Today The Guardian website posted this in Pass Notes:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/02/are-internet-explorer-users-stupid
It relates to a study which claims to have found a relationship (although more likely at best a correlation) between IQ levels and which web browser people choose to use. The inflammatory and eye-catching ‘results’ seem to indicate Internet Explorer users are less intelligent.
They seem to have got the story from CBS and link to this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20086362-501465.html
CBS at least link to the website of the people who claim to have carried out the study:
http://www.aptiquant.com/news/is-internet-explorer-for-the-dumb-a-new-study-suggests-exactly-that/
Leaving aside the issues of sloppy journalism, reporters regurgitating each others’ work and a lack of validation of an issue which will be of interest to so many, not even especially engaging with the apparent shameless publicity stunt the study almost certainly is, there are things in the study itself which undermine any possibility of genuine and statistically significant results. I left a comment on the CBS website that read as follows:
I’m a little rusty, but I have a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and I have many concerns with this study.
This is from their own website:
“A Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company, AptiQuant, has released a report on a trial it conducted to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser.”
They’re speaking as if reporting someone else’s findings and that seems quite odd.
They claim they’re studying the variable of cognitive ability against the variable of choice, but there is no establishment that the web browsers are chosen by participants, some of whom will potentially be accessing the test from work. Without establishing the factor of choice the results are confounded and unusable.
Next, I can’t find any numbers in the pdf report to indicate how many users there were per web browser. For this type of study that info is essential.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, out of 101,326 participants 101,306 use IE6-8 and the remaining 20 use IE9 or other web browsers. Now let’s say that just by chance half of the 20 have well above average IQs. That kind of slant is going to skew the data completely. The ‘population’ of the study (relating to the other web browsers) is too small and the data ‘not significant’. If the same thing happened at the other end, a handful of IE6 users with a few very low IQs mixed in, we have another set of skewed data and a ‘type 1 error’
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors). Averages are meaningless without the number of users.
There’s no indication in the report if the results were ‘significant’ – a term which indicates whether the results match the hypothesis, shown by a ‘P-value’. Where’s the P-value for this study? There are misleading uses of the word ‘significant’ in the Results section, e.g. “ranked significantly lower”, but this is not how genuine experiments use the word and it creates (presumably on purpose) confusion about the results by giving the impression they’re statistically significant when the author in fact means ‘pronounced’.
The Results section discusses the findings. That tips me off that this study either isn’t real or wasn’t done properly. It’s not for the Results section to convey the author’s opinion on the findings, that goes in the Discussion/Conclusion section(s). Students have it drummed into them not to talk about what they find until the correct part of the report. The Results section should be statements of bald facts and doing otherwise is either an amateurish mistake or deliberately misleading.
(Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks above. The script doesn't seem to be working today)
Edit later same day.
As suspected, it wasn't real:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14389430
But the point remains that a few simple things gave this away and should have been spotted by the journalists or the journalists who borrowed from other journalists. Or the hoaxers could have done a better job of it. Clearly a lot of effort went into this (for reasons not yet known), but schoolboy errors tripped them up.
Wednesday 3 August 2011
Wednesday 29 June 2011
Because...
On a Facebook discussion thread I was asked to justify why it's ok to laugh at Bill Hicks' call for anyone in marketing or advertising to kill themselves (see link - NSFW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
I declined to do so at the time, partly because the person I found myself arguing with wasn't looking for an explanation, he was looking for a victory. And partly because he asked me if it was ok to call for people in marketing and advertising to kill themselves then what next? Would we do the same for Jews?
Inwardly invoking Godwin's Law , I didn't engage with him. An hour later on my walk home along the seafront an answer occurred to me and I stopped to write it down. What follows is as it came to me.
Because...
Because there are two gods in my world: Truth and Beauty, and either one is diminished by the absence of the other.
Because walking home along the shore at the end of my working day listening to a well-written song, watching a gull soar on the breeze, I can start to cry at the inexpressible wonder of it all.
Because I loathe the culture of aspiration and the cycle of economic disaster and recovery it perpetuates. The embedded false inadequacies it inculcates, the endless procession of need-thrill-remorse-need-thrill-remorse instilled in the hearts of the naïve to line the pockets of the insincere.
Because it is abhorrent to me that some spend their days convincing the adequate they are not so, covering the truth with lies, using conjuror’s tricks to convince people to part with their money – money that, while earned by time and effort, its only value to the banks and corporations is pieced together from promises and greed and fear – to spend on anything; anything that will give them hope. A hope that must be made to die quickly or it will quench the insatiable need to buy things and fortunes will no longer be made so easily.
Because the market thrives on shattered dreams and misery and the promise of better that is only made good long enough to create another hopeless, cardboard aspiration. And because the world is made worse with every selfish lie, every dark deception, every failing hope, every moment of despair that profits the deceivers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
I declined to do so at the time, partly because the person I found myself arguing with wasn't looking for an explanation, he was looking for a victory. And partly because he asked me if it was ok to call for people in marketing and advertising to kill themselves then what next? Would we do the same for Jews?
Inwardly invoking Godwin's Law , I didn't engage with him. An hour later on my walk home along the seafront an answer occurred to me and I stopped to write it down. What follows is as it came to me.
Because...
Because there are two gods in my world: Truth and Beauty, and either one is diminished by the absence of the other.
Because walking home along the shore at the end of my working day listening to a well-written song, watching a gull soar on the breeze, I can start to cry at the inexpressible wonder of it all.
Because I loathe the culture of aspiration and the cycle of economic disaster and recovery it perpetuates. The embedded false inadequacies it inculcates, the endless procession of need-thrill-remorse-need-thrill-remorse instilled in the hearts of the naïve to line the pockets of the insincere.
Because it is abhorrent to me that some spend their days convincing the adequate they are not so, covering the truth with lies, using conjuror’s tricks to convince people to part with their money – money that, while earned by time and effort, its only value to the banks and corporations is pieced together from promises and greed and fear – to spend on anything; anything that will give them hope. A hope that must be made to die quickly or it will quench the insatiable need to buy things and fortunes will no longer be made so easily.
Because the market thrives on shattered dreams and misery and the promise of better that is only made good long enough to create another hopeless, cardboard aspiration. And because the world is made worse with every selfish lie, every dark deception, every failing hope, every moment of despair that profits the deceivers.
Thursday 26 May 2011
Dimensions and Creativity: Part Two
I include here a letter I sent to Professor Max Tegmark at MIT outlining the ideas, mine and other people's, that got me thinking and prompted Part One and the upcoming Part Three of my Dimensions and Creativity posts.
1-Dimensional Mathematics, The Echoes of the Universe, Roger Penrose and the Endless Loop of Time
Abstract
Below I will put forward several ideas; from a question on the validity of mathematical infinity, to the Universe existing as a cycle with no beginning or end.
I will suggest that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the arbitrary behaviour of unobserved particles and their ‘echoes’ in potential realities which, when observed, can be specifically located only because other possible but less probable locations are cancelled out and disappear without trace. I will suggest that the double-slit experiment can be explained as what happens on the rare occasion when we are able to detect two possible universes at once.
I will describe multiple universes consisting only of ‘potential’; a single pattern of probability in a wave of the most probable ‘reality’ expanding toward heat death and zero mass before eventually looping back on itself to create the beginning of space-time from its own end. Not, as Roger Penrose has suggested, a new universe, but the very same universe; its cause, in the absence of any measurable time or space required for a sequence to form, being its own death when the end gives rise to the beginning in a closed loop of Time.
Dear Professor Tegmark,
I recently saw the Horizon programme “What is Reality?” on the BBC and was interested to hear you say the Universe is not simply described by mathematics, but actually made of mathematics.
As you have a standing invitation on your website for people to contact you with their ideas I’ve sent you mine. I included an abstract above so you can see at a glance where I’m going and decide if it’s worth reading on.
With relation to how maths is embedded within the fundamental structure of the Universe, it occurred to me that maths could be said to have direction without width or breadth, which, by my understanding, would make it one dimensional. Could it be that maths is the 1-D aspect of the physical universe? I may be way off here, but isn’t maths, when you cut it down to absolute basics, a continuum with only increase or decrease in value as possible directions and no ‘sideways motion’ to produce additional dimensions?
If the Universe exists on a mathematical framework that’s being discovered piece by piece, is it possible the first dimension is where we find that framework? A blueprint from which the other dimensions of space-time emerge? That’s my starting point, from which I head towards a far bigger picture along the way taking in a few other ideas I think are related.
The title of this e-mail includes so many big ideas it would take too long in this format to convey in any detail everything I’m weaving together, so I’ll sketch out an overview of the points. The list below maps out a progression of ideas as I see it, some are mine and some are not. Much of it has been gathered from many places over many years to form a wider concept that seems to fit together quite well. I’m sure there are many flaws, but I’d like to offer it to the experts in case it is of any use or interest.
At the risk of sounding like a Lewis Carroll character, I’d like to start with infinity.
On Infinity:
Infinity is used happily by mathematicians, but to a physicist it indicates a serious error in their equations.
If the Universe is built on a framework of mathematics then ‘pure’ concepts like infinity are idealised and not functional. Perfection doesn’t seem to exist in this universe as the physics of non-uniform dispersal through inherent imperfections appears to be the root cause of diversity.
There’s a mathematician (whose name unfortunately I can’t recall) who claims numbers don’t increase +1 to infinity, but at some very big number they somehow return to zero.
It would be impossible, even for an indestructible counting machine, to add +1 infinitely without the end of the Universe interrupting. Infinity seems to me to exist only in manufactured spaces, like halving the distance between an arrow and its target so that it travels forever without hitting its mark; always a fraction closer. This isn’t what happens of course, so is it any more realistic to say numbers are infinite if space-time is finite?
