discern the meaning of the phrase “the brain is a computer.” It seems to paint a clear enough picture. And as such, it seems to have a layman’s level of detail in mind. Why is it then wrong to mention Halting Problem in lay terms? We’ve already used “computer”. If there is a problem it must come in fitting some joins.

Does the Halting Problem not apply to computers? “Indeed,” Lumpy seems to say, “Even brains”. So is the lack of fitness the brain-as-computer? Perhaps. In that case, that is the model I object to. If the problem with the fit is not that the Halting Problem vexes every type of computer—which, as both I and Lumpy understand it, it does—it is in the method by which we equate the brain with the computer?

Imagine that experts should keep people in the dark because a general sense of TMs and the Halting Problem could never be captured because of inner intricacies. Can a computer be any more widely used—if the concept of a computer is first formed and then ruled by TM theory?

The computer is not its singular architecture. It is not a vacuum-tube machine. It is not a silicon machine. Mathematicians first devised it as a theoretical machine which did computations step by step. Because we define it by its purpose and function, it remains linked to its role. And its role is heavily defined by TM theory.

The idea of the brain as a computer seems to be the source of confusion and error—NOT my plea to submit Halting into the public record. I said that in that the brain is a computer if suffers from Halting just the same. Thus if we can take a “not in front of the kids” approach to TM theory, why are we calling the brain a computer in the first place? And shouldn’t that claim be the one subjected to the same scrutiny that Lumpy gave a possible misstatement of the halting theory?

It seems that most of Lumpy’s objection was to the relation that brains have to TMs. He said, “I don't know anybody who genuinely holds that the brain just is a Turing machine….” (here) But let’s say that to comply with the sense of the term “computer”, the thing called such a thing must be a device that proceeds by steps to process recursive functions. As such it is bound by Halting. It is quite in the definition, subject to the Halting Problem.

If I could have said it this simply, I would have. But if you didn’t know any of the subject matter, you don’t know why I’m saying what I’m saying. Nor would you get a sense of how well these concepts fit when applied to the brain. So I went over a smattering of TM theory, so that I can say that not all logical processes end.

Thus although verifying the correctness of how someone else processes input from the world seems like a logical process, we have no proof that such a process ever ends. And had I been able to say that as simply as I did right there, I would have just kept it to that. Thus Halting suggests that despite that a process seems to be exact and have well-defined steps to compute intermediate products, you cannot say that the whole enterprise is not fraught with a never ending cycle until you are done. And as this has to do with brains, it has a recursive application to the question itself, when considered by brains.

Close Enough…

That said, we still have reasons to consider it a computer or “alike” in any case.

First, we know some part about how computers “think”. As I have said, before we had computers, we had mathematical of them. So we’ve always had more definite things to say about these devices than whatever brains are.

The brain also, fixed in the material world, has mechanisms. Chemical reactions and electrical reactions propagate causing a change of state in the brain and leave us with the material surmise that those changes in the brain cause what we think.

Now, I didn’t say that it doesn’t work that way (And Lumpy was wrong to infer that). I only doubted that it does. And I don’t doubt it as a personal conviction, I intellectually doubt it.

Materialists and atheists often make the claim (as I discussed here) that positive claims must be backed up with evidence. (see “Other uses”) When I make the claim that God exists, they charge me to prove that claim (as if I ever said, “it is clearly evident that God exists”). They claim—as a general strategy—that the party with the positive claim must give evidence (as if there were some tribunal for personal opinions—but that is another war.)

Thus, I should not receive the burden to prove that the brain and computer are dissimilar (a negative) if atheists and materialists are being at all consistent with their rules. Are rules only to be imposed for the hobble of the opposition?

What we call computers fall into two types: one is a mathematical conception of algorithm and the other is a designed machine to meet that specification. Neither is an evolved, undesigned protoplasmic thingy which dreamt up both.

We have a difference. The other side makes the charge that the organ fits the specification where every other evident case presents a machine designed to meet the definition of computation. This instance was not designed to fit this model. And we know how the other examples function so we know to what extent they do.

Appeals to future knowledge aside, we do not now know how the brain works. Thus whether the functions that we do not now know help or hinder the brain as a kind of computer, we do not know. Thus we cannot say now (because that’s when we are saying it, right?) that the brain conforms to the design, because we do not know to what respects it does or does not conform.

