Holy Cyclops

Now that I have the use of ChessImager (see previous post), I’ve been able to put a few “little lessons” in the chess section of my Web site with diagrams.  I have sections on playing for the endgame, on building walls, and on tempo moves, and a couple of other sections are planned.  I’m delighted!

I played Black against the club master last night, and although I lost, I’m happy, overall, with the game I played.  I played a Caro-Kann, he played his 1 e4 c6 2 Nc3 d5 3 Qf3 line–the one that caught me off-guard once before when we played–and I completely neutralized his advantage.  We wound up in an endgame with two bishops each and pawns on both sides of the board in a nearly symmetrical position, but somehow he managed to win.  I suppose that’s why he’s a master.  Of course, I missed a couple of his moves, including the one that won a pawn for him.

Tomorrow, I play in the First Saturday of the Month quads. 

At last, I can put chess diagrams on my Web site!  Steve Eddins, bless him, has created a little snippet of HTML code that you can put into a program to make a chess diagram show up.  It’s available at http://www.eddins.net/steve/chess/chessimager.  I’ve already used it to put several diagrams in the Chess section of my Web site (http://www.holycyclops.com).  Steve deserves an award.

new beginnings

(© 2006)

The saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers,” but we not only haven’t had a lot of April showers; we also haven’t had to wait until May for an explosion of flowers!  Our daffodils bloomed early and then wilted, but I’ve seen other people’s still in bloom while riding around the neighborhood with my younger nephew.  I only remember solid yellow daffodils from my childhood, but now there seem to be lots of white ones with orange trumpets (well, what’s the proper name for the middle part of a daffodil?).  Tulips are in bloom—we have a few red ones in back of our house, but elsewhere I’ve seen not only red ones but also white ones and yellow ones and reddish-pink ones and purple ones!  Every time I see purple tulips, I’m pleased.  I like purple.

We have azaleas blooming on a couple of bushes out front—red.  We have violets blooming.  We have lovely five-petaled lavender blooms, with red dots on one of the five petals, all over another bush out front.  I’ve tried to identify it, but the closest I could find online was some sort of hibiscus, which it doesn’t really seem to be.  Some people are growing yellow pansies and purple pansies.  And how could I forget my childhood favorites, which many people dislike but which I have always loved:  Dandelions!  (Speaking of dandelions:  If you ever get the chance, read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  It’s unlike his other writing, and very good.)  I like their yellow against the green grass—the Green Bay Packers wear green and gold uniforms, and I’ve always rooted for them—and I like their scent.  Maybe it’s a remembered-boy thing.

Trees’ flowers are blooming, too.  And, of course, leaves are unfurling.  My nephew noticed today the beginnings of mulberries, although it will presumably be a little while before they’re ready to be picked.  My brother used to like my mother’s raspberry pies and blackberry pies so much that he used to brave the thorns of the woods out back to pick them, coming back with arms covered with scratches.  He lives in Florida now, but my nephew and I picked lots of mulberries last year, to be baked in mulberry-and-rhubarb pies.  We discovered that picked mulberries quickly grow moldy—even when refrigerated!  They have to be frozen.  But when my brother visited for the Fourth of July last year, he got to eat pies he liked.

But for now, they’re just beginning.  The flowers, on the other hand, are in bloom. 

A few months ago, I attended a meeting at which the group leader used the word “perfect” in the following way:  Accept yourself as you are, for you are perfect; do not worry about the past, for the past is perfect. 

 I cringed.

Tonight, on the Science Fiction Channel’s program Battlestar Galactica, one of the characters, Gaius Baltar, gave what was supposed to be an inspirational speech to a group of followers in which he reasoned as follows:  God would not love you if you were imperfect; but God does love you.  This is God’s truth:  You are all perfect!

Again, I cringed.

