In my last installment, I described what I, for this series of posts, am calling the Electron Boogaloo - a dance where a tiny particle is not just Here or There, but in weird dance of Kind of Here and Kind of There, and Kind of Nowhere, and Kind of Everywhere At Once. I described the dance hall of that dance using a scenario known to science as the Double Slit Experiment. I also included a youtube video that explained the experiment and its bizarre implications about reality at the quantum level.
Quantum particles, when not being observed or measured, do not like particles; they do not act like tiny billiard balls that simply are, and are fully, actually, definitely present, in one place, doing one thing. When they are not being observed, quantum particles are not particles in the original sense of the word. They are whirling waves of probability, in which all the possible locations and states of a particle interact with one another the way crests and troughs of waves interfere with each other. They are mysterious clouds of all the things they Could Be. Instead of just actually being one thing and not another, in one place and not another, doing one thing and not another, moving in one direction and not another, quantum phenomena are, when unobserved, in all their possible places and states at once, moving, not This Way or That, but rather This Way and That, at the same time! They are not just Here or There before we look to find out where they are. They are both Here And There until we look - until we, by observing the phenomena, by taking a measurement - collapse the wave.
This is a very counterintuitive view of the ultimate reality of things, and thus most people recoil from it intellectually. This is a problem, because quantum mechanics is irrefutable and indispensable. Everything electronic uses the quantum effects with the Alice-In-Wonderland weirdness that goes with them. Anyone who doubts this can take up this challenge - tell me how a tunnel diode works without invoking an explanation that defies common sense.
I have another way out. Quantum theory is true, but it is not the ultimate reality of things. Atoms are not more real than the objects of our sense experience, but less. It is not the case that rocks, trees, pigeons and people are simply piles or collections that come about through the collision and fusion of the tiny particles that are the ultimately real things. On the contrary, the rocks, the trees, the birds, the fish, the dolphins, the dogs, the people, the planets and stars, are what are truly real. They are not composed of particles in the sense of being aggregates put together mechanically out of their smallest component pieces. They are composed of particles in the sense of being divisible into them. There is a difference. The particles derive their reality from the real things of our everyday lives, not the other way around. They exist, to be sure, but their actuality is compromised. They are not fully real. They are quasi-real. Their existence is foggy, nebulous, Not All There. They do not enjoy the same degree of objective, observer-independent reality that are enjoyed by us, or by the objects of our everyday experiences. We are more real than our protons, neutrons, and electrons. It is not the case that we do what we do because our smallest bits are doing their thing, in obedience to the laws of physics. It is the other way around - we make our choices, we decide what to do, and move ourselves into action. As a consequence, our bodies, which are divisible into particles, move those particles in motions which, due to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, are not in violation of the any deterministic laws of physics, because on the level of the micro-particles, there are no deterministic laws! Causality, when applied to human action, is not from the bottom-up, but from the top-down. We are wholes, not mere collections of parts, and our actions are holistic. We move our parts, rather than being moved by them. Epicurus was right that our freedom is related to atomic swerve. But he was wrong about the motive direction of causal power. Our free actions cause the particles in our bodies to have their particular Epicurean swerve. Rather than being grounded in and caused by that swerve from the bottom-up, they are the source of our atoms' particular "random" swerves from the top-down.
I’ll never forget when I was in class attending my graduate seminar on the Philosophy of the Human Person, and one of the people there opined that, if there is such a thing as a soul, we should expect to see some of the physically determined motions of some particles in our body (in our brain, presumably) veer off their otherwise pre-determined paths, and sort of Do Their Own Thing. I do not recall anyone labeling that intuition as such at the time, but I do not hesitate to do so now - that is the classic Epicurean Swerve intuition, the clinamen.
John Searle said something similar in his 1984 Reith lecture:
In order for us to have radical freedom, it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside each of us was a self that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature. That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making molecules swerve from their paths. (Minds, Brains, and Science; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 98 - Well, not necessarily molecules, and Searle knew that. Earlier in the same lecture, he tries to flippantly dismiss such a swerve on the quantum level - unsuccessfully in my view)
I held my tongue in class that day. I didn’t want to be the only person in that class to bring up quantum physics. I knew that it would make no impact - it would only peg me as an insufferable know-it-all. They wouldn’t get. I don’t even get it. Who does? It’s too crazy! But I knew he was wrong. We should never expect to see anything of the sort, because nature does not allow us to see anything on the quantum level with that kind of precision. The Uncertainty Principle forbids it. Mother Nature has a kind of basic, primordial modesty about Her. No matter how badly scientists want to look up Her skirt and see Her Goodies, they will not succeed. She’s keeping her Secrets. Laplace’s Ideal Observer will never exist, at least not in this physical world. Maybe God could theoretically know all the positions and momentums of every particle in the universe, but I am inclined to doubt even that - until the waves of the various particles collapse, there is no one totally real thing on that level for even God to know.
The fact that, at the level of quantum phenomena, there is an ineliminable statistical indeterminacy, means that there is a lot of room leftover from the gaps in physics for possibility of active influences from invisible, non-physical agents, i.e. souls or spirits. The soul fits perfectly in the quantum causal gap. The indeterminism at the level of the quantum does not prove that there are such things, but that is unnecessary. The point is, we already know that we are free agents capable of introducing new, spontaneous, unprecedented causal chains into the physical world every time we make a new decision. The only thing that ever made anyone doubt that was a commitment to Materialism and the Laplacian Determinism that it entailed. Quantum physics has killed that Determinism. It is no longer a viable natural philosophy. Since deterministic Materialism is dead, there is no more barrier to accepting the prima facie evidence of our own obvious and self-evident liberty of action (which we cannot, in practice, consistently deny). So with no more reason to doubt that which we cannot help but believe anyway, we can accept it as true, along with what it entails - that there is more to us than our physical bodies. We are souls, too.
Here is the link to installment 4 of this series:
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_04.html
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Weekend At Bernie's 2: Electron Boogaloo (2 of 5)
To see electrons do their boogoaloo, you need a special apparatus for them to use as their dance hall. You need a device that can fire electrons in streams, or in tiny bursts of single, isolated particles one at a time. You need a box with a hole on one side for the electrons to shoot through into the box and a pair of slits on the other side through which to leave the box. You need a wall on the other side of the box (the one with the slits). You need the wall to have a special material fastened to it that will react to the presence of electrons and make the impacts of electrons on it visible.
The dance takes place in steps. The last step is the really dramatic one. First you cover one slit - either slit will do, and fire up the electron gun. It doesn’t matter whether you have the gun set to fire a steady ray of electrons in a constant stream of bombardment, or to only release one electron intermittently at intervals - it will show the same thing - in the latter case it would just take longer for the individual electron impacts to form the pattern. The pattern when one slit is covered is a single band (the shape of the one uncovered slit) on the wall beyond the box. The electrons, whether in a stream or all alone, act like individual particles, or at least the wave characteristics are not detectable during this first step of the dance.
