An interesting article, which T99 cited over at Cassandra's place, is this one from the Wall Street Journal. Piercello will like it, with its notion that the quality of mental evolution is emergent. Joe will like it, with its positive view of the future! What I find so interesting, though, is this:
Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?Yes! And yet, no.
The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals.
Recently at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, Curtis Marean of Arizona State University found evidence of seafood-eating people who made sophisticated "bladelet" stone tools, with small blades less than 10 millimeters wide, and who used ochre pigments to decorate themselves (implying symbolic behavior) as long as 164,000 years ago. They disappeared, but a similar complex culture re-emerged around 80,000 years ago at Blombos cave nearby. Adam Powell of University College, London, and his colleagues have recently modeled human populations and concluded that these flowerings are caused by transiently dense populations: "Variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation."What other species engages in "symbolic behavior"? Mankind creates art wherever it goes; if there is a single quality that defines us, it is creativity, that artistic nature. No other species does this. A crow decorates its nest with shiny things it finds, but it does not fashion shiny things in pursuit of some artistic vision. A chimp strips bark from a branch to make a better ant-catching tool, but it doesn't develop pigments meant to paint itself for rituals.
[T}he existence of the ‘fifth branch of the Mabinogi’, Amaethon uab Don, was unsuspected until very recently, when a hitherto-unknown medieval Welsh manuscript was discovered in the library of Judas College, Oxford. The MS itself is of a decidedly heterogenous character. It contains a series of verse prayers, a version of the ladymass, and a partial collection of legal triads. Unusually, a significant amount of agricultural material is also found in the MS, in the form of a list of activities to be performed by the farmer according to the months, and a tract on the diseases of livestock.The earlier-known branches include some of the oldest references to Arthur, Guinevere and the heroics of their warriors.
I remember that once I read a piece by a farmer, who was writing about environmentalists; he said that, in his experience, they failed entirely to understand nature with their focus on preservation. Farming was as close to living with the land as a man could get, and it was all about killing. The land will grow anything. If you want it to grow a particular thing, you spend a small time planting, and a long time killing. You kill the weeds that compete with your crop. You kill the animals that eat your crop. You kill insects, you kill molds and mildews, you kill, kill, kill.
So that's what I spent my day doing. Killing! Today I was mostly killing baby cedar trees, trying to reclaim some land for pasture that had been overtaken by the things. We have one giant cedar, but each cedar puts out millions of seeds; and of these, some hundreds are fruitful. There's a lesson in that mathematics for each of you, in whatever undertaking you care about.
Yet along comes me, and wipes out the few hundred that were fruitful. And perhaps there is a lesson there, as well: the Lord giveth, and some cowboy comes and takes it away.
(But be not too bold, for perhaps it is the other lesson: "And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.")
It was a good day.
Today was Pentecost, the 'fiftieth day' after Easter, on which the Holy Spirit was supposed to have descended upon the Apostles. It is the key feast of the year in Arthurian tales, especially in Malory; Arthur is supposed to have required the knights of the round table to reswear their oaths at each feast of Pentecost. I'll render the piece from the Middle English:
[Arthur] charged them never to do outrage nor murder, and always to flee treason; and to give mercy unto him that asked mercy, upon pain of forfeit of their worship and the lordship of king Arthur; and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows service, to strengthen them in their rights, and never to force them, upon pain of death. Also, that no man fight a duel they knew was wrong, neither for love nor for worldly gain. So unto this were all knights sworn who were of the Table Round, both old and young. "And every yere so were the[y] swome at the high feste of Pentecoste."
Then the King in low deep tones,Yet the company was forgiving. Arthur himself violates this oath on at least one occasion, by taking battle in a quarrel he knows is wrong to obtain his liberty from imprisonment; this is when he fights for Sir Damas, whom he knows to be a false knight and yet who has him in his power. This seems not to have led to any questioning of the king's honor, for he was victorious in combat; his prowess, I suppose, sustained his honor, as did the fact that he enforced justice once he was at liberty and again with sword in hand.
And simple words of great authority,
Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light.
People sometimes say, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Apparently that's true even if you're already in their jail:
Rand Paul, of whom I had heard once or twice in passing before a few days ago, is probably the most talked about man on the internet today. And yesterday.
