A perfect refutation

The most satisfying refutation is one that not only shows why your opponent is wrong, but why he thinks he is right.

Greece, rainbows and existence

A much better post today from the Maverick.

Greece was a powerful tonic. God made it last of all the countries, and had little left over except a handful of dirt and stones. So he scattered it over the Aegean and Ionian seas, adding a rainbow as he did. So Greece is all light and rainbow, existence in the fullest sense. No wonder the ancients thought of death as some dark unlit cavern. London is in a halfway state, a sort of twilight between the Hellenistic day and the darkness of nonentity.

How much does a Greek earn?

Some economists talk about the 'Mars bar index', i.e. using the price of a Mars bar as a metric for inflation, or to measure the relative value of currencies. I prefer to use the price of beer.  In Greece I thought it was unusually expensive, namely E3.50 for a 400ml glass.  This was the local beer (Mythos) as opposed to any imported rubbish.  Converting to more natural units (pint, sterling) gives us about £4 a pint (multiplying by 568/400, dividing by 1.2).  This is more expensive than many places in cold, grey London.

I wondered whether this was just seasonal loading, but the taxi driver (who by definition must be right) said that this was standard.  This must be why there are so many Greeks in London: the driver, who has a degree in environmental science, said that the average starting salary for a graduate in Greece - assuming a job is available, which it usually isn't - is about E6,000. 

Rent is much lower in Greece, of course - the driver estimated about E300 per month for a reasonable apartment, whereas the nearest equivalent in London would be above E1,200, probably well above.  And of course, as I mentioned in my earlier post, it is usually sunny in Greece.

I was staying in Macedonia - not far from Aristotle's birthplace in Stagira, as it happens, though I didn't have time to visit, and he probably wouldn't have been in.  I will explore the phenomenon of Greek driving in a subsequent post - this is another area where I have deep disagreement with the Maverick.

Briefly offline

I will be avoiding the internet for a week, possibly two, in order to concentrate on writing the new book.  I wish all my readers a happy and fulfilling summer break.

The Afterlife

Maverick posts about The Afterlife.  Giles Fraser used to go on in this vein, saying how the perfect life would become boring after a long while.  All pleasure is cloying*, eventually we will long for the 'true death' of total annihilation, assuming true annihilation is logically possible. 

I disagree. Giles would always use golf as an example. Of course, how could even a week of golf not induce disgust and nausea.  But I could easily endure an infinity of the life that I find good.  Namely, rising at an early hour with the chirping of the birds, in the crisp purity of the morning.  A fine breakfast served by pleasant staff - strong coffee and orange juice.  Repair to a table in the verandah of a magnificient house fronting onto a lake filled with all kinds of wildlife (not of the dangerous kind).  Four of five hours of concentrated philosophical and logical speculation, enough to fill a chapter or two of an infinitely long work. 

A walk in the afternoon to admire the beauties of nature, then return to the verandah to enjoy the finest single malt (or two) while watching the sunset over the lake. An evening with wife and friends, and a fine cigar (there are no carcinogens in heaven).  Repeat endlessly, with infinite variations on that theme.  This is of course a form of the 'spiritual materialism' that the Maverick (and Giles) abhor in their different ways, but I don't altogether see the problem with it.

*producing distaste or disgust after too much of something originally pleasant

Is time travel possible?

Maverick quotes John Locke (great English philosopher and father of the American constitution) on the impossibility of two beginnings of existence, as follows.

When therefore we demand whether anything be the same or no, it refers always to something that existed such a time in such a place, which it was certain, at that instant, was the same with itself, and no other. From whence it follows, that one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning; it being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one and the same thing in different places.

He infers from this the impossibility of a soul not existing from the death of its body in 1890 (say) to its rebirth in a different body in 1990 (say). Does this also refute the possibility of time travel? Dr Who gets into his trusty police box in 1999 and travels to the year 2101. He lives out the rest of his life in the 22nd century and never travels to the 21st century. Therefore, Dr Who never existed in the 21st century. But he exists at the end of the 20th, and exists again at the beginning of the 22nd. Is this inconsistent with Locke's maxim about the impossibility of two beginnings? It's odd. The maxim seems correct, and it seems impossible that the same thing cannot have two beginnings. It seems almost a logical truth. Yet the impossibility of time travel does not seem a logical truth at all.