For the next step you uncover the slit that you had covered and fire the electron gun to send out a stream of electrons through both uncovered slits. If electrons were merely particles, you would see the two-slit pattern form behind the wall, but that’s not what you see here. You see several bands, the ligher, weaker ones closer to the outer edges, the strongest ones toward the center. That is an interference pattern. It shows that the stream of electrons is propagating like a wave of electrical energy. When waves are broken up into sets of waves as they bisect to pass through the slits, the sets of waves interfere with each other - their crests and troughs cancel each other out. In between those cancellations there is a richer degree of interaction. The net result is an interference pattern more complicated than the behavior of single discrete particles confined to a definite location or moving in a definite trajectory.
Ok, you might argue, that may be interesting, but that doesn’t mean individual particles do that. We fired a stream of many such particles, so perhaps it is no surprise that they would interfere with each other and move in a wave. What would happen if we fired single electrons intermittently one at a time through whichever of the two slits each would happen to go through? (Note for later that there is no causal explanation, no physical fact, known or unknown, that determines which slit an electron will exit the box through). If electrons were merely particles then surely now all we’ll see is two bands slowly form from the accumulation of marks from individual electron impacts.
Third and final step - intermittently fire individual electrons through the two open slits and see what happens. So what happens? Does a two slit pattern form?
No! An interference pattern emerges again! How can that be? It is only one individual electron (presumably) going through only one of the slits at any given time! What could be interfering with the electron if not other electrons in a stream? What could be causing the wavy behavior of an individual electron?
The electron is, in that instance, a wave interfering with itself. And what is interfering with what? The answer is that different possible states of the electron are all co-existing in a strange, foggy quasi-reality of less than full actual potentials. The possibility that the electron goes through the left slit is interacting with the possibility that it goes through the right slit. In a very real and valid sense, the electron, even as a single particle, goes through both slits at the same time! In another sense, it does not actually go through either one. In fact, in a very real sense, according to the equation governing subatomic wave collapse, the electron does not have any definite position or single trajectory until after it impacts on the wall and is thus observed and measured.
That is the Electron Boogaloo - a dance where a tiny particle is not just Here or There, but Kind of Here and Kind of There, and Kind of Nowhere, and Kind of Everywhere At Once. The dance hall scenario is known to science as the Double Slit Experiment.
Check out this video on youtube. (url link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc ) It illustrates what I have said, and also adds an important point I have left unsaid, simply because it is unbelievable. It is true, but you won't believe it. You can also click the image below:
Below is the link to installment 3 of this series:
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_238.html
The dance takes place in steps. The last step is the really dramatic one. First you cover one slit - either slit will do, and fire up the electron gun. It doesn’t matter whether you have the gun set to fire a steady ray of electrons in a constant stream of bombardment, or to only release one electron intermittently at intervals - it will show the same thing - in the latter case it would just take longer for the individual electron impacts to form the pattern. The pattern when one slit is covered is a single band (the shape of the one uncovered slit) on the wall beyond the box. The electrons, whether in a stream or all alone, act like individual particles, or at least the wave characteristics are not detectable during this first step of the dance.
For the next step you uncover the slit that you had covered and fire the electron gun to send out a stream of electrons through both uncovered slits. If electrons were merely particles, you would see the two-slit pattern form behind the wall, but that’s not what you see here. You see several bands, the ligher, weaker ones closer to the outer edges, the strongest ones toward the center. That is an interference pattern. It shows that the stream of electrons is propagating like a wave of electrical energy. When waves are broken up into sets of waves as they bisect to pass through the slits, the sets of waves interfere with each other - their crests and troughs cancel each other out. In between those cancellations there is a richer degree of interaction. The net result is an interference pattern more complicated than the behavior of single discrete particles confined to a definite location or moving in a definite trajectory.
Ok, you might argue, that may be interesting, but that doesn’t mean individual particles do that. We fired a stream of many such particles, so perhaps it is no surprise that they would interfere with each other and move in a wave. What would happen if we fired single electrons intermittently one at a time through whichever of the two slits each would happen to go through? (Note for later that there is no causal explanation, no physical fact, known or unknown, that determines which slit an electron will exit the box through). If electrons were merely particles then surely now all we’ll see is two bands slowly form from the accumulation of marks from individual electron impacts.
Third and final step - intermittently fire individual electrons through the two open slits and see what happens. So what happens? Does a two slit pattern form?
No! An interference pattern emerges again! How can that be? It is only one individual electron (presumably) going through only one of the slits at any given time! What could be interfering with the electron if not other electrons in a stream? What could be causing the wavy behavior of an individual electron?
The electron is, in that instance, a wave interfering with itself. And what is interfering with what? The answer is that different possible states of the electron are all co-existing in a strange, foggy quasi-reality of less than full actual potentials. The possibility that the electron goes through the left slit is interacting with the possibility that it goes through the right slit. In a very real and valid sense, the electron, even as a single particle, goes through both slits at the same time! In another sense, it does not actually go through either one. In fact, in a very real sense, according to the equation governing subatomic wave collapse, the electron does not have any definite position or single trajectory until after it impacts on the wall and is thus observed and measured.
That is the Electron Boogaloo - a dance where a tiny particle is not just Here or There, but Kind of Here and Kind of There, and Kind of Nowhere, and Kind of Everywhere At Once. The dance hall scenario is known to science as the Double Slit Experiment.
Check out this video on youtube. (url link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc ) It illustrates what I have said, and also adds an important point I have left unsaid, simply because it is unbelievable. It is true, but you won't believe it. You can also click the image below:
Below is the link to installment 3 of this series:
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_238.html
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Weekend At Bernies 2: Electron Boogaloo (1 of 5)
I am posting this long article in five daily installments.
In my last post, Faithful Readers and True Believers, we met ontological Materialism - a philosophical worldview that was looking very much like Bernie Lomax. Bernie looks good. He’s old, but he seems healthy and fit. He’s hanging out with his young friends, laying out on the beach, speed boating, water-skiing, haggling over the price of a Porsche, strangling his mob business associate, fornicating - he seems fine. If you pass by and wave, he seems to wave back at you. He’s not saying much, but his friends Larry and Richard are saving him the trouble. When you lean in close and listen, you can hear them. John Searle (played by Andrew McCarthy), says “...one can accept the obvious facts of physics -- for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force…” [The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 28, bold emphasis mine]. Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, speaking of the materialist philosophical worldview, says to Bernie: you, sir, are “a default position for any rational being who has not been favored with a direct revelation of the divine." In agreement, McCarthy, now playing Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, says that anyone for whom the “scientific discovery” that the mind is nothing more than the purely physiological activity of the brain is a matter of doubt “cannot be said to be educated.”
