nostalgebraist:

Any of you guys read David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”?  Because I’m reading it right now and it’s making me SO MAD, arrrrgghhhh

The book basically has two intertwined central theses:

(1) a definition of God that amounts to a philosophical God-of-the-gaps, i.e. “God” as the name of the answer (whatever it may really be, and however little we can truthfully say about it) to all the philosophical questions that are truly hard to answer in a naturalistic framework, like “why is there a world at all” / “why qualia” / “where does ethics come from”

(2) a claim that this is not just an ad hoc response to the current state of knowledge, the way an ordinary God-of-the-gaps would be, but is in fact the concept of God maintained for millennia by the the theologies of multiple religion traditions (Christian, Hindu, etc.) – so instead of religion struggling to find space for God not yet touched by science, it’s more like science has finally consumed all the space it possibly can, rendering it all the more conspicuous (via those philosophical problems) that God was taking up some space the whole time

And OK, this is abstractly a pretty cool argument, and a pretty refreshing one in the stale air of the usual religion/atheism debates, except … 

… well, except that Hart’s presented notion of God has no content except for the content it would need to at least potentially be a solution to the philosophical problems, so you basically get a bunch of negative theology type stuff (God can’t be just any old being if he is to be the ground of all Being, etc.), all of which is just a sort of mirror image of the naturalist impotence in the face of these problems.  Atheists say: wow, consciousness is a Hard Problem.  Hart says: God is the answer to the problem of consciousness, but gee, it is a Hard Problem, and so look at how marvelous and strange and singular God would have to be, in order to solve it!

I’m less and less sure what the difference even is between these two viewpoints.  The main substantial difference seems to be that the naturalist philosophers are at least thinking about how to solve the problem, even if their attempts often flop on their faces, and even if their very goal is likely to seem quixotic in the last analysis; Hart’s approach merely asserts that there is some answer answer and then stops, as though nothing more were needed, as though any curious human being has ever been satisfied with this manner of “answering.”

But Hart seems to think that a whole lot turns on the difference, given how angry he is at atheists, so angry, not fire-and-brimstone anger but “someone is wrong on the internet” anger, there on every page, in the same points repeated over and over again sentence after sentence, page after page, onanistically.  Naturalism can’t explain Being, naturalism can’t explain consciousness, what a complete idiot you’d have to be to think so, this on and on, when it all seems to come down to this odd, nerdy, technical, almost semantic issue about whether you view life’s deep mysteries as one vase or two faces, which has nothing at all to do with why actual people file into pews, or don’t.

Any of you guys read David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”?  Because I’m reading it right now and it’s making me SO MAD, arrrrgghhhh

One thing that stands out to me about my current job in the private sector, relative to my previous life in academia, is that there is a lot more implicit recognition of the importance of structure for getting things done, and a lot less reliance on any individual’s supposed ability to “just do it” through an act of pure heroic will.

Like, I know that “meetings” are not a part of corporate culture that people tend to have warm feelings about – and I’ve already tasted, a few times, the unique frustration of having so many meetings about the thing I’m supposed to be doing that I have no time left to do that thing – but they have their uses, and this fact was downright wondrous to me when I first arrived.

People would talk about a potential task or project, and then – rather than acting like it’ll just happen because we’re all supposed to be Heinlein protagonists here –  they would bring in other people at the company with relevant expertise and ask them stuff, and would start blocking out an ad hoc structure for talking about the thing every week, and would ask things like “how does this stack up against the other priorities of the people who’d be working on it?”, or “what level of imposed structure is necessary to make sure this actually happens, given that people have other stuff going on?”, or "can we commit to a date when we’ll either have a minimal proof-of-concept or dismiss this as too costly for the expected benefits?”

I was like, you can just do that stuff?  You can acknowledge that some structure is necessary and helpful, and that every task trades off against other competing tasks, and then talk about the tasks as though you actually want them to get done by real humans in the real world?

Because where I came from, it wasn’t like that.  Where I came from, the only meetings that happened with any regularity were one-on-ones between a professor and a grad student or postdoc, and in those meetings the professor would talk about what they wanted to happen, and the student / postdoc would talk about what they had recently done, and the entire thing was always about the content of the project and never about process.  The process was that someone was told to do something (perhaps something specific, perhaps something vague like “look into this”), and they’d go off by themselves, and do whatever their own personal process was, and then they’d come in next time and stuff would just be done (or ought to be), and no one would talk about how this happened.

And it felt embarrassing to bring up issues of process, because it felt like an admission that you weren’t good enough, that you couldn’t “hack it,” that you hadn’t done the work (which was your own responsibility, not anyone else’s) to develop good organizational structures for your own private activity, structures so good that you could be safely approximated as this primal agent of creation, always capable of going away to your desk (or wherever you work, no one cares, out of sight out of mind) and Just Doing It.

But if you know anything about people, you know that this isn’t actually a good system for getting things done.  And you can do things a better way.  You can do things as if you really cared about the end result, and not just about your own personal virtue.

She was a girly girl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. It had never happened before, and it is sure never to happen again, but she did win. She was not even of human extraction. She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name. Her father’s name was C'mackintosh and her name was C'mell. She won her trick against the lawful and assembled Lords of the Instrumentality.

Ted Dustin, an American inventor, seeks to win a prize of one million dollars by being the first person to touch the moon with an object launched from Earth. He devises a huge gun, which fires upon the surface of the moon. Shortly thereafter, the moon fires back, and war breaks out between the planet and its satellite. Using a videophone he invented, Ted hails communication with the moon. A beautiful woman and her guards first reply, but their transmission is cut off by warlike yellow aliens. Ted eventually heads to the moon in a spacecraft of his own design, and meets the titular character, who turns out to be the beautiful woman from the transmission, as well as a princess of one of the two groups that inhabit the moon.

The Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (Anal) say they have been in the Grade II listed building in Eaton Square since Wednesday. They intend to use it as a homeless shelter and community centre, open to any group that “would disgust the wealthy”.

Interesting Javascript Facts

snarp:

* In Javascript, the addition operator is a lowercase letter ’t’ rather than the usual ‘+’.

* In Javascript, the equality operator is ‘+’.

* Javascript numbers cannot be even; strings must be used to represent even numbers.

* Javascript does not have arrays. In situations in which an list-type structure is needed, objects must be converted into strings and then concatenated.

* Javascript does not have data structures. It’s on the floor.

* Javascript strings cannot be more than 69 characters long. That’s the sex number.

* Javascript characters are two characters long.

* The main character of Javascript is Dracula. (Javascript is the only programming language to have a main character.)

* “Javascript” is commonly shortened to “JS,” which stands for “Jerpin Sir.”

* Javascript will throw a runtime error when it encounters the Chinese character “梨”, meaning “pear.” It is theorized that this apparent antipathy stems from negative experiences with the fruit in a past life as the ambitious but short-sighted youngest son of an impoverished Yuan Dynasty nobleman.

* Javascript was written by one person in less than two weeks.

* The “If” operator is spelled “Bif”.

(via prospitianescapee)

I hyphenate those last three words to emphasize that the “being” in question belongs primarily to the conceptual realm of delphinity, and not to the actual dolphin sitting on my veranda (who by now may have finished his coffee).

Carving up the physical body and depositing its pieces into other bodies challenges customary notions about the equivalence of the body with an individual’s identity.