What I find interesting about young master Paul is that he has unusual courage for a politician -- probably due to his inexperience. He's willing to tell you what he really thinks, and why. The attacks he's suffered as a result demonstrate part of what is wrong with American politics today. The question he was originally asked, though, points to a deeper problem with our society.
The attacks are unfair because they attempt to paint him as being a racist, or at least unwilling to resist racism, even though he said something rather different. He held that he would not do business with a company that engaged in racist practices; that he thought those practices were morally wrong; and furthermore, that they were stupid as a business matter. That's hardly racism.
What caused the firestorm was that he didn't subjugate his other principle -- that owners of businesses should have free-association rights, which limit the government's power to tell us what we can and can't do. That position is not obviously wrong, and indeed is one that almost everyone would endorse in any other context besides racism. It shows that racism has been, and remains, a unique problem whose solutions should never be exported to other issues.
For example, let's say I own a small business. A person comes in, and after a little while talking to them, I determine that I believe that they are of low character and/or are dangerously unstable. Should I have the right to refuse to do business with them, based only on my intuition about their character?
Absolutely I should. The case is clearest if I am, say, a Federally licensed firearms dealer; even if the 'instant background check' turns up nothing on you, I ought to have the right to refuse to sell you a Glock if I think you're up to no good. That clarity isn't limited to guns, though; if I run a feed-and-seed in the country, I need to be able to refuse to sell you fertilizer, which can be used to make HME. Or piping, which can make pipe bombs. Or an axe, or a knife, or a hammer; or a baseball bat, if I sell sporting goods; or a car, if I sell cars. This is small business owner as good citizen.
In giving the small business owner that right, we are protecting our society to the degree that they put their good citizenship and moral intuition ahead of their desire to make money. We are also, however, endorsing Rand Paul's position -- because it quickly becomes impossible to sort out why you have a bad opinion of someone's morals. You might say that no harm can come from feeding anyone; but even that is not true. Harboring and forwarding people you suspect might be criminals is harmful.
You may say, "The racists knew that they were not dealing with criminals." And maybe they did; but how would you prove that, in a court of law?
Racism, as a special evil with a unique history, has required intense Federal intervention to mitigate. No other evil in our national fabric is of the same type; the tools we built to break these chains are too strong to use against lesser evils.
Mr. Paul is in a difficult position, and I feel for him. He has two deeply held principles that are in conflict. So do I, though they are different principles: Cassandra and I were talking the other day about whether a society with respect for women requires a powerful and intrusive state. A state that cannot rip your family to shreds cannot protect women from abusive husbands. A state that can rip your family to shreds is prone to evil, because power corrupts, and that kind of power will be misused. Our own case shows that it is misused regularly.
This is a potentially irreconcilable conflict in principles of equal weight. Perhaps it is possible to find a way to protect the rights of women without an intrusive state -- perhaps we can find a way to do it through individual action. In the absence of such a method, though, I'm in a difficult position. I believe the modern state is far too strong, and we desperately need to pull its fangs. I also believe that women's interests are our duty to protect, and defend, and that men who do not love and defend women are no men at all.
Do I believe that enough to sacrifice my desire to severely cut back the authority granted to the state? I don't know. I don't know that I don't; I don't know that I do. The principles are in conflict. Both of them are right, as far as I can see; but they do not co-exist.
Rand Paul is in a similar situation. He holds two principles that are both right: anti-racism, and a belief in the right of free-association. There's nothing wrong with either principle. The problem is, what to do when they conflict?
Really gotta love results of UCLA research involving 2,003 middle school children that showed girls with reciprocal antipathies – you don’t like me, so I don’t like you – outscoring others on…
* Social competence, rated by peers and teachers(!)
* Popularity and admiration
Teachers said boys with reciprocal antipathies were better-behaved.
Carey quotes various authorities on why it may be healthier to feel hostile toward hostile others.
...and good lads from Texas, Doc Russia had a piece up just recently.
He adds:
Yeah, I look back at a lot of the stuff that I did when I was young, and it strikes me now as being not rebellious or tough or daring. It was infantile. And sure enough, I let a lot of opportunities pass me by simply to spite myself. Now, I am older and more mature, yet I still feel as if this journey has a long way to go before I have myself figured out.But the ladies are not as we are, my dear friend. We are born mad, in a way they are not. For us confession is the road, first and foremost, to trying to understand ourselves. Why on earth have we done what we have done, and been what we have been?
