I was wrong about aliens

For decades now, I've been making this argument that it's unlikely we've ever been visited by aliens. The argument goes like this:

1. The only thing that could set Earth apart from the billions of planets in the galaxy, and therefore make it worth singling out for a visit, is if it had life.

2. The only way of knowing from a great distance that there's life on earth is by receiving radio signals.

3. The farthest any radio signals have traveled from Earth is a little over 100 light years.

4. If an alien civilization could travel at the speed of light, then any aliens who just got here today because of having received our radio signals and disocvering we were here would have to live within 50 light years of us.

5. If there were any civilizations capable of traveling here who lived within 50 light years of us, we would know about them since (1) they would already have radio technology, and (2) SETI has been searching the skies for decades.

6. But we know of no such civilizations.

7. Therefore, there are no aliens sufficiently close to have discovered us and visited us.

8. Therefore, it's unlikely that any aliens have ever visited us.

People have raised a number of objections to this argument, and some of them have some merit, but not enough to convince me that the whole argument is worthless. But recently, I've come to realize that the second premise is just false, and that undermines the entire argument.

There's another way to discover life on distant planets even if there are no advanced civilizations on those planets. It's by looking at star light that passes through the atmosperes of those planets. You can tell the chemical composition of a light source by breaking it up into a spectrum and looking at aborbtion lines. Absorbtion lines are like finger prints because different elements and compounds produce unique absorbtion lines. Living things on earth give off certain chemicals that, as far as we know, aren't produced any other way. If we can discover some of those same chemicals in the atmospheres of distant exo-planets, that would be good evidence for life. And that's what some people hope to do with the James Webb Space Telescope. This means we could discover life thousands of light years away.

Since there's been life on earth for more than a billion years, life could've been discovered here hundreds of millions of years ago, giving an alien civilization lots of time to travel here or send probes here. So I was wrong. My argument doesn't make it unlikely for aliens to have visited us after all. It still may be unlikely, but for different reasons. I'm just admitting that my long time argument is a failure.

Sabine Hossenfelder's objection to the fine-tuning argument

A little over a year ago, one of my favourite physics YouTubers, Sabine Hossenfelder, posted a video explaining why she doesn't think the fine-tuning argument is sound. To boil her argument down to what I think is the most important part, she doesn't think we can know whether the universe is fine-tuned because we can't know what the probability distribution is of the constants of nature. And the reason we don't know what the probability distribution is is because we can only observe one universe. We'd have to be able to observe many universes before we could know what the probability distribution is for the values of the constants, and only then could we know whether the universe was fine-tuned. Since we can't know whether the universe is fine-tuned or not, fine-tuning cannot be used as a premise in an argument for God or for a multiverse.

I think this is a decent argument, but it's not a satisfying refutation of fine-tuning. It plays on two other objections to fine-tuning that are pretty common, and which I'll talk about in a minute.

Notice, though, that Sabine has given us an undercutting defeater rather than a rebutting defeater for fine-tuning. In other words, she hasn't shown that the universe is not fine tuned, only that we can't empirically demonstrate that the universe is fine-tuned. It could be fine-tuned, and we just have no way of knowing it. But she is right that if we can't know whether it's fine-tuned, then we can't use fine-tuning as a premise in an argument for God or a multiverse. If we did, such an argument could still be sound (since the premises could still be true); we just couldn't know if it was sound (since we couldn't know whether the premises were true).

One problem I have with her argument is the assumption that an empirically demonstrated probability distribution is the only kind of probability we have to go on. In her dice analogy, she said that to get a probability distribution, we'd have to roll the dice many times to see the frequency with which it lands on each side. But that is not typically how people come up with the probability of things like dice. Instead, the probability is arrived at by making a ratio of 1 divided by the number of possibilities. If it's a six-sided dice, then there's a 1 in 6 chance of it landing on any given side.

The same sort of thing is true with the lottery. We say the probability of winning the lottery is one divided by the number of possible outcomes. We don't have to run the lottery a gazillion times to come up with an empirically demonstrated probability distribution.

In the case of poker, there are different kinds of probabilities we can come up with. There's the probability of any given hand, whether it's a meaningful hand or not. Then there's the probability of certain kinds of hands, like two pairs or a royal flush. Then there's the probability that you will randomly deal any worthy hand. You'd get a different probability in each of these cases, but it wouldn't be based on empirically observed frequency.

