White Bear

This was inspired by Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. In case anyone hasn’t seen it, spoiler alert.

If you were to wipe the memory of an event from your mind, has it still happened? Clearly, yes, because there’s (assuming you’re not a total nihilist) still an objective world out there in which events are recorded. Other people continue to have the experiences in their own memory and will behave accordingly.The record of the event is engrained on the world in terms of physical evidence and will manifest in the physical world accordingly. Even if you wipe out the physical evidence, in principle the chain of causality exists and can be traced back to show an event happening.

But, did it happen to you?

One might naively say “yes” for the same reasons above. Except, consider who you are. How do you want to define “you” in this sense. Is it the physical atoms that compose your body, or the emergent patterns that compose your mind? These aren’t the same thing, that much is obvious.

If it’s just the atoms, then it would suffice to trim someone’s finger nails and place these cuttings in prison for their crime of theft. If it’s just atoms, with no emergent properties, then we would string a handgun up with a noose and hang it, not the person who pulled the trigger, for murder. If it as just the atoms, then even if we wanted to imprison a human body, we would let them out at most a year or two later when every cell in their body had cycled through and the original molecules had decomposed and been replaced. Red blood cells last three months at least, taste buds on the order of days. A life in prison wouldn’t last long under these parameters.

If you, like most sensible people, accept that the mind is the pattern caused independently of the material, then from the perspective of justice, it makes no sense to punish just the material itself. Hence why we don’t release people from prison after they’ve scrubbed a certain number of dead epidermal cells from their skin and we don’t punish firearms for shooting.

So, if you erase an event from someone’s memory, does it make sense to punish them for it?

In White Bear, our (initially nameless) main character is revealed to not really be inhabiting a weird world where everyone is brainwashed (well, they are, but that’s a different point), but is actually living out a form of punishment. Her memory is erased each night and she’s made to relive an episode based on the experience child murder victim that she filmed on a camera phone. This is only revealed at the end, after her confusing day being chased and tormented. Her entire experience is reduced to being an amusement park, and the people following her are actually visitors wanting to see this odd form of justice up close. Her mind is wiped at the end of the day and the whole thing starts fresh once more with no clue of the revelation of what she had previously done until it was all over.

But with her memory erased, is justice even being served? Is the person who was complicit in a murder actually being punished? Such a thing, as strange a sci-fi concept as it is, might sound desirable to some people – wouldn’t they all like a punishment to fit the crime like the rhetoric-spewing table-thumpers they are? – but your memories are a key part of your personality, your experience and your mental state. Without those memories, or with different memories in place, you’re not the same person. What happens in White Bear is that the people all geared up to punish a murderer were, in reality, only punishing an empty shell. Using the proper terms, they’d explicitly removed the mens rea prior to punishment. That makes the punishment unjust. It makes it pointless. I’m pretty sure Charlie Brooker is smart enough to know that this is the feeling people should take from it, but probably don’t.

If anything, considering the inferences she made (and behaviour exhibited) upon waking up with no memory, they’re punishing a very caring person and a very good person – not an evil person or a maniac. There’s no sense of teaching anyone anything, or making them learn. There’s no sense of improvement made anywhere. Only a sense of sating an animalistic inability to separate the emergent mind from the shell that carries it.

You start White Bear thinking that people have been brainwashed into voyeurs by a mysterious alien force. But really, they’ve been brainwashed by their own bloodlust for punishment at all costs – even if that cost is the entire point of punishment and repentance. It’s the people who watch White Bear and think “I wish we could really do that to people” that the episode takes a long, firm, judgemental stare at.

When 1% of the …

When 1% of the population fall for some bullshit, it’s called a scam.
When 10% of the population fall for some bullshit, it’s called a conspiracy theory.
When 90% of the population fall for some bullshit, it’s called a religion.

Dumbest man alive?

So, I decided to subscribe to Ray Comfort’s Facebook page just to see if he can keep up his act rather than just save it up for his occasional documentary. (The title of this is something I’ve ripped from PsyGremlin’s blog, which examines Comfort’s documentary on John Lennon up close, and shows that it has next to nothing to do with John Lennon)

Anyway, the one piece of Comfort’s evangelism I want to address is this one:

Most atheists despise the very thought of “faith,” not realizing that they exercise it many times each day. If you want to see some faith in action, watch what happens at the lights at any busy intersection. Drivers speed up to a red light trusting (having faith) in their brakes. It hardly enters their trusting mind that if the brakes fail, they are almost certainly dead. Watch them take off as soon as the light turns green, trusting (having faith) that the lights are working correctly, and that the alternative light isn’t stuck on green. Their trust is so great (their faith) that no one is running a red light, that they don’t even look in that direction to see if the way is clear. Many trusting drivers have taken off in faith, and have tragically gone to meet their Maker. Watch unthinking pedestrians trust (have faith) the on-coming driver’s brakes and his ability to use them, as they step out in front of his car and trust (have faith) the light when it says “Cross now.”

That atheists somehow profess “faith” is one of the most common tactics found in the evangelical playbook. It’s a textbook tu quoque fallacy, and indeed is likely to be the single most common version of it you can find. It’s an odd accusation, though. Isn’t faith supposed to be virtuous? To simply believe because faith tells you to? So, clearly, atheists must be virtuous to express such faith. Or maybe not.

Faith or inference?

Comfort here is using a very broad and unusual version of the term “faith”. Now, this in itself is fine. “Faith” is just five letters arranged in a certain way; so long as you’re consistent you can define it to represent whatever you want, but as we’ll see in a moment, this can have unwanted consequences.

Faith usually means, by most people’s definition, as believing that something is true without evidence that it’s true. You take it on faith that a particular god exists, for instance. You take it on faith that this god wants you to wash your toes a certain number of times before praying, or to not pull and levers on an arbitrary day of the week, that sort of thing. There’s no actual evidence for this. There are a few books dictating it, but there are books that are testament to the existence of Gandalf and Harry Potter, this says nothing. There is no physical law of the universe  Given this understanding, Comfort’s accusation that drivers profess “faith” in their brakes is plain wrong. Brakes are designed to stop cars. Brakes are tested to make sure they work. They must pass tests of tolerances against ware and tear. Their expected life time is known and replacements occasionally made. At the very least, a driver approaching a red light will have repeatedly used their brakes on the drive so far. This is no guarantee that they’ll work next time – but this is much in the same sense that we can’t guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow because of the finite potentials for alien invasions destroying the Earth or spontaneous quantum death of the universe.

To be slightly technical, expecting your brakes to work when approaching a red light isn’t an expression of faith on behalf of a motorist or a pedestrian, but a reasonable inference based on past data.

But in the world of Ray Comfort and his rather bizarrely gullible followers, there’s no room for such subtlety.

