Pearls ...

Epistemic Egalitarianism

gepr — 2010-08-16T17:54:08-08:00

This web log entry on "Epistemic egalitarianism vs epistemic hierarchy" and the sub-link to this one have brought up a tender issue for me that I've mulled for quite awhile, now.

Some of my friends are Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) deniers. Some are, like myself, actual skeptics. (The difference between a denier and a skeptic is subtle and not that important to this log entry.) It also brings to mind various conversations where random, persnickety know-it-alls either claim to know something they don't or just don an affect that implies they know something they don't. We all act like know-it-alls sporadically. I believe it's hard-wired in us, especially men. And, amongst friends or colleagues, we owe it to each other to puncture these delusions when they appear... or at least when a pattern of such delusions appear, or the frequency rises too high. But there is NOTHING I hate more than having one of my friends don the know-it-all hat and pretend to know something they really don't know. I typically try to drop hints that I have facts available that can puncture their delusion and patiently wait for them to puncture their own delusion. Sometimes that doesn't happen, though, and you have to puncture it for them. And it's always unpleasant. Ugh.

Anyway, conversations with the deniers, skeptics, know-it-alls, and, in general, people who don't explicitly recognize the difference between credibility (credentials) and accuracy, have forced me to think a lot about why credentials matter so much to us.

Add to this my intellectual, if not emotional, commitment to critical rationality (the dominant element being that any and all ideas are equally reasonable and it's testing and falsification that matter), and you can see that my reaction to appeals to authority of any kind can be very negative.

So, I am anti-authoritarian. Credentials are meaningless and credibility is a real-time, dynamic, memory-less attribute, in other words non-existent.

Heh, if only it were so easy, eh?

No. The reality is that people believe the cockamamie ideas presented by other people who have demonstrated some success, even if in some totally unrelated domain. So, TV weathermen effectively claim to know more about the climate than climatologists. Albert Einstein can blab endlessly about Ethics. Hollywood actors argue for one governmental policy over another. Etc. And they get away with it because they are credible in some (other) domain.

In a conversation with one of my clients recently, the subject of consultant professionalism came up. My claim is that, in order to be a competent consultant, I have to be excruciatingly clear about what I know vs. what I suspect vs. what I speculate vs. what I flat do not know. I lamented the fact that, no matter how often or how vehemently I deny knowledge of some tool or method, my clients tend to think I must know something about the subject. This particular client responded with something like the following: "They feel that way because you are always so careful about stating what you do and don't know. If you sporadically acted like a know-it-all when you obviously didn't know what you were talking about, then they would be cured and begin to actually doubt what you say."

So, there's the crux. In order to foster TRUE skepticism, you have to lie, or be slightly misleading in what you say so that your audience is motivated to wake up their inner skeptic. (This is the point of John Fowles' The Magus and is the basis of several enlightenment programs, including that used by Setians and Freemasons. So, it's not a new idea in any sense. But it is a difficult concept to convey.) Of course, I'm exagerating a tiny bit. No single person can even be accurate, much less say something accurately. So, we are, almost by definition, incapable of telling the whole truth about anything. But such hair-splitting is unnecessary for the point I'm making, here.

As I think about this conclusion, I recall all the truly stellar teachers and mentors I've had over my life. And, sure enough, they're all LIARS to some extent. It starts with your parents when they start making up stuff just to shut you up. Then it moves into elementary school where you're taught, say, math by people who don't understand a damned thing about math. Then you learn things like Bohr's model of the atom or the distribution of a charge over a sphere... Our whole lives are filled with tiny little lies that, hopefully, encourage and awaken our inner skeptics.

The problem is that this string of tiny little white lies can go horribly wrong. Those of us whose inner skeptics don't wake up are in for either catastrophic delusion puncturing episodes or confused lifetimes of nonsense.

The Rhizomic Holarchy

gepr — 2010-03-02T11:22:25-08:00

A colleague on a mailing list forwarded this TED talk by Daniel H. Pink.

I'm going to try to say what I have to say about this in a single sentence... sort of as an experiment. After all, if you can't express your idea in a single sentence, can it really be a good idea?