In other words, Materialism is fine. Stronger than ever. Healthy as a horse. All that exists are the very teeny tiny little billiard balls click-clacking against each other against a background of Nothing. Sure, some collections of such particles are more evolved than others, but that just makes them more complicated, not more important. Ultimately, there is no difference between human beings and other animals, or any other living thing - indeed, there is no fundamental difference between living things and non-living objects. People are no better than grains of sand, and, with the huge scale of the universe, they are hardly even significantly different in size. Consciousness reduces (or will be reduced) to neuroscience, which is merely a branch of biology, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics - the meaningless dance of those tiny little bits. That’s all. There is no soul, and we need have no doubt about that. It’s scientifically established. No free will, no afterlife - we are biological robots who scurry about fulfilling our genetically and environmentally encoded programs, and then when we die, that’s it. No God, no Devil, no judgment, no hope of salvation, no danger of damnation. No heaven, no hell. No angels, no demons. No Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy either.
Bernie looks like he can keep on going and going like the Energizer bunny for another hundred years, No Problem.
But then I let you all in on the secret that those closest to Bernie already know: HE’S DEAD.
I even told you who killed him - the giants of early 20th century Physics - Einstein and the other pioneers of quantum theory.
I am going to explain how they did that, but first, I am going to pull a Quentin Tarantino on you and flash back to something that happened in the past. The fairly distant past, actually. You see, Bernie is older than he looks. It’s common for people to assume that Materialism is, as Pinker put it, a “scientific discovery”, and thus a product of modern times - a relatively recent insight into the real truth of things, proven by experimentation. But it is not. Materialism was not arrived at by any experimental result or scientific proof. It was not the conclusion of any recent argument. It is an assumption that is already in operation in those who believe it before they even begin to look at the evidence, and it is held in such a way that no evidence could ever overturn it - they will reject the data before they doubt the theory. It is a fundamental premise, and as such, it has been around for as long as there have been thinking people, always right alongside its opposite - the more spiritual theistic view of things. The ancient Greeks had their materialists. They were the first “atomists” - indeed, we get the word “a-tom” (un-cuttable) from them. Leucippus and his pupil Democritus we among the earliest we have on record. They believed that the whole of reality is a mixture of atoms (the very smallest bits of things, the ones that cannot be cut into smaller bits anymore), and the void.
A thinker less known for his Atomistic Materialism, because of the weird and wishy-washy way he held to it, is Epicurus.
Epicurus is more known nowadays for his advocacy of a not-obviously unreasonable form of selfish hedonism. Epicurus promoted the quiet, more lasting, more stable, and ultimately more fulfilling pleasures of the intellectual sort to those of the flesh, since the former satisfied desires while the latter ultimately excites them and makes them more persistent, more intense.
But Epicurus also introduced a notion that should really be getting a lot more play than it has been getting lately - that of the clinamen, or atomic “swerve”. He argued that, on the level of the smallest bits of physical stuff, the tiniest particles move around partly in ways determined by their collisions, and partly with an apparent randomness. He argued for this on two grounds, one of which doesn’t have any relevance here (the idea that the atoms would all be eternally moving in the same direction on parallel tracks, all falling separately, if some didn’t randomly swerve sideways into each other to produce the collisons and fusions that produce everything we see in the world including ourselves), but the other one, which even Epicurus deemed more important, was that there must be random behavior on the level of micro particles or determinism would be true and thus we would have no freedom. But we are free, Epicurus affirmed. We have free will. Therefore all the motions of the smallest bits cannot be fully determined by the prior states of the particles (their position and prior momentum).
We don’t have much of what Epicurus wrote himself, but we have Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), so we know where Epicurus stood. He posted his tweet on the ancient world’s version of the Internet (the scroll, the university and the public lecture), and that meme got around. When it reached Cicero (centuries later - much slower than dial-up, let alone DSL), the latter had to respond.
“What new cause, then, is there in nature which would make the atom swerve? Or surely you don't mean that they draw lots with each other to see which ones will swerve and which not/ Or why do they swerve by one minimal interval, and not by two or three? This is wishful thinking, not argument.” (De Fato [“On Fate”], 46).
Flash forward to a parallel debate between two of Materialism’s executioners, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein was arguing against the new quantum theory, asserting that it is incomplete. Because quantum phenomena have an irreducibly random element to even the most complete account of what occurs on that level, it cannot provide a complete causal explanation for anything that happens on the subatomic level. All it can provide is statistics, probabilities. For Einstein, that meant that there was something missing, something that would fill in the causal gaps and provide the theoretical ground for an explanation of all particle actions and interactions on the quantum level. “God,” he is famously rumored to have said, “does not play dice with the universe.” Cicero used lots in his scornful illustration. Einstein used dice. Both were objecting to the idea that at the level of the smallest bits of things some events happen apparently at random with no knowable physical explanation. Niels Bohr retorted, “Einstein, stop telling God what He can't do!”
The debate is over. Bohr won. Epicurus was right. Cicero and Einstein were wrong. The success of quantum theory vindicates the clinamen, the Epicurean swerve, and that success has been without parallel in the history of science. What’s more, there is no doubt that, when it comes to physics, quantum mechanics has the final word. There is no room for anything more ultimate. There is certainly room for a theoretical bridge between quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity at great distances, or even between the seemingly causeless weirdness on the quantum level and the undeniable ubiquity of causality at the level of ordinary sized objects. But there will never be a new discovery of physics that closes the causal gaps at the quantum level and thus revives the determinism of Laplace mentioned in the last blog post. It is impossible to determine, with absolute precision, both the location and momentum of any single subatomic particle, let alone all of them. That is Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one of the most important laws in quantum physics. This inviolable limit is not merely epistemological. It is not merely a consequence of the largeness and clumsiness of our scientific instruments compared to the objects they help us to observe and measure. The limit is ontological - it is part of the nature of the phenomena itself.
Now I am going to tell you about what I am calling, in this blog post, the new, weird, mystical dance of matter on the level of its smallest parts: the Electron Boogaloo.
The phrase “Electron Boogaloo” is the name I am using in this blog post to refer to the crazy dance that massless particles like photons and electrons do whenever they exhibit the characteristics of waves. It was first discovered with photons, individual particles of that form of electromagnetic energy we call light. All visible light is said to have these photons. Our eyes are sensitive enough, when adapted to total darkness, to detect a single photon hitting the iris of one of our eyes. But it was later discovered that light is not the only electromagnetic energy with wave-particle duality. Just as it was surprising that light, which we already knew traveled in waves, had a particle-aspect, so we would also be surprised later still that electrons move in waves like light under certain circumstances - even individual electrons. I call the quantum dance the Electron Boogaloo because we have electrons in every atom in our bodies. Thus every electron in every atom is doing this crazy dance.
This posting is already dragging, so I will give the details of the dance in tomorrow's installment.
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_02.html
In my last post, Faithful Readers and True Believers, we met ontological Materialism - a philosophical worldview that was looking very much like Bernie Lomax. Bernie looks good. He’s old, but he seems healthy and fit. He’s hanging out with his young friends, laying out on the beach, speed boating, water-skiing, haggling over the price of a Porsche, strangling his mob business associate, fornicating - he seems fine. If you pass by and wave, he seems to wave back at you. He’s not saying much, but his friends Larry and Richard are saving him the trouble. When you lean in close and listen, you can hear them. John Searle (played by Andrew McCarthy), says “...one can accept the obvious facts of physics -- for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force…” [The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 28, bold emphasis mine]. Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, speaking of the materialist philosophical worldview, says to Bernie: you, sir, are “a default position for any rational being who has not been favored with a direct revelation of the divine." In agreement, McCarthy, now playing Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, says that anyone for whom the “scientific discovery” that the mind is nothing more than the purely physiological activity of the brain is a matter of doubt “cannot be said to be educated.”
