Concerning putting "In God We Trust" on Coins

A friend sent me one of those “pass this on to everyone you know” emails today. I don’t think I have ever actually passed such an email on, and I certainly did not this one, mainly because I couldn’t disagree with it more.

The post---which turns out to be wrong--- said that there is a new US dollar coin out that does not have “In God we Trust” on the coin (I shall assume that I am not being naïve, and falling for some kind of gag….at first I thought it was something like that). The post went on to urge everyone to boycott the coin, that is, to refuse to accept it for monetary exchanges.

The fact is that the coin does contain the “In God We Trust” inscription on the edge of coin. I think this is unfortunate. It would be better if it were entirely absent.

I claim that whether you are Christian, Deist, Atheist, etc, you should in fact insist that all references to any Deity be absent from all government issues. Now, maybe there are other reasons for resisting the circulation of a new coin---though I cannot imagine what they might be---but one should not resist the circulation on religious grounds, regardless of his or her affiliation.

Here is the main reason why: we have, and should have, a secular government. Having such is in fact a requirement of a state that insures freedom of religion. It is unfortunately true that the “founding fathers” did put the term God into some of the founding documents, but a clear reading of the climate in which these things were created shows it to be a rather generalized term for a common ideal, not a theistically conceived God. In particular, there is, as far as I can tell, no mention of Christianity or Jesus in any of the state papers. The spirit of that age, which gave rise to a free society, and put an end to any justification of there being a “Divine Right of Kings”, was that of the Enlightenment. While many of the framers of the American documents claimed to be Deists, some were Christians, but I believe all felt that religious freedom was vital, and that adherence to a state recognized religion was very wrong.

What is a person thinking that says such things as “Now, especially in these dire times, we do not want to remove God from our coins!” Do they think that God will look favorably upon the citizens living under a government that puts His Name on government property? That He will favor a society that does this, and tend to bring misfortune on a country having a secular government? To me this is absurd, even from---or maybe I should say especially from---a Christian perspective. As I recall, there is a scene in the New Testament where Jesus asks whose image is on a coin, Caesar or God’s----the clear intent of it is that it is Caesar’s. He does not say that it should be God’s--- rather it is, I think, implied that a government is by its nature neutral from a religious perspective. Some Christians may disagree with my interpretation, but I hope they will at least think about mine. (Speaking for myself, I am an agnostic, not a Christian, but I believe I can see things from their perspective).

Do they think they are going to “fool God”, and He will think favorably of people who hypocritically put His name on coins and intone it in state-related oaths? And why pretend that we all have essentially the same concept of God? I am pretty sure that this is not the case, even among the various Christian denominations, even less so among the different religions represented within the United States.

There is the practical issue that it sets a very bad precedent. How will such precedents play in the future? Suppose “God” gets changed to “Allah”. Granted, Christianity is no doubt a majority religion at the present time, but this may not remain true in the more distant future. If you are Christian or Jewish, think how you would feel if the coins were minted with Allah on the face. Not happily, I am pretty sure. And in any case, it is central to the idea of religious freedom to protect the rights of those belonging to minority religions (or to no religion at all).

Everyone should rejoice that we have a government that makes no reference to any particular religion, even allowing for a more generalized concept of a Deity. Look around the world and observe how so many states have a dogma ingrained into their government. There are of course dogmatically infested states that are godless, but these seem to often involve the worship of an “Emperor” or such, and in effect are a sort of theocracy (think of North Korea). Theocracies abound, and the irony is that the US is at odds (even if not actually at war) with many of them. And quite often these theocratic governments are flagrant violators of human rights; I doubt that this is a simple coincidence.

As far as the government is concerned, let it be neutral about the existence of a Deity. This issue should be left to each individual’s conviction (and of course to the churches, denominations, or sects to which an individual freely chooses to belong), even if some decide that there is no such being
God, if He exists, will be able to tell who believes and who does not. Above all, He would not be fooled by a cheap and unjustifiable ploy of putting his name on coins, thus surely making hypocrites of a great many citizens.

