The True and the False

Bertrand Russell says this in his Preface to The Principles of Mathematics (1903):

"what is true or false is not in general mental"

This is true to a point. The proposition "the Cambrian Explosion occurred roughly 543 billion years ago" was as true back then as it is today when us late comers on the scene found out that this was a true statement. But then how does a materialist square this with his views? How do purely physical entities have truth values? Its true that human mental states don't make propositions true or false but they still seem like irreducibly mental categories to me.

So how does one assert the aforementioned proposition as true without positing a Super mental basis to the universe and the way it was created? (I believe the later Fregean philosopher Michael Dummett proposed an argument for God's existence in this way in his Gifford Lectures).

Darwinian Dating Scene

George Gilder made his mark during the 70's and 80's warning against some of the ill gains from the sexual revolution. One point that stood out for me was the dating environment becoming a sought of survival of the fittest with the older, wealthier males being predominant and older women at the bottom. Older men who are divorced have more money and maturity than younger men and so can swoop in for second, third, or fourth dibs at the pool of younger women. This leaves more younger and poorer males without a chance but especially the older class of women left behind by divorce.

Miranda Devine's new column gives a modern update of all this.

She has a treasure trove of human stories which tell of loneliness and disconnection between the sexes, and a series of brutal home truths - especially for single women, who outnumber their male counterparts in every age group from 30.

At age 25, women can afford to be choosy, with four single males for every three single females, because they are competing with older men.

But by age 44 there are six single women competing for every five single men of the same age.

The high school dufus unlucky in love turns out to be a great catch at 50, provided he has a decent job.

“Men are in a buyers’ market and they are just in clover,” Arndt said.

“They don’t know what’s hit them. I’m always talking to men who are getting 70 contacts (from women) a day. I know someone who had 80 in the first hour.”

That particular 65-year-old Lothario decided to target the “Mosman book club market” with a line in his profile that read: “Keep meaning to spend a year with Proust, but who doesn’t?”

Pretentious, you might think, but “he was knocked over in the rush,” Arndt said.

Spoiled for choice, some middle-aged men are falling prey to what demographer Bernard Salt calls “hotness delusion syndrome”.

Arndt sees the delusion translate into discourteous dating behaviour, with men failing to show up for a coffee date, for instance, or worse, turning up, taking one look and leaving.

The lesson? The sexual revolution had anything but an egalitarian outcome and younger women should be a little less willing to wait until their 30's and 40's to marry. 

Psychology and the Biblical Worldview - Part 1

Happened to be delving into some of the psychological literature surrounding addictions lately and there is some interesting material coming out that dovetails well with David Brooks’ recent The Social Animal.

In chapter 8 Brooks talks about three aspects to human decision making and self control. The first is the perceiving of the situation. The second is the use of reason to calculate the value of, and means to achieve, any goal related activity. And the third is the power of the will to execute or refrain from executing the decision.

Most notable for me was the first. Brooks mentions that throughout the last couple of centuries the reason and will has been given almost exclusive attention. Personally, I’ve only ever been aware of the second two and it was a revelation to me reading about this third vital component especially given its close biblical parallels on temptation and sin. “The lust of the eyes” is, of course, talked about in 1 John 2:16 and in Genesis Satan tempts Eve with fruit that was “pleasing to the eye”.

Much of temptation starts with the way we look on some thing, or some person of the opposite sex, perhaps. The best way to combat addiction or sin in general is not to put oneself in a position where the will and reason come up against the temptation (this is why the Bible tells us to “flee sexual immorality” 1 Cor 6:18). More often than not the latter will win out. One can know that following a particular course of actions is wrong and will have negative consequences, you can resolve to resist with all your might but there is a reason this rarely works. Just look at the dieting success rates!

But there is more to it than just the physical act of looking. One also has to concentrate on where their attention is being focused. Brooks mentions a fascinating 1970 study by Walter Mischel where he tested the abilities of a group of four-year-olds to resist the temptation to eat a marshmallow by promising that after he returns, if they are successful, they will get two. What was found was that the children that were successful employed methods to divert their attention away from the marshmallows by either pretending it wasn’t there or that it was something other than a marshmallow. Later experiments performed by Mischel employed similar mental techniques by children to focus away from the marshmallow with much greater success than those who focused on the marshmallow and just used sheer will to resist the temptation.

