The Everpresent Wordsnatcher

New blog

2008-12-06T13:33:00.001-05:00

Several years ago I started a blog to share personal updates and musings for my family and friends. More recently, I’ve also blogged about philosophical puzzles and ideas, and I’ve appreciated it when other philosophers have occasionally showed up. But it’s turned out to be an awkward double life for the blog. Since there’s personal stuff in the archives, I’ve wanted the blog to keep a low profile—which means I don’t get as much feedback and discussion from other philosophers as I’d like. Conversely, as the content and audience have become more academic, I’ve been less comfortable writing much about my personal life.

My solution: I’ve started a new philosophy blog. Tell your friends. I’ve moved over a few posts from earlier this year to kick it off (but without the comments, alas). For philosophy discussion, go there. For whatever is left after that, keep your dial pointed right here.

All things great and small

2008-11-16T09:42:00.001-05:00

This is a blog-sized summary of a paper I’m working on.

For more than a century now, there’s been a problem with “everything”. Here’s a simple version: say you have all of the sets. Then there ought to be a set of just those things—a set X that contains all the sets. But in that case X is a member of itself, which no set can be. Paradox!

In 1906 Bertrand Russell writes,

[T]he contradiction results from the fact that…there are what we may call self-reproducing processes and classes. That is, there are some properties such that, given any class of terms all having such a property, we can always define a new term also having the property in question. Hence we can never collect all of the terms having the said property into a whole; because, whenever we hope we have them all, the collection which we have immediately proceeds to generate a new term also having the said property.

Michael Dummett (1993) calls properties like this indefinitely extensible—the main example is “set”, but related paradoxes also show up for “cardinal number”, “order-type”, “property”, and “proposition”. Because of this a lot of philosophers are driven to conclude that we can’t speak intelligibly of all the sets (cardinals, properties, etc.). Whenever we think we’ve caught them all, another pops up to defy us. And if we can’t talk about every set, then we also can’t talk about plain everything—since that would have to include all the sets.

This kind of argument leaves open an escape to somebody with enough nerve: one way out is to deny outright that there are any sets (cardinals, properties, etc.). This is kind of an attractive view anyway, since sets are a lot spookier than, say, tables and chairs and galaxies and electrons—even without the paradoxes. The strong-nerved people who deny the existence of such things are called nominalists (contrasted with platonists or realists).

I have a way to close of the nominalists’ escape route. What we need is a new indefinitely extensible property that isn’t “abstract” (like “set”, etc.): instead, it applies to concrete, material objects. (Even nominalists don’t want to deny those!) I don’t claim that there actually are any such things, though: instead I claim that there could be. This is enough, because it would be very odd if it turned out that “absolutely everything”-talk was intelligible just by luck. The people who think it makes sense to talk that way think that it necessarily makes sense to talk that way. If they’re right, then it shouldn’t even be possible for something to be the way I suggest.

Here’s the idea. Material things could be made of atoms: they might have smallest parts that cannot be divided any further. Alternatively, they could be made of “atomless gunk” (David Lewis’s term (1991)): any piece of it contains ever-smaller bits. Inside our “atoms” we find protons, in the protons we find quarks, and it never stops. Gunk has a long pedigree as a theory of how the world is—and even if it happens to be false about our world, it sure seems like a way a world could possibly be.

But gunk doesn’t by itself give us what we need: it could be that the parts of a gunky material object eventually run out. If you follow finite chains of decreasing objects, there is always something further down—but if you follow infinite chains, you may succeed in getting all the way to the bottom, with nothing smaller below. But also, (it seems) that might not happen. As you go further and further down to smaller and smaller parts, there are always smaller parts further on. An object with parts like this I’ll call supergunk.1

More precisely, an object X is hypergunk iff it satisfies the following condition:

For any parts of X, the x’s, such that each x is a part of or has as a part each of the x’s, there is something that is a proper part of each of the x’s.

From this condition it follows that “part of X” is an indefinitely extensible property: X is indefinitely divisible. So if there’s trouble for the sets, there is just as much trouble for supergunk. And it sure seems like there could be supergunk (even if there isn’t any in the actual world). So the nominalist has a problem with “everything”, too.

Daniel Nolan (2004) describes something he calls “hypergunk”, but unfortunately that’s a bit different. ↩

Vote!

2008-11-04T13:31:00.001-05:00

Do it now!

Fiction skepticism

2008-10-14T10:13:00.001-04:00

This post is inspired by Dinosaur Comics, but I can’t find the relevant comic—it was from a while ago. If anyone knows, tell me.

There are lots of fictional characters. Most fictional characters think that they are real. And they seem (to themselves) have all the reasons to believe they are real that I do. But in fact, they are fictional. They are mistaken. Moreover, there are so many fictional characters—let’s say there are vastly more of them than there are real people (though I doubt this is true). So it is antecedently much more likely that I am fictional than that I am a real flesh-and-blood person. My evidence gives me no way to discriminate between the two situations, since there are (deceived) fictional people with the same kind of evidence. So I have some reason to believe that in fact I am fictional, or at least to doubt whether I am real.

If this is a real skeptical problem, then it seems like it should be worse than some other such problems. To be concerned about the possibility of being a brain in a vat is one thing—but suppose that I knew there were actually lots of deceived brains in vats around in my world. That seems much more justification-threatening than merely possible such brains—though I admit I’m not sure why. And there really are lots of fictional characters, even though there aren’t lots of brains in vats.

But in fact, fiction skepticism sounds sillier to me than the usual skeptical scenarios. But, again, I’m not sure why.

Fatalism and fundamentality

2008-10-13T21:34:00.001-04:00

Here’s another argument for fatalism (from a conversation with Dean Zimmerman):

If P is true, then P is true in virtue of some Q which is fundamentally true.
If P is true in virtue of Q, and Q is necessarily true, then P is necessarily true.
Whatever is fundamentally true is necessarily true.
Therefore, if P is true then P is necessarily true.

Understand “P is necessarily true” as “P cannot be changed”. The conclusion is that whatever is a fact cannot be changed. Thus if there are facts about the future, then the future is fixed, so that no one can do anything about it.

The most suspicious premise of the three is the third—and indeed, I think it is false. But it does have some tug. I think the tug comes from a principle of sufficient reason (PSR):

If P is contingently true, then there is some further reason for why P is true.
If P is fundamentally true, then there is no further reason for why P is true.
So if P is fundamentally true, then P is necessarily true.

The full argument is more or less Leibniz’s. It is unsound, since this version of the PSR is false (though I think there is a good methodological principle in the neighborhood). But I won’t defend this claim right now.

For now I just want offer a sociological speculation: I suspect that something like this kind of reasoning is what drives people to views like presentism in order to rescue our freedom. Suppose that there are future things; why would their existence threaten our power to make it such that there be different things instead? Existing future things would threaten this freedom, if tenseless existence facts are fundamental (at least for fundamental sorts of things), and the fundamental facts could not be changed. The right thing to say to this is that (some) fundamental facts, including tenseless existence facts, can be changed.

(I heard a good joke today—Adam Elga attributed it to Steve Yablo: “Everyone talks about how people could have done otherwise. But why doesn’t anyone?”)

In other words

2008-10-03T10:37:00.001-04:00

This endorsement is a bit more eloquent than mine.

Politicking

2008-09-28T15:38:00.001-04:00

I don’t usually write about politics, but I just donated to the Obama campaign, and I thought you might be interested in a few of the reasons. (For some of my readers voting for Obama is a foregone conclusion, but I know others aren’t so sure. This is chiefly for them.)

Foreign policy. An Obama presidency gives the U.S. a shot at regaining some stature in the world. Every non-U.S. citizen I’ve met shakes their head grimly at the last eight years, and McCain’s approach to foreign policy isn’t significantly different from Bush’s, as far as I can tell. Obama, on the other hand, not only opposed our military adventurism in Iraq, but also has a serious commitment to taking on what I take to be the much bigger foreign policy issues (at least in terms of number of lives at stake): global poverty and AIDS. I can’t even find these issues mentioned on johnmccain.com.
The environment. As far as doing good for the poorest people in the world, climate change is the biggest issue right now—and this is an issue our government has to take an active role in. McCain admits that climate change is a real and serious issue, but a president will have a hard time leading where even his own party won’t follow. McCain even chose a vice president who is on record denying—this year—that climate change is a human problem. This does not bode well. This is a moral issue: it’s not just about the extinction of polar bears; we’re talking about spreading deserts (one of the big issues behind the Darfur genocide), loss of fresh water for the people already most pressed, and natural disasters in places much worse equipped for it than New Orleans.
- http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837868,00.html
The economy. Obama’s stance makes more sense than McCain’s: cutting services to save the wealthy’s investment capital isn’t what we need—now less than ever. (I’m reminded of Hoover vs. Roosevelt.) And in particular, McCain’s response this week has been embarrassing. His comments have been decried by the WSJ, and by rushing presidential politics into the midst of the bailout he’s seriously impeded the process.
McCain has run an unethical, dishonest campaign. That’s unacceptable.
- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0914chapmansep14,0,4287762.column
- http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/obama_campaign_launches_ad_hit.php
Palin. Even her one-time supporters are recognizing that Sarah Palin is way out of her depth, and she’s faking it, badly. This is worth taking seriously; she could be president.
- http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/watching-palin.html
Abortion. I disagree with much of what Obama says about abortion (though my position is more moderate than it once was)—but even on this point I think he’s the better candidate. The fact is that Republican policies have generally led to an increase in the number of abortions. Why? Some of the main reasons women have abortions are poverty and lack of health care. And these are issues I think Obama will do much, much better on.
- http://www.publicchristian.com/index.php?p=734
- http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=sojomail.display&issue=041013#5
Since you have to register to see the latter article, here’s an excerpt:

When President Bush took office, the nation’s abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade. (This data comes from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute’s studies).

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

…Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

Those are some of my main considerations. I’m interested to know if you agree with them; if there are things you think I’m getting wrong, you can let me know. These issues are important enough to warrant talking about, and hopefully getting right together.

Patriotic Duty

2008-09-22T12:29:00.002-04:00

Make sure you're registered to vote!

A reason for theism

2008-03-18T18:03:00.001-04:00

In science, in philosophy, and in daily life, we evaluate theories in order to decide what to believe. The criteria we use in these evaluations include virtues like simplicity, elegance, unity, and symmetry. These theoretical virtues—what we might generally call a theory’s “beauty”—give us reasons to believe in one theory over another.

Why? Why should a theory’s elegance make it any more credible? The fact that the beauty of a theory gives us reason to believe in it is among the pieces of data we should look to explain in our theory of the world. Insofar as some account provides a better explanation for this fact than other accounts do, this explanatory power gives us some reason to suppose the account to be true.

If theism is true, it provides a good explanation. Theoretical beauty point us to the truth because someone who values these virtues is responsible for what is true. This is why pursuing theoretical virtues is a useful heuristic in our search for the truth. There’s more to the story than that, but a conventional theism has the resources to fill in the details. And it strikes me as better able to explain beauty-driven reasons than rival theories of the world. This explanatory power gives me a reason to believe theism is true.

More fatalism

2008-03-02T14:11:00.000-05:00

In response to my previous post, Jonathan Ichikawa offered a more puzzling variant of the fatalist argument. International tensions are high, and a captain spies a foreign frigate off his starboard. He reasons,

Either there will be a battle or there won’t be a battle.
If there will be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
If there won’t be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
So, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

Something is wrong here.

“There’s no harm in firing the cannons now” means something like “Firing the cannons now will lead to no worse consequences than doing otherwise.” Now let’s suppose that “if” expresses a material conditional. Then the argument is valid. But the world could be like this:

The captain fires the cannons. It starts a battle, which leads to a terrible war and thousands of ugly deaths. If the captain hadn’t fired the cannons, none of this would have happened.

In this case, the first premise is true. The third premise is also true, because the antecedent is false. But the second premise is false: there will be a battle, but there’s very great harm in firing the cannons now. Moreover, whatever “if” means, it means something at least as strong as the material conditional. So Premise 2 really is false in the war-world.

Then why does it sound true? Probably because we naturally hear it as saying something like “If there will be a battle anyway, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.” That is, we implicitly give the antecedent some kind of modal force.

If (necessarily, there will be a battle), then there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

This is true: if the battle is inevitable, the captain might as well take the first shot. But the reasoning fails precisely because the battle is not inevitable: the antecedent of this conditional is false.

There may be something more general going on here: maybe when someone says “It will be the case that P”, in general we hear this as saying “No matter what, it will be the case that P”. Maybe “will” even has this modal force as part of its content. On this alternative story, Premise 2 is true after all, and the fatalist argument shows roughly what the fatalist thinks it shows: in general, “There will be a battle or there won’t be a battle” is false! But this does not mean that the future is “open”: rather it means that this is false:

Necessarily, there WILL be a battle, or, necessarily, there WILL not be a battle.

Where “WILL” is an artificial version of “will”, with all of the modal overtones stripped out—it means merely “at some future time”. If something like this semantic story is true, it would explain a lot of our confusions about the future: our language naturally leads us to confuse tense with modality.

Fatalism

2008-01-27T20:03:00.001-05:00

This is well-trod ground, but I was thinking about this old puzzle this afternoon and I wanted to work through it myself.

There’s an argument that Aristotle discusses, I think, to the effect that our present actions make no difference to future events. It goes like this. Let B be the proposition “There will be a sea battle tomorrow”, and let A be the proposition “The captain starts the attack.”

Either B or not B. (Premise)
Suppose B.
In that case, whether or not A, B.
So A makes no difference as to whether B.
Now drop the assumption that B, and suppose instead not-B.
In that case, whether or not A, not-B.
So again A makes no difference as to whether B.
So in any case, A makes no difference as to whether B.

That is, the captain’s decision makes no difference as to whether there will be a sea battle. But fatalism like this is crazy, isn’t it?

This argument, or something like it, has led some people to deny excluded middle for at least some sentences about the future. They say that there is no fact of the matter whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and only when tomorrow comes will the proposition become either true or false. Otherwise, they reason, how could we make free decisions that affect the future?

This response is unnecessary. We should stop and ask, what do we mean by the expression “Whether or not P, Q”? Here’s a reasonable thing to mean by it:

(If P then Q, and if not-P then Q) or (If P then not-Q, and if not-P then not-Q).

In other words, either P and not-P equally well imply Q, or else P and not-P equally well imply not-Q. Intuitively, in no case does Q’s truth value depend on P’s.

But now we need to be careful about what we mean by “if”. In classical logic we take “If P then Q” to be logically equivalent to “Q or not-P.” (This meaning of “if” is called “the material conditional”.) On that understanding of “whether or not” and “if”, (3) logically follows from (2), and (6) logically follows from (5).

But in ordinary English usually what we mean by “If P then Q” is something stronger than just “Q or not P”. For instance, both of the inferences “It isn’t raining; so if it’s raining then it’s Tuesday” and “It’s raining; so if it’s Tuesday then it’s raining” sound weird at best, false at worst. Something closer to what we usually mean by “If P then Q” is “Necessarily, not P or Q” (or “In every relevant case, not P or Q”)—this may be too strong, but we’ll work with it. If we read “if” this way, then the analysis I gave for “Whether or not P, Q” is equivalent to “Necessarily, Q” or (“In every relevant case, Q”). And that sounds about right.

If we understand “whether or not” in the natural way, then the inference from “B” to “Whether or not A, B” is no good. It’s just like reasoning “B, therefore necessarily B.” On the other hand, if we insist on understanding “whether or not” in terms of the “if” of classical logic, then we shouldn’t allow the inference from “Whether or not A, B” to “A makes no difference as to whether B”. It sounds okay, but that’s just because we’re using the words “whether or not” in a funny artificial way. On neither of the two ways of understanding “whether or not” does the argument go through. We don’t have to deny that there are objective facts about the future in order to avoid fatalism.

A hasty nominalist argument

2008-01-26T21:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick and dirty argument against the view that properties are things.

"If Fido is a dog then Fido has the property of being a dog" is a logical truth. (Premise)
Logical truths are permutation invariant: that is, they remain true when individuals are arbitrarily exchanged. (Premise)
Suppose "the property of being a dog" refers to an individual D, and "the property of being a cat" refers to an individual C. (For reductio)
Consider a model M in which C and D are exchanged. "If Fido is a dog then Fido has the property of being a dog" is true in M if and only if Fido has C—that is, if and only if Fido is a cat. So the Fido sentence is false in M.
But this contradicts (1) and (2). So (3) is false.