When did “perfect” begin to be misused and abused this way?  The speaker at my meeting meant something like, “Accept yourself as you are; love yourself as you are.  Do not kick yourself or get down on yourself or overcriticize yourself for your flaws; human beings are imperfect, and you’re an imperfect human being, and that’s OK.  Accept the past as it is; it is unchangeable, and worrying about it won’t help anyone at all, least of all yourself.  Just accept it, and move on to doing what’s best and most constructive in the future.”  (I might have embellished her meaning a bit, but the gist of it is not to worry about either your flaws or the past, but just to love yourself and be loving now and in the future.)  “You are perfect” is not the same as “You should accept yourself as you are.”  Nor is “You should accept yourself as you are” synonymous with “You shouldn’t do anything to try to improve yourself.”  “Perfect” means “beyond any conceivable improvement.”  There are conceivable ways in which anyone could be a better person—if only by knowing one more language than he already knows, or by learning how to use the word “perfect”—and there are conceivable ways in which the past could be better than it was.  “You are perfect” does not mean “You are worthy of love,” as Gaius Baltar seems to have used it to mean. 

Why must people misuse and abuse a good English word?  Such misuse and abuse just makes it harder for people to communicate clearly with each other. 

The truly annoying thing is that it’s usually nice people using the word for noble purposes, trying to help people feel good about themselves and to stop being overly critical of themselves, who do this.  One wants to say, “I agree with your sentiment, but you need to express it differently.”  But, as I discovered at that meeting, not everyone understands what he’s doing wrong, even when it’s pointed out by more than one person, as was done then; the two of us were just categorized as “logical people”—as though being logical were optional!  As though logic were a hobby some people pursued but that other people were free to simply ignore.

This Humpty Dumpty language use, in which words mean whatever one wants them to mean, only ends up leading to confusion and to the acceptance of unjustified doctrines.  You get fuzzy thinking.  You get relativism and subjectivism and postmodernism.  (In a related vein, I’m reminded of a joke I just read:  What do you get when you cross a Mafioso and a postmodernist?  You get someone who makes you an offer you can’t understand.)  And, ultimately, you change the meaning of the word, and then a new word needs to be coined to express the old concept.  I can only shake my head and wonder why this happens.

Well, I was shocked when the 76ers pulled out Game 1 in Detroit, and then the Pistons did exactly as I expected in blowing out the 76ers in Game 2.  Game 3 was played in Philadelphia Friday night, and to my pleased surprise, the 76ers won, giving them a 2-1 series lead.  Not only did the 76ers win, they blew out the powerhouse Pistons 95-75.  Detroit managed to miss fourteen straight shots to close the third quarter, and seventeen straight overall; and at one point, the Pistons had twenty-three shots made and twenty-three turnovers, too, according to the announcers.  I have a hard time imagining that that was all attributable to the fine play of the home team, and I expect the Pistons to come out fired up for Game 4!  Still, it’s nice to see the seventh-seeded 76ers taking a pair of playoff games from the second-seeded Pistons, who won fifty-nine games during the regular season.  Samuel Dalembert looks really good, and Thaddeus Young and Reggie Evans look good, and maybe this young team will turn into a winner for years to come.

Tonight was chess club night.  After helping the older of my two nephews with his mathematics homework—it was on percentages, using taxes and commissions as exemplars—I walked into West Chester, bought some pizza (and breadsticks to bring home for my younger nephew), and proceeded to the club.  We meet in the basement of a church, and I stopped to smell a red tulip in its small flowerbed.  Tulips have been blooming all around, although ours—the ones at home, I mean—have been a little slow opening up.  (It’s funny; our daffodils bloomed early!  And wilted early.  I’m reminded of the T.S. Eliot line from The Waste Land:  “April is the cruellest month”; the daffodils’ joyous blooms last only briefly.)  Red, pinkish-red, purple, yellow, white—varicolored tulips are blooming everywhere, it seems.  And I stop to smell them.  One should enjoy the little things in life.

