Andy Borowitz has the hot scoop, as usual.

Blue: President Bush will make major economic speech today; investors are advised to convert their 401(k) plans to gold coins and foodstuffs.

He says it’s not–it’s philosophy, but I don’t know how you can make authoritative statements about souls and think that it’s not a religious discussion.

Blogger “Mark” (no idea what the last name is), deigns to educate us on why cryonics won’t work. We are appropriately grateful.

Most, if not all, of the above links, however, make a fundamental mistake in philosophical anthropology by treating the human being dualistically. Cryonics assumes that after death the body that was a human being is still a human being in some way. Cryonics then assumes that there eventually will be a technique of some kind, a Frankensteinian spark that will bring the corpse back to life.

This is a nice set of strawmen.

In fact, cryonicists assume nothing of the kind. First of all, cryonicists don’t accept that a body that’s been properly suspended is dead at all, so the Frankenstein comment (a nice little pejorative phrase, that) is inapplicable.

The best response to this silliness, this tendency toward conceiving of the human being as body and soul, whether it be Platonic or Cartesian or any other variation of dualism, is found in the philosophical tradition that started with Aristotle and culminated in Aquinas.

And the best response to this silliness is a) cryonicists don’t necessarily believe in dualism–in fact, just the opposite, and b) none of those philosophers are infallible, even assuming that they believe what the author claims that they do.

But even though they probably have no relevance to cryonics, let’s see where he’s going with this, at least for entertainment.

In this tradition, a human being is not a body with a soul in it, a kind of ghost in a machine. A human being is not the soul itself, a sort of spirit merely using a body. And a human being is not simply a body, a mechanical, purely material entity. But knowing what it isn?t doesn?t move us much toward understanding human nature. So what then is the nature of the human being? To understand the approach of Aristotle and Aquinas you first need to understand the principles of ?matter? and ?form.?

In his treatise On The Soul, though you?ll find the idea in many other places, Aristotle explains that the everyday things we encounter, rocks, plants, animals and the like are all composed by two principles: a material principle or principle of potency, and a formal principle or principle of act. In other words, everything we encounter in our daily lives (with the exception of things like heavenly bodies for which Aristotle had a different theory) is composed of matter, the principle of potency, potential to be some kind of thing, and form, the principle of actuality, actually being a particular kind of thing, e.g. a granite rock, a geranium, or a gazelle. The matter is only the potential of a thing to be ?this particular thing?; matter does not exist by itself (this sounds strange if you don?t keep the fact that matter is a principle of potency in mind). The form is the act by which a thing is ?this particular kind of thing?; and again, with an exception we?ll see shortly, the form does not exist by itself. It is only in a composite of matter and form that ?this particular thing? exists. The composite of matter and form produces a thing which we can point to and say ?this? thing.

This potency-act, matter-form approach was the brilliant solution Aristotle proposed to escape the many cul-de-sacs of early philosophical thought. What?s important in the cryogenic discussion is the fact that a living thing is a composite of matter and form where the form is a ?soul,? a principle of life. When the composite is sundered at death there is what Aristotle called a ?substantial change? that occurs. Just as wood burns to ash, so a living thing when it dies, when the composite of matter and form that made it not only a certain kind of thing but ?this particular thing? no longer exists, there is an immediate change and the form ceases to exist (with one exception that we?ll soon see). The death of a living thing is a complete and irreversible change because the destruction of the composite is the destruction of its principle of act, its form or ?soul.?

So Mark claims to be able to define and detect the exact moment at which a body goes from living to dead. He claims that this is an objectively verifiable instantaneous change in state. If so, he should write up a description of exactly how to measure this, so we can come up with better means of legally declaring folks dead, instead of the ambiguous and arbitrary techniques that we have today. This is a legal and medical breakthrough.

The reality, of course, is that there is no point in general at which a body passes from a live state to a dead one, except in the case of information death (e.g., being incinerated instantaneously, or smashed into a flattened unrecognizable pulp). Simple death by natural causes, or even violent wounds, if the violence isn’t to the brain, is a gradual process, not a distinct binary one.

