Another Philosophy Fail

This article by Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting is interesting, but not in the way that Prof. Gutting seems to think. It's interesting because it demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy and uselessness of the kind of philosophy that a lot of academics do.

Gutting presents the cosmological argument for the existence of a god, and seems to think it deserves to be taken seriously.

I say, it doesn't. Not only that, the fact that a well-respected philosopher thinks it does, and gets it published by a well-respected publisher like W. W. Norton, demonstrates that something is terribly, terribly wrong with much of academic philosophy.

Here, briefly, are just a few things that I think are wrong.

1. Gutting never defines "cause" or "caused". The words are very difficult to make rigorous, which is one reason why if you pick up a textbook on physics (say, Halliday and Resnick, the book I learned physics from), you won't even find them in the index (although of course the words themselves occur in the text). We sort-of-understand the colloquial and loose meaning of "cause" when it is associated with the events that are common in our lives, such as car accidents and elections and hot plates and Thanksgiving turkeys, but what guarantee is there that this understanding can be extrapolated to events on the micro or macro scales that physics deals with? Gutting seems to think that our folk understanding of these words is enough. I say it isn't.

2. After having acknowledged the looseness of the words, it nevertheless does seem that in nature there are genuinely uncaused physical events (like the radioactive decay of a particular uranium atom). Gutting doesn't even mention this possibility, except when it comes to his magical "first cause". So if events like the decay of this particular uranium atom has no explanation, why should we be so confident that all other kinds of physical events actually have explanations? This exemplifies another feature of much of academic philosophy, which is that it seems almost entirely divorced from what we have actually learned about the physical world. He is basically arguing to a Middle Ages audience (or even earlier).

3. There is no really good reason to always dismiss an infinite regress of causes, nor is there a good reason to dismiss a circular chain of causes (e.g., A causes B, which causes A). Of course, these don't seem to happen much in our daily lives, but again, we are talking about events (the creation of the universe) which are wildly different in scale from our ordinary experience. We don't experience cosmic inflation in our daily life, either, but that's not a good reason to dismiss that physical theory.

4. Gutting's description of "contingent" and "contingency" suffers from the same defects as "cause" and "caused". What does it mean to say "Germany might not have won the 2014 World Cup"? After all, possibly the universe was created by a supreme being who has an inexplicable love for German soccer. Perhaps everything was created and set in motion deterministically by a supreme being just so Germany won the 2014 World Cup and no other outcome was possible, even in principle. And just because I can imagine a different outcome doesn't mean a different outcome is possible; if I try very, very hard I can just barely imagine a square circle or a good philosopher, but that doesn't necessarily mean those things are possible.

5. Finally, I think what's wrong with this reasoning like Gutting's is that it is a kind of pseudomathematics: applying precise logical rules to vague concepts like "explanation" and "contingency" and "cause" without providing a rigorous mathematical or physical basis for those concepts, and then expecting the results to be meaningful. When you do that, it's kind of like doing a physics experiment and reporting the results to 20 significant figures when your measuring devices only provide 3 significant figures. You run the risk of thinking you're being precise and logical, when in fact you've only extrapolated your vague and inchoate understanding of what's really going on.

I realize in making these complaints I'm in a tiny minority. Nevertheless, I think my objections have at least some validity. What do you think?

Friday Moose Stories

Moose goes through car windshield, but driver survives

Moose go window shopping in Vail, Colorado

Moose killed illegally in eponymous town

Moose don't really get drunk?

Hat tip to R. M. for all four stories.

Another Intelligent Design Fail

Over at the creationist blog, Uncommon Descent, they just don't know when to shut up.

They present the story of an artifact which may be a 45,000-year-old flute. Then again, it might just be a partially eaten bear femur. And they present it with the title "Design inference: is it a Neanderthal flute?"

But wait a second. Don't the ID folks have a mathematically rigorous method of detecting design? I thought intelligent design was a thought revolution that was going to have significant impact on almost every field of science, including archaeology.

Then why hasn't anyone in the intelligent design field jumped in with their "mathematically rigorous" method and resolved the question about the flute? Why are there no papers by the ID giants like William Dembski and Jonathan Wells and Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson submitted to Science and Nature about artifacts like this? Or even submitted to their own vanity journal, which has published a total of one paper this year?