Resolution of the "Unexpected Hanging Paradox"

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox:

Here is a short version of a paradox that has intrigued me since I was in college: A condemned prisoner is told by the warden on a Sunday evening that he will be executed at noon on one of the upcoming weekdays, i.e., M-Tu-W-Th or F, but he will not know in advance which day it is until the time comes. The day of his hanging will be a “surprise”. The prisoner reasons that if Thursday noon passes and he has not yet been hung, then he can rule out Friday since that is the only day left and then he would know what day he was to die, in violation of the conditions specified by the warden. But having crossed Friday off the list, he quickly realizes that he can cross Thursday off too, since once Wednesday noon is past Thursday is the only day left (since he has already eliminated Friday). Going on this way, he realizes that he can eliminate all 5 weekdays, one by one, and he is happy to realize that he cannot therefore be hung (let’s say that he strongly believes the warden to be a truthful man). But here is the (sad) paradox…the executioner comes to his cell on (say) that Wednesday, and informs him that he is now to be hung. His last thoughts before dying are that the warden indeed spoke the truth: that he, the prisoner, was indeed going to be hung, and he was certainly surprised by it too. Where did his reasoning go wrong? It seemed so logical that he could not be hung if the warden was telling the truth……and yet, in the end, the warden did tell the truth. Seemingly, a paradox!

The Resolution:

Here is my understanding of the resolution of the paradox (and I think I follow, essentially, Martin Gardner’s explanation from his book with the paradox as the title). The prisoners’ reasoning goes wrong on the very first step. He cannot rule out Friday even if Thursday noon has come and gone. In somewhat formal logic terms, I see it as follows. Let the wardens statement to the prisoner be written as C =A + B, where A = “you will be hung”, and B = “you will not know in advance of the day of the deed”. First, suppose A = true. That would mean that B = false, and hence C = A + B = false. Next, suppose instead that B = true. Then this would mean that either A or “not A” can be true; if A is true, then C = A + B is true, and if instead "not A" is true, then C = A + B is false. This makes sense because even if he doesn’t know the day of the hanging, then he could still either be hung or not hung. Thus, considering all of the above possibilities, we see that C can be true or false. It could just as well turn out to be true as it could turn out to be false. So, if it turns out after the fact that C is true, this does not really entail a contradiction. What the prisoner should have realized is that the warden’s statement could turn out to be true or false, and since he could not be sure ahead of time what the truth value was, he could not logically deduce the outcome from it.

More on the topic of concealed ovulation in humans

There was an entry in this blog a few weeks about what seemed to me to be a puzzle, namely, how can we understand “concealed ovulation” in humans from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I recently happened upon the book “The Third Chimpanzee” by evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond. He writes, on page 78 of my paperback copy, that “…the most hotly debated problem in the evolution of human reproduction is to explain why we ended up with concealed ovulation….”.

I suppose I must admit I found it gratifying that at least I wasn’t being a dunderhead in writing about this puzzle. That is, if distinguished professional biologists cannot agree on the reason for this trait, then a layman in the area (such as myself) certainly has the right to be puzzled by it.

At any rate, Diamond goes on to say that there are at least six current theories about why the trait evolved. As I understand his more lengthy explanations, it evolved for one of the following reasons:
1. To enhance cooperation among males (he considers this one to be rather male chauvinist for some reason)
2. To cement the bonds between mates
3. To enhance the probability of the female to receive her fair portion of meat from male hunters
4. To force the male into a permanent marriage bond (he considers this one to be “gender neutral” in a gender politics context)
5. To encourage seevral males to help her, and to at least not kill the infant (this one, by Sarah Hrdy, he applauds as a welcome “feminist” perspective)
6. Because a woman that had a tendency to conceal ovulation could not avoid the risk and pain of childbirth, and hence left more descendants that did those that did not conceal it (this is the theory that Nancy Burly suggested in about 1979, and the one that I mentioned as being a common sense explanation in my earlier post).

I find it rather regrettable that Diamond seems to place so much emphasis on being politically correct. For example, he approves of number 5 because it “overturns masculine sexism and transfers sexual power to women”. This seems an odd reason to like a hypothesis, for shouldn’t scientific truth be the only guide for favoring an explanation of any natural phenomena? Nevertheless, the several pages he devotes to this issue involve some intriguing speculation, and I find it quite interesting.

Would you do it all over again?

A friend of mine recently asked me if I would live life all over again if I had a chance. Clearly an academic question, but it leads to some interesting speculations, and of course some juicy metaphysical questions.

