Month: March 2014

David Graeber considers the possibility:

Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.

Why do most of us, then, immediately recoil at such conclusions? Why do they seem crazy and unscientific? Or more to the point, why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field?

The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

Update from a reader:

I’m a grad student in evolutionary biology and currently TA an introductory evolution course. I had a strong reaction to your post – one surely expected by Mr. Graeber, but perhaps worth airing.

First, the scare-quotes around “metaphorically” are misplaced. This usage is the literal definition of metaphor. Evolutionary biologists talk about the agency of DNA as useful conceptual shorthand, which accurately describes the outcomes of genetic evolution while grossly misrepresenting the mechanism. “The allele wants to help the copies of itself carried in other individuals,” is easier to say and is more intuitive to communicate than “the frequency in the population of alleles encoding for behaviors that harm the individual but help close relatives will increase if the cost to the individual’s reproductive output is less than the benefit to reproduction received by the relative multiplied by the probability a copy of the allele is also carried by the relative.” The statistical sorting leaves behind genes suited for propagation, so the ‘selfish’ analogy works better for genes than for snowflakes.

Second, the evolutionary explanation for consciousness and free will isn’t really addressed. Like so much of biodiversity, it can be seen as an adaptive emergent trait. Behavioral plasticity is a huge advantage. Deterministic links between particular stimuli and behaviors are widespread across the tree of life, but cannot accommodate novel stimuli and likely do not scale to the number of relevant stimuli encountered by complex animals. Breaking the deterministic links in favor of flexible decision making is exactly the kind of solution consistently ‘discovered’ by natural evolution. The emergence hypothesis seems to me more plausible than particular agency, for at least two reasons.

One is that, while the behavior of electrons cannot only be predicted probabilistically, there are many levels of biological organization between electrons and humanity that behave in an exceptionally predictable manner. In the lab, I use enzymes to manipulate DNA molecules; no such science would be possible if these proteins were not reliable replicating, cutting, and ligating machines.

Second, I suspect most people would agree that consciousness is present in non-human animals, and would further agree that, whatever it is, there is more of it in an ape or octopus than a fly, jellyfish, or sunflower. Agency as we observe it correlates strongly with neural complexity, which fits well with the notion that a sense of self emerges from the billions of neural connections housed in large-brained animals.

I don’t mean to go full “dick-head athiest” on you. The piece certainly is interesting, thought provoking, and the sort of thing that brings me back to your blog (and reupping my subscription any day now). It reminds me of my go-to response if I’m asked about my belief in God, to avoid the unfortunate conversation that can so easily follow: No I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in electrons.

A reader writes:

I’m disappointed that you only put up the numbers from accidental gun deaths. It seems a bit disingenuous, as the number of non-accidental car deaths, pool deaths, etc., are, of course, dramatically lower. In 2010 the FBI recorded 12,996 homicides. Of those, 8,775 were committed with guns. That compares to 1,704 with knives, the next closest, 540 with blunt objects, and 11 with poison. Even if you would argue that, of those killed by guns, many would have been killed with another weapon, it’s hard to see how that would directly play out. How many drive-by knifings can you have? How many people can get hit by crossfire from a baseball bat?

How about suicide? In 2010, we had 19,392 gun suicides. Not so many with cars. And for those who would argue that guns don’t matter when it comes to suicide (i.e. people will kill themselves regardless of what tools they have to accomplish the deed), multiple studies have proven that access to guns dramatically raises the risk of a successful suicide attempt.

But if you want to stick with just accidental deaths, as you’ve done, let’s contextualize it a bit. From 2005-2010, almost 3,800 people in the US died from unintentional shootings. 1,300 of those were under the age of 25. 31% of those shootings could have been prevented by the addition of two devices: a child-proof safety lock and a loading indicator. And 8% of those shootings (that’s 304) were carried out by shots fired from children under the age of six. How many accidental road deaths are caused by drivers who are under the age of six?