Here goes ... Because business purpose must be achieved either by 1) grafting that purpose onto its constituents or 2) preparing "scaffolding" so that when a group of constituents with that purpose arises, a pre-adapted organization is ready to launch, only a subset of businesses and their domains can ever successfully apply this (autonomy, mastery, purpose) management technique.

Hm. OK. That doesn't read very well; but it's a legal sentence and says what I need it to say. I.e. Business consists largely of man-handling some natural resources (including cognitive skills) and squeezing them through a Play-Do device to produce a thing with an externally imposed purpose. Pink even implies this in his talk by pointing out that management is like a television. It's an invention. What he really means is that management is, like a business, a tool.

Businesses are means, not ends. The natural resources we abuse to construct these tools are, by contrast, ends in and of themselves. (And although you may balk at the idea that a rock or a piece of iron ore is somehow NOT merely a tool, available for unlimited use and abuse by us, you may want to re-think your position on environmental and ethical positions to be sure those constructs in your mind are consistent. ... I'm just sayin'.)

Now, I'll allow that some of the phenomena we call "businesses" do, indeed, arise naturally from the mechanisms of their constituents. Perhaps even most of them do so, though I find that unlikely because I think we'd see a much higher overall success rate for businesses, in general, if that were the case. But (at least) some (if not most) businesses are examples of a small clique of people grafting purpose onto a collection of natural resources.

I.e. There are at least some businesses (I'd argue most of them) whose job it is to turn people into tools, ends into means.... to bend others to their will.

Kant's universality test for ethical behavior asks: If this behavior were universal (everyone behaved that way), would the result be sustainable? (Yes, I'm paraphrasing shamelessly.)

It seems to me the question to pose is: What if every business was acquired and executed its purpose in this (intrinsic motivation) way? What would result? Would the result work? Would we have made the scientific and technical progress we've made so far? Sure, it's a no-brainer to admit that if some businesses operate this way, they'll work and the system in which they sit will sustain. (And they get to take the sanctimonious high road in comparison to their fellows.) But what if ALL of them did it or attempted to do it?

When I hear talks like this, I have what I think is the typical reaction... something like "Yeah! What he said!" But, in the end, my skeptical homunculus wrests the wheel back from the gullible one and puts me back on course. Although the two homunculi are equal brothers, co-CEOs if you will, only the skeptical one has a driver's license for this class of machine.

Frog Leap Brainteaser

gepr — 2010-02-25T10:26:43-08:00

Renee' referred the Frog Leap Brainteaser to me, to which she was referred by her sister.

I didn't time myself; but it took me something like 15 minutes and 4 or 5 tries to solve it the first time. Then it took me about 4 more tries to catalog all the moves.

Now, I know it's not that interesting and I'm sure Chinese school children solve it way faster than I did. But what is interesting (to me) is the heuristic I arrived at and that (I think) helped me solve it the first time. The idea is that for every move you make, you need to increase or preserve the number of face to face pairings of the frogs. If you have a frog facing the back of another frog, except for the final state, you'll get stuck with no moves.

Anyway, there are 2 solutions, depending on which color frog you move first. Here's one of them. First number the frog's rocks from 1 to 7, left to right. Then make the following jumps:

3 - 4
5 - 3
6 - 5
4 - 6
2 - 4
1 - 2
3 - 1
5 - 3
7 - 5
6 - 7
4 - 6
2 - 4
3 - 2
5 - 3
4 - 5

Vibram 5 fingers

gepr — 2010-02-24T07:33:21-08:00

I got my Vibram 5 Fingers KSOs yesterday, courtesy of FootZone. I "ran" with them this morning. I put "ran" in quotes because I really don't run. I'm too fat and slow. I really jog, which plays into what I'm about to write.

First a little back story. When I was a kid, my dad used to bitch at me for "walking like a girl". I've always tended to walk on the balls of my feet. I think I learned to do it because we had a 2 story house and I didn't ever want my dad, downstairs, to know when I walked from room to room. So, I learned to walk on the balls of my feet. That's just conjecture, though. I really have no idea why I did it because I've always done it. If that makes me effeminate, so be it. However, Ireally don't think it does. It came as a great boon when I started martial arts training in middle school.

