Boyle's List

A couple of months ago a list drawn up by the famous natural philosopher Robert Boyle went on display for the first time. Written in the 1660s, soon after the Royal Society was founded, it set forth the most pressing problems for scientists to tackle. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see a copy of the full document but I’ve managed to piece together some of it from a photo of the wishlist and a couple of newspaper articles on the subject.

The first item on Boyle’s list is the 'Prolongation of Life'; something we tend to be a lot better at nowadays, unless of course your last name happens to be Kennedy.

Following on from that, Boyle goes on to list 'Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour'd as in youth'. Again if you’ve seen those ‘Just for Men’ ‘no play for Mr Grey’ commercials you’ll know this is still very much a work in progress. Item 3 is ‘A ship to saile with all winds and a ship not to be sunk’. The first has been achieved, the less said about the second the better (I read recently that the Titanic was described to be ‘virtually unsinkable’ but only in an obscure trade publication)

Four is, intriguingly, ‘The attaining of gigantick dimensions’. Being only a modest 5”6 and a half, I for one would like to see this kind of technology come in but sadly the only progress since Boyle’s list has been the so-called ‘elevator shoe’, surely one of the worst inventions in recorded history.

These are followed by ‘the acceleration of the production of things out of seed, ‘the art of flying’, ‘the making of armor light and extremely hard’, ‘the practicable and certain ways of finding longtitudes’ and ‘the cure of diseases at a distance, or at least by transplantation’.

Towards the end it gets rather trippy as Boyle lists the production of ‘potent drugs to alter of exalt imagination, waking, memory and other functions, and appease pain, procure sleep, harmless dreams etc..’ as one of his aspirations.

Some of these functions are fairly practical but one wonders what Boyle really means by ‘alter of exalt imagination’. Perhaps if he had worked a bit harder with his chemistry set he might have become some kind of Restoration era Timothy Leary.

Next up is ‘freedom from necessity of much sleeping exemplify’d by the operation of tea and what happens in mad-men’. He must have written this mere decades before the first authoritative coffee treatise was written in latin by Faustus Nairon and coffee houses began to spread across Europe. Interestingly this movement met with some resistance in Germany where beer was at the height of it’s popularity and where Adam Olearius’s Persian travelogue appeared with the following anecdote:

‘However if you partake to excess of such kahave water, it completely extinguishes all pleasures of the flesh. They write of a king, Sultan Mahmud Kasnin who reigned in Persia before Tamerlane and who became such a habitual drinker of kahave water that he forgot his spouse and developed a repugnance of intercourse which displeased his queen greatly. For on one occasion as she sat in the window and a espied how a stallion was being held down prior to castration, it is said that she inquired what was happening. And upon being told with all due frankness that the intention was to tame the lust of the horse that it would no longer mount another or service a mare she express the view that such steps were unnecessary, all that had to be done was to give him the shameful kahave water and he would soon be like the king.

The last item on the list is perhaps the most intriguing, ‘the emulating of fish without engines by custome and education only’.

I’m afraid I’m at a loss to see how this could advance civilisation.






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A Rather Obvious Point

Often when someone brings up Islamic terrorism, one of the responses given is that other religions and ideologies have their kooks as well, and we shouldn't judge Islam because it has its own share. Obviously this response is at least half true: no matter where you go in life, no matter what group you associate with, there's always going to be what I call an assh*le element. Any and every group will have people who join it for the wrong reasons, so to single out one group because of this is inappropriate.

As I say, this response is certainly half true. However, it's no more than that, because it misses something important, something very important, and in fact, blindingly obvious: Ideas have consequences. Just because every group is going to have its assh*le element doesn't mean that every group is equal in all moral respects. Some groups are going to encourage violence, others will allow it in pursuit of a higher cause, etc. Ideas have consequences, and different ideas have different consequences.

An ideology which rejects the intrinsic value of human beings -- perhaps all people or perhaps just members of other groups -- will obviously have significantly different results than one which upholds the intrinsic value of all human beings, including those who belong to people groups that are usually held in contempt. And this remains true even though the latter ideology has members who obviously don't act accordingly. For example, at the end of the film To End All Wars, the lead character narrates an aspect of the Bushido code which had been introduced earlier in the movie (I'm paraphrasing): "The individual life weighs less than a feather." The narrator responds, "What is the result of believing the individual life weighs less than a feather?" The preceding two hours of the film answer that question.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Gizmotron

An archivist at the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium in New York state was curious about some vaguely-labeled film canisters in the basement. The films inside had been recorded on a pallophotophone and, oddly, there aren't any more around on which to play the recordings. He managed to get two engineers interested in figuring them out. One of them managed to build -- from scratch, over two years -- a working pallophotophone.

