I'm happy with my Covid passport, thanks

To follow-up on a previous post, Covid passports are now being actually used across Europe. I've been checked a few times in restaurants in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Each time, I felt considerably more comfortable about being in a crowded space knowing that everyone around me had some substantial level of immunological protection. 

So I continue to think this is a very good idea. As was blindingly obvious, checking the passes is not some unbearable burden the hospitality industry would have you believe - it is no burden at all. It takes all of five seconds to check a pass, and virtually every pub, restaurant, nightclub or any public venue involves a much longer interaction with the staff than that anyway. 

Likewise, having seen objections from the industry that "it's not for restaurant owners to ask about the health of their customers", I just think that in the case of a highly contagious and dangerous disease, this is irresponsible lunacy. I mean, so you'd be willing to let someone in and spread the virus around, would you ? Why in the hell would you want to do that ? I'm baffled. Maybe you think that knowing in advance that someone has the disease, i.e. quarantining them once already known is different from not knowing their status ahead of time (innocent until proven guilty and all that), but this is almost literally playing Russian roulette. Knowing that the virus is running rampant, and having easy and affordable access to testing and/or vaccination, it doesn't make any sense to me that you'd rather just take the risk instead.

This is a bit different to the regular case of knowing that any customer might be a potential murderer, which no-one goes around checking pre-emptively. For starters, the number of people actually prepared to murder complete strangers in cold blood is many orders of magnitude smaller than the number with Covid, so the risk/benefit calculation is quite different. Moreover, murders don't propagate exponentially. They don't threaten the entire health system of an entire country. There are legitimate grounds of presuming everyone to be, in a sense, guilty rather than innocent in the case of a highly contagious diseases that they can't directly control - your personal character isn't being criticised, it's just taking a precaution much as you would take similar safety measures against hurricanes or landslides.

Finally, the objection that they somehow threaten personal liberty is pure fantasy - of the kind that J. R. R. Tolkein would have spat on. Covid passports don't contain anything except your immunological status. They are not some mysterious back door into a draconian society in which only government-approved cronies would be allowed to participate, because that idea just doesn't make any sense.

Fortunately this is having the desired effect : vaccination uptake is finally increasing here. Which frankly shows what a bunch of selfish idiots people tend to be. Tell them they should get vaccinated because it will help stop other people dying and they're all whingy about "rights" and "personal liberty" and other made-up excuses - and they are excuses  - but tell them they need it to go to the pub and they're literally queuing down the street.

Likewise, the health sector. The news routinely reports on how people being laid off because they won't get the damn vaccine is going to cause staff shortages, but what they never ask is why these people are even in the health sector at all. I mean, why would you - excepting the small number of medical exemptions - work with vulnerable people you're ostensibly trying to save and not take the five minutes needed to get vaccinated ? Do you actually want to murder them ? I genuinely don't get it.

The Atlantic has a nice overview of Europe's strategies. Generally this seems to be proceeding much as you might expect : people are content to follow the rules, they just won't go out of their way to go any further. The fraction of people yelling about how Covid passports are evil who actually aren't prepared to put up with them is very, very small, because the whole objection is based on nothing whatever of any substance. There is a hardcore of genuine lunatics and misguided ideologues, encompassed by various sorts of hangers-on, people who are generally angry anyway, who tribally associate themselves with others but don't actually believe in the cause... just as the leader of Insulate Britain doesn't want to get his home insulated or some "anti-vaxxers" have indeed been vaccinated. See, the age-old and genuinely important question "lives or liberty" doesn't really apply when your loss of liberty is so minimal as to be essentially fictitious. 

People tend to be armchair bigots and heroes alike. They are happy to rant and rave, and some of them even believe in what they're saying. But the number who are prepared to go much more than waving a placard around is remarkably small. And, sat at home writing a blog, I certainly don't count myself an exception to this by any means.

Some countries are going further than I originally stipulated. The Czech Republic is now saying that you need a vaccine and isn't accepting a negative test as an alternative (with exceptions). Austria is going as far as compulsory vaccination. This is going several steps beyond a mere Covid passport - we now have true vaccine passports and even more. And... I think I'm okay with this.

True, as the Atlantic notes, this may drive polarisation - but my suspicion is that this is true largely or only of the hardcore, who are damn hard to reason with anyway. There isn't much of a rational counter-argument that anyone can come up with against people who would prefer to go to the pub than save their granny. Yes, these people have an important right to protest, but that doesn't mean we have to listen to anything they say. So if harsher measures increase vaccination among the reluctant and/or lazy, and only cause a backfire among a miniscule fraction, that seems all to the good to me. Moreover, we'd had compulsory vaccination for nigh-on 200 years, and it does work. As noted last time, what is required by law is perceived as necessary, whereas what isn't is seen as an optional extra. It is not - if done properly - that people simply cow in fear of the law as Tory ideology dictates. The BBC has a very nice, very detailed piece explaining this. 