Similarly, I joined the band in middle school and played cornet. So, naturally, when I went to high school, I was in the band (for 1 year [grin]). It was a marching band. I don't know how many people realize this; but it's pretty damned hard to play the trumpet while marching. Mind you, this is military style, not the smoother "corps" style. So, if you march so that your feet land on your heels, your lips bang pretty hard against your horn, not only making you a sucky trumpet player (which I most definitely was); but putting you at the constant risk of a fat lip. So, I remember this very vividly. Our "first chair" trumpet player, who was also the most talented musician we had at the time, used to say "You have to walk like a fag." (Sorry, if that's offensive. I don't think it is; but what do I know? This was Houston, Texas in the early '80s.) He would constantly say that. Well, anyway, because I already "walked like a fag", as so thoroughly pointed out by my dad, it was pretty easy for me.

OK. One more story from high school. After they realized I sucked as a trumpet player, they wanted me to be the "drum major" because I marched very well. I quit the band and joined the cross country team. Here, my tendency to walk (and run) on the balls of my feet worked against me. My coach and the other people on the team would constantly tell me that my stride was too short and I should stick my legs out further in front of me. That never made much sense to me; but being new to the whole thing, I figured I just sucked at running, too, which I do, pretty much. So, I tried to increase my stride; but it never worked. Whenever I wanted to go fast, my stride shortened up so that I could land on the balls of my feet, sort of. This is very difficult when you're wearing shoes with humongous sponges glued to the heels. Everyone then bitched about me "plodding", i.e. making a loud thumping noise every time my feet landed because I was landing on the flat of the sole. But, again, I didn't know any different. After about 1.5 years running, I quit that, due mostly to a knee injury, and stuck with martial arts. I continued to run by myself; but without other yahoos telling me how to do it, I settled into my own pace.

So, a few weeks (months perhaps?) ago, a friend of mine tweeted about barefoot running and some data that showed that many of the very fast runners land mid-foot. It turns out that if you learn to run as an adult in the West, you tend to land mid-foot. If you learn to run as a child, guided by the shoes they convince you to wear, you land on your heel. And in places where they run barefoot, they land mid-foot, as well. (Side note, why are kids' feet "cute" and adult feet "ugly"? Hmmm.)

This friend pointed me to a web log entry about a guy who was re-learning to run in the Vibram 5 Fingers. Sorry I don't have the link anymore. I thought PERFECT! So, I bought some and today was my first run in them.

It went FANTASTIC! For the first 2 miles, I thought: "This is how the gods intended us to run". But then my calves started tightening up. Running down hill is a bit of a lesson. While on a flat surface or going up hill, I'm running naturally, with little effort. In fact, it seemed like I went much slower on this run. I only got out of breath once. But my actual speed was the same as it was Monday. So, while I felt like I was going slower, I wasn't. It was just plain easier ...

Except for the down hill parts. Having run in regular shoes my whole life, I suppose I land on my heel when running down hill. So, I had to make an extra effort this morning to land mid-foot when going down hill. That really put a strain on my calves. I foresee a few night time charlie horses in my immediate future.

A few other notes are in order. 1) You can feel the surface you're running on! I happen to live in Portland, where the sidewalks are kinda broken up from the trees. I don't run in the street, even though the asphalt is softer, because the roads slant for water run-off, which puts a damaging, constant, lean on you. Plus, the broken up sidewalk reminds me of running in the forest where you have to jump over things like roots and rocks and such, anyway. It's better for all those tiny control muscles. But it feels so decadent being able to feel every stick or mid-sized stone you step on. And having the water splash over your feet when you run through a puddle is fantastic!

2) Despite it being a bit chilly (45 deg F this morning), my feet didn't get cold even once. In my Asics, which have a mesh top, but otherwise complete coverage, my feet often get cold. I attribute this to the idea that the muscles in my feet are actually working in these shoes, unlike the others. Your toes are moving, gripping the pavement, wrapping themselves around every bump in the road. At several points, it felt like I was going to pull a muscle on the bottom of my foot as it flexed with every step. Anyway, for whatever reason, my feet weren't cold.

