Quantum Power!

Quantum of the Seas isn't just a floating resort hotel, it's a moveable one. Ignoring all the power needed to run the hotel: to light the rooms and commons areas, cook the food, run the elevators, and spin the slot machines, it takes a lot of power to move the ship.

According to this Wikipedia article, Quantum has two "20.5-megawatt ABB Azipod XO propulsion units." Azipod XO propulsion units are gigantic electric motors (see here). The picture shows a much smaller unit, about 1/10 the size of Quantum's main units.

How much power is 20.5 megawatts? YMMV but here’s what this site has to say. The South uses much more electricity than the North--because of air conditioning--and of course life style is a factor. And so is the extent to which a power source runs at capacity. Bottom line: 

Going through the math, a 1,000 megawatt rated coal generator with a 75 percent capacity factor generates about 6.6 billion kWhs in a year, equivalent to the amount of power consumed by about 900,000 homes in the Northeast but only 460,000 homes in the South.

So let’s divide by 1,000 and round: a megawatt looks like between 50 and 100 homes. Each of Quantum’s propulsion units could take care of 20 times that: 1000 to 2000 homes. Double that for two units. 

And then there are the bow thrusters, used for maneuvering. Each puts out 3,500 kW, or 3.5 mW and makes them about the size of the Azipod in the picture. That's 14mW more for the four. 

Lots of power.

​

Cartagena, Spain

Today is Cartagena, and there’s a good chance I'm not going to get off the boat. Not because there's anything wrong. Because I want to write.

Cartagena has a natural harbor, with a narrow entrance and a channel that makes several turns. Here’s a Google map of the entrance to the harbor. If I were working at a more responsive network I’d try to overlay this with an image of our ship so you can be amazed by the ship’s ability to navigate through the passage.  For now you'll have to use a little imagination. But not too much.

Quantum is not a small ship; it’s a giant floating apartment house, 347m by 50m. Remember, 100m is about a football field. Despite its size it’s highly maneuverable, and it navigated through the channel without needing a tug for assistance and arrived just about on schedule. Yay captain Ban.

Quantum's main propulsion system is a pair of huge electric motors with power delivered, if I remember rightly, through slip joints, whatever they are. Whatever the mechanism, it lets the motors rotate through nearly 360 degrees, which makes it possible for them to pull the boat (normal configuration) or push it sideways. And of course it can pull the boat backward.

Quantum also has four bow thrusters, smaller electric motors, that give the captain greater ability to maneuver.

The narrow parts of the channel look to be around 250m wide on the map. The ship is 50m wide. That gives about 100m on each side, according to my calculations, but it sure seemed like less as I watched from decks 14 and 15.

At the top of the map image you can see the wharf where quantum docked. To get there Quantum entered at Punta de San Antonio then had to swing its way past Muella de la Curia, then pivot to parallel the wharf. It’s a tricky ride.

One of our waiters told me that when a ship like ours comes into harbor a harbor pilot comes out in a launch, goes to the bridge, and advises the ship’s crew rather than taking control. That makes sense since an error is likely to cause the ship more harm than the harbor. And because the propulsion and control systems of different ships must be quite different. (Side note: in the Suez Canal it appears that piloting is done by local personnel, who are trained using simulators, to use lots of different ship systems. But for them it's mostly a straight run. Not here.)

Running bow thrusters and main engines at right angles to the boat, we heave up silt from the harbor bottom and push closer to the wharf. The ships throws out a blue line with a loop on the end. Someone on the wharf throws a grappling hook on an orange line, grabs the ship’s line and pulls it in. The ship feeds two giant hawsers attached to the ship's line. The men on shore float the hawsers to a bollard, the big iron posts to which the ship will be moored. They haul the hawsers up, one at a time and drop them over the bollard. Then winches on the ship go into action and tighten the hawsers and settle the ship against the wharf. The same thing happens at the other end of the ship.

Everything goes smoothly. We're due in at 10:00 AM, and we're tied up and ready to debark at 10:15. Nice job, captain Ban.

We're on a boat!

Yes, as the song says, we're on a boat. Though not without some difficulty. Here's the story.

