Making Meaning (as Opposed to the “Ultimate” Rhetorical Device)

A Catholic friend asked:

Pat (and whomever else), I wonder if you would indulge me and give me a response to this blog post. I am trying to come to terms and understand more with the mind of an atheist. Can you help me?

He provided to this link. It's an excerpt from a book of Christian apologetics.
http://mattfradd.com/2013/01/04/what-hope-remains-if-god-does-not-exist

Here's my response:

Making Meaning (as Opposed to the “Ultimate” Rhetorical Device)

I don’t want my life’s meaning determined by an invisible, unaccountable, mythical, supernatural authority figure who allegedly “works in mysterious ways.”* Handing off my sense of meaning to such a vague character would deprive me of creating meaning for my own life.

To Christian ears this often sounds like arrogance, but it isn’t. It sounds as though I’m putting myself above the Almighty, but that’s impossible. I can’t put myself above something that I don’t believe exists. If someone asked you your appraisal of the mightiness of Zeus, would your denial of Zeus’ existence be arrogance? No. Your disbelief in Zeus is probably identical to my disbelief in God.

I do understand the emotional appeal of believing one is part of a grand story that will go on forever. There was a time I shared that belief.
 
When I realized my cherished beliefs were flawed, the loss of my prospective afterlife was the most difficult part to accept. I was really looking forward to an afterlife, provided it didn’t get too boring.

However, within a couple weeks of my loss of faith, while walking on Michigan Ave. near Greenfield, I was struck by a powerful realization. As I neared the K-Mart parking lot I had an epiphany:

This life and my present awareness became vastly more precious. When I was a believer, I had been in the Augustine and Kierkegaard funk of life—this “test for the afterlife,” this “vale of tears,” this “mortal coil.” Suddenly I shed all that dreariness and began to appreciate the fact that I’m here at all. Life became more valuable and my ability to create meaning became a part of what freedom means to me today, decades later.

I also became a much happier person—this too was a surprise.

There is a kind of “optical illusion” quality to differences of belief. When I believed in God, my faith was linked to very basic concepts—particularly my sense of value. I was surprised to discover that changing my answer on the God question resulted in almost no changes in my sense of value.

So where do I find meaning? Are there people I love? Yes. Are there creatures that are capable of pleasure and suffering? Yes. There’s plenty of meaning in all that already.

Let’s get to the blog post.

The link title suggests that the post is about hope. Actually, the post is about meaning. The two concepts do overlap but they are different. I’ll stick to the (familiar) argument in the post regarding whether atheists can have meaning in their lives. (Inhale, exhale.)

Just so you know, Christians can sound extremely condescending when this argument is presented. We give this a pass because of the “optical illusion” problem mentioned above. You’re probably not trying to condescend. It’s forgiven. But please consider this: Christians do not have a monopoly on living a meaningful life.

OK, let’s get into this. The book excerpt by Dr. William Lane Craig has a lot of problems but I’ll stick with the most important ones.

Dr. Craig’s argument uses the “ultimate” rhetorical device:

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life?

Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all?

It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance.

I thought gluttony was supposed to be a sin—how much significance does a guy need? The word “ultimate” appears 14 times in the blog post and his argument depends upon the word. Well, any amount is insignificant when compared to the eternal and infinite. The comparison is a rhetorical device. It dismisses the temporary and the finite—what Craig calls “relative”—as meaningless.

By analogy, the number one-million is greater than eleven. “Ah, but they are both equally insignificant when compared to infinity!” No mathematician would find this infinity gambit interesting. One-million is still more than eleven, relative claim though it is.

The Craig excerpt concludes with some very brief summaries of literature, cherry-picked from existentialists. I’d gone through my own existentialism phase and Craig gets some of this stuff wrong, but that’s beside the point. Existentialists do not speak for most atheists (at least not ones outside of France).