That by itself is extremely cool. What is even cooler is that when they listened to them, they heard a speech delivered by Thomas Edison. It was broadcast live in 1929 when Edison was 82 years old, he shared the stage with President Hoover and Henry Ford, and you can listen to it here. There were other gems as well, but the fact that we can hear Edison's voice over 80 years later makes me feel like a time-traveler.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Trust, but verify

As a follow-up to James' article in the Spectator several months ago, Beyond Necessity has a blogpost up on the pro-Islam bias at Wikipedia, with a particular focus on Avicenna. Via Bill Vallicella.

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"The alien who lives among you", part 1

Update (Oct. 17, 2014): I temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that was published in an academic journal about a year ago. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I took the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, with the intention of restoring it after a year had passed. Since it's been a year, the original post is below.
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There have been some interesting recent reports that two moons of the outer planets may have some form of life. Titan, which orbits Saturn, is often cited as a potential life-site because it meets one of the necessary conditions for life (high nitrogen content). The recent claims are that acetylene is rare on Titan's surface, and that hydrogen may be flowing down to the surface and disappearing. Both hydrogen and acetylene could theoretically be "consumed" by some primitive form of life on the surface, so their absence may be indicative of such processes actually taking place. More interesting (to me at least) is the unusual suggestion that Io may have some form of life, despite its proximity to Jupiter and its magnetosphere. The suggestion is that it might live deep under the surface, although it seems purely speculative to me.

Some say (and many more think) that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would essentially refute Christianity, since it would show that we don't need to appeal to God to explain our origins, or because it would contradict certain Christian doctrines about humanity's importance to God. Unfortunately it can be difficult to refute because it's difficult to find out what the actual argument is. Any attempt to address it, therefore, runs the distinct possibility of attacking a strawman. Nevertheless, I shall soldier on.

As far as I can tell, the argument is something along these lines:

a) If life or the remains of life are found beyond the earth,
b) then life would be a common phenomenon.
c) Therefore, it would be the product of natural processes.
d) Therefore, life would not be the product of supernatural process(es) or agent(s).

Two other conclusions are often drawn, although it's not clear whether they are drawn from b), c), or d). They are:

e) Therefore, the Christian claim that human beings are especially important to God is highly implausible.
f) Therefore, the Christian claim that God was incarnated as a human being (as opposed to one of the other myriad forms of life) is likewise highly implausible.

Now the philosophically minded will notice that this is a spectacularly poor argument. f) does not follow from a), b), c), d), e), or their conjunction; e), likewise, does not follow from a) through d); d) does not follow from c); c) does not follow from b); and b) does not follow from a). I'll go over each of these alleged inferences in turn, with the first below. For now I'll just point to how this charge fits into the metanarrative that science and Christianity are at odds with each other, and this because science is slowly but surely refuting Christianity. This is the conflict thesis -- James calls it the conflict myth -- and it is almost entirely rejected by historians of science.

So, first, does a) lead to b)? If we find life elsewhere in the universe, will it imply that life is a common phenomenon? Well, if we're talking about our solar system, the answer is no. Take Mars for example. Finding life or the remains of life on Mars would not indicate that life is common, for the simple reason that over the last few billion years, at least a hundred million tons of Earth has been dumped on Mars, most (not all) due to meteor collisions sending Earth material out into the solar system. The odds that none of it contained any biological material is remote in the extreme, although much of it would probably have been broken down by radiation. Hugh Ross has been predicting since at least the late 1980s that the remains of life will inevitably be discovered on Mars simply due to this cross-contamination. And this is true for virtually all possible life-sites in the solar system, including the moons around the outer planets: any biological material we find would be better explained as having its origin on Earth.

Moreover, the Anthropic Principle places severe limitations on what conditions must be met in order for life to exist on a planetary body. It must have a particular axial tilt, magnetic field, a moon of a particular size and distance, must orbit a particular type of star of a particular age at a particular distance, etc. There are several dozen such conditions. The only body that meets these conditions in the solar system is the Earth. There are sometimes sensationalistic claims that Mars might have had liquid water on its surface at some point in the past and so might have harbored life (since the presence of liquid water is one of the necessary preconditions). But this ignores the multiple other conditions that are not met by Mars or any other potential life sites in the solar system.

