Second, this segment from the show Newswipe, done by the inimitable Charlie Brooker:

Just in my city (a metropolis of just under 500,000 people), I’ve seen a huge number of species in the heart of town.  A partial list includes raccoons, foxes, marmots, skunks, geese, ducks, mice, rats, coyotes, pigeons, hawks (several species), and crows.  On a recent walk down to the river and back, I counted eight different sorts of non-human animals living, apparently comfortably, in the city.  These are all animals that have adapted from their natural environments to thrive in these new, artificial¹ ones.

What struck me on this particular walk, is that this phenomenon, i.e. species adapting to a change in environment, is the fundamental driving force of evolution.  And human beings have instigated these changes in environments all around the globe. Both intentionally (e.g. through urbanization) and unintentionally (e.g. pollution). This lead me to thinking about epic climatic and environmental shifts and the fact that all of the environmental changes that we’re seeing all around the globe have qualitatively similar analogs in geological history. Temperatures have swung wildly just in human history, and have done even more so in the millions of years that large animals have been wandering the earth.

These historical changes in environment have caused the extinctions of many species and the adaptations of others. Indeed, there’s good evidence for the notion that we have one or more of these environmental changes to thank for many facets of our biology, including our giant brains, our upright gate, and our mostly hairless bodies.² These changes, and transitively the extinctions and evolution they elicited, have been caused by a wide range of factors, from the impact of celestial objects to volcanic eruptions to tipping-point changes in the amount of plant life on the planet.

And yet the only environmental changes in the history of the planet, which people ever talk about in moral terms are the ones that we credibly have a hand in. Now this is undeniably due to the fact that we are moral agents. One simply can’t hold an asteroid responsible for changing the earth’s climate.

But to simply make the distinction that human-caused ecological changes are moral issues and other kinds aren’t doesn’t really capture the way people think about climate or environmental change. We seem to only be willing to cast a certain subset of these changes in moral terms. We seem willing to accept our agency and take the blame for big, abstract changes to the environment that don’t really have any personal impacts, but not to smaller, concrete changes which many of us find personally convenient. After all, not even the staunchest adversaries of global warming seriously suggest that urbanization is a moral issue. And those that due tend either to be derided as nutjobs or just ignored like the crazy uncle at Christmas.

Urbanization has changed the environment (at least in a local fashion) all over the globe. What’s more, it’s done so to a much greater extent than has global warming. As of a few years ago, half the people on the planet live in large urban centers. About two dozen of these urban centers now have populations over ten million people. The largest of them, the megalopolis of Tokyo, has over thirty million.³ Many of these urban centers cover thousands of square miles of territory, with suburban sprawl spreading for many more miles outward from them. All of these radically changes the local environment, putting huge stresses on species, ecosystems, and even local weather.⁴

And yet no one seriously suggests that the existence of Tokyo is a moral problem. And if anyone did, they’d immediately be pushed to the margins of the conversation. We seem to simply accept radical shifts of local environment. Huge environmental changes that we see every day (e.g. roads, sky scrapers, suburban sprawl) are considered fine, dandy, business as usual. But take a few abstract steps back and say that the globe is warming (a phenomenon that none of us can really experience directly), and suddenly, it seems, people are far enough removed from the issue to talk about it in terms of moral outrage.

Tell me that my house is an environmental change and therefore evil and I’ll ignore and deride you. Tell me that my “carbon footprint” is evil and I’ll go right out and buy a bicycle. The only real difference, it seems, is one of abstraction. It can’t possibly be one of scope, after all, since the building of a house does far more damage to the local ecosystem (effectively obliterating a portion of it) than one car does to the global ecosystem.

It seems to me, then, that it’s the abstraction that allows us to consider environmental changes in moral terms. To consider the small, concrete changes that human beings make and benefit from every day (and have been for as long as we’ve been human), seems to just cut too close to home. Sure, my modest city of a half million people displaced hundreds of square miles of natural environment, drove out many species, and dwindled the numbers of some that are decidedly imperiled. But no one in their right mind is going to say that Spokane is Evil.

“And really”, we seem to say, “what does it matter? We still have hawks in the sky, geese in the river, and raccoons in the garbage bins. Sure we changed this environment, but it’s convenient, and anyway, some of the critters seem to be doing alright by the change.

Now if only we could do something about those accursed SUV drivers and their carbon footprints, everything would be just fine.”

“Society cannot be run by the lowest common denominator.”  Amen.

