Depression and Atheism

Look through a faithless eye
Are you afraid to die?—"Thoughts of a Dying Atheist", Muse

I've heard a lot of speculation here and there about a link between depression and atheism. It certainly makes sense to Christians that without God and a life purpose, there's just no reason to get out of bed in the morning. And there's enough circumstantial evidence that you don't have to be living under a rock to believe it. But I suspect the majority of Christians only (knowingly) know at most one atheist personally, so I would take any generalizations about atheists from the mouth of a Christian with a grain of salt. Heck, I don't think most atheists are qualified to talk about atheists in general.

But it might surprise you to hear that I do suspect there's a link between depression and atheism, just not the way you might think: I'm not convinced that atheism causes much if any depression, but I do suspect that depression causes a lot of atheism, in a manner of speaking. Specifically, I propose that atheism is more natural and easier to accept from a depressive mindset than from a typical "well-balanced" mindset.

Cause and Effect

Emotions have a bigger effect on reasoning than it's comfortable to accept. Marvin Minsky proposes in The Emotion Machine that the division between emotions and reason may even be an artificial notion. I find from my own experience that my mind just works differently when I'm upset, and sometimes the differences are bigger than the similarities.

Someone who sees the world from under a shadow isn't going to see a divine underlying plan in everything that happens, or see little victories as a clear answer to prayer. They don't expect everything to magically work itself out in life or after death, and more often than not prayer won't give much comfort when they're having problems.

But even that's not all there is to it.

The Skeptical Mindset

When I get a heartwarming email forward, or hear a factoid from a motivational speaker, my first instinct is to check it on Snopes, every time. It doesn't matter if it's a good story, or if it makes a really good point, or if I think the teller is trying to trick me. The bottom line is, if it purports to be a true story, and it isn't, I don't want to be retelling it. And I've been shocked before by what convincing yarns turned out to be false, but I'm getting pretty good at sniffing out fabrications.

I bring it up because most people, under some conditions, just won't bother checking all the facts. It's tedious, and by the time you've confirmed all the facts, all the emotional punch is gone. A lot of those people, for whatever reason, gravitate towards religion, and the fact checkers gravitate away. There are just too many uncheckable facts.

Why it Matters

A lot of people would probably read my claim and say, "Oh, another reason to write atheists off. They don't believe in God because they're depressed all the time, but we emotionally balanced people can think clearly." I think that's a bit unfair. I'm not so sure there is an "unclouded reason" in any emotional state, or any "unbiased" default mode of thinking. My skeptical mind helps me investigate bugs in the software I deal with at work, and I think engineers, doctors, stage magicians, and judges need a similar skeptical mind to do their jobs properly. There are problems amenable to a sober mind and problems amenable to a cheerful mind.

If depression is part of the reason behind atheism, though, it does imply that God may not be the one and only cure for said depression. Usually God comes first, then depression, then atheism.

Depression medication won't necessarily "cure" atheism, either. People don't always take psychoactive meds consistently, and seeing their entire mindset change when going on and off the medication can make them question everything they used to believe. A lot of medication won't even dampen the skeptical nature, since that's not the problem it's designed to fix.

But Then Again...

I only come into contact with a specific population of atheists, so I'm never convinced that I've seen the whole picture, but I do know a lot of atheists who are on or have been on depression medication, and those are just the ones who talk about it. Still, it's possible it's all in my head, and atheists aren't any more depressed than the rest of the population.

Common Sense Gone Haywire

I hold a lot of uncommon beliefs, but determinism is probably the most infuriating to argue for. Free will advocates and "incompatibilists" seem to hold by far the majority view (although I can't find any relevant statistics). They argue that in a deterministic universe, a criminal justice system, the concept of choice, and "getting out of bed in the morning" make no sense, all of which I disagree with. But I want to hold off on those arguments today and focus on the flat-out complaint that determinism "leaves no room for free agency".

The idea of free agency is that it would be repugnant to have all of my actions fully determined by prior causes. Free choices obviously cause other events, but would in this case have no causes themselves. I recently noticed a similarity between this scenario and Aquinas's "Argument from First Cause". Part of that argument claims "There must be an uncaused cause of all that is caused. This causer is what we call God."

