The Toymaker's Grief (Polish)

Daleko, daleko temu

Daleko, daleko temu żył sobie raz – a może dwa lub trzy razy – zabawkarz z piękną żoną i czarującą córką. Później żył sobie zabawkarz z czarującą córką. Później żył już tylko zabawkarz, sam po pogrzebie, gdy wszyscy żałobnicy już wyszli, ubrany w swój najlepszy czarny garnitur, siedział bez ruchu na zasłanym łóżku w zimnym pokoju, w cichym domu, po prostu siedział, spoglądając przez okno na niebo tak niebieskie, jak oczy, które już nigdy nie miały potwierdzić swojej miłości nawet najdrobniejszym, przelotnym, uśmiechniętym spojrzeniem.

Styx Water and a Sippy Cup

I decided to do a reading for your viewing pleasure.

SFF Translation Awards Prize Draw Fundraiser

The clue is in the title. Yes, the jury for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards are currently considering the various nominees, but in order to give prizes to the winners they need money. So, a fundraiser is afoot in which you can win prizes. I'm donating a signed copy of my poetry collection, Songs for the Devil and Death, and I note that Steve Berman of Lethe Press has donated a prize including hardback of Wilde Stories 2011, containing "Oneirica" by yours truly. So if either of those pique yer interest -- and there's more neat swag to be won besides that -- click on through and add yer support.

New Link, Not Quite New Story

At some point I'll probably pick up where I left off before Christmas with my ramblings about mnemes and semes and whatnot. There is a big post on memes sitting half-done in Scrivener. But at the moment, I'm sworn to get my shit together and finish the fucking novel. So needless to say I procrastinated and updated the "Online Fiction" links to include my story from the latest Cabinet des Fées, "The Wolf and the Three Wise Monkeys." I'm sure I posted about it before, but if ye missed it the first time round, go ye and read.

Also, another story got placed a week or so back, so I'll let yez know where to look for it as and when the contract malarkey is done and dusted.

As you were.

Happy New Year

Having returned from my annual Hogmanay jaunt with mates to a remote cottage -- in the wilds of Dumfries and Galloway this year -- I just thought a quick wee post was in order to say Happy New Year to yez all.

Unfortunately, my MacBook seems to have become a boddhisatva with the end of the festive period, extinguishing all ego in the form of the letter "i," so emphasis on the wee. Oh, it survived the trip fine, was working perfectly when i booted it up on my return to check email. But somewhere between tweeting and checking that the interwebs were all in order, it suddenly decided there's no "i" in anything let alone "team." So, yes, when i say "wee post" i do mean "wee," cause copy-&-pasting one letter is fucking tedious to say the least. Looks like i have a fun trip to the Apple Store tomorrow to spend Chrimbo money on repairs. Either that or everyth_ng _ write turns _nto some crazy Oul_po malarkey. Fun fun fun.

Still, i refuse to be scunnered by this little gnatbite of happenstance, as i also returned to the news of Vellum's release as an audiobook n the US. Should you feel so inclined, you can now go buy yourself a copy over at Audible.com. Cool!



Even cooler, i also returned to an email from Dutch artist Stijn Windig to let me know that he was reading Vellum and had been inspired to create some art based on it. Here's his take on the Road of All Dust, and fucking awesome it is too, i think we can all agree:



Do click through because there's some great detail shots on his website, and hours of fun to be had exploring the other work up there. Gormenghast! Nefarious squid creatures! "Whirring mechanical dragon-type things"! Go see! The short animation Jacob's Lament is gloriously gorgeously trippy.

Anyhoo, enough for now. Don't think i can sustain the substitution of Ctrl-V for "i" much longer, but i just had to share that pic.

Of Mnemes and Semes

The Philosophy of the Experiential

In a previous entry, I kicked the notion of qualia around a bit and ended up with the notion of the aestheme, a term paralleling words such as phoneme or grapheme and basically decomposing to aesthetic morpheme. What with semes in the mix too, it looks like rhyme is the name of the game here, but hey, works for me. Besides, qualia sounds like a fucking Roman slave, so fuck that. Ancient Greek suffixes FTW!