3) My right foot is much wider than my left, and my left is pretty damn wide. I have duck feet. I have to wear shoes that are about 1.5 US sizes too large in order to get shoes that are wide enough for my right foot. And even then, my right shoe always fails by poping open at the ball where the upper meets the sole. It's no different with these, except, since the uppers are very stretchy and there's a velcro strap that goes over the top, the mount for the velcro strap is rubbing seriously hard on the inside left of my right foot. That soft skin there will either have to toughen up, or I'll have to use band-aids or something to interfere.

So far, it's a great success! And I highly recommend these shoes. We'll see how I feel in a month or two, though.

Population self-regulation

gepr — 2010-02-23T07:02:31-08:00

I really like it when things seem to converge. For example, in December, 3 things converged together around light sensitivity: 1) We watched a rather silly sci-fi movie where people's pineal gland grew and poked out of their heads like a little tentacle, 2) we had a long discussion over Christmas about my S.O.'s and her sisters' inability to sleep if there's the slightest bit of light in the room, and 3) I learned that some animals have a well developed "third eye" that is related to their pineal gland. It's like the gods were telling me to learn a little more about melatonin and the pineal gland! As usual, I only did about 1/3 of my homework.

Anyway, it's happened again. Three tidbits my mind has assembled into a pattern. (Make no mistake, convergence like this is a figment of your imagination. It is NOT your God talking to you.)

Anyway, so I'm reading this "Evolution without Selection" book by Lima-de-Faria (LdF) and finally arrive at the following paragraphs:

Population control in mammals by chemical interaction

Several species of mammals regulate the size of their population. The fluctuations in number of progeny are controlled by means of chemical communication between the different individuals of the community.

The rabbit shows autocontrol of its fecundity. If the community is small the females produce as many as 30 animals per year, but if the population is large this number diminishes appreciably. The same behaviour pattern is displayed by the squirrel Sciurus carolinensis, the black rat Rattus rattus and the mouse Mus musculus (Reichholf 1984).

This autocontrol of the population occurs by the transmission of chemical information. Male rats are able to distinguish between the pheromones originating from the urine of females which are in oestrus or in dioestrus. In the mouse a pheromone is produced by the males which is received by the olfactory organs of the females. This influences the production of the pituitary gonadotropin in the females and results in a shortening of the oestrus cycle and leads to a synchronization of the oestrus and copulation periods (Carr and Caul 1962). The boar accumulates in its saliva the hormone androsterone. A chemical precursor is carried by the blood stream into the submaxillary gland where it is transformed into androsterone. The courtship and copulation are directed by the male saliva which is injected into the mouth of the female. If the female is in oestrus she becomes receptive and copulation takes place.

OK. So far so good. A bunch of biological gobbledy-gook that, if you think too much about it, starts to sound kinda gross. But combine that with my belief that 99.99% of the earth's problems are caused by over-population by humans, I hear a tiny resonant humm. I wonder how/if humans control their own population?

One conjecture might be war. LdF talks about war just a few paragraphs later, but with no explicit connection with autoregulation of the human population. He points out that war is a relatively modern invention (8,000 years relative to the million-year existence of our genus), roughly corresponding to the move to agrarian society.

The relation between the over-population of the earth and permanently squatting on a plot of land seems pretty clear to me. It's OK to permanently squat on a plot of land when there's plenty of land and very few humans. But as the population grows, it becomes easier to remove the squatter than to find an empty plot of land. Hence, WAR. ... Oh, and hence banks and foreclosure, too.

So, the first element in this convergence was running across the population autoregulation text in LdF's book. The second element was my commitment to the Global Population Speakout, which was scheduled for this month, February. (BTW, I've only done a little speaking out on twitter and 1 mailing list so far. So, this web log entry is my actual speak out attempt.)

The third is the following article: Cost of raising child breaks �200,000.

It suddenly hit me that money, the universal unit of measure for the transmission of goods, might well be our (human) population autocontrol pheromone! Granted, it's not a chemical. But, as biologists seem to think, a chemical is just a mediator for information and control. And money is the mediator, at least for western society, for information and control. (Yes, yes, I know that most people tend to think things like language, books, the internet, etc. are the media for information. But a few good long conversations with some CFOs and, perhaps, the few classical liberals left in the world, will convince you that it's money that makes the decisions in this world, not thought or votes.)

