Is More Information Always Better?

Regular readers know my opinion of the Fox News corporation. Over the past few weeks, Obama's administration and Fox News have gotten into a couple of real and contrived wars of words. One of the main talking points for the defenders of Fox is this (pulled fromRob's comment #34 from one of PZ Myer's posts as a representation of echoed sentiment elsewhere):

Freedom of the Press is important and the more we have of it the better. Its your freedom to choose which to regard as truth and which to regard as bias. If you have less to refer to, how will you know if you are making the right choices?

It is actually kind of amazing how closely this parallels the arguments espoused by "teach the controversy" advocates for intelligent design/creationism instruction the biology classes. Freedom of the press is important, but so is journalistic ethics. What freedom of the press means is that the government does not mandate what can and cannot be reported. There are already many issues with this in the United States, but the problem here is not that the White House team is trying to silence Fox News (because they are not), just that they are calling them on being biased and playing to an agenda. While I recognize that true journalistic neutrality is impossible to achieve, it is still what one must strive for to be a good journalist. Presenting incredibly biased or blatantly false claims does not help people "make the right choice". After all, how is one supposed to decide "which to regard as truth and which to regard as bias"? Based on which news network has the most attractive reporters or greatest emotional appeal to their rhetoric? When a news organization has no legal obligation to the truth and spends money and time organizing and fomenting the dissent that they plan to cover, it ceases to be a legitimate source of news and ceases to bring useful information into public discourse. At this point, Fox News is no better than the Discovery Institute. Likewise, Fox's emotionally charged defenders' false dichotomy of either treating Fox News uncritically or being against freedom of the press is no better than the "teach the controversy in the name of academic freedom" nonsense the Discovery Institute spouts.

Start of the Week Quotations

"What millions died - that Caesar might be great!" - Thomas Campbell, Scottish poet, 1777-1844

(the following Albert Camus quotations are translations from French)
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself"
"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
"Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic."
- Albert Camus, French novelist and dramatist, 1913-60.

"We must recall that the Church is always 'one generation away from exctinction.'" - George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, 1935-

"If Jesus Christ were to come to-day, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." - Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian and political philosopher, 1795-1881.

"Discover Your Purpose in Life"

Tonight I went to a truly bizarre talk (actually, it was a series of four talks). The evening was advertised as a seminar presenting an irrefutable mathematical proof for the existence of God. Frustratingly, questions were held until the very end, so by the time the last fellow spoke one was so busy feeling blustery about what he said that one had forgotten many of the issues of the first talks. Also, unfortunately for the speakers the organizer of the event had, for some unfathomable reason, decided it would be a good idea to send a mass invitation to the math department. This then spilt over into some of the related departments (like physics), to the point where over three quarters of the audience were largely atheistic in mindset and highly versed in mathematics.

Roughly, the set of talks went like this:

Talk 1: "Discover Your Purpose in Life"
The fellow started by stating that there were two ways of reasoning, you either methodically looked at a sequence of data or you took all the information at once and made a comparison (at no point did he address how one knew whether one had all the relevant information or not). His talk was actually quite difficult to follow, for he seemed to jump from unqualified statement to unqualified statement. He made a number of tired and old arguments, including the "fine-tuning argument" and a number of other arguments from incredulity (mangling the concepts of probability and logic on his way). He then ended with one of the most bizarre theological renditions I have ever heard, including making the statement that the Earth was small in relation to the universe because the Earth was the kingdom God gave Satan to prove that Satan couldn't even run it properly... essentially, as far as I could follow, relegating the Earth to the status that I had understood hell to hold in the Abrahamic faiths. This was an inconsistent position, however, for he insinuated that God held sway over the happenings on Earth at multiple other points in his talk (as well as the other speakers), while also making the claim that no one held sway because everyone on Earth had the 'gift' of free will.

Talk 2: "The Proof"
A long, nonsensical power-point presentation of numerology finding coincidental recurrences of the number 19 in the Qur'an. Patterned coincidences in text have been well and thoroughly refuted numerous times (a good resource is here). Also, numerical coincidences in no way makes a mathematical proof.

