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A framing narrative imposes narrative duties and obligation on its writer. For example, we all ‘know’ that The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion were translated from the Red Book of Westmarch, which was chiefly written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, expanded by Samwise Gamgee, and amended by his descendants, the Fairbairns of Westmarch.

But I would argue that many writers implicitly adopt a metanarrative identity even when they do not provide an explicit framing narrative. After all, a writer is a craftsman of prose—responsible for choosing their words with intention—and if an impression is clearly conveyed, does it really matter whether it is conveyed through explicit statements or via contextual clues?¹ For instance, suppose the author of a story set in mediæval times (or fantasy pseudo-mediæval) goes out of their way to avoid terminology that rely on modern knowledge in favour of circumlocutions, using descriptive language rather than words like “electricity”. The effect is one of a storyteller limited to knowledge of the world, presumably because they are situated in it. Albeit by implication rather than explicit statement, hasn’t this author taken on as much of a narrative poise as Tolkien with the Red Book? An anonymous and unknown poise, to be sure, but that’s just as true of many real-world books (we don’t know who wrote almost any of the books in the Bible, for example, yet many have distinctive voices).

By implication, then, the author is logically limited to the knowledge of a narrative world that is available within that world. That doesn't mean they can’t break the convention from time to time—we may or may not like it, but when Tolkien compares the firework dragon to a locomotive in The Fellowship of the Ring, we read it as an editorial or translation device: even if Bilbo wrote the original, the locomotive part was clearly the editor/translator, Tolkien, using imagery familiar to us—himself and the readers. But it does imply that the a author is less free to break the illusion on the other side of the divide between worlds: if they tell you things about the invented world that the anonymous narrator they pose as could not have known, it breaks the illusion. They may be a third-party ‘omniscient’ narrator, but such a narrator of a real-world story is only inferred to be ‘omniscient’ about the story, not about our actual world!

It gets even worse when characters break the same constraints, which is terribly common. For example, consider an uncharitable reading of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.² The magic system is—I would be remiss if I did not use the word “Newtonian”. Magically metabolising one metal will let you magnetically attract things; another, push them away. One will make you strong and tough, another more sensitive and hence better able to see and hear. —And so on. It appeals directly to my materialist heart;³ this is not a problem. What is a bit of a problem is the fact that I understand it so well. Why do I know the logic of how magic works in Sanderson’s books? Well, obviously it’s because he tells you…quite explicitly, repeatedly, and at length.⁴ Although there are some missing facts in the characters’ understanding of the magic system (“allomancy”), they seem to be pretty clear on the system, and certainly the narrator knows everything.

Let us pause to think how weird that is. (Leave the specifics of Mistborn behind—the very ‘hard’, Newtonian feel to the magic makes it a good, vivid picture, but I’m not here to harp on it.) Your average fantasy world is vaguely mediæval, usually a sort of quasi-‘high’-Middle-Ages thing, with the occasional bit of Early Mediæval (like Deverry) or pre-Industrial (Mistborn, kind of; Discworld, some books). Imagine a writer in that setting writing a story from the poise of an omniscient narrator. Think how they would describe, not magical forces, but physical ones. Not mythical beasts, just animals in faraway foreign lands. Not curses and blessings, but ordinary diseases. Think how poorly understood all these phenomena were in the year 500, or 1000, or 1750. People have always had some notion of things, but even that may be flawed in ways difficult to imagine (consider physics going from Aristotelian to Newtonian, then Einstenian, then quantum). No one could have guessed that the hardness of a rock and the flash of lightning are both fundamentally down to electricity; and if here the same effects turn out to have a unifying cause, in other cases they may inappropriately group things—think how many diseases lurk behind the word “fever”. We may scoff at mediæval writers imagining griffins or unicorns, but to someone who would never come within a thousand miles of Africa, is a unicorn more absurd-seeming than an elephant?

But fantasy stories seem to be full of people who either know exactly what magical creatures are out there; or stubbornly refuse to believe in anything until it literally bites them; or they may have some wild superstitions instead of real knowledge of magical creatures, but any given character has either the one or the other. In reality, history did not see the study of the little-known neatly divided into categories according to what would eventually be discovered centuries later! There weren't proto-chemists on the left staring daggers at the woo-woo alchemists over on the right; woo-woo alchemists were the proto-chemists. Operating at the far reaches of knowledge, they had no way of distinguishing between a true rumour of the far and strange, and superstition.

So what happened in the world of Mistborn? Was there an allomantic Newton and a Maxwell of Metals who discovered, catalogued, systematised, and published on the laws and interactions of magic? Did all of our knowledgeable characters go through the school system to learn the Theoretical Allomancy?

Even if only the narrator seems to know too much, explaining everything about a magic system with no fuzziness or uncertainty around the edges has an uncanny effect. If I read a book and come out understanding exactly how the magic system works, it strikes me as unrealistic. What are the odds of someone writing a novel set in the real world and only ever mentioning things with which I am already familiar or which the narrative will explain to me? They seem rather slim to me; the moment your novel hints at the existence of, say, banking, or metropolitan transit planning, I know that the world of your story holds deep mysteries to which I shall never be privy. But a lot of fantasy novels feel rather sharply divided into things I understand perfectly well, which are common in the story; and…well, the things I don’t understand are on the outside, perhaps on the other side of the fourth wall. It is uncanny. If you blindfold me and put me in a wooded area, and I recognise every single species of plant around me…then I know I must be in a park, its flora picked from the very narrow selection of things I can immediately recognise. If I were in a real forest, I’d see some pine trees and some mosses I can’t name and an awful lot of plants I cannot classify even to the superfamily taxonomic level. Real forests are full of mysteries. There are plenty of things even the experts can only identify as “little brown mushrooms” or “little brown birds”, and nobody is an expert at everything.

All of this is to say that verisimilitude in world-building requires the presence of the mysterious and the unknown, because the real world is full of the mysterious and the unknown (and the moreso the lower the technology level of a story’s setting). Characters who know too much outright break the story’s logic, and in a looser and more implicit fashion, the same is true of a narrator whose omniscient poise is too omniscient. The forces and creatures that exist in the real world are imperfectly understood, so surely magical forces would also be misunderstood and surrounded by myths and misunderstandings; and a story that mentions only things fully and accurately understood feels unreal like a park is unreal, artificial, and stilted. There’s an obvious temptation for an author show off the world they spent so much time, energy, and creativity developing (do I ever—I’ve never written a story worth reading, but am an inveterate world-builder: I wish you could publish that and nothing else!), but that’s a temptation best resisted. There’s nothing wrong with the author knowing exactly how all the fantastic elements operate that they introduce into their world: in fact, it is much better if they do. But that does not mean that the narrator must know everything, inasmuch as the narrator is a character, a story-teller played directly by the author.

¹ Of course, the narrative fabric may not be entirely in harmony with the story, and that’s also fine as long as it is intentional. Careful phrasing may hide a twist (I haven’t read The Planet of the Apes, but I imagine it must be phrased rather deliberately), and a tone at odds with the text may do so for the sake of effect—telling a silly story with a somber tone can heighten the comedy (cf. the movie Airplane!); telling a dark story in a light-hearted tone can lend an edge of satire. But in all these cases, the author is choosing words intentionally for effect, not being misleading through sloppiness.

² I use them as a familiar example that has some of the aspects I want to discuss, but some of my concerns are ameliorated and some are arguably logically resolved. I know I’m being a bit unfair, but using a well-known story is too useful to give up. Sorry, Mr. Sanderson. I do like the books! At least enough to re-read twice so far.

³ Or more precisely, to the neuronal networks in my materialist brain responsible for the

⁴ Not in a way that’s bad prose. I don’t mean that he writes very repetitively, only that the information is repeated a few times across the several books to make sure it is clear to the reader. In terms of expository prose, I think that’s a positive.

To my mind, we often think of genres in literature (and perhaps other media¹) all wrong.

The existence of genres is inevitable. Human brains are rampant classification machines, and there's no way we could prevent people (likely even ourselves) from classifying things into genres. Take a hundred books at random from a library and place them on a shelf, and I'm sure you'll soon find yourself mentally grouping them into categories; maybe physically as well, grouping together books that seem like non-fiction, further by topic; while you may group fiction books by other criteria, like time period, whether the story is set in the real world or fictional one, and so on.

All of this is fine, but I think it's fundamentally the wrong approach to take to creating stories.² I think if you sit down to write a fantasy story, you're very likely to have a mental menu of items that you feel you probably should include, at least some of them; and a number of things that you feel do not belong in fantasy: Elves, dwarves, dragons, orcs, magic, and pseudo-mediæval environments on one hand; high technology and anything that seems badly anachronistic in a default pseudo-Tolkienesque setting on the other.

I would much rather people sat down and just created the world and the story they want without so much regard for imagined rules constraining the genre, as though Lester Del Rey's infamous list were international literary law. If that means you really want to combine demonology with hip hop; or explore how dragons would deal with helicopters, or with the ecological challenges of the Neolithic savanna; or how your favourite Western would have been different if the gunslinger was also a wizard…then why should someone's genre expectations of a fantasy novel constrain you? Why should you pre-commit your story to fit that mould before you've even written it?

