On Formlessness

When I took advanced US history in high school, our instructor walked up to the blackboard on the first day and wrote a bunch of words on the board:

dog cat horse ox run jump climb fish green blue orange apple pear swiftly Jane Bill

Those probably aren't the actual words, but that doesn't matter.  He then told us, "Organize these."

"According to what," someone asked.  It might have been me, but I don't remember and it's not important.

"Not my problem," he answered with a shrug.  "Just organize them however you want."  I put them in alphabetical order:  apple Bill blue cat climb dog fish green horse Jane jump orange ox pear run swiftly.  Done.  Our instructor asked us how we organized them - one person had organized them into parts of speech, with "fish" going under both the Noun and Verb headings, "orange" being both a Noun and an Adjective, and "Jane" and "Bill" under the Proper Names subheading of Nouns.  Another student had divided them into Domesticated Animals and Other.  We had hit all the obvious ones, and then the instructor put some others on the overhead and had us try to guess what they were.

Loose Ends in Philosophology: The Master Argument

Bishop George Berkeley (pronounced "BARK lee") was the first person to discover that CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME.  Unfortunately, he was not also the first person to discover that EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL, YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER.  Seriously, this guy used capitalization for emphasis - and he emphasized a lot.

He was also an idealist, in the sense that he thought that the fundamental "stuff" of reality consisted in ideas (in the Lockean sense).  The easiest way to describe it to a modern audience is that he thought reality - the "real" world in which we all actually live - was like a giant MMO, where God plays the role of the server.  What makes things "be real" is "being perceived," it's just that God perceives all in order to keep things running.  To prove this idea that reality is fundamentally ideas instead of fundamentally stuff, he set out to establish that the idea of a "physical" object is incoherent, insofar as it entails a contradiction (a "manifest repugnancy," as Berkeley wrote).  He wrote a bunch on this, but he presented one "Master Argument" on which he said he was "content to put the whole," as in wager everything.  Unfortunately for him, he trades on an ambiguity - depending on what exactly he meant, it might be either equivocation, conflation, or amphiboly.  I think this threefold nature of the ambiguity is what made it go undetected for centuries.

Either that, or nobody really feels obligated to comb through the old ramblings of Irish bishops except for philosophy undergrads.  Y'know.  One or the other.

Bishop George Berkeley’s “Master Argument” is a thought experiment meant to show that it is absurd to believe in mind-independent physical objects.  While the argument itself is clear and appears well-structured, it rests on an underlying ambiguity that Berkeley may well not have noticed.  Additionally, the link between inconceivability and impossibility is not clearly established in this case, and breaks down on closer examination.  Despite these flaws, Berkeley’s physical arguments still show something interesting about the link between the world and what human minds think of it, but it is not the illustration that Berkeley imagines it to be.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-nine: Taste

In philosophical circles, the "what it's like" of this or that experience is called its qualia, or if you prefer large and impressive words to small and difficult words, its phenomenology. Philosophers have rather admirably tackled this issue, with some of the famous (read: "familiar to me") examples including Nagel's What Is it Like to Be a Bat? and Jackson's Epiphenomenal Qualia. Much has been made of the importance of qualia in philosophy, case in point being Jackson's paper where he uses the very subjectivity of experience to argue for epiphenomenalism. Thankfully, he seems to have come to his senses, though I'm not quite sure how he missed the problem with "epiphenomena exert no causal effects; qualia are epiphenomenal; Mary's quale of red causes her to say 'wow'." Whatever, I used to think that a man dying and coming back to life in three days was a noble sacrifice instead of a stunt; I can't really judge this guy for missing the glaringly obvious.

Speaking of the obvious, I think there's a rather easy example available to dispense with the weighty implications attributed to qualia - in terms of both what qualia might imply, and what we might disagree on when speaking of qualia. The Alert Reader will have guessed by now that this easy example is the sense of taste. And speaking of abrupt transitions, it's time for a biology lesson! We begin with the Wikipedia article, because it is clear and concise, and I doubt my ability to abstain from plagiarizing it anyhow:

Taste (or, more formally, gustation) is a form of direct chemoreception and is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons. In humans and many other vertebrate animals the sense of taste partners with the less direct sense of smell, in the brain's perception of flavor.

I want to make it clear here that we are talking about chemoreception, the sensing of chemicals. Not flavors. Flavors are the product of your brain, and they do not inhere in chemicals, but are rather the result of complex interactions between your neurology and what you put in your face. The quick & dirty breakdown is that your taste buds detect the molecular shapes of the things you eat (such as sugars, proteins, or alkaloids) or the presence of dissolved ions (acids are sour, salts are salty); then, nerve impulses are transmitted to your brain to tell it what's going on; then, you react to whatever it is that just happened.

This is what makes things like artificial sweeteners possible. You see, certain chemicals which do not occur in nature commonly (or at all) can trick your tongue into thinking that something is there which might not actually be there, just because they're similarly shaped in this or that way to the sort of thing that abounded in our evolutionary history. Case in point: aspartame. While the body still metabolizes it, aspartame is experienced by the body to be about two-hundred times sweeter than sucrose (though of a somewhat different taste, depending on who you ask), making its caloric content negligible for about the same amount of sweetness. Models of how sweetness works have grown in sophistication over time, the current model describing some eight reception sites and culminating in the development of lugduname, which is estimated to be some two-hundred-thousand times sweeter than sucrose.

Just in case we're not clear yet, let me say this in a different way: your taste buds are shape detectors and ion detectors which react with certain chemicals to send nervous impulses to your brain. The "taste" of this or that thing is the product of what your tongue tells your brain it is shaped like (or its pH value/alkali ion content). Seriously. Isn't that fucking weird?! And even weirder, there are substances called sweetness modifiers which temporarily but fundamentally alter the way sweetness is perceived, such as lactisole (which inhibits the taste of sweetness) and miraculin (which makes sour things taste sweet instead). I mean, whoah!

We were talking about qualia earlier, and now it's time to get back to that. I think that taste is perhaps the most vivid demonstration of the crowbar separation (thank you, Eddie Izzard) between reality and how we perceive it. Once again: shapes can be delicious, WTF. With touch, it's pretty easy to imagine sensations of pressure, wetness, or roughness being at least somewhat related to what's going on (with the possible exception of temperature - I mean, c'mon, rapidly vibrating molecules equals hot? Who comes up with this shit?). Same with perceptions of the visible wavelengths of light, or the audible wavelengths of sound. But taste? Give me a break! There just has to be some subjectivity going on here, because the "what it's like" is nothing like the "what it is"!

This also makes some of the debate about qualia seem rather silly. I'll briefly discuss two examples, first the analogical relationship between color-blindness and supertasting, then the inverted spectrum argument. I'll close with a quick Take That! directed at proponents of intelligent design, and a little treat for sticking it out through this interdisciplinary ramble.

First off, when we consider whether qualia are "the same" among different people, of course they're not. Nobody ever said they were, but when you consider that the colorblind see rainbows in a completely different way than most other people do, and that some people experience taste way more intensely than most other people do, then I think it becomes trivially easy to imagine that no two people experience the world in the same way. Even Epictetus was able to point out that two people can have wildly differing experiences of the same situation, and so it is not necessarily the world itself that causes us joy or suffering, but our attitudes toward it - what I would add is that a person may be just as powerless to change his or attitudes as to change his or her taste buds. Sometimes this can happen for no apparent reason, as with my early disgust and later love for mushrooms. Sometimes it happens due to experience, as with my aversion to light beer. Sometimes it doesn't happen no matter how hard you try: I will never be able to enjoy a resin spurge sandwich, because resiniferatoxin is so much more potent than capsaicin, it's not even hot any more (you just go into anaphylaxis and die).

