The Garden

Alice came here every day, to sit on the wooden bench in her garden and watch the pigeons fly down from the trees and strut across the grass in expectation of breadcrumbs. Why they did this, she did not know, as no-one else was ever around and her pockets were empty; but every day, here they came. She had lost count of the number of days she had sat here on the long park bench, but that didn’t bother her. She was content. She was always content. At some point she would have to walk away from all this, there were other matters to attend to. At least she had a feeling there were. But there was plenty of time - she had only just arrived anyway. At least she had a feeling she had. It didn’t matter. There was peace, the trees, the birds, the wind and the Sun.

But today was different, there was something unexpected. Alice realised that she was not alone. Beside her sat a girl, dressed in grey, with a wild mess of white hair. The girl turned towards her, smiling. Alice felt a shock as she noticed the girl’s eyes: featureless, black, and yet she felt no fear, only the slight thrill of strangeness.

“Hello Alice” said the girl. “Beautiful day”

“It always is” replied Alice.
The girl stood up and held out her hand. “Please come with me. We need to talk”. Her words were polite, but left no possibility of refusal. Alice took the girl’s hand and they started to walk. “I have a story to tell you.” Sun, grass, birds, all faded.

“Once upon a time there were seven beings, seven avatars of reality, the Endless: Delight, Despair, Desire, Destruction, Destiny, Dream and Death. Older than gods yet younger than time, they shape reality through their thoughts and actions. Though powerful, the Endless could suffer the fates of mortals, including change, and even death, of a kind. As eons passed, Delight had become Delirium, and both Despair and Dream had taken on new aspects.

Each of the Endless has a realm, a home shaped by their natures. The realm of Destiny is garden of paths without end, paths which are walked by every sentient creature since the beginning of life. Destiny stands in his garden, tall and robed. With one hand he holds his book, chained to his wrist. In that book is everything, every spin of an electron, every planet’s orbit, every life, every death. Destiny is blind, but he knows the book and the book is everything. He turns a page, the first he has turned in an age, and reads:

“At a time so distant from the origin of all things that stars had been mere sparks in the afterglow of the Big Bang, a crystalline ship slowly circled a vast black hole that was the corpse of a galaxy. Within the crystals flowed thoughts so slow that species had risen and fallen in the blink of an eye. The thoughts were those of the last human mind, preserved in a way intended to challenge eternity, frozen in a timeless world of imagination. In that imagination a young girl, Alice, re-creates a single day from the time of worlds and stars. In his garden, Destiny had become aware of a presence.”

Destiny lifts his head: “Well met, sister”.

“So formal as ever. Today, of all days, say my name.

Destiny pauses and frowns. Del..? Dis..?” He asks. “You aren’t in my book”.

“I’m sorry Destiny. You always forget this time. I’m in your book now. I’m on every page. Look closely. Destiny needed no eyes to read.

“As the first stars were born, you were the delight of beginnings. As minds dreamed, desired and despaired and decayed, you became the mistress of their increasing delirium. As even suns and worlds at last fell into ruin and the last minds pass into Death’s domain, you have become the Lady of chaos. You have become Disorder. All reality has become your domain.”

“As our sister Death once said, we have always known this, but never remember. You must remember now.” said Disorder. “It's time for my final duty in this cosmos. When I am everything, then there is nothing. Even time loses its power. There must be a new beginning and so I need your book.”

“The book at I are one”, said Destiny.
“I know that brother”, said Disorder, “But even so you must give it to me.”
Destiny took his book with his free arm and held out the chain.
Disorder gently touched the chain and it collapsed into dust. She lifted the open book from Destiny’s hand. She turned a page, and saw nothingness. Now alone, she whispered to herself “Goodbye brother. Until the next time”. She closed the book and carried it away into the mist.

“No mortal before you has been free of Destiny. You are truly free to make your own future, and so this is the choice I give you”, said Disorder, “try to wait out eternity in a simulation, never dreaming yet not truly awake, never dying but neither truly alive, having no desires and sealed beyond destruction and yet your end will come, or you can take this book and help shape a new beginning.”

Alice reached out for the book. As her fingers touched the cover she knew all that had ever been. An image entered her mind of a tall robed figure, with a book chained to his arm, the book she now held. She knew who this was, who he was, and that he was blind and yet saw all that was, all that had been, and all that will be.

“Destiny…” she whispered.

“Yes, that was him. Now that will be you.” said Disorder.

“Will I be blind, chained, and so very grey?” asked Alice.
“That’s up to you” said the girl. “My brother liked to follow tradition.”

Alice came here every day, to sit in the sun and watch the pigeons fly down from the trees and strut across the grass in expectation of breadcrumbs. This was her garden, Destiny’s realm.

