10oclockdot:
As you see above, I received some passionate feedback on the powerpoint slides I posted six days ago (here). Though I doubt that the rebloggers above are reading this, I’d like to respond to the constructive feedback at the top. The first three posters all assert some version of the same basic argument (as did others who replied): intersex is an error, a disorder, something with “no natural reason” for being, and therefore thinking of assigned sex as male-or-female binary is appropriate. I disagree with their position on this, and I think it’s important to talk about why. One of them asserts that “from a biological perspective” intersex is an error. But what does that phrase “from a biological perspective” mean? From the perspective of pure science? From the perspective of an applied science (like medicine)? What exactly is a scientific perspective?
- I’d like to argue that this isn’t a debate about science. It’s a philosophical debate, specifically a debate dealing with purposes of things; that is, it’s a debate over teleology. The relationship between teleology and science is a complex one, and for a long time many purportedly purely scientific assertions have been draped in teleological language: that is, language which declares or implies purpose or goal-orientedness. For instance, a biology textbook might declare, “It is the purpose of the spleen to filter the blood.” While “purpose” might be a useful shorthand for common function, they aren’t strictly the same thing. To declare that any system has a purpose or a goal (a telos), is to declare the presence of either a designer (who designed with that goal in mind) or at least some universal standard of proper function. But neither of these things can be demonstrated to exist in nature, so to say that the “purpose” of the spleen is to filter the blood is, though sometimes a useful shortand, false.
- Teleological language is often pardonable, especially in clinical settings. After all, if you’d like to live a healthy life, you’d want your spleen to filter your blood. And you might, quite reasonably, refer to this as your spleen’s purpose and any variation from it an “error” or “disorder.” But in this case, the patient and the doctor have declared the spleen’s purpose based on certain criteria (“I want to live a healthy life”). This declaration of purpose is not self-evident from biology (the spleen doesn’t come with a manual or a warrantee), nor is it a purely scientific statement. Science is in the business of describing and modeling physical phenomena. It does not ascribe purposes or goals, nor does it evaluate phenomena (as good or bad, correct or in error, etc.).
- Still, nearly everything about life LOOKS goal-oriented. After billions of years of evolution, creatures have gotten pretty good at avoiding death and passing along their genes. They look designed for a purpose. But as we know, they (and we) are not so designed. Life came about by random events, certain mutations furnished an adaptive advantage, these advantages were preserved in the genetic code, allowing later generations further adaptations, and here we are. Natural selection (a vast phenomenon of forces), does not, as its name implies, select anything, much less design anything. The manifold forces that comprise what we call “natural selection” merely de-select. They filter, they kill. But they do so without agency or will or design. Drop a thousand Plinko chips down the board, and some will fall into the $10,000 slot, and others will fall into other slots. But the pegs don’t “select” certain chips to be winners, and neither does gravity or friction or the player or the chips themselves. The minimally complex system of chaotic collisions produces a normal distribution without will, intent, thought, or purpose. Physics just runs. Things happen.
- Same with natural selection. Out of this maximally complex system of systems of uncountable contingent events, life emerged, then multicellular life, and later bones and hearts and eyes and brains and so forth. As it happens, most cells and organs and systems of organs behave in reasonably predictable ways. But even that doesn’t mean that they were designed TO DO what they do. DNA mutates, it builds organs, adaptive advantages reproduce, and so on, but the DNA does none of this with purpose, just as natural selection does nothing with purpose. And on an evolutionary timescale, no attribute of any species is ever permanently fixed, as all species are continually changing into other species all the time.
- For a long time, scientists and the natural philosophers before them didn’t understand the contingent and dynamic nature of nature, and they pardonably ascribed fixed identities and concrete purposes to nearly everything. But we know better now, and we do science differently now. Pure science is in the business of describing and modeling that which exists. As such, science shouldn’t make evaluative judgments like, “Carbon is the best element” or “Quasars are mistakes.” That which exists exists. From a purely scientific perspective, existence is neither good nor bad. That said, there are plenty of reasons to greet scientific data with some sort of evaluative statement, like, “4 degrees of warming would be disastrous,” or “At the time, outhouses were a public health triumph.” But in both of these statements (or any like them), the judgments are being made with criteria outside of science. Science says, “this is.” To say, “this is good” or “this is bad” (or any other judgment), you’re bringing in ethical, moral, philosophical, political, or even religious criteria. (In fact, the idea that “science is good” cannot be proclaimed scientifically; it takes a philosophical stance to say that.)
