Watching Watchmen

Yes, I know it was released over 6 months ago, but I’ve just seen it. I don’t normally review movies on this blog – in fact, I’ve only done it once before: Man on Wire (refer The philosophy of Philippe Petit, Oct. 08), and that’s a completely different kettle of cinematic and philosophical fish.

But Watchmen is such a good movie on so many levels, and it encapsulates so much of the American psyche, especially the not-so-recent paranoia of the Cold War, as well as our universal infatuation with violence. And the cinematic references: Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove being the most obvious; both relevant to the cold war era. I am an outsider, regarding America, so my perspective may be different to those who imbibe and live its culture every day.

In Australia it got great reviews, with one notable exception: Evan Williams panned it for its gross glorification of violence as he saw it. Even the pacifists in this movie seem to thrive on violence. One can’t help but compare it to Sin City, which is an iconic movie for technical reasons rather than story content, not to mention a stellar cast. It was clearly influenced by Quentin Tarantino, whereas Watchmen probably owes more to the Matrix trilogy. But both films explore the moral landscape and both are based on comic books or graphic novels. It seems that this genre is becoming increasingly obsessed with violence, with a particular emphasis on the ‘graphic’ in graphic novel, and this is reflected in the movie renditions of the same.

I think the violence in movies has had one tragic consequence in real life. In the last 5 years, in Australia, there has been an increase in alcohol-fueled street violence with people receiving life-long and life-losing injuries. I think movies portray an unrealistic expectation that you can belt the crap out of someone and only inflict superficial injuries. In the case of super-heroes, the story can justify it, but the violence is part of the entertainment in these movies – it doesn’t really condemn it the way we do in real life. Cinema has replaced the Roman gladiators without the leftover corpses upsetting our sense of fun.

One of the characters in the movie, The Comedian, is quite literally a psychopath, yet he is clearly tolerated by his brethren because he’s on the side of 'good'. He is an allegory for the darker side of the American psyche, in particular, what Dick Cheney referred to as the ‘dark side’ of foreign operations. There is a scene in a bar in Vietnam where The Comedian shoots a pregnant woman, apparently pregnant with his child, but first he delivers a diatribe on why he hates her country, even though he’s supposed to be there to ‘help’ it.

Back in America, he continues the same psychopathic behaviour towards what he sees as America’s internal enemies. The Comedian pretty well encapsulates the contradictions that the rest of us wrestle with when we observe the dialectic in America between extreme right wing and liberal politics that inevitably overflows onto the global stage.

I’ve said in a previous post on Storytelling (Jul.09) that comic books are our equivalent to Greek mythology, and, like all mythology, allegory should be its core ingredient. In this regard, I felt Watchmen doesn’t disappoint, especially with the character, Doctor Manhattan. Named after the Manhattan project (as the movie reveals for those who don’t make the connection) which effectively ended WWII with the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb.

One of the advantages of reviewing a film so long after its release is I don’t feel guilty about giving away the ending. Doctor Manhattan effectively becomes an allegory for God, especially when it’s his ability to destroy on a cataclysmic, even biblical, scale that finally achieves world peace. This is a particularly pessimistic view of humanity, exemplified by the Bible in my view. We are inherently self-destructive by nature and only a fear of a superhuman (therefore supernatural) force can stop us from achieving our genetically determined destiny (in biblical terms, original sin). So, in a way, it’s a cautionary tale – but the moral of the tale in my view is that paranoia is what will lead to our self-annihilation and not Divine vengeance.

There are 2 things that make Watchmen an exceptional movie. Firstly, it’s cinematic rendering is close to perfect. A combination of film noir and graphic realisation that sets the standard above anything else I’ve seen, including The Matrix and Sin City. But it’s the rendering of the characters that really sets this movie above the norm for comic book movies. The romance between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre is completely believable. Only Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns compares in the genre and Singer is a master storyteller. But all the characters, in particular, the deeply, psychically wounded Rorschach, have a psychological depth one doesn’t expect in these movies. Again, I would reference Singer’s original X-Men as one of the few comparable movies in the genre, and of course Heath Ledger’s memorable rendition of The Joker in The Dark Knight.

But it’s as allegory for the American psyche, in all its contradictions, that I feel this movie delivers. It competes with Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove on that level, both of which it unashamedly honours, and that’s the highest praise I can give it.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the soundtrack - from Philip Glass to Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix - what more could one ask for?

Quantum Tunneling

In some respects this logically follows on from a post I wrote in July this year, Quantum Mechanical Philosophy, which is one of the more esoteric essays I’ve written on this blog. Hopefully, this essay will be less so, as the source material is well written and aimed at the uninitiated.

But I need to recount the gist of that post to make the relevant connection: specifically, the enigmatic Bell’s Theorem or Bell Inequality. To summarise, Bell’s Theorem arose from a thought experiment created by Einstein in an attempt to prove Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics (the famous ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’) wrong.

The thought experiment was elaborated upon by Podolsky and Rosen, so it became known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or EPR experiment. It examines the purported ‘action-at-a-distance’ phenomenon predicted by quantum physics for certain traits of particles or photons, which Einstein described, quite accurately, as ‘spooky’. If you have 2 particles with a common origin (could be photons with opposite polarisation or subatomic particles like electrons with opposite ‘spins’), then separate them over any distance whatsoever, you will not know what the spin or polarity, or whatever quantum mechanical trait you are measuring, is, until you take the actual measurement. The ‘spooky’ bit is that as soon as you make the measurement the ‘twin’ particle will instantaneously become the opposite. Before the measurement or observation is made the particles are in, what’s called, a ‘superposition’ of states – it can be either one or the other.