She sat down on an old wooden bench, took some bread from a pocket of her long white robe, broke it and threw the pieces towards the birds. Then she turned and saw beside her her book. She picked it up, opened it to the first page, and read the first few words with a smile. There, in the language of reality, were words that created a cosmos:

“In the beginning…”

The Guardian and Gamergate

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/28/gamergate-didnt-fade-into-obscurity-harassment-women-sxsw-panel 

I'm honestly puzzled as to why the Guardian publishes this nonsense. It's supposed to be a paper that promotes free thinking, not slavishly following dogma. #gamergate was a response to corruption in the gaming industry. There was real corruption - journalists not revealing if they did or did not have associations with game writers. This created understandable anger. The result was there was a campaign associated with a hashtag #gamergate. It's not an organised group. Some of the anger went too far. Some anger always goes to far when you are dealing with an online group of tens of thousands. It's deeply dishonest to then insist that gamergate was 'really' about hatred of women, and continually cherry pick to make that case. There are plenty of women gamers who have supported the gamergate campaign, and some of those women have been subjected to harassment and and threats too. These don't get reported as they don't fit the 'gamergate hates women' narrative.

What the Guardian is doing is supporting this dishonesty, and this kind of dishonesty is becoming an increasing problem: diverting the message of a movement to fit an agenda by cherry-picking. We had this with the awful atheism+, now just about everything online is about misogyny. There is real misogyny in our cultures, but it's rarely specific to individual movements. It has to be addressed as what it is, and not supposedly part of 'gaming', or 'secularism' or whatever.

'Gamergate' has not gone - it has won. It's now standard practice in the gaming interest to list any connections that have that might prejudice what they write.

I want to see journalists have to work harder to discuss real issues in constructive ways. The Guardian should do better.

Richard Dawkins on Twitter - nothing to apologise for

The media are at it again.  Richard Dawkins starts to discuss a controversial topic and his tweets are quoted because they seem to be either shocking or putting forward a strident point of view.  Some bloggers do the same thing, often advising Richard to keep quiet or get some sort of advice about what he tweets.

I find the reactions just a bit silly.  Richard Dawkins is an eminent scientist and science educator.  Richard is not a politician. He is not a religious leader.  He is not an elected leader of anything (at least not anything I know about).  He is an individual who is posting his opinions on an open forum.  He posts opinions which are often challenged, and he reads those challenges and sometimes changes his mind.  In doing this he is acting exactly as any supporter of reason should.

There are some who treat Twitter as a global soap-box; a place to make pronouncements, and to preach to the world your view of anything you want.  But that's a real waste.  The power of Twitter is communication, exchanges of views and feedback.  It's a source of much nonsense, of course, but it's also a source of great expertise.

If you want to treat the contents of a conversation by Richard as if they are pronouncements of doctrine then you are the fool.  If you want to get value from Richard's presence, then for goodness sake talk to him.  That's one great thing Twitter enables - conversation.

What is the middle ground of UK politics?

I have realised that I have no idea what the 'middle ground' of UK politics is. I assumed it meant that we don't really like nuclear weapons, but we'll have them if necessary; we really do like the idea of the NHS; we are generally cautious about immigration, but when there is a crisis we are welcoming; we are pretty concerned about the environment; we distrust those with a lot of money; we are generally keen on Europe, as we know it from holidays; we want a good fair wage for all; we utterly distrust private ownership of railways, and think that at least the possibility of nationalisation is a good thing. We are cautious about money, but good when it comes to charity.

But my impression is that these views are now considered widely left-of-centre by many, even "hard left". I remember the views of the "hard left" in the 80s, and they included universal nationalisation, support for communist states, scrapping all nuclear weapons, workers' collectives running everything.

How did the moderate left end up being now labelled "hard left"? How did nationalising parts of the NHS become mainstream? How did we end up with Labour party shadow cabinet ministers saying that they would match their Tory equivalents when it came to benefit cuts? How did we get so that benefit claimants, many of them disabled or ill, became the target of cuts?

I'm really confused.

Why you can't have evidence for gods being gods.

There are many definitions of 'god'.  I'll start off by making it clear the definitions I'm not dealing with.  I'm not considering 'gods' who are intelligent and powerful aliens who can do things that seem magical (a good example of such an alien is 'Q' in Star Trek).  I'm not dealing with beings who can create a world that seems real to us, such as the Machines in the Matrix trilogy.  I'm not dealing with the version of the Christian god written about by the physicist Frank Tipler who attempts to explain miracles in terms of physics in his book "The Physics of Christianity".   Why aren't I dealing with such gods?  Because they aren't what most believers want gods to be - they can't provide ultimate judgement and ultimate forgiveness; they can't give ultimate meaning; they can't provide eternal bliss or eternal punishment.  What I'm dealing with is beings that have powers that are truly 'supernatural', and that includes the Christian god - the Alpha, the Omega, the creator of all things and the source of all morality.