This leaves the important question : why aren't passports having more of a direct effect ? In the Czech Republic, they haven't been used much for very long, but in Wales they have - yet case numbers there remain high. My guess is that they don't cover as many holes in the Swiss Cheese model as needed, due to a combination of lack of enforcement and lack of requirements as to where they're required (which Wales has taken steps to address). And of course, they don't stop private gatherings of any kind, nor can they be required for access to essential services. 

Does that matter ? Yes and no. Clearly they are not a silver bullet. If not properly used they can give a false sense of security, just as it's folly to think of vaccines as the only layer of protection needed. We should still be enforcing social distancing, mask wearing, and using home office wherever possible even with vaccine mandates. 

So, we have to temper our expectations of what passports can do. They can't give us total normality back - vaccine and test efficacy isn't high enough for that, and not even the most diehard enthusiast would insist on them being required absolutely everywhere. But they can help in reducing the outbreak while allowing some aspects of ordinary life back. Surely, that makes them worth having.

Review : The White Ship

A short review because this is not the sort of book which needs a lengthy ramblings.

Charles Spencer's The White Ship is a an excellent little history of the life and times of Henry I, one of England's more forgotten kings. Oddly, we remember William I pretty well - everyone grows up learning about the Battle of Hastings, the Harrowing of the North, the Domesday book, etc., but we aren't told anything at all about what happened next. Which is a shame, because it turns out the answer is "quite a lot, actually".

Spencer's book begins with a brief recap of the Conquest before diving headlong into its main topic. Despite the title, its real focus is very much on Henry. We see him grow from a high-ranking but unimportant teenage noble into the archetype of medieval kingship. There are plenty of interesting diversions along the way, but everything revolves around Henry.

This is very much your traditional sort of history book, concerned almost exclusively with the politics of the high nobility. Ordinary folk don't get much of a look in, at least not with any kind of agency (Diane Purkiss does this much better). Nor does Spencer offer anything of real insight as to why things happened in the way they did (as Dan Jones does excellently), or any analysis of the larger forces at work (e.g. Michael Scott). And he doesn't much mention how reliable the narrative is given limited evidence, something Marc Morris deftly made into an intriguing virtue when considering the Conquest itself in more detail. As for rhetoric, Spencer doesn't hold a candle to the magisterial Tom Holland.

And yet... crucially, Spencer doesn't try and do any of those things. He plays to his strengths, presenting a complex saga of innumerable characters in a clear, concise, yet lively and vivid way. What could have become enormously and tediously confusing is instead rendered as a lucid, page-turning adventure story, full of shock plot twists and complex, multi-dimensional characters. The result is an absolute gem of a little book - a brilliantly told tale that deserves to be better known. "Game of Thrones but in real life", says a cover quote. That it surely is, despite the War of the Roses being well-known as one of the inspirations for George R. R. Martin's tale. A screen adaptation would easily have all the elements needed for grand success : epic battles, struggles, villains, betrayal, blood... and sex all over the place.

I give the book an extra point because it does something elemental that most historians forget : bibliographic notes are at the back, additional points of interest are footnotes at the bottom of the page. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have these mixed at the back, so you have to keep flipping to see if there's anything interesting worth reading when 90% of the time there isn't. Big kudos to the author on that one.

I have to withdraw a point, however, because the book is too short. Unfortunately, this isn't because it's just so well written that I wanted it to be longer, but because it genuinely ends too early. Though concise, the life of Henry I is described in some detail. We get a wonderful picture of Henry as a complex man, a battle-hardened promiscuous warrior but who was also concerned with learning. He even created the Exchequer, so-called because the original accounting was done on a giant checkerboard-painted table as a mathematical counting aid (Spencer isn't afraid to have lengthy diversions where necessary, and handles these well). We see Henry's turbulent life in all its rich details as his fortunes waxed and waned, from his obscurity to gradual, grinding triumph as he beat his many enemies into submission with military force and genuinely clever diplomacy. All this is very well done.

After the sinking of the White Ship, a disaster which cost Henry dearly at the height of his power, the narrative continues as he struggled - successfully - to claw his way back to dominance. Most rulers simultaneously suffering the sudden loss of all their most important supporters and their only heir would be flattened, but not Henry. Sheer force of will seemed to see him avoid becoming yet another tragic failure, ending the last 15 years of his reign apparently secure that his daughter Matilda would become England's first sovereign Queen.

It's the bit after Henry's death I take issue with. While you couldn't quite say Spencer glosses over the Anarchy, his description is far too short. Though he doesn't offer any of the sort of general trends that other authors identify, in most of the book it's at least very clear why specific events happened the way they did. Not so in this final quarter or so. It feels a bit like he had a word or page limit, and really this section should have been at least twice as long. Quite honestly I'd have been happier if the whole book at been doubled in length, but even another 50 pages or so would have done wonders. In particular, Matilda's retreat from England is never explained, which seems a bit like saying that the Spanish Armada was defeated without bothering to mention why.

