Reason vs. Religion

The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About

On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.

Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.

This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.

Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.

The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.

Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.

As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):

It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.

Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.

There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.

I was so excited last night to see what I believe is the source of your handle, I completely forgot to respond to the rest of your post. Sorry about that!

I have read a number of disparaging reviews of both Penrose's Emporer's New Mind and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

Admittedly I have discounted all of them simply because - on closer inspection - every author of such reviews, which I read, had a vested interest to the contrary.

As an example, when a few Geologists observed that the erosion on the Sphinx was such that it would predate history attributed by Egyptologists - the reaction was swift, vigorous and indignate. We see the same kind of reaction when evolution is challenged by Intellectual Design. As Shakespeare might have said “methinks they protest too much” and thus some of us on the outside wonder why.

Inquiry is not a threat to truth; therefore, objection to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry.

Aha! Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid!!!
Is that by any chance why your Freeper handle is "tortoise?"

You are a very smart girl! :-)

In truth, when I was writing that post (and disparaging books in general ;-) I started to consider what books related to the subject that I actually owned on my bookshelf. It turns out that I only have two books on my bookshelf even vaguely related to AI: The GEB book and the Li/Vitanyi book on Kolmogorov Complexity. Everything else I have amounts to a handful of obscure papers. Since the Li/Vitanyi book is esoteric and not directly related to AI (though the mathematics is extremely important), I opted for the Hofstadter book which I haven't read in years. I have an excellent memory and often work beyond the published edges of the fields I dabble in, so I find that a large library does not get used very often and opt to only keep a few texts that still have value to me.

My handle actually comes from a number of sources, and has been in use here and other places for a very long time. I used to have a carved stone tortoise in my office (since shattered in an accident) which I adopted as a handle. The tortoise is also a powerful metaphor in many cultures around the world, and has good symbolism. Lastly, it was indeed a subtle nod to Hofstadter for writing a book that inspired me many, many years ago. As an added bonus, it is a handle that apparently is not generally used by other people, so it is almost always available when I create accounts at various sites.

Regards!

At least orthogonal shapes intersect....

And this to me is what's important, and why I liked general_re's description so much.

beckett, it's interesting that Gould chose to distinguish between reason (i.e., science in his view) and the spiritual dimension, and then to characterize them as "non-overlapping magisteria," such that "Truth" (science) and "Meaning" (faith) are entirely discrete. People may tell you Gould is correct in this; but nobody actually lives as if he believed it. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with this formulation.

Gould himself seems to have unfailing faith in science. At a very deep level, he seems to betray his own formulation. More superficially, his relegation of faith/meaning to the "shallow end" of the spectrum of truth should perhaps be seen for what it may very well be: a desire to rid science of any sort of "rival" or effective "competition" that could place his preferred world view at risk. But the point is, to my way of thinking, the two are not "rivals," but equally valid approaches to Truth that necessarily work in different spheres (i.e., time orders).

general_re's insight into matters "orthogonal," and stuartcr's wondering what the hail that could be all about, brought to mind an image that, to my way of thinking, is the symbol sine qua non of a crucial fact of the human condition: That man lives at the intersection of two orders of time.

That image is the Cross. Its "X" axis, to my mind, stands for Eternity, the realm of Spirit, the timeless, of the Eternal Now. The "Y" axis stands for the unilinear, serial time that is the time sense in which human beings directly experience their existence in the world: i.e., in terms of past-present-future. The time sense of the "X" axis can be accessed only indirectly, through meditation, contemplation, prayer.

It seems to me that science can only deal with the "Y" axis. It has no tool or method to deal with "X".

Yet at the end of the day, the "Y" axis is folded into "X." It's difficult sometimes to find the language to express the content of a graphical image. So I don't know how much sense the above will make to the reader.

Thank you so much for your reply!

Any time you want something from me, you need but ask. I consider your archives to be world treasures, for which we all ought to feel indebted.

On previous threads you have spoken with authority and clarity on the principles which support Artificial Intelligence and therefore I consider you an expert!

Amusingly enough, I hail from the Stanford/Berkeley nexus that produced so much of AI, and was eagerly immersed in the stuff when I was a sprout, I am one of the numerous disaffected engineers who have grown rather impatient with the "discipline".

Although we have garnered some useful and decorative tools from AI, notably the programming_language/formal_math LISP (wherein data and code are treated identically) and such mainstays of database search as tree pruning and LISPish associative array processors, many of us consider it an advanced exercise in unreadable, undebuggable coding practices ensrined as design principles--so I have been disconnected from the field for a very long time now.

Nothing like familiarity to breed contempt, I guess. In that regard, one is tempted to point to the closing remarks of Russell, Whitehead, and Hilbert, after spending lifetimes trying to fruitlessly resuscitate the grand crystal palace of a hopeful 17th century clockwork-universe project of establishing complete, perfect, formal mathematical closure.

