Proof religious people are stupid! Or at least ignorant. Well, I have a CHART.

I know, divisive title for the blog. Razib at ScienceBlogs.com made this post where he correlates IQ and Biblical literalism by religion, hehe. (Which I in turn got from The Friendly Atheist.) And it's not really strong proof - what it is is a simple correlation between IQ values charted to religion. I, myself, don't think that IQ tests for intelligence so much as a particular kind of education . . . so if anything, this is a measure of the education of religious people (which is, itself, of course, very interesting data).

OK, then. Granting that it's not a study, and it's not really measuring intelligence but how well the people took IQ tests, it's still pretty lovely, hehe.



Isn't that lovely? Razib is personally aware at the limitations of the chart. While the data is legitimately gotten from reputable sources, it is, in the end, just a chart, so we should remember that correlation is not causation.

However, correlation suggests causation. What IQ tests were initially intended to do is locate people inside a given society that have special needs. If Pentacostalists as a group are doing poorly on IQ tests, it is legitimate to ask why. At a guess, it isn't the religion, but their education, which is likely bad not because of their religion (tho' that might play a role in it, esp. with science education - Bible literalists are known to have some contempt for science, after all) but because of issues like poverty and social status. Indeed, it isn't precisely news that fundamentalist religion goes hand-in-hand with poor, low status groups whereas non-theism is largely amongst the best educated people with secure careers (y'know, tenured scientists).

But for me the real pleasure is just seeing it charted out how Biblical literalism is heavily correlated to outright stupidity, hehe. I have to admit.

Cyborgization continues - "brain pacemakers"

Apparently, good work is being done by using "deep brain stimulation" to help some seriously depressed and obsessive-compulsive people.

I know that my own depression is not the same as the kinds of depression this device works on - severe depression is the realms of utter madness, often including delusions and hallucinations, and is utterly crippling. It is ghastly. So, knowing that, even I can't help but feel some real joy at the notion that work is being done that can successfully treat depression as a purely material problem. (Because it is, of course. The "mind/body problem" is only a problem if you think there's a difference between your mind and your body. Which there isn't. "Mind/body problem" makes as much sense as "heart/body problem". Your mind is part of your body, located primarily in your brain. Duh.)

Of course, what particularly fascinates me about this is that it's a mechanical, electronic solution. You stick some wires in your head and, zap, 4 out of 6 severe patients feel better.

It makes me wonder when someone will say to themself, "Self, if it works for them, might it not work for me. Oh, I know that I don't suffer depression, but if it helps my mood, makes me feel happier, be more productive, allows me to more fully express the person I want to be, why not?" then I'll be particularly fascinated. (People already do this with mood medication; taking anti-depressants as "mood brighteners". I should note I'm mostly for this. What's wrong with people being in good moods?)

But we're all on the verge of becoming literal cyborgs. I find all of this very fascinating and await all of this with bated breath.

For the most part, I will add, I don't think that this will lead to some dystopian future with people being modified or drug addicted to become the mindless drones of the state. The reasons for this are two:

1. In the end, humans will prove more useful if they are allowed to pursue their interests where it leads them. Since machines are taking over all our physical and even some of our intellectual labor, creative labor is about all we've got left as we begin this new period. Enslaving people through these techniques would be a disaster, good for no one.

2. The techniques, themselves, will lead those who use them to benevolent conclusions. I have long wondered how much of human civilization has been the results of literally madness - how many lawmakers have been mentally ill, and how has that effected our society? I think quite a bit. (I also think that since the average life expectancy of early civilizations was about 18 years old that civilization was created by teenage boys - and shows it.) I believe that clarity of thought makes it intellectually and emotionally difficult for tyrants to be tyrants. The cruelty and stupidity of what they are doing will be clear, not only to themselves, but others, because of people's intellectual clarity.

Continued cyborgization of athletics!