Those things which do relate to blogging are now spread out across three different blogs.  See, I’m one of those annoying people who likes to compartmentalize things.  Often to a sickening degree.  Some of it comes from what procrastination in the guise of productivity.  But sometimes it really helps me to be able to sit down and block out a certain section of my mind to focus on.  Right now, this is reflected in three blogs that I’ve got up:

Fifty-Two Tuesdays (My Music Blog) – Wherein I post songs I dig, reviews of things, and anything else related to music.  Music is a huge part of my life.  I listen to it 8 or more hours a day, on average.  I think a great deal about it, and it helps me to have a place to write about it.

Shut Up and Hack (My Tech/Code Blog) – This is the newest of my blogs, and it largely grew out of two things.  One was that I was filling this blog up with nothing but politics and tech.  I was getting sick of politics, but I figured that if I was going to just blather about tech all the time, I wanted to do it in a blog with that as the stated mission.  It also helps that I built that blog with code-blogging in mind, and that informed layout choices as well as spurred me to track down and install some good code-oriented WordPress plugins.

The Blag Switch (Everything Else) – This blog continues to be more or less a dumping ground.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that this is one blog that’s not going to be purpose-driven.  I have principled objections to “Misc.” folders and it drove me crazy for awhile that that’s basically what this blog is.  That being said, it’s proved very handy to have a place where I can dump all the errata that pops into my head.

I’ve thought about starting other blogs (a philosophy blog and a gun blog, in particular), but down that path seems to lie madness.  As it stands now, I think that operating a blog for music and a blog for code while maintaining this blog as a place to dump anything else I care to seems like it works pretty well.  At some point in the future I may condense blogs or create new ones.  But for now, three seems to be doing the trick.

Honestly, it feels strange not keeping all my blogging in one place.  To have a blog is so often considered a binary thing; a person either has a blog or they don’t.  To have several feels both clinically compartmental and also remarkably self-indulgent.  But to roll all my writing into one blog feels almost unbearably chaotic.

I guess for now I’m choosing self-indulgence over chaos.

Second, when faced with the befouling presence of government busy-bodies, sometimes all you can do is point and laugh.  Ridicule is a powerful and effective tool, and it is often well-deserved when directed against government ineptitude and asshattery.  Anything that helps people to see how horrid and absurd the machinations of bureaucracy really are is a good thing.

Third, no matter how powerful and cathartic ridicule may be, it doesn’t always work.  In the article linked above, the leash law got passed even with the ridiculous amendments.  It will no doubt be selectively enforced by petty-minded town-council twats to raise revenue or exert influence.  (Per point one above, never underestimate the pettiness of apparatchiks at ANY level of government.)

Fourth, given a ridiculous state, prone to self-oblivious absurdity and bureaucratic wankery, sometimes one’s options are limited to having a drink and a laugh or abandoning the locality and moving to a better one.  Changing things for the better would be preferable, of course, but that’s not always an option.  After all, there’s only so much a person can do when facing “a zillion Young Mothers” rallying behind an odious government tool and the war cry of “do it for the children!”

“A mighty earthquake rocked the tiny, impoverished island nation of Haiti today, collapsing a hospital, the presidential palace and other buildings and triggering what one diplomat called a “catastrophe.”

As night fell on the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and other towns, reports of extensive destruction were trickling out. Tsunami alerts were issued for Cuba, the Bahamas and much of the Caribbean.”

Spare a thought for those afflicted and please help out where/when/if you can.

1.) Imagine a being greater than which nothing can be conceived.

2.) This being exists in your imagination.

3.) It is greater (or better) to exist in reality than it is to only exist in the imagination.

4.) Therefore, if the being exists ONLY in one’s imagination, then a greater being (i.e. one that exists in reality) could be conceived.

5.) Therefore, there exists in reality a being greater than which none could be conceived.

6.) This being is God.¹

Now this argument is interesting to me because it’s a seductive one.  It’s one of my canonical examples of a specious argument that appears logical, even though it’s so logically flawed that it’s almost incoherent.  To illustrate this point, let me rattle off a few quick critiques.

a.) Point 3.) is unsupported.  Can one say it’s really greater to exist in fact than in imagination?

b.) Point 1.) is flawed because it’s very unlikely that a person can imagine something so great that nothing greater could be imagined.  Either by the original thinker or a later one.

c.) “Greatness” is not unipolar, so a thing “greater than which nothing can be conceived” misses the point.  Many dimensions of “greatness” may, in fact, be implicit tradeoffs so that they can’t both be maximized.

d.) Existence is not, strictly speaking, a predicate.  That is to say, it’s problematic to assert that “existence” is a property of the object to which it refers in the same way that size or color is.  (I get the impression that this point is still up for some debate, but I’m not aware of any compelling arguments to the contrary.  If someone else is, please do post them in comments.)