The answer should be obvious. Intelligent design is a massive intellectual fraud. It's a completely useless tool in science which can't even answer the simplest challenges put to it.

ID is not really about science at all -- it's just a cover for conservative Christianity.

Zonnestraal in Hilversum

Another cool set of buildings I saw in the Netherlands was Zonnestraal, an old tuberculosis sanitarium in Hilversum. The goal was to let as much light in as possible, and indeed, the buildings are practically entirely glass. My architectural in-laws tell me it's extremely famous. It's still being used as a physical rehab facility. There's also a family connection, as my wife's great-grandfather worked there in 1921-2 and wrote a little book about his experiences, which was published in 1923.

"Thinking Machines" Lecture at Waterloo November 27 -- And a Free Bingo Card

At first glance, this upcoming lecture at the University of Waterloo looks like it might be interesting:

Date: Friday, November 27, 2015 - 7:30pm
Lecture Title: Mathematics and Thinking Machines
Talk abstract: In the nineteenth century, mathematician Charles Babbage designed a programmable calculating machine that could execute algorithms with an accuracy and speed surpassing human abilities. Though Babbage’s mechanical computer remained unbuilt during his lifetime, his interest in developing machine intelligence anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about the promises, limitations, uses, and misuses of machine-generated data. This lecture will consider how our conceptions of thinking machines have evolved over the past 200 years and what issues may arise in the future. What does it mean to imagine machines “thinking”? What avenues are made available to us by the power of machine mathematics? And in what ways do calculating machines challenge our sense that human cognition is an exceptional phenomenon?

But when I look at the people speaking, I'm not so confident.

Nevertheless, I'll probably go.

To keep myself amused, I've made the bingo card below. It contains just a few of the worst arguments (courtesy of people like Michael Egnor, David Gelernter, John Searle, Roger Penrose, and Hubert Dreyfus) that I've heard proposed against the idea of thinking machines.

If you want to join me, print out a copy and bring it. Try not to disrupt the lecture by shouting "Bingo", though.

Library at TU Delft

There were lots of interesting buildings in the Netherlands. Here is just one: the library at TU Delft. Outside there is a large grassy ramp leading to the top, punctured by a cone. Inside, the cone gives light to the lower floors. At the far wall are all the books.

The building won a bunch of awards, and was designed by Mecanoo and built in 1996-7.

The Dutch Support the People of Paris

Here's a sign in the Delft (Netherlands) train station on Monday, November 16. It says (roughly) "Respect the victims of the Paris bombings with one minute of silence in stations and in trains at 12:00 Noon".

Are All Neurosurgeons Crazy?

I'm beginning to think so, what with Ben Carson claiming that the pyramids were used to store grain, not to bury rulers and that he had a violent past.

So it's not really a surprise to see that walking Dunning-Kruger effect-man, Michael Egnor, claiming that humans can't be apes because "Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking" and "Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not".

I'm really curious to know how Dr. Egnor knows with certainty that nonhuman animals cannot think abstractly. I guess he is just egnoring all the research that suggests just the opposite. It's not like this is hidden stuff; Egnor could read, for example, the books of Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal.

Maybe not all neurosurgeons are this batshit loony. After all, another thing that Carson and Egnor have in common is that they are both creationists. Maybe that's the real problem. Maybe you have to be immersed in jeebus-juice to believe, like Egnor does, that "Human rationality is different because it is immaterial." I guess our thinking powers are just magic; all that neurocircuitry is just there for show.

Torley Defends Dembski, Attacks Me, Over Bogus Schopenhauer Quotation

Over at the creationist website, Uncommon Descent, we have the logorrheic Vincent Torley trying to defend the behavior of creationist William Dembski with regard to a bogus quote of Schopenhauer.

I've discussed this alleged quote of Schopenhauer before, and you can see a summary of what I found out here.