This oddity aside, the book is excellent. Interesting enough, the author's bio is incredibly short, mentioning only that he worked for NBC. In fact, he's Earl Spencer, younger brother of Princess Diana. Well, regardless of the shenanigans of his adopted family, he's an excellent writer, and I'll certainly look out for his other books. 

Overall I give this one 8/10. It's great, albeit too short, de facto sequel to Marc Morris' Conquest, which I would recommend reading first. But where Morris brings new life, important details and uncertainties to an often-told tale, Spencer unearths an undeservedly forgotten and under-rated king. Conquest was a much-needed retelling, but for me at least, The White Ship is a whole new story.

The Godless Gaps

I wouldn't normally bother commenting on articles about cosmology and God, but this one is written by the inestimable actual cosmologist Ethan Siegel, so I'll make an exception.

My broad take is that science is in some ways agnostic and other ways antitheistic. Science presumes that observable natural phenomena can in essence explain themselves, that we can discover the mechanisms at work that explain the observable world through observation and testing. Following on from the previous post about knowledge, proposed explanatory mechanisms gradually transmute into observable facts. What begin as untestable or even apparently unknowable ideas are slowly brought into the realm of direct observation. 

For example, atoms were once just a purely philosophical speculation - no-one had any idea of their size, still less if they could ever be measured. There was nothing much of a physical, observational reason to suggest them at all. Later they became a more detailed theoretical construct that helped explain specific observations and made testable predictions, but only in recent years have they themselves become directly observable. The shape of the Earth underwent a similar change, as did the existence of the planet Neptune, evolution and the Big Bang - albeit with rather more uncertainty still hanging over that last one.

Obviously not everything has undergone this full process, or science and philosophy alike would be dead in the cold earth. Gravity has transitioned from being able to explain existing observations to being testable experimentally through interplanetary probes, but that which causes gravity is not yet a direct observable. Particle physics also has reached a stage where testing ever-smaller scales is becoming impossible with currently technology. Past developments might caution us not to assume that such capabilities will be forever inaccessible, so we might perhaps be more charitable to string theory and the like : just because it might take phenomenal energies to test is no real grounds to doubting its validity, only its experimental verifiability. 

At the same time, it might indeed be fundamentally impossible to directly observe the "fabric" of spacetime. Nothing is cut and dried. There might, perhaps, always be gaps.

Science has to presume that those gaps are not, however, the realm of God. It presumes that there must always be another aspect to reality that we have not yet discovered or interpreted correctly, such that observable phenomena are ultimately able to explain themselves. The difficulties posed by competing models and alternative interpretations only indicate that a subject has not yet reached the stage where it can be subject to direct observational test, but there are areas in which this has been achieved. The crystal spheres will not return. The Earth will never be shown to be flat.

So science is strongly antitheistic in this sense. Allow even the slightest possibility that "God did it" and the crack becomes a gaping hole that undermines, if not demolishes, the entire edifice. God could be suggested as the explanation for the tiniest anomaly or the smallest deviation from theory, much as "aliens" are frequently invoked by the less religious. No, where science finds a gap, it has to be content with - and even takes delight in - labelling it as an unknown. It denies that any presently inexplicable phenomena is the work of God.

But this is not the same as denying God itself. Denying each and every specific instance is still not the same as denying the general principle. At last it's time to bring in Ethan :

If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.

But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe. As a simple example, we can look at a single radioactive atom. If you had a large number of these atoms, you could predict how much time would need to pass for half of them to decay: that’s the definition of a half-life. For any single atom, however, if you ask, “When will this atom decay?” or, “What will cause this atom to finally decay?” there is no cause-and-effect answer... In fact, there are many interpretations of quantum mechanics — paramount among them the Copenhagen Interpretation — where acausality is a central feature, not a bug, of nature.

To assert that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause” ignores the many, many examples from our quantum reality where — to put it generously — such a statement has not been robustly established. It may be possible that this is the case, but it is anything but certain.

He also makes an interesting link between determinism and causality. Now I believe that everything must have a cause, and that if quantum mechanics says otherwise, this is pointing to some gap in our understanding, some incompleteness (rather than wrongness) in our science. But I'm not sure I'd subscribe to the idea that causality means the Universe is entirely deterministic. And I'm not at all sure how science can robustly accept the idea of acausality, or whether the whole concept of infinite time even makes any sense. That all... doesn't sit right. More on that in a future post, maybe.

Ethan goes on to note that the Big Bang theory does not necessitate a singularity - in fact, inflationary theory forbids it. 

Whereas a Universe filled with matter or radiation will lead back to a singularity, an inflating spacetime cannot. Not just “may not” but cannot lead to a singularity.  Remember, fundamentally, what it means to be an exponential in mathematics... That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller [going backwards in time] but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning... To assert that “the Universe began to exist” is completely unsupported, both observationally and theoretically.