Besides, the whole appeal to future knowledge 1) breaks the burden of proof on the claimant, but greater than that 2) is never dealt with inside of the whole computational model. If we will know something, brains and computers will know it. And thus, such a thing depends upon what brains and computers are.

Future knowledge claims are often softened into a statement that we “may know”. Seldom if ever does the writer deal with the fact that we “may not”. They tend to leverage future knowledge as evidence in current debates. They tend to cow you with a shared faith in technology, despite whether or not they can prove the positive claim “it is possible to know x.” But the full discourse on the problems with “Positive Claim” rule is yet to come.

hat is more important to me is the second. I repeat, Lumpy said that endless recursion is a problem in 1) the human brain and 2) the machines we build to think for us. The most general statement of this is: a problem is only computable, if it is computable.

Thus Halting (short for “The Halting Problem”) gives real challenge to claims of future knowledge. If our brains are computers and the physics of the brain are not computable, we will never get how it does what it does. We can only form a rough model, ruled by a different set of special case rules than how the brain actually functions.

How close will they be? Rice (short for “Rice’s Theorem”) tells us. If the brain is a computer and we create TM B to compute near-brain function, unless “brain-like” property is trivial (which it is not) the idea of having an algorithm than can prove that various submitted TMs produce “brain-like” behavior is impossible to determine. Arguably, by Rice, we can never tell if a brain-simulation is more or less “brain-like”.

The most we can get is a strong correspondence between the output of the brain and the output of the computer. But how computable is “strong correspondence.” How strong? What is our threshold? How will we measure it? How will we encode similarities? Is it close enough that the computer predicts that Joe wants an ice-cream cone, if Joe wants an Eskimo Pie? What is “close enough”? How is it encoded?

Do we decide? I would say that we do. But, in process of creating software that I know, we decide based on what we want the computer to do. We decide on the basis of our preference. Therefore “close enough” would depend on what we wanted it to do. (Odd that this has a meta-application on how a treated TM theory according to my purpose in writing.)

Is there then a precise specification of what is “close enough”?

Let’s say that every verdict of “close enough” has a mathematical definition of distance (and so “closeness”) and a mathematical definition of tolerance (but why this line and no other?) within that distance. Suppose we needed to find the TM that solves the problem.

Again Rice messes us up here, because there is no sure way of finding which TM this is. Thus there may be a TM which solves this type of question for each and every instance, but unless we know what it is, we cannot find it by picking TMs off of a conveyor belt and examining each one as they come by.

Therefore, if we do not already know how to do this, we find many questions in the notion of computing an algorithm to arrive there. Is the problem computable? What kind of shortcuts will we need to make? How “close” can we come with a simulation? How do we verify “closeness”?

In fact these questions produce an endless regress, in my mind. The TM that would solve Halting also answers the question whether something is computable. If the brain holds to the TM model and thus subject to Halting, you could never answer whether a problem was computable. Thus, the notion of a minimum distance between model and the problem depends on whether there is a “zero-distance” solution—or an exact computation, should it happened to be computable.

See the problem with “future knowledge” is on the level of a TM, we know that a TM encodes a computable function only if it has stopped. Any TM grinding away at its answer out there can possibly stop and possibly arrive an answer. But if we break this whole concept down to the machines computing, then having spent time computing a given verdict, is no guarantor of an answer. Only having spit out an answer is.

This is why in my exchange with Lumpy, I specified what we know. It is not good enough that we have made “progress’ in figuring out the brain, finding that the brain is a computer—by agency of the brain—means that the brain must run an algorithm to determine that the brain is a computer.

Lumpy’s worst mistake was to tell me that “Turing machines do not compute functions representing interpreted predicates like 'is useful'.” (here) I can only wonder what our brain-machine do by saying that then. Is nothing actually “useful”? Is the brain ill fit for that task? Is there an embarrassing gaucheness buried within our notion of “useful”? What does it mean when our brain gets a sense that something is “useful”? Does our conviction that something is useful have little to do with whether it is or is not?

We can then wonder about “is close enough”? Is it really “close enough” when we say it is? Well, I said above we do arrive at the verdict that something is close enough to our purposes in developing software. But if the “interpreted predicate” is just a by-product of real algorithmic processes going on in our brains, where does that leave “interpreted predicates”?

