Sobriety for BuJews

 For those who don't know, the "BuJew" is a portmanteau, a mash-up of Buddhism and Judaism for Jews who normally have a Reform Judaism background, want something more "substantial" than that, but want something that's "spiritual, not religious," and so glom on to Buddhism.

The problem?

Buddhism IS a religion, first of all, something I eventually reiterated. Your counterarguments aren't accepted, either. Please don't reference the likes of Stephen Batchelor or Robert Wright, either. I've read both long ago and crushed Wright here, something also eventually reiterated. Also, beyond its being metaphysical, it's questionable as to whether it teaches everything that some claim. Take universal love.

So, sobriety recovery?

Refuge Recovery would certainly appear to be BuJew. Founded by Noah Levine, son of poet Stephen Levine. 

I guess Noah's a true "western Buddhist" guru in another way. Allegations of sexual misconduct, that seem to be credible.

And, going by birth family surname? I wouldn't be totally surprised if Pema Chodron is also a BuJew.

No, Luther wouldn't have agreed with Calvin on the Eucharist

Even though that new-to-me argument is making some rounds in recent years.

Many post-Zwinglian Calvinist Reformed argue that Luther actually accept Calvin's spiritual presence, while noting Zwingli believed the same, but involved in direct disputations with Luther, focused on the "no bodily presence." See here, near the end.

Yes, Melanchthon did, but ... IMO, Luther more ignored Calvin in silence than anything. He was focused on intra-Lutheran issues post-1530 more than anything else. And, this is itself a claim from silence.

Sure, Luther accepted Calvin's "spiritual presence" — as far as it went. But, that wasn't far enough. 

He explicitly condemned it for not going further. In reality, Calvin stood with Zwingli and against Luther on "local presence" vs "illocal presence," and on rejecting Luther and Rome on what's technically called "oral manducation" or similar. See here. Let us not forget that, while it was Zwingli's idea, Calvin also never explicitly rejected "finitum infinit non capax est," an idea that appalled Luther. Let us not forget that running until Barth or beyond, the Reformed have held to this.

Indeed, until writing this post, I'd never heard of claims that Calvin and Luther agreed on the Eucharist. Tosh!

That said, as noted most in my Roper Luther bio review, Luther was wrong and Karlstadt was right on this issue.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about the human brain

More and more research shows not only that brains are not massively modular, but that the whole old functional diagram of brains, including the alleged primary function not only of the cerebral cortex's different surface areas, but also separate portions like the cerebellum and amygdala, is so out of whack it's probably at Paul's Not.EvenWrong. stage. As part of this, just as we know that "one gene ≠ one phenotypic expression" in both that some expressions need multiple genes coding for them, but more to the case, one gene can be part of coding for several expressions in combo with other genes, so, those functional areas of the brain can express multiple mental workings. This Quanta piece has plenty more.

Some of the "more" is that, as we already know that analogizing a brain to a computer is wrong (at least those of us who know it's wrong know it's wrong), but that trying to describe the functioning of the brain in terms of how it APPEARS to function in producing human consciousness versions of phenotypic expressions is probably ALSO wrong.

In short, to stand Dan Dennett on his head, and who doesn't love that? A lot of past descriptive neuroscience is probably now best categorized as folk neuroscience. 

From the piece, here's a good example of what that means.

“I don’t think any of us would want to tell people: Don’t use the word ‘memory’ anymore,” he said. But to understand the brain, we might need to challenge our intuitions about how it works — “in the same way that quantum mechanics is challenging to comport with our understanding of physical phenomena in the world.”

In short, we're been barking up the wrong tree. We need to find a new one that's not only not the same species, but a different genus and probably even a different family. Conifers instead of deciduous trees.

At the same time, per quantum theory and beyond, any new tree-barking must have some insight relevant to us as conscious human beings.

Richard Carrier thinks ancient Christians thought Jesus was a space alien

No, really, that's the claim in a sad piece at Wired, sad from Wired giving him a platform and also from letting him call himself a historian, with the professional implications that may have. I guess calling himself "Jesus mythicist," or "Gnu Atheist," let alone "liar about interpreting the Hebrew Bible" would be too much. (I now realize this is my first time to directly blog about him, though I kicked his butt repeatedly, via idiotic nonsense of his anally-retentive worshiper Coel at old blogs of Massimo Pigliucci. He is the first and second, and occasionally a troll as both, and was busted in the past, as discussed at one of Massimo's old sites, misinterpreting Aramaic Targums and eventually admitting by silence that he didn't know Biblical Hebew.)

