Freedom of Speech in France

I was stunned to learn that apparently freedom of speech in France does not extend to “Holocaust denial”. In other words, it is a crime in that country to deny the Holocaust. I believe this is a huge mistake.

The recent mass murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff were done by two muslim terrorists, who were evidently enraged to violence by cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by that organization. The French government, quite rightly, does not legally forbid the publication of such cartoons that might be offensive to certain religious or ethnic groups, the justification being freedom of speech. Citizens do not have the legal right to not be offended by words (spoken or on paper) against the group they happen to belong to. But by making Holocaust denial, or any particular general topic, off limits, the free speech argument is rendered hypocritical.

In a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r29tRfjv3N0 a French government official says that the reason for this limit on free speech is that scholars the world over are all agreed that the Holocaust is a historical fact. Well, that may be true---but it is irrelevant. The justification for free speech is not that one should be allowed to say (or write) anything at all as long as it is true. One should be allowed, for example, to say that the earth is flat, or even that some particular ethnic group has this or that negative characteristic (though that would be unkind, and I would not like someone to say or write such things).

Now, there are instances where speech is quite properly limited. One should not be free to engage in personal, libelous attacks on individuals, nor should one, in a mob frenzy context, be allowed to clamor for killing some group of people (e.g., the police). A common example of disallowed “speech” is falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Clearly, the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo did not involve any of these disallowed forms of speech. 

Legality aside, I would say that the cartoons were perhaps unkind, and predictably hurtful to some groups; but that does not constitute being guilty of any crime against muslims, and certainly is not deserving the death penalty. Any persons who respond to an offensive cartoon or words by violence and murder, have committed a capital crime, and should be prosecuted and punished accordingly, with no leniency to account for their having being offended. One should not have the right to not be offended.

I suspect that the proscription of Holocaust denial by the French is an attempt to avoid offending the Jewish citizens that had direct family experience with the Holocaust. While I do not wish to encourage Holocaust denial, and I would avoid any hurtful words to any people of the world, making the denial a crime undermines, and renders hypocritical, the position that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were protected by the rights of free speech.

A few thoughts after watching a Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Ben Affleck discussion involving Islam, and how the Liberals in the West should be more inclined to criticize the human rights violations inherent in certain political ideas practiced by Islamic states.This discussion took place on Bill Maher’s show in early October (I’m not sure of exact date and time)

This discussion can be seen on YouTube, and it is a painful thing to watch, because the irrationality of Mr. Affleck goes beyond anything I have ever had the misfortune to witness. Affleck appears to have had no idea of, or any desire to understand, what Maher and Harris were arguing, and his constant jumping in and interrupting with irrelevant, angry statements made this very clear throughout the entire ten minute segment.

Incidentally, almost all of the subsequent comments by the “talking heads” on this pathetic performance also missed the essence of the Harris-Maher argument. I believe their main point was simply the following: a great many of the ideas of mainstream Islam, as represented by Sharia Law, are bad, and lead to blatant violations of basic human rights.

Their point was not so much that, as so many talking heads argued, more prominent muslims should condemn the violence associated with “radical islam”, jihad, or “extremist islam”, although surely a reasoned argument could be made along those lines. It is just that that was not the main point Maher and Harris were making.

Affleck, showing painful ignorance, came back at Harris early in the discussion with accusations of “bigotry” and  “racism”. Ludicrous, since Islam is a religion, and its practice is not limited to a “race” of people (muslims are not a race, they are a religious group consisting of many ethnicities). Apparently Affleck may be OK with Sharia Law, which for example prescribes execution to anyone daring to leave the faith of Islam, or to anyone found to be gay, or to a woman that has committed adultery. The treatment of women generally under Sharia Law is unfair to an unbelievable extent. Harris is claiming that there is, in the West, a prevalent, misguided “multi-culturalism”, leading many self-styled “liberals” to fail to denounce such evil concepts, and this failure enables such ridiculous laws to persist in many nations dominated by Islamic people (indeed, many are theocracies, and so “Sharia Law” often has the force of that countries’ government behind it).

At one point in the discussion, Maher stated something like “Islam is the only religion in the world where if you try to leave it, they f__ing kill you”. Mr. Affleck did not address this comment.

Here is how the United Nations has addressed the issue of punishment for leaving ones religion, according to Wikipedia:

“Laws prohibiting religious conversion run contrary to Article 18 of the United Nations’ 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which states the following:

‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.’