Talk 3: "Why Bad Things Happen"
This talk was surprisingly the best of the bunch, although only because the fellow who gave it was an accomplished speaker who never really made much of a point (although at one point he did make the claim that your free will gave you control over whether you were on God's side, at which point your life would be good, or Satan's side, at which point your life would be bad. I wanted to ask about things like hurricanes and other natural disasters, which make life miserable for believer and non-believer alike and over which we have no control, but I never got that chance). He also made a couple statements which sounded very much like Yoda's philosophy (things along the line of "Don't give in to anger and hate"), so that kind of endeared him to me.

Talk 4: "Here's Craig"
For some reason, no title was given for this talk, and the speaker was only introduced as "Craig", hence the title given. This was a pretty wasted talk, as the speaker was clearly speaking to the wrong audience. He was attempting to reconcile the Bible with the Qur'an, meaning he basically quoted a lot of both of them without really saying much himself. At the end of his talk he made a very bizarre statement that completely contradicted the "free will is everything" sentiment espoused by two of the previous speakers by intimating that everything that happened was according to God's plan, including things like medical and scientific breakthroughs. He then left that hanging there as a confusing and highly arguable statement, and apparently disappeared (he failed to return to the podium for the question and answer period).

The Question and Answer Period: "Over an hour of brutal and highly charged argument"
I honestly felt a little bad for the speakers, because I don't think they were prepared for the response they got. Professor Charles Dyer got the first word in, and thoroughly blasted the numerology "proof" as such a twisted and overly round-about method of revelation that it was just as likely to be a trick of the devil as the work of any all-powerful god. As an opening salvo, while incendiary, it was not particularly devastating. There was a lot of blustering and, "Oh, but you haven't gone through the rest of the proof, this was only the rough beginning of it...", at which point Dyer and another member of the audience, a fellow named Ali in possession of a very robust knowledge of the Qur'an, tried to get across the profound contradiction imposed by the combination of omniscience and omnipotence as espoused by the speakers. This was largely lost on the speakers, at which point the organizer tried to salvage the evening by calling on another member of the audience.

This was a mistake. She called upon a mathematician in the audience named Alfonso who launched into a blistering tirade against their numerology, pointing out that very similar analyses had been done on numerous other books and were all based on the simple preponderance of coincidence available with very large data sets. I think it was a combination of his accent, rapid speech, hostility, and calling out of nonsense that would shake their worldview, but his question was not well received. The organizer herself got quite upset and snappy, and once again tried shuffling between questioners to ease the burden.

Alas, things continued to not go well as more of the audience clamped on to inconsistencies and fallacies. I got a brief moment to speak (I believe that the organizer was once again seeking reprieve), so I made the attempt of trying to engage the speakers on their level. My question was that even if one accepted what they were saying, why would God have let hundreds of generations of people live in complete and utter ignorance all over the world prior to revealing His word through the Qur'an, and even once that was revealed he continued to neglect the people of the Americas and Australia and other regions for more centuries. Even once he released the Qur'an, he did so with ultimate "proof" of his existence embedded in a manner that would require the invention of modern computers to adequately analyze, thereby preventing its discovery until 1974 (when this numerology was apparently completed). To my profound disappointment, the second speaker (who was standing at the podium at the time) said that he thought one of the other speakers should answer my question because he wasn't well versed in "that sort of thing", at which point no one else came up and the organizer simply called on another person. So much for my attempt to engage the speakers on their own level.

The final response was a calm and quiet audience member (I don't know his name) who simply pointed out the fact that numerical coincidences do not provide a proof. This was met with some uncomfortable squirming of the speakers as they professed to be "simply presenting information for others to make up their minds about". When they finally asked what a valid mathematical proof entailed, Alfonso started to give an answer when the organizer abruptly (and, I think, quite rudely) cut him off and wished everyone a good night, bringing the evening to a close.

Thus ended an odd and somewhat vexing (though still rather entertaining) evening.

Free Will Revisited

Just over a year ago, at the request of Cornucrapia, I made a post discussing my outlook on the concept of free will. Since free will seems to be one of those topics that refuses to keep its ugly head down, Robert sent me an email mentioning that it had come up at the new atheist group at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While I directed him to have a look at my original free will post, I thought it might be worth rattling off some more musings on the matter. The subject of free will, after all, is ostensibly a question about the function of the brain, so one would think that I might have something sage-like to say on the matter.