In the same way, fine-tuning arguments do not use empirically observed frequency to come up with probabilities. Instead, the probabilities are based on a ratio between the life permitting range of the contants and the possible values of the constants. One of the major objections brought against fine-tuning is that we don't know what the full range of possible values they could have is. But this is a weak argument because we can know something is highly unlikely without knowing precisely how unlikely. As Luke Barnes pointed out one time (I can't remember where), we can artifically limit the range to what is mathematically coherent. Robin Collins has a different approach to dealing with this problem, but that'll take us on a rabbit trail, so nevermind about that.

The only problem with using these kinds of probabilities (let's call them "statistical probabilities") is that it assumes the probability is evenly distributed among all the possibilities. We know that in nature, probabilities are not always distributed this way. Consider the path an electron might take when it goes through a double slit. Pretty much any spot on the wall behind it is a possibility, but the probability takes the form of a wave. If you shoot a bunch of electrons through the double slit (whether all at once or one at a time doesn't matter), a pattern will emerge that takes the form of a wave. There are peaks and valleys of probability. The wave can be described by the Schrodinger equation, so there's a law that describes the probability distribution.

In the case of the dice, the observed probability would only be evenly distributed if the dice were a perfect cube. If it has a funny shape, and we rolled it many times, the observed frequency with which it landed on each side would be different than the statistical probability would suggest.

That may be the case with the constants of nature. It may be that if we generated many universes while randomly shuffling the constants, that the frequency with which we got each combination would not be evenly distributed between all the possibilities. That is the heart of Sabine's objection to fine-tuning.

If you think about it, though, this is really just another version of the "deeper laws" objection to fine-tuning. According to the deeper laws objection, it's possible that there's some unknown law of nature that makes it to where the constants we observe in nature had to be that way or had to be very close to their current values. Well, the only way Sabine's argument could serve to undermine fine-tuning is if the probability distribution makes it to where life-permitting values happen to be more probable than life-prohibiting values. That means there has to be a hidden law that determines the uneven probability distribution. Sabine's argument fails for the same reason the "deeper laws" objection fails. It's because if there were a deeper law that made life-permitting universes more probable than life-prohibiting universes, then the law itself would be fine-tuned. So Sabine hasn't undermined fine-tuning. She's only artifically moved it back a step by suggesting the possibility that there's a deeper law that makes life-permitting universes more probable on the probability distribution curve than life-prohibiting universes.

What's so mysterious about consciousness?

Here's an off-the-cuff response I gave to somebody on YouTube today who didn't think consciousness was all that mysterious.

I think the mystery for physicalists isn't in THAT consciousness arrises out of a physical substrate, but in HOW it does so. Consciousness is different than everything else in the physical world in a fundamental way. Everything else in the physical world is describable, at least in principle, in third person terms. If the properties of some physical object are observable to one person, then they're observable to anybody else who has the same instruments with which to do their observations.

But consciousness is different. The only person who can feel your feelings, see your perceptions, or experience what it's like to be you is YOU. Take something as simple as a visual perception. When you're dreaming, for example, you can very clearly see visual images of people, plants, and all kinds of things, but if you looked into the brain while the person was dreaming, you wouldn't see any of those things. And it doesn't even make sense to say that you could "see" an emotion or a desire or an intention.

To me, that's a big part of what makes consciousness so mysterious. But the biggest mystery to me is that supposedly our conscious states have some causal influence over our behavior. It's a mystery how a desire or a motive can result in me moving my arms and legs. We can explain this in terms of the third person physical properties of our neurons, but how do you explain it in terms of the semantic content of the desire, belief, or motive?

We can conceive of equations to describe the movement and behavior of physical things in terms of their third person properties, but how can you conceive of an equation to describe the "what it's like" of first person subjective experiences? Isn't that mysterious?

Two kinds of cultural relativism

There are two kinds of cultural relativism, and I think the distinction between them may explain why the same confusion comes up whenever people discuss the moral argument in debates and discussions.

The two kinds are descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive cultural relativism is just the observation that different cultures have and do, in fact, hold to different standards of moral behavior and values. Sometimes they might agree in what personality traits they think are virtuous, but they differ in the degree of value they place in each of the virtues.

