the lottery of saintliness

It's realistic to note that the typical human life contains horrible details from time to time, if not more frequently. This presents an inevitable puzzle for anyone who believes in supernatural forces which are both benevolent and powerful. Before the culmination of my gradual intellectual anti-conversion, I maintained an uneasy acceptance of several well-known solutions to that puzzle. One partial solution was that the supernatural forces place a high value on human freedom and therefore on the consequent side-effects of that freedom. Hence some of the awful parts of human existence were explicable as the effects of other humans' despicable yet free choices. Rather than causing or preventing awful events, supernatural forces simply permitted humans to do as they wished.

However, from my new vantage point, I've noticed a problem with this solution. I don't mean the obvious injustice of supernatural forces allowing many to suffer for the mistakes of few. I mean the failure of the solution to succeed on its own terms in shifting the blame. It presumes that at the moment when a human selects evil, the sole substantial explanation of that selection cannot be anything other than the selector's freedom. Otherwise, the selector is under influences and by that fact cannot function as an independent and blameworthy shield for the notion of supernatural forces which are both benevolent and powerful.

Examples may be clearer. If the selector has an excessive inborn level of aggression and it influences the selection, then it's partly responsible. Yet once that concession is made, the next question arises: why didn't the benevolent and powerful supernatural forces, which value freedom so highly, intervene to rectify that "external" influence and increase the selector's freedom? Or consider the selector whose culture conditioned him or her to give harsh treatment at every opportunity to everyone in an out-group. Surely this conditioning is an influence on the selection of evil and at the same time is outside of the control of the selector and under the potential control of supernatural forces. Or turn to positive contributors. Suppose that the selector has benefited from the lifelong care and guidance of excellent role models who continually taught appropriate techniques for self-control and coping. Is it fair to credit detrimental influences for reckless selections but not credit advantageous influences for conscientious selections?

In short, regardless of the ultimate degree of freedom of human selectors, the influences on their selections differ greatly. Assuming supernatural forces which don't interfere in these scenarios, the conclusion is that those forces acquiesce in effect to a lottery of saintliness. Some unfortunate humans select good or evil on the basis of tragic factors, while some fortunate humans select good or evil on the basis of lovely factors. Some must build their characters out of straw and some out of brick. In either case the supernatural forces, due to tender adoration of human freedom, tolerate the resulting successes and failures.

Under the watchful benevolence and power of the supernatural forces, the lottery of saintliness confers to Damien personal constraints toward selecting evil and to Victor personal constraints toward selecting good. Damien freely chooses contemptible actions which harm Victor in one way or another. But the faithful believers shall never doubt the benevolence nor the power of supernatural forces for this outcome. Instead they shall shrug; no one said it was a perfect system.

self-refuting statements: a proud tradition

From the standpoint of logic, some statements are unusual. For instance, a statement could assert its own truth: "I tell the truth." It could be redundant: "The obvious statement is obvious." It could reference itself: "I have seven syllables."

Yet self-refuting statements are the most unusual specimens of all. "I am lying" is the prototype, but unfortunately it is far from alone. In fact, generations of humans have believed in clusters of these.

• My benevolent god wishes that I kill you.
• My omnipotent god requires me to defend it.
• The freedom my god has granted to me is expressed through complete and unquestioning obedience to specific forms of coercion.
• Sacred statements possess objective Truth because of the opinions of many believers, referred to as 'faith'.
• Centuries-old moral customs last eternally as long as believers expertly modify the original formulations, in order to integrate the many deep cultural changes which happened since.
• Centuries-old texts are literally true and readily apparent apart from the sections which are purely metaphorical and infinitely debatable.
• Divine justice shall come, although that may not occur until after every good believer is already dead.
• My god is affected by the requests of earnest believers, but it does whatever it wishes regardless.
• After altering my internal state of mind via various techniques, I eventually sense the external existence of the spiritual realm.
• The best 'open-minded' way to fairly check for god's existence is to greatly discount contrary signals and greatly magnify agreeable signals, i.e. you must believe in order to see.
• I construe the truism "absence of proof is not proof of absence" as affirmation of my views alone, despite placing my views in the same logical category as every unobserved "thing", including the irritating gnomes that steal socks on laundry day.