A rough summary is as follows (you can read more here, if you like): I noticed a bogus quote in one of Dembski's articles, which he attributed to Schopenhauer. It is a quote that had interested me for a long time, long before I ever saw Dembski use it. I had already done some research on it, and I knew that Schopenhauer did not really say what was attributed to him. I pointed this out to Dembski, who was (in private correspondence) quite contemptuous of my point, and asked me to prove to him that Schopenhauer never said the alleged quote. Of course, this is impossible, and a completely unreasonable demand. The burden of proof is on the quoter, not the person disputing the quotation! The quote then appeared, unaltered, and still attributed to Schopenhauer, in one of Dembski's books. Not only that, Dembski later belittled me publicly for the fact that I chose to investigate the quotation! So much for respect for scholarship.

But this isn't the only time Dembski has been sloppy with quotations, as I documented before. There's a pattern here, which Torley doesn't address, of course.

Apparently Torley is quite taken with the fact that 10 years later, Dembski used the bogus quote once more, but this time wrote "In a quote widely attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer". I guess it only took ten years for my point to sink in. Torley seems to think this shows how ethical and scholarly Dembski is. Others might differ with that assessment.

For all his logorrhea, Torley essentially acknowledges my point. The quote is bogus, and Dembski knows it is bogus, and Dembski doesn't seem to care that others have put in the time and effort to trace its origins, while he nevertheless continues to use it. All that effort expended when any reasonable colleague would just have written, "Thanks, Jeff, for letting me know about the quote. I'll be more careful in the future."

What could be more emblematic of the intelligent design movement?

Every Moose Was Kung Fu Fighting

From my colleague Jean-Paul, here's a video of a moose skirmish in Alaska. Or, if that one doesn't work for you, try this link instead.

Neat Trompe L'Oeil Bike Rack in Sacramento

While visiting my childhood friend, musician & cartoonist Mark Stivers in Sacramento, I spotted this neat bike rack.

Here's what it looks like from one angle. Just an ordinary, but weird, bike rack, in three pieces.

Here's what it looks like from another angle.

According to this page, the rack was designed by Jason A. Silva.

Well, I Guess I Won't Be Visiting Saudi Arabia Anytime Soon

I don't go where I'm not wanted.

Another Non-Biologist Thinks He Can Teach Biologists About Evolution

It really cracks me up how religious people with no biology training think they have some special insight into evolution that the people who actually study biology somehow haven't figured out.

Granville Sewell, William Dembski, Barry Arrington --- the list goes on and on. And here's another name to add to the list: Steve Laufmann. It shouldn't surprise you that this dolt is published by the Discovery Institute, a group whose fundamental purpose is to confuse the public about evolution.

Laufmann, who claims to be an expert in "information systems", but cannot seem to manage to complete his own web page (check out all the "lorem ipsums" under "The Blog"), has absolutely nothing new to say. It's all the usual claims without evidence, like "Random events cannot create complex information, except in two circumstances: (a) there is some predefined notion of a desirable outcome, and (b) any "positive gains" toward that outcome are protected from random degradation through some external mechanism. Both of these special circumstances require intention, which the physical laws cannot offer." Laufmann clearly doesn't know a damn thing about information, since random events are, in fact, essentially the only source of information, and it doesn't require anything like "a predefined notion of a desirable outcome".

Oh, and if you had any doubts that Laufmann's doubts are based in religion, check out this page, where he is described as a "long-time ministry leader".

Lobby of the Philadelphia Record, early 1940's

Here's a postcard showing the lobby of the Philadelphia Record newspaper building. The card seems to be postmarked 1945, which suggests this photo is from the time that my parents worked there as newspaper reporters. (The couple at the right center even looks a little like them!)

The building still stands, at 317 N. Broad Street, where it is now high-end apartments.

It seems like a beautiful lobby. I wish I could have seen it, and I wish there were a much higher resolution version of this photo. (This one appears to be a colorized black-and-white photo.)

You'll Know Them By Their Love ... and By Their Honesty

From Ed Brayton, we see this appalling video of how "loving" Christians yell at a lesbian couple getting a marriage license in Kentucky.

Yup, you'll know them by their love.

And, in related news, Barry Arrington loves to label those who disagree with him as liars, while providing this gem: "The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most reliably documented events in all of human history."