You can easily make parallel arguments against numbers, propositions, and any other domain where you think there are parallel logical truths. (E.g., "If there are eight planets then the number of planets is eight." "If snow is white then the proposition that snow is white is true.") The proposition case is very similar to an argument David Lewis makes in chapter 3 of Plurality—though he worries about necessary truth, rather than logical truth.

I don't find the argument especially convincing, but I think it's interesting anyway. And I think that's all I'll say about it just now.

Why study philosophy?

2007-10-13T12:05:00.000-04:00

Going on two years ago I offered six reasons to study philosophy. Now that I'm a year and change into the process of becoming a philosopher, I think it's time to revisit my reasons.

A lot is different now. I'm reading less Discourses On Natural Religion and Euthyphro and more Parts of Classes and From Discourse to Logic. The questions I'm asking aren't the ones that sprang from a sophomore's crisis of faith. They're questions that are increasingly difficult to explain—sometimes even to other philosophers—and justify—sometimes even to myself. "Does space have simple parts?" "What does 'if' mean?" "What's the best way to describe quantum mechanical states?" "What makes arithmetic true?" More and more of my life is dedicated to the technical and obscure. What does this have to do with the deep questions?

And I'm making serious sacrifices to do this. I have one of the best stipends in the business, but it doesn't compare to what I made as an intern (and my rent is truly absurd). I've given up almost all control over where I'll live. I've moved twice in two years, I'm in a city of strangers, and I can probably plan on several more moves in the next decade or so. My girlfriend and I are doomed to at least another year of despicable long distance.

So a poignant question is, what the hell am I doing?

I'm studying philosophy. Here's why.

I like it. And I think I'm reasonably good at it.

Philosophers are entrusted today with caring for the twin virtues of reason and tolerance. There are few other corners of academia where you will find people so dedicated to pursuing the truth, governed by a common commitment to following good arguments where they lead, to logic and rigor and clarity—and who at the same time disagree with each other passionately, fundamentally, and respectfully. The world—in particular, my religion—desperately needs these traits. Part of my mission is to practice and promote them.

More often than not, the questions I work on these days aren't the soul-eating questions I had in college. But neither are they disconnected from them. When you dig into a hard question, you quickly discover that a good answer depends on a more subtle question. Answering the new question demands some careful logic, or clearing up what some of your words mean, or solving some other puzzle that, if you had started out by asking it, would have seemed obscure and trivial. It's these last questions that philosophers spend most of their time on. That's good! We have a chance at answering some of the obscure questions, and if we can manage that, then we may have a real shot at the big game. Appropriating Dr. King: unclarity anywhere is a threat to clarity everywhere.

Studying philosophy is good for me. The effects are a bit mixed now that it's my job—academia affords plenty of opportunity for selfish ambition, arrogance, and dishonesty. Still I maintain: philosophy is essential training in intellectual humility, in asking questions, testing assumptions, and charitably hearing out opponents. It makes me more useful to my church and better equipped to serve and worship God.

When I'm tempted to think that philosophers don't matter, it's worth remembering: they mattered immensely to me. I'm not helping the most people I could in the most tangible ways I could. But leaving my part unplayed would silence a note in a chord and leave the whole piece hollower. Or to use a more familiar metaphor: "If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?"

On the invisible

2007-04-09T12:36:00.000-04:00

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

-Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast", Washington Post

A meditation for Holy Saturday

2007-04-07T12:59:00.000-04:00

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

-Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship"

Some moving considerations

2007-03-02T15:56:00.000-05:00

In Tim Maudlin's class we've been going through theories of space-time. I had a worry last week that he talked me out of, but now I'm back to thinking there's something worth saying. First some background.

First player: "Newtonian space-time". Space is made out of lots of points that persist through time. So I can pick out a point at 1:00, call it A, and then at 2:00 I can meaningfully ask of any point in space whether it's the same point as A (and in general, how far it is from A). We can either think of the points as enduring through time (the way Newton did), so a point B being the same point as A means that A=B—it's numerically the same object. Or we can think of the points as being points in space-time, and there's some special "sameness" relation that holds between space-time point A (which only exists at 1:00) and space-time point B (which only exists at 2:00).

Second player: "Neo-Newtonian space-time". Space-time is made out of lots of points. The points don't persist through time, so in general it isn't meaningful to ask of a point at 1:00 whether it's the same as a point at 2:00. (Instead, there's a weaker kind of structure, called "affine structure". If I have a point A at 1:00, a point B at 2:00, and a point C at 3:00, it makes sense to ask whether A, B, and C are "in a straight line", which physically means that an object could travel through A, B, and C without accelerating at all.)

Nobody wants to believe in Newtonian space-time: it posits more structure than Newtonian physics needs. For instance, in Newtonian space-time we can ask whether the universe is drifting at some uniform rate, but this kind of motion wouldn't have any physical consequences. Nobody believes in Neo-Newtonian space-time nowadays either, but it's the kind of space-time we would want to believe in if we still believed in Newtonian physics. And I think what I'm going to say applies to the sort of space-time people do generally believe in, too.

Third player: the "at-at" theory of motion. This is a theory of what it is for an object to move. And the simple theory goes like this: an object moves if (and only if) it is at different places at different times. It's a nice theory.

Finally, here's my worry: it looks to me like the at-at theory requires full Newtonian space-time. The theory doesn't make sense if it isn't possible for an object to be at the same place at different times. And this kind of structure isn't around in the Neo-Newtonian universe. So in NN-world the at-at theory makes motion meaningless.

First response: that's right! It doesn't make sense to ask, in absolute terms, whether an object is at different places at different times, and so there isn't any absolute motion. Instead, there's only relative motion. We can ask about point A at 1:00 and point B at 2:00 whether they're the same point relative to a frame of reference. If I pick New Brunswick as a frame of reference, then there is a definite fact of the matter whether a car at the corner of Suydam and Nichol at 1:00 is at the (relatively) same point at 2:00. And so there is a definite fact of the matter whether the car moved relative to this frame of reference. And (the response goes) those are the only kind of definite motion facts.

The problem for this response is that there is absolute motion in Newtonian physics. This is a fact that perplexed everybody for centuries. Imagine two balls, attached by a chain, alone in the universe. Are they spinning or not? There's a way to find out the answer: measure the tension in the chain. If they aren't spinning, there's no tension. If they are spinning, there is some. This is a frame-independent, absolute fact. And if the ball-chain assembly is rotating (absolutely), then the balls must be moving (absolutely). In NN-world the at-at theory can't account for this.

Second response (this is my gloss on what Tim said in class): ok, simple at-at was wrong. But we don't need to abandon the heart and soul of the at-at theory. And the heart and soul is this: there is nothing to moving above and beyond positions and times, no primitive motion properties. In short: motion supervenes on the space-time trajectory. That is to say, if you know all of the space-time points an object occupies through its lifetime, you know everything there is to know about the object's motion.

The revised at-at theory seems fine. I have but three remarks.

First remark. On the simple at-at theory, position was primary, velocity secondary (it reduces to change in position), and acceleration tertiary (it reduces to change in velocity). On the revised at-at theory, this isn't true. Acceleration isn't primitive, but neither does it reduce to velocity-facts or position-facts. It reduces to space-time trajectory facts and affine structure facts, those alone and those directly.

Second remark. In the olden days, the at-at theory offered an account of motion that was independent of the structure of space-time. You can do this if you have genuinely enduring places, points in space that are numerically the same from moment to moment. Then you can tell if an object is moving by looking purely that the numerical identity or distinctness of the points it occupies over time. When we switched to the four-dimensional picture, though, we had to appeal to space-time structures to make sense of motion. In Newtonian space, the structure exactly mirrors the endurance of points. In Neo-Newtonian space it's weaker than that. In either case, the mere occupancy relations doesn't tell you whether or not an object moves: it's the occupancy relations plus the cross-time spatial structure, the "links" between 1:00 points and 2:00 points.

Third remark. Some people took the simple at-at theory to be an account of the meaning of "move". Revised at-at, though, looks nothing like an account of the meaning of "move". And I can't see any plausible meaning account in its vicinity.

(One attempt: "to move is to have a non-inertial space-time trajectory." But that doesn't capture merely relative motions. So should we say "move" is ambiguous between relative and absolute motion, with totally different definitions for each? That doesn't sound like plausible semantics to me.)

Worth considering

2007-02-19T17:02:00.000-05:00

some sobering food for thought from my daily blog consumption.
also this.

Naked

2007-02-16T15:42:00.000-05:00

it has come to my attention that more strangers have been stopping by my blog. at first i thought this was cool. upon further reflection, it's a little creepy. well, let's revise that: i'm not too worried about strangers coming by. everything i've written was meant to be fit for public consumption, and i think i've had a decent sense all along of the Weight of Internet.

no, what really freaks me out is the thought of my professors and (eventually) colleagues venturing into these half-thoughts. and i have reason to suspect that this may actually be happening. the weight of this was not something i had really accounted for back in my early blogging days. (they'll see i don't capitalize!)

so i've been a lot shyer, lately. i still like blogging. i like airing my half-thoughts a bit, and sharing and discussing things with you, my friends. but i feel more exposed and conflicted, due to this new secondary audience. it is time some things be removed from the public eye. anyway, just thought i'd let you know. we'll be feeling things out as we go.

The beginning and the end

2007-01-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a combination of views that I think a lot of people like me (college-educated Christians from evangelical churches) hold more or less unreflectively:

Young-earth creationism is silly. The scientific evidence (biology, geology, cosmology) overwhelmingly suggests that the earth is four or five billion years old, the universe began in a Big Bang about thirteen billion years ago, etc., etc.

Some kind of broadly millenial eschatology is sensible. The universe will not end in a gradual cold death, wiping out all possibility of life as the energy density goes to zero (as suggested by the current observations of the amount of matter in the universe, as far as I know), or for that matter in a heat death where the universe collapses again toward a singularity. Rather, God will redeem the world, restoring the universe to a state of perfect justice when Christ returns, and so on. Alternatively, God will destroy the universe and replace it with a good one (somehow managing to get people from this one to the other one—don't ask me).

That's kind of a weird combination. At any rate, there's an asymmetry. Physics tells us how the universe began, but not how it will end. That is, it's silly to think that the beginning of the universe would be different from what it looks like it was---that the past would be discontinuous with what we observe. And yet it's sensible to think that the end of the universe will be different from what it looks like it will be: again, discontinuous with what we observe.

Maybe this asymmetry is okay. After all, it really does feel like our pastward and futureward extrapolations are based on different kinds of evidence. But I don't really know what to say.

(Or maybe Christians who take both eschatology and science seriously need to believe the energy density of the universe will stay delicately balanced forever? Or maybe they should believe the final return and resurrection is in an important way non-physical? Anyone?)

In honor of round numbers

2007-01-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

this is my one hundredth post.

On miracles

2006-12-03T23:08:00.000-05:00

Just a quick sketch of an argument against thinking of miracles as violations of laws of nature. I doubt it's very original (In fact, I know it isn't, because Geoff Anders was talking about something like this a while back), and I'm sure it's fairly naÃ¯ve. But anyhow, into the breach.

First, I'm concerned with official laws of nature, rather than statistical laws. Official laws say what happens, categorically: all ravens are black; momentum is conserved; the evolution of the quantum wave-function obeys such-and-such a differential equation—that kind of thing.

(Statistical laws, on the other hand, say that certain things are more likely than others to occur, in whatever sense of "likely" is appropriate here. It's hard to say what precisely constitutes a "violation" of a statistical law, but at least on some readings miracles certainly do violate some statistical laws, simply by virtue of being unusual events. But the unusual, in various degrees, is really pretty commonplace.)

Second, i'm concerned with macroscopic miracles: events at the scale of people and everyday objects. Lazarus is raised from the dead, Moses parts the Red Sea, that kind of thing. Maybe there are miracles that occur on the Planck scale, which are only detectable with sensitive instruments; but these aren't the sort of miracles that make a difference to most religions.

Then the main argument is just this: on our best accounts, the official laws of nature don't rule out any macroscopic events to speak of. (This, by the way, is also a problem for "falsifiability" accounts of scientific theories---in case that coffin needed any more nails.)

For illustration, imagine that the official laws are Newtonian mechanics. People die, sometimes; this is one of the events that is consistent with the laws (I presume). Well, it's a fact about Newtonian mechanics that if an event is consistent with it, the time-reversal of that event is consistent too. So run the death backwards, and---presto!---Lazarus rises from the dead. (Statistical laws broken? Hell yeah (in some suitable sense of "broken"). But that, remember, is none of our concern.)

The kinds of observations we ordinarily make of the world aren't nearly fine-toothed enough to distinguish states of affairs in which (according to the dynamics) run-of-the-mill events are about to occur, from states of affairs in which (still according to the dynamics) great marvels are about to occur. And so miraculous events are never physically impossible, conditionalized on our knowledge of the physical state of the world. And, I claim, this situation isn't peculiar to Newtonian mechanics. It ought to be a feature of any good candidate for the official laws (have to think more about why this would be true).

(When quantum physics enters the picture, the story is even more fun. My grip on the quantum world is loose, but as I understand the folk tales, anything is possible.)

So if macroscopic events can count as miracles (as I assume they can), then miracles aren't violations of the official laws of nature.

Happiness

2006-11-20T18:25:00.000-05:00

...is a good webcomic. very busy these days, but never too busy to spread a little joy and delight. that's right, to you!

(xkcd. credit for joy-and-delight-spreading belongs to rob.)

(dinosaur comics remains my joy and consolation.)

Reading Romans

2006-11-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

[I've been having a discussion over at Drinking Deeply about Total Depravity, which has become a discussion of Romans interpretation. This (long) post is an installment in that discussion. If you're interested, I suggest you pick up the thread from the beginning.]

I think I was unclear and/or mistaken on a lot of important points in my last comment. This is an attempt to repair that.

(One specific point of unclarity: I made it sound as if there was no difference at all between the believer and anybody else; clearly that's not what Paul is saying.)

The goal here is to outline a reading of Romans 7.7-8.11 that coheres with its context. I'm making up a lot of this as I go, but my reading is definitely heavily influenced by this paper by N.T. Wright, which I read a while back. Unsurprisingly, I'm unconfident in a lot of what I'm saying. Correction and criticism is (as always) much appreciated.

***

First, the big picture. The passage in question is continuous with the discussion of sin, the law (i.e. Torah), and grace starting at the end of ch. 5. In fact, I think the last two verses of chapter 5 are a good summary of the argument that runs up to the middle of chapter 8:

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (5.20-21)

Before that, Paul summarizes his argument up to that point: "death spread to all men because all sinned" (5.12); but "while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (5.6), reconciling us to God through the justification of faith. In chapter 6, then, he takes up the implications this has for our relationship to the law, sin, and grace. Here is Paul's main imperative, which governs the whole discussion in 6.1-8.11:

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (6.12-14)

He argues that the grace of God releases us from the law and from sin in one stroke: it is because we are no longer under the law that "sin will have no dominion over" us. And it is because we are free from sin that we are free from death--"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (6.23).

Paul then goes on to explain this reasoning in ch. 7 and 8: why is it that being no longer under the law makes us free from sin?

***

For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit. (7.5-6)

We were "in the flesh", captive to sin, which produced death in us (6.21). This sin was "aroused by the law"--so when we were released from the law, we were free of what held us captive.

This is confusing---is the law sin? "By no means!" (7.7) Then in 7.7-8.11 (finally we reach our original question), Paul talks about what the law is.

"Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin" (7.7) and so "when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died" (7.9). Because of the law, I am seized on by guilt where before there was none; sin which was dormant in me springs to action. The law pokes the hornet's nest in my soul.

Why does the law (which is good) do this? "...In order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure" (7.13). What was invisible and at peace becomes a visible battleground. And so the law brings about a split in the person, a state of war where originally sin had untroubled dominion. This is the split that Paul describes in 7.14-20:

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (7.14-17)

I recognize sin whereas before I did not, and in recognizing it I also recognize the Good. And so the same stroke that makes me a captive, in a sense makes me free: "it is no longer I who do it"--but what a terrible sense! I am demolished, disintegrated.

