Rust Belt Philosophy

Go figure: "Obama is expected to announce between 30,000 and 35,000 reinforcements as part of a new strategy intended to 'finish the job' in the war, after what the White House says was years of neglect during the Bush administration." It's terrifying enough that we've apparently been coasting along on a strategy not designed to "finish the job," but could somebody please say what the job is?

We ran into this problem with Iraq, too, and everyone seemed to get it then: throwing the military around without having a goal in mind is a terrible idea, so we ought at least have some sense of where we're going. When Bush had that "Mission Accomplished" banner, people asked what the mission was; when he said the surge was working, people asked what "working" meant in this context; basically any time anyone said "winning" it was questioned. Even real accomplishments, like the removal of Hussein from power, triggered skeptical reflexes about how the war wasn't helping anti-terrorism efforts and so on and so forth. Well, where's all that stuff now?

Frankly, I would even question whether we ought to be doing jobs that the military can finish on its own. Certainly such jobs exist, and I'm even willing to say that they were at some point worth doing (and could be worth doing again), but the overall ideal for international action should be to raise everyone's standard of living, should it not? And, forgive me if I'm mistaken, militaries just aren't equipped to do that. We can start jobs with the military if we want - though opening with diplomacy would of course be more prudent and polite - but looking to finish a job with the military seems disturbingly like trying to finish building a house with a bulldozer.

If in a spasm of charity I interpreted Obama as meaning that his new strategy would finish the military's job and not the job in general, I would still very much like to know just what that job is. But he would have to make that distinction quite clear indeed - and back it up with the appropriate actions. Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

In memoriam:


Now can somebody please do one of these for the 0-17 NJ "Nots" Nets?

A recurring challenge in philosophy is how to attack an old problem from a new perspective. If you read conscientious modern philosophers for long enough, you'll see lots of claims that an argument or objection "is distinct from" or "does not reduce to" some other (usually strangely named) argument or objection - that counts as their attempt to meet precisely this challenge. At the same time, however, you'll also read philosophers responding to arguments or objections by trying to show that they don't say anything new, because why bother reiterating the whole history of a question every time somebody asks it? Today we have an example of the latter.

So as to make an analogy with abortion, Mike Almeida presents this argument:

"(1) The tumor in Smith’s abdomen is currently benign and presents no threat to him, but if it is left untreated it will develop into something that is seriously life-threatening.

...(2) If Smith’s tumor will develop into something life-threatening, then we ought to remove it now, prior to it’s [sic] development into something life-threatening.

(3) Therefore, we ought to remove it now, prior to it’s [sic] development into something life-threatening."

Similarly, if something currently possesses little value but will increase in value substantially as time goes on, Almeida wants to say that "we ought not to remove [that thing] now, prior to it’s [sic] development into something extremely valuable." Before I get into the deeper stuff, I have to start by observing that - once again - this argument only covers some fraction of abortions. Unless he really likes stillborns and other problematic fetal end-states, Almeida can only use this argument in some cases. I don't think this hurts his reasoning much, I just wanted to point out that this is a hole that's typically left unfilled, and it remains so here.

At any rate, the key transition lies between premises 1 and 2. Regarding the tumor, Almeida holds "that the potential of the tumor to develop into something life-threatening is not just a reason, but an excellent reason for us to remove it now, before it has those life-threatening features. Intuitively, it seems a serious wrong to fail to remove it, providing we can, and other things are equal." In other words, we have an obligation to remove a not-currently-but-eventually threatening tumor so long as its threatening nature is our only concern. If, to make up a wildly ridiculous example, removing the tumor would blow up the planet, we would have to reconsider. And, luckily, tumors tend not to impact other areas too much, especially if they're detected early: the question of removing it, then, pertains only to harms. The reverse, however, cannot be said of a fetus.

To look at it coming from the other direction, when a fetus grows its value increase (which I'm giving to Almeida for the sake of argument) is accompanied by physiological changes in the host (a.k.a. the pregnant woman), not all of which are good. Moreover, pregnancy carries with it a variety of social shifts, which again come as a mixed bag. A tumor, on the other hand, doesn't make anybody's life better in and of itself. You can't, for instance, get a raise or a promotion because you have a tumor; living with a terminal form of cancer won't reliably help you meet friends or improve your taste in art or achieve historical significance. So in his first case, all other things really are equal, but when it comes to the issue of abortion this is decidedly not so.

What this means for Almeida's argument is that it offers nothing other than the old question of weighing the value of a fetus against the value of a woman's health, happiness, and self-determination. He sweeps the qualifying statement that signals this under the rug a bit, yes, but it's still there: until humans start reproducing outside their bodies like turtles or fish, Almeida's argument only adds a false sense of certainty to the dialectic.

So, what with the holiday coming up, I'll be taking an extended weekend from blogging. So as to wrap things up, my fantasy teams went 1-1 again (stupid Matt Schaub beat me on Monday night by like .8 points), here's a funny webcomic...



...and here's my obligatory shot at the ever-growing, Olympian, self-obsessed insanity of the Ableist Word Profile:

"Our goal with the Ableist Word Profile is to explore language, and the way in which language usage can subconsciously reinforce ableism. ... While a lot of these posts are intended to get people thinking about word usage, they are not intended to dictate the language that individuals use. Only you can decide what language you use, but you should do so in full awareness of the impact that your language has. Ultimately, the person you need to be accountable to is yourself, not us."

Oh really?

"People don’t like being told they’re wheelchair bound. Stop doing it."

If there's anything I can't abide, it's a bunch of fucking liars. I wonder how disabled you have to be before it's okay to just make shit up and then brazenly disregard it...

Remember when you were a kid and you had to have a favorite color and number and all that stuff? Is it just me, or did people not bother having a favorite letter? That seems a bit unfair, on reflection,* so allow me to make amends: my favorite letter is S, because it (usually) marks the difference between singular and plural. And while you'd think that would be a pretty easy determination to make, singular versus plural, some people still need to figure it out.

James Kalb, one such person, feels as though his political position, conservatism, has been unfairly maligned by modern ways of thinking and aims to correct this via copious usage of the wrong noun form. Principled conservatives prioritize tradition, he says - "tradition" being "the habit of loyalty toward one's society and its ways." They do so because "society cannot be rationalized on clear simple principles, [and so] evolved social practices must be accepted to a large extent on their own terms." Moreover, if we "don't accept life on the whole as we find it," our only "alternative is to construct some new form of life based on supposed superior knowledge. However, life is too complex, subtle and all-embracing to be reconstructed in more than marginal ways." Give Kalb points for obviousness, at least: human life is indeed all-embracing for humans.

Besides its inevitable presence in our lives, Kalb says that we should value tradition because "we can only make sense of our actions by reference to standards and realities we don't create. The direct application of will to social reality through bureaucracy must accept the setting created by the unplanned aggregation of individual wills through the market, and the latter must in turn accept a larger setting, the human world created by the aggregation of human perceptions, experiences and habits through tradition." Thus, that "today the necessity of accepting tradition is in effect denied" implies a mass social rejection of "[u]ltimate standards of goodness, beauty and truth. ... As an example, 'affirmative action' demands the forcible eradication of the practical consequences of traditionally-recognized distinctions among human beings. ... Age, sex, religion, family ties and culture are to be made irrelevant to social status and life chances no matter what the social, moral or economic cost."

In summary, then, Kalb's argument goes like this: tradition, which is the maintenance of socially recognized "ultimate standards" that were "created by the aggregation of human perceptions, experiences and habits," is itself under attack from leftists (who favor bureaucracy) and libertarians (who favor markets). Such attacks, if successful, would undermine a very valuable part of society, which cannot function without some large degree of willfully suspended disbelief. But, since "human society, as conservatives recognize, is always in some way religious," it will always "be carried on in a world that...makes sense to us through traditions that point to something beyond themselves. It follows that tradition is the natural state of man, and at bottom he can never give it up.'"