I have no doubt that thoughtful believers have their own thorough responses to the preceding statements. In return they may feel inspired to suggest self-refuting statements to illustrate my beliefs. I'll anticipate a few on their behalf, and then counter each one immediately (blogger's privilege):

• Transcendent authority doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop me from claiming to know truths better than you. Authority and correctness don't need to be transcendent to be pragmatically useful. Beliefs lie on a continuum of certainty based on the level of verification of the beliefs' implications. Depending on the particular belief, I am simply too unimpressed by the belief itself or its inadequate verification.
• My skepticism of others' fundamental axioms overlooks the unavoidable necessity of my own. I don't dispute the necessity of minimal axioms. Something must function as the foundation of symbolic thought. However, that doesn't justify an explosion of mostly-unproven assumptions about the universe. Better to have few axioms than many axioms.
• Like all humans, I opine that some morality is superior to the rest, although my failure to profess transcendence once again presents no plausible basis for me to do so. Ethical principles and guidelines can originate from humanity. So can goals and ideals ("values"). Instead of reference to an ultimate moral standard, I use the full extent of my human capabilities to perceive and balance the various concerns which apply to a dilemma. When asked, I explain my analysis and justifications bit by bit without mentioning any gods whatsoever, because the backing of a god is irrelevant to evaluating the righteousness of my moral judgment. The religious actually agree on this point. During a conflict between differing religions 1 and 2, the proponents of religion 1 certainly don't give any more credence to the conflicting morals of religion 2 due merely to the ("false") god of religion 2...
• Imperceptible inferences about the supernatural domain are inexcusable, while imperceptible inferences about the natural domain are customary. Inferences differ in validity and probability. To infer the supernatural is to step far beyond the support of known reliable facts. Satisfactory proof needs to be consistent and therefore statistically significant (i.e. not explicable by the slim nonzero chance of rare coincidences). Inferences of supernatural causes fail the criteria, at least in comparison to competing inferences of natural causes. Supernatural causes also have the downsides of extravagant mystery and unpredictability. Placing blame on undetectable mind-organisms, like unidentified designers, raises a torrent of aggravating questions about life-cycle, psychology, habitat, composition...
• Reason and decision-making have resulted in the inescapable conclusion that 'reason' and 'decision-making' are illusions superimposed on the brain's physics of matter and energy. I suppose, but according to that logic, isn't everything "illusions" superimposed on physics of matter or energy? Surely reason and decision-making can continue to be meaningful if the innards of the two are particles rather than ghostly mind-stuff. In either case, marvelous symbolic computations continue to yield stunning products. Matter can be the executor and storage of the computations, assuming the right configuration: not tiny isolated chunks of it, like hydrogen gas, but vast populations and multitudes of interconnections, like BRAINSSSS.
• Humans are content with an existence in an unguided universe which contains no god(s) and no afterlife. The flippant rejoinder is that human contentment isn't the aim, truths are; the appropriate reactions to the truths are "left as an exercise" to the seekers. Seriously, my recommendation is to avoid obsession on unchangeable Big Questions. Such obsessions are distractions from what can be enjoyed and controlled: daily life, on planet Earth, in the 21st century. On the other hand, I think it's generally good for a human to create a "purpose" and to acknowledge/accept the danger of inevitable death. For example, motivation for rectifying some of the terrible afflictions on humanity, even on a small scale, isn't contingent on how much it pleases gods.

personal responsibility through collective suffering

I'm no economist, which explains why I attempted to describe the economy using "deadlocks" and "local minima/maxima". And I suspect that many other commentators aren't economists either, which explains why their preferred analysis also comes from a different domain: morality. Within that frame, economic decisions are moral decisions; decisions in the context of efficient markets result in swift and appropriate moral consequences. Personal responsibility is a synonym for the level of economic success.

Like many perspectives, this one has an unsurprising problem: its implications aren't a perfect fit for all reality. For example, market shifts in the unit price of fossil-based fuel have unavoidable consequences on anyone who has no substitute method of transportation to and from the workplace, yet the sole cause of these shifts isn't their personal decisions. Nor are they personally responsible for drastic adjustments in the market price of their largest assets. Nor are the downsized employees of a company responsible for the new competing product that decimated the company's number of customers. In an actual massive economy, relatively tiny participants might not have meaningful personal responsibility for their current level of economic success. (Although they decide how to adapt to the changes, of course.) Poetically, transactions link the fates of many, whether temporary or ongoing, whether material or contractual.

Hence, while the moralistic interpretation is sometimes accurate and instructive, it also has pragmatic limits. To prescribe grave and unrestricted consequences is to affect the "innocent" as well as the "wrongdoer". To permit a woeful decision to ricochet is to watch escalating damage to the bystanders. It's paradoxical. Market "punishment" can be effectively unjust. The perpetrator might be able to absorb the fall in wealth without much harm but the same loss eliminates the net worth of multiple others.

I agree that personal responsibility is a vital principle for a realistic free market. I agree that an economy without risks is an economy without a brighter future. But I disagree that the entire thing must be left sick whenever a slob sneezes, in order to ensure the slob's maximum pain.

Nick Burns the Client Object

In 2009 I compared a lack of data encapsulation to a nudist community. Not long ago another metaphor struck me, but this one applies to the interactions among objects within that anti-pattern: Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy. If translated to the form of skit dialogue, it might be like the following.