And where does that leave the link between what our brain thinks and what our language says? Can we accept that something we say can be “right” if it is naturally incorrect by the lack of an exact algorithm to compute these predicates? Can we interpret if TMs cannot? And how can we if our computation faculty has the same bounds as TMs?

And on we go…

Lumpy's Contribution : Part 1 — Problems

2004-12-14T01:30:00.000-05:00

I have to thank lumpy pea coat for helping me adjust my focus on the issues about what computation says about the brain. (here and here) I value input however much it differs from how I present my case. I try my best to walk around my writing and examine it from all possible sides. I try to rewrite what I feel overstates my case or invites unwelcome suggestions too readily to the table.

But the method of writing with pure signal and no noise escapes me. And as well, I demand a number of other things from my prose. So far on this page, I have yet to succumb to passive voice, so rife in more technical writing. I like to write as simply as I can. I want to use short, colorful words where possible. Alas the paint sometimes bleeds. So one must forgive me if I sometimes smudge the colors.

I note that we often seem to reduce the noise by repeating familiar patterns of symbols, like jargon. But, at times, I see the pattern between the repetition of working with the subject and the repetition of words by others immersed in similar experiences, as forging a stronger correlation, which conveys a cleaner signal.

The fit of jargon to carry signals among workers in a field gets in the way of some of my writing goals, though. All having worked with in the field, its members keenly grasp certain patterns of events, which then relate to patterns in speech. In contrast, I want to speak to everyone with the skill to read. I don't want to block anyone.

Moreover, I appraise my role as a layman noting the outputs of workers in other fields. I don't propose to cover here why it is that a layman should think that he needs to expound on the connection of ideas that are outside of his field. But whether or not I should do this, I do it.
Nor can I explain in the space of a post why I trumpet my role as a layman. (I hope to develop that whole concept given time.) But I can mention how my view, lay status is soul of our being as post-Renaissance men and women, relates to my attempt to be reviewed by other laymen , and thus to break jargon. Where the drawback is that I leave the well-traveled lines of communication and throw the concepts out there for wooly, general inference.

In my writing, purpose dictates the method. Sometimes in the balance between fairness and brevity, I will leave a word that has a stronger meaning than I want in place. Why? Because a number of my professors in college said I was too cautious and tried to mince and over-explain. (Like I'm doing here, somewhat.)

I at times change words because of its undertone. Or I’ll change words to make them more vivid. If you imagine a wording that is changed multiple times, the target it straddles depends on what I wanted to do the last time I changed it. But the balancing act between technical topics and friendly prose is uncertain. My effort is blown about by the winds of all too human missteps as well.

This is the first part of a broader answer to the issues Lumpy raised.

More to come....

The Black Box Brain II

2004-11-18T19:30:00.000-05:00

My last post was about how the brain-as-Turing-Machine doesn't help and in fact, can be said to lose the notion of any objective concept of the word objective itself.

Casting the brain as a Turing Machine (TM) helps us understand our processing a little more, but only if we think of the brain as not a Turing Machine, first. (In other words, we must think ourselves capable of determining non-trivial properties.) Otherwise, whether we are thinking what we think we are thinking would become problematical.

Think of what Im saying here: Even were thinking a precise and quantifiable process , we would never compute the TM: ComputesThinking because we could not ever tell which TMs would halt on the problem. Now, add to that picture, our ignorance of what thinking, or what we would quantify as thinking.

So to observe the brain as TM, the observer must be free from the rules of TMs, to some degree. Otherwise, we assume a bunch of stuff that is not provable: for example, that the brain TM computes the predicate “x is objective”

Of course, we cannot think as concretely about the processing power of the brain without this model. And perhaps, without it, we would flounder in the muddy waters of philosophy’s Consciousness. So whether or not this model fits, we will examine the brain as an undesigned computer.

InfiniteMonkeys.com

The brain, unlike the computer, is a black box. Sure, the computer is a black box to some. And sure, Information Technology advances with the value of limited knowledge.

The “value of limited knowledge” may sound like a confusing phrase. So let me try to explain in the next couple of paragraphs. (Anybody with a good level of understanding of computers, may find the next few paragraphs boring.)