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. (7.18-19)

And just as I am disintegrated, the law itself is split: "For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members" (7.22-23). And there's the rub: the war that the law begins the law cannot win, for when it enters me even the law itself becomes fleshly. And so I am a captive under the law, captive to sin, captive of my own flesh.

"Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (7.24-25)

***

But! in the hour of despair, the trumpet is sounded:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. (8.1-3)

The law at work in me was weakened by my own nature, and so became a law of sin and death, driving me to despair. But "the law of the Spirit of life" has set me free from this:

By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (8.3-4)

This sums up again the argument that has been made earlier in Romans. God sent his son to die for the ungodly, and as we share in his death we are liberated from our own flesh: our flesh dies with Christ. We "died to that which held us captive"--the law of the flesh, the law of sin (7.6). And so we no longer walk "according to the flesh", but are now free to walk "according to the Spirit", living by the law which is not "the old written code" but which is "the new life of the Spirit" (7.6).

And here Paul describes two ways of life, set in dramatic contrast: "those who live according to the flesh", and "those who live according to the Spirit". This parallels the split described in chapter 7, and the implication is: which side will you take in the war over your soul? This brings the discussion back home to the question raised back in 6.15: "What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?" Only now the answer should be obvious. We were captives of the flesh, and were set free by God's grace. Would we then keep our minds "set on the flesh", "hostile to God", unable to please him--just as we were under the law, only fighting on the side of death? "By no means!"

But Paul doesn't use question marks here. Paul echoes what he said before in the imperative mood, this time in the indicative mood. The command---"Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions" (6.12)---becomes a declaration: "You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you" (8.9)." But this declaration is also a prediction--for in fact, we are still in the flesh, "this body of death" (7.24).

But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. (8.10-11)

The victory is completed at the final resurrection, when "The body that ... is sown in dishonor ... is raised in glory" (1 Cor. 15.43). This future victory is sealed in the present: "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (8.16).

The war is won: the war will be won.

***

I hope that the above offers a compelling way of reading Romans 6-8, which hangs together coherently and makes sense of some confusing passages. (If you don't think so, I want to know.) Now I want to bring this back to the original question. What does any of this have to say about the question of Total Depravity?

Well, the passage certainly has a lot to say about sin. It is made abundantly clear that sin affects everybody (Universal Depravity), but that God's people are set free from sin. Okay, we agreed on that much already. What about the extent of sin?

Clearly it runs deep. Romans 7.13-24 shows that we are so far under the dominion of sin that it is not nearly enough for us simply to know what is good. This is in contrast with the Greek thinkers: Plato diagnosed the human predicament as a problem of ignorance. Paul says, no! even when I see that the law is good, it is still beyond my power to do what it commands.

(Paul echoes Plato on a lot of points in this passage, putting the conflict in terms of "mind" and "flesh"---but he parts ways with him on crucial points. The solution to the predicament is not merely to liberate the soul from the body, as Plato thought; but rather the Spirit will "give life to your mortal bodies" (8.11). But I digress.)

I think the case is strong for a version of Total Depravity: that every human faculty is affected by sin---or more evocatively, mxu's "Radical Depravity": the problem of sin goes right to the root, right to the very core of our being. Sin is not merely a question of flawed knowledge or flawed desires. "For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out" (7.18).

But what about "Total Total Depravity": that every human aspect is entirely sinful, that there is nothing good at all in humanity? I don't think this passage decides that question one way or the other. We see that sin thwarts every effort toward the Good. But I see no evidence that Paul in fact thinks there is nothing good whatsoever in the person so thwarted. Or again, "the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot"---but I see no evidence that (even if Paul really thinks that describes a particular set of people) Paul thinks that there is nothing good, nothing of value in such people whatsoever. He describes the state in extreme terms---for of course it is bad! very bad! to be so enslaved to the passions, so set against God. But I still see no case here for TTD.

(And if we look elsewhere, I think there's a good case to be made against TTD. But there's enough on the table as it is.)

Yay dinosaur comics

2006-11-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

this comic is my latest obsession.

A week of miracles

2006-11-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

on monday our apartment finally got the internet

and heat

and dwight came today to fix the leaky tub

and we cleaned house.

it feels big now.

for halloween, the philosophers all dressed up. the first years were the coolest.
angela was a lunchlady.

josh was a seventies guy.

jenn was the ship of theseus.

i was the present king of france.

i had a crown, but i lost it during the party.

(other people were also very cool, but i don't have good pictures handy.)

i proved another small gunk theorem the other night.

i just learned of a game which i have an insatiable desire to play with some of you. it's called "1000 blank white cards."

i'm pretty sure i'm getting better at basketball, little by little.

i've started my proseminar paper days in advance.

discount post-halloween candy!

On church, again

2006-10-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.... The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God and himself accordingly.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

oof. ok, rev. bonhoeffer, you win this time. seriously, that just demolished me.

(hat tip to mickey)

On distance

2006-10-28T13:53:00.000-04:00

i've heard it said that distance reduces a relationship to the essentials. that is totally a lie. what distance really does is reduce a relationship to words.

i miss you people.

Get the story

2006-10-20T21:19:00.000-04:00

tragedy! i twisted my ankle (slightly) playing basketball today. verdict is i need new shoes. alas: shoes are expensive, and i am cheap. seriously, this is going to wipe out my entire clothing budget for the year, and eat into entertainment, too.

comedy! halloween is coming, and there's gonna be a philosophy costume party. and i need to come up with a costume. if you have any suggestions, do tell.

epic! the mereology conference last weekend was much fun. i ended up utterly disregarding my classwork and going to all the talks. and i even got to eat lunch at the grown-ups' table!

romance! since the conference, i've been working on a new project that requires me to do math! lovely topology and measure theory sorts of things! i am reunited at last with my old amour.

More thoughts on church

2006-10-08T17:03:00.000-04:00

maybe i'm just being hard to please.

first off, turns out i totally misdiagnosed christ community church (where i went three weeks ago). in reality, the leadership is a good bit reformeder than me (which, granted, isn't saying that much). and, as if to drive the point home, today's sermon was a nice yay-luther-boo-catholics session on justification by faith. sigh.

(ok, i should be fair. it wasn't exactly "boo catholics"--certainly much, much more charitable than some i've heard. the pastor didn't question their salvation or nonsense like that. he mentioned that he had a smart catholic friend read over the sermon before he gave it, which was definitely a good move. he was really trying hard to play fair, and he deserves credit for it.

but when he tried to make clear contrasts between protestant and catholic doctrine, i think he maybe tried too hard--because his catholic version sounded so obviously more correct! more biblical. honestly, a lot of what protestants say about justification make god sound just silly and arbitrary. he also (like most everyone on this topic) slippery-sloped wantonly--you know, "doctrine X can lead to error Y; (therefore X is false)". i got news: the truth is always on a razor's edge in a sea of error. if i may mix weird metaphors.

it is true, by the way, that catholics say some stuff about "merits" that sounds pretty weird to me. but i suspect i may just be misunderstanding some medievalese, because the conclusions they draw from the logic of merits sound perfectly sensible ("Man's merit...is due to God", Catechism par. 2008).)

but i digress. point is, i seem to find myself somehow landed with a mess of views (how did this happen? i always thought i was mister know-nothing ecumenical!) that are gonna knock any church i set foot into out of the running. between views and church, which shall give way? the views, of course. how they give way remains to be seen.

Emotion

2006-10-07T19:25:00.000-04:00

once in a while, i feel homesick.

Talk about the weather

2006-10-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

tonight we have a glorious thunderstorm that started in the middle of my class at princeton, and the building lost power, so we canceled class and went to a bar instead. and now i'm at home listening to the rain and thunder, and it's wonderful.

A tribute to Mickey

2006-09-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

Alice is building skyscrapers at Infinity City. Bob is a science fiction monster who is toppling skyscrapers. Alice is twice as industrious as Bob. So here's what happens: Alice builds two skyscrapers. Then Bob destroys one. Alice builds two more. Then Bob destroys another. This goes on forever. At the end of forever, what is left standing?

(If you don't like the idea of "the end of forever", imagine that Alice and Bob are also getting faster and faster with each step. The first step takes a half hour, the second a quarter hour, the third an eighth of an hour... so reaching "the end of forever" just takes an hour.)

The surprising answer is that the order matters: you get different answers depending on how Bob decides which skyscraper to violently unmake next.

Say the skyscrapers that Alice builds are numbered 1, 2, 3, ...

Now say after Alice builds 1 and 2, Bob destroys building number 1. Then she builds 3 and 4, and Bob destroys number 3. Bob goes on destroying number 5, 7, 9, .... At the end of forever, all of the odd-numbered buildings are gone, and the even-numbered ones are still around. So Infinity City has infinitely many skyscrapers.

But if Bob instead destroys number 1, and then number 2, and then number 3, and so on, then at the end of forever there are no skyscrapers left at all, because every one of them is reduced to rubble.

Now here's the problem: what happens if Bob chooses the next skyscraper randomly? That is, at each step there are a finite number of buildings still standing, and Bob picks a building to destroy from a uniform distribution over all of them. When this process goes on forever, I claim (and this is cool) that the probability of any building staying upright goes to zero. Prove it.

Vast and spacious

2006-09-24T22:04:00.000-04:00

i spent most of today in the american museum of natural history, up in new york city. this was the first of what i hope will be many museum pilgrimages (the other two of my big three are the met and moma). i was there for close to five hours, and i only explored a little corner of it--never made it anywhere close to the dinosaurs. my favorite part was the Hall of the Ocean, standing before dioramas of angler fish and tubeworms by deep sea vents, and giant kelp forests, and the sperm whale wrestling the giant squid, and i gasped like a little kid and my mouth hung open, and it all moved me powerfully (i'm quite serious here) to worship god in my heart--as the psalm says,

How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there...

May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works.

(similarly, it made me think a lot about conservation and global warming and stuff (i saw an inconvenient truth last week, which you probably oughta go see), and to pray for the preservation of the earth. that was all part of it.)

the Hall of Biodiversity was like that too, and the Hall of the Universe--galaxies colliding and comets swirling around the sun--so numinous, you know?

and then i came back and went to church, and i got all grumpy again. sigh.

It's a small world

2006-09-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

turns out my best friend from high school (who i haven't seen in like three years) is at princeton theological seminary, a mere half hour's journey hence. how cool is that?

This week in Jeff

2006-09-17T15:10:00.000-04:00

thursday was the best day ever.

i went to a couple good classes and all, but that has nothing to do with it.

then there was the colloquium (every thursday a visiting scholar gives a talk to the department, and then we all hang around for wine and pretty decent food). During the Q&A I worked up the nerve to raise an objection to the speaker's argument--and lo and behold, it was not a stupid thing to say! that was a small part of it.

then, during the after-colloquium schmoozing, richard (one of the other first-years) paid me what is among the best compliments i have ever received: he said, "you are articulate and wise." i mean, wow. articulate and wise. that was also a part of it.

later on, instead of working on my personal statement (yeah, those oughta be all gone, but on the department's behest i'm applying for an outside fellowship), i played scrabble with jenn and richard. and, lo and behold, i made the best play i have ever made. seriously. "unpolled" (unless it was "unpooled"--there was a blank)--using all seven of my tiles, and covering two triple word scores, for a total of (get this) 149 points. with one word! it was truly epic. that was a large part of it.

then, when i got home, i had, count 'em, six packages, and one of them was my bicycle, and one of them was the internet (which should be hooked up tomorrow). i also got a postcard, and a letter from my mommy. that was definitely part of it.

also, i did finish up a fairly respectable draft that night. and i gtalked for a while with one of my favorite people. so all in all, it was the best day ever. the end.

**

the bike, by the way, got me to another church today. (since sunday is my dedicated do-stuff-that-isn't-philosophy-(like-blogging) day, you'll likely be hearing a disproportionate amount about the churches i go to.) this is the church that the wassermans went to, and where dean goes (though i didn't see him there). it was kind of a revelatory experience for me.

first a little backstory. the last four years i've been going to a reformed (calvinist) church, and i've gotten used to frequently being the token non-calvinist. and a lot of my friends talk in angst-ridden tones of the man-centeredness and gracelessness and heedlessness of god's sovereignty out there in the wild and wooly heterodox arminian wasteland (if you're out of the theological know, that's most american churches). and i've generally been the guy who stands up for the frontiersman, and been sort of bemused at all the sweating calvinists.

well, i have to admit, i get it now. at this wonderful friendly bible fellowship church in piscataway (which reminded me a lot of my church back home) i listened to preaching on how "god just wants to be believed in" and how "what the gospel is all about" is the hard road of discipleship, god's insatiable requirements--and it all seemed awfully man-centered, and graceless, and maybe even heedless of god's sovereignty. and i've gotta tell you, it was frustrating.

really, the frustration didn't all stem from my internalized reformedness. part of it was the mostly separate gut response i have to a lot of aspects of american evangelicalism--the emphasis on a conversion event, the christianity-as-self-help theme, the cut-off-from-tradition worship that makes me think they're just making it all up--you know, that kind of thing.

it makes me recognize how fragmented my christian identity is, you know what i mean? i want a place with sensible religious epistemology, with a robust christ-centered and sacramental liturgy, with a loving, honest, humble, thriving community that studies the scriptures and serves the poor and the world, that cares about justice and peace and god's kingdom on earth, and knows its place in the ancient church universal. i mean seriously, why can't there be more of those around?

(by the way, though i come off pretty negative about today's church, i really do think i'll give it another try later. it wasn't a bad church, by any means.)

**

also of note: we had a party in our apartment last night. it was like, you know, a party. it was for richard's birthday, and lots of grad students from the philosophy and linguistics departments came, and there was mostly drinking and talking. we had both (a) a neighbor threaten to call the cops, and (b) somebody throw up in the living room. it was like a stereotype or something. really, though, it wasn't bad at all, quite fun actually, and people were pretty responsible and didn't trash the house or anything. (and we'll write a nice note to the neighbor today, and the vomit cleaned up nicely.) because we're so close to the department, it's a nice place to have people over. i have to say that, while i've nothing against talking and laughing with people, the department's idea of fun is a bit more alcohol-centric than i'd prefer--but we'll work on that. (in smaller groups, actually, people really do know how to have fun, as thursday's scrabble game attests.)

ok, that's about it for this week's installment.

That which is up

2006-09-10T19:59:00.000-04:00

for those out of the loop--

i'm in new jersey now.

on the down side, the apartment was a wreck when we arrived.

on the up side, my housemates are fantastic. we were cleaning-painting-moving troopers, and we have filled this apartment and subdued it.

it's been a crazy busy week, between that and sundry. lots of administrivia--computers didn't acknowledge my existence till friday--and since i'm indecisive i've been going to all of the classes. i'm only just getting going with the reading. but it's been quite a good kind of busy. lots of the time has been filled with rambling nerdy conversations of the best kind, other bits of it with reading interesting books, and still others with the comforting trivialities of grocery stores and washing dishes and sorting books and such. since i went for a run with jenn yesterday, and went to church today, my life is starting to feel more real and balanced. main deficits right now are a bed, a bicycle, and the internet. other than that, my cup pretty well runneth over.

i was an episcopalian today, which was really nice. i love the rhythm of the liturgy, and the eucharist felt celebratory, you know?, a kind of reverent triumph. something seems right about a service rising to its climax at the communion sacrament. and we ended with one of my favorite hymns:

God of grace and God of glory,
on your people pour your pow'r;
crown your ancient church's story;
bring its bud to glorious flow'r.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the facing of this hour.

Lo! The hosts of evil 'round us
scorn the Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the living of these days.

Cure your children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore.

i don't know if i can see making this church my home, but it was very good to be there today.

Our dearly departed

2006-08-19T03:28:00.000-04:00

i hate goodbyes.

but i guess sometimes a sort of goodbye can be kind of good. a very strange kind of good--"sweet sorrow", you know--a dismantling kind of tragedy that opens people, slightly, and exposes unusual glimpses. the hidden cables that tether me to you become briefly, unsettlingly visible. it's terrifying--like a kiss is terrifying.

tonight was a good kind of goodbye. gathering, food, legos, music, laughter, and circulating conversations, mostly like a hundred other conversations--except occasionally the cables are exposed. and, as much as i try to flee those moments, and as much as i hate a clichÃ©--they mean a lot. thank you.

still, i do hate goodbyes.