Genres would still be around—they would emerge organically, both as readers pick the traits they consider genre-defining and classify books accordingly, and as writers (even if they unrealistically managed to shrug off all genre considerations) would still tend to cluster as they share favourites and inspirations. But it need not be so rigid. In today's world, I increasingly feel like genre classifications being imposed even prior to a work's inception is part of the awful machinery churning out “content” instead of things anyone should want to read—you may be able to create art without the prefabricated constraints of a genre, but you need the genre to create a formula. And we live in an age where, among many other dystopian problems, art is drowning in an endless sludge of “content”.

¹ Or perhaps not. Maybe media that are by their nature more collaborative but also more capital intensive would struggle to meaningfully exist without neat categories to fit into. The only medium I've ever seriously thought about working in is prose, where, give or take editorial input, a story really can be the work of a single person.

² I have some caveats here. If your livelihood depends on writing and targeting genre helps your livelihood, then of course you must; and even if I think that books might theoretically be better if more untethered from genre convention, I'd much rather my favourite authors write a bunch of solid genre works than one or two unpublished masterpieces no one will ever read. And of course some kinds of writing do require genre awareness: anything that aims to comment on its own genre must, of course, make sure to qualify for that genre.
If I thought about it, I also expect I could likely come up with an “In defence of genre” kind of post. This entry is one-sided by choice: because I want to focus on one side of the issue.

Suppose you’re a modern-day Grimm, utterly in love with folklore—perhaps traditions you grew up with; perhaps traditions you fell in love with because they are new and strange to you in a place you moved to as an adult. As you talk to people in the rural area about old stories, you come across a truly great one—perhaps it involves moose and moonshine—which you hear about from two old codgers who heard it from their respective grandfathers.

You love it; it’s brilliant; you immediately decide to write it down and publish it (whether as a short story or novella or academic treatise on folklore, you may decide)…but you’ve got a bit of a problem: You have two sources for your story, but they don’t quite agree. Each contains details missing from the other; and, worse, there are points on which the stories are incompatible, or flatly disagree.

How will you present these two stories, given their differences? I can think of a number of approaches, most of which I’ve seen in actual use. For example:

You might simply give both versions. I don’t think that needs much explanation: You can publish one story after the other.

Or, since they’re mostly the same story, you might annotate differences by giving one story as the main text and indicating differences in footnotes, endnotes, or marginal notes.

If you want the story to flow better and make it more of a narrative than an academic read—basically, if you want to be the final product to be a single, uninterrupted narrative—perhaps you’d rather supplement one version with the other by basically telling one version from beginning to end, but taking elements from the other that the first was missing. In this case, when the stories disagree, you might either prefer one over the other, or you might take a more archival view of things and want to preserve both versions, thus including anecdotes from the secondary story even when they introduce tension or contradictions.

You might take this one step further and harmonise the stories. In this case, you’d create your final version by including elements of both stories but making sure to explain away any tensions and reconcile any contradictions.

What you probably wouldn’t do—at least I wouldn’t—is to chrologically interleave the narratives. This peculiar approach works as if you took the first story and cut it up into short chunks—paragraphs or sometimes even sentences—and annotated them each with its chronological position in the story; then, did the same with the second version of the story; and finally, included all the pieces of both versions by taking them in strict chronological order, even if that sometimes means interleaving the stories: A/B/B/B/A/B/A/A/… And if you did this, surely you would at least make sure not to include all the many times that both stories agree, repeating the same details twice.

But if you were a biblical redactor, this is precisely what you might decide to do. In fact, it is what the writers who produced the final biblical text did with a number of well-known and important stories. When Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt, that’s two stories, or two versions of one story; in each case the basic gist is that he’s betrayed by his brothers, except that one plans to save him, but he is sold into slavery in Egypt before he can be thus saved; but the two versions disagree on why his brothers hated him, which brother wanted to spare him, or by whom he was sold. The story simply tells you that it was Reuben who decided to save him and also that it was Judah, and the editor does not appear to have done anything to either resolve or explain the contradiction: the text is a mess—the product of chronological interleaving. And the same is true of several other stories: for example, the Flood myth famously doesn’t make sense, and David’s introduction to Saul and fight with Goliath has similar doublets and contradictions (including the trivial but striking fact that David kills Goliath twice in immediate succession, first emphatically without a sword and second emphatically with one).

To me, this editorial decision is so profoundly puzzling that I cannot stop thinking about it. I am aware of some common ingredients in standard answers to why the text looks this way: A great value placed, perhaps due to political necessity, on preserving both traditions rather than prioritising the one over the other. The fact that while some doublets can be preserved by repeating similar stories (someone passing off his wife as his sister logically could happen more than once), other things can’t be repeated like that (even if it’s awkward to have the Flood last only forty days and one hundred and fifty days in one story, you can’t tell one after another within the same narrative if there’s to be only one deluge). And yet, as explanations, they feel as fragmentary to me as the preceding sentences might strike the reader; I still don’t really understand how someone could find this a satisfying solution, on purely literary grounds; it simply isn’t how a story works in my mind. (And this has nothing to do with whether you treat this as putative history or recognise it as pure myth; my problem here has to do with literary structure, not historicity.)

I think what I’d really like to see is a book that explores this topic by giving a broader overview of narrative construction in general and in the Ancient Near East in particular, compares it to the development and (if ever applicable) recombination or reconciliation of parallel narratives in other cultures, and so on. Unfortunately, if such a book exists, I have not been able to find it. If I had infinite time and energy, I would go back to university, earn another degree or two, and write that book as a monograph. If I instead had infinite money, I’d endow a grant or scholarship somewhere in return for somebody writing it. As it is, I suspect I may go to my grave many years from now still wondering why, oh, why those biblical redactors had such a profoundly weird editorial approach.

How is this the way anyone decides to combine two stories?

A quick comparison of the issues I can recall at the moment, in order to share somewhere that tables aren’t conveniently available.

Matthew	Luke
Takes place before 4 BCE (while Herod the Great rules in Judea).	Takes place a decade later, in 6 CE (while Quirinius is governor of Syria).
Joseph and Mary appear to be living in Jerusalem.	Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth.
Jesus is born in a house (presumably, Joseph’s).	Joseph has to travel to Bethlehem due to a census. Jesus is born in a stable.
Jesus is worshipped by magi, apparently at least months later, since they had time to see the star rise at his birth and travel from the "East", and because when trying to kill Jesus, Herod has all children aged two and under killed, not just newborns.	Jesus is worshipped by shepherds.
(A month after Jesus is born, the magi can’t even have arrived yet!)	A month after Jesus is born (after the rites of purification), the parents return to Nazareth.
Afer the magi leave, the family flee to Egypt to avoid Herod [the Great].	(Nothing.)
After Herod dies, the family return to Israel, but rather than return to Bethlehem, they move to Galilee, because Herod’s son Herod Archelaus rules in Judea.	(Nothing.)

There are some additional problems.

Matthew

Matthew actually begins with Jesus’s alleged genealogy. This is largely drawn from the Old Testament, but because Matthew has a theological notion that there’s something special about blocks of 14 generations between important people, he actually leaves out a number of people in the Old Testament genealogies.
Supposedly, the magi find the house when the star stops over it, but…well, obviously, a star cannot stop over a specific house; even if it’s something like a comet or magical meteorite, you can’t possibly pinpoint a specific house by its location.
Even though historians like Josephus wrote very critically about Herod and catalogued a number of his bloody deeds, there’s no mention of an indiscriminate slaughter of all the toddlers in Bethlehem. This was probably invented as part of Matthew’s “New Moses” narrative.
Galilee is strange place to flee to, because Herod’s other son, Herod Antipas, ruled Galilee: but the gospel is explicit that this is why they move to Galilee rather than return to Judea.

Luke

It is a bizarre census that can’t have happened as described: there was no empire-wide census, and for taxation purposes it makes no sense to have people return to the putative birthplace of their ancestors a thousand years prior and register there, rather than where they are being taxed, which is where the information is wanted! That’s even if it were logistically possible, which of course it wasn’t: how would everyone know their lineage going back that far? how would everyone be uprooted to traipse off to ancestral home towns? In short, it’s a census that could not have been made to happen, and would have been a terrible idea even if it could.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/262220.html

			DRAMATIS PERSONAE

JOB: A rich, good, and very pious man.
GOD: A syncretic Middle Eastern deity.
SATAN: Ha-Satan, the Accuser, an adviser to GOD. Not the Devil.
JOB'S FRIENDS: Friends of Job.


			ENTER JOB.

				JOB
I'm so happy. I'm rich, and have ten children, and lots of livestock. And I'm
oh, so very pious.

			EXIT JOB.


			ENTER GOD AND SATAN.

				GOD
Look at Job. He totally loves me.

				SATAN
Bet you he wouldn't love you if his life sucked.

				GOD
I'll take that bet. Go fuck him up, you'll see.

				SATAN
Right ho.

			EXEUNT.


			(SATAN fucks up JOB's life.)


			ENTER JOB.

				JOB
All my livestock and servants are lost and my children died. This sucks. Oh 
well, God gives and God takes. I still love him.

			EXIT JOB.


			ENTER GOD AND SATAN.

				GOD
See? I told you. Pay up.

				SATAN
Fine, fine... Still, we only took his property, like livestock and children.
People only really care about themselves. We didn't really hurt HIM.

				GOD
What are you driving at?

				SATAN
Double or nothing. We fuck him up personally, he'll start hating you.

				GOD
Ha! Sucker. I'll take that. Go do your worst.

			EXEUNT.


			(SATAN afflicts JOB with boils and misery.)


			ENTER JOB.

				JOB
Well, now it REALLY sucks. Still, I love the shit out of that GOD.