Philosophical passwords

I've been amusing myself on this site finding out what passwords people used to access the compromised site LinkedIn. Type in a password of choice, such as 'moonshine', and the page computes a 'hash' for that password, then sends the hash to the server database to see if it is there. Hashing is a very clever algorithm which converts a string of letters, i.e. your password, into a long alphanumeric code – the hash. The clever thing is that even if an attacker knows the hash code, and knows the hashing algorithm, they cannot in theory reverse engineer the hash and discover the original password. The algorithm is a so-called 'trapdoor function' that lets you go one way, but not the other. That is, you cannot compute the inverse of the function, even when you know the function.

In theory, that is, because if you choose a simple dictionary word or even a combination of simple dictionary words, it is easy to run a 'brute force' program that hashes every single simple dictionary word, or combination, until it finds a hash that matches. E.g. the SHA1 hash for the word 'moonshine' is befa39749509fd9ab56743e14f9d68d843ea4038, which if you Google it returns any number of sites that managed to crack it.

Testing for philosopher names I see that 'Aristotle' and 'Wittgenstein' and even 'BertrandRussell' were chosen passwords for LinkedIn members. Even, gasp, 'Animaxander'. However 'WilliamOckham' and 'DunsScotus' were not, although a Google search for their hashes shows that one clever site managed to crack them.

The hash for 'consciousness' is e02c4a06f389ccdd0f5682e257af382928ce3110

Do I use philosophical passwords? No.

Is slavery harmful?

Larry Sanger's recent post brought out the usual idiotic comments. But some thoughtful and clever comments too, in particular from someone called 'Carl Gombrich' who I suspect is the grandson of E.H. Gombrich. Some asked for evidence which supports Larry's implicit assumption that pornography is harmful to children. Gombrich replies, asking whether there is any evidence that slavery is harmful.

[…] as far as I know there is nothing we could really call evidence to show that slavery is bad, either collectively or for individuals kept as slaves. Are those refusing to move on restricting the access of children to pornography therefore in favour of legalising slavery until we have ‘evidence’ (presumably a longitudinal study over many years involving several hundred people, control groups etc) to show that slavery is harmful? Specifically that it is so harmful to individuals that it should therefore be outlawed? If they do not advocate such a move, why don’t they? That is the logic of the position: no evidence, no move.

But the important point is that slavery is bad, and the argument that it is bad was successfully made on moral grounds by previous generations in the West. That is why it is outlawed in many countries.

Now ask: is it better or worse for children to come across hardcore pornography? We are talking children, not adolescents searching out of curiosity or for arousal, but children, for whom sexuality is a very different thing. I would like to know the libertarian answer to this question. If you think it is better that children do not see hardcore pornography, then we should something about the fact that, increasingly, many of them do.

Success

So we drove down the A3, whizzing past the village of Ockham, where the real Ockham (reputedly) once lived, and aimed for the wilds.  We reached Tilford, which is itself in a pretty rural part, and made enquiries with neighbours.  There was a full-blown cricket match taking place on the green, and a ball landed a few feet away from where we were parked.

Then down a minor road for a few miles, ask some more neighbours, and we head down a dirt track for a while.  And - right at the end of the track, just before you head into a dark pine wood with goblins - there it was.  The house where Bertrand Russell wrote the early parts of Principia Mathematica.  It is the place where he wrote this letter to Frege.

Russell moved there early in 1904 for the seclusion and have the freedom to think.  He was still with his first wife Alys, who he treated pretty badly.  He moved back to London (Ralston St, Chelsea) at the end of the year, so the letter to Frege (dated December 1904) must have been the last time he stayed in Tilford.