Interesting fact

2006-08-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

apparently my blog is the number one hit for the google query "Famous Losers named Jennifer". i know this because statcounter saw somebody came in that way. i'm not sure how i ended up winning that relevance contest--i don't think i've mentioned any losers named jennifer.

On friendship, and passing

2006-08-14T20:06:00.000-04:00

God bless St. Augustine.

There were other things which occupied my mind in the company of my friends: to make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity--just as a person debates with himself--and in the very rarity of disagreement to find the salt of normal harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved and are expressed through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand gestures of delight, acting as fuel to set our minds on fire and out of many to forge unity.

This is what we love in friends....

'O God of hosts, turn to us and show us your face, and we shall be safe.' For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things external to you and external to itself, which could nevertheless be nothing if they did not have their being from you. Things rise and set: in their emerging they begin as it were to be, and grow to perfection; having reached perfection, they grow old and die. Not everything grows old, but everything dies. So when things rise and emerge into existence, the faster they grow to be, the quicker they rush towards non-being. That is the law limiting their being. So much have you given them, namely to be parts of things which do not all have their being at the same moment, but by passing away and by successiveness, they all form the whole of which they are parts. That is the way our speech is constructed by sounds which are significant. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded its constituent parts, so that it can be succeeded by another.

Let these transient things be the ground on which my soul praises you, God creator of all.... But in these things there is no point of rest: they lack permanence. They flee away and cannot be followed with the bodily senses. No one can fully grasp them even while they are present.

St. Augustine, Confessions IV.viii-x

Trinity: Episode IV

2006-08-03T19:12:00.000-04:00

If you who haven't been following the comments, you're missing out. In particular, Dale Tuggy paid me the high compliment of linking here from his blog, trinities--a discussion of the same subject, with one exciting difference: Dale knows what he's talking about. Seriously, check it out.

Okay, let's recap. In my last post, I set up the inconsistent tetrad. For easier reference, I'm going to give the claims more mnemonic names:

(GW) Only God is worship-worthy.
(GH) God is not human.
(JH) Jesus is human.
(JW) Jesus is worship-worthy.

Let me quickly recant on one point. I spoke in a couple places as if orthodoxy would constrain us to explanations in which Jesus is identically God. On reflection, I think that probably can't be right, for the reasons in my first post on the subject. If orthodoxy really says "Jesus = God", then orthodoxy is confused. More likely, orthodoxy doesn't really say that--if indeed there is something out there called "orthodoxy" which is saying non-trivial things on the subject.

There's more to be said about the two parthood theories, but I don't get the sense that any of us really likes them that much. If somebody wants to go to bat for one of them or propose a refinement, then by all means.

**

Okay, so. Dale proposes a bold and clean solution to the difficulty: deny GW. But we want to do this in a way that preserves the sense of the first commandment. And there's a pretty neat way to do this.

Key word: context. If I say, "There's only beer in the fridge", I don't mean that beer is strictly the only thing in the fridge--there's air, after all, and beer bottles. The point of my statement is to rule out particular sorts of alternative things you might otherwise think were in the fridge--like cheese, or peanut butter.

Now when scripture says things like "Only worship God", the point is to rule out particular sorts of alternative things you might otherwise worship--other gods. Don't worship Baal. Don't worship Ashoreth. Don't worship Ra. But should you worship Jesus? He isn't one of the Ancient Near East deities, so no problem.

Of course, Dale isn't an ANE deity either. Doesn't mean we get to worship him (though after that argument against Son-modalism, we may be tempted). The doctrine about worship runs a little deeper than that, and we're gonna need to flesh it out.

After a quick perusal through BibleGateway, it looks to me like there are three main categories of things you shouldn't worship.

Other gods
Idols
Astronomical bodies

The first two arguably belong in the same category (the prophets like to talk about "gods of wood and stone"). Maybe the third one belongs in that category too (sun- and moon-gods). But we may want to extend those categories to include earthlier things. Read through Deuteronomy 4.15-20. Does this forbid worshiping animals? Or men and women? It doesn't say, precisely--maybe because that's not the sort of thing people would have thought to do--but my definite sense is that animal-worship is not okay. Any dissenters out there?

If I'm right, then even granting that GW is weakened by context, we still have a problem. Because as I'm reading the text, the weaker version of GW still entails

(HW) Humans are not worship-worthy.

Same dilemma. I admit, though, that HW rings a fair bit hollower than GW, in the light of the New Testament. But if that generalization isn't true, then what is the rule that prohibits us from worshiping Dale? (Or John from worshiping the angel in Revelation 19?)

If Dale's solution does work for worship-worthiness, it still doesn't answer the parallel problems for the other attributes I allege could fill that slot in the argument. But it does present a strategy for answering them. Is God really the numerically unique entity that can forgive sins? Is God really the numerically unique judge of the world, the numerically unique ruler of creation, the numerically unique source of life? Maybe not. (Or maybe Jesus really isn't some of these things.)

Does this make polytheists of us all? I'm not sure how far I'm willing to take the idea that "monotheism is a verbal issue". If Bert thinks that there's more than one all-powerful, all-wise ruler of creation deserving of praise--or at any rate something like that--then I don't think Bert's a monotheist no matter how you cut it. Surely the proclamation that "the LORD is God, there is no other" means more than the trivial claim that "Only the LORD is the LORD"--i.e. anything identical to the LORD is identical to the LORD. I'm not sure exactly how much uniqueness we can give up before we can no longer say truly and non-trivially, "I believe in one god"--but there is a limit, and seems to me worship-worthiness at least runs pretty close to it.

Further Adventures of the Trinity

2006-07-23T18:42:00.000-04:00

By popular demand.

As promised, I want to keep working through some of the trinity questions from a few months ago (has it really been that long?). But first, in response to the comments on my last post on the subject, I want to make a brief note on method.

As I try to work this stuff out, I am making some ludicrously unorthodox statements. This is not because I am inclined to disregard the pronouncements of a hundred generations of thinking Christians. It's because I don't understand what the orthodox formulas are saying. So I'm starting from claims that are probably wrong, but which I (and I hope you) understand. I know how to evaluate claims like that. And by evaluating claims like that, I hope to use them as stepping stones to other claims that I understand, which are closer to the truth. Hopefully the rest of you also find this kind of project worthwhile.

**

That said, I want to try a new angle on things. I started by putting out some trinitarian claims without touching the question of why anybody in their right mind would believe anything like them. I want to reground the discussion: where do these wild claims come from?

For starters, they come from Jewish monotheism. In contrast with other ancient near eastern tribes, who have separate deities for handling the weather and politics and stuff, the Hebrews only worship one god, the LORD (the traditional English rendering of his name). According to Genesis 1, the LORD governs light, darkness, sky, earth, sea, life, sex, food--he's considerably cooler than the average deity.

But is the LORD the only god? The Hebrew scriptures are actually kind of equivocal on that point. On the one hand, the LORD is contrasted with other gods in a way that seems to presuppose their existence. On the other, though, those contrasts are so complete as to lead to claims like "the LORD is God; besides him there is no other" (Deuteronomy 4). What is unequivocal is that the LORD is unique in a lot of important respects. Only the LORD is properly to be worshiped. Only the LORD is the creator. Only the LORD is the all-powerful, all-wise judge of the world.

So as Eric was suggesting, how many gods there are may really be just a verbal matter. If gods are those things that the nations worship, then there are lots of gods. If gods are all-powerful rulers of creation deserving of praise, then there's only one. In light of this, I'm going to drop talk about counting "divine entities"; we can arrive at basically the same place by replacing "divine" with less ambiguous uniquely-held attributes. For the sake of discussion, I'll single one of these attributes out:

(1) Only God (the LORD) is worship-worthy.

Another thing: God is holy. He is utterly different, other, apart: he is not "in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" (Exodus 20). He is not an idol, not a beast, not a human. We'll fix on this particular bit of otherness:

(2) God is not human.

So far, so good. Now fast forward to the first century. Along comes this guy Jesus, who in most ways is a good Jew--except he keeps claiming to have attributes that a good Jew would know belong only to the LORD. Like being able to forgive sins. Being "lord even of the sabbath". Judging the world. Having power over the wind and waves. People even worship him, and he treats this as if it were appropriate--despite his apparently holding the fully orthodox view that only the LORD is to be worshiped. What's more, he proceeds to back up these absurd claims, in whatever ways they're open to some kind of empirical scrutiny (c.f. Mark 2.1-12, 4.35-41)--the climactic evidence being his resurrection. What in the world do we make of this? Here are the problematic claims:

(3) Jesus is human.
(4) Jesus is worship-worthy.

So you see the problem. To keep with tradition, I'll spell it out. The Christian, on the face of it, has good reasons to believe propositions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Propositions 2 and 3 taken together logically imply that Jesus is not God (this follows from indiscernibility of identicals). But 1 and 4 taken together imply that Jesus is God (this follows from the standard semantics of "only"). This is the dilemma. One side or the other has to give--or else we have to fundamentally rethink the standard logic.

This is a formulation of the problem that I'm finally happy with.

(I should emphasize that there's nothing very special about the choice of "human" or "worship-worthy" here--lots of other attributes could play the same role. I'm hoping that the way we treat these choices will generalize to the others--but I could turn out to be wrong about that.)

**

Now we can start to think about how to resolve this dilemma. In this post I'm going to consider a simple version of Eric's proposal. It goes like this: God is complex. That is to say, God has parts. Among them is a human part, Jesus. So far, this doesn't help to resolve the dilemma. But the important step is to relax claim 1, to this:

(1') Only God or any of his parts is worship-worthy.

There's something intuitive about this move: when Bert says, "I only eat vegetables", that doesn't mean he doesn't eat parts of vegetables (that would be very awkward). A lover isn't unfaithful if he praises his beloved's eyes or smile.

First thing to note about this solution, though, is it's pretty unorthodox. For one thing, on this account it's clear that Jesus is not God, any more than an arm is a person (though it might still be fair to say that Jesus is "divine", since he's part of God).

It also seems to make God dependent on Jesus, instead of the other way around. In medieval terms, "the part is prior to the whole": a lego spaceship is dependent on the legos that make it up in a way that the legos are not dependent on the spaceship. If Jesus is part of God, then God would seem to depend on Jesus the same way. This is one basis for the traditional doctrine that God has no parts. It's a very clean argument: if a thing depends on its parts, and God doesn't depend on anything, then God has no parts (Geoff Anders introduced me to this argument, from Thomas Aquinas, I think).

One further observation: if we allow a composite God like this, which can have a whole human being as a part, then it becomes even hazier what the difference is between this and good old-fashioned polytheism. The polytheist could say, "I also believe in 'one God', one worship-worthy entity: the pantheon. Each of its parts--that is, each god--is also worship-worthy. And nothing other than the pantheon and its parts is worship-worthy." This isn't exactly a knock-down argument against the theory of divine parts, but I think it does make it look less appealing.

While we're on the subject, here's a complementary solution: Jesus has parts. Among those parts is a divine part, God. Then, to resolve the dilemma, we can take a couple of different routes. One route is to relax proposition 1 a different way:

(1'') Only God or anything which includes God as a part is worship-worthy.

This seem wrong, though, because God is a part of lots of things: for instance, God is a part of God-and-this-sofa, but worshiping this weird hybrid object seems pretty clearly against the first commandment.

The other route is to relax proposition 4:

(4') Part of Jesus (the divine part) is worship-worthy.

So far I can't find anything illogical about this move, but it does give a rather different picture from the orthodox one--the formula in the Chalcedonian creed is that Jesus is "truly God and truly man", sometimes glossed "fully God and fully man". Besides that, though, this move just seems unsatisfying, though I can't put my finger on the problem yet.

Thoughts?

"Science and Religion"

2006-07-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

i have a real post coming, with lots of philosophical theology goodness to satisfy the masses. in the meantime, though, enjoy this tidbit from g.k. chesterton's biography of st. thomas aquinas:

For instance, in the matter of the interpretation of Scripture, [Aquinas] fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

A familiar theme

2006-06-14T00:37:00.000-04:00

there's a melancholy satisfaction to packing. my scattered messy life is folded and stacked neatly in four or five boxes by the door. giving things away and throwing things away until it's all dependable bare surfaces and square corners. packing up, moving on. a familiar theme in these years' fugue; echoed with different dynamics, in new keys, and still that eerie hesitating staccato phrase.

Miscommunication

2006-06-01T00:27:00.000-04:00

so i lost my cell phone the other weekend. got it replaced tonight, so i'm all wired again (or, um, wireless, i mean). i have a minor rant stored up about telecommunications companies, but i'll spare you.

but here's my point. my old phone has dragged countless phone numbers along into the abyss. and this means i can't call you to tell you i love you or to offer you money. and this means that you should call me to celebrate my new phone. it's still the same number.

(ok, actually, before the cell phone came along i used to keep a paper phone book, and everyone in that is safe--thus proving some important lesson about technology or the evil of telecom or something like that. so if i had your phone number before i got my cell phone, i probably still have it. but if you're not sure, you'd better call me just in case. it'll be fun. we can talk about something interesting like time travel or the weather.)

in other news, i've recently learned how to build a paradoxical time-travel machine and why you don't put a wool blanket in the dryer. and i will be in new jersey all next week. that is all.

Stolen from facebook

2006-05-23T11:44:00.000-04:00

Scott:: And now over to Kent Brockman for some grim economic news.
Kent Brockman:: Scott, things aren't as happy as they used to be down here at the unemployment office. Joblessness is no longer just for Philosophy majors&mdash useful people are starting to feel the pinch.

Bulletins

2006-05-16T00:38:00.000-04:00

i don't think i've ever had so many mosquito bites. wow. thank god for benadryl, and roommates who have benadryl.

current reading. this guy spoke in menlo park last night, and i have to say, he's cool.

time flies. you don't even have to be having fun, though it probably doesn't hurt. (and fruit flies like a banana.)

and speaking of time, i now have a ticket to mayhem. fun fun fun.

[Edit] oh! i nearly forgot! i had a dream in french! it was pretty awesome. my french n'est pas tres bon, so i spent most of the dream trying to catch bits of what the other people were saying, and frantically working out how to respond--just like in real life. isn't that cool? maybe this means my subconscious is actually fluent.

Pensive

2006-05-09T00:48:00.000-04:00

i appreciate the discussion in the comments, and i'll get back to the theology on the table, really i will. just not yet.

i was feeling out of sorts today. minor jarrings, you know, that build up through the day until you're feeling all grumpy and you can't point to why. so i left work on the early side and came home to shoot a few aliens before dinner.

after dinner, dubs and tiger and i watched a pbs documentary on the london air raids of dec. 27, 1940. it was a very good documentary. i wept. which is what leaves me pensive, and a bit at a loss for words. i mean, say you're a firefighter in shoe lane holding a spray of water against a wall of precarious flame, for hours through the crackling night. and then watching that wall collapse on the man who relieves your shift. just say.

More trinity

2006-04-19T13:55:00.000-04:00

There's been some good comments on my last post. This is a continuation of that discussion.

In my original post, I treated "God" as a name, referring to a unique individual. The proposal on the table is that we treat "God" instead as a predicate (in the logical sense, not the grammatical sense): basically, "Jesus is God" does not mean "Jesus = God", but instead it means "Jesus is divine." It's a description, not an equation.

(This is not to say that "God" can't also function as a name; just that it isn't a name the way it's used in claim T1.)

On this reading, T1 could be paraphrased like this:

T1'.	(a) The Father is divine, (b) Jesus is divine, and (c) the H.S. is divine.

This is a sensible move, which smites both of my arguments in a single blow--because both of them treat "God" as referring to an individual. On this reading, the intermediate step "God is Jesus" (or "God is the Father", etc.) doesn't even mean anything--it's like saying "Human is Jeff".

So I agree that on this interpretation T1 and T2 are consistent. By T1, the Father, Jesus, and the H.S. are each divine. By T2, no two of these people (or "persons", if you prefer) are the same. So far so good.

