On certainty

A week ago, in a Facebook group for CrossFit physicians, I read a post blaming poor parenting (i.e., poor mothering) for childhood obesity.

There and elsewhere I read confident statements on nutrition. I read confident statements about market movements (usually retrospective) and white men.

I always imagine these confident people are young, but I believe that is not always true.

There are likely things. There is entropy and death (but also the inexplicably low entropy of the early universe, and it is possible for an Old person to be stronger than they were in middle age).

Most things though, they are … complicated. They are some of this and some of that.  If you cannot imagine a worse outcome than an obese child you have not opened your eyes enough, or lived long enough for the world to pin your eyelids back and burn reality into your retina.

Look for the Old of any age. Some have something that might be wisdom. Ask them about certainty.

Bostromism rediscovered

While recently rereading Banks’ marvelous book The Algebraist I decide I ought to write a post about “The Truth”, which is basically Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis made theology.

An initial topic search lead me to a 2013 pinboard post, where I learned I’d started to write that post 5 years ago - in 2013. I didn’t finish then, because at that time a topic search uncovered a post from 5 years before that. In 2008, 10 years ago now.

My 2008 post includes an excerpt from The Algebraist — it’s worth a read. Banks begins with the consensus response to the simulation hypothesis — “a difference that made no difference wasn’t a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.”  I’m not sure the hypothesis is totally irrelevant though; it is one answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Now I’m looking forward to doing this again in 2023.

PS. deGrasse in 2016.

PPS. I’ve been lately thinking about the other odd aspects of Oldness. Such as realizing I’m supposed to be the sober and silent sage in meetings whose primary duty is to do introductions and conclude with expressions of appreciation. Most unfairly, for someone who never missed a nap during meetings and classes, I’m not allowed to fall asleep any more.

Capitalism, fraud and maximizing wantability

WaPo has a delightfully meta-subversive headline for an article about the failings of 21st century capitalism: This Kardashian headline shows why two Nobel winners say the economy is broken. Beneath the headline is a photograph of 3 reasonably attractive women and the hit enhancing text “Kourtney, Kim and Khloe — arrive at the Maxim Hot 100 party”.

Jeff Guo’s article proceeds to an interview with Akerloff and Shiller, reasonably well regarded academic economists, about their book Phishing for Phools. Unfortunately Guo does get around to the Kardashians, which blunts the beauty of the introduction. Still, it is a lovely bit of meta; boosting page hits for an article about how easily humans are manipulated in the interests of feeding their wants.

Shockingly, it seems capitalism does not optimize our better selves.

I’ll let that sink in a bit.

Sure, you think it’s obvious that capitalism is a system for finding local minima traps in a 3 dimensional field where demand is gravity and information technology enables complexity enables deception. If pressed to respond further you might say something like “tobacco”.

It’s not obvious to Americans though. Our culture equates wealth with virtue, and the “invisible hand” of capitalism with the “invisible hand” of a Calvinistic God. It’s an authoritian-dominance attractor in culture-space, and we’re not the only people to get stuck in it.

So this is an article worth scanning, if only as a marker for the fading glamor of the 1990s capitalist (emphases mine) …

… Economics predicts that wherever there is a profit, someone will be there to make it. To that, Akerlof and Shiller propose a corollary: Wherever there is an opportunity to profit off people’s weaknesses, someone will exploit it…

… The basic idea of this book is that there is a “phishing” equilibrium, in which if there’s a profit to be made by taking advantage of your weakness, then that will be there.

… The standard view of markets (which is subject to problems of income distribution and externalities) is that markets will deliver the best possible outcome.

… that’s what the standard graduate student is taught. It’s what you’re told to believe, and what I think most economists do believe. As long as the markets are competitive, and there are no problems of income distribution and there are no externalities, it’s going to lead to the best possible world…

… that then has acquired a moral tone, which is that whatever happens in the market is okay. And that translates, in turn, into people arguing and thinking that it’s okay to be selfish. That if I earn this income, then I in some sense deserve it.

So this view that whatever markets do is good becomes this idea that whatever markets do is right…

… Kirman tracing the origins of this idea back to the Enlightenment. He says, “laissez faire made a lot of sense against the background of monarchy and controlling church.” So this idea of freeing the markets really came through at a time when businesses were being particularly oppressed….

… Irving Fisher was a Yale economist who in 1918 wrote a book saying the free market system is maximizing something but it’s not what Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, called utility. So he named it wantability.