I'm going to take this very slowly, because there's a lot wrong. First and foremost, liberalism and libertarianism don't object to tradition; if anything, they object to traditions. (I know for sure that liberalism does this but I'm not sure about libertarianism; just hedging my bets.) Kalb, then, gets it right when he says that alternatives to conservatism entail "a denial of the legitimacy of tradition as such" - questioning traditions does indeed mean refusing to take tradition at its word - he just doesn't know what those words mean. To deny the automatic rightness of tradition is not the same as accepting the automatic wrongness of tradition. Furthermore, nobody in their right minds actually wants "the practical abolition of culture," particularly things like "goodness, beauty and truth." In fact, proponents of things like affirmative action and multiculturalism advocate those things precisely because of their ideas of goodness, beauty, and truth. And, on the other side of the coin, libertarians do actually protest these and other reforms based on "the social, moral or economic cost." Much of Kalb's argument, then, applies only to a gross mischaracterization of his opponents.

Not, however, that that's his only or even his biggest problem. When he says that all tradition (i.e., including theories of value) is the result of "the aggregation of human perceptions, experiences and habits," he unwittingly ruins his own argument. For, if "we can only make sense of our actions by reference to standards and realities we don't create" and if every standard comes from humanity (albeit aggregated humanity), then culture is an impossibility and the whole thing is a moot point. In order to maintain a consistent position, Kalb has to ditch either the obvious truth that human traditions have human origins or the insane idea that we need a really-existing objective value system to give our lives a sense of meaning. Attacking a position on the basis that it doesn't support contradictions is just a bit on the unfair side.

It's a bit shocking, actually, that Kalb even positions himself the way that he does. We must either "accept life on the whole as we find it" or else "construct some new form of life" from scratch? Hardly - he himself admits the feasibility of making incremental social changes. And that's not all: societies often, and often rightly, undergo very large changes without starting over altogether. Unless Kalb wants to deny the very history of his country, he has to confess that this dilemma rings false. Between abolishing slavery, giving women equal rights under the law, restricting child labor, and the myriad of other major social changes that took place just in the U.S., there's ample evidence that rejecting individual traditions doesn't mean abandoning tradition ("the habit of loyalty toward one's society and its ways," remember) entirely - even when those individual traditions are the big ones. And, apparently, in the right (or, one might say, "wrong") circumstances, it very much appears that Kalb would have us undo these advances: correctly-functioning politicians, he says, "live the life of...politics as [it] exist[s] in a particular tradition supremely well." So if your "particular tradition" approves axiomatically of slavery or rape or torturing infants for fun, Kalb wants you to support those activities. After all, complex issues "require acceptance of a particular culture and tradition," so have at it!

Really, just a brief look around would've disabused Kalb of all these loony notions. Societies that hold unswervingly to traditions end up like the Muslim nations in which people lack basic human rights. The "bureaucratic uniformity" that he fears does not now and never has existed: at most, we end up with a profound reconfiguring of social identity. When race, age, and gender matter less, other things start to matter more: political affiliation, hobbies, artistic taste, individually-held morals, (dare I say it?) philosophy. It's happened before, and all known psychological and historical evidence indicates that it'll keep happening. Far from seeing these major incongruities as weaknesses or problems, Kalb seems buoyed by the recognition that his preferred system lacks coherence - it "can't be analyzed," it "cannot be rationalized," it doesn't "have internal qualities that make it reasonable." Proudly, he demands that "conservatism today must stand" for this irrational, unreasonable, contradictory, illogical morass of half-baked theorizing. Well, James, if you want it, it's all yours. Let me know how that works out for you.

*Although also potentially very interesting from a philosopher's perspective. Colors and numbers, after all, exist (in some sense) independently of humans, but letters don't. Probably that's just a coincidence, but you never know.

Sharon Begley has apparently never watched Darren Aronofsky's fantastic "Pi," or else it wouldn't have been news "that when you are trying to solve a problem—and by 'problem' I mean anything from a new ad campaign to an effective compromise in a political battle to a new product design—it might help to go offline, mentally." Although, in fairness, maybe she had just been waiting for a more reliable source of evidence than a movie, in which case good job, Sharon. Anyway, the report that spurred her reaction reiterates the common psychological finding "that cross talk between the brain's hemispheres is important, and maybe even necessary, for creativity." Thus, activating both hemispheres leads to better performance on creativity tests, such as naming uses for a brick.* All well and good.

Taken from another angle, however, this observation challenges a very popular (and, to some, very meaningful) cultural myth that we've developed. Contrary to our lofty ideas about ourselves, Begley's position - and Aronofsky's - implies that most meaningful discoveries rely on a stroke of extremely good luck. Just as in the case of Archimedes's fortuitous discovery of the relationship between displacement and mass, which appears in "Pi," "having a 'leaky' mental filter, so that thoughts that are seemingly irrelevant to the problem at hand penetrate your consciousness, [possibly] boosts creativity." When we say of humanity's evolutionary history that the universe created a way to understand itself, then, we are giving ourselves way too much credit.

A good first reaction to this news, if it's as accurate as these people say, would be to update the Aristotelian definition of humans: we aren't rational animals, we're trial-and-error animals. At least some part of what makes human learning unique and effective, in other words, is governed more by the laws of statistics than the laws of logic: make enough observations while having a "leaky" enough filter and sooner or later you'll strike gold. But - and this is a hugely important "but" and one that's treacherously easy to forget about - you'll also end up with a lot of total junk. Any talk of inherent rationality or comprehension-based teleology regarding any big questions, then, would be awfully hard to maintain on an individual level.** Especially considering that some people consciously reject "empirically true" interpretations in favor of "honest" ones, that just doesn't wash.

After coming to terms with that, the next step seems to be to embrace the weirdness of our brains. Creativity, even creativity that comes at the cost of a little epistemic reliability, is worth pursuing, and this research indicates that we can best pursue it just by having varied experiences and learning from a wide breadth of subject areas. Of course, this would ideally be tempered by the awareness that creativity-based belief formation isn't the most consistent of methods - the awareness, in other words, of event permanence - but even then I would say that being a creative, hit-and-miss thinker is better than being a boring but reliable thinker. At least, for now; come the zombie apocalypse, maybe reliability will make a comeback.

So go out and enjoy the world. See some new sights, talk to new people (I mean, people you haven't talked to before, not babies), put yourself in new contexts - who knows, you might just inadvertently learn something. But remember that information is meant to be shared: if your experiences lead to a true insight, you'll have nothing to fear in sharing that insight with others; if they lead to a false insight, you'll only be better off without it.

*"Well, there's building a house, breaking a window, holding down a pile of papers on a windy day, squashing a bug, paving a driveway, building a wall, as the legs of a small table...putting in the toilet tank to reduce water usage...a mock coffin at a Barbie funeral." Okay, game on: murder weapon, martial arts prop, indirect source of heat for cooking, emergency exfoliating device (or, for that matter, emergency any other device whose primarily useful quality is roughness), exemplar of the color red (or whatever color it is), metaphor for the hopeless despair of uniformity...uh...coaster? That's about all I've got.
**This says nothing about the population level, though. If every person were an island of information, this would be seriously troubling and would likely even give Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism a major boost - but, again, information travels, so we sort of escape the worst here, at least over the long term.

Okay, granted: death is hardware failure. But this story raises questions that rarely see the light of day. Usually, near-future speculation about human/computer intimacy fixates on sex - VR sex, sex robots, the possibility (or not) of consent in artificial intelligence, how to reconfigure age laws to apply to machines, and on and on. Not to sound like your garden-variety repressive conservative, but what about marriage?

