Friday, December 25, 2009

The Disease Process In Physics

The Real History Of Physics

Okay, I've been asked a question about how the big bang occurred. Now for those very few of you who understand history of physics, you'll know that physics is not a happy story of one triumph after another, each discovery extending the achievements of previous generations.

The grim reality is much closer to one giant clusterfuck after another with doddering morons drunk on their own power stubbornly clinging to the most obsolete notions until the day they die. And inflicting blatant lies on their captive audiences of suffering students in order to ensure future generations are just as fucked up as they themselves are. You know, because pain is educational.

Everybody who's read a single book on history of science knows this, whether it was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions or Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. And it's a shame that physicists, being vapid self-aggrandizing shits, choose to pretend to teach history of physics in physics classes so as to brainwash everyone with their ridiculous propaganda.

But that's just the way it is. So if you've studied history of physics then you know the common misconceptions are blatant lies. And if you haven't, if you've merely studied physics, then do me the favour of shutting the fuck up about a subject you know absolutely nothing about.

Some Examples

Let's list some of those clusterfucks.
  • Heisenberg's clinging to an intrinsically ridiculous concept of point particles (it's why what was called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle bears no relation to anything bearing that name now)
  • the Copenhagen consensus reverting physics to filthy vitalism (ie, the false dichotomy between observer vs observed)
  • Bell's awe-inspiring mistake of producing (or even trying to produce) a circular "proof" of vitalism, still celebrated to this day as a major advance even though it set back any understanding of quantum physics for most of a century
  • assuming continuity in physics even across revolutions such as classical to quantum. Notice the casual coverup that's occurred over the 3 radically different iterations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (note also how mathematicians do the same thing with Goedel)
  • the intrinsically incoherent "concept" of non-determinism and "wave collapse". If you bother to analyze it, you'll find out it doesn't actually mean anything. See the middle of this page for details.
  • the steady erasure of the formal definition of probability from math and physics textbooks because (being multi-valued) it's incompatible with the dominant retardation (yes Virginia, censorship and groupthink happens)
  • no teaching of what quantum probabilities are cause you're supposed to figure it out on your own, by magic, after several years of studying math. No mention of what happens to those who study the math for years and still don't get it.
  • no deep understanding of time
  • no deep understanding of information
  • no organizing of physics along conceptual lines, let alone teaching such. Active scorn towards the idea of teaching concepts (this is how the priesthood maintains its power, by demanding that all go through its rites of passage before touching on the sacred knowledge)
  • confusing physics with history of physics with mathematics of physics
  • having no conception of physics or physical theories beyond "what we do"

If you've kept count, you'll note that quantum mechanics as taught is an amalgamation of more than a half dozen clusterfucks. Each of which separately would warrant mass dismissals from the halls of academe. Nice, eh?

Why The Rant?

At this point you might be wondering why I'm ranting about physicists failures with quantum mechanics when the subject at hand is basic cosmology. There's a good reason for that and it's because physicists' clusterfuck on the big bang question is very stereotypical. It's not just some random mistake or even some random clusterfuck that you can just say Oops and forget about it. This is their modus operandi!

The predictable result of all this is also entirely stereotypical. The deeper problems in cosmology are relegated, dismissed, misunderstood or screwed up. And it's the lay-people's comprehension of the subject that suffers most. And just like in quantum mechanics, don't expect anyone to fix anything in cosmology for several generations. Maybe even a century or two.

Whether in quantum physics or cosmology, you can see the same diseased process at work. The symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is the same, and the prognosis is the same. In both cases, you have morons trying to do science without any grasp of (or respect for) the bigger picture They are incapable of synthesizing overarching concepts and are suspicious and scornful of anyone that does.

Next up is what's wrong with big bang theory.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Overlearning

What Is Overlearning

Overlearning is a broad topic. Let's start first of all with just what is overlearning. Basically, it's conditioned stimulus-response pairs. It's when you've learned something so profoundly that you can't set it aside easily. When it takes real conscious effort in order to set it aside at all.

The simplest example of overlearning is reading. You don't need to put any effort to read something. The translation from lines and angles straight to letters and words is automatic. And it takes real effort to avoid reading a word, to see it in its individual letters, let alone to see the lines and angles that make up the letters themselves.

