Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
“If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
-Lao Tzu
This puzzling advice by the famous Chinese philosopher is perhaps the wisest words ever uttered. Can you figure out what it means?
My take on it: Don’t rely on outside influences promising to get rid of all your problems. You have to deal with it on your own. All the self-help books, motivational speakers, and religious promises are for the weak. And they don’t work. The only person that can solve all of your problems right now is you. Lao Tzu is telling us that when we run across these “Buddahs” in life, it’s better to kill them than to risk being swindled by their schemes that don’t work.
This is what I meant when I said “Religion promises false hope” couple of posts back. Any mode of thinking that believes your life can be improved by superstitious and supernatural beliefs (including prayer, divine beings, and miracles) has to be utterly worthless, not to mention duplicitous. Because we know (to the most practical and rational way that we can) that supernatural things do not exist. So if religion, or anything else, promises things in the name of supernatural beliefs, it is false hope. How can we be so sure that supernatural things do not exist? After all, there is always some slight possibility? Of course, but there is always a slight possibility for anything. For all we know, Santa Claus and the Toothfairy might still exist. Science can’t disprove that these things exist. But it doesn’t make it rational to believe in them.
I suppose what religion has to offer is very attractive. After all, how wonderful would it be if there was a divine creator who cares for us, and who rights all the wrongs. Believe me, I would want to live in a universe like that. Unfortunately, all the evidence is to the contrary. And this is the most striking part about this conversation: many people say they believe in God because they wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t one. But this isn’t even an argument. What you want the world to be and how the world actually is are two completely separate things.
The fact that that you believe in a God is NOT an opinion. It is either right or wrong. It is either fact or fiction. Yes, one is entitled to their own opinions. But one is not entitled to their own reality. We call these people delusional or crazy. As far as we know, there is an objective reality. One is not entitled to believe that he himself is Napoleon if he is not Napoleon. Likewise, one is not entitled to believe in the supernatural if there aren’t any. Religion is not a matter of taste or preference. It is a matter of truth.
Lao Tzu was truly a smart man.
Astronomers and cosmologists have been pondering for decades just how unique intelligent life is in the universe. While there may be other planets (possibly thousands) that are hospitable to some form of self-organizing matter, evolving intelligence is another issue. Coupled with this question is just how to define intelligence. Even more perplexing, how do you test intelligence? Suppose an alien race landed on Earth. They seem to be pretty sophisticated, because they built an UFO aircraft to travel millions of light-years. But does this mean they are intelligent? Perhaps they have evolved without consciousness, and are more like very complicated and sophisticated robots.
I was thinking about this for a while, and I came to the conclusion that human intelligence is most probably unique in the universe. First, it seems to me that our form of intelligence is pretty useless when it comes to evolution. If humans had evolved to be highly sophisticated machines, programmed to reproduce, eat, and nurture our offspring, we may have faired much better (by evolutionary standards, that is). But instead we have gained consciousness, and we have to deal with emotional and intellectual baggage. Now one might argue that this baggage, in the end, helped us develop technology which, in turn, made us “win” the evolutionary war. This might be true, but this goes against evolutionary principles. Evolution does now “plan ahead”. If a newly evolved feature has no instant advantage, it dies out. We seek meaning and purpose. What other life form may do that, anywhere in the universe? Meaning and purpose may also be unique in the universe.
I suppose it is a little grim to say that there is no ultimate meaning in the universe, but that’s what the sciences seem to be telling us. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot create our own meaning in life. While Dawin may tell us the ultimate purpose of organisms is to reproduce, humans can do better. Because we have been endowed by evolution (perhaps accidentally) with emotion, intellect, and purpose-seeking, we ought to take advantage of it. We have superseeded evolution and the immutable laws of the universe (in some sense). When the human race is gone, there just may be no meaning left in the universe at all.
In this week’s issue of The Phoenix, Swarthmore College’s weekly newspaper, the editorial writer Nathaiel Peters responded to the Virginia Tech tragedies by claiming that if we are to condemn such atrocities and have a rational ground to stand on in declaring what is right and wrong, an absolute system of morality is needed. In other words, culturally determined morality is not strong enough. Peters has been sort-of an evangelist, writing about how great Christianity is in his columns for the past semester. My criticisms at his arguments have been printed in The Pheonix twice in the past. If you have read those, you know that I find Peters’s arguments to be entirely wrong.
The reason the massacre at Virigina Tech is morally wrong is because it killed people. Killing people brings harm and suffering to not only the killed but their loved ones. What firmer rational stance do you need to judge whether certain actions are moral or not? At best, biblical morality is superfluous.
The most striking part about this conversation is that many people, even those who who are agnostic, seem to believe that without religion, morality could not exist. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, religion has been commiting some of the most atrocious violations when it comes to moral standards. Consider, for example, preaching that contraceptions are immoral to use in Sub-Saharan Africa when millions are dying of AIDS and other STDs. Condoms have been proven to be effective in preventing STDs. By preaching that these are wrong to use, Christians are in essence allowing people to die when they can be saved. What could be more immoral than that?
Moral philosophy have existed for millenia before the rise of religion. One only has to look to the Greeks for such moral systems. And morality have been evolving for decades, independent of what the Bible says. If the only source of morality was the Bible, morality would be the same now as it was thousands of years ago. But we know better now. We know that slavery is bad and that interractial marriage is ok. And we are still making progress on other issues like sexual orientation.