A poor definition

Let’s assume for this second part that Comfort’s wider definition of “faith” to encompass reasonable inferences holds true. As I said, this is fine. You can define words how you like so long as you’re both consistent and let people know that bellabubing your flapdoodle isn’t quite as dirty as it sounds.

The question then remains: “so fucking what?”

Simply put, the fact that Ray cheekily expands his use of faith to encompass reasonable inferences doesn’t change the fact that they are, in fact, reasonable inferences. Even if you described the faith Comfort has in a God that is curiously absent in the real-life smiting or healing business (or has aim so terrible as to be completely indistinguishable from random, deity-free natural disasters) as “faith” and described the inference a driver makes about their brakes also as “faith”, they’re qualitatively different things. This doesn’t prove anything. It certainly causes a massive problem for what “faith” is because if trusting that your brakes (that you’ve observed to work previously) is faith, then is there an action, or belief, or factoid, that would not be counted as faith?

Without an example of this, the entire concept fails to have any meaning. It’s like using the word “stuff” to refer to absolutely anything in the universe. It’s nice and all, but it doesn’t narrow ourselves down and you’ve lumped in a cubic lightyear of hydrogen gas in a nebula with a coffee pot – it’s a pretty absurd abuse of language. To rip an example from Scott Clifton, we use words like “small” because we can define them in contrast to things that are “big”. If things weren’t bigger nor smaller, then the concept of size wouldn’t exist.

By the same token, if Ray Comfort insists that atheists have faith, and insists that drivers have faith… then it becomes a useless concept to use. He proves nothing, and indeed weakens his own ability to use the word “faith” anything.

Caveat

For the sake of completeness, it’s worth pointing out that Comfort continues a little more after that paragraph:

With these thoughts in mind, it’s important to know that when a Christian says to have faith in God, we’re not saying to believe that He exists. That’s axiomatic. We are saying to exercise the same trust we have each day in things and in people. The difference being that God is utterly faithful because He cannot lie. You can trust Him to never let you down. Ever.

At first glance it may seem to address some of the issues described above. It’s just an analogy at the end of the day. But does it really? The analogy is a bad one. The situations are comparable for all the reasons espoused above. When he states that God will never let you down ever, he’s moving faith back to being an absolutist position. He gives no room for error or contingency as a reasonable inference allows for. He’s trying to evoke a sense of trust, and then yank it away to replace it with faith. It’s a good old fashioned semantic switcheroo, which is what makes him a bullshit merchant.

Who am I?

A while back, someone down the pub asked me if I had figured out who I was before I got married – the silent implication, of course, being that they had a particular cynicism towards long-term relationships and so viewed it as something I clearly rushed into and will inevitably regret (or maybe that’s projection, I dunno, but it’s a reasonable inference when you meet a twenty-something divorcee). I made a fairly wry reply along the lines of “yes, I did”, something about the internet, and moved on. I’d never really given much thought to the question of “who I am” up to that point.

More recently, I have given it some thought. And that thought has lead me to the conclusion that it is a totally bullshit question.

Really, what is it even asking? If you don’t know this, you can’t really generate an answer. At least give me a sample paper with some relevant answers here. Who am I? Is it my name – no, that’s just a label. Is it my occupation – no, because you’re not your job (unless you are, or whatever). It’s not my gender, sex, race, sexuality – those are just random attributes associated with yourself, they’re not “yourself”. It’s not my hobbies, clubs I’m involved with, political opinions – those are things I “do”, not “am”. Scratch those off the list of reasonable answers and you’re not left with much.

Now, at this point I could just say “E-Prime” and have done with it, but really that’s something else entirely. After all, we’d still want to figure out what the question is asking by phrasing it in E-Prime. As pointed out above, the question certainly isn’t asking for a list of attributes. E-Prime could help us tell when a casual “Who are you?” can easily be answered with “Agents Mulder and Scully, FBI”, but that oh-so-deep-and-meaningful version renders out less well in it.

So what could it mean? Does it ask you to describe your “essence”? Perhaps, but even then you’ve replaced bullshit with more bullshit. What the hell does “essence” even mean? It’s like some form of dualism, but more abstract and more full of itself. It’s asking for something more detailed than just a list of attributes and more qualitative than quantitative, requiring some thought and discussion rather than some box ticking, and yet it has to be simple and fundamental to you, and you alone. It’s supposed to capture the thing that makes you “you”, and not someone else. In this respect, the question is more like “who are you?”, not “who are you?”. Still, this doesn’t help us answer it.

In truth, there is no one right answer to it and there’s no one right interpretation of the question. The best we can do is say that who I “am” is really a big detailed description of my attitudes, behaviours, thoughts, opinions, all across a range of subjects, that aren’t just regurgitating what someone else has told you to think, that describes how I act and react and what I will think at any given moment for any given situation because that’s certainly going to be at least consistent. This is what people are asking for; and answering this is the only response that makes sense because all of that sort of stuff satisfactorily describes who you are.

This brings me back to the original point of someone hoping that I “discovered who I am” before a fairly arbitrary marker in my life – and it brings up why the question is full of even more bullshit than it appears at first sight.

Nothing in that list of opinions, ideas, attitudes or behaviours is fixed any more than the atoms in my body are fixed and unchanging. I “am” not the same person I was when I got married. I “am” not the same person I was when I was asked that by some randomer in a bar somewhere a year and a bit later. I hardly consider an opinion or attitude of mine valid if it was written more than a few months ago. I’m happy with this constant change. If I was going to have the same opinion of myself a year from now, there would be absolutely no point in living. I may as well consider myself at the peak of personal development and throw myself under a train because there’d be literally nothing else to do.

So why would I ever need to figure out “who I am” at any one point in time? Why would I even consider that even a valid thing to attempt? Who I am is whatever is sitting in front of you right now. It’s what I do, it’s what I think, it’s how I behave and how I react. Check back in five minutes to see if there’s been any improvement.

The one and only problem I have with the moderately religious…

Generally, I have no trouble with the moderately or liberally religious. Really. Contrary to popular opinion of me, simple belief doesn’t bother me, and I don’t care what you believe. It’s only what you then do with it and how you action it that I object to. Oh, and mostly why people believe, as that’s usually far more interesting.

So, people trying to say that the Earth is 6000 years old and claiming this ludicrous assertion is legitimate science – that pisses me off. People claiming moral absolutist authority (regardless of their inconsistencies) for their One True Religion – that hacks me off. People using religiously derived traditions as an argument against anything – I will not suffer such ideas to live. Anyone who does this is someone I consider fair game to attack their beliefs. Because, frankly, if you’re making statements that can be proven wrong, then people should try to prove them wrong – ideas that stand up to that sort of treatment are good ideas.

The liberally religious fall into this far less so. They more or less get on with it. You can have a sensible and grown up conversation with them on the subject. They’ll most likely view their religion as guidance rather than didactic statements of absolute authority. They probably won’t restrict their respect and friendship along religious lines. Perhaps they’ll even use their beliefs as a force for objective good, like helping people, rather than wasting their time on telling everyone how immoral homosexuality is and how women should shut up and stay indoors because… because… well, just because.