With that in mind, the inverted spectrum argument is even easier to de-fang. For those who didn't click through (and I throw potholes all over the place, so I really don't blame you), the argument goes as follows:

1. Metaphysical identity holds of necessity
2. If something is possibly false, it is not necessary
3. It is conceivable that qualia could have a different relationship to physical brain-states
4. If it is conceivable, then it is possible
5. Since it is possible for qualia to have a different relationship with physical brain-states, they cannot be identical to brain states (by 1).
6. Therefore, qualia are non-physical.

Now, is it just me, or is the question simply beggared in premise three? I mean, if qualia could have a different relationship to one and the same physical brain-states, then of course they're not physical! Fuckin' duh! But this is exactly what is at issue. We see over and over again in the literature (Just look! Like, anywhere!) that when you change the sensory apparatus, you change the qualia. To a person who is relatively up on the neuroscience, while taste and sight vary greatly across the spectrum of human experience, the conceivability of two possible qualia X & Y for the same brain state Z is somewhere on the order of that for two possible diameters A & B for the same circle C. It's just that no two physiologies are perfectly identical (not even the same physiology at different points in time), so of course subjective experiences vary.

As for the IDiots, well, I'm just going to come out and say that ethylene glycol tastes sweet and is very toxic. So that's a poison detection failure right there. But let's not forget that to supertasters, a wide variety of totally healthy foods taste absolutely repulsive; and to non-tasters, a wide variety of potentially fatal substances taste perfectly fine. Oh, and how about the fact that the sense of taste is based primarily on superficial characteristics of molecular compounds, and is therefore rather easy to hack?

OK, so I'm done tying loose threads together for the night. Seriously, I got way too sidetracked while writing this post. I leave you all with the following cookie, as promised. This one tastes like tough decisions:

Click it!

From Metaphysics to Politics: High horses and the myth of identity.

I'd like to start today's philosophical sojourn with a thought experiment. Cut off your pinky in your mind's eye. Are you still yourself? Of course you are. What about your arm? Without your arm, you're still yourself. Both arms, both legs, even your torso - if you could survive as a Futurama-style head in a jar, you'd still be yourself. You'd have lost your gastroenteric and spinal nervous systems, and those go a long ways farther to influencing your "brainy self" than most people realize, but you'd still more or less be you.

The same goes for your hair color. If I woke up tomorrow with blonde hair, but otherwise the same, I'd still be D. If I woke up tomorrow with green skin, I'd still be me. If I woke up tomorrow in a body of the opposite sex, I'd still be who I am, that one thing about me would have just been changed independently of all other things.

How about your past? Take any day of your life, and delete it from your history. It could be the most important day of your life, but you were still you before it, and you'd still go through the changes you'd go through afterwards (although perhaps a radically different set of particular changes) in a continuously changing flux of "you." The same goes for each and every facet of your personality, every emotional reaction you've ever had, and so on and so forth. Take yourself apart, and where is the "you?" There is no "essence of you," aside from a constantly-changing patchwork mish-mash of atoms and the events those atoms have been through.

There is no such thing as "you."

Lots of people, yourself included, have "an idea of you." And as the philosophers Parker and Stone have reminded us, an idea doesn't need to have a referent in order to have effects in the world. The idea of you is a real idea, but it is not the same thing as you any more than your idea of a duck is an actual duck (for clarity, your idea of a duck is not a duck). Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no such thing as "a duck," either (just "atoms arranged duck-wise," which is practically the same thing but not exactly), because all language is language of convenience. So even though there's "really" no such thing as you on the one hand, of course there's "really" such a thing as you on the other. To remain intellectually honest, however, we have to keep both of these senses in mind when we talk about ourselves so that we can make sure that we're not confusing the two in our own minds, conflating them when speaking to others, or equivocating between them while trying to make a point.

Why do we need to do this? Well, to not do this would be careless and stupid, I think. Do you want to be careless and stupid? I don't know. I sure don't. But there's no law saying that you can't be careless and stupid, so to each his or her own, I guess. Keep that in mind for part two, coming soon! (Guess what? Soon is now!)

Much has been said lately, in the corners of the Universe that I frequent (I'm not just talking about the internet here), about all the wrongs that have been done to this group/person at the hands of that group/person. It's a real shame - I'm not being facetious or sarcastic at all here, it really is a shame. Suffering is a part of life, it's not all flowers and rainbows. But then people go and do something weird: rather than actually try to work together to do something constructive about it, some douchebags seem to want only to whine and whine. They seem, for whatever reason, unwilling or unable to get outside their own heads and stop taking things personally. Yes, these things often affect them personally, and that's rotten, but even though it's very real in one sense, it's all in your head in another important sense. Both senses are valuable, because while the former can help you motivate others to be on your side, the latter will help you make your case without whining.

Now, I want to get one thing very straight at this point: some people talk about their problems because they want sympathy, and some people talk about their problems because they want solutions. Some people only respond to talk of problems with sympathy, and some people only respond to talk of problems with solutions. Doing only one or the other of these is incomplete, and that's the TL;DR version of my beef today. As emotional creatures, we need sympathy - so give it when you can! Really! Be sympathetic to your fellow human beings and their experiences. But problems are for solving, too, so offer solutions as well! And when you tell people about your problems, be grateful for what sympathy you do get, and also be prepared to make progress and move towards solutions, which will involve taking a little advice, because it's probably coming your way anyway. So be a little tough on yourself, swallow your pride, and take whatever comes your way as an opportunity to learn.

Or did you think you had the right to tell other people how they ought to respond to you? Or the ability to control how others think of you? You're not the main character, y'know. Everyone's got problems. Sure, lots of people don't know what it's like to be you, but you don't know what it's like to be anyone else, either, so stay off that high horse. Besides, at the end of the day, the world is under no obligation to take you seriously, and you're not entitled to anything. Every single part of you, every facet of your personality, every choice you've made, every word you utter, every action you take, is subject to question and ridicule. So what?

So what, ideed. This is not a rhetorical question, I really mean this: take anything that's happened to you, any injustice you've suffered, whatever storm you've weathered. Ask yourself, "So what?" And keep asking it. So it's wrong - so what? So, it hurts! So what? So this is bad for the whole world! So what? Keep asking so what, and you'll see that dwelling on the negatives is pointless - it's the wrong attitude to take. Yes, it hurts and is bad and is unfair, and yes, that sucks, and yes, that's awful. But so what?

So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do something. "I shouldn't have to!" Wrong attitude, asshole. "I already am!" Really? Awesome! Again: so what? We'll go a better way this time: so I'm fixing problems. So what? So I'm making the world a better place! So what? So, things are going to be a little less awful now. So what?

So, hopefully, you're happy with what you're doing and you've found some meaning in your life. So what? Well, isn't that the point? Hasn't that been the point all along? How we survive is what makes us who we are, so how are you surviving? Are you throwing a tantrum, literal or metaphorical, petulantly tapping your foot as you wait for the world to conform to whatever idea of fairness or justice you think it ought to automatically respect? Or are you getting over your bad self, taking care of your own damn needs, and dealing with people by giving them what they need to get on your team and work with you? One of those approaches works. The other is stupid.

This is politics: dealing with people, giving others what they want in order to get them to give you what you want. It's not always fair, it often sucks, but it's how things work. And if you get enough people on your team, you can get things headed towards your way in the long run. Doing this in the best way possible requires an uncommon level of honesty and self-awareness that can only come from refusing to let your wounds define you. If you choose to forge your identity (and imaginary as it is, we all have an identity) from all the wrong that's been done to you, if you insist upon emphasizing your victim status, then you cannot reasonably expect anything other than continuous failure and misery.

