A Fascinating World

Imagine what it would be like to have been born on a planet in another galaxy to another race with its own history, physiology, and culture. In some ways it would be wildly strange, but in some ways it would have to be remarkably similar, given the universal requirements on rational animal life, but for that no less unsettlingly alien to anything you can imagine now. How fascinating it would be to explore such a world!

But for the experience to be complete, you could have no notion of what you know here and now, your present life. There would be no secondary world such as the one on which these imaginings implicitly depend. So the world you knew, the only one you would know, would seem utterly normal and complete in itself.

Now tell me this: how does the situation I've described differ from your own present situation?

The Blindness of Power

This 2017 power causes brain damage article from The Atlantic keeps popping up in my FB feed. Not a bad article by any means. But what it documents is a more general phenomenon.

Have you ever noticed that our sensory organs are among the most weak and easily damaged? They are among the first to fail as we age. Have you ever noticed that the poor and the weak are usually the most affected by any sort of change, and usually in a way that hurts them?

These are manifestations of the difference between agent and patient, between activity and receptivity. The powerful and active are better at effecting an internally determined goal, whereas the weak and receptive are sensitive to external conditions.¹

A son of privileged like Ted Kennedy can drive a car off a bridge and fail to report it for nine hours, leading to the death of his female passenger, without suffering any consequences, whereas a poor schmuck like you or I would rightly be forced to acknowledge the injustice of his actions, in body if not spirit, in the penal system.

The Philosophy of Power that has prevailed since the Enlightenment emphasizes knowledge through active means. It grows from the nominalist philosophy that teaches an act of the will precedes knowledge of the world.² Power has always been a strong motivation in politics, but today's politics is amped up on the philosophical justification of power for its own sake. When human desire becomes the principal justification of actions and policies, truth is the casualty.

This unseemly reality was on display in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The leftist media was so busy promoting their "inevitable" candidate, that they failed to listen to broad swaths of the electorate telling them she wasn't inevitable. They created an echo chamber for themselves and swallowed their own propaganda. In short, power caused blindness. (None of this is to deny that the winner of that election has his own blindness.)

Leftists begin their considerations from desire. Whereas true conservatives and traditionalists begin their considerations from what already exists: nature and tradition. So it makes sense that leftists use bullying tactics. The result of making desire the principle is a political philosophy of Power. Decisions are made based purely who's will has the most power; might makes right. In such a regime, there is fundamentally no respect for truth. It can only breed a civilization of death.

So it should come as no surprise when dissenters are fired purely based on the positions they take, e.g.,

Gender Dissenter Gets Fired .

Some academics (mostly leftists) have recognized how bullying tactics are corrosive to finding the truth (or at least that version of the truth that's the object of the game in academic philosophy), e.g.,

Philosophers Should Not Be Sanctioned Over Their Positions on Sex and Gender .

As Solzhenitsyn put it:

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul—don't let him be proud of his “progressive” views, don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general—let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm.

But, given the current regime of mind (which has no time for qualms about the soul or eternal reward), such protests can at best prevail in the short term. In a longer term, the regime of lies prevails.³

Western society is locked into a downward spiral. How far down the spiral do we have to descend before we bounce back?

Man when he prospers forfeits intelligence: he is one with the cattle doomed to slaughter. (Ps 49:12, cf. verse 20)

There are two ways: the "Philosophy" of Power, which leads to death, and the Philosophy of Love, which leads to life.

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Notes

1. For creatures only. God paradoxically combines omnipotence with omniscience: infinite power with infinite sensitivity.

2. This error has a basic truth at its kernel: that before we can see reality truly, the will must exercise a desire for openness to reality. And, given our fallen nature, this act of the will must be continuously reaffirmed.

3. Take comfort. In the longest term, only God and truth can prevail.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Live Not By Lies" (Letter published Feb. 12, 1974).

How Do We Rebuild Culture?

What if the best way to rebuild Western culture was not to rebuild culture, but rather to praise God?

Here is an excellent blog post by Rachel Fulton Brown that powerfully makes that argument. It quotes the famous passage from the "Letter to Diognetus" about Christians being in the world but not of the world, and also quotes an amplification of that same point from Remi Brague's book Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern World (2019):

For instance, there is in Judaism a Talmudic cuisine, based on the rules of Kashrut; there are Christian cooks, but there is no Christian cuisine. There is in Islam a so-called prophetic medicine, based on the pieces of advice given by Muhammed in some cases and summarized in some collections of hadith which have this name, prophetic medicine; there are Christian physicians, but there is no Christian medicine. There is in Islam an Islamic dress code, the Islamic veil for each grown-up female, the commandment that each adult male let his beard grow and trim his mustache; there are Christian tailors and hairdressers, but there is no Christian fashion.

The post links to a speech by Pope Benedict that is insightful along the same lines (and beyond). Here are the last couple sentences:

A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.

H/t to Dr. Scott Hahn, who posted a link to the blog post on FB.

A Funny Thing about Rainbows

In this month in which the symbol of the rainbow has been appropriated by, shall we say, non-traditional causes, it might be good to look at rainbows as they actually are and what they actually mean.