It was the third round of our current four-round USCF-rated tournament tonight, and I played M.R., who is rated about the same as I am.  I had White, and I must say, I was very happy with my game.  It was one of those games where you feel like you’re in control the whole way—a very gratifying sort of game to play.  The moves were 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Bc5 4 O-O d6 5 h3 a6 6 Bxc6+ …  (I wonder if I should have done this on move five?)  6 … bxc6 7 d4 exd4 8 Nxd4 Bd7 9 c3 Qf6 10 Be3 Qg6 11 Qf3 Nf6 12 Nd2 O-O 13 Nf5! …  (White threatens Ne7+, and if Black plays 13 … Bxf5, White will reply with 14 exf5 Qh5 15 Qxh5 Nxh5 16 Bxc5 dxc5, isolating and tripling Black’s c-pawn) 13 … Rfe8 14 Bxc5 dxc5  (Black’s c-pawn is isolated and tripled anyway) 15 Ng3 h5 16 Qf4 …  (attacking c7 isn’t the point; preventing … h4 is) 16 … Re7 17 Rfe1 Rae8 18 Re3 …  (preparing 19 Rae1, 20 Nf5, and 21 Rg3, when 20 … Bxf5 couldn’t be played because of 21 Rxe7) 18 … Bxh3? (hopeless, but it’s hard to find a good move for Black, who miscalculated here; he saw 19 gxh3 Nxe4 20 Nxe4 Rxe4 21 Rxe4 Rxe4, followed by 22 … h4, but he missed 22 Qxe4, when 22 … Qxe4 unpins the g6-knight and allows 23 Nxe4)  19 gxh3 Re5 20 Kh2 Rg5? 21 Nf3 … (now, with the rook trapped, my opponent tries something desperate) 21 … Rg4 22 hxg4 Nxg4+ 23 Kg2 Nxe3+ 24 Qxe3 Qg4 25 Rh1 f5 26 Rh4, Black resigns. 

I didn’t do anything brilliant, although my sixth, seventh, and thirteenth moves were good.  Black just got stuck with nothing to do.  Anyway, I now have 2 1/2 out of 3 in this tournament; I’ll play the club’s master next week.  With Black.  Wish me luck!

I normally try to show what’s wrong with subjectivism, but let me try to think of what a subjectivist might say in response to criticisms.  (I’ll note that there are what one might call “hard subjectivists,” who deny that there is an objectively existing reality, and “soft subjectivists,” who merely don’t commit themselves one way or the other.)  I do want to note that subjectivism is not the same thing as perspectivalism.  We objectivists agree that different human beings perceive the world differently (some have sharper vision than others, some experience synesthesia, some see the world from a greater height than others) and interpret what they perceive differently.  We agree that our experiences affect how we think of what we perceive—that our conceptualizations of the world differ.  Each of us has his own perspective.  That’s not what the objectivist opposes.  The objectivist opposes the notion that nothing exists independently of his own mind.

1)  How does one explain the patterns and regularities of his personal experience? 

The objectivist explains them by saying that there is an objectively existing reality that has a certain structure, and that the structure of that reality causes events to occur in a lawlike way, and that we human beings perceive the lawlike occurrences of that reality (albeit indirectly), and that it therefore makes sense that our sensory qualia also occur in a lawlike way.  I never see objects fall up because my visual qualia reflect the gravitational aspect of objectively existing reality.

The subjectivist may explain them by saying that his internal world, his phenomenal reality, has a certain structure, and that the structure of that phenomenal reality causes his sensory qualia to occur in a lawlike way.

2)  How does one explain intersubjectivity? 

The objectivist’s explanation is that there really are other people who are on an existential par with himself, and that, having subjectivity himself, he assumes that other people, who seem similar to him in biological construction and physical behavior, and with whom he seems able to communicate, are not mindless robots but do also have mental lives.

It seems a bit tougher for the subjectivist.  If he claims that other people do have subjectivity, then he seems to be saying that the appearances of people in his mind have subjectivity.  They then seem to be portions of his own mind that are inaccessible to him directly, and that are only indirectly accessible to him, via the appearance of communication.  Moreover, if he thinks that their subjectivity includes the appearance of him, the subjectivist himself, then it seems as though we get a vicious loop:  Another person’s subjectivity is a hidden part of the subjectivist’s own mind, but the subjectivist’s own subjectivity is then a hidden part of that other person’s subjectivity, which is in turn a hidden part of the subjectivist’s own subjectivity; which is contained in which?  Intersubjectivity is, then, hard for the subjectivist to explain.