We had made their way to the Doubletree Hotel in Newark, returned their car and were all set to head to the Quantum of the Seas. I'd been checking Uber regularly to make sure we wouldn't have to wait too long for a car. What I didn't take into account was this: that traffic in New Jersey congested, and that the Uber driver who picked me up might not be familiar to the area. This last thought was so non-obvious that I didn't think of it until I started writing this. But in retrospect it's obvious. We're not far from Newark Airport. There's going to be a steady flow of drivers from Manhattan, and other non-local places dropping people at the airport. And one of them is most likely to get the call. He wouldn't know the area. If the GPS gave him wrong directions he wouldn't know it. And if he missed a turn, he wouldn't realize it, until it was too late.

Whether my theory on why this is likely is right or wrong, the fact is: that happened. As planned and expected we got a driver pretty quickly. I called him to make sure he knew where we were--which was a good thing because he missed the hotel first time around, but maybe because I moved the pin. Dunno. Uber seemed to show him circling around before he got there.

Anyway the car arrived. As always with Uber it was a spotless car of recent vintage. We got in and we took off. I remembered that there was a trick getting on the road in the first place, and once we'd done that, I let him take over. What I now realize is that I ought to have tracked our progress all the way with Maps or Waze. Instead, I sat back and enjoyed the ride. Until it stopped being enjoyable.

It seemed at first we were going the same way we'd gone the previous night, but pretty soon it seemed different. That's when I pulled out my phone and discovered we were way off course--further away in time and space than we had been at the Doubletree. Bad! Bad! Bad!

I had him pull off and used Waze to plot a course back and looked at Google Maps to confirm it. Also a semi-bad idea. They agreed on the amount of time needed. They disagreed on how to get back. Waze seemed to want to take us overland. Maps seemed to want to turn us around and head back into the stop-and-go traffic we'd seen going in the opposite direction. I decided to go overland.

There were lots of twists and turns, and opportunities to go the wrong way, but I managed to pick the right road, or almost the right one, when the road was ambiguous. We got to the Cruise Port right on time, but only because I'd planned things so that we'd get there a hour early.

I had wanted to take our suitcases on board with us--they were roll-ons--but the baggage handler who called us out of traffic said we couldn't; that we had to check the bags with her. Which we did, but as we walked closer to the entry I could see that there were other people rolling their bags on board. Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she gets paid by the bag. Or maybe she wanted the tip that I reflexively gave her for possibly misguiding me.

Whatever. We got through baggage and body scanners. We'd previously registered online, and as part of the registration process we'd uploaded pictures of ourselves and our passport numbers, then printed out a "Set Sail Pass." A young lady with an iPad met us, scanned the barcode on our Set Sail Passes, and up popped our pictures. She scanned our passports using the iPad as well, asked us some fairly stupid questions: "Have you been to Africa in the past three months?" "No." (And if I had, maybe I'd want to lie about it because people are so fucking paranoid!)  "Do you have a cold?" "No." (And what would you do if I had one? Deny me boarding.). Then my favorite: "Are you sure?" This is a question designed to trip up people who lie the first time and who become so guilty when asked a second time that they completely cave in. "Aaargh! You got me. I do have a cold. And I've spent the last year in Africa. Working in an Ebola hospital. And I'm testing a new vaccine. And, yes, yes, I let myself be infected, to test its efficacy."

Well, she didn't trick me. We continued on to a desk where our Set Sail Passes were again scanned, and the results of the first were confirmed, but not including another "Are you sure you aren't sick?" check. The whole process was very smooth,

We'd been warned that our rooms might not be ready--after all the boat had gotten in just six hours before--but the onboard elves had done their job efficiently and our rooms were clean, made up and ready for us, although set up for a queen, not twins as we had requested. No problem, we were told. And it was no problem. Our bags took a little time, but we had them before dinner.

I registered for Internet access, and once things were settled I checked my email which included a bill from Uber. It was for more than $80.00 instead of the $30-ish I had expected. But conveniently it showed a track of the route that the driver had taken: past the turn-off for the port we'd taken the other night, and then all around Robin Hood's famous barn, and finally overland back the port.

It wasn't obvious how to complain, but that's OK. I googled and got the procedure, followed it, and sent in a polite request questioning the charges. On Monday, when the support center came on line, I got an acknowledgement and a follow-up question. And on Wednesday or Thursday I got a refund: they dialed the cost back to what it should have been if the driver had taken the right course. Yay Uber!

Internet cost me a little over $200 for 11 days of 0.23Mbps download speed. Once they've got you on the boat, they've got you. For example, their price for movies on demand: $12.00 a view. But they make up for these extortionate costs by serving amazingly good food, in VAST quantities, delivering extraordinarily fine and friendly service everywhere, having lots of high quality entertainment, and providing lots of ways to amuse yourself for free.