I did a Google N-grams search [how often a word appears in books] for wantability. The term enjoyed some popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, then exponentially decayed. After the Reagan-Thatcher revolution the term was gone….

… the children’s candy bars were put at children’s eye level …You have professionals who are designing everything. They are designing it for wantability.

Reading this a part of me thinks I should get a Nobel just for my blog rants. Economists don’t think market solutions have local minima traps? It’s novel to think markets produce things that are bad for us? Stockholm, it’s not that hard to find my real identity. I would’t mind the money. You can give me another prize for canopy economics and eco-econ.

So this isn’t a book I’m likely to buy. It’s an interesting marker, however, of our changing attitudes towards market capitalism and for the intellectual history of our judgments from Adam Smith to Donald Trump. Twenty years of lousy economic growth (great for elite, awful for non-college) will do that. I’ll be looking for more signs of thoughtfulness …

See also

• IT and productivity - two noteworthy posts from Equitable Growth 2/2015 - good set of links to my older stuff.
• Learning from an Amazon “Newer Galaxy” fraud: I too am prey. 10/2015. Just this morning! I got caught. 

How to buy happiness

If you're a reasonably healthy middle-class American adult you too can buy happiness. Here's how ...

Coding Horror: Buying Happiness 

1. Buy experiences instead of things
2. Help others instead of yourself
3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones
4. Buy less insurance
5. Pay now and consume later
6. Think about what you're not thinking about
7. Beware of comparison shopping
8. Follow the herd instead of your head 

Number two was probably the hardest one for me -- pre-kids. Now 'helping others' is most of what I do. Obviously, there are other ways to do that.

The list and explanations fit my own experience. It's the best guide I've seen.

Choices

The Atlantic has a sure fire winner online. Kate Bolick's All the Single Ladies follows the formula - single woman in New York, romantic life, no true love, aging now, allegedly happy single. Every magazine can do it once a year, usually in the fall.

I skimmed this one. Can't help it, I get the paper rag though it often annoys. It's my way of saying thank you to Fallows and TNC.

These articles feel sad to me; the authors protest too much. I hope it's just part of the formula, the adult equivalent of the dead mothers of Disney orphans. Something to pluck the strings and get the hits. We all need to work.

There's a deeper theme to play with though, one Bolick wisely avoids. The vast majority of humans, from nameless peasant to feudal king, have had short lives of abundant suffering and few choices. Bolick has, by their standards, vast wealth, luxury and choice. Me too and probably you, we're the lucky ones.

It's relative though, our active lives aren't much longer than the life of a Roman citizen. We have many more choices, but roughly the same number of prime years to spend them. We have to leave a lot of roads untraveled.

If our lifespan were matched to our choices, we'd be 35 for a hundred years. It still wouldn't be enough of course.

Me, I say there's a truck waiting on every one of those roads. Step off the curb one day, and meet the truck. So this road really is the best of all ...

The BBC is making In Our Time archives available for download (!)

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program available for download.

In addition to the regular weekly In Our Time podcast, you can now download all previous editions of the series via the podcast genre pages listed below.

In Philosophy, for example, there are currently 62 programs available dating back to 1998. In early 2010 the BBC made back episodes available to stream, but now they've gone all in. My 2006 tech post on grabbing old episodes is now happily obsolete, my fears of 2008 have been refuted, and I don't need to covertly circulate DVDs of past programs.

These are not great times for the old world (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK), but there are still a few candles in the dark. This is one of them, there's more good news in efforts to freely distribute learning and education. Echoes of the Enlightenment as it were.

In honor of this happy event, I'm adding a "good news" tag to Gordon's Notes. A wee ray of sunshine in my daily gloom.

PS. It's not now documented, but little known, that Blooger has tag (label) feeds. For example, this is my "good news" feed (1 article at the moment, I don't want to overdo it) - http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/good%20news. The label feeds get the main feed title, so you would want to rename them on subscription.

Happiness as editing - Sunnyside edition

“No story ends happily. The happy ending is only about knowing where to end on a smile, at the very moment where fortune is still on the ascent. The open road. The wedding." Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, as quoted in Sunnyside II – Count no man lucky until he is dead — Crooked Timber.

Happiness is all about the editing. Things happen around us, we make up our own stories. If we're smart, we pick the happy moments to declare a chapter done, signed, sealed for ever. It can't be undone, the unchanging past is more eternal than the universe.