Sure, I still am fighting many fronts. That's okay, there is a lot more peace in my heart now than there was then. There is no tempest that the heavens or kingdoms of the world can produce that will dislodge a man with a calm heart.
I pray that I am able to bestow the wisdom which will let my daughter learn from my mistakes. I hope that she can. There ain't no need for her to have to go through what I did.
Reason Magazine posts the winners. But you know, consider this claim:
Similarly, the invocation of the popular Where's Waldo? series forces the viewer to ask Where's Mohammed?, and to begin a hunt for a figure in the midst of an overstuffed scene. One assumes the black-robed character in the upper right-hand quadrant of the image is our quarry, but then what does it mean to confer on a small dot any significance whatsoever?Well, what does it mean? What it doesn't mean is that the small dot can't carry that kind of significance. It can. You can. Joan of Arc did. Robert the Bruce. George Washington. Jesus of Nazareth. The Buddha. William Marshall. King Arthur -- whoever he was -- and Sir Thomas Malory, who told his tale in his own way.
Our co-blogger Daneil, USMC, sends this as a favorite for the music thread:
We had one of those rare but prized visits from my sister, last night. I made a dish whose recipe allegedly dates to Julius Caesar and his invasion of Gaul. Though no documentation confirms that tale, if a dish so fine were as old as that it would be small wonder!
The knife my sister is holding, used frequently for butchering duties here, is a Kabar Next Generation. It's also a good swimming knife.
There are lots of recipes for the dish online, so I won't bother to type it out. The bread was also fresh made. It's essentially a simple white bread, but with milk substituted for the water; less 1/4 cup of the liquid, for which I substituted an egg. That gives it a much richer flavor and crispy golden brown crust, which is ideal for dinner rolls.
A good time was had by all.
Here lies what’s left of Michael Juster,
A failure filled with bile and bluster.
Regard the scuttlebutt as true.
Feel free to dance; most others do.
It's good to know that we have men of intelligence, spirit, and who remember the ancient things. Unfortunately, the article ends, he as other civil servants know "that their political masters would never really stop playing a bloody game of ambition and small-mindedness."...why no one’s content
with either what they’ve done or fate has sent,
yet they applaud men taking other trails.
“O lucky businessmen!” the soldier wails,
his body weighted down by age and shattered.
Yet whenever southern winds have battered
his boat, a businessman will surely cry,
“Can’t beat the army life! Don’t you know why?
Two sides will clash, and in a flash you’ll see
a sudden death or joyous victory.”
There's some fair practical advice on offer in this little bit of a song.
A second song of worth, from the same young gentleman.
Two stories of interest about women and Islam. The more important is from Saudi Arabia.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.Parzival's remarks to Gawan, that "it was better to trust women than God," may well be true in this case. But if it were really God, perhaps he sent you the woman whom you find you can trust. (Remember the story about the preacher and the rowboats!)
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
To Monteverdi we owe a substantial part of the transition from early music to the Baroque. Here is a motet, whose words are from the Vulgate.
There is also this "Madrigal of War," which was inspired by this sonnet, which was in turn composed by Petrarch.
Arguing against my position is this author from the Chronicle of Education, defending the new Atheism. I don't think he does a very good job of understanding the position being argued by his opponents:
After all, there is no evidence that consciousness and mind arise from anything other than the workings of the physical brain, and so those phenomena are well within the scope of scientific investigation.That's really not what is being argued; what's being argued is that even complete proof on this score wouldn't alter the question. It's not that science should not answer these questions, but that it cannot. By all means try!
Well, if we were talking about medicine, I'd be inclined to agree that it would be an odd position to believe that spirits caused physical diseases.That's not an argument about what science should or should not do; it's an argument about what it can and cannot do, not what it may or may not do.
What we're talking about, though, is consciousness -- that direct experience of reality that normally leads people to believe that they have a mind; and which opens for us the realm of experiences that very often lead people to believe that they have a soul. These beliefs are based on intuition about our direct experience: if that doesn't rise to the standard of scientific evidence, it is at least empirical.
And it happens to be in an area where science has no final answer available, even in theory. For example: imagine that through future advanced brain scan techniques you could prove that the brain's state wholly determines our mental experience, and that we can control mental experiences by altering brain states in a reliable way.
Does that prove that there is no mind? Not at all -- what it proves is that the mental supervenes on the physical. The question of why we have the mental experience at all is still there.