Cryonicists accept that the victim of an information death is truly dead, and there’s no point in trying to preserve the remains. However, in most cases, most of the information that constitutes the person remains, and the sooner he or she can be preserved, the more of that information will persist to allow reanimation later. Such a person is not, however, dead.

While a dead body may look like an organic whole, an entity with a single principle organizing it, the truth is that a dead body is a complex of organs and compounds that are themselves undergoing substantial change to less organized elements. Cryonics assumes that after death the ?form? of the body, its organizing principle, remains. But this is not the case. And that?s because the ?form? of a human being is a principle of life, the soul, and when a human being is no longer alive, when the soul no longer ?informs? the human being, the being is no longer human. What made the being human is also what made the human living. You can?t be a human being and not be alive; you can?t be dead and be a human being.

Can our philospher tell us wherein this “soul” resides? Can he show us what instrument we can use to detect its presence or absence, and so determine whether the body is alive or dead?

No.

He simply uses tautological arguments. And again, since the body that he’s describing is not dead, simply in suspension, his equating life with humanity and death with non-humanity is meaningless.

I?ve mentioned that there?s an exception to the fact that when a composite being with principles of matter and form ceases to exist, when a living thing dies, the form ceases to be. For a living thing the form is a soul. So when a living thing dies its soul ceases to exist. The exception, which Aristotle likely didn?t grasp fully, but which is thoroughly worked through in Aquinas, is the human form or soul. Aquinas demonstrated that the human being?s fundamental constitution as a rational creature implied a principle of activity which per se did not require a body. In other words, a human being?s fundamental way of being, thinking, understanding, abstracting, occurred without bodily mechanisms. And since activity follows from existence (i.e. you can?t act if you don?t exist), an activity that does not require a body must derive from something that exists without requiring a body. The technical term for this is ?subsistence.? The human soul, unlike any other soul or principle of life (e.g. orange tree, oyster, orca), subsists even after the matter-form composite corrupts. Aquinas refers to the separated soul as an incorporeal subsistent thing with an incomplete nature (since its nature is to inform a human being in a matter-form composite).

You would think this would bolster the cryonics industry. After all, if the soul is still around isn?t there hope that it might again inform the human being? Well, no. The nature of the soul after death can only be known in sort of a negative way, by saying ?what it is not,? or by extrapolating what we observed when the soul was not separated, since an incorporeal subsistent thing is beyond our senses. But Aquinas suggests that the separated soul exists in a sort of twilight zone. It no longer has sensory input and consequently can only understand (it has to still ?do? something if it exists) in an imperfect way. Still, as an incorporeal subsisting thing it cannot be manipulated by us (nor can it be created by us, but that?s for another post). No matter how long you wait for the wonders of technology, there simply is no way for corporeal beings (that?s us) to influence incorporeal entities like separated souls. Science can?t create a human soul and science can?t cause a soul to again inform the human being it once did. It?s not that we don?t know how. It?s that we are barred metaphysically from doing so. The creation of a human soul would require the infinite power of the Creator since it would require creation of something from nothing. The causing of a separated soul to again inform the human being it once did would require the infinite power of the Creator because it would require the ability to move incorporeal substances.

This may all be true.

It may also be nonsense.

Since there’s no scientific way to determine its validity, cryonicists assume that there is no such thing called a soul, or alternatively, that it will take care of itself or that God will take care of it as needed, but it’s not necessary to be concerned with it in order to suspend and reanimate a person. Any other assumption would be both non-scientific and pointless, until we can come up with the soul detector requested above.

Never mind that the technology is primitive. That?s just a matter of time for cryonic proponents. But cryonics runs into several related fundamental problems of philosophical anthropology ?

1) death is a substantial change and thus irreversible

But since the cryonics patients haven’t gone through that irreversible change, this argument is irrelevant

2) the human being is not present in an organ or in a corpse

This is a partial strawman, since cryonicists don’t believe that the patient is a corpse. However, the first clause is wrong; the human being is present, for the most part, in the brain. At least that’s the operating assumption. It may be wrong, but Mark certainly hasn’t proven it to be so.