So, yes, lots of stuff can kill you. No surprise. But in the US, we’re at a much higher risk of death by firearm because of the lobbying efforts of the industry whose product is design to kill.

Another reader, from the other side of the debate, quotes Waldman:

On one hand, there are over 300 million of us, so only one in 500,000 Americans is killed every year because his knumbskull cousin said “Hey Bert, is this thing loaded?” before pulling the trigger. You can see that as a small number. The other way to look at is that each and every day, an American or two loses his or her life this way. In countries with sane gun laws, that 606 number is somewhere closer to zero.

That sentence encapsulates what I hate about the anti-gun crowd.

While Waldman is ahead of the game in that he at least admits that at .5% of all accidental deaths make accidental gun deaths a pretty low priority, he goes on to say that we should eliminate all personal gun ownership to take care of it anyway. Why does this bother me? Well, because it says that he doesn’t value my desire to own a gun to the point where he would take my gun to solve a problem he just admitted was insignificant.  So by extension, what I want is even less significant than this insignificant issue.

Look, as a responsible gun owner I want to reduce the number of gun deaths, and there are many ways of doing this, from requiring guns to be locked up when not in use so that minors cannot accidentally shoot somebody, to universal background checks to at least make it difficult for criminals to get their hands on guns.  The problem is that it is difficult to work with somebody who puts such a low value on something that you value that they see no reason why anybody would even want what you want.

If you want to know why it is so easy for the NRA to sell the idea that some people want to take your guns away look no farther than Paul Waldman (and Obama, Bloomberg, Feinstein and others) who on one hand say they don’t want to take your guns while making statements that make it clear they don’t value you having one.

Update from a reader:

Your reader wrote, “While Waldman is ahead of the game in that he at least admits that at .5% of all accidental deaths make accidental gun deaths a pretty low priority, he goes on to say that we should eliminate all personal gun ownership to take care of it anyway.” I read the Waldman atricle you posted, and it mentions no such thing. I started reading other articles Mr. Waldman has written and it’s clear he favors more gun control laws (expanded background checks, limits on amounts of ammunition which can be purchased, are two examples I found), but nowhere have I seen a claim to eliminate all personal gun ownership – and he certainly doesn’t “go on to say” that in the linked article.

In the article he does mention other countries with “sane gun laws.” Few countries totally ban the ownership of guns. There is some chance that Mr. Waldman is speaking of Japan, which does come close to forbidding ownership, but, for example, most of Europe allows private gun ownership. It’s really hard to conclude that elimination of all gun rights is what Mr. Waldman means by the phrase.

Your reader seems to equate any talk of “sane gun laws” with a prohibition of ownership, but goes on to advocate for laws such as “requiring guns to be locked up when not in use so that minors cannot accidentally shoot somebody, to universal background checks to at least make it difficult for criminals to get their hands on guns” which are actually to the left of the Toomey-Manchin bill, which the NRA fought so hard against. The reader seems to have more in common with Mr. Waldman then the NRA, but sees his ally as the enemy.

(Chart based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, via Leon Neyfakh)

Ed Finn argues that “when we start depending on our computers to explain how and why things happened, we’ve started to outsource not just the talking points but the narrative itself”:

The idea that a computer might know you better than you know yourself  may sound preposterous, but take stock of your life for a moment. How many years of credit card transactions, emails, Facebook likes, and digital photographs are sitting on some company’s servers right now, feeding algorithms about your preferences and habits? What would your first move be if you were in a new city and lost your smartphone? I think mine would be to borrow someone else’s smartphone and then get Google to help me rewire the missing circuits of my digital self. …

But of course we’re not surrendering our iPhones or our cloud-based storage anytime soon, and many have begun to embrace the notion of the algorithmically examined life. Lifelogging pioneers have been it at it for decades, recording and curating countless aspects of their own daily existences and then mining that data for new insights, often quite beautifully. Stephen Wolfram crunched years of data on his work habits to establish a sense of his professional rhythms far more detailed (and, in some cases, mysterious) than a human reading of his calendar or email account could offer. His reflections on the process are instructive:

He argues that lifelogging is “an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened.” We may not always be ready to hear what those things are. At least one Facebook user was served an ad encouraging him to come out as gay—a secret he never shared on the service and had divulged to only one friend. As our digital selves become more nuanced and complete, reconciling them with the “real” self will become harder. Researchers can already correlate particular tendencies in Internet browsing history with symptoms of depression—how long before a computer (or a school administrator, boss, or parent prompted by the machine) is the first to inform someone they may be depressed?