So it isn’t just taking in the scene with one’s eyes that counts but one’s actual mental focus and attentional bias. What priorities and goals one sets determines the level of intensity of the addictive stimuli that is encountered. It is not enough therefore, just to resist in the face of temptation but one has to assess one’s mental state several steps before coming face to face with the temptation. A change in goals, ideals, and even identity is necessary so that the attention is focused away from the stimuli in the first place. As this paper on addiction points out:

"That is, becoming committed to a goal pursuit makes the individual responsive to cues associated with those goals in the sense of potentiating emotional and cognitive responses to them, thus giving those cues increased priority in cognitive processing and leading to “attentional biases” for them. During the past 15 years, a considerable body of evidence has accumulated to suggest that substance use and abuse are characterized by biases in the attentional processing of substance-related stimuli. That is, substance-related stimuli acquire the ability to grab the user’s attention." (Field & Cox, 2008)

This isn't just fascinating material and helpful for combating addictions but illustrates just how relevant and prescient the Bible is on the human condition.

Temp and CO2 Mismatch

This passage from Lord Monkton makes me more convinced than ever that Man-made Global Warming is a crock:

...at the end of the Maunder Minimum temperatures rose at a rate of 4 Celsius/century for 40 years. Nothing like that has been seen since: the 20^th century saw just 0.7 Cº of warming, and the 21^st century shows none at all. In a graph showing the linear trend for the last 23 years, the trend line looks like a billiard cue.

So the greatest increase comes just after the MM which is the late 18th Century, well before much of the modern period has had a chance to inject much CO2 into the air. Yet only a modest increase in temperature comes during the 20th century where one would expect acceleration instead. And then for the last decade or two there has been no increase where we would expect an even greater acceleration due to far more CO2 output.

Compassion

Dennis Prager is fond of saying that one should have compassion in the micro and standards in the macro. Gay marriage is one area. The standards to say that marriage should be restricted to a man and woman yet remain compassionate and understanding to each and every homosexual one knows.

Tony Abbott actually looks to be walking that tight rope

On gay marriage Abbott said he was “unpersuaded” but “I have been a bit personally torn on this because Chris (Forster), my sister, came out as gay four or five years ago ... And she is a very lively disputant. I have been well and truly buttonholed.”

I remain convinced that Abbott is a man more disliked from a distance than personally, where the opposite is true of Kevin Rudd. He is loved from a distance but hated in person. 

Income Inequality II

Great piece by Mark Thornton on the Fed's great ability to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, and from the savers to the debtors.

This doesn’t even consider what prices would be like if the Fed and world central banks had not acted as they did. Housing prices would be lower, commodity prices would be lower, CPI and PPI would be running negative. Low-income families would have seen a surge in their standard of living. Savers would get a decent return on their savings.

Of course, the stock market and the bond market would also see significantly lower prices. Bank stocks would collapse and the bad banks would close. Finance, hedge funds, and investment banks would have collapsed. Manhattan real estate would be in the tank. The market for fund managers, hedge fund operators, and bankers would evaporate.

In other words, what the Fed chose to do ended up making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. If they had not embarked on the most extreme and unorthodox monetary policy in memory, the poor would have experienced a relative rise in their standard of living and the rich would have experienced a collective decrease in their standard of living.

Is God Just Another Force?

Consider this quote from the philosopher, John Searle.

For us [naturalists], if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact like any other. To the four basic forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces—we would add a fifth, the divine force . . . [I]t would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural. [Searle, 1998, p. 35] HT: William

Is this the only way that God could act in the world? Indeed there is a far deeper question than this. Is this the only way that God could be a sustaining Cause in the world?

Based on the way I have proposed we should think about form and matter, I would say 'no'. My idea of a form is to think of it as the abstract organisation of the matter that inheres in a substance. A chair is just a bunch of wood organised in a particular way and that 'particular way' is not something physically tangible that could be detected scientifically and it would be a gross category fallacy to say that it must.

Likewise one could say that God's work in the world is metaphysically present via the abstract forms that exist and organise the matter of each respective substance or natural kind. So there is no new matter or energy present when water is formed out of oxygen and hydrogen but it is organised in such a way as to produce something new and ontologically significant none the less.

Where do these forms exist? In the mind of God, perhaps?