What the subjectivist can  say is something different:  Not that other people really do have subjectivity, but rather that the appearances of other people in his mind appear to talk and appear to act as though  they were subjective; he can treat those appearances as though they were subjective without actually claiming subjectivity for them.  (Notice that this has implications for ethics:  In circumstances in which the subjectivist has no expectation that his actions with respect to another person will have any consequences for himself beyond the action itself, why should he be kind or concern himself with the other person’s feelings?  It’s not as though the other person actually *had* feelings, after all.)  He may, in so doing, say that he is doing no more than is justified by the appearances—and the objectivist must agree that he doesn’t have direct knowledge of other people’s mental lives, and must agree that he only assumes that they have them by ostension.  But does the subjectivist really want to claim that other people don’t have thoughts or feelings?

3)  How is empirical error possible? 

The objectivist who says, “I was mistaken about X,” can say that there was an objective fact of the matter about X and that he misperceived that fact.

The subjectivist has a harder time of it.  He can hardly be mistaken about his own appearances!  What he might say is that he thought that X was so (X appeared to be so), but that various appearances of people appear to be telling him that he’s mistaken, and that on that basis he agrees to use the words, “I was mistaken about X,” even though he couldn’t have been mistaken about the appearance of X; or he might say that he thought that X was so (X appeared to be so), but that now X isn’t so (X no longer appears to be so), and that on that basis he uses the words, “I was mistaken about X,” instead of, “The appearances about X have changed.”  But in neither case is he really reporting an instance of being mistaken; nor could he be.  One can’t be mistaken about one’s own appearances.

The subjectivist’s best course might be to deny that there is such a thing as empirical error—to say that empirical error would require objective facts of matters, and that in the absence of such objective facts of matters, there simply is no empirical error. 

4)  How does one explain the existence of facts or knowledge that he himself is personally unaware of? 

The objectivist says that there is an objectively existing reality comprising a great many facts, and that he himself only knows a few of them—but the ones he doesn’t know are still facts, by virtue of their objective existence, and other objectively existing people may very well know some of those facts that he himself doesn’t know.

The subjectivist denies that there are any facts outside of his awareness, and unless he comes up with a subjectivist account of intersubjectivity, denies that there is any knowledge outside of himself.    He is then committed to denying that scientific research has discovered any facts that he has not himself heard about or read about; he is committed to denying that those people of whose existence he is unaware do not exist.  (There remains the question of whether his being vaguely aware of scientific research, without being aware of its specifics, suffices for him to accept that there are specific facts that he has not himself heard about or read about; there remains the question of whether individuals of whom he is not personally aware may nevertheless exist as part of a class of which he is aware—whether he may admit that individual Chinese people exist, on the basis of knowing that a Chinese population exists, without being aware of particular individuals.)  It seems as though the subjectivist is committed to claiming that all that exists is what he personally is aware of.

5)  How does one account for past events and knowledge of past events beyond his own personal experience? 

The objectivist thinks that temporality is part of objectively existing reality (whether he thinks that past and future objectively exist or not), and that past events really happened and that we can garner objectively existing evidence of what has really happened.

The subjectivist can accommodate talk about a past beyond his personal experience by allowing that the appearances of people appear to talk about a long-gone past and that appearances of people appear to identify various objects as being very old, and so on, and by saying that he simply agrees to talk in conformity with the conventions of those appearances; but, as in (4), it seems difficult for the subjectivist to go beyond that and to discuss an actual remote past.  Any time when he was not conscious seems to be nonexistent, for the subjectivist—including last night, when he was asleep.  

 6)  How does one account for technological progress?

The objectivist thinks that objectively existing people have made real scientific and technological advances, resulting in our having refrigerators and cell phones and laptop computers.