Perhaps money has become our pheromone for population autoregulation?

Autoevolutionism

gepr — 2010-02-22T07:17:56-08:00

Here are a few provocative paragraphs from Chapter 26 of Lima-de-Faria's "Evolution without Selection":

The physico-chemical basis of ethics

"Not only is a physico-chemical concept of life compatible with ethics, but it seems to be the only approach to life that will allow us to understand the origins of ethical principles". This statement comes from Loeb (1912), who emphasized that most if not all of our instincts have such a basis.

He points out that we eat, drink and reproduce not because humanity has decided by general consensus that such behaviour is desirable to the species, but simply beause we are forced to do so by our construction. A woman loves and cares for her children not because of the fact that the psychologists think that such behaviour is desirable, but because she is obliged to do so due to the physico-chemical processes going on in her own body.

Our fight for justice and truth also has no other source.

The point Lima-de-Faria is raising is merely the old problem of determinism and free will, of course. But he's doing it in the context of "autoevolution". It's unfortunate that if you search for the phrases "autoevolution" and "autoevolutionism" on the internet, you get references to intelligent design. Let me be very clear about this:

Lima-de-Faria's concept of autoevolution is NOT intelligent design.

It is simply the concept that biological form and function is a natural, self-organizing, extension of mineral, chemical, and physical form and function. Plants and animals are constructed in precisely the same way that the elementary particles, chemicals, and minerals are constructed. In simple terms, a human grows and lives in the same way a crystal or a hunk of rock grows and lives.

Although this is difficult to swallow in these simple terms, he makes his case working backwards from he current neo-Darwinist concept of evolution to this point simply by considering evolution without selection. All the same concrete mechanisms of the modern theory of evolution are present in autoevolution. He just attempts to remove the abstract and problematic concept of selection. And in that context, although autoevolution won't be popular until we either falsify selectionism or identify concrete mechanisms for selection, it's a perfectly reasonable alterative to neo-Darwinism WITHOUT resorting to nonsense like intelligent design.

Indeed, I believe we have found some concrete mechanisms for some forms of selection; but I am largely ignorant of biology and can't build strong rhetoric for it. However, it does seem to me that Lima-de-Faria is, in this book, arguing from a dual position to that taken by the selectionists. I imagine the actual system working analogous to any complementary system, like a hand to a glove or Lagrangian to Eulerian perspectives. Autoevolution examines the system solely from the perspective of the construct. Selectionism examines the system solely from the perspective of the environment that surrounds the construct.

Hence, selectionists think in terms of constraints and degrees of freedom. Autoevolutionists think in terms of composition and construction (for lack of better terms).

In this sense, I think that Lima-de-Faria's conception of neo-Darwinism is outdated. I think there are some few concrete selection mechanisms (constraints) that are the precise duals of the self-organizing mechanisms that give rise to biological diversity. Again, I am too ignorant in biology to build the rhetoric to show that.

All this smacks to me of the age old question of determinism versus free will. It's almost like the selectionists are simply those of us who are agnostic enough to allow for free will, whereas the determinists are those of us who see life as a series of straightforward actions to be taken. In autoevolution, an organism takes the next best action where "best" depends on whether it needs food, has an chemical urge to mate, or whatever. There is no free will required, only a canalized most efficient next action. In selectionism, there is plenty of wiggle room surrounding any next action. At any point, there are sets of actions to be chosen from. The environment circumscribes the set of actions the organism can take. It then takes the action it WANTS to take, where "want" would be determined by some random (inexplicable and/or unpredictable) process.

Of course, both of these are over-simplifications because selectionists allow for selection at multiple scales and autoevolution would, presumably, posit composition at multiple scales.

Scientifically, what we really need is a particular concrete multi-scale situation that's determined at the lower scale and indeterminate at the higher scale. The trouble is that our best and smallest scale theory (quantum mechanics) also alows the dual. In some ways, it's deterministic and in other ways it simply circumscribes the wiggle room for the mysterious mechanisms underneath.