So this guy in Japan (where else?) "married" one of the characters in his Nintendo DS game. (I say "married" because I don't know for sure whether the government recognizes it or not. Normally I'd assume not, but this is Japan...) What happens if somebody else wants to marry the same character - or, heaven help us all, if he meets an analog person* that he wants to marry? Shifting gears a little, he shouldn't really get any of the tax benefits of marriage, right? Cause those don't really make sense to apply to a virtual character - when two flesh-and-blood people live together, housing opens up for someone else; 3D couples have medical concerns that couldn't ever matter for a simple video game character. And what happens when his DS breaks and he can't get another? Is that a de facto divorce, or is she just considered to be in a permanent coma, or what? Or, if a sequel comes out, is he automatically married to the same character in that game? And don't let's even talk about parenting status.

Actually, though, human/computer marriage shouldn't pose too huge a problem. If enough people want it, countries will have to find a way to make it work and that's all there is to it. My major concern is what happens when computer characters find a way to interact with each other directly and then ask us to marry them. Right? It seems like we'd have to honor that, so long as we allow them to marry humans, but that would cause all kinds of ridiculous problems. Could you imagine meeting someone who felt they had to erase a save file or snap a game disc in half because they were jealous? What a mess that would be.

The only sure benefit I can see resulting from all of this is that video game companies would finally have to pay for good writers. Right now, anybody can spend time working on a game and then ditch that game arbitrarily for no reason, which makes niceties like realism economically infeasible. Add a copious amount of government red tape to the picture and that'll change, at least in limited cases. Whatever happens, I hope I'm around to see it - if nothing else, it should be fun to watch Michelle Malkin's head explode.

*I.e., not digital - you'll have to give me some leeway on this one.

Work in philosophy long enough and you'll encounter the "either trivially true or absurd" objection. A response that usually comes up in the context of fortune-cookie-esque nuggets of wisdom, the idea behind leveling this objection is to tease apart two potential interpretations of a phrase so as to look at each one independently of the other. So, for instance, the second half of this...

"Since God created the natural world and all that it contains with its own integrity, it is also reasonable to believe that consciousness itself - a feature encountered in the natural world - has a natural explanation."

...can have one of two meanings. On the one hand, it could mean that consciousness is a feature that we encounter that's also part of the set of "things directly connected only to the natural world." In that case, of course consciousness has a natural explanation: anything that can be fully described as having only natural causes and natural effects has a natural explanation. But in order for this to be a useful observation, its author (Kevin Corcoran) would already have to know that consciousness belongs wholly to the natural world - which would defeat the need for a quote like the one above.

Alternatively, Corcoran could mean that consciousness is merely something that we experience while we are in the natural world. But, for a theist like Corcoran, that wouldn't prove anything at all. Morality, after all, is (in this sense) another "feature encountered in the natural world," but Christians pretty much have to deny that it "has a natural explanation." Similarly for God itself, which many Christian philosophers claim to experience directly, and the angels in the Bible, and lots of other supernatural entities - basically, unless Corcoran wants to radically rewrite the entire Christian worldview he has to abandon this second reading.

Also note that the first half of that sentence - the stuff about the world having "integrity" - matters not one bit to the second half. "If minds are entirely natural, then they have a natural explanation" is a tautology regardless of which metaphysic one subscribes to; likewise, "if we see a thing then that thing is natural" clashes with every known religion regardless of which religion is true. I think Corcoran wanted to say something like this:

"If God created the world, maybe God set it up so that minds are natural, who knows?"

But that's not what he ended up saying; it's not even close.

Elsewhere, his troubles with words continue. Fully embracing the dime-store zen master in himself, Corcoran hypothesizes that "our task—our godly task!—is to lie to the world, it is the task of the world to tell the truth, and in so doing dishonestly describe the world we inhabit. Our task is to lie—big and bold—and in so doing to honestly describe the world we inhabit. I know this all sounds crazy," he says in a rare and confusing moment of clarity, "and it is. It’s ridiculous. It’s lunacy. It’s foolishness. But, of course, the wisdom of God is foolishness to the likes of us." Well, you got that part right, at least.

In the comments, a reader tries to call him to his senses, which produces this explanation: "My point is that we are called to create pieces of fiction or little plays that imagine a different world than the world described by news reporters, politician, etc. Often what they say is empirically true. But we're called to incarnate represenations [sic] of reality that contradict what those folks say. And that is what I am calling a lie." So, when Corcoran says "lie," he means "true but unaesthetic statement"? With all due respect to Lewis Carroll's infamous wall-sitter, that's not how words work.

For his sake, I hope all of this inane babble makes Corcoran feel good about his life. It seems to have no other purpose - certainly it has no philosophical utility. And yet what does Corcoran do for a living? Why, he teaches philosophy, of course! Y'know, they say a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but honestly? If this is the alternative, wasting seems like the better option.

Dear readers, today I owe you an apology. I implied that I would watch every last music video on this top 101 list, but I find I cannot. The list goes from good to bad to awful very fast, so instead let me just suggest a few better music videos that deserve (but were denied) a place on that list.

First, "The First Day of My Life" by Bright Eyes. A lot of people find his music too whiny and emo in general, but this is just a nice, happy love song. Nothing revolutionary, but a hell of a lot better than (I'd estimate) 60-70 of the videos on the list:


Next, The Postal Service's "We Will Become Silhouettes":


"Grapevine Fires" by Death Cab For Cutie:

And, finally, "Use It" by The New Pornographers:


Enjoy - and if anybody out there managed to watch all one-hundred and one of the videos on the list, you have my eternal respect.

Do any of my readers specialize in hypnosis? If so, there's a golden opportunity waiting for you in the United Kingdom: implant a lucrative criminal behavior, such as grand larceny, in a willing subject such that the person acts out that behavior while asleep. Then split the profits and retire safe in the knowledge that sleeping people "bear no [legal] responsibility for" their actions in Wales. Or, if movie-caper anti-heroics aren't your style, go find a Welsh casino and wager obscene amounts of money. If you win, great! If you lose, go to court some time later and claim that you were asleep the whole time. Maybe better yet: show up to your job for several years and then refuse to pay income tax on the grounds that you had been sleep-working the whole time. In Wales, the world is your oyster!

Charles Mudede tries to universalize this ruling and comes up with the conclusion "that much of your life, which is taken up by sleep, is not you but someone else. The wife [in the case that set this precedent] was killed by a shadowy someone else who is beyond the limits of the law. You are a kind, loving husband; your dreaming is murderous and insane. The two are not one." Somebody should tell the husband - judging by his photo on the BBC's website, he hasn't heard the good news.

One can only hope that this column is nothing more than a badly failed joke:

"I was in Chicago with time on my hands and the sweet woman murmured to me — you know how this goes — 'Would you like to see the Art Institute?' and I was thinking No No No God No, and I said, 'Sure. Fine.'

...I’ve been here before. The sweet woman loves galleries and French impressionists and the sunny gardens of Pierre Bonnard. While looking at them, she is likely to say something about color and texture. But I am an American man and color and texture are not my strong suits. And so I staked out my aesthetic at the start. I said, 'I see no reason to paint flowers. You can buy fresh flowers. Still lifes are only an exercise. And abstract expressionism is for the lobbies of big insurance companies. The true calling of an artist is to paint women and the greatest challenge is the naked female form. That’s what separates the true artists from the wallpaper-hangers.'"

His angst practically leaps out from the screen, does it not? "Garrison Goes To The Museum," soundtrack composed and performed by Linkin Park.