In my experience, most atheists in the English-speaking world are rationalists. Very few are nihilists (which is what Craig’s argument suggests). There are plenty of atheists who are more eloquent on this subject than I—if you want, I can provide plenty of links. For now, I’ll refer you to Julia Sweeney’s excellent story on This American Life:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/290/godless-america?act=2

The full audio is available at the link. Her story is very similar to mine, including her similar epiphany on life. It’s heartfelt, funny, and more representative of the naturalism shared by most of the atheists I know.

*This is leaving aside the horrible personage depicted in a famous collection of ancient Jewish folk literature.

How to Design the Rice Experiment

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

– Richard Feynman

The rice experiment, as popularized by businessman Masaru Emoto, is a good example of how not to design a scientific experiment. I will explain why at the end. First, I will explain how I would design a rice experiment. I am not a scientist, but I try to stay scientifically literate. If anyone has suggestions on how to improve this design, let me know.

To be clear, I am not planning on doing this experiment, as I will explain afterward.

My Hypothetical Rice Experiment:

1: Prepare good words and bad words on opaque adhesive labels. The labels need to be opaque enough so that they cannot be read through the back of glass jars.

2: For a control, I would prepare labels with no words. I would also prepare labels with neutral words. I would also prepare good, bad, and neutral words in a foreign language that I don't understand. All the labels would be prepared under the same hygienic conditions and cut in identical shapes.

3: Have all the words recorded separately in a ledger.

4: Sterilize dozens of jars, seals, and lids. This will zero out the bacteria count. Let them dry.

5: Have someone other than me apply the labels to the jars.

6: Have that person cover the labels with identical strips of lightly adhesive opaque paper. At the end of the experiments these covers will be removed. This will double-blind the experiment.

7: Have a third person rearrange the jars before delivering them to me. This will randomize the experiment.

8: The ledger from step 2 records what words are used, though I don't know which ones are on which jars. The words should be categorized at the outset: good, bad, neutral, or blank. Words should also be categorized as English or foreign. The word categories have to be established at the outset to prevent fudging afterward.

9: Set the labeled empty jars in a relatively non-hygienic place so they can attain similar levels of light contamination. Totally sterilized jars may preserve rice indefinitely.

10: Cook some rice and put the same amount in each jar. A few ounces on the bottom will do. All we want is to be able to look inside the jar without the labels and their covers blocking the view.

11: Set the jars in an array that I can check every day. The jars would be numbered so I can track the progress of each jar individually.

12: See which jars get moldy first. Keep watching as other succumb. I would set a deadline of maybe 60 days.

13: The reveal. After the 60 days, look at the jars and their corresponding labels. Compare with the ledger and mark each jar as good, bad, or neutral. If the results are:

• 12 good English words and 12 good foreign words = all pristine
• 12 neutral English words, 12 neutral foreign words, and 12 blank = all somewhat moldy
• 12 bad English words and 12 bad foreign words = all very moldy

This, or something close, would be an extremely significant result. But I expect the onset of mold will be random and will not track with any good word or bad word labels in any statistically significant way. Mold will slightly favor one category of words over another, just as a matter of statistical noise. The math for this is well worked out. The more jars I use for each category, the smaller this statistical noise becomes. If I do the experiment with 30 jars for each category, I would get very high resolution, low noise results.

14: Submit for peer review. I would explain the process described above. My test would satisfy the basics of what we want from a well designed experiment: it's double-blinded, randomized, controlled, and uses an OK sample size. Negative results would be expected and not terribly interesting. (Sometimes negative results are groundbreaking, like the Michelson-Morley experiment that set the stage for Einstein's Relativity.) In the rice experiment, a positive result would be extremely surprising. The way this is designed, a positive result would have a rock solid foundation. Just one more step would be needed:

15: See if anyone reproduces the results under similar experimental conditions. If no one can reproduce my results, there's a good chance I falsified my data or was just plain sloppy.

16: If the results are positive, conduct the experiment for the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). If it does show evidence of paranormal activity that can be verified under scientific controls, I will win $1,000,000. And that's a lot of money! I would like to have that prize! But it's been available for decades and no one has won it yet.