Yup, more reliably documented than the Battle of Waterloo, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of Lincoln, the invasion of Normandy, the sinking of the Titanic, ...

You'll know them by their honesty.

Robert Marks II: Still Refusing to Reply One Year Later

Wow, has it been a year already? A year ago, I wrote to the illustrious Robert Marks II, asking him about a claim he made: "we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji".

No reply.

No reply after three months.

Or six months. (Just an auto-reply.)

Isn't this just typical of creationists? Make wild claims and refuse to back them up when challenged.

They Offer Nothing But Lies, Continued

Here we have the amusing spectacle of Denyse O'Leary offering nothing truthful at all, with regard to speciation.

What is a "species" anyway? If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask.

Right you are, Denyse! If evolutionary biologists studied speciation, there would be articles and books about it in the scientific literature, written by prominent Darwinists (and even some philosophers!). But of course, there are no such things. (Don't follow those links, Denyse!)

In short, no one knows.

In short, Denyse doesn't know. I can guarantee she never read Coyne's book.

Look, I (O’Leary for News) am not saying speciation doesn’t occur. I guess so, but don’t really care.

What Denyse O'Leary doesn't know could fill several large stadiums.

James Barham, A Very Confused Philosopher

As you know, I'm very skeptical about the ability of most philosophers to say anything interesting (or even true) about science. Here is yet another example of bad philosophy, this time from James Barham.

Really, I wish anyone who wants to prattle on and on about the deficiencies of Darwinism would take, at the very least, undergraduate courses on the theory of computation and artificial intelligence. It would save a lot of electrons being wasted the way Barham does.

It starts badly, with a claim that the "Darwinian consensus" (whatever that means) is "gradual[ly] crumbling" and that the "official explanation" (no kidding -- like a 9/11 truther, he really says that) "of the nature of living things---and therefore of human beings---that we've all been led to believe in for the past 60 or 70 years turns out to be dead wrong in some essential respects."

Yeah, yeah. We've heard that for more than a hundred years; it's what Glenn Morton called the "longest-running falsehood in creationism".

"The machine metaphor was a mistake---organisms are not machines, they are intelligent agents."

This is precisely the kind of silliness that a good course on the theory of computation could avoid. Why does he think that a machine cannot be an "intelligent agent"?

"For one thing, it [Darwinism] meant that all purpose is an illusion, even in ourselves, which is absurd. We know that is not true from the direct evidence of our own experience."

No, the biological theory of evolution does not mean that "all purpose is an illusion". Trouble results from using the vague word "purpose", which means many things to different people. It is not a concept that has a precise scientific definition (what are the units of "purpose"?), although Barham tries to provide one: he says, "Purpose is the idea that something happens, not because it must tout court, according to physical law, but rather because it must conditionally, in order for something else to happen." Well, that's not what most people mean by purpose, but even so, practically any computer program would exhibit purpose under Barham's definition. And nature is filled with objects that can serve as a basis for computation, including DNA and sandpiles. There is simply no logical barrier at all to computing devices arising through natural processes.

There are a few philosophers who have something interesting to say about evolution, but Barham is not one of them.

A Silly Paper in a Silly Journal

The International Journal of Mathematics Research, also known as IJMR, is officially a Silly Journal™. Here's why:

Reason #1: The journal's URL, as provided on some papers they have published, is given incorrectly: it says "http://www.ripublication.com/ijmr.htm", but the correct URL is "http://www.ripublication.com/irph/ijmr.htm". You have to be particularly incompetent to run a journal which cannot publish its own URL correctly.

Reason #2: The journal's listing of their editorial board contains spelling errors, lists at least one editor twice, and contains not a single person in the countries where mathematics research is strongest (e.g., USA, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Russia, Italy, Australia). Also, no e-mail for any of the editors is given.

Reason #3: Recently they published this paper: Ali Abtan, "A New Theorem for the Prime Counting Function in Number Theory", in Volume 7 (2015). Containing ungrammatical and false claims like "So till now their is no formula for the prime counting function π(x) as you see from the end of 18th century till now" (completely ignoring the work of Meissel, Lehmer, Lagarias, Miller, Odlyzko, and others), this paper is a mess. Understanding why the paper is silly is a bit more involved, so I'll start by explaining one aspect of what makes a paper good.