Enough prologue, though. On to the piece.

It actually doesn't start with that claim, though. Carrier, presumably trying to spread his Bayesian erudition bullshit across a broad area, first puts the old "you killed your grandma" worry about backward time travel into a new twist. He says time travelers would risk this by taking modern viruses to the past, riffing on the title of the piece.

Let's take a look at an extended excerpt, because there's several issues.

In general Carrier thinks that science fiction authors tend to underestimate the difficulties a time traveler would face surviving in the past. “It would take you a while to get settled,” he says. “You’d have to figure out the customs, the language, how to get money so you could eat. There are a lot of things you’d need to sort out, because it’s basically an adventure mission. You’re basically going into the Congo with whatever’s on your back, and then you need to get your base of operations and figure stuff out, and then you can relax and wait for whatever scene or event you’re trying to watch.” 

One of the biggest threats would be viruses, an issue that’s seldom tackled in science fiction. “The problem with time travel is that if you went back in time, you would probably wipe out the whole population then, and they would probably kill you within months with viruses that you have no immunity to,” Carrier says. “So note to time travel authors: You have to come up with a universal immunity so that the time traveler who goes back is not bringing viruses that everybody is not immune to, and is immune to viruses that his body has never encountered.”

OK?

The first graph? Pure absurdity. A Borg-like chip or something would address the language issue, and would be used to augment something like Rosetta Stone training. Money? Said time traveler would be equipped with shekels, talents, sesterces, or whatever, upon being sent backward. Also, as with Apollo 8 and 10 scouting things out before Apollo 11, a first time traveler would get the lay of the land for followers.

Viruses? Nonsense. The time traveler would be vaccinated against all the major ones, and be slipped some gamma-globulin etc. in the backpack for viruses without vaccines. No "universal vaccine" involved. As for the flip side? He's ignorant of vectors. Disease spread was only a problem in truly urban areas in antiquity. So, that's dismissed.

Next, there's straight-up Carrier arrogance:

“If I had to go into the past, and it had to be the Roman Empire, I would probably pick right after the victory of Vespasian, because from everything I’ve read, Vespasian seems a very pragmatic fellow. I feel like I could go there and convince him to institute a proper constitutional government, in exchange for certain technologies of empire, like the railroad, for instance, and the printing press. Possibly gunpowder. That wouldn’t fix every problem—it would turn the Roman Empire into the British Empire, basically, which is a slight improvement, but still pretty far back—but if we could get that constitutional government set in, we could have social progress as well as scientific and technological progress a thousand years earlier, and we could bypass the hell of the Middle Ages.”

Gee, what a shock that Carrier thinks he's smart enough to advise Vespasian.

If this happened, I'd slip in right behind Carrier, and whisper to him a riff on the old Latin proverb: Memento insanitate.

Oh, we're getting close to the "Jesus was Klaatu" (no, really) but not there yet.  We are in mythicism territory, though:

“We have the complete Babylonian Talmud, and it does mention Jesus and Christians, but weirdly it always places the story of Jesus’ execution a hundred years earlier. It puts it right after the death of Alexander Jannaeus, in some sort of Hellenized Jewish context. [Jesus] is stoned by the Jewish authorities—there are no Romans, because Romans aren’t there yet—he’s stoned by Jewish authorities in Joppa rather than outside Jerusalem. So there’s this whole different narrative. He’s placed in a completely different century. And it’s definitely the same guy—Jesus of Nazareth, mother was Mary, the whole thing. … It’s usually just dismissed as some sort of change or error or whatever, but it’s actually hard to explain if there was an actual historical Jesus.”

Oh, let's start with the fact the Babylonian Talmud was written 500 years after the Christian gospels, Carrier. And, contra you on it, and contra former mythicist R. Joseph Hoffman on Toledoth Jeshu, while these Rabbinic Jewish writings may have elements that trace back earlier, they're less historic than the gospels, and ultimately have polemicist roots. Like these:

In the 1230s Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, pressed 35 charges against the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX by translating a series of blasphemous passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity. There is a quoted Talmudic passage, for example, where Jesus of Nazareth is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that permits Jews to kill non-Jews. This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX of France, where four rabbis, including Yechiel of Paris and Moses ben Jacob of Coucy, defended the Talmud against the accusations of Nicholas Donin. The translation of the Talmud from Aramaic to non-Jewish languages stripped Jewish discourse from its covering, something that was resented by Jews as a profound violation.