As I mentioned in my original post, I am actually not a fan of the topic. My dislike is not based on finding the topic itself dull, but rather because it is such an old topic weighed down by the nonsensical baggage of eminent names that have come before it. For some reason the combination of trundling theological dogma overly concerned with the divine judgement and punishment of immortal souls, the psychologically pressing intimacy of the question, and our current dearth of information about many aspects of mental life makes the subject of free will (as well as 'consciousness') burdened by a disproportionate number of eminent thinkers from completely unrelated fields all deciding that it is a perfect problem to which they should devote their retirement treatises. The opinions of these thinkers are then bandied back and forth, all with a great deal of undeserved weight given the phenomenal intellectual prestige of the thinkers' earlier works.

While the explanation of my discontent turned a little more vitriolic than I had originally planned, it is nice to have gotten it out of the way. Now I can press on with my own meandering thoughts on the matter. One of the difficulties that plague many discussions of free will is a lack of definition. With such a vague (though intuitive) definition as "do we control our own actions", it is difficult to engage the topic in a meaningful manner. To start with, I think the anyone who brings up the debate must also seriously consider the rejoinder, "Does it matter either way?" To a great extent, the consternation gripping many people over the topic of free will rests with the theological roots I was railing against in my previous paragraph. After all, if we live in a deterministic universe (which itself is not a settled matter, but most people treat it as such), how can we be divinely judged on actions we had no choice but to perform?

Treating the matter outside of the theological realm in the domain of empirical philosophy, I admit the question of free will can still carry some weight when it comes to the issue of earthly justice (such as our criminal justice system). The justice system is a complex entity, however, and, though some people view it as such, does not exist solely for the purpose of delivering retribution. People, including criminals, are remarkably complex dynamical systems. As I mentioned in my previous post, such systems are virtually impossible to fully model, and sometimes impossible to even remotely predict, and thus we have no recourse but to act as if free will exists even if there is no mystical soul or tiny homunculus making choices. In my mind imprisonment and fines therefore remain ethical and necessary institutions. I tried to more fully elucidate my feelings on the matter, but it threatened to take over the rest of my discussion, and I had one more area that I wanted to address. If people take issue with my brief remarks on crime and punishment, let me know and I will try to more completely discuss the matter in another post.

As an atheistic scientist, I strongly doubt the existence of the aforementioned immaterial soul or decision-making homunculus. Of course, there is always the possibility of discovering some previously unsuspected aspect of our mental lives (after all, we only recently uncovered the quantum nature of photosynthesis) which makes our brains fundamentally different than other computing devices, but at the same time that does not mean we will not be able to reproduce our cognitive abilities following such a leap in knowledge. While the strong AI hypothesis (basically, that the brain is a computing device akin to any other computational model) is by no means proven, it is an open question with I think very little current evidence against it. As I said, even if our brain operates in a fundamentally different and as-yet unknown manner from a Turing Machine, every piece of evidence we currently have still points to it being a physical device beholden to physical laws. Damage the brain and you damage your mental faculties. Accepting this physical nature, however, does not equate to relegating our mental lives to that of deterministic automatons. As I have said before, we are still simply too complex to fully predict.

There is one final argument that I would like to address along the lines of neurophysiology. I do not know if I have the argument entirely correct, as I am getting the report of the argument second-hand, but it is a supposed proof against free will. Rather than further mangle the argument by summarizing it again in my own words, I will reproduce it here as it was sent to me:

When I think about moving my finger I am already moving it, and therefore the decision to move my finger must have been made before I thought to do it. Free will would, in this case, be an illusion. Because, the argument goes, there is a slight delay in the signal being sent from my brain to move my finger. Therefore, if I were to have conscious control (and actually making decisions about such things) then I would think about moving my finger, and, half or a quarter of a second later, my finger would move. Instead, at the same time I think about moving my finger, my finger moves, implying to those advancing the argument, that there must be something beyond our control in our heads making us do stuff. So, we do not have free will.