			ENTER JOB'S FRIENDS.
			(They sit quietly for a long time.)

				JOB
Woe is me! My life is ruined, and I'm innocent. This sucks.

				JOB'S FRIENDS
You must have done something wrong. You're a nice guy, but still, this must
be GOD punishing you.

				JOB
I've done nothing wrong! My life sucks. I wish I'd never been born. I wish I
could face GOD so I could prove my innocence.

				JOB'S FRIENDS
No, you must have done SOMETHING wrong. This must be GOD punishing you. Can't
be for nothing.

				JOB
Seriously, my life sucks and I'm innocent. If I could face GOD in a court of
law, I'd prove my innocence. I'm being treated unfairly.

				JOB'S FRIENDS
No, it's definitely your fault. GOD is punishing you, and that must mean that
you're a bad person, somehow.

				JOB
Oh, just shut up, you lot. You're not convincing anyone. If I could address
GOD, he'd have to admit that I've done nothing to deserve this.

			ENTER GOD.

				GOD
I'm way stronger than you. Look how mighty I am! Can you beat up all kinds of
wild animals? I can, because I'm so mighty. Were you there when I made things?
Are you as strong as me? Well, are you?

				JOB
Oh, GOD, you're so big and strong and could totally beat me up. I relinquish
any claim on justice from you.

				GOD
That's more like it.

			EXEUNT.


			(GOD gives JOB new livestock and ten
			 replacement children.)


			ENTER JOB.

				JOB
Now I'm happy again. I have twice as many livestock and just as many children
as before. They're not the same children, but whatever, as long as I've got
ten of them, it's all the same.

			EXEUNT.

			FIN.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/261915.html

When people talk about free will, in the context of philosophy, without knowing the terminology of the field, they often seem to mean something like libertarian free will—a position not related (except etymologically) to political libertarianism: the belief that you “could have done otherwise”: your will is properly free if, and only if, having to re-make a prior decision under perfectly identical circumstances, you can choose to do otherwise the second time.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that libertarian free will is logically coherent. Any event—decision or otherwise—is either deterministic or non-deterministic. If it is deterministic, this means that it is causally determined: the state of the universe around me, along with my disposition in the form of knowledge or beliefs, opinions, desires, goals, and so forth, fully determine what I will do. If you were omniscient, you could in principle predict my every action. On the other hand, if the decision is non-deterministic, this means that there is an element of randomness to it: to some degree, my decision is not determined by reality around me, nor by what I think or want. Intuitively, this does not seem to me like “free will”: in fact, as much as the deterministic versions limits freedom, the non-deterministic version limits will.

As far as I can tell, libertarian free will is supposed to occupy some magical middle ground that’s neither deterministic nor non-deterministic. This violates the law of the excluded middle—that is, it requires propositional logic to be wrong! This seems absurd and prima facie wrong, and even if it were true we could ipso facto not reason about it.

Note that, although the terms often arise in free will discussions, I have not hitherto said anything about materialism and dualism. This is because I honestly don’t see that it particularly matters. As it happens, I am a materialist: I think that our minds are what our brains do. But my argument about free will does not depend on this. If you want to suppose that your mind is really some sort of non-material spirit stuff, this does not affect the dilemma between (non-free) determinism and (non-willed) non-determinism. Dualism does not solve the problem of free will, because the problem is not about physical versus non-physical causation, but rather about the logic of causality itself. Christian apologists often argue quite vehemently about this, because metaphysical free will is essential to their theology; but their arguments seem largely to amount to an assault on physical causation without ever addressing the true problem—and as a rule they are quite fond of the laws of logic, so the excluded middle remains a major problem. Put bluntly, they want to absolve their God of responsibility for the things that we do out of “free will” in spite of his supposed omnipotence and omniscience. It does not work.

If a logical exposition exists to get out of this quandary, I've failed to find it and would be fascinated to hear it, but I'm not holding my breath. As far as I can tell, attempts to salvage libertarian free will are less clear-headed philosophy than desperate attempts to justify what we all intuitively feel in the face of what is logically true.

Furthermore, although I can readily see the objections to free will raised by the spectre of determinism, it's not that clear that they have all their apparent force when you look more closely. Normally, I think of a free choice as one where no one is constraining or coercing me. It can be deterministic. It can even be predictable, which is much stronger than merely deterministic: if I strongly prefer chocolate to vanilla ice cream, and you know I do, I can still freely choose to have chocolate every time. The fact that you know doesn't constrain me. I could choose vanilla if I wanted to—the fact that, given that I don't want to, I never do, is precisely what makes my decision free, even though it is an explicitly determined choice!

In fact, every good decision is deterministic. If I choose according to my best knowledge and current beliefs, and make the choice that best aligns with my dispositions and desires, in the sense of (so far as my knowledge can tell) being optimal toward achieving my goals, that is a deterministic choice: but if I had some greater metaphysical freedom, it's still the one I’d hope to make. A non-deterministic component can only serve to randomly push me away from this optimal choice. Is that more free? And is it truly willed if it is random?

I’m not terribly excited about the term compatibilism, but I suppose that in effect, I largely am a compatibilist, and my ἀπολογία can be summarised as: The alternative to deterministic free will entails a freedom to randomly act against my own interest, which perverts the word freedom into incoherence. As Dennett might say, that kind of free will worth having is deterministic.

Perhaps the free will problem is best addressed by Ordinary Language Philosophy:

Non-ordinary uses of language are thought to be behind much philosophical theorizing, according to Ordinary Language philosophy: particularly where a theory results in a view that conflicts with what might be ordinarily said of some situation. Such ‘philosophical’ uses of language, on this view, create the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve. This is often because, on the Ordinary Language view, they are not acknowledged as non-ordinary uses, and attempt to be passed-off as simply more precise (or ‘truer’) versions of the ordinary use of some expression – thus suggesting that the ordinary use of some expression is deficient in some way. But according to the Ordinary Language position, non-ordinary uses of expressions simply introduce new uses of expressions.
[Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Maybe the fundamental problem of the free will debate is that it has developed a problematic concept of free will that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have the discussion. In practice, determinism is perfectly compatible with every kind of freedom we care about or can measure; but in philosophy, philosophers and theologians have defined a problematic concept into being. In that case, we can explain it as being a matter of two different things: We do have free will, in the OLP sense, and this is compatible with determinism; but we do not have [libertarian] free-will—which, however, does not actually matter in reality.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/261757.html

I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading Bart Ehrman, a famous scholar of New Testament studies:

They are all excellent books and I highly recommend them; you can also find lectures and interviews on YouTube. Apart from being simply fascinating as studies of how the mythology of Christianity developed, it has also given me a new perspective on the Bible.

First, let’s acknowledge that the Bible is indisputably an extremely important book, since it underpins so much of Western civilisation; it has greatly impacted the whole world, for better and for worse. It has certainly affected literature. For this reason alone, if nothing else, I think it’s worth being familiar with it. I think I know a fair bit about the Bible—probably more than the average Christian!—but but I have not, in fact, read the whole damned thing; just an expurgated version when I was a child, and various excerpts and verses since. I’ve long thought that I need to, for a variety of reasons.

I have long thought of the Bible as a rather foolish work, in some important ways. After all, it contains lots of internal contradictions, and even presents a set of prima facie incompatible moral frameworks. If it were written by one person, it would have to be somebody profoundly unhinged. This criticism certainly applies to the literalist, inerrantist “word of God” interpretation of the Bible.

But of course I have never bought into that. I may not have known the details of how, say, the New Testament canon was formed over the first few Christian centuries as a result of various warring factions, ‘orthodoxies’, and ‘heresies’; but I knew damned well that the Bible was in fact written by a large number of people over a large number of centuries.

Somehow, though, one perspective never properly occurred to me until Ehrman emphasised it. (I feel a bit stupid and embarrassed to admit that it hadn’t, but honesty above all:) They are different books by different authors. Obvious? Let’s think more closely: It’s not one book written by one large committee of debatable competence, but sixty-six books, by an unknown number of authors (most of them unknown). It’s an anthology. They wrote separately. Their beliefs are related, to be sure, but not identical.

This means that it is not fair to dismiss the whole thing in the same way as though it were a monolith written by one confused person. Rather, the books need to be considered individually if we are to fairly evaluate their literary and moral merit, or lack thereof, as the case may be. The author of Ecclesiastes is not responsible for the brutal, tribal, genocidal violence gloated over by whoever wrote Deuteronomy. Nor can we fairly blame each author for being inconsistent with the others; after all, they didn’t collaborate. Earlier writers couldn’t know about later ones, and later writers may have simply thought that the earlier ones were wrong; or for that matter been unaware of them. They may not have had any idea at all that they would ever be combined in one canon.

This is not least true for the New Testament, where in particular, it sounds like the life of Jesus that ‘Mark’¹ believed in is a story with a good bit of pathos that’s rather diminished by reading it as though it were part of a whole with the other gospels, rather than letting it stand on its own. As Bart Ehrman says:

…The two portrayals of Jesus going to his death in Mark and Luke are radically different, [and] recognizing this radical difference is of utmost importance for understanding what each author is trying to say. The in-shock, silent Jesus of Mark, who is betrayed, denied, abandoned, and mocked by everyone, who wonders at the very end why God himself has forsaken him, simply is not the same as the calm confident Jesus of Luke, who knows God is on his side, who understands what is happening to him, and who knows what will happen to him after it happens to him: he will wake up in paradise.