It doesn't even address the question of where consciousness "comes from," because there's no way to determine if consciousness is arising from the brain, or if the brain is a receiver for consciousness. For example, imagine that you could now build an entire human being, controlling every aspect of their physical reality down to the quantum level. In theory, then, you should be able to produce two people who are actually identical: and, if the mental supervenes on the physical, they should have exactly the same mental states, and indeed, be thinking exactly the same thoughts.
Can you prove that they are, in fact, having the same thoughts? It turns out you can't actually even prove that they are conscious -- to the degree that we show that the mental supervenes on the physical, we run into what philosophers are currently calling the ZOMBIE problem. They may react predictably, even deterministically, in the way that a person experiencing consciousness does; but we can't really know if they are actually conscious at all. They may be physically determined, not "human." Our only reason for assuming otherwise turns out to be that same intuition that leads us to believe in the mind, and sometimes also the soul.
All that means is that these questions come down to articles of faith -- even at very high levels of scientific evidence, currently unavailable to us. That means the one assumption is no better founded, from an evidential perspective, than the other; but the intuition remains to support the idea of minds and souls. That fact seems important to me, but even if you are inclined to disagree, it remains the case that these questions appear to lie permanently within the area of faith.
What's more, because the powerful appeal of religion comes precisely from its claims that the deity intervenes in the physical world, in response to prayers and such, religious claims, too, fall well within the domain of science. The only deity that science can say nothing about is a deity who does nothing at all.No, actually, it would not. A God who had the ability to alter the world could, and maybe might, alter the world so completely that what appeared to be determined by physical forces was determined instead by divine will. A genuinely omnipotent God could alter the past and the future as well as the present.
I'm not sure which of these items I like better: the governor of California calls to end all state welfare, or this ad from Alabama:
Yes, Allah, he's serious. When a man from Alabama pulls out his lever-action in a political ad, he means business.
I went to the new Robin Hood movie today, prepared to see Gladiator in cloaks; instead, I saw a genuinely remarkable and worthy film. I hope that all of you will take time to see it, but more importantly, that you will suggest that others should see it.
The new Robin Hood harmonizes perfectly with our current political situation exactly where it varies from the historical account. This may or may not be how it was intended, but it happens to be the case. King Richard the Lionheart is the old king, valiant but wasteful on foreign adventures. King John is the lying, prideful new king, who talks about unity and promises to bring all Englishmen together, then betrays them in order to seize greater power and taxes from the people. He is provocatively weak, inspiring a French invasion because he is clearly unable to lead. He is saved by William Marshall and Robin Hood, the former a military man who is trusted by all except the new King -- who detests him, but needs him 'whether he likes it or not.' The latter is an everyman, good at what he does, honest, brave, and foolish enough to believe that a king will appreciate his honesty.
The remarks on liberty, the place of the law in relation to it, and the rights of men are note perfect. Normally departures from history in historical films bother me; but not here, because there is other game afoot.
It's a tremendous movie, deeply enjoyable. Some of the music is fantastic, designed around the mandolin and drum.
I would not have expected it to be the best Robin Hood film ever made; but it may very well be that, and besides that, a great movie judged apart from its genre.
One of the hardest things to get smart people to do, whether philosophers or scientists, is to confess the hard limits to our knowledge. One thing well beyond the limits is what is called 'the hard problem' of consciousness: that is, why does it feel like we're conscious at all?
If we don't call it a miracle, it's not clear what else we might call it.
[H]ere we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us.The thing about the hard problem isn't that we don't know how to answer it. The important thing is that we can't even put firm brackets around what an answer would look like.
There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say that if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms....
The universe passed through its unimaginable first moment, first year, first billion years, wresting itself from whatever state of nonexistence, inflating, contorting, resolving into space and matter, bursting into light. Matter condenses, stars live out their generations. Then, very late, there is added to the universe of being a shaped stick or stone, a jug, a cuneiform tablet. They appear on a tiny, teetering, lopsided planet, and they demand wholly new vocabularies of description for reality at every scale. What but the energies of the universe could be expressed in the Great Wall of China, the St. Matthew Passion? For our purposes, there is nothing else. Yet language that would have been fully adequate to describe the ages before the appearance of the first artifact would have had to be enlarged by concepts like agency and intention, words like “creation,” that would query the great universe itself. Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us—if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.