In other words, Materialism is fine. Stronger than ever. Healthy as a horse. All that exists are the very teeny tiny little billiard balls click-clacking against each other against a background of Nothing. Sure, some collections of such particles are more evolved than others, but that just makes them more complicated, not more important. Ultimately, there is no difference between human beings and other animals, or any other living thing - indeed, there is no fundamental difference between living things and non-living objects. People are no better than grains of sand, and, with the huge scale of the universe, they are hardly even significantly different in size. Consciousness reduces (or will be reduced) to neuroscience, which is merely a branch of biology, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics - the meaningless dance of those tiny little bits. That’s all. There is no soul, and we need have no doubt about that. It’s scientifically established. No free will, no afterlife - we are biological robots who scurry about fulfilling our genetically and environmentally encoded programs, and then when we die, that’s it. No God, no Devil, no judgment, no hope of salvation, no danger of damnation. No heaven, no hell. No angels, no demons. No Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy either.
Bernie looks like he can keep on going and going like the Energizer bunny for another hundred years, No Problem.
But then I let you all in on the secret that those closest to Bernie already know: HE’S DEAD.
I even told you who killed him - the giants of early 20th century Physics - Einstein and the other pioneers of quantum theory.
I am going to explain how they did that, but first, I am going to pull a Quentin Tarantino on you and flash back to something that happened in the past. The fairly distant past, actually. You see, Bernie is older than he looks. It’s common for people to assume that Materialism is, as Pinker put it, a “scientific discovery”, and thus a product of modern times - a relatively recent insight into the real truth of things, proven by experimentation. But it is not. Materialism was not arrived at by any experimental result or scientific proof. It was not the conclusion of any recent argument. It is an assumption that is already in operation in those who believe it before they even begin to look at the evidence, and it is held in such a way that no evidence could ever overturn it - they will reject the data before they doubt the theory. It is a fundamental premise, and as such, it has been around for as long as there have been thinking people, always right alongside its opposite - the more spiritual theistic view of things. The ancient Greeks had their materialists. They were the first “atomists” - indeed, we get the word “a-tom” (un-cuttable) from them. Leucippus and his pupil Democritus we among the earliest we have on record. They believed that the whole of reality is a mixture of atoms (the very smallest bits of things, the ones that cannot be cut into smaller bits anymore), and the void.
A thinker less known for his Atomistic Materialism, because of the weird and wishy-washy way he held to it, is Epicurus.
Epicurus is more known nowadays for his advocacy of a not-obviously unreasonable form of selfish hedonism. Epicurus promoted the quiet, more lasting, more stable, and ultimately more fulfilling pleasures of the intellectual sort to those of the flesh, since the former satisfied desires while the latter ultimately excites them and makes them more persistent, more intense.
But Epicurus also introduced a notion that should really be getting a lot more play than it has been getting lately - that of the clinamen, or atomic “swerve”. He argued that, on the level of the smallest bits of physical stuff, the tiniest particles move around partly in ways determined by their collisions, and partly with an apparent randomness. He argued for this on two grounds, one of which doesn’t have any relevance here (the idea that the atoms would all be eternally moving in the same direction on parallel tracks, all falling separately, if some didn’t randomly swerve sideways into each other to produce the collisons and fusions that produce everything we see in the world including ourselves), but the other one, which even Epicurus deemed more important, was that there must be random behavior on the level of micro particles or determinism would be true and thus we would have no freedom. But we are free, Epicurus affirmed. We have free will. Therefore all the motions of the smallest bits cannot be fully determined by the prior states of the particles (their position and prior momentum).
We don’t have much of what Epicurus wrote himself, but we have Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), so we know where Epicurus stood. He posted his tweet on the ancient world’s version of the Internet (the scroll, the university and the public lecture), and that meme got around. When it reached Cicero (centuries later - much slower than dial-up, let alone DSL), the latter had to respond.
“What new cause, then, is there in nature which would make the atom swerve? Or surely you don't mean that they draw lots with each other to see which ones will swerve and which not/ Or why do they swerve by one minimal interval, and not by two or three? This is wishful thinking, not argument.” (De Fato [“On Fate”], 46).
Flash forward to a parallel debate between two of Materialism’s executioners, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein was arguing against the new quantum theory, asserting that it is incomplete. Because quantum phenomena have an irreducibly random element to even the most complete account of what occurs on that level, it cannot provide a complete causal explanation for anything that happens on the subatomic level. All it can provide is statistics, probabilities. For Einstein, that meant that there was something missing, something that would fill in the causal gaps and provide the theoretical ground for an explanation of all particle actions and interactions on the quantum level. “God,” he is famously rumored to have said, “does not play dice with the universe.” Cicero used lots in his scornful illustration. Einstein used dice. Both were objecting to the idea that at the level of the smallest bits of things some events happen apparently at random with no knowable physical explanation. Niels Bohr retorted, “Einstein, stop telling God what He can't do!”
The debate is over. Bohr won. Epicurus was right. Cicero and Einstein were wrong. The success of quantum theory vindicates the clinamen, the Epicurean swerve, and that success has been without parallel in the history of science. What’s more, there is no doubt that, when it comes to physics, quantum mechanics has the final word. There is no room for anything more ultimate. There is certainly room for a theoretical bridge between quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity at great distances, or even between the seemingly causeless weirdness on the quantum level and the undeniable ubiquity of causality at the level of ordinary sized objects. But there will never be a new discovery of physics that closes the causal gaps at the quantum level and thus revives the determinism of Laplace mentioned in the last blog post. It is impossible to determine, with absolute precision, both the location and momentum of any single subatomic particle, let alone all of them. That is Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one of the most important laws in quantum physics. This inviolable limit is not merely epistemological. It is not merely a consequence of the largeness and clumsiness of our scientific instruments compared to the objects they help us to observe and measure. The limit is ontological - it is part of the nature of the phenomena itself.
Now I am going to tell you about what I am calling, in this blog post, the new, weird, mystical dance of matter on the level of its smallest parts: the Electron Boogaloo.
The phrase “Electron Boogaloo” is the name I am using in this blog post to refer to the crazy dance that massless particles like photons and electrons do whenever they exhibit the characteristics of waves. It was first discovered with photons, individual particles of that form of electromagnetic energy we call light. All visible light is said to have these photons. Our eyes are sensitive enough, when adapted to total darkness, to detect a single photon hitting the iris of one of our eyes. But it was later discovered that light is not the only electromagnetic energy with wave-particle duality. Just as it was surprising that light, which we already knew traveled in waves, had a particle-aspect, so we would also be surprised later still that electrons move in waves like light under certain circumstances - even individual electrons. I call the quantum dance the Electron Boogaloo because we have electrons in every atom in our bodies. Thus every electron in every atom is doing this crazy dance.
