Why Your Opinion on NSA Snooping Is Irrelevant

Much of the discussion about the recent revelations of the NSA's massive snooping capabilities has centered around whether or not people think it's a problem.  There are plenty of opinions, from "The government are fascists trying to kill us", to "I don't care if the government reads my stupid emails", to "It keeps us safe".  The ever-popular "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" always gets discussed, whether this opinion is being advocated or debunked.  But all of these opinions, including yours and mine, are completely irrelevant to what's going on here.

The emphasis on opinions and polling data is powered by a persistent, pervasive and false belief that the United States is and should be a democracy.  In a democracy, every citizen gets to vote on every issue, and the majority rules.  This is not the form of government we have, and it's not the form of government you want.  Other names for majority rule are "mob rule" and "tyranny of the majority".  If majority opinion ruled, women and black people would still be property, and the country would be a Christian police state where homosexuals and atheists were publicly executed.  Is that what you want?  Thankfully, the United States is a representative republic, where the rights of minorities are explicitly protected in the Constitution.  The contrast between democracy and republic is being played out on many issues, most notably gay marriage.  A host of ill-conceived popular votes on gay marriage have elevated the public's bigotry to the status of law, but this will not last.  Legislatures and the courts are slowly but surely seeing that this is a civil rights issue, a matter of equal protection.  The will of the public is going to be overruled by the constitutional government, and this is as it should be.

There are also a lot of people talking about whether the spying programs are legal or not, and there is a lot of misconception about what this means.  The most common misconception is that whenever a piece of legislation is passed by Congress and signed by the president, it becomes legitimate law from there on after unless repealed.  While it's true a signed bill becomes a law, it's really a kind of temporary, provisional law, unless and until it becomes settled law by being tested and upheld in court.  The fact is, much of what has passed through Congress in recent decades is blatantly unconstitutional.  Take, for instance, the NDAA, which authorizes indefinite detention of American citizens without trial.  How can you square this with the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a speedy public trial?  It's absurd on its face, yet it is, for the moment, law.  People do not seem to understand that the legislature is not obligated to pass laws that agree with the constitution.  They should, but they don't.  And the Supreme Court doesn't have any sort of veto power over legislation.  Ultimately they can strike down legislation, but only after someone brings  a legal case against the government, against the law itself.  This can take years to work its way up to the Supreme Court which can finally overturn the unconstitutional actions of the legislature and executive branch.  We are in that waiting stage for many fundamentally illegitimate laws like the NDAA, which has a major lawsuit against it, currently in the appeal process.

To understand what's so significant about the NSA spying case, you need to appreciate how this lengthy process of interplay between the three branches of government results in settled law, which is the only type of law that has any moral authority.  The key point to realize is that the Bush and Obama administrations have been deliberately and aggressively blocking the process of settling law which ought to involve all three branches of government.  The Washington establishment is pretending that there is oversight and checks and balances because a corrupt warmonger like Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she approved what the executive branch is doing.  But the founders of this country made three branches of  government for a reason.  The judicial branch has been failing very consistently, because they are being swayed by an executive branch which is manipulating the system to prevent the courts from doing their job.  The Obama DOJ is not simply arguing that laws like the NDAA or the NSA's surveillance are constitutional and letting the courts decide.  They are trying to block the cases from being heard, typically by using secrecy claims to prevent the cases from moving forward.  They believe they must do what they're doing in order to protect the country, but they are willing to destroy the country in the process.

These complex, and perhaps boring questions of law are what really matters here, not your opinion of whether or not the NSA's snooping is intrusive or not.  Nor does anybody's security concerns matter here.  Because if we give up our constitutional government, for any reason, we're doomed.  Thousands of years of human history have conclusively demonstrated that unchecked power is inevitably abused.  That's precisely why the founders of the United States set up such an elaborately balanced system of government.  And either we are a nation of laws, or we are a nation of bullies.

