John C. Wright's Journal

JP over at SF Signal comments: “Aishwarya Rai is a Bollywood actress and former Miss World, so I expect huge ratings when Heroes hits India.”

Hmmm. Yeh, I would expect so.

I can think of a series of simple to more complicated detectors.

1. A photovoltaic light detector. Goes green light when light is present.

2. A fancier one that detects flashing light.

3. One that detects increasing frequency light.

…

4045673. One that detects animals walking by.

…

6009387356. One that detects threatening animals walking by.

…

On and on until you have a man looking at the world and seeing patterns that describe enormous underlying physical complexity. Where in the progression did something else get added?

Another way to ask this is “Can I create a man from scratch in a laboratory?”

I have his DNA and a scifi atom assembler. Can’t I create an embryo and grow it into a baby? Where in this process does something else (non-material) get created? What is the source? When did it get there?

Following the above discussion it seems like you both agree that simple materialism (read matter/energy) is not fully descriptive of the universe (meaning everything). But I don’t see the reasoning by which you conclude this.  

My reply:

Well, I am not sure I understand your questions well enough to answer them, and I am sure a comments box is too narrow a forum to give these deep topics the careful analysis they deserve: so let me try to respond to your questions, even if I cannot answer fully.  

1. An atheist is someone who says “God does not exist.” An agnostic is someone who says, “No one can say for sure whether God exists or not.” The former is a statement about the world; the latter is a statement about human knowledge. When I was an atheist, I disbelieved in God for three reasons, a logical reason, an empiric reason, an emotional reason. Logically, for example, the concept of a benevolent and all-powerful omniscient God governing a world filled with real and pointless suffering does not make sense. Likewise, the concept of a all-powerful being who acts (for action implies selecting means to gratify ends, whereas omnipotence implies immediate gratification) is illogical. One might as well speak of square triangles. The empirical evidence seemed to be against it: the history of the Church (I was raised Protestant) was portrayed as a mass of superstition and priestcraft. Emotionally, I was not willing to bow to any superior power, certainly not in the realm of morality. If my conscience told me murder was bad, and an all-powerful being told me burning heretics was good, then that all-powerful being was merely an all-powerful tyrant.  

Let me hasten to add that I was a Judeo-Christian Atheist, but I was a Pagan Agnostic. The Christian God I was sure did not exist: Thor and Zeus, meh, I assumed it was theoretically possible that they existed, but I had never seen evidences of them.  

2. “But what reason do you use to conclude that these other things you list like mind, logic, etc. are not just referring to a common pattern in matter/energy?”  

Physical properties can be reduced to simpler physical fundamentals: acceleration, viscosity, energy, can be reduced to expressions of mass, length, and duration, for example. Even things one would not normally associate with these constants can be reduced: “red color” for example, can be expressed as a wavelength of light, and wavelength be expressed as periodic motion over time.  

Nothing on my list, mind, logic, etc., can be described as a “pattern” because patterns describe the formal cause of a thing, and my list lists things that require a final cause. A formal cause can describe the movement of a threatened amoeba (mass A goes direction B in time T) but it cannot describe the final cause (the organism fears a threat, and moves away from the threat in order to preserve its beloved life and health, which are good).  The formal cause of an amoeba moving toward food might be the same (mass  A goes direction B in time T) but the final cause would be the opposite (the organism craves food, and moves toward the food source in order to augment its life and health, which are good).  

In the same way physical properties can be reduced to simpler physical expressions, final properties can be reduced to simpler final expressions:  all living things seek the Good, by definition. All value judgments are a judgment that something has value. No merely physical property of matter involves a value judgment: two meters is not “better” or “worse” than six seconds.  

Men seek health and prosperity, but also justice, beauty and truth because these things are (or are seen to be) good. Ask any dog in heat whether fighting a rival for a mate is good, and whether it is better to win rather than lose such a combat. The meaning of the dogfight is lost if the final cause is not known: you do not understand what you are seeing if you do not see the dog is fighting for his mate. Merely describing the mass and motion-vector of the dog fails to describe the meaning of his actions.

To use your example, somewhere between 3 and 4045673, a meaning was introduced: the light-image cannot be interpreted, nay, cannot even be seen, unless the Idea, the Concept, the Mental Reality, of what is called “animal” is understood by the watcher. A subject-object distinction is introduced, that only a living organism, a creature that thinks, can think.  

Somewhere between 4045673 and 6009387356 a value judgment has been introduced: the Idea and Concept of a “threatening” animal. To be a threat does not mean to mass nine pounds as opposed to eight and a half pounds. To be a threat means to threaten something I love and value. It introduces the concept of good and bad, pain and pleasure, health and damage, potential and actual, fear and anticipation, and other concepts and ideas that cannot be reduced to mere expressions of mass, length, and time.   

“I have his DNA and a scifi atom assembler. Can’t I create an embryo and grow it into a baby? Where in this process does something else (non-material) get created? What is the source? When did it get there?”  