Again, as before, a “Universe that came into existence from non-existence” is a possibility, but it is neither proven nor does it negate the other viable possibilities.

So cosmology suggests that the Universe didn't have a beginning, and therefore there is no need for causation to invoke it. And you can hardly have a Creator without a moment of creation. On the other hand, there are many caveats to that : these are theoretical models which hardly have the same rigour as the shape of the Earth, and nothing in them explicitly forbids a creation event. Nothing explicitly says the Universe cannot have begun at a singular point in time but of finite size and other physical conditions, i.e. to begin the same inflationary process as we observe, but with a discontinuity only in time and not in space. But let's push on a bit further first :

 [The necessity of God] is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.” Here are some examples that show why this is absurd.

• When we simulate a two-dimensional Universe on a computer, did we bring that Universe into existence, and are we, therefore, the God(s) of that Universe? 

• If the Universe’s inflationary state arose from a pre-existing state, then is the state that gave rise to inflation the God of our Universe? 

• And if there is a random quantum fluctuation that caused inflation to end and the hot Big Bang — the Universe as we know it — to begin, is that random process equivalent to God?

Although there would likely be some who argue in the affirmative, that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God.

Here I must disagree, because I would be one to argue in the affirmative - in fact I find it strange that anyone would argue otherwise. If I create a simulated Universe, how am I not that Universe's version of a God ? I am omnipotent with regards to that simulation. With respect to that simulation, I have all the supernatural powers of a God - I can even be regarded as eternal, since I can alter the flow of time in that "universe". True, in my world I will age and die, but that's not the case from the perspective of any entities inhabiting my simulation - and for them that's all that matters. To them, I have characteristics which are literally and fundamentally beyond their comprehension or imagination.

Likewise, I think it's perfectly valid to describe the cause of the Universe as God. That argument is discussed at length in both Spinoza and the Upanishads. The definition of God needn't be confined to a traditional Western version. One version of God not as a moralistic beardy busybody but as a prime mover is that God is the solution to the infinite, the ultimate and final cause, the unknowable solution to the mystery of inescapable discontinuities. E.g., God is that which can create itself, or what causes eternal existence. Such concepts are ungraspable by the human mind, which God, by definition, is beyond. Personally I like this conception of God very much (which is not to go so far as to say I agree with it, mind you).

To return to Ethan :

In any scientific endeavour, you absolutely cannot begin from the conclusion you hope to reach and work backward from there. That is antithetical to any knowledge-seeking enterprise to assume the answer ahead of time... In particular, you cannot posit an unprovable assertion and then claim you have “proved” the existence of something by deductive reasoning. If you cannot prove the premise, all logical reasoning predicated upon that premise is unsubstantiated.

It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. 

While I think science is antitheist in presumption, I think it is equally important that it be agnostic in potential. It should by default assume that God is not the answer. But if it rejects any possibility of God whatsoever, saying that God cannot exist because everything is physics, then that is circular and unscientific - just as it would be equally unscientific to use God as an explanation for everything.

It is quite sensible in everyday life to reason by induction and inference, to assume that patterns hold beyond their initial observations : lions are dangerous, therefore other animals with sharp teeth can also be assumed to be dangerous. But we would be wrong to hold this as proof. We would ordinarily be quite prepared to have our ideas subject to revision by new data. With any mystery, science should seek an explanation other than God, and indeed should reject the possibility that the answer is God... unless there is active evidence to the contrary. If a miracle-working deity descends from the clouds, at some point it becomes pretty silly to reject the possibility that it is in fact a divine supernatural being.

But is this notion of a Prime Mover just another sort of gap - the kind that science is forbidden from filling with God ? I would argue no. Where there are gaps in knowledge, such as not knowing if the hypothesised Planet Nine exists, science cannot invoke God. But here we have a gap of an altogether different kind, one that is arguably unavoidable : a gap unbridgeable by human thought. Can anyone ever comprehend a timeless or infinite existence ? No. It is not a matter of increased computational power, but something of the most fundamental kind of impossibility.

Just as the beings in my own personal simulated Universe couldn't understand my reality, so we could not understand God. This means the possibility of a simulator-like God is not impossible but rather reinforces the point that there is no reason to expect the simulation to be anything much like our observable reality. This is true even in our own simulations : we render them in a way that looks familiar, but the actual mechanics of what's happening in the computer - electrons moving around inside a chip - bears no resemblance to, say, the motion of a gas cloud or the fluid dynamics of an ocean. So our simulator God would be no less supernatural, after a fashion, than our traditional divinity - even if from the perspective of God itself, God is nothing very special. God might be a sort-of glorified computer programmer, yes, but this is to misunderstand the differences between a simulation and reality. God might well also be something utterly incomprehensible to us. Nothing about observable reality can give us any clue either way, unless God itself decides to intervene.

Science, then, is often antitheist but it is also profoundly agnostic. And perhaps most importantly of all, it should be apatheistic - to the unbiased observer, it does not matter if the evidence indicates a divine entity or otherwise. Whether God is the fundamental cause of two atoms colliding does not matter when it comes to understanding the mechanics of the collision. For science, God is not dead, just irrelevant.