And so, it’s simply unfair to ‘Mark’ to read his book while pretending that it also says what ‘Luke’ [later] wrote. It robs the story of its pathos and power and makes it worse literature. And this is, after all, literature. I will happily ridicule the whole thing as belief, but the fact that it’s ridiculous to think it’s true does not excuse dismissing it as literature. After all, I love The Lord of the Rings but would hold an extremely low opinion of anyone who believed in hobbits; and in fact it would stand up very poorly as a model of reality.

So I got myself a Bible, specifically the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, NRSV translation, which comes highly recommended. I expect a very great slog, but I do want to read this thing, and I want to try to approach it, as best I can, with an open mind to its literary qualities. Obviously, the literary qualities of some parts will be atrocious, with mind-numbing series of begats, but at least I will try to be honest about it.

Though I may have to print myself some warning labels, to feel less embarrassed about reading this thing in public.

WARNING: This is a work of fiction. Do NOT TAKE it literally.

¹ I.e. the author of The Gospel According to Mark, whose name may not have been [the Aramaic equivalent of] Mark, traditionally identified as a travelling companion of the apostle Peter. In fact, all four canonical gospels were written anonymously, and Christians a century later attributed them to people close to the inner circle, presumably to lend them authority.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/261429.html

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate

Occam’s Razor is a famous philosophical device, a pragmatic solution when faced with multiple competing hypotheses: always choose the one that necessitates the fewest additional assumptions.

Wikipedia contains this description:

Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor and in Latin lex parsimoniae, which means 'law of parsimony') is a problem-solving principle devised by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian.

The principle can be interpreted as

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

…

In science, Occam's razor is used as a heuristic technique (discovery tool) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models, rather than as an arbiter between published models. In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there is always an infinite number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypothesis to prevent them from being falsified; therefore, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.

I’d argue, however, that the paragraph cited above actually contains at least the seeds of good reasons why it is more than a mere heuristic device. Consider: There is always an infinite number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypothesis…. This means that for every concrete question, there is an infinite number of answers; one of them is maximally correct, some are plain wrong, and an infinite number fit the data but make unjustified and unparsimonious assumptions. But then, the simplest explanation that fits the data is actually very special, and not just because it’s more testable, but because of that privileged position. It alone accounts for the observed data without adding extraneous assumptions.

This leaves us with a choice, not just on a heuristic and testing level, but on an epistemological level, too: Do we accept only the one explanation permitted by the data yet spared by Occam’s Razor, or do we accept more explanations? If we do not restrict ourselves to only the simplest working possibility, I do not know of any reason why we should not accept all possibilities. Then, since we have an infinite number of possible explanations, whereof only one is maximally correct, the odds of our choosing the best solution are one out of infinity—which is to say, zero. Neglecting parsimony, then, does more harm than merely making it harder to test our hypotheses: it statistically guarantees that we will choose the wrong explanations!

So:

Occam’s Razor provides a rule for choosing a single explanation with strong heuristic properties and avoiding the arbitrary choice of complex solutions that, statistically, are certain to be wrong in detail.

That’s perhaps a bit abstract, so let’s ground it a bit. This actually came up in a discussion on religious epistemology, where I set up something like this: Agnostic (sometimes called “weak”) atheists make a negative existential claim, not based on the existence of positive evidence for non-existence, but based on the lack of positive evidence for existence. Or, in plain language: I’m not an atheist because I have evidence there’s no god; I’m an atheist because there’s no evidence of a god.

But then, runs a certain standard counter-argument, the agnostic atheist is on the same rational footing as the theist. Neither has evidence either directly supporting their position, nor directly refuting the contrary. (Perhaps, this may go on to say, the ideally rational stance is ‘strict’ agnosticism, apparently meaning a refusal to commit to any stance on likelihood.)

This, however, I reject on the basis of a stronger Occam’s Razor.¹ The reason is this: Theists and I agree on the existence of physical reality, each other, rocks, trees, suns, moons, and so on. When we run out of established physical reality, I stop. The theist goes on to add unsupported assumptions—and that’s where the trouble sets in. After all, if you are willing to accept one god without evidence, why not two? Or three? Or a billion? If you accept (though you cannot demonstrate it) that the universe was designed by God, how can you be sure it wasn’t actually designed by aliens pretending to be God? Or wizards posing as aliens pretending to be God? Or Smurfs dressed up as wizards posing as aliens… Well, you see where this goes. I can extend this list into infinity.²

If you are willing to accept any proposition without positive evidence, on the mere basis of inability or to disprove it, or impossibility of so doing, then either you must regard all such propositions as equally valid; or you must have a method of separating your proposition from the infinite number of other propositions with the same property (the property that it hasn’t been disproven, or is not falsifiable); or you are being completely arbitrary and no longer rational. But you can’t have a rational method for separating it, for if you did, it would have to be positive evidence, and you wouldn’t face this problem to begin; so either you are being arbitrary and non-rational, or you must accept them all.

And if you hold that the infinity of possible explanations is valid territory to enter, then your preferred explanation is wrong. How do I justify this assertion? Suppose that each explanation can be laser-etched onto a grain of sand, and we take all possible explanations and let the wind carry them into the sandy desert. This is an infinity of explanations, and as the text is too small to read, you cannot know which is which. With no positive evidence to point to any one explanation, your choice is arbitrary relative to the truth. Maybe one of these explanations is the correct one—but it’s one grain of sand in the desert; and it is an infinite desert. When you bend down and pick out a single grain of sand, I can be confident that you chose the wrong one.

I prefer a more consistent principle of reason, Occam’s Razor: Choose the simplest explanation that fits observations (id est, that isn’t falsified). If our investigation has been thorough enough, it is the right explanation. If not, then it is a good explanation to start from as we investigate further, and our investigation won’t be cluttered up by arbitrary (and almost certainly wrong) assumptions.

That is why, in the absence of existential evidence either positive or negative, assuming the negative is more reasonable than assuming the positive. We should be agnostic in the strict sense of being prepared to admit additional evidence—but that does not mean we should be holding our breath.

¹ This is pretty close to Hitchen’s Razor; in a way, it’s the two razors put together: Occam’s and Hitchens’s. Mine is a two-bladed philosophical razor!

² Or if not infinity, then at least until the text of my post exceeds storage limitations. I wonder if I could write a Haskell program to generate an infinite list of increasingly unparsimonious complications…

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/261241.html

I recently watched a video of a debate between famous apologist and Liar for Christ, Dr. William Lane Craig, and well-known cosmologist and theoretical physicist, Dr. Lawrence Krauss. Obviously all my sympathies lay with Dr. Krauss, so it was with some mortification that I watched him apparently just fail to understand Craig’s distinction between epistemic and ontological basis for moral behaviour.

Those terms weren’t used in the parts I saw, but here is how I understand it:

An epistemic claim would be of the nature If not for God or revealed truth, we could not know what is morally right or wrong.
An ontological claim is different and asserts that God is the basis, not for the knowledge of moral truth, but the existence of moral truth.

In other words, the epistemic claim is concerned with how we can know what is right and wrong, while the ontological claim deals with how there can (supposedly) be a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’.

Craig, for example, claims that everyone is designed to have an innate sense of what is right and wrong, and therefore does not claim that religion is epistemically necessary to assess moral propositions, but does claim that his god is ontologically necessary. This distinction is what Krauss loudly and repeatedly failed to appreciate.

That’s not to say that I think much of the argument itself. The standard objection is a chestnut that’s been around for well over two thousand years and never convincingly resolved: the Euthyphro Dilemma. Its modern formulation when addressing Christian dogma runs something like this?

Is God good because he does what is intrinsically good, or because what is good is defined by what God commands?
If the former, then there exists an objective moral truth outside of God, who is therefore not ontologically necessary.
If the latter, then “God is good” is a circular and hence meaningless claim, and in fact whatever God commanded would by definition be “good”, regardless of whether it resembles what we in actuality think of as good.

Craig is a firm believer in the latter option, and to his dubious credit he carries it all the way by affirming the so-called Divine Command Theory. According to DCT, if God says to kill every man, woman, child, and head of livestock in the land you invade (1 Samuel 15), then it’s right and morally good to do so; and Craig has consistently defended this view: The genocide described in the book of Samuel¹ was morally right. It was morally good to kill all those babies.

Personally, I find this view reprehensible if not downright monstrous. But there are further problems with this view that I don’t see brought up.

If God defines Good, he cannot be trusted

If whatever God wills is (by definition) good, then “good” is arbitrary (as is often pointed out). But this is not merely a problem for ontological grounding. Christian apologists like Craig argue that it’s not arbitrary, because to do other than what is in fact (as we instinctively see it) good is against God’s nature…but so what? On the view that good is defined by God’s will, there’s no real reason to suppose that it cannot change tomorrow. Craig would probably raise a lot of arguments to the effect that God has promised not to, it’s not in his nature, and so on; but how does he know that? Under DCT, it’s not wrong for God to deceive Craig about what his nature is: if he wants to, it’s good by definition. It’s not wrong for him to change his mind about what’s good: if he wants to change his mind, that’s good by definition. In fact, it’s rather Nineteen eighty-four-ish: It is wrong to kill people. It has always been wrong to kill people and always will be. It is good to kill Amalekites…

Craig fails to notice the beam in his own eye

But there’s a deeper yet much simpler problem with Craig’s view, which is this: He says that what God wills is by definition good, and that God has the right to determine this because he created the universe, owns us all, and has the right to do with us as he pleases. But this is a naked assertion. Craig claims that DCT provides an objective view of morality, meaning presumably one with no arbitrary propositions accepted axiomatically, and yet ultimately even his own moral view is arbitrary and axiomatic, too. When Krauss says it’s bad to cause suffering, Craig asks Why?—fair enough, and I fault Krauss for failing to understand this question: I think Craig is right when he implies that Krauss is relying on what amounts to an arbitrary axiom.² But Craig’s own argument is no better, because when he says that God’s will defines what is good, even someone who agrees with him might well ask Why? Craig will say it’s because God created and therefore owns the universe and everyone in it: to this I would retort Why does creating the universe give him the right to do what he wants with it? Craig spends a good deal of time insisting that you cannot get from a factual to a normative statement—you can’t get from an is to an ought—and then he blithely goes and does that very thing in the very same breath.