Prescriptive cultural relativism is the view that whatever moral norms a society accepts constitute our moral obligations. In other words, people are obligated to live and behave in conformity what their own culture's moral standards.

The descriptive view isn't that controversial. The only controvery is the depth to which different cultures disagree. I think there is far more agreement than disagreement, and that most of the disagreement is superficial. It can be accounted for by looking at the underlying moral premises and how different cultures solve moral dilemmas. But hardly anybody denies that there are at least some differences in the values and morals that different cultures hold to.

Prescriptive cultural relativism can be reduced to moral objectivism because it depends on the supposed universal principle that each person ought to behave consistently with the morals of their society. Since that principle is universal and transcendent, it's not culturally relative even if everything else is. If there is no universal moral presciption about living consistently with one's own cultural morals, then prescriptive cultural relativism would reduce to individual subjectivism.

One of the primary objections people often bring up against objective morality is to point out that different cultures (and the same culture over different times) subscribe to a different moral point of view. I used to attribute this kind of response to a confusion between moral epitsmology and moral ontology. I would grant that, yes, different people have different moral beliefs, but the moral argument isn't concerned so much with the beliefs as with the ontological reality of moral prescriptions. So the standard response to this objection was to say, "Well, people have also had disagreements about the shape of the earth, but doesn't mean there isn't an objectively true answer to the question of what the shape of the earth is."

But I wonder if, rather than being a confusion of ontologogy vs. epistemology, if the confusion is, instead, between prescriptive cultural relativism and descriptive cultural relativism. Descriptive cultural relativism tells us nothing at all about the ontological existence of objective morality. Moral objectivism (or moral realism) is perfectly consistent with descriptive cultural relativism. It's only prescriptive cultural relativism that poses a challenge to moral objectivism. So I think this distinction ought to be fleshed out when it looks like there's a misunderstanding going on in these discussions. I suspect that when people raise the observation about cultures disagreeing on morality as a challenge to moral objecivism that they are confusing the two kinds of cultural relativism. They are conflating one with the other by treating descriptive relativism as if it were prescriptive relativism.

I suppose the best way to handle the situation is just to ask questions for clarification on what the other person's objection is. Maybe they misunderstand your position and think you are claiming that moral beliefs are universal or that everybody holds to the same moral standards.

D'oh! My bad. Lewis' argument from reason revisited

For a long time now, I've complained about how other apologists have misrepresented C.S. Lewis' argument from reason. The mistake a lot of people make is in thinking that Lewis argued that determinism undermines reason, when Lewis argued no such thing.

But it turns out I've had a misconception about his argument myself. What's worse is that my misconception lead to me being inconsistent in my epistemology, and I only recently noticed my inconsistency.

For a long time, I've treated Lewis' argument as if it showed that naturalism undermines all knowledge. I've argued that if our beliefs are caused by blind mechanistic forces, then they can't be rational. The inconsistency in my epistemology was that I also have defended the notion that certain items of knowledge (the foundational a priori ones) are hard-wired. We are essentially caused to believe them. Yet they are rational, and we are justified in holding those beliefs. They count as knowledge.

What's worse is that the way I have attempted to demonstrate that the distorted version of Lewis' argument that a lot of apologists use is a fallacious argument is by pointing out that there are justified true beliefs we have that are both caused and determined, for example, by our sensory perceptions, like my belief that there's a cat on my lap.

I've got it all straightened out now, though. I still think my criticism of those other apologists is sound. I think the way they attempt to defend the argument from reason is fallacious and wrong. You can see my reasons here.

What Lewis argued, wasn't that any belief that is caused is non-rational. Rather, he argued that reasoning would be impossible if naturalism were true. The consequence is any belief that depends on reasoning can't be justified since it wasn't really reasoning that lead to the belief.

This makes good sense because the process of mechanistic cause and effect is completely distinct from the process of logical deduction, seeing that a conclusion follows from premises, or inductively extrapolating. The relationship between "All men are mortal," "Socrates is a man," and "Therefore, Socrates is mortal," is not a causal relationship, but a logical relationship. The conclusion doesn't happen by the laws of nature the way a domino falls because of the laws of collision and gravity. Rather, the conclusion is arrived at by rationally "seeing" the relationship between the propositions and drawing the conclusion through the laws of logical inference.