It sounds awfully strange to me to say on the one hand that a break in causality is something miraculous enough to need God as an explanation, and then on the other hand say that uncaused causes are an everyday occurrence for every human being. Both are natural, commonsense notions, but it seems to me like common sense isn't harmonizing too well with itself...

Fine-Tuned Constants

There seems to be a lot of buzz in the theological community lately about the "Argument from Fine-Tuned Constants", which is an argument for Intelligent Design that claims that a universe like ours can only exist when certain universal physical constants lie within a very narrow range. I have a lot of problems with this argument, and I argue that not only is it not very compelling, but it's an unsound argument on several fronts.

The Constants

The standard conception is that these physical constants are a fundamental feature of reality. But if you take a look at how physicists works, you get a very different picture.

The truth is that physicists really don't like constants. If a theory ends up having too many constants (or "fudge factors" as some scientists call them), then it begins to look suspicious. The main reason is that each constant is an unanswered question. There's generally a deeper reason for the value of a constant. For instance, the speed of sound in air seems constant, but it turns out to be related to the inertia of the air, so we can calculate it from other values. Scientific progress is gradually supplying answers to these unanswered questions, so positing God as the answer is a cut-and-dry God of the gaps argument.

But there's more to it than just the unsatisfied question of "why?". A physical theory with a lot of constants is like a house for sale that's filled with overpowering air fresheners: there's a lot of room for error..."overfitting" and sometimes "data dredging", in this case. With enough constants, any model can be made to fit the existing data, but theories with more constants have much less chance of predicting new data, and therefore are likely to be wrong as an abstract model. It's not always a case of foul play, but the values of any constants will be fit to existing data, which means that more constants couple a model to specific measurements and steer away from a general solution. The building blocks of our physical theories seem "undeniably real", but that's more because we've been taught about them for so much of our lives than because it's so obvious.

All this muddles the question of what the constants actually represent, and what it means to "tune" them.

How Things Might Have Been

Even if these values can be freely changed and the universe could be drastically altered, what then? The fine-tuned constants argument, like all design arguments, paints our environment as somehow "special". In this case, it's usually claimed that life could not exist in a universe where such-and-such value were different by one part in some-odd million billion billion billion.

But the same "scientists" have until now been telling us that evolution is impossible, and therefore that life should not exist in our universe. Sure, an altered universe would be different, but the salient question is "could (intelligent) life exist?". No scientist today is qualified to start with a handful of values, extrapolate out to an entire universe, and then determine that intelligent, self-replicating life won't ever exist anywhere within that universe. And certainly no scientist is qualified to do that same thing for every possible universe to determine that all or even most would be uninhabitable.

Answering the Questions

Theistic arguments take an attitude of demanding an answer for a given question. They often take the form "how else can you explain it?". That's not always a terrible approach, but it's certainly something to take in moderation, since easy answers are often wrong. It also entails the assumption that we already have all the requisite knowledge, which is especially unlikely when we're talking about metaphysics.

The common response is to take these arguments at face value and try to give an alternative explanation. To that end, many people suggest anthropic reasoning to explain why we observe such "special" conditions in our universe. I believe the anthropic principle is an excellent answer to the question, but based on the above arguments I don't believe the question itself is valid. The anthropic principle is such a neat, unconventional idea that it's easy to forget to ask if it's really necessary in this case.

Finally, it's unrealistic to expect scientific inquiry to ever finish its job and answer every significant question. The answers to questions about the "fundamental constants" will probably be incredible, but the questions themselves aren't all that special or compelling. There are volumes of unanswered questions; what makes this question of fundamental constants stand out is mostly that it's easy for laymen to speculate about.

The bottom line is that the argument from fine-tuned constants is a lot of things, but it isn't science.

Unconditional Love

I know
You love the song but not the singer.—"I Know", Placebo

I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and since then I've been doing a lot of thinking about Ayn Rand's philosophy. One of the weirdest turns she takes in her philosophy is how she applies her "no sacrifice" tenet to love and relationships, but as it turns out, I'm starting to see more and more how it all makes sense. In a nutshell, she outright rejects the idea of unconditional love and in its place believes in loving a person for their virtues.

