Michael Prescott's Blog

Poetry interlude: "Albert and the Lion"

Too lazy to write anything new, I'm posting this strangely charming 1933 poem by Marriot Edgar. (Thank you, OldPoetry.com .)

Albert and the Lion
by Marriott Edgar

There's a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That's noted for fresh air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.

A grand little lad was young Albert,
All dressed in his best; quite a swell
With a stick with an 'orse's 'ead 'andle,
The finest that Woolworth's could sell.

They didn't think much of the Ocean:
The waves, they were fiddlin' and small,
There was no wrecks and nobody drownded,
Fact, nothing to laugh at at all.

So, seeking for further amusement,
They paid and went into the Zoo,
Where they'd Lions and Tigers and Camels,
And old ale and sandwiches too.

There were one great big Lion called Wallace;
His nose were all covered with scars -
He lay in a somnolent posture,
With the side of his face on the bars.

Now Albert had heard about Lions,
How they was ferocious and wild  -
To see Wallace lying so peaceful,
Well, it didn't seem right to the child.

So straightway the brave little feller,
Not showing a morsel of fear,
Took his stick with its 'orse's 'ead 'andle
And pushed it in Wallace's ear.

You could see that the Lion didn't like it,
For giving a kind of a roll,
He pulled Albert inside the cage with 'im,
And swallowed the little lad 'ole.

Then Pa, who had seen the occurrence,
And didn't know what to do next,
Said 'Mother! Yon Lion's 'et Albert',
And Mother said 'Well, I am vexed!'

Then Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom -
Quite rightly, when all's said and done -
Complained to the Animal Keeper,
That the Lion had eaten their son.

The keeper was quite nice about it;
He said 'What a nasty mishap.
Are you sure that it's your boy he's eaten?'
Pa said "Am I sure? There's his cap!'

The manager had to be sent for.
He came and he said 'What's to do?'
Pa said 'Yon Lion's 'et Albert,
'And 'im in his Sunday clothes, too.'

Then Mother said, 'Right's right, young feller;
I think it's a shame and a sin,
For a lion to go and eat Albert,
And after we've paid to come in.'

The manager wanted no trouble,
He took out his purse right away,
Saying 'How much to settle the matter?'
And Pa said "What do you usually pay?'

But Mother had turned a bit awkward
When she thought where her Albert had gone.
She said 'No! someone's got to be summonsed' -
So that was decided upon.

Then off they went to the P'lice Station,
In front of the Magistrate chap;
They told 'im what happened to Albert,
And proved it by showing his cap.

The Magistrate gave his opinion
That no one was really to blame
And he said that he hoped the Ramsbottoms
Would have further sons to their name.

At that Mother got proper blazing,
'And thank you, sir, kindly,' said she.
'What waste all our lives raising children
To feed ruddy Lions? Not me!'

The problem of universals

There is an old philosophical conundrum called the problem of universals. Although it may seem too abstract to be relevant to any practical concerns, musing on this issue can lead to some interesting conclusions. But first, just what is the problem of universals? (In what follows, I'm indebted to Michael Huemer's remarks on this topic, and also to Scott Ryan's detailed exploration of it.)

Imagine a piece of chalk and a piece of paper. Both of them have the quality or attribute of whiteness. But what is the relationship of whiteness to the chalk or to the paper? Is there a real property called whiteness that somehow inheres in each entity? In other words, even though the chalk and the paper are different items, do they possess an identical property?

We treat them as if they do. When we say that both the chalk and the paper are white, we understand this to mean that the chalk and the paper have the attribute whiteness, which is identical in both cases. If there is no such property as whiteness per se, then our thinking is inaccurate. We are not correctly grasping the entities we perceive. We are fundamentally mistaken about them, because we think that they have certain real and identical attributes, when in fact they do not.

On the other hand, if the chalk and the paper do possess a real attribute called whiteness that is identical in each (a so-called "real universal"), then we have to ask how this attribute arises or where it comes from or how it is grounded. After all, there are no patches of whiteness just floating around.

To cut to the chase, the simplest answer to the question of where real universals come from is to say that they come from the mind of God - that real universals, including whiteness, are expressions of ideas in God's mind.