Apparently, Japan's Olympic swimmers were in an uproar because of bathing suits. Speedo has something called an LZR Racer swim suit. Since the LZR's launch, 29 swimming records have been broken, and twenty-eight of those records had people wearing the LZR. Japanese swimmers must use Japanese products, so they were pissed off about this, likening using the LZR to doping. The LZR was developed, in part, by NASA's advanced materials division.

Of course, trying to beat Japan with technology is askin' for a smackdown, so now Yamamoto Corp. has created what they say is an even faster swimsuit. Just in time for the Olympics, so Japanese swimmers can glide exclusively to victory!

The cyborg aspect is, of course, that the high-tech suits serve as a second, almost frictionless skin. Everywhere the swimmer's body propelling a swimmer serves as drag to slow them down. Reduce drag and you get a faster swimmer!

Now, none of this has anything to do with the athletes. The quality of the athletes is now less in question than the clothing they wear. To break records, swimmers now need super-slick bathing suits.

Which, of course, makes me wonder when the concept of physical sports will go away entirely. The shoes you wear, the clothing you wear, whether or not you have mechanical feet - all these things are technological developments, not training and exercise developments. I wonder how long it will be before we're forced to acknowledge that we are, as a whole, more interested in the technology than the athletes, in the swimsuits and not the swimmers.

If I had a billion dollars, I might think about that sort of thing. Leagues where I don't care if you dope, or use shoes that make you jump higher and faster, and just focus on creating the most kinetic athletic entertainment experience possible. Like pro-wrestling with gadgets!

An IDer lays it on the line about faith and reason!

Over at Stardust's blog she posted about the movie Expelled. Like pretty much all atheists, she's offended at the links between Hitler's genocide and evolutionary biology. I'm offended! It's offensive! It's a terrible slur and not true.

But this is about Stardust's post about Expelled, right? Right. Well, her blog was trolled by a a fundie Christian who thought Stardust was being ridiculous. It's . . . amusing. The fundie is a young woman of about 17 years of age who is full of vim, vigor and idiocy. I will let her speak for herself:

And, in response to your question, "What are ID's scientific predictions, what are its unifying principles, and what experiments have been done to support your ID theory? WITHOUT THE MYTHOLOGY BOOK." Alright, telling me to do so without the Bible is like telling you to prove one of your bunk theories without the world or without your brain.

WHOA! I mean, you don't get it much clearer than that! When I read this quote to my wife, she said, "That's your primary objection to religion in a nutshell." Yes. You have this person who's saying that the problem with evolution is that it relies on our knowledge of the world, and that is irrelevant to what's in the Bible.

So, no, she can't prove intelligent design without the Bible. Which means it's not science, of course. On the other hand, what's in the Bible is more important than the mere world and reason.

I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

John Freshwater teaching creationism in an Ohio school, and Pharyngula's bizarre reaction

Recently, PZ Myers of Pharyngula brought up the case of John Freshwater. He's a science teacher who keeps a Bible on his desk.

He also, "When Freshwater taught students about electrical current, he used a device to leave a red mark in the shape of a cross on the forearms of some students". He used electricity to do what?!

Some parents describe the "red mark" in a little more detail:

The News received a fax Tuesday from attorney Jessica Philemond of the law firm Isaac, Brant, Ledman & Teetor, who issued a statement from her clients, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of their child being retaliated against.

The fax stated, “We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. ... We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”

That "make a red mark" on the child's arm was a burn. This sonofabitch was burning children. That he was doing it with the cross is adding insult to injury, but PZ Myers, the Columbus Dispatch and the Mount Vernon News are focusing on the religious implications of this and they're sort passing by that students were intentionally burned by this teacher!

If this guy was puffing on a cigarette and asking kids over and snubbing it out on their arm, that would be the story. The story would be about how this guy is a child abuser who snuffs out cigarettes on student's arms. But because he uses a gadget to brand children with the cross, it's about . . . religion?!