He first phrased the question, or maybe I should say “posed the thought experiment”, in a way that suggested that I might be a baby again, identical to what I was at birth. Well, of course, right away that brings up the questions, “what is meant by identical”, and “would I know as a baby what I know now?”. Otherwise, I might note, I would probably repeat many of the mistakes and committed the same foolish acts that I have in this life. But what would it even mean, to have the knowledge that one has now? Surely, there is no way to model how a baby, in the true sense of that term, could have the conceptual knowledge that an adult has. A baby has to learn language and concepts, and so there just seems to be no way to make sense out of that idea.

It also raised the question of, “would the world go back to being the exact state it was in when I was a baby?” (we are having fun here, remember, not taking the possibility of this return to a baby thing seriously, but just dancing around some peculiar conceptual problems of identity that I want to return to in a minute). One might imagine, or for the present purposes model, one’s life as a movie, and this would amount to rewinding the film and having it played again. It seems like this would be a meaningless action to choose to do even if one could. What would be the point?…..wouldn’t everything just unfold again the same way (well, maybe, or maybe not, given the possibly chaotic nature of such a historical re-enacting)?

And one might even say, how do I know that hasn’t in fact been done, many times or an infinite number of times, already, in some sense (think of Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence”). But there would seem to be no point in it……and who would be behind it (what entity or being), and to what purpose? Improvement in one’s character? Hmmm---but without any memory, or at least faint recollections, of the previous cycles, how could one “learn from ones mistakes”?

Some of this territory was explored, or maybe I should say suggested to the philosophically minded viewer, in the film “Groundhog Day”, where a man (Bill Murray) lives one particular day over and over, only seemingly dimly aware that he has done it before, and has repeatedly botched it in some way (the idea was to get him to improve to a point where he was worthy of the female star that he hoped to win over, an unfortunately rather trivial spiritual “chick-flicky” motive for bettering oneself).

Now suppose one agreed to become a baby again, but without the amassed knowledge or memory of his life up through adulthood, and placed in the world in its present state. Well, now we move into a more practical area, as it is interesting to note that one could almost do that now (or probably would be able to in the not too distant future): one would simply have oneself cloned, then one would immediately commit suicide. The cloned cell would develop eventually into a baby, very nearly identical to what you looked like at birth (some inert gestational induced variations might be present, but these would presumably be very small). This illuminates the identity issue that of course your clone would not have your personal consciousness, and would not in any sense of the word, be “you”. But wouldn’t it be essentially the same kind of transformation of somehow magically returning the present you to a baby state, without implementing any of the acquired knowledge or character into the baby?

The same kind of issues arise with the concept of human teleportation, such as is depicted in “Star Trek” (“Beam me up Scotty”). How would one ever know that the teleported human had the essential consciousness, the same sense of being oneself as the original being had? This raises the question of what is consciousness, and what constitutes the peculiar fact of conscious identity. This even arises when we realize that our cells are replaced every so often, such that after several years we are not exactly the same person we were earlier. I suspect this is what bothered the ancient Greeks in their “ship paradox” (although they would have known nothing about cell development and replacement, they would have known that people change over time). In what sense do you retain your identity as your body sheds and acquires new “building blocks”?

These issues are explored very insightfully in Chapter 1 of the book “Riddles of Existence” (by Conee and Sider). In my opinion, they do not “solve” the myriad identity problems, but they do rather thoroughly explore the issues.

Moral issues raised by artificial consciousness

I wonder if many people have thought about ethical issues that may be raised by systems that embody artificial intelligence, and that are possibly conscious (but I would guess that anyone who has seen Spielberg & Kubrick’s AI might have). There seems little doubt that humans will eventually, perhaps even soon (on a time scale of tens of years), create artificial systems that exhibit intelligence. The issue will be, of course, are they conscious?
Now, as everyone who has taken a college philosophy class knows, we only infer the consciousness of other humans (and, to some more questionable extent, that of other animals). Each of us only directly knows our own consciousness (thank you, Rene Descartes). Consciousness is subjective, and I do not see any way it can be objectively proven to exist in another entity. While we may all infer it as being virtually certain that biological systems have it, it is by no means clear how we can determine whether a human-made system is conscious. That is, if it has a sense of self. Or, to put it in the terms that present day students of consciousness use, whether a system has that peculiar feeling of what it is like to be someone. But no doubt it will eventually come to seem that some artificially produced systems do have it. How then will we deal with them? Will it be ethical to deny them the rights that humans have? Will it be right to use them as servants or as slaves? Will it be right to terminate their existence, scrap them, and interchange central processors (or whatever would serve as a brain). Can they be punished for “crimes”, or will they be considered as lacking free will and hence be immune from punishment? These questions are just a partial list of any of the issues we could all come up with. Spielberg & Kubrick’s entertaining film aside, how many philosophers have begun to address these issues?