Rainbows are a reflection phenomenon created by dispersion. Dispersion means different frequencies of light are bent different amounts in the medium (in this case usually rain) through which the light travels. So the colors that make up the white light are separated out in the various bands that make up the rainbow.

The thing I'd really like you to notice about rainbows here is how to notice them. They usually appear when the sun is low in the sky (for example, not long after sunrise or not long before sunset) and when it's raining in the part of the sky 180 degrees away from the sun. So if it's later in the day, not many hours before sunset (i.e., sun in the west) and raining in the east, you'll see the rainbow in the east.

What this means is that rainbows usually appear in the midst of rain, or near rain. The most dramatic rainbows have a dark, stormy backdrop.

There's a moral to be had from this coincidence of rainbows and dark sky. If the rainbow appears behind you, you're leaving a stormy past. You survived. If the rainbow appears in front of you, the rainbow reminds you that the storms you're about to enter will not last forever. There is hope.

Rainbows are symbols of hope.

Apologies to Maudlin

In my last post I complained about the philosophers George Ellis recommended in Sabine Hossenfelder's book. Further research reveals that I was wrong. I have to retract my complaint, at least in the case of Tim Maudlin. I'm happy to report that Maudlin appears to have a healthy respect for Aristotle. Further, the latter part of his paper on substances and space-time is written in the style of Thomas Aquinas's replies to objections in the Summa.

Maudlin also has a very good paper on unification in physics from which I think Hossenfelder and Smolin would profit. He asks what unification means and sets out some limitations of what we can reasonably expect from unification efforts.

A young theorist friend of mine points out that people largely aren't working on grand unification schemes these days (viz., GUTs, TOEs) and that the figures interviewed in Hossenfelder's book who are working on unification are either older or somewhat marginal. (Admittedly he wasn't familiar with some of the names.) It strikes me that the people who are most concerned with unification are people like Hossenfelder and Smolin who write books on what's wrong with unification efforts. But what they really need to consider is that the possibility that unification of physics isn't possible within physics as we understand it today, but through philosophy, that is, natural philosophy (in other words, by also bringing in some methodologies more typically characteristic of metaphysics). (I wonder if Ellis was hinting in that direction.)

Discovering truth is unification, at very least bringing together reality and the mind, but also often finding commonalities in previously separate insights. The over-all tendency of a truth-discovering activity like philosophy is to unify seemingly unrelated parts of and thoughts about the universe.

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Tim Maudlin 1990 "Substances and Space-time: What Aristotle Would Have Said to Einstein," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21:4, 531-561.

Tim Maudlin 1996 "On the Unification of Physics," The Journal of Philosophy, 129-144.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

Lost in Math

I recently read Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math and recommend it. The backbone of the text is a series of interviews with fellow theoretical physicists, punctuated by the author's own typically gimlet observations and reflections. I don't intend to review the book here, but merely to provide a few highlights.

Some of the people interviewed:

• Nima Arkani-Hamed
• Steven Weinberg
• Chad Orzel
• Frank Wilczek
• Garrett Lisi
• Joseph Polchinski
• Xiao-Gang Wen
• Katherine "Astrokatie" Mack
• George Ellis

Hossenfelder's thesis is that the dearth of data in high-energy physics over the past few decades has left theorists with little guidance, so they end up selecting among the many possible theories using criteria spun largely out of thin air. "Beauty" is how many refer to that inarticulate quality that supposedly characterizes a good theory. Hossenfelder particularly takes issue with "naturalness": the idea that dimensionless constants in physics should have a value of order of magnitude 1. Simplicity, elegance, and symmetry are other criteria.

Chapter 2's catalog of where "beauty" has failed physics should be required reading for aspiring theorists. A primal example is Kepler's inscribing the planetary orbits in the Platonic solids; she also cites Galileo's preference for circular orbits over elliptical. Here's a choice line:

The historian Helge Kragh concluded his biography of Dirac with the observation that "after 1935 [Dirac] largely failed to produce physics of lasting value. It is not irrelevant to point out that the principle of mathematical beauty governed his thinking only during the later period." (p. 21)

In chapter 5, she names the types of proposed multiverses: Eternal Inflation, String Theory Landscape, Many Worlds, and The Mathematical Universe. All of these seek to avoid fixing the values of mathematical parameters in theories by positing that every value of every parameter is actualized somewhere or in some way. The weakness of the justification for such theories becomes evident when she undermines the uniqueness of the present need for them: "Since every theory requires observational input to fix parameters or pick axioms, every theory leads to a multiverse when it lacks input" (106). Throughout all of physics we could have speculated about a multiverse, but we didn't.

She talks with Steven Weinberg at length. The most interesting part was this remark on quantum foundations:

If you had a theory that said that, well, particles move around and there's a certain probability that it will go here or there or the other place, I could live with that. What I don't like about quantum mechanics is that it's a formalism for calculating probabilities that human beings get when they make certain interventions in nature that we call experiments. And a theory should not refer to human beings in its postulates. You would like to understand macroscopic things like experimental apparatuses and human beings in terms of the underlying theory. You don't want to see them brought in on the level of axioms of the theory. (124)

Aristotle's dictum that form precedes matter makes perfect sense of this irreducibility. The truth of two facts is no mere coincidence: that Weinberg doesn't understand this aspect of quantum theory and that he would be one of the last people to admit that Aristotle had anything meaningful to say about the world.