Einstein realised that this conjecture contradicted his special theory of relativity, which states that no signal or means of communication between particles of any kind can travel faster than the speed of light, which had already been confirmed by experiment. John Bell developed a mathematical equation that analysed correlations of hypothetical results from the thought experiment that would categorically prove either Einstein or Bohr wrong.

Alain Aspect developed a real experiment to test Bell’s Inequality (made the thought experiment actually happen) and proved Einstein wrong (long after Einstein had died, by the way).

As I point out in that previous post, the upshot of this is that either faster-than-light actions are possible (called non-locality) or there is no objective reality. Non-locality is self-explanatory (you can’t communicate faster than the speed of light) but no objective reality means that the thing doesn’t exist until someone measures it or takes an observation. I discuss this in more detail (lots of detail) in my previous post, but that’s effectively the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: at the subatomic scale, particles don’t exist until they are measured or observed. A less extreme and more popular interpretation is that they remain in a superposition of states until they interact with something else. If you want to delve deeper, read my previous post, but you may be none the wiser. The philosophical implications of this have never been truly resolved.

My conclusion was to accept non-locality (faster-than-light connections) in order to keep objective reality, and I made specific reference to David Bohm’s unpopular interpretation, known as the ‘hidden variables theory’. Bohm believed that there was a hidden set of parameters that govern the particles which we can’t see or detect.

To quote David Deutsch (who doesn’t agree with Bohm at all): ‘A non-local hidden variable theory means, in ordinary language, a theory in which influences propagate across space and time without passing through the space in between.’

And this leads me to quantum tunneling, because that’s exactly what quantum tunneling does, only it happens over short distances, not the distances used in the EPR experiment, which could theoretically include the other side of the universe.

I’ve just read an excellent book on this subject, Zero Time Space subtitled, How Quantum Tunneling Broke the Light Speed Barrier, authored by Gunter Nimtz and Astrid Haibel. Originally published in German in 2004, it was published in English in 2008. This book could be read by people with only a rudimentary knowledge of physics, as it contains only a few simple equations, among them Planck’s equation: E = hf where E is energy, f is frequency of a ‘wave’ and h is Planck’s constant, 6.6 x 10^-34 Js (Joules seconds). The authors also include Snell’s law of refraction and the universal wave equation of wavelength times frequency equals velocity (I can’t find the symbol, lambda, for wavelength, in my arsenal of fonts). One of the annoyances is that there is a type-setting error in this particular equation (in the book). If someone is going to include equations, especially for people unfamiliar with them, I wish they could at least get them checked during type-setting. The same applies to Richard Feynman’s excellent book on relativity theory, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces where I found 3 type-setting errors amongst the equations scattered throughout the book. In both cases the books are aimed at people who are not familiar with the material, which means they won’t know the errors are there.

Putting that one (some may say petty) criticism aside, it’s a very good book on quantum mechanics for people who know very little about physics. It includes a short history of physics leading up to Einstein’s theories of relativity (with particular reference to the Special Theory) as well as quantum mechanics. They do this because the whole point of the book is to highlight how quantum tunneling breaks Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and therefore reinforces non-locality, as I described in my previous post. So the authors go to some pains to give the reader an overview of both Einstein’s theory and quantum mechanics, in conjunction with the historical context. It’s very well done.

Nimtz and Haibel, by the way, make no reference to Bell’s Theorem, as it would probably confuse readers who are unfamiliar with it – I hope I haven’t put people off by referencing it here. Having said that, they do discuss ‘entanglement’ towards the end of their book, which is the state I described above concerning ‘twin’ particles interacting at a distance. In particular, they raise this phenomenon in their lengthy discussion on causality, as they are at pains to explain that ‘tunneling’ does not affect causality as some people might be led to believe. Even so, it still manages to confound common sense, as I explicate below.

In the forward to the book, they briefly discuss the ‘myth… about the half-life of knowledge… It suggests that our knowledge is being declared invalid every five years by new knowledge.’ They then go on to dispel the most common representation of that myth: ‘Newton’s theory of gravitation is still valid, even in the light of the theory of relativity… Einstein’s theory has extended theory rather than disproved Newton’s theory.’

I made the same point in my essay on The Laws of Nature (March 08), explaining that Einstein’s equations reduce to Newton’s when certain parameters become negligible. The authors raise this point, because, whilst quantum tunneling appears to contradict Einstein’s special theory of relativity, in their own words: ‘Einstein deals with free space, whereas tunneling is not free space.’ In other words there are constraints on relativity theory in the same way that there are constraints on Newton’s theory, but there are various aspects of nature where one is more significant than the other. It’s one of the reasons that I’m a bit sceptical about a grand unified theory (GUT), a meta-theory of everything. Many people would love to prove me wrong, and a part of me would like to see that, but another part wouldn’t because I don’t believe there will ever be an end to physics.

During this discussion they make another statement, relevant to the stability of scientific knowledge: ‘Mathematical proof has been regarded since Pythagoras and Plato as eternal, metaphysical truth.’ A statement I would agree with. For example, Reimann geometry hasn’t displaced Euclidean geometry, it has just extended our knowledge, both of the mathematical world and the physical world (through Einstein’s theory of General Relativity).