But not so fast: the trinitarian also wants to make a third claim (which Eric was getting at):

T3.	There is exactly one God.

(This assumption was latent in my previous use of "God" as a name. But if "God" is a predicate, claim T3 needs to be made explicit.)

If we're using "God" in the same way as in T1, then we should be able to rephrase it:

T3'.	There is exactly one divine entity.

Now we have problems again. Let's give a name to that divine entity; say "Theo". Then we can conclude from T3':

P4.	If any entity is divine, then that entity is Theo.

And this "is" is identity--the equals sign. For any entity X, if X is divine, then X = Theo. But if I'm right so far, we can rewrite my first argument from before:

1.	The Father is divine	T1'(a)
2.	The Father = Theo	By P4
3.	Jesus is divine	T1'(b)
4.	Jesus = Theo	By P4
5.	Jesus = the Father	Identity is transitive and symmetric

We can also redo the second argument from before, provided that there are properties we can ascribe to Theo (like being a trinity) that don't apply to Jesus (or to one of the other two, for that matter).

So where might these arguments have gone wrong? What are our options?

We can deny T3: There are, in fact, three or more Gods.
We can deny that T3' is a good paraphrase of T3. There is only one God, but there are, in fact, three divine entities. In this case we need to tell a good story about what T3 really means.
We can deny that P4 follows from T3'. That is, we can deny the interpretation I gave to "There is exactly one". In this case we need to tell a good story about what "There is exactly one" really means here.
As with the original arguments, we can deny the transitive or symmetric properties of identity.
Or we can give up on T1 or T2, and either (a) become unitarians or (b) start over with our description of the trinity.

Now, options 2 or 3 seem feasible within the context of orthodox Christianity. Not easy, but feasible. Then again, nobody ever tried to say the trinity was easy.

Discuss.

[Footnote. Rebecca brought up an interesting point about Peter Geach's idea of "relative identity", which she represents as denying that identity is transitive. Here's my general position on that kind of move.

"Identity" is an abstract relation that philosophers and mathematicians introduced for speaking about things technically. As such, its defining properties are conventional. Now, you can say, "But wait! The conventions are bad! Here's a more useful set of conventions." There can be a lot of merit to an argument like that, but I don't think it's the best way of putting the point. Thing is, the conventions are very, very entrenched, and changing them is like trying to get people to use the "+" symbol to mean division--confusing.

That doesn't mean Geach's points are a waste of time, though: what is up for grabs is the semantics of non-technical ordinary language expressions like "Bush is the president", or "That is a good argument." There may be good reasons to think that the meanings of these sentences don't satisfy the formal conditions we conventionally put on identity. Now, one way to put that kind of complaint is to say something like "identity isn't transitive"; I would much rather say, "we don't actually mean identity (though we may mean something similar)".

(In fact, I haven't actually read Geach, but I think this is basically what he says; though he also adds the stronger claim that in fact we couldn't mean (absolute) identity, because its conventional properties aren't even coherent.)]

[PPS. I just found out that Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe were married! Crazy.]

Two trinity problems

2006-04-17T16:24:00.000-04:00

There's been some discussion of the trinity over at Mickey's place, among other places. My profound ignorance on the subject doesn't stop me from being interested. Or from making a few (probably ill-conceived) comments.

Up front: I'm a little leery of this whole "trinity" thing.

1.

Let's start with two claims:

T1.	(a) The Father is God. (b) Jesus is God. (c) The Holy Spirit is God.
T2.	Jesus is not the Father, and similarly for every other pair.

I'm pretty sure this is a bad start. At least, if we can replace the "is" with "=" (denoting the relation that philosophers call "identity"), then we get a clear contradiction. It goes like this:

1.	The Father = God	From T1(a)
2.	God = the Father	Identity is symmetric.
3.	Jesus = God	From T1(b)
4.	Jesus = the Father	Identity is transitive.

But step 4 contradicts T2. Oh no!

So you have three options:

You can say we goofed on the properties of identity: either symmetry or transitivity breaks down.
You can say that in claims T1 and T2, "is" does not mean "=".
You can give up and say, yep, it's contradictory: T1 or T2 is false.

I'm probably gonna have to go with 2 or 3, myself. If you go with 2 then you're gonna have to (Clintonianly) resolve what the meaning of 'is' is. If you go with 3, then you have to either (a) become a unitarian, or (b) start over with your description of the trinity.

2.

Here's a separate problem with T1. If we gloss "Jesus is God" as "Jesus = God", then arguments like this one would be valid:

God does not change.
Since Jesus = God, Jesus does not change.
Dying and rising from the dead are changes.
Therefore Jesus did not die or rise from the dead.

(If you don't like premise 1 (or premise 3), you can redo the argument with some other property of God that you think is true. God doesn't have a body; but Jesus has a body. God "never sleeps nor slumbers", but Jesus slept. God is a trinity, but Jesus is not a trinity.)

This is kind of a ridiculous argument. But all it really uses is the fact that if X=Y then any property of X is a property of Y (philosophers call this "indiscernibility of identicals"). If X and Y are the same, then they aren't different.

But Jesus does not have all of the properties that God has. Either I'm wrong about that, or indiscernibility of identicals is false, or else Jesus = God is false. I'm afraid my vote is probably going to have to go to the last option.

So if "Jesus is God" is a true statement, it means something different from "Jesus = God". (What does it mean, then? Ummm, still working on that.) But even if the statement is true in some other sense, it's one we should be very careful with, to keep from inadvertently making bad arguments like the one that proves Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

That's as far as I've got. Thoughts?

(By the way, Shieva (whose blog I linked to at the top of this post) is a soon-to-be-fellow-student at Rutgers. Which is to say, she's already a student there, but not yet a fellow student, because I'm not yet a student. Is there a better way of saying what she is to me?)

(Also by the way, I'm sure neither of these arguments are remotely original, so please don't give me credit for them. If you know which ancient dude I should give credit to, please let me know.)

Meaningless, meaningless

2006-04-14T16:47:00.000-04:00

[a friend asked me for my take on the book of ecclesiastes. i thought it worth sharing with the rest of you.]

have i told you that ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the bible? i've lapsed a bit in this tradition, but i used to make a point of reading it at the beginning of every school year. i need this: the Teacher launches a full-scale assault on the values that we ambitious types are always pulled toward.

i say, "become great!" and the teacher says, "i became great and surpassed all who were before me...and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind."

i say, "work harder!" and the teacher says, "what gain have the workers from their toil?"

i say, "study harder!" and the teacher says, "of making books there is no end."

i say, "party!" and the teacher says, "pleasure...was also vanity."

i say, "create something novel!" and the teacher says, "there is nothing new under the sun."

i say, "know more!" and the teacher says, "those who increase knowledge increase sorrow."

i say, "communicate!" and the teacher says, "the more the words, the less the meaning."

i say, "understand the world!" and the teacher says, "no one can find out what is happening under the sun."

i say, "leave a legacy!" and the teacher says, "in the days to come all will have been long forgotten."

i say, "change the world!" and the teacher says, "a generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever."

the teacher puts every shred of my shallow idealism to shame. all of those things i would love to find meaning, purpose, and identity in are meaningless, chasing after the wind.

ecclesiastes is basically destructive, not constructive: it destroys illusions, but does almost nothing to replace them with the right view of things. that's in keeping with what the teacher says--"a time to break down, and a time to build up". but how does one go about rebuilding, after this book so utterly lays to waste?

the teacher gives just a few small clues--the refrain to enjoy what god gives us, and finally: "remember your creator."

Improbable pronunciation

2006-04-13T13:56:00.000-04:00

"By the way, from a linguistic point of view it looks like Proof's big mistake was allowing himself to be pronounced upon, and if I were you, I'd never let anyone pronounce you anything. Based on Google counts, you're over 5000 times more likely to be pronounced dead than pronounced alive. More optimistically, you have a better than 1 in 100 chance of being pronounced husband and wife rather than dead. Can marriage really merit such a risk?"
(David Beaver, Language Log)

exercise for the reader: work out a probabilistic account for this delightful fallacy.

Telephones

2006-04-10T13:53:00.000-04:00

So i was talking about christianity with this philosopher at NYU (yeah, i know--pretty cool, huh?) and he mentioned offhandlike that he didn't see how any reasonable person could put much confidence in scriptures, knowing where they came from. "What do you mean by that?" i asked. I mean, "where they come from" could be getting at all sorts of different issues, some of which have some real merits. But i was shocked by the naivete of his answer. The basis for this smart professional thinker's dismissal of biblical texts apparently came down to (1) it's very old, and (2) it's written in foreign languages. Seriously, that's what it amounted to. (Is he similarly skeptical about Aristotle? He's not really into history of philosophy, so he might be, for all i know.)

Anyway, to support his distrust of ancient translated texts, he pulled out the old analogy of the telephone game. You know: one kid makes up a message and whispers it to a second kid, who whispers what she hears to a third, and so on, and the last kid announces the utterly garbled message, and everybody laughs. Aren't really old, many-times copied and translated manuscripts just as ridiculous?

Here's a new telephone game that I think is a better analogy. The first kid writes down her message on a slip of paper, along with the time. She then hands this off to two other kids, who each copy down the message as faithfully as they can on new slips of paper, and write down the time. Each of them passes their copy on to one or two more kids. They keep this up for a while, until you've got hundreds or thousands of timestamped slips of paper. If you picked one of these slips at random and read it out loud, you might get something people could laugh at. But that's not how this game works.

First, you randomly choose maybe one in every twenty slips of paper, and throw all the others into an incinerator. Then you take all of the dozens or hundreds of surviving slips, and you hand them to a bunch of folks with a lot of practice playing this game. They line everything up, and compare the different versions and their timestamps, and they do their best to reconstruct the original message (and in the few places where they really can't tell, they add footnotes). Finally, you take the version these folks come up with, and you read it out loud to everybody.

Unless the original message was a joke, i don't think you'll hear a whole lot of laughter.

And the winner is...

2006-04-07T18:43:00.000-04:00

just got off the phone with dean zimmerman, and now it's official: i'm starting in the fall as a phd candidate in philosophy at Rutgers The State University Of New Jersey. it's a little scary.

Live on-the-scene coverage

2006-04-01T10:03:00.000-05:00

i'm at the tail end of a Grand Whirlwind Graduate-School-Visiting Adventure (i think disneyland may be basing a ride on it). i'm on my fifth state and counting, running through a montage of airplanes, trains (note: even though train lines back east are basically the same as the caltrain, they have much more romantic signage, saying things like "South Shore Line" and "Northeast Corridor", and much, much more impressive train stations), buses, subways, cars, and an Authentic New York City Taxi Cab.

interspersed with the travel, i've been visiting friends, strangers, and philosophy departments. if you can overlook the sleeping on floors and futons for two weeks (i certainly can), it pretty much rocks. i ran around chicago with michele a bit, and in new york (where i stayed for a couple days with a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody who used to go to my church--score.) i got to traipse about central park and see really big buildings and help serve dinner at a soup kitchen.

as for the schools--well, for the first time i have a really good sense of what it means to be wined and dined. oh, the dining. and oh, the wining.

(though i've been told by several people: enjoy it. this is the last time in a philosopher's career when they are sought after. ever.)

while we're on the subject, here are three things that seem to be much more common among philosophy grad students (and faculty, too) than they are among the greater population: (1) alcohol. (2) gossip. (3) facial hair. so there you have it.

Stuntz

2006-03-15T18:59:00.000-05:00

"Seeing the Ten Commandments in public spaces is a little like hearing the Miranda warnings on Law and Order, which doesn't make anyone think about the real meaning of Miranda (whatever that is) because it doesn't make anyone think at all. It's the social equivalent of elevator music. Religious people shouldn't want their faith to be elevator music."

(William J. Stuntz, "Turning Faith Into Elevator Music")

people like this guy inspire me. these articles aren't exactly up-to-date, but i recommend you read them anyway.

Troubles

2006-03-13T20:01:00.000-05:00

the trouble with improvising is it's utterly evanescent. you do a great show, and the very instant it's complete--it's gone forever. the thrill has no echo.

the trouble with reading is it's utterly private. you read a delightful bit, and the delight has no one else to resonate against. unshared laughter is really only half-laughter. the thrill has no echo.

of course, both of those troubles are part of the glory of their respective arts. i guess it's just a little disconcerting how being something always goes along with not being something else.

Loser language

2006-03-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

On my co-worker's Dilbert calendar today, Wally is being interviewed.

"Your story is perfect for Loser Magazine. It makes me wish I'd written it down because I'm already forgetting...oops, it's gone," says the interviewer. "I'll just make up something that sounds good. And I'll use photos of a model. Thanks, Willy."

Meanwhile Wally, with visibly enthusiastic eyebrows, thinks, "I'm famous!"

Now my question is, is he? The humor in the strip is supposed to come from the fact that he isn't (I think)--the interviewer's incompetence has removed the actual Wally from the article altogether. But if that's so, when exactly did that happen? Certainly not as soon as he replaced some real information with misinformation. If I write in this blog that Eric Lowe is from Oregon, then I'm writing something false about a real person. And if that sentence happens to garner lots of attention from the press, I could in fact make Eric famous--even though the only thing the masses would know about him would be a falsehood. Similarly, I could put up fake pictures, and make Eric famous that way, even though people would have a mistaken idea of what he looked like. So it kinda seems that all the readers of Loser Magazine (and I'm sure there are lots of you reading this) might in fact learn lots of false things about Wally--and so Wally really would be famous, despite nobody knowing anything true about him. Maybe like Johnny Appleseed or something. But this is sort of a baffling conclusion--I mean, if everything is wrong, in what sense is this article really about Wally, and not about, say, Dogbert?

Someone like Saul Kripke might say the line gets crossed with the name. Names are special. They aren't like descriptions, which have meanings that can be true or false, and pick out individuals according to those meanings. A name always picks out the same person. (Different people can have the same name, but whenever you use a name, you mean a particular person. Well, usually. I think I wrote an email recently in which I said "you and Jennifer", when the email was to two people named Jennifer, and I meant both of them. But that felt pretty weird.) If we're feeling jargony, we say that a name is a rigid designator--that is, it designates a person rigidly: it doesn't depend on contingent stuff about the person like their hair color or whether they're a loser.

So Kripke would probably say that as long as the article uses the name "Wally", the article is really about Wally, even though nothing it says or shows about him is true. But as soon as the interviewer took the fateful step of forgeting Wally's name, the game was up. We now have a fanciful article about an imaginary person named "Willy"--and so no matter how popular and famous Willy becomes, Wally is still a loser that nobody's ever heard of.

But that's not an entirely satisfying answer either. For one thing, people make mistakes about names all the time, but it still seems like they're talking about who they mean to talk about even so. For another, why is it that authors write those ridiculous notices? You know, the ones that say,

This story is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely by coincidence.

It seems like the implication is that, if that notice weren't there, we might think that the story is actually about some particular real people (with different names)--and in fact, those people might sue for libel because the story says false things about them. Think about that.

Here's one more question. If Wally's interviewer put a notice like that at the top of his article about "Willy", would it be true?

(Misinformation touches a sensitive spot right now. Speaking of which, come to the SImps shows this weekend! Guaranteed to be entirely fictional!)

Two philosophers on reason and religion

2006-03-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that's obvious. 'Unreasonable' implies, with everyone, rebuke. I want to say: they don't treat this as a matter of reasonability. Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn't pretend to be.

(L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief)

Is Wittgenstein right to insulate religious beliefs from 'the historical proof-game'? I doubt it. It is certainly impossible to insulate religion entirely from rational criticism: 'If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain' implies 'Either Christ is risen or our faith is vain' for exactly the same reason as 'If the weather is not fine, our picnic is ruined' implies 'Either the weather is fine or our picnic is ruined'. But if religious beliefs and systems of religious beliefs are not invulnerable to logic, why should they be cocooned from other sorts of rational scrutiny?

(John Hyman, "The Gospel According to Wittgenstein")

Memorandum

2006-02-24T12:59:00.000-05:00

this was such a snappy quote, i had to put it down somewhere i'd remember it.

"And who-so seith of trouthe I varie,
Bid him proven the contrarie."