¹ Fortunately, it most likely never actually happened.

² Philosophically arbitrary—of course, it’s not arbitrary in terms of our neural wiring.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/261097.html

Of course, sex workers don’t actually sell their bodies: like everyone else, they sell services. The “selling bodies” line is used simply for shock value and adds an assumption that it’s wrong into the question itself. But still, you might ask, why those, why sell sexual services? I think it's for the same reason that men become fishermen, which is to say that it varies, and may include

They are forced into it, as happens with tragic frequency on fishing boats off the coast of East Asia. Literal slavery is unfortunately not dead.
They have no other options, though they wish they did. In some places there are no jobs, and even if you loathe the very sight of water, let alone the stink of fish, your choice is between fishing and starving.
They have no access to better jobs. If the choice is between fishing and cleaning toilets, you might choose fishing.
They see it as just another job. To some people, fishing isn't special. Everybody has to earn a living; why not through fishing?
The money tempts them. The king crab fishery is hard and dangerous work, but a captain can make $200k in a season and take the rest of the year off, if they want.
They genuinely enjoy the work. Personally I don't get it—I love the sea and enjoy fishing under certain circumstances, but turning it from a private pleasure to a job would make me miserable. But even if it wouldn't suit me, I have no reason to think that there aren't people who love it and cannot get enough, and even if some proponents are just putting on a brave face, it seems foolish and rudely dismissive to insist that someone who claims enjoy it must be lying. Different strokes for different folks.

Personally, I think the poor fishermen kept as slaves deserve help, to be freed and helped to find new means of subsistence, lest they have no option to go back to a now angrier and warier ship owner. Child labour is horrible and should never be tolerated. Those who regard the job as a foul, stinking drudgery should have better opportunities. And obviously all fishermen should enjoy the protection of occupational health and safety laws. But who am I to criticise the others for their choice? It would be foolish to judge their job satisfaction by how I feel about the job, and if some people sneer at the hands-on, blue collar work, that's snobbery and classism we are better off without. If they're treated poorly for their profession, it's the ill-treatment we should stop, not the fishing!

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/260420.html

Or, Satirical depictions of religious leaders should be illegal, says Ottawa imam.

This is a fascinating study in the art of getting things completely backwards. It should be mentioned up front that this guy (wrong-headed though he otherwise is) does denounce the terrorist attacks and refer to the terrorists as disturbed individuals—he’s disingenuous but not an apologist for monsters. (Nor did he claim that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists bore the responsibility for their own deaths, unlike some old, white, male Christians¹.) That said:

"Imtiaz Ahmed...said it should be against the law to publish cartoons that depict religious figures in a derogatory way.
“Of course we defend freedom of speech, but it has to be balanced. There has to be a limit. There has to be a code of conduct,” Ahmed said."
“We believe that any kind of vulgar expression about any sacred person of any religion does not constitute the freedom of speech in any way at all.”
Ahmed said there should be limits placed on freedom of speech to prevent the publication of offensive material. He says that seems to be the case for events such as the Holocaust. Members of the public denounce those who say the Holocaust never happened.

It’s worth noting that his position is in fact against free speech. He’s for free speech…unless it’s just too offensive. However, the legal right to free speech is entirely about offensive speech; after all, it’s only once speech has been deemed offensive that anyone wants to silence it, and therefore only offensive speech ever needs, and uses, legal protection. In practice, “free speech except for really offensive speech’ is exactly equivalent to no free speech at all. (Incidentally, his words are incredibly offensive to free speech advocates; but of course he wants special protection only for religious speech, on the basis of…who knows?)

His remark about public denouncement of Holocaust denial is an even more stunning miss, because public denouncement of offensive remarks is precisely what free speech advocates strive for. Legal protection of free expression necessarily includes the protection of responses to said speech. That’s the whole idea of the principle: Let everyone speak their mind, and let those who are in the wrong be defeated by having their ideas exposed, rebutted, and rejected, not by shutting them up and forcing them to nurse their grievances and resentment in private.

¹ Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. Bill Donohue, everybody.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/260204.html

Just got back from a helicopter flight to, over, and landing in the Grand Canyon. I have a bad track record with outings, but this was sublime (though I'm not sure if anyone could tell, as it was sublime in a manner that had me wrapped in my own headspace).

The Grand Canyon itself is, well, famously grand, but focusing so much on it does a great disservice to the surrounding landscape, which defies description. I was about to construct an analogy involving craftsmen and chisels, but to compare it to human art would be to do the country a disservice and to demean it: It was not carved, but magnificently eroded.

I would not have thought that a landscape so arid would be so shaped by waters, but the entire landscape was full of dry water-courses, canyons, and arroyos; there was little water to be seen, but its trace was everywhere. (Maybe this is because it is so arid, and the soil therefore contains much less organic matter to soak and bind up the water, so that when it does rain, it flows unimpeded?) It was interspersed with cliffs and hills and small mountains -- but never a rolling landscape. Rather, craggy ridges and scarps thrust into the air, seeming to defy geology. One hulking ridge was all rusty-red down one side (from, yes, rust), whereas the other crumbled away in a dark umber, nearly black. In places, ridges jutted up at forty-five degree angles, yet were banded with what for all the world looked like the bands of sedimentary layers. Were they sediments, and were those ridges thrust up tectonically? If not, what other process was responsible? In one place a stepped ridge was in at least four different colours, each step running along the ridge distinct -- the first white, the next yellow, then rust, and finally that dark umber.

Nor was it a dead landscape. Arid, yes, and probably that is why it is so geologically dramatic, because it is thus free of not one but two great sources of erosion, rainfall and organic factors; yet though the great part of the ground was bare and dry, still you'd never have been more than a few steps from a cactus, or spiny bush, or other plant (tough, dry, spiny, thick-leaved) that I cannot even categorise. I saw no animal life save flies, a crow, and a few sea-birds on Lake Meade (which barely counts), but there was a ubiquitous buzz of insects. Somehow this appealed to me even more in some ways than a forest (though I do love to walk in a forest), perhaps because it seemed comprehensible. I don't know the few dozen important plant species, nor yet the insects and many lizards and so on, but in this arid and therefore sparser, slower-moving ecosystem, it had an air, it looked as though one might with study figure it out -- not like even a temperate forest, where I wouldn't even care to guess the order of magnitude of the number of important species. This isn't to say that I dislike a forest just because its ecosystem is too far beyond my grasp, but rather that the lure of attainable comprehension was another attraction of the desert.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/259940.html

Whenever a religious fringe group rises up in arms, be it Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Christian murderers of abortion providers, or whatever, pundits amass to fight at the steps of the podium to be first to proclaim that what those people do is not motivated by religion, that "real religion" is not like that. This is bizarre, and either dishonest or foolish.

Let's be clear: I don't like Islam, but there are about a billion and a half Muslims out there who aren't terrorists, the vast majority of whom would (I presume) be no more eager to decapitate people than I would. I am not suggesting that, for instance, ISIS aren't a fringe group. Of course they are. (And of course there are lots of non-Muslim Arabs, and the large majority of Muslims aren't Arabs to begin with.) Nor do I think that Islam is inherently more vicious than Christianity, though the latter has been somewhat defanged by the Enlightenment.

That said, it's very odd that these commentators always insist that any evil whatsoever cannot be motivated by religion, as "properly" understood. It's always other factors -- political, historical, cultural. Of course, all that context is always significant, and sometimes religious divisions are secondary (IRA?), but claiming that it's about history and culture instead of religion is an implicit assertion that religion has no influence on culture and history. If someone says that people are never motivated to evil by religion, they're implying that people's beliefs do not influence their behaviour; or perhaps that religious beliefs aren't important enough to be acted upon.

Well, that's what they would be implying, at any rate, were they not busily committing logical fallacies to protect, pardon me, the sacred cow of religion. If someone does something nice and credits “do unto others” or “whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers”, if Muslims give to charity and say it's because the Quran tells them to, everyone is happy to accept their stated motivation. But the moment they do something bad, it is widely denied that their motivation could possibly be what they say it is, even if they can cite verses in their support. “No religion condones the killing of innocents,” said Obama, apparently unfamiliar with Psalm 137-9, Hosea 13:16, and other pleasant tidbits.