Anyways, having taken yon wee digression through suppositional logic, ontological bootstrapping and a defense of atheism from an accusation of faithiness ("It's just like truthiness... only now even less true!") I figured I'd get back on the road I was wandering down from Plato's cave via universals, entity, narrative, sensation and ideation to... well, I guess with this all being kicked off by reading PKD's Exegesis, it's the morphological realm I'm trying to get back to, but reconstructed in terms of virtuality rather than spirituality -- eschewing any non-physicalist essentialist flummery of the mental that's really just a reiteration of that perennial pseudo-substance, spirit. It's a useful metaphor that pseudo-substance, and as a poet I'm happy to throw it into the mix, but it is just a metaphor. What we really need to be talking about are the actual substantia of aesthemes and semes, the stuff of our sensation and ideation considered as narrative.

This takes us then into the territory of some other -eme words, into the domain of mnemes, semes and memes.

From Max Stirner's '"spooks" to Richard Dawkins's "memes," the last century or so has seen the emergence of the notion of the culturally active notion. Vide my post on narrative and entity, particularly with those two opponents of institutional dogma, it seems to me an anagnorisis of the antagonist in their personal narrative. The stories have started to come out in which story itself is the enemy -- grand narratives and discourses gone bad. It's not hard to see my own concern with story writ large in Vellum and Ink, where it'd be a mistake to look at all the metafictional shenanigans as mere postmodern gameplaying, art about art. If, as I suggest, the very identification of entities is an artifact of experience as narrative, then to take fiction as subject for fiction isn't about retreating inside the ivory tower to ponder the ivory tower itself; it's about heading into the labyrinthine foundations of it all -- ontology, epistemology, ethics... all of these as branches of aesthetics, not as the philosophy of beauty but as the philosophy of the experiential.

It's a territory pointed at by Hume in the notion of ideas developing from impressions -- ideation from sensation, to stick with the parlance I've been using. And with qualia reconstructed to aesthemes now, maybe we can start to lay down at least a broad overview of that terrain, something a little less fuzzy than "senses" and "ideas."

A Brutal Balletic Battle

First things first then, when we talk of senses we're talking a whole lot more than the famous five. We're talking about the external senses that model the environs: sight; sound; smell. We're talking about the threshold senses that sit on the effect horizon of the entity, where the external and internal are mutually defined in a relation not of simple transition but of intrusion: smell; taste; touch; heat; pain. We're talking about the internal senses that model the entity itself: pain; kinaesthesia; balance/acceleration; nausea; orgasm; other interoception faculties.

But we're also talking, I'd say, of the attitudinal senses that do so in a way that brings ideation into the picture via import long before we have the semic structures we'd generally think of as ideas: joy; sorrow; anger; fear; esteem; disgust; intrigue; surprise. Elsewhere, I've made some (highly) speculative sorties into the notion of an affectspace broadly comparable to colourspace, constructed from something akin to opponent processes. And I've blathered as to how I reckon such stuff might build up into a proper agency. So I won't reiterate that. Suffice to say, I reckon there's an interzone between interoception and introspection, a degree to which we seem to model psychophysiological responses -- e.g. the fight/flight response -- in a sense of our own stance, so to speak, affect as attitude. And with this we have the basics of modality -- epistemic, alethic, boulomaic, deontic. We have sensation becoming judgement, an inherent import in the ongoing articulation rendering it ideational.

We're even talking, at this base level, of what I'd term reflective senses, a framework of aesthemes with the rather elusive quality of the tail a dog tries to catch in its teeth, aesthemes we have to spin round on ourselves to try to pin down, leaving us a little dizzy in the process: duration; recollection; capacity; realisation; metasensation. Is the sense of time really a sense in its own right? I'm not wholly sure, to be honest, what it's fair to call a sense here and what it isn't. But note that studies of the experience of déjà vu seem to indicate that there's a distinct aesthetic "tag" fired during the act of recollection, a sense of being in the state of recall; the theory is that déjà vu is basically revealing this in the dysfunction, the accidental misfiring of that aestheme when no recollection is taking place. What I'm suggesting by talking of capacity as a sense is the similar sensation known as presque vu, the "tip of the tongue" sense of being right on the verge of getting it, a sense of tension, of potential on the cusp of realisation -- realisation which has its own "tag" in that "Eureka!" sensation.

Which would also, I might add, give us anagnorisis -- recognition -- not as some anodyne abstract ideation, some purely intellectual identification of sense with memory, but as a raw sensation of import, as a potentially profound charge of meaning loaded into sensation, bound to it. We begin to see a rethinking of thought itself here, I reckon, away from the sort of procedural mechanics implied by the association of thought with intellect, toward a turbulent dynamics which is so overshadowed by the mechanics of semantics introduced by language that we tend to dismiss those processes as the liminal undercurrents of intuition. Where we're talking of mentalese, maybe we need to forget the syllogisms of propositional logic, I mean, imagine instead the dialectical agon of suppositional logic, a brutal balletic battle driven and driving onwards by and through the flux of activity.