The electronic-circuit-to-bit transformation helps to illustrate this concept of the value of limited knowledge. At the base of all computers, are electrons and their near-random behavior. Yet somehow, through the magic of circuits, those inconsistencies are smoothed out and produce the abstraction known as a bit. Thats precisely the way the machine looks at the product: They are bitsnothing more. They are abstracted above their mere circumstances and taken as something of a different kind.

The application of electronic circuits has an input and an output. We start from circuit technology. What we require from these circuits is that the wiring for a bit stays in the state in which it was put. It needs to change when it is instructed and keep the state until its instructed to change it. That consistency creates the output concept bit. Just like that every layer of technology layered on top of the basic machine, takes in its wild and woolly nature, and hands to other layers a simplified interface of that level.

Thus, you do not need to be an expert atomic physicist to design a circuit. And you do not need the knowledge to design a circuit to design a machine. And you do not need need the knowledge of somebody who designs an instruction set to program in machine code. (See abstraction at Wikipedia.org.)

And so it goes all the way up to you. Because of all the work that was done up to now, we require you only to know your way around windows, and perhaps the URL for Google. With all that you can make your way around the net, feeding your brain its own process.

So the computer is a black box to many and relies on the concept of black box to limit complexity of each task in almost all phases. But somebody knows each part. It’s all written down in a manual somewhere. So you can learn about electrons, and how circuits are made, and how circuits are turned into the abstractions of processors and storage devices (which is about the lowest level most of us Software designers ever tend to think about). And after moving on, you could learn how instructions are designed from bits. How software is composed from higher and higher abstractions.

If you could spend the time, and had the brains and money for it, you could know the computer from the electron to the CSS stylesheet your browser is using to tell it how to display this page. Theoretically, you could know it all. But you dont need to.

The Black Box Brain

2004-11-13T08:27:00.000-05:00

Some offer us a sleek view: the brain as computer.

We have not mastered the brain, the way we have the computer. Some bits of the physics on which a computer runs are not fully grasped, perhaps. But they are known to the degree that they will conduct streams of electrons down circuits in a regular pattern and that these patterns will hold state information. We designed the computer, first on paper, and then in silicon, in a way that we could say that a electromagnetic state mapped to a state in the design.

Nobody designed the brain, they tell us. And on the testing goes. Meanwhile, engineers have designed machines to compute and have proved them Turing Complete—or ready to compute any number of problems. And in making a scheme and store for a set of instructions, made the machines flexible computation machines, by rejecting designs that locked the engineer in to one problem per computer.

We have mastered the computer, because we built it. It wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know what it was doing. Not so the brain, apparently.

We can imagine the brain as a computer, but that doesn’t make it one. The brain-as-computer model helps us make concrete observations about thought and computation. But taking the brain as a computer just doesn’t hold the value that people tend to think it does.

The computer is limited. It has bounds; it has a problem domain. The trick is to figure out how to convert your task, into a similar task that can be solved in the problem domain.

It is by numbers and lookup tables that a machine deals with characters. Characters comprise text and the contents of text provide the machines interpretation of the user’s purpose in providing these characters. It stores “cat” as the sequence 67, 65, 104. It doesn’t relate that string to anything other than what some other software will tell it to relate to it. It cannot even paint those letters on your screen unless some pre-designed scheme tells it how to draw something based on that number. Needless to say, we’ve done that work.

Every problem that lies outside the given problem domain of the computer will need to have a set of designed steps which tells the computer how to transform each part of the problem into the problem domain of the computer. Needless to say, we’ve done a lot of work there.

Now, as much as I have been schooled in computer architecture and computability theory, I do not hold every scrap of knowledge about the computer. Very few application designers know the instruction set of a machine anymore. It is almost impossible to understand the high-level view of software, by thinking in terms of machine instructions.

It is better that a compiler handles these details and that our minds are set free to recall how to turn boxes that we drew on the page into patterns of text called “source code”. The compiler will then use the text to create instructions. I should not have to know how an “object” is composed in memory in order to design objects. All computers these days will need some scheme to represent the “object” so the charge to the compiler designer is “Thou shalt represent objects!”

So a computer doesn’t even begin to solve your problem, until you solve the problem of how it’s going to represent the state of your problem. The brain, on the other hand, solves problems—or so we think that’s what it is doing. We don’t know for sure.