As proof, you only need note that if a person is flashed a picture of a green square with the word BLUE written on it and then asked what colour it was, they're likely to answer Blue. The connection from lines and angles to letters to words is so strong, so solid, so automatic, that it's capable of displacing the perception of colour.

In the case of reading, overlearning it is beneficial. The benefits are high, the drawbacks are few and esoteric. And in any case, it's unavoidable since written language is omnipresent in an average modern person's life. You can't avoid overlearning reading without becoming a primitive throwback so you might as well suck it up as part and parcel of civilization.

In fact, the association of literacy to civilization is so strong that illiterate nations were considered barbaric savages in earlier centuries.

Neurosis and Psychosis

But reading is hardly the only thing that can be overlearned. Lots of things can be overlearned. Steven Pinker explains quite lucidly in this essay why swearing is overlearned. Disgust which comes from fear of mortality seems to be an overlearned reaction which it is difficult to get past without understanding its basis.

In earlier times, fear, awe and reverence were overlearned. This was called Sacredness and Holiness. Sacred were those things towards which fear was overlearned. Just think of sacred bears and sacred jaguars, both murderous. And holy were those things towards which awe was overlearned. As Julian Jaynes points out in The Origin Of Consciousness, the past couple of millenia have seen the profaning of the sacred. That is, the rise of consciousness and its erosion of all things anti-conscious such as insanity and religiosity.

Speaking of insanity, neuroses are automatic reactions that spring up for no good reason and override rationality. They are typically caused by overlearning in childhood. Neuroses can encompass anything up to and including hatred of one's own body manifesting as a very strong nudity taboo. Neuroses are inflicted by childhood abuse, often euphemistically called poor childrearing. Americans have almost universally poor childrearing. Good childrearing is rare on this planet and mostly restricted to Scandinavia.

When neuroses are so numerous and overwhelming that they impede basic functioning and a person's sense of reality then we speak of psychoses. Religious experiences are psychotic in nature. The Jerusalem Syndrome is commonly known among psychologists. As are Conversion Experiences, when a person is subjected to such a barrage of extreme stimuli, often with emotional content, that their sense of reality (often including their sense of self) distorts and breaks.

Pedophilia

Pedophilia is pretty funny, just not haha funny. Most people can tell you that pedophilia is wrong but people being idiots, they can't tell you why it's wrong. Worse, people aren't logical enough to either accept that there's nothing wrong with pedophilia or to gather evidence of its being wrong. Fortunately, I do know what's wrong with pedophilia and will explain it to you, so you don't have to act like a retard if the issue ever comes up.

Yeah, you probably guessed it has something to do with overlearning. And if you're smart, you may even have guessed pedophilia is wrong because it causes overlearning. Which it does. It causes overlearning of sex. It causes children to become sexualized and to learn to behave sexually even when they don't desire anyone (which they don't since they're children) or they aren't sexually aroused (which they may or may not be). The typical result of pedophilia is sexual compulsion. And since compulsion undermines conscious control of oneself, it is almost automatically evil.

Incidentally, the sexual compulsion produced by pedophilia is the reason why humans were universally pedophilic way back when before consciousness arose. It was easily demonstrated in the case of feral children (incapable of consciousness or language) that they are incapable of completing the sexual act. So yeah, way back then pedophilia was necessary for the continuation of the species. It isn't anymore, and it's harmful now, but it's necessary to keep in mind why we have it today at all. It's a relic of the past. Millenia in the past. And contemporary with widespread infanticide.

Stimulus Response

After this cursory survey of the different kinds of overlearning, we are in a position to judge the claims of behaviourists. Their claims being that all learning by human beings is mere stimulus-response. That consciousness does not exist to stand in the way of the automatic stimulus-response associations. The only conclusion a rational person can come to is that behaviourists are vile mindless people who are opposed to all the psychological advances humans have gained in the last millenium.

Humans are not mindless animals, humans are not rats or dogs, humans have complex inner states consisting of expectations and anticipation, not merely memories and feelings like animals do. Stimulus-Response is broadly, with a few exceptions such as reading, pretty evil. And anyone who denies this, anyone who tries to reduce humans to mere animals, is against the great human project and a bitter enemy of humanity.