I Know What You Knew Last Summer

Here's a nice Aeon piece about another favourite philosophical conundrum : what is knowledge ?

There would seem to be two broad aspects to this : how we actually evaluate data and how we should evaluate data. Like it or not, we tend to let emotions and a host of biases influence how we respond to new information, which makes it extremely important in deciding what's the correct, rational approach that our biases are obscuring.

Science posits at least a partial answer to the latter. Facts, at least, are relatively easy in the scientific world view. Facts are that which is established by repeat observations by multiple independent observers that give consistency using different observational methods. The more of those criteria you meet, the more secure your data point. At a purely practical level, above some threshold it makes sense to accept some things as hard, certain facts. True, measurements always have instrumental and fundamental limitations, but for everyday life it's often perfectly safe to drop this and use "certain" when we really mean "as confident as we can ever be".

Models, though, that’s where it gets tricky. It’s under-appreciated that wrong models can still get highly specific details right  And even where they appear to be wrong, sometimes this can only be due to a host of implicit assumptions that were overlooked. So while one can apply the same basic conditions of truth to models as one can to facts, the evaluation is always more difficult. Consistency with one model does not automatically imply inconsistency with another.

But, while nothing can be absolutely certain in the strictest philosophical sense, once we accept some common, practical restrictions as to what we mean by “knowledge”, a kind of certainty can be happily recovered. And this applies to models too, e.g. the shape of the Earth makes testable predictions and can be legitimately described as both model and fact. While I like very much the analogy described here that a model posits explanatory mechanisms which are unknown or even unknowable, with science only concerning itself with purely measurable phenomena, this is not always true. It's an extremely appropriate analogy for forefront, novel research, but it doesn't work well at all for more established findings. You can't really say that atoms are uncertain anymore, or that evolution is just an idea. Those models are also things we can say we know are true, within any useful definition of knowledge.

But... who has to know things ? There things get even more difficult. I always like the health warnings along the lines "it is known to the State of California that this chemical causes cancer", as though there were something extraordinarily special about California that was beyond the ken of mortal men. Clearly, California is not the fount of all knowledge. Here we come into a headlong crash as to who and what we can trust :

There is the larger question of what justifies our beliefs, and there is the narrower question about how justification factors into the life of a thinking, enquiring person. For internalists in epistemology, my belief cannot be justified unless its justifier can somehow be appreciated by me. Externalists deny this; they say I can have a justified belief even if I can’t check whatever makes it credible. 

Is this an academic debate? Absolutely, but I don’t think it’s merely academic. True, you’re unlikely to learn about internalism and externalism unless you’re taking upper-level philosophy courses. Nevertheless, what’s up for grabs are rival conceptions of ourselves as knowers and enquirers, and which conception will take precedence in the theory of knowledge. When we ask the hard questions about our fallible intellects, where should we start? What’s our foundational picture?

Perhaps these question deserve better outreach ? More simply put, the question would appear to be, "can I trust an expert in a field I myself don't understand ?". My answer to which is "no, never completely, but always more than I can trust my own assessment." Of course, deciding that they're an expert in the first place raises a whole other layer of difficulty. So how do we get at some basic, hard level of knowledge with which we might judge this ?

Some aspects of this appear to be quite silly :

I have a justified belief about where my dog is because I had an experience reminiscent of the sounds of her feet. And the experiences themselves need no justification, since they are, as the philosopher Roderick Chisholm put it in 1966, self-presenting. They make themselves known. And how could they not? What could be more luminous and manifest than conscious experience?

Well, opinions differ. Wilfrid Sellars articulated a lasting difficulty for the self-presentation idea: raw experience isn’t fit to justify...  If you ask me: ‘What reason do you have to think your dog is nearby?’ what good is it to indicate my unrepeatable, inarticulate inner episodes? What good is a certificate of authenticity that can’t be shown? I couldn’t even cite my experience to myself, because as soon I have the experience, it’s gone.

Seen as how all our perceptions are internal and subjective, this would seem to be utterly daft : you could raise the same objections to literally anything, and have no foundations to any sort of knowledge at all. To build on a recent post, it would seem self-evident that whenever we talk of knowledge, the applicant conditions must involve sensory perception. We cannot possibly talk of knowledge in a framework totally independent of perception, even if perception cannot be all there is to it. 

So, hearing the dog provides good evidence for the presence of a dog, and in ordinary terms that evidence is more than sufficient to constitute knowledge. The chance that we're being deceived in some way is ordinarily so low as to be negligible, and we can ignore this possibility until we have direct evidence that this is the case. Normally we would anyway have perceived that the wider circumstances are the same as usual except for the sound of the dog, so we'd actually have good grounds for believing that no-one is out to trick us. We'd only go around actively worrying about someone trying to fool us with recordings of dog noises if a) we had other reasons to suspect someone, b) we were super paranoid, or of course c) we're in a philosophy class discussing knowledge. Those are the only three possibilities.