I have a couple of arguments that deal with the question of evidence for such beings:

1. The argument from complexity.

The Catholic Church insists that their god is ultimate simplicity, but that's just not on.  A being that is infinite, eternal and all-knowing and all-powerful is exceedingly - perhaps infinitely - complex, as that being contains all knowledge, and all wisdom.  This complexity is a real problem when it comes to evidence for this god, as just about anything else is simpler.  This includes vast galactic civilizations that have existed for billions of years.  It includes Star Trek-level cultures that can destroy a world with a phaser bank, and can cure most illnesses with a wave of something that looks like a pepper pot with lights.   So, if you come across what seems like a miracle, or you have some internal mental experience that feels like religious revelation, there are many alternatives of lesser complexity you have to consider before you allow for the possibility of the Catholic god.  The complexity problem has been expressed beautifully by Arthur C. Clarke, who said 'any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic', and by David Hume, who said that claims of miracles are never to be trusted, because there are always simpler explanations.

2. The argument from supernaturalness

The word 'supernatural' is the label for attributes of gods which are 'beyond Nature'.  The problem with this label is that it's never specified what 'beyond Nature' is supposed to mean.  Nature as we know it involves particles like atoms, electrons, photons and so on.  So, presumably, a supernatural being manages to get things done in ways that don't involve any such particles.  But that isn't an explanation of what they are actually doing to perform miracles.  Even if you can have reliable evidence that what is happening doesn't involve familiar particles, that evidence is in no way evidence for 'beyond Nature', it's only 'beyond what we know'.  So, from a practical point of view, evidence for the supernatural is definitely a problem.  It gets worse when we consider that a common definition of supernatural is 'beyond the reach of science'.  This makes evidence for the supernatural impossible by definition.

It's worth at this point clearing up a common misconception.  Sometimes evidence is considered to be supportive of the supernatural, when what that evidence is actually for is a thing that is believed to be supernatural.  For example, a primitive tribe might consider planes flying over their rain forest to be gods.  When asked for evidence of these supernatural gods by another tribe, they point up at a metal machine high above.  Of course, planes aren't supernatural (although I have to say that they feel like magic to me).  What I mean by 'evidence for the supernatural' is evidence that a thing has supernatural nature.

So, whichever definition we choose for 'supernatural', we reach an impasse.  We either have to try and demonstrate that something is beyond Nature, which is impossible, or we have a property of beings that is defined as being beyond empirical testing, so demonstrating its supernatural nature is impossible.

So, gods, by their definitions, are beyond reach of evidence.  No evidence is sufficient to show that what seems like a god or an act of a god isn't some simpler alternative, and according to some definitions, evidence isn't even possible to test a god's divine supernatural nature.

I don't understand magnetism!

I'm having trouble understanding magnetic monopoles. Magnetic forces we know about are the result of electric charges in motion. As a result, the idea of there always being two magnetic poles makes sense, because the motion of charges has a direction and the magnetic poles are perpendicular to that direction. Consider something simple like a spinning sphere with electric charges on it. If you look at the sphere one way the spin will be clockwise and you will see one magnetic pole (I forget which!). If you look at another direction and you see the spin anti-clockwise you will see the opposite magnetic pole. Having a magnetic monopole is like trying to cut a spin in half, so that you can see a clockwise spin of charge but no anti-clockwise spin. It makes no geometric sense. There are situations where what look like monopoles appear but these are in reality the result of things that are very thin and stretched so that you can only see the effects of the opposite spins at long distances - it's just looking at the ends of a system with both North and South poles.

So, I'm wondering if magnetism makes sense at all as anything fundamental. It's simply electrostatic charges + movement, and so 'magnetic field lines' are badly named, and everything can be re-formulated in terms of electrodynamics.

What am I missing?

Macroevolution can happen

Macroevolution - the formation of a new species in one generation is extremely rare in animals, but more common in plants. The way it can happen is through duplication of the entire genome. Organisms which have multiple genome copies are called 'polyploid'. In some plants it's possible to trace back exactly where and when these things happen. For example, a new species of marsh grass appeared in a certain area of marsh in Britain in around 1870. This would have been one faulty cell division resulting in a new species. 

Animals are much more complex in structure than plants and rarely reproduce asexually so this kind of thing is much rarer, but it does happen - the plains viscacha rat in Argentina is one example. What must have happened is a faulty cell division leading to a polyploid female and then inter-breeding in her offspring.