And hey, if behaviourists want to claim that humans don't have minds then they can't complain when theirs are stripped from them, can they? It would be merely justice if behaviourists were tortured until their minds snap. The best kind of justice even, the poetic kind.

I remain appalled at the number of people who wish they could throw away their consciousness. Behaviourists, Religionists (Christian and Buddhist), Gaians, Primitivists. Even Zombies who claim they don't have any subjective mind at all, let alone consciousness. I will eagerly welcome a day when our technology allows these people to experience their fondest wish.

Friday, December 18, 2009

What Are Oughts

There's a tired old argument that keeps recurring over and over again whenever sane people encounter egotistical numbfucks (henceforth 'egotists'). The egotists like to claim that altruism doesn't exist blah blah blah, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Evidence both definitional and empirical (see Amartya Sen on Identity). And of course sane people counter the egotists but then go on to pontificate about the fact that you can't derive Ought statements from Is statements.

To me this is very sad because those otherwise sane people are obvious mental incompetents who haven't the slightest idea what Ought statements are in the first place. And their "arguments" involve a lot of trivial examples (ignoring the fact you can't prove a universal statement from examples, let alone trivial examples) and quoting other mental incompetents who happen to be famous among their clique. And when you pontificate at length about a subject whose basic concepts you neither understand nor comprehend, well that's just sad.

So what are Ought statements? Fuck statements, what are OUGHTs in the first place? Oughts are second generation desires. Or meta-desires. Oughts are what you want to want. You want ice cream, right? But does that mean you OUGHT to have ice cream? No, it doesn't. After all, maybe you're fat and you really wish you didn't want ice cream. Oughts are the universal wants. Things you want to be the case in all places, at all times, in all timelines and all possible realities.

That's why Ought statements can never be derived from Is statements. Not because some mentally incompetent overhyped philosopher said so two centuries ago. Nor because you can come up with a handful of examples of its not working. No, simply from the fact that Ought statements can only be derived from GREATER THAN the sum total of reality. And Is statements encompass only a reality. Pretty fucking simple, innit? But then again, what 'ought' means seems pretty simple once you actually know it.

IS

In fact, let's deviate first into IS. As everyone who's ever studied meta-mathematics knows, there's no such thing as a universal mathematical system. There's no such thing as universal mathematical statements. Truth and falsity depends entirely on the system you're working in. EXISTENCE depends on the system you're working in. To say that something exists means that an object having its characteristics can be found in such and such a system. Existence doesn't say something about "objects" the way other predicates do, it says something about objects in a specific system. That's why it's a meta-predicate.

Now, the system can be Mathematical System 1, or Mathematical System 2, or any of an infinite number of others. And Physical Reality is merely 'the mathematical system which we live in and experience subjectively'. This is why math succeeds in describing physical reality. Because physical reality is just math. The great "mystery" that has boggled famous but mentally incompetent philosophers for 2000 years is neatly resolved.

WANT

And with that deviation out of the way, let's get back to Wants. What are wants exactly? It seems like such a terribly obvious question. And it is, once you actually know the answer.

First of all, wants are not "preferences". Preferences are relations between two things. Wants are not relations between things. They aren't binary, they're unary.

Second of all, wants are not real numbers. They don't add together and they don't multiply. 10,000 oranges don't have the value of 1 orange. 10,000 trinkets you want don't have the value of the life of a friend. Your relationship with a friend doesn't have the value of their life.

Funny thing though, both economics (who think wants are preferences) and utilitarians (who think they're real numbers) use "utility" and "utility function" to describe wants. And it's not just because they're retards stuck on a term that was in favour two centuries ago. No, it's because these two groups share between them a core of fanatical anti-reality egotistical right-wing fucks.

If you want to have some laughs, attend a few lectures on economics. Physical reality as it actually is never enters into their tiny little heads. Only mathematical reality and reality as it is imagined by other economists. You'll never hear an economist ask "does this concept actually describe anything at all in physical reality"? Take Ricardo's theorem of comparative advantage, which shows taht free trade is always advantageous in a situation where labour and financial investments can't move geographic and political boundaries. Does this describe anything in the post-1980s world? No, it does not.

For that matter, the equations of standard economics all come from obsolete thermodynamical equations. You know, ones that didn't work. And that were supposed to describe heat anyways, not money. They were just transferred wholesale, and economists are all too mentally incompetent and brainwashed to check whether they're true. Or even to care.