I have said before that most religions are systemized child abuse. I have said before that religion gets a free pass in our religion to abuse children. I have said that even atheists still believe that religion is somehow exceptional and should be held to different standards than other beliefs and organizations. That not even PZ Myers can see that this is child abuse and that child abuse is way more important than the church and state religion, and the fact that seemingly everyone else is missing the fact this guy is branding students I think amply displays all of this.

C'mon, guys, this is about the child abuse!

Cyborgs out of the Olympics!

Cyborg Oscar Pistorius isn't going to the Olympics. The IAAF ruled that his carbon fiber feet constitute unfair advantage. This is actually what I expected, tho' I admit that I didn't think the ruling would be so soon. Even if Pistorius' legs do not constitute an unfair advantage (and I, personally, don't think that they do because the technology is currently pretty crude) if he was allowed in one of the things that would happen is additional research into such technologies. Indeed, para-athletics are used for precisely such research, and to showcase it, but right now it's relegated into the ghetto of "special Olympics" or whatever. And moving this sort of thing into "normal" athletics will - and already has - given it a higher profile and probably helped the company that makes the prostheses more money.

I mean, I regard this all as hypocrisy. The distinction between elaborate high-tech training programs in advanced countries routinely give their athletes a technology based advantage over athletes from poor countries. But this sort of thing challenges the macho body image of traditional athletics in a way that personal nutritionists and computerized performance evaluations do not. But the ruling, itself, I do not find surprising as an attempt to preserve the traditional image of athletics.

Still, the genie is out of the bottle. We are entering the initial days of the cyberpunk world. I wouldn't be too surprised if in the next couple of decades some people start to intentionally replace at least some body parts with mechanical parts that enhance performance.

Thought about Hobbes and civilization!

I had a thought that is worth sharing. One of my reasonably guilty pleasures is the comic Action Philosophers. They're brief descriptions of various philosophy set in humorous comic form! I like them because I like philosophy and I find them funny. In reading number nine - the last, alas - they had a bit about Hobbes and, of course, quoted his bit about without civilization that life was brutish, nasty and short.

My first interesting thought - interesting me at any rate - is that Hobbes is wrong. We are extremely lucky to live in civilization during the period that it works. It took about ten thousand years for civilization to actually work. Humans, generally, were much better off in a pre-civilized state. The average paleolithic human lived to be in their fifties. The average ancient Hellene? About eighteen. This would creep up as time went on, but even when Hobbes was writing those paleolithic humans were better off in terms of diet, longevity, freedom from disease and general quality of life. Interestingly enough, they were also much freer. It takes a pretty organized society to seriously oppress people. Hobbes was just factually wrong, which I find interesting. I've long disliked Hobbes, and it's nice to realize that he's factually wrong.

My second interesting thought is about the nature of intelligence. If humans were just a trifle bit less intelligent than we are, just a little less clever with things, our civilization would never have gotten to the point where the median lifespan was greater than those paleolithic hunter gatherers.

To me, this begs the question if we are seed AI - an intelligence smart enough to make itself smarter indefinitely. For reasons of ego, if nothing else, I'm inclined to think that the answer is "yes", that we are smart enough to get better and better. Saner, smarter, more prosperous, etc. But it wasn't until today, right now, that I realized how close we were to never getting to that point. If we had just been a trifle less intelligent, we could be stuck in a perpetual dark age.

Which might not be much of an original thought, or even very original, but it's the one I had.

Conflicts between science and religion - bring 'em on!

Adrienne said something particularly clever about religion and I'm going to pass it on. We were talking about the touch of flames on this post, the fiery touch being about, unsurprisingly to those who read my blog, intelligent design. Which I, of course, think is deeply stupid and a pretty pathetic attempt to insert supernaturalism into science.