- So, what about people who are intersex? We can declare that the PURPOSE of human life is to reproduce, and thus that infertility is a “disorder” (n.b.: some intersex people are infertile, but not all), but as I argued above, this declaration does not derive from science. Because it declares purpose, it’s a philosophical statement. So don’t claim that “from a biological perspective” intersex people are disordered. Pure science makes no such assertion, nor can it. If you’d like to claim that based on your beliefs about human sexuality, intersex people are disordered, go ahead. But understand the difference and don’t hide behind science.
- Also consider that, historically-speaking, nearly all statements that declare the presence or absence of a disorder also set up a hierarchy of normal-ness that lead to negative social consequences. Certain groups of people now and in the past have declared homosexuality to be a “disorder” or an “error” (the American Psychiatric Association listed it as a mental illness until 1973), and anywhere where that happened, it led to or supported prejudice, stigmatization, and hate. But gay people aren’t an error, they just ARE. For a long time, certain Christians considered dark skin a disorder or worse, God’s “mark” on Cain or his curse on the sons of Ham (as described in the book of Genesis).
- Maybe those examples are too extreme, so let’s pick some banal ones. Multiple births (twins, triplets, etc) are comparatively rare events (they happen about 3-4% of the time), but we don’t think of them as “errors” or “disorders.” Why not? Triplets occur with less frequency than intersex people, but they face none of the possible stigma or misunderstanding. Again, why not? Being about 6ft 7in tall or taller is also about as common. Are rare blood types an “error”? Is Aspberger’s a “disorder” that must be cured, or is it simply a neurological difference, another way of wiring the brain? Attitudes are shifting. Remember, rare is different from error, and outlier is different from disorder.
- Consider also the purpose of labeling something, especially being intersex, a disorder. Does calling intersex a disorder benefit anyone, or does it stigmatize and marginalize a natural phenomenon? I guess that depends, but in the past, plenty of clinical labels have been used to support discrimination and unnecessary institutionalization, so I’m cautious. While there is clinical benefit to labeling certain things disorders – to designate a condition which causes harm, like diabetes or alcoholism, and come up with a treatment plan – there are plenty of other things which are simply natural variations, but we call them disorders anyway. I believe that calling intersex an error or a disorder reinforces the idea that there are “right"s and “wrong"s in biology. But there aren’t. Biology just happens. If we’re going to label something a disorder, we’d better make sure that a net benefit will result from it. And we’d better also make sure that that label doesn’t efface natural complexity or encourage the general public to believe in false binaries. (By the way, I accept that the original commenters aren’t ignoring intersex people, but my students are often surprised to learn that sex isn’t binaristically male or female.)
- In a later response to my post, blogger mechanicusdeus wrote, “What we do denounce, though, is the modern SJW thinking that [intersex] is not in some way an illness… because it is. And i don’t say that out of unkindness. I say it because it’s true.” But it’s not true. It’s true that intersex has been variously thought of or classified as an illness (or disorder, or error, etc.), but to declare unequivocally that intersex IS a disorder is to disavow one’s philosophical position. It also seems to obscure the difference between pure science and applied science. I guess you can argue that intersex people might not be evolutionarily or reproductively optimal in some way, but that doesn’t mean that intersex is an error or a disorder. By the same logic, we might call people shorter than 5 feet tall “disordered” (because they can’t reach objects on high shelves, for instance). But is that appropriate? Evolution has never been an optimal process. As Robert Full put it, evolution works on a “just-good-enough” principle, not a perfecting principle. There’s what we might term “bad design” everywhere in nature (as I’ve posted about before). And since there’s no mind or will or designer behind evolution, it’s inappropriate to say that intersex is a an illness or a failure. It just happens. In short: things happen. How we think about them is up to us. Pure science describes and models, but it should not judge or evaluate. Clinical categorizations do not reflect absolute truths, but culturally-specific evaluations which often change. Based on the fact that there is no ultimate designer or set of purposes behind evolution, I conclude that no aspect of the human body, including sexual characteristics, has any ultimate purpose to fulfill or fail. Therefore, I choose to consider intersex a rare but incredibly significant aspect of human sexuality, one without which we cannot fully understand the rest of human sexuality. I think it’s a bad idea (and probably even hateful) to stigmatize or marginalize it as an error (same goes for trans, genderqueer, homosexuality, asexualty, etc). And I urge everyone to investigate the assumptions, impetuses, and consequences entailed in calling rare things disorders.