• Nick Burns, Client Object: (impatient) You're the Customer object, right? Tell me the average number of purchases per month, year-to-date.
• Customer Object: (confused) Er...but...I don't have a method for doing that. I know the customer inside and out, but you're asking for statistics about the orders. I suppose I have the ability to fetch all customer purchases for a time range...
• Client Object: (annoyed) Don't know much, do you? Give me all your data and MOVE! The Client Object .gets() all the information from the Customer Object, filters it, and finally calculates. THERE! Was that so hard?
• Customer Object: (defensive) Well, if someone had given me the capability to do what you were asking, or if you had gone to the right Object in the first place...
• Client Object: (dismissive) Don't worry about it. You're just one more do-nothing data container like all the objects in the hierarchy. I'm here to do your thinking for you. The Client Object starts to return to its caller, then hesitates and turns back to the Customer Object for one last bit of sarcasm. Oh, by the way, you're welcome!

Google Translate met my challenge?

In the last footnote of the previous entry, I wondered if the infamous ambiguity of natural language would easily defeat algorithms that don't have deep comprehension of the symbols. I contrived two different English sentences with distinct meanings despite sharing many words: 1) "I'm quitting my run because I can't stand the sun directly overhead," and 2)"Too much overhead is required to run a stand". I'm feeling chagrin after I stuck the two into Google Translate. It produced French translations that don't appear to have grievous errors. Then again, my first language is English and my French is...limited. But my consultations of online French-to-English dictionaries haven't shown any serious problems. For an English speaker who doesn't know any French, the words' discernible resemblances aren't hard to see.

• J'arrête ma course parce que je ne peux pas supporter le soleil directement au-dessus.
• Trop de frais généraux est nécessaire pour faire fonctionner un stand.

I'll admit it. I'm impressed by Google Translate's use of context. Will Google's automated cars do well on Canadian roads?


UPDATE later: And...here's a counterexample of GT not working as well. "The child put the toy in the pen" is a classic conundrum for machine translation. "Stylo" is not the appropriate French word in this case. Changing "pen" to "playpen" works better, though. L'enfant mis le jouet dans le stylo.

the renovated Chinese Room

I have already posted about the Chinese Room two times. But after reading some comments in The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon, I think I can offer some more clarification or express the same perspective in a different way. Although Deacon states his belief that artificial intelligence is possible, he also opines that the Chinese Room casts doubt on the equivalency of sentience and algorithms for manipulating dissociated symbol tokens. These algorithms belong to systems of logical deductions, which function well in many domains but not as realistic models of brain computations. I agree with him. In fact, I shall renovate the Room around his observation.

As always, the bemused human alone in the closed room receives a sequence of unknown¹ tokens (i.e. symbolic representations), applies a preexisting set of manipulation rules onto that sequence to form a response sequence, and finally sends back the response. However, this time, the testers outside the room are shrewd in their determination to detect the presence or absence of a sentient conversationalist. They carefully note the close correspondences of questions and responses. Gradually the growing collection of notes resembles the collection of originating rules in the room, which the unknowing manipulator can neither disobey nor adjust.

Eventually, the testers select and "combine" two suitable questions from out of the notes. By "suitable" I mean that via the syntactic and semantic structure of the unknown language, one of the selected questions modifies the meaning of the second. The meaning of the combined question isn't a "lossless sum" of the two questions' independent meanings². Therefore an appropriate and believable response to the combined question isn't in the set of acceptable responses to either of the two independent questions. If the testers receive a believable response, then they may try combining two other questions. Or combine the combined question with a third. Or combine it with another combined question. For mischievous testers, the possibilities multiply.

For instance, since the algorithm in the room is intended to mimic a human³, it surely has a prepared response to the question, "What food does your father like to eat?" The alleged algorithm somehow uses the tokens of that question to produce the tokens of a response like "Licorice". Again, the algorithm surely has a prepared response to a distinct question of the same general category, "What food do you like to eat for breakfast?" Will the algorithm produce a reasonable response to the modified question, "What food does your father like to eat for breakfast?" Or, "What food does the father of your father like to eat for breakfast?" Or, "What food does your father not like to eat and you like to eat for breakfast?"

Regardless of the questions' triviality, the interpretive complexity can increase dramatically through tweaks that are rather simple (for humans!). As always, the Chinese Room asks, "Assuming that the fraud in the room achieves a perfect outcome from the testers' perspective, isn't it a self-contradiction for them to claim that anything in the room understands?" But after my renovation of the testers' methods, successful deception is much more difficult for the proposed algorithm! No matter how long the algorithm's finite list of prearranged question and responses, the testers can still escape it through valid combinations of any suitable questions in the list. And recall that the tokens of the right responses for the combinations aren't derivable from the tokens for the responses for the independent questions. If the algorithm is one big list of token transformations, then the testers can confound it by constructing an explosive quantity of more and more questions. It cannot yield passable words in response to the combined question by transforming passable words of the responses to independent questions⁴.