(This, by the way, is a random Bonnard that I found online [courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. It's hard not to notice, given Keillor's complaint, that the painting is indeed wholly void of naked women; actually, I'm not even sure if it has a "sunny garden." It looks like there's some plant-like stuff in the background, but is that a garden? And is it sunny? Damned if I can tell. My readers can determine their own opinion of Monsieur Bonnard's work - as painting has never been my medium of choice, I will take the Socratic shortcut to wisdom and admit that I know nothing regarding this particular subject.)

Maybe Keillor ought to pause for a moment the next time he deigns to speak "on behalf of American men everywhere" - I myself would really like to avoid "watch[ing] a couple of welterweights whale on each other for 10 rounds," or even just for one round. I also seem to lack his peculiar allergy to art, confidently though he attributes it to everyone who shares his gender and country of origin. On the other hand, he does have the strength of character to continue believing that "[a] man gets to say what he likes" even though he spends his whole first paragraph talking about how he grudgingly gave "the correct answer" to his sweet acquaintance. Strength of character has to count for something, right? Something that makes up for being a chauvinist philistine, hopefully?

Some time in most humans' infancies, they develop object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist even after they pass from one's direct sensory field. Most of us, however, apparently never achieve event permanence, which I will define as the understanding that events continue to have existed even after they were subsumed, undone, or otherwise overwritten by other events. This might contribute to the phenomenon that Dan Gilbert reported in his Stumbling On Happiness wherein we remember events disproportionately by their endings - at any rate, it often makes it hard to carry on meaningful conversations about past events, as many of those events are likely to have been forgotten. Today's case in point: Hugh Ross.

Weirdly combining advanced science and childish theology, Ross turns his attentions to the "symbiotic and widespread relationship between AMF and vascular plants, [without which] neither soulish animals (birds and mammals) nor human beings would thrive on Earth." Leaving aside what exactly "soulish" might mean or why it even matters, Ross's argument essentially says that the synergy between AMF (a type of fungus) and vascular plants requires a designer. "The challenge for evolutionary models," he says, "is how to explain by natural means the simultaneous appearance of both vascular plants and AMF. ...It seems nothing less than a supernatural, super-intelligent Creator can explain all the intricate designs required in advance of launching symbiotic relationships." Of course, by now we know lots of reasons to reject teleological arguments in general, but there's another problem specific to this version of the design argument.

When Ross talks about the "intricate designs" that got set up "in advance of launching [any given] symbiotic relationships," he's ignoring those relationships that failed to develop. For any given evolutionary strategy that succeeds any number do not, resulting in both extinctions and in evolution itself. Taking these misses and adjustments into account, this looks not so much like design as coincidence: we would not, for example, be tempted to look for design (a.k.a. conspiracy) every time somebody wins the lottery by playing their license plate number. If everyone who played their license plate number always won, or if one person always won when they played, then there'd be cause for concern, but the presence of a few good results among a vast sea of bad results is hardly surprising. At the very least, Ross would have to develop a teleological account of evolutionary failure; if God designed the fit survivors, surely God's responsible for the rest as well. Without even recognizing the existence of evolutionary failure, Ross can't even address the real world. It would indeed be inexplicable if fungi and plants always only evolved to match each other, but (like Edison's "ways not to invent the lightbulb") the efficacy of the few working strategies doesn't obliterate from history the many other impotent strategies that are, by definition, no longer being practiced.

Oy...

"One sign of the Spurs' age has been their relative inability to play on the second night of a back-to-back. Having the Mavs the night before should be a stiff enough test to push them, so if they can win this game they may have (temporarily) solved their conditioning problem."

Yeah, or not so much. I was right about the Mavs game - it went to overtime and required a high level of play throughout - but then San Antonio came back and died against Utah. You just can't score 83 points in an NBA game and expect to win, even against a team like the Jazz that's off to an uncharacteristically rough start.

It doesn't help that Manu and Tony were both out, of course, but health is part of conditioning. Even without them, the Spurs are supposed to be a 3-point shooting team, but they went four for twenty last night, including 1-5 from George Hill and 0-3 from Keith Bogans. FYI, guys, if you can't shoot the ball, don't. Utah, meanwhile, can't really feel too good about this either. They beat a sub-.500 team to pull into...ninth place in the conference. Whichever of these teams makes it into the playoffs (if either does) looks like they're headed for an early exit.

But Andrew Sullivan can, and apparently has. His reading of Sarah Palin's new book - which I had been studiously trying to avoid mentioning, and which I include here only because it's crucial to the point I'll make - concludes with the judgment that "[i]t is a religious book, full of myths and parables." Though the text in the book describes real events, "comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality (so many lies, so little time) is just a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious puree of such ghastly prose that, in the end, the book can only really be read as a some kind of chapter in a cheap nineteenth century edition of 'Lives of the Saints.'" Ultimately, Sullivan says, the book "is based...on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc."; in sum, this amounts only to "barely-credible myth-making and descriptions of actions taken that really make no sense even on their own terms." Not a glowing review by any stretch of the imagination.

When it comes to Palin, Sullivan has the soul of a philosopher: he "just want[s] to know" the truth. And, though one might quibble about the object of this desire, the desire in and of itself represents a wholly admirable mindset. I, again, would rather not apply that mindset to such a grating and ultimately meaningless topic, but if I did the mindset itself wouldn't be objectionable. Indeed, Sullivan's crusade - apart from its perhaps questionable motivations - can be seen as a thoroughly (albeit amateur) philosophical endeavor. If only he carried that same attitude into his religious life.

The Catholic church, as experienced by Sullivan, is "a nest of dysfunction and dishonesty and hypocrisy" (not quite Obi-Wan's "wretched hive of scum and villainy," but surprisingly close). His religious life "is conflicted, but from those conflicts can come a deeper appreciation of the truth." "But," he says, "I cannot search for another church as if it were another club and I cannot and will not leave in my heart the church that taught me the greatest truths about human love and life, and that brought me the astonishing good news of Jesus." Great truths, he says: truths, which are at the core of a philosopher's life. And yet Sullivan is no philosopher when it comes to religion.

What counts as an infuriating flaw in Palin's book becomes a saving grace in the Bible. Human responses to suffering are "evidence of God's love for us (and the divine spark within us), while [they] cannot, of course, resolve the ultimate mystery of why we are here at all in a fallen, mortal world" - and that's perfectly okay. Just "see this as less a literal error than a metaphorical truth" and everything works out, he says. All that Sullivan requires for his faith is the knowledge that his idea of "God lifted [him] into a new life in a way [he] still do[es] not understand." When things get confusing enough, he counsels his readers to "go to God, [to allow] Him to take over," because after all, why not ask Big Brother to confirm his own propaganda? Even taking into account the possibility of being fundamentally mistaken, Sullivan can hardly comprehend the idea of ditching his metaphysical commitments. "Why would any sane person abandon such an astonishingly rich inheritance that civilizes, informs, educates, inspires and then also saves?" Falsehood, it seems, weighs less than a past history of making people feel good. And, of course, he has his own meaningless, over-used slogans: Jesus saves, our world is fallen, etc. Replace "Sarah" with "Jesus" and Sullivan's frenzied truth-seeking becomes a docile, even joyous, acceptance of "barely-credible myth-making and descriptions of actions taken that really make no sense even on their own terms."