Right now, the bullies are in charge.  Whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing are prosecuted, but powerful Washington insiders who lie to Congress are given a pass.  This needs to change if we this country is going to survive in its current form.  If you value the freedom you have left, if you think the United States is a good country worth saving, then you must make your only consideration whether or not the laws are being upheld.  And as defined in our constitution, the making and settling of laws requires all three branches of government.  That's the key result of these recent leaks, exposing what the legislative and executive branches are doing in trying to shut out the judicial branch.  Only if we insist that all of our security laws pass muster in the courts can we preserve our country and our way of life.

Physics and the Limits of Reductionism

I was recently discussing the difference between chemistry and physics with my 17-year old son, who is thinking about what he wants to study in college.  I said at the time that chemistry studies how protons and electrons behave in atoms, and physics studies what protons and electrons are.  However, soon afterward, I realized that this was wrong.  While this may be an aspiration of physics, it's not true in any practical sense today.  You can take every physics course on earth and nobody will tell you what an electron is, because nobody knows.  The descriptions of reality that physics provides are operational descriptions, meaning they describe how entities operate, or behave, in certain situations.  These descriptions have proven incredibly useful, as demonstrated by our incredible technology, which was designed using these operational understandings.  However, they remain unsatisfying if what you really want are what I'll call existential descriptions, meaning what things really are.  This realization has helped me understand that the reason I study physics is for existential explanations.  I want to know what the heck all this stuff is.

Science typically makes progress through reductionism.  This principle seeks understanding of a complex entity by breaking it down into its constituent parts.  Usually, these parts are simpler than the whole, and once we understand the parts, the behavior of the whole becomes more comprehensible.  The bottom of the reductionist ladder in physics today is called The Standard Model of Particle Physics, which is more or less synonymous with "quantum physics".  Quantum physics is all operational descriptions, for example that things called electrons behave like waves in this experiment and like particles in that experiment.  There may be a layer underneath particle physics that we can't detect today.  String Theory aspires to be this next layer, describing all the particles of the Standard Model as different vibrations of Plank-scale entities called strings.  If string theory is true (which I have strong doubts about, due to Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics), we may be able to eventually detect these strings and come up with satisfying existential descriptions of what they are.

The universe is, of course, not obligated to be comprehensible to our brains, which evolved to understand the behavior of macroscopic objects on earth.  It's also possible that no intuitive existential description of the universe exists.  However, I don't believe this is the case, and at this point I certainly see no reason to stop looking for one.  However, it is concerning that string theory has so many flaws, and that quantum physics produces so many incomprehensible and seemingly contradictory results, such as wave/particle duality.  I think it's possible that this confusion results from the fact that reductionism has reached the limits of its usefulness in physics.

Let me illustrate this idea by using biology as an analogy.  The successes of biology have mostly resulted from the reductionism that explains organisms in terms of their parts, in layers from systems, through organs, tissues, cells, organelles, down to the genetic code which orchestrates it all.  But then why haven't we cured all disease since we've already cracked the genetic code?  There are many reasons for this, but one major factor is that thinking of genetics as the "bottom layer" that explains everything is not accurate.  Just because a gene exists doesn't mean it's expressed (used to create proteins).  Whether or not a gene is expressed turns out to depend on many epigenetic (outside the genome) factors, including food, environmental chemicals (often produced by other organisms) and radiation.  For humans, the epigenetic factors include the symbolic input we receive from our culture, which influences our nervous system, which in turn strongly influences every other bodily system.  It's often most accurate and useful to think of the cumulative influence of the whole planet as decisive in determining which genes get expressed.  From this viewpoint, biology begins to look like a giant game of rock-paper-scissors, where no phenomena can be fully understood unless you look simultaneously at all the layers and their interactions.

I think the same pattern may be in play with physics.  Maybe quantum physics is so inexplicable because we are not considering the other layers, which are "above" it in the reductionist model.  There is certainly ample evidence that every particle in the universe affects every other particle.  Electromagnetic and gravitational fields (whatever they are) are infinite in extent, so that every part of the universe is causally connected to every other part.  These cause and effect relationships all travel at the speed of light.  Why?  How can physically separated entities be causally connected?  Maybe there are no more layers, but when all of the layers and their interactions are understood simultaneously, it will form an intuitively satisfying existential description of reality.  This would require combining quantum physics with relativity, which is the description of space, time, and matter as an evolving whole.  However, relativity is currently a classical (non-quantum) theory, where things are continuous, not quantized.  The combination of relativity and quantum physics (sometimes called quantum gravity) is a dynamic frontier of the field, with many ideas but no clear winners as yet.