Thus the algorithm cannot successfully defeat the challenge unless it consists of more than a preset list of token manipulations. Instead it must think of the tokens as symbols (and qualify as Deacon's second "Symbolic Species"). It must expand and condense information. It must translate: 1) from the source sequence to reconstituted isomorphic reference "content", 2) from the restored "content" to an appropriate response, 3) from the response content to an adequate sequence of symbolic tokens to represent it.

My own past reactions to the Chinese Room have assumed that the algorithm in the room was doing these tasks in order to work convincingly: hence my view that the meanings, i.e. isomorphisms, of the unknown language simply resided in the smart algorithm as opposed to the algorithm's human "scribe". With a renovated Chinese Room in which the testers exploit the tireless elaboration permitted by language, the algorithm is forced to take the form of symbolic thought which I assumed; direct token transformation is a hopeless strategy⁵.


¹ As other commentators have remarked, the unknown characters are "Chinese" in order to emphasize mystery for native speakers who use Latin-derived alphabets, so Aurebesh and Tengwar would fill the role too. In any case, with the right talent, tools, and educated skills, a linguist in the Room might speculate accurately about the unknown language itself after study of the algorithm and a large quantity of sample sequences. Nevertheless, the experience of archaeologists demonstrates that lack of context would prevent discovery of the majority of the tokens' meanings.
² Grammatical modification is a significant characteristic of natural/unbounded language. Changes to tense, mood, gender and so forth are less like addition or multiplication and more like shifting ("rotating" or "translating") a vector's direction along many axes. The testers outside the room can certainly perform these language operations because they're fluent humans without the restriction of pure token manipulations. Unfortunately, they couldn't mechanize this type of processing until AI has a long-sought breakthrough: guided re-combination of old ideas is one of the leading definitions of creativity.
³ It's questionable whether mimicry of humanity is an essential proof of intelligence. I chose this instance to highlight that aspect. "Thinking like me" is a narrow and shallow definition of intelligence. Deacon acknowledges that this definition is already applied to answer the similar and basic question, "How do I know any human besides me has the same intelligence, sentience, and consciousness?"
⁴ In more formalized language, if the algorithm requires an explicit individualized mapping from every source sequence of tokens to a response sequence of tokens, then the algorithm is not computable. The combinatorial capability to create new meaningful source sequences implies that no theoretical algorithm can enumerate or count all the source sequences or contain a novel response sequence for each. (Nobody really speculates that human brains handle natural language in this way.)
⁵ Perhaps ambiguity would stymie direct token transformation sooner than I suggest. Without deep information about all the numerous definitions, the initial categorization of words as "nouns" or "verbs" could be problematic. For example, what if the question were to guess the speakers of the following quotations? 1) "Too much overhead is required to run a stand." 2) "I'm quitting my run because I can't stand the sun directly overhead." The first is an entrepreneur pondering where to sell, and the second is a dehydrated athlete.

immediacy gaps

The quest continues to defend materialistic naturalism from malicious distortions. This entry is a natural extension to its predecessor, which was a natural extension of its predecessor. Where I last left off, I suggested that it's no loss of information to relinquish the philosophical idea of "real" minds. The tangled contents and events of consciousness correlate precisely (albeit cryptically) to the tangled contents and events of the brain. Ultimately, the set of physical operations that the brain performs to compute the "inner world" will certainly turn out to be at least as bewildering as the apparent experience of consciousness. My guess is that the set of brain operations will be far more bewildering; one vexing question among many is how exactly the summarized and sanitized "window" of mentality is synthesized out of the glaring discord of myriad neuron firings.

Unfortunately, the advance of knowledge about the brain's functioning has an intrinsic credibility problem, which is an immediacy gap. Within pure experience, not all parts are equally immediate. The coldness of ice water has great immediacy. Planning when to go buy more envelopes has less immediacy - the need might be urgent but the planning itself is not engrossing. A phone in my hand has great immediacy. A phone that I remember using several years ago has less immediacy.

Differences in immediacy motivate differing instinctual reactions. Parts of pure experience that have immediacy provoke rapid evaluation and firm belief in the parts' existence. Immediacy implies difficulty to ignore. It depends on few conceptual intermediates, unlike the lengthy chains of reasoning which link abstruse logical statements. Sparse intermediates are consistent with nonverbal character. Symbolic communication only comes "later", after suitable descriptions and metaphors are chosen. The nonverbal character is in turn consistent with frequent idiosyncrasy. For instance, individuals experience varying degrees of favor for particular smells or tastes.

Hence, humans cope constantly with substantial gaps of immediacy. It's a factor in good psychological health. Intellectual labor and social cooperation help to disentangle raw immediacy from "true" importance and/or reality. Maturity includes the recognition that experiences with immediacy often have in-depth impersonal causes, which by comparison have little if any immediacy. An empty blue sky is certainly of greater immediacy than envisioning the divergent molecular scattering of electromagnetic wavelengths. A typically effective strategy is to split pure experience into subjective and objective domains and reconcile the two in ways that can be...uh...complicated.