This posting is already dragging, so I will give the details of the dance in tomorrow's installment.
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_02.html
Friday, June 12, 2009
Bury Bernie Already - He's Starting To Stink Up The Joint!
A month and a day since my last post - it's about time for another one. The title calls to mind the 1989 movie Weekend At Bernie's. Bernie is a metaphor for a philosophy known as ontological Materialism, which I identify loosely with Physicalism and metaphysical Naturalism. It is the dominant intellectual paradigm in Western science, academia, and much of the mainstream media, especially the more heady portion thereof, e.g., PBS, NPR, and the New York Times Book Review. For those who know how to spot it, it is detectable behind every article in TIME and Newsweek that comes out around Easter that attempts to discredit miraculous events recorded in scripture. It is the driving force behind every new Scientific American article or National Geographic feature on the latest de jure Missing Link and Final Proof of Darwinian evolution. It is openly asserted in the typical piece that screams from the title page on the magazine at the supermarket rack that Now Science Has Shown That There Is No Room for the Soul. It is the default assumption of the talking heads that make up the elite intelligentsia.
It was 1820 when the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace , known as the "French Newton" (and known for being more strictly Newtonian than Isaac Newton ever was), gave us this little gem:
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. (Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités forming the introduction to his Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, Paris: V Courcier; repr.)
That requires a translation from Vulcan into Ordinary Human, and such a translation needs a story.
We all probably remember that when we were in grade school we were taught about molecules and atoms and all that stuff - the little bits of things, so small you can't see 'em. I remember I had to memorize a definition for a seventh grade science quiz, and I drilled it into myself so hard I never forgot it: "a molecule is the smallest part of a substance that is still that substance." I was taught that water is a substance, and it is made of molecules that we call H2O. We call them that because they are made of atoms: two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But those atoms are not themselves water. I remember I was also told that the oxygen I breathe is a gas whose molecules are O2 (two atoms of oxygen). I remember wondering why a molecule of oxygen was "that substance" (oxygen), but an atom of oxygen wasn't. But that's besides the point. (Ok, if it's going to bother you for the rest of this post and distract you from the point, I'll tell you - atomic oxygen is not the O2 oxygen gas we breathe - if you were in a room full of free floating atomic oxygen but no O2, you'd asphyxiate).
That was what I learned when I first was taught about molecules and atoms. I was shown models of molecules, which looked like little colored balls or spheres fastened to each end of a thin dowel rod or stick. The little spheres were atoms. The atoms, I was told, were not really like little balls, but rather like little solar systems. There was an even tinier ballbearing or bunch of them, in the center, and very tiny dot-like spheres whirling about it very fast, like miniature planets around a sun. These, I was assured, are what everything is made of. If I knocked on the wood of my school desk or whatever table I was sitting at, the atoms of my hand were knocking against the atoms of the wood. The solidity of the table was the solidity of its atoms - they were the ultimately real, and very hard, literally uncuttable things that everything we see is made of. Atoms were so hard, so there, so real, so impenetrable, that if you split the atom, you have an atomic bomb - that's how much energy is released when the bonds holding an atom together are broken - that's one violent Balloon-Pop!
Fine. But then I was told that most of what we know as atoms is empty space - and thus everything I see, including myself, is mostly empty space. That was puzzling - why don't the atoms in my knuckles slip right through the empty space of the atoms of the table? Why don't I fall through the floor, through the earth, and just join my empty atomic space with the rest of empty space in outer space? Well, because there are force fields between these particles that are like the fields around the poles of magnets. They can attract, and they can repel. The protons in the nucleus of the atom attract the electrons, and the electrons of my atoms repel the electrons of the table's atoms. If you have ever seen two magnets push each other away without touching, you can get the picture. The solidity of the table against my rapping knuckles was the result of all those fields between the force-field-embedded particles of my knuckles and the force-field-embedded particles in the table repelling each other. Ah hah! Gotcha.
Now comes the interesting part. It seems, or so I was taught, that Everything That IS, that all of existence, is just a large, complicated story of a staggeringly huge quantity of particles inside their respective force fields bouncing up against all the other particles inside their force fields. The world was like a very large game of pool - a vast billiard hall with only one table. The particles (in fields of force), are all doing their thing, moving around, bouncing blindly and meaninglessly off each other, floating around in space. That, ultimately, is the story of the universe, reduced to one sentence. The universe, in summary, is a bunch of tiny little particles, the smallest of which, of course, are the ultimately real, solid, present things, banging against each other. The pattern of their interaction, the sum total result of all those collisions, is the whole story of the universe from start to finish, from its beginning until the end. The level of the smallest particles is the bottom level, the foundation, the existential substrate, that from which everything that is real derives its reality, its substance. From rocks to trees to plants to animals to people to planets to stars and galaxies, ultimately, it is all a bunch of atoms in the void. Everything larger than atom is just a collection of atoms. Nothing more. What's more, if we knew where all the particles were, down to the smallest ones, and where they were going - their positions and momentum, we could apply Newton's laws of motion and theoretically we could calculate the whole history of the universe, all the way back to the beginning, and all the way forward to the end. We could know everything that had ever happened and everything that ever will happen. That is what Laplace was saying.
Naturally, if everything we do, every move we make, every action we perform, can be reduced to the inevitable consequence of the smallest parts of the matter in our bodies blindly and necessarily obeying the laws of physics, that is the end of freedom. No traditional notion of free will or responsible moral agency can be maintained if this worldview is affirmed, nor can any coherent, meaningful idea of God, of soul or spirit and life after death, be believed, if that truly is the whole story of us and the world, of everything that exists. However comforting such beliefs may be, however useful they are in constructing a law-based society and maintaining a coherent, orderly civilization, at best these are convenient fictions, civilly and sociologically necessary "white lies".
This is how one of the contemporary giants of English philosophy, John Searle, expresses this view from his famous 1984 Reith lectures:
On the one hand we are inclined to say that since nature consists of particles and their relations with each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms of those particles and their relations, there is simply no room for freedom of the will...The strongest image for conveying this conception of determinism is still that formulated by Laplace: If an ideal observer knew the positions of all the particles at a given instant and knew all the laws governing their movements, he could predict and retrodict the entire history of the universe. (Minds, Brains and Science, 86-87)
So as recently as 1984, a very well-respected philosopher who is a very strong proponent of what he calls "the Scientific Worldview" (which is his question-begging term for materialism as I have described it), said that Laplace's "image" is STILL the "strongest" one. It is clear from the context that he does not consider Laplacian determinism to be, in any meaningful way, outdated, let alone overturned, by the fundamental and revolutionary changes to physics that have taken place since the 19th century. Even in the light of the great advances we have achieved in our knowledge of the physical world in the 189 years since 1820, Laplace's illustration and the intuition it expresses is still, in all its significant aspects, up-to-date, according to Searle. And Searle is not alone or out on a limb in holding this position. The web-based, online Stanford Encyclopedia article on "Casual Determinism" used the Laplace quote I gave above as the standard expression of physicalism causal determinism (an integral and necessary part of metaphysical materialism, the dominant academic, scientific, and intellectual paradigm). In fact, I copied it from there and pasted it here. You can find it at this url:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
It remains for a follow-up to this already-overlong blog article to explain this, but for now, let me blow the gaff loud and proud:
Laplace was dead wrong, and all those soul-denying materialist bastards know it!