Every internalist view, even weaker varieties, says that justification has to be accessible from your perspective. Justification always comes from inside. But what is this accessibility? It’s usually imagined as something you could have from the armchair, reflecting on your thoughts, so if you’re justified in believing anything, you can find that justification here and now by looking within. Reflection becomes the means of justifying your beliefs, and that places a huge burden on the shoulders of reflection. 

...anyone not sufficiently reflective can’t have justified beliefs. We often talk about what very young children know, even before they learn to talk, and we say that our fellow creatures know things too. I might tell you about an eastern phoebe that knows and remembers where her nest is, but can’t tell that one of her nestlings is a cowbird.

Internalism captures the hard rigour of philosophy and science, where proof and argument are the coin of the realm, but when we start taking the credibility of the beliefs of children and nonhuman animals seriously, it comes up short. They typically do not or cannot reflect, so internalism would have us deny that they can have justified beliefs. The externalist says: ‘So much the worse for internalism.’

The argument here isn't quite clear to me as to whether the author means to say that animals do or do not know things. We might fairly say that children, animals and stupid people alike all just have opinions (or unjustified beliefs), not knowledge. As do very clever people outside their comfort zone too, or perhaps only very weak justification. Correlation isn't causation, but correlation does provide evidence - it's just not the whole story. Only a belief having sufficiently rigorous justification might count as knowledge, but we needn't have certainty in all things in order to act. A songbird doesn't need the same qualitative kind of knowledge as an architect to build a nest. It isn't really necessary to say that a child "knows" the Earth goes around the Sun for them to be able to repeat it parrot-fashion; their knowledge is at best crude compared to a qualified astronomer, and more akin to an opinion - it just happens in this case to be correct.

The article goes on to an alternative method of justification :

You can form justified beliefs based on what you see while having no insight into how vision works, or even into the overall reliability of your visual system. For reliabilism, justification flows from the reliability of the process, not its accessibility to consciousness. Hence, reliabilism is an externalist theory, not internalist.

Without the burden of accessibility, externalism can account for the credibility of non-reflective thinkers, such as birds, dogs and toddlers. Frank Ramsey once compared beliefs to maps, so if we model thinking on the production of and navigation by inner maps, it makes sense why we would bring our fellow creatures into the fold. Every thinking thing needs to find its way through environments where the locations of food, friends and enemies can change. So when we’re thinking about credibility and justification for the beliefs of such creatures, we’re interested in what it takes for those creatures to succeed. They need senses that put them in contact with the world. They need reliable processes to lean on.

These two proposals don't appear to be so at odds to me. I, as I thinking being, can form conclusions and beliefs based on pure correlation - I will have rather weakly justified opinions, but opinions nonetheless. If the correlation is very good, with a slope close to 1 and a small scatter, my justification is reasonable, however imperfect it may still be. But I can also go a step further and posit explanations for the correlation - in addition to, rather than instead of, considering the degree of reliability, I also reflect on what's going on. Reliability would appear to be one possible aspect of justification, not a fully-fledged alternative to it.

Another internalist argument has given externalists more trouble... In the first story, you use the certificate to make a decision, and it gets you what you wanted. In the unhappy version, you use the certificate to make a decision, exactly as before, but it goes wrong due to no fault of your own...  If you made the right call in the happy case, then you made the right call in the unhappy case. Externalists have struggled to explain why my beliefs in the good and bad cases seem to be on equal footing. 

Which recalls the famous Picard quote : "It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." You can correctly evaluate data, but if that data itself is flawed, so will be your conclusion. This would seem to be equally problematic in this "internalist" view as well, because ultimately all external data is evaluated and interpreted internally. You can't form a conclusion from pure reflection because you'd have nothing to reflect on. 

So would knowledge count as knowledge if it was later disproved ? I guess not. All we can decide on is the best method of evaluating information, not the Absolute nature of reality itself. Every finding, in the strictest sense, is provisional, even if many are so firmly established that questioning them would be insane. You can evaluate information correctly and still reach a wrong conclusion - there is only better and worse, not true or false, which are really linguistic conveniences rather than being Really True.

Ultimately, the only way to verify anything is with more data. There is no system of knowledge in which you're constantly and consistently deceived in which you can magically reason your way to the truth. Descartes couldn't possibly overcome his evil demon through thought alone - he would need to peek behind the curtain, so to speak. 

Likewise, if you want expert-level knowledge for yourself, the only surefire way is to actually become an expert. Most of the time, most of us have to make do with something lesser, placing trust in those who seem somehow competent and trustworthy. What we can all do, however, is to do a minimum level of investigation to check if basic things that distant experts are saying is verifiable and sensible. If you can't make it to becoming an expert, or even an amateur, at least do some basic checking besides evaluating personality and character. At least try to do as much as you can. If you don't do this - if you place your faith in an "expert" purely on the basis that you like what they're saying, or even worse because you think they're a nice person with good hair, then you can still have an opinion, but it risks being worse than merely wrong. In all probability, it won't even be valid at all.