Since her theory of love is a close parallel to her economic theory, let me say a thing or two first about her economic theory. She believes that socialism and our modern society try to completely separate productivity from incentive, and that the direct result is that people basically can't help but stop working hard, start cheating, and as a group destroy our economy. But one of her central ideas that I missed at first is that in her ideal society, more will be produced, and that in a society of free trade, both parties benefit with every transaction. That means that Medicaid and unemployment will go down, but that wages and standard of living in general will go up.

So how does that relate to love? Well, if all love were suddenly based on virtue rather than "choice", my knee-jerk fear would be that nobody would be "good" enough to deserve love. I recognized right away that it's the same knee-jerk response I had to her economic ideas (that nobody could be productive enough to survive), so I think the analogy runs pretty deep. I realized that if we punish "conditional" love so much and make it a black mark to love someone because you want to, if we make it a virtue to love someone in spite of their faults and horribly "selfish" to love someone because of their virtues, then what we're left with is empty, devoid of emotion, and based on guilt. If we love based on virtue, then I predict that our quality of love will increase, and there will be more love to go around!

As someone who always strives for sincerity and makes it a priority to live and love richly, I find a lot of energy and comfort in that thought. It's very hard for me to answer questions like "why do you love me?" when my love is based on sacrifice and guilt, but when I base my idea of love on virtue and mutual benefit, I'm coming up with new answers to that question all the time. I think how easily such a question comes to our minds in moments of insecurity should itself be a hint that love should not be based on nothing and that love naturally goes hand-in-hand with appreciation.

Objectivity in Art

"If I could do it, it ain't art." —Red Green

There's a discussion on Kevin's and Ben's blogs about whether there's any objective standard for art. I like to watch movies, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a movie good. Some movies that I feel like I should like but don't; others I like for exactly the reasons I hate another. And while there are some movies that almost nobody appreciates, there aren't really any movies that almost everyone appreciates. Can art itself really be "good" or "bad", or is it all in our heads?

To say that art is "good" or "bad" implies a purpose to the art that it either meets or falls short of. The high-level purpose for anything we would call art is to be appreciated by somebody. To know what people will appreciate, you have to understand people, so I don't think any criteria can be universal (i.e. we have no idea what kind of movies aliens would appreciate). But if any qualities are shared by all of humanity, they have potential to become a foundation for objective artistic principles, not objective in the sense that outside observers could agree about what is artistically valuable, but that they could agree about what humans would find artistically valuable.

You might be tempted to point to brain structures we have in common as examples of "shared qualities", but the human brain is designed to be extremely adaptable. Similarities in "artistic taste" are rare, and subtle differences in taste can have a big effect on how we evaluate a particular song or painting.

If you could agree on criteria, evaluating a specimen would become a much more objective process. The subjective part is deciding on the criteria. But some things intrinsically imply a particular purpose. A metal plate on a door in place of a handle suggests a purpose to be pushed, not pulled. If something suggests a purpose and then fulfills its suggested purpose, then it is "good" in a more "objective" way than something that doesn't suggest a purpose. By the same token, something that fulfills some purpose extremely well is more "objectively good" than something that doesn't really fulfill any purpose. The very fact that it works for some purpose suggests using it for that purpose (once that purpose is discovered). That said, we can find a purpose for almost anything, but some things have so much order to them that they're nearly perfect for one clear purpose and nearly useless for anything else (e.g. computer software).

Movies and television depend very heavily on understanding the purpose. That's why TV sitcoms use a laugh track to cue the viewer in to look for a joke. A bad movie can become a hilarious joke, and then from that vantage point become a great movie (okay, maybe not for everyone).

My conclusion is that when we say some art is good, we usually mean that there's some purpose it's good for. When people disagree, they usually disagree on the grounds that they don't value that purpose, and therefore that it's no purpose at all. The criteria are subjective on some levels and objective on others. Consequently, I don't think it's accurate to call art either purely subjective or purely objective.