I’ve discussed on other posts, the relationship between mathematics and the natural world (refer The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, March 09), but no where is that more significant than in quantum mechanics. QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), for which Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga jointly won the Nobel Prize, is the most successful theory of all time. Without mathematics, quantum mechanics would be indecipherable, quite literally. Intriguingly, there are imaginary numbers in quantum theory that are completely relevant to quantum tunneling. Without imaginary numbers (created by the square route of -1, called i) quantum mechanics would never have been articulated as a meaningful theory at all.

As Nimtz and Haibel point out, it is the imaginary component of the equation that does the tunneling. When this was first derived, people just assumed that these imaginary components were unnecessary remnants of the mathematics, but that’s not the case. When tunneling occurs there is an interface where part of the signal is reflected and part is transmitted through ‘the tunnel’. The part that is reflected is mathematically ‘real’ and the part that is transmitted is mathematically ‘imaginary’. (I've since been informed this is not correct - refer Addendum 2 below.) A tunnel, by the way, is a barrier, where the particle or wave theoretically can’t travel, because it doesn’t have enough energy. The authors point out that it even occurs in the sun, otherwise the fusion, which gives us sunlight, would never occur. I should add that quantum tunneling is a feature of all transistor devices. In fact, it's the very feature that makes transistors work (called 'tunnel diode' by Nimtz and Haibel).

Both of the authors have performed experiments, to not only detect quantum tunneling, but to also measure the time elapsed. As predicted by Thomas Hartman in 1962, there is a time elapse at the ‘entrance’ to the tunnel, or the ‘interface’, between the medium and ‘the tunnel’, but the actual time spent in the tunnel is zero. This is called the Hartman effect. To quote the authors: ‘So the wave packet spreads in the tunnel in zero time and is everywhere from the entrance to the exit. This non-local phenomenon makes one feel eery.’ An understatement, if I’ve ever read one.

One of the authors, Gunter Nimtz, participated in an experiment that tunneled Mozart’s symphony in g-minor through a waveguide at superluminal speed: 4.7 times the speed of light. The elapsed time occurred at the entrance to the tunnel, as predicted by Hartman, not in the tunnel itself. In an exposition, that I will not try to repeat here, the authors explain how this quirk of nature (the elapsed time at the entrance to the tunnel) allows superluminal communication without impacting causality. The speed in the tunnel is infinite – as the Americans like to say: go figure. The title of the book, Zero Time Space, is therefore entirely appropriate.

They end the book with a brief description of wormholes and hypothetical warp drives, beloved of Sci-Fi writers, like me, that require exotic negative gravity amongst other improbabilities.

Of all the incredible manifestations of the universe, only consciousness is arguably more inexplicable or more mysterious (but no more weird) than quantum phenomena. If we didn’t observe it, no one would believe it. And if we didn’t have the mathematics to describe it, no one would be able to fathom it, even remotely.

Addendum 1: I came across this - it's very entertaining as well as informative.

Addendum 2: I would like to acknowledge Timmo (refer comments thread below) who has valiantly tried to correct all my mistakes. In particular, that the imaginary component of Schrodinger's equation plays no greater role in tunneling than the real component, if I understand Timmo correctly. Also he points out that tunneling and non-locality are independent phenomena, and possibly I misled people on that point.

He also corrects some faux pas I made concerning the Lorenz transformation and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in response to comments I've made since the post was posted.

I confess I don't know as much as I appear to, and I wish I understood more than I actually do.

And I would like to thank Timmo for reminding me of how much I don't know.

Utopia or dystopia

I’ve written on this subject before (Living in the 21^st Century, Sep.07; and The Problem with Democracy, Jun.08 ) but a recent conversation (with Dino at Coffee Plus) in combination with reading about ‘dystopian fiction’ as a subgenre of science-fiction, has led me to revisit it. A lengthy essay I wrote called Human Nature (back in Nov.07) may also be relevant to this topic.

I’ve been reading The Science Fiction Handbook by M. Keith Book and Anne-Marie Thomas, which is a very erudite analysis of various ‘seminal’ works of science-fiction along with their authors. In particular, their analysis of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (which I haven’t personally read) that works on the premise that humans appear genetically predisposed for self-destruction. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is another example, though Wells’ exploration is different: humans evolve into 2 species, the Morlocks and the Eloi, that symbiotically exist in an extreme master-slave relationship, or predator-prey relationship, to be more exact.

But Butler’s scenario is that our hierarchical nature, in combination with our competitiveness and addiction to capitalism, will inevitably lead to overpopulation, war and nuclear destruction. I’m not so pessimistic, and perhaps Butler isn’t either – after all, it’s a cautionary tale. I’ve left out the main plot, an alien invasion by the ‘Oankali’, who incorporate their DNA into ours and create a new species, which is the major premise of the trilogy (or so I believe).

In an issue of COSMOS earlier this year, there was a feature article on the overpopulation of Earth and the consequences thereof. As I said in the introduction, I’ve raised this issue in earlier posts. The COSMOS article used an island metaphor which I thought was very apt. We are turning our planet into an island, but once we have over-resourced it we don’t have another island to go to. There are some people who believe that planetary colonialism will save us, but, if that’s the case, it means we haven’t addressed the problem, and, worse still, we aren’t seeking a solution.

There have been a number of mass-extinctions in Earth’s history, not just the dinosaurs, but at no other time has the rate of global species extinction been as high as it is now, and the cause is obvious: it is us. This is just one symptom, like climate change, that we are simply too successful (as a species) for our own good. If a species at the top of the food chain eats all the food then it ensures its own extinction. In effect, that’s what we are doing despite all of our harvesting techniques. We cannot live on this planet with only a handful of species to sustain us – it doesn’t work like that. Biodiversity means a healthy planet, and it’s no exaggeration to say that we are behaving like a disease.