10oclockdot:
“The universe is wider than our views of it.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), ch. 18. “There are more things in heaven and on earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Shakespeare, Hamlet (c. 1600), Hamlet speaking to Horatio, 1.5.166-7. “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” – J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 286. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” – Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1956) “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” – Max Planck, Where is Science Going? (1932) “Whatever the nature of the “real” world, we cannot assume that the words in our language refer to it or describe it.“ – Vivien Burr, An Introduction to Social Constructionism (1995). “Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol “dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the “dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally.“ – Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” (1942) “Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don’t know if I’m in charge of mine.” – Karl Pilkington. “If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system.” – Gilles Deleuze, in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1972. “Oh, fuck you, eat your French fries, you little shit, goddammit!” – Louis CK.
10oclockdot:
10 New Words and Ideas for Higher Education Pedagouging - the rapid and injurious spikes in the cost of higher education, which prompt nearly all students to accrue harmful levels of debt. Higher rEd - A slang term for those increasing levels of indebtedness. A supplement to the term “debt factories,” which is already being applied to the many institutions which seem to exist for the sole purpose of producing heavily indebted young adults who either graduate with useless degrees or don’t graduate at all. The Multiversity - the set of all courses offered online by all colleges and universities. The word may be used in discussions of future students who pursue an education by taking online classes exclusively, but without limiting themselves to the online offerings of a single institution. Students who pick and choose the best online course offerings from multiple universities would be said to be attending the “multiversity,” and the existence of such students would necessitate the emergence of third-party institutions to accredit and award such patchwork degrees. Extbook - In an era when education was little more than the memorization of factual data, the textbook was a sensible delivery system for this information. But now that nearly all learning is a matter of processing abstract concepts, why use books anymore? If a TEDTalk promotes this understanding in a more efficient way, why not use it? The Extbook (think Ex-book, Ex’ed book, and outside-of-book) will combine video, audio, captioned images, and the occasional text in a Web 2.0 format (like tumblr) which allows for comments, shares, reblogs, and the like. Paleo-Ed - As more and more coursework moves into the digital realm, expect a small subculture of students to reject mediated education altogether. To respond to this niche market, a few institutions will begin to offer specialized courses which eschew technology entirely, opting instead to meet outside, perambulate, and engage in Socratic discussions, poetry reading, hands-on botany, and the like. Convergent Disciplinarity - Interdisciplinarity and Post-Disciplinarity have been the quiet rage for some time now, and the academy has successfully bridged or found common interdisciplinary ground between a number of previously distinct disciplines. Convergent Disciplinarity refers to the go-for-broke intellectual game of identifying and connecting all disciplines which have not yet been connected, and offering courses or programs at the site of those new connections. It also portends the looming novelty crisis which will surely erupt when there are no more disciplines left to converge. Tunnel Students - students who because of academic tunnel vision or K-12 failure are under-informed or completely unaware of large portions of general subject matter - for instance, students well-versed in Judith Butler but who don’t know who fought in World War II or how many millions are in a billion, or students who can navigate Ring Theory but haven’t heard of Citizen Kane or Vermeer. (By the way, we might call professors, adjuncts, and administrators who also suffer from similar knowledge-gaps “acadumbics”.) Humblemanities - Since there is so much information of general relevance which everyone “ought” to know, it would be very difficult for a single course to cover it all. However, of the few institutions that feel a moral obligation to correct some of the glaring ignorance of their Tunnel Students, most will be unable to devote more than one Freshman-level course to it. Therefore, expect these colleges and universities to introduce general knowledge courses designed not to fill in gaps in students’ awareness, but rather just to make them aware that those gaps exist - that is, to humble them with the sudden revelation of how much they don’t know. Attenuration - the slow loss (or attenuation) of tenured faculty positions. Dust Cafe - the modern university’s brick-and-mortar library, which students value less for the presence of its books and more for the presence of a coffee-and-snack shop with internet access.