Some chapters are long, some short. The last chapter ends badly, but it's only one among many.

The Legless and the Lazy - a parable

There are two racers.

Jane is legless. Since the age of two she has excelled.

Jill is apathetic. She has trouble getting started. She gives up easily. Jill is lazy.

Each is invited to race one mile without devices. Jane rolls. She somersaults. She walks on her hands. She is relentless. The odds are invigorating.

Jill is disinterested. She starts slowly. She complains about her sore foot. She stops to rest. She doesn't like her shoes.

Jane finishes bruised, scraped, dirty and sore. Jill finishes first.

Who is the better person? Who do we praise?

Jane and Jill are identical twins. Jane lost her legs after a childhood infection. Jill's personality changed after a brain tumor was removed at age 17. Jill has spent years relearning speech and ambulation.

Who is the better person? Who do we praise?

Jane and Jill are not identical twins. Jill was born lazy.

Who is disabled?

Jack is a sociopath. He was born unable to form connections to other persons ...

See also ...

• A taxonomy of American politics - how attitudes to the weak define America (3/2011)
• Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment (12/2006)
• Calvin, free will and me (3/2010)
• Addiction and disease: My comments on the TIME Science blog (7/2007)
• Lurching towards wisdom: neurodiversity and the morality of abnormality (5/2004)
• Bad genes, bad people and a crisis of punishment? (11/2009)
• Diminished responsibility: the next cultural battleground (9/2005)

A taxonomy of American politics

The weak are inescapable. Live long enough? Probably weak. Child? Weak. Wrong genes? Not so strong. Blacksmith post-horses? Tribe out of power? Parents not wealthy? Don't own a Senator? Organic in the machine age? Ok, so you get it.

In America weakness and poverty trend together. and, to a first approximation, American political tribes can be classified by their attitudes to the weak...

Branch I The strong should help the weak because ...

• I need help -> Weak person, not in denial
• My religious tradition tells me I will be rewarded for compassion -> Theist
• Seeing suffering makes me feel bad -> Normal human
• I choose to assume this obligation because ...
  • I am perverse [3] ->  liberal secular humanist
  • Some of those I love are weak -> Social interest
  • I may be weak some day -> Rational self-interest
  • I favor civilization and prosperity -> Rational social interest
  • My tribe is defined by its service -> Noblesse obliges

Branch II The strong should not help the the weak because ...

• I am strong because I am of the strong tribe, non-tribe is non-person -> Weak person, in denial
• Misfortune is the will of God/The Market which I must support -> neo-Calvinist [1], Marketarian
• I am strong, and the weak serve me -> Authoritarian
• I don't care about the suffering of others -> Sociopath
• I like seeing others suffer -> Psychopath
• Obligation is an infringement on my liberty ->  Libertarian
• The health of the tribe requires the sacrifice of the weak -> Social Darwinist [2]
• Charity makes people weak, for weak must win or fall on their own -> Tough Lover

I guesstimate that about 70% of Americans belong in Branch I and 70%of them vote Democrat. Of the 30% of Americans in Branch II about 95% of them vote GOP. Branch II defines the heart of the GOP, though Branch II alone can't win elections.

Of all the twigs of this tree there are three that are in play during elections.

• non-Calvinist theists can vote Democrat or Republican. They are why we can have a Black President, but never an atheist President.
• GOP voters who are weak,  but yearn to be of the strong tribe. They may realize they are dupes, that they are sheep funding wolves. They can then change sides. (Today many of these are Beckians.)
• The Tough Lovers

The last are the most interesting. From my secular humanist perspective, they have a point.

Sure, some TLs are just sociopaths in denial, but most of us are capable of more than we, or others, imagine. Sometimes hunger or homelessness helps someone overcome a social phobia and accept an unpleasant public facing job. Sometimes loss of child care benefits leads to rational choices about contraception. Parents in particular know that children love to win by their own ends against the odds (although we rig the game in the child's favor).

Tough love has its limits though. Sometimes people break. They become homeless. Their dependents suffer. This is why Food Stamps are usually a very good thing. Even the core GOP voters of Branch II often support some sort of publicly funded education, thought they want it to be locally funded and thus favor the strong [5].