Some Random Thoughts about "What I Believe"

To a reasonably high degree, I believe the following things to be true:
We humans are animals--apes, basically---with brains that have evolved to solve certain mental tasks better than any other animal. This enhanced mental capability is the human animal’s tool of survival. But, reason is very hard for most people when it comes to thinking about things of a more abstract nature, or in the heat of emotion. Our brains are only wired for reason or critical thought in certain kinds of circumstances (e.g., understanding how mechanical things work, predicting danger, how to acquire food or how to obtain sexual gratification).
Everyone is by nature selfish (although the appearance of altruism can be very convincing in some cases, it ultimately serves a genetic succession purpose—or in some cases a socially egoistic purpose).
Biological evolution, per Darwin, Dawkins, etc---has occurred, and explains most of the biological world, including human traits and tendencies.
The “Hell” many religions have imagined to await unbelievers and evil doers does not exist. If there is an afterlife and a God, Hell is not part of the package, at least not in an eternal lasting sense. Rather, Hell is something that certain human institutions have dreamed up to try to scare people into their camp, or in some cases, to enjoyably imagine themselves having the “last laugh” (yes, I fear some people can be that spiteful, although to be fair I don’t think they have really thought about how cruel a wish that is on other people—at least, I hope they don’t). Institutions that have subscribed to the concept have in some cases thrived, because it serves as "an offer you can't refuse" (if you were to be convinced that Hell is real), and hence membership in, and associated donations to, the religion tend to be obtained.
Humor and joyous merriment are great boons to humankind. But humor can sometimes turn nasty, mocking, and cynical, and hence can serve evil purposes.
Morality is not relative. Rather, it is based on human society, the nature of the human being, plus on something along th elines of the “prisoners dilemma" of game theory.
With a somewhat lesser degree of certainty, I am inclined to believe that our brains are not designed to (i.e., have not evolved to be able to) solve the “big metaphysical questions”, for example, that of existence: “why is there something rather than nothing?”; The riddle of free will vs. determinism: “do we have free will, what is free will, etc”; and the mystery of “consciousness” ---who/what has it, how does it emerge from biological tissue, can we create it artificially, etc.
With these issue it seems it is very likely beyond our mental capabilities to even frame the right questions. Rather, the human brain is limited to practical things That is, questions and issues that can be solved by engineering, science, and technology. This we are potentially superb at.
Regarding politics, I think that the “Libertarian” view of limiting the power of the government to securing "negative rights" is correct in most respects. But it will be a long time before most of the earth’s population can be converted to this view. And, there may still be improvements to be made in framing a fully consistent libertarian political philosophy. Socialism in it’s various forms and degrees is wrong, but is at least partly driven by a prevalent human strategy of trying to manipulate other people for one’s own benefit. In particular, it is usually attractive to an “elite class” (many academics, for example) because they resent the success of the practical humans, and sense that a strong central government will actually lead to privileges for the elite class. Of course, Orwell exposed these motives in 1984 and Animal Farm.
My strong suspicion is that the world’s religions are wrong, in most respects. While some may have intuited or captured some of the truth, they have not got most of it right. Among the theistic religions, Christianity is the most plausible and highly developed theoretically (i.e., theologically), while, from the little I know about Buddhism, it seems a reasonable "philosophy" about a lot of things. Hinduism also seems insightful in some ways, from what I have read about it. Islam I would give almost a zero chance of being true.
Now for a few predictions for the distant future. What the human race will likely come to understand, accept, or do eventually.
First, my optimistic, hopeful perspective (my pessimistic, fearful side in a moment): in this first perspective, in most respects, life on the planet will eventually become much much better: It will become widely and generally accepted that religious dogma has no place in the state (government), and should never be coerced, and never be the cause of war (5 to 10 thousand years).
And it will become generally accepted that war is an intolerable evil, and peace will prevail for all the earth (but this will take perhaps 5 to 10 thousand years). Science will learn how life began, and it will be widely accepted and understood (5 to 10 thousand years).
Much more will be learned about whether there is life elsewhere in the universe, but this may not be for a very long time, perhaps eons. New, as yet unimagined, modes of communication and travel will eventually be discovered to make this possible.
Crimes, such as murder and robbery, will become exceedingly rare, if not altogether vanished (this also will take a very long time, something like 5 to 10 thousand years).
Science will continue to progress and learn. In particular, physics, the most basic science, will progress to a point that we can not even imagine right now. A physics book from the year 2500 would completely mystify our most brilliant physicists of today.
Artificial life will be perfected, and robotic forms of life will be virtually indistinguishable from natural. The human body parts will be intermingled and replaced by artificial forms as they wear out or become diseased or injured; at some point, where what is a human and what is a robot will become blurred, as parts are intermingled. Perhaps only the brain will stay organic--or maybe even not that.
The natural life span will be dramatically increased, and disease made much more rare (I doubt that it will be eliminated entirely). Accidents will become less rare, and less fatal due to the availability of artificial parts.
Biases and prejudices (ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) will eventually vanish, on a time scale of perhaps hundreds of years.
Music will merge into other art forms, although the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart (and others) will remain effective and emotionally edifying to humans (and robots?).