On a related note, Nick Diakopoulos urges reporters to focus more on algorithms:

He wants reporters to learn how to report on algorithms — to investigate them, to critique them — whether by interacting with the technology itself or by talking to the people who design them. Ultimately, writes Diakopoulos in his new white paper,“Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes,” he wants algorithms to become a beat:

We’re living in a world now where algorithms adjudicate more and more consequential decisions in our lives. It’s not just search engines either; it’s everything from online review systems to educational evaluations, the operation of markets to how political campaigns are run, and even how social services like welfare and public safety are managed. Algorithms, driven by vast troves of data, are the new power brokers in society.

(Image of Wolfram’s chart based on data from his digital pedometer via Stephen Wolfram)

A reader speaks up for “church-going atheists”:

We are many.  Just not all of us are open about it!  I don’t like the term “atheist” (being freighted with Dawkins anti-theism); I prefer the term “non-believer”.  I passed through my ex-Catholic/angry-atheist phase to a post-religion phase where I value what we have in common more than I care about what separates us. I go to church because 1) I married a woman of deep faith, and 2) because we found our way to a community that welcomes both of us, when she was effectively driven out of her cradle Catholicism by the horrors of California’s Prop8.  In fact, I was lobbying her to become Episcopalian for years, as that seems the logical place for a Vatican II-style Catholic with progressive views of church and justice.

Mutual respect makes our inter-faith relationship work.  My wife’s service in church (she’s now the Head Verger of an Episcopal cathedral) is a major part of her life, and I love her completely, so of course I support her wholeheartedly.  And she respects who and where I am as well. I too was raised Catholic, so the ancient rhythm of the liturgy is familiar, and the music is simply amazing (thankfully she went “nosebleed high” when she swam the Thames).  I guess I am essentially a cultural Trinitarian sacramentalist Christian, even if I don’t believe per se.  So I’ll do gladly do Episcopal calisthenics on a Sunday, though I don’t pray, sing, or take communion, because that would be disrespectful of the community.

As the members of my church say, “Whoever you are, wherever you are on the journey of faith, you are welcome here.” Kinda restores my faith in Christianity.

Another reader:

Reading your most recent post on Apatheism, I thought I’d relate the following story of how politics have made this outspoken atheist into a staunch defender of religious freedom.

I’m what you might call a “movement atheist.” I go to cons. I write for a well-known skeptical website. I am 100% for the complete separation of church and state. But in the last year I have found myself in the rather unexpected position of loudly and publicly advocating for the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, among other public expressions of religious values.

You see, I live in Quebec, where the separatist government’s proposed “Charter of Values” would ban public sector workers – which here includes all university and hospital employees in addition to your standard public servants and primary/secondary educators – from wearing any “ostentatious” religious symbols. This includes not only the hijab, but also the turban and the kippah for observant Sikhs and Jews.

The ban does not, however, extend to employees of state-funded Catholic parochial schools, which receive substantial government funding, or to the giant cross in the National Assembly, which is part of Quebec’s “cultural heritage.”

The brazen xenophobia of the whole endeavour is utterly repellant to me, especially given the province’s worrying history of anti-semitism, but the proposed charter is unfortunately quite popular with the general electorate outside of Montreal (where nearly all the affected populations live and work) and may in fact lead to the PQ winning a majority government in the upcoming election and forcing it through.

Should the measure pass, many committed atheists like myself plan nonetheless to wear banned religious articles in solidarity with our colleagues of faith. Needless to say, as an atheist activist, this is just about the last thing on earth I would ever have expected to do, but racist politics make very strange bedfellows.