Hell, I know a couple of liberal/moderate Christians who would happily engage in a bit of creationist bashing for the same reasons I do – namely that they’re all scam artists trying to sell cheaply produced books and DVDs to the masses just to keep them stupid enough to keep buying those books and DVDs and throwing their money at megachurches.

Guys, continue with that. It’s great.

But… and this is a tiny little “but” in the grand scheme of things… let’s switch track from actionable beliefs to actual truth value.

Not actual factual truth value, but perceived truth value (if, of course, you care to discern a difference).

I presume that if you believe something, you believe it’s true. Well, Daniel Dennett did coin the term “belief in belief”, but the point of that is that no one ever actually thinks they merely have “belief in belief”. If you think it’s true, then, from your perspective it is true. You treat it as true. It’s an “I believe this chair is here so that when I sit down on it I won’t crash my arse onto the floor” sort of true. Well, I presume it is, because if it isn’t you need to have strong words with yourself.

So, when it comes to believing that a specific religion is true, then the only thing consistent with that is acting like it. At least actively converting others and warning them of the dangers of hell fire and so on. You need to go out there and really believe it. After all, this is your immortal soul you’re dicing with here considering what religions are about. But not only your own soul, but everyone else’s – and surely you’re morally obligated to save others. That means preaching, that means evangelism… that means being a disrespectful dick to everyone who doesn’t think like you.

The moderately/liberally religious don’t do that. They’re not dickish about that. They respect other beliefs. They think that others are entitled to their own beliefs. They’ll even have inter-faith platforms where they’ll be nicey-nice to each other in a constructive way. Some might even go so far as to hold the belief that all religions are right. Hey, I’ve heard that said on several occasions although I still have no idea how it’s internally consistent.

So, here’s my problem. Again, the one and only problem, and a tiny one in the grand scheme of things. If you think that all religions are valid, and can coexist, and you can generally live-and-let-live with differences, and you’re not being a preachy evangelical dick about it… doesn’t that mean that what you believe is somewhat arbitrary? If a vicar can stand next to an imam without shouting “You’re going to hell! Repent now sinner!”… doesn’t it say that the specifics of what you believe doesn’t really matter? If you can fall asleep a Christian and wake up as a Hindu then, from your view… has anything really changed about reality?

If so, and it doesn’t really matter what you believe, what’s the point in even having those beliefs?

Nanotechnology ate my hamster

Nanotechnology is great. New materials for advanced displays, molecular recognition for more selective catalysis, or new drug delivery pathways through dendrimers and nanoparticles. And there is the cool property of gold nanoparticles being red rather than yellow (with a size dependence on colour) due to the differences in light interactions at macro and microscopic scales.

Except few want to hear about that stuff. Make no mistake, nanotechnology is very real science – but it would be called “chemistry”, “biotechnology” or “materials science” if it wasn’t for the imagination-capturing concept of nanoscopic robots presented in decades of science fiction books and television.

The dream is simple: build a small enough intelligent robot and it will be able to manipulate not just pieces of plastic and metal as they do in a production line for cars, but atoms and molecules themselves. The possibilities of this are endless. Any molecule can be made with ease and without thought for a retrosynthesis process. Any part of the body can be repaired with just a computer program. Or they can just go wild and eat the entire Earth, converting its entire mass to a lifeless grey goo.

We’re all gonna die.

Trouble is, taken literally this pipe dream is far from realistic. Not far from realistic in the sense that such abilities are more 500 years away than 50 years away, but far from realistic in the sense of “chemistry doesn’t work that way” and “physics doesn’t work that way”. It’s therefore unsurprising that such robotic nanotech is popular with people like Eric Drexler and Ray Kurtzweil – both singularity-obsessed engineers with no formal experience or training in how molecules work in real life. It’s not that these people lack the intelligence to fathom this (far from it) it’s just that they seem to have little first-hand appreciation for the real difficulties their ideas have to overcome. In a way, they’re like theologians discussing, with great depth and clarity, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin without much thought to whether angels even dance in the first place.

Far from nanoscopic problems

Nanotechnology is said to be a blend between biochemistry and modern engineering. This is a fair description, but overly simple in many ways. Nanoscopic robots have to cope with conditions that have absolutely no similarity to the macroscopic world we experience around us because of the change in scale. A bacteria can propel itself through water with a measly flagellum, while a ocean liner cannot, simply because at the bacteria’s scale, moving through water is more akin to burrowing through wet sand than swimming through easily parted waves. In organometallic chemistry, parts of molecules fall on and off all the time, often permanently, in direct competition with the solvent they’re in. While our own arms don’t necessarily come on and off so rapidly because we have many more bonds holding them together. More often than not, this sort of thing leads to a massive solvent-dependence on the reaction – what works in dichloromethane doesn’t necessarily work in water. Solvent molecules need to move out of the way before any reactivity can happen, and this can hinder any chemical reaction far more than you might expect if the molecule was on its own. Macroscopic machines don’t experience this; air simply moves out of the way with ease. If you want to think of a nanobot as something like a car assembly plant, imagine filling the entire production line from floor to ceiling with sticky gravel and you have a better idea of the environment such bots would work in.

No, you don’t get it. You are still in a pretend world where atoms go where you want because your computer program directs them to go there.

Next is the physical work they have to do. Chemical bonds take a lot of energy to break. This is why you can happily have oxygen and hydrogen floating around with each other without a problem until you heat it up with a flame. It’s why we’re constantly developing new catalysts and new processes to boost efficiency. Without this, few chemical reactions are straightforward. A nanobot would have to be able to overcome this by being able to stabilise all the reactive intermediates that simply don’t want to be in that exposed, half-built, state and will tear at anything that comes close in order to become stable. If thermodynamics says that involves tearing the nanobot apart, so be it; giving it clever programming won’t stop nature doing that. The only thing stopping oxygen eating away the steel in a conventional machine is its relatively huge size – at the nanometre scale, reactivity is much faster, and a metal nanobot would be oxidised and denatured fairly quickly.

But let’s finally wind down with some of the practicalities of how a magic nanobot is even supposed to know what it’s doing. For a single cell, its operation is chemical. Certain stimuli happen here, the cell releases a certain chemical there. It all works. For proteins and enzymes, these work as very specific catalysts that facilitate chemical reactions. And these can be very specific. While many chemical or transition metal catalysts may react with, say, “any alcohol”, an enzyme can pin its reactivity down to a specific kind of alcohol molecule. This is one of the reasons that propanol and methanol are more poisonous to us humans than ethanol (which we can drink in much larger quantities before killing ourselves). Our bodies can tell the difference even though, chemically speaking, they’re remarkably similar chemical compounds. Loading a program onto something so small is also an issue. What can store the information and how does it process it? A chemical will just move according to the chemical environment it’s in, getting some bonds to rearrange at that scale is infinitely more complicated than just sending a pulse of electricity down a macroscopic copper wire.