Okay, I never said they were happy laughs. They're more the kind where you have to laugh because otherwise you'd cry.

What WANTs Are

Okay, so if Wants aren't preferences and they aren't reals, then what are they? One candidate is hyperreals. Hyperreals have the useful property that a billion times an infinity is more or less equal to that infinity. Multiplyig an infinity by any finite amount will never get you the next greater infinity. Establishing a reliable supply of donated blood will always be a higher moral priority than killing the vampire, no matter how much blood he drinks, so long as he doesn't endanger anyone's life. No matter how many (finite) number of people he inconveniences.

Hyper-reals also have the nice property that two infinities of the same order CAN BE compared against each other ... and the comparisons will give different answers at different times. Saving 2 people's life has more priority than saving 1 person's life, unless those 2 are retarded. It's all nicely fuzzy and actually does depend on the otherwise irrelevant finite multiplication factor.

Whatever wants are, I like to call them 'values'. It's not quite correct since people have the notion that values are high-falutin' things that exclude earthy desires like chocolate and ice cream. But all the other technical words (utility, preferences) have reserved (wrong) meanings. And 'desires' is wrong too since what I mean by values (or by wants for that matter) includes satisfied desires. By value I include things you don't actually want right now. Values include things whoese heh "value" is 0; or even negative value for things you hate or are repelled from. As opposed to things that have a value of NIL; things that just never cross your mind.

If you can think of a better candidate term than 'value' for the concept, something that doesn't give the wrong flavour, I'll adopt it immediately.

Deriving Oughts From Is, part 2

So what does it mean for something to be an Ought? It means it's a kind of Want. It's something you Want To Want. And what does it mean to be a Want? It means that some concept or idea has got a little hyperreal number tagged to it. That's the difference between an Is and an Ought concept or idea, the latter has a meta-tag attached to it and the former just has nothing.

So it's pretty obvious why you can't derive Oughts from Ises. Because those meta-tags don't exist as part of the thing (concept, idea, object, whatever). It's your mind (or your brain for you mindless types) that attaches tags to things. The tags spread almost like viruses from one concept to any nearby concepts. Or your mind can just tag things by inspecting the tags of any concepts logically related to the concept you're examining. If you can do logic anyways.

The point here though is that those tags don't exist in physical reality. Ice cream cartons don't come with little tags attached to them that say "Richard wants me THIS much". Those tags are created by the mind and exist solely in the mind.

Meta-circular

And yeah, the mind is a product of the brain and the brain is embedded in physical reality. That's called meta-circularity. The fact that inside of physical reality is a brain that has a(n incomplete) model of all of physical reality. But meta-circularity is a strange beast and that's why all sane people pretend it doesn't exist unless they're actually talking ABOUT meta-circularity.

Consciousness (both multileveled and unileveled) is an artifact of meta-circularity. The fact that Oughts and consciousness are both meta-circular is not a coincidence. They're actually different aspects of the same phenomenon. It's why people attaining multileveled consciousness develop higher level values (values that govern their values) even though the proper definition of multileveling (creating an independent conception of oneself) makes no reference to values.

But even when talking about consciousness, it's always helpful to shove the meta-circularity to the side. Acknowledge it then dismiss it. Pretend it isn't there and treat the meta-hierarchy linearly. Pretend the mind exists outside of reality. Pretend that Ought statements can't be found in Is statements about your mind or your brain.

Because they're strange loops, and people who like to draw strange loops together like knotted rope are retarded morons. They're twits who like to Shock and Awe people rather than explain anything. Comprehension of strange loops can only come from cutting and unrolling them. Just take the strange loop, duplicate it a few times, cut each loop in different places and unroll them all. That's the key to comprehending how they work.

So that's all there is to it. Anyone who says Ought statements are Is statements is just trying to fuck with you by drawing your attention to a true but utterly unimportant fact. Yes, there's a strange loop (a meta-circularity) in there. So what? That's not the important bit. The important bit is the relation between Is->Want->Ought, not Ought-(Is). The important bit is that Oughts are those Wants which you Want To Want.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Reward-Seeking vs Goal-Seeking

There's a fairly interesting post about the limitations of reward seeking. Unfortunately, it's somewhat lacking in insight. I mean, yes reward seeking is limited, so what? It's not like this is a novel observation to anyone who's encountered utilitarians, hedonists and other egotistical numbnut fucks. Limited, problematic, sterile, dead, take your pick of adjective.

