Beam me back down

From about the ages of 10 to 25, I went on sporadic science fiction reading binges with months or years in between.  I think watching first-run Star Trek episodes may have set them off.  My first sci-fi books came from Arrow Books and the Scholastic Book Club catalog that was passed around my elementary school homeroom every month.  At some point, I discovered the Greats of that era:  Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury.  The first two I enjoyed right away.  Bradbury took longer to appreciate.  I’m still waiting to grok Heinlein.  Technically, I’m a “child of the 60s,” but I was literally a child at the time and didn’t have to choose between the hippies and the establishment.  Heinlein was too adult and, to my ear, too oddly written to reach me.

My mother, a high school English teacher, later taught a science fiction course.  She had her kids read books as diverse as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  I followed her list, reading some of the books and getting bogged down in others.  I also acquired an anthology from the “Golden Age” of science fiction and became absorbed with its lurid tales of mayhem and solitude, usually the result of a single scientific extrapolation gone horribly wrong.  There was John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, which became the movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing.  There was Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel, which later got developed by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick into the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  And there was my favorite ripping yarn, though no literary masterpiece, He Who Shrank, in which a guy gets smaller and smaller until he cycles around to a nanoverse that strangely resembles our own.

Competing with sci-fi for my attention were the vicissitudes of youth and “real literature.”  The latter, I thought, should not be so well-defined as to exclude science fiction.  I had to admit that nothing I had read in the genre struck me as great from a poetic or mythic point of view, but sci-fi, I thought, ought to lend itself to great myth-like creations and great reflections on the human condition, and to beautiful prose.  Clearly science fiction was waiting for its transcendent exponents, its Homers and Dantes and Faulkners and Prousts.  It was still a relatively young artform whose time would come.

However naive that youthful expectation, I’ve begun to wonder, 25 years later, whether it might have come true.  All right, not with a Homer or a Dante, but would it kill someone to be science fiction’s F. Scott Fitzgerald?  So I decided to read, say, ten sci-fi novels over the next couple of years.  I would pick them the way I do anything else:  on the internet.  What I ended up doing was some googling and mungeing of numerous lists of “best sf novels of the decade,” and here’s the combined and reduced list I came up with, in no order of preference:

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
• The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
• Glasshouse, by Charles Stross
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks
• Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
• Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
• Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

To this I’ll probably add Little, Big by John Crowley.  It’s a fantasy novel (as is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell), but it has a strong reputation, and Harold Bloom has called it “the most enchanting 20th-century book I know.”  The truth is that I may never read this whole list.  I don’t want to prejudge based on reviews—also gleaned from the net—but I’ve heard some dissuading stuff about a couple of items.  The Miéville, for instance, apparently devolves into a “bug hunt” for the final hundred pages or so.  That doesn’t sound enriching, although for all I know the bug-battle descriptions are as good as Homer’s account of the Trojan War.  An audio clip of a Ted Chiang story struck me as hard-boiled or glib, but maybe he’s the sf Elmore Leonard.  So these deserve a chance, I suppose.  I’ll probably prioritize the list and at least knock off the most promising titles, then maybe do another search.  Will post my reviews here, naturally.

Further recommendations are welcome, by the way, even though I know no one reads this blog.

When worldviews collide

Just watched the 2009 documentary “Collision,” in which pastor Doug Wilson and pundit Christopher Hitchens duke it out on the question of whether Christianity is good or bad for the world.  The question sets up a sort of public-policy debate, as if some government agency might mandate either Christianity or atheism for all.  Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been attempted, but the focus of religious debates is usually more ontological than pragmatic:  Does God exist?

The existence of God does figure in this debate, but it doesn’t take center stage, and with good reason.  The question of existence doesn’t touch on the most interesting consequences of our belief in the God described by scripture.  Even if God exists, what could this possibly tell us about His nature?  What moral authority, apart from the self-certifying imprimatur of scripture, would He command?  What should be our relation to an omnipotent being, anyway?  Assuming He exists, why does God hide himself?  Why should God care whether we worship or believe in Him?  These are all questions asked in the philosophy of religion, and for many religious people they never get asked.  I had never considered many of them until I took a course in the subject.