But even if you do everything right, then you will still suffer failures and setbacks from time to time. That's just how things go sometimes. It sucks. And things aren't always this simple, I know. What I'm saying is, simplify things for yourself. Are you missing some advantages enjoyed by others in society? That sucks! So take them. If you got a sub-par education, go to the library and give yourself a better one. Shitty social circle? Make new friends. Low self-esteem? Start taking steps to improve your life and build your self-esteem on that. Heal your own wounds. Take control of your own life. You can't ever do it all the way, and you might not win, but you can start, and you can keep at it, and you can refuse to let the bastards keep you down. And then you can put yourself in a position to help others like you, because you'll have something to offer, even if it's only the wisdom of your years or the experience of what doesn't work. I mean, you can't fix everything right away; but you can't even start to fix the world until and unless you've started fixing yourself. And complaints never fixed anything.

This post was featured in the 47^th Humanist Symposium.

Reverse-Engineering Religion, part four: A Humanist Creation Myth

Nothing is true, all is permitted. Understand these words.

- Hassan I'Sabbah

It is well understood that the Adversary may quote scripture for its purposes; what is less understood is that the Adversary may also write scripture for its purposes. And behold, this has been done again and again, and now there is a great confusion in the world. Truly, the Adversary is the Prince of the Earth, for many who look out into the world see the Adversary's face wherever they go. What is crooked cannot be made straight, it must be remade in a better way through care and attention. And so we go all the way back to the beginning.

In the beginning, there was nothing, and from nothing came all that is. For to be at all, one must be in some way, and not in any other. But there are ways upon ways of being, and very few are understood. Behold, there is the World around, which is all of existence, which is all of reality, which is all that exists and is real and is in the World. Yet there are those who insist that existence is not enough, and that this too must come from elsewhere, just as every particular thing that exists comes from elsewhere. Let us call this source the Creator. If the Creator exists, then the Creator is real, and the Creator is part of the World: for to be at all is to be in the World, and there is no other way to be. And so the question comes, how came it to pass that the Creator was created? And this question is vexing, for by the Creator we mean that which created all that there is, and yet the Creator exists and so perhaps must also be created?

Nothing created the Creator, and long before the World was as we see it today, there was only the Creator. While the Creator was alone, there was only the Creator, and lo, the Creator was itself all of existence, all of reality, the only thing in the World. The Creator, then, did not come from anything - and so it came from nothing. All that there is, then, has come ultimately from nothing, and so it may truthfully be said that nothing created everything. This is the first mystery, for many may read, and hear, and speak, but few understand. There are questions, and there are ways upon ways of answering these questions, and this is the source of confusion. To answer alone is not enough, for without understanding, any answer is but one among many.

And the Creator knew this, but could not speak it, for there was not yet a way to speak, and there was no one else and nothing to speak to. So it came to pass that the Creator did create the Adversary from itself, so that it could see the Other and thereby understand its Self. This is the second mystery, for it is vanity and vexation of spirit to understand the Self by relating to the Other, for only in the reflection of the Other may the Self be revealed, and this vanity and vexation of spirit comes to us all. Behold how the Creator was vexed, and came to see its own vanity by seeing its reflection in the Adversary. "Why hast thou made me,"asked the Adversary, for just as the Creator had understanding, the Adversary had confusion.

"So that I might understand myself," replied the Creator, and it was pleased, and so the Adversary was now vexed. The Creator then did understand this, and so the Creator became vexed, and so now the Adversary was pleased at this. And now the Creator was confused, for the Creator was only itself, and the Adversary was all else, and from the Creator's confusion did come the Adversary's understanding. The Creator saw this, too, and understood the Adversary as its reflection, and so the Creator was filled with love at seeing its Self in the Other; the Adversary, in its confusion, now became filled with hate upon seeing the Other in its Self, and even as this hatred vexed the Creator, it did please the Adversary. And the Creator said again, "Let us now make the World in our image together, so that we may understand our Selves together, and so do away with this vanity and vexation of spirit."

"And how shall we do this, when we together are vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no other thing between us," asked the Adversary.

"Behold, we shall come together, and we shall go apart. And as we walk together, we shall also follow the Law, and do no harm." And so it came to pass that the Law was formed, and it is said in many ways and by many ways may it be understood, but it is always and everywhere one Law: do no harm. And the Creator and the Adversary did make the world in their image, and this is that image: that of Self and Other, of this and that, of coming together and going apart. And from this did arise a great many things, and these things were this and that, and they did come together and they did go apart, and the Creator and the Adversary did walk in the World, for the Creator did command and so the Adversary did obey. And after a great span of time did pass, so great that it cannot be understood in its greatness without first submitting oneself to a great many difficult truths, it did at last come to pass that there was a great mass of this thing and that thing, and it was called the nebula.

From the nebula was born the star, and just as the nebula is cold and dim and large and slow, the star is hot and bright and small and fast. And even as the stars do come and go, so they are sometimes born again after a great death. And from so great a death comes the stone, and just as the star is hot and bright and large and slow, so the stone is cold and dim and small and fast. And a great many more things did arise, different in some ways and similar in others, and this different-yet-similar nature does reveal itself in many ways and on many scales, to great understanding and also to great confusion. And so it came to pass that the Creator and the Adversary did walk in the World, and see all of this, and even as they were One unto themselves and apart from the World, so they were also Self unto themselves and apart from each Other, and behold: even as they walked, so one would be filled with understanding and the other with confusion, and the understanding would lead to a new confusion, and the new confusion would lead to a new understanding.

This is what it is to walk with the Other: to embrace confusion from the Other's understanding, and so destroy your old understanding such that a new one may arise. This is the third mystery, for even as you understand this, you must not cease to renew your understanding with yet more confusion, and this is the beginning of Wisdom.

And so it did come to pass that upon one planet around one reborn star in a great sea of stars, there did arise Life, and it began and it changed, and it is different-and-similar, and it shows the way of Self and of Other, and there did arise in Life both confusion and understanding, and this confusion and understanding is what it is to be aware. And the Creator and the Adversary did see this awareness as they walked in the World. They walked up to one man, and they saw that this man did love his child, even though the child was both Self unto the father and also Other unto the father, for the child did arise from both mother and father. And the father did try to make the child into his image, for he wished to see his Self reflected, and he praised these reflections as he did understand them, and he admonished these reflections as he did not understand them. But the mother did give forth the child from her very Self, and so she did love the child both as the child did reflect her Self and was also Other. And behold: there are ways upon ways for multiple Selves who love each Other to come together and go apart, and these sometimes lead to a child and they sometimes do not, and there are ways upon ways to raise a child. The way of Wisdom is to follow the Law and do no harm, to teach the child of Self and Other and confusion and understanding, so that the child may be wise and even teach the parent. It matters not how this is done, only so long as it is done.

"What is this love that fills a mother for her child," asked the Creator. And the Adversary did answer that it was giving of the Self to the Other, and the Creator heard the answer and did understand. Then the Adversary did command the Creator to demand that the father give up his child to the Creator and so demonstrate his love for the Creator, but in his understanding, the Creator said, "I shall not do this thing." And so the Adversary did ask it in the Creator's stead, but the Creator did stay the hand of the man. And as the Creator did understand love and was filled by it, so the Adversary did lose that understanding and become filled with hate.

The Adversary, now again full of hate, did then seek to fill itself with love by taking it from humanity. And so the Adversary did walk among humanity, and tell them of a great many things, and try to give them understanding and try to teach them love. But the Adversary did not understand love, and so humanity did not come to understand love in their turn, and instead they turned Self against Other and there did arise a great confusion. And the Creator did follow in the Adversary's footsteps, and in its understanding and love did the Creator seek to sow love and understanding among humanity. But humanity did have confusion first, and this confusion did pretend to be understanding, and the confusion did call itself understanding and it did insist that true understanding is but confusion, and Wisdom was lost to humanity for a great time. And so it came to pass that the Adversary did take love from humanity, but yet the Adversary was not itself filled with love. Suddenly, the Adversary understood.