Now, an alternative, Pessimistic view (in this perspective, life on the planet will get worse): The religious dogma will prevail, become embedded in the state (government); at present, it seems like many Muslims would do this if they could.
A nuclear war might occur, or a nuclear device will go off, triggering a catastrophic war, and the state of human society will suffer a great setback.
Governments will gain more power, and a statist world will prevail. This may be driven by an evident human tendency toward envy, which tends to want to create sameness, and equality in all things (like Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House vision).
Some natural catastrophe (like an asteroid) will decimate human civilization, and humankind will revert to a more primitive state.
While I view it as dubious, it is possible that the ecological doomsayers are right, and mankind’s activities will bring about disaster for the planet.
What I definitely do not know or understand:
Why there is anything rather than nothing? (my long time psychological obsession).
If there is a purpose or plan for humankind, by some outside agency…and if there is, what it might be.
If we survive death in any sense…and if so, what might that be like.
If there is a God or gods, how to imagine or model Him/Her/Them.
How to make any sense out of the concept of free will; how to make any sense out of the concept of strict determinism; how to imagine any reasonable alternative, since these seem all inclusive.

Can the stimulus package and the bailouts really help?

Re the stimulus package and the bailout, as of February 2009

I have bad feelings about these things. I haven’t looked into the details, or into all aspects of them. But on very general principles I am inclined to think it will not help pull us out of the bad economic situation we are in. I dearly hope I am wrong.
My reasoning is that neither have much to do with increasing the actual wealth of the US economy. Taking money from the taxpayers---or worse yet printing more money---and doling it back out to the taxpayers seems to be at best a null action, and at worst a step backward.
I suspect that the real problem is that we tend to be too light in terms of production of goods; that is, I think we lack sufficient activities such as manufacturing and invention of new tangible products, which together really constitute the substance of wealth. True, we have an active service sector, which generates a lot of paper products---a few years back in a Dave Barry column he cynically (but insightfully) referred to “that great American product, the polished final report”-----but too much of this seems to be in the realm of government and defense related areas, not in the commercial sectors where it might count the most.
It is true that Americans seem to have become, in the last 20 or so years, the workaholics of the western world, but it is not clear that the kind of work we tend to do contributes much to tangible wealth, but rather is often paper shuffling and services of dubious desirability or worth to the average consumer. Perhaps way too much of it is “white collar” work either aimed at government markets, or aimed at persuading or convincing the general public to buy things that they probably really do not need or want. Perhaps one might say that we have too many MBA’s and lawyers, and not enough people willing to roll up their sleeves and do real work.
Today all companies emphasize growth, but too often this seems to be achieved by shuffling departments around and reorganizing in ways that seem to reduce to value of the service or products to the customers. There is only so far that such cuts and structural redesigns can go toward attaining growth of profits. Eventually gains made in such ways must run dry.Perhaps the deep problem is the decline of the work ethic and true commercial spirit of our nation. All nations rise and fall in time, and perhaps we have passed our zenith. As I said at the start, I certainly hope I am wrong, and that our economy and spirit will bloom once again.