A nanobot would have to play at being a combination between Maxwell’s Demon (to be able to identify chemical compounds by some magic process) and the Incredible Hulk (to have the energy to pull molecules apart without being destroyed itself)  in order to perform its supposed function of universal molecule builder. This is a shame, because real nanotechnology can work some wonders, but not miracles.

Oh, Eric…

A quick summary of the Herp-a-Derp from Eric Hovind’s Facebook page. As always, this wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if Hovind was just a regular idiot spouting in the comments section. Remember, he’s in charge of a fairly big evangelical ministry; you expect him to be well informed.

RT @richardwmnelson: “Giraffes provide no established evidence for the mode of evolution of their undeniably useful necks.” Stephen Gould

Here, surprise-surprise, Eric is retweeting a quote mine of Stephen J Gould. Gould was a frigging evolutionary biologist, paleontologist and science historian. Does anyone think he’d say something to the effect that evolution has no evidence as this quote mine suggests? Raise your hand if you think he would. Anyone? No? Good. Don’t be stupid.

The truth is far more interesting. Gould is making reference to the “browser” hypothesis – basically the just-so Sunday-School version of how giraffes evolved a long neck. The idea is simple; giraffes with long necks can reach higher trees to browse for food, so ones with longer necks survive. It’s textbook evolution by natural selection. Literally textbook. But actually examining some evidence, such as the fact that young giraffes are far shorter than their adult counterparts, or the fact that during some seasons giraffes browse for food on far lower shrubs, suggests that this explanation is bollocks. A competing hypothesis is that giraffe necks come from sexual selection, and are a side-effect of the “necking” fights that males engage in. This stuff is interesting, and is science adjusting its theories to suit evidence – i.e., working perfectly fine – but is far too complex a topic for Hovind and the sycophants who follow him. It certainly doesn’t invalidate natural selection.

RT @pastorlocke: Humanism says that God is good because he does stuff for us. Christianity says God is good simply because He’s God.

Now, the easy route to this would be to ask what retarded dictionary Eric yanked this definition of humanism from. It has little similarity to anything humanists would actually say. Humanism is a philosophy that suggests you can derive morality (how to act “right” and how to act “wrong”) from purely a human perspective. Note, the mere fact that you can even attempt to do this is a big kick in the balls for moral absolutism. It really doesn’t say anything about God doing stuff for us. Indeed, being a fairly atheistic form of philosophy it doesn’t have much to say about God at all.

But the second part, where “Christianity says God is good simply because He’s God”. That’s something else. This is called the euthyphro dilemma. The short version goes like this: is God good because God wants to be good, or is good good because God says so. If the former then morality is external to God, and can be skipped out entirely (hence we can derive humanistic morality) – God is just a messenger. If the latter, then we run into a lot of problems because God is very clearly written in the Old Testament as a complete and utter prick, and so morality becomes some arbitrary nonsense that doesn’t even mean anything useful to us. What interest should we have in being “good” if this arbitrarily defined “good” thing involves endorsing genocide or slavery? If you have 30 minutes to spare, Scott Clifton explains the entire thing nicely here.

How would YOU answer these questions?
Are any of the people in this video ‘real’ Christians?
Why or why not?

This is in reference to an overly long and mostly boring vox-pop video where people answer such hot-potato questions about what football team God supports.

This one is remarkably easy to deal with: No True Scotsman, for the love of your God, Eric, look it up. This is fallacies 101, here. Does it matter if these people aren’t your “real” Christian – what interest to they have in being held under that definition if this is how you treat them as people?

#Atheists. Here is a revealing question. If I could prove the God of the Bible exists, would you worship Him? See, not an evidence issue.

Now, putting aside him pre-supposing an answer in order to make a snide remark (because I do this all the frakking time), the problem here is that there is a massive difference between the proposal “God exists” and the proposal  “God should be worshipped”. No, really, there is a huge difference there. Is God worthy of worship? Do we get something for worship? Why does God even want worship, and why does it matter? If God has such an ego, then why is this thing still worthy of worship? The questions on this can come thick and fast, and have nothing to do with evidence presented for God’s existence. Indeed, Eric is right to say that it’s not an “evidence” issue, but not quite in the way he thinks it is. Go on, prove it to me (in a way that also can’t arbitrarily be switched around to prove that I should worship Allah instead) that your God exists, I’ll wait. If it’s managed sufficiently, I will probably respond with “oh, fancy that”. Is that a problem for atheists? No, they’re just going to adjust their beliefs and suck it up. Is that a problem for believers? Only if they conflate the need to assert the truth value of their belief system with the need to spread a specific doctrine about it – in short, for a majority with a working brain it’s not a problem.

The irony I do want to point out is that the Hovind’s are massively right-wing in their political views. They think that the world doesn’t owe you anything for merely existing. Consider not-a-doctor Kent Hovind’s rant about the economy, for instance. You exist, but you’re owed nothing because of it. So the question we need to ask is this: if God exists, why do we owe him anything?

#atheists Do you get upset with how much the players in the #SuperBowl give thanks to God?

Well, no. But someone is clearly pissed off with the concept of atheists even existing. Don’t worry, you might grow up one day, Eric.

Fact vs opinion

Suppose I was to say to you “Hey, I’ve got a secret! Want to hear it?”

Oh, Christing hellfuck, he’s about to make a bloody point again… you’d probably think. You roll your eyes and wait for it. So I lean in close to tell you, and say: “I have a dragon in my garage.”

“Yeah, sure.” some of you might think. “This is just one of those silly little word play things where it’s a Komodo dragon or the make of a car that’s called a ‘dragon’ or some shitty cop-out like that.” But I assure you, that’s not the case. Not at all. This is a real live beast of myth, legend, and that cool bit of Sucker Punch. It’s a fire-breathing, badass motherfucker. With bizarrely mammalian features for a flying reptile.

Others might say “look, I’ve read my Carl Sagan, too. Stop stealing his bit. Ass.” But just bear with me for this. The garage-dwelling dragon is a powerful point to make. It’s one of those analogies that’s really worth grasping by the balls. Hard.

The more observant may remark that, in fact, I live in a tiny flat and don’t drive, so don’t even have a garage to store a dragon in, so I’m obviously bullshitting you. This is true, good spot. Here’s the interesting twist on that bit, though: I’m not going to ask you to assume, for the sake of argument, that I do own a garage. Know full-well that I do not, nor have I ever, owned, rented, exchanged money or favours (sexual or otherwise) for, a room that could be conceivably called a “garage” by the majority of the English-speaking population, in which one could potentially store a vehicle powered by the principles of the internal combustion engine. Yes, I’m being that specific to ward off any suggestions of fancy wordplay. Allow me to even clarify with a pretty picture:

So, the challenge is this: evaluate the accuracy and truth value of the statement “I own a dragon, and I keep it in my garage.”