Beyond that, it's not hard to explain at all. This site sort of takes care of the rest of his claims about the Talmud.* (I once was tempted by the Alexander Jannaeus idea, as it provided an extra century for Christian growth to develop. But, all the Xn gospels anchor on John the Baptizer as well as Pontius Pilate as well as Caiaphas. Plus, Acts talks about disciples of John "versus" disciples of Jesus. And, it talks specifically about Apollos as one of them, and Paul mentions him, though without a tie to John.) This site takes care of the reliability of Jewish sources in particular as well as Carrier's sources in general, and puts the lie to Wired calling him a historian.

OK, and now, from a book I shall never read, referenced by Carrier.

The first Christians were preaching that Jesus was a space alien, he was like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was their view. You really don’t understand the origins of Christianity if you don’t understand this. There’s a lot of pushback against it, because of the anachronistic belief that he didn’t come from ‘outer space,’ he came from ‘heaven.’ But back then that was outer space.

What bullshit.

Ancient people in general did not believe in "outer space" in this way. I guess Carrier is now channeling his inner Erich von Däniken. Metatron from Qumran was no more a space alien than this. Basically, this is drawing a caricature of the ancient world. It also ignores that the people intelligent enough to not only be literate but the ancient world's intelligentsia certainly weren't so simplistic.

And, yes, the Erich von Däniken of Gnu Atheism and Jesus mythicism is believed to be a historian by Wired. And accurate by the likes of Coel.

To wrap up? Back to this historian stuff. He is not, and he is even less a biblical scholar. His degrees may be in history, but his polemicist attitude undercuts his claim to be a historian. (Also, at the height of his mythicist high priesthood, he didn't peddle himself as one. He holds no tenure nor tenure-track academic position. He lists himself as "independent lecturer" through the present, which means nothing. His academic publications are few and far between. His only full books appear to be from a quasi-vanity press that focuses on Gnu Atheists and whose Wiki page doesn't even list Carrier! (Also, the founder of Pitchstone appears to have published his own dad as one of his first projects. And, some of the authors in the stable, like Peter Boghossian, are wingnuts, and Shermer's a full-on libertarian.)

I want to tackle "liar" one more time, though. He's a liar if he really believes that non-mythcist actual biblical scholars run scared of mythicism. No, it's more that with mythicists, especially ones like him that are Gnu Atheists as well, it's as much a Gish Gallop to engage them as it is Duane Gish.

Updated side note: While Paul says he doesn't really know any biography of Jesus, he DOES clearly state that Jesus was "born," and was a human being, normally born, in Galatians 4:4.

* I updated this to say "sort of" takes care of Carrier and the Babylonian Talmud because it doesn't fully address the BT's lack of historicity. Also, the guy's a nutter on Xi Jinping Thought.

==

Other updates: For a VERY interesting take on not just proto-Rabbinic era Jewish literacy at the time of Jesus but a hot take on "the disappearance of half the Jews" and why, read this piece.  

And, as a placeholder for future blogging, via that piece? The Jewish shtetl of "Fiddler on the Roof" et al was as much fabrication by photographer Roman Vishnaic as reality.

Anil Seth: a new thinker about thinking; but is he actually new?

He's new to me, at least, but this Guardian interview, with discussion of his ideas and his new book, means I think I need to do more to rectify that.

He says Dan Dennett was the biggest influence on his current ideas, but yet that he's plenty willing to argue with him. From the interview, "subselves" and an evolutionary battle idea on how consciousness emerges from fights between these subselves seems to be the biggest influence.

Based on the famous permanent amnesia case of Clive Waring, he then says it seems that personhood is not totally tied to explicit memory and related issues. To some degree, this would tie with subselves and multiple drafts (but refined from what Dennett says).

As for Dennett's denial of a Cartesian theater? What if, going beyond Seth in this interview, there is such a thing, but it's not permanent or ingrained. What if, per Seth and other new thinkers, that's part of our "hallucinating" our sense of the world "out there" into existence?

As for Dennett's refusal to deny, or even discuss, the non-existence of a Cartesian free willer on parallel grounds, will Seth discuss that or not? Will he discuss how much Dennett ripped off from HIS mentor, Gilbert Ryle, then tried to palm Ryle's ideas off as his own?

In light of all of the above, he has a great new riff on Descartes:

“I predict myself, therefore I am.”

Well put, per Tevye!

The book is "Being You."

It sounds interesting ... but, if Seth is really that enthusiastic about Dennett, it also sounds like something that needs to be carefully eyeballed. His Ted Talk may have had more than 10 million hits, but other than the idea that consciousness is a controlled hallucination, there's really nothing new.