Islamic nations have criticized the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a non-Muslim world's attempt to impose their values on Islamic people, and presumption of cultural superiority.”

Cultural superiority? No, it’s moral superiority. This is Harris’s point, I believe. By objective standards, Sharia Law violates human rights at a level that is above any particular governments or cultures domain of law. Attitudes of some Western liberals appear to be, “Well, this is what they believe. Who are we to condemn or even criticize their practices?”  The fact is, we must condemn them, because such practices as implicit in Sharia law are in fact evil by any objective standard.

The precept of innate and universal human rights is well stated by this passage in the US “Declaration of Independence”:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.“

Seemingly unable to understand that one can criticize Islam and Islamic theocracies while not wishing physical harm to any of the followers of that religion or citizens of such states, Affleck blurted out something indicating that he thinks that Sam Harris and Bill Maher want to wage war and kill Muslims. My goodness, how could anyone possibly infer that from their arguments? Well, I guess it would be easy to explain how; namely, if one were not listening to the arguments of the other side, and had perhaps decided ahead of time what their positions were going to be. 

The point of this blog post is not such much to heap scorn on Mr. Affleck, though there is something to be said for that since these days the American public seems to accord too much credence to the banal political pronouncements of attractive film stars, as perhaps typified by Mr. Affleck. The point I would like to emphasize is the point I think Harris and Maher were making, that “liberals” in our country and Europe should, whenever the opportunity arises, point out the inherent badness of governments founded on such principles as Sharia Law.

My take on Cognitive Dualism

Understand that this may not be exactly what philosopher Roger Scruton meant in his essay on Cognitive Dualism. What I write here is my interpretation of his idea.

I have always been mystified by the concept of free will. Even though I am firmly convinced that all conscious beings (well, at least humans) have free will, I have never been able to see any way that we can have it, in view of two highly convincing arguments for determinism (that may in some sense be the same):

• Type 1, According to which all motions in the universe are determined by the laws of physics. In this view, the atoms in any brain are determined in a self consistent manner with all the other matter and energy in the universe. There is no room for free will in this mechanistic picture. Not surprisingly, this version of determinism seems to be prominent among physicists.
• Type 2, Which would determine animal behavior even if Type 1 can be gotten around (which I think it can). This corresponds to the complete determination of a person’s actions, behavior and thoughts by a combination of that person’s genetic makeup (“hardware”) and the persons experiences after birth (and the memories of those experiences). Hence there is no room for free will in this picture. This version of determinism seems to often be held by those in the social sciences.
  

It would seem to me that it is hard to escape the conclusion that a person’s actions are entirely determined by Type 2 (I tend to think that Quantum Mechanics (QM), which implies that causeless transitions and motions occur, undermines, and allows an escape from, Type 1 determinism).

But this leaves a troublesome inconsistency. What role would reason and consciousness play in deciding what course of action to take? It seems that a reason for an action is redundant if genes/experience would determine what one would do. It is like an “overdetermined” quantity in mathematics.

We humans are seemingly “programmed” to look for causes of all actions and motions. If I understand Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason”, he maintains that the idea of cause and effect is built into the human brain. That things have causes is, in a sense, an axiom within the human brain.

But what if not all phenomena have physical causes? As I mentioned, QM suggests that causeless transitions occur, for example the causeless dropping down of an electron in an excited atom to a lower energy state, giving off a photon of light. Of course, there is a cause of the transition in the sense that the electromagnetic interactions is responsible for the transition, it is just that there is no reason why the electron “decided” to make the transition at a given time. It is a statistical thing, just as it is with the familiar idea of radioactive decay and the half life concept.

Another physics consideration: in QM, a photon can manifest either wave or particle aspects, depending on the context of it’s interaction with a given experiment or observation. So we have an example of a hard science being content with two incommensurate models of a physical entity.

OK, perhaps by analogy we could argue that there are two incommensurate ways of looking at the world:

View 1: Cause and effect, the mechanism of physics, the complete determinism of inanimate objects and energy. In this view, animals are collections of atoms all obeying laws of physics, and there is no room for free will. In particular, consciousness itself is a deep mystery__unless as many physicists do, it is argued that a machine of a threshold complexity can lead to the emergence of consciousness. A big problem here is that this latter idea is untestable, since consciousness is subjective, and only resides inside the mind of a given person. It cannot be objectively accessed by methods of science.