10oclockdot:
For the past year, I’ve distributed this document in my film classes at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Most of my students are in various engineering programs and have not taken any art class before, so it seemed right to draw up a set of precepts to guide our approach to inquiry. As the new school year begins, I offer it to a wider audience.
The Decimet
- Art is the story of all of mankind, expressed to the senses, the emotions, and the mind.
- Engineering is the application of all human knowledge toward the solution of problems.
- Engineers without the arts are incomplete engineers. Engineers must be able to know every possible thing and be able to think in every possible way.
- The future belongs to those who ask the best questions.
- “Do not block the way of inquiry.” - Charles Sanders Peirce (FRL, 1899)“Do not put out the spirit’s fire.” - St. Paul, I Thessalonians 5:19
- “The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination. The task of the university is to weld together imagination and experience.” – Alfred North Whitehead, “Universities and their Function,” 1929.
- As such, any true analysis (in science or in art) is much more about creativity than about processing a list of worn-out questions. This class is about discovering from the film – while you’re watching the film – how to watch the film and what questions you must ask of the film. Then it’s about answering those questions.
- Topologically, a human may be homeomorphic to a donut, but in our experience we know that even identical twins are completely different people. Sometimes you can assume a horse is a point-mass to make the calculations easier, but sometimes a piston must be manufactured to a tolerance under one-ten-thousandth of an inch. So also in art. Sometimes, wisdom is the ability to find the common form between two greatly different things, and sometimes perception is a matter of looking at the nearly-identical and discerning the one difference that makes all the difference. Tune yourself, and you’ll know.
- It is both honest and humble to admit where your knowledge ends.Brené Brown says that though we interpret vulnerability in ourselves as weakness, we see vulnerability in others as courage. She adds that all great moments of creativity and innovation begin with vulnerability.In humility, hunt down your blind spots and ruthlessly work to fill them in.
- Mankind’s greatest art and greatest ideas have waited decades, centuries, or millennia for you to find them. Live so as to be ready for them.
10oclockdot:
On Universe-Simulation Computers, 10 points.
- Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” discusses the possibility of a planet-sized computer which could run 10^42 operations per second. This is an astronomical number. He proposes that such a computer could simulate the entire history of mankind a million times over in the space of one second.
- When I first read Bostrom’s article, I was already familiar with summaries of his basic argument; consequently, my mind wandered to something else. How could such a planet-sized computer be powered? Wouldn’t it require a planet-sized power source? And wouldn’t that power source have to consume fuel with an incredibly high energy density? Chemical reactions (such as burning coal or gasoline) would hardly cut it; this planet-sized computer would require nuclear, indeed probably thermonuclear power. Otherwise, the power source would have to be prohibitively large compared to the array of computers. Just as chemical rockets (fueled by ammonium perchlorate and a metal or liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) cannot transport cargo intergalactic distances (that is, while keeping the spaceship at a reasonable size), so also chemical reactions cannot provide power to planet-sized computers in any practical way. And just as intergalactic space travel would only be practical with humongous solar sails, so also planet-sized computers could probably only be run with thermonuclear power.