Since everything that we perceive consists of a variety of attributes that can be understood as real universals, this means that everything around us is an idea in the mind of God, or more precisely an expression of ideas in the mind of God. For instance, when we perceive a piece of chalk, we don't just perceive whiteness. We also perceive roundness or cylindricality, a certain degree of weight or heaviness, a certain solidity, a certain grainy texture, and we perceive the chalk in relation to other things - for instance, it may be lying on top of a desk. All of these attributes, qualities, and relationships are universals. There are other round or cylindrical things, other heavy things, other solid things, other grainy-textured things, and other things that are on top of things.

So not just whiteness but all of the various disparate elements that go into our perception and our mental grasp of a piece of chalk are attributes shared with a variety of other things in existence. If these attributes are real universals, then all attributes, qualities, properties, relations, etc. are real universals, which means that everything is grounded in the mind of God.

Furthermore, by perceiving and grasping these attributes, we are in effect reconstructing the mental process that gave rise to them in the first place - thus gaining an insight, however small, into the mind of God itself.

(As an aside, we might observe that our own consciousness is more readily explained if it can be said to have arisen out of a universe that is grounded in consciousness than if it emerged from a purely physical universe devoid of consciousness. It is a difficult philosophical problem to see how consciousness could emerge from an entirely unconscious environment. But if consciousness is built into the universe at its most fundamental level, then the emergence of our own consciousness is less puzzling.)

The alternative to all this is to say that there are no real universals and that the whiteness of the chalk and the whiteness of the paper are merely perceived as being the same, but really are not. One difficulty with this approach is that there are certain attributes that clearly are identical, such as number. One piece of chalk and one piece of paper both have the attribute one, and there is no doubt that one equals one, which means that the oneness of each object is real and identical. Or take the case of musical notes. The note C sharp is the same note whether it is struck by a piano or a guitar or played on a flute or some other instrument. Something like whiteness may be a little harder to nail down, but the principal is the same.

So it appears that in the clear-cut cases of numbers and musical notes, the attribute in question really is identical with corresponding attributes. Thus it will not work to say that attributes only appear to be identical, since in at least some cases they clearly are identical.

What we have found, then, is that the so-called ontological realist's position - that real universals exist as thoughts in the mind of God or proceed from such thoughts - is preferable to the alternative. Not only does it allow us to maintain our confidence in the validity of our thinking, but also it gives us a clearer explanation of how consciousness emerges in the first place.

Note finally that since everything we perceive consists of attributes that are shared with, or identical to, the attributes of other things, the whole of reality is a vast interconnected pattern with everything related to everything else. The single piece of chalk has its singleness in common with every other single thing, its whiteness in common with every other white thing, its cylindricality in common with every other cylindrical thing, its heaviness in common with every other heavy thing, its length in common with every other long thing, its graininess in common with every other grainy thing, its on-top-of-somethingness in common with every other thing that is on top of another thing, etc. Nothing exists in isolation.

This approach, then, not only brings together existence and consciousness, the human mind and God's mind, but also the disparate phenomena of the universe, which can be seen as parts of a larger whole.

Mind and the cosmos

Lately I've been blogging about evolution vs. Intelligent Design - the idea that life is too complex to have happened by chance. It might be worth explaining how I think this sort of "design" could come about.

Vaguely I have this notion: there is a cosmic intelligence that underlies the order and complexity of the universe, and this intelligence not only gives rise to the physical world but somehow infuses it, so that there is intelligence implicit in everything that exists.

This universal, implicit intelligence accounts for the ability of subatomic particles to "know" how to pass through the slits in the classic double-slit experiment in quantum physics. It accounts for the ability of crystals to "know" how to organize themselves. It accounts for the ability of amino acids to "know" how to chain themselves together to form proteins. It accounts for the ability of nucleotides to "know" how to form a DNA molecule. It accounts for the ability of living organisms to "know" how to adapt to changing conditions around them. It accounts for the development of consciousness out of material things - awareness and self-awareness only make explicit an intelligence that was implicit all along.

