Asymmetrical Information

It's possible to believe in absolute right and absolute wrong without the need for a Creator to decree such things. Indeed, I'll bet that you do believe in them:

"I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong of the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal."

-- Herbert Spencer, "The Proper Sphere Of Government"

Funny you should mention this.
Just the other night, I was asking a friend
of mine what ethics could be derived for a functioning society using as few axioms as possible and NOT resorting to ANY religious argument.

That is, is it possible to create ethics without God?

We started from "Perpetuate the species" as an axiom, given that the alternative was more than a little depressing.

I'm sure that secular/humanist philosophers have much more to say on this than my amateur musings, however.

This is one of the themes that permeates the works of Robert A. Heinlein, except that he defines "moral" as what works to advance the species. Morality is certainly related to ethics, but since it's been many years since I read philosophy don't ask me to explain the difference.

Jane,

That statement could be interpereted one of two ways depending on where the emphasis is. Do you mean that some things are "just wrong" regardless of what anyone thinks, or that some things are "just wrong" in the sense that they're so obviously wrong that no further argument is necessary? The first is a defensible position (and one I'm inclined to agree with), but the second is far stronger and pretty obviously irrational.

Nate,

Flip the question around. How is it possible to build an ethics based on God? You have two choices: 1) God says doing X is right/wrong because X is right/wrong. 2) Doing X is right/wrong because God says so. Option 1 pretty obviously makes God otiose, but option 2 isn't any more appealing -- if (2) is true, then if God said tomorrow that the opposite of X was right/wrong (e.g. murder), reversing his previous decree, then so it would be. Doesn't look like a very nice ethical basis to me.

I don't think the belief that some things are just plain wrong is absurd to most people. The average joe on the street would shrug at this idea with an "of course". I don't agree with it (in an objective sense), but I don't consider it absurd.

My absurd belief: Historical determinism

Jane -

Just to humor us, can you name something that is just plain wrong?

My absurd belief is that god is math. It works as well the other way around, too. That's my higher power.

"My absurd belief is that god is math."

Math is certainly a higher reality than physics--the material universe for that matter.

There is a school of thought that argues that anything that has a non-zero probability of existence, exists.

Matt -

The idea that G-d defines right and wrong includes the idea that He does not change His mind. It is specifically His eternal existence and singlemindedness that makes it possible to say that there is one standard which is always applicable.

"There is a school of thought that argues that anything that has a non-zero probability of existence, exists."

So is that proof of the existance of military intelligence and libertarian majorities, or would you argue that those are zero probablity events?

Matt McIntosh: Let me take a stab at running with your argument (after looking up "otiose").

Your first alternative posits that God is completely separate from moral law -- that something would be right regardless of whether God favored it or not.

Your second alternative is that God effectively IS the moral law -- that what makes something good is nothing more than that God happens to like it, the way he surely likes vanilla Cokes heavy on the syrup, the way Ruby's Diner on the Balboa Pier makes it.

What if it's something in between? What if God and the moral law are distinct, but interdependent -- that is, what if what makes God God is that the moral law is an inherent part of his being? That if by acting contrary to the moral law, God would cease to be God?

Then, I would think it would be possible to build an ethics based on God. If you subscribe to the neoplatonist/Christian idea that God's existence is more real than ours ("shadowlands" and all that), then a person might choose to act ethically because he believes that by doing so, he is acting in accordance with his true nature as a being created in God's image.

Some might argue that God does indeed say that doing X is right/wrong because X is intrinsically right/wrong. But, perhaps we simple humans still need God because we won't be able to recognize true right and wrong without His guidance.

Not a view I subscribe to, fwiw.

That is, is it possible to create ethics without God?

Ethics derived from God are no different from ethics derived from X, where X is any given person you care to name. You could derive a coherent moral system by simply agreeing that everything *I* personally say to do defines what is good and right. That's what theistic people do, except that the person they're listening to doesn't have a demonstrable existance of his own.

In practice, God-derived moral systems are actually based on rather a lot of axioms. such as:

- God exists
- God knows and/or defines what right and wrong are
- God communicates this information to humans
- Nothing interferes with the accurate relaying of this information to you personally.

In practice there is no identifiable difference between a person claiming something is wrong for his own selfish reasons and a person claiming something is wrong because God really and truly did tell him that it was wrong. We're just taking a human's word for it. Even if you think God speaks to you directly, you're taking it on faith that you're not crazy or being tricked by some non-divine being.

