Deduced

There are a couple of rather famous deductive arguments for the existence of God.

Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument can be considered to be a direct argument... it explicitly references God.

• It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
• God exists as an idea in the mind.
• A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
• Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined that does exist).
• But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined.)
• Therefore, God exists.

The Kalām cosmological argument, on the other hand, might be considered an indirect argument... it claims the Universe has a cause, but doesn't directly say anything about said cause. Other people, however, have added on to it.

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.

In each case, the final sentence, the one that begins "therefore" is considered to be true if one accepts the preceding statements, the premises, to be true. And this is part of what makes them popular. An apologist will walk someone through the premises, seeking agreement with each one, and then present the conclusion as granted. Which I get, because it works. The only way to avoid having to either agree with the conclusion or admit to following faulty logic is to deny one or more of the premises, which are generally held out to be common-sense statements that no-one should have a problem with.

But I was reading about these, as part of my amateur interest in philosophy, and it occurred to me: What do these arguments actually mean, anyway? Sure, they have their "common-sense" meanings, but is that actually what they mean?

Take the Ontological Argument. What does "greater" mean in this instance? How should it be understood? The argument doesn't hold up as well if I substitute "taller" for "greater." Because if it's true that "a being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, taller than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind," it does not follow that if I imagine a being a million feet tall, that there must be some real being that's taller than that. It appears, at least to me, to indicate that imaginary height does not matter. Going back to "greatness," this would seem to indicate that I find whomever I consider to be the greatest, and bestow the title of "God" upon them, but that's where it ends.

Likewise with the Cosmological Argument, what does it mean to "begin to exist?" I like to build plastic models as a pastime. And it's true that at some undefined point in the assembly process, a Mobile Suit or an aircraft "begins to exist." Now you don't see it, now you do. But it began to exist because it was assembled from parts that already existed. It's generally presumed that in the Cosmological Argument that the universe began to exist ex nihilo, but there's nothing in the syllogism itself that requires that interpretation. And because the Big Bang is, effectively an Event Horizon, there's no way of knowing whether the Universe simply sprang into existence, or if our current spacetime is simply the current arrangement of matter and energy that already existed in some or another form. So then, even if it's understood that the Universe began to exist, I'm not sure that this tells us anything, especially if energy may be neither created nor destroyed.

Now, to be sure, I don't think that I've put these two long-standing arguments to rest. I'm not that smart. I'm fairly certain that other people have come up with similar objections, and that someone else has come up with counter-arguments. I'm just surprised that I haven't encountered them, and their counters, more often.

On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.

A Modest Request

I saw a panhandler today whose sign read: "At least give me the finger." It was both comedic and heartbreaking. The young man appeared to be in the process of giving up for the day, he was walking away from the corner. It's a popular place for panhandlers; there is a Jack-in-the-Box there, which I suppose increases the likelihood that any given car might have someone with cash in it.

It occurs to me that I don't know whether the greater Seattle area has a relatively high number of panhandlers or not. I live in the suburbs, so while there are certain spots where panhandlers and buskers tend to set up, I've never encountered them in numbers. And even the usual spots don't always have someone there. (This doesn't stop the more conservative/fearful among the population from seeing them as symptomatic of apocalyptic levels of social disorder It's somewhat surprising how many people apparently cannot tell the difference between panhandlers and supervillains.)

Now, while there are some panhandlers who don't strike me as being on the up-and-up, for many of them, it seems that what you see is what you get; a down-on-their-luck person who has been reduced to begging funds and/or food from passers-by in order to survive. Often it's just one person. Sometimes, there will be a mother with her child(ren) or a family. Childless couples, however, are vanishingly rare; perhaps they tend to split up to work different places.

Today was sunny and warm, especially considering it's only mid-February, so it wasn't a terrible day to have to be out of doors. But neither Winter nor the rainy season are over yet, so we'll see how things work out.

Of course, the real problem isn't the weather; Seattle's climate is fairly mild, when compared to some of the alternatives. It's the fact that Seattle, like pretty much every other place in the United States, understands itself to be too poor to devote enough resources to the problem to actually solve it. This is, in part, due to a lack of coordination, and a willingness to defect... While Texas and Florida made headlines for putting migrants on busses and sending them to large cities in more liberal-minded states, the practice of shipping homeless people off to become somebody else's problem goes back a lot farther than that. So any city that actual starts to make a dent in their own homeless problem risks becoming a target for elected officials elsewhere looking to find someone else to foot the bill for their own homeless population.

It's also a side effect of the individualistic culture that has grown up in the United States. It's not hard to find someone who will claim that living-wage jobs are freely available for the asking, even when unemployment was significantly higher than it is now. (Of course, asking them just where said jobs were located rarely resulted in answers.) And when the impoverished are viewed as intentional freeloaders, who could get back on their feet whenever they wanted to, people who give are seen as chumps; a perception that many are keen to avoid.

I doubt that I'll ever see the young man again. Panhandlers tend to be a transient population. I'd like to say that as long as he maintains his sense of humor, he'll be okay. But that places the onus back on him, and I know he needs more than that. 

Demonstrated

 

There was another protest today, and it was a good day for it. I'm still of the opinion that deep-Blue Washington state is not the most effective place for it, but it's really not about that.

Bad Read

Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) read out six names that had been redacted, and then unredacted in "the Epstein Files." According to the Department of Justice, four of the names were of random people who had been in a photo lineup. According to Representative Khanna, the fault lies with the DoJ.

While it seems patently evident that the Department of Justice has been sloppy with their handling of the documents, I think that ownership of this particular screw-up belongs to Representative Khanna, simply because it had already been established that simply being named in the set of documents released, or even knowing Jeffry Epstien, is not, in and of itself, evidence of guilt. Representative Khanna blames the DoJ for not explaining why the names were in the documents earlier, but it shouldn't have been up to the DoJ to make clear what everyone already knew.

The idea that there was a smoking gun, being hidden by the Department of Justice, that would blow the lid off of a ring of powerful men who were into sex with teenaged girls, always rested on the ideas that a) Jeffrey Epstein compiled information on people who were committing crimes along with him, and b) that he pretty much exclusively surrounded himself with other people who were into sex with underage girls. That's what it takes to believe that the simple fact that one's name could be found in the documents made one a wealthy and powerful person who was engaged in the rape of minors.

Hoping that Q-Anon's (remember them?) obsession with the idea that there was an Illuminati-like ring of pedophiles running around sleeping with children would become a weapon against President Trump was a bad idea from the jump, based as it was on the conjecture that enough people could be peeled away from the Trumpist coalition on that basis to weaken him politically. Personally, I'd hoped that Democrats would give up on being anti-Trump and pro-fixing things that need fixing in the United States, but it turned out that the Democrats were more than capable of remaining single-minded for longer than I could remain irrational.

It would be nice if this blunder dialed back the strange alliance with conspiracy theorizing that seems to have become popular with the political class (it has zero chance of ending it) but I doubt that it will. Too many people have hitched their wagons to the idea that this will be straw that breaks the camel's back, apparently unaware that thus far, it's been a very resilient camel.