This is, to me, an almost entirely nonsensical argument. As far as I can understand it, the claim is that because one's actions appear to happen in the same instant that one thinks about doing the action, there must be some sort of unconscious automatic decision making device controlling both the thought that the move should be made and the move itself. What the argument is actually doing is basing a conclusion off of the acknowledgement of the latency of some neurological processes but not others. We do not entirely understand at what point one becomes aware of a conscious desire for action, but even assuming that the command is sent to the motor cortex at the same instant it is consciously acknowledged, there is still the latency of the visual and proprioceptive systems in checking that the command was executed. So perhaps there is a two hundred and fifty millisecond delay before one's finger starts to waggle, but one could reasonably expect an equally large or larger delay in the visual and somatosensory cortices as they decide whether or not the waggle is going on, and then report that knowledge back to the administrative cortical regions. What is actually an amazing property of our brain is that it gives the impression of a complete, simultaneous, and coherent picture of the world.

Local Government Outreach

I found in my mail box yesterday Issue 2 of Our Toronto, a newspaper apparently published by the city. While I figure such unsolicited publications will, unfortunately, tend to simply end up in most peoples' waste baskets (as I'm sure our Issue 1 did), I found such civic outreach quite charming. As a member of the internet generation, though, I found that the most useful aspect of the paper was the pointing out of the municipal government's website. In particular, they have an online 'course' called civics101 outlining how the municipal government works. I have not gone through it yet, but I plan to over the next few days. The reason I plan to do so is because I have an embarrassingly poor grasp of what the municipal government does. Within the hierarchy of government, news and general public knowledge tends to focus almost exclusively on the federal level. The provincial (or state) and municipal levels, particularly in large cities, can have a great deal of impact as well on one's life. This, of course, is rather obvious, but it is still one of those things that I think often gets ignored. I recognize that a lot of my readers are not from Toronto, so I suggest going online and finding out if your municipal government has a website. You might be surprised at what you find.

Corruption of Journalism

Like many people my age, I sometimes catch myself thinking that we live in a singularly politically corrupt age. I usually follow such thoughts, however, with the conclusion that such an idea is likely untrue, and instead it is simply the difference of currently living through a time and paying attention to the politics as opposed to childhood memories or the veneer of the historical lens. After all, from my high school knowledge of American history (combined with modern revelations) I recall Nixon's notoriety as a horribly corrupt man. Going further back, I recall learning about Ulysses S. Grant's corrupt presidency, characterized by nepotism forgiven by the populace due to his popularity as a war hero.

One thing that I think is different, however, about our current state of affairs is the symbiotic relationship of the media, politics, and the economy at large. The major news networks are an unduly powerful political force, particularly now that a number of very disconcerting precedents have been quietly set (namely, the propagation of the idea that there is a difference between commentators and reporters in terms of ties to truth, followed by the more horrifying right to lie Fox News won in court). By straddling the line between mere entertainment and news, television news has entered into a state of phenomenal power (it is still viewed by the majority of the population as a reliable source of news), but is also largely defunct of journalistic ethics. As much as I love the Daily Show with John Stewart, I believe it is primarily a failing of television news networks rather than any sort of uncanny talent for weaving comedy with fact on John Stewart's part that results in Daily Show viewers typically scoring as well or better than viewers of traditional news networks in terms of current events knowledge.

In the same way that we have regulatory agencies designed to protect people from false advertising and ensuring the safety of foods and drugs, it is absolutely vital that our society begin to hold news agencies to a standard beyond simply entertainment bodies. Within the realm of information dissemination, the level of power and influence one currently has is largely not based upon the truth of one's information, but rather the depth of one's advertising budget. To a certain extent these sorts of regulatory boards do exist, such as Media Matters (who recently managed to bring to light a huge conflict of interest with one of CNN's contributors), but they wield no where near the clout of the cable news organizations.

I have no solutions, and I have no power to change things beyond the little network of influence occupied by this blog. The television and computer screen are immune to my snide heckling and indignant bellows, and news agencies will continue to shill for whoever has greased the right palms. As easy as it is to sink into apathy and cynicism, though, that is most certainly not the answer. If anyone has ideas, let me know. Journalistic ethics are important, and they are something worth fighting to restore.

Start of the Week Quotations

"An apology for the Devil: It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books." - Samuel Butler, English novelist, 1835-1902

"What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books." - A. S. Byatt, English novelist, 1936-

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." - James Branch Cabell, American novelist, 1879-1958

"When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist." - attributed to Helder Camara, Brazilian priest, 1909-99

"It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses." - Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner), English actress, 1865-1940