Maybe what I'm suggesting is that my theory of narrative modalities with its alethic, epistemic, boulomaic and deontic quirks is only a reflection in fiction, a virtual articulation, of the dynamics of mind itself -- ideation as the thematics of sensation, as a fundamentally visceral feature of animal existence. A dance from stance to stance to stance, whirling, catapulting, diving, blasting ever-onwards. Where ego is, there id could, can, would, will, should, shall, must, might, may be. Deep among and emergent from all else that could, can, would, will, should, shall, must, might, may be.

From Id to Ideation

Still, this is a reconfiguring of ideation so far from the common usage of the term, so far from our general notion of ideas, that it's maybe a stretch too far to even apply the term. I'm sorta thinking that volition is a better fit, to be honest, for this volatile involution of sensation I can't help but imagine as swashbuckler -- amoral agency immersed in the moment, living the buccaneer's Tao of libido unbridled but complexified by the inherently social desires wired into that libido, the essential empathy, the lust for care and camaraderie, that turn rat into rogue, rake, rapscallion. If readers of Vellum & Ink recognise Jack Flash in this description, you're not wrong. That archetypal figure is my own articulation of a recurrent symbol of the id.

Not of the id in the Freudian sense per se, I should note, and not an archetype in the Jungian sense per se. I don't really gell with Freud and Jung's essentialising and compartmentalising approach(es), the treatment of these aspects of sentience as innate organs. Me, I'm treating the libido not as some hidden pool of repressed desire, the id not as some secret subconscious agent, but rather casting these as wholly conscious, wholly substantiate in sentience, not existing outside it, under it. Libido is simply volition in this model, the "unconscious" mind only determinedly disregarded volition.

Which is to say: we don't want without knowing that we want; all we can do is drown out the desire, distract ourselves from it, repress it by rendering it liminal. For me, the idea/image of id as discrete unconscious mental organ is an artifact of an effect horizon projected onto self-structuring sensation, like a dance at a ceilidh. The point of this is that a shadow archetype is, I reckon, an alternate idea/image of the same volitional matrix, or of a particular facet of it, cast as monstrum. Indeed, these archetypes themselves, I'd argue, can and should be decomposed, understood not as some Major Arcana of set universal tropes but as articulations in a recombinatory symbolic language.

But we'll come to that. To get there, first we have to get to the idea of recombinatory symbolic language. For all the semic underpinnings of sensation, even the inherent import I'm tracing out in affect as stance, comparing to the epistemic, alethic, boulomaic and deontic modalities of statements, it doesn't seem quite right to cast these aesthetic processes as semiotic. We still don't, as I say, have what we really think of as ideation. But add the practical faculties of manipulating experience, recall (i.e. memory) and recombination (i.e. imagination) -- with the senses of recollection and capacity as aesthetic tags for these perhaps? -- and maybe we've got the stuff of ideation proper, constructed out of impression as per Hume. The stuff that semes are made of, one might say.

From Mnemes...

I'm inclined to bring in Richard Semon's notion of mnemes at this point, memory traces left by external-to-internal experience as permanent records invoked by the recognitive faculty on encountering comparable experience. Coming to this second-hand, I can't say how literally we're meant to take the term "trace" there, but from my understanding, memory appears to be distributed -- theorised as holographic by some even -- so we're not talking potato prints in the brain. Whatever the theoretical specifics though, those mnemes were also dubbed engrams by Semon, the term that survived into neuropsychology -- and was co-opted to the complete bollocks of Scientology -- so I reckon there's an opportunity here to leave the technical details of engrammatic memory to the actual scientists, and resurrect this obsolete term which fits neatly into the old -eme scheme. In other words, I'm going to nick Semon's term out of the trash, shake off the questions of actual mechanism, and treat the mneme as virtual entity so I can develop it a little.

In that Notes from New Sodom column linked above, see, it strikes me now that what I was reaching for was basically the mneme, but as node in a network, inherently interconnected, the whole mnemic archive of the memory correlated for isomorphisms on the fly and under constant revision. Isomorphisms in events parsed into the effect horizons of beings, doings and attributes thereof. The narrative dynamics of modality permeating it all, imbuing the collective entities so circumscribed with import as antagonist, obstacle/tool, goal and so on -- those roles perhaps decomposable to modalities indeed, the quirks of real-life.