Neither the present occupier, who kindly showed me around, nor the neighbours knew of the Russell connection. However, the Hindhead area seems to have been a sort of writers' colony in the early twentieth century. Shaw lived there, as did the somewhat different writers J.M. Barrie and Conan Doyle.  Harold Joachim, who wrote The Nature of Truth, and who coined the term 'Correspondence Theory' lived in High Pitfold just down the road, as did Russell's uncle Rollo.

I will ask the current owner if I can publish photos of the house itself - he was intrigued by the connection - but meanwhile there is a picture of the garden above, nicely set in splendid 4 acre grounds.  Just the thing to look at while you are working on the theory of types.

Reclaiming prudery

It's well known that 'queer theorists' successfully reclaimed the term 'queer', which used to be a term of abuse for homosexual, and turned it into a sort of verbal flag for the homosexualist movement.

Can we do the same thing for the term 'prude'?  By far the most common statement I see on one side of the porn debate is 'I am not a prude' (the most common statement on the other side is 'I am against any form of censorship').  But I am always puzzled by what a 'prude' is.  It seems like a term of abuse, given that so many people are so eager to deny being one.  I have never seen anyone admit to being a prude. Is this because prudes are a bit like homosexuals were in the 1950s, and afraid to admit this.  Should prudes come out of the closet?  It's difficult to say, because whereas it was clear in the 1950s what 'homosexual' meant, it's not clear what 'prude' means.

So we can't reclaim a term if we don't know what it means. Time for some further research.

What should we do about Wikipedia’s porn problem?

By Larry Sanger here.  The logic of arguments for and against porn is interesting, although I don't have a great deal of time to go into it now.  The top level argument, as it were, is that people, i.e. all people, should have the right to see absolutely whatever they like, and that any restriction is an encroachment upon freedom.  The objection to this is that not all people, namely young children, should have this right.  Then we encounter all sorts of counter-objections and replies to the counter-objections.  For example, what exactly is wrong with children seeing such images.  If sex good or not?  If it is good, why shouldn't children participate in the good, etc etc.  Larry (who is a philosopher) covers some of these arguments in his post.

At least Augustine had a clear approach to this.  Sex, or rather shame about sex, is the result of original sin. I'll look up the reference some time.

Appearance and reality

I just noticed the Maverick’s comment on C.J.F. William’s obituary here, and was struck by the fact that his wheelchair-bound existence was news. This reminded me of the contrast between what we know of the thought of a philosopher such as Duns Scotus, which is immense, and what we know of his life, which is almost nothing, and what we do know is mostly guesswork based on other facts, and thus is not even knowledge.

CJF being in a wheelchair was in one way the most striking thing about him. I remember helping carrying it – with him in it – up the steps of the Wills building. The building was designed in the grand neo-Gothic manner (in about 1908) and so the flight of steps was about half a mile long, and I remember entertaining with horror the idea of us letting go the wheelchair and it moving with gathering speed to the bottom where it would crash into the porter’s lodge with horrifying consequences, perhaps carrying off a few undergraduates along the way.

But in another way it was the least important, and once you got to know him, you were hardly ever aware of it. He was teaching philosophy after all.

One story he liked to tell was about his special trousers he had, with a zip at the back going right up from bottom to top. A colleague came to collect him one day, and saw a spare pair of these lying on the floor, fully unzipped and looking like a tiger skin rug, except without the stripes. “Now I understand the difference between appearance and reality”, said the colleague.

There was a constant philosophical war going on between CJF and another philosopher in the department, Edo Pivcevic. Edo was Czech, or from some central European place – he was hired by the late Stefan Korner – and was a ‘phenomenologist’ always talking about Husserl and Heidegger, and saying things like ‘to answer the question about the meaning of being we must analyse the being of Man’. CJF was utterly contemptuous of this European stuff, although he taught Frege and Wittgenstein, who were very European in their own way.