For my part, I was opining why intelligent design folks decide to take on the best scientific theories. In the above discussion, the point wasn't evolution, but cosmology. The gent with whom I was talking was making some bizarre points like . . . because physical laws are uniform throughout the universe that's proof of intelligent design. Which is a bizarre argument. I mean, also false, but additionally bizarre. Even if it was true - and it's not, say, inside a singularity, or in the very early universe, or the differences between quantum effects and relativistic effects, there's plenty of reason to think that the universe isn't the same everywhere - I don't know why that's suggest an intelligent designer. I mean, couldn't the same reasoning be applied regardless of how the universe is? But one of the specific things that the person said is that there is no scientific theory, even a bad one, that explains the origin of the universe. This is very wrong. Not only does science have a theory about the origin of the universe, the big bang, but it is amongst the strongest theories in science. The big bang theory is science working very much how science "should" work - the theory of general relativity suggested that far enough back in time that all matter and energy would achieve infinite density and there would be a beginning to space and time. From that reasoning, there have been numerous experiments that validate the big bang. There are few scientific theories with the level of proof we have for the big bang, both theoretical and observational. The same is true of evolution. The proof for it is staggering, overwhelming. If supernaturalists want to challenge science these are not the theories they should be challenging. I mean, much better would be . . . gravity. We don't know what the fuck it is, hehe. It's downright confusing and there is simply no connection between quantum gravity and relativistic gravity theories, and gravity behaves in certain unique ways that make it the odd-man out of physics. Or electricity. Or turbulent motion. All these things science is having trouble addressing. But, no, they always go after evolution and cosmology, which are particularly strong as theories go. Adrienne opined, certainly correctly, that the reason they go after those two is because they challenge the narrative of religion.

Then Adrienne said, and this is the clever thing, that some religious apologists will try to reconcile religion and science by saying that they cover entirely different subjects, different parts of the human experience, but that's a lie. And it is. The reason why science and religion are brawling is because both of them talk about . . . how humans came into existence, how the universe came into existence. No major religion lacks a creation myth. But this isn't discussed very well, that so long as religions have creation mythology there is going to be considerable antagonism between religion and science. Because, y'know, science says that the universe came into existence because of quantum flux in an instanton around fifteen billion years ago causing the big bang, and religious folks say that a supernatural being that transcends time and space willed the universe into existence. These are conflicting narratives, mutually exclusive, so the people who say that religion isn't about the same things as science are wrong. They are, and evidently so, and people don't much talk about that as being the essence of the conflict, because it is a conflict. Science says one thing, religion says another.

And even beyond cosmology and the origins of life, there are still conflicts. Religious people all make supernatural statements. Even if you're the species of religious person who says that the big bang and evolution are the way that god created the universe, almost all of those people will still cling to supernatural events to justify their belief. So a Christian might say that evolution is the method that god created life, but what about Jesus rising from the dead and physically ascending into heaven? Even religious folks who are willing to concede the creation myths are allegorical or whatever nevertheless make statements of fact. They say, "Jesus rose from the dead". They say, "He physically ascended into heaven." Even when they avoid the biggest issues, they make all these statements that simply cannot be physically true. They still are saying that supernatural agents are at work amongst us.

Which is back to intelligent design. That's what intelligent design is - saying that supernatural agents work amongst us, but do so invisibly. In the case of ID, the invisible is the bogus concept of irreducible complexity. Otherwise, it is invisible amongst the annals of history - which are, of course, woefully incomplete. A Christian says that, you know, supernatural events are only recorded in religious texts because they are otherwise lost to history. Sometimes they can sorta get away with this, like the census that supposedly took place at the time of Jesus' birth. We know the Romans did a number of censuses whose records did not really survive. It becomes less plausible, of course, when you're talking about the graves giving up their dead and zombie prophets walking around Jerusalem, or the Nile turning into fucking blood, or the destruction of two large cities by angels, or . . . you see the point by now, I think. That the only records of the innumerable supernatural events that occur in all religions seem to be recorded only by members of that religion. So, we entirely lack Babylonian accounts of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or any other of these supposedly supernatural events (save when one religion copies a story from a second religion, like with the Biblical Flood).

