Arguing on the Internet: Another Naive Atheist

I just read Ricky Gervais' op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Why I'm an Atheist. It's well written, and it's nice in a lot of ways. I couldn't help agreeing with a lot of things he says. Gervais doesn't have the mesoraphobia and political ambitions of Dawkins' New Atheist crew. However, when Gervais starts talking about science and religion, he shows some naivete, in my arrogant opinion. So here's a platonic dialogue, where Gervais' lines are taken from the op-ed itself.

Ricky: Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out.
Daniel: What do you mean, "science doesn't discriminate"? Do you mean that science isn't biased? Come on. Lots of scientists are biased. The scientific community has no shortage of biases.
Ricky: Science is humble.
Daniel: Oh, come on. I'm sure the scientific community could be more arrogant than it is, and of course many scientists are humble, but on the whole, the scientific community is not humble.
Ricky: It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know.
Daniel: Does it? Did 18th century science know what it didn't know? Scientists who think they know what they don't know are arrogant indeed.
Ricky: Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine.
Daniel: What is that supposed to mean? Effective at what? According to statistics, religion seems to be pretty "effective" at making people happy. Religion may not be as effective at medicine in curing pneumonia, but neither is vector calculus. So what?
Ricky: From what I’ve heard the very definition [of God] is a logical impossibility in this known universe.
Daniel: Who told you that? That's not science. I think you've been reading too much Dawkins.
Ricky: You know, you're right. I should take the paragraph about science out of my WSJ op-ed.
Daniel: Wait a minute, you're only supposed to say things in this dialogue that you actually said in the op-ed.
Ricky: Why are you complaining to me? You're the one writing this blog!

keep on the shady side

MC Complete
Like a mana tzimhonit
Coming on fresher than a slice of whole wheat
After that, it’s rinse and repeat if desired
Why do I do hip-hop, you inquire?
Why don’t you ask Hashem? He’s the One Who inspires me
See ‘cause some Yiddin come with their emuna hard-wired
But my beliefs are acquired from the Yeshiva Boys Choir
I’m nerdy to the extreme, whiter than caesar dressing
But the sunny side is considered harmful like unit testing
It reminds me of a short story by Doris Lessing
One page and it’s already depressing
So keep on the shady side, steal the blessings
‘Cause the angel changed my name to MC Complete
I used to be continually discreet
Now I’m eating more beets on the shady side of the street

chorus:
Keep on the shady side, always on the shady side
Keep on the shady side of life
Find a cool and shady place
Far away from the ultraviolet rays
When you keep on the shady side of life

Hot sun beating down
Enough to put a frown on Jolly Solly the clown
It’s just a typical November in my home town
Sunshine everywhere like the cosmic microwave background
Oops! There was an error! File not found!
No plugin installed for that page that you crawled
Fortunately I have the antidote so I’m glad that you called
I’ll just shoot you a quick email with a really small attachment
It’s a safer, more secure implementation of Flash
So next time you’re watching punk videos by the Clash
My plugin will sell all your assets so you’ll have some extra cash
It’ll hack your Mac apart and make your Windows crash
Yo, I told you that the internet is a dangerous place
It’ll poison your mind like arsenic and old lace
Before you know it you’re friends with Ken Kaniff on MySpace
(OMG are you Slim Shady??) No, fool, I’m his replacement
Slim Shady is locked in the basement with Dr. Dre
If you really want them they’re on sale on E-Bay
‘Cause that savoy truffle is nothing but trouble and tooth decay
‘Cause it’s easy to be happy when the skies are gray
But it’s the shady side that saves your skin on sunny days

(chorus)

Yo brother where art thou?
We’re getting ready to start now
I got Imitation Vanilla in my shopping cart now
I guess it’s time to checkout
The Grand Design that Stephen Hawking is always talking about
Stephen Hawking an atheist? I seriously doubt it
These days the atheist chat rooms are too crowded
Endowed with nothing but loudmouths and shouting matches
Shuffling assumptions like dynamic dispatches
Hanging on every Babel fish that Douglas Adams catches
You atheists are more myopic than a cyclops with a eyepatch
So you can all just open my attachment