AND? If he is a fan of Dennett (and hopefully, cutting through the chase, Ryle), then who's controlling the hallucination? Oops.

In addition, if he appeared on Sam Harris' podcast to talk to him, per his bio page on his website, he needs to be read very carefully. (The podcast is 115, yes ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN, minutes long. Pass. And not linking, even with a no-follow, as it's on Harris' website.)

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Sidebar: On the subselves and struggle, the Guardian also interviewed David Eagleman a couple of months ago. Read it, too. (He's a bit too reductionist for my taste, and per an old piece on my main blog, too much a techie-enthusiast within neuroscience, but still.)

Skeptical about Houdini and his touters

The piece is more than 4 years old, but I saw it via Pocket.

Anyway, I know that Harry Houdini probably had an edge or two or three, but bribery? Makes you wonder about magicians today.

That said, Jackson Landers does NOT wonder about Penn and Teller, or Randi, or others, whether conflating political libertarianism with skepticism, or other problems with movement skepticism.

Noam Chomsky, linguistics genius? Not so fast

Is Noam Chomsky perhaps above my intellectual pay grade? Yes.

Genius? No.

 

Including and above all, not a genius on linguistics.

Neuroscience has shown the brain is NOT "massively modular," therefore undercutting theories of language of Chomsky, Steve Pinker and others. I first noted this point 15 years ago. I also noted, per Wiki's take on him, that he was too much of a rationalist on this issue in general. 

Indeed, Wiki's piece on generative grammar notes that no evidence for deep structures has been found, and that Chomsky has shrugged that off by a fallacious appeal to Galileo (who DID have evidence for his claims), showing that not only is Chomsky too rationalist, but also that, in additional to being anti-behavioralist, he's anti-empiricist.

Related? Back in 2010, per Doug Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach, I said the mind, including on language, was massively recursive, not massively modular. And, more and more new research, on linguistics in specific and human mental activity in general, is demonstrating this.

And, some researchers argue that Chomsky's version of a universal grammar violated Ockham's Razor even if it actually does explain things.

Next, per this review of Terence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species," even if a universal grammar does exist to some degree, it might not be the major factor in the origin of language.

Related to that, and also undercutting Pinker to a fair degree, neuroscience HAS shown the brain didn't have a massive explosion 60,000 or whatever years ago. In short, language ability evolved gradually and adaptationally, or even exadaptationally. And "one-tenth of a language" is of as much evolutionary value as a planarium's "one-tenth of an eye."

Chomsky also seems to miss the power and role of cultural evolution in this.

 

Even more, of course, he ignores the power and role of plain old neo-Darwinian evolution. It's clear that other upper-level sentient animals (other primates and cetaceans coming first to mind) communicate. Per teaching sign language to some primates, it's clear that they have at least rudimentary skills at symbol manipulation and recombination. And,  of course, from that, clear that language of some sort is not peculiarly or solely human.

 

Those facts all go directly against the claims of Chomsky, a straight humanities guy, that language IS specifically human. From there, to use Dan Dennett's "skyhooks" idea, he seems to have "pegged" without evidence the massively modular brain, etc.

 

Finally, the end of this Wiki piece on transformative grammar he got some massive signal-boosting on early claims to have invented a new world in linguistic study. Related? He got lucky to be attacking behavioralism with his linguistic ideas just as behavioralism was starting to collapse in general. He admits to getting lucky in being the "somebody" MIT needed to fill the faculty position he was hired for. Remember, Noam is purely a humanities guy.

And, even if Chomsky WERE right? What then? He hadn't shown HOW things like deep syntactical structure evolved, and we still don't know that today, whether the brain is massively modular or not.

To be honest, really, on the origins and development of our original use of language, we now little more today than we did 50 years ago.

And, this may remain permanently unknowable.

And, there ARE alternative, newer, scientifically informed takes on the development of language.

 

(Update: And, among them, more and more research shows not only that brains are not massively modular, but that the whole old functional diagram of brains, including the alleged primary function not only of the cerebral cortex's different surface areas, but also separate portions like the cerebellum and amydala, is so out of whack it's probably at Paul's Not.EvenWrong. stage. As part of this, just as we know that "one gene ≠ one phenotypic expression" in both that some expressions need multiple genes coding for them, but more to the case, one gene can be part of coding for several expressions in combo with other genes, so, those functional areas of the brain can express multiple mental workings. This Quanta piece has plenty more.) 

The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From by Michael C. Corballis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent book from the preface on.

