God versus Science. Result just in...

I’ve said before that Tartarus, vast though it is, is a fairly empty place and gloomy with it. It doesn't produce an atmosphere conducive to discussing issues that are more germane to the world above. Hence most of what I’ve written here has been extremely self-indulgent and solipsistic. Updates are sporadic because I have little to cue me to write, not enough changes in Tartarus to provoke a reaction. Yesterday, however, whilst exploring down one of the many nameless corridors here, I entered a cavernous room that inexplicably contained a strong gale of hot, dry air and thousands of loose sheets of paper. The wind carried the sheets in strange balletic eddies before depositing them in the corners where they piled up like great, towering drifts of snow. More paper seemed to be entering the room by some means all the time so that this process appeared to be endless. The paper piled up. I made my way to one side of the room and found it to filling up with discarded sheets from sacred texts and religious treaties on the nature of God, the formation of the world and the origins of mankind. In the opposite side of the room all the sheets were scientific papers and articles refuting much of what was in the other side and making claims that atheism was thereby a sound position to take.

Whilst glancing through various stray texts, it occurred to me that when people pick up this science versus religion debate, they tend to fail to distinguish the true quiddity of the terms. Science and atheism are not synonymous and religion is not offering, or trying to offer, any scientific proof for the existence of God. It is an apples and oranges argument. Religion offers no proof and science will give no credence to things that are not evidentially provable. As such they are not well made for sensible debate.

Religion attempts to offer us a route to understanding how moral codes are derived from the notion that a God exists. This invariably requires that very human attributes are ascribed to God in order to support some notion of divine providence. It is the lack of rationality of this route from the transcendent that concerns scientists as it cannot be translated into terms that would be acceptable to scientific method.

Science, however, is amoral. It is not focused on the same issues of how we should live our lives but is more concerned with empirical discovery to further our understanding of the universe in which we live in order to, in the main, have more control over our own destiny and provide a platform for further scientific discovery.

Science gets itself into difficulties when it fails to recognise the limits of its methods. We often perceive science to be the epitome of understanding whereas, in fact, it is, in the main, a method for approximating likely outcomes. It is about constructing models that generally seem to reflect empirical experience to an acceptable degree of tolerance. What it does not do, though, is provide an exact understanding of the world as it actually is nor can it answer all questions. If scientists attempt to answer a question that is couched in a way that requires the answer to be derived from inductive reasoning it is already failing to comply with the central tenets (dogma even) for valid scientific discovery. Just because I have only ever seen white swans does not give me the scientific support for saying that all swans are white (even though my personal experience may strongly suggest it). This is why I believe that atheism is not really a scientific position. It is denying the existence of God through induction – “because I have seen no evidence of God, God can’t exist”.

A scientist can of course critique religion and religious dogma for failing to be soundly based. The mistake, though, is to say that because the logic of religion fails to be scientifically convincing that there can be no God because this makes God’s existential status dependent on religion whereas there can be no causal link, logically or chronologically. This is where so many atheists make their mistake by refuting God’s existence by critiquing something that has no causal link to God’s existence. All that these people can do is to dispute the validity of religious dogma not the existence of God.

It is easy for scientific thought to critique religious dogma for failing to operate in an evidential way and it is easy for religious thought to critique science for failing to deliver moral guidance. We’re back to the apples and oranges. Science is amoral so we should not be using religious intuition to critique it and religion is faith based and therefore cannot be critiqued for failings in scientific rigour. The religious should stop trying to intuit scientific propositions derived from religious principles (e.g. the Sun revolves round the Earth, the Earth is only a few thousands years old and so on) and the scientists should stop trying to induct propositions on the nature of God by spouting science (you heard me, Dawkins).

So where does that leave us? God knows. No he doesn’t. Yes he does. No he doesn’t, he can’t. Can so. Can’t. Can….etc.

Sometimes I think I’m the only person who is genuinely solipsistic…

We all like to think we’re special, think we’re something different. I’m by no means a committed blogger, as is clearly evidenced here (and how my soul recoils at the sheer etymological ugliness of the word ‘blogger’ and its kin), but is not this activity of blogging itself an attempt to express this difference, make it more apparent to the world that we are here? We’re not just existing, we have something to say. Or perhaps we’re not all that arrogant. But all the same, we could just watch TV, if we wanted our views to go unheard.

