Never Forget! Republicans Are the Party of States' Rights (Except Their Right to Regulate Corporations)

So the House of Representatives just passed a bill that would prohibit states from requiring the labeling of genetically modified food. I mention this not so much for anything about the merits (as to which, my best impression is that there's no good reason to think GMOs are problematic, but also I don't see any real harm in labeling them; if people want to be idiots that's sort of their business and it doesn't feel right to trick them into doing what you think is best for them) but because of the constitutional politics of it. Because, y'know. The operative words of the bill are "prohibit states." Which is not a very states' rights-y thing to do. To be clear: this is absolutely constitutional. Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce and to preempt any state laws contrary to its own regulations. That isn't, or at least shouldn't be, in controversy. But anyone who really believed in the political values of federalism, in the modern, pro-state sense of that word, would oppose this bill.

But of course, the people who passed it are precisely the ones who like to go on and on about states' rights. So the next time any Republican talks about how, I dunno, the Voting Rights Act or whatever violates states' rights, just remind them of the time that they passed a bill that would literally remove the states' right to protect their citizens from what they perceived as a potentially threatening or deceptive trade practice. The main state's right they care about is the right to discriminate; if there's a conflict with corporate rights, federalism is going to lose every time.

Regarding the Definition of the Word 'Unscientific'

So, yesterday the left-wing part of the internet had a bit of fun reading this essay (of sorts) by one Charles C.W. Cooke for the National Review Online. Apparently NRO hasn't heard of single-page formatting, so that link goes only to page 1. The thing I'm gonna talk about in this post is on page 2. However, you should read the whole thing, because it is staggeringly, mind-blowingly, hilariously awful. It's basically a rant against the supposed "nerd culture" of American liberalism, with a bizarre fixation on Neil deGrasse Tyson as the emblem thereof. I could probably write a post that had a one paragraph per sentence ratio of response to this essay, but that is almost certainly a poor allocation of resources so I'm mostly gonna let it speak for, and against, itself.

But I did want to make a bit of a point regarding one particular paragraph late in the article. After criticizing liberals for claiming that their worldviews are driven solely by data, he says the following:

This is nonsense. Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon...

The sentence continues, but this is the part I'm interested in.

Cosmos and Creationists

Back in 1980, Carl Sagan, noted astrophysicist and public-intellectual ambassador for science at large, ran a TV series on PBS called Cosmos, which presented a great deal of scientific knowledge about various cosmological issues for public consumption. It was highly successful. Earlier this year, Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the closest thing to Sagan in today's popular culture, rebooted the series on FOX. The first few episodes have aired, and predictably, people who don't like what science has to tell us about these cosmological questions are not happy. According to this article, creationists are apparently trying to demand "equal time;" I can't tell whether they want that time on Cosmos itself or whether they want to be given a show of their own with which to answer NDT. Here's the money quote from some creationist guy:

I was struck in the first episode where [Tyson] talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion –- it's all on the table -- and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem.'

The thing that's so striking about this is how very, very wrong it gets what having an open mind means for a scientist. What it means is that you don't rule out any ideas before you look at the evidence. What it most emphatically does not mean is that you don't rule out any ideas after you look at the evidence. If you can't rule things out after you look at the evidence, well, what's even the point of looking at evidence? Why bother having science at all? The whole point is to let the universe tell us what it's like. If, to use the incredibly-cliched comparison, we aren't allowed to conclude, after looking at all the evidence, that the earth is round and not flat, well, it's absurd to call what we're doing science. It's some kind of weird philosophy of how you can never really know anything, blah blah blah. To a scientist, the shape of the earth is an open question precisely until we actually observe something in the world which is only consistent with one particular answer.

And the evidence says that the universe as we know it goes back about 13.8 billion years, at which time everything in it was packed into an unimaginably small region, and immediately after which it underwent a period of extremely rapid inflation and has been expanding more gradually ever since. (In fact, we just got another big bunch of evidence supporting this explanation, which is pretty cool.) Now, there's stuff to be said about the ability of religious types to craft "yeah but god made it happen" responses to this kind of evidence, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's absurd for a bunch of people who happen to dislike what the universe has told us about its nature to demand that a science show, devoted to telling people what we know about the world, spend any significant amount of time talking about specific "alternate" theories about the universe that are known to be wrong. NDT can, and I believe did, spend a significant amount of time laying out all of the reasons why we know that the universe is 13.82 billion years old et cetera, and doing so implicitly states that any particularly literal Biblical creationist beliefs are wrong. That's the most those beliefs deserve from him.