I have returned from my short journey to California. Southern California has a particular beauty, which can help explain why there seem to be so very many people there. Some highlights from the trip included getting to sit with some Hollywood Marine recruits on the flight out, who were just on their way to boot camp; it was a pleasure to talk with them. In addition, I had one afternoon for looking across the bay at Coronado, and for driving past Miramar.
Now, as DB says, back to your regular programming.
Todd Jensen writes to point us to his piece on ten great (or terrible) riots of American history. It's a short piece, but with description and video from the more recent of these shortlived uprisings.
As Hadrian died shortly after and Antoninus Pius assumed the throne, Marcus soon shared in the work of the high office. Antoninus sought for Marcus to gain experience for the role he would one day have to play. And with time, both seemed to have shared true sympathy and affection for each other, like father and son. As these bonds grew stronger Marcus Aurelius broke off his engagement to Ceionia Fabia and instead became engaged to Antoninus' daughter Annia Galeria Faustina (Faustina the Younger)in AD 139. An engagement which should lead to marriage in AD 145.
Also of interest:Faustina would bear him no fewer than 14 children during their 31 years of marriage. But only one son and four daughters were to outlive their father.
In AD 139 Marcus Aurelius was officially made caesar, junior emperor to Antoninus, and in AD 140, at the age of only 18, he was made consul for the first time.
I'm traveling this week. 
While DB continues to entertain us with Met photos, I may have less to say than usual.
Author Alexander Prokhanov, editor in chief of the nationalist Zavtra daily, called the appearance of U.S. servicemen in Red Square a national humiliation.
"The fact that American troops are trampling underfoot the cobblestones of Red Square is a huge shame and humiliation for Russia," Prokhanov said. "Thus they are celebrating their final victory not in World War II but in the Cold War."
I wish this book had never been written, because it is the account of an unbearable sorrow, and I wish it had never befallen Roger Rosenblatt. On December 8, 2007, his daughter, Amy Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old, the mother of three children, a pediatrician, collapsed at home in Bethesda and died. Rosenblatt and his wife... immediately left their home on Long Island and drove to their mutilated family. When one of his little grandchildren asked how long he is staying, Rosenblatt replied, "Forever."That was a reply worthy of a man.
Apparently the USMC and the UFC have decided that they'd be good for each other; you've probably seen the new Marine recruting ads. What I hadn't seen until this evening is the USMC's supplementary material: MMA fighers invited to Marine Corps martial arts training.
They never had a chance, of course. 'You're going to die in this situation. Your job is just to take one guy out, so your buddy coming behind you has one fewer to fight.'
That's not the mindset of a competition fighter. There was no way they were going to be able to make the shift in time. Uncertain, they hesitate, and are lost.
Strange things are being taught in school...
That is true only if you mean by "should" that the market is structured to provide incentives for that kind of behavior. Ethics goes well beyond market oriented behavior; though it is a truism to say that 'incentives work.'Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the action taken by the school on Wednesday was warranted if their objective was to maintain the security and safety of the other students.Got it? If freedom of expression is faced with the threat of illegal violence, freedom should be curtailed.
"Was there a danger of a fight between the students celebrating Cinco de Mayo and the students wearing the American T-shirts? If there was a threat, then their action was ethical," Hanson said.
"The decisions regarding student dress are always difficult for school authorities and it is possible that any particular dress, including the American flag, could under circumstances be threatening," Hanson said. "But when the students' rights are at stake, the school authorities clearly should try to find some way to protect those rights and at the same time defuse the situation."
Note also that this guy is supposedly an expert on ethics. So now it's ethical to give into violent mobs.
The Tea Party has gotten beaten up for the past year for embodying a threat of violence that doesn't actually exist.
The lesson we are getting is that maybe it should.
...I hate nearly all modern music.
Hat tip: Chuck Z.
It's like musicians forgot how to write music; and in response, the people forgot how to listen to music.
Here are three variations on a piece written by sixteenth century Spanish musician, composer and choirmaster, Diego Ortiz.
This version is played at very high tempo, with a recorder. The pipe adds a lively air to the piece; taken together with the change in tempo, it's almost a different song.
Here's a variation with a crumhorn, which has much the sound of a giant kazoo. There's also a tambourine, and a harpsichord instead of the strings.
An interesting piece, and strong enough to handle the variations well.