In any event, my absurd belief is that a purely libertarian society is possible. :)

Russ,

God never changes his mind, eh? Do I really need to drag out my Bible and point out all the parts where God says one thing and then says another thing later? Here, start with this one (all references KJV):

"Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities." -- Isaiah 14:21

"The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." -- Deuteronomy 24:16

Or this?

"And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle." -- Exodus 33:11

"And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live." -- Exodus 33:20

Or this?

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." -- Matthew 5:16

"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly." -- Matthew 6:3-4

Etc etc etc. My point is that you're going out on an awfully long, thin limb here, because isofar as God has made his will known there are noted inconsistencies (assuming you take the Bible at face value), and we have no sound evidentiary way to differentiate which version is "corect". So we're left no better off than we started.

Duck,

Sorry, doesn't work. Even if they're interdependent that still makes God's existence contingent on some primary moral law, so it's said moral law that you're basing your ethics on rather than God. You could take it one step further and say God *is* the moral law like Russ seems to suggest above, but that has its own problems.

My favorite absurb belief:

"Robots are stealing my luggage."

Ironically enough, many years after Steve Martin said this, it happened to me.

Mine: The eventual heat death of the universe or Big Rip is not a bad thing.

Matt McI.,

You've confused two ideas: (1) God never changing His mind, and (2) every word of the Bible being what some people call 'literally true'.

The two ideas are pretty much separate. And regarding the second, it is quite clear to me that the Bible often teaches by literary figuration. (Metaphor, analogy, parable, etc.)

For example, suppose you were explaining the shape of the Earth's magnetic field to someone. You might draw a circle with curved lines coming out of it and arrows to indicate directionality.

Does that mean you're saying that there are actually arrowheads in outer space? That the Earth is a 2-dimensional circle? That the magnetic field exists only on certain lines, rather than at every point in space? No, of course not.

The intention is to provide a familiar model that the student can use to better understand the deeper truth. The truth is the aim. The model is a way to get closer to that end.

When you quote individual verses from any work -- not just the Bible -- you can lose important context. Sometimes it's not a big deal. But other times you'll miss a piece of rhetoric or dialogue that can alter the meaning. This is not a defect in the work itself. It's simply the nature of rhetoric.

Now, in case anyone's interested, I'll give my imperfect understanding of the quotations you selected. Take this with several grains of salt:

Isaiah 14:21 -- This verse is an example of trash-talking. Isaiah assures the Israelites that one day they'll be free of the Babylonians, and will be able to mock their former rulers. He provides a song to illustrate this vividly. This verse is the last part of it.

It does not advocate killing the sons of the Babylonian king. The Israelites were not in a position to do that anyway! The point is to reassure and predict that, one day, the Jews would be free again, while the Babylonians would be humbled. This did happen when Cyrus the Great (a Persian) invaded and conquered Babylon, killed off its ruling line, and allowed displaced Jews to return home.

Deuteronomy 24:16 -- This is part of an assemblage of law. It codifies a formal limitation on revenge in judicial proceedings. (War is a completely different issue.) I don't know if this limitation would even apply to foreigners.

In terms of basic truth, it is part of the larger idea that people should be merciful. I don't see much conflict between it and what happened to the kings of Babylon.

Exodus --

When Moses is speaking "face to face" with God, the point is that he is getting information directly from God. Not that he is literally seeing God's face, or even that God has a face as we understand it.

In the context of the next verse you quoted, Moses asks to see God's glory. God tells Moses that no one can see His face without dying. But He also does tell Moses that he can see God's back.

This is clearly metaphor. The plain meaning is that we humans are unable to comprehend perfection in its fullness, but that nevertheless we can perceive it reflected in creation.

Matthew 5:16 -- Jesus is saying that it is useless to try to be good by keeping goodness to yourself. And furthermore, that by doing good, we set an example through which others can find their way to goodness. He illustrates his meaning with metaphor -- a light hidden under a bushel, a city on a hill, etc.

Matthew 6:3-4 -- In the beginning of this section, which you omitted, Jesus says, (in the NAB translation) "Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father."

The point is that it is not really virtuous to do charitable deeds for selfish motives. Jesus illustrates the point with comical exaggeration.

For example, "When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you." Now, how many people are actually going to blow a trumpet to announce their good deeds? Trumpets themselves are not a big concern. But the seductive idea of doing something with the intention of winning admiration is a real temptation.

Hopefully, almost anyone can see a distinction between those selections from Matthew. The first one is not a command 'Show yourself', nor is the second an order to 'Hide yourself.' Rather, taken together, they are a caution against the dangers of two extremes: on the one hand, it's hard to be good while isolating yourself from society; but on the other hand, you must not let your goodness be motivated by your participation in society.