CJF also told a Swinburne story. Once Swinburne offered to drive him from some place to another, probably Bristol to Manchester. However, Swinburne qualified the offer by saying he never drove over 30 miles an hour. Thinking he meant urban zones where a 30 mph limit applies in Britain, and thinking this exemplary practice, he accepted. What Swinburne meant, however, was that he drove at this speed even on motorways, where most people are whizzing along at speeds in excess of 70 mph. I don’t know how long it took to get to Manchester up the M5, although I can picture it.

A thought is a proposition with sense

Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz. Someone made a video of this, and I felt so sorry for it (only 43 views) I felt compelled to link to it.



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Thought for the day - what would you do?

It's Sunday, which is traditionally a time for reflection on higher matters, when the pub plays light jazz on the juke box instead of some awful rap music or death metal, and some folks go to church.  So here's Porter Waggoner with some philosophical reflections on Christianity and possibly the hypocrisy of Christian life.  I can't decide whether it's awful or not.  Did I mention here before that I have a weakness for country music?

The human molecule

Yesterday I discussed arguments for the broadly materialistic principle that "we can characterise thought and understanding entirely without reference to any external object". But let's not confuse that with materialism itself, and certainly let's not confuse it with crude materialism. I am concerned with rejecting the sort of anti-materialist argument that we cannot characterise a thought unless we can specify what it is a thought of, and rejecting an argument against something is obviously not the same as an argument for something.

As for 'crude' materialism, that is a perfect example of the kind of bad, sophomoric philosophy which it is the job of good philosophy to correct. There's a wonderful page full of it here. Someone, probably with an education entirely confined to the hard sciences, has the insight that people are made entirely of atoms. Molecules are made of entirely atoms, ergo humans are molecules. Materialism of the crudest sort. What's wrong with it? Well, I am not sure it is even scientifically correct. Molecules are arrangements of atoms in certain bonding relationships that hold only at the atomic level. So even DNA is not a molecule, but rather a pair of molecules held tightly together. The relationship that ties the heart to liver, and the liver to the brain is not an atomic one. Or is a molecule a set of atoms in any relationship whatsoever? Then a city is a molecule, the Earth and the Sun are molecules, the Earth and the Sun together are a single molecule, the whole universe is a single molecule. That is no help whatsoever.

Even if it is scientifically correct (I'm no expert), how does the insight help? We want to explain the nature of money, for example. Now money is an arrangement of atoms – either atoms of pound notes, or coins, or bond 'paper', or their electronic correlates in the general ledger of a payments system. But how does that help explain money? It is the job of the sciences of economics and finance to do that. How does the science of atoms and thermodynamics help us here? That's not to say that, once we have perfected those sciences, we could give a more complete, but vastly more complicated explanation in terms of atomic theory. My point is that the insight – that things are composed of atoms – does not help us explain economics, aesthetics, history etc.

Sometimes a crude materialism of this sort is used to justify malicious actions. "OK I lied to you, but I am only a collection of atoms, and concepts like good and evil and being 'wrong' are not appropriate to collections of atoms. Therefore what I did was not wrong". Which reminds of the story (I can't remember where I read it), of the man who was about to be executed for murder the next day, and pleaded to the king for clemency. "I could not help my actions, I was determined by my nature and by the stars to commit these evil deed, it was all predestined". To which the king replied "I forgive you. I also forgive the man who is to execute you tomorrow".

The London plumbing crisis ends

I never thought it possible. A nice shiny new tap. A shame about the fungus bits at the bottom of the tiles.  However not all is well.  There is still a mysterious damp patch in another part of the kitchen about four feet above ground level, probably caused by demons, as there is no scientific explanation for it.

More bad philosophy

Another excellent post by the Maverick on a topic in which he excels, namely the hamfisted and sophomoric way in which scientists deal with philosophical questions.

One would think that a scientist, trained in exact modes of thought and research, would not fall into such a blatant confusion. Or if he is not confused 'in his own mind' why is he writing like a sloppy sophomore? Scientific American is not a technical journal, but it is certainly a cut or two above National Enquirer.