Small cries, then, in a big world. This is also part of what I believe drives people, myself included of course, to decide to become writers. It is a belief that our views and perspectives, imagination and linguistic brilliance will be of wider interest to all those people out there and with this will come recognition and success. Blogging (do I really need to keep using that term?) is some sort of ersatz form of creative writing, or at least can be, and can easily consume, I would imagine, time that should be put to more constructive use. I say this because an awful lot of people seem to be writers or express an interest in writing and I cannot always tell whether this means anything beyond maintaining a web log itself. We take up writing to validate our unique difference but, on doing a quick search, an expressed interest in writing is shared by another 189,000 people on this site alone. Although there is obviously a degree of rounding there (and the number may be more of an order of magnitude than scientifically accurate), it is also known that there are others here who have not declared their interests and could well add to this figure.

In days prior to the preponderance of user-defined internet content, you could decide to become a writer and find that you alone, amongst your friends and acquaintances, had this ambition. You would feel differentiated and perhaps encouraged by this. But now the internet can demonstrate that you are not unique or special at all, pretty much everyone is at it. Flicking through the blogs of those with an interest in writing (and I have applied no real scientific statistical analysis behind this) I start to develop a sense that many of the women seem also to like cats and many of the men profess accompanying interests in music and playing guitar. I’m guilty of falling into that male stereotype (there’s a pun there if you look hard enough) – although guitar owning probably describes my status better than guitar playing.

Why am I bothering to bang on about this? What has this got to do with anything at all? Well I’m not sure but it would seem that to declare yourself interested in writing is both easy and common place. But these days the poverty of such a declaration is more easily exposed. To be a self-proclaimed writer differentiates you by a fraction of one percent from all other human beings, it is no achievement in itself, even as an ambition. What makes the difference is not the intent but the writing itself. You need to forget your orgulous posturing and the existential aggrandisement that may be your hope from writing and think merely of the words. The words, if written well, will validate you, will determine whether you are indeed a writer or just someone with a vague and misdirected interest. Having the desire to be a great writer has no worth, desiring to write well, and pursuing that desire until you attain it, does – or so it would appear to me.

But Tartarus Central is not really about attaining things, or moving on in any way. It is, as far as I can fathom, more to do with adopting transient aspirations that are never really pursued with any commitment and vigour. Not everyone gets this, for instance Sisyphus continues to make one hell of a racket down here by persistently lugging his boulder around. He should just sit down and reflect on how great it would be to get the boulder up that slope rather than go through the futile activity of trying to actually do it. But he’s always grumpily muttering about “miscarriages of justice” and “I’ll bloody show them” and won’t be discouraged. I’m in half a mind to ask Gyges to confiscate the boulder, I wonder what Sisyphus would do with his time then.

"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." - Camus

“Yeah, right. Have you spoken to him recently?” – me

“No.” - Camus

Techno notice

Last night I found myself, once more, attending the annual dinner of the Dunwich Observatory Academy of Science. This year the dinner was held in the well appointed surroundings of Dunwich Preceptory; the observatory facilities, themselves, being out of action yet again this year.

I think I signed up for some Academy newsletter once when I was at university (as it contained a short piece on Plato’s Music of the Spheres) and have received tickets to the dinner on an annual basis ever since. This is despite several changes of address on my part, of which I’m reasonably sure I’ve never informed the Academy. Even after all these years I still think my invitation is a mistake as I’m not a scientist (I did Classics and Philosophy at University) and have no connection to the Academy in betwixt these annual dinners.

The dinners are the usual thing, long refectory tables, plenty of wine and food (that is for some reason always seafood – which I can’t abide), a few awards and Academy announcements, and a guest speaker (who was this year one of Tolstoy’s descendents who is a senior radio astronomer in California and who’d just published some tract or other after an assignment at Arecibo). Things don’t really relax, however, until the speeches are over and everyone has had enough wine to be less guarded, with their fellow scientists, about exactly what it is they’re working on. If you thought that literary types were a bit defensive and suspicious of plagiarism at every turn, then you’ve never spent time amongst a bunch of scientists who’re all after the same funding.