(Chaucer, The House of Fame)

My belief is almost surely false

2006-02-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

I'm perplexed. Arnold Zwicky at the Language Log just wrote,

Try this little experiment: ask a number of friends (linguists or not) how long they think the idiom the whole nine yards has been around; if they're over 30, ask them if they remember reading or hearing it when they were young. I myself believe that it was in common use when I was in high school and college (in the 50s and 60s).

My belief is almost surely false, since much tedious digging by lexicographic types has gotten attestation of the idiom back only to the early 70s. I still find this astonishing.

Zwicky acknowledges in two consecutive sentences (a) that he believes an expression was in common use in the 1950s, and (b) that this expression "almost surely" was not in common use in the 1950s. He has just asserted "I believe P; but P is almost surely false". This is a form of expression which philosophers (following Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore) claim you just can't say--utter nonsense--and I've always been inclined to agree with them. The canonical example is, "I believe it is raining; but it is not raining". (More precisely, you can't assert such a thing. You can say it in non-asserting contexts, like "Suppose I believe it is raining, but it is not raining.") And yet here is Arnold Zwicky asserting it loud and clear--and worse, I seem to understand what he is talking about. Maybe. I can't tell.

The problem, you see, is that normally when you assert something, you are putting the force of your beliefs behind it. If I tell you (sincerely and without qualification) that it is not raining, you have the right to conclude that I believe it is not raining. But if I also tell you that I believe that it is raining, then it would seem that I believe two contradictory statements.

It seems like Zwicky is describing believing as a purely perceptual experience, without any connection to what he takes to be true. He's treating "believe" like "seem to see": you can say "I seem to see that it is raining, but it is almost surely not raining", in which you are describing on the one hand a subjective experience you are having involving images of falling water, and on the other hand your beliefs about what is objectively the case about the weather. But "I believe it is raining" doesn't work the same way, because you can't drive a wedge between your beliefs about the world and, well, your beliefs about the world. You see the problem?

Maybe Zwicky is treating himself as two distinct people. We relativize other people's beliefs all the time: there's nothing weird if I say, "Arnold believes it is raining, but it is almost surely not raining." But to adopt that same detachment toward yourself...the mind boggles.

My other roommates are also cool

2006-02-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

Eric: "She's sixty-five, so she really knows how to throw a party."

I can't think of any particular recent Sung-Woo utterances. But he does have a secret admirer, and that certainly counts for something in the keeping-me-entertained department.

Free advice to everybody: people are a lot more interesting than no people. Keep a few around, if you can.

Some good advice

2006-02-06T18:39:00.000-05:00

"My advice to students is to be born in 1943, and get your Ph.D. by 1968," [Prof. John Perry] told his listeners. "Because everybody got nice offers in 1968, but by 1969 the bottom dropped out of the job market and it's been out ever since."

(Campus Reports, June 10, 1998)

On Me

2006-02-02T14:59:00.000-05:00

i can't speak a word of the person i am.
you can ask, and i'll say what i see,
but the flittingest fact swoops to unspeak my sham.
all i know is what i want to be.

now, to be--that stuff's real, every wisdom will say,
and to want--merely myth, to be sure.
but reality fades (and may god haste the day);
still the myth (by and large) may endure.

I love my roommate

2006-02-02T01:30:00.000-05:00

Chris: "Dude, I'm gonna marry you--not marry you like I'm gonna marry you--like--I'm gonna marrify you."

Why study philosophy?

2006-02-01T19:38:00.000-05:00

I don't know if any of you care about this question, but hey, since when has this blog been about the questions you care about? That's what I thought. Thus, my apologia:

Claim: Our most tenacious dogmas are not those we assert, but those we assume. Lots of people are pretty quick to question assertions, and even check them from time to time. But rarely do we give a second (or first) look to the things the people around us (and by consequence, we ourselves) take for granted--for better or for disastrous. Philosophy (on one characterization) is the study of what everyone takes for granted.

Claim: The apparatus of philosophizing must be kept in good repair--knowing an assertion from an argument, or a premise from a conclusion. Everyone uses these tools, but they are easy to misuse (c.f. the opinions page of your favorite newspaper). The philosopher's job (on another characterization) is to clean, hone, apply and train others in the application of tools for being reasonable.

Claim: People (like me) ask--or are asked--or are plagued with--deep questions about knowledge, reality, God, themselves, and so forth. Ignored, these questions fester. Treated superficially, they cripple. Addressed frankly and diligently, they heal and strengthen.

Claim: Honest grappling with philosophical questions is essential training in humility. C.f. David Hume: "...the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy...."

Claim: To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if you do not have good philosophy, you will have bad philosophy; there is no such thing as no philosophy. Therefore, injunctions like St. Paul's, "See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition" (Col. 2.8)--far from warning against studying philosophy--are (at least for some of us) a command to do so--and to do so well, and with much trembling.

Claim: I like philosophy. And I think I'm reasonably good at it. Ergo (and in light of the foregoing), why not give it a stab?

Usually a little vague

2006-01-27T19:51:00.000-05:00

"The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbook are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn't have much use for the equipment or the jargon."

Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature, 1954.

(i think i'm going to assimilate my quote page into the main blog, because i have a suspicion that the quotes generally get ignored, while the blog is occasionally read--which really gets things entirely backwards (do i have better things to say than lewis or leibniz?). i may eventually do the same with the poems.)

So how's work?

2006-01-24T13:55:00.000-05:00

This is the kind of thing I read at work:
"The identity of meta-language and object-language is a quintessential characteristic of natural languages."

That's from Pattabhiraman and Cercone 1990, "Selection: Salience, Relevance and the Coupling between Domain-Level Tasks and Text Planning". In case you were wondering.

Shining Lights

2006-01-20T14:07:00.000-05:00

A question I hear a lot these days is, "How's work?" It always leaves me sort of tongue-tied. I mean, work's work, I guess. But here's another stab at an answer.

I worked for around a year, up until last summer, on "surface realization" (which amounts to putting together sentences in natural language). Since I came to Bosch my focus has been officially switched to "user modeling" (which amounts to predicting what a human user knows/prefers/needs/etc.). There's been a lot of culture shock and stuff moving to Bosch, but I think I finally put my finger on why my user modeling research has been (by and large) so slow and unfulfilling, in contrast with my earlier work.

I have no inspiration. I don't mean no inspiration at all, or no inspiration to do research; I have plenty of that. But in my earlier work in surface realization, solid papers were thick on the ground--the kind that get at central issues, decompose the problem effectively, apply well-established techniques, and present meaningful experimental results. I had heroes who had gone before--minor demigods in the academic pantheon, perhaps, but heroes nonetheless: Ratnaparkhi 2000, or Kay 1996, or (a little further afield, but excellent) Klein and Manning 2003. (Note: I never noticed until just now that one of my computational linguistics muses has the exact same name as my improv coach. Crazy.) These are papers that lift your spirits: you see a sense of continuity and building on one another's work--you see a recognition of the underlying structures that unite the topic with the rest of the discipline. Surface realization is a perilous subject in a lot of ways (evaluation is notoriously slippery, for one thing), but there is good inspiring exploration going on.

Not so for user modeling. It's a jungle. The literature abounds with sketchy and semi-apocryphal guidebooks: Fantastick Travels in the New Worlde (with Brilliante and Statistickal Illustrations). Papers tend to present entire systems in their manifold glory, which is nearly useless for gleaning the good ideas from the hacks. It's an isolated territory cut off from the rest of the discipline--it's even unclear which discipline that would be. It's a savage untamed land without corpora, without evaluation metrics--and thus far, without the brilliant lights of inspiration I have sought.

What's interesting, though, is recognizing that this is important to me, and what this says about my adventuresome spirit. Apparently the uncharted wilderness doesn't by itself move me to chart it: I am Sir Stanley, and not Dr. Livingstone. I need those who have gone before. Or maybe that's not the real reason at all. Maybe I need examples of excellence not just to inspire, but to instruct: without them I really don't know what I'm striving toward. I don't know what good user modeling research is until I've seen it.

(Either way, perhaps this is one reason I'm inspired to study philosophy--a subject with a greater cloud of witnesses than almost any other.)

Celebrate Good Times (Come On!)

2006-01-11T17:09:00.000-05:00

mailed the last of my application materials. boom.

On Bicycle Grease

2006-01-08T23:20:00.000-05:00

Just before Christmas, catastrophe struck. My noble bicycle, my gallant steed, Schwinn the Red, suffered a sudden and bizarre injury, and he's been out of action since then. Thank God I have a sweet roommate; I've been getting to work by Chris's car for the last week and a half--but finally I got less busy, so I could get busy. Today after dim sum with church friends, Timothy dropped me off at The Bike Connection on El Camino, and I picked up a bottle of tri-flow, some handlebar tape, a fresh patch kit, two inner tubes, a new tire, and a front wheel (I mean it when I say "out of action"). And then I spent until after dark wrenching and taping and cleaning and lubing and puttering.

There's a quiet thrill to bicycle repair: going down to the garage (or out to the carport, as it may be), disassembling mechanisms down to the washers, cursing at your tools a little, coming back in and watching the drops of grime splatter off your hands in the sink--and for the rest of the day noticing the uncleanable bit of black under your fingernails, a subtle badge of honor that whispers, "These hands ain't just for keyboards or cell phones or spatulas. These are the hands of a man".

I have an inseverable mental connection between masculinity and grease. My dad's dad was a mechanic, and my dad has always done basically all of the car maintenance at home. I have a fixed image of Dad under the hood with a baseball game on the radio and grease up to his elbows: that's one of those essential things that Dad does. Years ago my brother picked up the baton and started taking care of the family's several dozen bicycles. (Don't ask me why we always seem to have two or three hundred bicycles in the garage. I really don't know.) I was slower on the uptake (Brian beat me to a lot of cool stuff, like backpacking and driving and going to South America. I beat him to some cool stuff, too, though, like being born.) and I still know nothing about cars. But about the time Brian and I did our west coast trip, I too started to pick up the Art and Science of Bicycle Repair. And since then, I too am occasionally covered in grease. I too am a man.

That's what I like to think, anyway. That's why I feel free this evening: besides the fact that my bike now has a nicer front wheel than it knows what to do with (it's aluminum!), and my brakes work, and I'm once again mobile--besides all that, tonight I have a telltale bit of bicycle grease under my fingernails.

Words, Words, Words

2005-12-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?
(Eccl. 6.11)

Last week I was struggling to write a personal statement for my next batch of applications. It was frustrating. If you don't believe me, I recommend you write 500-1000 words describing your motivations and goals in undertaking graduate study in philosophy. It can't be done. This is because things like deep-running delights and obsessions simply don't go into short synopses: every time I try to write my way around "why I want to be a philosopher", I feel the reality squeezing out between my fingers. Or (to recast an image from Bill Watterson) writing is like catching snowflakes in your hands: delicate, weightless realities instantly become cold, inspid, featureless drips. It is impossible to write two accurate words.

Conclusion: language is deception. Some of the lies we call metaphor, other lies we call hyperbole, and even dull people who manage to avoid those run against the inescapable lies of omission and imprecision.

Now, don't get me wrong: I love language. It's nuanced and entertaining, and occasionally profound and important. Half of my job is studying language. I've on occasion thanked God out loud that we get to communicate using language, of all things, with all its arbitrariness and ambiguity--in the list of absurd and marvelous human facts, language comes second only to having bodies.

But like having a body, using language is a hindrance, too--sometimes catastrophically so. If you haven't read The Phantom Tollbooth (shame on you! Go read it immediately!), The Everpresent Wordsnatcher is a Very Dirty Bird who takes the words right out of your mouth: he makes anything you say mean exactly what you didn't mean for it to mean. And he's never far off. It's because of him that I have to approach blogging with a hint of irony, and he's why it's difficult to take the prospect of professional philosophy too seriously.

The wordsnatcher is also the reason it's hard for me to swallow certain claims about scripture. Claims like "inerrancy" and "infallibility". Or the idea that God's primary concern is our acquiescence to a set of statements. Or even that, as a friend wrote not too long ago, "the book (words and concepts, not the ink and paper) is the breath of God".

In the face of the absurd opacity of language, there's something scandalous about the idea that God spoke.

But then again, is it half as scandalous as the claim that God pooped? Or God died? And yet creditable doctrine of the incarnation would have me believe that God is just that scandalous. And if God took on flesh--with all its grossness and debility, even to be snatched up by the final absurd opacity of death--might he not also take on words?

Spam Withdrawal

2005-12-08T02:04:00.000-05:00

stanford space is finally down. this means that a couple of my sites have gone dead, which means i'm reshuffling the blogspace once more. if you're still at the old site, my main blog site is now here.

my school email address is dead now, too. if you don't know how to contact me, because i forgot to ever put up an autoreply message (sorry), my new address is the short version of my first name, my middle initial, and my last name, separated by periods, at gmail dot com. (try that on for size, spambots.) let me know if that's insufficiently convoluted for you. you can also contact me at my full name--first, middle, and last--at gmail dot com. or if that's still too confusing, i also have a stanfordalumni dot org account.

upshot is i've now fallen off the eight gazillion mailing lists i used to be on (and am bouncing like a superball--sorry, majordomo), which is a mixed blessing. on the one hand, i didn't really read nine out of ten of the emails i was getting. on the other hand, there was always that tenth one. ah well; chalk up the withdrawal as another post-college rite of passage.

Shout Out

2005-12-01T15:08:00.000-05:00

You may have heard me mention my friend Pat, who lives in Mexico. He tells good stories, and now he has a blog. I recommend you read it.

On Theology

2005-11-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

Think of a subject that you have some expertise in. Say, math. Now think of that person who, while perfectly intelligent, does not know your subject well, and wants to tell you something about it anyway. Like the person who is raving about Gödel's incompleteness theorem and how it proves we don't really know anything. Now think about the way they say lots of things that, well, they aren't exactly wrong so much as upside-down--the implications of technical turns of phrase seem disproportionately dire to them; the words are right, but they're attached to all these funny concepts, and those concepts are attached to each other in impenetrable contortions, so you don't even know where to begin setting things straight. Instead (because after all, they weren't really wrong in the first place) you smile and say, that's right, that's how it is, isn't that interesting.

Surely that's how we must sound to God, all the time?

(Which is not to say that's any excuse to stop trying.)

A Logic Puzzle

2005-10-11T23:39:00.000-04:00

Eric, Chris, Jeff and Sung-woo share an apartment with two bedrooms. Chris and Jeff are sound sleepers; Eric and Sung-woo are light sleepers. Eric, Chris, and Jeff snore. Chris snores louder than Eric, and Jeff snores louder than Eric and Chris. Jeff and Sung-woo go to work early. Sung-woo is sick and really just wants to get one good night's sleep. Chris has constructed an elaborate sound barrier between Sung-woo and Eric, to no avail. Jeff has spent most of the discussion laughing hysterically.

Where should each roommate sleep, what time should they go to bed and wake up, and how many nights of experimental sleeping arrangements will it take before everyone decides to make Jeff sleep outside?

Moving On

2005-10-08T02:35:00.000-04:00

my university has forsaken me. alas, this trusty webspace will soon be as the morning mist by noontide forgotten. and so, just as i left my stanford mail for gmail, so do i leave the stanford domain for the blogspot domain. at this rate, soon my whole life will be owned by google. well, as long as they keep giving it to me for free...

anyway, the point is that, as the error page should tell you for a while, you should now look for me at wordsnatcher.blogspot.com. actually, this blog will be at wordsnatcherblog.blogspot.com, but you get the idea. i may shuffle things around a bit within the wordsnatcher*.blogspot.com family, but you should always be able to find your way from the main page.

while i'm on the subject, do any of y'all pay any attention to my non-blog pages? i'm particularly trying to decide whether it's worth the effort to find a way to bring over my papers and music. i may let that stuff also go the way of the morning mist by noontide forgotten. we'll see.

Q-tips and Science

2005-10-07T11:23:00.000-04:00

The instructions on the box of cotton swabs in our bathroom begin: "Hold swab firmly and use a soft touch". That's rather poetic.

Ran into Chris this morning, which was unusually early for him (he works at a Stanford bio research lab). He explained, "I have a meeting at nine. Journal club. It's like Bible study for scientists. Early in the morning."