Oh, I can just hear him saying, but God is God and Sarah Palin is just some schmuck from Methville, Alaska - the two situations aren't at all the same. To which I reply, only if God exists: otherwise, God, just like the Sarah Palin portrayed in her book, is a figment of somebody's imagination. And, as we now arrive at the point, if you cannot prove the trustworthiness of the Bible without first assuming God's existence, that book has the same philosophical value as Palin's "religious," "mythological" text and should be treated exactly the same. By locating deeper truth in Christianity's many incoherencies, contradictions, and outright falsehoods, Sullivan allows the followers of other cults to make the same claim; in grounding his faith in the existence of meaningful personal experience, he permits Palin's followers to take that same path. He says of Palin's book that "we do not have a rational actor in the center of it; we have an unbalanced, delusional, ambitious fanatic whose relationship to reality is entirely instrumental and can change from minute to minute. ...she cannot be given the benefit of the doubt." It escapes him entirely that this claim isn't unique to Palin: it applies to anyone with a dogmatic devotion to anything but truth itself, including (but not at all limited to) the religious spokespeople who receive such frequent approval on his blog.

The phrase "special pleading" seems pale and thin compared to the levels of self-deception at play here. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell warns us from Sullivan's own masthead. Well, fellas, I've got news for you: it needs a constant struggle not to as well.

But original to me, anyway, and that's good enough.

Sad though this is to say, The Onion has had a great - perhaps even a brilliant - idea:

"In an effort to combat what organizers are calling 'our current epidemic of complete and utter obliviousness,' the American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things has declared December 'National Awareness Month.'"

At first I, perhaps like you, thought that this was just a relatively lackluster joke: yeah yeah, "Awareness" months pop up every now and then so they're sort of hackneyed and silly by now, I get it. But take another look.

"'All across the country, millions of men and women are dangerously unaware,' AFPAT spokesperson Karen Teeling said during a press conference Monday. 'What's worse, the vast majority of those suffering from this debilitating state of mind don't even know it.'"

Go ahead and tell me that doesn't remind you of anybody you know. I dare you.

Of course, correctly identifying the problem still leaves open the challenge of finding a workable solution. This, for instance, likely won't work:

"'Lack of coherent thought is usually a sign of being unaware, as is a fleeting attention span, and forgetting what this particular sentence pertains to midway through reading it,' said Dr. Howard Sturges, who has treated several hundred cases of acute obliviousness. 'If you suspect you have such a disorder, please contact a health professional immediately, or, as you likely know him, the man in the white lab coat with the shiny thing around his neck who has that office with all the chairs and patients inside of it.'"

Good luck getting that covered by your insurance.

But on a more serious note, that bumper sticker isn't lying: if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. Now look around you and take a rough measurement of the outrage - not very high, is it? Not nearly high enough, I'd wager, to account for the real existence of food-bank robbers, "aggravated homosexuality" laws, witch trials, rape-centered video games, or this idiot. Hell, I'd be surprised if any of us encountered enough average daily outrage just to cover the fact that somebody out there invented recipes for cocktails based on the Twilight franchise.

So, speaking with only the slightest bit of tongue in my cheek, could we please institute National Awareness Month? Their proposed timing seems about right, too - if we start it on December 1, we can start by noticing that people have had their damn Christmas lights up for two weeks already even though the holiday itself isn't for another three. You know, go slow with it, work our way up. Then maybe, if we're really lucky, one year people will get good enough to notice that they should be aware all year long.

Ha ha! No, I'm just kidding - that'll never happen. Still, it would be nice, wouldn't it?

Step 2: ??
Step 3: Profit!

Rather than offering actual arguments against theories or institutions, some people prefer to just complain about them. Rowan Williams uses this precise strategy in supporting his stance on education, and it works: he just collected an honorary doctorate (and a hefty speaking fee, I'm sure) in exchange for what's essentially an extended whining session.

Schools need to include religious education, he claims, because "the rationality of secular thinking is no guarantee of universal understanding and reconciliation. A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly." Aside from the utterly tiresome argument from consequences, Williams's only argument here is an absolute world-ender: since universal understand and reconciliation haven't happened yet, it follows that no currently or historically practiced kind of thinking guarantees them. Offering to substitute one "failed" system for another isn't really much of a solution.

I use those scare-quotes because rationality never aimed to establish "universal understanding and reconciliation." Williams himself understands that any system of reasoned thought exists "as a way of arguing and testing propositions," so it's quite odd that he criticizes them for not doing some completely different thing. More to the point, the system he proposes as a replacement has this exact same "flaw": for him, reason means "look[ing] for the ways in which [one] can discover the rhythms and patterns of reality and so understand [oneself] more fully." How self-comprehension will lead to universal understanding he does not say, which means that we have no reason to believe that his so-called solution works either in theory or in practice.

And, if I can end this post on a more subjective and less analytical note, I really question the value of academic courses that teach what Williams calls "the sacred." Employing a somewhat unintuitive definition of that term, he says that "a religiously grounded education" will always address "the freedom to respond to the beautiful and the puzzling and the tragic, to all the things that we do not have the power to manage." This secular version of "the sacred" surely merits some attention, but for my part I cannot see how an academic treatment of the subject would help (or, for that matter, contribute to the avoidance of financial crises, which Williams seems to imply that it would do). Can you imagine response-to-beauty homework? Or a midterm on unmanageable situations? At best I'd guess that this would just be an extremely roundabout way of advocating for some sort of comparative anthropology or psychology course, but it seems much more like the "freedom" part of that sentiment should exclude the "education" part of it - there's a reason that "reeducation" is the euphemism of choice for "brainwashing." Especially since Williams explicitly speaks out against pluralism and relativism, I'd urge extreme caution if anyone should ever encounter an actual instantiation of one of these courses in "the sacred."

Dan Savage must've been in a really good mood when he wrote that the preliminary results of a recent survey would "throw a serious wrench in the Vatican's efforts to pin the whole clergy sex abuse scandals on teh gays." Yeah, the report "found that sexual identity was not 'a predictor of abuse,'" but how good of a record does the church actually have when it comes to respecting facts? Let's not forget that this is the same group that continues to insist that crackers are (for some sense of the word "are") human flesh - how much impact can we really expect a few statistics to have?

Incidentally, it's also worth remembering that the opposite result would still not have confirmed the church's position. Likewise, if the data revealed that (say) men over 6'1" had the worst record it would still not prove anything about tall men in general. The same, of course, goes for men 6'1" and under, men with bad teeth, straight men, redheaded men, and men whose first names begin with the letter F. Given that the church's position was never fact- or logic-based in the first place, it would come as a bit of a surprise if they recanted upon learning that the facts and logic were against them. Sorry, Dan, but you're not out of the woods yet.

Like this:

"Viewed in one way, ambition is a good thing, and its absence in people, especially in the young, we consider to be a defect. Without ambition, there can be no realization of one's potential. Happiness is connected with the latter. We are happy when we are active in pursuit of choice-worthy goals that we in some measure attain."

Where does this tripe even come from? Which observable facts in the actual world indicate that we need progress towards "choice-worthy goals" in order to be happy? (What, for starters, is a choice-worthy goal?) What, besides only the most superficial understanding of the conventional wisdom, connects any of these concepts to any other?

Especially beguiling here is this notion of fulfilled potential. If we want to connect a person's happiness at all to the extent to which they meet their potential, we would first have to know both their potential and how much they've actually done. I dunno about you, but I don't even know those things about myself. Nor, in fact, do I know which sense of "potential" we're using here. It could be volitional (x is within a person's potential iff, had that person willed x, x would've come about), hypothetical (x is within a person's potential iff that person could, given some possible history, have brought x about), categorical (x is within a person's potential iff that person is a member of some class such that a member of that class has already brought x about), or something totally different - and those are just some of the potential objective senses of the word, we haven't even started in yet on the possible influence of potential as perceived subjectively, or how to measure accomplishments.

Nobody's intuitions match reality so closely that they can go without factual confirmation and precise fine-tuning. Nobody's.

Several music videos in to that top 101 list I mentioned the other day, I am sensing a few patterns. It doesn't feel particularly good, this sensation.