In the last century, we have demonstrated, beyond dispute, that capitalism is the most successful economical model ever devised. But it, too, is too successful for its own good. In the recent economic crisis we have seen how the smallest dent in ‘growth’ is considered devastating. Unfortunately, economic growth means growth of everything, including: products, housing, infrastructure and, of course, people. You don’t have to have a PhD to see where this will eventually lead us, yet everyone appears to be in denial.

The ideal economic climate, as the recent ‘downturn’ revealed, is to maximise employment to maximise spending to maximise consumerism to maximise production to maximise employment, in an ever increasing cycle with no limit except the Earth’s capacity to sustain it. And it’s the last bit that everyone conveniently ignores.

As my friend Dino pointed out, in the ideal economy everyone should be in debt, which is what makes it so susceptible to bust-boom cycles, that we take for granted as being part of our modern environment. There is another side to this as well: I’m talking from my privileged position of being a member of a Western democratic society. We still live in a feudal society where the privileged few live at the expense of the massive poor, only the feudalism occurs on a global scale not a national one, so we don’t notice it so much. But just look at Africa and some South East Asian countries where goods and resources are provided at dirt-cheap prices for our wealthy consumption. The free-market is supposed to ‘flatten’ this inequality out, but I only see the converse: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – the gap widens.

But even in our special, privileged society so many people are not satisfied; in fact, they actually hate their jobs, yet will be demonstrably upset if their job is taken away from them. Our world, in short, is full of contradictions, yet no one seems to notice, or, if they do, they pretend they don’t exist.

I strongly believe that the 21^st Century is going to be crunch time, whether we want to face it or not, but it’s hard to imagine anything is going to change until nature forces us to. The result, I fear, will be wars on a scale we’ve never before witnessed, which leads one to consider Butler’s speculative fiction.

In an early post on this blog, I wrote an essay on Evil (Oct.07), whereby I proposed a thesis that evil is a logical consequence of our evolutionary heritage to be territorial, which is not unique to the human species. Predators are territorial for the very reason I gave above: they need to control their resources, and they do so by rejecting intruders. This is true of lions, magpies, apes and humans, along with innumerable other species. So humans are xenophobic by nature, as history demonstrates, but there is a counter-culture to this. Humans are also highly empathetic, as are other species as well, which creates a natural antithesis to xenophobia and has allowed us to develop multi-culturally in many parts of the globe. But it’s the constraint on resources that can turn tolerance into intolerance more quickly than you can say refugees.

In my essay on Human Nature, I make the point that there are 3 human traits that have shaped our modern world. The first is our need for social contact, without which, we wouldn’t even have language; fundamental to our ability to think. But this also leads to the tribalism and its inherent problems that I alluded to in the previous paragraph. The second trait is the natural search for leadership in any group endeavour. Our hierarchical nature, that Butler apparently sees as a genetic fault, is actually a strength if one allows the group to choose their own leader, which is the fundamental dynamic of democracy. The third is that every individual has a tendency to achieve their best in their chosen field. This wasn’t always the case, and still isn’t in many cultures, where discrimination based on class, wealth and sex were the biggest obstacles and still are in some places.

I don’t have any easy answers to this, but I see some contradictions that may eventually resolve themselves when we are forced to face them. There is no utopia, I only see evolution, but it may well be Kuhnian rather than Darwinian. To obtain a sustainable future without losing our ability for creativity and material progress will require a change to the paradigm of infinite growth, and that means population growth must become stabilised. In many Western cultures this has already happened with the changing role of women, and this should not be reversed. Feminism, in its own way, may well save the planet, but it won’t be enough. The economic paradigm needs to change so that recycling replaces raw materials, with incentives to have long-lasting products in lieu of short-life ones that currently drive the capitalist machine. Sustainability will be forced upon us, and it’s technologically achievable, but politically difficult. Corporations have demonstrated by their activities in third world countries that they are simply amoral without regulations to enforce environmental and health compliances. A more global society is slowly changing this ethic but by how much and how soon is not easy to judge.

Economic growth needs to be decoupled from population growth but there is no sign this is achievable and no one is attempting to provide a model that may facilitate it. I feel this is the biggest dilemma that we face as a global community. Technology will slowly erode the most mind-numbing and health-debilitating occupations, so humans can do what they do best, which is to think creatively, solve problems both individually and collaboratively, and facilitate with others. And machines will do the things that they are good at: crunch astronomical numbers, do repetitive tasks at high speed and precision, and work tirelessly with no sleep and without complaint at jobs we disdain. This is the future that I try to project into my science-fiction where the word economy doesn’t even exist – but that’s a real utopia.

Addendum: The COSMOS article that I linked is actually from 2005 (Issue 3) but it's possibly even more relevant. Please read it.

The Existential God

I was introduced to Don Cupitt on Stephen Law’s blog, about a year ago, or even earlier, when he provided a link to a radio interview with Cupitt on a BBC philosophy programme. Cupitt is a theologian, and he was being quizzed on his particularly unorthodox view of God, which, from memory, was more humanist than sacred.

More recently, I acquired his book, Above Us Only Sky, followed by a Chinese hieroglyph, which I assume means ‘sky’. Inside, the book is subtitled, The Religion of Ordinary Life, which pretty well sums up Cupitt’s entire philosophy. The book’s title is obviously a direct reference to the line in John Lennon’s song, Imagine, which also includes the line, ‘And no religion too’, and, despite being a theologian, that line could equally apply to Cupitt’s book. Right at the start of his book, he provides 27 points in, what one might call, a manifesto for living. Point 22 is headed:

“Even the Supreme Good must be left behind at once.