3) infusing life into a corpse again would require the ability to control an incorporeal subsistent principle (the human soul) which is not possible for corporeal beings in the land of the living

Since souls are irrelevant to the discussion, and the cryonics patient is not a corpse, this is another strawman.

So, sad as it may seem to some, Walt Disney won?t be watching Teddy Ballgame put the wood on the ol? apple anytime in the future.

Even sadder, Walt Disney was never frozen. This is an urban myth.

Not unlike much of the rest of the posting.

[Update at 9:10 PM PDT]

One more comment. I’ve never before read the words “philosophical anthropology” in conjunction with each other. I think that he’s just making it up, and blowing smoke. This post of “Mark’s” is an excellent example of the old aphorism “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

This is a blog that will definitely not go on my link list.

Now Fox is reporting that Citigroup may be complicit in the Enron debacle. And of course, the Dems will try to blame Republicans for this as well.

Only one problem. Two and a half years ago, Robert Rubin became Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Citigroup board of directors. And for those with short memories, just which party was in power when Rubin was Treasury Secretary?

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the story from Reuters. J.P. Morgan is in the hot seat as well.

Glenn Frazier’s got the story on what’s happening in Iran, that you won’t likely get from the mainstream press until it’s almost over.

The normally-astute Iain Murray seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the drug-legalization issue. He demonstrates it in a TechCentralStation article today. While I agree with him that the data is ambiguous, and with too many entangled factors to draw any firm conclusions, I take some umbrage at his last line:

The rest of us, however, will have to wait a while before “More Drugs, Less Crime” appears on the nation’s bookshelves.

I don’t ever expect to see a book titled “More Drugs, Less Crime,” at least not one that’s worth reading.

Of course, it’s a strawman, because those favoring drug decriminalization or legalization are not (necessarily) in favor of more drugs–I’m certainly not. We just want less expensive ones that don’t require crime to sustain habits, and that don’t provide incentive for turf wars between gangs heavily armed by high drug profits.

Such a book would actually be titled “Fewer Drug Laws, Less Crime.”

Charles Murtaugh has a post this morning on “the talent myth,”–the notion that if you take a bunch of talented people and put them into an organization, you can expect to get a talented organization.

I’ve known a lot of people at the space agency over the years, and for the most part they are smart, dedicated folks. Many of them pull their hair over the decisions that come out of the agency. But there are also many who justify those decisions. Until, that is, they retire or resign, at which point I’ve often heard them say something like, “How could I have made that decision?”

People studying artificial life and artificial intelligence often refer to it as an emergent property–a side effect of putting a bunch of entities together that interact with certain rules. For instance, individual ants are as dumb as a bag of buckwheat. They have very primitive programming to do very basic things when confronted with various situations. Yet somehow, when congregated in a colony, the colony itself can behave in what appears to be an intelligent manner. Attack it, and it will defend itself, often in sophisticated and responsive ways.

Another example of this is the chevron flight of geese. No goose is permanently in charge, or organizes them into the V-shaped pattern. But each goose has a few basic (presumably instinctual) rules–fly to one or the other side of the bird ahead of you, and slightly behind, to pick up a little benefit of its backdraft. Don’t create a parallel line–if the bird in front of you is to the right of the one in front of it, you stay to the right as well. Only one bird can draft another, unless it’s the leader. Trade off and lead occasionally.

That’s it.

When we program these rules into artificial computerized lifeforms, they will fly in similar V’s. No more organization than that is necessary–no need for a permanent leader or organizer.

Of course, the most obvious example of lots of dumb things appearing to be (or in fact actually being) smart is the human brain. No neuron or synapse is intelligent. But put a bunch together, and you can get an Einstein, or a Mozart.

Of course, you can also get a Cynthia McKinney or an Alec Baldwin.

So clearly it’s not enough to just put a bunch of dumb things together–how they are put together matters as well. But it at least offers the possibility that if you had a large enough bagful of Michael Moores (admittedly, it would require all of the burlap that the world will produce for the next century or so), you might have a chance of getting something intelligent as a result.