If the above is true there must be a ‘maximum number’. Perhaps if you take the smallest possible division of Time and multiply it by the full length of Time, i.e. the full duration of the Universe, that yields the largest possible number that could ‘fit’ into Time before somehow resetting to zero. As odd and counter-intuitive as this sounds, it would parallel what Penrose suggests for Space.
On Waves of Universes:
In Creation Revisited Atkins describes the behaviour of light waves through air and water and the resulting refraction. Light waves, he says, travel by the quickest route from A to B, but to find it they must first try everything then eliminate all the ones that aren’t the quickest. Light has a short wavelength so any waves deviating far from straight lines quickly interfere with each other and cancel out. When light travels through different media the wavelength is effected.
I’ve heard that anything that can be described as a single object with momentum can be thought of as a wave, including the Universe itself. (I think this relates to deBroglie’s ‘matter wave’.)
If the Universe described as a wave has an extremely short (near imperceptible) wavelength it may create multiple possibilities that, from our perspective, instantly cancel themselves out leaving just one wave as the optimum, most thermo-dynamically probable, configuration of everything.
I suggest the medium the universe-wave travels through consists of the vast number of possibilities that exist (the total potential energy of the Universe) and that all thermo-dynamic occurrences and choices of humans and animals affect the ‘direction’ of the wave. Where choice occurs the wave would take on a local characteristic, perhaps of a specific complexity (could this one day be used to detect life in distant galaxies somehow? A good plot for a sci-fi story). This doesn’t argue for Determinism as it doesn’t imply causation.
The interference that cancels out the other waves and leaves the one that is our Universe, what we call Reality, is according to probability. The improbable doesn’t happen, the probable does. Where this is arbitrary it can go either way and gives us an opportunity to detect it with experimentation. These areas of our reality appear ‘fuzzy’ to us, as in the double-slit test.
If the probability of an event (e.g. the location of an electron, the path of a photon) changes due to interaction such as measurement, observation, etc., the wave behaves differently and becomes less ‘fuzzy’ as the number of probabilities reduces. If an electron is unobserved it has the potential to be in more than one place due to equal probability of being in any specific location; but once observed that’s no longer the case. The extra waves of probable universes interfere with each other and cancel each other out until just one is left in a single location. If the electron’s velocity is measured, rather than its location, the Universe has no need to be so definitive and location can remain ‘fuzzy’.
In the double-slit test, while the photons aren’t measured, they can be in two places at once because they always were. The photons appearing on the screen are those that aren’t cancelled out by interference. No photon is split in two, no new universe is created, in fact one of many possible universes is revealed to us. When the photons are measured as they pass through the slits the probability changes and we can see the edges of Reality change. An echo normally hidden from us disappears. Measuring the photons applies the laws of physics at an increased local level, reducing the probability to one location per photon. Wouldn’t this fit with quantum mechanics and go some way to explaining the apparent paradoxes?
In current multiple universe hypotheses each universe begets further universes and each of these begets even more, increasing exponentially. This requires a limitless capacity for creation; and surely that would include the creation of energy. But energy can’t be created. Taking Occam’s razor to the problem, if the same energy is recycled again and again as the waves are cancelled out and return to potential energy state, we don’t need to explain anything new. The standard model fits.
In this hypothesis however, each new universe exists only for an infinitesimal amount of time (is there a lower limit on splitting Time, and could the duration of the new universes define it?). If events in those universes are possible yet not probable they cancel out. They wouldn’t occur over noticeable distances because the wavelength is so incredibly short. This occurs at the quantum level yet is simultaneously occurring throughout the Universe, each wave contributing to the universe-wave, the tiniest and largest scales linked together. The particles of the whole falling into place individually to create Reality as we understand it. Schrodinger’s cat now begins to make sense.
For us to be able to do anything we have to ‘move through’ the medium of what is possible, but we’re confined by the laws of physics and directed by what is statistically probable. In the medium of time-space I can get up from my chair or stay put. For those potentials to exist there has to be something for the variant universes to ‘fit into’ or ‘flow through’, but each choice or variation doesn’t have to be the cause of a whole new ‘Reality’ in its own right. If the potential that forms the possible is recycled back into the whole the problem disappears.
The ‘flow’ of potential begins to explain Time’s singular direction and why things bigger than an electron don’t spontaneously appear from nothing. The laws of thermo-dynamics dictate what is possible and what is most probable. If physics theoretically allows for time travel or the spontaneous appearance of conscious minds such events don’t occur because the probability of them happening is negligible at every moment a universe-wave cancels out and the possibility never becomes Reality. We’re misinterpreting the statistics by thinking the odds get better as Time goes on. Each moment is in one sense a new universe and the odds are the same for each one as it comes into being. The reset button is pushed. The chances of a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale suddenly springing into being are small enough to be discounted.
Time doesn’t need to flow in a specific direction, an illusory arrow may have come about due to the nature of statistical probability. A cup falling off a table is statistically weighted to keep falling because gravity bends space making the probability of it not falling zero. It smashes when it hits the floor because entropy says it will. The number of permutations the molecules can take other than as a fixed cup are so many, breaking is so probable, that nothing else can occur in the brief moments where the universe-waves come into being and cancel out. We experience Time as the flow of events towards the unavoidably probable, it can’t flow backwards or be perceived backwards without violating probability. There’s no ‘rule’ against it, but the capacity for it to happen isn’t there.
On the End of Time as its Beginning:
Roger Penrose has theorised that the end of the Universe and the dissipation of all matter and energy into potential energy is the catalyst which creates a new universe via its own Big Bang.
Penrose may have overlooked that it doesn’t need to be a new universe. A sequence of universes implies a continuum occurring within a timeframe, yet Time only occurs within a universe. To put the process into a procession of one universe following another is simply to imagine our universe within a bigger universe that behaves the same. But that doesn’t address the issue, it just moves locus, I believe incorrectly, further out. I can’t see how a sequence can occur outside Time.
A thought experiment: Compare the life of a universe to a train journey; the train itself represents space-time in any form (temporal sequences, matter, energy, potential energy), and Passenger A represents an immortal traveller who loves riding on trains and is able to survive the birth and death of universes. Each train runs exclusively on its own track and the tracks all run in large circles so that all journeys begin and end at the terminus. The terminus is at the South Pole and all tracks run up the lines of longitude, cross at the North Pole and return to the terminus. Other stations along the way are not relevant, remove them and there is still a journey. Direction of travel is irrelevant. Imagine a journey ending; the train stops but Passenger A doesn’t need to board a different train travelling on a separate track to begin another journey.
Our universe may be a closed loop. Time ends but instantly begins again, the whole Universe returning to the start. In the final moments of space-time dimensions become immaterial and it becomes possible to return to the point of beginning without moving. With no mass, no distance and no passing of time what in one moment were the furthest reaches of the void in the next are indeterminate from every other point in space-time. Time as we understand it no longer functions with nothing physical to affect. The entire Universe dissipates to potential energy and is reduced to a single point in Time and Space, an indefinably tiny speck of nothing containing literally everything. The Big Bang is the beginning of Time, but also marks its end.
I’m not a physicist or a mathematician. If I had the skills to express these ideas as equations I might be able to spot the (no doubt many) faults in them and understand why no one has made these connections before or come to these conclusions. Maybe I’m totally wrong…
…but about ten years ago I had an idea that universes could repeat, this was coincidentally about the same time Roger Penrose began thinking about it, but I only heard about his theory this year. That gives me confidence at least some of my ideas are respectable and make some kind of sense.
I hope you’ve had time to read this email and maybe, just maybe you’ll decide to respond. I’d love to know if I’m way off or if there’s anything interesting in there.
Regards,
Richmond Strange BSc (Hons), BA (Hons), MBPsS
1-Dimensional Mathematics, The Echoes of the Universe, Roger Penrose and the Endless Loop of Time
Abstract
Below I will put forward several ideas; from a question on the validity of mathematical infinity, to the Universe existing as a cycle with no beginning or end.
I will suggest that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the arbitrary behaviour of unobserved particles and their ‘echoes’ in potential realities which, when observed, can be specifically located only because other possible but less probable locations are cancelled out and disappear without trace. I will suggest that the double-slit experiment can be explained as what happens on the rare occasion when we are able to detect two possible universes at once.
I will describe multiple universes consisting only of ‘potential’; a single pattern of probability in a wave of the most probable ‘reality’ expanding toward heat death and zero mass before eventually looping back on itself to create the beginning of space-time from its own end. Not, as Roger Penrose has suggested, a new universe, but the very same universe; its cause, in the absence of any measurable time or space required for a sequence to form, being its own death when the end gives rise to the beginning in a closed loop of Time.
Dear Professor Tegmark,
I recently saw the Horizon programme “What is Reality?” on the BBC and was interested to hear you say the Universe is not simply described by mathematics, but actually made of mathematics.
As you have a standing invitation on your website for people to contact you with their ideas I’ve sent you mine. I included an abstract above so you can see at a glance where I’m going and decide if it’s worth reading on.
With relation to how maths is embedded within the fundamental structure of the Universe, it occurred to me that maths could be said to have direction without width or breadth, which, by my understanding, would make it one dimensional. Could it be that maths is the 1-D aspect of the physical universe? I may be way off here, but isn’t maths, when you cut it down to absolute basics, a continuum with only increase or decrease in value as possible directions and no ‘sideways motion’ to produce additional dimensions?
If the Universe exists on a mathematical framework that’s being discovered piece by piece, is it possible the first dimension is where we find that framework? A blueprint from which the other dimensions of space-time emerge? That’s my starting point, from which I head towards a far bigger picture along the way taking in a few other ideas I think are related.