Anyway, as you can see if you're still reading, I'm just muddling through all this as best I can. There's no point, no moral to the story. Sorry.

Loeb, J. (1912) La Conception M�canique de La Vie. Librairie F�lix Alea, Paris.

MAUDE pres notes shared from AK Notepad

gepr — 2010-02-02T12:54:28-08:00

Below are my notes as taken by me in the Android AK Notepad tool and shared with that tool. Note that this is exactly how they came out when I typed them, including the stupid "smart" capitalization.

Maude talk @galois, joe hendrix 2010.02.02
Kind & sorts, typechecking only on kinds
Only combine powerlists of same length
Cond membership needs powerlists



? Len(illformed powerlist)?
    -- len() won't be applied



Head(N List) -> head(3) -> head(3 nil) -> 3



Termination: maude is indeterminate but any term has a normal form



Maude termination tool (mtt) reduces it to unsorted spec preserving non-termination



Reasoning assumes theory is confluent
   Ie order of simplif preserves normal form
   Confluence checker (crc)



Parameterized theories (from OBL lang)
   Fth Loose semantic fmod
   Need param fmod
To use param theories, need view



Meta-level is reflection module



Inductive theorem prover (itp) for reasoning over the term algebra
   Uses reflection



Rewriting logic
    Ops not symmetric mod not fmod



Applications
  Actors, mobilemaude, duran agent lang, petri net, lambda calc, ccs, p-calc, uml diagrams, pathway logic @ sri, middleware for composable servers

More double negatives

gepr — 2010-01-29T14:51:27-08:00

Thanks to @itspubnight, I can add the beautiful word "unironic" to the list of words like irregardless and notwithstanding.

Double negatives do definitely NOT resolve to positives.

Do double negatives resolve to a positive?

gepr — 2010-01-25T10:37:52-08:00

I was recently berated by a friend when I used the term "irregardless". It was a casual usage and, although I don't use the word very often, I thought it perfect for the context. The context was one where I wanted to draw attention to a domain, as a context, but establish the independence of one instance of that domain, from that domain. So, with a single word, I can establish both membership and independence.

Another phrase we use to do things like this is "not unlike". When you say something is not unlike something else, you are not merely saying that the former is like the latter. You are not merely making a comparison. Hence, the double negative "not unlike" does NOT resolve to the positive "like". You are also not merely making a weakened contrast. So, it doesn't resolve to "a little bit unlike". Instead, you are drawing a qualified comparison and contrast with respect to a specific domain. It's a phrase we only use when our language is very context sensitive.

I believe we use "irregardless" in the same way. It does NOT merely resolve to "with regard", as so many pedants claim double negatives do. And I don't believe it resolves (as they say in the dictionaries) to "regardless". I think it acts as "not unlike" acts, and perhaps as "notwithstanding" acts. And I'm sure there are other examples.

However, I can't help but note the rather intense protestations the pedants (and pedant wanna-bes) make over the term. Why such vitriol? Why the rush to pretentious self-righteousness? Now, I'm the first to admit that there are a few words or usages that are pet peeves of my own. Nukular (a.k.a. nuclear) peeves me the most. If you want to see me get mad, wait till I've got a few pints in me and say that word! And, like everyone, I think my pet peeves have more basis than other peoples' pet peeves. But the pedantry surrounding "irregardless" has been elevated far above that of equivalent abuses like nukular. I just have to wonder why?

Needless to say [giggle], I will continue to use "irregardless" when I think it appropriate, if for no other reason than to fly my anti-intellectualist flag while dressed as a pseduo-intellectual.

Appeals to Ignorance

gepr — 2009-09-04T06:06:14-08:00

I felt like I needed to add an entry to my log, since I haven't added one in so long. So, this entry is a bit of a stretch (as if any of my entries aren't stretches ;-). But it is something I think about regularly.

Why do we hold metaphysical beliefs? I think we've come far enough in our exploration of the world to admit that everything we know for sure, we learned from our sensory-motor, physiological, bodily experience. And everything else comes with large doses of ignorance. (Just to be clear, I accept that most people out there don't and will never admit their ignorance... But I'm not really talking to those people. I'm talking to rational people who admit when they don't know something as fact.)