Yet this two-part organizational scheme collides with all propositions about the real origin of the subjective domain. By definition, everything that's categorized into the subjective domain has great immediacy, but propositions belong in the objective domain with less immediacy. Whenever the topic has greater immediacy than the proposition itself, it crosses the immediacy gap. The challenge is convincing someone that propositions about objects can be satisfactory explanations for experiences which have greater immediacy than propositions or objects.

For example, what quantities of what things add up to the "sensation" of an emotion like contentment? None of the possible answers to that question (serotonin?) evoke intuitive satisfaction because of a gap of immediacy between the answer and the question. Humans simply don't experience emotions as sums of quantities of things, so they struggle to equate emotions with even the most thorough analysis. This communication obstacle is quite irrevocable. Crudely put, even if a meticulous teacher in plain view took out the working brain of a determined dissenter and then presented exhaustive and lucid observations of the diligent exertions taking place in direct present correspondence with ongoing thoughts, the exasperated retort might just be, " 'Brain' and 'brain'! What is 'brain'? How can that pulsing ugly thing have any relevance to the vivid beautiful images in my mind's eye?"

Of course, the dissenter's insistence on an "objective" immediacy gap has a cost of assorted systemic brainteasers (so to speak). If origins aren't expressible in propositions about objects, then how does the subjective domain originate? How do real stimuli landing on the real senses enter into the subjective domain? How do intentions in the subjective domain exit to voluntary muscle movements in the objective domain, and how do severed nerves intercept those intentions? How can head trauma affect the content of the subjective domain so drastically? Upon consideration of all these practical facts illustrating the pervasive domination of the objective domain over the subjective domain, on what basis could someone persist in the notion that the two are either independent or that the mere immediacy of the subjective domain implies its superiority?

Immediacy is a consequence of a brain-based point of view. In other words, greater immediacy is no more than greater prominence in the egocentric "universe", constructed by an object called the "brain", using data that arrived via mediated contact with surroundings. It's the preeminent bias. "I think, therefore I am" belongs with a counterpart, "I am what my brain thinks."

Consciousness is a brainy action. The immediacy of some parts of pure experience doesn't falsify this principle. I could construe it as subtle supporting evidence: if the immediacy is meant to be a clue that I have a mind independent of my body, then why is it so rare to have immediate experience of stuff outside my body? Why isn't overt clairvoyance/ESP a common practice? (Vague sensations, probable educated guesses, and unverified fictional explorations like dreams, don't qualify.)

materialistic naturalism is not behaviorism either

This is an addendum to the preceding entry. I tried to draw distinctions between comprehensive materialistic naturalism and the simplistic forms of reductionism or relativism. Materialistic naturalism is the stance that all of reality is natural, and all of it consists of variants of the same material/physical stuff. In particular, if materialistic naturalism is true then it casts doubt on the reality of a ghostly mind, because the usual concept of minds is much too poorly-integrated with proven physical theories. Compared to minds, dark matter's effect on observable parts of reality has more concrete definition and substantiation.

Materialistic naturalism's incompatibility with minds may inspire opponents to equate it to an unappealing philosophical stance known as ("radical") behaviorism. Behaviorism in the bogeyman sense is the proposition that accurate analysis of human thought and decision-making doesn't require any knowledge beyond the plainly-seen external interactions between the human and everything else. In this alleged caricature, minds aren't necessary at all. Most of the proposed attributes of minds aren't easily analyzed or predicted through manifest behavior, so the behaviorist assumes that the attributes are pointless distractions. Humans may assert complex reasons, but their claims are post hoc rationalizations to cover up the real rationales. Behaviors are either inborn or shaped through training. Even a free-will-like rejection of a specific training regimen in the present is probably due to the direct opposing influence of past training regimens which are more strongly ingrained.

Thus bogeyman behaviorism is portrayed as a dehumanizing stance which is self-evidently inadequate to explain the entire range of human experience. Opponents of materialistic naturalism present the dilemma of embracing either the full reality of the mind or the distasteful alternative of behaviorism. I deny the dilemma altogether. Once again the universe is not simple enough to accommodate the old debates.

Indeed, the same detailed evidence that discredits shadowy minds also supports an astoundingly intricate chain of causes for both humans' behavior and inner "mentality". I'm alluding to ongoing research about the brain. The more that we learn and decode what happens in this dense internal space, the less plausible it becomes to revert to either mind-based or behavior-based explanations. Knowledge isn't anywhere near complete, but the trend is suggestive. Brain-based explanations are the future. Minds explain human behavior from the inside-out. Behaviorism explains human behavior from the outside-in. By contrast, brains inside human bodies inside environments are a unitary system of physical behavior.