Hope that helps..

Matt McIntosh, Russ, TheProudDuck, &c: actually, as I understand it this is a fairly significant theological question. Some groups (including, I believe, the Catholic Church) argue that what is right is right, but God will never tell us to do wrong (since he's omniscient, he knows the good, and since he's all-good, he won't oppose it). I personally (though I'm an atheist) consider this pretty reasonable and enlightened. It captures the idea that killing innocents for no reason is never right, regardless of what you're told (although it's possible that God may know of some factor you don't that makes one particular instance justifiable). However, to make it hang together even more, in my opinion, I narrow it to "God would tell us to do what is good for our ends." Because God is benevolent, he wants us to be happy; therefore he'll try to get us to do what will make us all happy. He just knows what's good for us better than we do, and so translates it into a code so we have guidance. (Note--this is pretty much what I believe about morality in actuality, sans the God part. What's right is our attempt to be happy; moral codes are sets of rules that try to give advice on generally what helps us to live a good life).

The other view is that it is right to obey God purely because we love him and will do whatever he asks us. A friend of mine considering the priesthood quoted a Muslim scholar on this topic: "If God tomorrow ordered us to kill all our infant children, it would be right to do it, because we love God and are submissive to His will." I personally consider this view pretty incoherent sort of for the reasons Matt gave. Also, I don't think it tracks the Bible very well, on my reading: I don't see any explicit ethical commands given before Exodus, and yet throughout Genesis there is a clear moral code (starting with Cain and Abel; God hadn't specifically commanded that no one should murder his brother, but it was still wrong).

As for my most absurd belief: I'm an ironist of sorts in the school of Richard Rorty. I believe that there's no foundation in the universe for true knowledge, and 'truth' and 'falsehood' only have meaning in the context of certain language games and value judgments. At the same time, I'm willing to defend my favored language games and value judgments against anyone else, and I act as though I believe they have objective truth even though I think they don't.

Living in the middle of the bible belt all my life, I've noticed most fundalmentalist christians don't believe in the ten commandments, instead preferring stories made up by their local pastor to justify whatever the hell they want to do. The 10 rules aren't that complicated. Mostly they attempt to apply them to you, not to thou.

Jane, you might try looking at the philosophy literature on ethical intuitionism, if you are interested in secular moral philosophy.

That is interesting. I've (evidently by his description) lived in the same area rmark has and yet, my impression of "fundalmentalist christians" and the Ten Commandments is, ftmp, the opposite. In fact, quite the opposite. But then, the "Bible Belt" is a large area.

My absurd belief:

Dinosaurs did not exist.

Or to be more precise: Under any current (or former) Darwinian models of evolution, dinosaurs as we understand the term could not have existed for any extended period of time.

I know all about the fossil record. I do allow for a very short period of time where there may have been some kind of mutation that resulted in animals leaving the giant bones that we have discovered. But there is no way that they were around for 100 million years or that their numbers were much above "dozens."

I would love for dinosaurs to be real. My particular religious beliefs allow for the time and the possibility of dinosaur existence. I just don't buy it.

Electrolux,

Sure, you're quite free to take all the creative license you want in interpereting the Bible in a way that makes the most sense to you. You can interperet many parts of the holy texts in any number of ways. But that exposes us to a rather gaping hole in the argument, which is that once you start picking and choosing which parts to take literally and which to de-emphasize, how the heck do you know which interperetation is correct? We're left with a hypothetical absolute moral law without being able to know what it is! This leaves us no better off than we started.

rmark,

I am not surprised. Anthropologically, religion is not and has never been primarily about doctrine.

asg,

No! Don't try to fill her head with that rubbish! :)

My absurd belief?

That I can make a difference.

email is human readable - aloud

Anyone who believes in 'god' can just put that down as their absurd belief.

Jane,

I take it your name has nothing to do with Ayn Rands, John Galt.

"there are some things which are just plain wrong"

Yes, Yes indeed.

Vegatable Aspic is one of them.

With a pen name like Jane GALT one would assume you are at least open to the idea of an objective morality not based on religion.

I guess that would have to be my absurd belief as well -- at least I'm told it is absurd - I never though of it as particularly absurd myself.