Quantum effects are even more weird than, say, electromagnetic effects, because there appears to be instantaneous causal interaction in phenomena like entanglement.  This instantaneous effect is baffling to so many people because it paradoxically violates the "cosmic speed limit" of the speed of light as described in relativity theory.  However, if you stop thinking about two entangled particles as separate objects, then perhaps the phenomena can make more sense.  If what we perceive as separate objects are just two aspects of a single underlying characteristic of the universe, then perhaps there is no paradox at all.

I have read a couple of books which talk about the wholeness of the universe being important in trying to understand quantum phenomena.  Well, I've started reading them anyway.  One is called The End of Time by Julian Barbour, which makes the audacious claim that time does not exist.  It's really fascinating, but I'm wondering if I should study relativity theory first, and I also made a bad choice in purchasing the Kindle version of this book.  It has diagrams that are hard to see on my phone (my Kindle reader) and it requires frequently flipping back to earlier diagrams, which is hard in an e-reader.  At least that's my excuse for not finishing it quicker.

The other fascinating book I'm stuck on is David Bohm's The Undivided Universe.  Bohm was a brilliant but controversial physicist who never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.  The Copenhagen interpretation is what gives us notions like that a particle does not exist in any particular state until we observe it.  This interpretation is treated like fact by many physics-minded people, but it's far from universally accepted, and the mathematics just doesn't say that definitively.  People are constantly describing Schrodinger's Cat, a thought experiment which "shows" that a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.  What people don't understand is that the thought experiment was devised by Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, in order to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation is.  However, science is a social activity, and the strong personality of Niels Bohr won out, resulting in the Copenhagen interpretation being taught as fact today.

Bohm's Undivided Universe explains his alternate interpretation of quantum physics, which states that subatomic particles always have specific properties like position whether or not we are observing them.  To make this square with the math of quantum physics, he has to assume that instantaneous non-local effects exist, which is more than most physicists are willing to accept, because it appears to violate the relativity speed limit.  However, I don't so far see anyone else offering a better explanation for things like entanglement. I got halfway through Bohm's book by simply reading the words and "browsing" the math.  It is not a book for general audiences like most of my reading is, and it's chock full of some very advanced math that I never studied in school (or that has atrophied away now).  Bohm's quantum interpretation is so interesting to me that I decided to go back and learn all the math that I would need to know to really understand his book.  I want to review the math and then take another crack at it.  Unsurprisingly, this has been a tough program to stick with.  I'm considering this a long-term project.  Not sure when I'll get to it unless I win the lottery and quit my day job, but we'll see.

It's hard for me to imagine anything more interesting than thinking about what subatomic particles actually are.  Given how bewildering most discussions of physics are today, I think we're in need of some different interpretations of the math, and of what things are.  I think I'm attracted to The Undivided Universe and The End of Time because they both try to explain the world of subatomic interactions by understanding them as configurations of the universe as a whole.

What Effect Will 'Zero Dark Thirty' Have on America?

I expected to be upset by Zero Dark Thirty, after reading Glenn Greenwald's complaints about how the movie promoted the false idea that torture was instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden.  However, the film did not strike me as something that glorified, or ever justified, torture.  My impression was that the world depicted in the film was dark, sad, and hopeless.  This actually makes me hopeful that others will get this impression and decide to move this country in a different direction.

The movie's main character, a CIA analyst named Mya, looks like a deer caught in the headlights for most of the film.  In fact, many of the characters give that impression.  They find themselves in a violent world where everyone hates them and they can't stop the slaughter of terrorism no matter how many detainees they torture or how many billions they spend.  They are the security troops of the most powerful empire on earth, yet they feel helpless.