On Choosing

2005-10-05T01:16:00.000-04:00

This post is the sort of thing you've heard before, especially if you've talked much with Eric Lowe, but it bears repeating. It comes from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra (that is, that's how it comes to me; it certainly doesn't originate there):

"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

In the rest of Perelandra Lewis sets that principle up as the cornerstone of his theory of freedom and of sin: I cling to the good thing I'm not given, and in choosing the imagined thing I destroy the good of the actual thing I'm given. That bears thinking on.

(Just before that passage there's another good quotable: "The sense of precariousness terrified him: but when she looked at him again he changed the word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind." Well, so be it.)

We could have a problem here...

2005-09-28T01:29:00.000-04:00

Hi Jeffrey
Here is some feedback to help with the final application.

No special order.

1. It is not clear in the materials what you wish to do with your
life and this should be related to why you wish to continue your
studies in UK

A Rock and a Hard Place

2005-09-26T22:07:00.000-04:00

i survived a harrowing interview last night. as you may know, i've been applying for fellowships to study philosophy in england next year, and this interview was with stanford's panel to determine whether to endorse my application. twenty minutes of lively, intellectually stimulating terror.

the panel (five former rhodes and marshall scholars in a variety of disciplines) had the good-cop-bad-cop thing going: the dramaturge on my right warmly admired my guts for raising a subject as taboo as religion in my personal statement; then the physician on my left demanded how belief in god could possibly be consistent with an event like Katrina. they also asked for my position on the intelligent design movement, my proposal to eradicate palo alto's homelessness, my evaluation of the ethics of "pay day loans" from an economic perspective, and when the devastation seemed complete they congratulated me on my grades and ushered me out of the room gasping for breath and clutching my chest. thank god that's done--unless of course i actually get endorsed and run the full gauntlet of three more of those.

but, as a sort of ironic reminder that i really do want to go to grad school, i started work today. at bosch i have truly gone corporate: not much use anymore for the gazillion t-shirts i acquired in the last year. on the plus side, there's a bike path that runs almost directly from my apartment to work, and we get free drinks. a frappuccino or two may heal the wounds left by the dress code.

Getting Back and Getting Rid

2005-09-25T16:22:00.000-04:00

i've been looking forward to this week for some time, what with the stanford kids getting back and all. (1) my friends are back, which makes me happy. (2) they have removed their mountains of stuff from our apartment hallway, which makes me very happy.

Jesus Doesn't Need Your Sympathy

2005-09-15T16:20:00.000-04:00

I read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code yesterday, by and large a pretty frustrating experience. I'm no historian, so there are better people for you to talk to as far as those details go, but I know enough to recognize the stew of baloney Brown has cooked up (ever so lightly seasoned with fact). Still, the thing that really aggravates me (and I'm sorry if after my previous posts I'm starting to sound like a band that only knows one tune) is that after Brown's Robert Langdon has proposed that there exist, in secrecy, "thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony", he then goes on to rally to my poor deluded religion's defense:

"The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet...Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical."

Sophie looked skeptical. "My friends who are devout Christians definitely believe that Christ literally walked on water, literally turned water into wine, and was born of a literal virgin birth."

"My point exactly," Langdon said. "Religious allegory has become part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people."

"But it appears their reality is false."

Langdon chuckled. "No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number i because it helps her break codes."

(By the way, that last analogy is interesting, but figuring out how good of an analogy it really is requires us to answer the same questions about reality and justified beliefs that we started with, not only for religion, but also for mathematics (and you certainly shouldn't put much weight on whether a mathematician calls something "imaginary", "irrational", or "transcendental"). So, while interesting, the analogy isn't especially helpful.)

Here's a parallel to Langdon's vindication of Christian belief, from one of my favorite authors:

"What do you mean, Lu?" asked Peter.

"What I said," answered Lucy. "It was just after breakfast when I went into the wardrobe, and I've been away for hours and hours, and had tea, and all sorts of things have happened."

"Don't be silly, Lucy," said Susan. "We've only just come out of that room a moment ago, and you were there then."

"She's not being silly at all," said Peter, "she's just making up a story for fun, aren't you, Lu? And why shouldn't she?"

The trouble with Peter's well-meaning defense, of course, is that Lucy is not trying to communicate a made-up story for fun, but rather something that really happened to her in Narnia. So if Peter were to successfully carry off his "defense", then he would actually defeat Lucy's whole purpose in telling them about the wardrobe.

And I'd say the same to Langdon or Brown or whoever offers this kind of "defense" of Christianity: thank you for your sympathy, but some of my religion's stories are not metaphorical, and if that is the only way you can see to make sense of them, then please, kindly throw them away along with the phlogiston theory. "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain."

Saying Yes

2005-09-09T15:50:00.000-04:00

I finished Life of Pi a few days ago, and I'm fairly dying to discuss it. Unfortunately, after much deliberation, I've decided there's pretty much no way to do that without spoiling the story for those of you who haven't read it. So go read it, and then we can discuss.

And speaking of stories, I am currently in possession of Simpstory, the Stanford Improvisors' archival tome. Each graduating member takes their turn with the book and fills a page or so with recollections and advice to future SImps. I'm not sure what to write.

What is improv? First off, it's wonderful and beautiful. We play games. We tell stories. There are few rushes to be got rivalling that of finding just the right piece at just the right moment: suddenly realizing that of course the doctor was in love with her receptionist all along, and the prescriptions she's been writing contain coded love poems to him, which we will now both read aloud, one word at a time.

Improv is creative in the best way, the way that feels more like discovery than invention. You don't make stories, you find them, waiting for you, in silly suggestions and unconscious offers. The best improvised characters have the least contrived about them; they walk onto the stage ready-made with lost loves, secret ambitions, apartments in the South Bronx, and rose tattoos on their upper arms. The best improvised stories are obvious--even when they are surprising--because the sapphire of Montecristo never really could have been anywhere else but in the mechanic's toolbox, disguised as a ratchethead, all along.

Improv is collective in the best way. Everyone is as different from each other as possible, and it's precisely because one of us is a quiet, self-effacing rubber tycoon and the other a prattling, stage-filling nephew that the magic happens. On stage and off, we take care of each other. We help each other. We share control; there is no room for divas in improv. The SImps are a Team like few teams can be.

Improv is forgiving. One of the main reasons I improvise is because it teaches me to fail, over and over again. The Coach's motto is, "If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't doing improv". The freedom to be absolutely awful, shocking, dull--is what makes it possible (from time to time) to be none of the above. In other circles we call that Grace.

"Improv is the closest thing I've found to a religion", says one SImp, and she speaks for many. And really, there are far worse religions one could find; here is a great deal of genuine wisdom and authentic joy, and that's a large part of why I so exuberantly immerse myself in it. But the immersion has to be slightly ginger, because wholeheartedly entering the world of theater really is very like practicing a foreign religion, and it can be difficult to hang onto the knowledge--that not everything beautiful is true.

And there's the rub. Stories are wonderful and beautiful, but if none of our stories are true, we are impoverished, or worse. Really, despite the enormous beauty I've tried here to describe, at the end of the day my dear playful trusting loving improvisors show all the symptoms of truth-starved people. (Which is to be expected, I suppose--it seems just about everything I've read or watched lately is out to remind me that "truth" isn't a real hot item these days. "Just believe" is more the spirit. Alas.)

So my prayer for the Stanford Improvisors, and for the rest of you, too, I guess, is that we would learn not only to tell stories that are beautiful, but also to hear the stories that are true.

Yes.

Does Christianity Make Sense?

2005-07-09T14:50:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller, which is an excellent book that I recommend to all of you. But in this post I want to address one of the book's theses that I find troubling. Blue Like Jazz is basically about postmodern Christianity, and not by one of those Christians who think that postmodernism is one of Satan's latest hobbies, but by one of those Christians who has grown up living and breathing postmodernism and regarding that as pretty okay. Now, one of the central tenets of postmodernism is that the world doesn't make much sense, and that's just the way it is.

So Donald Miller says things like this:

There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don't make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God.

So maybe you can begin to hear my warning bells going off. I read something like this, and I start to wonder what in the world Miller can even mean--I mean, what are these "facts of reality" if not just the things that are true? Is the truth itself supposed to be contradictory, then? True things are false simultaneously?

But a couple sentences later, here's what he says:

[Our creator] would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason.

Note the shift there--from "reality" to "our reality". And that's the big postmodern leap there, propelled by two centuries of philosophers: we don't see things or talk about things as they are, but things as they seem to us. And the radically postmodern bit goes on: in fact, there aren't any "things as they are", no God's-eye-view of total, cohesive truth--only stories and perspectives.

But Miller isn't that radical, and I think it's important to pay attention to that. Because the reason things-as-they-seem-to-us don't make sense is because things-as-they-are do make sense: that is, because there is a God with a complete view of total, cohesive truth, and that God is incomparably greater than me and my knowing capacity--"such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain". God doesn't make much sense, but that's not just the way He is--that's the way I am.

So how do I respond to that? Is it to say with Miller, "There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this"? Well, yes, to some extent: clearly I don't have a clear grasp on much of anything, and the only respectable course of action is to fess up to that, to recognize that

As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

But I don't think (and I've forgotten who wrote this) that's an invocation to revel in our ignorance and keep to the low road, but rather to seek God's ways and to think his thoughts: to aspire to the perspective from which things make sense. Miller writes, "I don't think there is any better worship than wonder"--but we don't, like the Athenians, raise altars to an unknown god. Rather, as John Stott writes, "All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God.... Our worship is poor because our knowledge of God is poor."

The postmodernist despairs of making sense of things--of nature, of love, of religion--because she rejects that there is any sense to be found in them: it's chaos and confusion all the way down. But that's not what I believe. Sure it's chaos and confusion, and I don't claim to be able to see much through that; but even so there is something solid and sensible--cohesive truth--at bottom. Of course I can't reach the truth--so it's sure a good thing that the Author of truth is reaching for me.

Ann Arbor

2005-06-26T07:42:00.000-04:00

for a change, in the last few weeks i've actually had a number of things i've wanted to blog about--improv, graduating, my new apartment and new roommates--and i'll get to some of them eventually, but at the moment you get to hear a couple words about Ann Arbor, Michigan, because that is where i am, because that is where ACL-2005, the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, is taking place.

the last thing i thought as my plane lifted off in San Jose was "i should have packed warmer clothes". in that judgment i could not have been wronger. you wouldn't think that "sweltering" was a word designed for use in Michigan (at least, i wouldn't) but in failing to so think you would miss the truth of the matter staggeringly. because it is sweltering. even at night--especially at night, when all you want is to stop sweating long enough to fall asleep. if i am ever again at a conference in Ann Arbor in June, i will foot the extra charge for a room with air conditioning, in a heartbeat. yesterday i camped out in the public library all afternoon, partly for the books, but mostly for the climate control.

and why, you may ask, was i camped out in a library yesterday instead of drinking deep from the font of computational linguistics? the reason is simple enough: it turns out i don't exist. first, i wasn't on the list at the dorm i'm staying in, which apparently is normal enough (and certainly not my fault, for those of you who like to think of me as irresponsibility incarnate) but which resulted in my being accidentally put in a room piled with furniture, with no linens, and with a giant hole in the wall. it was 2am in this time zone by the time i got to my room, and i really didn't feel it was worth waking up the night clerk again, and, considering the climate, linens weren't especially desirable anyhow, so i went ahead and put up with it for the night and got reallocated in the morning.

but, you insist, that still doesn't answer the library question. and that's true, except that as soon as i got done settling the question of my existence at Betsy Barbour Hall, the question was raised all over again at the ACL registration desk. and, for those of you who like to think of me as irresponsibility incarnate, this time it was my fault. seems that amidst all my careful planning for this trip--final paper draft, check; copyright agreement, check; poster printing, check; airline tickets, check; accomodations, check; airport shuttle, check--i somehow neglected to register for the conference. this really only had two consequences: first, i was embarrassed, and second, due to my misunderstanding of the registration process for the saturday tutorials, i had evidently arrived a whole day earlier than was strictly necessary.

but i really wouldn't call the second consequence bad. i had an extra day with a copy of the conference proceedings in my hand, for one thing, which meant i had a day to study up before going to talks with titles like "A Dynamic Bayesian Framework to Model Context and Memory in Edit Distance Learning: An Application to Pronunciation Classification". also, i got an afternoon in the library, during which i read the first half of Colin McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher. and, since we're in the middle of Ann Arbor's summer arts festival, i had an evening of live folk and blues. oh, and don't forget the nap--the nap was crucial. so no, i wouldn't call the extra day a waste by any measure. the foresight of the inept, you might say.

the other thing you should know is that they give you all sorts of goodies at academic conferences. not only did i get my own copy of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference (at 629 pages, nothing to sneeze at) together with the Companion to the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics--of much greater value, seeing as that's the volume that contains my paper--and its companion CD-ROM. i also got a very nice messenger bag, emblazoned with emblems of geekdom (the sponsors: Google, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, etc.) which may just send my dissolving backpack into obscurity. and that's not all! they also threw in a 64MB USB drive, whatever you call those things. oh, and a good map of downtown Ann Arbor, probably the most immediately valuable thing of the lot. all in all, i'd call that a pretty good haul. they have good refreshments, too.

so yeah, if anybody ever offers to send you to a conference, i say jump at it.

in other news, you've probably heard by now that i've shuffled off Stanford's mortal coil (kind of) and am now living in the eastern wilds of the College Terrace neighborhood. please address all fan mail to:

760 S California Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94306

no phone yet, but let your forebearance be evident to all; the phone is at hand.

and in a related item, this blog and attendant sites will probably also be shuffling off the mortal coil of its Stanford domain pretty soon. i'll let you know where it ends up when that happens. probably wordsnatcher.blogspot.com.

and now i must be off to find out about "Probablistic CFG with Latent Annotations", followed by "Modelling the Substitutability of Discourse Connectives", and more of that ilk for most of the day. it's more fun than you might think--this morning i saw demo videos of a gesture simulator (computer graphics waving their hands), and the Q&A at one of the generation talks was downright heated. tomorrow i'll be presenting at the poster session. stay tuned.

Getting my picture taken

2005-06-10T02:25:00.000-04:00

3:00-3:30 pm today was the best half hour of my week. I met a photographer over at Green library to have my picture taken for the financial aid website (they're putting up profiles of some students who receive aid in order to convince people that Stanford is worth giving money to. I'm gonna be a poster child!) The photographer's name was Steve, and he rocked my world.

First off, he's really cool. He's very friendly, asked me my name, about what I study; and he has honest crinkly eyes that say that stuff is important to him. And we had a great chat while he took shots: we talked about how technology has changed the photography business, what kinds of jobs he does (portraits and events, mostly), his past in newspaper photography. We talked about the role of pictures in shaping how we understand events. We talked about the time when he was a low-on-the-totem-pole photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle, when the 1989 earthquake struck, and all the big shot photographers were at the World Series, so he was sent to Santa Cruz to shoot at the epicenter. And I asked him, so after doing the news, do portraits and events seem less momentous?

And he lowered his camera and paused a moment, and he said to me: I am making a record of something that is very important to someone. Last week I took pictures for a professor receiving an endowed chair--and that is a huge thing in some person's, some family's history. These things may not make headlines, but they're momentous for people, and I get to be a part of that.

I want to be like Steve.

Fourteen things that make me happy

2005-02-28T15:01:00.000-05:00

raisin cookies for breakfast
sharpening pencils with a pocket knife
people who write sensible things
people who smile when they see me
feminine rhyme
hugs
hymns i know
sustained notes near the top of my range
scratch paper covered in formulae
equations in print
jumping to catch a frisbee
made-up songs
bright colors
madrona trees

English Pictures

2005-01-30T04:30:00.000-05:00

i've got a couple pictures from my trip to london back in december. the first is in front of the tower bridge across the thames, and the second is of st. paul's cathedral. what a fun trip that was. photo credit to craig chen, a fellow stanfordian-oxonian philosopher.

On Faith

2005-01-26T02:45:00.000-05:00

the subject of faith has come up with unusual frequency in the past few weeks, and i was going to write a brief article to post here, something along the lines of "Toward a Definition of the Word 'Faith'". i may still publish those thoughts when i have a chance to flesh them out, but for now i want to take the surer path to wisdom: plagiarism. i read this passage from francis schaeffer's Trilogy tonight, and i'd like to share it with you.

