Ah, there's nothing quite like a good piece of hand-waving to start off the day - don't you agree? Carson Holloway must, or else he would never have written this article on the military's policy of discriminating against anybody who's not heterosexual. Holloway, in short, is upset at Obama for having "framed the issue as one of fundamental justice stated in terms of 'rights'" without having also taken the time to fully define and support those rights. This is all a little on the silly side - the context is a state of the union address, not a thesis paper or something - but at least Holloway makes an effort to fill in some of the blanks, and that makes up for some of the silliness.
After expressing his skepticism about a constitutional right to serve in the military, Holloway considers another kind of right. "Can there be a moral right to be free from such moralistic discrimination? I will not venture a complete answer to this question, but will only observe that its investigation is surely bound up with the question whether homosexual acts are in truth morally objectionable." Now, if I were a partisan screwball like Holloway appears to be, I might very well reply that it's absurd to criticize somebody for not providing any details and then come right out and say that you yourself refuse to even "venture a complete answer." Heck, I might even go so far as to point out the differences between a pro forma political speech and a position paper written specifically for an intellectual audience. But let's go with option B: actually evaluating Holloway's position.
If gay sex isn't a moral problem, he says, "then discrimination against those who openly admit to [having gay sex] is an arbitrary disqualification based on mistaken moral scruples. If they are, then such discrimination is defensible as an attempt to maintain a sound public moral culture." Well, that's a bit odd - I wasn't aware that the military served as the basis for our "public moral culture." I mean, how many of us even know what sorts of things normally happen on military bases or in combat? It would be awfully hard for us to base our behavior on an example that has thoroughly hidden from our view. Along the same lines, I was also not aware that any old legislation of morality was "defensible" on those grounds alone. Perhaps while he's on the subject he would also like to explain why it would be "defensible" to bring back prohibition, ban premarital sex, outlaw casual gambling, and so on.
Or does "bound up" mean something far weaker? I mean, maybe he's just saying that discrimination is defensible in that someone can defend it in their own minds. Alas, it seems that we won't ever know! Hopefully one day Holloway will descend from his mild indignation and dirty himself with an actual argument. Until then, I think we can all move on without waiting for his permission.
You'd think that BioLogos and I would be good buddies, since neither of us likes the mishmash of theology and wishful thinking that is intelligent design. It's just so hard, though, to support an organization that publishes something like this.
"The only way to truly tell when 'science' is happening is if new knowledge is being generated. And new knowledge is just that—new. New in the sense of novel, exciting, surprising. New in the sense of 'How can that be?' This is how science has always worked, and this is where new ideas get their power."Karl Giberson's point in writing this is that ID - better known as "creationism" - fails to qualify as science because it has never "generated [any] brand new information about the world." As cute as it is that a supporter of theistic evolution should level this accusation in the first place, this argument is doubly flawed.
Creationism, first, should be rejected not because it's not science but because it's not true. And second, contrary to what Giberson says, those two criteria are in fact different: his definition of "science" could hardly make less sense. Science often generates "novel, exciting, surprising" knowledge, true, but sometimes it generates mundane and boring knowledge (that being, after all, in the eye of the beholder). At other times, science generates no new knowledge at all - "we just can't say" is a perfectly valid scientific conclusion. Non-scientific fields, moreover, can also be sources of thrilling new findings. I wouldn't want to say that math or history is inherently "exciting" or "surprising" - again, that depends on who's being excited or surprised - but they certainly can create those feelings and they definitely generate new knowledge in non-scientific ways.
The key is not to defeat creationism at any cost but rather to encourage rational thought and let that rationality dismantle ID in all of its various incarnations. Giberson's end may be the same, but his means essentially guarantee that the same problem will recur in the future. Better to put one's foot down now than to continue to settle for the easiest way out.
In the wake of long-running puzzle shows like The X-Files, many LOST fans (and, I would hazard to guess, 99% or more of all former LOST fans) fear that the show will end without resolving many or any of its most pressing mysteries. Last week it looked like we finally started to get some answers.
According to Jacob - who, admittedly, is becoming less and less reliable a source of information - the island serves as a barrier of some sort against a truly horrific outcome. The specifics of this horrific outcome have, naturally, been left unspecified, but it has been compared to hell on Earth. As far as this putative answer resolves some issues, however, it opens up still more. In particular, how does Jacob's depiction of the island square with World X?