Observation 1: people really like choreography
Which sometimes is good...

...but more often distracts from the uncomfortable fact of really mediocre music.


Seriously: those songs are just boring. Also, I feel like this is maybe an overrated visual phenomenon. Scads of dancers do this sort of thing on a daily basis on Broadway (and other places) - why should it get special treatment here?

Observation 2: multiple copies of the performing artist = instant popularity

Et cetera and so on.

Observation 3: people have no taste in music
As expected, but still a little irritating. I won't make you suffer through the worst offenders, there's no reason to be cruel.

Observation 4: Michel Gondry is a genius
This is far and away the best of the bunch, despite ranking in the mid-50s:

But he also works wonders with this kind of generic-sounding Chemical Brothers tune:


More pithy analysis after I recover from my initial bout with this list.

(Thanks, SMBC!)

More often than not, reading amateur philosophers feels like watching an old-timey slapstick routine. Absurdity enters not because the person tries to keep too many balls in the air at once - that's common enough not to be particularly remarkable - but because, despite having no noticeable talent for it whatsoever, they decide to juggle only with precious, fragile family heirlooms. You can't help but laugh a little when all their shiny knick-knacks inevitably shatter into tiny pieces. It's even worse when, as with Michael Gleghorn, they don't seem to realize that they've screwed up.

Gleghorn, working almost entirely from Lee Silver's philosophically regrettable Remaking Eden, wants to take a stand against certain kinds of genetic manipulation. "We must be careful," he says, "how we choose to apply such technologies--especially to ourselves!" I don't intend to argue with that conclusion, but his method of obtaining this particular omelet breaks more eggs than Gleghorn would probably like to sacrifice. For him, the Bible "not only affirms that man bears the image of God, it also implies that human life is sacred and imposes a severe penalty for the unjustified taking of such a life. ...You might say it indicates that all men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,' chief of which is the right to life!" This indicates that Gleghorn believes in a universally applicable, non-axiomatic law in this matter: all people have a right to life, but this right (and the penalties for violating it) depends on another fact of the matter (i.e., that people "bear the image of God"). Such a view, however, mixes rather poorly with concerns about genetic manipulation.

In order for science to impact this discussion at all, Gleghorn has to allow for some metaphysical consequences of material actions. He does this when he says that "any attempt to genetically alter man's unique nature as a rational, emotional, volitional, moral agent could be viewed as an attack on the image of God in man": such alterations, though they consist entirely of genetic changes, would for him have supernatural consequences. Trouble is, his view can't actually abide by those consequences.

As a relatively fundamentalist Christian, Gleghorn believes, in one category, that abortion and euthanasia can never be justified and, in another, that humans occupy a permanently unique place in the animal world. Neither of these is compatible with his claim that genetic changes could reduce or possibly eliminate "the image of God in man." If such tampering could make humans less divine, we would have to admit first and foremost that some humans already are more divine (and therefore valuable) than others: people come with varying degrees of rationality, emotionality, morality, and freedom, so Gleghorn would have to start by asserting a value hierarchy of people based just on how well their brains work. But he cannot do this, as it would pretty directly imply that some cases of abortion and euthanasia - and indeed even murder - are perfectly okay (or at least are significantly less serious than other cases). Likewise, if certain genetic combinations lead to divinity in biological creatures, we could artificially inject (at least part of) the image of God into many different animals, making them essentially as valuable (or comparably as valuable, anyway) as humans. This, too, simply could not find a place in Gleghorn's worldview.

Sadly for him, Gleghorn appears to have painted himself into a corner here. Surely things like rationality and the capacity for moral reactions seem like quintessentially human traits, but we now know that they depend on (and most likely are) certain physical qualities. His next move in the dialectic, then, appears to be either to abandon any coherent definition of "the image of God" or else to radically alter his moral framework. At the bare minimum, he has to change something in his current configuration of beliefs - though he seems not to realize it, that noise in the background isn't applause. It's the sound of his position breaking under its own weight.

Well, my fantasy teams again split the week, and I again have not figured out anything enlightening to say about it. But there is some good news: another basketball season is right around the corner, maybe! The PSL just announced yesterday that it'd run a fun-sized 4-week league in December, for which registration opens this Friday. My team and I expect it to fill up quickly, so we'll see if my speed-typing skills are up to the task of getting our collective foot in the door.

And, in completely unrelated news, Sacramento and OK City are the 7 and 8 seeds in the west?? If things stay that way I might have to seriously reevaluate my life.

Say what you like about the death of print, books hold a special place in the human world. The image of a living tome seemingly permeates our collective imagination much more than a living any-other-method-of-communication: living paintings and statues crop up on rare occasion, but good luck finding any story about a living phone or modem or telegraph. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I found out that Pete Enns's "incarnational" Bible isn't one that actually incarnates anybody.

Instead, the phrase refers to a "model of Scripture...that expects Scripture to have an unapologetically thorough human dimension." Or, in somewhat more cogent English, "if the Bible were a book dropped out of heaven with only a tangential, peripheral participation in the human contexts in which it is written--sort of a divine dictation--it ceases being the Word of God." The vocabulary at play here needs a little work - "dimension" and "participation" in particular seem very out of place - but the general impression comes through: God, Enns says, wrote the Bible for two specific audiences. Any factual errors contained therein, like the contention "that the sun revolves around the earth" or "Genesis," are on this view really only "ancient, contextual terms" used to describe the world. Our ancestors, in short, were too dull and rigid-minded to accept any document that would have disabused them of their many misunderstandings, so God chose to humor them. Okay, but...so what?

Enns says that this thesis shows "how willing God is to meet us where we are," but the conjugation there is all wrong: given the lack of a more modern and less factually erroneous Bible, Enns can only say that God met us where we were. Not only does this not help his ultimate cause, it hurts it. The entire point of criticizing the Bible for its scientific wrongness and primitive morality is that God hasn't met us where we are. A loving god, one that wants at all times to help humans, would have a field day with the open-minded, receptive minds of today, and yet we've received no updated text from which to work. Moreover, it'd be one thing if God had just not provided us with any books at all, but to have provided humanity with a few mostly wrong books without ever intending to correct it seems more in line with what an apathetic jackass god would do.

At best, then, Enns manages only to avoid addressing the real problem at hand; at worst, he contributes to it. For how, on his view, can we plausibly read the Bible? Modern interpretations are necessarily wrong, he says, because it wasn't written for us. Then again, if getting to the "right" interpretation requires one to purposefully forget thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, that interpretation surely can't fit in a contemporary person's life. Enns can't even tell us which passages, if any, can go without this "incarnational" treatment - for all he knows, the whole thing is a waste. To his credit, Enns does at least realize that the Bible isn't trustworthy. Just saying "it was designed that way," however, does not by any means excuse that.

Ever since I had the obligatory "hey wait, this show actually really sucks" epiphany about TRL, music videos haven't really meant all that much to me. They still exist, obviously, though TRL itself does not (hooray!), but they just don't seem...important anymore. And yet, like so much else in the world, lots and lots of people on the internet absolutely love music videos, and so we get things like the 101 best music videos of the aughts.

Now, to repeat, I haven't cared about music videos since before the aughts began, so to a large extent I really have no place talking about this list in any capacity at all. But hey - that's never stopped me before, and it damn sure won't now.

It would, however, push the limits of hubris too far to comment without having actually watched the videos in question. At some point in the near future, then, I will commence watching these 101 videos and forming my opinions thereof - you, dear reader, are of course welcomed and encouraged to play along at home. Be warned, though, that I consider the "music" part of "music video" to weigh just as much as the "video" part: no matter how amazing the visuals might be for the latest Nickelback video, the video as a whole sucks.

