Worse than Meaningless

Worst Graph of the Year. If it was completely devoid of any information, it would be a whole lot better, simply because it wouldn't be shockingly historically inaccurate and blatantly propagandistic. I also wonder what the units are for "militancy." Apparently the person who didn't label the axis doesn't know either. Relationships have ended for less.

Against Humanism

This article argues that Comte's attempt to create a religious humanism failed because we revere individuals and not the species. This is because individuals are the ones who change the way we view the world - greatness is an attribute of individuals.

There is no fixed, unalterable background map of the "familiar facts" that must survive all such shifts, and certainly no fixed schedule dividing real entities from fishy, imaginary ones. Entities like Fate and Progress and the Logic of History and the Hidden Hand of the Market come and go.

Unfortunately for the science of consciousness, Comte's materialism has yet to go:

The search for a "scientific explanation of consciousness" which goes on at the yearly conference at the Center for Consciousness Studies in Tuscon, Arizona still centres not on trying to be scientific in the sense of using suitable methods, but on making consciousness respectable by somehow bringing it within the range of physics and chemistry, mainly at present through neurobiology.

A real robust humanism would have to take the religious tendencies of people into account. Science isn't up to the task of myth-making:

It just works through old-fashioned personification. If there is no purpose and everything is impersonal, how can DNA be actively ruling our destinies? How can it feel "pitiless indifference" and make us "dance to its music"? The Cartesian drama of inert matter and active spirit is suddenly reversed here to show humans (and animals) as helpless objects – passive "lumbering robots" – stage-managed by plotting genes (and memes) that are sometimes helped by other entities such as market forces. The myth-building capacities that surround every new world-view are surely as busy here as they are in established religions. These visions perhaps offer the worst of both worlds – an ontology that is as bankrupt morally as it is scientifically. The imagery of science is used, not, as Huxley hoped, to ground a deep reverence for the natural world but to justify human alienation from it.

An Anthropological Curiosity

The reports predicted snow that night. So Friday in my classroom, the possibility was on my students' minds. Having finished her work, one girl asked to draw on the board and so I allowed her to do so.

She proceeded to draw a snow scene, complete with snowman. I thought I had seen something like this before, some event related somehow - and I realized what it was. Cave paintings.

One theory about the purpose of those paintings has it that they were magical in nature, as they often showed hunting scenes. If some of them were done as a way to attract success in hunting, what happened in my classroom was another example of the same thing - sympathetic magic.

In some ways, how little do we change, as a species, in thirty thousand years. The girl would most likely not be happy to think of her actions as magical, and it is possible she would doubt that humanity was so old. Nevertheless, without knowing it, she affirmed the connection we all still have to our ancestors in the ancient past.

A long, detailed, and nuanced discussion of the affair between Galileo and the Church may be found here. Part of the interest is in the exposure of some of the "mythology" that surround this issue. Such as this:

According to one of these readings, Galileo knew the Earth to go round the Sun, as Copernicus had written, rather than the converse as implied in several Biblical passages. The Church would not allow science to disprove the revealed truth of Scripture, however, and hence threw Galileo to the Inquisition where he was forced under threat of torture to disclaim this opinion and never speak of it again. He was then imprisoned under house arrest for the remainder of his life, a clear example of the conflict between scientific investigation of the world around us and the presumed infallible authority of the Bible.

Which is a story often cited as the truth of history.

A Nightmare

After a long pause, a comic. Friday this time.

mathematics, astronomy, religion

I found something on the Library of Congress website: a collection of images from the Vatican Library of mathematical manuscripts from between the ninth and fifteenth centuries.

Saturday Comic:


The background is an ultra deep field photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and credit is due to ESA and NASA.

Pascal's quote is from the Pensées, numbers 205-206.