(Yes, I know there are a smaller section of Christians who believe all supernatural events in the Bible are allegorical and treat Jesus simply as a wise man or whatever, but this isn't really addressed at them and they are a very, very small portion of Christians and most other Christians would say that they're not Christians, so even calling them Christians is fairly problematic.)

I think that non-religious people should stand up more to religious people who are trying to slip it in, then, that "science and religion aren't about the same things". They are. Religions have creation myths that explain the origin of the universe and of life, and these are in direct contradiction to scientific theories. Religions also include supernatural events which also contradict science in a number of ways (being that science, by definition, can't have supernaturalism in it). The people who say that religion and science are about "different things" are ignoring the cases when science and religion do discuss the same topic and are at odds.

Robot Drivers, the US Army and . . . You?

In most ways, Forbes is a horrible magazine, who's sole purpose is to make rich people feel good about being rich. It's pretty sad, really. But this story about the DARPA robotic vehicle contest I found interesting in a couple of ways.

First, it said that the US DOD wants 1/3rd of it's fleet of vehicles automated by 2015. That's eight years away, folks. I don't know if they'll get a full third of them automated, but I'm sure that the technology for automated vehicles will be pretty robust by then. Indeed, I suspect robot drivers by then will be better than human drivers.

I went and looked at a number of other articles about the subject. Most of them, like the Forbes article, are of the "ooooh, robots are cool" school of journalism. And, well, yeah, robots are cool. Not a single article mentioned any possibility of, say, social consequence because of this. Such as, in industrialized countries, in the next ten years or so the entire industry of long distance driver might be completely wiped out. Once it is demonstrated that these vehicles are safer than human drivers . . . well, I'm pretty sure that it's already the case that it'd be cost effective to replace human drivers with machines. They're just not good enough yet, but they will be in the next several years.

There are around 1.3 million long haul truckers in America. In twenty years, I'd be surprised if any of them have jobs. Robots will just do what they do better and cheaper than they could ever do it. Many short haul jobs will also be totally automated, too.

Sometimes I feel like I'm talking science-fiction when I say, "The biggest labor problem that industrialized countries are facing is that in the near future there will simply be no jobs." Already, three in four of American jobs are service jobs, most of them low end, near minimum wage jobs. I mean, screw artificial intelligence as the technological singularity. I mean, maybe at some point AI will also make intellectual human labor wholly obsolete,but the day is nigh when most people will simply . . . not be needed for labor purposes. Just not needed. Most low end service industry jobs will just be done by machines. (Even for many interaction jobs, you won't need real artificial intelligence to do them - just enough verbal skills to negotiate specific problems. Like tech support. When you're calling up to troubleshoot your TV, the robot doesn't need to be able to talk about the weather, just identify what the problem is and clearly tell the person how to fix it. The automated menu systems that some tech support places have is a crude form of this, of course. So even jobs where direct communication is important can be automated without invoking some possibly mystic goal of artificial intelligence.)

Is there anyone beyond a couple of sci-fi writers and futurists who are even talking about this? Seriously. I want to know. Because this is not some hypothetic possible future problem, but something that's very much right around the corner - the US military wants 1 in 3 of it's drivers automated away in eight years. But I can't think of a single politician who is even tangentially addressing what is likely to be the biggest labor problem of the 21st century. That most of us won't be needed.

Intelligence Singularity, Futurism, Some Rambling Thoughts

A fair bit of my science-fiction work has to deal with, broadly, issues of futurism. I just got done reading A Deepness in the Sky, and I liked it tolerably well (in the long run, I suspect my biggest problem with Vinge is his anarcho-capitalism; I sorta like it because he's addressing what is one of my biggest pet peeves amongst sci-fi writers - that while they'll spend a hundred thousand words on technobabble most can't be arsed to talk about what post-democratic governments look like . . . indeed, my sci-fi settings have political systems that are actually backwards, stuff like monarchies; the problem is that I think anarcho-capitalism is so deeply and obviously stupid that anyone can take it seriously, and, yet, many in the sff set do precisely that) and the writer of the book, Vernor Vinge, is one of the proponents of a technological singularity.