The title of this e-mail includes so many big ideas it would take too long in this format to convey in any detail everything I’m weaving together, so I’ll sketch out an overview of the points. The list below maps out a progression of ideas as I see it, some are mine and some are not. Much of it has been gathered from many places over many years to form a wider concept that seems to fit together quite well. I’m sure there are many flaws, but I’d like to offer it to the experts in case it is of any use or interest.
At the risk of sounding like a Lewis Carroll character, I’d like to start with infinity.
On Infinity:
Infinity is used happily by mathematicians, but to a physicist it indicates a serious error in their equations.
If the Universe is built on a framework of mathematics then ‘pure’ concepts like infinity are idealised and not functional. Perfection doesn’t seem to exist in this universe as the physics of non-uniform dispersal through inherent imperfections appears to be the root cause of diversity.
There’s a mathematician (whose name unfortunately I can’t recall) who claims numbers don’t increase +1 to infinity, but at some very big number they somehow return to zero.
It would be impossible, even for an indestructible counting machine, to add +1 infinitely without the end of the Universe interrupting. Infinity seems to me to exist only in manufactured spaces, like halving the distance between an arrow and its target so that it travels forever without hitting its mark; always a fraction closer. This isn’t what happens of course, so is it any more realistic to say numbers are infinite if space-time is finite?
If the above is true there must be a ‘maximum number’. Perhaps if you take the smallest possible division of Time and multiply it by the full length of Time, i.e. the full duration of the Universe, that yields the largest possible number that could ‘fit’ into Time before somehow resetting to zero. As odd and counter-intuitive as this sounds, it would parallel what Penrose suggests for Space.
On Waves of Universes:
In Creation Revisited Atkins describes the behaviour of light waves through air and water and the resulting refraction. Light waves, he says, travel by the quickest route from A to B, but to find it they must first try everything then eliminate all the ones that aren’t the quickest. Light has a short wavelength so any waves deviating far from straight lines quickly interfere with each other and cancel out. When light travels through different media the wavelength is effected.
I’ve heard that anything that can be described as a single object with momentum can be thought of as a wave, including the Universe itself. (I think this relates to deBroglie’s ‘matter wave’.)
If the Universe described as a wave has an extremely short (near imperceptible) wavelength it may create multiple possibilities that, from our perspective, instantly cancel themselves out leaving just one wave as the optimum, most thermo-dynamically probable, configuration of everything.
I suggest the medium the universe-wave travels through consists of the vast number of possibilities that exist (the total potential energy of the Universe) and that all thermo-dynamic occurrences and choices of humans and animals affect the ‘direction’ of the wave. Where choice occurs the wave would take on a local characteristic, perhaps of a specific complexity (could this one day be used to detect life in distant galaxies somehow? A good plot for a sci-fi story). This doesn’t argue for Determinism as it doesn’t imply causation.
The interference that cancels out the other waves and leaves the one that is our Universe, what we call Reality, is according to probability. The improbable doesn’t happen, the probable does. Where this is arbitrary it can go either way and gives us an opportunity to detect it with experimentation. These areas of our reality appear ‘fuzzy’ to us, as in the double-slit test.
If the probability of an event (e.g. the location of an electron, the path of a photon) changes due to interaction such as measurement, observation, etc., the wave behaves differently and becomes less ‘fuzzy’ as the number of probabilities reduces. If an electron is unobserved it has the potential to be in more than one place due to equal probability of being in any specific location; but once observed that’s no longer the case. The extra waves of probable universes interfere with each other and cancel each other out until just one is left in a single location. If the electron’s velocity is measured, rather than its location, the Universe has no need to be so definitive and location can remain ‘fuzzy’.
In the double-slit test, while the photons aren’t measured, they can be in two places at once because they always were. The photons appearing on the screen are those that aren’t cancelled out by interference. No photon is split in two, no new universe is created, in fact one of many possible universes is revealed to us. When the photons are measured as they pass through the slits the probability changes and we can see the edges of Reality change. An echo normally hidden from us disappears. Measuring the photons applies the laws of physics at an increased local level, reducing the probability to one location per photon. Wouldn’t this fit with quantum mechanics and go some way to explaining the apparent paradoxes?
In current multiple universe hypotheses each universe begets further universes and each of these begets even more, increasing exponentially. This requires a limitless capacity for creation; and surely that would include the creation of energy. But energy can’t be created. Taking Occam’s razor to the problem, if the same energy is recycled again and again as the waves are cancelled out and return to potential energy state, we don’t need to explain anything new. The standard model fits.
In this hypothesis however, each new universe exists only for an infinitesimal amount of time (is there a lower limit on splitting Time, and could the duration of the new universes define it?). If events in those universes are possible yet not probable they cancel out. They wouldn’t occur over noticeable distances because the wavelength is so incredibly short. This occurs at the quantum level yet is simultaneously occurring throughout the Universe, each wave contributing to the universe-wave, the tiniest and largest scales linked together. The particles of the whole falling into place individually to create Reality as we understand it. Schrodinger’s cat now begins to make sense.
For us to be able to do anything we have to ‘move through’ the medium of what is possible, but we’re confined by the laws of physics and directed by what is statistically probable. In the medium of time-space I can get up from my chair or stay put. For those potentials to exist there has to be something for the variant universes to ‘fit into’ or ‘flow through’, but each choice or variation doesn’t have to be the cause of a whole new ‘Reality’ in its own right. If the potential that forms the possible is recycled back into the whole the problem disappears.
The ‘flow’ of potential begins to explain Time’s singular direction and why things bigger than an electron don’t spontaneously appear from nothing. The laws of thermo-dynamics dictate what is possible and what is most probable. If physics theoretically allows for time travel or the spontaneous appearance of conscious minds such events don’t occur because the probability of them happening is negligible at every moment a universe-wave cancels out and the possibility never becomes Reality. We’re misinterpreting the statistics by thinking the odds get better as Time goes on. Each moment is in one sense a new universe and the odds are the same for each one as it comes into being. The reset button is pushed. The chances of a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale suddenly springing into being are small enough to be discounted.
Time doesn’t need to flow in a specific direction, an illusory arrow may have come about due to the nature of statistical probability. A cup falling off a table is statistically weighted to keep falling because gravity bends space making the probability of it not falling zero. It smashes when it hits the floor because entropy says it will. The number of permutations the molecules can take other than as a fixed cup are so many, breaking is so probable, that nothing else can occur in the brief moments where the universe-waves come into being and cancel out. We experience Time as the flow of events towards the unavoidably probable, it can’t flow backwards or be perceived backwards without violating probability. There’s no ‘rule’ against it, but the capacity for it to happen isn’t there.
On the End of Time as its Beginning:
Roger Penrose has theorised that the end of the Universe and the dissipation of all matter and energy into potential energy is the catalyst which creates a new universe via its own Big Bang.
Penrose may have overlooked that it doesn’t need to be a new universe. A sequence of universes implies a continuum occurring within a timeframe, yet Time only occurs within a universe. To put the process into a procession of one universe following another is simply to imagine our universe within a bigger universe that behaves the same. But that doesn’t address the issue, it just moves locus, I believe incorrectly, further out. I can’t see how a sequence can occur outside Time.
A thought experiment: Compare the life of a universe to a train journey; the train itself represents space-time in any form (temporal sequences, matter, energy, potential energy), and Passenger A represents an immortal traveller who loves riding on trains and is able to survive the birth and death of universes. Each train runs exclusively on its own track and the tracks all run in large circles so that all journeys begin and end at the terminus. The terminus is at the South Pole and all tracks run up the lines of longitude, cross at the North Pole and return to the terminus. Other stations along the way are not relevant, remove them and there is still a journey. Direction of travel is irrelevant. Imagine a journey ending; the train stops but Passenger A doesn’t need to board a different train travelling on a separate track to begin another journey.
Our universe may be a closed loop. Time ends but instantly begins again, the whole Universe returning to the start. In the final moments of space-time dimensions become immaterial and it becomes possible to return to the point of beginning without moving. With no mass, no distance and no passing of time what in one moment were the furthest reaches of the void in the next are indeterminate from every other point in space-time. Time as we understand it no longer functions with nothing physical to affect. The entire Universe dissipates to potential energy and is reduced to a single point in Time and Space, an indefinably tiny speck of nothing containing literally everything. The Big Bang is the beginning of Time, but also marks its end.
I’m not a physicist or a mathematician. If I had the skills to express these ideas as equations I might be able to spot the (no doubt many) faults in them and understand why no one has made these connections before or come to these conclusions. Maybe I’m totally wrong…
…but about ten years ago I had an idea that universes could repeat, this was coincidentally about the same time Roger Penrose began thinking about it, but I only heard about his theory this year. That gives me confidence at least some of my ideas are respectable and make some kind of sense.
I hope you’ve had time to read this email and maybe, just maybe you’ll decide to respond. I’d love to know if I’m way off or if there’s anything interesting in there.
Regards,
Richmond Strange BSc (Hons), BA (Hons), MBPsS
Tuesday 8 March 2011
Dimensions and Creativity: Part One
In his latest book Stephen Hawking says philosophy is dead, claiming that it’s scientists who now make all valuable discoveries. The comment prompted a debate on BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage (available to download on iTunes) where Brian Cox showed his less often seen dismissive and impatient side, usually reserved for astrologers. Prof. Cox begins the discussion from the perspective that Hawking is right and goes on to challenge the usefulness of philosophy, saying that science is the best if not only means to deduce and reason our way through understanding of the universe. I disagree with them.