A general principle about theorems is that they should be (within reason) as general as possible. For example, if you prove that if some property of a specific set S holds, then before publishing it you should think about what more general property S has that makes it possible to get the result. Here's a specific example: recently I saw a reddit post that pointed out that every prime p greater than or equal to 5 can be expressed as p = (24n+1)^½, for some integer n. This is totally uninteresting, but the reason why it's uninteresting is that this property has basically nothing to do with primes at all! Rather, it is trivial fact that every number q that is relatively prime to 6 has the property that q² ≡ 1 (mod 24), a fact that can instantly be verified by computing (6k+1)² and (6k+5)² and observing that k(k+1) is always even. Since every prime greater than or equal to 5 is relatively prime to 6, the result follows immediately. But, I emphasize again, the result is really about numbers relatively prime to 6, not primes. It captures basically nothing interesting about primes at all.

Now, in Abtan's paper, what is the silliness? He states the following formula for the prime-counting function π(x), which is the number of primes ≤ x. (For example, π(10) = 4.)

π(x) = (Σ_2≤p≤x p + Σ_2≤n<x π(n))/X.

Now, as stated, this formula contains two silly features. First, X is undefined; it should be x. (Where were the editors or referees for this paper?!?) Second, the formula is manifestly incorrect when x is not an integer (for example, try x = 2.5). So we shouldn't use x, because among mathematicians, x usually implies a real-valued variable. Let's use N instead.

With these two corrections, the formula becomes correct:

π(N) = (Σ_2≤p≤N p + Σ_2≤n<N π(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

Let's overlook the fact that the formula is completely useless for computing prime numbers or π(N), and instead focus on the formula itself. Remember the principle: try to figure out the class of sequences for which such a formula might hold. Well, let's try some interesting but completely unrelated sequence, like the squares. Instead of π(N), we might define sqrt(N), the number of positive integer squares ≤ N. Does a similar formula hold?

Yes! In fact, more or less exactly the same formula holds:

sqrt(N) = (Σ_1≤i²≤N i² + Σ_1≤n<N sqrt(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

How can this be? Well, the obvious answer is that Abtan's formula (for which he gave a long and complicated induction proof) has nothing to do with primes at all!

Let us generalize Abtan's formula and give a very, very simple proof of it. (It is often the case that if you generalize a theorem properly, it becomes easier to prove than a specific case might be.)

To generalize it, let S be any set of positive integers. S could be the prime numbers, or the positive square integers, or anything else. Let π_S(n) denote the number of elements of S that are ≤ n. Then we claim that

π_S(N) = (Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} s   +   Σ_1≤n<N π_S(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

This has an easy proof by diagram! To see it, draw a histogram of the function π_S(n) from n = 1 to N. For example, for the primes and N = 12, this would look like

The total number of red boxes is clearly Σ_1≤n≤N π_S(n).

Now consider the rectangle bounded by the lines x = 0, x = N, y = 0, and y = π_S(N):

The total number of boxes here is clearly Nπ_S(N).

How about the boxes in the rectangle which are not colored in red? Well, the top row is all blank boxes until the first prime hit in this row, which is 11. So there are 10 boxes. In the next row, there are all blanks until the first prime hit, which is 7. So there are 6 boxes. And so forth. So the total number of white boxes is Σ_2≤p≤N (p - 1) (or, more generally, Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} (s - 1).) Thus we have proved

Nπ_S(N) = Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} (s - 1)   +   Σ_1≤n≤N π_S(n).

This is the nice version of Abtan's formula. To get his formula, just add π_S(N) to the left sum and subtract it from the right, then divide by N, to get

π_S(N) = (Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} s   +   Σ_1≤n<N π_S(n))/N.

So we see that Abtan's formula has nothing to do with primes at all, really.

Any competent referee would have seen this immediately. Congratulations, IJMR. You're officially a Silly Journal™.

Old Issues of APL News

I digitized these a long time ago, but I can't find any record that I posted about it! So here are some old issues of APL News, a newsletter about the computer language APL published from 1978 to 1982 by Ken Iverson. I contributed a little to it.