It's an interesting bit of futurism (to the extent it is futurism), but I think that Vinge is doing what many futurists have done before (and many will continue to do, no doubt also including myself), which is basically attributing to the future the qualities of the present but merely in a more energetic form. So, in the 50s, when futurists (which is a term almost identical with "science-fiction writer" at the time) discovered lasers what they did was project that technological innovation into existing technology - the future would have ray guns! Of course, what actually did happen with lasers is nothing like that. We found that, instead, that lasers were much more useful as sensors, information storage, things like that. Many of us use lasers every day! In CD players, video game consoles, DVD players, blah, blah, blah. Lasers as ray guns? Still waiting on that one, and are likely to be waiting quite a while.

So, the idea behind an intelligence singularity is that some day a computer will be so powerful it'll be smarter in every meaningful way than any biological human. Since it is more intelligent by definition, it'll be able to make even more intelligent machines that we can, and those machines will make even MORE intelligent machines, etc., etc. The scenarios on this range from doomsday-esque Terminator-like scenarios (except the computers win because they will be, then, by definition more intelligent than humans) to Utopian fantasies where super-intelligent computers see to our every need.

I think that's, basically, doing what folks in the Fifties did with lasers but with computers, instead.

I mean, I'll out the first flaw - that human intelligence is singular, itself. Well, human intelligence is now, and always has been, a network. A technological singularity won't start until a technological system is more intelligent than the then existing human intelligence network. It is still, of course, an open question if we're smart enough to make seed AI in the first place. But, those little caveats aside, I suspect we are.

But, y'know, I think the idea of an intelligence singularity is a very crude sort of futurism. Like with lasers, or computers, or the radio, what ends up happening with them will likely be pretty . . . different than what we imagine. For instance, and I think this is non-trivial, as I said, human intelligence already exists in a network. Right here, right now, I'm actually using that network. The network started before we were even human - what animal species does not have some form of communications network? Artificial intelligence will merely be adding onto the system of which we're already a part - and it'll be designed to do that. The technique that the IS people are using seems to me analogous to the laser-ray gun situation: that the future will be like the present, just faster and with more energy. We are thinking that the goal of AI is to have computers . . . engage in human style thought, just do it much better than we do.

I doubt that'll be the case. Technological development goes into weird places. No ray guns, but dig that shiny new HD-DVD player. I suspect it'll be that way with AI. Rather than just doing what modern intelligence does better than modern intelligence, I suspect it'll go over in interesting tangents, and I've said the main one: it will be used to augment the existing human information network in novel and interesting ways. (Furthermore, AI will pick up the biases of their creator's behavior. A fundamentalist religious AI might not be the first AI ever made, but it's likely to be the second, with stuff like literal interpretations of religious work built into its architecture and low-level programming. AI might well be constrained by the irrationality of human belief system . . . like I said, tho', it's an open question if we're smart enough to pull this off!) I don't think that just proposing that machines in the future will do things that happen not much better and faster than happen today is very useful, because it is likely to be wrong.

On the other hand, we need to talk, I think, about futurism. This is a current and quite awful problem. I mean, for instance, right now the lack of intelligent futurism is creating a world wide global climate change event. Since almost no one bothered, at the early stages of the industrial revolution or, really, at all very seriously until recently, to talk about the climatic changes inevitably wrought by world-wide industrialization we're now on the verge of a very nasty, possibly Black Death-like problem. If people had been interested in accurately forecasting the changes wrought by industrialization and the like, global industry would look much different than it does. The same should be true of any new technology! But it isn't. So, with biological engineering, virtually every corn plant in the world is now genetically altered as pollen from genetically modified plants go to unmodified plants. Great going. We have permanently modified the DNA of corn. That was not, I should add, the plan, but it's what happened, and even though some people did try to stop it, it went ahead anyway. And there are some fairly intense technologies that could happen in the next couple of decades - AI, radically improved genetic engineering, and the unlimited promise of nanotechnology.