Laplacian determinism, and the naturalist, physicalist materialism it entails, is totally out of date and, in fact, completely refuted, by post-Newtonian physics. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, by rendering scientifically meaningless a universal present moment, knocked the Laplacian version of Newtonian classical mechanics to the ground, and then Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, performed the coup de grace.
Materialism is Dead On Arrival.
But it is such a useful fiction (which, ironically, is how materialists characterize the notion that human beings are free agents, morally responsible for their behavior) that its exponents could not bring themselves to declare it deceased. The worked valiantly to revive the corpse, but the long, monotonous flat-line beep did not waver. They should have admitted defeat in the face of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and said "Ok, Stop CPR and Call It: Time of Death, 1927." But they could not do it.
So they have been propping the carcass up like Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman propped up Terry Kiser in Weekend At Bernie's. They put on a bold, brave face and act as if nothing is wrong. All is well. Materialism is fine. Strong as an ox. Healthier than ever.
Don't you believe it!
It took over a hundred years for Relativity and quantum physics to kill Laplace's determinist materialistic version of Newtonian physics. It has been eighty-two years since it took its last breath on its own. That is one long-ass weekend! When are they going to get tired of hauling Bernie's dead ass around and waving his arm to passing onlookers? It's time to pull the plug! Materialism isn't in a coma. It's dead. Bury the body already. Give it to the worms - they're hungry.
In the next post, which I will publish very soon, I will present the autopsy report in detail. I will show exactly how materialism died. It will be like an episode of Philosophical CSI.
To Be Continued in "Weekend At Bernie's 2: Electron Boogaloo".... so STAY TUNED, TRUE BELIEVERS! SAME BLOG TIME! SAME BLOG CHANNEL!
Link to first installment of series of sequel posts:
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo.html
It was 1820 when the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace , known as the "French Newton" (and known for being more strictly Newtonian than Isaac Newton ever was), gave us this little gem:
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. (Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités forming the introduction to his Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, Paris: V Courcier; repr.)
That requires a translation from Vulcan into Ordinary Human, and such a translation needs a story.
We all probably remember that when we were in grade school we were taught about molecules and atoms and all that stuff - the little bits of things, so small you can't see 'em. I remember I had to memorize a definition for a seventh grade science quiz, and I drilled it into myself so hard I never forgot it: "a molecule is the smallest part of a substance that is still that substance." I was taught that water is a substance, and it is made of molecules that we call H2O. We call them that because they are made of atoms: two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But those atoms are not themselves water. I remember I was also told that the oxygen I breathe is a gas whose molecules are O2 (two atoms of oxygen). I remember wondering why a molecule of oxygen was "that substance" (oxygen), but an atom of oxygen wasn't. But that's besides the point. (Ok, if it's going to bother you for the rest of this post and distract you from the point, I'll tell you - atomic oxygen is not the O2 oxygen gas we breathe - if you were in a room full of free floating atomic oxygen but no O2, you'd asphyxiate).
That was what I learned when I first was taught about molecules and atoms. I was shown models of molecules, which looked like little colored balls or spheres fastened to each end of a thin dowel rod or stick. The little spheres were atoms. The atoms, I was told, were not really like little balls, but rather like little solar systems. There was an even tinier ballbearing or bunch of them, in the center, and very tiny dot-like spheres whirling about it very fast, like miniature planets around a sun. These, I was assured, are what everything is made of. If I knocked on the wood of my school desk or whatever table I was sitting at, the atoms of my hand were knocking against the atoms of the wood. The solidity of the table was the solidity of its atoms - they were the ultimately real, and very hard, literally uncuttable things that everything we see is made of. Atoms were so hard, so there, so real, so impenetrable, that if you split the atom, you have an atomic bomb - that's how much energy is released when the bonds holding an atom together are broken - that's one violent Balloon-Pop!
Fine. But then I was told that most of what we know as atoms is empty space - and thus everything I see, including myself, is mostly empty space. That was puzzling - why don't the atoms in my knuckles slip right through the empty space of the atoms of the table? Why don't I fall through the floor, through the earth, and just join my empty atomic space with the rest of empty space in outer space? Well, because there are force fields between these particles that are like the fields around the poles of magnets. They can attract, and they can repel. The protons in the nucleus of the atom attract the electrons, and the electrons of my atoms repel the electrons of the table's atoms. If you have ever seen two magnets push each other away without touching, you can get the picture. The solidity of the table against my rapping knuckles was the result of all those fields between the force-field-embedded particles of my knuckles and the force-field-embedded particles in the table repelling each other. Ah hah! Gotcha.
Now comes the interesting part. It seems, or so I was taught, that Everything That IS, that all of existence, is just a large, complicated story of a staggeringly huge quantity of particles inside their respective force fields bouncing up against all the other particles inside their force fields. The world was like a very large game of pool - a vast billiard hall with only one table. The particles (in fields of force), are all doing their thing, moving around, bouncing blindly and meaninglessly off each other, floating around in space. That, ultimately, is the story of the universe, reduced to one sentence. The universe, in summary, is a bunch of tiny little particles, the smallest of which, of course, are the ultimately real, solid, present things, banging against each other. The pattern of their interaction, the sum total result of all those collisions, is the whole story of the universe from start to finish, from its beginning until the end. The level of the smallest particles is the bottom level, the foundation, the existential substrate, that from which everything that is real derives its reality, its substance. From rocks to trees to plants to animals to people to planets to stars and galaxies, ultimately, it is all a bunch of atoms in the void. Everything larger than atom is just a collection of atoms. Nothing more. What's more, if we knew where all the particles were, down to the smallest ones, and where they were going - their positions and momentum, we could apply Newton's laws of motion and theoretically we could calculate the whole history of the universe, all the way back to the beginning, and all the way forward to the end. We could know everything that had ever happened and everything that ever will happen. That is what Laplace was saying.
Naturally, if everything we do, every move we make, every action we perform, can be reduced to the inevitable consequence of the smallest parts of the matter in our bodies blindly and necessarily obeying the laws of physics, that is the end of freedom. No traditional notion of free will or responsible moral agency can be maintained if this worldview is affirmed, nor can any coherent, meaningful idea of God, of soul or spirit and life after death, be believed, if that truly is the whole story of us and the world, of everything that exists. However comforting such beliefs may be, however useful they are in constructing a law-based society and maintaining a coherent, orderly civilization, at best these are convenient fictions, civilly and sociologically necessary "white lies".