A future post will contain the results of this little experiment, hopefully taking into account the many astute suggestions and remarks provided by my (indubitably) sharp-minded and artistically well-versed readers.

In his 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novelization of the Kubrick movie, natch), Arthur Clarke comes very close to predicting the e-reader:

"When [space-traveling scientist Heywood Floyd] tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his fools-cap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad.

...The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites." (p. 57 in my edition, who knows which page(s) in yours)

Most amusingly, Clarke missed the invention of wireless information transfer - we obviously have no need to have each and every one of our devices plugged into an "information circuit." We've also succeeded in doing away with meaningless "codes," at least for some definition of "meaningless" (see e.g. Google, Yahoo, Reddit, and so on). I wonder if Clarke didn't borrow that concept either from TV or radio, both of which use totally arbitrary numbers as points of reference in their user-interface systems; either way, that design no longer applies as a universal technological rule, especially when it comes to finding "the more important" news organizations online. And, of course, the idea of an internet-like system updating hourly now strikes us as obviously silly, but I'm tempted to give Clarke a pass on that one: to a large extent, publishing still does depend on human effort. At the very least, editors have to approve stories (right?), which plausibly could happen on a periodic basis.

Still, I find it quite impressive that somebody saw this coming 40-plus years ago. Actually, the book in general has been very impressive so far - impressive enough for me to wonder whether it qualifies for my earlier complaint about sci-fi movies. The gist, for the tl;dr crowd, is that some sci-fi just doesn't need (and wouldn't plausibly benefit from) the silver-screen treatment, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris being the paradigm case. With all due respect to Kubrick and his devotees - I loved "Full Metal Jacket" and "A Clockwork Orange," among others - the "2001" movie just isn't cutting it for me. Granted, to this point I've finished neither the book nor the film, but the differences between the two aren't exactly minor. If this diversion of stylistic paths continues, it can only reinforce my point about the need to leave some sci-fi alone: if a brilliant director like Kubrick can't pull it off, perhaps it just can't be done.

Still, a fair judgment requires a full view of the evidence, so we'll see how things end up. For now, I will restrain myself to recommending Clarke's novel. Despite its occasional moments of myopia (and, I'm guessing, its more frequent moments of just plain scientific inaccuracy), it's been a very entertaining read.

Not exactly, according to Sue Bohlin, but that thought isn't entirely wrong, either. Though not all jobs have the blessing of Bohlin's God, she says that work itself "is God's gift to us." If you'll allow me to pointedly ignore the implications that her view has for retirees, it seems smarter to instead discuss Bohlin's position in a little more depth.

Referencing some book or other, she says that God loves work for at least five reasons: it helps us to "serve people" (not in the Twilight Zone episode sense, presumably), "meet our own needs," "meet our family's needs," "earn money to give to others" in the form of charity, and "love God." That last one makes a good deal less sense than it really should, but the rest seem about right. At the very least, we can agree that jobs actually do accomplish those things, modulo certain trivial preconditions (gainful employment doesn't, for instance, help people with no families provide for their families). They also seem more like straightforward moral reasons to work than religious reasons - self-sufficiency, for instance, surely has at least some entirely non-theological benefits - but whatever, let's play along for now. The problem for Bohlin arises when she pauses to consider the many different kinds of work there are - especially since many job descriptions work at cross-purposes, you'd think that a morally inclined deity (just like a morally inclined anything else) would only approve of some jobs.

Thankfully, Bohlin doesn't go quite so far as to deny this altogether. Instead, she distinguishes between "work that contributes to what God wants done in the world and doesn't contribute to what He doesn't want done" and what she calls "non-legitimate work." In that latter category, she says, we should include "prostitution, drug dealing, and professional thieve[ry]," as well as "working in abortion clinics [surprise!], pornography, and the gambling industry"; sadly, Bohlin neglects to provide a similar list of examples that qualify as "legitimate work." One can't help but notice, though, that the "non-legitimate work" fulfills at least four of the five benchmarks that she lists (the thing about loving God being the one possible exception, I still can't really wrap my head around that one). Lots of supposedly immoral industries serve the desires of others and provide good salaries, and certainly the economy would look very different without consistently strong industries like porn and gambling. Given what she's written, then, it's hard to see how Bohlin can get away with maintaining this double-standard; just using a deprecatory labeling system won't do it.

Oddly, this doesn't mean that her argument is a complete waste of time. If she understood that goods and evils can add up, she might have been able to make some kind of case that the five benefits of work are outweighed in some cases by the sins of certain professions. People make this kind of argument all the time just using secular moral (or economic, or political) metrics, so it's not like she couldn't adapt that same format into a religious usage. The real problem, I think, would be trying to cobble a consistent and coherent principle out of the dreck that is Biblical morality: for ethicists or economists or politicians, finding fundamental axioms poses no particular challenge. But theists, given the mostly incomprehensible and primitive source material from which they work, tend to struggle much more when it comes to laying out a clear, even halfway-plausible system of theistic ethics. Perhaps that explains why Bohlin didn't even bother to try.

I like this...

...even if I understand that attraction much less than I did with the last series of photos to draw my eye. It seems to me like this Chris Engman person gets a tad too much mileage out of this rectangles/nature contrast thing that he does (see here, here, here, here...), but that sheet of plastic - wow.

Just one question, though: what's that warning post doing there? This road goes pretty much straight ahead, at least for this one short section. Are drivers in this area really so incompetent that they need reminders not to swerve wildly at random points on the road? It adds to the photo and all (at least, I think), but its presence really says nothing good about the people who live nearby.

Following on yesterday's post about the ill effects of insufficient sleep, I now present several more potential examples. Each of these criticisms affects only a small part of a much larger post, though, so don't go around thinking that I've addressed every point that each author presents.

First, someone ought to tell Bill Vallicella that words don't increase in importance in direct proportion to their size. "Only," for example, is really quite small, so far as words go, but drastically changes the meanings of sentences. His argument for gun rights depends on the premise that "a gun is [often] the only effective means of defending one's life," but his defense of this idea is a little lacking: "A gun," he says, "is an effective means of self defense." That's it. I leave it to my readers to figure out why that's not sufficient.

Elsewhere, Alex Pruss evidently believes that, "if [a] pain-replacement, call it shpain, had the same motivational effects [as pain itself], we would observe the same kinds of aversive responses to shpain as to pain." This comes up in the context of an epistemological objection to the problem of animal suffering, but that's not particularly important. What does matter is that Pruss evidently has never felt nauseous or vertiginous or even just sad or guilty. Good on you, Alex, but next time a wider awareness of motivating pressures would be nice.

To round things out, Ed Feser has some very strange ideas about what it means to disagree with somebody. He denies William Lane Craig's conception of God because he (Feser) believes "that when we correctly predicate some attribute of God, we are using the relevant terms, not in a univocal way, but in an analogous way." Thus, "there is in God something that is analogous to power, something analogous to knowledge, something analogous to goodness, etc., and that these 'somethings' all turn out to be one and the same thing." You might - really, you should - be tempted to ask for more details, but Feser tires of such requests. "Precisely because God is simple" in this way, he says, "there is...a sense in which we cannot strictly know His essence. ...precisely because He is so radically unlike anything in the created order, we simply cannot expect to comprehend Him with anything close to the sort of clarity with which we can understand the denizens of that order." Okay, so we can use pretty-sounding words to describe God, but we can't really claim to get their meaning - I myself wouldn't be so excited about this, but Feser seems pretty high on the idea and says that it refutes Craig's position.