More about this in later posts.

If this is Friday, it must be Newark

Here we are on the first day of our Journey To Siena for Dana and Daniel's wedding. So far it's gone better than expected, but that's because I carefully set my expectations quite low. So I easily vastly exceeded them. Pessimism can be an effective strategy, I learned from Dan O'Dowd. When you're a pessimist, either things go badly, and you feel good for being right for your low expectations, or they go well, and you're happy about a good outcome. So I set out fully expecting to have something major go wrong. I was disappointed, happily.

On the positive side: the car was ready on time. I got into no accidents--well, no major ones; more on that later. I didn't get a speeding ticket. The hotel was where it was supposed to be, our rooms were clean; the beds comfortable; dinner was good. Nothing happened that made me stressed. No one got sick and nobody died. Some of these things were expected, but not all. For example, I expected stress; I did not expect death.

On the bad side: I didn't adjust my mirror and some guy had to honk at me when I started to change lanes without seeing him. Check: adjust mirrors. I carefully backed out of parking space, very carefully watching a car that was parked behind me and just to the left of my car (yes!) and missed seeing the car that was parked behind me and just to the right. The driver of that care might have been blowing her horn, but the windows were down and I was too busy (carefully) watching the car to the left to hear the horn it it had been a horn. Bump! I stopped the car, and the driver of the other car came up. "What were you thinking?" she asked angrily. Or something. "Apparently I'm an idiot," I explained. We went back to assess the damage. There might have been a scratch on her bumper due to my car, but there were already several scratches and it was hard to tell which one, if any, might have been mine. Her male companion, much more relaxed than she was said: "It's all good. No problem." I said thanks and we were on our way.

I had been using Waze to navigate, but during the stop and bump episode my phone ran out. So while I recharged it, Peggy her iPhone app to guide us. And guide us it did, right into 4 mile-per-hour traffic jam. By that time my phone had acquired enough charge to reboot, and Waze guided us around the jam, and pretty soon we were flying again. With my phone plugged in to charge as we went.

Then we hit the tangle that is New York and collided with physics. Waze apparently consumed electrons faster than my charging cord supplied them, and after a while my phone crashed again. Peg to the rescue, again! We navigated our way through the New York side tangle of roads, got across the GW bridge to hit the Jersey tangle. And that's where the next bad thing happened. I made a wrong turn. We recovered, and found ourselves facing a toll plaza, with the map app telling us to keep left. Which would have been the right thing to do if I'd had my EZ-pass. But I didn't. And I found myself in a high-speed EZ-pass lanes with no way to get to a take-a-ticket cash lane. So I went through without getting a ticket. Which meant that when we got to the toll plaza at our exit, I had to pay the maximum toll: north of $10.00. In the grand scheme of things, it's nothing.

A few more twists and turns and we found our way to our hotel where, as I said, everything was great. Except, fortunately, for a very annoying noise coming from the fan in our room. Fortunately? Yes.

I went to the desk and the person there, Musa, said they'd sent maintenance to fix it. Right. Eventually, I thought. But maintenance showed up faster than expected, and the guy, a very nice fellow from Ghana, took care of it right away. I went back to the front desk to thank Musa for excellent support, and to ask if breakfast was covered in our reservation; he said it was not, but comped us (and Peg) breakfast for our inconvenience. So, yay! And that's why the annoying fan noise was fortunate.

We had dinner in the hotel, and then took a drive through the tangle of New Jersey roads to the Cape Liberty Cruise port, making sure I got tickets before getting on the short tollway segments to the port and returning. Yay for learning from experience.

The Quantum of the Seas was not yet in port, and that was expected because I'd done my research before we headed over there. It was returning from a weekish-long cruise to the Caribbean, and I had found it would get in at 7:00 AM. Which makes sense. It makes no money sitting at dock, so it was in at 7:00 AM and out at 5:00 with 3500 passengers off, with all their waste and garbage; and another 3500 on, with all that would be needed to sustain them for ten days.

We got back to the hotel and now it was time to drop off the car, which was uneventful except for two things. One: Google maps had the wrong location for the drop off. Two: I had forgotten to fill the car with gas. So I searched for a nearby gas station and ended up getting routed around and around through a tangle of roads, finally seeing a toll both ahead, (What!!!) and a sign that said: last exit before toll. Which you better believe I took, only to find myself going along a winding road that led...back to the hotel. Turns out there is a gas station at the airport. I'd driven right past it the first time around and found it the second.