I, all my expressions, and even the Summum Bonumm, the Supreme Good itself, are all of them transient. Eternal happiness may be great enough to make one feel that one’s whole life has been worthwhile, but it is utterly transient. Let it go!”

His book, as the above quote exemplifies, is even more humanist than his interview, and, in fact, I would call it existentialist, hence the title of this post. I have also called myself existentialist on more than one occasion, but then so is Viktor Frankl in my view, who is not entirely an atheist either. Existentialism is not synonymous with atheism, by the way, but most theists think it is. By existentialist, I mean that we are responsible for our own destiny, which makes God less significant in the overall scheme of things. In other words, a belief in God is less relevant when one considers that moral choices, and any other choice for that matter, are completely dependent on the individual. I take the extreme view and suggest that we are responsible for God rather than God is responsible for us, but that’s so heretical I’ll desist from pursuing it for the sake of continuity.

But Cupitt’s book was a genuine surprise, because, despite its glib title, it’s actually a very meaty book on philosophy. For a start, Cupitt puts emphasis on language as the prism, or even filter, through which we analyse and conceptualise the world. To quote his point 6:

“Life is a continuous streaming process of symbolic expression and exchange.

The motion of language logically precedes the appearing of a formed and ‘definite’ world. It is in this sense that it was once said that ‘In the beginning was the Word’.”

I don’t entirely agree with him, concerning his implication that language determines our reality, but I need to digress a bit before I can address that specifically.

A central tenet of his thesis is that our Platonic heritage of a ‘perfect’ world is an illusion that we are only just starting to shed. Life is exactly what we get and that’s all it is. His philosophy is that once we realise this ‘truth’, we can live the ‘religion of ordinary life’ as his title suggests, and his manifesto specifies. In fact, he argues that this is what we already do in a secular humanist society, but we just don’t articulate it as such. Curiously, I made a similar point in a post I wrote on this blog almost 2 years ago, titled, Existentialism: the unconscious philosophy (Oct.07). Basically, I contended that, following the global Western cultural revolution of the 1960s, we adopted an existentialist philosophy without specifying it as such, or even realising it. We effectively said that we are responsible for our actions and their consequences and God has very little to do with it. I believe Cupitt is making a similar point: we achieved a revelation that humanity’s future is in our hands, and, unless we accept that responsibility, we will fail it.

But it’s in his discussion on rejecting Plato and the illusion that we inherited from him, that he returns to the significance of language:

“You can have more-or-less anything, provided only that you understand and accept that you can have it only language-wrapped – that is, mediated by language’s secondary, symbolic and always-ambiguous quality.” (Emphasis in the original.)

In highlighting this point, I’ve skipped a lot of his text, including an entire chapter on ‘Truth’ and a discussion on Descartes, and, in particular, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant famously contends that we will never understand the ‘thing-in-itself’, which is a direct reference to Plato’s ‘Forms’.

Like many dissertations on epistemology, Cupitt glosses over the significance of mathematics, which is arguably the most stubborn relic of Plato’s philosophy, and one that effectively side-steps Cupitt’s ‘language-wrapped’ dependence that I quoted above. I’m not a physicist but physics has interested me my whole life, and I’ve long believed that, as a discipline, it provides us with the best means of interpreting the universe and revealing its mysteries. In fact, without physics, our knowledge of the universe would still be stuck in the dark ages. But Cupitt alludes to a deep scepticism when he describes it thus:

“The physicist sets out his definitions of matter, space and time, then his laws of motion, and then his formulae for making calculations. But when he has developed his system of mathematical physics – a system of ideas – how is he to prove that there is a Real World out there of which the system is true and to which it applies? …whence do all its ideas get their ‘objective reality’?”

In other words, Cupitt is sceptical that a ‘system of ideas’, even one imbedded in mathematics, can provide an ‘objective reality’. But there are 2 points that Cupitt fails to address in his dissertation on ‘truth’ and ‘language’. Firstly, mathematics is not a language in the normal sense, although many people refer to it as if it is. Mathematical symbols are a language of sorts, but the concepts they represent, and, in particular, the relationships that mathematics describes are the closest we will get to ‘“God-given” truth’ to quote Roger Penrose (The Emperor’s New Mind). In other words, they have a universal quality unlike any other epistemic system that we know of, that arguably contain truths independent of the human mind. Now, I know many philosophers dispute this, but mathematical ‘truths’ (wherever they come from) are arguably the only abstract truths we can rely on, and do rely on all the time, in every technological marvel we exploit.

So mathematics provides us with ‘truths’ as well as a window into the ‘reality’ of the universe that we would never otherwise possess. It is on this point that I believe Cupitt and I epistemologically differ.

But it’s not epistemology per se that Cupitt is challenging when he explicates: ideas are ‘language-wrapped’; he has a deeper, theological motive. He points out how absurd it is to think that God provided us with scriptures using a language humans invented. Especially since God should be outside language in the same way ‘He’s’ supposedly outside the very universe in which we exist. What’s more, Cupitt challenges the very notion that our experience of ‘God’ by praying can be validated without language. I believe Cupitt makes a very good point here: if our ideas are language-wrapped then so is our idea of God.