What do we mean by philosophy? Maybe “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence” (OED online), but I think that definition misses something. To me philosophy is thinking a problem through at a time when there’s no available empirical research, constructing thought experiments where no physical experiments can be performed. Until the raw thinking is done there’s often no clear starting point for research to begin, but thought experiments can provide them through logical, axiomatic reasoning unhindered by the limitations of the laboratory. Einstein’s daydreams about the subjective experience of a man falling from a building prompted his theories of Relativity, but they have no place in the world of objective demonstrable data as experiments involving interviews of people thrown off buildings isn’t exactly ethical.
In the study of human consciousness psychologists often talk about a “black box”, by which they mean the unknown inner workings of the mind. At this point science leaves the stage and takes a long walk into the gathering dusk, hands in pockets and whistling tunelessly. It takes a philosopher to step up and take over the challenge because philosophers deal with exactly this type of problem. Daniel Dennett digs deeper into the matter than most psychologists have been comfortable to go. He has assembled data and opinions from multiple scientific disciplines, each of which have criticised him for wasting his time with the others, and he suggests that the black box is in fact a very poor and misleading way to frame the problem as there’s nothing within the brain that equates to it. It’s bad thinking and a trap easily fallen into (see Dennett’s book ‘Consciousness Explained’). When scientists run aground it’s sometimes philosophers who push on. Unbounded creative thought can sometimes lead to entirely new ways of seeing things.
In response to Hawking’s dismissal I wrote a blog entry almost entirely without scientific research. The introduction to that blog entry took on a life of its own and became the one you’re reading now. To avoid overkill I’ve split them into two parts, the first to introduce the background and inspiration for the thought processes in the second. Also to explain why I’ve gone off on a total flight of fancy in an area about which I know almost nothing and without benefit of information or calculation. In my deliberate eschewing of the scientific method I used creative thought to find my direction and logic to steer by. I was especially encouraged by my discovery that about ten years ago Professor Sir Roger Penrose started working on a theory describing the Big Bang as following on from and being caused by the end of a previous universe. It’s now in the public domain:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=201377
And it happens that at around the same time I had come up with something that was essentially a scaled-down and maths-free version of the same thing. Go me! It all came about when NASA telescopes discovered that distant galaxies are increasing in velocity as they move further away from us, leading to the proposition of so-called ‘dark energy’, now thought to be the cause of the universe expanding at an increasing rate. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to work out that if there’s a mysterious energy pushing everything apart then eventually all matter will dissipate; nor that once all matter cools to pure, massless energy, or even prior to that when all that’s left is a sea of photons, that the passing of time will no longer occur and the four dimensions of the universe will disappear, with Time going right alongside the other three spatial dimensions and leading, literally, to the end of all things. At that point time and distance become meaningless – all energy eventually becomes potential while mass and dimension are entirely absent from the universe. Imagining everything spread over near-infinite distance or concentrated into a single point are both errors. But it seems that even well-respected scientists have trouble getting to grips with this.
In the first episode of Wonders of the Universe Brian Cox describes the fascinating and awe-inspiring depths of time after the death of all stars and evaporation of the last black holes, but he trips up on his final point while stating that the arrow of time will cease to exist and the universe will continue in a perfect order of maximum entropy and total heat death “forever”. “Forever” is after all a direction in time which requires not only space but mass. A sea of photons has no mass and a dimensionless universe devoid of time removes itself from such pedestrian concerns as past, present and future, its here and now is indistinct from its beginning or its end. Roger Penrose takes this to be the clue to the birth of a new universe. I take it to be a clue to the birth of our own endlessly cycling universe, looping like the Ouroboros symbol of antiquity and of multiple unscientific cultures worldwide, which Plato, a philosopher, described as the first living thing in the universe.
Philosophers have always had far more freedom in their thinking than scientists and early philosophers lived in times dominated by imagination and symbolism. Scientists now often live in a world devoid of imagination. Philosophy has been shut out of science and science is the poorer for it. Creative thought is a fundamental part of human development yet it’s so often side-lined. People lack cross-discipline thinking and guard arbitrary territories behind lines drawn only for the sake of convenience:
There are often good reasons for the doors being shut. The art world too demands a pedigree to show an artist is ‘qualified’ to contribute to the field from some deep-rooted personal value system and aesthetic understanding rather than applying themselves randomly. The difference is at times very hard to spot but is an essential aspect of modern art. Nature is quite capable of abstract beauty without human assistance so it’s possible to dupe unknowing art critics into heaping praise on an elephant with a paint brush. That’s not to say the elephant’s work isn’t of aesthetic value, only that the elephant is no more aware of the effect of her painting on others than a spider is aware of humans that stop to gaze at a web bejewelled with dew. It’s not the intrinsic value of a piece of modern art that resonates, it’s the value added to it by a human being holding it up and putting their name to it as a thing they wish others to be aware of and experience. The assumption, perhaps correctly, is that anyone (or anything) that hasn’t already proved themselves as a creator of art for art’s sake should be treated with caution. The world of science is not dissimilar. There are barriers and trials one must overcome before becoming an accepted member. There are uniforms, strange languages and obscure symbols. Scientists at times conduct themselves like a priesthood, custodians of the mysteries of the universe dressed in white vestments. It’s understandable, even forgivable, but their altar is sanctified by logic, reason, intellect and deduction. They seek evidence not proof, as nothing can ever truly be proven scientifically, only verified by repeatable demonstrations. Their beliefs are founded on demonstration while faith is anathema to the process, but an amount of faith is in fact enshrined within the most fundamental concepts of science: faith that humans must possess the ability to comprehend reality with some practical degree of accuracy, and faith that the process used for deduction, the scientific method, is the only correct way to go about it.
Neither of those tenets are arrived at scientifically. It’s not possible to do an experiment using the scientific method to determine if there are alternatives to it, neither is it possible to discover the limits of our comprehension through experimentation. We can’t manipulate the necessary variables or appoint a non-human control group for study. It’s easy to forget that before the endless waves of faultless logic begin a small leap of faith is required. What this means is, despite assurances that science is an entirely objective discipline, it cannot be so. It also means that science is a very human discipline and one that cannot remove itself from its human origins. To my mind that’s one of it’s strengths, not a flaw. Without it scientific research would lose its sense of wonder, its practical applications, its greatest achievements; it would become no more than a cataloguing exercise in patterns of matter and energy. As meaningless and directionless as nature, which despite a wealth of aesthetic beauty is devoid of intent or human message and is not art.
The most awe-inspiring, fascinating and beautiful thing in the known universe is simply this – to be human and to experience life here. It transcends individual disciplines and the territorial approach to knowledge, it cannot be categorised as any one thing or coherent collection of things. And it isn’t separate from the universe, life on the Earth, or even the matter and energy from which everything is made. The boundaries are ours and they are false.
*EDIT 06.04.11*
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/06/martin-rees-templeton-prize
So Hawking was just sounding off against philosphy without doing any research.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/11/science-stephen-hawking-brian-cox?INTCMP=SRCH
What is it Brian Cox is doing if not philosophising? To me the finger-pointing 'my dad's bigger than your dad' attitude shown by otherwise respectable and brilliant scientists is just an argument over territory - 'You leave the thinking to us and we'll just call it all science, even when it's not.'
What do we mean by philosophy? Maybe “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence” (OED online), but I think that definition misses something. To me philosophy is thinking a problem through at a time when there’s no available empirical research, constructing thought experiments where no physical experiments can be performed. Until the raw thinking is done there’s often no clear starting point for research to begin, but thought experiments can provide them through logical, axiomatic reasoning unhindered by the limitations of the laboratory. Einstein’s daydreams about the subjective experience of a man falling from a building prompted his theories of Relativity, but they have no place in the world of objective demonstrable data as experiments involving interviews of people thrown off buildings isn’t exactly ethical.
In the study of human consciousness psychologists often talk about a “black box”, by which they mean the unknown inner workings of the mind. At this point science leaves the stage and takes a long walk into the gathering dusk, hands in pockets and whistling tunelessly. It takes a philosopher to step up and take over the challenge because philosophers deal with exactly this type of problem. Daniel Dennett digs deeper into the matter than most psychologists have been comfortable to go. He has assembled data and opinions from multiple scientific disciplines, each of which have criticised him for wasting his time with the others, and he suggests that the black box is in fact a very poor and misleading way to frame the problem as there’s nothing within the brain that equates to it. It’s bad thinking and a trap easily fallen into (see Dennett’s book ‘Consciousness Explained’). When scientists run aground it’s sometimes philosophers who push on. Unbounded creative thought can sometimes lead to entirely new ways of seeing things.
In response to Hawking’s dismissal I wrote a blog entry almost entirely without scientific research. The introduction to that blog entry took on a life of its own and became the one you’re reading now. To avoid overkill I’ve split them into two parts, the first to introduce the background and inspiration for the thought processes in the second. Also to explain why I’ve gone off on a total flight of fancy in an area about which I know almost nothing and without benefit of information or calculation. In my deliberate eschewing of the scientific method I used creative thought to find my direction and logic to steer by. I was especially encouraged by my discovery that about ten years ago Professor Sir Roger Penrose started working on a theory describing the Big Bang as following on from and being caused by the end of a previous universe. It’s now in the public domain:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=201377
And it happens that at around the same time I had come up with something that was essentially a scaled-down and maths-free version of the same thing. Go me! It all came about when NASA telescopes discovered that distant galaxies are increasing in velocity as they move further away from us, leading to the proposition of so-called ‘dark energy’, now thought to be the cause of the universe expanding at an increasing rate. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to work out that if there’s a mysterious energy pushing everything apart then eventually all matter will dissipate; nor that once all matter cools to pure, massless energy, or even prior to that when all that’s left is a sea of photons, that the passing of time will no longer occur and the four dimensions of the universe will disappear, with Time going right alongside the other three spatial dimensions and leading, literally, to the end of all things. At that point time and distance become meaningless – all energy eventually becomes potential while mass and dimension are entirely absent from the universe. Imagining everything spread over near-infinite distance or concentrated into a single point are both errors. But it seems that even well-respected scientists have trouble getting to grips with this.