Round two was success. I had my gas pumped by another guy from Ghana. And found the drop-off. I took the shuttle back to the hotel, and after evening ablutions, the day was gone. No serious accidents. No upset (even when wandering all over the Newark area at night).

But tomorrow is another day. I hope things go well, but I'm not counting on it.

Epiphenomenally yours

Bill Gosper's Glider Gun in action—a variation of Conway's Game of Life. This image was made by using Life32 v2.15 beta, by Johan G. Bontes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night I got into a wonderful discussion at the Maine Hackers Club. I used the word “epiphenomenon” more that night than I had my whole prior life. And boy, did it feel good. Today I checked two books by Daniel Dennett out of the library: “Consciousness Explained” and “Freedom Evolves.” Because I’m an epiphenomenon that wants to understand its epiphenominality.

What’s an epiphenomenon? Well, the dictionary says: “: a secondary phenomenon accompanying another and caused by it; specifically : a secondary mental phenomenon that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal influence itself.”

And Wikipedia says:

Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. Fear seems to make the heart beat faster; though, according to epiphenomenalism, the state of the nervous system causes the heart to beat faster. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.

And I say: what underlies all of existence is quantum mechanics, wave functions, configurations with amplitude functions. Everything else is epiphenomenal.

The Buddha said: Everything is impermanent, and we know that to be true even at the macro level. As I write this some molecules are leaving my body, for example as I exhale, and some others enter it, as I inhale. Inhaled oxygen atoms find their way into my blood stream, course through capillaries, are absorbed by cells where they participate in metabolism. Some metabolic by-products remain in the body for a while, others leave.

What I experience as consciousness is ever changing, because what gives rise to consciousness is ever changing. All of conditioned existence, without exception, is transient, or in a constant state of flux. That we can talk about consciousness seems to imply that consciousness is a thing, but it is no less and no more a thing than a person is a thing, or a drop of water is a thing.

As we talked about this, as I interacted with the minds of my fellow-hackers, as we danced with the ideas of consciousness and epiphenomenality, for a few moments, several time, I imagined that the veil of apparency was lifted. I stopped seeing myself as an individual talking with other individuals and experienced the boundaries between us falling away. There was no I and no them, but only an us. The words that I said came out of my mouth, but they were not caused solely by me because it was the words and reactions of my comrades that elicited those words; had they not been there, I would not have said what I did; had they not responded as they had, I would have said something different, or said the same thing differently; had I not said what I had said still earlier, they would not have said and done what they had said and they had done.

My consciousness is an epiphenomenon arising from a collection of primary phenomena considered as a unit and given a name. But since everything in the universe interacts, however weakly, with everything else in the universe, no matter how carefully the collection is constructed, it must be incomplete. And giving it a name does not give it any special standing in the universe.

I was an epiphenomenon, experiencing my epiphenomenality.

​

Family of Mind (Internal Family Systems)

English: System Dynamics Modeling as One Approach to Systems Thinking (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Followers of this blog and others that I write -- yes, I mean all two or three of you -- may have noticed that after years of inconsistent posting I am posting like a mad demon. I think that there's a reason for this; I think that I know the reason; and I hope that writing about what I think is the reason will not suddenly reactivate the dreaded Wannabe Blogger Syndrome, which I have had to endure for years.

This part of my journey starts with the mindfulness course from The Great Courses, which I blogged about (or will have blogged about) here.

In that post, I write about Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction" (MBSR) (Wikipedia ref, here.) Subsequently the course mentioned something called "Internal Family Systems," or IFS which I researched, and which I credit with my blogging renaissance, among other good things.

IFS traces its roots to many different disciplines, but for purposes of discussion let's tie it back to the "Society of Mind," which I wrote about here.

Society of Mind proposes that our minds are not unitary; instead, they are composed of many "agents," each of which has its own orientation, skills, and goals and which can cooperate, compete, and even subvert one another. Kind of like fractal people inside people.

IFS created by therapist Richard Schwartz, who observed his patients saying things like "a part of me wants to do this, while another part of me wants to do that" as they discussed their internal conflicts. Schwartz started trying to understand what the parts of his patients wanted, and how they related to each other. And because he was a family therapist he structured the "parts of me" idea with the structure and dynamics of family. I think of Schwartz's "parts" concept as similar to Minsky's "agents" concept, but more familiar because we know families better than we know societies in the large.