Making Meta Beta Feta Data

I put down a few thoughts on Facebooks' "Metaverse" project back when it was announced, but given that they're really going all-in on this lately, I think I'll jot down a few more. For this, I watched the keynote speech by developer John Carmack at Facebook Connect and read a transcript (because I honestly can't stand the sight of his ugly head) of an interview with Zuckerberg.

I'm at least as conflicted about this as I am about billionaires funding space travel. Human space fight is an intrinsically and highly valuable experience and I'm convinced we should be supporting this as much as possible, over and above robotic probes. The recent race for re-usable rockets has done more for this than any government projects since the Apollo era, the hopelessly expensive Shuttle project notwithstanding. All the same, this doesn't mean that the leading proponents of this aren't generally a bunch of self-entitled, exploitative, profit-mongering jerks. It is a great and bitter shame to me that these people have tainted what should be an inspirational and unifying human endeavour, something that we should see as a goal of improving life for all of us on Earth, not to allow some elitist twats to try and escape it.

Facebook's VR project is even worse. The company is, simply put, a bag of dicks, and Mark Zuckerbot has all the empathic awareness of a mad robot hell bent - literally - on world domination. Yet I love their Oculus products and use my Quest headset on an almost daily basis. I am... conflicted.

Let's start with the practical aspects. The "metaverse" is not a great name, but it is adequate. It appears to refer to this blending of multiple realities : the ordinary real world, the purely virtual world, and the use of augmented reality to combine the two. The idea appears to be that these new, virtual worlds would become as integral to daily life as the conventional world of flesh and stone. So I'm fine with the name, despite the inevitable deluge of hilarious memes.

Even Facebook is not so ambitious as to think it could dominate every aspect of this metaverse, and is even proclaiming that it doesn't want anything like a walled garden - but it does want to become a key player in it. Still, is this goal even achievable, or desirable ? The timing of Facebook's announcements is certainly more than coincidence given recent scrutiny, but this does not mean it's a doomed gimmick - not by a long shot.

I like very much Carmack's analogy of mobile phones. He made this comparison for two reasons. First, that practically, mobile phones have become highly successful and replaced a slew of different devices. Access to a metaverse could potentially offer similarly staggeringly profitable benefits, but I'll get back to that in a moment. Second, he notes that there are plenty of lapsed VR users, who bought a headset but rarely or never used it - a phenomenon not seen in phones*. So to some users, the device effectively has negative value : they already have it, they paid money for it, but they're actively choosing not to use it. Clearly that has to change for a metaverse to become feasible.

* Carmack is worth listening to, I think - he's quite honest about the practical problems, even if he does seem to buy into the "only connect !" mantra.

I think mobile phones are an excellent analogy for another reason : thresholds of convenience. We had mobile phones back in the 1980s, but hardly anyone had one. They were large, cumbersome, expensive, silly executive toys. I don't doubt they added value to their users, but that came with such high non-financial costs that their eventual explosion as a market wasn't at all obvious or inevitable.

An anecdote may help illustrate this further. When I was ~12 I remember reading a technology magazine that boldly predicted we'd eventually all have mobile phones. The magazine depicted them, rather oddly, as pendants we would wear everywhere, though we might have to move in range of antennas in order to make an actual call : outside of this they'd be no more than pagers. And I remember thinking that the magazine's depiction of someone making a phone call on the beach was very silly - who in the world would want a call on the beach ? Ridiculous ! Likewise, no-one seemed to predict the success of text messaging : why would anyone prefer this to an actual conversation ?

So I'm wary of claims the metaverse will add the necessary value Facebook thinks it will. It might just be a silly gimmick, this is entirely possible. All the same, it might succeed. It would be foolish to dismiss this possibility based on the limitations of current headsets or past 3D flops like cinematic movies (in particular, the latter are a qualitatively different experience than true VR).

Hence, thresholds are key. Carmack notes that once the Oculus dropped its price by $100, sales spiked. Likewise I think this applies to convenience too, more than it is about actual functionality. If you could immerse yourself in a 3D world, or augment the real world with 3D, lifelike imagery, as easily as you can currently say, "Hey Google", why wouldn't you ? If wearing the necessary device was no more burdensome than a pair of ordinary spectacles, if you could do this comfortably for the entire day so that its features were available when you needed and could instantly be dismissed when not, why would you choose not to have this ? Why would you choose not to opt in to this larger, enriched world ? To allow both your existing 2D content and a new world of 3D content together however you wished ? It would be like denying yourself access to the entire internet or every public library. Sure, some parts of the internet are best avoided, as are (presumably) some libraries. And some people do indeed choose to avoid both, but their numbers are negligible. The vast majority to not deliberately deprive and disadvantage themselves in such a way.