In the first episode of Wonders of the Universe Brian Cox describes the fascinating and awe-inspiring depths of time after the death of all stars and evaporation of the last black holes, but he trips up on his final point while stating that the arrow of time will cease to exist and the universe will continue in a perfect order of maximum entropy and total heat death “forever”. “Forever” is after all a direction in time which requires not only space but mass. A sea of photons has no mass and a dimensionless universe devoid of time removes itself from such pedestrian concerns as past, present and future, its here and now is indistinct from its beginning or its end. Roger Penrose takes this to be the clue to the birth of a new universe. I take it to be a clue to the birth of our own endlessly cycling universe, looping like the Ouroboros symbol of antiquity and of multiple unscientific cultures worldwide, which Plato, a philosopher, described as the first living thing in the universe.
Philosophers have always had far more freedom in their thinking than scientists and early philosophers lived in times dominated by imagination and symbolism. Scientists now often live in a world devoid of imagination. Philosophy has been shut out of science and science is the poorer for it. Creative thought is a fundamental part of human development yet it’s so often side-lined. People lack cross-discipline thinking and guard arbitrary territories behind lines drawn only for the sake of convenience:
Knowledge may be infinite and it may be borderless, but for practical purposes, we slice knowledge up into pieces and apply convenient labels that help us segment it into manageable portions for pedagogical purposes.
M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/science.cfmThere are often good reasons for the doors being shut. The art world too demands a pedigree to show an artist is ‘qualified’ to contribute to the field from some deep-rooted personal value system and aesthetic understanding rather than applying themselves randomly. The difference is at times very hard to spot but is an essential aspect of modern art. Nature is quite capable of abstract beauty without human assistance so it’s possible to dupe unknowing art critics into heaping praise on an elephant with a paint brush. That’s not to say the elephant’s work isn’t of aesthetic value, only that the elephant is no more aware of the effect of her painting on others than a spider is aware of humans that stop to gaze at a web bejewelled with dew. It’s not the intrinsic value of a piece of modern art that resonates, it’s the value added to it by a human being holding it up and putting their name to it as a thing they wish others to be aware of and experience. The assumption, perhaps correctly, is that anyone (or anything) that hasn’t already proved themselves as a creator of art for art’s sake should be treated with caution. The world of science is not dissimilar. There are barriers and trials one must overcome before becoming an accepted member. There are uniforms, strange languages and obscure symbols. Scientists at times conduct themselves like a priesthood, custodians of the mysteries of the universe dressed in white vestments. It’s understandable, even forgivable, but their altar is sanctified by logic, reason, intellect and deduction. They seek evidence not proof, as nothing can ever truly be proven scientifically, only verified by repeatable demonstrations. Their beliefs are founded on demonstration while faith is anathema to the process, but an amount of faith is in fact enshrined within the most fundamental concepts of science: faith that humans must possess the ability to comprehend reality with some practical degree of accuracy, and faith that the process used for deduction, the scientific method, is the only correct way to go about it.
Neither of those tenets are arrived at scientifically. It’s not possible to do an experiment using the scientific method to determine if there are alternatives to it, neither is it possible to discover the limits of our comprehension through experimentation. We can’t manipulate the necessary variables or appoint a non-human control group for study. It’s easy to forget that before the endless waves of faultless logic begin a small leap of faith is required. What this means is, despite assurances that science is an entirely objective discipline, it cannot be so. It also means that science is a very human discipline and one that cannot remove itself from its human origins. To my mind that’s one of it’s strengths, not a flaw. Without it scientific research would lose its sense of wonder, its practical applications, its greatest achievements; it would become no more than a cataloguing exercise in patterns of matter and energy. As meaningless and directionless as nature, which despite a wealth of aesthetic beauty is devoid of intent or human message and is not art.
The most awe-inspiring, fascinating and beautiful thing in the known universe is simply this – to be human and to experience life here. It transcends individual disciplines and the territorial approach to knowledge, it cannot be categorised as any one thing or coherent collection of things. And it isn’t separate from the universe, life on the Earth, or even the matter and energy from which everything is made. The boundaries are ours and they are false.
*EDIT 06.04.11*
"I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read little philosophy and less theology, so I don't think his views should be taken with any special weight."Sir Martin Rees, astronomer Royal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/06/martin-rees-templeton-prize
So Hawking was just sounding off against philosphy without doing any research.
"If I have the time and I'm not totally overwhelmed with things to do, then my mind constantly and gently chews over problems and often an answer or idea will pop into my head almost at random. Having the space to think is a genuine luxury, and vitally important if we want people to be creative in any job."Professor Brian Cox
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/11/science-stephen-hawking-brian-cox?INTCMP=SRCH
What is it Brian Cox is doing if not philosophising? To me the finger-pointing 'my dad's bigger than your dad' attitude shown by otherwise respectable and brilliant scientists is just an argument over territory - 'You leave the thinking to us and we'll just call it all science, even when it's not.'
Monday 14 February 2011
Thoughts On Legally Enshrined Human Rights
In what is evidently a continuing stream of consciousness and curiosity on the concept of 'human rights' I appear to have now written this:
Human rights are often divided into distinct categories of ‘natural’ and ‘legal’. I’ll deal with ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’ human rights in more detail in another blog post perhaps, if the momentum for this topic stays with me, but for this post I want to look at legally enshrined human rights because this is the manifestation of such beliefs in an officially sanctioned form. This is how groups attempt to gain international acceptance of their beliefs. Drawing up a declaration of rights is a statement both of those beliefs and the conviction to uphold them. It may be a declaration to defend them with force, or of the anticipation that every right-thinking government will adopt them as of undeniable value and validity. The Declaration of Independence is a famous example, but a much more recent and secular one is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The UDHR was drawn up in 1948 as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. It was the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are considered inherently entitled and is made up of 30 articles reproduced in full at the end of this post).
Freedom of thought, for example, is defined under Article 18 in the UDHR as:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The above sentence is a good place to start demonstrating what a minefield this exercise is. One aspect of life for some Islamic people is the practice of female circumcision. Although not part of any official religious text it’s been adopted by many Muslims as a religious observance, but has been condemned as brutal and entirely unnecessary mutilation by the many who oppose its practise. This, to me, nullifies any effect Article 18 hopes to enshrine and calls into question how we should interpret freedom “to manifest … religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The UDHR as a whole is not without its critics either. In 1982 the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, described the UDHR as “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. The Organization of the Islamic Conference officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam as an alternative to the UDHR and which includes the "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah".
In relation to Article 25 on rights to health, Andrew Bissell (a supporter of ‘objectivism’) argued:
"Health care doesn’t simply grow on trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others...no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to one’s efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients’ lives depend."
This is a good example of how ‘freedoms’ in actuality can become enslavements. Not only can individual articles in practice remove rights, as a whole a declaration can have the opposite effect it is intended to make. To quote Philip Alston:
“If every possible human rights element is deemed to be essential or necessary, then nothing will be treated as though it is truly important.”
There are also issues with the interpretation of some of the ‘freedoms’. For instance Article 26 stipulates "...education shall be compulsory", but to make a thing compulsory is to remove freedom of choice. John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, says:
“No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than [the right of a person to peacefully follow their own interests]. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests you and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”
Somewhat controversially, the UDHR includes the word ‘compulsory’ once and ‘compel’ twice.
Human rights can also be split into civil/political rights, and economic/social/cultural rights. The UDHR holds the two groups to be indivisible as only in combination can the different rights successfully exist. Critics claim that the two groups require, by their nature, very different approaches and so cannot be treated as indivisible. In The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights, Olivia Ball and Paul Gready point out that some civil rights are reliant on progressive and vague legalities, while some social rights are precise and well-defined by the observable needs of individuals.
Further criticism asserts that the UDHR is rooted in liberal, Western and/or imperialist perspectives and so cannot be considered universal. Some Asian critics such as former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, claim that individual freedoms and liberties are prioritised lower in Asian values than in Western values. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir then went on to assert that this made Asians more suitable for authoritarian regimes than for democracies, which itself was not received without criticism, including a response from Mahathir’s own deputy Anwar bin Ibrahim who accused him of offending “our traditions as well as our forefathers, who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustices”. However, there is evidence to support at least the first part of the claim, that Asian don’t tend to put themselves before their social groups. In ‘Cognitive social psychology: the Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition’ Gordon B. Moskowitz describes the interaction of implicit self-regard and culture. He says:
‘Research on the relation between culture and self-concept suggests that the members of Eastern and Western [culture] understand and evaluate the self quite differently.’
In ‘Handbook of Child Psychology: Theoretical models of human development’, William Damon and Richard M. Lerner describe how research suggests Asians emphasise the fundamental interrelatedness of all individuals within a group and that this relationship, rather than individual freedoms, is the influencing factor to consider:
‘From an East Asian cultural perspective a … European American style – distinct positive and attribute based – is not a mature, fully civilised form of human agency. A strongly held, clear sense of self signals childishness because it entails failure to take full account of and show sufficient regard for the relationships of which the self is part.’
It’s also worth noting that when speaking Japanese there is no fixed word or meaning for ‘I’ as there is in English. In Japanese the equivalent of ‘I’ in a sentence such as “I carried the bag to the car” is changed to reflect the relationship of the carrier of the bag to the owner of the bag. If it’s his boss’s bag the social subordination is reflected in the word used. What we in Europe consider to be a concrete, unchanging self neither holds up cross-culturally nor in psychological research. Language shapes and directs thought. The labels we use in our definitions of words and concepts create models of them in our minds. What we then consider ‘reality’ is our own constructed mental model assembled from our personal, subjective experiences within the context of our own culture. If the concept of ‘me’ is dependent on where I grew up then how can the concepts of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ not be? How can there be inalienable human rights when it appears the concept of the individual human being is not itself an inalienable thing?