The debate within “Collision” struck me as a near miss or at best a grazing blow, not the flush whomp of two conflicting worldviews that have come to understand each other deeply.  The film is worth watching mainly for its illumination of the two combatants.  Wilson comes across as an autodidact country parson, humble in self-portrait but clearly pleased with his range of knowledge.  In a voice-over, he terms the mastery of theology, scripture, and philosophy needed to face the mighty Hitchens “copiousness.”  There is something Victorian about him.  No less smug is Hitchens, who wields a databaseful of lectern-ready prose on his pet topic of why “God is not Great.”  Hitchens is slicker, more academic, better rehearsed.  He, too, possesses the copiousness the battle demands.

I must confess to having a soft spot for Hitchens, despite his retrograde politics, his ironic self-description as a “contrarian,” and his distinctly non-ironic righteousness in the crusade against religion.  I have known and sympathized before with the schoolyard prodigy who could fight his way out of any scrape using words alone.  To be such a person requires unfathomable fortitude and energy due perhaps to equal parts vanity and fear.  But Hitchens at least searches and makes his search public.  His written and spoken record seems a kind of vanity project, but the same could be said of any engaging body of published work.  His bears his stamp.

Unfortunately for the dialectic conveyed in the film, being smarter, better-spoken, and even right do not guarantee Hitchens a slam-dunk.  Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to keep the contest “close” in order to maintain tension or to focus on the amity between Wilson and Hitchens, which appears to be held together by a shared love of Wodehouse.  Maybe the aim was merely to whet the viewer’s appetite for the meat of the debate itself, toward other dramatic ends.  In any event, Hitchens is portrayed as losing some of his decisive edge about two-thirds through the film.

That’s when Wilson seems to draw Hitchens onto his turf by pressing the issue of how one is supposed to ground one’s morality if not by God’s authority.  Wilson hammers away at the assertion that Hitchens has “helped himself” to the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to wage a (self-defeating) war against Christianity.  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only source of moral conviction, of course, and to reason from its primacy is both obtuse and circular.  Wilson seems comfortable with the position this leaves him in.  His strikingly postmodern defense is that participants in such a fundamental debate can only ground their arguments on certain axioms, to which they must return again and again.  If one must argue in the round, best to start and end one’s circle with God’s word.

My preferred response at this point would have been for Hitchens to “go Socratic” (not a bad motto generally) and press the Euthyphro question:  Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?  Hitchens eschews this line, perhaps because he himself holds that morality is innate, and, if morality is merely instinctive (or the equivalent for rational beings), it has no independent theoretical foundation that would render the Euthyphro question rhetorical in the desired way.  But by hewing to the Euthyphro line without foundationalism (as I imagine Socrates would have preferred), Hitchens could have held that God’s moral authority can be only as well-founded as morality itself—however well-founded that may be—and that the difficult course of questioning and refining and coming to grips with moral theory is preferable to checking one’s conscience at the chapel doors.  One finds oneself arguing in circles only when one stops trying to improve one’s position.

Contradiction and Unity

Graham Priest gave a colloquium presentation 9/8/2010 on “Contradiction and Unity.”  He offered a theoretical construct called a “gluon” which serves the role of unifier, accounting for the constitution of wholes by parts.  The presentation was divided into three parts:  the problem, gluon theory, and the application of Priest’s solution to Aristotle’s metaphysical problematic of unity.

The problem is that wholes made up of parts must be unified (“bound”) somehow, otherwise they are just congeries of the simples that compose them.  In answering the question, “What does the trick?” of unification,  we find ourselves responding with something entitative, noun-like.  E.g., when asked what makes a group of bricks a house instead of just a pile of bricks, we want to say, “Their form.”  Or their arrangement or configuration or principle or relation to one another, etc.  But this form is a thing of some kind; if it is not, we have gained nothing, since we find ourselves incapable of characterizing them otherwise.  If the form is a thing, however, we have a regress problem, since the form-thing just gets added to the list of things (parts) comprising the whole, and we need to postulate some other thing that unifies the larger set comprising all the original parts plus the form (a “metaform”).

The problem, for Priest, arises from the fact that the extra principle contains a “metaphysical gap.”  The gap is the requirement that the principle lacks instantiation; forms must be instantiated by particular objects, generally comprising parts, and instantiation of an object of a certain kind is exactly the problem he is trying to solve:  What unifies an object?  The motivation he presents first is not physical.  Frege’s scheme for the unification of a proposition is just as prone to this metaphysical quandary.  For Frege, a term (“Socrates,” say) serves to complete an unsaturated formula (“is mortal,” e.g.), but the nature of this completion or saturation is never addressed.  The concept of mortality awaits instantiation in the subject of a proposition of which “is mortal” is the predicate.  Together they make a unity, a proposition, but how?  So in Frege’s scheme the parts are subject and predicate, and the metaphysical gap is the need for saturation of predicate-mapping functions.  Priest’s point in starting with this example is to note that the ontological status of the parts in question, as being either concrete or abstract, is irrelevant to the more general problem of unification.