Having said that, the pragmatic status of these competing explanations is a tricky mixture of qualities. Unlike brains, devices or surgical procedures cannot verify the presence or absence of minds. In that way, minds cannot be as real. Nevertheless, whether the context is the interpretation of another human's behavior or the "location" of conscious sensations, minds work well enough as approximations for the casual purposes of communication and introspection. In that way, the usefulness of the idea of minds is like the usefulness of "real" stuff, i.e. stuff that's verifiable by the multitudinous methods that don't work for minds.

To be more specific, minds are useful to serving the function of intangible inferences. A companion's expressed drowsiness may provoke the comment, "You're feeling sleepy." The comment is an inference about the companion's fictional mind as opposed to a measurement of the quantity of melatonin in the companion's nonfictional body. As long as the state of the "mind" corresponds closely to "real" stuff, it suffices for some aims. The intangibility of drowsiness doesn't destroy its meaningfulness.

Furthermore, within the category of pure human consciousness, other phenomena have similar meaningfulness. "Subjective" thoughts have been shown to have correlates in brain activity. Stimulation of the brain is reflected by occurrences in a subject's "mind", and the currently-predominant factors in a subject's "mind" are reflected by patterns of brain activation. As I mentioned earlier, the amazing mind's material replacement isn't an organic switchboard of behaviorism's straightforward inputs and outputs. It's an equally amazing brain packed with mind-correlates.

what materialistic naturalism is not

• Naturalism is the broad and simple stance that anything real is not supernatural and anything supernatural is not real. 
• Since naturalism describes the borders of reality rather than its interior, I pair it with materialism, which is the presumptive stance that the fundamental contents of reality are material (i.e. physical, particulate, and either observable or deducible from observation). My relationship with materialism is more complicated than pure agreement. But stepping over those numerous semantic pitfalls for a moment¹, the most salient point of materialism is that (real) humans are solely composed of the same stuff as anything (real). I see materialism constraining the broad and simple stance of naturalism, so I say "materialistic naturalism" and not "naturalistic materialism"². 
• Reductionism is the stance that a whole thing can be understood by understanding all of its parts. Furthermore, no knowledge is lost by examining all of its parts in isolation.
• Relativism is the stance that all truth is relative to other truths. For instance, one human's statements about reality may be "true" relative to their own experiences yet "false" relative to some other human's experiences.

An all-too-common misconception is that all of the above stances are inseparable, or that the latter two are logical consequences of the former two. This misconception is so pernicious that it deserves direct debunking. 

I'll start with reductionism. I assume that the charge of philosophical reductionism stems from the frequent usefulness of reductionism as one methodology of many. "Information overload" receives more than its due share of press coverage, but it's quite accurate for many complex things approached as raw wholes. In many cases reducing the whole to a set of parts is an indispensable first step for facilitating comprehension. And over time, the success of this approach has in fact produced more and more reliable knowledge about the parts of complex materials, not to mention the surprisingly complex parts of homogeneous materials.

However, these discoveries could lead to the mistaken overall impression that reality can be fully known just by dividing it up through analysis. It's mistaken because it ignores the essential companion of analysis: synthesis, which is recombining the analyzed parts. Synthesis requires an understanding of how the parts interact in order to give form to the whole. Interactions among parts might be of equal or greater complexity than the parts, and of equal or greater importance. The lack of that knowledge often imposes a practical limit on the applicability and accuracy of idealized calculations, simulations, and predictions. That's why reductionism is most effective in the context of controlled and repeated experiments, which systematically minimize the amount and effect of interfering interactions³.

Hence, solitary reductionism is an incomplete stance. Full knowledge about reality cannot be obtained by first dividing it into separate independent subsets and then knowing the subsets. An investigator must uncover the various interconnections among the subsets to explain the whole.

But for the purpose of frivolous argument, I'll comment on the curious fictional story which is sometimes associated with the reductionist stance: the omniscient materialist (Laplace's demon), who by assumption knows all the material information in all reality. That information includes every bit about every particle as well as every applicable rule for how each one acts and how it interacts with its counterparts⁴. Does the hypothetical omniscient materialist have all information? Answering "yes" is said to indicate belief in philosophical reductionism, along with determinism.

Of course my answer is "yes"; I'm a professing materialist. I can agree to this peculiar all-encompassing "reductionism" because it's far different from the less grandiose specimens of actual reductionism, which I've already criticized. My belief that my decisions are natural physical phenomena doesn't force me to think that detailed knowledge of individual physical phenomena X/Y/Z is enough to predict my decisions with certainty. What if the measurements are significantly inexact? What if the effects of X/Y/Z are overwhelmed by a positive feedback loop in physical phenomena N/M/O? What if my brain is running low on nutrients? What if a set of mysterious neurons, which has no verbal expression, "tips" the decision in a strange creative direction that avoids the original dilemma altogether? "Reducing" something into mere matter might yield more questions than insights.