This is how one of the contemporary giants of English philosophy, John Searle, expresses this view from his famous 1984 Reith lectures:
On the one hand we are inclined to say that since nature consists of particles and their relations with each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms of those particles and their relations, there is simply no room for freedom of the will...The strongest image for conveying this conception of determinism is still that formulated by Laplace: If an ideal observer knew the positions of all the particles at a given instant and knew all the laws governing their movements, he could predict and retrodict the entire history of the universe. (Minds, Brains and Science, 86-87)
So as recently as 1984, a very well-respected philosopher who is a very strong proponent of what he calls "the Scientific Worldview" (which is his question-begging term for materialism as I have described it), said that Laplace's "image" is STILL the "strongest" one. It is clear from the context that he does not consider Laplacian determinism to be, in any meaningful way, outdated, let alone overturned, by the fundamental and revolutionary changes to physics that have taken place since the 19th century. Even in the light of the great advances we have achieved in our knowledge of the physical world in the 189 years since 1820, Laplace's illustration and the intuition it expresses is still, in all its significant aspects, up-to-date, according to Searle. And Searle is not alone or out on a limb in holding this position. The web-based, online Stanford Encyclopedia article on "Casual Determinism" used the Laplace quote I gave above as the standard expression of physicalism causal determinism (an integral and necessary part of metaphysical materialism, the dominant academic, scientific, and intellectual paradigm). In fact, I copied it from there and pasted it here. You can find it at this url:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
It remains for a follow-up to this already-overlong blog article to explain this, but for now, let me blow the gaff loud and proud:
Laplace was dead wrong, and all those soul-denying materialist bastards know it!
Laplacian determinism, and the naturalist, physicalist materialism it entails, is totally out of date and, in fact, completely refuted, by post-Newtonian physics. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, by rendering scientifically meaningless a universal present moment, knocked the Laplacian version of Newtonian classical mechanics to the ground, and then Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, performed the coup de grace.
Materialism is Dead On Arrival.
But it is such a useful fiction (which, ironically, is how materialists characterize the notion that human beings are free agents, morally responsible for their behavior) that its exponents could not bring themselves to declare it deceased. The worked valiantly to revive the corpse, but the long, monotonous flat-line beep did not waver. They should have admitted defeat in the face of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and said "Ok, Stop CPR and Call It: Time of Death, 1927." But they could not do it.
So they have been propping the carcass up like Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman propped up Terry Kiser in Weekend At Bernie's. They put on a bold, brave face and act as if nothing is wrong. All is well. Materialism is fine. Strong as an ox. Healthier than ever.
Don't you believe it!
It took over a hundred years for Relativity and quantum physics to kill Laplace's determinist materialistic version of Newtonian physics. It has been eighty-two years since it took its last breath on its own. That is one long-ass weekend! When are they going to get tired of hauling Bernie's dead ass around and waving his arm to passing onlookers? It's time to pull the plug! Materialism isn't in a coma. It's dead. Bury the body already. Give it to the worms - they're hungry.
In the next post, which I will publish very soon, I will present the autopsy report in detail. I will show exactly how materialism died. It will be like an episode of Philosophical CSI.
To Be Continued in "Weekend At Bernie's 2: Electron Boogaloo".... so STAY TUNED, TRUE BELIEVERS! SAME BLOG TIME! SAME BLOG CHANNEL!
Link to first installment of series of sequel posts:
http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo.html
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The "Other Woman"
Those who know me will be shocked by the title of this inaugural blog post. Kevin cheat on Teresa? they will say. No! He's not the type! I don't want to dissuade anyone from that belief, but if you please bear with me to the end of this piece, I promise you that you will not be scandalized or disappointed. It ends well. I promise.
You see, Teresa and I have An Understanding. We always have. She knows where I stand on this, and she accepts it. Yes, admittedly at times she is jealous and gets exasperated, and I don't begrudge her that, but generally, she is at peace with this. (Right now she is standing behind me with her arms folded...maybe I overstated her peace of mind).
I want to tell my readers a little about The Other Woman. I am going to tell a story about a very significant moment in my life. Again, I plead with you - bear with me and you will not be disappointed, and my honor will be intact, I assure you.
Anyone who has known me well knows that approaching women has never been my strong suit. I never had much confidence. I'm not much to look at, and I'm more than a bit of a nerd. For quite a while I had what the late Chris Farley called "a bit of a weight problem". If a woman was attracted to me, she pretty much had to hit me in the head with a brick for me to get it. Dropping hints on me was a lost cause. I was too timid to act on them. So those who know me are going to be shocked when the read what follows. I am going to relay an incident in which I approached a woman at a store. I, a happily married man, felt the urgent need, the inner yearning, and I had to act.
She was standing in the used book section of the Good Will in Salisbury, MD. I remember that she was attractive, to be sure. But that was not what riveted my attention to her. She had picked up a volume that I had missed when I perused that area of the store minutes earlier, and in her hand, open, was a copy of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica.
The reader who is not a philosopher may well wonder why that would intrigue or excite me. Trust me, when it comes to philosophy, G.E. Moore was The Man. Moore was a common sense realist and a B.S. eliminator. Moore is famous for denying metaphysical idealism (the idea that the world is an idea in the mind, and that matter is not real) by holding up his hand and saying, "Here is a hand." Moore also cut through the B.S. of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and the hedonic calculus of Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism by refusing to define Good in his formulation of ethics. Refusing to define the central term in ethics - this was very unusual! For Moore, it is not the case that a thing is good because all rational beings would will it, or because it brings about greater pleasure or reduces pain. That puts the cart before the horse. For Moore, something will be willed by all rational beings because it is good, and thus it would also be no surprise if it eliminates suffering or makes people happy. These are not what define good, but are consequences of a thing being good. Good, he says, is a simple reality, not a complex one subject to breaking it down into simpler elements, analyzing and indentifying them. We do not define value, we define other things by their value.
So, back to my story. I was attracted. I was filled with a passionate desire. You may be inclined to think this was a simple story of a man seeing an attractive woman who had shown an intellectual compatibility, an interest in common, and wanting to get to know her, but since I am a married man, it is a bit more complicated than that. I began to feel my old insecurity well up in me. I wanted to approach her, but I always had that phobia. I anticipated the sweating and the stuttering that I was sure I would emit if I dared to address her. Was my desire strong enough to overcome this terrible timidity? YES! I knew I had to say something to her, or I would regret it. I would wonder for God knows how long whether I would have succeeded in getting what I felt I so urgently needed.
"Excuse me, miss?" I heard myself say.
She looked up at me expectantly, saying nothing.
I breathed in heavily and gulped before continuing. "I'm going to ask you something, and if you say no, it's no..." I began, trying to get the words out quickly so I would not begin stammering like a fool.
She nodded, indicating I should continue.
And suddenly a very confident, articulate, savvy, smooth-talking person stepped into my body - someone who seemed to be able to talk to women with the greatest of ease. Part of me was stunned and, within a psychological fortress, I watched in awe as Ricco Suave went to work, speaking words out of my mouth, moving my head and hands in subtle, cool ways.