The computer is sometimes called a Turing Machine, This term names the mathematical model of an algorithm (set of computational steps). But more specifically, the computer is more properly an example of a Universal Turing Machine. Programs, like your web browser, are also a type of Turing Machine, only more specific to the problem of retrieving text from the web and displaying it to you. The Universal Turing Machine takes a mathematical representation of another Turing Machine and processes it with an input. That is the universal TM (computer) takes the code for a specific TM (browser) and processes your input.

Now, in the field of Turing Machines (TMs) we have a thing called Halting Problem, which roughly says that there is no definite way for a universal TM (computer) to decide whether the input TM (program) will completely process a given input or even stop.

As well as having no precise specification of the brain or how my the sight of my mouse is “input” into my brain. But were there such a representation, we have no way of knowing whether the brain would have definitively processed, say the input of the eyes. And the shadow of Rice’s Theorem suggest that a non-trivial property, say “sight-processing” can never be determined by an exact algorithm—including, perhaps the algorithm the Brain-TM uses to analyze TMs.

So were the brain a TM, Computability Theory tells us that stating non-trivial properties of that TM are impossible by algorithm, which is all that the brain as TM can do. We come to a place where the brain either is a TM and if the universe is computable, then the TM cannot say non-trivial things about the universe with any certainty that could be checked by another algorithm. Thus objectivity breaks down.

Take it in this way: We take the Universe-TM as input and we process it within our Universal TM. Provided that we could specify exactly the process we came up with to process the computable universe, no one could ever “check our math” with an algorithm, that is their brain. They could not “run” our brain and pass the universe in as input and conclude any fixed thing. Nor could it be computed that we should ever fix any one things about the brain by following the steps of our brain.

In fact to say we could ever verify the statement brain₁ = brain₂ is to remove our mooring to fact. And again, with Rice’s Theorem, “processes like brain_x” is non-trivial and remains problematic for a brain or a computer to decide this.

Next: The Black Box Brain II

What’s Going on Here?!

2004-11-10T02:54:00.000-05:00

It says you’re a Fundamentalist Christian. You don’t sound much like a fundamentalist Christian to me. In your last post, you have a section called “No God Either” and you’re talking about how human life has no value. What’s going on here?

As I'm getting no comments at the moment, I thought I’d supply my own. Because I understand that some people would be confused about what I’ve been saying the past couple of posts. I am a fundamentalist Christian, but I also am a self-styled philosopher. I say in a previous post, that it is easy for me to believe in value, because I believe that value is set by the Objective Observer, God.

It requires no additional maneuvers to add belief in value to belief in God—in fact it coincides with what we understand as the details of value. Value is an opinion of worth that lives in the beholder.

What I try to outline in my second-to-last post is that constructing objective value for the unbeliever is harder, because using similar rules to (and dodges of) atheism, we can construct an Invincible Ignorance argument which denies value based on lack of evidence and wide disagreement.

For the progressive in our society, evolution is a simple fact. I’m not talking about firmness of belief, or whether they are willing to question it. I’m talking about the simplicity with which they take it into their worldview. It is, to some degree, compartmentalized.

If we are primates, what is the nature of primates? If we are animals, what is the nature of social animals?

Do not the males of a social species vie for dominant status? Yet, the progressive thinks dominance and status something to be rooted out. And he or she thinks that showy male behavior is a backward trait. It’s just silly, something we need to root out.

Is it not one of the distinctives about primates that they are sexually dimorphic? Yet the progressive thinks that we should rise above the sexism of brutes. “There is no gender” says one type of progressive.

Are not many animals territorial? Is it not true that the “sweet song” of the birds in the trees is simply the refrain of, “Get out of here! This area is mine! Don’t make me come over there! You’ve been warned! Get out of my yard!” Yet the progressive says “property is theft” without stopping to consider how deeply ingrained in us that “theft” is.

And yet it is the progressive who is most likely to say that others are absurd for not being able to embrace the fact of their animal nature. Who are they fooling? They can’t even look the beast in the eyes.

Faced with the items on the menu, they want to ask for another menu. “No thank you, I’d like a different human nature, please.”

So let me get back the main point of this post: I want to illustrate to people the evolution that they forget so easily in their narrative of Ascendant Man v2.0. Cultural “evolution” was furthered the most by transcendent, catholic faiths, which in the face of the visible inequality of man asserted the theoretical equality of man, consistent of their view of overcoming the flesh. Today’s progressive has co-opted the course of overcoming the flesh, without even an understanding of how or why, and a partial doubt that it can be done.