Now, you’d probably say I was wrong. Or that I was mistaken in some way. Or, frankly, that this statement is as close to Zero in truth value as it’s possible to get without trying to breed Bayesian statistics with Knuth’s up-arrow notation. Things that are more likely to be true – indeed, statements that probably must be true in order for me to own a dragon – include the possibility that your senses are deceiving you and you’re actually in an elaborate computer simulated hoax of my design, and that in the real reality you’re a womble.

In short, you would think I was crazy to assert ownership of such a creature.

But what if I preceded it with “I think that…” or “in my opinion…”? Suppose instead of being so up-front about it, I hedge my bets on factual accuracy instead suggest “I think that I have a dragon in my garage and that’s my opinion”. What then?

You clearly still wouldn’t think I was right. You wouldn’t think my “opinion” or “thought” was valid. Perhaps (well, probably) you would tut, nod, and know inside that I was wrong and just be too damn polite about it. But you definitely wouldn’t concede the truth value of the statement. That would still be close to Zero. After all, you know fine well that I don’t even own a fucking garage to keep the damn thing in. You know for a fact that this isn’t even a debate worth having.

If you didn’t think that, then you’d have to almost certainly evaluate your views on mental health. Not just with respect to those institutionalised because they’re under the impression that they’re dead, but whether it’s right to treat people with extreme depression. As, wouldn’t you agree, they also posses the perfectly valid opinion is that they’re worthless, and that they should kill themselves right now as the world would be better off without them. You’d almost certainly want to reconsider your respect for the opinion (Godwin Alert!) Adolf Hitler and Company had of Jews and disabled people, and their opinion that the world would be better off without them.

The reason you’d still assume I was mad to say that I thought I owned a garage-dwelling dragon, and not immediately bow down in reverence to my opinion on the matter, is that you’d recognise that simply adding “I think” didn’t really change what I was saying. What I’m asserting is true about the world is no different thanks to the words “I think that” stuck in front.

Simply stating “I own a dragon” already makes the presumption that I think I own one, and that I hold the belief in my head that I do. Otherwise I simply wouldn’t say it in the first place.

It’s my opinion that the sky is blue in the day time (although tending towards a reddish-orange at sunset/sunrise), and it’s certainly my belief that the sky is blue. I act according to that belief, and expect the world to also function accordingly; for example, in having photographs of a clear daytime sky in which it is clearly a light shade of blue. Should the sky appear green and stripy, or develop pink polka dots one day, I will act in a most surprised fashion at the sudden clash of belief and reality. No one points out that this sort of thing is their belief, thought or opinion, however, simply because such a thing is hardly controversial. It doesn’t need stating that you posses this as a “belief”, even though you do posses a belief. A “belief”, in this case, being any at-least-vaguely-coherent set of thoughts in your head.

Yet so often you might see someone state an opinion, and have it respected even though it’s clearly as disprovable as it was as if it were simply “stated” as fact. Prefixing it with “I think that” treats this fragment as something akin to a magic word. It’s magic because somehow it changes everything, even though it really doesn’t change anything.

It’s as if I could say “all blacks are homophobes” and people would rush to attack me as speaking false – but if I say “abracadabra, all blacks are homophobes” and then see people respond with a resounding chorus of how entitled I was to hold such an opinion. In reality, the central claim itself hasn’t changed. Or perhaps it’s like picking something up in a shop, running outside and setting off the security alarms, and then turning and saying “lol, j/k, I didn’t really steal this!!!1”. Or – and this is something that really fucking irks me – pirating some music or film, putting it up on PooTube, and putting “no copyright intended.” in the description. That’s not even fucking wrong! In reality, those acts haven’t changed, even though someone declares them to have been.

Actual thoughts and actual actions don’t change thanks to magic words.

Now, you might just think that any educated person can spot the difference between fact and opinion in this sort of way and so the above is just unnecessary. It gets drummed into you at school if you’ve ever done History or English or Media Studies; the way people can spin an opinion of theirs into a fact is taught quite rigorously. It all leaves us with a healthy cynicism towards certain types of claims people make. “This man is evil!” says one source. “No, this man is good!” says the other source. Both are opinions being stated as facts, and so the fallacy is easy to spot. This is a Good Thing. I won’t decry the fact that people take such assertions of truth bullshit with a pinch or seven of salt.

But it does mean we don’t as easily recognise this happening the other way around; people hiding facts – more specifically, things that can be tested as if they were facts – as opinions. Mostly because we want to avoid the spin that school has taught us to have a healthy cynicism for, we mistake people adding magic words to their blind and bold drivelling assertions as a sign of legitimacy.

“Did they say ‘I think that’ before they said it? Oh, that’s fine then”.

Nothing has changed about the assertion. The only thing that has changed is that we think opinions don’t need to be amenable and answerable to evidence. We should respect opinions. We can agree to disagree over an opinion. Or, let’s be more precise, we should respect things labelled as opinions. And this simple labelling of something as “opinion” is why adding a magic word doesn’t change anything. Adding the label “religion” to Jedi isn’t going to change the fact that it started as a bunch of Star Wars fans taking the piss. Adding the label “opinion” doesn’t exempt it from scrutiny or outright and frank accusations of bullshitting and being emphatically wrong.

The factual accuracy of a statement doesn’t change upon addition of a label; and so the respect that a statement should get, or the free ride it gets when we compare it to evidence, shouldn’t change either. If I make a statement about reality, that statement should be validated, or not, on the basis of reality. Magic words don’t create that exemption that bullshit merchants crave. Even if those magic words are “in my opinion”.

In its most acceptable form, “in my opinion” could mean “to the best of my current knowledge”. But then the same thing still applies; failure to update your views on the basis of evidence and demonstrable fact constitutes wilful ignorance. I have no problem with the ignorant, just with the people who actively want to stay that way. Fuck those people, and fuck their not-opinions.

This isn’t limited to silly little spats where someone says something wrong but sticks by it no matter what. The widespread resistance to evidence-based policy within government is entirely due to this fallacy being ramped up to eleven. The line of thinking is “If I’m presenting an opinion, I’m not making a statement about reality, so I don’t need evidence” – except this is bullshit. Policy is all about the evidence. You’re making decisions that will have an effect on the world. You need to be able to match up the actual effect of a decision with the intended effect of a decision. That’s the very definition of evidence, and it’s central to policy making. If assessing your policy or “opinion” has nothing to do with this approach in the slightest, then what fucking good is it?