Anyhow, that’s all pretty much by the by. To get to the point at last, I end up sitting opposite this chap with a French sounding name (Carpentier, Chaproniere or something, I didn’t quite catch it) who was in fact an American and working for some AI research lab out in the San Fernando Valley. I suspect that he is one of those most dangerous of scientists, the ones who hoard boxed sets of Star Trek - The Next Generation and other sci-fi shows in their otherwise lonely apartments. Those whose research interests are more guided by the low-rate fiction in which they indulged than by anything more worthy.

Apparently he’d recently done a TV series because he mentioned it with tiresome regularity (“…in episode two I discussed…”, “…one of the major themes of the series was around this exact point…”, “.. I first met Dr. Whoever when we were filming interviews for the show and he believes…”) – he went on like this throughout the evening. I don’t watch television so I’ve no idea whether this series made it over here or not, I certainly didn’t recognise the chap. I think this lack of recognition initially irked him but then he seemed to have seized on my ignorance of his celebrity as a personal mission of conversion and by the end of the evening I probably knew the details of his show better than he knew the names of the bridge crew of the Enterprise.

What got my fellow diner going, wine notwithstanding, was the guest speaker.

“Interesting to see that Tolstoy guy up there, don’t you think?” he said as the speaker sat down and the applause subsided.

“Yes, I never erm … never thought you could …deduce so much from…erm those spectrums-”

“-No I mean how he’s up there doing the whole science bit not trying to bang out a novel.”

“You think writing is some genetic heritage?”

“Not at all. That’s not what I’m driving at. I think he gets it. Gets the idea that the arts are dead.”

“I thought he was just interested in pulsars and their extra-solar planets”, I hadn’t been paying much attention but I was pretty sure that both the word “pulsar” and the term “extra-solar planets” had been used more than once by Dr. Tolstoy but I don’t think my companion was listening to me now, he’d mounted his horse and was going to charge right on through the conversation until he reached the other side no matter what I had to say.

“You must have caught my show. I discussed this idea in the first episode where I explore where humanity is going and the things that we’ll leave behind. One of the first to go is the arts. Did you catch it?”

“I don’t actually watch much television these days.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

And so it goes on. After a brief exchange where I establish that I’m not kidding and he suggests that my life is somehow poorer for its lack of access to popular science shows with high production values he gets to the point of his thesis about the arts being the first against the wall when the techno-revolution happens.

His thesis went like this. Whereas for most of the backend of the Twentieth Century researchers in Artificial Intelligence had been obsessed with computer technology, voice recognition and chess – and had essentially got nowhere beyond the humbling of a few Russian chess grandmasters - the Twenty First Century emphasis was on Synthetic Intelligence (SI, he called it) and this was already taking giant steps forwards. SI is founded on building enhanced capabilities to human intelligence, exploiting the fact that our current brain utilization is low and memory unreliable. If we can improve our ability to think and improve our memory recall we suddenly have a new tool to invent even more ingenious adaptations – and so it goes on. This is all done with a combination of computer chip implants and gene manipulation therapy.

In less than a decade, he says, you’ll be able to have an implant that will act as a precise memory store. You’ll no longer forget things or recall them imprecisely. Couple this with the fact that you’ll also be able to boost the efficiency of both cerebral hemispheres by a combination of hardwiring and neuro-chemical gene enhancements, you'll not only be able to recall more, you'll be able to think more too. It is at this point that he claims the arts die. There are two factors to this, he postulates, the first is that it will be within the capacity of every human, enhanced in this way, to produce a Nobel Prize-winning novel or a painting the equivalent of a Carravagio or suchlike and therefore it becomes a devalued exercise. The other factor is that these people will be more fascinated by the limitless possibilities of advancing their new science to be stirred anymore by art that thrives, not on the perfection of humanity, but on its imperfections.