The trick for those of us who want to help the weak be stronger, but also recognize that humans are not not rational actors, is to fake "Tough Love". We need systems and solutions that allow the weak to seem "win on their own" , perhaps by rigging the game in a way that seems 'fair'. So instead of doing affirmative action on the basis of ethnicity, we achieve similar ends to by providing affirmative action on the basis of poverty. Instead of directly subsidizing employment, we make it easier to create a viable startup company.

Political systems are good at finding solutions like these, which is why politics is the worse form of governance save for all the alternatives. We'll need to get very good at this form of kindness, because the 21st century will soon be seen as the age of mass disability, when fewer skills are needed, and more skills are as redundant as blacksmithing in the age of the automobile ...

[1] Calvinism is the best "Christian" example I know of, but this is common to many traditions. It is perhaps the only rational answer to the "problem of evil" in a religious tradition.
[2] Apologies to Darwin, who was a remarkably compassionate human being.
[3] It's a "worker Bee thing". Some are programmed this way. It isn't perverse if you think as humans as bipedal naked mole rats.
[4] It's been a long time since I'd given this much thought. I'm indebted to a substantially younger person for refreshing topics I'd internally settled long ago. 
[5] Note to foreigners. Americans typically fund education through local property taxes. Shocking, isn't it? The most shocking thing is that Americans think of this as a good idea.

Apologetics: God and the Fermi Paradox

As a Catholic schoolboy in 1930s Quebec my father practiced a form of polemics known as Apologetics [1]. He argued through reason for the the existence of God.

Dad tells me he was good at Apologetics. As best I can tell he's an atheist, which probably helped his rhetoric.

I think I share the same gift. So I've long been surprised that theists don't use the Fermi paradox in their arguments. I suggested they pursue this back in 2003 ...

SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity: Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed

... The universe we live in was designed so that we would be alone. There are a few variants on this idea, but they're fundamentally very similar. I list three here. In some ways the Fermi Paradox may be an even stronger "existence of God" argument that the usual "balance of physical parameters" argument.

1. Some non-omnipotent entity created our universe (there are allegedly serious physicists who speculate about how one might create a universe) and deliberately tweaked certain parameters so that sentience would occur on average about once per galaxy. Maybe they lived in a crowded galaxy and thought an alternative would be interesting.
2. God created the world in 7 days, and He made it for man's Dominion. He didn't want anyone else in our galaxy, maybe in the entire universe.
3. Nick Bostrom makes a credible argument^[9] that there's a reasonable likelihood that we exist in a simulation. If so, then perhaps the existence of an non-human civilizations does not suit the purposes of the simulation. (This could be considered a special case of "God created the world...")

Today, for the first time, a Google news search filter of mine found a Kevin Roeten post making an Apologetic argument ...

Atheists Beware--A Bona Fide Reason for God

... Assuming 10 billion years for the age of the Milky Way galaxy, there was at least 2000 chances for all additional civilizations (#16, p.48, Show Me God) to settle the entire galaxy. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asks, "Where are they?" Hence, Fermi's Paradox...

...  For civilizations 15 light years away, they should be receiving signals from TV shows transmitted by earth, such as "I Love Lucy". Their signal to earth should be arriving back about now. We've received nothing...

I doubt this is really the first time anyone but me has made a connection between the Fermi Paradox and apologetics, but it's the first one my filters have caught. Congratulations Kevin.

This is why, though I'm functionally an atheist, I'm technically agnostic [2]. Personally I assign a non-zero probability that we're living in a simulation, which is just about the same as saying there somewhen existed one or more all powerful creators. Of course this says nothing about their attitudes towards us. Given the nature of reality I rather hope we're unnoticed mice in the walls, but I fear they're sadists.

Of course I assign a higher probability to the Fermi paradox answer that a "great filter" eliminates all biological civilizations. Still, I'm glad to see theists picking up on an interesting argument.

[1] The word "apologetics" is all but forgotten. It deserves a resurrection.

[2] It's impossible to truly disprove the existence of the supernatural, at best we can only prove it's not necessary to model what we measure. So, really, there are no rational atheists, there are only functional atheists. Incidentally, I'm very sympathetic to the religious inclination. Reality is overrated.

The key to happiness

This is disturbingly close to what I think ...

I would say "editing" rather than "self-delusion", but, really, that's quibbling.

South Dakota - state of denial

Just west of the Minnesota Saint Paul border is the Catfish Bay water ski park.

It's a puddle with a grandstand.

Some obsessed maniac dug a hole in the ground and turned it into a water skiing attraction - in South Dakota. A few hours west of the land of 10,000 lakes.