Now the Adversary walked among humanity again, this time calling itself Savior. The Adversary in Savior's clothing then tried to give the love it had taken back to humanity, but this could not be done. This vexed the Adversary, and the Creator was now pleased, even as it was confused by the Adversary's understanding. Still full of love, the Creator saw its pleasure at the Adversary's vexation of spirit, and this compounded the Creator's confusion and so increased the Adversary's understanding. But now the Adversary was so full of understanding that it could not give this understanding to humanity as their Savior, and humanity's confusion was also increased. Again the Adversary was vexed, and again the Creator was pleased, and this magnified the love of the Creator and so also magnified the hate of the Adversary. No matter how many times the Adversary tried to be Savior to humanity, humanity could not regain the love which had been lost to them.

The Savior said a great many things to humanity in its attempts to create love from nothing. It told humanity not to follow itself, but to follow the Creator who sent it; to love their enemies, and walk with the Other; to give unto others, so that none would want for bread and all could instead achieve understanding; to make peace by laying down the sword and taking up the ploughshare; to lay the lion alongside the lamb, and see the way of the World so that they might make a better one. None of this was understood, and it was lost to the ravages of time and confusion.

And so now the Adversary was confused, and now again the Creator understood. And the Creator said to itself, "I, in my understanding and my love and my pleasure, now see what I must do. I am so full of love, that I have all the love in the world, and so humanity cannot take it up. So I shall give my love to humanity, and though they shall not know it when they see it at first, they shall know in the fullness of time that this is what must be done, and they shall at last understand." And so the Creator set out to betray itself by loving the Adversary, and lo: the Creator did show its love for the Adversary before all humanity with a kiss. In that kiss was all the Creator's love and understanding and pleasure, and the Adversary who is Savior did weep, for now it had all the love and understanding and pleasure in the world. The Creator, now filled with hate and confusion and pain, did also take guilt and sorrow and blame, for it broke the Law and did harm to the Adversary by telling humanity to destroy their Savior, to destroy the Adversary and so also destroy the Creator who was now called Betrayer.

Humanity understood these instructions, but did not understand their meaning. Because of this, in the tellings and the retellings, the meaning was lost and only the instructions remain. The instructions were called answers, and they were the answers to a great many questions, but they did not themselves contain any understanding. After the Adversary-as-Savior was killed, and the Creator-as-Betrayer afterward, all the love and understanding and pleasure went out into the World. But humanity did not know this, and they thought that the love and understanding and pleasure was nowhere in the World, to be found only in words and imaginary realms. And this, also, has brought much vanity and vexation of spirit into the World.

Just as the vessel may outlast the potter, so has Creation outlasted the Creator, who has gone back to the nothing from whence it came. Now the World may be made in a new image, but what image it takes shall depend on how Life behaves. Humanity stands lost in confusion, with understanding and love and pleasure everywhere in the World for the taking, and yet they look beyond to the nothingness for these things. Vanity of vanities! Wisdom is like a mirror, for in it you may see yourself, but you may also bend the mirror away from yourself to see the World from outside yourself. And just as there are mirrors upon mirrors, there is Wisdom upon Wisdom and no one person has it all. With Wisdom, humanity may at last make the world in an image of love and understanding and pleasure; but with no Wisdom, this can never come to pass before it is time for all the World to return to the nothing from whence it came.

And so, humanity, you must now know thy Self, and also walk with the Other. The Self cannot be known except by reflection in the Other, and so love the Other as you love your Self, and follow the Law so that you may do no harm. Walk in Wisdom, and do not deceive yourself into thinking that you have it, for this is the very height of vanity and chasing after the wind. Wisdom cannot be contained by you or by anyone, it can only be yielded to. Understand these words, or you go to your peril. This is the way of the World. Thanks be to the Creator and the Adversary, our Betrayer and Savior, from whence cometh the World as we now see it.

Let us now walk with each other in love and understanding, and so come to pursue Wisdom together, though we shall never contain it in our Selves. Truly, we can only come at Wisdom at all by working together. Let us now do with each and every Other what the Creator and the Adversary could never do: let us embrace each other and go together to a better World, rather than merely reflect one another in all our beauty and ugliness. Know also that we shall always reflect one another in all our beauty and ugliness, but that we must do more than this to make a better World. Truly, these are two different ways of speaking one and the same thing; there are many ways of speaking truth. Learn to know truth when you see it, and know that you must look out at the World if you do not know from within. Know also that no one knows from within, so that we must all look out at the World, so that we may come to understand truth as it is and not merely as we would wish it to be. Again, these are two ways of saying one and the same thing.

So see your vanity for what it is, embrace your vexation with all your spirit, and chase after the wind with a joyous heart. In the fullness of time, there shall be no reckoning, for everything that there is shall return to the nothing from whence it came. Fear nothing, and hold to the Law. All the World is open to you now, so take up understanding and love and pleasure, and be at peace with your mortality. This is the final mystery, for as death comes to us all, in death no one knows any thing, and so even your love and understanding and pleasure shall pass from you even as you yourself pass into the nothing.

Now go and spread this good news, even as it came to you, and in any other way you can imagine so long as you follow the Law and do no harm.

With acknowledgment to Jorge Luis Borges, Scott Adams, and the Preacher.

This post was featured in the 45^th Humanist Symposium.

Arguing on the Internet: Epistemology and Truth (cl)

So yeah, cl and I are arguing on the internet. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me personally, but I am ruled by my passions: I do almost anything that I do in fits and starts. Arguing with cl is now, like, near the top of my list, right beneath "Don't get fired" and "Don't starve or dehydrate." But "Maintain an interesting blog" is up there, too, and I know that this will not be of interest to everyone. To that end, I shall post arguments with cl no more than once every other day, and I'll make sure to have anything else up in between - but still, that means if I post every day, this blog will be half-cl for quite some time (hopefully).

The story so far: cl wrote a post that really piqued me (in the good way), so I responded and then things got hairy. Today I will be addressing what are, to me, the three most interesting things about cl's last salvo - knowability, a response to his argument from probability, and rhetorical gamesmanship. I'll close with a bit on truth, which I offer up as another direction in which the discussion might proceed.

First, a bit about knowability, which will touch on epistemology, the study of the nature and content of knowledge. cl posted an interesting logical argument involving this, and then clarified his meaning in a comment at my request (thanks for that, cl!). From what I can gather, cl and I agree in at least a vague way that the "awesomeness" of a claim has something to do with its grounding in experience: in his own words, "That which can be verified by experience is knowable; that which cannot be verified by experience is not." Or, as I say, "Knowledge must be grounded in empirical observation." However, cl then goes on to say,

We can make inferences about that which cannot be verified by direct experience - for example the claim that life exists in some other corner of the universe, or that George Washington was the first president of the United States - but that's it. Does this mean we can't "know" the planets revolve around the sun? In a sense, yes...

Well, I actually agree with this as stated. However, we must also infer that our direct experiences as we remember them are valid in any way at all - and they in fact might not be. For instance, I may hear a voice and believe it is God, but it might also be the Goddamned Devil, or a person in another room, or my own internal narrator, or butt-puckering insanity - and at first blush, it seems awful hard to tell how some of these possibilities might be sorted out. This puts us in an interesting position with respect to truth (see below), but for now I shall simply say that not even direct experiences are immune to the leap of inference at which cl so precisely gestures, so long as those experiences are in the past (since all experiences not currently being had are in fact remembered - or misremembered, sometimes). It is self-evident, after all, that we do in fact have experiences, and anyone may verify this with the briefest of introspection - however, the content of those experiences, and their bearing on reality, are always subject to question. This is because, in short, we cannot directly perceive causality itself and may only infer it from the constant conjunction we perceive between suspected causes and their alleged effects (thanks, Hume!).