If naturalism is true, then all of our beliefs can be fully accounted for by appeal to blind mechanistic cause and effect, leaving no room for reasoning. Reasonining is an illusion, so any belief we appear to have arrived at through a process of reasoning cannot be a rational belief. That includes naturalism itself as long as naturalism is a belief supposedly arrived at through reasoning. One can't sensibly argue and reason toward naturalism because the position itself would undermine the process that lead to it. So naturalism is a self-defeating position to hold. It could still be true, of course, but it can't be rational to believe it.

The best a naturalist can say is that while the two modes of arriving at conclusions are distinct in kind, they actually run in parallel in the human brain. They're just two different ways of explaining the same thing. That's how calculators work. Math is a kind of logic, but calculators operatate, at their most basical level, mechanistically according to the laws of nature. I explained in another post why this is not an adequate response to the argument from reason.

The CuisinArt vs. the Breville vs. the All-Clad classic round waffle maker

I prefer the classic style waffles over the Belgian style. It's easier to get the syrup evenly distributed without having too much.

I have owned all three of the waffle irons in the subject line, and the All-Clad is the hands down winner by a large margin.

The CuisinArt cost me about $20, and it never was a great waffle maker. I'd turn the heat up to the highest setting, and when the beep happened, the waffles were still not done. I'd have to leave it in for a few cycles. The waffles were evenly cooked, which is good, but they never were crispy. But that's what I ate for years.

Then recently, I got the Breville because by the time I had enough Amazon gift card saved up, the All-Clad was no longer available. The Breville was better than the CuisinArt because (1) it had no problem getting the waffles brown and crispy without even having to crank it all the way up, and also because it had a big mote around it to capture and cook any overflow. But I did not like the waffles that came out of it. They were crispy pretty much all the way through, which I think might be because they were so thin. The plates were too close together. I tried tweaking my recipe, and I made a few different waffles on different settings, but I just could not get the waffles to come out like I liked. The Breville was the most expensive waffle iron. I think I spent something like $160 on it.

Then the All-Clad became available. By this time I was wallowing in buyers remorse over the Breville. I wasn't sure if I could return it since it wasn't defective, and I only didn't like it. But I returned it and bought the All-Clad. The All-Clad was delivered the same day (yesterday). The first waffle that came out of it was absosmurfly perfect. It was crispy on the outside, and soft on the inside. There's a small mote, but not as big as the Breville. It cost a little less--about $130. I am quite pleased with it, though. I highly recommend the All-Clad if you like waffles. I just hope it lasts.

EDIT - 3/15/2022 - It's been two months, and the All-Clad is still producing superb waffles. It is definitely worth the price.

One track mind: knife making

I think I have a one-track mind. I can't seem to give equal attention to everything that interests me. You might've noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. That's because I've been all wrapped up in knife making. I wanted to make a video of my most recent knife-making adventure. A bunch of YouTube knife makers decided to do a Bowie knife challenge where they all made a Bowie knife, posted the videos on the same day, and had people vote on the best one. I wasn't part of the challenge, but watching all the videos made me want to make a Bowie. Since I wasn't part of the challenge, I called this a Fan Film.

I'm pretty terrible at shooting videos, and I gave up on it part of the way through. I had accumulated over an hour of video I was going to have to edit, and I just lost my enthusiasm for it. Plus, the camera angles were terrible. So there's video at the beginning of this video, but then there's just pictures with me talking after that.

I have more pictures of knives and other things I've made on my Instagram.

http://instagram.com/sambostuff.

Arguing over the meaning of words

There are two ways that words can come to have meaning--common use and stipulation.

Most words we use in every day life get their meaning through common use. Unless we invested our words with meaning by having an intention behind them when we use them, they would just be arbitrary sounds, scribblings, or gestures we made. It is because there is a thought or intention behind the words that they have meaning to us. Effective communication depends on everybody using words in the same ways. It's through interacting with people that common use takes place.

Language changes over time and can be different from place to place. That's because words can take on new meaning as people begin to use them in different ways. And if people are isolated from each other, they can take their language in a different direction. Eventually, they can become so different that they are different languages altogether.

Since language grows organically, it can be a rough process. It's inevitable that while a group of people are ironing out precise meanings to their words, there's going to be some conflict and misunderstanding along the way. If two people use the same words but with slightly different meanings, they will have a miscommunication. Sometimes miscommunication can happen without either person realizing it.