The Airplane/Treadmill Problem: Corrections

Since my last post on the airplane/treadmill problem, I've had some extremely interesting conversations about it with a few friends. I'd like to make some clarifications and qualify a few of my earlier statements. I apologize, this looks like it will be another long post, but it also looks like now we're getting to the real meat of the problem.

"Eustace Bright" asked me if this has ever been tested. I'm sorry to say I never gave a very good picture of what would happen if you tried to test it and why. I tend to favor theory over practice, but theory divorced from practice quickly becomes aimless rambling. So, with that in mind, let me try to start from a real-world perspective this time.

The short answer is that some aspects of the problem would be extremely hard to test. Now for the full answer...

The Wings and Engines

I said before that with "powerful enough" engines, the plane would take off regardless of how the engines themselves work. I understated the point a little bit that for some types of engine "powerful enough" might mean "like the warp drive from the Enterprise". With big propellers and a very light plane, there might be a chance it could take off from a stationary position. I really have no idea how powerful of a rocket or jet engine it would take to create enough airflow, if it's even possible. Also keep in mind that more powerful engines tend to be bigger and heavier. If the engines are attached to the plane, they're going to have to meet a certain power-to-weight ratio.

In other words, it may be possible to build a plane that could lift off in place (with only horizontal thrust), but if you pick a plane at random, you could be reasonably certain that it wouldn't pass the test.

The Wheels

Remember that a quirk in the problem description requires the plane to be stationary without necessarily providing the forces to hold the plane stationary. This creates a weird kind of reverse causality where you can try to find the answer and find that you've lost the question. The upshot is that if you can show that no such force can hold the plane stationary, you thereby prove that the problem has no exact solution.

I had listed two candidate forces to hold the plane stationary, friction and rotational inertia (the resistance to spinning faster or slower) in the wheels. The friction I'm referring to is in the wheel bearings. As far as rotational inertia, I think I need to clarify what I meant just a bit with another quick example:

This time, imagine a ball on a treadmill. When you turn the treadmill on, the ball moves back a bit before it gets rolling. Once the ball's spin gets up to speed, its momentum alone keeps it spinning, like a ball spinning in mid-air except supported by the treadmill. When you stop the treadmill, the ball will "coast" forwards quite a ways before friction finally brings it to a stop.

I had suggested that those two forces would be enough to keep the plane stationary, but then I discovered a flaw in my reasoning: neither of those forces is proportional to the speed of the treadmill.

The sliding friction in the wheels is a constant force, regardless of speed. Unless the wheels have some serious wobble or mechanical problem that makes them start to lock up at higher speeds, we'll only ever get a fixed-strength force from the friction. If the engines exceed that force (which is extremely likely), there's nothing we can do with the conveyor belt to compensate.

The rotational inertia is a little more promising, but not much: its associated force won't be proportional to the speed of the belt, but it will be proportional to the acceleration of the belt. Momentum and inertia are related to velocity whereas force is related to acceleration. Remember that once my hypothetical ball was up to speed, it stopped moving backwards without any additional forces having to act on it (not even friction). That means with the conveyor belt spinning at a constant speed, the wheels will offer no real resistance to a constant force from the engines.

My conclusion on the "exact match" constraint between the belt and wheels is that it very well may be impossible to balance the forces and create a stationary plane to meet the requirements in any practical scenario.

Postscript: An Apology

Last time I mentioned Mythbusters and some YouTube videos that claimed to solve the airplane/treadmill problem, but didn't seem to have anything to do with the real issues. They demonstrated exactly that the plane wasn't stationary, so they couldn't have been answering the question exactly, which had specified that the plane must be stationary. Well, that was true, but they were trying to answer the follow-up question of whether any such real-world forces could hold the plane back against the force of the engines, which turns out to be a tough part of the problem. Since the friction is a constant force, they've definitively ruled out friction as a candidate in any realistic scenario.

That said, I still have some ideas to kick around before I'll concede that the problem can't be saved. It'll be a longshot, though.

Edit: I did some more thinking and ruled some ideas out. I think I'll leave the whole airplane/treadmill thing alone for a while. It's more fun to discuss it in person, anyway.