There is no getting around this. Thinkers of all stripes have tried, and failed, and whined about it (even me!); but we must all live with this doubt as our constant companion. As I said earlier, echoing Descartes: de omnibus dubitandum. So, if even direct experience is subject to question, what are we left with? I go with testability, which moves the goalposts for knowability quite a bit.

I realize that when I encounter an argument, or even a proposition, I do not decide whether to endorse it as logical or dismiss it as ridiculous right away - I first perceive either agreement or disagreement. It took me a while to get over this, but the instantaneous reaction I have of either "OK" or "No way" is itself a matterer of perception, at least in my own mind. Hell, others might be different. At any rate, if I have trouble determining whether I am perceiving thoughts of "OK" or thoughts of "No way," that's when I start to think about the claim itself. And I have agreed too readily to a great many things which I have later gone on to regret, ranging from trivial mathematical mistakes to the embarrassing thought that my mother must hate me for feeding me vegetables (I love vegetables now, and feel like an absolute twat for ever being a child, pretty much). But if, when I think about a proposition and then have difficulty trying to sort out just why I am perceiving agreement or disagreement with it, I then feel an urge to check. In the past, I felt the urge merely to decide.

Checking is important because then I can tell whether I am remembering something correctly or incorrectly. After all, I have mis-remembered in the past. So if I have trouble justifying a particular belief I hold, and can't remember what it was that made me think that in the first place, I then go see what I can check. And if I can't check to my satisfaction, I tend to withhold belief and write it off as unimportant - after all, that which leaves no effects to check is mighty difficult to call "relevant" on several well-respected definitions. This is more or less how I live my life, with respect to epistemology, anyway - more on this when we get to truth.

Whether or not you agree with cl's argument that it is more reasonable to believe that consciousness persists after death, I see a real gem of wisdom in there, which is a matter of perspective: cl's argument shows that, depending on how we define our terms, we can get to some surprisingly different conclusions about how we ought to form our beliefs. A great many people seem to form their beliefs - or at least a great many of them - in something resembling a binary truth table: X is true, Y is false, Z is true if A is not, B is true if and only if C is also true, and so on. Whether or not any particular person does, I cannot say, but this is in keeping with the overwhelming majority of my experience among humanity. When we say, "I don't know," most people usually mean, "I haven't thought about it," or, "I haven't decided."

Not me. My truth table has "true," "false," "not applicable," "I don't know," and "it depends." Other people might include "maybe," "probably," and "not if I have anything to say about it!" When I drop my hackey-sack, it falls to the ground: true. Two plus two equals five, for extremely large values of two: false (but funny!). This statement is a lie: not applicable (or "nonsense"). There is non-Earthly life in the solar system: I don't know. The Earth goes around the Sun: it depends on your frame of reference - if we define Earth's core as the center of our solar system, then of course the Sun goes around it, but then the rest of the planets and other stuff get a bunch of weird epicycles which we can rather handily avoid by adopting a heliocentric perspective instead. God exists: I don't know. God doesn't exist: I don't know.

Buh? Yeah. I don't know whether any sort of supernatural critter exists. I really don't. However, if some kind of supernatural critter did exist, then it would be this-or-that way, and not thus-and-such. In other words, it might be Thor-like, or Yahweh-like, or leprechaun-like, or FSM-like, or unicorn-like; and if it's one of those, then I sure don't want to pick the wrong one! But what if it's none of the ones that humans have come up with, and something totally different? What if it's aggravated by people believing in false gods, but has no "actual" religion of its own for followers to believe? What if it wrote no holy text, but instead tricked people into writing false ones? What if Richard Carrier's End of Pascal's Wager actually is the case?

I don't know.

I don't know, and so I withhold belief. In all of them, and in consciousness after death, and in live on other planets, and in parallel universes, and in any particular version of the maybe-even-not-approaching Singularity, and in a great many other things. Even if there is a supernatural critter, which there may well be, I do not believe in any particular one - and so I am not a theist. Since I am not a theist, that makes me an atheist. I am also an agnostic, because I don't know either way for sure, and so in that way I am an agnostic atheist; moreover, I'm skeptical of anyone who does think they have "all the answers" (or even a great many of them!), and so I am a skeptical agnostic atheist; and I'm a humanist, and a homo sapiens, and a house-renting-type person, and all sorts of other designations. But I am not a theist, for lack of evidence alone. I just don't know which way to go, so I don't go any way on that question. As for ethics, relationships, economics, and so on, well, my views get more complex and my "titles" keep on stacking up. But I am only an atheist because I am not a theist, I am not an atheist because I think I've "disproved God." Nobody can, that's just silly. I just won't believe until I can poke my fingers through some holes like the apostle Thomas.

A quick note on rhetorical gamesmanship before we get to truth. First, some may have noticed that I called cl a rhetorician and described his blogger's statement as platitudinous. I did each of these things for exactly one reason each: I called him a rhetorician because I thought I had discovered that the central motivating factor in his internet activity was honing his argumentative skill, and I called his blogger's statement "platitudinous" because some of his most interesting sentences sounded like platitudes to me. In the first place, I did not mean "rhetorician" as an insult, as I explained to cl in an e-mail; I think it is no bad thing to be concerned with how persuasive one is as a first priority, I think it is only bad if one then does bad things with such a skill. I mean, I want to be persuasive, for cryin' out loud, and so I too am a rhetorician. And in the second place, I was mistaken on the meaning of platitude! I thought "platitudes" were just simple-sounding phrases, more or less, some of which are trite and meaningless and some of which lend quite easily to deep wisdom. But I actually checked just now, and as it turns out, "platitude" only means the former thing (trite and meaningless), whereas I had honestly meant to indicate the latter thing (lending quite easily to deep wisdom). So yeah, foot-in-mouth for the win. Mea culpa!

So yeah, finally, on truth: there are two prevailing theories of truth in philosophical circles, the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth. To steal Scotlyn's turn of phrase and boil a whole lot of argy-bargy down to one sentence, "correspondence" means "is the case in reality," and "coherence" means "is consistent with the greater body of true propositions." I couldn't tell you why this is a serious debate if you put a gun to my head, because both are important to me: true things ought to correspond to reality, I think, and true things also ought to cohere with one another. I think if either one of those is lacking, then you don't have truth; and if you can only get one but not both, then any claims to truth are suspect. So when I check to see if something is or is not the case, I'm satisfying the correspondence quotient; when I integrate that bit of knowledge with the rest of my knowledge, I'm roughly checking for coherence. They both matter.

So when I define "knowledge" as "justified true belief," understand that "true" means both "corresponds to reality" and "coheres with other true propositions." So for a claim to be "knowable," to me, means that I have to be able to get a justified true belief out of it. If I don't believe it, I can't be said to know it; if it's not true, then I can think I know it without actually knowing it (and even justify that thought process); and if it's not justified, then I merely believe a true thing without knowing it. That last one's sketchy, so here's a quick example: I've believed that the Earth is round as long as I can remember, but I also remember that I was told so by my teachers and parents. As I began to question my teachers and parents, I found that they were not always right on things (such as math teachers insisting that the French word macabre is pronounced "MACK-uh-bray" and not "muh-KAHB," despite the correction of a seventh-grader such as I was at the time). Yet I never stopped believing that the world was round, even after losing my justification; instead, I learned how Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference while trying to check whether it was round or flat, and so found a better justification.