View 2: Free will, consciousness, and reason are an entirely distinct picture of the nature of human life (maybe to some extent, animal life also). In this view, some actions of conscious entities are not caused by physics mechanisms. This perspective is separate and obviously incompatible with view 1. Free Will would simply involve the “causing” of an action by the concomitant effects of reason and consciousness on the part of a being. (Of course, no doubt many actions, perhaps the majority of them, are in practice not undertaken because of reasoning, but are undertaken rashly or impulsively without much thought being involved. Perhaps such actions fall under the category of Type 2 determinism.)

Yes, it might seems that the two views have to be relatable, or reconcilable,  in order to make sense to us beings “trapped” in a realm where all things seem to be caused. But, taking the cue from the aforementioned photon’s dualistic nature in QM, isn’t it plausible that the two views must simply co-exist, in full recognition of their incommensurate nature? 

To explore a little further the implications of this cognitive dualism model: Consciousness is not caused by any physical mechanism, but simply is. A conscious being can choose, through its free will, to use, or not use, reasoning processes to decide what to do. 

The physical world, in the absence of any conscious beings within it, is purely, strictly, deterministic. Many process that would occur are chaotic and hence “unpredictable”, but are still deterministic (a coin toss is chaotic, and hence unpredictable, but no one can doubt that the dynamics of the coin is absolutely determined by Newton’s laws). The cosmologist Andre Linde has pointed out that the Schrodinger equation for the entire Universe does not depend on time, but that this changes when conscious beings enter the picture. Novelty in the universe thus requires the decisions of conscious beings.

Bertrand Russell’s phrase in “A Free Man’s Worship” (which has had a very great effect on me all of my life) that we are “accidental collocations of atoms”, is thus dubious, since there are no accidents in a strictly physics-determined universe. Time and chance in such a universe are superfluous concepts.

But what qualifies as a conscious being? Is an amoeba or a slug a conscious being? I doubt it. There must be a threshold degree of consciousness, in some sense, in order for novelty to emerge.

(to be continued)

I want to once again present some thoughts, perhaps a bit rambling, on the issue of Free Will (FW), in the context of the question “Can we hold wrong-doers to be blameworthy?” 

In private conversations, I continue to see what I think is a great deal of puzzlement on this issue. For example, many wonder if FW is illusory, given that all of the processes in the universe presumably follow causal laws of physics. Bertrand Russell, in his brilliant essay, “A Free Man’s Worship”, called humans (and all animals)  "accidental collocations of atoms" (let’s leave aside for the present purpose that it would seem there could be no “accidents” if the universe unfolds in a strictly mechanistic manner). 

It is common to hear people say that quantum mechanics (QM) does away with strict causality, implying that that solves the FW problem in that it allows room for us to have it. I think that is partly right, in that QM seems to allow an escape from strict Laplacian determinism: The apparent randomness, or probabilistic nature, of processes at the quantum, or micro, level, might conceivably be amplified up to macro levels, where the “Butterfly Effect” of chaos theory 

leads to indeterminism in the evolution of the universe, and of all “collocations of atoms” within it. In other words, an organism might not have to be considered “a puppet on a string”, with the strings being pulled only by the iron clad laws of physics. QM does indeed seem to offer a way out of Laplacian Determinism as the sole cause of an person’s actions.

But I think this misses a deeper aspect of the problem: namely, that we human animals seem to be products of nature (genes) and nurture (experiences), and these two factors seem to be exhaustive in determining our choices and actions. What other factors could possibly be involved in these? There do not seem to be any.

Among other confounding aspects, this raises knotty moral issues. If an individual’s genes and experiences are all that make him/her act as he/she does, and there is no one to blame for these, how can there be any justification for punishment? Or for credit, praise, or assigning merit, for that matter.

A new born baby seems to have certain innate, or instinctive traits (as we have learned from Dr. Steven Pinker's persuasive book The Blank Slate); but surely these traits and inclinations are morally neutral. As the baby grows into childhood and adulthood, he/she acquires experiences, which create memories, opinions, loves and hates, desires, prejudices, insights, and so on. At some point in the toddlers development, as surely every parent or guardian must know, he/she is capable of being “naughty”.

Does perhaps each person have an " Adam and Eve"-like "Fall", a threshold in time, where he/she is first capable of knowing good and bad? But there is a problem here. The terms “good and bad” apply to actions that are presumed to be freely chosen, and if the developing person has genes and experiences that determine how he/she will act, the terms “good and bad” seem to become of dubious applicability.