For example, do we know that it's safer to look both ways before crossing the street? No, we don't know that. It's entirely possible that it's safer to cross the street very quickly without hesitating at all, depending on the street, the speed at which one can cross, the efficacy of one's eyesight, etc. This "knowledge" of the best way to cross a street, which we learn very early on, comes with a huge swath of ignorance and, therefore, forces us to assume a great many things.

It's not my intention to pick apart the meanings of words like knowledge. I'm merely pointing out that all the things we call "knowledge" are inseparable from the context and assumptions within which they are usable.

Examples of things we do know, that carry minimal ignorance, are those mechanisms that constitute our body. I know how to move my fingers and type these words. Since I learned how, I have never even begun to forget how to wiggle my fingers, or digest my food, or open my eyes. Likewise, I know that if I poke myself in the eye with my finger, it hurts. These little facts come with minimal ignorance. It's important to note, however, the presence of the ignorance these things carry with them.

There are people who "forget" how to talk, or move their fingers. (I'm not talking about damages to the physical mechanisms. I'm talking about psycho-somatic or even unexplained but seemingly psycho-somatic disorders.) And while these conditions are very rare, they do exist, demonstrating that even though the ignorance is small compared to other bits of "knowledge", the ignorance is never vanishingly small.

Now, go up the scale far away from the minimal ignorance of the knowledge we have about our bodies.... go all the way up to, say, cosmology or the origins of the universe. Do we know that the universe began with a big bang or by the will of some omni-* being? No. The amount of ignorance that comes with such "knowledge" is so huge... The ignorance that accompanies such hypotheses and conjecture plainly dwarfs any related knowledge we might have.

Note that I'm not saying theories grounded in physics are, in all ways, equivalent to metaphysical beliefs about omni-* beings. I've simply placed those two types of "knowledge" near each other on a scale of the ignorance that accompanies them. To the scientist who believes the one is built on facts more solid than the other, I can only suggest they consider their commitment to the solidity of facts, evidence, and knowledge. Likewise, to the faithful who believe one is more fundamental to the human condition than the other, I can only suggest they consider the methodological success of their more skeptical brethren.

The issue I do care about is why do we make these hypotheses and conjectures and, more importantly, why do we come to believe them? When an intelligent design advocate ridicules evolution by calling it "just a theory", what is she really trying to say? Or when an atheist ridicules the modern monotheists by talking about a "flying spaghetti monster", what is she really trying to say?

What are these people expressing in such ham-handed, stupid, and disrespectful ways? And why do they feel the need to be so rude and disrespectful?

Well, I believe the answer lies in our discomfort with ignorance. None of us are truly comfortable with ignorance, their own or others'. When a militant atheist cruelly jabs at the heart of a theist's beliefs, she is expressing her discomfort with BOTH the theist's hard-headed and lazy attachment to seemingly incredible metaphysical beliefs as well as her own ignorance of how the universe operates.

Imagine if, when the atheist ridicules the theist, rather than being offended, the theist treats the atheist with a brotherly commitment to a life's work of scientific inquiry! I.e. out of love for the atheist, the theist devotes her life to the scientific method.

Likewise, what if, when a theist threatens to surround the atheist with laws based on obscure words written on some ancient scroll, the atheist, rather than lashing out in defense, committed herself to distilling whatever truth may be found in those obscure words?

These sorts of constructive responses to attacks do happen. But they are rare. And I believe they are rare because we are all uncomfortable with our own and others' ignorance.... but especially our own.

As a result, we build up what are ultimately, logically, appeals to ignorance as justification for our own beliefs. When one compares their own ignorance with another's ignorance, which body of ignorance are they going to be more inclined to ignore? Which body of ignorance are we most likely to sweep under the rug? Which body of ignorance are we more afraid to stare straight at and consider in depth?

Our own, of course.

We will always minimize the scary specter of our own ignorance and maximize the not-so-scary hobgoblin of another's ignorance. Hence, all metaphysical arguments are rooted in appeals to ignorance. We cannot KNOW that your silly speculation is true; so, it's better to go with my silly speculation. -----