The "Living Constitution" and Repudiating the Past

An article I'm reading about the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court describes the debate over the "living constitution" as one between "an eighteenth century Newtonian Constitution and a nineteenth century Darwinian Constitution." The idea is to contrast the timeless, unchanging nature of Newtonian physics with the kind of gradual evolutionary change identified with Darwin. Kind of at random, this is a perfect metaphor for a point I've been planning on writing into a post for the past several days. The key point is this: Newton was wrong about stuff! Not, actually, wrong about the idea that the laws of physics are unchanging throughout time; as best I know, that part is true. But he got a lot of the laws of physics wrong. The universe only looks the way Newton thought it did at a very superficial level. Our ideas about the universe are very, very different now than they were in 1727, not because the universe has changed but because we just understand it better.

How does this relate to the living constitution? Well, it should be kind of obvious, but now I'll approach from the other side and make the point I've been wanting to make for a while. I don't think anyone really believes in the "living constitution." At least, I think a lot of people who purport to believe it don't really, not if its taken literally. Not if it's taken to mean that the Constitution itself changes over time. Bruce Ackerman sure seems to believe that, but I doubt that someone like William Brennan did. Rather, I think he thought that a lot of existing constitutional doctrine was dead wrong. He, therefore, wanted to issue decisions on constitutional issues that were not remotely consistent with the current or pre-existing understanding of the Constitution. But it's always controversial when the Court repudiates one of its existing precedents, and would doubtless be many times more so when it repudiates a whole complex of constitutional theory. So instead of saying that the old understanding was wrong, he, and those similarly minded, talk about how the Constitution needs to adapt with the times, or whatever.

In other words, the "living constitution" is an idea that people make up to avoid having to be honest about how much they're repudiating the past. We're very proud of our past, and rightly so in a lot of ways. Scientists are very proud of their past, too. But scientists don't see any problem saying that Isaac Newton was a great man and that he was dead wrong about a whole lot of things. This is perhaps one of the downsides to the eminently justified demise of legal scientism, the belief that human laws were like the laws of nature and had only to be discovered through the exercise of reason. (I get the impression that the legal scientists put more emphasis on reason than on experiment or observation, interestingly.) In that framework, it would make complete sense to say, well, the views of a century ago were just plain wrong, and we're not going to follow them even though we don't think the underlying truth has changed. The legal realists rightly attacked the view of law as an abstract, timeless entity, as opposed to the product of ongoing human politics. And, I think, after their triumph it was just easier, more comfortable, to see the Constitution as evolving over time than to say that the constitutional understandings of prior generations were wrong. And so emerged the living constitution, to say that, well, perhaps the past wasn't wrong for the past, but it would be wrong for the present. It lets us gloss over the continuity errors in our Dworkinian chain novel. But we know the errors are there, we put them there on purpose, because we like the new version of the story better than the old one, we just don't quite want to admit it.


Oh, and as an aside, it's worth pointing out that Darwinian evolution unquestionably occurs within a universe governed by timeless physical laws. In fact, Richard Dawkins has suggested that evolution by natural selection is a timeless law of nature, that life anywhere in the universe would proceed by it. There is no inconsistency between evolution and physics, and of course none of this has anything to do with the way we update our scientific understanding of the universe. Also, individual organisms don't evolve, they develop, the Constitution could only "evolve" in a properly Darwinian sense if the change took place over several different versions of it. A Jeffersonian world, where the constitution expired every twenty years, would feature such evolution; ours cannot, even under a "living constitutional" view. But all of that is nit-picking and not really about the legal stuff.

Stop Saying Atheists Think The Universe is Purposeless (And Other Complaints About Ross Douthat)

So, as reported by Kevin Drum, Ross Douthat apparently has some new column or blog post or something that basically beats the old "how can you have morality without religion?" drum. Kevin Drum's response to Douthat is that secular ethics are in fact older than Christianity and are humming along just fine. Mine is slightly different. Here's the central passage from Douthat:

"The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals [the biblical or the spiritual world pictures], because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss."

Can we just stop this already? It's hard to actually get to the bottom of how bad this is. I could go through it line by line. There is no sense in which the modern scientific-atheist cosmology describes the universe as "purposeless." Now, it is true that, as best we can tell, our universe was not created by anyone in particular, and therefore not for any particular purpose. It is also true that the universe was not aiming to create human beings, that instead they just arose from a not-particularly-random evolutionary process over millions of years and that they just as easily could not have. But, so what? Who said that the universe has to have been created for the purpose of having humans in it in order for anything to be meaningful or for individuals' sense of self to be real? Oh, that's right: religious people. That's entirely their idea. For most of us secular-scientific intelligentsia types, the quasi-miraculous facts of life and consciousness create plenty of purpose and meaning all by themselves. And they make it seem, well, pretty bloody obvious that the well-being of us conscious living types is important, and that people should generally act so as to increase it.

Evolution is Not a Morality Play

This is not about the Masters, but it actually sort of made me a bit angry so I thought I should comment on it. The background is that President Obama used the term "social Darwinist" to refer to the currently prevalent Republican philosophy in an economic speech a few days ago, and some Republicans objected. Jonathan Chait then wrote a blog post defending the use of this term. Aside from the point I'm about to mention, which is not a political one, it's a good post making sound points that deserve making. But at one point he says that the "social Darwinist" label is supposed to suggest that certain kinds of right-wing laissez-faire economics "treated the market the way Darwinists treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards." Later, he says that conservatives might object to the label because "because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce."