What is the real difference between reward-seeking and goal-seeking in the minds of the people who believe in them? Given the copious and total disproofs of utilitarianism, egotism and behaviourism, given how completely discredited these pathetic attempts at philosophy are, why is it that numbnut fucks that believe in reward-seeking exist at all?

The key insight here is that they are mindless. Reward-seeking is a mindless behaviour which any trivial automaton is able to produce. Slugs can do it. Amoeba can do it. It doesn't take a mind to engage in reward-seeking. It doesn't even take a single neuron! All it takes is a mindless obsession towards some kind of easily-perceived and discernible external condition.

The other insight is that reward-seeking is entirely egotistical. The only thing that ultimately matters to the reward-seeker is themselves. Their own reward. Despite the pretense and pathetic protestations otherwise, utilitarianism is an ideology of egotistical wankers trying to aggrandize themselves by justifying their atavistic greed.

To see this, just consider whether a utilitarian would ever push a button that kills themselves in order for someone ELSE to experience an eternal orgasm. Utilitarians somehow never consider that it would provide me with immense pleasure for the rest of my natural life if they all suicided. A philosophy doesn't get any more dead than by prescribing the deaths of its practitioners.

So yeah, these are mindless people. Lying and hypocritical but mindless. So it comes as no surprise that they would try to aggrandize themselves (which gets them a mindless reward) by assuming that everyone else is just as mindless as themselves. That's the reason why it's so difficult to convince utilitarians of the sterility of their ideology, despite the easy disproofs. Because they have no first-hand experience of having a mind, they don't believe that minds exist. Especially when it would make them inferior.

To have a mind means to value concepts above sensations, above mere experiences. And the fundamental concepts which are valued above all others can be fairly esoteric. For instance, I value fractals. I have an affinity towards fractals of all kinds, whether it's complex music with high dynamic range, or trees, or the Haussman city districts in Paris. Even my disgust for uniformity, hierarchy, orthodoxy, linearity, and conformity of all kinds is just an expression of my affinity towards fractals. Same goes for my disgust for the dehumanizing concept of reward-seeking.

A reward-seeking idiot would claim that fractals are my reward, but that's not even remotely true. I want fractals to exist whether or not I ever experience them. Whether or not I ever could experience them. Just knowing they exist pleases me. Just knowing that uniformity exists displeases me. Just knowing that conformity (sub-optimal uniformity) exists disgusts me.

(And let's not go into the ridiculous conceit of reward-seekers that 'pleases' as uttered by a goal-seeker has any relation to mindless pleasure. Enjoying a concept isn't the same thing as enjoying a sensation. And appreciation (a kind of highly abstracted pleasure) isn't the same thing as enjoyment anyways.)

To get back to the point, I don't need to experience something to care about it nor do I need to be someone else to care about them. That's the mark of an intellectual by the way, that they can mentally place themselves in environments and situations far removed from their daily life. Whether those environments are the other side of the world, in a different galaxy, a different person of a different race or even an entirely different kind of being. Even impossible situations such as back in time can be and are imagined and thus matter.

That's what having a mind means, that you care about having a mind. That you would never willingly sacrifice it to become some kind of mindless animal experiencing forever the Ultimate Orgasm . It may seem that there's a difference between having a mind and wanting a mind, but one day soon, our technology will allow reward-seekers to become the mindless animals they desperately want to be. So the difference between wanting a mind and having one will soon disappear.

As a practical matter, I've found that people capable of abstractions care about them. I have yet to meet someone capable of abstract thought who was dissatisfied with their possessing their cognitive faculties. Dissatisfaction with and devaluation of abstract thought is the province of those who are incapable of it.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Pet Peeve #731: Liberal => Left-Wing

This one doesn't bug me so much when average Americans or even Canadians do it. I don't expect much from eager citizens of the most brainwashed country in human history. And I'm not excluding North Korea or goodness forbid slave-holding, slave-killing, totalitarian, communist, fascistic Sparta from the running either. I mean, how can you not give the prize to the nation that invented propaganda and inspired Goebbels?