We do not need an atom assembler for this question: Every mother has the power to give birth, which is bringing new life into the world. You are asking me at what point a mass of tissue becomes a baby. The answer is never: the babies are made of tissue, but no description of tissue masses will describe the baby. Your question assumes its own conclusion: you assume the things that cannot be reduced to physical fundamentals arise out of physical fundamentals–but by definition whatever cannot be reduced to physical fundamentals does not arise from the combination of physical fundamentals, no more than adding any number of horizontal magnitudes in a plane will never get you one inch of vertical distance above the plane.

Are you asking me by what material process does a nonmaterial reality come into material existence? The answer is never. Let me ask you a question in return. Take a living amoeba and a dead amoeba. Place both under a microscope. Their mass and volume is the same. Does the fact that their mass and volume is the same mean they are the same in all respects?  

Obviously not. The fact that one is alive and the other is not MEANS something: the living amoeba’s behavior cannot be described except in terms of final causes. The amoeba “desires” to live and “seeks” food and health and “prefers” to avoid threats.  Concepts like desire and seeking and preferring are concepts that can be reduced to statements of good and bad, but not to statements of mass, length, and duration.  

Take a living amoeba that dies. One moment, it is alive, the next, not alive. The mass and volume are the same. No mass was lost during the moment of death. But no one in his right mind would bother asking me where in the process did something non-material get destroyed. Obviously nothing non-material got destroyed (if I understand what you mean by non-material). All that happened was the philosophical category of understanding, that is, the category of value judgment, of good and bad, the categories which apply to living things and not to unlving things ceased, in this case, to apply. Dead things have no good and bad: they are merely matter in motion, not creatures with meaning.   

One might as well ask me when Isosceles Triangles got invented. Before the Big Bang? After? Did Pythagoras invent the Isosceles Triangle? Would triangles have four angles instead of three if Pythagoras had been in a different mood that day? Did hexagons exist when the First Bees first made the first honeycombs, or not until Euclid?— and so on.

The questions make no sense because they involve an assumption that makes a categorical error.  Final causes, minds and ideas can only be described in terms of other ideas, not in terms of the material evens and material causes.   

This is the Budapest Parliament

An interior shot

Look like good enough reasons to me. For example, point 5. Iron Man will dogfight with F-22 fighter jets!

“Can Spider-man battle the U.S. Air Force with those web balls of his?  No.  Can Wolverine, for all of his screw-the-worldness, take on heat-seeking missiles with mere adamantium claws?  Don’t think so.  There’s only one man, one iron-clad man to be exact, who can trade blows with fighter jets and still have the energy afterwards to stroll down to the corner pub and order a double shot of Jamison Irish whiskey.  Iron Man.”

Cool beans.

Brooks also point out reason number 3 to be excited:Mandarin is the villain!

 The Mandarin!  The Mandarin is to Ming the Merciless and Fu Manchu as Hawkeye is to Green Arrow and Robin Hood: in other words, a pretty good Marvelization of an other guy’s idea. But pretty good for Marvel is Marvelicious, True Believer!

 “Iron Man vs. Mandarin will be a smack down of mythic proportions.  The last time we saw such a powerful protagonist was General Zod in  Superman II, and old General “Kneel before me Son of Jor-el!” Zod was a tad fruity if you ask me. 

“In X-Men 3 the U.S. Government was the prime enemy of mutants with its “X” gene cure.  Boring.  In Spider-man 3, Peter Parker faced a black suit that made him… umm… dance.  Yeah, dance.  The Fantastic Four are facing some weirdo on a surf board this summer (cowabunga dude!).  And in 2006, Superman’s main foe was a giant rock made of Kryptonite.  Yes, a giant rock. 

“Mandarin, meanwhile, is a descendent of Genghis Khan (or so he claims), a master of science and mathematics who possess ten magical rings that give him powers even Supes would envy. Mandarin can emit a shot capable of destroying the bond between atoms and molecules with his “Disintegration Beam.”  And that’s just with the ring on his right ring finger.”

He can also karate chop through Iron Man’s armor, which is a dumb idea, even for comics, unless he is actually using a force field from the combination of his Impact Beam and Matter Re-arranger. Boy, I really wanted a matter Re-Arranger ring when I was younger, by which I mean, last week. Why buy my wife a new lawnmower, if I could use my Matter Re-Arranger on the front lawn and turn it into a pair of giant stone hands to grapple and kill my arch-foe?

( My wife comments: “Dear, you don’t have an arch-foe.” Oh yeah? Well, what about John Scalzi? “Dear, I thought you LIKED John Scalzi?”
Well, he WOULD be my arch-foe if I tried to take over the world and he put on a suit of power armor and stopped me. That could happen.
 “John Scalzi cannot be your arch-foe, dear.” Why not? “Because John Scalzi is the arch-foe of Scott Westerfeld The Pluto-hater. You’re on his side.” Ph’nglui! You’re right!! … but I still want that Matter Re-Arranger ring.)