It's insane. It's pathetic. It's glorious.

The Corn Palace. Wall Drug. Mount Rushmore. Crazy Horse Memorial. They're all in South Dakota, at the heart of the Buffalo Commons. They're all crazy. Doomed.

Just like humanity, not to mention our ever dissolving universe.

Catfish Bay is an honored member of the trans-galactic museum of the Deniers of Doom.

Calvin, free will and me

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with Calvinism (TULIP, via Garrison Keillor), though I picked up a bit more thanks to George W Bush and his fellow Marketarian social Darwinists.

It wasn't until I listened to In Our Time on Calvinism, though, that I realized Calvin and I had something fundamental in common. Neither Calvin nor I believe in the myth of free will, or the myth of responsibility. (Though I do treat both as a useful fiction - especially with the kids.)

If you're a Christian, and you don't believe in free will, then you have to believe that either nobody is saved, or everyone is saved, or that God is capricious.

The first two options are simpler, but the first makes Christ seem rather pointless and the second can't create a successful social movement. Only the third option, that God is capricious, will produce the right mixture of fear, pride, power and scorn - particularly when coupled with the Marketarian principle that God rewards the righteous with worldly power. The principles of natural selection ensure that, absent free will, the theology of a capricious God will win.

I've never liked Calvin, but at least now I understand his logic. Of course, were I a Christian, I'd follow Occam and choose the simpler assumption that everyone is saved. Calvin didn't let his logic get in the way of a good power base, so he made a different choice.

See also:

• Bad genes, bad people and a crisis of punishment?
• Addiction and disease: My comments on the TIME Science blog
• Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst
• Diminished responsibility: the next cultural battleground
• Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment
• Marketarianism (Label)

Update 3/9/10: This meme is circulating. I've added a "meme watch" tag to this post.

Update 4/7/10: Sci Am article - no free will. One more sign of social acceptance.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics - explained

Eons ago my peers used to puzzle over the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Back in the 1960s an essay on the topic by Merci Cooper ended with this conclusion …

… The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve….

Why is it that the “the great book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics” (Galileo Galilei)?

In a recent In Our Time programme on Mathematics' Unintended Consequences I heard, from one guest, a personally persuasive explanation. It’s a fundamentally anthropic explanation that goes something like this:

1. Entities that can do mathematics arise as a consequence of natural selection.
2. Natural selection can only occur in regions of a universe that have interacting and persistent patterns (perhaps including recursion).
3. So a universe containing mathematicians will also be a pattern-based universe.
4. Mathematics is a process for describing and manipulating patterns.
5. Therefore mathematics is a language that can describe pattern-based universes, including our own.

I’m good with that.

In Our Time archives - EVERY EPISODE from Oct 15 1998 onwards

Wow.

You know, this really did deserve more than just a small aside on the recently redesigned IOT web site...

BBC - Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time

...For the first time, listen online to every episode ever broadcast, from Aristotle to the History of Zero...

The list includes many, perhaps all, of the legendary lost episodes...

... These ‘lost editions’ include topics such as Science and Religion, Childhood, Consciousness, The End of History and Quantum Gravity, and they’re discussed by guests including Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen and the sadly deceased Stephen Jay Gould. The term ‘treasure trove’ is bandied around quite casually these days, but for anyone who enjoys In Our Time, these transcripts are very valuable...

I found Quantum Gravity (RealMedia only) from Feb 22, 2001 - but they "by year" list currently only goes back to 2004. So they've got some bugs to work out.

By walking backwards from Quantum Gravity, however, I was able to locate Evolutionary Psychology (Nov 2000), Imagination and Consciousness June 2000, The Renaissance (June 2000), Death (May 2000), Grand Unified Theory (incl Brian Greene and Martin Rees, Feb 2000), Climate Change Jan 2000 w/ George Monbiot), Time w/ Lee Smolin Dec 1999, Consciousness w/ Roger Penrose (Nov 1999), Utopia (first one not available to play - Oct 1999 - so it's not every episode) ...

Sometime around 1999 the format drops to 30 minutes and the theme becomes "the 20th century". Then we come to the very first episode (Oct 15, 1998):

WAR IN THE 20TH CENTURY

... In the first programme of a new series examining ideas and events which have shaped thinking in philosophy, religion, science and the arts, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss warfare and human rights in the 20th century. He talks to Michael Ignatieff about the life of one of the 20th century’s leading philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, and to Sir Michael Howard about the 20th century will be remembered; as a century of progress or as one of the most murderous in history.