On to relativism. Its alleged connection to materialistic naturalism comes from the central inquiry of how to obtain truth: given the premise that humans are nothing but matter, how can any human claims to truth be trusted? If I'm a jumble of cells (or atoms or anything else diminutive), and so is everyone else, what makes their propositions, or even mine, objectively true⁵? And if we disagree, don't all those other jumbles of cells have as much "authority" as the jumble of cells called "me"? The most any of us can say is that our conflicting truths seem to be real relative to each of us individually.

The reasoning may seem stretched, but I encountered it multiple times prior to the culmination of my gradual intellectual anti-conversion. Clearly it's intended as a reductio ad absurdum, where to stop believing in absolutist supernatural souls or gods is to irrevocably destroy the justification for absolutist truth itself. Outsiders can easily spot the logical flaw, though. If the duty of sacred truths to underpin every other truth, then what underpins the sacred truths? Moreover, how can humans uncover new truths that have no connection whatsoever to the finite list of sacred truths? And on what basis shall they resolve quarrels about the sacred truths? Or select from among the many contradictory groups and subgroups of sacred truths? I imagine that devout thinkers have their own nuanced replies to these questions.

Laying aside the dubious solution of arbitrarily canonizing chosen beliefs into absolutist sainthood, I answer the change of relativism in my usual fashion. Relativism can't have a neat categorization into true or false (i.e. it's not compatible with "binary thinking"). Propositions have varying qualities due to varying content and varying techniques for verification. Humans, viewed through a microscope or not, cope with the demands of propositions as best they can. They may judge that some propositions are relative to the speaker. And relative propositions may work for some purposes. For instance, propositions about monetary value are relative to a buyer, yet every other market participant may find that proposition to be useful.

Nevertheless, relativism isn't thereby an automatic judgment for all propositions. Humans may judge that some propositions are not relative. It's pragmatic to do so. I've mentioned the two "meta-truths of objectivity": 1) it works for an individual human to think that some parts of reality exist independently of that individual, 2) it works for an individual human to think that some other individuals also interact with some identical parts of reality. For any isolated proposition, it's uncertain at the outset whether both meta-truths apply to it. That's for the human to evaluate/verify/judge. Objectivity per se is a conclusion, not an axiom. (Someone may choose to adopt the tactic of "objective until proven subjective" from time to time.)

I forgive skeptics who are unconvinced by the proposal that individual humans are responsible for judging the degree of relativism case by case. Am I not assuming what I wish to prove? At first hearing it sounds like I'm advocating verification by bluster. If the proposition "I'm telling the truth" isn't adequate proof that the speaker is telling the truth, then how is the proposition "I'm telling you something that isn't relative" adequate proof that the speaker is telling me something that isn't relative? The short response is that no, it isn't adequate proof on its own. Humans can err, and humans can be wrong about how much relativism is embedded in the truth of a proposition.

The longer convoluted response, appropriate for a convoluted reality, is that I can't present universal guidelines or procedures. When the proposition is about obvious objects, the proposition is less likely to be relative. When the proposition fits well with other propositions which I judge to be true, the proposition is less likely to be relative. When the proposition comes with a straightforward method for anyone to test it, the proposition is less likely to be relative. When the proposition is expressed by many, the proposition is less likely to be relative. When the proposition is expressed by a dispassionate expert, the proposition is less likely to be relative. And on and on.

It may feel uncomfortable that fallible humans play a central messy role in the dialogue about truth, but as long as propositions continue to be messages between humans it's unavoidable albeit manageable⁶. Unfortunately, sublime emotional comfort isn't a mark of truth. If anything a comforting proposition should invite suspicions about its level of convenience. Building and attacking an uncomfortably-itchy straw man out of simpleminded reductionism/relativism doesn't discredit materialistic naturalism with facts. It shows that the debater has chosen to urge the reality of ideas based on attractiveness, as opposed to urging the reality of ideas based on verified implications⁷. Desiring standalone/easy truth doesn't cause it to materialize (it's like ice cream in that aspect).

Within materialistic naturalism, truths are laborious and valuable. Humans try hard to purge the extreme elements of reductionism/relativism. They attempt to eliminate both oversimplification of internal structure or personal bias. To ask that truths never have the least inkling of reductionism/relativism is to ask the impossible⁸.

Much more proof should be demanded of those who posit an alternate reality which allows that possibility. In that alternate reality, materials have no parts and humans don't have any individual frames of reference. It's a realm with many approximate similarities to ours and a beautiful place to visit. But when we need to accomplish anything, we return home, confounding though it may be. 


¹ "Semantic pitfalls" refers to the fraught complications which arise during long discussions about "Reality", the philosophical idea. To a pragmatist's eye, those complications appear to amount to nothing more than disagreements about ideological preferences. Which labels communicate the "best" emphasis? No matter how argumentative a pair of philosophers is, the specific question "Is  ____ 'real'?" may not yield the same disputes...until they go on to say "And by 'real' in general I mean..."
² Materialistic naturalism is different from "supernatural materialism". Supernatural materialists blur the lines by proposing that supernatural stuff is also built solely from matter. Thus the supernatural stuff cannot violate physical laws and it isn't different in kind from natural stuff...in which case "supernatural" becomes a confusing term. It customarily stands for "phenomena beyond nature". But for the supernatural materialist it stands for "natural phenomena which happen to be beyond current human explanation or understanding". For example, they may refuse to believe in the traditional concepts of gods/spirits yet believe in "paranormal soul powers" (they may use the words "mind" and "soul" interchangeably).