Maybe "absurd" is not quite the word, but one belief that is firmly stuck in my head is that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented if the passengers on the hijacked airliners had fought back - and, further, that they *should have* fought back. I base this on the fact that the hijackers were greatly outnumbered, 7-to-1 and 8-to-1 on the WTC planes, counting only passengers reasonably capable of resistance (which I have somewhat arbitrarily defined as male passengers between the ages of 16 and 55). In addition, they were poorly armed and, for the most part, a bunch of pencil-necks. They wouldn't have stood a chance against a concerned group counterattack. As for the "should have" part, we know that the hijackers had killed some people aboard the aircraft prior to the impacts, yet it didn't seem to occur to the passengers that they were dealing with highly trained killers and that nonresistance just might *not* be the optimal strategy. I attribute the nonresistance to the never-fight-back mindset that prevails among the sort of upscale businessmen most likely to be found on transcontinental flights during the business day. Fighting is something that only *other* people do - ghetto dwellers, rednecks, drunken fratboys - upscale businessmen would never *dream* of doing such a thing.
As for the people on Flight 93, I agree that their resistance was heroic. The ironic thing, however, is that by resisting they prevented some property damage but probably didn't save any lives. It is believed that the plane's intended target was either the Capitol or the White House, both of which had been evacuated.
As one might imagine, this is not a popular belief and I've gotten plenty of criticism for it, both in online forums and in real life conversations. Nonetheless I stand by it. Michael Moore got a lot of criticism for raising the point not long after 9/11, although he added a racial angle that I am not. More recently, Carlos Mencia adapted the issue for a comedy routine, claiming that the hijackers knew enough to steer clear of Southwest Airlines because that airline's largely working-class passengers would have stomped the hijackers to death. Right on, Carlos.

Matt, I believe that the Bible is the Word of God, as it seems you do, but Electrolux provided a gracious response to your initial post. In the Spirit of unity, though, especially in this forum, I will refrain from presenting some scriptures to you and ask whether you accept all of them as literal and you have evidence of such in your life choices. The scriptures need to be faithfully interpreted, with integrity. And with the Spirit. I think you should give Electrolux a second read.

But that exposes us to a rather gaping hole in the argument, which is that once you start picking and choosing which parts to take literally and which to de-emphasize, how the heck do you know which interperetation is correct? We're left with a hypothetical absolute moral law without being able to know what it is!

Except that if you had read the texts in question carefully, the context would have been fairly clear. You pulled pairs of verses at random and said, "Aha! Contradiction!" Your interlocutor responded, "No, if you look at the context, it is clear that these refer to separate things so..." and now you respond, in effect, "Well, it's all too abstract to understand anyway."

That line of reasoning is not compelling.

In fact, the Bible does give a coherent theme for moral behavior at the individual level (governing authorities are dealt with somewhat differently): unselfish love. You don't read a lot of obvious dissertation on these lines in the Old Testatment, because it frequently wasn't possible there; a group of people were given a set of commands and told, "Do all of this and be blessed, or else." As with any legal structure, long term people cannot or will not do it. The teaching of the New Testament is that God, after showing that man could not be righteous on his own, sent an embodiment of God as an emissary: Jesus. His crucifixion embodied all of the worst possible penalty for sin, putting an end to the violent horrors sometimes found in the Law because if the penalty for failure is paid in full, there is no longer a need for guilt. The one who will accept this becomes a follower of Jesus Christ, and will submit to His leading. The incentive now is, "Do this, because I did, and will help you in turn."

In one sense, it is the difference between being lead versus being driven, and it can be a very jolting contrast -- particularly for those prone to grab short passages at random from either section. But it in no way makes God's mind indiscernible, or inconsistent.

i'm not religious (though i went to missionary school), but my take is that it makes no sense for all of god's commands to square with what's verifiably right or comports with our notions of morality. that is, god likes to test faith, and it's not test of faith to do something that makes sense or is right for reasons other than god's will. so you don't eat pork or cover your head all the time or whatever. these are fairly petty demands, but i think they reflect the obedience required, even if what god orders seems "wrong." god can just say kill all the bunnies, and you do so, because god's word is what counts, rather than some morality external to god's will. the interesting question is whether this makes god the arbiter of what's right and good -- that is, he gets to redefine right and good as we go along, which he could do, since he's omnipotent -- or whether it's just positivism -- what god says, goes, and there is no right and good to resort to (i tend to believe in natural law, which is why i'm not very religious (though i suspect most religious folk are more inclined to natural law)).

My absurd belief is that 7/64" drill bits are inherently jinxed. I base this belief on having broken more 7/64" bits in my life than any other diameter make. For years, I would even avoid using one, even if it was the exact size I needed, if I could force a 1/8" or 3/32" hole to work.