Like family members in an ordinary functional family, the members of a functional internal "family of mind" can work for the good of the family. Even when they find their roles in conflict, they find ways to work things out. Like family members in an ordinary dysfunctional family, the members of a dysfunctional "family of mind" can be at war with one another and act to harm other family members even to their own detriment. 

The families we grew up in and the families of which some of us may have formed always combine the functional and dysfunctional modes. As a result, the family metaphor is familiar, and can be useful.

The idea of having "parts of myself" that did not always cooperate was familiar to me. Sometime in the morning I'd feel that a distinct "part of me" wanted to get up and do stuff, while another "part of me" wanted to stay asleep. And me? I seemed to be the part that was watching the other two parts and wondering: WTF?

In the IFS system, "parts" fall into three groups: protectors (sometimes called managers) are parts that try to keep the family stable and functioning; exiles are parts that are dysfunctional and need to be controlled; firefighters are parts that take extreme actions when protectors don't control exiles. And then there's a unique part that Schwartz refers to as "the Self." The Self is always calm and compassionate, open and non-judgmental: an internal Buddha figure. But the Self is often "blended" with parts and loses its unique character.

Parts are "activated" by circumstances, including the behavior of other parts, and when they are activated, each parts acts in accord with its nature, history, experience, and assumptions. The set of parts that are activated and their interactions determine how the perceived human person behaves.

IFS suggests that you have conversations with these parts. I know it sounds a bit looney, but I was up for it.

So in my half-waking state, a part of me wanted to get up and greet the day; a part of me wanted to sleep, and my Self was watching, not knowing what to do. IFS gave my Self a strategy: I decided to talk to the part that wanted me to stay in bed. 

As I talked with that part, I realized that this part also activates when I am writing: I become incredibly exhausted. Sometimes just the idea of writing is enough to make me tired, so I read stuff instead. Thus a million open tabs on my browser, and nothing written.

IFS suggests you give names to the parts: after all, you can't tell the players without a program. So I chose (or it chose) "Morpheus" as a name.

What did Morpheus want?

As the conversation in my mind evolved, it seemed that Morpheus was a protector: it wanted to avoid conflict and the discomfort that exiled parts might experience, and its solution was simple: to put everyone to sleep. When I pointed out that not every part of me wanted to sleep, that some parts of me (and me, my Self) wanted to write, not sleep, Morpheus had an answer. "Sleeeep! Sleeep!" And I got sleepy.

No, really.

This happens often when I write. I'll be full of energy, ready to rock, and sometimes as soon as I start to write and sometimes after a little writing, I get tired. My usual response was to succumb and nap, or to do some physical exercise--or browse the web. I kept trying to talk to this Morpheus thing, genuinely interested. And Morpheus would talk a bit, and then interrupt: "Sleeeep! Sleeep!" 

Now that I knew what was going on, or what I thought was going on, I was able to explain firmly but politely that I understood that Morpheus was trying to be helpful, but this was not helping. Eventually (and I may have had to take a few naps in the process) I learned that there was another part of me, one that Morpheus was trying to protect by putting "all of me" to sleep. I perceived this part as an exile: the fragile, vulnerable, fearful, sad little boy that I used to be.

I suppose everyone is different now than they were as youngsters, but to me the contrast between the person that I am now, and the part that slowly revealed itself was stark. I look at failure as the necessary price for learning. Failure sometimes hurt, but the hurt does not last. There is nothing that I have ever done that I now feel shame for having done. Mistakes, failures, doing things that were stupid and even shameful are what's gotten me to who I am today, and I feel pretty good about who I am today.

I was a timid, fearful person for a great part of my life. As I grew into the responsibilities of having a family I often succeeded because my fear of failure, and the shame I knew I would feel if I failed were much, much, much greater than any other fears and discomforts I'd experience if I did what I needed to do for my family to prosper.

After retirement the fear subsided, and I found that I was able to confront any new thing without fear of discomfort, or embarrassment, or incompetence. I would back away from things that were truly physically risky, but that became the limit of my concern.

Writing? I'm entirely prepared to write things that are shit, and not care about it. Because I believe that the way to get good at writing is by doing a lot of shitty writing. And because I fucking like writing.

That's how I feel. But not all of me feels that way.