(chorus)

tipesh mode

My spirit is angelic

I got more beats than Tom Selleck

'Cause I'm not drunk, I'm just psychedelic

I'm a thug

Like Melissa & Doug

Tripping on toy ships

Sweeping trucks under the rug

'Cause when I play Duck Hunt

I hit the trees harder than James Blunt

So get behind me Satan

Cause I'm going in front

But the details always got the devil in them

That's why I'm crabbier than Crabtree & Evelyn

I'm a rebel without a spiritual level

Lately I've been having trouble with my treble clef

Or maybe I'm just tone deaf

But I still stone you like an Iron Chef

So let the nouveau riche eat quiche

I'm MC Complete and this is my pastiche

chorus:

I'm MC Complete and I'm in tipesh mode

Twisted like an operator overload

Turn off the lights and I'll glow

'Cause I'm a cross between Vanilla Ice and Sonny Bono

And I'm still waiting for your web page to load

'Cause I'm not drunk, I'm just in tipesh mode

I'm living on a prayer
Like A.J. Ayer
Like charismatic megafauna I'm not all there
So share this song with all your friends on twitter
'Cause facebook is my new babysitter
And you record labels might want to consider
My offer to sell my talents to the highest bidder
'Cause I rip off Eminem like I was a counterfeiter
In God we trust
But defraud we must
Until this body returns to the dust
Plus we must write server code in C++

So we can overload the comma operator

And change over less than to make it greater

'Cause I'm an innovator and an imitator

So in the future, come with me to Taba for my seder

I promise you'll be looping like a constant iterator

(chorus)

I bend you and I blend you like mixflakes

'Cause your crew is full of toucans that's sweeter than six cakes

Yo messing with Complete was your last mistake

'Cause I bang out battle raps till my wrists ache

Yo I better take a coffee break before I get carpel tunnel syndrome

Plus I better get a wikipedia entry of my own

Or at least the cover of the Rolling Stone

'Cause I'm 33 years old and I'm still unknown

I bought a prefab sukkah with a subprime loan

Now there's ushpizin everywhere like the attack of the clones

So take a stand like Shuli Rand

'Cause Torah and Hollywood go hand in hand

I'm complete like a breakfast with raisin bran

I just imitate MC Frontalot so I can leverage his brand

(chorus)

Re: Tuna

I posted a new song on my website today. It's a silly parody for kids. Let me know what you think:

https://sites.google.com/site/toofrum/Home/tuna

Prayer, a Timeless Need

Traditionally, Judaism recognizes three aspects of prayer: praise, request and thanks.

Why do we make requests of God? I ask people for things because otherwise they might not know what I want. But God already knows what I want before I ask. Giving me what I want is not always in His plans (it often is, of course), but He does know. He doesn’t need me to inform Him.

I think that asking God for things and asking people for things might be very different. Maybe asking God for things is really an act of gratitude, just like saying thank you. Maybe it’s like saying thank you in advance. Or you can look at it this way: as all parents know, there are nice and not nice ways to ask for things. Not asking at all and just expecting God to read your mind is not a nice way of asking.

The Cucumber Curse: A Platonic Dialogue by MC Complete

Daniel: What do you think about Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room argument?

Bob: I don’t think Mary learns anything when she leaves the room.

Daniel: She learns what seeing colors is like, doesn’t she? She learns what seeing blue is like, she learns what seeing red is like...

Bob: What blue “is like” is not information.

Daniel: What do you mean?

Bob: Well, what is it like to see blue? Why don’t you tell me?

Daniel: You already know.

Bob: But if I didn’t, there wouldn’t be any way to communicate it to me.

Daniel: I could show you something blue.

Bob: I mean, if you couldn’t show me something blue, for whatever reason, there’s no way you could communicate to me what it’s like. What is it “like” to see blue? The answer to that question can’t be communicated, because it can’t be encoded. All the information about vision and experience is encodable, and it presumably is encoded, in our brains.

Daniel: That makes sense. I can see why you’re not convinced by Mary’s Room. I have another story, though. You could call it a variation on Mary’s Room.

Bob: Do you have a name for it?

Daniel: No. I guess you could call it The Cucumber Curse. The story is about Bob.

Bob: Bob? He sounds intelligent. Is he a neuroscientist like Mary?

Daniel: No, he’s a philosopher. A materialist, in fact.

Bob: Like most philosophers of our day.