In an earlier post (May 09) I referenced an essay by Raymond Smullyan called Is God a Taoist? In my post, I made a connection between Smullyan’s idea of God or Tao as ‘the scheme of things’ and the mathematical laws at different levels of scale that the universe appears to obey. This particular concept of an impersonal, non-language-wrapped God in combination with a Platonic mathematical realm is entirely compatible with Cupitt’s stated philosophy, though I doubt he would accept it. Cupitt provides an allegorical tale of a large group of Buddhist monks, one of whom gets up to speak about the Tao (Cupitt uses the term, ‘Supreme Good’), saying that: ‘No words can speak of it… It is beyond speech, it is even beyond all thought.’ When he sits down, another monk stands to address the same crowd: ‘Did the last speaker say anything?’

In a recent post on Storytelling (July 09), I made the point that without language we would think in the language of dreams, which is imagery and emotion. In fact, I argued that the language of dreams is the language of storytelling, only we are unaware of it. The story is ‘language-wrapped’ but the emotional content of the story is not, and neither is the imagery it conjures in our minds. Without these 2 components, the story is lifeless, just words on paper – it fails to engage the mind as story.

I’m not surprised that many cultures include dreaming as part of their religion – the American Indians are possibly the best known. Australian Aborigines use the term ‘Dream-time’ (at least, that’s its English translation) as the reference to their religion, full of mythical creatures and mythical tales. In recent posts on Larry Niven’s blog, there have been a couple of references to the comparison between religion and music that people often make. Many people have made the observation that music transcends language, and to some extent that is true. The only reason, we can say that, is because music moves us emotionally, and whilst language can describe those emotions it can’t convey them, whereas music can. So I would argue that religious experience is not language-wrapped in the same way that musical experience is not language-wrapped. Again, Cupitt would beg to differ. In fact, he would dispute the religious experience and call it illusion, and he is not alone. Most philosophers would agree with him completely.

Cupitt devotes an entire chapter to the subject, ‘Religion’, where he describes it as a ‘standard’ (as in a flag) to which people rally and identify, and, to which he rightly acknowledges, represents a view of God that is no longer tenable or of value. This is the religion that divides people and incorporates an infinite being who stands outside the world and judges us all. On this point, Cupitt and I are in agreement: it’s an entirely outdated, even dangerous, concept.

“…those who split the world between good and evil in effect split their own psyches too, and the puritans, the wowsers, the morality-campaigners, the condemners and the persecutors end up as unhappy people, Bible-bashers who are themselves without religion.”

This is the origin of the neurosis that made people of my generation revolt. Cupitt also makes reference to the 1960s when he describes the change in the zeitgeist that is effectively the theme of his book. Neurosis is like hypnotism – your brain tells you to do one thing but you do something else over which you feel you have no control. If you put your mind in a strait-jacket then it will revolt in a way that will shock you. Religion can do exactly that. To quote Cupitt again:

“In one form or another around the world, organized religion still manages to keep a large percentage of humanity locked in the most wretched mental poverty and backwardness.”

Cupitt goes on to express his individualistic philosophy that he calls ‘solar living’ (as in solo or solitary) but I would call existentialism, or a variant thereof. The fundamentals of his religious philosophy is to replace ‘God’ with ‘Life’, and rather than have a relationship between an earthly existence and an immortal one, to have a relationship between the individual’s life and the continuing stream of life that involves the rest of humanity.

My own approach is to refer to the internal and external world, which is the cornerstone of my entire world philosophy, but is effectively the same concept that Cupitt expresses here, albeit using different language. (Later in the book, Cupitt rejects the inner life concept altogether.) However, unlike Cupitt, I would contend that religion is part of one’s inner world rather than the external world. This makes religion completely subjective, and, in many respects, in conflict with organised or institutionalised religion. I’ve made this point before on previous posts, and Cupitt makes a similar point, arguably the most important in the book for me:

“The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.”

Cupitt always brings the discussion back to language, and this is the source of my personal dissent with his philosophy. He makes the apparently self-evident point: ‘…there is no meaning, no truth, no reality, and no knowledge without language.’ Which is true for us humans, cognitively, but the unstated corollary is that because none of these things can exist without language, they can’t exist without humanity either. This is the crux of his entire epistemological thesis.

Language is the most obvious bridge between our internal and external world, and almost nothing can be conveyed without language, but lots of things can be felt and experienced without the intervention of language. But Cupitt would argue that any experience is meaningless, quite literally, if it can’t be expressed in language. In other words, because it comes ‘language-wrapped’, that’s what makes it real. One needs to be careful here to distinguish epistemology from ontology, and I think the 2 are being confounded.

I think religion, as it is experienced by the individual, actually has little to do with language and more to do with emotion, just like music or even storytelling. As I described above, a story is written in words, but if it doesn’t transcend the words then it’s not a story. On the other hand, Cupitt argues, categorically, that there is nothing meaningful ‘outside language’.

Religion, and therefore God, is a psychological phenomenon, just like colour. Now, everyone thinks this is a misguided analogy, but colour does not exist out there in the external world, it only exists in your mind. What exists in the external world are light waves reflected off objects. You could probably build a robot that could delineate different wavelengths of light and associate a range of wavelengths with a label, like red for instance. But the robot wouldn’t actually see the colour red like you and I do. Some monkeys can’t see colours that we can see, because they only have bichromatic vision not trichromatic, but, if we genetically engineer them, they can. Yes, that’s a fact, not internet bullshit – it’s been done.