That part that I identify as an earlier version of me worries about these things. I remember my failures as facts and mainly remember what I have learned; that part of me remembers mainly the feelings of hurt, shame, pain. It remembers feeling worthless, wanting to be dead rather than to endure its continued existence, but not being able to die because how would the family survive?

It was surprising to discover that the old version was "alive and unwell." It was surprising because I did experience it standing in my way. It wasn't present. Until I started these conversations with parts of me, I wasn't aware of it. And, I learned, how could I be aware of it? Whenever that part of me began to activate itself, Morpheus would put it, and whatever other part of me was awake, to sleep.

I named that part of me Little Michael. I could not write, so the developing narrative went, because Morpheus was doing what Morpheus could do to keep Little Michael from suffering the feelings that little Michael was stuck in suffering. Morpheus protected Little Michael by keeping us from completing writing projects and by putting us to sleep soon after we started.

Frustrating and puzzling as it was, I (the Self) could tolerate failure to write. But Little Michael could not endure what he had to endure: the pain of choosing a word and feeling there was a better word that one could not think of; the pain of choosing the wrong label for a post; the embarrassment of spelling something incorrectly and having it discovered by someone else; the agony of knowing that something could have written better than it had been, and yet not being able to produce that better thing.

I could say: "Fuck it! I love to write, and I'm going to write."

Little Michael could only curl up in a little ball and cry.

Or Morpheus keep peace in the family, by putting us both to sleep.

Since having my first conversation with Morpheus, and with Little Michael, and others in my internal family, things have been changing, and my blogging is just one piece of evidence. When I do my morning pages I'll sometimes have a conversation with a struggling family member and so far the outcomes have all been good ones.  Each conversation helps me clarify the dynamics of my internal family system; each helps me be clearer about what is my Self and what is a "part;" and parts of me whose development has been stunted are starting to grow up.

Little Michael isn't the pussy he used to be. And he can even chuckle a bit at my writing that.

Is it real, or just a story I've made up? In the end, it does not matter. Minsky points out that there are good reasons why we can't happen on some new idea and just change our minds. If we could, then our whole self could be hijacked at any time by the agent bearing the idea; and no one could trust us if we were that changeable.

So there's a social contract in place. We can change slowly. We can change with great effort. And we can change after a truly significant event: a near-death experience; falling in love; finding Jesus. Reading a book full of good ideas does not qualify.

Or we can discover an internal family system that "explains" our dysfunction, and engage with it, and experience something with enough explanatory power to let us do what we could do all the time: change.

Whatever it is, I'll take it.

Schwartz's theory is interesting because it's self-similar across scale: that is, the dynamics of the internal family system and the dynamics of the external family systems, and of other interpersonal relationships are much the same. And the theories cross boundaries: the "parts" of one external family member sometimes interact with "parts" of another external family members and produce conflict or other forms of dysfunction.

References:  IFS website:  (The video is pretty lame, so don't bother with it)

A more thorough description of the model, here.

Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig debate

Here, we are at Notre Dame, in 2001 for the second annual "God Debate." In In this corner, William Lane Craig, Christian apologist. In this corner, Sam Harris, unapologetic atheist. Up above, perhaps, God is watching the debate with a couple of buddies, and laughing.

"Those fucking mortals!" God says.

Anyway.

I don't remember how I found the debate. Perhaps YouTube suggested it. But no matter. Find it I did, and this morning, intending to write on a different topic entirely, it came to mind. And then I opened the eight new tabs that I blogged about here.

For those who don't know, and even for those who do, a Christian apologist isn't a person who apologizes for Christianity. An apologist is "a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial."  Christian Apologetics is enough of a thing to have its own Wikipedia page, here. And Sam Harris, who I described as an "unapologetic atheist," is also an apologist. See what I did there?

Anyway.

This morning I was going to write about something that happened in the "Spiritual Journeys" course that Bobbi and just finished, and the debate seemed relevant and before you could say "Don't open any more tabs," eight new ones were opened! So of course I had to metablog on that topic, as I mentioned, here, before I get to the original first topic, which I hope will have a reference real soon, here.

Anyway.

I listened to the debate and concluded that William Lane Craig was by far the superior debater and that Sam Harris had done a terrible job of breaking down Craig's arguments. From the transcript at Craig's website, here:

In tonight’s debate I’m going to defend two basic contentions:

1. If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

2. If God does not exist, then we do not have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Very specifically Craig says he's going to avoid the question of whether God exists. Or how we might know of his existence. He says:

I shall not be arguing tonight that God exists. Maybe Dr. Harris is right that atheism is true. That wouldn’t affect the truth of my two contentions. All that would follow is that objective moral values and duties would, then, contrary to Dr. Harris, not exist. 