I seem to be muddling around in territory I also explored in a post from a couple of years back riffing on the idea of notation versus signification, connotation versus denotation, import versus content. Approaching the same basic idea from this angle, it might well be easier to get at what I'm aiming for there by mapping that contrast of notes versus signs to mnemes versus semes. We'd begin then with the memory trace invoked by an encounter with comparable experience as the basic note, a recognitive sensation struck by repeat sensation -- the mneme as the first taste of cocoa recalled by the second, as both recalled by a third, the cumulative effect rendering the mneme a palimpsest of reiterated impressions. We don't just have a note; we have multiple voices singing that note. From here we get associations, connotations, deep import -- the marshmallows in the cocoa, the pyjamas worn at bedtime, the mooching dog, the feeling of warmth -- the complexifying effect rendering the mneme a collage of resonances. We don't just have a choir singing the same note; we have harmonic notes being sung, massed voices forming a rich chord.

The mneme of /dog/ as a gestural totality then, the palimpsest of all instances of recognition, like multiple photos morphed/blended into one another, blurred to crude morphology. With the memory trace of a dog, all dogs, functioning as icon, here we have the beginnings of semes as mnemes made classes -- or something like classes -- invoking the mneme of dog akin to instantiating a virtual object of that class. That core note would be anchorpoint in the collage of all associated mnemes -- e.g. /fur/ or /barking/ -- most of these liminal, tangential, but many integral, so inextricably co-notative we can say that this mneme is an attribute (e.g. /fur/) or method (e.g. /barking/) of that (e.g. /dog/). The boundaries of any mneme are just a matter of effect horizon, after all: what are the edges of a memory?

... To Semes

Bearing in mind that the associative recall of these palimpsested and collaged impressions is taking place within the context of the volitional dynamics driven by affect, assuming a capacity to let mnemes invoke mnemes in free associative chains, I reckon you have all you need for an ongoing recombinatory articulation of iconic semes that can cut loose in the creative and strategic process of ideation, as the stuff of memory becomes the stuff of imagination.

Now we just need a forced association of /dog/ with "dog", an integration of these similar to that between /dog/ and /fur/ or /dog/ and /barking/ but established arbitrarily, reinforced by repetition, so that one connotative binding can become a binding of signification. With repetition, the ideational mneme /dog/ gains the acoustic mneme "dog" as a value in the list of values set for the attribute of mnemes that invoke it, so to speak. Maybe the acoustic mneme rises to the top of that list because that association is hammered home. Maybe it's a separate list for arbitrarily invoking mnemes, for arbitrarily invoking acoustic mnemes. Maybe it's a distinct attribute of mnemes that are used to invoke it in a specific way, mnemes used purely as symbolic pointers to that mneme, as handles for it.

So the acoustic mneme becomes a seme where it is used as handle for an ideational mneme, for the sake of efficiency in articulation. Articulation may be more ergonomic if the largely attribute-less acoustic mneme "dog" is all the imaginative faculty needs to to deal with in a given instance. If you're mainly just dealing with the "dog" mneme as a semic handle for the ideational mneme /dog/, if you're leaving the ideational mneme itself on the shelf, it's like dealing with an index card representing a scene in a novel rather than the actual MS pages. It's less cumbersome, takes up less space on the desk. And the more one is focused on the process of structuring mnemes rather than on any individual mneme in its own right, the more logical it is that we'd want a technique for backgrounding /dog/ like this.

So we end up back at "universals" where the ideational mneme of /dog/ is left indeterminate, non-particularised because the invokation of it that takes place with the use of the seme "dog" is superficial. We don't really need to deal with the full import of /dog/ when we're reading or writing something like, "The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on." But of course if we do stop to deal with the ideational mneme in its own right, to hold it in our imagination is to keep the note ringing, focus in on it to find the resonances of specifics. Hence the old arguments that if we try to fully imagine a universal, we always end up imagining a specific instance of one: it's just a matter of how fully is fully.