Who does not want ten magic rings to commit supercrimes and restore China to her ancient and well-merited glory? Thing about how cool a magic ring is. Now multiply that by ten.

(Yes, yes, fanboy, I know that they are not actually MAGIC rings per se, but I will quote Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum at you: any sufficiently advanced technology from the dragon-people of planet Maklu IV resting in a crashed spaceship in the long hidden and terror haunted Valley of the Dragons in China, is indistinguishable from magic.)

(( Good golly, I did not even need to google the name of the alien planet from which the Mandarin’s ring-tech comes. Maybe I don’t need the Memory Wipe Machine to free up brainspace after all. Or maybe I need it more desperately. What date is my wife’s birthday again? ))

So, then, Mr. Reynolds asks “what happened?” when we did not get jetpacks by 1999, and a space mission to Jupiter by 2001. Somehow, I do not think that what happened was a loss of an ethos of foresight that attempted to steer reality toward preferred outcomes— by which, I assume, he means Big Government.

Let me propose three or four possible answers to “what happened”:

1. Unrealistic expectations.
We did not get the future we expected because the expectations were unrealistic: what use is a jetpack? Even the military has no real need for a one-man rocket. Why not take a helicopter? We are not on the moon because there is nothing on the moon to go see: it is the Gobi desert, except without air.

2. Unobservant results.
We got the future we expected, but it merely looks slightly different than we expected, and we tend not to notice the changes. How is a flying car different from a helicopter? Businessmen can be shuttled from airport to skyscraper in record time. We have flying cars, and no one calls them that.

3. Dramatic expectations, realistic results.
The needs of history are different from the needs of drama. It is easy to write a story about Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman (or Martin Luther King), and most robot stories are tales of this kind, yarns about men who are more or less like us, merely made of metal. It is hard to write a story about the Internet. The Net is not trying to take over the world, like Skynet or Colossus; it does not have a personality, except, perhaps, a fetish for selling Viagra. It is not something we can actually jack into with neural implants as in a Gibson story, or fight in gladiatorial games against an evil Master Control Program with our lightcycles, as in a Disney movie.  But the Internet is darned convenient for a darned large number of things—it has revolutionized the way office work is done, the way mail is sent, the way porn is sold, the way English is misspelled.

Who here actually needs or wants an Asimov-style mechanical man? Do you need a butler, really? The military might use an Asimobot, except that bots cannot hurt people. Maybe we could use them in tending nuclear reactors, except that we stopped building reactors. We could use them for deep sea work, if there was any to do, or space exploration, except, again, robotic space exploration is going on at a fine clip. I am not saying I would not like a giant robot, for example, like the one used by Daisaku Kusama to defeat alien invaders or illuminati-like conspiracies: but if I had to chose between a future where we each have a metal manservant and one where we all have the Internet, I chose the information revolution over the robotics revolution.

4. Thwarted Expectations.
One possible answer is one our Mr. Reynolds might not think of, or might not want to think of: what happened was that the men who dreamed those great dreams looked back at the previous fifty years of technological innovation, from 1880 to 1940, and predicted a similar rate of progress.

And the rate of progress lagged, for the postwar generation was a laggard generation.

What happened? Well, look around at the modern thinkers, shakers, movers and doers. Compare them with our fathers and grandfathers. Do you think they have the grit to be pioneers? Do you think this nation has the backbone needed to make the sacrifices an unparalleled human adventure like space colonization calls on us to make?

What happened was the 1960’s and 70’s. What happened was the growth of big government, the loss of entrepreneurial spirit, the slow death of the pioneering ideal, the sloth, narcissism, and cowardice of the baby boomers.

What happened was the loss of the “can-do” Yanks that won WWII. Their children lost the Vietnam War, and lost the economic incentives for space exploration. NASA was not the culmination of the space effort; NASA was the roadblock stopping further growth, the waterworks drying up all the other fountains.

Imagine how many engineering companies, or companies of every kind, might exist now if we had pre-FDR levels of taxation, pre-FDR levels of litigation, bureaucracy, red tape.

I read an article that said employers hiring kids out of school find that if they do not love-bomb them in the same way school does, so that every employee is the employee of the month, everyone is praised every day, and everyone gets an ‘A’, the young employees quit—for they are used to a flood of expectation-free adoration, and feel underpraised and undervalued if they do not get it.

Now picture those same young men aboard the spaceship Comet, or the Rocket Cruiser Polaris, or the Skylark, or the Britannia, or the spacebattleship Yamato, or the Rodger Young. Hard to picture, isn’t it?

The Flower Generation was the one drugged out at Woodstock while their fathers were launching moonshots. They are the generation that lost us the Moon.

If you are the kind of folk who hate Christopher Columbus, and sneer and scoff at pioneers and heroes, you are not the kind of folk among whose number the next Christopher Columbus of Outer Space will be found.