How to Backpedal:

Let's say I was invested (monetarily or emotionally) in the results coming out positive—but they came out negative. There are some tricks, fallacies of special pleading, I can play on myself. These might help me to dismiss my own results or fudge them in my favor:

Anomaly hunting: Maybe some seals were red and some were beige. Maybe the red ones were moldier to a slightly higher degree that statistical noise would predict. Maybe the vibrations inherent in color caused the differences in moldiness. Of course, that's not what we were testing, that's a patterns identified after the fact. If you want to test for color, put that in the ledger at the outset. Don't shoehorn an identified pattern after the fact.

For some real adventures in anomaly hunting, look at the number juggling people apply to the Egyptian pyramids. You can take a rich batch of numbers and combine them into all sorts of flukes that match physical constants or astronomical distances. James Randi shows how you can do the same anomaly hunting with the Washington Monument in his great book Flim-Flam.

Blame science or Western thinking: This is the common tack of accusing the skeptical mindset of spoiling the results. The experiment above is designed without appealing to any particular cultural heritage. The design is based on me preventing myself from introducing bias. If scientific thinking is such a party-pooper, how has it been so successful in shaping every little bit of technology we use?

Science, skepticism, critical thinking—these have produced plenty of reliable results, like cars and air travel. Telekinesis, for example, has not delivered comparable goods for human transport.

Those YouTube Videos and Why I Will Not Conduct My Own Experiment Design:

The rice experiment, as popularized online, has no controls, no blind (let alone double-blind), and operates on the smallest possible sample size. It is a race to see which rice gets moldy first. If the bad word rice gets moldy first (it's a 50-50 shot) a naïve person might claim confirmation. If the good word rice gets moldy first, a naïve person might think, "I must have done something wrong," or "I got so impatient waiting for mold, maybe my impatience threw it off." Such a person may be less likely to post their results on YouTube.

Now, I have no plans to conduct my hypothetical experiment. It's a lot of work putting together a well-controlled study. And I'm very confident the results would be uninteresting. You might say, "Put your money where your mouth is. Do the experiment!" In a sense I am putting my money where my mouth is. If I'm wrong, I am giving away, for free, a great way to win a cool million from the JREF. Have at it.

Dukes of Stratosphear Demos

Thought for the day

The Internet doesn't cure loneliness, it just spreads it around more evenly.

Defending Xanadu

My favorite movie musicals are The Commitments, A Hard Day’s Night, Singin’ in the Rain, The Blues Brothers, Waiting for Guffman, The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, This is Spinal Tap, Dancer in the Dark, and the much maligned Xanadu (which I first saw only recently).

I now have a lot of affection for Xanadu. On my first viewing, I didn’t know what to make of it. But I kept thinking about it (this is generally a good sign). On a second viewing, I finally got it. I like this movie a lot and I want you to like it too. But it can be a confusing experience. So, as an antidote to confusion, here are 18 points about Xanadu:

1. Xanadu has no bad guy and almost no dramatic tension. The closest thing to a bad guy is an egotistic boss who is at best a comic foil. The only dramatic tension in the story is resolved in three seconds at the very end. I was expecting a story on the first viewing and got bored when no story appeared. Later, I realized Xanadu’s style is purposefully lifted from musicals of the 30’s and 40’s. It’s not plot-driven or character-driven. Xanadu is theme-driven.
2. It was a labor of love and “labor of love” is Xanadu’s theme. The labors of love are shown as building a dance hall, building a partnership, and building a romance. The romance between the artist and the Muse carries the movie. These labors of love are all shown as effortless (it is a fantasy, you know). The movie exists to celebrate falling in love and being alive. It is willfully nice. It is very nice. And it is the thoroughgoing niceness of the movie that won me over.
3. Xanadu doesn’t have a shred of irony. I find this refreshing. Some people confuse lack-of-irony with lack-of-self-awareness. That really doesn’t hold true in this case.
4. Critics accused the filmmakers of not knowing what they were doing. I think those critics were projecting their own confusion. I see the principals of Xanadu positively radiating confidence. What’s more, perfectionists like Gene Kelly and Jeff Lynne (and, I expect, Olivia Newton-John) don’t involve themselves in projects where people don’t know what they’re doing. Uncertainty and confusion are anathema to perfectionists. Quite the contrary, Xanadu accomplishes what it sets out to do. I see only three basic mistakes in the movie:
5. The first mistake is that Xanadu should have been rated G. It looks like they added post-production audio of the boss saying “shit” (twice) to guarantee a PG rating. If so, this was a terrible miscalculation. Some sequences are obviously made for kids. If it had been rated G, it probably would not have met so much hostility when it was released. And I think kids would really enjoy it.
6. The second mistake is the leading man is an everyman. Worse, he never sings and barely dances. Placing this candle between the arc lamp charismas of Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John yielded the predictable results. The actor’s performance was called wooden. If you look closely at his face, there’s real acting going on. But why look at his face when Olivia and Gene are right there?
7. The only other basic mistake (which I don’t mind at all) is that Xanadu embraces styles that are now kitschy and unintentionally funny. Fashions from the 70’s and 80’s are now camp legend. And, for that, Xanadu is quite an artifact. This only adds to my enjoyment of the movie. (How about that van’s paint job, or the Ruthless People wardrobe, or the Kotter stripes in the apartment?) I like it, but I can understand the facepalms.
8. I bet P.T. Anderson studied Xanadu very thoroughly for visual style and other elements when he was making Boogie Nights. And I suspect Xanadu’s male lead was a big influence on the Dirk Diggler character.
9. The handmade (pre-CGI) special effects depicting colorful streaks of light and fun scene segues are one-of-a-kind for this movie.
10. Xanadu is *not* a roller-disco movie. Roller skates are a form of transportation in this movie’s Los Angeles. The music is pop, new wave, and big band jazz. Electric Light Orchestra does most of the songs and they are great (even when they recycle their own material and fall into disco-y sound effects). Unfortunately, the title song is overproduced almost to the point of parody. Strip away the overblown audio and it’s a good song. (The only song I don’t like is the one Olivia sings in the studio sequence. This is just personal taste, but it’s a style of dreary ballad that was all over the place in the 70’s. Still, this particular number is worth watching, if only for the palm tree.)
11. A palm tree steadily erects during the studio sequence. It’s not there to be clever or subtle. It is maybe the most unapologetically Freudian moment I’ve seen on film. Then again, why the urge to be ironic? Erections are, after all, a fact of human life and falling in love. Their symbolic representations are not unknown to the cinema. But I still have to laugh for the surprise. There are other surprises (don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything):
12. The Tubes perform, representing new music in one number.
13. There is an animated sequence. On first viewing, suddenly seeing the Disney-style images made me groan. But my groan was misplaced. It’s animated by Don Bluth and is very well done.
14. Olivia Newton-John, in heels and a USO uniform, tap dances with Gene Kelly in a big band sequence. Gene is a gentleman and holds back on his fireworks to let Olivia shine. And she is stellar! Who knew she could tap dance?
15. Olivia’s costume changes in the finale are really over-the-top. I hear the various get-ups are quite a hit with gay men and middle school girls.
16. Xanadu correctly anticipated: clothing styles, new wave, big band revival, working women, some aspects of hip-hop, and multiculturalism. Even the sister Muses are multi-ethnic. Combinations of styles run throughout the movie and represent an everyone-is-invited cosmopolitanism.
17. Xanadu’s director, Robert Greenwald, now makes popular lefty documentaries like Out-Foxed and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices.
18. Xanadu is like Being John Malkovich except it is a musical fantasy about designing a dance hall. In both movies, an artist is inveigled (by forces beyond his comprehension) to host an enjoyable refuge for people. In Being John Malkovich, the artist’s personality is supplanted by a bunch of greedy, fearful senior citizens. In Xanadu, the artist gets to fall in love with Olivia Newton-John. Being John Malkovich is a more convoluted and interesting movie. But Xanadu has a much happier ending. The music is great. It is relentlessly nice. And I believe Xanadu is also fun for the whole family.

And here is my decidedly underproduced version of Xanadu (flubs and all):

Image of Flying Spaghetti Monster Discovered in Pancake

I’m voting for a bunch of spineless twerps and I’m not happy about it.