Anyway God is an experience that some people have that ‘feels’ like something outside themselves even though it only occurs in their minds. Many people never have this experience, so they don’t believe in God. The problem with this is that some of the people who think they have this experience believe that makes them superior to those who don’t, and likewise some of the people who don’t, believe they must be axiomatically superior to those who claim they do, because they’re obviously nuts.

Cupitt doesn’t address this, but I do because it’s what creates the whole divide that is actually so unimportant. I contend it’s like heterosexuals believing that everyone should be heterosexual, because it’s unimaginable to be anything else, and homosexuals arguing that everyone should be homosexual, even though they never do. But, in the same way that I think people who are heterosexual should behave as heterosexuals and people who are homosexual should behave as homosexuals, I believe that people who have an experience that they call God should be theists, and those who don’t should be atheists.

At the end of the day, I think God is a projection. I believe that the God someone believes in says more about them than it says about God (I’ve made this point before). That way people get the God they deserve. I call it the existential God.

I’ve now gone completely away from Cupitt’s book, but don’t be put off, it’s a very good book. And it’s very good philosophy because it provokes critical thinking. Another person would write something completely different to what I have written because they would focus on something else. This is a book to which, I admit, I have not done justice. It is worth acquiring just to read the essay he wrote for a symposium on Judaic Christian dialogue – not what people expected, I’m sure.

Cupitt ultimately argues for a universal morality that ignores identity of any kind, just like Lennon’s song. Accordingly, I’ll give Cupitt the last word(s):

“Our moral posture and practice must never be associated with a claim to be… an adherent of some particular ethnic or religious group, because all those who retreat into ‘identity’ have given up universal morality and have embraced some form of partisan fundamentalism – which means paranoia and hatred of humanity.”

“…any philosopher who is serious about religion should avoid all contact with ‘organized religion’. …Which is why, on the day this book is published, I shall finally and sadly terminate my own lifelong connection with organized religion.”

Memetics

Susan Blackmore is a well-known proponent of ‘memes’, and she wrote an article in New Scientist, 1 August 2009, called The Third Replicator, which is about the rise of the machines. No, this has nothing to do with the so-called Singularity Prophecy (see my post of that title in April this year). I haven’t read any of Blackmore’s books, but I’ve read articles by her before. She’s very well respected in her field, which is evolutionary psychology. By the ‘Third Replicator’ she’s talking about the next level of evolution, following genes and memes: the evolution of machine knowledge, if I get the gist of her thesis. I find Blackmore a very erudite scholar and writer, but I have philosophical differences.

I’ve long had a problem with the term meme, partly because I believe it is over-used and over-interpreted, though I admit it is a handy metaphor. When I first heard the term meme, it was used in the context of cultural norms or social norms, so I thought why not use ‘social norms’ as we do in social psychology. Yes, they get passed on from generation to generation and they ‘mutate’, and one could even say that they compete, but the analogy with genes has a limit, and the limit is that there are no analogous phenotypes and genotypes with memes as there are with genes (I made the same point in a post on Human Nature in Nov.07). And Dawkins makes the exact same point, himself, in his discussion on memes in The God Delusion. Dawkins talks about ‘memplexity’ arising from a ‘meme-pool’, and in terms of cultural evolution one can see merit in the meme called meme, but I believe it ignores other relevant factors as I discuss below.

Earlier this year I referenced essays in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I (Subjectivity, Jun.09; and Taoism, May 09). One of the essays included is Dawkins’ Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes. In another New Scientist issue (18 July 2009), Fern Elsdon-Baker, head of the British Council’s Darwin Now project, is critical of what he calls the Dawkins dogma saying: ‘Metaphors that have done wonders for people’s understanding of evolution are now getting in the way’; and ‘Dawkins contribution is indisputable, but his narrow view of evolution is being called into question.’ Effectively, Elsdon-Baker is saying that the ‘selfish gene’ metaphor has limitations as well, which I won’t discuss here, but I certainly think the ‘selfish meme’ metaphor can be taken too literally. People tend to forget that neither genes nor memes have any ‘will’ (Dawkins would be the first to point this out) yet the qualifier, ‘selfish,’ implies just that. However, it’s a metaphor, remember, so there’s no contradiction. Now I know that everyone knows this, but in the case of memes, I think it’s necessary to state it explicitly, especially when Blackmore (and Dawkins) compare memes to biological parasites.

Getting back to Blackmore’s article: the first replicators are biological, being genes; the second replicators are human brains, because we replicate knowledge; and the third replicators will be computers because they will eventually replicate knowledge or information independently of us. This is an intriguing prediction and there’s little doubt that it will come to pass in some form or another. Machines will pass on ‘code’ analogous to the way we do, since DNA is effectively ‘code’, albeit written in molecules made from amino acids rather than binary arithmetic. But I think Blackmore means something else: machines will share knowledge and change it independently of us, which is a subtly different interpretation. In effect, she’s saying that computers will develop their own ‘culture’ independently of ours, in the same way that we have created culture independently of our biological genes. (I will return to this point later.)

And this is where the concept of meme originally came from: the idea that cultural evolution, specifically in the human species, overtook biological evolution. I first came across this idea, long before I’d heard of memes, when I read Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler gave his own analogy, which I’ve never forgotten. He made the point that the human brain really hasn’t change much since homo sapiens first started walking on the planet, but what we had managed to do with it had changed irrevocably. The analogy he gave was to imagine someone, say a usurer, living in medieval times, who used an abacus to work out their accounts; then one morning they woke up to find it had been replaced with an IBM mainframe computer. That is what the human brain was like when it first evolved – we really had no idea what it was capable of. But culturally we evolved independently of biological evolution, and from this observation Dawkins coined the term, meme, as an analogy to biological genes, and, in his own words, the unit of selection.