I guess this view could be called panentheism - not pantheism, which is the idea that God equals Nature, but panentheism, which says that God created the natural order but is also immanent in that order. A rough analogy might be a person blowing up a balloon. The person is separate from the balloon, but the balloon is infused with the person's breath (or life force, or spirit). We might picture God blowing up the balloon of the universe and thereby infusing it with His (Its?) spirit.

I find this view, vague though it is, more satisfying than the materialist worldview that claims that order and complexity arise from randomness. It also seems to be more consistent with paranormal and supernatural phenomena, which materialists must deny altogether.

Snake in the grass

Someone asked me today what I made of the idea that Mary Magdalene was actually the wife of Jesus. This notion has gotten a lot of currency because of the unprecedented commercial success of The Da Vinci Code, but I'm afraid there is no evidence whatsoever to support it.

For the most part, Mary Magdalene plays a minor role in the gospels, though she is listed as one of the first to visit the empty tomb. Otherwise, all we are told about her is that she was possessed by demons, which Jesus exorcised. She is never described as a prostitute, despite the ill repute she subsequently acquired. Prior to her cure, she was probably what we would call a madwoman - someone wandering the streets in a demented state of mind. There is no suggestion of any romantic link between her and Jesus.

But even if Mary Magdalene wasn't Jesus' wife, surely he must have had marital relations with someone? Not necessarily. In that period, a Jewish man who was devoted to a radical interpretation of his religious tradition might very well remain celibate - like the Essenes, a militant, all-male group of reclusive monks who lived in the desert and spent their time preparing for a final showdown with the forces of evil, represented by the occupying Romans.

If there's no reason to think Jesus was ever married, why do people cling to the idea? I think it's probably because the feminine element has largely been ousted from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Goddess worship was so deeply entrenched in non-Jewish cultures that the Jewish tradition seems to have reacted against it by expunging any goddess elements of its own. The woman, instead of being a figure of power, became a scapegoat. Just ask Eve. It is possible, in fact, that the Garden of Eden story was told specifically in an attempt to vilify the standard icons of pagan goddesses like Astarte and Isis. The goddess was associated with gardens, fruits, even snakes (because snakes shed their skin, which was seen as a kind of rebirth, and birth/rebirth was the province of women). By painting the snake as evil, the fruit as dangerous, and the woman as corrupt, the Eden story inverted the meaning that these symbols would have had in a pagan context.

On the other hand, the Jewish patriarchs were often paired with equally powerful matriarchs, so the picture was not completely one-sided. And the later tradition of Jewish "wisdom literature" prominently features Sophia, a (female) personification of wisdom, who is depicted as being on almost equal footing with God.

It is possible that Sophia originally found a Christian counterpart in the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew word for spirit, ruah, is feminine. But the New Testament was written in Greek; or perhaps parts of it were written in Hebrew or Aramaic and later translated into Greek. In either case, since the Greek word for spirit, pneuma, is neutral, once ruah was replaced with pneuma the suggestion of a feminine dimension to the Spirit was lost.

Religious belief, at least when it operates at a fairly unsophisticated level, seems to manifest a deep need for both a father figure and a mother figure. The absence of a female presence as a major part of Christianity has been addressed, in some cases, by elevating the Virgin Mary to an almost godlike level (a doctrine called Marianism) and by the worship of female saints. In other cases, people will put a spotlight on Mary Magdalene and elevate her to the level of Jesus' wife, or at least his paramour.

The impulse is understandable, but in terms of any historical information we possess, it appears to be unfounded.

Perhaps it would be better to stop thinking of God as a father figure at all. Masculinity or femininity would not seem to have any application to God, who is perhaps better conceived of as pure cosmic consciousness, or as the underlying intelligence and wisdom that brings order out of chaos and cultivates the emergence of human awareness from the raw material of nature.

In the meantime, some of the more uncritical readers of The Da Vinci Code will continue to insist that Jesus climbed down off the cross, married Mary Magdalene, and sired a brood of children in France. And they lived happily ever after!

All hail the Wood-man!