The most recent episode of This American Life tells two stories – one about Tea Partiers in Petoskey and another about Democrats in DC.

My take on it: fighters who don’t think, followed by thinkers who don’t fight. It’s a very good episode especially if you want to get exasperated and angry.

We need the government to create as many jobs it reasonably can, as soon as possible. But the increasingly cranky Republican Party is blocking any attempt and the Democrats lost interest in fighting for it.

One unreal talking point from the Right claims, “Government can’t create jobs.” That is amazingly false. I see government workers regularly at the library. There’s another one that brings my mail. There is a whole category of jobs called government jobs. What’s more, governments can create work programs which can pump a lot of money into the private sector. Maybe we could use that to fix our crumbling infrastructure now so we don’t need to replace it, at far greater expense, later. I know people who could use the work. Or, I suppose we could just do without bridges and pipes. By the way, some communities are reverting to gravel roads because they can’t afford pavement, or because they are ideologically opposed to the idea of commonwealth. Governments can also create tax incentives and encourage industry in ways that promote job growth. The political right is keen on convincing us that government can do nothing about employing people. And some are fooled by this. And I have yet to hear this idiotic claim contradicted.

A more honest Republican talking point would be, “We don’t want the government to create jobs.”

That is why I am voting against the Republicans. And that means I’m voting for those cringing and fearful Democrats.

Any economist will tell you that during an economic downturn, deficit spending is a tool that governments can use to help revive the economy. I expect many Republican leaders are aware of this fact, but they have other priorities. The Republican leader in the House said his top priority is ensuring Obama is a one-term president. Really? That is more important than jobs and the economy during this crisis? Please, be sane. We’re hurting here.

And now we have a bunch of cranks that actually believe those talking points and are running for office. Let’s say we’ve had a house fire that’s been burning for the last couple years. These are the people who spent those two years trying to defund the fire department.

I don’t want these people in high office. I don’t want these people operating heavy machinery.

The Republicans refuse to realize the economic collapse happened because of the deregulation they continue to advocate. They led, with a lot of support from Democrats, a decades-long dismantling of all things New Deal. This allowed banks to divert mortgages into incredibly risky investments. In some cases, these investments appear designed-to-fail. If they were designed-to-fail, that’s not illegal.

I’m not generally opposed to risky complex financial instruments. I want investment banks free to try new things. But I don’t want the entire economy tied to those risky thingamajigs. Deregulation allowed that to happen. The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – there’s a name to behold – ended a 1933 law that kept investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies separate. Now, all those institutions can combine.

Several mergers later, a huge part of our economy was in just a few very large buckets. That’s why humble home mortgages found their way into those bizarre financial instruments. This gave Wall Street a big appetite for making new mortgages and even betting against them. Did you know taking insurance policies out on crappy mortgages can be more profitable than having the mortgages paid off? And you never have to report the billions you made this way during the housing collapse, so there is no paper trail. It’s true. And it’s legal. And the economy is in the shitter as a result. The Right’s obsession with financial deregulation – getting rid of laws designed to protect the economy – was disastrous.

I’d rank that as one of the biggest legislative failures in the last 100 years. Yup.

And yet deregulation remains one of the few Republican platform issues – along with opposing Obama on everything and cutting taxes. (Right now, Obama wants to renew Bush’s tax cuts and the Republicans oppose him on that too, supposedly because it doesn’t apply to the very richest. And the Democratic Senate caved in and tabled the tax cut debate until after the election. Yeesh.)

To be fair, the current unemployment problem also stems from the Free Trade agreements of the 90’s. And those treaties were enthusiastically supported by both parties.

Now I know hating government is very trendy. Supposedly it’s patriotic even. I don’t get that one. But I actually want government officials who like the pretext for their jobs. I don’t want them hostile to the idea of public service. Politician is one of the few occupations where contempt for one’s work is seen as a virtue.

Of course the political power is very appealing. It’s the responsibility part they openly oppose.