Well, it still bugs me when otherwise educated, genuinely cosmopolitan people do this liberal == left-wing crap. Anglophones' comprehension of politics would be much enhanced if they accepted that liberals are right-wingers BY DEFINITION. They are so not just in, say, British Columbia but EVERYWHERE. They are so in Russia. They are so in France. They are so in Germany. They are so in Canada, at the federal and provincial levels. And they are so in the Naziesque USA.

Right-wing and left-wing have standardized, well-understood definitions in political and international science. A left-winger is someone who believes in social justice, or something else, as the key economic organizing principle. A right-winger is someone who believes in capitalism. A centrist is someone who’s agnostic to economic ideology.

By this internationally understood standard it’s clear the NDP are centrists, that there is no left-wing party at the federal level in canada. And that the USA is about as politically balanced as 1940 Germany.

The other meaning of liberal is of course the term of abuse used in the USA. This term of abuse has as its meanings (both original and current) ’sexual liberal’. Which basically means “fags, homos, and nigger fuckers”. US Democrats are conservatives who happen to be fags, homos and nigger fuckers.

To see why, you have only to note that the common french word libertine translates into the esoteric word ‘free-spirit’. There’s obviously a lacunae in the American culture, one that was filled by ‘liberal’. This becomes obvious when you consider that Americans despise others’ sexuality. So the correct translation of libertine into the American language is NOT free-spirit but liberal, with all the attendant scorn.

Getting back to economics, if you want to look for economic liberals in the USA, look no further than redneck country Texas. Where free environmental laws allow every coal-spewing power plant to pollute and every citizen to die of arsenic and mercury poisoning. That’s liberalism!

Sigh. At least in European countries, socialism and communism are well-enough defined that liberalism has some meaning against it. In the USA, the only political parties are the Corruption Party and the Antedeluvian Corruption Party. To claim that one or another is more or less liberal than the other is ludicrous. Conservative? Sure. Fascist? Oh yeah. Anti-Left? Yeah. But actually liberal? Hell no.

So you see, liberal doesn’t even have any well-defined meaning in the USA. Other than of course as a term of abuse. And your attempt to pretend that there exists a left-wing in American politics (other than the lone socialist senator from Vermont) just to avoid facing the fact you live in one of the most totalitarian and autocratic nations in history is a joke.

Finally, there are more left-wing conservatives (and there are plenty) than there are left-wing liberals. Except of course the self-subverting seriously confused puppies of Moderaterna in Sweden.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Differences in National Attitudes Towards Rail

Swiss:
I want a rail tunnel. no, you heard me right the first time! I WANT A RAIL TUNNEL. ummm, I want ... two rail tunnels? yeah, yeah I want two rail tunnels!
Loetschberg base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, oops, well that turned out to be quite expensive, we'll need to save some money for the next tunnel.
Gotthard base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, no wait, make it better yeah. sweeet!
So when's the next one? We have to start planning RIGHT AWAY!

Austrians:
Brenner base tunnel in the Austrian-Italian alps: hold on a minute, I don't want to pay for this, YOU pay, fuck do I have to? well I suppose, maybe I will, man this thing is never gonna pay for itself, well I suppose we can so long as this is gonna be CHEAP. oh man where are we gonna get the money for it?

I suspect the Austrians only did it because the Swiss were making them look bad. The lousy cheapskates.

On the Swiss side, I have never seen any indication, or any concern whatsoever, that the duplicate Loetschberg and Gotthardt base tunnels are going to be uneconomical. It's just kind of assumed that they will be economical. Money just isn't a concern, these things will pay for themselves many times over in the next century or two.

The same thing can't be said about the Austrians. All I find is road companies and trucking companies tearing it down, and politicians finding one excuse or another to not do it, or having exceedingly delusional ideas about how little it's going to cost, or how much others are going to pay for it.

I guess that's the difference between direct democracy and totalitarian capitalism.

Oh and in case you're interested,

France:
I am BUSY. Can't you see I'm building rail lines over here? Don't talk to me of tunnels, I don't like tunnels. And I'm busy. Just go away. Yes, yes, come back in 20 years.

America:
What is rail?

California:
Vy rail? Ve haf prisons to build! Ve need money for prisons!