Other examples of supernatural materialism veer closer to understated pantheism. Its most abstract forms don't need anything beyond materialism. Instead there's the worship of cosmic unknown knowledge: combining a belief in a "god of the gaps" with the observation that the inherent limitations of puny humans imply that everything in toto is mostly a knowledge "gap" to us upstart primates. I respond by admitting readily that a human's inability to grasp all reality is humbling, but that emotion isn't a sufficient reason to cultivate misunderstanding by applying the figurative name "god" to it. If it's only phrased as worship of the "order" displayed by materialistic reality, then I still question the merit for those warm feelings. The impersonal flow of natural laws will utterly demolish us into our constituent pieces eventually whether we respect it or not. On the other hand, if everyone agrees to completely restrict "god" to a colorful synonym for "awe-inspiring", then I'll join in on the harmless metaphorical fun: a well-done blend of lemonade and iced tea inspires me to call it the spittle of god. The experience of the drink doesn't qualify as "numinous" but the all-consuming enjoyment is somewhat like an altered state of consciousness...
³ The same problem of too many interactions arises in the abstract domains of theory and mathematics. Many variables, whose rates of change are mutually defined in interdependent functions, quickly become formidable obstacles to finding solutions analytically, i.e. proving that a related simpler equation is a solution. The present era of calculating machines has been a great aid in finding solutions numerically, i.e. swiftly calculating and retrying better and better estimates of a solution.
⁴ I realize the vast breadth and depth of this statement's absurdity. If it helps, imagine seeing it during a tour through Willy Wonka's factory. Wonka: "Next up, here's the Candy Know-It-All Machine. It detects everything which is detectable, and also many things that aren't." (Wonka demonstrates by dropping in a red Everlasting Gobstopper and grabbing the resulting printout of small text.) Guest: "But that's self-evidently preposterous!" Wonka: "No, it's cherry." (Wonka lifts up the printout. It contains lines of letters and punctuation in the rough shape of a cherry.)
⁵ In passing, note the argument's purposeful usage of "jumble" here. Although it's a caricature, it's one more excellent illustration of the problem with reductionism. Body cells are extremely fine-grained subsets of the whole reality of a human body. To ignore the interactions among these subsets is to ignore the vital structures formed by cells. By doing so the argument is casting the body as a "linear sum" of the effects of its cell parts, whereas the totality of the cell parts' inherent cooperation is more accurately characterized as an "exponential growth" of emergent/network effects. A page of randomly arranged letters is of far smaller total effect than a page with the same quantity of letters arranged into words and grammatical sentences. Unlike a jumble of cells like a colony of bacteria, it's more plausible that a highly-structured body and brain is an effective processor of highly-structured information.
⁶ It seems to me that nobody seriously wants to remove the human role anyhow. One of the surest ways to provoke a rebellious reaction is to perform all of someone's thinking. Preventing others from thinking the wrong thoughts generally gathers more support than preventing me from thinking the wrong thoughts.
⁷ In practice, the distinction could be subtle between a proposition's attractiveness and its verified implications, depending on the rationale for its attractiveness. Maybe its degree of intuitive attractiveness, verified by seeking the opinion of a wise mentor, is a "reasonable" implication to ponder...corroborated with more verified implications. Wise mentors who verify a proposition's attractiveness may be insufficient evidence (the proposition could be ugly but true!).
⁸ Regardless, I confess happily that the specters of reductionism and relativism are virtually nonexistent in a good number of the truths which I acknowledge. Here's a short non-exhaustive listing: the age of my automobile, the value of the Plank constant, the scar on my left thumb, the cash in my wallet, the formula for the area of a circle with radius measurement r. These truths' verifiable implications are quite free from interferences of reductionism and relativism.

other economic fellows

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. -Mark Twain

The above is a popular quip nowadays. Let me suggest some others.

• A deadbeat is a fellow who asks for a bushel of apples now, and pays back a bushel of cores later.
• A market victim is a fellow who waited to buy a snowshovel until the snowstorm, and now needs to sell it during the middle of summer.
• An insurer is a fellow who offers you a life jacket on the road, and offers you a spare tire on the ocean.
• A nation undergoing "quantitative easing" is a fellow who promises that his wares are popular, and demonstrates it by buying up a quarter of the merchandise himself.  
• A central banker in a time of crisis is a fellow who buys everyone's lit dynamite, and extinguishes all of it by unleashing a flood.