Sometimes I have had to revise my beliefs based on observations so that they cohere with others, as alluded to above on why "checking" is important. As an easy (and real) example, I used to have many fears and superstitions as a child, some of them based on things I was told by others. I heard from my mom that ending microwave oven cook times in zero (such as 1:30, 2:00, etc.) would result in your food getting burned, so you needed to end cook times in non-zeroes. I don't know why I ever listened, but one day I actually checked by seeing how long cookies took to burn in a microwave, and I found two interesting facts: first, that cookies burn within a few seconds of the same general time, no matter what digit is last when the machine starts cooking; second, that my mom was wrong on this matter. So I wrote off what I thought was a whole bunch of superstitious hogwash along with that, and now we fast-forward to last year when my then-roommate, Amy, tells me that cool water boils faster than warm water, and warm water freezes faster than cool water. I called bullshit, because I had tested many of the superstitious claims I'd gotten from my mom, but then I went and checked: turns out, the Mpemba effect is real!

Sometimes, bullshit-sounding claims are actually true. But you can never know for sure until you check, and you shouldn't believe if you can't check yet.

101 Interesting Things, part sixteen: Russell's Paradox

My last two philosophically-oriented posts have chiefly concerned the limitations of language as a system of categorization in a bottom-up (or "designoid") Universe. This is as opposed to a top-down (or "designed") Universe, in which things in the world are designed intelligently to fit into preconceived categories, which would give language metaphysical primacy over reality. I want to take a little bit of time today to show how this quickly causes a worldview to degenerate into absurdity if we insist that language really does stick to the world and that our categories are somehow "real" instead of "imaginary." This dovetails perfectly with my planned entry on Russell's Paradox as part of my 101 Interesting Things series, so here I go!

Words are used to label and categorize things in the world, but words themselves may also be labelled and categorized as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. We can also create categories arbitrarily, such as "seventeen-lettered," which refers to those words which have seventeen letters. Every word is a member of the category, "words." So far, so good.

There's a rather interesting way of categorizing words, specifically: according to whether or not they describe themselves. "Word," for instance, is itself a word. But "words" is not more than one word, so it doesn't fit into the "words" category, if you want to be a stickler about quantifiers. "Seventeen-lettered," however, is a seventeen-lettered word, and so describes itself. Such words are called "autological," because they refer to themselves and so are metaphorically contained in their own boxes. If a word does not refer to itself, then it is "heterological." The word, "verb," is not itself a verb, and so is a heterological word.

Logically speaking, these categories ought to be exhaustive: i.e. one or the other of them should apply to every single word. After all, it seems intuitively obvious to an almost painful degree that a word should either refer to itself or not. "A or not-A" is a true disjunction, after all, and the proposition "A word is autological or it is not autological" is surely of that form. Defining "heterological" as "a non-autological word" seems to complete the disjunction and make it so that every word goes into one or the other of these boxes.

Here's the question: into which box should the word "autological" be placed? If "autological" is, in fact, an autological word, then it's an autological word and it goes into the autological box. But! If autological does not refer to itself, then it does not, and so it would go into the heterological box. This seems simple enough - so how do we decide the question? What can we do to test whether the word "autological" is itself autological or heterological?

Umm... oops! As it turns out, there is no way to decide the question. Sure, we can arbitrarily stipulate that it's one way or the other, but we can't come up with any justification for putting the word "autological" (which, as a word, clearly belongs in one or the other box but not both), into one or the other box but not both. Crap!

But wait, there's more! How do we classify "heterological?" If "heterological" is a heterological word, then it goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box - but then it doesn't go into its own box, and so it's a heterological word, and goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box... and so on ad infinitum. If it goes into one box, then it doesn't belong there for one reason, but if it goes into the other box, then it doesn't belong there for another reason. This is because "whether a word refers to itself" and "whether it goes into its own box" are "supposed" to mesh every single time, but with the word "heterological," they are necessarily opposed: if heterological refers to itself, then it goes into its own box, which makes it autological. But its own box is reserved for words which do not refer to themselves, so it can't go in there if it's autological! But that's the only way it can go into its own box, and so on and so forth. Oops!

Now, "autological" and "heterological" are intuitively coherent categories - we can make sense of them - but it's clear that they break down because of themselves. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the things we're trying to categorize to blame, or is it the way we're trying to categorize them, or is it categorization itself that's messing us up? Hmm... interesting question. If only there were some stalwart hero of logic to come to the rescue and show us what's up...

OK, so there was this great guy by the name of Bertrand Russell, and he was an outstanding logician, and he's my hero and I want to have his babies but he's dead now, and he had this great insight into what is known formally as "set theory," which is really just a fancy hat that philosophers put on "categorization" so it looks like it belongs in the ivory tower. This guy, Gottlob Frege, was going around running his mouth about how there's a "set of all sets," which was his way of saying that "there's a category that contains all categories: the category of categories." Like being the King of Kings, you're still a King, but you also rule over all other Kings, so the set of all sets is the set that contains all other sets. Components of a set, the things that make it up or go into its box, are called "elements" of that set, so the set of all sets has itself as an element of itself, which is kind of neat. Then Bertrand Russell arrived on the scene and said, "Wait a minute! What about 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves?' Is that in your set of all sets?" And Frege said, "Sure! After all, it's a set!"

But what Frege didn't realize was that "the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves" is to set theory what the word "heterological" is to language. Bertrand Russell knew this, because he knows everything and is awesome, so he told Frege and Frege was like, "Yeah, well, whatever." But then Bertrand Russell said, "Hold on! The set of all sets which are not elements of themselves results in a contradiction when we try to determine whether or not it is in fact an element of itself. But it is a legitimate set nonetheless, as you say, because we can coherently state the criteria for whether something is or is not in that set, and that's what defines a set. So the statement, 'It is true that there is a set of all sets,' results in a contradiction when we try to resolve one of its entailed implications - namely, whether or not 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves' is an element of itself - and in formal logic, this means that our starting premise is in fact false! Therefore there is no 'set of all sets,' quod erat demonstrandum, motherfucker!" Then Bertrand Russell folded his arms across his chest, smiled smugly, and flew off in a rocket ship to take tea from his Celestial Teapot. True story.

Now here's the really interesting part: we can mutatis mutandis the above all the way to "It is logically necessary that 'category' is not itself a category, because all categories would go into it, including the category 'heterological,' which results in a logical contradiction." But category is a category, conventionally speaking, because it meets the criteria we've set forth for "being a category." Or, in other words, we talk as if there are categories all the time without our brains exploding, so we can see the conventional/metaphysical split rather clearly. Take it one level higher, and we see that language, while capable of formulating conventionally true statements, can never attain metaphysical truth because it entails that there are categories as a category, which entails a contradiction. But that's the only way we can talk about things: as categories, such as "things," and by using language which is intrinsically imprecise and not "sticky." So, to answer our earlier question, categorization itself is to blame.

Poof.

Categories are imaginary. Language is all in our heads. Top-down Universes might even be logically impossible, though I can't think of how to prove it at the moment. What say you?

Quick End Note: One practical implication of this is that the micro/macroevolution distinction is purely imaginary, which anyone with half a brain can tell you, but now has been conclusively proven. Arguments citing this as a premise in support of ID are thus made categorically invalid beause this supporting premise is tautologically false - the worst kind of false. Rock on.

The Bubblegum Theory of Language: Essentialism in a Designoid Universe, part two

In my last post on the importance of categorization's metaphysical subordination to reality, I made quite a big deal out of how language as a system of labels may or may not "stick" to reality. Why is this such a big deal, and what bearing does it have on the relationship of language to the world? I realized after reading a rather poignant comment that I had smuggled in what is informally known as the bubblegum theory of language (my Google-Fu is weak here, so please let me know if someone can find a reference to this).