I don't believe in any of this. I believe that when someone claims to act out of religious conviction, the possibility should be entertained that they may be telling the truth, whether the act be good or evil; moreover, that even if an interpretation is a minority view, that doesn't disqualify it from being religious. I believe that many people take their religion seriously and do act on their beliefs, sometimes to great good and sometimes to great evil. Let me repeat that: Religion in general, and certainly the big monotheistic ones, can motivate people just as easily to good and evil. That, precisely, is the problem—not that people of any religion are somehow intrinsically evil, but that people mistake scriptures for moral compasses.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/259760.html

When I think about the awful shit happening around the world right now—whether on the murderous level of ISIS (which I shall speak no more of qua too fucking depressing) or the sordid pettiness of the coproliths from 4chan behind #GamerGate, I often find myself in a state not so much of moral outrage as weary bafflement, unable to comprehend the kind of mentality behind it. I don’t think of myself as notably nice, and on occasion I can out of sheer irritability be petty and unpleasant (above baseline levels). Yet the thought of launching a campaign of black hat hacking, libel, and fraud to ruin someone’s career, livelihood, and life, merely because their opinions offend me, feels…unthinkable, quite literally: I can verbalise it, but I don’t know that I can actually think it per se. Thomas Nagel wondered what it is like to be a bat: to see the world through senses and perceptions completely different from those of humans. I do, too, but (albeit with less interest and more distaste) I also wonder what it is like to be that kind of active misogynist.

I read once, a long time ago, the claim that in order to truly understand something, you must believe it—that is, at least briefly entertain the notion, even though you will discard it in the next moment.¹ I do not know whether this is true, but it always seemed to me that it has a ring of truth to it.² I can verbally describe how bats perceive textures with sound modulation and motion via Doppler effects and shifting frequencies, how a particularly base and virulent form of religious extremism perverts people to cutting other people’s heads off, or how criticism of their preferred monoculture appears to stir some basement-dwellers into fomenting anger, but I have no sense at all of the qualia involved.

Sometimes I find myself wondering to what degree this is emotional self defence. Perhaps (part of?) the reason I don’t understand is that I don’t permit myself to understand—that I hesitate to gaze into and have that abyss stare back at me. Of course I don’t want to experience the qualia of being these people: after all, I find them vile and do not ever want to be like them. Perhaps that implies (in the logical sense) that I do not permit myself to understand them. It’s certainly pleasing to be able to honestly say that I cannot fathom what manner of mind would stoop to these levels.

That might not be an unalloyed good, though, because it sounds an awful lot like a defensive flavour of othering, of rejecting these people utterly and as morally subhuman³ to avoid having to suffer the quale of comparing myself to them and finding any moral similarities, however tenuous. Perhaps at the personal level, that’s OK, but on a larger scale, it leads to retributive justice systems where the focus is on ensuring that They—Those People who commit iniquities—suffer their Just Desserts: putting a priority on making rule-breakers suffer rather than minimising harm. Consider the difference between the dystopian prison system of the US with, say, Norway.⁴ My gut tells me that if I somehow found myself in the same basement with one of Zoe Quinn’s or Anita Sarkeesian’s erstwhile tormentors, the most satisfying course of action would be to hamper their typing, tweeting, and hacking abilities by breaking both of his⁵ elbows. Yet reason and data both tell me that the only way to solve these problems in the longer term is to despise the attitudes and behaviours, yet empathise and build bridges with the perpetrators.⁶

I can’t do that. I couldn’t, even if the opportunity improbably arose—perhaps because I lack the interpersonal skills, perhaps because I lack the moral courage to attempt to understand these people well enough to talk to them, or perhaps because I’m just too judgemental and unforgiving. If, for example, your moral hackles were raised by my suggesting just now that we should on some level attempt to sympathise with the slime currently harrassing Quinn, Sarkeesian, et al, I want to point out that I’ve already described them in such terms as “sordid pettiness”, “coprolite”, “misogynist”, “vile”, and earlier in this sentence, “slime”. In my defense (on the rational side), I let this be my lodestone for personal views, not for voting in political elections—I wouldn’t want to base policy on classifying those people as slime (that and a bit of racism is how you end up with the world’s largest prison population).

Ultimately, though, we all need to remember: The #GamerGate harrassers aren’t sordid, petty, vile, misogynist, slimy coprolites. Like us, they are human beings—they just happen to be particilarly petty, misogynistic people with petty, sordid, coprolitic, and vile opinions, words, and deeds.

¹ If anyone knows the source of this idea, I should be grateful to hear it.

² Put it this way: At the very least, I feel confident that I understand the proposition.

³ I do not regard anyone as inferior on the basis of ethnicity, biological sex, gender identity, &c., but I do judge opinions harshly.

⁴ Not that I’m an expert on the Norwegian justice system, and I’m sure it has many glaring flaws, but surely the focus on rehabilitation and minimising recidivism is more useful to society than basically torturing criminals and teaching them them to hate.

⁵ Inevitably, alas.

⁶ See this Cracked list, item #3. I find it oddly touching.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/259543.html

Thus spake WLC.

“Fine-tuning ergo God” is like saying “The odds of drawing just these ten cards are so small, it must be rigged!” when we don’t know the composition of the deck: A glib generalisation, as though every drawing of cards corresponded to a deck of Bicycle playing cards and a probability distribution we are, supposedly, intuitively familiar with. There’s a bait-and-switch here, since for all we know the deck we’re really concerned with is (meta?)physically constrained to nothing but straight flushes. For all we know, the deck might have only ten cards to begin with or the cards might be stuck together with string and Scotch tape.

Of course it’s entirely legitimate to wonder why the parameters of physics are just what they are (and on some level there is presumably a reason), but I find it highly suspect when someone asserts that they were a priori improbable—how exactly do you determine the probability? Can you demonstrate, from first principles of making universes, that there’s a wide range of possible parameters whereof the chemically productive parameters form a small proportion? I’m sure the cosmological community would be fascinated to learn the principles.

Point one—I must call them points, for they aren’t really reasons—point one is juvenile, point three is perversely ironic in the light of two millennia of unresolved theodicy (don’t you think the Cathars had a better idea, until the Catholics murdered them all?), point four is presumably included for the sake of hilarity alone (surely no one is expected to take it seriously?), and point five must have been added after Dr. Craig got drunk and forgot to activate GMail Goggles, but point two is offensive in its duplicity.

Oh well. For this particular atheist, Christmas—well, I think of it more as “juletid” in Swedish, precisely cognate with Yuletide, a pagan term that merged with Christmas when Jesus’s birthday was moved to mid-winter to co-opt older religious celebrations like Saturnalia and, elsewhere, Yule—was never much about religion but rather family, presents, a tree (of likely pagan origin), and good food (much of it based on pork and so presumably frowned upon by Jews like the Nazarene). Or at least, it was not about religion when I grew up. Now there’s always a heavy dose of news articles, editorials, and opinion pieces by Christians who hysterically complain that their holiday is under attack (because they’re not allowed a monopoly), that Jesus and Santa Claus are white, so there!, or (á la Craig) assert that people like me are echoing slogans rather than thinking. I don’t go pissing in his crèche, but ye gods! (both Jesus and the older myths he was based on), this editorialising gets on my nerves.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/13/christmas-gift-for-atheists-five-reasons-why-god-exists/

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/259179.html

Mail encryption

If privacy of your email matters to you, you may want to consider using end-to-end encryption. This is different from using a “secure” email provider: With end-to-end encryption, the sender of the email encrypts it before sending, and the receiver decrypts it after receiving it. It's not decrypted during transit—thus, even your email provider cannot read your email.

Without going into mathematics whose details I’d have to review anyway, suffice to say that PGP is a strong system of email security that, with sensible (default!) settings, cannot be effectively broken with modern technology and modern mathematics.¹ (Strong enough, in fact, that various US security agencies tried to suppress it, and when its creator released it for free to the world, he was taken to court and accused of exporting munitions. The case never really went anywhere.)

PGP uses something called asymmetric encryption. Technical details aside, the nifty and amazing thing about it is it’s what’s known as a public key cryptosystem, meaning that I can give you a bit of password (public) key that you can use to encrypt messages for me, but no one², not even you, can decrypt them…except for me, as I retain a special (private) key with the unique power to decrypt. My public key is here, should you wish to send me secure email.

My preferred solution is a plugin called Enigmail for my mail client of choice, Thunderbird.

PGP with Enigmail in Windows

Install Thunderbird.
Download GpG4Win, an OpenPGP encryption system in its Windows version.
Install Enigmail (the easiest way is, in Thunderbird, go to Tools→Add-ons and search for Enigmail).

There are some other solutions, none of which I have used.

PGP for webmail (like GMail) in Chrome

There's a browser plugin, currently for Chrome only though Firefox is in the works, called Mailvelope that will transparently encrypt/decrypt your webmail. There's a helpful guide. For now, there’s another plugin for Firefox, but it has received mixed reviews.

Linux

If you’re using Linux, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Install your mail client of choice and it surely comes with or has an OpenPGP plugin readily available.

Other

Apparently there's an Outlook plugin. There’s a plugin for OS X Mail.app.

Passwords

As a reminder, keep in mind that your security is never stronger than your password; and your password is never safer than the least secure place it is stored. If your password is weak (password, your name, your date of birth…) there’s no helping you. If your password is pretty strong (|%G7j>uT^|:_Z5-F), then that’s no help at all if you used it on LinkedIn when they were hacked and their password database stolen, so that any malicious hacker can just download a database of email addresses paired with their passwords.

The solution is to use strong passwords, and to only use each password in one place—if you steal my LinkedIn password you can hack my LinkedIn account, but you can’t use that password to access my bank, email, blog, or any other account. The drawback of strong, single-use passwords is that you’ll never, ever remember them. The counter is to use software to remember them for you.