But what about beyond the solar system? What if we find life on planets orbiting other stars? Wouldn't that prove that life is ubiquitous in the universe? Again, the Anthropic Principle puts severe limitations on how many places in the universe could naturally support life. So, for example, the planet has to be in a spiral galaxy (not a common type of galaxy), and be between spiral arms. In any other place within any other type of galaxy there would be too much stellar radiation to allow life. Additionally, it has to exist in a very particular stellar neighborhood: nearby white dwarf binary stars which have lost some of their stellar material to interstellar space (this is the only natural source of fluorine, which is necessary for life); near enough to past supernovae to obtain the necessary heavy elements produced, but not so near as to receive too much radiation from them; etc. The point being that, even if we do find life elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't contradict the Anthropic Principle's claim (which is recognized by all the relevant scientists) that most places are hostile to life, and so there are relatively few potential life sites in the universe. Indeed, when factoring all of the necessary preconditions into the equation, the odds of another planet anywhere in the universe being naturally capable of supporting advanced life is zero. Part of the problem here is whether we're talking about simple life forms or complex, perhaps complex enough to be intelligent and have a civilization. The more complex the life form, the more anthropic coincidences must be met in order for it to exist. Conversely, simple forms of life do not have to meet as many requirements, but it's still no walk in the park. The most popular book addressing this issue is Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee. They argue that while simple forms of life may be common in the universe, advanced life almost certainly is not.

Of course, some may continue to ask, what if we find that other forms of life are everywhere in the universe? Wouldn't that refute the claims being made here? Well, the discovery that life is ubiquitous in the universe would certainly refute the claim that life is not ubiquitous. In the same way, the discovery that E does not equal mc² would refute the claim that it does, and the discovery that earth is at the center of the universe would refute the claims that it's not. So it's not a very interesting line of argument. But, ignoring that, if we find other forms of life out there, the anthropic coincidences should certainly be looked at again to see if they merely represented a failure of imagination. Perhaps our conception of "life" was too narrow. But if, after looking at them, they still hold, then the occurrence of advanced life would have to be fit into the claim that the odds of there being a planet capable of supporting advanced life anywhere in the universe is too remote to be considered a realistic possibility. But that will be the subject of the next post.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

The Destruction of the Temple of Artemis

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World but almost nothing is left of it today. So, the question of who destroyed it is an interesting one. Luckily, we have an explicit historical source that tells us the answer. It is in Jordanes’ History of the Goths composed around 550AD. He tells us (20:107), that in about 259AD, “Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, leaders of the Goths, took ship and sailed across the strait of the Hellespont to Asia. There they laid waste many populous cities and set fire to the renowned temple of Diana at Ephesus, which, as we said before, the Amazons built.” Jordanes’ work comes with a health warning because the beginning is pure legend (not to mention his claim that the Amazons built the Temple). However, it is generally felt to be reliable when it deals with encounters between the Goths and Romans from the third century AD.

After the Goths destroyed the Temple of Artemis, it was quarried by the local inhabitants for its valuable marble and very little is left today. Bits of it have been found in local buildings and Justinian took much of the statuary that survived to his time back to Constantinople.

So why is the destruction of this Temple blamed on Christians? John Romer said as much in his television series in 1994 on the Seven Wonders and Charles Freeman continues to peddle the myth today. Let’s look at where it comes from.

The source of this legend is the Acts of John. This is a very late and inauthentic apocryphal book that claims to tell the life story of St John the Apostle after the end of the New Testament. Among many fantastic episodes is one in chapters 22 to 24 where St John converts the people of Ephesus to Christianity and they march off to tear down the Temple of Artemis. The Acts of John is normally dated to the third century and the inclusion of this episode in all likelihood means that it was written after the Temple had actually been burnt down by the Goths (who were, at this stage, still pagans). But the Acts do provide further evidence that the Temple really was destroyed during the third century. We can be absolutely certain it was not pulled down on the orders of St John around 100AD as the Acts pretends.

But there is another snippet in the sources that might illuminate how Christians got the blame. In his twentieth Oration, delivered in the early fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople is busy praising St John Chrysostom. Proclus, listing his achievements, says “In Ephesus, he despoiled the art of Midas.” This might be a reference to the cult objects of Artemis (the Temple was originally founded by the Lydian kings of which Midas was one) since even after the Temple was razed you would expect the cult to have soldiered on. Then again, it might not. That this was not a large scale operation is confirmed by Book 14 of Palladius’s Life of Chrysostom that covers his visit to Ephesus but makes no mention of the Temple.

Christians certainly destroyed several pagan temples and converted many others into churches. But not, it appears, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

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Gödel and Lucas

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, J. R. Lucas wrote "Minds, Machines and Gödel" and The Freedom of the Will several decades ago, in which he argued that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems would apply to any physical deterministic system. Any such system should have a Gödel sentence, which is basically the proposition, "This proposition is not provable within this system", which is true but not provable (if it were provable, then it would be false; and if it were false, it would be provable). Mechanistic systems cannot recognize their Gödel sentence as true, because they can only "comprehend" truth as a matter of provability. This is not the case for human beings: we can see that Gödel-type sentences would be true, even though they are inherently unprovable (within their respective systems). Therefore, human beings cannot be explained in purely physical, deterministic terms. Nor can any mere physical system, i.e. computers, be able to duplicate the functions of the human mind -- since they would not be able to recognize their Gödel sentences as true.