Meanwhile, the atheist communists have killed 100 million of our species throughout the 20^th century, because fellow humans refused to de-stratify themselves and surrender property to the group, as if that could be expected of any animal. This is not a general charge against atheists. Just because I have an atheist living next to me, does not mean that I need to fear being dragged to a re-education camp or purged. All I mean it to say is that some atheists are drastically naive about their own worldview.

One note, I should make here is that some view evolution in harmony God. I am not really challenging this view. I deal with the concept of creator-redundant evolution, or evolution that makes any creator redundant.

Next: The Black Box Brain

No Value

2004-11-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

My last entry was about the “value code word” and the tie between the concept of value and religion. This one talks about something that I call A-value-ism. The idea that there is no such a thing as value outside of human thought.

I propose an idea of A-value-ism. It is the cognate of Atheism. In other words just as Atheism is a simple lack of belief in God, avaluism is a lack of belief that things have innate value—or that value is a fuzzy concept that should be viewed akin to the Logical Positivists, that is a meaningless cipher.

Some of you are convinced already. You’re on your own from here. Skim down or stop reading as you please, almost all of the rest of the this is a challenge to valuism.

No God Either

The case proceeds by assuming that the common conclusions of Atheists are correct and will make a parallel case based on the soundness of the following principles.

It is a lack of belief, not a belief, and so therefore does not need to be supported with argument.
It makes no specific claims and therefore the burdon of proof falls on those who want to prove value. (This itself is not a claim, however much it resembles one.)
Nobody has ever seen a value—price tags do not count. They are statements of an existing supposition of value.
Ancients write about values, as well as “the Good” and a bunch of other ideas that express a personal preference for unseen things.
Humans disagree so much on what has value, if anything did. That we cannot be clear that we are speaking about any one thing.
Value is a pseudo-objective projection of personal preference. It runs similar to the statement that “Nickelback rules!” from a fan, suggesting that one's musical tastes are better than those of another.
The big universe is a big, scarry place. (Boo!)
Wishing doesn't make it so. The number of people who innately believe something doesn't make it so.
Any fuzzy notion that can kill a great number of people is dangerous and best abandoned.
By Ockham’s razor (or the Common Atheist interpretation) the negative claim shouild be preferred absent positive evidence.

I really rest with points 1 & 2. As long as I maintain an ignorance—some would maintain that's an invincible ignorance—and refuse to put forward a claim. My inclusion of points 7 and up will become evident below.

But from here, I would guess that I can suggest how many millions of people have been killed for not sharing the same values as others. All deaths of the Church and Crusades can be put in here.

But as well, Marxist revolutions of Russia and China, the atrocities of Pol Pot, and even ethnic cleansing currently around the world, can be put on the shoulders of the notion of one person judging human life according to his or her values. And if we cannot decide whether or not to place Hitler’s dead at the feet of religion (wrong) or scientism (right), we can still put them at the feet of having a value in the "aristocratic principle of nature" and value Hitler placed on tribal culture.

Are we dying for a basic confusion about our natural world? (9)

How many people have died for other people's values?

But that should only worry us if people had a value.

Modern Construction

Modernists have tried to assemble an idea of the value of a human life because we prefer to live. I think that is a fact whether or not we believe that humans have value, actually. That has to do with the ability to parse sentences, and has nothing to do with whether we actually have value. Much of what humans say, if I am to understand the Logical Positivist urge, is meaningless and emotional. The problem starts when we project our preferences out into the world.

The universe is a big scarry place (7), believing that humans have value is attractive in the face of a universe which belies that idea. But it can’t really be established and our preference for our life, may be counteracted with the preference of a vast number more for our death. So my value as a human being is at best questionable.

The idea that I have any value outside of someone's preference would require an objective standard. And again we have no evidence that such is the case. So I think that we should require all subsequent discussions about “innate human value” to start with the assumption that there is none, because via #10, it is preferable, more reasonable, etc.

In fact, arguing that human's have value is bizarre in the face of all the deaths caused by the unnatural concept of value. Perhaps the expression of objective value is nothing but the intolerance for a different preference, as it appears it has operated such a way in the past. It seems doubtful that we should ever trust the impulse that lead to the Inquisition, Crusades, Stalinist purges, Pol Pot, and the deaths of 9/11.