My preferred solution is a family of software called KeePass for Windows, KeePassX for Linux, KeePassDroid for Android (my smartphone), and so on. This has the primary feature of storing all my passwords in a very strongly encrypted file. I store this file in Dropbox, which lets me share it between my devices (work computer, home computer, laptop, phone). I don’t consider Dropbox fully trustworthy, but that’s OK: if anyone breaks into my Dropbox account, all they’ll get is a very strongly encrypted archive that requires either major breakthroughs or billions of years to break into (or a side-channel attack like reading over my shoulder, literally or electronically; but if they can do that my passwords don’t matter anyway). Thanks to this, I can use very strong passwords (like -?YhS\[q@V4#]F'/L|#*1z)_S".35/#T), uniquely per website or other service. Meanwhile, I only have to remember one password: the password for KeePass itself (which I shouldn’t use for anything else).

The KeePass family of software also tend to come with good password generators, which can generate garbled gobbledygook like the above, and/or include constraints if a given website won’t let you use special characters (e.g. you can tell it to generate a random password 10 characters long with letters and digits but nothing else, which includes at least one letter and one digit). You can also use it to store files, which is a nice way to keep track of things like PGP keys.

¹ It may be broken in the future if usefully sized quantum computers are ever build or if a major mathematical breakthrough is made in prime factorisation—mathematicians have failed to make this breakthrough for some centuries now. If this happens, then I still wouldn’t worry about my personal email: the communications of major world governments, militaries, and corporations will become as vulnerable as mine, and will be a lot more interesting.

² That is to say, there are no direct attacks known to be effective against the ciphers used. There are side channel attacks, which is a fancy way of saying that someone could break your encryption without defeating the mechanism. For example, they could be reading over your shoulder, or they could install malware on your computer that records keystrokes (when you type in passwords), or they could beat you with a $5 wrench until you talk.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/258122.html

Some people feel that the Emperor’s attempt to turn Luke to the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi is a weak story element, in that there is very little in place to tempt him; that when we have heard of Vader being seduced by the Dark Side of the Force, we should expect something more persuasive. Personally I feel that this misses the point. Certainly and trivially it’s true that “if you go with it, you can win the fight against Vader (your father!) and defeat me, the Emperor (although actually it will give me your victory)” is a rather weak argument. However, that entirely misses the point that it was never about an argument to begin with. Nobody ever said that Vader was persuaded to join the Dark Side. The Emperor was not depicted as a demagogue; his evil was blatant.

Ironically, the point that I think is missed by those who argue that the “seduction” of the Dark Side should have been more persuasive and had a more human element to it is that it was about…well, the Force. It was the Dark Side itself that was supposed to hold an unnatural and harmful attraction—not the course that took you there, not the goals it promised to, or actually did help you reach, but the power in itself: Once tasted, forever will it dominate your destiny. Of course Yoda turned out to be wrong in being quite so absolute, but if we accept him (as the story clearly intends) as wise, then we may infer that his error must ipso facto have been a rare exception.

I think of it more like a metaphysical drug, a psychic super-heroin: Use it once or twice and you’re going to be hooked, not because you enjoy it so much but because it gives you no choice—even if the exposure, as it were, is largely accidental, unwilling, and transient, as Luke’s enraged onslaught at the end of Jedi.

You might argue that this is not clearly stated in the films and that I’m just making it up as a post hoc justification. To this I say—well, maybe, to some degree. Still, regarding (as I do) the original trilogy as the authorative canon, it’s the only interpretation that makes sense to me. You don’t know the power of the Dark Side, Vader intones: I must obey my Master. This was not loyalty, which is still a matter of choice. Rather, the power itself left him no options; he was enslaved to it, using it and under its control.

It also explains the Emperor himself very nicely—twisted and physically distorted, gleefully malicious apparently gratia malice; corrupted, then, by long decades of addiction to the Dark Side. (Need I explicate that I find this a more compelling interpretation than having his face melted by Samuel L. Jackson?)

Speaking of the Emperor, his behaviour lends perhaps the strongest support to my view. I think it is safe to assume that he, within the context of the Star Wars universe, is no fool, and is certainly well versed in the ways of the Force. He has lived with the Dark Side for decades at least, and experienced first-hand whatever effects it has had on him, body and mind. He is, then, pretty well placed to judge its effects on Vader’s mind. Now consider his actions, and his terminal error: He provokes Luke into fighting Vader, apparently expecting Luke’s rage to snare him in the Dark Side. If he did not have good reason to think that this might work, his entire scheme to capture Luke makes no sense. And as he didn’t have anything compelling to tempt or persuade Luke, I submit that he must have expected the intrinsic nature of the Dark Side to do it for him—as his experience had taught him it would.

That’s not the end of it, though, for his behaviour becomes far more foolish on the “psychological view”. The Emperor, seeing Luke caught up in rage, encourages him to kill Vader, and take his father’s place at the Emperor’s side—this while Luke stands over the fallen Vader, who obviously hears every word. Consider this: The Emperor distinctly informs Vader that he’s ready to toss him aside, have him killed, and replace him. But when Luke refuses, and Vader gets back on his feet, the Emperor has no qualms about having Vader by his side again. So: The Emperor demonstrates he’s willing to have Vader killed; Luke refuses to kill his father because he won’t submit and keeps insisting that Vader is not beyond redemption; so the Emperor chooses to torture Vader’s son to death right in front of him, turning his back on this seven-foot cyborg while standing next to a deep shaft into the chasms of the Death Star. Unless the Emperor had strong reason to believe Vader incapable of betraying him, this is beyond foolish: it’s suicide-by-cyborg.

Now, of course it turned out that he was wrong—Luke could and did refuse, and Vader, under these extreme circumstances, proved that though his will had been constrained by the Dark Side of the Force, it had not been utterly subsumed.¹ He was able to make a final choice and redeem himself, though it killed him. (And was this from his injuries, or from the Emperor’s dying lashing-out, or was this because at last he denied himself the addictive substance of the Dark Side on which he had become dependent—and so effectively killed himself?) But unless his mind was constrained, Vader’s killing the Emperor was not a dramatic redemption at all. Of course he might well kill the Emperor, redeemed or not; he had just been betrayed.²

The only way the dramatic climax of the saga becomes a dramatic climax is if you accept that Luke’s resistance was rare, unanticipated, and difficult; and that Vader’s redemption was profound, unprecedented, and hitherto believed impossible by everyone we had met along the way, save Luke only.

Some of you may argue that the psychological view would have given us a better story. Personally I don’t mind a bit of fairy-tale Good versus Evil, so long as it’s not my only fare, but I will not insist that you are wrong. My point is not that a Star Wars version with metaphysical evil is better than a Star Wars version with purely ‘human’ motivations—but rather that judging by the original trilogy, and Jedi in particular, the metaphysical version is the one that was actually made.

You could also argue that if what we saw was a metaphysical conception, it could have been made plainer and it could have been written better. Well, that’s certainly true of all things Star Wars. Nonetheless I disagree with the specific criticism that Jedi is inferior to Revenge of the Sith in that sole aspect of Anakin having a “real temptation” versus the Emperor failing to really tempt Luke with anything. I could even argue that it’s the other way around: By giving Anakin a concrete motivation and casting his apostacy in terms of human motivation, we’re forced to consider the strength and credibility of his sudden turn from “I just want to save my wife” to “alright, I’ll go slaughter some children”, and in terms of human psychology—well, that doesn’t look very plausible to me. Precisely by invoking the mystical corruption of the Dark Side, the original trilogy can at least justifiably ask us to invoke suspension of disbelief.

¹ At this point the Emperor has evidence that the Dark Side was a bit less absolute than he (and everyone else) had hitherto believed, but he didn’t really have time to consider the implications. Seeing Luke resist him, maybe he could have predicted Vader’s redemption, but in any case he didn’t have time.

² It is perhaps a little ironic that the very extreme emotional circumstances at play for Vader are precisely the reason why the “psychological version” would take all the drama out of the climax of the film, by making the choice too easy.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/257881.html

Some theologians and apologists (notably, I gather, the fairly famous Alvin Plantinga) hold forth a curious epistemic argument purportedly in favour of their theism. The argument in one form (not due to Plantinga) goes like this: Evolution optimises organisms for survival and gene dispersal, not correct beliefs, which would be favoured only if they enhance the above.

That is, because there’s no telling whether unguided evolution would fashion our cognitive faculties to produce mostly true beliefs, atheists who believe the standard evolutionary story must reserve judgment about whether any of their beliefs produced by these faculties are true. This includes the belief in the evolutionary story. Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it.

Now, the most obvious problem with this argument is of course that evolutionary theory does give us a reason to suppose that we can arrive at true beliefs, because it is difficult to conceive of any process whereby a tendency toward mostly false beliefs would be beneficial for survival or gene dispersal. I'm sure some scenarios can be dreamed up where fortuitous misconceptions would cause an animal to behave in a manner just as good, or even better, as correctness, and certainly we know of (and science corrects for) some tendencies toward, for instance, false positive errors and other biases, but here we must imagine something both subtler and more pervasive, and in particular a mechanism that accepts sensible input from the exterior world and systematically transforms this input into beliefs that are erroneous and yet more advantageous than the simpler mechanism of apprehending reality…

Still, I don't think that's the argument's worst problem. After all, the assumption of some divine entity provides no more guarantee that your senses are accurate than a naturalistic view! On the contrary: Although it's not a logical proof, I think I have outlined a good reason to think that evolution is in fact likely to produce brains capable of apprehending reality, not perfectly but with at least some fidelity. Assume the existence of an all-powerful being, on the other hand, and that all goes out the window. What grounds have you to suppose, if such a being exists, that the beliefs it chooses to have your brain produce are correct? It is completely arbitrary! The apologist might conceivably argue that his God is a God of truth and so forth, but those are just more of the same arbitrary beliefs. On the assumption that an all-powerful being exists, which can manipulate your senses and beliefs as it sees fit, your are at the utter mercy of its intentions; and its intentions are unknowable, because it can make you believe whatever falsehood it wants, and every “evidence” you might have that your vision of this god is the right one is equally susceptible to (infallible) falsification.