The Airplane/Treadmill Problem: My "Solution"

A few days ago I posted a description of the Airplane/Treadmill Problem, which is basically a trick question of physics and logic:

Imagine a 747 is sitting on a conveyor belt, as wide and long as a runway. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

Now I'm going to share my thoughts on what's wrong with the question and how I would go about "answering" the question at face value.

Since there's a lot of ground to cover, I'll give you a quick outline of my plan of attack:

• The problem description implies that the plane can't move, but doesn't say why.
• With powerful enough engines, the plane will lift off.
• Any reading of the problem description that makes sense of the premises leaves the plane stationary and the air flowing past the wings fast enough for an in-place liftoff.
  

There are several angles to look at the problem from, but there's one observation that's relevant to all of them: the problem defines the plane as stationary but doesn't necessarily provide a mechanism for holding the plane in place. We're told that no matter what else happens, the wheels don't slip and the conveyor belt speed exactly cancels out the wheel speed. By the principles of geometry, not physics, this boils down to an obscure way of saying that the plane doesn't move. That means that any statement of the problem that requires the plane to move forward or backward entails a contradiction, and can be read as "imagine a plane is moving and also not moving".

(Note: I read the problem to say the treadmill moves backwards at the "speedometer speed" of the wheels. A lot of people seem to read the problem as matching the air speed of the plane. I believe that's why on Mythbusters and several YouTube videos, the plane is clearly not stationary when it lifts off. If you solve the problem using air speed instead of wheel speed, the answer is trivial and turns out to just require the wheels to spin twice as fast as they would on solid ground.)

One other thing is certain. With powerful enough engines, the plane can always achieve liftoff, whether it's being held stationary, pushed forward, pulled backward, or completely uninhibited by the conveyor belt. I can prove it using only Newton's third law (actions and reactions) and some back-of-the-envelope aerodynamics:

1. The wing's shape is designed so that if enough air flows past it, it will pull upwards enough to lift the plane. It doesn't matter whether the plane moves through the air or the air moves past the plane (like in a wind tunnel).
   
2. Any engine (turbine, rocket, etc.) achieves acceleration by forcing something in the other direction (air flow, rocket exhaust, etc.). If enough of anything is forced in one direction, the balancing effect of air pressure will cause some breeze to follow it.
3. With enough energy ("enough" being the operative word), that air is going to move, and with enough airflow, that plane will go up.
   

That said, I doubt such engines can be made at any time in the near future, given that more powerful engines will tend to make the plane weigh more.

So, the plane must be stationary for the question not to be bogus, and the plane will lift off in any non-bogus but idealized) statement of the problem. But there's still one question left to answer: what's stopping the plane from moving forward? To answer that question, let's forget about the plane engines and consider a slightly different problem:

Imagine a wagon is sitting on a conveyor belt as wide as a wagon trail. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. You stand in front of the conveyor belt holding a rope that's attached to the wagon. If you give the rope a tug, what stops the wagon from moving?

In other words, since the wagon can't move a fraction of an inch without making either the universe or our heads explode, who or what are you playing tug-o-war with?

Here's where we bring back all of the little pieces of physics we ignored. If we neglect all of the technicalities of real-world physics and declare that the wheels have absolutely zero resistance to motion, then the motion of the conveyor belt is completely unrelated to the wagon and your rope. It could be tracking 10,000 mph in either direction, and you simply wouldn't feel it from the rope. That means that the wagon would necessarily move, and the problem description breaks down. Since that won't work, I'll relax the constraints a bit and see how I can link the motion of the conveyor belt to an equal and opposite tug on the wagon. The question is whether there is some way to interpret the problem so that there is still a single correct answer, or whether every reading turns out to be bogus.

The simplest way to make the problem work would be to say the wheels don't roll perfectly, that there's some friction in them. That way, if you get the conveyor belt moving fast enough, it will match your tug with its own.

Another option is to give the wheels some mass, which eats up some of the energy in getting the wheels to spin. As an example of this effect, think of how you can lift a yo-yo by the string alone before it gets spinning very fast. The same idea would allow the conveyor belt to pull on the wagon.

The theory of relativity might give a third option for balancing the system, but I'll spare you the details.