Well, I have truly entered the digital age. Last night I downloaded a movie from MovieLink (broadband connection required) and watched it on my computer. Worked without a hitch. Cost $2.99. Of course I could have rented it from Netflix and had a higher quality image, but this was just so cool.

What movie? you ask. Plan Nine from Outer Space.

Okay, so the movie wasn't exactly 21st century, but the viewing technology was. (MovieLink has plenty of recent movies available, but I was in an Ed Wood kind of mood.) You can't go wrong with that great Ed Wood dialogue:

Wife: You don't have to worry about me. The flying saucers are up there (indicates sky), the cemetary is out there (indicates off screen), but I'll be in there (indicates house)!

Police detective: He's dead. Murdered! (pause) And somebody's responsible!

Air Force Captain: Visits? Why, that would indicate visitors!

Air Force Colonel: Then they attacked a town. A small town, I'll admit. But a town of people. People who died!

Uppity alien: All you of Earth are idiots.
Macho hero: Now, just hold on, buster!

More quotes (and more accurate ones than these, which are from memory) are found here.

Wood's grasp of science was a tad shaky. One character speaks of difficulty in receiving the aliens' transmissions because of "atmospheric conditions in outer space." Later we are told that humanity is on the verge of developing a weapon that will "explode particles of sunlight." When we learn how to "explode" them, we will set off a chain reaction that will "explode the sun" and "destroy the universe." Wood seems not to have grasped the distinction betweeen the solar system and the universe.

He also had trouble with story continuity. An "evening" scene at a graveyard is intercut with a plane in flight, but the plane-flight scene is apparently taking place in the morning (in the same time zone). The aliens don't speak English, so the government must build a translating computer to communicate with them - but when our heroes confront the aliens, everyone communicates fine, in English, without any need for a computer. Other continuity errors are listed here.

And of course there's the immortal Bela Lugosi, who proved to be all too mortal, having died a couple of years before the film began. Wood uses (and reuses) a few shots of Lugosi that he had filmed for some earlier purpose, which are intercut with a Lugosi stand-in, holding a cape over his face. The stand-in looks nothing like poor Bela at all.

Also, get a load of Vampira, the minor horror celebrity who plays a resuscitated ghoul. Her waist is, like, two inches wide! What kind of diet was she on? Atkins for the undead?

And then there's the Police Detective, who is constantly using his loaded gun to scratch his nose, adjust his hat, and tap himself on the chest.

Plan Nine vies with Phil Tucker's Robot Monster for the title of worst movie ever made. (You have seen Robot Monster, haven't you? The space alien is a guy in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on his head. More details here.)

(Click image to enlarge)

I think Plan Nine wins by a nose because it's just so darn weird. It's a window into the mind of a truly crazy man, Ed Wood, who managed to convince himself and a small entourage of talentless misfits that he was creating great art. (Unlike Johnny Depp's portrayal, the real Wood was a surprisingly macho ex-Marine with a deep voice and a "man's man" attitude, which was only partially compromised by his penchant for wearing women's clothes in public.)

Like the narrator in Plan Nine, I will leave you with this disturbing thought:

Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it ... for they will be from outer space!

The idea of ID

Recently, President Bush was drawn into a rather esoteric controversy over the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) in public schools as an alternative to Darwinism. Bush's opinion - that we ought to teach the controversy and let students think it through for themselves - seems eminently reasonable to me, though it has not been well received by the self-appointed guardians of scientific rigor, who seem to regard any questioning of Darwin as tantamount to the burning of witches.

This attitude of theirs is odd, because the idea that Darwin represents the last word in evolutionary theory is hardly shared by all scientists, or even by all evolutionary biologists. Just today I came across a Web site run by a biologist with solid credentials, who describes his viewpoint as "process structuralism" - an approach distinct from, though not necessarily incompatible with, Darwinism. There's a new book coming out, written by two mainstream biologists, that promises to solve certain problems of Darwinism by postulating a new approach ("facilitated variation") to macroevolutionary theory. (The book description characterizes Darwinism's problems as a "glaring gap," a "major gap," and a "longstanding puzzle," and calls Darwinism "woefully inadequate" in this area.) Years ago, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge pioneered an alternative to Darwinian incrementalism called punctuated equilibrium, which was their attempt to explain the seemingly rapid and stochastic development of new species, as evidenced by large gaps in the fossil record. Complexity theory and theories of self-organizing systems have also been hauled in to better explain the origin of species.