Observant viewers will remember that World X's island was revealed to have sunk to the bottom of the ocean in the first episode of this season. While our intuition says to apply Jacob's statement to all possible worlds including World X, the facts pretty strongly dispute that intuition. World X, far from having any obvious or (thus far) even subtle problems compared to World α, seems to be the far superior place to live: people are (overall) happier, there's (overall) less evil and less serious evil, and it's even tempting to say that the inhabitants of World X are (overall) better people. Our options, it seems, are either to assume that Jacob lied about the island's role in World α or else to take a specific and somewhat odd position on transworld identity.
Transworld identity, for those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, is simply the philosophical concept of a thing being itself across multiple possible worlds; it's what we all rely on when we say things like, "If I hadn't done well in high school I'd be working at a McDonald's right now." Within a specific world we philosophers think we have a pretty good handle on what it means for thing A to be identical to thing B. We attribute the following view to Liebniz:
- At time t, A is identical to B if and only if all of A's properties are shared by B and vice versa.
But this method will clearly fail for transworld comparisons, since the entire point of investigating possible worlds is that those worlds diverge at some point from each other and from the actual world. In this specific case, for example, the island in World α hasn't sunk in 2004 (~Si /2004) but it has in World X (Si /2004). Since this would lead us to deny that it is the same island if we only had Liebniz's laws to work with, we must look for other solutions.
This search has not even come close to concluding - and that's by the standards of academic philosophy, which should tell you something - so I'll limit this post to discussing the most tempting answer, namely, the possibility of invoking some sort of Platonic solution. As most of you know, Plato is famous even far outside of philosophical circles for his idea of forms. A rough approximation of this idea has (according to the very helpful link above) apparently been adopted to address issues of transworld identity, only nobody calls it that. Instead, they talk about non-trivial essences.
Briefly, a non-trivial essence is a non-empty set (of some indeterminate size) of properties (character traits, for instance, or birth dates, or whatever) that, in theory, apply to "the same thing" across all possible worlds in which that thing exists. One really easy example of this, provided famously by some philosopher whose name I forget, is that each person would presumably have to have the same parents in all possible worlds; if for no other reason than genetics, it just doesn't seem plausible to say that any of us could have been the same person with different parents. "Having persons P1 and P2 as parents," then, would be an example of a property in each of our non-trivial essences (where P1 and P2 get filled in with the relevant people, of course). This solution matches our intuitions pretty well and, more importantly for the sake of this post, seems to be supported by LOST as well: the major reason we viewers can appreciate the differences between LOST's two worlds is that all of the characters in World X retain many of their distinctive features from World α, so if we were to write down those features it would seem that we would have a list of the non-trivial essences of all the characters in LOST. There's just one minor problem: this theory, if it is to succeed in general, must also account for things other than people.
Consider again the island - it has no parents, so that option goes right out the window. Since inanimate objects seem to be far more interchangeable than people, most of us will have more trouble identifying the non-trivial essence of, say, a ballpoint pen than we will any random acquaintance. A complete theory of transworld identity, however, must be, well, complete - you can't just find one that works for people and then dust off your hands. At the same time, since objects are harder to discern, it's not immediately obvious which properties of theirs might qualify for inclusion in a non-trivial essence. The island, returning to our example, seems to be something "keeping the darkness where it belongs" - except, in World X, it's not. Likewise, in both worlds it's the home of the Dharma Initiative and also a giant statue of some ancient god - except then what would we do if we discovered that it lacked those features in some other possible world? Moreover, since this island jumps around in space differently depending on which world it's in, we can't even necessarily say that it's just "the island at latitude x and longitude y." Without any ability to rely on its physical attributes and without any obvious metaphysical attributes left to use, then, it sure seems like we're forced to deny transworld identity altogether.
As it turns out, this is maybe not so terrible - counterpart theory, for instance, has many or all of the positive features of transworld identity without quite so many of the issues. One could also chalk this whole thing up to our epistemic limitations: if only we knew every detail of all the actually possible worlds (as opposed to what we think the possible worlds are), such a person might say, then all of these questions would be resolved. Or maybe this is the only possible world, in which case the whole question is moot. So of all the philosophical topics broached thus far in (my summaries of) season six, this is probably the least important overall. Still, we'll learn more the writers' opinions on this topic as the series progresses - and hey, who knows, maybe they'll come up with a good answer.