And if a seme like "dog" does have this ideational mneme not as a simple denotational content but as a complex connotational import, we're dealing with a system that's not just complexified by différance. It's not simply that meaning is based on difference and always already deferred, not just that we can't pin the referent of a seme down because it's defined ultimately by negation, by distinction from all other semes in the system. It's that the deep import of a seme, the connotative charge, renders it always already a unit of story, of a superposition of stories. My /dog/ sits in a superposition of stories that involves eating socks, biting black plimsolls, digging under fences, puking in the back of cars, barking at the words "horses" and "squirrels," and various other details just too damn specific for you to share. What "dog" means to me is not what it means to you, and what it means is linked to what "socks" and "plimsolls" and "fences" and "cars" and so on mean, the totality adding up to one big superposition of stories. As one of PKD's favourite terms in his Exegesis renders the personal world as the idios kosmos, we each have a personal world of signs, an idios semiocosm, so to speak.

Not that my idios semiocosm is so wildly idiosyncratic it's wholly alien to yours. Stories are shared after all, passed on from one person to the other. But that takes us from mnemes and semes to the third of those -eme words mentioned at the start: memes. And to the whole notion of a story I tell you about dogs not just reconfiguring the deep import of "dog" for you, but doing so in such a way that you're driven to pass that story on, reconfigure the deep import of "dog" for others.

But I'll leave that to the next installment of Duncan's Crazy-Ass Philosophy of the Experiential.

Atheism Is Not a Faith

Seeing an acerbic comment on Twitter the other day on the "atheist faith" having religious features in the shape of apostolic figureheads and a persecution complex, part of me thinks I can appreciate a skepticism as regards some hardline proselytisers who scorn all doubt of their position being the only legitimate position. Part of me, on the other hand, is well aware that I am myself a fairly hardline proselytiser of atheism, on the whole sympathetic to the positions of Dawkins, Hitchens and suchlike and yet reject wholesale the notion that my brand of atheism constitutes anything one can legitimately deem faith. So I figured a little post on the how so of that superficial contradiction might be in order.

Simple answer: as I'd reckon it, there are three different brands of atheism, three different types of foundation for a disbelief in God, only one of which just might be deemed to have the characteristics of faith. And even in that case, I'm not convinced the term "atheist faith" is really applicable.

So, what are these brands?

OK, first is what one might call the Probability Atheist. The probability atheist holds that the supposition of God may not be amenable to disproof, but finds it too implausible to sustain credulity. Basically, we have Bertrand Russell's Celestial Teapot here. As far as the probability atheist is concerned, the believer's claim is on the same level as a claim that there's a teapot in orbit around Jupiter. The atheist lacks the technical capacity to disprove this empirically, epistemically, but where the agnostic shrugs and implicitly treats the two possible states as equal possibilities, the atheist factors in the extravagance of the claim and deems it unjustifiable.

This is not a position of faith. To call it such is to shred the meaning of the term by conflating confidence and conviction. The probability atheist is not operating on a conviction apropos of nothing that there is no teapot in orbit around Jupiter. It's just that when the question arises they have zero confidence in such a random conceit. This is not a 50/50 likelihood any more than a notion that there's a golf cart in orbit around Saturn, or a leper colony circling Alpha Centauri, or whatever random whim one might come up with.

A probability atheist might well feel that it's bizarre characterising their position as "atheist" let alone as "atheist faith." One doesn't have a special word for people who don't believe in Santa. Start down that road and we end up all members of an infinite number of "faiths" defined wholly by the absence of belief in every potentially articulable supposition. You don't believe carrots would explode on contact with formaldehyde when the moon is in Gemini if enough people were picking their noses at the exact same instant? Let's not pretend your confidence in the implausibility of that conceit is some sort of active faith, that it would be more balanced and reasonable of you to withhold judgement in the absence of evidence for or against.

Next is what one might call the Logic Atheist. The logic atheist holds that the supposition of God may not be amenable to disproof, but finds it too incoherent to sustain credulity. Here the atheist goes further, unpacking the complex idea of God to basic features, two or more of which are deemed incompatible -- as if one were to note that the claim specifies the teapot as the work of Josiah Wedgwood but also asserts it to have been formed in orbit around Jupiter along with the planet's other satellites. A logic atheist might argue, for example, that volition is decision is selection of state is limitation of being -- i.e. that an agency is inherently finite, that thinking X, doing Y, being Z means thinking, doing, being those specific possibilities as opposed to all others. This, they might argue, is incompatible with the characterisation of God as infinite. The supposition can be dismissed, they hold, because the specifications are simply invalid.

This is not a position of faith either. To call it such is to conflate validity and soundness, casting a decision that one model is invalid as a decision that another opposing model is sound. There is a position of conviction here, but it is simply that the supposition is oxymoronic. Probability isn't even a question if your supposition amounts to a "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" style claim that just doesn't make sense.