"I noticed you found that copy of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica," I (Ricco) crooned.
"Yes," she smiled, "I was just looking through-"
I plowed over what she was about to say. My passion was aroused and I had no patience for small talk.
"Well, ma'am, that's your find, and it is only fair that you should be able to purchase it if you want to, but I have to tell you that I am very interested in acquiring that copy of Moore from you. After you take it up to the cash register I would be happy to buy it off you for significantly more than you will pay for it."
She cocked her head, confused. No doubt she was expecting some kind of come-on, some request for her phone number, some cliché, some silly line. "Well," she said haltingly, "If you want it, you can have it."
"Are you sure? It is a beauty, and I can understand your wanting it. Like I said, if you want it, you can tell me no, and that will be that."
"No," she said, her eyebrows tensing, "no, it's all right." She slowly handed it to me, looking at me and then back to the book. Then back at me...and saw me looking at the book. I could tell...I could see out of the corner of my eye...she was waiting for something. The line, the pass, the come on. When was I going to ask for her phone number? Or say, "Hey, let me make this up to you. Let's go get some coffee, my treat." But once the book was in my hand I smiled. "Thank you!" I gushed. "Thank you very much!" And then I was moving, on my way to the cash register, joyous at the find. She was looking at my back, and I already would never see her again, thrilled that I would never regret that.
At this Good Will, at that time, books were sold at 25 cents for hard covers and 10 cents for paperbacks. I pulled a dime and a penny (for the tax) out of my pocket, paid for the book, and I was out of there, already gone.
You see, Teresa and I have An Understanding. We always have. She knows where I stand on this, and she accepts it. Yes, admittedly at times she is jealous and gets exasperated, and I don't begrudge her that, but generally, she is at peace with this. (Right now she is standing behind me with her arms folded...maybe I overstated her peace of mind).
I want to tell my readers a little about The Other Woman. I am going to tell a story about a very significant moment in my life. Again, I plead with you - bear with me and you will not be disappointed, and my honor will be intact, I assure you.
Anyone who has known me well knows that approaching women has never been my strong suit. I never had much confidence. I'm not much to look at, and I'm more than a bit of a nerd. For quite a while I had what the late Chris Farley called "a bit of a weight problem". If a woman was attracted to me, she pretty much had to hit me in the head with a brick for me to get it. Dropping hints on me was a lost cause. I was too timid to act on them. So those who know me are going to be shocked when the read what follows. I am going to relay an incident in which I approached a woman at a store. I, a happily married man, felt the urgent need, the inner yearning, and I had to act.
She was standing in the used book section of the Good Will in Salisbury, MD. I remember that she was attractive, to be sure. But that was not what riveted my attention to her. She had picked up a volume that I had missed when I perused that area of the store minutes earlier, and in her hand, open, was a copy of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica.
The reader who is not a philosopher may well wonder why that would intrigue or excite me. Trust me, when it comes to philosophy, G.E. Moore was The Man. Moore was a common sense realist and a B.S. eliminator. Moore is famous for denying metaphysical idealism (the idea that the world is an idea in the mind, and that matter is not real) by holding up his hand and saying, "Here is a hand." Moore also cut through the B.S. of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and the hedonic calculus of Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism by refusing to define Good in his formulation of ethics. Refusing to define the central term in ethics - this was very unusual! For Moore, it is not the case that a thing is good because all rational beings would will it, or because it brings about greater pleasure or reduces pain. That puts the cart before the horse. For Moore, something will be willed by all rational beings because it is good, and thus it would also be no surprise if it eliminates suffering or makes people happy. These are not what define good, but are consequences of a thing being good. Good, he says, is a simple reality, not a complex one subject to breaking it down into simpler elements, analyzing and indentifying them. We do not define value, we define other things by their value.
So, back to my story. I was attracted. I was filled with a passionate desire. You may be inclined to think this was a simple story of a man seeing an attractive woman who had shown an intellectual compatibility, an interest in common, and wanting to get to know her, but since I am a married man, it is a bit more complicated than that. I began to feel my old insecurity well up in me. I wanted to approach her, but I always had that phobia. I anticipated the sweating and the stuttering that I was sure I would emit if I dared to address her. Was my desire strong enough to overcome this terrible timidity? YES! I knew I had to say something to her, or I would regret it. I would wonder for God knows how long whether I would have succeeded in getting what I felt I so urgently needed.
"Excuse me, miss?" I heard myself say.
She looked up at me expectantly, saying nothing.
I breathed in heavily and gulped before continuing. "I'm going to ask you something, and if you say no, it's no..." I began, trying to get the words out quickly so I would not begin stammering like a fool.
She nodded, indicating I should continue.
And suddenly a very confident, articulate, savvy, smooth-talking person stepped into my body - someone who seemed to be able to talk to women with the greatest of ease. Part of me was stunned and, within a psychological fortress, I watched in awe as Ricco Suave went to work, speaking words out of my mouth, moving my head and hands in subtle, cool ways.
"I noticed you found that copy of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica," I (Ricco) crooned.
"Yes," she smiled, "I was just looking through-"
I plowed over what she was about to say. My passion was aroused and I had no patience for small talk.
"Well, ma'am, that's your find, and it is only fair that you should be able to purchase it if you want to, but I have to tell you that I am very interested in acquiring that copy of Moore from you. After you take it up to the cash register I would be happy to buy it off you for significantly more than you will pay for it."
She cocked her head, confused. No doubt she was expecting some kind of come-on, some request for her phone number, some cliché, some silly line. "Well," she said haltingly, "If you want it, you can have it."
"Are you sure? It is a beauty, and I can understand your wanting it. Like I said, if you want it, you can tell me no, and that will be that."
"No," she said, her eyebrows tensing, "no, it's all right." She slowly handed it to me, looking at me and then back to the book. Then back at me...and saw me looking at the book. I could tell...I could see out of the corner of my eye...she was waiting for something. The line, the pass, the come on. When was I going to ask for her phone number? Or say, "Hey, let me make this up to you. Let's go get some coffee, my treat." But once the book was in my hand I smiled. "Thank you!" I gushed. "Thank you very much!" And then I was moving, on my way to the cash register, joyous at the find. She was looking at my back, and I already would never see her again, thrilled that I would never regret that.
At this Good Will, at that time, books were sold at 25 cents for hard covers and 10 cents for paperbacks. I pulled a dime and a penny (for the tax) out of my pocket, paid for the book, and I was out of there, already gone.
I love Teresa very much, but I also love She whom Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius called "Lady Philosophy". Teresa knows about this "Other Woman" in my life. She's like Peggy Hill on the animated TV show King of the Hill - she is a trooper, a very understanding soul. “Peg and I have An Understanding…” Hank Hill says. When I hear him say that about Peg, with reference to his own mistress, "Lady Propane", I have to nod knowingly and smile. I am lucky like Hank.
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