- This observation raises another question. Even if power could be supplied to a planet-sized computer, how could such a massive computer be cooled? Either the material would have to be fractally porous (possibly resembling a Menger sponge, or perhaps an animal’s circulatory system) to allow a remarkably efficient coolant to circulate, OR - and this seems more likely - the computer would have to be designed from components which could not overheat. Or, better than that, it would have to designed to function optimally (or even solely) at extremely high temperatures. Is liquid or gaseous computing possible? It turns out that the answer is probably yes.
- Such a computer would be more efficient if it didn’t have to sacrifice any of its power to cool itself. It would be even more efficient if the power-generating thermonuclear reactions were distributed evenly throughout the computer, so as to reduce the energy loss which crops up whenever power is transmitted over long distances. Such a computer would approach maximum efficiency if it was it wasn’t powered in the conventional sense at all (with wires and such), but was instead designed to operate in the presence of the extreme heat of the thermonuclear reactions. At this stage, the computer’s material substrate would no longer be liquid or gaseous, but purely atomic plasma.
- What would such a planet-sized computer look like from the outside? Operating at such extreme temperatures, it would emit quite a lot of heat into the surrounding empty space; and a portion of that heat would likely radiate outward as visible light and many of the other wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine it - a vast spherical computer, the size of a planet or even larger, powered by a tumultuous cauldron of thermonuclear reactions, blazing forth against the darkness of space.
- It would be indistinguishable from a star. What if the sun is a computer? What if all the stars in the sky are computers?
- What if the big bang and the initial conditions of the universe were set up to create sextillions of computers? What if the designers of our universe designed it only for this purpose? What if the chaos of the cosmos was designed so that no two stars would form the same way, and thus no two stars would run the same simulation? What if the Chandrasekhar limit (that is, the mass above which a star will collapse into a black hole), was also designed, so that stars which run sufficiently robust simulations will collapse on themselves when their simulation is completed, either sealing the data obtained by their simulations inside (for later harvesting), or perhaps opening up an output wormhole which sends their data back to the designers of the simulation?
- But what about the other stars? Well, they would do exactly as we see in the universe: lighter stars would burn out, unable to transmit their data. When too-massive stars burn too quickly and go supernova, they would (as they do) emit the fusion products which they once forged in their core as an explosion of dust. From this explosion, the dust coalesces into nebulae. Perhaps, over time, other stars will form from this dust and run successful simulations.
- But also over time, some of that dust may coalesce into planets. And, in the fullness of time and novelty, life may emerge, as it did. I don’t know what the beings in the next-universe-up may be trying to simulate, but what if it’s life? Would it shock them to discover that within the bowels of their microcosmic universe, the refuse and byproducts of failed simulation computers accidentally banded together and actually made life?
- Bostrom demonstrated that if it is possible for posthuman societies to run ancestor simulations, it is overwhelmingly probable that we are living in such a simulation. I don’t dispute Bostrom’s math; most life probably is a simulation. But what if when we look into the night sky, we’re not seeing stars simulated for our eyes? What if in each stellar twinkling we actually behold a simulation computer at work, and inside it simulated minds and bodies experience first kisses, deathbed farewells, and the rise and fall of civilizations? Those consciousnesses within the star-computers would accept all their experiences as reality, and they would be right to (as David Chalmers suggests) – but where would that leave us? What if the beings in the next-universe-up have no idea that we exist, living on worlds and in bodies which self-assembled from their broken computer parts? What if reality was programmed, “it from bit,” but we were not? Would this account for our feelings of lostness, purposelessness, and abandonment? Or might it mean that we are the only truly free beings, for we have escaped the eyes of the gods?
10oclockdot:
On decolonizing the secretly poisonous ideologies of Christianity, 10 points.
- When I returned for a visit to the emptied-out spiritually-stagnant husk of my old home church over the holidays, I took a moment to wander through the cobwebbed basement and recover a few artifacts. Above, a youth-oriented paraphrase of the Ten Commandments which reveals much about the Christian miseducation of my upbringing. Below that, a sheet I found in an adult classroom which shows how that miseducation foments in adulthood; the list not only distorts but also invents a number of sins (including not voting, lack of wholehearted participation in fellowship, “overregulation” of private industry, multiculturalism, and “Leading America into New World Order”). Here’s also some more evidence from danforth.