ONE of my absurd beliefs is that petroleum is not a *fossil* fuel.

anony-mouse:
Your observations about 7/64" drill bits might have some actual scientific basis. For instance, it could be that the 3/32's are made with a harder alloy to compensate for their smaller size, while the 1/8's are just enough larger to withstand heavy use without breaking.

My absurd belief? That God wants us to learn to work out moral questions on our own; hence, He gives us guidance, but not a complete and consistent exposition of all morality.

Or maybe a complete and consistent moral code is as impossible as a complete and consistent typographical number theory.

My other absurd belief is that there are no noncomputable numbers, and hence there is no real axis.

Your observations about 7/64" drill bits might have some actual scientific basis. For instance, it could be that the 3/32's are made with a harder alloy to compensate for their smaller size, while the 1/8's are just enough larger to withstand heavy use without breaking.

Could be. Could also be that I have an "every problem is a nail" tendency, regardless of whether or not the tool in hand is a hammer, and the 7/64" bit just happened to have suffered the most as a result. The selection of broken bits includes everything from cheap carbon steel to titanium alloys.

Or, maybe 7/64" bits are jinxed. Now, where did I leave those garlic cloves...

My absurd belief is that someday people who are not illiterate shepherds, fishermen, soldiers and farmers will stop pretending to be following rules derived from an arbitrary compilation of ancient Middle Eastern folklore and mythology.

Cowalker:

David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and other stupid Calvanists of the Scottish Enlightenment are so beneath your level of understanding, achievement, and contribution to the world.

I would love to hear what alternative principles to which you subscribe.

Thanks in advance.

I believe that if one took a broad survey of how human societies or groups organize themselves and how they conduct in interpersonal relations there would be several commonalities reflecting intrinsic "rules" as to what is "Right" or "Wrong". The apparent differences between societies are functions of how these rules are promulgated (formally via laws and official pronouncements or informally via custom and practice), how enforced (formally or informally), the sanctions employed, the exceptions allowed, etc.

David Hume was not exactly an enthusiastic purveyor of Christianity.

My absurd beliefs:

1. Torturing people in a non-permanently-disabling way AFTER they are found guilty has merits as an alternative to imprisonment. Given the level and arbitrariness of prison rape, it's probably more humane, and it would be a lot cheaper than the whole panapoly of guards, prisons, loss of human capital, etc. While some people obviously need to be jailed to keep the rest of society safe, prison costs could be lowered substantially. (Note, I am not at all in favour of torturing people to gain information. But 100 lashes with a cane as an alternative to a year's jail sentence?)

2. Coffee tastes foul and smells even worse.

My absurd belief is that the refs ALWAYS call the game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Jimbo

Kent: You're right in one sense - any real number can be computed(take the limit of the sequence of progressively longer decimal expansions of the number you want, for example). It's just that there's a whole lot of ones that aren't algebraic - that is, there's no polynomial equation over the integers that has that number as a root. If you're disputing the latter, you're simply wrong, but if you're making the former claim, I'll allow that(though I'll note that it in no way disproves the existance of the real line).

Of course, if your disagreement is based on a misunderstanding, or possibly on a lack of sufficient understanding of jargon, just trust me on this one ;)

As for my absurd belief, the first one that springs to mind concerns Pearl Harbour. I'll qualify this by saying that I don't believe it per se, I just think it's more possible than most people believe. Basically, the idea goes that the US knew about the attack in advance, and that they intentionally let it succeed, as an(ultimately successful) attempt to lose the battle but win the war. Be it through breaking the cyphers(which the Allies did a whole lot of in the war, of course), or through some other means, they found out that the attack was coming. Knowing that the US wouldn't enter the war without sufficient reason, and that without the US the Allies were probably doomed to failure, they had to make sure that something happened to bring the US into the war. However, they didn't want to lose the Pacific Fleet in its entirety, so they saved the carriers by taking them out of the harbour "on maneuvers" and hoped that the battleships, which were a hell of a lot better armoured, could at least avoid sinking and be relatively repairable(which, for the most part, they were). Besides, the course of the war was starting to show that carriers were actually a lot scarier than people gave them credit for - the attack on Taranto the year before sank one battleship and crippled two more, using only 21 planes, and there were wargames as early as the 1920s that showed how trivially carriers could destroy valuable targets like the Panama Canal.

Anyways, I don't want to get into too much of a long-winded rambling explanation here(too late, I know), but I just find the plausibility of the idea interesting. It may well have gone down the way history records, of course, but it's certainly interesting, and not entirely a waste of time, to consider the alternative.

Alsadius,

I'm not as clueless as you seem to think.

I am not conflating the computable numbers with the algebraic numbers. There are certainly transcendental numbers (non-algebraic numbers) that are computable. e and pi are only two examples. I am willing to believe in e and pi.