But to get back to my NASA example. I have a theory that the converse is true as well. You can aggregate a bunch of really smart things (like rocket engineers) and come up with something really, really dumb–an entity that would make decisions that no single individual among them would ever make, sans psychotropic drugs. Call it, if you like, the “committee effect.”

I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I suspect that it’s kind of like the rule for determining the resistance of a parallel network of resistors. If resistors are in series, that is, connected end to end in a long row of them, it’s easy to determine the total resistance–just add them up. So two resistors of ten ohms each become one resistor of twenty ohms when one end of one is connected to one end of the other, and the resistance is measured across the two free ends.

Parallel resistors, in which both ends of the resistors are connected to each other, so that the current flows through them all simultaneously, instead of first one and then the next and so on, has a different rule to compute the net resistance.

It’s: Total Resistance = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+…+(1/Rn))

where the “R”s represent the individual resistances, and there are n resistors. In words, it’s the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the individual resistances.

For the example given above, it would be one over the sum of one tenth plus one tenth, or one over two tenths, or one over one fifth, or five ohms. So instead of doubling the resistance, as in the series case, we’ve halved it.

It can be shown that if all of the resistors are of equal value, the formula simplifies to the original resistance divided by the number of resistors.

Which is a frightening thought, if the same rule applies to my emergent stupidity theory. Assuming for simplicity that everyone in a government bureaucracy has the same IQ (it doesn’t change the answer that much if you allow variation, but assuming they’re equal makes the calculation much simpler, as one can see from the formulas above), that means that the net IQ will be that IQ divided by the number of agency employees. If you add the number of lobbyists and interest groups to the mix, you can drive it down another order of magnitude in value, to the point that it has the intelligence of a lobotomized fern (only slightly smarter than Margo Kingston). And my theory would seem to be borne out by the quality of decisions coming from, for example, the US Agriculture Department, or the INS, or the State Department.

All of this, of course, is a long way of saying that I’m not encouraged by the prospects of merging several agencies and departments into a much larger (and probably dumber) one called the Department of Homeland Security, and then actually entrusting it with homeland security…

There’s a very interesting piece in today’s Arab News, whose lede is that bin Laden is dead.

But that’s not what’s interesting. Considering the source, what’s interesting is that it almost reads like a blogger piece–it indicts Wahhabism, cynical Europeans, naive and not-so-naive funding sources and complacent Americans. It identifies Pakistan and the Sudan as culprits.

Andrew Sullivan, from whom I got the link, writes:

The reasons given for the death of Islamism in the Arab world are also eye-opening. Could we be winning this propaganda war?

But Andrew misses what is to me the most significant thing, which is not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. The only significant way in which it differs from an essay by Victor Davis Hanson or Daniel Pipes is that it doesn’t mention…Saudi Arabia.

I’m wondering if the Sauds are now getting ready to accept the truth, and give up on the Wahhabi colonization and dreams of an Islamic empire, in exchange for being allowed to deflect blame away from themselves?

You know, no harm, no foul? Let us not bicker and argue over ‘oo drove airplanes into ‘oo’s skyscrapers–let bygones be bygones.

Let’s not focus on the past. Let us instead just stride forward, hand in hand, into a westernized future, in which we keep our oil money and our power to oppress people at home.

I just reread the article cited in my earlier post on Magaw being sacked, because of one of the comments.

Magaw’s strained relationship with Congress, airport operators and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta ( news – web sites) prompted Mineta to ask him to leave, government sources said Thursday.

Gee, Norm, wasn’t it you that said something like “his background and experience make him the perfect candidate for the job” when you appointed him a few months ago? I don’t have the exact quote, because when I google your appointment speech, it comes up “Page Not Found” at the DOT web site.

It’s nice to be able to change inconvenient histories, I guess, when you’re a cabinet secretary. No embarrassing backtracking required that way.

Here’s a not very sympathetic piece on cryonicists in the WaPo.

A four-year-old retarded girl was tethered to a mosque and starved to death in the hot sun, in Uttar Pradesh, to exorcise her demons.

I know, what’s the big deal? She’s just a girl.