At his website, Lucas has most of his contributions to this debate, and the online journal Etica e Politica published several of the more important essays by both Lucas and his detractors. Interesting stuff.

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Copernicus Reburied

Lazy journalism alert!

It has been widely reported in the press this week that the reburial of Nicolas Copernicus in a rather grand tomb represents the Catholic Church "repenting" for branding him a heretic (The London Times) or it "making peace" with him (GMA News).

To be fair, GMA go on to note that the reason Copernicus was originally buried in an umarked tomb was because he was a bit of a nobdy at the time he died. And the fact that he was buried in Fromberg Cathedral at all shows he was a respected member of the community in full communiun with the Church.

Still, he's now very famous and gets a flashier resting place. Part of this is Polish nationalism. Copernicus is the second-best-known Pole in history (after John Paul II) and suggestions that he was actually German have not pleased patriots (see some very upset people on the Wikipedia discussion page). So the reburial is an assertion that he was Polish as much as being a respected servant of the Catholic Church. But none of that fits the science versus religion agenda of the media.

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The Problem of Evil and the Multiverse

I just finished reading Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief, and in the final chapter he addresses the problem of evil, and whether it constitutes a defeater for belief in God. One small point he made was very interesting: he suggested the multiverse can actually be employed to address the problem of evil in the same way that nontheists use it to address the problem of our universe having all of the precise properties necessary for the existence of life (which I've addressed here). Quoting Dennett's account of this in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Plantinga writes

One contemporary response is that possibly "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Daniel Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out (p. 179); as it happens, we find ourselves, naturally enough, in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow the development of intelligent life. But then the probability of theism, given the whole array of worlds, isn't particularly high.

In the same way, then, a theist might agree that it is unlikely, given just what we know about our world, that there is such a person as God. But perhaps God has created countless worlds, in fact, all the worlds (all the universes) in which there is a substantial overall balance of good over evil. In some of these worlds there is no suffering and evil; in some a good deal; as it happens, we find ourselves in one of the worlds where there is a good deal. But the probability of theism, given the whole ensemble of worlds, isn't particularly low.

I suppose one could argue that it's ad hoc to propose a multiverse in order to deal with the problem of evil, but I don't see how it's any less ad hoc than proposing it to account for the anthropic coincidences.

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Gray Vs Grayling

The raison d'etre of a career in academia is to savage your opponents in print under the pretext of a book review, and thereby destroy their life's work within a few carefully worded paragraphs. Hence the spats that occur amongst the intelligencia are among the most entertaining reading.

Since things have been a bit quiet here recently, here is a synopsis of a recent argument conducted between the political philosopher John Gray and the philosopher and prominent humanist A.C Grayling. Some time ago, A.C Grayling attacked John Gray's book, 'Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' in the pages of the 'New Humanist' (the mouthpiece of the 'Rationalist Association'). John Gray has now returned the favour with Graylings 'Ideas that Matter' in 'The National Interest' (the prominant conservative rag which published Fukyama's now infamous 'The End of History'). In it he writes:

From where, then, do modern liberal values derive? Why, from ancient Greece, of course. Retelling an old rationalist fairy tale, Grayling writes in the entry on justice, “the ancient Greeks were, as with so many things, the first to rate the possession of a sense of justice, and moreover one on which one acts, as a virtue.” Well, so much for the Hebrew prophets. Again, in the entry on Buddhism he asserts that “the Greeks assumed that we are individuals, and as such are ethical agents responsible for ourselves and what we do,” and created a “new ethics of civic, intellectual and moral virtue.” On the contrary, what is most striking about the ancient Greeks is that they had hardly any sense of the human individual as being independent of society, and having rights against it. After all, Socrates never contested the right of the Greek polis to put him to death.

Reading Grayling, it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Absurd as it is, there is nothing new in such a claim. It is one of the most venerable clichés of Enlightenment thinking, and Ideas that Matter is a compendium of such dated prejudices.

Grayling has now authored a short reply in response, saying that:

I am delighted to have been reviewed at such length in The National Interest by John Gray, whom I was beginning to suspect of too impervious a dignity ever to respond to the repeated bashings I have had to give his views over the last several years.

Reading this, I am compelled to conclude there is only one way to decide the question of the relative success or failure of the enlightenment project and the contested source of western values and that's IN THE RING. Tickets go on sale next week.

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