The subjectivist seems to be in a bit tougher spot.  He may say that it is part of the structure of his subjective reality that the appearances will alter over time in the direction of the appearance of technological progress, but otherwise, it’s hard to see how he explains it.  Unless he personally works in the factory where cell phones are made, he can’t appeal to the workings of people and machines to make them (because those people’s actions and those machines’ actions aren’t part of his personal subjective reality), and he must say that the appearances of technological goodies in the appearances of stores just appear, without explanation.

He might say that he has the idea of people’s and machines’ acting to make cell phones, and that he has the idea of people’s making scientific and technological breakthroughs, and that those ideas are part of his subjective reality; but it’s unclear how his having those ideas accounts for the appearance of a cell phone in his subjective reality, unless he again makes appeal to the structure of his internal, subjective reality.

It seems to me that the idea of an objectively existing reality serves to explain a lot, while the subjectivist view is beset with difficulties. 

On the Darwin Awards Forums (at http://forum.darwinawards.com ), I’m taking part in a few threads in which the question of whether there is such a thing as an objectively existing reality, and the question of whether or not we can know anything about it if it does exist, have arisen.  To my astonishment, about half of the authors in those threads are, or say they are, subjectivists:  They do not accept that there is an objectively existing reality.

To be fair, it seems that some of them take the quite natural position that we cannot know, with certainty, that there is an objectively existing reality external to ourselves, and that even if there is, we cannot know, with certainty, what it is like.  We could be brains in vats, being stimulated by some mad scientist; we could be hallucinating.  We have no way to know, with certainty; moreover, we have no way of assigning a probability to the existence of an objective reality:  How, after all, does one assign a probability to the alternative possibility of our hallucinating all of reality?  Most of the DAF’s subjectivists seem to think that as a practical matter, we operate as though there were an objectively existing reality, and simply refuse to say that we absolutely know there is.  

But for some reason, the word “objective” makes them quail.  When I say that I make the assumption that there is an objectively existing reality, they immediately react as though I were wrong to do so.  The word “objective” seems to make them think that I have in mind not only that there is an objectively existing reality but also that I have complete and certain knowledge of it—which, of course, is not at all what I have in mind.  I only have in mind that there are apples and tables and chairs whose existence does not depend on my perceiving them or thinking about them, and that will go on existing if I turn my back or walk away or go to sleep or die, and that other people can also perceive.  Our subjectivists say that I’m assuming too much—that I have no basis for assuming that there is an objectively existing reality.  But if there were no objectively existing reality, how could one explain the patterns and regularities of our sensory qualia?  How could one explain intersubjectivity—as the telepathic sharing of a mental world?  How could one explain the possibility of error in empirical claims?  How could one explain the usefulness of our mental maps if there were no territory being mapped—if there were no correspondence between the structure of a person’s mental map and the structure of the territory?  An objectively existing reality looks like a good bet to me. 

When did “objective” become a bad word?  When did subjectivism take such hold?  I’m baffled.

Scientists, when faced with physical phenomena to explain, come up with plausible-sounding explanations. Often, however, those plausible-sounding explanations fail to stand up under further experimental testing, and they are then consigned to the dustbin of history. Nature says, “Nice try, but sorry, no; that’s not how things are.”  Science demands that our ideas conform to the way the world is, or forever remain merely fictional constructions of the human mind.

Metaphysicians, when faced with what they think of as metaphysical problems, come up with plausible-sounding explanations, too. However, since there is no testing of those explanations against nature, they cannot be consigned to the dustbin of history  (as long as they are not clearly internally contradictory—and I mean clearly). Proponents of plausible-sounding but false metaphysical theories may go on supporting them forever, as there is no experimental test by which to judge them. I take this to be good reason to be skeptical of metaphysical theories in general.  Any number of theories of the nature of reality can be constructed, and many have been; and, naturally, some metaphysical theory might be correct.  But as long as we cannot have evidentiary reason to prefer one to all the rest, and cannot thereby distinguish among their respective merits as descriptions of reality, we should probably withhold our belief in any of them.  (This includes accounts of various sorts of deity or afterlife.)  We should not expect our untested and usually untestable metaphysical theories, sans  evidence, to be any more reliable than our scientific theories before they’ve been tested; if most of the latter turn out to be false, surely so must most of the former.