Ultimately, both atheists and theists must assume some fidelity of their senses a priori, whether they wish to admit it or not. Although every epistemology needs its axioms, the naturalistic world view introduces no more than necessary, and people like Plantinga and his fellow admirers of the Argument from Arbitrariness (if you will) would do well to avoid casting stones in glass houses, for once you assume the existence of ultimate beings, everything is arbitrary.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/257754.html

Recently, Valve announced that they are working on a Linux version of the Steam client, along with a port of Left 4 Dead 2. Rumours of plans for a Linux version of Steam have floated around since roughly the dawn of time, but now it is official; now it is real.

Reactions are mixed, from gung-ho enthusiasm to RMS-style caution. Personally, I am enthused. This is partly because I am not a free software purist, and partly because I regard this as a win-win scenario.

Cards on the table: I run Steam, and I own games on Steam. Their DRM is not a deal-killer for me. That said, I prefer DRM free software, and I would rather buy games via Good Old Games, who are entirely DRM free. (If a game is available via both services, there is no contest: GOG every time.)

However, I think that this move can only be good for Linux. Even if you never run a Steam game in your life, this is a good thing. One possibility is of course that this effort of Valve's fails, in which case nothing really changes. But consider what happens if they are at all successful:

Currently, there is no significant market for games on Linux, because gamers all run Windows (or, I suppose, OS X); and gamers all run Windows (…) because there are no games for Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg situation; there's no supply because there's no demand, but there can be no demand because there's no supply to demand from. Launch a few AAA titles on Linux and suddenly there will exist a games market. It may thrive or it may fail to thrive, but this kind of effort gives it a real fighting chance.
Games are important. Gaming is a big piece of what computers are used for, and probably the only piece where the average consumer currently has any reason at all to go with Windows over a user-friendly Linux distribution. Having a games market will be good for Linux adoption.
It will be good for indie developers. Even if, initially, only a few AAA games are ported, and only a few AAA developers care about the Linux games market, Steam remains a powerhouse delivery vehicle for games, now to a potentially new market. This should leave a lot of room for indie developers to exploit this new space in a way that cannot currently be done without a good way of reaching consumers.

As a bonus, I expect indie developers are much better situated to port software, because they don't have massive, hard-to-port codebases to deal with (because indie games are smaller), and because they don't have bleeding-edge graphics and so don't need to worry quite so much about performance; thus a penalty from using a less-efficient cross-platform library, or a performance hit from a less-than-perfect port, is more affordable.

And I gather that the Humble Linux Bundle proved that Linux users are quite willing to support indies, whose ethos more easily aligns with OSS mentalities than AAA corporations.

So I regard this as Valve breaking the ice with Steam and an AAA title, whereupon indies will have the powerhouse delivery vehicle of Steam, along with a few larger players, to expand the market. Hopefully more big names will follow.
As this market grows, so will the demand, now backed by real money, for better and better video drivers. The Valve team have already collaborated with Intel to improve OpenGL performance. And big players like Valve are well placed to put some pressure even on giants like NVIDIA and AMD if and when there are problems.
Even if you hate DRM with a burning passion… If a games market is once established in the Linux world, there will be more room for niche players (like Good Old Games) to edge in. It may sound paradoxical to suggest that Valve moving into a virtual monopoly with Steam would improve GOG's position, but I think it may be so. Right now, there's no reason for GOG to target Linux because there is no market, and there are very few games. If a cultural shift of any statistically significant magnitude occurs, then there will be a market (ergo consumers to target), and game developers will be more motivated (and better equipped) to produce Linux versions of games.

We'll see how the ports actually work out, but I for one wish Valve the best of luck and regard the whole thing as a positive development.

Crossposts: http://petter-haggholm.livejournal.com/257385.html

The oft-repeated saw is that to improve, what you need is to train with people who are better than you are—to swallow your ego and accept that you’ll get beaten in sparring, you’ll have to tap a lot; because you can only learn from people who are better than you (and therefore have something to teach) and in particular, you’ll never learn to defeat skilled opponents without practicing on skilled opponents. There is of course considerable truth to this, and I’m sure it is possible to get very good indeed in a meatgrinder situation where your every training partner from day one is a brown belt and up.

Personally, though, I feel that there is plenty to gain from training with people who aren’t better. Regarded one way, it’s certainly a lot easier to learn offence, and practice new moves that I’ve yet to master, on less experienced opponents with whom I have a greater margin of error. I’ll never pull off a brand new sweep on someone with whom I struggle to keep up to begin with, but with a brand new beginner, I can perhaps get my position and get a few reps in every round. When rolling with people at approximately my own level of skill, I get to practice a more competitive sort of game, because either may credibly “win” and neither is predisposed to play a super defensive, staving-off-inevitable-disaster game—and here those new moves are put to the test. Against superior opponents, well, I certainly get plenty of opportunity to pratice defence…

This may be a psychological flaw on my part, but I will be honest and say that sometimes, I don’t feel like I gain anything at all from rolling with people who are better than me by too wide a margin. It’s one thing if I’m constantly forced to play at the edge of my capabilities; that’s fertile ground. When someone shuts down my every attempt before I can even get started, though, I don’t think that really teaches me anything because I get no useful feedback: I can’t tell the difference, then, between “that was a mistake” and “that was a good idea but this guy is just good enough to shut it down anyway”. Then it’s not a learning experience, but mere frustration. (I do my best, when rolling with very new beginners, to remind myself not to create that kind of situation.)

I also think that one should not scoff at the benefits of rolling even with very new people, or much smaller people. Yes, if I outweigh someone by 50 lbs and have 4–5 years of experience to their week and a half, I can probably sweep them in pretty much any direction I choose, but I should be able to make more intelligent use of our training time than that. For one thing, it is a good time to relax, roll without using strength or power, and isolate details, control using the feet only, and that sort of thing. For another, I find that helping people, providing hints, and talking them through those first few rolls can itself be a learning exercise for me as much as for the other person, because it forces me to analyse the situation carefully and isolate and highlight the most important essentials, which is hard to do in the rough-and-tumble of a more even match.

And, of course, it’s good to give back. The only reason I am where I am today is because other people (I would be remiss if I didn’t specifically mention Kabir’s name at least once here) helped me in this fashion, by toning their game down a few notches, give me room to try things, and help me out—and I have a long way to go still, during which I hope to receive more of the same. So of course I want to do as much as I can to provide the same encouragement, help, and guidance to others in the same community or, if you will, family. For all that you go one-on-one at the time when you’re facing a particular opponent, building grapplers is a community effort, and as in many things, the journey is to my mind more important than the destination.

Now I’m off to open mat at GBV (slightly late because I felt moved to write this post) where I will roll with people who may be any combination of better than me, worse than me, and roughly at my level, and I leave confident that either way, I’ll have room to learn.

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Petter Häggholm

petterhaggholm.net

July 2025

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Page Summary

The omniscient narrator as a worldbuilding flaw
Literary genres properly belong to readers, not writers
The weirdness of biblical redaction
Gospel birth narratives: Matthew vs. Luke
The Book of Job: a short play
Free will
The Bible
Occam’s Razor is more than a guideline
William Lane Craig and his bankrupt ontology
“Why would a woman want to sell her body for money?”
“Ignorance is strength”
Grander than the Grand Canyon
The No True Theist fallacy
I cannot empathise with those without empathy
William Lain Craig seeks Reasons, hits bottom of barrel, and keeps tunnelling
Email security
Nerdy digression: Star Wars and the “seduction” by the Dark Side
“Evolved brains would be fallible, ergo evolution is epistemically unsound”
Steam on Linux, coming at last!
“In order to improve, you have to spar with superior opponents”

Petter Häggholm’s blog

Thoughts, essays, rants, and things I find interesting

Recent Entries

The omniscient narrator as a worldbuilding flaw

Literary genres properly belong to readers, not writers

The weirdness of biblical redaction

Gospel birth narratives: Matthew vs. Luke

The Book of Job: a short play

Free will

The Bible

Occam’s Razor is more than a guideline

William Lane Craig and his bankrupt ontology

If God defines Good, he cannot be trusted

Craig fails to notice the beam in his own eye

“Why would a woman want to sell her body for money?”

“Ignorance is strength”

Grander than the Grand Canyon

The No True Theist fallacy

I cannot empathise with those without empathy

William Lain Craig seeks Reasons, hits bottom of barrel, and keeps tunnelling

Email security

Mail encryption

PGP with Enigmail in Windows

PGP for webmail (like GMail) in Chrome

Linux

Other

Passwords

Nerdy digression: Star Wars and the “seduction” by the Dark Side

“Evolved brains would be fallible, ergo evolution is epistemically unsound”

Steam on Linux, coming at last!

“In order to improve, you have to spar with superior opponents”

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July 2025

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