The Crowhill Journal

RIP, Notorious RBG.

With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left has gone apocalyptic and Republicans are trying to say “never mind” about the things they said re: Merrick Garland.

While RBG became a feminist icon later in life, feminists didn’t like her at first, for two reasons: first, her friendship with Scalia, which seemed to throw shade on her liberal credentials, and second, the fact that she transferred to Columbia to accommodate her husband. What a bad, bad thing to do!

P&C review the political circus and talk generally about the Supreme Court.

It’s always interesting to see what does and doesn’t qualify as “diversity.”

As Thomas Sowell said, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

There are any number of characteristics by which you can divide people. When it comes to the Supreme Court, people talk about liberal vs. conservative, male vs. female and black vs. white, and every once in a while they’ll talk about the religion of the justices, but why don’t they talk about diversity in law schools?

Harvard dominates, especially recently. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

FWIW, Amy Coney Barrett studied at Notre Dame.

P&C drink and review Old Pro, a Gose from Union Brewing. Then they discuss crazy people.

The unfortunate truth is that some of our neighbors are psychopaths. According to the scientists, sociopaths can be cured, if it’s caught in time, but psychopaths cannot. Psychopaths who are violent challenge our idea that we should only punish people who have moral agency, since they are unable to reform. But some of them have been arrested hundreds of times. They’re incorrigible criminals. What are we supposed to do with them?

Locking them up is not a perfect solution, because the guards and the other prisoners are now exposed to this person. Their lives matter too.

There’s a TV show on Hulu called Devs. It’s about a big tech company with a deep secret and an engineer who’s trying to find out why her boyfriend died. I’ve only seen the first four episodes, but I like it.

This isn’t too much of a spoiler, because I think it’s revealed in the first episode, but the big secret is that they’ve discovered a way to calculate history. If everything is deterministic, as the tech giant in Devs insists, then with a big enough computer, and with programmers who have a comprehensive knowledge of physics, you can calculate the future and the past.

I don’t know if I’ve told this story recently, but this is very much like the thought experiment I had in English class in 12th grade. It went like this.

Imagine that the universe consists of only two 1 kg marbles, one meter apart. That’s it. There’s nothing else in the universe.

With a little bit of math, you could calculate what’s going to happen to those marbles. Gravity would attract them. They’d collide and lose some energy, bounce away, until gravity pulled them back together again, etc. You could conceivably write a problem to explain exactly where those two marbles are for all of eternity.

If you add a few marbles, it gets a little more complicated, but it’s still conceivable. It still works if you add billions of marbles, although you’d need a computer that might not have been available in 1981. (Realize that this thought experiment was based on my knowledge of physics at the time. It wouldn’t really work this way. I was imagining space as a given, for example. But those details don’t change the value of the thought experiment.)

Continuing on …. What does it matter if we exchange these marbles for protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.? In my mind, it didn’t change anything. They still act according to fixed, deterministic rules. And it doesn’t matter if we collect these particles into ponds and streams and rocks and mountains. Everything is still clockwork, and completely deterministic. Each cause has a precise effect, according to the laws of physics.

Why would that change if these particles assembled themselves into bacteria and protozoa and such? They’d be very complicated machines, but they’d still be deterministic.

So there I was, in English class, thinking this through, with my clockwork universe in my head. I could advance the frame forward one millisecond and know exactly where everything should be. Or I could go back one millisecond and see where everything had been. From the moment of the Big Bang, everything would progress according to deterministic rules. Not that I knew what all those rules were, or that I could calculate it all, but that didn’t matter. Whatever those rules were, they were like the laws I already knew. They’d work by strict application of mathematically precise formulas.

Or, in other words, gravity doesn’t ask if you want to fall, and it doesn’t care that the asteroid falling onto the planet is going to wipe out the dinosaurs.

The introduction of animals seems like a problem, but it doesn’t change the reality. They’re just complicated meat machines. At their core, they’re just as deterministic as the marbles.

I knew enough of the grand eras in the history of the universe to pretend that I could advance through my experiment until Earth was formed, and then I would think through the geologic ages and imagine that it was all the natural, necessary, determined result of the Big Bang.

Including me sitting in English class thinking about this.

At that point it all went “poof!” in a cloud of ridiculousness.

The idea that a deterministic, unfeeling, impersonal, mechanical universe would generate a kid sitting in English class imagining all this stuff struck me as the single dumbest thing I had ever thought in my life. I didn’t know it yet, but that was the death blow to the worldview I’d tried to develop in my teen years.

I realized later (and probably knew a little about it then) that some very competent, intelligent physicists would dispute the idea that the universe is deterministic in the way I have described. I accept that, although for the life of me I can’t understand what they mean. Does a proton get to choose which way to go? To my way of thinking (which is very possibly wrong), if it’s not moved, it’s not moving. (Take that metaphorically. I understand about momentum and such.)

People who don’t believe in determinism apparently believe that a cause can have an indeterminate effect. That doesn’t mean “so complicated we can’t figure it out,” which would still work with my thought experiment, but “it’s impossible to figure it out because cause doesn’t work that way.” (Don’t get distracted by thinking about humans. The issue is cause at a fundamental, physical level.)

The bottom line is that I found then, and still find now, that materialistic determinism is about as dumb as anything can be, although none of the alternatives seem all that appealing either.

Devs seems to be confronting this issue in a decently fun sci-fi TV setting. It’s a little slow, but I’m enjoying it.

P&C drink and review Hawaii Five Ale, a blonde ale with lots of fruit additions.

Voice recognition and facial recognition have come along faster than the boys anticipated. The new technologies offer lots of new possibilities, but there are also new privacy concerns as a result.

Are we on a path to blanket, continuous surveillance?

Pigweed and Crowhill discuss some of the positive aspects and potential benefits of facial recognition, as well as some of the concerns.