A computable number, roughly speaking, is one that can be approximated to any desired finite precision in a finite number of operations of some deterministic algorithm. It has been proven that the computable numbers can be placed in one-to-one-correspondence with the integers. Hence, if you accept Cantor's diagonal proof, which purports to show that the real numbers cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the integers, then there are real numbers that are not computable. In fact, (again loosely speaking) there are infinitely many more noncomputable reals than computable reals -- if you accept the existence of the real axis.

I guess what I'm saying is that I reject Cantor's diagonal proof.

I'm sorry to hear that you believe in some variation of a Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory. Occam's Razor alone is sufficient reason to reject these theories, but there are other reasons as well.

If you actually, really and for true, believe that some things are "just wrong" (regardless of italicization), universally, I agree that this is irrational. But if you believed that, you wouldn't recognize that belief as irrational, so...

In my case, at least, I find that I am, in an absolute sense, absolutely relativist, but that in a relative sense, I can be a touch absolutist. I think that that's as rational a way of looking at things as any other, if a bit obscure.

What I mean is that, if I assume (and I do) that there is no absolute arbiter of right and wrong, then, in a universal sense, I have to abandon the idea that the terms "right" and "wrong" signify anything (universally, of course).

But, given that, I don't see any reason to take a universal position, and in fact think it would be a bit unnatural- after all, I am, or at least seem to be, localized, and if I have already dispensed with an absolute concept of right and wrong I can hardly object that it is wrong to view the world from my own viewpoint, even if it is neither universal nor absolute.

In fact, my viewpoint is very relative- I live in a certain time, within a certain society, and I have a certain place within it. More importantly, I belong to a certain species, and it seems likely that a lot of my beliefs and behavior have been shaped by environmental pressures, particularly by the pressures of intra-group competition and cooperation within primate groups, probably to an extent that I do not fully realize.

But, if the universalist position offers no consolation, I see no reason not to take my own relative position seriously- some things are _just wrong_, as far as I am concerned, and, given that I don't believe that it makes sense to argue that anything is absolutely "right" or absolutely "wrong", I don't feel any need to make any universal arguments in this respect.

In a (kind of perverse) way, this is the ultimate conservative argument- I am not just unwilling to throw away the traditions and institutions of the last few centuries. I am unwilling to throw away the accumulated primate wisdom of the last several million.

It's also worth noting that you have to take a somewhat relative view of things to reason about reasoning. A mathematical proof is not really convincing in an absolute sense, because it can only really be defined as something that a mathematician recognizes as a proof... and you cannot know that humans do not all have some cognitive deficit that causes them to percieve some proofs as correct when they are not.

And that's my ultimate beef with universal arguments- they lead, inevitably, to sophistry. I do not occupy an absolute position, and therefore I cannot take universal positions without contradiction.

So I think that believing that "some things are just wrong" is at least as rational as believing the opposite.

Kent: Re the math, that makes more sense than what I read you as originally - I guess I'm a little too used to people misusing jargon. In any case, while I haven't seen the proof of the countability of computable numbers, I'll take your word on it. What's your point? So there are non-computable real numbers - big deal. My guess is that there's some additional requirement on what the generating algorithm can be - if, for example, it's only allowed to contain a finite amount of information(thus ruling out things like sequences of partial decimal expansions of numerically-gibberish reals), then there will of course be reals that aren't computable. And if what you're attacking is the diagonal proof, then find a hole in it. That's the beauty of mathematical proofs - assuming you don't make mistakes, they're 100% undebatably true. So, find the mistake in Cantor's logic, or find the mistake in your own.

Re Pearl Harbour, as I said, I don't actually believe it per se(mostly, as you said, due to Occam's Razor), it's mostly just that it actually does seem to fit the observed data, it isn't strikingly unlikely(we all know the Allies read a huge amount of Axis signals in the war and kept it secret for decades, what's to say that it's all public yet?), and, if you assume that the US did know, it was actually a pretty brilliant strategic move on the part of whoever planned the American side of it. Remember, the Pearl Harbour attack saved the war for the Allies in a lot of ways, and the fact that the carriers survived was what let the US turn the Pacific war around so fast. I wouldn't put good odds on it having happened that way - I picked that one because it came to mind first, not because I don't believe anything more absurd - but I figured it was worth saying.