Hence, on this view, it seems wrong for society to punish crimes (Crimes being a certain kind of immoral action; clearly there are immoral acts that should not to be considered crimes, such as rude or loutish behavior). But this view leads to an absurdity, or into a circular path, because the individual humans comprising society, and in particular those in a position of prescribing punishments for crimes, are all themselves subject to the same all-encompassing, molding factors of nature and nurture. Hence it would seem that they cannot be blamed for punishing criminals.

It is odd, in a way, that so much political and sociological heat has been vented in the past 50 years or so on whether “Nature or Nurture” are dominant factors in determining or forming a person's moral and intellectual character. Both factors are deterministic, and would of course imply that a what one does is beyond his/her control.

The sad fact is that many contemporary political agendas, especially those on the Left, would like to argue for Nurture dominance partly because it seems to further their agenda of forcing a more active role of the government to install a favorable social environment. The idea seems to be that if we create a "Utopian Society", everyone will be happy ( excuse me for being a bit cynical here: I suspect a hidden agenda of optimizing their own identity-driven political position). In addition, they seem to want to minimize the Nature side of the equation, since that is perceived as being associated with Fascist regimes and/or Racist philosophies.

Let us turn back to the issue of moral culpability. My college Philosophy book on Ethics (Value and Obligation: Systematic Readings in Ethics, ed. R. B. Brandt contains an essay by philosopher C. A. Cambell titled “is Free Will a Pseudo Problem?”  In this, he points out that what most of us mean for a person to be blameworthy, or guilty of some act, is that he/she must have been able do what she/he ought to have done even even being exactly the kind of person he/she was, and all other conditions being exactly as they were. I think this is one of the best ways I have seen the free will and blame conundrum framed. Note that determinism would say that with those stipulations, the person could not possibly have acted differently. His/her behavior would, after all, be wholly fixed by the casual factors related to genes and experience. So if there is somehow some other factor, someone "inside" that is somehow outside of those stipulated factors, the act might have been free (and hence subject to moral blame or praise).

This suggests that one way---can it be the only way?-- out of the nature-nurture deterministic trap is to postulate that a given conscious being has some kind of eternally existing soul, or at least one that is outside of time. Postulating that we have souls, or spirits, that are created and formed as we live and grow in this world do not allow a way out, for all of the reasons presented above; i.e., the soul would still have been formed by causal factors that could not be considered the fault of that soul. 

My own suspicion is that somehow the fact that our subjective consciousness is anchored in time prevents us from seeing how FW can actually be possessed by sentient life forms. But I am not at all sure of that. And by the way, the emergence of consciousness is to me another one of the great mysteries, and is very possibly related to the emergence of FW (if there really is such).

OK, I'm back. I have been absent from posting on this blog since June of last year (2012). I do have some excuses for the lapse, mostly valid, IMHO: some distracting medical issues, plus teaching senior and graduate level classes in elementary particle physics at UCCS. The latter has required a great deal of time, since my PhD in the field was "many years ago" ---er, many decades ago, actually. So not only was considerable review of the subject required, but I also had a lot of catching up to do. However I love the subject passionately, so the "work", though intense, was really more like an inspiring kind of play for me. The course focused on the "Standard Model" of particle physics, which is heavily reliant on gauge theory of quantum fields as well as the abstract mathematical field of Group Theory. This is not easy stuff! And, BTW, as I have noted in previous blog entries, it is a very odd thing that the universe appears to be, in a very real sense, mathematical (I understand this to be a "Pythagorean" view of the world, so-named in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher that held essentially this view). In any case, I now have a considerable backlog of topics I want to consider in these pages. For example, though I have previously written a lot about consciousness, and free will (versus determinism), I want to further consider them in view of my recent, related studies. I plan to also add (at the risk of venturing---or blundering---into some areas that I lack professional credentials in) some thoughts about music, ethics, literature, theology/metaphysics, and maybe even politics. I plan to also add some short book reviews. So more to follow soon!---Tom

Consciousness and the Universe--Part 1.