Of course, some people are working on it, like The Singularity Institute of Human Intelligence. The trick here is we need to start listening. But more than that, I am calling for more ingenuity in talking about futurism. I think we need to go beyond the idea that the future will be like the present with more horsepower! We need to create learn the hazards (particularly) of a given technology before we unleash it on the world. We need to ask ourselves questions like "what will seed AI mean to us?" Not just in the sense that they might become our computer overlords (benevolent or not), but also in the sense of, say, what will a post-labor world look like? What happens when machine intelligences destroy all human labor value?

I am, of course, optimistic about these things. I think our computer overlords will be benevolent. Indeed, because I suspect that they'll be part of the information network we already possess, I suspect we're just going to merge with them. We'll think what they're doing it so spiffy that we'll want to do it, too, and we'll suss out a way to do it! I don't think it'll be the computer overlords caring for us like we were children, or controlling us like we were cattle, or destroying us like we were rabid dogs - I think they will be us.

I also think that we should - and this is certainly what organizations like the Singularity Institute of Human Intelligence is involved in - take steps to guide, thoughtfully and with some care, where we want our technology to go. We do not, after all, want to create a computer tyrant by accident! More than just trying to predict the future, I am calling on people to understand that we are also making the future. And if we want human beings to have a meaningful say in this future, we will have to make a future where they have a meaningful say. Which is, I think, something that we don't really want to address, but it is perhaps the biggest social problem facing the developed world: advances in travel, communication and automation are are showing more and more clearly that there is less and less meaningful work to be done. In the US, for instance, three in four people work in some service industry. It won't take a seed AI to replace most of those workers, too. (I suspect that most of them could be efficiently replaced right now, if we had a mind to do it - the problem would be an engineering problem, not a theoretical or technological one.) But rather than the future filled with hypercompetent people that one sees in, say, most science-fiction literature, what we are instead creating is a huge body of poorly trained servants. Not precisely a shiny future. But, like with global warming, this is happening because no one is bothering to seriously consider the consequences of technological development or try actively to guide human development into a world where we, in fact, all are the hypercompetent future people seen in sci-fi novels.

So, as it developed, this post is two-fold. The first is to call on futurists to think beyond the concept of the future being "the present by harder and faster", and in the second case for people to take futurism seriously - because we need to do it! Because we have not done it, we're on the verge of a huge labor problem, a huge energy problem and a huge environmental problem. We really need to start planning for the future now, and we need to be aware of the extent to which we actually get to decide what kind of future we will have.

The Future is Now. Again.

A South African amputee came in second in a 400m race in Italy. He's got these curved carbon fiber springs instead of feet and lower legs. The International Association of Athletics Federations is seriously asking if these prosthetics give him an "unfair advantage".

My initial feeling was to be appalled that the IAAF was going to discriminate against their legless man, but I guess then my critical faculties kicked in because I realized that these curved carbon fiber blades were cybernetic enhancements. And even if these particular prosthetics weren't an "unfair advantage", it was only a matter of time, and probably a brief period of time at that, before some prosthetic was invented that was so great that the person who had it would simply be unbeatable by people without similar or superior enhancements.

So, the future is here. Again. An international sports body is legitimately considering the possibility that a prosthetic limb is inherently superior to flesh and blood limbs.

I mean, for the sake of my own curiosity, I hope they do rule that the runner can keep racing. I'm curious when it'll come to pass that ambitious athletes are willing to, say, voluntarily cut off their own legs below the knees to have these techno-feet. I know the curiosity is deeply morbid, but the curiosity is still there. I feel that it is inevitable that people will start to replace their body parts with superior technological models, but as far as I know this is the first time that has practically occurred, that people have actually said that a prosthetic is possibly better than a normal working limb.