His debate point is conditional: if God exists, we have a foundation; if not, then not. And his subtext, elaborated later is this: that if we don't have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties then WTF, anything someone might choose do on moral grounds is on subjective moral grounds, which means (Craig avers) it's just a matter of opinion. And since people like ISIS would in future years think that it's moral to chop heads off, well, that's as well founded, on moral grounds, as Mother Theresa ministering to the poor.

And sadly, for Team Atheist, Harris does not clearly address his point. (Disclosure:  I am not a member of Team Atheist, but some of my best friends are atheists, so I can root for Team Atheist; and some of my best friends are Christians, so I root for Team Christianity, too). He does, in fact address it, as I learned from reading the transcript, and as was clear to me after reading reviews of the debate. I came to the same conclusion that another favorite blogger, Luke Muhlenhauser came to here:

As usual, Craig’s superior framing, scholarship and debate skills ‘won’ the debate for him. 

Too bad. Because his argument, which sounds so good, is really a bad one, and it's unfortunate, for the sake of good-debating form, that Sam Harris did not say what I would have said.

Craig's argument, "If God exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties" translates to: "If an entity that I have not yet described, defined, and about whose existence I will not debate at this time, exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties."

He then describes some of the characteristics of this Thing-that-he-does-not-want-to-debate-the existence-of and his description, in my view brings his thesis to this:

If an entity whose nature provides a solid foundation for objective moral values and duties exists, then we have a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

Harris, for his part, does not make his better and more coherent argument relevant. My favorite blogger, Scott Alexander, makes the argument clearly here:

If God made His rules arbitrarily, then there is no reason to follow them except for self-interest (which is hardly a moral motive), and if He made them for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

Not having made this important point, Harris proceeds to provide testable criteria against which an act can be tested for greater or lesser morality. The criteria are themselves neither objective, nor subjective, but definitional, and consistent with our native sense of what is moral and what is not moral. The point that Harris fails to make is that to have a reasoned discussion real things (like behavior) at an abstract level (like morality) you have to define the abstraction, and then able to test whether some real thing does or does not match the definition. So a mammal is an abstract category with a definition that lets us test whether or not a particular entity does or not belong to the category mammal. And God is an abstract category (a Singleton, according to monotheistic religions) that must be defined in order that one can tell whether or not a particular entity belongs to the category God. And in the case of monotheistic religions, assuming one found anything that met the criteria one would then have to demonstrate that no other entity fit the category.

Scott Alexander's argument, quoted above is part of a much longer, well reasoned 13,000 word essay on consequentialism, which I will unnecessarily, but for your convenience, re-link to here.

The section most relevant to this post, in its entirety is quoted below:

What would it mean to say that God created morality?

If it means that God has declared certain rules and will reward those who follow them and punish those who break them - well, fair enough, if God exists He could certainly do that. But that would not be morality. After all, Stalin also declared certain rules and rewarded those who followed them and punished those who broke them, but that did not make his rules moral.

If God made His rules arbitrarily, then there is no reason to follow them except for self-interest (which is hardly a moral motive), and if He made them for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

If it means that God has declared certain rules and we ought to follow them out of love and respect because He's God, then where are that love and respect supposed to come from? Realizing that we should love and respect our Creators and those who care for us itself requires morality. Calling God “good" and identifying Him as worth respecting requires a standard of goodness outside of God's own arbitrary decree. And if God's decree is not arbitrary but for some good reason, then that good reason, and not God, is the source of morality.

Newspaper advice columnists frequently illuminate moral rules that their readers have not thought of, and those rules are certainly good ones and worth following, but that does not make newspaper advice columnists the source of morality.

References: transcript.
The first review of the debate I found thought Craig was weak, Harris awesome. WTF? I disagree. But it's here. And it led me to a far better review.  The author of that review says:

[Addendum: looks like Luke is going to be more thoroughly picking apart the arguments. He also has a nice round-up of reviews.]

"Luke," I guessed was Luke Muehlhauser, a frequent contributor at the LessWrong rationalist community. And it was.

And here are part 1, part 2, and part 3 of his thorough analysis of the debate. And here's Luke's bio.