My point is not that any of these particular approaches, including ID,  is necessarily correct. Rather, I'm simply observing that scientists who actually work in this field are not always in complete agreement with each other or with Darwin. Many regard Darwinism as a valuable insight but not as the final answer to the mysteries of life's origin and development. Why, then, should students be taught to respect a static consensus that does not, in fact, exist?

For decades the scientific community has shown a public face that brooks no disagreement with Darwin, while privately engaged in vigorous, ongoing debate. Apparently laymen are not to be trusted with the details of such contentions. Maybe the establishment,  like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, is convinced that we just can't handle the truth.

In this context, it's hardly surprising that ID has made some inroads. Whenever there is a privileged, insular establishment grimly defending its turf, there will be outriders who try storming the battlements. The ID folks are only the most visible, the most inconoclastic, and the most publicly controversial of the insurgent forces.

So what is ID? It is not "creationism" in any normally accepted use of that term. It does not teach Biblical literalism, a six-day creation, Adam and Eve, or a 6,000-year-old Earth. ID is a movement based on the premise that life is too complex a phenomenon to have arisen by chance. Specifically, the complex informational content encoded in the DNA molecule at the heart of every cell is said to have been unobtainable by chance alone. ID theorists argue that while simple information can be encoded by purely natural mechanisms (the classic example is the repetitive structure of a snowflake), complex information cannot arise the same way. To oversimplify, a snowflake's structure is equivalent to typing abababababab ... while DNA's structure is equivalent to typing It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... and much more. (The information in a single DNA molecule is said to be roughly equivalent to all the information contained in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Could the Britannica have been put together by chance?)

ID theorists also point to what they call systems of irreducible complexity - biological systems that require all of their components to be in place in order to work at all. The standard analogy, used by Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box, is that of the mousetrap. A mousetrap consists of a few simple parts, all of which must be present if it is to be functional. A mousetrap without, say, a spring does not catch 10% fewer mice or 50% fewer mice - it catches no mice. ID advocates say that certain biological features have this same all-or-nothing property, and they ask how any such feature could have evolved incrementally, over many generations, if it would have been useless and nonfunctional before its final, completed stage.

These arguments quickly become technical, and I don't claim to have the expertise to consider them in detail. But I will say that after reading a fair amount about the inner workings of the cell, I find it hard to conceive of this astonishingly elaborate microscopic world coming into existence by a lucky accident. It is a world in which messenger RNA routes the instructions of DNA to assembly lines of micro-machines, which then manufacture new micro-machines to order; these new machines are then whisked on their way to appropriate parts of the cell via a complex system of tubes, where they are put to work metabolizing nutrients and eliminating waste. Thousands of such chemical transactions go on every second in every single cell. Even the cell membrane, once thought to be no more complicated than a soap bubble, turns out to be a remarkably complex structure that allows entry to beneficial substances while screening out (most) harmful ones. And in the greatest miracle of all (I don't think miracle is too big a word for it), this entire cell, comparable in its complexity to the assembly plant of a NASA spaceship, can accurately reproduce itself, making a perfect or near-perfect copy. (Let's see a NASA assembly plant do that!)

Richard Dawkins, the most popular polemicist of neo-Darwinism, would surely have none of this. He derides any such argument as a fallacy, which he has dubbed "the argument from incredulity." Just because an unsophisticated layman finds something astonishing or miraculous, he says, there's no reason to think it really is astonishing or miraculous. 

Perhaps not. But until Dawkins et al can explain the origin of the cell and its parts, not to mention the fantastic complexity of muticellular entities like ourselves, with our finely calibrated immune systems, our reproductive systems, our physical senses, our higher consciousness ... well, until then, some of us are going to remain incredulous, even at the price of their derision.

After all, a little ridicule is a small price to pay for living in a world of miracles.