Meta and Meta

Digging

The Raving Atheist's recent line of posts reflects either some fabulously subtle or crudely perverse joke, or else the complete psychological unraveling of one of the sharpest atheist polemicists I've ever read.

For the moment, I'm wagering on the former.

However, it's worth noting that if there truly is a conversion in the offing, it's quite clearly one born of existential despair and emotional attachment rather than careful analysis. (It dang sure ain't born of "digging for gold." It never is.)

Reality and Taste

Unfortunately, reality isn't a matter of taste. (Or maybe fortunately--there would be so many different tastes to account for...)

Fear of Flying

Whatever reality turns out to be, it could never be so dark as to overshadow the thrill of uncovering it.

Potential Properties and Abortion

Engaging in colloquy in the comments to the Equable Agnostic's (née Raving Atheist) post here got me to thinking about the moral status of blastocysts and the issue of "potentiality." Blastocysts have the potential to become newborn infants, then toddlers, teens, adults, and so on. Such potential (so the argument goes) is the reason we should view blastocysts as morally significant.

But why are, say, toddlers morally significant? Well, presumably it's not merely because they have the potential to become teens, etc. That is, presumably we take it as a brute fact that toddlers are morally significant. And it's this brute fact that anti-choicers appeal to to justify the moral significance of blastocysts.

It seems, then, that the argument from potential relies on something like the following premise:

(P) Having the potential to become a morally significant organism makes an organism O morally significant.

But if O has the potential to become morally significant, then (by P) it is morally significant--it isn't merely potentially morally significant. But then if it is morally significant, there isn't any need to appeal to its potential in becoming so. So isn't P tautologous, or even incoherent? And is there any other property like that described in P, such that the potential to instantiate it actually instantiates it?

Wisdom and Waste

It is said, usually by the old, and always by the self-regardingly wise, that youth is wasted on the young.

But, you know, it's just as likely that wisdom is wasted on the old.

No matter. One thing we can all agree on: there's an awful lot of waste going on somewhere.

Where Is Planet Earth, And What Have You Done With It?

According to Media Matters, CNN has within the past three days featured two "news" segments regarding the extent to which events in the Middle East presage the apocalypse. (The apt title on MM's entry: "CNN or CBN?")

I think CNN's journalistic decadence here is a far more reliable presager of the coming apocalypse.

Reality on the Brain

In his recent column for Scientific American, Michael Shermer relates the following tale:

Thirteen years after the legendary confrontation over the theory of evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce ("Soapy Sam") and Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), Wilberforce died in 1873 in an equestrian fall. Huxley quipped to physicist John Tyndall, "For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal."

Posner on Douglas, Law and Politics

Richard Posner has a review of Bruce Allen Murphy's new book, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. At one point, Posner makes this interesting claim:

The supreme court is a political court. The discretion that the justices exercise can fairly be described as legislative in character, but the conditions under which this "legislature" operates are different from those of Congress. Lacking electoral legitimacy, yet wielding Zeus's thunderbolt in the form of the power to invalidate actions of the other branches of government as unconstitutional, the justices...are confined, in Holmes's words, from molar to molecular motions. And even at the molecular level the justices have to be able to offer reasoned justifications for departing from their previous decisions, and to accord a decent respect to public opinion, and to allow room for social experimentation, and to formulate doctrines that will provide guidance to lower courts, and to comply with the expectations of the legal profession concerning the judicial craft. They have to be seen to be doing law rather than doing politics.

I wonder, why not just doing law? Why the need to be seen to be doing law? Does Posner mean that the  judgment of the professional legal audience is in some sense performative, or constitutive of part of what it means to "do law"? Or is he just making the merely pragmatic point that to function in the political world the Court has to appear politically legitimate?

And is it just me, or does the portrait on the Wild Bill cover look like Bill Buckley?

(Via Eugene Volokh.)

 

Tuning the Devil's Instrument

[Treoblogging] The violin is an unforgiving instrument to learn. For the average student, it takes months to get anything resembling a musical sound out of it, and intonation will be unsure for years. Whereas on, say, the piano, you could have that same student playing a musical phrase after the very first lesson, and tuning is never an issue at all.

Well, almost never. One of the benefits of violin, is that when you get good you can play even more in tune than on the piano. This may seem counterintuitive, but pianos are actually tuned according to a compromise scheme known as equal temperament. The compromise is a good one from the standpoint of harmonic modulation (i.e., you can "cycle" through all the different keys and they will all sound pretty much in tune with one another). But the downside is that a class of melodic and harmonic intervals are noticably (and in some cases frustratingly) off.

The violin is particularly well suited to demonstrate this phenomenon because of its open strings can be combined with stopped notes to compare different tuning regimes. If you're interested in hearing what all this means, Kurt Sassmannshaus' superb site Violin Masterclass has a perspicuous demonstration and explanation of the issues. Go here and start at the "definition" files. (Other fun stuff abounds on the site, so make sure to surf around.)

It's a Number

From the NYT: "Over 3,000 Iraqi Civilians Killed in June, U.N. Reports." I guess they must have died trampling over one another trying to fête American military with flowers and kisses.

Ah, the tragedy of American compassion...