When we see pictures on television of starving people in war torn areas most of us feel we must ‘do’ something. Where does the feeling that we are in some way responsible for our fellow human beings originate historically? How has technology affected the concept of the Just War? And what are the prospects for world peace as we enter the next century?

With Michael Ignatieff, writer, broadcaster and biographer of Isaiah Berlin; Sir Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of History, Oxford University and joint editor of the new Oxford History of the Twentieth Century.

Ignatieff now leads the Liberal Party of Canada.

I have my work cut out for me.

Thank you BBC and thank you Lord Bragg and brave guests. There is still hope for humanity.

Update: ok, so go easy on the hope bit.

Update 3/4/2010: The handful that weren't online have since been added. It appears to now be complete!

Update 3/17/2010: The older material mostly uses RealAudio. That's easy to capture using AudioHijack Pro (you do need to read the manual, see also my old directions). Some of the very oldest material, however, is now rendered with the newish BBC iPlayer. To capture that I had to change the AudioHijack source to "Safari"; AHP switches Safari to 32 bit mode to Hijack the stream. I think I would have to change it back to 64bit myself, but I'm inclined to leave it in 32 bit mode for a while. Quite a bit of software doesn't like 64bit.

Update 5/21/2010: I gave up half way through the 30 minute 1999 (year two) Utopia program. It wasn't exactly bad, but the newer material is much better. I suspect today's guests rise to greater expectations than those of early days, and Melvyn is better at keeping people, including Melvyn, on track. It's also likely that ten years of intense study have moved Melvyn into a different world of background expertise. Incidentally, there's a painful point in the Utopia program where the guests expound on a cheesy essay about a posthuman utopia of the genetically enhanced. Melvyn's guests have almost no science fiction background; their futurist dialogs are pathetically naive. We ought to make post-1980 science fiction reading a requirement for a liberal arts degree.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

John Wooden - Pyramid of Success

I'd never heard of John Wooden before I came across this drawing on the wall of an old arena in Northeast Minneapolis (click for full size) ...

Wooden was a basketball coach at UCLA, and he is said to have spent 14 years polishing versions of this drawing (see pdf version). He's 99, so we should here more about him in a year or so.

As a guide to competition one could do worse. There's nothing there about curiosity, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, tolerance, imagination, empathy, creativity, love or questioning authority - it's a guide to battle, not to life.

Boethius – the most important philosopher you’ve probably never heard of

The first I remember hearing of Boethius was this In Our Time programme on The Consolation of Philosophy…

In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell, awaiting a brutal execution, he found solace in philosophical ideas - about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts did not save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote them into a book. He called it The Consolation of Philosophy…

Boethius, I learned, was a Christian influenced neo-Platonist scholar and man of the world who lived in the waning years of the Roman empire. Wikipedia has more …

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius^[1] (ca. 480–524 or 525) … was born in Rome to an ancient and important family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was executed by King Theodoric the Great…

It is unknown where Boethius received his formidable education in Greek. Historical documents are ambiguous on the subject, but Boethius may have studied in Athens, and perhaps Alexandria…

As a result of his education and experience, Boethius entered the service of Theodoric the Great, who in 506 had written him a graceful and complimentary letter about his studies…

…By 520, at the age of about forty, Boethius had risen to the position of magister officiorum, the head of all the government and court services…

… Boethius's best known work is the Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote most likely while in exile under house arrest or in prison while awaiting his execution, but his lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy. He intended to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato from the original Greek into Latin…

…it is his final work, the Consolation of Philosophy, that assured his legacy… the work was translated into Old English by King Alfred, and into later English byChaucer and Queen Elizabeth; many manuscripts survive and it was extensively edited, translated and printed throughout Europe from the 14th century onwards.^[5] Many commentaries on it were compiled and it has been one of the most influential books in European culture…

From our perspective it’s not clear how Christian Boethius was by the time he died, but he’s a Catholic saint anyway, and supposedly a favorite of Benedict. He was immensely influential in many ways, but I suspect most of us have never come across his name.

I do like In Our Time, it’s so sad that the BBC doesn’t sell past programmes on iTunes. (You can subscribe easily to the podcasts, but you can’t turn the available streaming archives into mp3/aac unless you’re a serious geek.)

