129
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_14
Chapter 14
Russell’s Paradox as Ecological Proxy
14.1 Surrogate Ecologies
Thomas Bayes,
1
son of a London Presbyterian minister, wrote three religious and
mathematical treatises in his life that would change our concepts of what is possible
forever more. The first, “Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the
Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His
Creatures (1731); a second defending Isaac Newton’s concept of “fluxions” (instant
or gradual change; variables of transition and derivatives of constants); and a third
that would be published 2 years after he died, “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem
in the Doctrine of Chances. Today, his ghostly presence haunts the mathematics and
statistics of probability theory. Point estimates, within what Bayesian specialists
refer to as a maximum a posteriori estimation, are coefficients within a purgatory
between a predicted event and the power of belief in that event happening. Bayes’
calculations are not interpretive. Rather, they outline the reality of the anthropic
principle: cosmological calculations must somehow account for the perceptions and
number crunching, not to mention the very ecological presence, of Homo sapiens.
Our subjectivity is just one of the world’s infinite objectivities. While it is still tenable to calculate a planet without humans, a post-human biodiversity implicates a
fascinating matrix of ethical targets, each with probability distributions entirely relevant to choices made in the here and now. But every conception is a human conception. Every space a biased dimension (Fig. 14.1).
Even if we speculate upon the doomsday of doomsdays, the branch of mathematics dealing with faith is a human faith, a compilation of biases and a less than sanguine harbinger of what those fixed outcomes bode.
1 Statistical Science 2004, Vol. 19, No. 1, 3–43 DOI 10.1214/088342304000000189 © Institute of
Mathematical Statistics, 2004 “The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: A Biography to Celebrate the
Tercentenary of His Birth,” by D. R. Bellhouse, http://biostat.jhsph.edu/courses/bio621/misc/
bayesbiog.pdf, Accessed March 16, 2019.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_14
Chapter 14
Russell’s Paradox as Ecological Proxy
14.1 Surrogate Ecologies
Thomas Bayes,
1
son of a London Presbyterian minister, wrote three religious and
mathematical treatises in his life that would change our concepts of what is possible
forever more. The first, “Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the
Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His
Creatures (1731); a second defending Isaac Newton’s concept of “fluxions” (instant
or gradual change; variables of transition and derivatives of constants); and a third
that would be published 2 years after he died, “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem
in the Doctrine of Chances. Today, his ghostly presence haunts the mathematics and
statistics of probability theory. Point estimates, within what Bayesian specialists
refer to as a maximum a posteriori estimation, are coefficients within a purgatory
between a predicted event and the power of belief in that event happening. Bayes’
calculations are not interpretive. Rather, they outline the reality of the anthropic
principle: cosmological calculations must somehow account for the perceptions and
number crunching, not to mention the very ecological presence, of Homo sapiens.
Our subjectivity is just one of the world’s infinite objectivities. While it is still tenable to calculate a planet without humans, a post-human biodiversity implicates a
fascinating matrix of ethical targets, each with probability distributions entirely relevant to choices made in the here and now. But every conception is a human conception. Every space a biased dimension (Fig. 14.1).
Even if we speculate upon the doomsday of doomsdays, the branch of mathematics dealing with faith is a human faith, a compilation of biases and a less than sanguine harbinger of what those fixed outcomes bode.
1 Statistical Science 2004, Vol. 19, No. 1, 3–43 DOI 10.1214/088342304000000189 © Institute of
Mathematical Statistics, 2004 “The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: A Biography to Celebrate the
Tercentenary of His Birth,” by D. R. Bellhouse, http://biostat.jhsph.edu/courses/bio621/misc/
bayesbiog.pdf, Accessed March 16, 2019.