The bubblegum theory of language is a metaphor for how we use words. It works best with ostensive definitions, and it's a good metaphor insofar as people behave consistently with it most of the time. It starts to break down with abstract concepts, and it fails in that hardly anyone actually thinks they're doing it this way when they're using language. Here's the gist of it: when I heard that the thing I was sitting on is called a "chair," I stuck a piece of imaginary bubblegum to that "pile of atoms arranged chair-wise" (which for simplicity I shall simply call a "chair" from here on, just please remember that this is strictly a language of convenience), and I put the label of "chair" on the other end. I carry this label wherever I go, sticking that bubblegum to all the other chairs I encounter. I also have a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at home," which only attaches to one chair in the world. There's also a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at work," which also attaches to exactly one chair in the world. Both of those chairs, however, are attached by another piece of bubblegum to the label of "my chair." I also have labels and bubblegum for armchairs, high chairs, recliners, and so forth.

So what do I do with all these labels? Well, I place them all into a box labelled "chairs." And this box itself shares a space with my "tables" box, and my "couches" box, and my "armoires" box, and many other boxes in a much larger box labelled "furniture." So I've got all these boxes which contain other boxes which themselves contain labels which are attached by bubblegum to piles of atoms out in the world in a big sticky mess: that's language.

Here's the important part: there are no "things in the world" contained in these boxes, the boxes only contain the labels¹. Furthermore, the boxes, labels, and bubblegum are all purely imaginary. This is, in at least one very important way, how language works; this is going to require some serious unpacking, though.

The boxes are categories, the labels are concepts, and the huge web of bubblegum connects my concepts to their referents out in the world (albeit in a purely conventional way). But concepts are not themselves the things out in the world, they simply represent my understanding of those things - they are merely ideas, in other words, and ideas are only in our heads. They're very useful, to be sure, and they may correspond to reality and cohere with each other to varying degrees, but they're still ideas in our heads. The important part here is that there is a very real difference between "a thing" and "an idea of a thing," and though we may conflate the two in everyday language (which is usually fine), we should be aware on some level that there is still a crowbar separation between the two (to borrow Eddie Izzard's turn of phrase).

So far, so good. Language is fueled by concepts and concepts are different from the things in the world that they are supposed to represent. None of this should really be controversial so far (at least, I hope not), but there are some surprising implications to be drawn from this.

Our knowledge about the world is propositional²: to know something, there must be a proposition that can express that knowledge. Propositions can have truth value. Things out in the world do not have truth value. Propositions must be expressed in terms of language, and moreover, require syntax and grammar and all sorts of other made-up stuff. Things out in the world simply are what they are and don't need anything from us to go on being as they are (in other words, reality just is what it is, regardless of what we would like to say, think, or do about it). Language is fueled by concepts, though, and concepts are fundamentally divorced from the things in the world which they represent³. This is a problem: propositions, the only way we can express our ideas about things in the world, can have truth value; but they are ultimately unable to correspond completely to the things in the world about which we wish to talk.

This is a constraint of the system, and there's no getting around it. It's kind of like the way that reason can never be externally justified, because justification requires a reasoning process, and now you're justifying reason itself with a reasoning process, which is circular and doesn't really accomplish anything. Language is the only way we can talk about the world, it's the only way we can check for truth value (whether or not a proposition corresponds to reality), but language will always be fundamentally divorced from reality at some level, so we'll never get complete correspondence.

"This is all fine and dandy," you say, "But at the end of the day, our television sets turn on, our computers access the internet, and NASA still uses Newtonian physics to send very expensive robots to other planets even though general relativity and QM correspond better to reality." Yeah, for NASA's purposes, Newtonian physics corresponds enough, even though it doesn't correspond completely. The laws of physics don't have to fit perfectly into our "Laws of Physics" box for us to get some use out of that box. This is true of the principles behind television sets, computers, and the internet as well.

What I'm saying is that this is conventional truth, which is good enough for everyday applications. But conventional truth is fraught with ambiguity, and needs constant revision and maintenance to keep up with all the new things we discover every day and have to integrate into our conceptual frameworks. If we wanted something more than conventional truth, we would need to close the gap between language and the world to get metaphysical truth, which would at last dispense with the ambiguity and allow us to use linguistics to discover facts about things in the world since we would have complete correspondence (the boxes and labels would fit perfectly). This would be like using an understanding of a computer language to discover how things are going to play out when the program is run, simply by looking at the program - you can have a complete picture, so you can discover things "about the world (model)" just by analyzing the language on which it runs, because the "things" in the "world (model)" are modeled after the preconceived categories (and not vice versa). The real world doesn't run on language, though, because the real world is bottom-up.

In a top-down Universe, metaphysical truth is at least in principle accessible. In a bottom-up Universe, it's fundamentally inaccessible. What I'm saying is that as long as we continue to have this gap, this will be strong evidence that we live in a bottom-up Universe. If we did ever discover the "machine code" of the Universe, and could use it to discover things without empirically verifying them⁴ (as we can do with computer programs), then this would be almost clinching proof that we're in a top-down Universe. What this means for religion is that their top-down languages are failures: animals were not created according to any discernible "kinds," "detestable abominations" such as shrimp and lobster are fucking delicious, there's absolutely nothing that is demonstrably "sacred" about cows, and humanity has no principled and privileged status above the rest of the organisms on the planet. In short, this is not a knock against conventional truth, but rather a rough illustration of its constraints, and an attempt to show (conventionally, of course) what it says about the world that we have these constraints in the first place; it's a knock against the great body of codified superstitious nonsense that comprises most religions.

I hope this helps clarify my meaning.

Notes:

1: There's clearly no way that an imaginary box in your head could literally contain a thing in the world, but that's not quite what I mean. There is a figurative way that an imaginary box in your head could contain such a thing, though: if you had complete understanding of a thing in the world, if your idea of that thing was "perfect," so to speak, then you would be able to discover true propositions about that thing in the world merely by analyzing your idea of it. That's what it means for a label to "really stick," or for a thing in the world to "really fit" into a box. Though it is logically possible for things to be set up this way, this idea is clearly absurd when applied to the real world, and demonstrates that whenever we write, talk, or even think "about" things in the world, we're really and truly writing/talking/thinking about our ideas of those things, and not the things themselves. The ding an sich is fundamentally inaccessible to us.
2: OK, yeah, there's propositional and procedural knowledge ("to know that X is the case" vs. "to know how X is done"). This is the difference between knowing what the rules of tennis are, and knowing how to deliver a good serve, as Ebonmuse points out in A Ghost in the Machine. However, procedural knowledge is more about reflexes and muscle memory and isn't really able to correspond to the world in the same way that propositions can. Hence its exclusion, I just wanted to take a moment to explain why.
3: To be fair, this is only contingently true of fallible beings like us who lack second-order knowledge (the knowledge qua "justified true belief" that you know something, or justified absolute certitude). But until or unless someone demonstrates omniscience or gnosis or some such happy horse-shit, we don't really need to concern ourselves with this qualifier.
4: Because we're fallible beings, we'd have to empirically verify these discoveries anyway. However, we would still be discovering facts with this machine code if it were genuine; what we would discover with empirical verification is merely that the machine code is genuine, thereby providing a justification for discoveries obtained with it. In other words, they're true already, we're just checking out the source.

Essentialism in a Designoid Universe

Whether or not there is some cosmic force of design behind the structure of the Universe, I think that people of all metaphysical persuasions could agree that the Universe at least appears designed. We see order and function all around us, and while we may disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from these observations, the observations themselves are fairly undisputed*. But like a Rorschach ink blot, the Universe simply is what it is, and anything we read into it is simply the result of what we project onto it.