As if in one voice, they acknowledged that it probably couldn't be done, and that was before Godel ever hit center stage. Even without Godel, the problems of type conflict ( for example, the set of all sets contains itself, which constitutes a type conflict), undetermination, and under-determination had already undermined the project hopelessly.

But believing an event occured, no matter how ardently, isn't the same as proving it.

Except that you have to prove it to yourself. Otherwise, you could just chalk it up to tequila.

Prove it to yourself. hmmm. vs. (I guess) prove it to the world....Well, ok, if you want to claim the word "prove" has an alternate meaning which is subjective in nature, I can't stop you. The primary definition of proof, however, seems to suggest that proof is something one can offer to others as a definitive form of persuasion, that has something of an objective, and therefore mutually sharable nature, even in the face of skepticism.

Thank you so much for the analysis!

I wonder though if it is that science lacks the tools and methods to deal with the "X" or if scientists are more often determined not to deal with.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin according to The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

I suggest that refusing to acknowledge the "X" can lead to kluged theories and error.

Thank you so very much for your post and for the kudos (you are waaaay too kind to me though!)

Your background in the subject assures me that I was correct in figuring you as an A.I. expert. IMHO, people who have been on the ground floor of new theory or technology have much to contribute; having that perspective seems to help us laypeople understand the concepts without having to wade through the detail. Your clarity rather proves the point!

Again, thank you so much for all the information! Hugs!

Karl Popper made an attempt to unravel the phenomena of real things that have no physical existence, and unreal things that have no physical existence by dividing phenomena in three worlds: 1) the physical world 2) the imaginary world that tries accurately to describe relationships in the real world and 3) the imaginary world that does not try to be an accurate reflection of the physical world.

In my humble opinion, much of the unsatisfactory vagueness that always seems to hover about ontological discussions on this subject is alleviated by sharply differentiating these three worlds, as Popper did in his fairly famous 3-worlds paper, which I recommend.

It is, I submit, the tendency to implicitly resolve the middle world (accurate imagination) with either the physical world (raising type conflicts for the formal crowd) or with the purely imaginary world (thereby unfairly yielding the tar brush to banish it from objective existence) that leads these discussions into infertile territory.

I've had a sudden impulse of delight which has led me to suggest a modified platonist position: as a new & improved modern platonist, I subscribe to the theory that world-1 objectively exists, world-3 subjectively exists and world-2 plows a middle ground we have not named, and which is neither entirely objective nor subjective. I'm going to call it "conditionally exists" or interjective. The condition being, of course, that world-1 behavior is close enough to world-2 descriptions to qualify as existing, for whatever purposes we have to hand. Something that cannot be guaranteed to be permanent or completely reliable. As an example--Ptolomaic astronomy is an interjective (world-2) reality of less reliable existence than Einsteinian astronomy. Nobody really thinks epicycles are an essentially explanatory orbital description, even though they accurately describe orbits. And nobody knows if Einsteinian astronomy is the final story. So there's an intractibly subjective element to world-2, even though it is objective in intent.

I call it the toe-in-the water school of platonism.

I call it the toe-in-the water school of platonism.

Interesting. I haven't read Popper. Of his three "worlds":

1) the physical world
2) the imaginary world that tries accurately to describe relationships in the real world and
3) the imaginary world that does not try to be an accurate reflection of the physical world.

I humbly suggest that only world one exists. I suppose now we need a definition of what it means "to exist." I think it means that it has objective existence -- external to our private conceptions of what's out there. Worlds two and three are the same thing -- abstractions in our minds, and they "exist" (so to speak) only subjectively. The difference between worlds two and three is that world two is a reasonably accurate conception of world one, and world three is fantasyland, as can be determined by reference to the reality of world one.

I think you mean "a distinction between the physical real and non-physical non-real?" The answer is self-evident. Unless one is a deranged subjectivist who feels that his private imaginings are no different than objective reality.

I believe in reality. Maybe an even better way to put it would be -- what is the distinction between reality and consciousness? For instance, the color green is a property of our consciousness, while in reality there is only light of a certain wavelength. The same probably holds true for numbers. If there were no conscious beings in the universe would qualia like the color green, or numbers exist?

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Alamo-Girl, this is probably the most aggravating "expert public pronouncement" that I have ever had to endure in my lifetime so far.

IMHO, invert it, and you get a better grasp on Reality. The statement would then go: "Once you 'kill God', then -- and only then -- can you believe in anything."

I gather God, you see, in Beck's view, could never be classified as "liberal." Therefore it follows -- O heaven forfend!!! -- if the Judeo-Christian God reigns, then man is constrained. And putative "liberals" and "progressives" and otherwise "enlightened" intelligentsia are "forbidden" to even "go there"....

Yet it seems to me -- as a contingent, finite creature who owes a lot to others -- that we human beings live within constraints.

So it wouldn't seem to be so much a matter of acknowledging this insight, as it would be a matter of figuring out how best for human beings to live "within the limits" of their collective natural and spiritual environment.

FWIW.

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