Oh - that's right, I haven't told you what Craig's position is yet. Sorry about that. According to Craig (according to Feser), "[i]t remains very obscure...how God's nature or essence can be simple and all His properties identical." The argument, then, appears to have gone like this:

Craig: It's incoherent to say that the Christian God is simple in this sense (i.e., that all of its attributes are really the same single attribute).
Feser: No, you're getting it all wrong. Our God is simple, just analogously. It's just that nobody has any solid idea of what that means, particularly in terms of identifying the way in which this one divine attribute is analogous to all the other non-divine ones that we use in normal speech.
larryniven: ...what?

I was under the impression that disagreeing meant "not agreeing," but evidently in some cases it can also mean "agreeing so long as you say 'nuh uh' beforehand." This seems like a textbook case of what might be termed a subtext disagreement: Craig's implication is that it's bad for God to be incomprehensible or to talk about God in terms that essentially reduce to gibberish, whereas Feser appears to hold those same actions in much higher regard. As I keep saying, though, subtext disagreements don't change the ontological nature of the object in question (that is, the text): gibberish is gibberish regardless of whether or not we endorse it.

So with these examples in mind, let's all celebrate this first edition of lazy-thinking blogging by goign and taking a nap.

Wait for it...

Coenesque, in a way:

This recently in from our No Duh office in New York: "disrupting your sleep cycle can interfere with your health and cognitive function." Not that Kelly McGonigal doesn't have a point, but isn't this kind of obvious? The specifics, maybe, are unexpected - she lists everything from organ failure to a lessening of willpower - but it should be relatively obvious to everybody that sleep matters. Can we, therefore, finally admit that it's a dumb idea to force people to come in to work early?

From the point of view of the business, shoehorning employees into the 9-5 schedule apparently means guaranteeing that many of them will show up dazed and unmotivated. Employees, meanwhile, are forced to choose between doing things they like in the evenings and showing up to work with any semblance of attentiveness. Guess which one they'll choose? Especially if Dan Savage is right that "[d]rinking is sometimes the only thing that makes parenting...tolerable at all," wouldn't you want to let people climb out of their irritating-child-induced buzz before they arrive at their desks? (Also, sorry mom and dad - I'll buy you some wine at some point to make up for it, unless you'd like something harder. [Edited 11/13 to add: I guess Dan wasn't kidding, geez.])

In case you don't believe me yet, let me show you the sort of thing that happens when the human brain doesn't operate at peak capacity. meloukhia, blogger at the ever-ridiculous Feminists With Disabilities blog, thinks that "it takes only a cursory glance and thought to realize that the word ['scab'] is ableist." By the way, that's not "scab" as in the thing that stops your wounds from getting infected, it's "scab" as in the type of person who blows up an organized labor strike - though I wouldn't be too surprised to read soon that the other "scab" is also ableist. The strike-breaking sense is ableist, it seems, because the word meant "despicable person" as of about 1590. According to meloukhia, that means that "apparently people with scabs are despicable." And who has scabs? Certain disabled people, of course! So there you have it: ableist!

Well, or "scab" used to mean "despicable person" because scabs themselves are despicable. I mean, "jackass" isn't an insult because people who own donkeys are obstinate fools; we don't call people "shits" because everyone who defecates is an immature, amoral cretin. (Oh, and, as an aside to meloukhia - what, you think you're the only one who can use the Online Etymological Dictionary? Cite your sources, jerk.) This, I'm pretty sure, is what willpower is all about. meloukhia feels like this word is hurtful, so that's the way she sees the world, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Likewise, if you feel lazy and if you don't have any willpower because you're getting 5 hours of sleep per night, guess what's gonna happen when you show up to your job.

There's a lot to be said in this same context for hiring better managers, making workplaces less generally antagonistic to human needs, and (yes) just plain being a better employee. But it'd be a hell of a lot easier if everybody had the option to show up fully awake.

Outside of science fiction, odds are very few of us have ever encountered the idea of evolved immortality. Besides the fact that the idea basically screams "badly conceived plot device," eternal life just doesn't seem to fit with a material universe governed by laws like ours: in the words of the Paul Simon song, everything put together falls apart. And, since time and space are connected in an apparently fundamental way, it seems quite difficult to envision any scenario in which a non-physical afterlife even makes sense. Still and all, enough (evolutionary cousins of) monkeys have been pounding on enough keyboards for enough time that we now actually have a straight-faced argument for evolved immortality.

Coming from the obviously troubled mind of Dinesh D'Souza, the argument claims that nature includes "a plan that shows a progression from perishable things to imperishable things." He cites research by Christian de Duve (who we've seen once before) and Simon Morris to the effect that "chance mutations and varied environments nevertheless lead to evolutionary convergence." Without committing myself one way or the other on this, I will at least say that this view is plausible: "random" as a technical mathematical term doesn't necessarily mean "totally patternless," so it is indeed possible for a process governed by randomness to nonetheless reliably produce a certain kind of outcome. (The reason, incidentally, that I don't want to commit myself to anything one way or the other is that this convergence depends on both the probibalistic laws at play and the initial conditions, neither of which appear in D'Souza's article in any detail.) If such a tendency exists, D'Souza says, and if it runs "from matter to mind," then "a part of us might outlast these mortal coils" and survive after death.

The major problem with this whole thing is that D'Souza straightforwardly assumes that minds are non-physical. It's nice of him to present this assumption as directly and honestly as he does, but his entire argument basically boils down to this one statement: "consciousness and mind have qualities very different from those of material bodies, and it’s possible that these qualities enable consciousness and mind to survive even after bodies perish." That's a direct assertion of his conclusion, which he then goes on to use as a premise in his argument - this pattern of his won't point to immateriality or immortality at all unless we hypothesize that minds are both immaterial and immortal. Having the evolutionary backstory gives his argument a convenient veneer of scientific support, but in the end it begs the question and does little more. If minds survive the physical death of the bodies they govern, we can just stop the conversation there and not even bring evolution into it.

I would, though, like to point out one more problem with what D'Souza says. Far more interesting than the question-begging or the ridiculously speculative non-sequitur about how consciousness's different qualities might enable it to survive after death, D'Souza is actually perverting the argument made by de Duve and Morris. Looking at the examples that they provide, a clear pattern emerges that D'Souza seems ignorant of. "Eyes," for one, "have evolved on separate evolutionary lines on multiple occasions"; "[p]lacental and marsupial mammals are not closely related, and yet they have developed with similar structures and forms" (emphasis mine in both cases) - starting to notice a trend? The structures that de Duve and Morris identify as likely objects of convergence appear in multiple, independent cases throughout nature. Far from being a curiosity or a lucky mistake, this is essential to their theory: statistically, any given anomaly is capable of occurring once (think of the first few scenes of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). For an apparently low-probability event to occur frequently, on the other hand, means that more investigation is required. For D'Souza, this means only bad things. Eyes and mammals, as de Duve and Morris correctly note, are really very common in nature, which provides some evidence of convergence; "awareness and understanding," on the other hand, remain quite rare (for D'Souza, rare enough that only one species actually possesses them). When D'Souza says that human-level sentience is part of evolution's statistical tendencies, then, he actually uses a much weaker standard of evidence than de Duve and Morris. Thus, even if his argument didn't beg the question and proceed largely by hand-waving, D'Souza would still fall short: piggybacking on claims of evolutionary convergence only works if one actually demonstrates convergence.

We can give D'Souza points for trying, but it's not exactly hard to figure out that evolutionary arguments for the afterlife don't stand much chance of succeeding. To be honest, I'm not even sure that evolutionary arguments can even parse the idea of an afterlife, let alone demonstrate the existence of one. In trying to make this whole thing work, D'Souza confuses himself to the point of arguing that ideas also survive death: "bodies are perishable but immaterial things like ideas aren’t," he says. If that's his best argument for immortality, that things that never lived can never die, I don't think there's much to worry about.