This is social relativity. Each individual’s perception and interpretation being wholly and subjectively constructed according to where they are and how they got there; like photons passing a spinning black hole, in their own relative space-time they experience travel in a straight line, behaving as they always do; but to an outside observer their path is a spiral. As a culture we are beginning to accept the notions of relativity in physics, happily using satnav systems every day that incorporate Einstein’s theories to allow for the different pace of passing time on the surface and in orbit. Yet in our own individual experiences we rely on information provided by our intuition and evolved perceptions, despite scientific evidence that they can be, and regularly are, fooled. We cling to our personal narratives, confabulating our way across the gaps, assigning supernatural powers to any unexplored detail of science and wishing fervently for magic in our fiction and our festivals.
If human rights truly were inalienable I don’t believe there would be any need for documents such as the UDHR to attempt to define them. The articles would indeed be “self-evident” and would apply to any person in any culture under any circumstances. I don’t think the evidence allows for that conclusion. Humans are complex and highly flexible things so any attempt to define morals and behaviour is going to be a tough job, and in all likelihood it would need updating every few years for each cultural group. Yes it would be nice if there really was a book of rules we could all refer to and check what’s ok and what’s not, but that concept is a compromise of our personal freedoms at best, a contradiction of them at worst (see my earlier blog post for my take on the logic) and in a more tangible, less philosophical way it undermines one of the most important aspects of adult human life – taking responsibility. As an emotionally mature adult I have the responsibility and multiple occasions to make choices of what is right or wrong, what is necessary or optional, what is a good decision or a bad decision. I won’t always get it right, but I hope for a general trend in improvement. I’d even say we measure someone’s maturity and wisdom by observing their track record in decision-making and responsibility and comparing it to our expectations for someone of their age. If the basis of those decisions is already enshrined in our genes or our psyches how can any moral decision I make be said to be mine? I’m not looking for a god or a politician to tell me what’s right. I’ll read the words and take in the meanings, but in the end the decision of what is right and wrong sits with me. The combined experiences of humanity seem to back this up. Perhaps this is especially so when we consider the behaviour of victims of atrocities because it’s at the extremes or when normality breaks down that we begin to see how things really work. All the theorising and postulating amounts to little more than rhetoric until it’s put to the test in unusual circumstances. Let’s all hope we never really have to find out how our beliefs hold up under extremes.
Appendix
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
Everyone has the right to a nationality.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Human rights are often divided into distinct categories of ‘natural’ and ‘legal’. I’ll deal with ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’ human rights in more detail in another blog post perhaps, if the momentum for this topic stays with me, but for this post I want to look at legally enshrined human rights because this is the manifestation of such beliefs in an officially sanctioned form. This is how groups attempt to gain international acceptance of their beliefs. Drawing up a declaration of rights is a statement both of those beliefs and the conviction to uphold them. It may be a declaration to defend them with force, or of the anticipation that every right-thinking government will adopt them as of undeniable value and validity. The Declaration of Independence is a famous example, but a much more recent and secular one is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The UDHR was drawn up in 1948 as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. It was the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are considered inherently entitled and is made up of 30 articles reproduced in full at the end of this post).
Freedom of thought, for example, is defined under Article 18 in the UDHR as:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The above sentence is a good place to start demonstrating what a minefield this exercise is. One aspect of life for some Islamic people is the practice of female circumcision. Although not part of any official religious text it’s been adopted by many Muslims as a religious observance, but has been condemned as brutal and entirely unnecessary mutilation by the many who oppose its practise. This, to me, nullifies any effect Article 18 hopes to enshrine and calls into question how we should interpret freedom “to manifest … religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The UDHR as a whole is not without its critics either. In 1982 the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, described the UDHR as “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. The Organization of the Islamic Conference officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam as an alternative to the UDHR and which includes the "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah".
In relation to Article 25 on rights to health, Andrew Bissell (a supporter of ‘objectivism’) argued:
"Health care doesn’t simply grow on trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others...no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to one’s efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients’ lives depend."
This is a good example of how ‘freedoms’ in actuality can become enslavements. Not only can individual articles in practice remove rights, as a whole a declaration can have the opposite effect it is intended to make. To quote Philip Alston:
“If every possible human rights element is deemed to be essential or necessary, then nothing will be treated as though it is truly important.”
There are also issues with the interpretation of some of the ‘freedoms’. For instance Article 26 stipulates "...education shall be compulsory", but to make a thing compulsory is to remove freedom of choice. John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, says:
“No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than [the right of a person to peacefully follow their own interests]. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests you and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”
Somewhat controversially, the UDHR includes the word ‘compulsory’ once and ‘compel’ twice.
Human rights can also be split into civil/political rights, and economic/social/cultural rights. The UDHR holds the two groups to be indivisible as only in combination can the different rights successfully exist. Critics claim that the two groups require, by their nature, very different approaches and so cannot be treated as indivisible. In The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights, Olivia Ball and Paul Gready point out that some civil rights are reliant on progressive and vague legalities, while some social rights are precise and well-defined by the observable needs of individuals.
Further criticism asserts that the UDHR is rooted in liberal, Western and/or imperialist perspectives and so cannot be considered universal. Some Asian critics such as former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, claim that individual freedoms and liberties are prioritised lower in Asian values than in Western values. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir then went on to assert that this made Asians more suitable for authoritarian regimes than for democracies, which itself was not received without criticism, including a response from Mahathir’s own deputy Anwar bin Ibrahim who accused him of offending “our traditions as well as our forefathers, who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustices”. However, there is evidence to support at least the first part of the claim, that Asian don’t tend to put themselves before their social groups. In ‘Cognitive social psychology: the Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition’ Gordon B. Moskowitz describes the interaction of implicit self-regard and culture. He says:
‘Research on the relation between culture and self-concept suggests that the members of Eastern and Western [culture] understand and evaluate the self quite differently.’
In ‘Handbook of Child Psychology: Theoretical models of human development’, William Damon and Richard M. Lerner describe how research suggests Asians emphasise the fundamental interrelatedness of all individuals within a group and that this relationship, rather than individual freedoms, is the influencing factor to consider:
‘From an East Asian cultural perspective a … European American style – distinct positive and attribute based – is not a mature, fully civilised form of human agency. A strongly held, clear sense of self signals childishness because it entails failure to take full account of and show sufficient regard for the relationships of which the self is part.’
It’s also worth noting that when speaking Japanese there is no fixed word or meaning for ‘I’ as there is in English. In Japanese the equivalent of ‘I’ in a sentence such as “I carried the bag to the car” is changed to reflect the relationship of the carrier of the bag to the owner of the bag. If it’s his boss’s bag the social subordination is reflected in the word used. What we in Europe consider to be a concrete, unchanging self neither holds up cross-culturally nor in psychological research. Language shapes and directs thought. The labels we use in our definitions of words and concepts create models of them in our minds. What we then consider ‘reality’ is our own constructed mental model assembled from our personal, subjective experiences within the context of our own culture. If the concept of ‘me’ is dependent on where I grew up then how can the concepts of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ not be? How can there be inalienable human rights when it appears the concept of the individual human being is not itself an inalienable thing?
This is social relativity. Each individual’s perception and interpretation being wholly and subjectively constructed according to where they are and how they got there; like photons passing a spinning black hole, in their own relative space-time they experience travel in a straight line, behaving as they always do; but to an outside observer their path is a spiral. As a culture we are beginning to accept the notions of relativity in physics, happily using satnav systems every day that incorporate Einstein’s theories to allow for the different pace of passing time on the surface and in orbit. Yet in our own individual experiences we rely on information provided by our intuition and evolved perceptions, despite scientific evidence that they can be, and regularly are, fooled. We cling to our personal narratives, confabulating our way across the gaps, assigning supernatural powers to any unexplored detail of science and wishing fervently for magic in our fiction and our festivals.
If human rights truly were inalienable I don’t believe there would be any need for documents such as the UDHR to attempt to define them. The articles would indeed be “self-evident” and would apply to any person in any culture under any circumstances. I don’t think the evidence allows for that conclusion. Humans are complex and highly flexible things so any attempt to define morals and behaviour is going to be a tough job, and in all likelihood it would need updating every few years for each cultural group. Yes it would be nice if there really was a book of rules we could all refer to and check what’s ok and what’s not, but that concept is a compromise of our personal freedoms at best, a contradiction of them at worst (see my earlier blog post for my take on the logic) and in a more tangible, less philosophical way it undermines one of the most important aspects of adult human life – taking responsibility. As an emotionally mature adult I have the responsibility and multiple occasions to make choices of what is right or wrong, what is necessary or optional, what is a good decision or a bad decision. I won’t always get it right, but I hope for a general trend in improvement. I’d even say we measure someone’s maturity and wisdom by observing their track record in decision-making and responsibility and comparing it to our expectations for someone of their age. If the basis of those decisions is already enshrined in our genes or our psyches how can any moral decision I make be said to be mine? I’m not looking for a god or a politician to tell me what’s right. I’ll read the words and take in the meanings, but in the end the decision of what is right and wrong sits with me. The combined experiences of humanity seem to back this up. Perhaps this is especially so when we consider the behaviour of victims of atrocities because it’s at the extremes or when normality breaks down that we begin to see how things really work. All the theorising and postulating amounts to little more than rhetoric until it’s put to the test in unusual circumstances. Let’s all hope we never really have to find out how our beliefs hold up under extremes.