I can understand the appeal of small government. Getting rid of Government creates need. Then companies can make money satisfying that need. Let’s assume that markets can satisfy anything a healthy society requires. (Yes, it is a fantastical idea.) A problem still arises when the population doesn’t have enough money to buy those requirements. If there aren’t enough jobs and the government is run by ideologues who are opposed to government helping people, we end up with a lot of very needy people.

The Bush administration’s non-response to Katrina is exactly what we should expect. I was in as much disbelief at the non-response as anyone else, but we should have seen it coming. Bush seemed genuinely surprised that people expected him to do something. The Republicans are tireless advocates of small government – it’s one of their favorite topics. Well, sometimes small government looks like a flooded city with no one to help. People were so angry at Bush, but he was just being consistent with his party’s platform. Why anyone wants to put that philosophy back in power is kind of mind-boggling.

The Republicans also want to privatize Social Security. Of course, if Bush had succeeded in this, the economic meltdown would have created a new brand of conspiracy theory: “Can’t you see? Cheney screwed the stock market on purpose so it would destroy Social Security! Man! It all makes too much sense!” (The effect is enhanced if you say this like Dennis Hopper or Crispin Glover.)

The Constitution charges our country “to promote the general welfare.” Republicans now consider that socialism.

We are far freakin’ far from socialism. If you think socialism is our big threat right now, you probably watch Fox News too much.

Instead of conservative, it’s more accurate to think of today’s Right as anti-liberal. Some of these anti-liberals are not just opposed to 60’s liberalism or the New Deal. They’re opposed the liberal tradition since the Enlightenment: Universities, scientists, journalists, progressive taxation, and the concept of public are all a part of what they see as rampant liberalism and what others see as the modern world.

The US is woefully behind the rest of the industrialized world in technology. And we have no political will to catch up. For example, the Federal goals for American Internet connectivity are to match, by the year 2020, the bandwidth South Korea enjoys today. And we may not even reach that goal because the political will isn’t there. I have nothing against South Korea but I don’t like them beating us like that.

And all those jobs that went overseas? Those jobs included research and development, because you need a shop floor to do that kind of work. So other countries are doing the innovating right now.

Can government solve this problem? Well, it can create incentives and programs that could help a lot. Well, the Right won’t have it. And we have a motivated subgroup that will rant all teary-eyed about Hitler, or some other nonsense, if it tries. But these are poor reasons not to try.

We have a vocal minority that believes Canada and Denmark operate like the Soviet Union. And they fear we’re next. I am sad our governance is influenced by these delusional people.

I am sadder there is so much airtime and money devoted to promoting and exploiting their delusional fears. It looks like the US Chamber of Commerce is trying to do for the Federal Government what General Motors did for the streetcar*. Only this time it’s legal and it’s cheered on by Fox and millions of voters.

These voters are about to vote for their own deprivation. And it’s all wrapped up in some perverse and badly-informed idea of virtue. “Vote against economic stimulus, it’s feels like fighting the Nazis.”

What’s more, some of them don’t give a crap about the world because they think their invisible buddy Jesus will put an end to it soon anyway. Leave it to religion to make the world disposable.

The conclusion of the Tea Party story on This American Life is surreal. The reporter is trying to make sense of one man’s contradictory decisions. This particular guy decided to do a number of things that are completely self-defeating. And it doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t seem to care about being logical or consistent or even successful. It’s a stark moment of hearing someone not thinking.

Electing that mindset is a bad idea.

So please join me in voting for those lame-ass Democrats. You probably won’t enjoy it anymore than I will. But it may keep cranks from having a legislative majority.

*General Motors was found guilty of criminal conspiracy under anti-trust law involved in the destruction of municipal streetcar systems across the country. GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Mack Truck and Phillips Petroleum were fined $5,000 each. Their executives were fined $1 each. See the excellent one-hour documentary, “Taken for a Ride” for details.

A Diplomatic Letter from Space

There used to be an early draft of a story here. But it was just for a short time. And it was just for some friends who are smarter than me to take a look. Now it is gone. It may re-appear here or elsewhere. I don't know yet. If you know me personally, feel free to contact me on this trivial matter and we will talk about this and other things.