Although I don't find his Chinese room argument to be at all convincing, John Searle did hit upon and important phenomenon when he discussed the distinction between syntax and semantics. Especially for the mid-level intellects that form the majority of the authors in the various mass media, it's all too common for a writer to identify the surface-level attributes of an argument (its syntax, more or less) as the meaning behind that argument (its semantics); what they think is the core, to paraphrase Andrew Bird, turns out to be the rind. Predictably, this leads to nothing good.
"Leftism, though secular, must be understood as a religion (which is why I have begun capitalizing it). The Leftist value system's hold on its adherents is as strong as the hold Christianity, Judaism and Islam have on their adherents."That's Dennis Prager, failing to understand that objections to religions almost always pertain to the content of those religions and not the mere fact of them being religions. His rhetorical strategy is extraordinarily commonly applied to atheism - this is the first time I (think I) have seen it used in a political context. It's no more convincing in this context, but it does allow for at least one new kind of stupidity.
"Why," Prager asks, "are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?" And, while he's at it, "if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn't Catholics or Protestants assert these values prior to 19th-century European Leftism?" As much as I love arguments that are phrased entirely in the interrogative, these are not convincing. Now as it happens I don't think that Christianity or Judaism or any other religion "really is" Leftism - in large part because I think "Leftism" is a joke that Prager is playing on himself - but referring to the beliefs or behavior of the masses is no way to demonstrate this.
Within the religions themselves, beliefs have changed radically over time and across sects. Unless Prager wants to say that theism leaves most of its details up to each particular believer's preferences, his same argument causes major issues for believers: if your interpretation "really is" what the religion says, howcome people didn't start believing it before (insert appropriate date here)? Similarly, religions have also changed political, scientific, moral, and other alliances throughout the ages; this, too, could be used as fodder for a Pragerian argument against a religion "really being" anything other than its very first historical instantiation. Nor is this even confined to religions - as a general fact, people do not tend to believe all of the logical consequences of their chosen axioms, so it should never come as too much of a surprise when new data (or even just a new phrasing of old data) inspires them to change their minds or shift their positions.
Unfortunately, I can't say with any confidence that Prager would have avoided these errors if only he'd been able to separate the semantics of secular arguments from their syntax. He's not terribly bright, you see, and so for all I know he would've just found a different way to screw up. But, still, it really can't help to believe that the thinnest surface layer of an argument is the only layer that exists.
Having lost their ill-chosen fight against health care reform, conservatives here in the U.S. of A. are now determined to win the fight about having lost their fight against health care reform. Some, like Jim DeMint, assert that the Republicans' defeat in fact is a strategic victory that lays the foundation for a substantial win in the upcoming 2010 elections; others like Meredith Turney have taken a somewhat different approach.
"Democrats are particularly adept at publicizing isolated threats and insinuating that all opponents of the health care bill are responsible. Demonizing all opposition as hooligans, they attempt to drum up public sympathy. But it’s hard to overlook the convenience of such claims of victimhood so soon after the healthcare freight train steamed through Congress last weekend.Aside from her puzzling depiction of the legislation as a mode of transportation that's been obsolete for about 50 years, Turney's thought process is crystal clear: if she can achieve the high ground by demonizing the Democrats, that will indemnify her party in future clashes because everyone will know who the "good guys" are. There's only one problem, and it pertains to the very issue of how to locate the good guys.
...How hypocritical of sanctimonious Democrats to call upon their Republican peers to denounce the very bullying tactics their own constituency employs so frequently and effectively."
"In an indictment against the nine [arrested Michigan militia members], the Justice Department said they were part of a group of apocalyptic Christian militants who were plotting to kill law enforcement officers in hopes of inciting an antigovernment uprising, the latest in a recent surge in right-wing militia activity.Yes - how convenient that the Democrats should have people like the Hutaree around. It's so sanctimonious of them to ask the Republicans if they could maybe quit it with the crazed, violent (and especially religious) imagery in view of the fact that there are actually crazed, violent religious people out there planning to start a civil war by killing cops.
The court filing said the group, which called itself the Hutaree, planned to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer and then bomb the funeral caravan using improvised explosive devices based on designs used against American troops by insurgents in Iraq."
This whole thing is just sick.