- I was instructed back then that all sins are equal in the eyes of God, which means that in breaking any commandment, one becomes just as sinful as a rapist or murderer. For instance, the sins of swearing or lying or adultery equal the sin of murder. As seen in the image above, “Murder is not an option” holds equal footing with “Save sex for marriage.” I accepted this teaching.
- Of course, the Bible says “You shall not commit adultery,” not “Save sex for marriage,” which means that my teachers mistook consensual fun for the violation of a sacred promise. Their explanation: when you have sex before marriage, you’re cheating on your future spouse. I never thought to ask, “What if I don’t plan to get married?” I was also taught that both masturbation and lust counted as sins in the eyes of God. Thus, if adultery and masturbation are equivalent, then, by syllogism, masturbation and murder are equivalent.
- Plainly, this is madness. Implicitly I surmised that in order for this teaching to be true, murder must not be a sin against the person who dies, but rather a sin primarily (or solely) against God. Since no one but God could be the wronged party in masturbation, God must also be the wronged party in murder. Accordingly, I assumed that rape was only a sin because it violates God.
- Once a religion computes sinfulness in terms of a person’s relationship with God rather than in terms of a person’s relationship with other people, all other people cease to be fully people and simply become objects. In my youth, when lust was ignited by the presence of other people, I thought of them, unconsciously, as manifestations of Satan. They were temptations, not persons. I sometimes became very cruel to people I cared about. But I had been taught by masters.
- So I ask, is belief in God nearly a kind of interpersonal schizophrenia? When most of humanity’s laws can be explained in terms of a social contract without any necessary reference to the divine, what kind of mental fissures does divinity produce?
- More importantly, when a person shakes off the shackles of theistic belief, what sort of further mental decolonization is necessary before they can safely re-enter a contractarian society? As long the Christian maintains the illusion of God as a deterrent, he might mainly go on with his life sinless, which I suppose is a positive result. However, if the person begins to doubt or disbelieve, God disappears as a deterrent, and with His disappearance, actions formerly counted as sins momentarily appear to harm no one. During the extended moment in my life wherein I let go of God, I also became a small-time thief, stalking about my college campus at night, turning door handles, and when one yielded, entering. Sometimes I left only a cryptic mark behind; other times I lifted trinkets from the rooms. Pens or posterboard, items which a bureaucracy could easily and unsentimentally replace. Maybe I wanted to take back what “God” had denied me.
- It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I felt justified in these actions only because I still believed that only God would be wronged. And without a God, no one would be wronged. Or nearly so. God still lingered, incompletely exorcised, a palimpsest weakly scratched and not yet over-written. So guilt also lingered, without apparent justification, and when I made love, my partner’s body still felt like a site of sin. I could not experience pleasure without some kind of ensuing numbness or nihilism, for I had not yet built for myself a means of morality distinct from Christianity’s mutilated invections.
- For years as a youth, my mind must have torn viciously at itself trying to comprehend why pleasure was evil, or how consensual premarital sex could be as bad as rape. In my post-Christian adulthood, more conscious anxiety accompanied the decolonization. How could I be a materialist without hopelessness? How could I be sure that others were equal to myself without God decreeing it? I’m still discovering what ultimately becomes of a post-Christian set adrift. At times, I wish there were churches of atheism, because I miss the positive aspects of community and shared values. But by itself, atheism is no ethos. The world has work to do.
- Quite a lot of my last decade has been about recognizing my own privilege. My skin color is privileged, my gender is privileged, my language, my class, my upbringing, and more were all very privileged. Only in my Christian ideology was I deprived. So for those of you reading this who value evidence and logic and empiricism over blind belief, I urge you to recognize your mental state as a kind of knowledge-privilege. Indeed, how privileged was I that I was able to battle my implanted ignorance, since so many of my old Christian acquaintances continue to lack the ability or the desire to break away from the fiction of God!