(Carmack leans toward the software aspect of the VR as being more important for increasing value than hardware. I have some sympathy for this : for myself, the iDaVIE app is almost to the point where I would use VR routinely for work. But for truly mainstream use, I think we're still at the point where hardware needs to improve before developers will be interested in writing programs to use it.)

Of course, these thresholds gloss over a wealth of practicalities : how to make the glasses visually appealing, how to have a long battery life, how to deliver high-end performance, what level of graphical fidelity would be acceptable as a minimum standard, etc. My point is that if you could create such a device, it's hard to see why any ordinary person wouldn't want it. So I do think the metaverse in principle has every shot of going mainstream. We all use smartphones to the extent that making them even more convenient and powerful definitely would add a great deal of additional value, not least in having far more engrossing conversations and fostering more productive collaborations than in primitive Zoom calls. 

I could spell out a rosy vision of an augmented reality lifestyle, where one routinely has 3D calls with distant relatives and gets to experience distant places without the high-energy demands to actually visit them; where one replaces phones, computers and screens in general with a pair of lenses. I could wax lyrical on the utopian possibilities... I think it not outrageous that a metaverse, using data, could even help us making better feta cheese (hence the silly title), or other ordinary activities where the internet doesn't normally come into play. 

In short, just imagine an activity, and try and imagine how augmenting this could help - what you could do if your imagination was as clear as day, and accessible to anyone you chose to share it with. Most activities have possibilities in such a case, I think. Not all by any means, but a hell of a lot.

But alas, this is Facebook, so we all know such grand utopian visions aren't worth dwelling on. I only mention them to point out that there are potentially enormous positive aspects, just as there are with Facebook itself. It would be foolish indeed to pretend there aren't : Facebook wouldn't have so many users were it not doing at least something right. So burying one's head in the sand isn't going to help. Furthermore, while I doubt this sort of system is going mainstream in the next five years, Facebook seems quite determined to plough billions of dollars into this. Even - especially! - if you don't buy in to the benefits, it's worth being at least concerned about the possible next big crisis in social media.

We all know by now that Facebook is horrendous, so I trust I don't need to spell this out for anyone. I do not believe Zuckerberg at all when he claims he's so passionate about social media or fostering connections between people - his company seems to have a single overriding goal in all things, and enriching human existence isn't it*. But at long last it seems the great political blocs have realised that having such huge profiteering being driven and governed by anger-inducing manipulative news feeds isn't a way towards a utopian dream, and have stirred themselves away from the trivial question of whether regulation needs to be employed towards the much more difficult questions of what, how, and how much.

* While interesting, I do not much agree with this piece on how social media doesn't lead to echo chambers or polarisation : yes, by getting people of conflicting views together it does expose that conflict, but it does exactly nothing to help and often clearly makes things worse.

Questions about whether social media companies should be treated as publishers remain difficult, in my opinion. I think of social media as something wholly new, possessing attributes of all sorts of older media together with something radically different. It is neither like someone organising a town hall meeting nor like a postal service delivering a latter. It has aspects of both, coupled with the extraordinary capability of reach fantastically large audiences in an interactive way that is simply impossible elsewise. 

Rather than wondering whether they are publishers or not, we need entirely new terminology - and new regulations to go along with it. Social media has given rise to memes and deepfakes, and this sort of art as communication is only going to get orders of magnitude more common in a metaverse.

Similarly, painting Facebook as a villain, though - and I can't stress this enough - is very, very easy, it may not be all that helpful. Just saying, "don't use it" clearly doesn't work. Profiteering is a fundamentally amoral, not immoral, activity. For this reason the actual metaverse is more likely to be closer to dystopian than utopian (think DRM problems writ large), but that doesn't mean to won't be desirable enough for people not to want it - or indeed to make its use a practical necessity for everyone else. The threshold of quality standards needed to make a profit is not the same as the threshold to ensure everyone has a wonderful time, which appears to be the foundational myth of the free market.

So is the metaverse coming or not ? I lean towards "probably, but not yet". Maybe in five years we might have a high-end device capable of the sort of features needed, but it won't be affordable. My suspicion is that VR will remain something of a niche activity for several more years, though it may well go to console-scale mainstream when it comes to gaming. Among my friends, this is almost the case already (and I've never even interacted with any of them in VR).

Unfortunately this means it's going to have to continue to put up with the usual sort of idiots who criticise anything they themselves can't see the immediate and instantaneous value of. And if VR can't make good on the convenience criteria, then it may well eventually go the way of 3D televisions - the doubters do have a point. But against this, the immersion of VR is just too much fun, the potential for education too great. The doubters aren't so much wrong as they are very narrow-minded. And if we do reach a full metaverse, it won't - most assuredly - just be because the likes of that twit Mark Zuckerberg told us to : it will because we deemed the costs to be worth the genuine value offered. We should be prepared for a much more sophisticated response to this than simple Luddite rejectionism : if it works, we won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.