See also:

• Danger- Addictive temptations from the BBC
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time threatens to go mainstream

Update 11/5/09: When I listen to the best of IOT I take it in sips. A bit of listening, a bit of contemplation. The very best I'll do twice. Since I first wrote this I'm about three quarters done with the Consolation of Philosophy, and it is among the best. Great guests, and for once Melvyn didn't run out of time. They fit Boethius into the chain from the Stoics through Schopenhauer to Camus and Nietzsche (but not Hume and they didn't trace back to the Greek religious tradition of the futile but heroic response to inevitable tragedy).

I'm going to have to go back to past discussions of the Stoics, and I'm looking forward to the new episode on Schopenhauer.

Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst

I was 15 when Patricia Hearst "joined" the SLA. I don't remember a lot of public sympathy in Canda for her then, I dimly recall she was thought to be another foolish youth. I don't think I paid that much attention really. When the SLA was caught Patricia Hearst, despite her wealth, went to prison.

DI recaps the story, and shows how our interpretation has changed. Today, I think, Hearst would not have been prosecuted. She would have been understood to have been a victim. In retrospect DeFreeze was an evil genius of manipulation, milder versions of this techniques are the modern basis of US torture standards.

Culture evolves. Our concept of responsibility is in transition.

The robotic ape: Morality and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Persons with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortext behave more like Mills and less like Kant (emphases mine):

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - New York Times

... findings, published online by the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision-making, and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments. The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

“I think it’s very convincing now that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,” said Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain, and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in these people is clearly intact.”...

...The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor. ...The area in adults is about the size of a child’s fist.

People with this injury can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward. They also have some of the same moral instincts that others do.

... All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another. They would not send a daughter to work in the pornography industry to fend off crushing poverty, or kill an infant they felt they could not care for.

But a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip — when they had to choose between taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.

Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option), or to poison someone with AIDS who was bent on infecting others, or suffocate a baby whose crying would reveal to enemy soldiers where the subject and family and friends were hiding...

...The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions. The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem, which transmit physical sensations of attraction or discomfort; and the amygdala, a gumdrop of neural tissue that registers threats, social and otherwise. The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.

... This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape. The ventromedial area most likely adapted to assist the brain in making snap moral decisions in small kin groups— to spare a valuable group member’s life after a fight, for instance. As human communities became larger and increasingly complex, so did the cortical structures involved in parsing ethical dilemmas. But the more primitive ventromedial area continued to anchor it with emotional insistence an ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being.

It's hard not to wonder what a similar study would find find on adult genetic relatives of children with autism. The study is too small to be persuasive on its own, but it's just another in a flurry of recent research that hammers home the reality that we are our brains, and that we have more in common with science fiction robots than we once fancied. Pull out our emotion chip and we switch to a relatively "cold-blooded" judgment system. Disable that, and you probably get a sociopath. I would wager that a successful sniper has a relatively inactive VPC.

Eventually we'll discard the illogical concept of 'individual responsibility'. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see what will replace it ...

Diminished responsibility: the next cultural battleground

My wife and I were chatting about the genetics of cognition when conversation turned to one of the great emotional touchstones of the conservative momement -- "individual responsibility"

My wife tells me of a conversation she had with a neuroscientist who studies brain maturation in adolescents. After the neuroscientist explained about the extraordinary transformations and faults of the adolescent brain, my wife remarked on the obvious connection to diminished responsiblity. The scholar was appalled "but they are still responsible for their actions ...". My wife, who is far nicer than I, changed the subject.

Like much conservative language "individual responsibility" is best understood as a denial rather than an affirmation, in particular it is a denial of the concept of 'diminished responsibility'. Republicans hate the idea that age, brain maturation, retardation, or other disorders of cognition should in any way mitigate punishment. This is why, for example, they are keen to execute children (ok, teenagers). If one treats children differently from adults, then why not hold retarded adults to a different standard than average adults? The age exemption is a big step down a slippery slope to the terror of relativism.

But what are the roots of this terror? I'm not sure. There is, however, a theological component. If humans can see that a person's responsibility may be diminished in proportion to their consciousness, then could a deity do no less? Who then, would ever go to Hell? Either no-one goes, or as CS Lewis suggested -- God judges each person on the basis of what they did with what they were given. If that were so, many New Orleans looters could bask in paradise, and many born-again Republicans whither in damnation.

Scary thought indeed.