Friends and enemies out there, our lives are soon going to get increasingly weird. No cyberpunk novelist has done much to prepare us for the inevitability of the deeply disturbing future shock that is very much right around the corner. What it is to be human is really breaking down, and not in some abstract, but in the immediate present.

Science and Secularism

I was reading PZ Myer's blog. In a recent post, he did something he frequently does, and that many atheists do, which is give this universal primacy to science in the scientific method. Says he: "Faith says that the way to get answers is by revelation, accepting authority, and dogma. Science says that the way to get answers is by examining the evidence critically, testing hypotheses with experiment in the natural world, and by constantly reevaluating and revising our ideas to make them more accurate."

Indeed, he was responding to this: "The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths."

Both of them conflate reason with science. Anyone with passing interest in my blog and writings know that I am very pro-science, but I think that . . . well, I understand that the theists do want to try to limit the damage that the secular world is doing to them. But I am finding it increasingly disturbing that the atheists approach the subject of addressing religion in such a one note way. As if the fight is a brawl over scientific facts, alone!

But it isn't, and science is not the only field to use reason and philosophical materialism to address it's subject matter. Another area -- and this is another key area when discussing matters religions -- is history. History attempts to explain human events without the slightest hint of the supernatural. It is not a science, but all the core elements of history are similar to science, and they are based on the same sort of philosophical materialism of science. You look for data to create an increasing accurate view of the past, and ideas that aren't supported by the data are generally discarded.

History is also one of the most powerful tools that an atheist can use -- and secular historians are definitely under a sustained attack by religious people. Still, it is useful to be able to debunk religion by pointing out not only how none of the supernatural events of various religious works are supported by historical works but also all the other religions that are dead, to be able to talk about how religions are formed and die, the plethora of would-be messiahs and gods whose works have been exposed as frauds, and often the complete lack of a historical record about the existence of these people, and how that record is at variance with religious works.

I know this is true for me. I can be talking with a Christian about Simon Peter and they'll be disturbed at what I'm writing about. That is, after all, part of the point of me writing it. They'll get disturbed and say that I'm factually wrong about things and they'll use what as their sole reference? If you didn't guess "the Bible" then where do you live so I can go there where it isn't know that Christians have a grand total of one reference about everything, hmm? Yes, the Bible. So, I can start talking about historical events and other religions of the period and I'll almost always draw a blank stare. So, you say that Christianity is just Roman Mithraism with a Jewish coat of paint, and that various solar religions with stories similiar to Christianity were all over the area for centuries, Roman, Persian, Greek and Egyptian, the general response I get is a blank stare. Despite Mithraism being the official cult of several Roman legions, including some in the area, and Mithraism's similarity to Christianity, and it predating Christianity by about 200 years, Christians are ignorant of Mithraism.

And that's just one of the gems that can be dropped on Christians from history. The Christian narrative, like all religious narratives, simply can't stand up in the face of the historical record. When a person is able to contextualize a religious story in the broader panoply of history, the stories don't seem as urgent. A Christian reading the Bible can easily feel that what is going on in those stories must have been the most important thing in the universe -- but when compared to the larger story of the Jewish world, the Roman Empire and it's struggle with Persia, the vastness of Indian and Chinese history, all occurring at the same time, it becomes a lot less impressive.

Of course, history isn't even the only additional discipline. Politics is another. Now, politics won't be able to combat the truth or falseness of religion, but when a person has studied politics in any capacity, it becomes painfully obvious that the best sorts of governments are those without church interference. The correlation between a secular government and the well-being of the people under that government is nearly absolute. It is harder to promote religion in society when a person has a good knowledge of politics.

Of course, all of these things are related to some extent. Science and religion share many techniques, and politics and history have interesting interconnections, and they all make use at various stages mathematics and statistics. But the notion that science is the only way to addressing the foolishness of religion is something that needs to stop, I feel.