Read the whole discussion thread here.

With the release of Son of God, a new movie about the life of Jesus, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey remember that “Jesus films have not always been so serious, and they have not always been directed toward particular segments of the Christian community”:

Neither Godspell, nor Jesus Christ Superstar endeavored to convert unbelievers to Christianity. If they had a particular audience in mind, it was those who loved the theater. Both originated as stage productions. Tim Rice, the writer of Jesus Christ Superstar, explained later that he was fascinated with Jesus as a human and not as a divine figure. Following the theological controversy of the 1960s that had some leading religious thinkers emphasizing the actions of humans and not the powers of God, Rice tapped into this humanistic concern. In some respects, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar wanted to have their communion bread and eat it too. They followed the Jesus People movement by repacking Jesus in the idiom of cool, but also indulged in the new theologies that wanted to dispense with his divinity.

Blum and Harvey go on to ponder why, then, “major motion pictures about Jesus returned to their serious ways”:

So what was unique about the 1970s? One main difference was that evangelicals and Catholics had yet to form tight political bonds and had yet to become a powerful niche market. By the time of [Mel] Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, an entire industry of the devout had been created. It boasted singers like Amy Grant, athletes like NBA star David Robinson, restaurants like Chic-fil-A, and painters like Thomas Kinkade. Those markets, along with conservative media outlets, made the Son of God and The Passion not only possible, but lucrative. In fact, a main sponsor of The Bible miniseries was the dating site Christian Mingle.

Recent Dish on God and Hollywood here.

(Video: Clip from Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973)

In a review of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism, Michael Walzer observes that the author “insists, rightly, that real Jews have remarkably little to do with anti-Judaism.” Elaborating on how “imaginary Jews” came to capture the minds of thinkers who had little experience with actual Jewish people, Walzer draws on Nirenberg’s discussion of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice “to illustrate the difference between his anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism that is the subject of more conventional, but equally depressing, histories”:

Shylock himself is the classic Jew: he hates Christians and desires to tyrannize over them; he loves money, more than his own daughter; he is a creature of law rather than of love. He isn’t, indeed, a clever Jew; in his attempt to use the law against his Christian enemy, he is unintelligent and inept. (A modern commentator, Kenneth Gross, asks: “What could [he] have been thinking?”) But in every other way, he is stereotypical, and so he merits the defeat and humiliation he receives—which are meant to delight the Elizabethan audience. …

Nirenberg’s question [is]: What put so many Jews (like Shylock or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta) on the new London stage, in “a city that had sheltered fewer ‘real Jews’ than perhaps any other major one in Europe”? His answer—I can’t reproduce his long and nuanced discussion—is that London was becoming a city of merchants, hence a “Jewish” city, and Shakespeare’s play is a creative response to that development, an effort to address the allegedly Judaizing features of all commercial relationships, and then to save the Christian merchants by distinguishing them from an extreme version of the Jew.

But the distinction is open to question, and so the point of the play is best summed up when Portia asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” The play is about law and property, contracts, oaths, pledges, and promises. Shylock is the Jew of the gospels: “I stand here for law.” But he is defeated by a better lawyer and a more literal reading of the law: Portia out-Jews the Jew—which is surely an ironical version of Christian supersession.

So Shakespeare understands the arrival of modern commerce with the help of Judaism, though he knew no Jews and had never read a page of the Talmud. He knew the Bible, though, as Shylock’s speech about Jacob multiplying Laban’s sheep (Act 1, scene 3; Genesis 30) makes clear. And Paul and the gospels were a central part of his intellectual inheritance. Shylock emerges from those latter texts, much like, though the lineage is more complicated, Burke’s “Jew brokers” and Marx’s “emancipated Jews.” The line is continuous.

Previous Dish on Nirenberg’s book here and here.

(Image of Shylock by László Mednyánszky, circa 1900, via Wikimedia Commons)