Appendix
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
Everyone has the right to a nationality.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Thursday 10 February 2011
February and Other Mysteries
Yesterday I heard a DJ complaining about February, with it’s “silent r” and its fewer days. “What’s that all about, Febyoory?” he wittered.
fɛbrʊəri, or fɛbjʊəri gets its name from the Latin ‘februarius’, which in turn comes from februa, the name of a Roman purification feast held in this month. Precise speakers insist that the r should be pronounced, but it doesn’t flow easily for everyone so most people replace it with a y sound: Feb-yoo- rather than Feb-roo-. This is now becoming the accepted standard. Three seconds on AskOxford.com would have told him that, as it did me, and no doubt explanations for the fewer days could be found with a little more digging.
I have to conclude that his question was entirely rhetorical. He had no desire to find out the answers, only to find a subject which his listeners could relate to. And I suppose it’s likely that many English speakers will at some point have wondered about the seemingly redundant and obstructive first r in the word, so the DJ was sure to have connected with a lot of people on some level.
But what kind of people? With exabytes of digital information within easy and almost instant reach, in an age of smart phones, i-pads, laptops, Google, Android and Wikipedia, who is still left in the dark about such trivial things? Presumably a fairly big proportion of radio listeners tuning in to DJs that fill their air-time with inane rhetoric. They must feel the inclination to listen to these topics and even, in the case of some shows, to phone in and discuss them live on air.
So what purpose does it serve to question without seeking answers? I think the answer to that is it provides people with commonality, bonds of shared incredulity and tutting at the state of things. It allows the head-shaking grumblers countless opportunities to vent the Victor Meldrewisms that tend to bubble up in us when we feel out of our depth, like a kind of irritation version of nitrogen narcosis. I also think this, along with titillation and confirmation bias, is among the last few remaining purpose of most newspapers.
So what’s the problem? For me the problem is it’s lazy. It reinforces our existing fears and prejudices. It’s the reverse of scientific thinking because it doesn’t seek answers, it seeks only consensus of opinion. It’s a form of confirmation bias itself, on a grand scale. A mutual agreement to banish thought and reason and to lock thought patterns into disapproval. Entrenched dissatisfaction with trivial and often transient matters, such as pronunciation or fashions, provides the opportunity to conserve energy by resetting the default attitude towards any process requiring effort to condemnation. It removes the need to re-assess our model of the world to fit the new or the or to acclimatise ourselves to the unexpected.
Remember the flightless birds of New Zealand. Evolution follows the rule of ‘use it or lose it’ and it favours anything that conserves energy. If we as a species make a virtue of ignorance we make it an attractive quality, which in turn risks it becoming an adaptive trait. Our huge and costly brains came about through necessity during periods of ever-more complex problem solving, both technical and social. Now everything is done at the push of a button and we have less need to think for ourselves. Our intellectual wings have been superseded by a cultural miasma which buoys us up and along whatever path we slouch our way into early in life. As we’re less and less inclined to think for ourselves or to challenge our long-held and safe beliefs we’re more and more likely to lose our ability to discern between truth and comfort.
fɛbrʊəri, or fɛbjʊəri gets its name from the Latin ‘februarius’, which in turn comes from februa, the name of a Roman purification feast held in this month. Precise speakers insist that the r should be pronounced, but it doesn’t flow easily for everyone so most people replace it with a y sound: Feb-yoo- rather than Feb-roo-. This is now becoming the accepted standard. Three seconds on AskOxford.com would have told him that, as it did me, and no doubt explanations for the fewer days could be found with a little more digging.
I have to conclude that his question was entirely rhetorical. He had no desire to find out the answers, only to find a subject which his listeners could relate to. And I suppose it’s likely that many English speakers will at some point have wondered about the seemingly redundant and obstructive first r in the word, so the DJ was sure to have connected with a lot of people on some level.
But what kind of people? With exabytes of digital information within easy and almost instant reach, in an age of smart phones, i-pads, laptops, Google, Android and Wikipedia, who is still left in the dark about such trivial things? Presumably a fairly big proportion of radio listeners tuning in to DJs that fill their air-time with inane rhetoric. They must feel the inclination to listen to these topics and even, in the case of some shows, to phone in and discuss them live on air.
So what purpose does it serve to question without seeking answers? I think the answer to that is it provides people with commonality, bonds of shared incredulity and tutting at the state of things. It allows the head-shaking grumblers countless opportunities to vent the Victor Meldrewisms that tend to bubble up in us when we feel out of our depth, like a kind of irritation version of nitrogen narcosis. I also think this, along with titillation and confirmation bias, is among the last few remaining purpose of most newspapers.
So what’s the problem? For me the problem is it’s lazy. It reinforces our existing fears and prejudices. It’s the reverse of scientific thinking because it doesn’t seek answers, it seeks only consensus of opinion. It’s a form of confirmation bias itself, on a grand scale. A mutual agreement to banish thought and reason and to lock thought patterns into disapproval. Entrenched dissatisfaction with trivial and often transient matters, such as pronunciation or fashions, provides the opportunity to conserve energy by resetting the default attitude towards any process requiring effort to condemnation. It removes the need to re-assess our model of the world to fit the new or the or to acclimatise ourselves to the unexpected.
Remember the flightless birds of New Zealand. Evolution follows the rule of ‘use it or lose it’ and it favours anything that conserves energy. If we as a species make a virtue of ignorance we make it an attractive quality, which in turn risks it becoming an adaptive trait. Our huge and costly brains came about through necessity during periods of ever-more complex problem solving, both technical and social. Now everything is done at the push of a button and we have less need to think for ourselves. Our intellectual wings have been superseded by a cultural miasma which buoys us up and along whatever path we slouch our way into early in life. As we’re less and less inclined to think for ourselves or to challenge our long-held and safe beliefs we’re more and more likely to lose our ability to discern between truth and comfort.
Tuesday 8 February 2011
Response in Discussion on Immutable Human Rights
Part of an online discussion with Roland, this response was too long and too wide-ranging to comfortably fit on the Facebook page where the conversation began.
One of the problems with the idea of immutable human rights is that the evidence from history and cross-cultural studies doesn’t back it up.
The luxuriously comfortable world of the domesticated and educated classes of late 20th Century/early 21st Century Europe causes a skewed perspective. It’s a cognitive illusion to assume that what you know is a) correct and b) a general rule.
Secondly, for there to be immutable human rights they must be encoded in us somehow. There are 2 means by which this is generally thought to happen – evolutionary selection for a genetic predisposition (often called ‘instinct’, which means nothing), or by divine decree.
The problem with that is it’s not logical. If one follows the logic it goes round in a big circle and falls over. Lookie-see:
1) If a feeling that we have certain definite rights is genetically pre-programmed into our brains then we are not free to choose how we feel or to review and change our beliefs. We are enslaved by a perspective that dictates our feelings from within, so in this case the argument for a right to freedom is self-contradictory. If you are genetically pre-determined to feel you have a right to freedom you have no choice in this and therefore you are not free.
If you discount genetic pre-determinism (as many do, because it’s a very hard notion to live with) then perhaps a pre-disposition is a better option. But pre-dispositions are by their nature less precise and so the concept of immutable rights – perfect, unchanging, precise, inviolate doesn’t fit. Plus perfection isn’t found in a natural system. Nature is vague, imperfect and imprecise, hence bio-diversity, niche specialties and speciation. This universe does not contain anything of absolute unchanging perfection. That is fundamental to the laws of physics and a root cause of the existence of matter itself dating back to approx 380,000 years after the start of this universe. So any form of encoded and precisely defined behaviour cannot be unchanging in the natural, physical world. It can only be tied to a particular species in the form of tendencies towards certain behavioural traits. But remember that even the concept of ‘species’ is a category that collapses under scrutiny. A species is just a snapshot in a bio-diverse process that is utterly mutable and constantly subject to change, frequently radical. It’s the antithesis of immutability. If these immutable rights belong instead to all species then where is the evidence in the natural world? Are animals capable of evil?
If you’re not looking for evidence and acting purely on belief, what is it in your philosophy that makes humans so special that they have rights other animals don’t? What, must be asked, is ‘human’ anyway? Would a fully sapient, self-aware android have human rights? What if it was self-aware but shaped like a big goldfish or flower? Does a human with serious brain damage have less rights than you or I? Are human rights a virtue of our form or of our intellect? A combination? Any way you answer that it can’t explain logically how rights can be attached to an AI and simultaneously to a biological person in a vegetative state. If you remove the rights of the brain damaged aren’t you at risk of making a value-judgement on what makes a life worthwhile? The judgement seems to be made from an emotional perspective and emotions are out of our control. That brings us back to the earlier idea of being pre-determined or pre-disposed to feel that way.
Also consider the fact that there was at no point in our ancestry a ‘first human’. Any cut-off point from now going backwards to our ape-like ancestors that one may decide is where the human/non-human boundary exists has to be an arbitrary decision. There is no point genetically or palaeontologically where humans arise, just a seamless blend from one ancestor’s DNA to another’s all the way back to the first post-RNA slime. Where do you arbitrarily assign ‘human’ rights on that chain? If you do it too recently you’re saying ancestors who are a bit too hairy and hunched don’t have the same rights. If you go back too far who’s to say where you stop? Monkeys? Fish? It’s an illogical proposition and can only be explained in terms of mutability and context, like all categories and emotional responses.