Daniel: The trouble starts when he’s late for a lecture. On his way to the university, he cuts off another car, kind of accidentally, kind of not so accidentally. Unfortunately for Bob, the driver of the car that he cut off was The Wicked Witch of Western Philosophy. The witch goes into a fit of rage and puts a curse on Bob. Suddenly, all cucumbers start to look red.

Bob: That’s interesting. And celery is still green?

Daniel: Yes, everything green but cucumbers.

Bob: And for everyone else, the cucumbers are still green?

Daniel: Yes, for everyone else.

Bob: Well, apparently something in Bob’s brain is scrambling the color signals. Something sophisticated enough to know what is a cucumber and what isn’t.

Daniel: Well, that’s what Bob thinks at first, but then he looks over his brain logs and sees that his neurological state when looking at cucumbers is the same as his neurological state when looking at celery.

Bob: His brain logs?

Daniel: You see, Mary has invented a device which produces something like a debug log of the brain, capturing all its states and transformations.

Bob: Clearly, there’s something that these brain logs are missing. This calls for more research.

Daniel: Look, just assume that these brain logs are not missing anything, OK? The neurological state is the same, but cucumbers are red and celery is green.

Bob: So there’s a mismatch between the brain and the mind.

Daniel: Yes. The brain state of cucumber is the same as the brain state of celery, and different from the brain state of beets. However, the mind state of cucumber is the same as that of beets and different from that of celery. I agree, “green is greenish” is not information. However, “cucumbers look like beets” is information, and a description of the world that only takes matter into account loses this information.

Bob: So you’d like to draw the conclusion that, in the real world, the information “cucumbers are the same color as celery” and “cucumbers produce the same brain state as celery” are two different propositions, even though in the real world, a given brain state always corresponds to a single color.

Daniel: Yes. The information is not what green “is like”, but that green is like something. This is information that Mary knows before she leaves her room, even though she’s never experienced it. It is information that is missing from a materialist description of the world.

Bob: Very clever. However, I’m suspicious of thought experiments that resort to the supernatural. I mean, even a dualist would admit that this scenario goes against the laws of physics, as the dualist takes them to be.

Daniel: Well, in dualist physics, brain states cause mind states, but a given mind state can be influenced by a previous mind state as well as by the brain state. But you’re probably right that the cucumber story is pure fantasy even for a dualist.

Bob: In fact, it seems intuitively that such a story must break the laws of physics, even dualist physics.

Daniel: I don’t think so. I have another story.

Bob: Do tell.

Daniel: You’ll have to wait for my next blog post.

Bob: I can’t wait.

A Fishy Story

“David,” said Batsheva, “did you see Avshalom take the cookie from the cookie jar?”

“No,” said David.

The funny thing is, David did see Avshalom take the cookie. And he remembers seeing it. But when he told Batsheva that he didn’t see it, he wasn’t lying. You see, David saw Avshalom take the cookie, but he believes that Avshalom can do no wrong, so he believes that he did not see Avshalom take the cookie. Even though he did see it.

My Dear Readers will be quick to point out that, in this scenario, David is probably just doubting his memory. That is, he remembers seeing Avshalom take the cookie, but he believes this memory to be false. So, let’s modify the story. It’ll be a bit less realistic, but not much.

“David,” said Batsheva, “do you remember seeing Avshalom take the cookie from the cookie jar?”

“No,” said David.

A bit trickier here, if you think about it. False memories won’t save us. David believes that he has no memory of Avshalom taking the cookie. We know (we assume for the purposes of the story) that he does indeed remember it. David is not lying, he is mistaken.

Is there something fishy about this story? It sounds plausible, but is it really possible to be mistaken about a question of what you yourself remember? Is it possible that we are consistently mistaken when we reflect on our own memories? If a skeptic challenges our belief in the content of our own memory, can we answer him, or does the skeptic win here too? Can we doubt anything, even the present contents of our own minds? Or is there something different about the present content of my mind? Something special?

How do we know what we are thinking?

David Lewis once made fun of “internalist” philosophers, who claim that we have a special relationship with our own present state of mind. He said that they always end up telling “some fishy story” about how we can have direct knowledge of our own conscious states. Is Lewis right? Or is there One True Story of the World, in which our memories are truly self-evident? Is the fishyness in Lewis’ mind, or in everyone’s mind?

I have some thoughts on this matter, but they’re not fully baked. Meanwhile, Dear Readers, please let me know what you think.

Or what you think you think.