Here the atheist might more happily own the label "atheist." It's not just a matter of a default position of skepticism as regards all random conceits, not just that a wholly arbitrary whim isn't automatically considered to be on an equal basis with its negation. Here the theist position has been given the time of day, serious consideration afforded it as a serious notion. It's just that on scrutiny, for the logic atheist, it doesn't hold together. An infinite spirit characterised as thinking is not something that can be believed in by them any more than they can believe in an idea characterised as sleeping. You don't believe that colourless green ideas sleep furiously? Again, let's not pretend that your inability to sustain the contradictory notion is some sort of active faith.

Finally is what one might call the Principles Atheist. The principles atheist holds that the supposition of God is incompatible with established principles of how reality works and dismisses it as wholly unreasonable on that basis. Confidence of the unjustifiable status of the supposition is bolstered to conviction by reference to principles taken as self-evident -- as if one were to note that teapots are man-made, we cannot yet put things in orbit round Jupiter, and so a teapot cannot currently be in orbit around Jupiter. Rather than focusing on inherent self-contradiction, the principles atheist points to the features of the idea that cannot be reconciled with inviolable assumptions as to how reality works.

This is a position of faith in so far as the specific principles in play are not as inviolable as assumed, however it is not a faith of atheism but rather a faith in those principles. As an analogy, we can contrast the probability skeptic who dismisses ESP as an unjustifiably extravagant claim to the principles skeptic who dismisses ESP as physically impossible; where the latter is operating on a conviction that all perception works by established physical principles, the former could sustain the conceit of perception working by unknown physical properties but sees no justification in doing so given the repeated exposure of purported evidence of ESP as fraudulent. The point is that with the latter, the faith is not in an idea that ESP does not exist but in a specific model of How Things Are which the supposition of ESP cannot be integrated with.

This is where I can appreciate skepticism as regards hardline proselytisers who do sometimes come across as dismissing the notion of God largely because it has no place in their grand narrative. But if we're talking hardliners for whom the notion of God is at odds with a fundamental article of faith, a sort of Grand Order of the cosmos which has no place for agency, we're talking a form of realism in its Platonic sense as the faith, not atheism. The faith is that certain principles are eternal and essential realities, that they cohere as a Grand Order underlying all things, with all things being generated non-volitionally from that order; hence any crude demiurgic creator figure is rejected because it clashes with this belief. To call this "atheist faith" is like doing the same with some strands of Buddhism which are no less atheist and for the same reason -- there's an active faith in something else. It's hardly fair to either a Hindu or a non-Christian to conflate the two. Being a non-Christian doesn't make me a Hindu. Being an atheist doesn't make me a cosmorealist, to coin a term.

This is where the characterisation of atheism as a faith becomes a cheap tactic, in fact, and profoundly wrong-headed, as there may even be a form of faith in play that has nothing to do with the epistemological stance as regards God's existence. Many of those most actively proselytising atheists who tend to provoke the "atheist faith" judgement are actually probability atheists and logic atheists driven to advocate that position more passionately by principles that are entirely tangential. The ethical principles of empathy and universal fraternity at the heart of humanism are irrelevant to an epistemological judgement on God's existence, and where this is the driving justification for vehemence in promoting atheism -- a pragmatic/ethical judgement on the danger of religion -- it's pure knavery to cast anti-religious ethics as pro-science epistemology. Principles are in play, but it's probability/logic atheism plus principles, not principles atheism. That "atheist faith" is actually a deep belief in the principle of integrity.

Do I hold to a faith in empathetic integrity? Hell yeah. Do I have an unshakeable conviction in the efficacy and necessity of honesty and sympathy? What the fuck do you think? Of course I do. But this is not a matter of being an atheist but of being a humanist. Such a humanist "faith," after all, can take religious forms -- I'd say the Quakers are a good example -- as easily as it can take secular forms. Hardly surprising. I mean, as ethics go it's something of a no-brainer it seems to me. And one should have little problem with an accusation of zeal in that respect, I'd think, if it was articulated honestly: "But humanism is also a faith -- in the efficacy and necessity of empathetic integrity!" I doubt most hardline atheists would object to that.

"You have a profound emotional commitment to integrity that excludes consideration of certain beliefs!"

"Well, duh."

The dishonest spin put on that accusation to make it a matter of epistemology rather than ethics is another story though. When people describe atheism as a faith, they're not acknowledging the ethical humanist principles that make a bolshy motherfucker like me carp on about God being dangerous bollocks because of the fricking dangerous part. No, what they mean is "You have a profound emotional commitment to the idea of God not existing that excludes consideration of certain beliefs!" To which I say, nope, you're not fucking getting it.