If you’re going say “this action will improve the economy”, that’s testable (providing you define “improve” sufficiently). If you say “this alternative medicine will cure cancer”, that’s testable (because if 50 people receiving the treatment don’t do better than 50 people not receiving it, it just doesn’t work). If you say “the global climate isn’t really being affected by anthropogenic activity”, that’s testable (we have trends, data and statistics to play with). How many more examples are there? If you say “allowing same-sex marriage will destroy the sanctity of traditional marriage”… again, testable! Just allow it and see what happens. It’s easy.

So, in future, my response to most things masquerading as “opinion” isn’t going to be “well, I respect that”, it’s going to be “Go on. Prove it. Put your money where your mouth is. I fucking dare you.”

Mad-lib logic

One of my favourite things to do in the world is play Mad Libs with peoples’ arguments. If someone says something particularly derpy, I simply fiddle around with the nouns, the names, and the ideas, and see what I come up with. Literally, take their idea apart and fill in the blanks with something else. Does it sound equally valid that way? Does it sound like complete zebrashit that way? Does it still work as an argument that way?

By looking at what changes and what doesn’t when you do this, it reveals a lot about the nature of someone’s thought process and reveals the chinks in an argument and logical process with relative ease. For instance, most first cause arguments for the existence of God can be equally applied to the existence of any god of any religion. Imagine taking William Lane Craig standing up for Christianity with his Kalam Argument and transplanting it over to Islam. It still works that way round. The fact it still works to support two competing and different religions points out a big logical leap in the therefore department. (Really, first-cause type arguments can only be used to support one particular conclusion, which is a trivial one.)

But our murderous parents are different…

I first tried Mad Libbing an argument a few years ago when looking over the defence statements of some parents who effectively murdered their child by standing and praying over her as she died from an easily curable/treatable form of diabetes. The defence statement simply said that the parents were being true to their faith in God, and that they genuinely thought they were doing Right by God.

During their sentencing, Marathon County Circuit Court Judge Vincent Howard said the Neumanns are “very good people raising their family who made a bad decision, a reckless decision.” He then gently encouraged them to remember that “God probably works through other people, some of them doctors.”

This sort of defence frames what would otherwise be considered as death from criminal negligence as a freedom-of-religion or an expression-of-faith issue. Lighter sentences from judges are known to correlate with that – in this case, six months in prison and some probation. It made me think about the reaction it would elicit if these parents were to say how they wanted to unquestionably follow Charles Manson, instead. Or what if they didn’t subscribe to a fairly mainstream religion with a strong lobbying base, or if they had just outright stated that random voices in their head told them to do it? It made me think how quickly we would react in horror to this, and how quickly a judge and/or jury would be to pass a far more harsh judgement on them. Nothing about the defence would actually change by doing this, though. All they would be changing is the subject of their belief, not the fact that a child died because they believed it so strongly and were subsequently rendered negligent by it. Only our prejudices towards the specifics would change.

This isn’t me making things up, harsher judgements were applied to a vegan couple when their child died of malnutrition. Again, just because of their beliefs. No judge or defence lawyer was there to give them a reassuring nod to their deeply held ideas about the world, and to reduce their sentences to a slap on the wrist and a “naughty naughty” for it.

We didn’t starve my son to death. We didn’t starve my son for weeks and weeks and weeks. You know we’ve been vegetarians. We’re against animal cruelty. So why would I be cruel to my son? We’re against animals being burdened. Why would be cruel and burden him and try to drive around and do something with his body? We’re going to jail for no reason.

Nothing has changed between these two. It’s still a case of two sets of parents who used their deeply held beliefs and inadvertently killed their child by following through with them. Yet the conclusions reached are different. One was given a stern talking to about faith by a Judge and six months, the others had a life sentence and abuse hurled at them by a prosecuting lawyer.

Madness in the method

It wouldn’t be until a few years after I looked over the first example about the God-based murder defence that I found that, in fact, there is a reason this can work. There is, in fact, reason that looking at similar arguments, and showing them reaching different conclusions can be used to highlight argumentative flaws.

Formal logic is what underpins ideas and arguments (or, at least, it should be). Logic is not even 2 + 2 = 4, it’s more fundamental even than that. It’s the basic rule that says how and why 2 + 2 = 4; by defining what “+”, “2”, “4” and “=” even mean in the first place. This builds the rules that numbers work on, and so we can say things like “if 2 + 2 = 4, then 5 – 3 = 2” and so on. The thing about such logic is that it’s practically independent of its actual content, it’s distilled very purely into “if this, therefore that” without a care for what this and that are. I can say ♣ + ♦ = ♠ and justify it with some form of formal logic under it and demonstrate through that logic whether ♥ – ♦ = ♠ is also true. If the logic is valid on one, the logic is valid on the other. I can’t say, “if 2 + 2 = 4, then 7 -3 = 12”. It must hold to be at least consistent.

In principle, if you take a bunch of premises, A and B, and assert that they must come to the conclusion, Z, then any isomorphic arguments for A and B will produce an equally valid set of isomorphic conclusions, Z. If you can justify one with supposed logic, you can justify the other with the same logic. Valid logic is tautologically valid logic. Should we then point out that these new isomorphic premises don’t actually lead to the the new conclusion, then there’s one of two problems. Either there’s something wrong with our substitution (i.e., we’ve made a bad analogy, but that’s easy to fix) or there’s almost certainly something wrong in the underlying logical form of the argument.

Making exceptions to your own rule to say “nuh-uh”, just because you don’t like the conclusion it produces under other circumstances, is an ad hoc fallacy. It’s what happens when someone punishes a pair of vegans but lets of a pair of Christians. It’s what happens when people tolerate misogynists but not racists. It’s the same piece of bullshit that restricts marriage from couples on basis of sexuality, even though we’ve already completely overhauled the concept of marriage from where it was a century or two ago.

These exceptions don’t derive from logic, but straight out of the anus. Eventually the list of exceptions can grow so long that the original argument is all but useless. The fact you need even a single exception in the first place proves that the argument isn’t especially sound. So saying we should respect peoples’ cherished beliefs and be lenient when those beliefs lead them astray should apply as equally to vegans as it should to Christians. Making an exception of one but not the other is bullshit, and merely gives undue privilege to one idea for no other reason than historical precedence.

In formal terms

Let’s illustrate how just swapping some of the objects in an argument can show up flaws with this cute little syllogism.

Premise 1: Some men are doctors.

Premise 2: Some doctors are tall.

Conclusion: Some men are tall.

Totally valid, right? I mean, you have tall men. You know this because you have short men to compare them with. This is true. You won’t find an argument against “some men are tall” that doesn’t involve crude and trivial semantics like “not compared to the Eiffel Tower they’re not!”.

But the logic itself… doesn’t actually work. Remember, this is just the logic, the framework of the argument, that we’re looking at. People can still come to correct conclusions through wrong arguments, although it’s more likely that they will come to wrong conclusions through wrong arguments. It’s still a non sequitur and therefore a formal logical fallacy as the logical framework here doesn’t hold up and there is nothing in the premises that actually support the conclusion. This hard to spot when we think a conclusion is correct, or pre-assume that it is. It biases us against examining the argument or evidence more closely; we simply assume it’s true and forget to examine the thought process.