Sometimes, in the process of ironing out the meaning of words, we resolve conflict by accepting that each word can have more than one meaning. To understand each other in those situations, we have to rely on signs, the most important of which is context. The fact that words can have more than one meaning (since they are used in more than one way) can result in mistakes in reasoning. For example, if we use the same word with two different meanings, but treat them as if they refer to the same thing, then we can commit the fallacy of equivocation. People commit this fallacy sometimes on accident because they aren't thinking carefully enough about what they are dealing with. But people can also exploit equivocation to deceive and manipulate. People can also exploit equivocation to make a joke.

Dictionaries exist for the purpose of capturing the various uses of words. A good dictionary will put the most common use at the top. It's important to note that dictionaries don't give words their meaning; rather, they try to accurately capture the meaning they already have through common use. The definition a dictionary gives is only "correct" insofar as it accurately captures how people use words. A dictionary isn't right just because it's the dictionary. It's not right by definition, in other words. A dictionary can even be wrong if it fails to capture how words are used.

Words can also get their meaning through stipulation. We often use dictionaries in this way. While they are originally written to capture the common uses of words, a dictionary can carry authority if we're all willing to grant it authority. Then we can use the dictionary to settle disputes about the meaning of words. We treat the dictionary as if it's correct by definition. This can have some practical advantages.

When words get their meaning through stipulation, it most often happens when words are being used as terms of art. So, for example, if you're a physicist, an historian, a philosopher, a painter, or whatever, you might have particular words that are used in those fields with meanings that are peculiar to those fields. The meaning of those words in those contexts may be quite different than common use.

When somebody writes a paper in some specialized field or subject, they will sometimes either invent a word or use a word with some particular meaning that may differ from common use. If it's a good paper, and the author intends to use a word in a particular way that may be different than common use, they will be careful to define the word in their paper so the reader knows precisely what they mean by it. It could be that the definition they give is "wrong" according to common use, but that shouldn't matter. As a matter of praticality, all that should matter is that the reader knows what the author means.

The reason I'm belaboring all these points is because I see language causing a lot of unnecessary conflict between people, and I want to offer some suggestions for avoiding that conflict.

Conflict can happen when there's a misunderstanding between people. While most of us can agree that we should all define our terms so as to avoid miscommunication, we don't always know what terms need defining and which can just be taken for granted. So in spite of our best efforts at avoiding misunderstanding, it's still going to happen. The solution is not to accuse somebody of being deceptive or inconsistent, but to ask them what they mean. If it turns out that whatever meaning they tell you is not the most broadly accepted meaning of that word, the solution is not to correct them and tell them that's not what the word means. The solution, instead, is to interpret what they are saying in light of how they are using that word. That's the more amiable way of dealing with people.

If you treat language pragmatically, there's no reason to get up in arms with somebody over what you perceive to be the wrong use of a word. Arguing over the meaning of words is pointless if the bottom line is just to understand what each other are saying. The pragmatic approach is to listen to each other, ask each other what you mean, and interpret what they say in light of the definitions they give you.

There are times when it's useful to argue over the meaning of words, though. When two people are trying to interpret a third person (especially when that third person is long dead and left some writing behind), it's useful for the two people to argue over what the third person meant by their words since that deterimines the correct interpretation.

It can also be useful to argue over the meaning of words when it seems like they are being used in equivocal ways. This is especially the case when a word can carry a negative connotation but doesn't have to. Imagine this conversation:

Jim: Bob, you are a BLANK (used with a negative connotation).
Bob: Yes, I am a BLANK (used without a negative connotation).
Jim: Oh, did y'all hear that? Bob just admitted that he's a BLANK (used with a negative connotation).
Bob: Well, no, I'm not a BLANK like that. [picking up on Jim's negative meaning]
Jim: Oh, don't backpeddal now, you just admitted it. [Jim exploiting the equivocation in a dishonest way and treating Bob uncharitably].
Bob: When I said I was a BLANK, I didn't mean it the way you're using it.
Jim: But my definition is correct.

I suppose some people mean to engage in conflict when they try to stick somebody with whatever negative connotation a word might carry. If they can get the person to admit to owning that word, even if in a benign sense, then they exploit the opportunity to treat the person as if they've just admitted to something nefarious. In the cases like that, it makes good sense for a person to defend themselves by arguing over the meaning of a word. It's a shame one must do this, though.