Many people know the name of Noam Chomsky, but they may not know that, while he dethroned B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to linguistics, his own theory, which broadly falls into humanist linguistics, has itself become largely passé.

Two major newer schools, with a fair amount of overlap but with distinct emphases, are in the lead today: functionalist and Darwinist schools of linguistics. Michael Corballis comes from the later, though he’s conversant with the former. In the same broad train of thought as a Michael Tomasello, he talks in this book about the likely route for development of human language.

Corballis says straight up that he knew he would butt heads with Chomsky, Gould and others. He rejects Chomsky’s massive modularity of the brain (as does most modern neuroscience) and rejects Gould for saltationist ideas about the origin of language.

Corballis says that he sees normal, incremental neo-Darwinian evolution at work.

Early in part 1, chapter 1, he calls out Chomsky for ignoring most of the vast variation between languages in his attempt to posit a universal grammar. He even QUOTES Chomsky to that effect.

“I have not hesitated to propose a general principle of linguistic structure on the basis of observation of a single language.”

This is basically like the old “spontaneous emergence” idea of maggots in rotten meat, Galen’s claiming the human liver has seven lobes because monkey livers do, or similar.

Now, after refuting Chomsky, what ideas does Corballis offer up?

First is that language probably in part evolved from gestural issues. He notes that human babies point to things just to note them as an object of attention, vs chimps who point because they want.

Next, he notes humans’ ability to mentally time travel. Tis true, he notes, that corvids may not immediately revisit seed caches if they think another of their species has been spying on them, but that’s about it as far as looking to the future among animals. Elephants and primates seem to retain some memory of deceased loved ones, but of itself, that doesn’t reflect mental time travel backward, really. Only humans seem to have that in great degree. This, in turn is part of larger “displacement” in language, moving ourselves spatially as well as temporally. Related to that is that, in English at least, many prepositions can have both spatial and temporal functions.

Beyond that, he postulates that humans (and possibly earlier members of the genus Homo) having third-order theory of mind, vs primates (and presumably, cetaceans) having only second-order TOM, and a restricted and species-specific one at that, is probably a big factor in language development. Language recursiveness and nesting would seem to underscore this.

In all of this, though, Corballis notes that primates have some gesture usage, and that even dogs can recognize specific human words.

Next, it’s off to grammar. After a basic look at parts of speech, Corballis notes how and why, in English and other language, some things like “helping verbs” evolved … and then, in some successor languages, devolved again. As part of this, and the idea that languages in general started as noun-verb only items similar to modern pidgins, Corballis notes the role of cultural evolution.

Corballis ends with his “Crossing the Rubicon” of how he things language began. This starts by summarizing some of his differences with Chomsky on things like internal vs. external language and their function in language development, language as a means of expressing thought rather than thought itself and more.

With that, he notes that to the degree there was a great leap forward, speech, not language, was it. Abstraction was not inherent to speech. Related to that, he says it’s an open question as to whether all current languages evolved from one Ur-language, or if instead, they started evolving after modern Homo sapiens started splitting.

Corballis does admit that, without more evidence, he too is telling a “just-so story,” and it’s nice for him to end on a note of epistemic humility.

Side note: many of his “peregrinations” during the book are interesting, but I think he spends too much time, with repeated returns, to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, when it’s but marginally connected to his main theme.

 

Beyond that? Carl Zimmer reports that new research indicates language evolved primarily for communication, and NOT for thinking. Fun sidebar? This is another overturning of Chomsky's claims about language. (I can't say "research," since Chomsky did basically none.) Also, this would tie in with people like Corballis stressing cultural evolution's role in the development of language.

View all my reviews

Chomsky is also wrong on some philosophical issues, such as claiming humans have universal standards of moral justice. On many issues, no we don't. Even what constitutes "murder" is not 100 percent universal. Per my cultural evolution link above, Chomsky's also surely missed its role and power in development of morals. And, speaking of morals, his actions in the Faurisson affair still raise questions.

Sidebar: Deacon's second book, Incomplete Nature, is way controversial. Here's an interesting review. It defends his invention of a number of new words and generally says "good try, but still not actually explained." Deacon was also charged with plagiarism ... charges that might just be true.

He IS right, very much, on media criticism. I'll give him that.

 

Also, Noam's attacks on AI, with claims like it's behavioralist below the elephants and turtles, are laughable, unscientific and anachronistic. They're unscientific because Chomsky admits that his theories of linguistics aren't scientifically founded. They're anachronistic because behavioralism has even fewer devotees than Freudianism. 

I hope that within 20 years Chomskyism on linguistics has as small a crowd of devotees.