Not convinced that we can’t conclude that some men are tall based on those premises? If I was to change a few of the words, and engage in such Mad-Libbing, the argument could be changed to read:

Premise 1: Some men are doctors.

Premise 2: Some doctors have vaginas.

Conclusion: Some men have vaginas.

Gasp!

The conclusion is wrong; men don’t have vaginas. Gender/sexual fluidity aside just for a minute (we can assume, for the sake of argument, that men are defined as not having vaginas), this conclusion is wrong. The underlying logic is the same in both syllogisms, but because the absurdity of the conclusion is actually highlighted here, we can see the error clear as day.

In generic skeletal form it’s this:

Premise 1: Group X overlaps with Group Y.

Premise 2: Group Y possesses property A.

Conclusion: Group X also possesses property A.

There are many ways this could have been laid out generically (it could have used entirely symbolic notation), but importantly when it is laid out formally we can also see the logical typos. The Mad Lib substitution made us aware of it, the formal logic demonstrates it.

Top: What the logic actually says. Bottom: What we infer the logic says, which it doesn’t.

It can be a bit difficult to make this leap towards examining an argument completely devoid of context, but it’s possible to simply play with substitutions to see what goes wrong. Perhaps if a particular Mad Lib sounds wrong, you haven’t defined a term properly, or more than likely you’ve tried to say something about a label, not an actual property. Any argument about what constitutes a “religion” – say, in the context of “all religions are bad for humanity” – does this without fail.

You need to be very careful about over-extending an analogy, though. You can’t simply say “this small cup still holds coffee, therefore Pluto is a planet”, for instance. This is about highlighting logical flaws in an argument to show that it doesn’t hold, not about introducing new ones.

Archimedes Plutonium

Addendum: Oh wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder.

Via PsyGremlin via PZ Myers, this is Archimedes Plutonium, my new favourite crank hat. I was really fucking surprised to have taken this long to come across his own breed of Wrongness, having been a fan of the internet for many years, as apparently Mr Plutonium (yes, allegedly his actual deed-poll-altered name) has been a Usenet Celebrity since before the beginning of time. Or, about the time of the early 1990s Usenet boards at least. Plutonium is the perfect crank. The whole package. A perfect, crazy blend of Gene Ray’s Time Cube and Dewey Larson’s Reciprocal/Reciprocating System and ramping it up a notch of “I can do bullshitting better than you, you pussies”.

For those who might not know (and we all have to experience this thing for the first time at some point), Time Cube is a badly-written, badly-formatted, horrific eyesore of a website which is internet-famous for being long, virtually incomprehensible in content, and so off-the-wall rambling that it’s author, Gene Ray, was invited to speak at an MIT conference specifically for students to laugh their asses off at him. Time Cube’s four-corner-day non-Singular-God fag-hating educated-stupid hypotheses can’t even be judged on the criteria of whether it’s right or wrong, because there’s hardly an idea there to judge. The interpretations vary, but the most realistic is that Ray simply jumped up and down a keyboard several times and out it popped. The late Dewey Larson (and his extant successor, Ron Satz), meanwhile, presents something more coherent (only just), and perhaps evangelises my favourite theory-of-everything going. Being qualified engineers, they at least can string sentences together, but that hasn’t stopped them being considerably wrong about everything. Larson’s biggest claim to fame (he’s not even Wikipedia-notable) is gettings The Case Against The Nuclear Atom read and reviewed by Isaac Asimov, who promptly dismissed it as a ludicrous that doesn’t stand up to testing (though frequently the review is quote-mined to the part where he calls it “an interesting exercise”). Larson doesn’t use 10 words when he can use 500, and despite his insistence that ideas should stand up to both logic and evidence, presents neither in his work.

Ray brings the crazy, Larson brings the wrong. Archimedes Plutonium manages to bring both to the table in one solid block.

Like Larson and Satz, Plutonium’s claims rest on pimping his extensive collection of self-published books. Over 100, it seems, are in Plutonium’s pipeline and due for completion. Some are already out there in the wild, with bemusing titles like “All Matter is made up of atoms, and the Universe is matter, hence the Universe is one big atom; Syllogism”. Which certainly puts the most commonly-cited unwieldy book titles to shame, and has the founders of formal logic spinning in their graves. The only difference being that at least Larson was self-publishing back before internet-based print-on-demand rendered the enterprise depressingly hilarious.

The central thesis that Plutonium has been peddling since the days of Usenet is the “atom totality” theory. This states that the structure of the universe is actually that of an entire atom. Specifically, the plutonium atom. Why the plutonium atom? It’s the first synthetic element, as naturally occurring elements end at uranium (well, to a first approximation) but other than that it seems like an arbitrary choice.

Why? That’s summed up, of course, in the book title above. The universe is made of atoms, therefore the universe is a giant atom. The logic is as airtight as P(A|B) = P(B|A).

Okay, so time for some more specific crazy. This is the fun part, after all.

Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather progressive growth from a Hydrogen Atom Totality into the present “Plutonium Atom Totality”, in which the galaxies are dots of the electron-dot-cloud.

Now, I’ll go ahead and assume no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics for a moment and go through this really quickly. An electron isn’t the little planet-like thing orbiting the atom that you were lead to believe at GCSE-level science. Your teachers lied to you, kids. They lied big. The electron’s position isn’t fixed in a circular orbit, but is actually governed by a three-dimensional wave (it’s just a mathematical function, not too significantly more complex than, say, y=sin(x). It’s nothing disgracefully scary) that represents the probability of finding it at any one place around the atom. Some of the time we expect to find it over here, other times we expect to find it over there. But we know the equations governing this probability. In chemistry it’s convenient to represent it as a boundary that surrounds the space where we expect to find the electron 90-99% of the time. On a chemical scale, it’s easy enough to think about this as the actual shape of the electron itself, or the density of it as it’s smeared out over time.

This is the shape a 2p orbital looks like, which is like a big fuzzy dumbbell. Though the dz² is my personal favourite, these higher functions do put to rest the idea of circular, planet like orbits.

This can be a bit misleading for some tastes, as this sort of representation removes much of the 3-dimensional component. If we were to freeze this function at any one time, we’d locate the electron precisely – not that the uncertainty principle makes this possible, but lets assume for the sake of argument that it does. This allows us to build up a picture of the electron cloud as a series of dots, with each dot representing the randomly selected “position” of the electron at any “one time”. Like so:

This is what Plutonium is saying the universe looks like. It looks like this sort of structure, a dot diagram of an electron cloud, or building up the time-averaged probability density of finding an electron at any one point in space. Specifically he talks of an f function in a plutonium atom, not a p function, but the difference is negligible for our purposes here. Trouble is, the universe doesn’t look like it’s governed by the spherical harmonics of Laplace’s equation. It looks like this:

On huge scales the universe and the galaxies in it do seem to form structures that are bound by gravity. These seem to be filament-like structures scattering across and stretching from one end of the observable universe to the other. If Plutonium was suggesting that galactic super-clusters looked a little like neurons in the brain, he might be onto something. But no. He says it looks like an atom. Specifically a plutonium atom.