But reading Blackmore: ‘In all my previous work in memetics I have used the term “meme” to apply to any information that is copied between people…’. So, by this definition, the word meme covers everything that the human mind has ever invented, including stories, language, musical tunes, mathematics, people’s names, you name it. When you use one idea to encompass everything then the term tends to lose its veracity. I think there’s another way of looking at this, and it’s to do with examining the root cause of our accelerated accumulation of knowledge.

In response to a comment on a recent post (Storytelling, last month) I pointed out how our ability to create script effectively allows us to extend our long term memory, even across generations. Without script, as we observe in many indigenous cultures, dance and music allows the transmission of knowledge across generations orally. But it is this fundamental ability, amplified by the written word, that has really driven the evolution of culture, whether it be in scientific theories, mathematical ideas, stories, music, even history. Are all these things memes? By Blackmore’s definition (above) the answer is yes, but I think that’s stretching the analogy, if, for no other reason than many of these creations are designed, not selected. But leaving that aside, the ability to record knowledge for future generations has arguably been the real accelerant in the evolution of culture in all its manifestations. We can literally extend our memories across generations – something that no other species can do. So where does this leave memes? As I alluded to above, not everything generated by the human mind is memetic in my opinion, but I’ll address that at the end.

Going back to my original understanding of meme as a cultural or social norm, I can see its metaphorical value. I still see it as an analogy to genes – in other words, as a metaphor. Literally, memes are social norms, but they are better known for their metaphorical meaning as analogous to genes. If, on the other hand, memes are all knowledge - in other words, everything that is imbedded in human language - then the metaphor has been stretched too far to be meaningful in my view. A metaphor is an analogy without the conjunction, ‘like’, and analogies are the most common means to explain a new concept or idea to someone else. It is always possible that people can take a metaphor too literally, and I believe memes have suffered that fate.

As for the ‘third replicator’, it’s an intriguing and provocative idea. Will machines create a culture independently of human culture that will evolutionarily outstrip ours? It’s the stuff of science fiction, which, of course, doesn’t make it nonsense. I think there is the real possibility of machines evolving, and I’ve explored it in my own ventures into sci-fi, but how independent they will become of their creators (us) is yet to be seen. Certainly, I see the symbiotic relationship between us and technology only becoming more interdependent, which means that true independence may never actually occur.

However, the idea that machine-generated ideas will take on a life of their own is not entirely new. What Blackmore is suggesting is that such ideas won’t necessarily interact with humanity for selection and propagation. As she points out, we already have viruses and search engines that effectively do this, but it’s their interaction with humanity that eventually determines their value and their longevity, thus far. One can imagine, however, a virus remaining dormant and then becoming active later, like a recessive gene, so there: the metaphor has just been used. Because computers use code, analogous to DNA, then comparisons are unavoidable, but this is not what Blackmore is referring to.

Picture this purely SF scenario: we populate a planet with drones to ‘seed’ it for future life, so that for generations they have no human contact. Could they develop a culture? This is Asimov territory, and at this stage of technological development, it is dependent on the reader’s, or author’s, imagination.

One of Blackmore’s principal contentions is that memes have almost been our undoing as a species in the past, but we have managed to survive all the destructive ones so far. What she means is that some ideas have been so successful, yet so destructive, that they could have killed off the entire human race (any ideologue-based premise for global warfare would have sufficed). Her concern now is that the third replicator (machines) could create the same effect. In other words, AI could create a run-away idea that could ultimately be our undoing. Again, this has been explored in SF, including stories I’ve written myself. But, even in my stories, the ‘source’ of the ‘idea’ was originally human.

However, as far as human constructs go, we’re not out of the woods by a long shot, with the most likely contender being infinite economical growth. I suspect Blackmore would call it a meme but I would call it a paradigm. The problem is that a meme implies it’s successful because people select it, whereas I think paradigms are successful simply because they are successful at whatever they predict, like scientific theories and mathematical formulae, all of which are inherently un-memetic. In other words, they are not successful because we select them, but we select them because they are successful, which turns the meme idea on its head.

But whatever you want to call it, economic growth is so overwhelmingly successful: socially, productively, politically, on a micro and macro scale; that it is absolutely guaranteed to create a catastrophic failure if we continue to assume the Earth has infinite resources. But that’s a subject for another post. Of course, I hope I’m totally wrong, but I think that’s called denial. Which begs the question: is denial a meme?

Einstein's words

Today I bought a special edition of the science magazine, DISCOVER (July 2009), with the auspicious title, DISCOVER presents EINSTEIN. The magazine opens with an essay that Einstein wrote in 1931 (so before World War II). Or, at least, it was published in 1931, copyrighted by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The essay is titled, The World as I see It, which one assumes was provided by Einstein himself.

For the rest of this post I will remain silent; I merely wish to present some very eloquent excerpts that provide an insight into Einstein’s personal philosophy.

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though sometimes he thinks he senses it.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of the labor of my fellow men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

Schopenhauer’s saying “A man can do what he wants but not want what he wants” has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people all too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in particular, gives humor its due.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves – this ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts – possessions, outward success, luxury – have always seemed to me contemptible.

I am truly a “lone traveler” and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude – feelings which increase with years. One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle.

The led must not be coerced; they must be able to choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. Force attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia today.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity, and in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.