Of course there are those that claim that although parts of the Bible advocate slavery, genocide, and almost every other agregious crimes against humanity you can think of, other parts advocate love and harmony. But then I would say, how do you know which parts of the Bible are good and which parts are bad? Clearly, that sense of moral judgement comes from our society -something that is available to any rational person. So in that sense, Biblical morality is superfluous. We ALL know what is right and wrong. You don’t need God to tell you that muder is a bad thing.
It is time for our society to move beyond superstition. Religion not only advocates false-hope and irrationality, but also legitimizes immoral acts in the name of God. Why are the religious Right associated in politics with “values” anyway? They seem to have the least sophisticated idea about what morality is. We need to claim ethics back to the side of rationality and reason.
I recently discovered a wonderful website: http://www.metamath.org
The website is a project to derive all of math from set theory (The ZFC axioms to be more precise). Of course, formalists have been espousing the view that all of math is essentially a game of logic since the beginning. While this view is held “in principle”, an attempt to actually carry through with this seemingly ginormous task has been largely ignored since Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Of course the Principia is a bit outdated, and doesn’t explicity use the ZFC axioms. Hence, this web project is a long-needed one in my opinion. In addition, the database uses symbolic logic exclusively, hence the rigor of the approach is never in question. Plus, this allows anyone who has looked at the ZFC axioms to understand the proofs (actually parsing out what the proof and the theorem mean is entirely another matter).
Another cool thing about this project is that a computer program has been written that checks the proofs automatically! Of course automated theorem proving is something that has divided mathematicians. Some claim it removes the beauty and the “Art” of mathematics while others see it as the only way to do truly rigorous math.
A fun thing to do is to just browse the various theorems that are in the site’s archives. Some of them are extremely interesting. For example, there is a proof for the principal of equality (that x=x). While many think this is an axiom (the axiom of equality), it can actually be derived from the ZFC axioms, which do not include the equality principle. I think this is completely mind-blowing. Something as seemingly trivial as equality can actually be proven rigorously!
If I had more time, I might want to work on becoming conversant in symbolic logic so I can actually read this stuff.
Recently, I finished reading a book called “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute. The book is mostly a critique of why String Theory is bad for science. But on a more general context, it also talks about a certain type of sociology prevalent in the physics community that, Smolin argues, is hampering progress. I think the most representative example is his arguement about “Seers” and “Craftpeople”. Smolin argues that there are essentially two types of physicists. The more common type is the “Craftpeople”, someone who went into physics because they found themselves good at doing calculations and other “craftwork” that’s necessary to be a physicist. These people don’t think about stuff like philosophy or epistemology and show strong deferrence towards well-known physicists, like Feynman and Wheeler. On the other hand, there are the “seers”, the ones who go into physics because they truely care about how the universe works at the most fundamental level. These people might be artists or philosophers if they had not gone into physics. The deep fundamental questions are what drives them, and they are not afraid to challenge established ideas and think on their own.
Now, I think his description of “Seers” and “Craftpeople” are somewhat true, but I also cannot help feeling that most people are a mixture of both types rather than clearly one or the other. He does make a good point about when each kind is needed though. For example, you need Seers during revolutionary times when the experimental data is clearly in disagreement with established theories, or the theories are not sufficiently clear or elegant. On the other hand, you need craftpeople to do the “hardwork”, to establish all the ramifications of a new theory. For example, you needed the “Seers” like Einstein and Dirac to challenge Newtownian Mechanics and establish Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but needed “Craftpeople” like Feynman to work out all the applied theories like Particle Physics. Smolin also says that the “Seers” are usually motivated by philosophical principles to develop new theories while the “Craftpeople” are mostly occupied with not-so-elegant mathematical approximations and hard calculations to develop new models.
And thus, Smolin makes the point that in order to unify Quantum and Relativity, you need a “Seer”. Instead, we have had the “Craftpeople” dominant in physics for over 30 years, and their solution to the problem, String Theory, has failed specifically because it is, at best, a mathematical approximation and not a deeply motivated and philosophical theory.
I must say that everything he says is music to my ears because I have been sort of peeved at the “Shut Up and Calculate” mentality that I have found in physics so far. I was glad to know that talented physicsts, like Lee Smolin, cared about philosophical issues as much as I did. On the other hand, I also cannot help but wonder just how much of his arguments are oversimplified. Are most physicsts really so dumb as to deliberately ignore philosophy and epistemology? Can the lack of progress in theoretical physics for the last 30 years really be blamed on the “craftpeople”? If I become a physicist, it seems like there is treacherous road ahead of me.Â
One of the more interesting thing I have been pondering about recently is the distinction between logic and ontology in math. Mathematicians spend a good deal of time developing the theory (or the structure, if you will) of mathematics, but spend far less time worrying about ontology. The theory, of course, is developed using the rules of logic. It can be even said that all of mathematics is simply a subset of set theory, which is a subset of logic (formalists think that anyways). But ontology is more subtle because it is not certain whether you can prove a physical existence. The traditional empricist approach of experimentation does not work here because the “Existence” mathematicians speak of is more abstract than a mere materialistic existence. For example, do the Natural Numbers exist? Most mathematicians simply chose to postulate that such a set exists. However, it is unclear whether this can be shown by experimentation. There certainly is no clear way of showing it through logic. Hence, ontology seems to escape both empiricism and logicism. Should mathematics be even concerned with it?
I would argue whole-heartedly that mathematicians should be concerned with it. Because if ontology is not established, than the whole affair of mathematics is useless. For example, I recently read something by the famous mathematician Alain Connes that there is a whole branch of non-standard analysis that is logically sound and very beautiful until you realize that none of the things they are talking about actually exist. So it is a useless affair. (Or is it?) Clearly, ontology is important in this case. But the trouble seems to be that there is no satisfying way to investigating the issue.