Consciousness and the Universe--Part 1. I find it mind boggling to contemplate the question “would the universe (U) exist in the absence of conscious beings within it?” (WTUEITAOCBWI). Of course, we know going in that there is not going to be anything like a clear answer to it. There seems to be no way to explore it using methods of science (which I regard as the only definitive ways we can arrive at truth to our mutual satisfaction). Rather, the payoff is simply the “buzz”one can get from contemplating it. Some might find this a foolish waste of time. I for one do not. This question is perhaps the cousin of the metaphysical question “Why is there something and not nothing?” (WITSANN). I say metaphysical, because certain prominent fellow physicists are inclined to embarrass themselves by trying to answer that in terms of the quantum field theories of physics, and do not seem to understand what “nothing” means. For example, an all pervading “vacuum” which allows quantum fluctuations is most definitely not nothing in the true sense of the word. Whether they are being naive, dense---or, perhaps more likely have a anti-religious agenda--is open to dispute. I plan to have another post soon on this issue. Turning to WTUEITAOCBWI, this is of course in some ways a greatly enlarged version of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if there is no one to hear it. Most people consider that one to be just a matter of deciding what we mean by making a sound. We could of course imaging a sound energy recorder of some kind being placed in the forest, allowing some conscious being to listen to it later. That really sidesteps the question though, as it simply puts a delay in the sound reaching the being. But I do not want to get bogged down on that version of the problem. Just a few relevant comments and questions: Considering human and other animal life on earth, these only observe a minuscule fraction of the U. This is true no matter how powerful the telescopes and other instruments, and no matter how much space exploration is done. There may of course be guzillions of other conscious life forms scattered throughout the U, but as far as we know now, these would be subject to the same limitations as is conscious life on the earth. Those of us who have studied quantum mechanics know that it suggests that somehow observations, or measurements, cause the quantum states to “collapse” into some definite state. This suggests that in some way conscious perception affects the dynamics of the subatomic realm. Of course, QM might not turn out to be fully correct. QM has its own version of WTUEITAOCBWI in the form of the Schrodinger Cat Paradox, but in my opinion this does not have shed much light on the present question. Conscious beings may not necessarily have the level of conceptual consciousness that humans or more advanced aliens posses. If consciousness is required to make the U exist, does it have to highly conceptual.? Can a snail, cockroach, or sea hose be sufficient to make it exist? I know there are many scientists and philosophers that have explored this idea in much more depth that I can do here. For example, I believe that the brilliant physicists John Wheeler and (separately) Eugene Wigner have suggested that consciousness is involved in making the U exist. One recent book by a scientist (physicist-biologist), coming at it from an “orthodox Jewish” perspective, says that consciousness is “the U being aware of itself” (though what exactly that means is not entirely clear to me). We might all wonder “in what sense does the U exist for me after I die (or before I was born)? I suspect that none of us seriously doubt that it did, and will, exist. But it is hard to get one’s brain around that--at least it is for me. Some people believe that this tends to suggest that in some way all of conscious life is connected, maybe even unified, at some deep level. It is of course a common idea in New Age thinking that “we are all one”. I have no definite belief about that being the case or not, but can appreciate the plausibility of that idea since it seems to preserve the idea of the U being conscious of itself. So to conclude, I repeat that this question, though unanswerable, is fun and mind expanding to think about. I have only skirted along the surface of it here. And whether Consciousness is necessary for the U to exist---that may be true or false, since after all there may be true things that cannot be answered by generally accepted methods. This is analogous perhaps to the mathematical idea of Godel, that there may be true facts in any math system that cannot be deduced from the axioms. “To be continued”.

Is Math in the Universe?

Is Math in the Universe? Or just in humankind’s minds?
Why is mathematics so effective in physics and engineering? Is math really “in the world”, in some sense, or is it just some peculiarly human way of interpreting things? It seems that physicists in particular are divided on this issue. Stephen Hawking has asked the celebrated question, “What is it that breathes the fire into the equations?” http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_hawking.html, which would seem to imply that he believes that “the universe knows about math”.
The great physicist Eugene Wigner wrote an oft cited essay, "The Unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” , which, if not explicitly suggesting that the universe is built on our math, at least suggests that there may be some deep connection between the two.
A great many of my science colleagues, though, have maintained the opposite--namely, that the math models of the world are purely human inventions, and the equations really just represent the way our minds work, and that nature knows nothing about these equations.
I realize the very question I am asking may be naive, and it is difficult to even frame the issue in a rigorous manner. But I have to confess that I like the idea that the equations do have some real connection with the way the world is, and that they are more than just some human-centered version of reality. For one thing, such entities as electrons, quarks, and so forth are so deeply nested in the mathematical constructs of physics, and these constructs seem to be so highly consistent, and work so well in explaining and predicting events on the micro scale, that it just seems like nature must “know” something about them.