2) If human rights have been enshrined in us by a benign deity then freedom is again removed from the equation. If your perceived freedom is only made sacred by virtue of a supernatural power then it’s not by choice. Even the definitions of what’s fair and just are suspect because they are not your own definitions, they’ve been presented to you by a god and you’ve been constructed to feel comfortable with them and as if they’re your own. It’s a theological cognitive illusion and the result is the same. You as an individual play no part in the process and by definition are not free to choose other than whether to obey or defy the dictum of the god. Your ‘choice’, if any, is to be ‘good’ and obey or be ‘bad’ and defy. That leads to all sorts of problems, not least that of culpability. If a god has instilled in all humans a knowledge of right and wrong then ignorance is no defence and any tribesman in Papua New Guinea can be held as a ‘sinner’ for not subscribing to the same view of right and wrong. Sound familiar? Perceived permanence of a natural form of justice, by a process of logical deduction, leads us to religious persecution and the obliteration of freedom of choice. What’s morally right and wrong in comfortable, well-nourished European suburbs is not necessarily the same as what’s right and wrong in a rapidly depleting jungle at the edge of the world. Or on the game reserves of Africa where poachers are shot dead to protect endangered species. Does a rhino on the verge of extinction have more rights than a human simply due to the numbers?
To say that human rights are immutable – i.e. established and maintained outside of human decision making processes - and to promulgate the view that human rights are inviolate, is to ignore the efforts made, the blood spilled and hardships endured, by our European ancestors in establishing what we now perceive to be our deserved rights as free and intrinsically valuable individuals. As voting, fairly emancipated people we generally think of our society and ourselves as deeply connected and that we deserve respect. That view is very ‘Western’ and very modern. Yes it’s been a feature of philosophers’ discussions for thousands of years, but when they discussed the freedoms of men in antiquity they meant men. Not women, not children, and certainly not slaves or even lower classed men. The boundaries of moral certainty move as a culture changes. They are not fixed.
These days there would probably be much agreement on feeling uncomfortable about abuse of power or strength and individuals deserving respect, not being judged purely on how useful they are to society. But that view isn’t universally held even now and historically the opposite has been held by many cultures many times, always justifying it to themselves with arguments couched in their own philosophical and sometimes theological ideals. Such views are artefacts of cultures, just as our own feelings on human rights are. But, as ever, environment and genetics co-exist and shape each other. The key issue here being that they are shaped and thus they change.
On the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t believe there are consciously ‘evil’ people doing ‘evil’ deeds in the world. I think there are very different views of what’s acceptable and what’s desirable and that ‘evil’ is open to interpretation. (For an inevitable Star Wars interlude, to me Palpatine is at his least convincing when he’s melodramatically portrayed as knowingly villainous. I don’t buy it. Dictators are usually driven by a desire to ‘better’ society by draconian means and so aren’t evil in their own eyes).
There does appear to be a genetic link with an inter-personal value system that pre-disposes one to certain feelings, including how we see society itself and our position in relation to it. I forget the details, but this TED talk is where I heard about it. If I remember correctly, whether we are left or right wing, libertarian or fascist, is merely a matter of where we are on the spectrum as defined by our individual phenotype and the culture in which it arises.
http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/
Actually, Haidt has a few TED talks on this subject so I’m going to go listen to them all and see what he says before I write anything else.
http://www.ted.com/search?q=haidt
One of the problems with the idea of immutable human rights is that the evidence from history and cross-cultural studies doesn’t back it up.
The luxuriously comfortable world of the domesticated and educated classes of late 20th Century/early 21st Century Europe causes a skewed perspective. It’s a cognitive illusion to assume that what you know is a) correct and b) a general rule.
Secondly, for there to be immutable human rights they must be encoded in us somehow. There are 2 means by which this is generally thought to happen – evolutionary selection for a genetic predisposition (often called ‘instinct’, which means nothing), or by divine decree.
The problem with that is it’s not logical. If one follows the logic it goes round in a big circle and falls over. Lookie-see:
1) If a feeling that we have certain definite rights is genetically pre-programmed into our brains then we are not free to choose how we feel or to review and change our beliefs. We are enslaved by a perspective that dictates our feelings from within, so in this case the argument for a right to freedom is self-contradictory. If you are genetically pre-determined to feel you have a right to freedom you have no choice in this and therefore you are not free.
If you discount genetic pre-determinism (as many do, because it’s a very hard notion to live with) then perhaps a pre-disposition is a better option. But pre-dispositions are by their nature less precise and so the concept of immutable rights – perfect, unchanging, precise, inviolate doesn’t fit. Plus perfection isn’t found in a natural system. Nature is vague, imperfect and imprecise, hence bio-diversity, niche specialties and speciation. This universe does not contain anything of absolute unchanging perfection. That is fundamental to the laws of physics and a root cause of the existence of matter itself dating back to approx 380,000 years after the start of this universe. So any form of encoded and precisely defined behaviour cannot be unchanging in the natural, physical world. It can only be tied to a particular species in the form of tendencies towards certain behavioural traits. But remember that even the concept of ‘species’ is a category that collapses under scrutiny. A species is just a snapshot in a bio-diverse process that is utterly mutable and constantly subject to change, frequently radical. It’s the antithesis of immutability. If these immutable rights belong instead to all species then where is the evidence in the natural world? Are animals capable of evil?
If you’re not looking for evidence and acting purely on belief, what is it in your philosophy that makes humans so special that they have rights other animals don’t? What, must be asked, is ‘human’ anyway? Would a fully sapient, self-aware android have human rights? What if it was self-aware but shaped like a big goldfish or flower? Does a human with serious brain damage have less rights than you or I? Are human rights a virtue of our form or of our intellect? A combination? Any way you answer that it can’t explain logically how rights can be attached to an AI and simultaneously to a biological person in a vegetative state. If you remove the rights of the brain damaged aren’t you at risk of making a value-judgement on what makes a life worthwhile? The judgement seems to be made from an emotional perspective and emotions are out of our control. That brings us back to the earlier idea of being pre-determined or pre-disposed to feel that way.
Also consider the fact that there was at no point in our ancestry a ‘first human’. Any cut-off point from now going backwards to our ape-like ancestors that one may decide is where the human/non-human boundary exists has to be an arbitrary decision. There is no point genetically or palaeontologically where humans arise, just a seamless blend from one ancestor’s DNA to another’s all the way back to the first post-RNA slime. Where do you arbitrarily assign ‘human’ rights on that chain? If you do it too recently you’re saying ancestors who are a bit too hairy and hunched don’t have the same rights. If you go back too far who’s to say where you stop? Monkeys? Fish? It’s an illogical proposition and can only be explained in terms of mutability and context, like all categories and emotional responses.
2) If human rights have been enshrined in us by a benign deity then freedom is again removed from the equation. If your perceived freedom is only made sacred by virtue of a supernatural power then it’s not by choice. Even the definitions of what’s fair and just are suspect because they are not your own definitions, they’ve been presented to you by a god and you’ve been constructed to feel comfortable with them and as if they’re your own. It’s a theological cognitive illusion and the result is the same. You as an individual play no part in the process and by definition are not free to choose other than whether to obey or defy the dictum of the god. Your ‘choice’, if any, is to be ‘good’ and obey or be ‘bad’ and defy. That leads to all sorts of problems, not least that of culpability. If a god has instilled in all humans a knowledge of right and wrong then ignorance is no defence and any tribesman in Papua New Guinea can be held as a ‘sinner’ for not subscribing to the same view of right and wrong. Sound familiar? Perceived permanence of a natural form of justice, by a process of logical deduction, leads us to religious persecution and the obliteration of freedom of choice. What’s morally right and wrong in comfortable, well-nourished European suburbs is not necessarily the same as what’s right and wrong in a rapidly depleting jungle at the edge of the world. Or on the game reserves of Africa where poachers are shot dead to protect endangered species. Does a rhino on the verge of extinction have more rights than a human simply due to the numbers?
To say that human rights are immutable – i.e. established and maintained outside of human decision making processes - and to promulgate the view that human rights are inviolate, is to ignore the efforts made, the blood spilled and hardships endured, by our European ancestors in establishing what we now perceive to be our deserved rights as free and intrinsically valuable individuals. As voting, fairly emancipated people we generally think of our society and ourselves as deeply connected and that we deserve respect. That view is very ‘Western’ and very modern. Yes it’s been a feature of philosophers’ discussions for thousands of years, but when they discussed the freedoms of men in antiquity they meant men. Not women, not children, and certainly not slaves or even lower classed men. The boundaries of moral certainty move as a culture changes. They are not fixed.
These days there would probably be much agreement on feeling uncomfortable about abuse of power or strength and individuals deserving respect, not being judged purely on how useful they are to society. But that view isn’t universally held even now and historically the opposite has been held by many cultures many times, always justifying it to themselves with arguments couched in their own philosophical and sometimes theological ideals. Such views are artefacts of cultures, just as our own feelings on human rights are. But, as ever, environment and genetics co-exist and shape each other. The key issue here being that they are shaped and thus they change.
On the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t believe there are consciously ‘evil’ people doing ‘evil’ deeds in the world. I think there are very different views of what’s acceptable and what’s desirable and that ‘evil’ is open to interpretation. (For an inevitable Star Wars interlude, to me Palpatine is at his least convincing when he’s melodramatically portrayed as knowingly villainous. I don’t buy it. Dictators are usually driven by a desire to ‘better’ society by draconian means and so aren’t evil in their own eyes).
There does appear to be a genetic link with an inter-personal value system that pre-disposes one to certain feelings, including how we see society itself and our position in relation to it. I forget the details, but this TED talk is where I heard about it. If I remember correctly, whether we are left or right wing, libertarian or fascist, is merely a matter of where we are on the spectrum as defined by our individual phenotype and the culture in which it arises.
http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/
Actually, Haidt has a few TED talks on this subject so I’m going to go listen to them all and see what he says before I write anything else.
http://www.ted.com/search?q=haidt
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