That wholly misses the point of atheism founded on epistemological principles in which principles atheism is anathema, something I'd argue as firmly as I would my own logic atheism. If I were simply a probability atheist -- who's fundamentally no more than an agnostic ultimately come down on one side of the fence -- I'd argue just as strenuously that you're not fucking getting it. Yes, I'm quick to dismiss an unjustifiable or invalid supposition that God exists, but I do so for the same reason I'm not a Buddhist or cosmorealist -- I'm a skeptic. A cynic after the manner of Diogenes. It's about doubt, not belief. Where I might argue my epistemological position with little compromise, it's because I reckon that pussyfooting around faith-based morality's propensity for justifying murderous fucking atrocity would be spineless fucking cowardice on my part.

But rather than tackle the rejection of articles of faith in favour of suppositional logic, the "atheism is a faith too" snipe refuses to recognise this stance is even being taken, conflating probability and logic atheism with principles atheism, erasing the difference in order to erase skepticism. It's a bullshit pretence that the doubt of skepticism is simply the fuzzy uncertainty of equivocation, that it cannot be actively interrogating, challenging, rejecting the unjustifiable and the invalid. In trying to recast skepticism as agnostic fence-sitting by recasting negative judgements that one model is unjust or invalid as positive judgements that a negative of the model is sound, it is an attempt to limit doubt to the zero impact of withheld judgement. Sorry, but no. Calling skepticism a type of faith is just self-serving sophistic wank.

If the pretence that the only legitimate doubt-based stance is equivocation is self-serving to a believer, so too is glossing over what real belief there is -- in integrity. The "atheism is a faith too" snipe is also expediently refusing to recognise the humanist faith in which probability and logic atheism generally arise -- may well do so despite explicit statements by the probability and logic atheist that their advocacy is ethical, not epistemological, that while they judge the notion of God unsustainable, it is the corrosive effects of that notion that lead them to oppose it. They might well argue a position born of skepticism on purely epistemological grounds in a philosophical discussion. But their committed advocacy in general is a matter of humanist ethics. Disregarding such straightforwardly professed imperatives, the believer positing atheism as a faith is now not simply saying, "You're not really skeptical if your doubt isn't equivocation" but is saying, "You're not really ethically committed to integrity; your passion is a product of epistemological faith."

There's more sneakiness here too arguably. A probability or logic atheist, if asked straightly, will most likely deem their judgement of God's non-existence an outcome of their ethical commitment to integrity. As a skeptic, they might well say, they would profess agnosticism, allow the possibility of God, precisely because to be a skeptic is to eschew unfounded faith, were it not that they simply can't in all honesty sustain a conceit they consider either unjustifiable or invalid. Ethics precedes epistemology. The humanist ethical principle is fundamental, with honesty written into integrity, and it's playing out that ethical principle in the interrogative, doubting philosophy of skepticism that has led to the epistemological position. The "atheism is a faith too" snipe fundamentally reverses this, casts epistemological position as fundamental base, the ethical commitment to action as an outcome of that belief. For the humanist skeptic in the shape of the probability/logic atheist, that's simply an underhanded denial that the sort of philosophy they're advocating even exists.

Your average probability/logic atheist is, I mean, someone who faced up to the discourse of religion with all its historical weight behind it, a discourse in which ethical judgement essentially depends on faith in received wisdom as absolute truth, a discourse in which epistemology precedes ethics, in which the belief in How Things Are plays out in moral dicta taken as facts within that system of thought. Humanist skepticism is the application of doubt on the very basis that faith is unsustainable. Morals conflict. Unless one develops strategies of diverting attention from the conflicts, the only moral thing to do is to critique the received wisdom, the faith. Honesty and empathy come into play as the simple principles by which one does just that, developing ethical judgement. Integrity becomes the base principle that drives the epistemological enquiry necessary to informed ethical judgement. And so, operating on that core principle, taking doubt as the all-purpose tool to apply across the board, one ends up questioning the whole underpinnings of religion, the ultimate supposition at the heart of faith. The probability/logic atheist finds that supposition unjustifiable/invalid and along the way has very likely ended up applying their ethical nous to the socio-political mechanisms of the religions rooted on that supposition. Thus they end up proselytising for the very thing that began their journey -- the application of doubt to faith.