There's a gigantic problem with these descriptions: they act like Darwinian evolution by natural selection is supposed to be a morality play! This is simply false. Evolution is not right any more than it is wrong, in the moral sense: it simply is. It's also not about "distributing rewards" in any meaningful sense; the point is just that the genes of those who accrue the rewards of survival and reproduction will tend to dominate the gene pool of future generations. That it! The "social Darwinist" label describes someone who thinks it morally correct to set up human civilization on a slightly misunderstood version of the principles of natural selection, i.e. a Hobbesian war of all against all in which the strongest prosper, for a time anyway, and for the rest of us life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (And yes, that's a misunderstanding of actual natural selection: life is often like that, but not necessarily and not always.) One could level a similar charge against one who believed it was good that lions go around slaughtering gazelles.

Incidentally, I think this whole confusion has to do with a kind of projection on the part of the early opponents of Darwinian theory. As they tended to be people who freely conflated how they thought the world should be with how the world is, they assumed that Darwin and company were doing likewise. But the Darwinians, or most of them anyway, had a proper scientific mindset.

(As an aside, most serious Darwinians, starting with Darwin himself, don't think that natural selection is the exclusive mechanism of evolution; sexual selection can also play a substantial role. But I don't think that part makes a particularly good analogy to Republican policies!)

Why It's a Good Bet that Reality's Really Real

I just returned from the inaugural meeting of my Perception and the Mind class. Our professor spent a while discussing the concept of perception, including the more-or-less philosophical puzzle about how or whether we can know whether our perceptions tell us anything objective about the real world. Is there any way, she wondered, to be sure we're not in a Matrix-style virtual reality, where our brain is being fed information to simulate an apparent reality that doesn't exist? Well, no, we can't be certain. But I do think that we have good reasons for thinking that it's exceedingly likely reality is real, and not a virtual computer simulation*, for the very simple reason that making such a simulation would be extremely difficult.

The world around me is tremendously detailed. Just sitting on my bed in my dorm room, using only my (admittedly very strong) glasses as a sensory aide, there's already enough to take in. If I chose to acquire the right apparatus, I could see, in addition to everything that's apparent on inspection, the tiny molecular structures of everything around me, their electromagnetic images outside the narrow visual band, etc. The amount of sheer information about this world that appears to surround me is staggering, in other words. A simulated virtual reality would have to pour that information into me, and would have to generate it, all at once, all using the strength of some computing system. That's hard.

On the other hand, all that needs to happen for this information to be there, and for me to perceive it, on the hypothesis that it is the actual world is just for a world to exist, one that's got lots of detail to it, and for beings within it to develop the ability to detect information about that world. That's not very hard. Or, to be more precise, it is very hard, probably a great deal more unlikely from a properly a priori vantage-point than the task facing the designer of a virtual reality that I described above, but these things are also necessary for the virtual reality. This is something like Carl Sagan's observation that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. In order to have a simulated virtual reality, there must be some real world in which that virtual reality is being simulated, and there must be beings within that world who can detect information about it, and therefore be tricked into thinking they've received information about a world that doesn't exist. All of the complexity, the difficulty, the improbability, and the weirdness of the sheer existence of reality and sentient beings within that reality necessary for me to sit here observing such a wonderfully detailed world are also necessary for that world to be a fake. It's just that, if it is a fake, there's a whole extra layer of complexity, difficulty, improbability, and weirdness, entirely added on top of the original layer.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I do have any way of knowing for sure that this dorm room around me isn't a fake. It just means that, if I don't have any direct evidence on the question one way or another, it's staggeringly unlikely to be a fake. It's a reasonable presumption for me to make, in other words, that reality is really real. I might be wrong, and it might even matter a great deal that I'm wrong (though it might not). But until some Morpheus comes along to give me a reason not to do so, I might as well bet on reality, the less-unlikely possibility.

The Mother Of All Cop-Outs

I wrote this post up a while ago and it was accidentally erased before I could post it, significantly dampening my enthusiasm for it. This isn't going to be as long as the original was.

This is basically a response to a debate between Richard Dawkins, a prominent neo-atheist and personal favorite of mine, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Science and prominent religious scientist. They're asked by the moderator about the vast improbability of the universe. Dawkins explains by saying that maybe the six physical constants that had to be "just right" for life to exist are somehow tied to each other, reducing the improbability, or maybe we're in a multiverse system that reduces the improbability even more; but in either case, science can respond with a confident, "We don't know yet, but we're working on it." Collins then said that with his god the improbability is removed, because his god needs no explanation. Dawkins responds that that is, in his opinion, the mother of all cop-outs. And I have to agree.