I typically find George Ellis insightful, and Hossenfelder's interview with him does not disappoint. He's especially good in observing how atheists' baseless claim that science disproves the existence of God actually contributes mightily to undermining the authority of science (214). The conversation also fruitfully turns to the value of philosophy, including this exchange:

"Yes—when we have an infinity appearing in a function, we assume it's not physical," I explain. "But there's no good mathematical reason why a theory should not have infinities. It's a philosophical requirement turned into a mathematical assumption. People talk about it but never write it down. That's why I say it gets lost in math. We use a lot of assumptions that are based on philosophy, but we don't pay attention to them."

"Correct," George says. "The problem is that physicists have been put off philosophy by a certain branch of philosophers who spout nonsense—the famous Sokal affair and all that. And there are philosophers who—from a scientific viewpoint—do talk nonsense. But nevertheless, when you are doing physics you always use philosophy as a background, and there are a lot of good philosophers—like Jeremy Butterfield and Tim Maudlin and David Albert—who are very sensible in terms of the relationship between science and philosophy. And one should form a good working relationship with them. Because they can help one see what are the foundations and what is the best way to frame the questions. (218)

Recognizing a value to philosophy is certainly a significant step, but does it go far enough? I have at best a passing familiarity with the work of the three philosophers named, but I daresay that they are the typical "safe" philosophers that physicists typically turn to, the kind that never question the central idea of modernity that philosophy has no meaningful access to the natural world except through "science." This kind is a far cry from recognizing that what we call physics today is actually a subset of a much larger field called natural philosophy, whose axioms are as certain and as immediately graspable as your presence in the place where you read this; which can draw on physics without being wholly dependent on it for data about the real world; and on which physics is wholly dependent if only implicitly. I would delight to be proven wrong about these three philosophers: please comment below with citations.

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Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

Big Screen Conventions

The big screen (not to mention the small screen) is not only a screen that presents the world, but it is also a screen that obscures the world. Below is a list of some prominent big-screen conventions that we need to see past to see the world rightly.

Bop on the head

It's a convenient way to get someone out of the way without killing him. By convention, the person comes to without any lasting damage. In reality, being knocked unconscious is a serious injuring, possibly accompanied by a concussion.

No helmet

The good don't wear helmets, at least ones that would obscure their faces. For example, in Lone Survivor (2013), the heroes repeatedly throw themselves down the side of a mountain to escape the Taliban forces pursuing them. Somehow their heads sustain no injuries, despite the lack of protective headgear. Why? Movies are a visual medium, and the audience has to be able to tell the protagonists apart, and seeing their faces also helps us to identify with them. What's also interesting is how often the bad guys are anonymized by wearing helmets, e.g., the Star Wars stormtroopers. That way we don't mind their being killed.

Sleeping around

Many modern romantic comedies and situation comedies have characters sleeping around. But no one gets pregnant or contracts a venereal disease. I suppose the reason is that if something like that happened, the movie would take on a deeper moral dimension and no longer be a (light) comedy. Of course, in a slasher film, the convention is exactly the opposite: the teen couple that transgresses this moral boundary is usually the first to suffer at the hands of the supernatural antagonist.

Anachronistic sexual morals

The characters in relationships portrayed as taking place in a previous age often hold assumptions about the nature of sexual intercourse that are manifestly characteristic of the modern, anything-goes age. For example, in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), the action takes place in 1939, but the characters in the love triangle at its center talk as if casual relations were nothing remarkable. The Amazon series Man in the High Castle (2015–) takes place in an alternative 1962, but two central characters, Frank and Juliana, live together unmarried, with no one around them making any special note of the fact. The assumption behind these anachronisms is that the upside-down situation that has prevailed since the advent of the Pill is how things have always been. At best, this is shorthand for allowing us moderns to identify with the characters of the past. At worst, it's a kind of cultural imperialism: the present conquering the past, notionally if not in fact, in order to justify itself.

Significant details

Any detail shown is significant to the story. In part, this is just a limitation of story-telling: there's only limited time to convey the action and make it understandable to the audience. But it has the potential to mislead. What's significant to our lives very often we only realize in retrospect, whereas any given detail of our day-to-day lives (e.g., an unexpected coincidence), is unlikely to have a tremendous significance to our life story.

The End is The End

Another story-telling convention. Stories are finite, they must end. But the end carries with it the implication that the character's state at the end is what prevails from that time on, "ever after." In reality, the only real end is death and the end of a story is the beginning of another story—or rather another point in the continuum of life. Episodes of The Twilight Zone have significant endings in this sense, though often the end conveys a notion of Justice that echoes that Final Judgement we all must face.

What are some other conventions? I'd be interested to hear in the comments.