My magical belief relates to my total inability to perceive how things work. I am 100% impaired technically and mechanically. Little faerie elves are under the hood of my car and behind the wall and the light switch. They must be union, because they occasionally go on strike. LOL

As for a morality without reference to God or religion, and the motivator being the perpetuation of the species, um, well, that doesn't really resonate with me personally. I spend 0% of my time on the whole perpetuation of the species project. So I will opt out of that morality and do whatever the hell I want anyway.

Unless of course, it's socially enforced from without, in which case it might as well be God and religion, or at least a very Britishy sense of certain things being "bad manners."

Alsadius,

The algorithm for computing a computable number must be a finite-state algorithm. Roughly speaking, it has to be something you can program into a real computer of whatever finite precision you are interested in, and run in a finite (not necessarily short) amount of time using a finite (not necessarily small) amount of memory. Whereas an uncomputable number, again roughly speaking, is one that is forever beyond the reach of our computational machinery, mental or electronic.

As a computational physicist, I find it amusing to argue that, if we can't compute it, it doesn't exist. I'm not sure I'm being anything but tongue-in-cheek when I do so. But then this "absurd beliefs" thread strikes me as a bit tongue-in-cheek to begin with.

I'm not sure how one pokes a hole into something like the diagonal proof. It vaguely reminds me of the famous proof that 1+2+4+8... = -1. Something just ain't right. If I could poke such a hole in the proof, I wouldn't be describing it as an absurd belief; I would be citing it as my claim to a mention in all the histories of mathematics for the next thousand years.

All the conspiracy theories of Pearl Harbor suffer from the absence of a smoking gun. Sure, you can't prove it doesn't exist -- but the burden of proof is on those who assert otherwise. There is also the problem of explaining motivation in light of the circumstances of the time. Roosevelt was trying mightily to provoke a war in the Atlantic -- it's obvious from the historical record and it's amazing that conspiracy theorists have essentially ignored it. But maybe not; the point is not to say the war was unjust (a hard sell, in my opinion) but that Roosevelt was wicked to allow over two thousand Americans to die when he could have warned them to defend themselves. And that's the problem. The Hawaiian naval commander received a message, a week before Pearl Harbor, that began "This message is to be considered a war warning." Perhaps Roosevelt thought this would be enough of a warning that the Japanese would be successfully repelled, which would still have provided ample causis belli; but, if so, why not give more specifics?

Put another way: The Pearl Harbor conspiracies all require that Roosevelt calculated that only a crushing initial defeat would get us into the war. If he thought the mere fact of an unprovoked attack were sufficient, he could have warned the commanders, and perhaps started the war with the raid successfully repelled -- which would have been infinitely better for the morale of the Navy.

My own studies of the history of the time leave me believing that American lack of preparedness, mental and material, were more than adequate to produce the Pearl Harbor disaster. Hence Occam's Razor applies.

Kent - Re: Pearl harbor. Do you have any reason to believe that Roosevelt anticipated that the Japanese would be able to launch a torpedo attack in the 30 foot waters of Pearl Harbor? At the time, that was generally believed to be too shallow for a torpedo attack, and all previous attacks had required deeper water. Roughly half of the Pearl Harbor casualties came from the Arizona, which FDR couldn't have anticipated.

But it seems certain that FDR was pushing American into a war with Japan re: the embargo on oil and scrap metal which forced Japan's hand. FDR knew the Japanese would be attacking somewhere.

The US Navy had been operating under the assumption that the Japanese would attack somewhere, sometime for at least a decade. In 1905, they kicked off a war with Russia by destroying the Russian far-east fleet in harbor with a sneak attack, and AFAIK that was simply because the Russians happened to be in the way of their plans for expansion. Everyone expected them to try to do it again, to us, because we were also inevitably going to get in their way. But it's impossible to defend everywhere all the time, so that knowledge was rather useless for planning. The Army and Navy ran annual joint exercises around some Japanese sneak attack scenario, often including a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but never learned from this just how a successful sneak attack might be possible.

As for specific knowledge that an attack was imminent, in late November the Army and Navy sent out warnings that it was. The Navy version started by saying something like, "This is a war warning." The Admiral and the General who jointly commanded in Hawaii (if I recall the names correctly) conferred together, and one result was that the Army's airplanes were guarded against sabotage by moving them from their camouflaged and protected parking spots, gathering them all together in the middle of the field under guard, and de-fueling and de-arming so if a Japanese bus-boy did somehow manage to sneak a bomb in there, it wouldn't cause a chain-reaction fire. If the General had been working for the Japanese, he could not have done them a bigger favor than to render his airplanes helpless and exposed! OTOH, the Navy maybe moved up plans to reinforce some small islands, and just by luck that involved sending the carriers to sea.