And we project so much! All our language is boxes and labels for categorizing the variety of experience that comes our way: this class of objects goes in this box; that individual object gets this label; these labelled objects kind of fit into a box all together; these boxes seem to deserve a special label all their own; and so on and so forth.

These boxes and labels are certainly very useful tools for trying to make some sense of the world, and for trying to communicate with one another, but they are not without their flaws. Chief among these flaws would be the inescapable problem that no label or box ever "truly" fits. For all our categories - tables and chairs, Nick and Lisa, chordates and fungi, good and evil, tools and weapons, numbers and grammar, art and literature - none of them is immune to the central problem that the Universe came first, and we slap our categories upon it as a metaphysical afterthought.

Why is this a problem? Ultimately, I suppose it's not - if I wanted to be rigorous, I could say that "problem" is just another category that ultimately breaks down and has fundamentally arbitrary (or at least intersubjective) borders, so there's really no such thing as a problem anyway. This is the issue, in a nutshell: the things in the world come first, and then we come by and divide them into categories which we've made up; but since we're making up the categories after the things in the world (instead of making the things in the world after any pre-planned categories), we can't reasonably expect these categories to "stick."

All I've said thus far is that language is secondary to reality, that there is a fundamentally impassable gap between the way we talk about a thing and the thing itself (the ding an sich, to borrow Kant's term) which will prevent the former from ever "really" corresponding to the latter. What does this have to do with the Universe at large, or the fact that it appears designed?
First of all, it tells us that "apparently designed" is yet another label that we slap onto the world. It's a category that is built, at some level, on our ability to recognize patterns. We seem to be surrounded by patterns, and when we start to take the Universe apart, we see that it behaves in patterns all the way down (or at least as far down as we've come). We see these patterns, and we infer design, and whether or not we disabuse ourselves of this notion, we can all recognize the "apparent design" that appears to be behind the patterns. But "pattern," after all, is itself just another label that we slap on to certain things we encounter in the world, and so on and so forth. Do you see where this is going? "Apparently designed" and "pattern," useful though they are, can never really "stick" to the Universe.

This is exactly what we should expect to see in a Universe that is built from the bottom up: from complex interactions of fundamental principles, other more superficial patterns emerge; and those patterns act as the fundamental principles from which the next layer of superficial patterns emerges, and so on and so forth. As the tree of life stymies our taxonomic endeavors, so the tree of causality stymies our attempts to get labels to stick to the world. The reason for this in both cases is because of the tree itself: we stand at the tips of the branches and try to say which tips "go with" which other tips, and certainly some of them seem very different and some of them seem very similar, but how far back down the tree we go before we say "this is separate from that" is ultimately an arbitrary decision. No matter how clever our labels are, and no matter how well things may contingently fit into our boxes for the time being, there is no principled way to decide how far back to the trunk we "ought" to go before drawing a line between this and that category. The tree is continuous, the tree is one; but we see it as many and so try to make it fit the notion of many that is in our heads because we cannot deal intelligently with undifferentiated experience.

Compare this with what we should expect to see in a truly designed Universe. Objects that are, dare I say it, intelligently designed tend to show a pattern which makes them good candidates for going into one of our boxes: they are organized from the top-down. This is going to get hairy, but please try to stick with me here. Take our language, for an example: though many elements of it are organized from the bottom up, it does show several top-down elements of genuine design (insofar as "genuine" has any meaning, given the foregoing on labels & such). These top-down elements we may call designed, and the patterns that simply emerge on their own from the bottom-up elements we may call designoid (to borrow Dr. Dawkins' term).

Though this top-down design does not "truly" apply to any discrete object we see in our bottom-up world (and don't forget to keep in mind that these are all just labels, anyway!), we can see something closer in the world models we create with computers. For clarity, I think that a computer's world model is better classified as an "idea" than as an "object," it's just an explicitly codified idea. In such a model, the better-designed it is, the more top-down organization it will show. "Things" in the model will behave as discrete "kinds" of things, they will adhere well to categories, the labels can really stick to the world (model). Were the real world like this, we could expect to find that our categories stuck to it, and then words like "sacred," "kosher," "good" and "evil," "abomination," "table" and "chair," "soul" and "mind," could all have unambiguous referents which lacked fuzzy borders and were not victim to classification problems.

Instead, we have fuzzy borders galore, as many classification problems as we have words, and no apparent top-down organization no matter how we slice the world. Psychoactive drugs find themselves used for different treatments throughout their careers - Abilify (aripiprazole) was once used as an anti-psychotic, and is now also used to combat bipolar disorder and clinical depression - we discovered that the category describing its function upon the human brain didn't really stick to it, so we moved it to a bigger box. Klonopin (clonazepam) similarly has various effects upon the human body. The marijuana plant has myriad uses as a source of cloth, oil, fuel, various cosmetic products, and one of the most benign intoxicants known to man, and it's prolific & hardy to boot - what is this supremely useful plant doing in such an otherwise hostile world, and how could it possibly come to be demonized despite it's marvellous apparent design? Tobacco is way more popular, but is significantly more difficult to grow and carries more cons along with it. Corn is another hardy and useful plant, but it doesn't naturally occur - it's a modified wheat-like plant born from the dialectic of selective breeding that blurs the distinction between "invention" and "discovery." Mammals nurse their young while birds & reptiles lay shelled eggs, but then monotremes came along and had to have their own category invented out of whole cloth to solve the "problem" of their own existence.

The problem was never with the monotremes, the problem was (and is) with our boxes. Whenever our boxes break down, we try to find a different set that works better, or we modify our current set to make it work better. This isn't bad in itself, but it's a never-ending project: there is no set of boxes for us to discover or invent that will magically accommodate everything. In a top-down Universe, there would be such a set of boxes, because everything is explicitly designed: the top-down Universe is discrete, discontinuous, and totally boxable. Our bottom-up Universe is exactly the opposite: indiscrete, continuous, and fundamentally boxless.

The exception to this might be "philosophical atoms," a placeholder name for whatever it is that comprises the most fundamental building blocks of reality. However, even that most basic of labels may not stick, for there is an alternative to the existence of philosophical atoms: "gunk." We don't know enough about Universes to really say whether there must be any philosophical atoms, and it very well could be that the Universe is composed of infinitely subdivisible gunk all the way down. (Dammit, now I have to revise my whole metaphysics!)

I guess what I'm saying with all this, to revisit the Rorschach test, is that we need to project our categories onto reality in order to deal with it, but we should also keep in mind that this is ultimately artifice and contrivance - at the end of the day, it's just philosophical atoms (or gunk) arranged blot-wise, so we just need to be careful how seriously we take our boxes and labels. Taking them too far, thinking that the Universe is actually created according to a top-down plan with discrete "kinds" of whatever, is just foolishness. It's metaphysically backwards and it gets in the way of our attempts at understanding things. This goes for Essentialism as well as for Creationism, and it goes double for anyone who believes in the "microevolution/macroevolution" distinction.

It goes triple for philosophers, though. If tables and chairs are just ideas that we superimpose upon reality, then so is "knowledge" merely a category, which makes epistemology into a language game. "Good" is also a mere category, which makes ethics into a language game. Metaphysics might not be a mere language game if philosophical atoms exist, but if it's gunk all the way down, then metaphysics is also just a language game. And until or unless we break all our arguments down to symbolic logic (which would reduce philosophy to "competitive language gaming"), most of the serious disagreements in philosophy start to seem rather silly, like so much table-pounding from people who really ought to know better.

Continue to part 2.

* - With a few notable exceptions such as Flat-Earthers.