The climax that the movie builds to, the raid on bin Laden's compound, was really quite anti-climactic.  It's not a glamorous gun battle.  It's just a bunch of armed thugs methodically breaking into a house with explosives and shooting everyone who moves.  Well, they spare the children, condemning them only to a life of fear and hatred by shooting their parents and then trying to assure them "it's all right".  Yes, I just shot your mother, but it's all right, we're the good guys.  It wasn't pretty or glorious.  We didn't even "bring him to justice", putting him on trial to showcase how our civilization is superior with our rule of law.  We just killed him.  Osama bin Laden directed the killing of 3000 citizens, but we got him back.  We had to spend a trillion dollars and kill 100,000 innocents along the way, but we got our revenge.

That's the America Zero Dark Thirty depicts: a sad, vengeful group of rich bullies that everyone hates.  We used to send astronauts to the moon, and invent things like integrated circuits.  Now the greatest feat this America can accomplish is killing an old man in his home.  I'm glad the movie came out now, nearly two years after bin Laden's death.  This way, people can see the hollowness of Mya's claim that getting bin Laden matters.  Perhaps he was, as she claimed, continuing to direct attacks against America.  But since the War on Terror shows no signs of abating or even slowing down as a result of his death, perhaps people will realize that we need a plan for interacting with the world that goes beyond getting everyone to like us by killing every last person who hates us.  It should go without saying that you can't slaughter your way into people's hearts, but that's literally our strategy.  Perhaps the unglamorous despair of Zero Dark Thirty will help wake up America's citizens to the sad, ongoing trauma that they've allowed their government to inflict upon the world.

Book Review: 'Science Set Free' Challenges Assumptions You Didn't Know You Had

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Science Set Free, by Rupert Sheldrake, and I expect the book will have a lasting effect on my worldview.  If you are the kind of person who gets uncomfortable when your worldview is analyzed, or someone who feels dread when your hidden assumptions are pointed out to you, then Science Set Free is not the book for you.  If, on the other hand, you are, like me, exhilarated when you stumble upon a persistently convincing person like Sheldrake telling you everything you know may be wrong, then you would probably enjoy the book.

The gist of the book is that many foundational principles of the scientific worldview that we take for granted are not proven facts.  They are assumptions, and assumptions may always be questioned.  However, Sheldrake contends, the real life sociological phenomena we call science has its flaws like any other human institution.  Sometimes dogmas harden for the wrong reasons, and paradigm shifts need to occur when evidence piles up showing that the prevailing dogma requires revision, or replacement.  Sheldrake presents much evidence (in Science Set Free and his other books) to show that many of the scientific worldview's most dear foundational ideas are on shaky ground.  Sheldrake turns the assumptions into questions, and questions into chapters, including:

• Is Nature Mechanical?
• Is the Universe Purposeless?
• Are the Laws of Nature Fixed?
• Are Minds Confined to Brains?
• Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind That Really Works?

Sheldrake's attack on unquestioned scientific dogma is so effective because of his deep respect of and adherence to the scientific method of free inquiry.  You must either side with Sheldrake in defense of science itself, or sacrifice the principles of "follow the evidence wherever it leads" in the service of today's prevailing beliefs.

Sheldrake definitely has a motive, and it comes out slowly in the text.  At first I thought he was trying to leave room for theism in a rational person's worldview, but that's not really it.  While he's apparently a practicing Christian, I would guess he's officially agnostic.  Anyway, his real agenda is his theory of Morphic Resonance, which is a controversial idea which I'm not going to go into because I don't know that much about it.  This is not a flaw of the book or Sheldrake, just something that helps you understand where the book is headed.

What impressed me most about the book was the many experiments he suggested which could prove or disprove his theories, including morphic resonance.  My judgement of the quality of these proposed experiments is in conflict with the harsh skepticism which greets Sheldrake's ideas in mainstream arenas, such as his Wikipedia article.

If at times Sheldrake sounds a little paranoid, you might forgive him, since everyone does in fact seem out to get him.  I think that's because he makes them uncomfortable by challenging their worldview.  I personally think the scientific worldview is great, but leaves a lot of very fundamental questions unanswered.  I agree with Sheldrake that taking our paradigms too religiously can constrict science and limit what we can learn.  I think I was already softened to this idea by Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, which debunks the folly of string theory's domination of physics.  So I guess I'm just a softy for scientific rebels.  If you like the expanded possibilities that are enabled by free thinking, you might want to judge for yourself what Sheldrake has to say.