What more warning could they expect, other than "and they're coming after you, three weeks from Sunday"? Those specifics are something the Japanese went to a great deal of trouble to hide (fleet assembly and exercises in a remote Northern location, radio transmissions banned and phone calls and mail extremely restricted, and a route that was designed to stay in stormy waters as much as possible). There were only two things that could have given a much better warning: a spy in Japanese HQ (pretty much impossible in that era), or a ship or submarine that just happened to be in the path of the strike fleet and managed to get off a radio message.

Now, the latter event was a possibility: if someone had actually considered the Japanese to be as proficient and daring as the best Western navies, tried to figure out how the Japanese might really pull off a Pearl Harbor attack, and had all the information about the holes in our patrol patterns at hand, they might well have stationed a line of submarines across the Japanese route. But actually, intelligence analysts came up with a whole lot of reasons the attack that actually materialized was impossible:

1) Japan to Hawaii was too far, the escort ships would need refueled. Therefore, the Army's entire complement of B17's in Hawaii was busy patrolling a 150 degree arc centered on the southwest, where the Japanese could refuel at Japanese-held islands. (The attack avoided this by going past the patrol area and sailing straight south; Japanese consuls in Honolulu had been watching those airplanes leave and arrive for months so they had a pretty good idea of the pattern.) I have no idea why they did not consider at-sea refueling a possibility, unless it was just plain racist underestimation of the Japanese.

2) Torpedo bombing did not work in the shallow waters of a harbor. This was US Navy doctrine even though British torpedo planes had sunk an Italian fleet at anchor. It wasn't easy for the Japanese to stabilize their torpedos well enough to work in shallow water, but they kept experimenting until they found a way. Apparently no one expected that the Japanese could be inventive.

3) Any way you look at it, the Pearl Harbor attack was a daring plan. The Japanese admiralty was generally cautious. I think the factor missed here was desperation - Yamamoto knew that the US was stronger overall, and so demanded an attempt to even the odds, even if it was risky. If the attack had failed, the Japanese would have negotiated for peace and not lost too much, if it worked they might win; in Yamamoto's estimation any other way was sure to lose, after terrible costs.

And finally, some very specific foul-ups:

4) Back in Washington, DC, the military chiefs apparently believed the Army was maintaining a 360 degree patrol to nearly the maximum range of a B17, twice a day. This patrol would probably have given over 12 hours warning of the attack, and made it possible for the Fleet to either disappear or to sail north and try to shoot up the Japanese carriers while it was too dark to fly, if there had been enough airplanes to do it. General Short's muted protests that he didn't have the airplanes to carry out his orders seem to have been forgotten. And here is the huge f'up - Short's predecessor had been fired for being too vocal about the lack of resources for defending the islands.

5) Naval intelligence in DC decoded Japanese diplomatic messages that showed Pearl Harbor was getting some special attention. One of the consuls there was going out every day, making a map of the ship positions in the harbor, and transmitting it to Japan. We all know what that was about in hindsight, but the analysts that thought that was what it might mean before the attack were overruled by their superiors. Of course, sending the data to Pearl Harbor for their own opinion wasn't even a possibility - our ability to crack those codes was too big of a secret. Given the attitudes of the Pearl Harbor commanders, I'm not sure a warning that Japanese intelligence was paying special attention to them would have made much difference, but it might have.

6) Saturday night and Sunday morning, the Japanese sent a long series of messages to their embassy in DC. Apparently the embassy failed to decode it, but our Navy did! It wasn't exactly a declaration of war, but it was close enough, and when the instructions to hand the message to the Secretary of State at a particular time came through, it was obvious that this was zero hour for the long-expected sneak attack. They had no idea where (having forgotten #5), but they knew when several hours in advance. But the existence of the decoding section was our most closely held secret, and sending out a warning based on the decryption required clearance from a very high level - on Sunday morning. Hours ticked away while they found some top brass and got this clearance. Then there was a problem with radio transmission to just one of the likely sites - so every place but Pearl Harbor received a timely warning.

7) Pearl Harbor had just received a powerful radar set to watch for approaching airplanes. Procedures for using it and sending a warning had not yet been established, but someone happened to be running the radar for training and spotted a large bunch of airplanes coming in. After considerable difficulty in getting a message through, some mid-level officer decided it must be the new B17's they were expecting from the mainland. The radar was shut down before it spotted those unarmed B17's coming in a little later and from a different direction.

There are enough bad coincidences there to make it almost look like a conspiracy - but so many people would have had to have been in on it that it's impossible, and FDR wasn't directly linked to any of it.

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