Friday, December 04, 2009

Evolutionary Explanations

There's plenty of science in biology. Cladistics, measurements of the rate of evolution in the fossil and genomic records, the double hierachy, so on and so forth. You know, those parts of biology nobody ever hears about. There is precisely ZERO science in those parts of biology accessible to and proselytized to the mainstream public.

Ever wonder what an "Evolutionary Explanation" is technically? How biologists come up with them, work with them and test them? What their methodology is? Well it's pretty simple. When you strip out all the crap it boils down to that they IMAGINE what advantages a feature could have conferred way back in the past. Does this sound like mystical voudoun yet? The kind of "there are no coincidences in life" crap religionists specialize in putting out? If you've been paying attention, it should.

Let's take a look at the "evolutionary explanation" for visible breasts. For a long time biologists were convinced that visible breasts in human females developed due to sexual selection. Yeah, because for some magical reason, it happened in humans but not in any other animal species. Sounds convincing innit? But let's not let logic get in the way of biology! This is Serious Business here. This is fucking Academia damnit. You don't get to bring no logic in thar biology unless you have a P.H.D!

Then as if the biology profession were saved by Jeezus, they (or some of them anyways) cottoned on to the idea that homo sapiens, uniquely among animal species, doesn't have muzzles. And with infants' faces being crushed to a female's chest on a regular basis, they run the risk of being asphyxiated. The solution to that was big breasts to let the infant live and breathe. Aha! Surely life and death of infants provides a much stronger selection pressure than some "sexual selection" claptrap? You know, just IMAGINE it and you'll KNOW it's true. That's how science works innit? On IMAGINATION!

Of course, if biology were science then they would have heard of William of Ockham's famous razor. They would have noted a few psychological FACTS such as,

  1. infants draw comfort from breastfeeding
  2. breasts are imprinted as sources of comfort deep in the human psyche -- if blankets can be so imprinted just because they're soft, imagine the double whammy that comes from being soft and nourishing?
  3. adults are sexually drawn to sources of comfort as evidenced by the recent emergence of plushie fetishists
  4. an infant would judge the size of a breast compared to the size of their head
  5. people's perceptions of size don't make any allowances for growing up -- it's why your childhood bed seems so small after growing up

All of these are measurable, verifiable facts. Facts we can measure right now, today, and don't have to rely on our imaginations to make up. Add them all up together and what do you get? You get that there's more than sufficient reason for (ever-growing) big breasts to have evolved by accident. And if biologists were real scientists, as opposed to hopeless hacks, they would have left it at that.

But that's not all! You see, "evolutionary explanations" are bad enough. Try to wrap your mind around the cluster-fuck that is "evolutionary psychology". Yeah because that's all we needed. It's not enough to have one field that's a pseudo-scientific proto-science. No no, it's far better to cross it with another field that's pure verified pseudo-scientific proto-science. Yeah. That makes the pseudo-science synergize together until it's totally awesome. Paradigm shift baby!

No wait, I'm not done yet. Behold the total awesomeness that is evolutionary moral psychology. Yeah, because crossing TWO pseudo-scientific fields ruled by worthless hacks just wasn't enough. THREE is better! How the fuck do these people manage to breathe? Let alone eat and breed. Seriously.

Why are they so retarded? It's as I keep saying, they're magical thinkers. They're not analytic so they lack even the capacity to reason abstractly. And logic is an abstraction. Now you might think that magical thinkers get attracted to all fields of academe equally but that's not true. They get preferentially attracted to the fuzzy fields by a wide margin. And biology? Whoa.

The field of biology is a mass of contradictions because biology itself (ie, DNA and proteins) is nothing but a mass of arbitrary, contradictory, ad hoc crap. (Not to mention that it's non-linear as all hell so you actually cannot apply reductionism to it if you are going to be at all logical. The number one tool in the logic toolbox just doesn't work and even reaching for it is a horrible horrible idea.) So biology doesn't just attract wooly and fuzzy thinkers, it actively repels logical thinkers. A logical biologist would be suicidally depressed and on the verge of losing their sanity. And THAT is a neat logical explanation for why biologists came up with the ridiculous notion of Evolutionary Moral Psychology.

Next up, you thought that physicists were immune from braindead idiocy? Ha! Marvel at physicists' own special brand of retardation.