The problem is that philosophy, unlike 'science' is a subject which most people feel qualified to talk about. Unlike physics or maths or chemistry, it is not taught in school, so most people have no idea of the difficulty of acquiring expertise in it. Philosophy is also rather like drama, and unlike music, in that it is difficult for non experts to spot lack of expertise. Let me explain. Bad playing of a musical instrument is immedately obvious to anyone who has no training in music. All parents will remember those primary school concerts when the young ones play violins, trumpets, pianos and so on, where the pain of listening whose only just counterbalanced by the love we all bear towards our progeny. In contrast, bad acting is less obvious to those without training in the dramatic arts.

Supposedly this is why membership of the actor's union Equity is so difficult to obtain, whereas membership of the Musicians Union is not. Being a good actor is something that good actors have to judge, being a good musician is obvious to the world. No one can pretend to be a good musician, everyone can pretend to be an actor, and so rules must be drawn up. Now in an ideal world, there would be a philosopher's union, and no one would be allowed to write or even speak about it unless they were a member. But that is not so, and the best we have is Bill's occasional entertaining ranting - which is good enough, to be sure, and lightens the darkness of our days.

Essex on dreaming

Joey Essex (My London, Evening Standard, 27th April 2012) says

I had a nightmare the other day. It felt like I was still asleep but I was awake, but it was weird because I was actually asleep.  When I woke up I was like 'Wow'.  It was so weird.

I'm not sure what he is on about here.  Is the point that, when you are dreaming, you are usually dreaming that you are awake, i.e. dreaming that you are walking, reading, talking to people, doing all the things that you are doing when you are awake. But sometimes you might be dreaming that you are dreaming, or in this case, dreaming that you are awake, but in one of those waking states where it seems as though you might be dreaming.  And then you actually wake up. Weird, eh?

[See also Alarm clock dreams, posted six years ago]

Wikipedia, Britannica and Wales

Lest anyone accuse me of bias against the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, here is something about the inadequacy of its arch-rival Britannica, and its articles about Wikipedia.

Britannica on the origin and growth of Wikipedia: " In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, Calif., to establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company."

On Jimmy Wales: "From 1994 to 2000 he was an options trader in Chicago, amassing enough money to allow him to quit and start his own Internet company."

There are almost too many errors to count. First mistake, if you are going to be wrong, at least be consistently wrong.  Elementary logic suggests it is unlikely that he was both in Chicago and San Diego at the same time, unless he was commuting frequently.  Was he a bond trader or an options trader?  Did he start Bomis in 1996 or 2000?

Second, the facts, as far as I can establish.  Wales never traded bonds but rather futures and options, which are derivatives of bonds and other interest rate instruments.  He was probably not trading to begin with, as he joined Chicago Options Associates in June 1994 as a research associate.  He probably stopped trading in 1998, although he gives conflicting accounts of his time as a trader.  He moved to San Diego around August 1998, not 2000.  He had already established Bomis in 1996, but not as a Web portal company, that came slightly later, probably in October 1997.  Wales and the other founder, Tim Shell, explored many other ideas, including an online takeaway service, before they settled on the idea of the 'portal'.

What else?  There is no compelling evidence that Wales was a 'successful' trader.  In early interviews such as this, he claimed that he had made enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives. In later interviews, such as with Andrew Lih (author of the Wikipedia Revolution, which contains a mostly accurate account of the Wales's early years), he said he simply made 'enough'.

Bursty traffic

Two records broken today. First, today's page views exploded to over 1,000 for the first time in the history of Beyond Necessity. Usually it chugs along at around 150. Second – a direct cause of the burst – the number of monthly page views exceeded 5,000 for the first time.

All because of a post last year on Tolkien's Two Towers, spotted today by someone on Reddit. The interest was because of the five towers mentioned in the book, which came as a surprise to some (even though the Wikipedia entry also mentions this). This was not the object of the post, however, which concerned reference to non existent things, and the possibility of counting them. Never mind. I forget this blog is a humble cottage on the shores of the dark sea of the internet, from which the occasional storm is bound to blow in.