To say that this is a form of faith in and of itself is to miss the point by a mile. In the way it misrepresents the position it seems wilfully obtuse, in fact, a sophistic twisting of the doubt-based strategy in order to refuse its very possibility, insist that ethical judgement is and can only be a matter of submission to epistemological faith. It's a short step from this to the oft-articulated prejudicial assumption that without some sort of unshakeable conviction in absolute authority, atheism must be amoral in its nihilism, a sort of baseless ethical anarchy -- the presupposition that an irreligious epistemology of doubt is by definition morally unprincipled. This is the sort of thinking that makes atheists bizarrely more distrusted in the US than gays, on par with rapists, because if atheism is not a faith how could its adherents possibly be kept in thrall to a faith's moral dicta?

There is no doubt, in this mentality, that is not mere wooly-minded equivocation. There is no capacity to even be a humanist skeptic, basing one's judgements on honesty and empathy, in a constant process of interrogation. If you think that sort of ferocious doubt is "faith too," you don't have the understanding of the faculty necessary to apply it. There is no fucking conception of integrity if you cannot imagine epistemology subject to it. And without an idea of integrity, this is the sort of thinking that makes reactionaries cling to patently unjust moral dicta (e.g. regarding miscegenation or gay marriage) because the autonomous ethical thought -- the doubt -- that challenges these dicta is seen as corroding absolute authority, eroding the certainties of faith. Such challenges to the moral order are "threats to the fabric of society." Integrity itself is fucking forbidden fruit.

And yet I'm not convinced that a believer playing the "atheism is a faith too" card is actually as wholly oblivious to the possibility they're denying as they seem. I might even go so far as to say they're seldom that oblivious. Where the humanist skeptic in the shape of the probability/logic atheist hears in this a twofold assertion that 1) "You're not really skeptical if your doubt isn't equivocation," and 2) "You're not really ethically committed to integrity; your passion is a product of epistemological faith," this is essentially a button-pushing snipe that impugns that skeptic's intellectual honour. It's a claim that advocates of this philosophy do not meet their own standards, do not meet their own principles -- which rather implies a recognition of what those standards are.

What I mean is I hear in this an accusation of failure which doesn't so much deny the problem of faith -- the potential for wrongness which warrants the doubt which underpins a philosophy of humanist skepticism, which leads in turn to a position of probability/logic atheism -- doesn't so much deny that as tacitly accept the problem, tacitly accept that it is a problem one might tackle with a suppositional logic based on doubt and suspicion, tacitly accept that the atheist is, in principle, aiming to do just that; and the accusation rather seems to do so in order to simply say, "but you fail." In "atheism is a faith too," I hear "but you're just as bad, so there." Like one of those homophobic, racist, misogynist fucks you find on the interwebs, sniping that "the PC brigade" fail their own principles by being "intolerant" of his homophobic, racist, misogynist bullshit, the believer sniping about the "atheist faith" rather seems to me to be employing a cheap deflection strategy guaranteed to irk.

From an agnostic it might have some legitimacy -- though I think there it's largely a lazy dismissal of tiresome demagogues from one who's perfectly entitled to their neutrality but who ought to know better than to collapse all forms of disbelief into dunno and never! -- but from a believer it just seems dishonest. Don't bother to deny the problem -- the epistemological and ethical vacuity -- of your faith, just accuse the very philosophy which confronts it on principle of being exactly what it is opposed to. Paralleling the "reverse racism" accusation designed to simply derail the discourse, this is an accusation of "reverse faithism."

Somebody calls faith out in no uncertain terms on being an utter and complete travesty of reasonable belief where it seeks to eradicate doubt as to whether one should be stoned to death for putting one's cock up another man's arse? Somebody passionately, uncompromisingly, says your faith is a fucking unconscionable lie, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster at the heart of it not just an absurdity but a criminally fucking reckless one, so pardon me but I'm going to do everything in my power to wipe that bullshit from the arse of reality and flush it to oblivion where it belongs?

Quick! Throw some more bullshit at them! Call their atheism faith! They can't help but take that as an accusation of everything they're condemning, and with any luck they'll be so incensed we can throw the tone argument at them and flounce away, wanking ourselves off over how thoroughly we've delegitimised their case.

So, yeah... while I'm no great fan of principles atheism by any means, and can appreciate how tiresome many find the ideologues who've made it their mission in life to rid us all of the scourge of God, that's pretty much my opinion of the whole "atheism is faith too" notion.

It ain't high.