 The large-scale structure of the universe is fairly well known (dark energy/matter excluded) and the equations governing the electron are also pretty well known. Forget the horrendous syllogism Plutonium uses to come to his conclusion, the bottom line is this: these two types of structures are characterised quite well, and don’t match up.

The Nuclear-Coulomb force arises from the *nuclear electron* which is inside every neutron in the nucleus of atoms wherein this nuclear-electron spills out and runs around holding together all the protons in the nucleus.

I really don’t want to get into this shit right now…

Now, this is why I brought Dewey Larson into the equation earlier. In The Case Against The Nuclear Atom, he makes a staggering claim against the electronic structure of the atom as described above. He actually claims (as I made the mistake of actually reading it, I know he gets to this point by about 70% the way through it; he doesn’t get to the point very quickly) that the electron is part of the nucleus, much in the same way Plutonium assumes an electron does here. It’s a shame Larson died a few years before Plutonium became really active, seeing those two in a debate would have been priceless!

The main error here is that we know quite a lot about the strong force that holds the atom together. Particle physics explores this all the time when it decides it wants to start the day blowing atoms apart. The forces governed by the Standard Model are pretty much correct as far as we can tell right now.

As a result of these forces, an electron won’t go running around inside the nucleus as described. The energy barrier is simply staggering for a particle to do that, and the wave nature of the particle itself simply doesn’t allow it to do so. The lowest ground state of a free electron is in the 1s orbital. If the electron could conceivably get closer to the nucleus – bear in mind that it’s being continually yanked in there by the highly attractive positive force of the protons – it would. It’s the energy-quantised nature of quantum mechanics that actually stops it from doing that. Once it’s in that 1s ground state it doesn’t go any lower, and it’s this property that keeps atoms stable – otherwise they’d just collapse into a dense steaming heap of neutronium. At least, it can’t do this without hopping a serious energy barrier to instigate a fusion process – a process that can have its energy barrier reduced by replacing the electron with an analogous, but heavier, muon. Again, this is nicely quantified stuff. If there is an “electron” running around inside the nucleus, its properties will be nothing like the electron we know and love, and so it may not make sense to even call it an electron.

But the main problem with how Larson and Plutonium treat the behaviour of electrons is that the theories we have about how they work are very, very successful. The wave mechanics governing electrons and the molecular orbital theory (or band theory in solids) explain, very successfully, all of chemistry. Literally everything that atoms and molecules do can be framed in terms of electronic structure methods. We don’t simply fail to gain an improvement in accuracy by switching to these crank theories, we can’t even begin to make any predictions about the world by using them.

For biology, the theory of Darwin Evolution is flawed, it is not a theory but a rule or algorithm that captures some of what happens in biology. What replaces Evolution is Superdeterminism. The Bell Inequality with the Aspect Experiments show us that Quantum Physics is on the large-scale and that events are connected stretching across the entire distance of the Universe. You cannot have both Evolution which is based on free-will and probabilities, and also have Superdeterminism. Only one can be true.

Now, this is special. Really fucking special. It’s common amongst cranks who think they understand quantum mechanics, and, naturally, they all seem to have problems with evolution.

Bell’s theorem basically states this: Nature doesn’t give a fuck what you think makes sense and is under no obligation to bow to your opinion. Or, in less colourful terms, that classical or quasi-classical physics (i.e., the physics/mechanics that “makes sense”) cannot replicate quantum mechanical effects. No matter how you fudge your theory and your equations, if you try to make it “classical” the actual experimental results of quantum mechanics will throw it back in your face and tell you that you’re wrong.

This is unless you have a loophole that gets you out of this obligation, and one of these loopholes is superdeterminism. This states that the universe is entirely deterministic with zero deviance from it, and so the indeterminacy we see in quantum mechanics (such as the probability function of the electrons described above) is actually a complete illusion. Indeed, this is generally considered incompatible with “free will” (Plutonium is just about right here), but that depends entirely how broadly you want to even define free will in the first place (it’s not that simple) and whether the lack of it even matters. It’s also considered a highly unlikely proposition to be true.

Plutonium simply thinks superdeterminism is the only way quantum theory can make sense. And given his horrific understanding of the spherical harmonics of an electron, where he seems to think a dot cloud represents some kind of real picture rather than a very strained abstraction of a probability distribution, this is unsurprising.

Alain Aspect is a French physicist most notable for his work into quantum entanglement; how particles can apparently interact at a distance and supposedly violate a lot of known laws and “common sense” at the time. Whether it be people trying to say the universe is a simulation inside a giant alien supercomputer or whether it’s a crank pushing a Theory of Everything, or some naive idiot who thinks entanglement can cause information to go faster than light, they will probably cite Alain Aspect or a branch of his research as confirming their theory. If you drink every time you see a crank reference Alain Aspect’s experiments, you will die a horrible alcoholic death.

What unites them all, however,  is that they never say how this exactly happens. I’ve never seen any of them even vaguely attempt to make this leap. That would, you know, require actually understanding what is going on.

Though not 100% conclusive, Aspect’s experiments into entanglement have been cited as strong proof for quantum mechanics being non-deterministic, and that Bell’s theorem holds true (that it can’t be married up with “common sense”). So, this is where I don’t quite get what Plutonium is even hinting at here. He’s actually trying to get two things that say completely different things, (that the universe is superdeterministic, but Bell’s theorem is true, I think…) and get them to say the same thing. As I said, this is nonsensical on a level with Time Cube, and wrong on the scale of Larson and Satz.

How this fits in with a macroscopic theory of evolution, which certainly does not rely on free will, isn’t clear. In short, even superdeterminism isn’t incompatible with evolution. Evolution is simply a process. If the universe repeats itself and does exactly the same thing again because of superdeterminism, this doesn’t violate the mechanism of action involved in making evolution by natural selection occur. And therein lies the problem with conflating determinism and no free will – can you even tell the difference? That’s beyond the scope of this rant right now. Regardless, the theory still retains its predictive qualities – which is why it’s a theory, despite Plutonium’s objections – and its explanatory nature for the processes involved on a higher, slightly heuristic, level than brute sub-atomic collisions.

There’s a lot more in Plutonium’s work, including the idea that all anthropology can be explained by people throwing rocks, but I’m hitting the limit of how long these things can be and remain sensible. Maybe another time.

Now go away.