Appendix B: "Faith" versus Faith

One must analyze the word faith and see that it can mean two completely opposite things.

Suppose we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock, and suddenly the fog shuts down. The guide turns to us and says that the ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep warm the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour or so, someone says to the guide, "Suppose I dropped and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?" The guide would say that you might make it until the morning and thus live. So, with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support his action, one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one kind of faith, a leap of faith.

Suppose, however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard a voice which said, "You cannot see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang and drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning."

I would not hang and drop at once, but would ask questions to try to ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and if he was not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask him his name. If the name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of that area. In my desparate situation, even though time would be running out, I would ask him what to me would be the adequate and sufficient questions, and when I became convinced by his answers, then I would hang and drop.

This is faith, but obviously it has no relationship to the other use of the word. As a matter of fact, if one of these is called faith, the other should not be designated by the same word. The historic Christian faith is not a leap of faith in the post-Kierkegaardian sense because He is not silent, and I am invited to ask the adequate and sufficient questions, not only in regard to details, but also in regard to the existence of the universe and its complexity and in regard to the existence of man. I am invited to ask adequate and sufficient questions and then believe Him and bow before Him metaphysically in knowing that I exist because He made man, and bow before Him morally as needing His provision for me in the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ.

(Francis Schaeffer. Trilogy, pp349-50. 1990 Crossway Books.)

Oh, yeah

2005-01-04T02:03:00.000-05:00

Oofta, it has been a bit of time, hasn't it. For the clueless among you, I am no longer at Oxford, and haven't been since December 12th, when I left. The week or so before that was ridiculously busy, as it suddenly occurred to me that I was taking classes besides my tutorial, and it was about time to do something about that. So I did, and suddenly, poof, it was time for twenty hours or so of planes, buses, and layovers, and then I was home.

The three weeks or so after that were not ridiculously busy. By any stretch of the imagination. But I guess, really, they weren't so flagrantly indolent as I like to pretend. The main accomplishments of the break:

Sleeping. And how. It really was a bit of a project to shift the biological clock around, but a less unpleasant project than it was the other direction. I went to bed as soon as I got home--11 pm Pacific time, 7 am Greenwich time--and woke up at about 6am Pacific time, 2pm Greenwich time. Which is already a pretty substantial shift. And then I progressively woke up later each subsequent day, until by the end of the vacation I was well-adjusted to the healthy, normal wake-up time of noonish. Ahhh, vacation.

Visiting relatives. Again, and how. Both sides of the family, in a mad yuletide blitz. My dad's sister's family was back from France, so the grand old get-together in Tacoma was of somewhat greater proportions than our typical gala, and there was much feasting to be had. Oh yeah,

Eating. I'd say "and how" again, but I think you get the idea. Mmmmm.

A project. Because, by a now-quite-established tradition, no vacation is complete without some kind of geeky programming project. Yes, I program computers in my spare time, because I like it. I'm sorry if any of you feel like you can't be my friends anymore, but that's just who I am. This vacation's project was designing a framework--a simple scripting language--for creating Myst-like adventure games, or anything else that would use an interface like that, I suppose, with images, sounds, music, and video. As several people have pointed out, it was pretty much like Hypercard, from the Macintosh glory days. It was written, like all good programming projects, in Python, using the pygame library, which made everything very, very easy. (Yay!) It also came in handy for

A treasure hunt. It's another pretty-well-established tradition in the Russell house that every Christmas involves at least one treasure hunt. It's a convenient way to deal with gifts that don't fit under the tree, but an awkward gift isn't a prerequisite, since any old present can be made much more exciting by making it hard to find. In the days of our youth the treasure hunts started out as simple chains of commands--"go to the tire swing", "go to the laundry room", etc. But soon our (read: my) thirst for the more complicated led to more and more involved trails of ciphers, puzzles, and riddles. I really, really like making treasure hunts. I don't want to reveal too much about this year's clues, because if East Flo does The Game and the staff lets me design a clue again this year, I want to reuse at least one idea. But, as I mentioned, my scripting language was handy for one clue, in which my brother and I used digital photos to make an adventure game set in our house, complete with authentic on-site-recorded sound effects, and a forbidding microsoft-paint-drawn Evil Gate. Brian and I are looking for a publisher, so let me know if you've got connections...

Reading. I picked up The Mathematical Experience again, and read most of it, and got thinking about philosophy of math again. Oh, I have a question for you: How should a person decide what questions are worth asking? Worth dedicating time, thought, energy, money, whatever, toward pursuing wholeheartedly? What criteria do you use?

I also read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, written from the perspective of an autistic teenager. Quite good. Also, the first of the Lemony Snicket books, The Bad Beginning, and I really must find an inexpensive way to get my hands on the rest of them.

One thing I did not do was finish the econ paper for my incomplete. Which means I still have, oh, maybe a page or two to write of that, and I really ought to take care of that before this quarter starts in earnest. I'll get to it, I'm sure.

Now that I'm back at Stanford, the main challenge before me is figuring out where I left all my stuff. So if you've got anything that belongs to me, um, drop me an email, ok? Thanks. I'm on the third floor of Cardenal once again, which is peachy by my reckoning. There are lots of fun people in the FloMo vicinity, and my new roommate, freshman Kevin Lai, seems to be a fan of both Settlers of Catan and Half-Life--which were, incidentally, my two most auspicious Christmas gifts (meaning no offense to anyone who gave me anything else, because your gifts were very nice, too). I think I'm going to like it here quite a bit.

And it is very good to be back.

British Slang

2004-12-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

trolleyed, adj. very drunk.
the business the best.
pull, v. tr., intr. to seduce.
twatted, adj. very drunk.
pleb, n. a simpleton.
loaf, n. the head.
chav, n. a low-class person (offensive).

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these:

2004-11-26T12:01:00.002-05:00

we lost to christ church. it was a very sad race. our boat fell apart less than ten strokes in--grant and i both lost our seats. we were in an alternate boat, an aged wooden thing, since on wednesday the b team crashed our usual boat, the pelican. and i'm afraid cobwebbed roy of the rowers let us down. despite our technical collapse, we stayed pretty tight with the other boat, but with two men rowing seatless we couldn't pull it off. it was frustrating. i have a very sore bottom.

on the bright side, this means i have all of tomorrow to get research paper number one of three going. and we're still gonna party tomorrow. oh, the corpus girls won their race, though, so they'll be continuing to tomorrow's octafinals. go corpus!

We all know what today is

2004-11-25T20:29:00.000-05:00

one of my Blogging Principles (one i forgot to list) was that my blog would not become a journal. i have a journal for that, after all, so there's no point in parading everything out here. but today i am going to do a very journal-ish thing, and list some of the things for which i am thankful. it's late, so the list won't be very comprehensive. that would make for an awful long list, anyhow.

dinner. in particular, mrs. bing, mabrookah the turkey queen, david lewis who knew where my stuffing ingredients were, and i can't name everybody, so the first three i thought of luck out. lots of hard workers today, and an awe-inspiring spread to show for it.
one tutorial paper to go. two weeks until home. and today's paper actually went over pretty well.
in the list of email addresses in julian's inspirational post-race party-planning email, he gave the whole crew nick-names. these include rick "where's my seat" slettenhaar, adam "dude" skinner, jeremias "crazy ivan" prassl, and, since you were going to ask anyway, jeff "no, this is his room-mate" russell. the reason for that is i was late to practice once, and they called the room, and J.D. answered with that expression. the brits found this very funny, since british students don't have roommates. i'm thankful for the crew and for nick-names in general.
instant messenger. it's very nice to have the luxury of occasional chats with home-people (by which i mean stanfordians as well as bellinghamsters).
home-people.
oxford-people; corpus, the choir, the stanford house. i'm in a good place.
evensong and eucharist.
being loved, being safe, being free.
the corpus christi library, because it has everything.
no class on friday, and the general enlightenment of the Programme.
cardenal! (my residence upon my return to stanford.)
sleeeeeep.

Yes

2004-11-24T11:15:00.000-05:00

corpus men's first boat has won its first race, by about a quarter-length, despite rick's seat coming completely off its track halfway in. rick never stopped rowing, and he is now officially the Man. and we are all Winners. next race is friday. that is all.

[correction: i am informed by a reliable source that we actually won by at least half a length. apparently that's a decent margin in this sport, though i wouldn't know.]

[addendum:

that's us kicking ass in the middle, with our well-intentioned competition just above. at the bottom is some random crew getting ready for another race.]

Busy Busy

2004-11-23T16:57:00.000-05:00

took a swim test tonight for crew. it was fun. i hadn't been swimming since...since catalina i guess, back in june. it wasn't hard, though i did get a little breathless: swim a couple lengths, dive for a brick, tread a little water, and we're done. our first race is tomorrow, and we'd better win it. half the eight has conflicts with the repechage time tomorrow, so if we lose we'll probably have to forfeit our next race as well, and that will be it. but we're going to win it, so that should be all right. also, the river's up to blue flag again, which means our fearless cox jeremias can't cox for the race tomorrow. so we need to win (and the river needs to go down) so jeremias can cox on friday or saturday.

in other news, thursday is thanksgiving. and the stanford house yanks are gonna celebrate it, dadgum, national holiday or no national holiday. there will still be tutorials and classes roughly as normal, but in the thick of things we'll be whipping up a feast to put the pilgrims to shame. yeehaw.

in addition, the fact that i have other classes besides my tutorial is beginning to loom darkly. as in, i actually have to start doing research and stuff. so the next couple of weeks promise to keep me hopping. oh, and the choir has a carol service coming up, too. so i'm gonna be accelerating right to the finish line. time flies when you're having funne. that's british for "fun". really. ok, not really. i'm donne now.

Observations

2004-11-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

there are no storm drains in oxford.
the corpus dining hall serves far more elaborate breakfasts than any other meal.
i have only two more tutorial papers to write
matt chwierut makes some real mean pizza dough.
being at the eastern edge of a time zone means that it gets dark earlier. so does being at the 51st and a half parallel. it's dark a lot.
you don't have to be able to see to row.
the lower the quality of the work, the longer it takes to do.
the english don't take any days off for armistice day. nor for thanksgiving. on the other hand, oxford winter and spring breaks are both over a month long.

All Eight, From Halfs, Feather Blades

2004-11-15T16:57:00.000-05:00

The first thing you should understand is that rowing is a lot more technically challenging than you might think. You don't just sit eight guys in a boat with a coxswain and start pulling on oars. If you did that, then the first thing that would happen is the boat would tip over to one side or the other, half the oars would get stuck in the water, and the boat would lamely wobble amidst much cursing and splashing while the cox's shouts get increasingly patronizing.

So our first lesson once we get in the boat is about balance. First we learn to sit the boat by resting our oar blades flat on the surface of the water. Even this simple task takes several rounds of relearning. Once we've mastered the knack of floating in one place without tipping over, a single pair is allowed to begin rowing, arms only, while the other six oars lay out like training wheels. After all the pairs begin to get the feel of it (and it's terrible at first, because even with six training wheels the awkward balancers let the boat rock enough that you're not quite sure if your oar will hit the water or come out again) then we move up to fours. Half of us rowing, half sitting the boat. That was as far as we got in the first couple of weeks.

The next thing to know is that rowing is not just about arms. Our seats slide in tracks forward and backward, with our feet anchored to plates in front of us. This way we can double ourselves up completely, reaching out between our knees, and lunge backward to full extension. Like a spring. Body length is a plus (Hooke's law). But even just springing out and curling up has technique to it, so your oar doesn't hit your knees and so you make the most of all the force you have to exert. Legs straight, back back, arms in. Arms out, back up, legs bent. Legs, back, arms; arms, back, legs. Until it's worked into your subconscious, that's the mantra.

But the dominating feature of rowing is the coordination. The ideal state is for all eight of us to match each others' movements exactly. Eight blades enter the water, push back with even pressure for the same distance at the same depth, pop out together, feather together, and return to position at the same height. When the eight of us are rowing and that perfect synchronization breaks down, the boat begins to wobble. And as it wobbles, someone's oar will catch too early, throwing the rhythm further off, until we end up rocking and splashing and frantically trying to catch up with the person in front of us. We've been doing a lot of that this week. Still got another week to go...

A rowing eight is a unit, a body. The boat has only one pair of eyes, the cox's. Jeremias is our fearless cox, a fresher as new to his job as we are to ours. The cox sits in the back and shouts in elaborate code. "Bow four, from backstops, half slide, feather blades, ready...go!" "Bow and three, take a tap; stroke, hold her up." "Stroke side, take the runoff." "Next stroke, easy there. Strokeside, back it down; bowside row on."--though Jeremias likes to call that last maneuver "Crazy Ivan". I think the jargony cox signals are my favorite part.

The Christ Church Regatta for novice rowers starts next Thursday, and Julian (an experienced rower for Corpus, and our coach) thinks we have a shot at winning it. At least, that's the only rationale I can think of for trying to get us on the water four times this week, with an additional two land-training sessions. And judging from the look of what's been floating out there, I think we have a good shot. We began seriously rowing all eight from Saturday before last, and it's beginning to feel somewhat less than terrifying. We're good at starts, and our in-place turn--totally unimportant for the actual races, but crucial for pre-race intimidation--is starting to look quite good. At any rate, I'm getting a much better workout than I'm used to, and having quite a lovely time--in spite of the 6am outings.

Stay tuned.

Coventry

2004-11-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

[sorry, this is old. i wrote it and then forgot to post.]

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,
Father forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,
Father forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,
Father forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
Father forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,
Father forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,
Father forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,
Father forgive.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

this text is the Coventry Cathedral Litany of Reconciliation. it's printed on a placard that stands at the foot of the cross in the chancel of the 14th century church. there is no glass in the windows behind it. there is no roof over it. the red stone walls are that sweep back around the nave rise to a jagged open space, weathered from age, and blackened in places by fire. a plaque, near the transcept entrance, reads: Coventry Cathedral. Built 14th Century. Destroyed 20th Century.

during november of 1940 coventry was the site of some of the most protracted air raids of world war ii. on the 14th, Coventry Cathedral was left filled with charred rubble.

rather than repair the old cathedral, a new one was built--a massive hangar-like structure adjacent to the original site, an immense awning covering the space between their entrances. people stand quietly in the old church, pray, and remember. but despite being marked by the memory of fire, the old cathedral stands together with the new as a symbol not of the war or of destruction, but of reconciliation: of the old and broken things made new and whole. it is the most overwhelming place i have been to in the british isles.

Coventry Cathedral is now the home of the Community of the Cross of Nails. the original cross of nails was made from three long roof spikes, two of them parallel as the cross-piece. the community is a world-wide association of christians committed to reconciliation--in israel, in northern ireland, in south africa, in the united states, and in many other places.

Coventry has a sister in germany. the Church of Our Lady in dresden was reduced to rubble during the allied firebombing of february, 1945. with the church, the gold orb and cross from its roof were destroyed. several years ago, british donors (private, public, and ecclesiastical) provided for the orb and cross's reconstruction, and the symbol was sent to dresden in 2000. in thanks, dresden sent a gift to Coventry Cathedral: from the destroyed rafters of the Church of Our Lady, a cross of nails.

i don't have any pictures, i'm afraid, but there are a couple good ones here.

By The Way

2004-11-01T18:43:00.002-05:00

hey, look! it's a picture of jeff in oxford!

simps eoq is nov 22-23. mark your calendars.

(the building behind me is the radcliffe camera, mentioned in an earlier post. it's one of the multitudinous branches of the bodleian library.)

Words That Mean Something Different When You Say Them In Britain

2004-10-30T21:24:00.000-04:00

"pants"
"pissed"
"johnny"

fun evening. after getting back from coventry (post on that forthcoming), choir folks had a noisy dinner at jamal's curry place, dropped by the corpus halloween bop, then hung out in catherine's room and eventually played a game of trivial pursuit. thanks to catherine's brilliance (she was quite impressive--she knew such things as the date of the chicago valentine's day massacre, and that jfk was shot in dallas--but had to ask me what state dallas was in), our team won. it was quite fun. i also had my first gin and tonic.

Things That You Don't Say Unless You're An American

"folks"
"automobile"
"all y'all"