Modern Construction, v 2.0

Okay, let’s take another run at it. Some want to say that it is a way to mitigate between claims of value. But do we really want to mitigate between claims of imaginary creatures? And if we do, what about those who do not? Mitigating is one preference, fighting it out with bloody weapons is another. Saying that we’re all trying to mitigate is ignoring what many in the world are trying to do. So again, the preference to mitigate, seems to accept, at base, an idea of human value, where each person’s claim has as much value as it can hold.

But if we get real and translate value back to preference, then we find that popularity of preference is about all the value that we will ever be able to get a claim to hold. That is, a popular preference is more likely to have people fight for it as an outward expression of value, than an outnumbered value which seems to degrade the more popular preference.

Preference fully explains “value” in an economic setting. I have a preference for the way to spend my time. People have a preference for who’s hard work has value to them. The more people who are willing to buy my product as an expression of their preferences, the more products I can buy that indulge my preferences, the more time and capital I might prefer to spend producing that product.

Now, my economic rival may prefer that I not squeeze him out of the market, fairly or unfairly. He may also prefer that I not buy the time of certain skilled workers to kill him. But in a real world any of these three outcomes can help me indulge my preferences. Thus we see how it can be a real competitive advantage, used with discretion, to realize that the value of other people’s lives, when they do not provide an ends to our preferences is entirely a fiction.

People tend to put value on the death of other individuals as well. The dollars paid to a hit man or the military belie the idea that the death of others does not have a preferential value.

But wait! Is there no case that the people who provide the means for us to indulge our preferences have value? Well, I never said they didn't. People who provide us the means to express our preferences are very valuable to us. We prefer them to live, because replacing them is an unsure thing.

But what is this to the Militant anti-Westerner who sees my very preferences as imperialistic or the height of decadence? He may prefer my death to the challenge to his sainted value. He may find me an infidel or a dupe of capitalists to be removed in the jihad, revolution of the people, or retribution of their slain.

I prefer to live, sure. And that may be something to someone who shares my “values”, but my ability to live depends on what I or others are willing to forgo to keep me alive and what the opposition will forgo to kill me. If we prefer butter, we might not have guns. And if other prefer guns to butter and our death to our life, well (who can doubt that) that's the way things go.

The Code Word is “Value”

2004-11-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

I watched a discussion about the press and the US election on CSPAN this week. While politics is something I like to stay away from writing about, I wanted to reflect on the question raised by one lady that “values” was a new “code word” for religion.

However, it appears that given a chance to say that moral values influenced their vote, more conservatives than liberals chose that category for their vote. It was up to anybody who wanted to, to label their vote a practice of their moral values, but it was mostly conservative voters who did so.

Saying that that was a code word when “religious beliefs” was not offered up as a category, is ignoring who made up the labels. It is not so much as a self-description, as it is a preference among choices to describe yourself.

Still it is interesting that many perceive a relationship between religion and value. We religous believe in value the way that we believe in a god. And our view of value is similar to the way that economists use it: the value placed by a person or a group of people. In this fashion, God beholds all things and we observe the value He places on all things. It is a projected attribute that takes place only in the beholder.

Skeptics call this opinion or even illusion. In the world of the relativist skeptic, one can only speak of the value an individual places on things, not of value as if it were an objective attribute. The claim of value is something that I make, and then something that you differ with, and then something that a certain group of people hold in common at roughly the same level. We have no final arbiter of value, except popular opinion.

It is easy to see why a reasonably advanced skeptic might stop using the word “value” as if it had any meaning. It is also pretty easy to see why a believer or even a follower would gain an idea of value consistent with faith.

But, regardless, I would doubt that a “code word” can be used for the same thing on both sides of the political divide—unless it means simply “Yes, things have value from the supreme beholder of value, God himself.”

Lord Help Me, I've Done It!

2004-11-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

I've gotten myself a “blog”!

Now, I can throw half-digested thoughts out there (I call it Ruminations instead of Thoughts) . Now all can see contents of my mental “stomache” as my weak constitution could hold it back no longer, splashing onto your web screen.

However, I'm prompted here to remember what Pascal wrote in Pensees 152:

Most frequently we wish to know but to talk. Otherwise we would not take a sea voyage in order never to talk of it, and for the sole pleasure of seeing without the hope of ever communicating it.