These are just the four critiques that are on the top of my head.  I doubt I can claim originality for any of them, (and definitely not for d.) ), but the point is that the flaws with the argument are numerous and fatal.  Which is why it’s interesting to me that the ontological argument, in its many forms, is still regarded by some as a valid or, at very least, compelling proof.

Going to a Catholic university, I encountered people all the time who point to this and other easily-refuted “proofs” as being linchpins of their faith.  These were people who could (and often did) routinely construct tight, well-reasoned arguments and attack my own succinctly and incisively when they were flawed.  These are people are well versed in logic and skilled in its use.  And yet their love for this weak, easily-dismissed argument remains.

As near as I can tell, this is due to some form of internal sophistry.  They need the conclusion to be true for their philosophical framework to hold and for their world to make sense.  So they develop a blindspot for arguments that have a logical form and the desired conclusion but whose premises or steps are flawed, sometimes in fatal ways.

This points to one thing that bears consideration about the argument; it is, more or less, formally sound.  That is, the problems with it are not with the individual steps in the argument² but rather it’s the premises from which the argument is made that are flawed.  My critiques above all attack the underlying assumptions of the argument, not the logical steps it employs.

Another such argument is the appeal to a first mover.  It’s another instance in which flawed premises but fairly sound logic end up producing an argument that’s equally flawed and has proven to be equally seductive.  After all, there’s nothing logically incoherent about either an infinitely regressing chain of causation OR about a chain of causation kicked off by some initial, yet natural base condition.³

It seems to me that the key factor that a lot of these seductive arguments have in common is that they’re formed in an essentially rigorous fashion.  But where a strong argument would have strong premises and strong logic, these arguments have strong logic married to premises that are either deeply flawed or, worse yet, semantically meaningless.  It’s open question to me whether “a being greater than which no other can exist” even means anything.⁴ It may be in the same semantic class as the phrase “a gnome which contains more glass jelly than any bunny rabbit.”  It’s syntactically correct, but what it’s actually describing eludes me.

If that’s the case, and the premise of the argument is based on semantically empty statements, then really, the argument’s not erroneous, so much as everything that follows from the premise is incoherent.  This, then, becomes a classic case of “Not Even Wrong“.  And if that’s the case, then I guess I shouldn’t trouble myself about it overly much.  But so long as otherwise brilliant people are turning to arguments that are, at the very best, wrong or, at worst, total nonsense in order to prop up their personal philosophies, then I’m sure I’ll have a hard time letting the issue drop.  It may well be simply my contrarian nature or it may be the pedantism inherent in all philosophy, but either way, so long as people are being seduced by these bits of pseudo-logic, I’ll have a hard time ignoring them.

UPDATE: Commenter J points me to an excellent parody of Anselm’s argument by the inimitable Julian Sanchez:

1. For every good thing that exists, I can imagine a still better version that does not exist.
2. Generalizing, extant things are always less perfect than those that exist only in the imagination.
3. God is defined as a supremely perfect entity.
4. Therefore God is purely imaginary.

² – This is especially true with later, more refined versions of the Ontological Argument which improve on Anselm’s in some meaningful ways.

³ – If you’re one of those people that asserts that whatever that natural starting condition was is what we call God, then we don’t have anything to talk about. I mean that literally.  You’ve added nothing to the conversation and have just shuffled the problem away behind a semantic curtain.

⁴ – Whether it does mean something or not, hinges largely on the definitions of “greater” and on how one resolves the seeming equivocation between existence-in-thought and existence-in-reality.

An ongoing challenge is the tendency of Eureqa to return equations that fit data, but refer to variables that are not yet understood. Lipson likened this to what would happen if time-traveling scientists presented the laws of energy conservation to medieval mathematicians.

“Algebra was known. You could plug in the variable, and it would work. But the concept of energy wasn’t there. They didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it,” he said. “We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

So some smart folks created a smart application.  The application is so smart, in fact, that seems to be returning equations that are true, but beyond our current ability to understand.

Welcome to the future.