Each step in SI will open up new horizons of invention. It becomes not just self-perpetuating but self-accelerating. The greatest thinkers of today will seem like simple children to tomorrow’s citizens. We will no longer need art or artists as we will be fascinated in ourselves. Happiness becomes a setting and not a mood reaction. We can banish sadness forever at the flick of a nano-switch. And so he went on.

Of course, he predicts, not everyone will be so lucky. It’s going to cost a lot of money to get the enhancements. Soon there’ll be a divide between the enhanced humans and the “organic variety” as he so blithely put it. “This is one revolution that you don’t want to be on the outside of”, was his parting shot as he got up to find, no doubt, another victim for his evangelism.

I think the upside of his forecast for humanity is that, in this new world order of his, there’ll be no call to give him another series on TV. Sometimes even Tartarus Central starts to look sane….

Speaking figuratively...

Terence J Crabber’s The Chronicle of Figs. You may not have read it, not many people have. It is a large tome that never made it into a popularising paperback edition. Anyhow if you do get hold of a copy I recommend that you spend some time leafing through it as Crabber has a lot to say. Admittedly most of it is quite closely related to figs, the history of their cultivation and their wide culinary and medicinal application but if you can read between the lines it is possible to pick out some essence of Crabber’s philosophy of life and that, I think, can be more widely applied.

What drove Crabber to invest thirty four years of his life to the painstaking construction of The Chronicle is not well established. He died at the age of sixty seven from the dehydrating effects of a prolonged bout of diarrhoea. At that point he was pretty much a recluse spending his days in even measure between his glasshouses in Kent and his study in the adjoining house. Even his research trips to the British Museum Reading Rooms that, along with his excursions to selected locations of the Mediterranean, the Levant and North Africa, had been such a characteristic feature of his early studies had declined to nothing in his last five or six years of life.

The fact that he died with no family or close friends and left neither diaries nor any obvious autobiographical texts means that most of what we know of Crabber has been gleaned from the text of The Chronicle itself, a work that Crabber finally completed, in sporadic bursts, in those final days. Over and above the fascinating biographical details that can be teased from the text, the overwhelming sense one gets from reading The Chronicle is that Crabber, through his single-minded pursuit of figs and all things figgy, had in fact stumbled across both a consistent epistemological framework for metaphysical analysis and a rather fine variant on the date and walnut cake (where it is the walnuts, and not the dates, that are replaced with figs).

When I was at University, too many years ago to mention now, there was a miniature underground academic industry of people writing exegeses and commentaries on sections of The Chronicle. No one was doing this as part of their main course of study, no department would countenance such a thing, but instead it was all done in spare moments, the papers and pamphlets circulated amongst the clique of initiates. Some of the more bawdy or anarchistic commentaries were occasionally left, mischievously, in department coffee areas or slipped under the study doors of the more staid professors and lecturers. These always created quite a stir and, for a time, the college library’s edition of The Chronicle of Figs was removed from the stacks to try to put an end to such things. It was eventually returned after accusations of censorship and illiberalism were levelled at the college administrators, forcing them to relent. Within days new commentaries were doing the rounds. In fact I would guess that most people who have come across Crabber and his Chronicle would have done so through these, or similar, commentaries rather than through actually reading The Chronicle itself.

Anyhow, I’m straying from the point, what I am really trying to say here is that just because a book is called The Chronicle of Figs doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain great philosophical insight and, conversely, just because a book purports to be of great philosophical importance doesn’t mean that it contains a fig of truth.

Now I wonder whether there is a library anywhere down here in Tartarus Central…

What's behind this door? Oh...

This is most peculiar. I seem to have found myself back where I started, back in Tartarus Central. Nearly two years have passed and I’m back here in these gloomy halls. I have gained an extra daughter but apart from that nothing has changed in all this time. I’m no nearer to becoming a writer than I am to becoming a giraffe (mind you these shirts are getting tight around the collar, so that might not be entirely accurate).

What the hell have I been doing with all these days? That path paved with good intentions was a complete dud. It looked so good to start with but just brings me back here again.

I could just sit here and sulk...

Or I could give it another go...

May be with fewer pretensions and less pretentiousness