Priest’s solution is to offer a binding object that is free of the problems outlined above.  He is clearly in favor of a realism that conceives of simples, complex objects, physical objects, and nonphysical objects such as forms, tropes, configurations, and the like as bona fide objects.  Objects all the way up, objects all the way down.  Note that there still can be collections of objects that do not constitute composite objects, that is, bunches of items, or congeries.  He just wants to embrace objecthood for abstract as well as physical objects.

Well, what sort of object can unify a group of other objects without introducing a metaphysical gap?  Priest’s solution is a special kind of object called a “gluon,” which requires no saturation by the object it unifies.  The only way it can manage this is to introduce no difference, no non-identity, with any of the object’s parts.  The only way it can do this is to be identical to each of the object’s parts.  The only way it can do this is under a logic that permits contradiction, because each part of the object is taken to be non-identical to every other part.  The contradiction is that the gluon will be identical to a bunch of distinct items.

Priest’s scheme for the gluon relies on a paraconsistent logic in which some propositions are taken to be true, some false, and some both true and false.  The Venn diagram of this arrangement of logical space is two overlapping circles.  If the lefthand circle is the set of true statements, and the righthand the set of false ones, the intersection is the set of statements that are both true and false.  The region in which gluons operate is this intersection, because the gluons must possess mutually contradictory properties.  The reason they need to do this is so that they can be identical to each of the parts.  The metaphysical gap, for Priest, is removed if the gluon can be identical to each part (and of course it is identical to itself).

Take an object O with parts A and B, the simplest case of unification.  Part A may possess properties that B possesses, and vice versa.  In fact the two objects may be qualitatively identical.  But they are not numerically identical, and if they are physical objects they are not identical as to location, perhaps among other properties.  O’s gluon G must be identical to both A and B.  How can it be?

This depends on how one treats identity.  Priest’s suggestion is Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles:  x = y iff (AP) P(x) iff P(y).  So two things are identical just if they share all and only the same set of properties.  This brings in the biconditional as a way of representing in quantified logic the nature of identity.

The interesting properties of parts of an object will be those that differ.  If all the bricks in a house are red, we’re not so much interested in the predicate ‘red’, since for the gluon to share redness with any part does not conflict with the non-redness of any other part.  But if we take another predicate, such as location or microscopically precise shape, every brick will have different properties.  For the gluon G to maintain its identity with A and B by sharing unique properties with both A and B, it must itself possess contradictory properties, e.g., both Thislocation and !Thislocation.  Hence Thislocation(G) will be both true and false, as will its negation, so we can see various predications to G occupying the overlap in our paraconsistent logical space.

It’s important to keep in mind that, for Priest, the embrace of contradiction, at least within the paraconsistent limbo, is essential to overcoming the regress problem that arises from postulating a glue element such as a form or arrangement.  But is it also important that the system allow the parts of an object besides the gluon to differ from one another. They must differ, or else the scheme would not show how different parts come together to make a unity.  The paraconsistent logic works out nicely in this regard, since the biconditional definition of identity Priest uses renders identity reflexive and commutative but crucially not transitive.  That is, objects are still identical to themselves (a = a), and if an object a is identical to some object b, then b is identical to a, but a = b and b = c do not imply a = c.  As we have seen, if a gluon G plays the role of b in the transitive  scheme, two objects with which G is identical need not share all properties with each other, and therefore need not be identical to each other.

That’s the gist.  I may make another entry to discuss Priest’s claim about how historical versions of the problem of unity are covered by his gluon approach and to mention some objections raised during Q&A.

Wanting to be bad

It just occurred to me—maybe this shows how dull I am—that the reason crime novels, murder mysteries, serial-killer procedurals, and the like are so popular is not the hazy interest we call “morbid fascination” but something much more specific and easier to understand:  envy.  Simenon had it right:  Suspense should be told from the criminal’s point of view, because she is us, and we are pulling for her.