...but my interpretive faculties are failing me here:
'The fact that street harassment tends to divide men and women as classes is no secret. Women who have experienced street harassment often report coping by responding with wariness to all strange men, in order to fend off possible future harassment. And men express frustration that they can’t approach a woman in a way they perceive as non-harassing—whether it’s to ask for directions or deliver a compliment—without being regarded as a potential offender. But the defensive strategy is often made necessary by the frequency of such harassment."It pains me to see language abused like this. I cannot conceive of a sense of "necessary" that turns that last sentence into something true. Maybe some background will help?
"A new study from University of Connecticut researchers Stephenie Chaudoir and Diane Quinn suggests that simply being a bystander to sexism is enough to inspire women to report higher identification with women as a group, and heightened feelings of negativity toward men. The effects of this 'bystander sexism' help to explain how a cat-call targeted at one woman can work to demean all of us.Nope, still not getting it. I mean, yeah, cat-calling and similar techniques are fucked-up and stupid and wrong, but there's lots of fucked-up, stupid, wrong stuff that doesn't seem to "necessitate" stereotyping. And yeah, men ought to try to stop harassment; that's a trivial consequence of the obvious moral fact that everybody ought to try to stop harassment. Still, though - "necessary"?
...this casual sexism has serious effects on its victims: 'the experience of street harassment is directly related to greater preoccupation with physical appearance and body shame, and is indirectly related to heightened fears of rape for U.S. undergraduate women' [the study says]."
I mean, look - I went to elementary school in a poor black neighborhood with a bunch of poor black kids who were, like poor any-kind-of kids usually are, on average pretty poorly behaved. If their bad behavior had "necessitated" me to stereotype black people, I would now be a pretty virulent racist and people would be absolutely right to criticize me for that. Similarly, as a skeptic living in a society that glamorizes credulity and slanders any kind of non-theistic thinking, I could easily have developed a neurosis about e.g. Christians - but, again, that would have been morally wrong and not connected to reality. Even if it were morally right and factually accurate, however, it would clearly not have been necessary because those attitudes never developed in me.
Moreover, this strategy doesn't actually seem to help anything. If stereotyping is as common as this study suggests - and that's still an open question; it was a small study with a demographically limited sample - it has clearly not helped the stereotypers (i.e., women) feel better or safer or anything - again, "the experience of street harassment is [still] directly related to" all kinds of problems. It cannot, therefore, be "necessary" in terms of erasing or reducing the "serious effects" of harassment; the evidence apparently shows that it just doesn't work that way.
Does anybody out there understand which meaning of "necessary" is being used here? Or was this article as poorly-written as I suspect it was?
"'To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.'Could it? Could it really? Because I would really enjoy seeing that. I dunno if this guy remembers or not but the last time we had a civil war it didn't really end too well for his side - and that was before the government acquired all kinds of fun toys like the LRAD and the taser. Listen, Mike: if you and your fractious buddies want to throw yourself like bugs on the windshield of the U.S. military, you have my blessing.
These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation -- he calls it 'Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act' -- to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.
...He said he believes throwing bricks through windows sends a warning to Democratic lawmakers that the health-care reform legislation they passed Sunday has caused so much unrest that it could result in a civil war."
(And for the record, yes, he lives on disability checks from the government.)
If they do start the dumbest civil war in history, they should definitely remember to recruit you-know-who as their main general.
"You won’t win only playing defense, so get on offense! The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.We've seen this before from Palin, whose personal history with the sport of basketball has somehow not prevented her from making asinine analogies like this one. ("Bomb through the press"? What could that possibly even mean?) But at least that previous case had this much going for it: it didn't support both terrorism and illegal immigration.
Focus on the goal and fight for it. If the gate is closed, go over the fence. If the fence is too high, pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, parachute in."
But, in the end, nobody comes within an order of magnitude of Michele Bachmann's mastery of the self-defeating sound bite.
"I said I had very serious concerns that Barack Obama had anti-American views. And now I look like Nostradamus."Yes, Michele, you most certainly do.
For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Theodore Beale is the sort of person who inspired Groucho Marx's joke that he would never join a club who would let someone like him in. Beale, who writes for WordNet Daily and other sources under the nom de plume Vox Day, is one of the dumbest smart people you'll ever see.
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An unapologetic theist, he's well-known for writing a book that addresses all of the least substantive arguments put forward by Dawkins et al. The odd thing about this is that somebody with such a high IQ would permit himself to be distracted by such philosophical trivialities as which belief system "causes" more wars. Having allowed himself to be dragged into what's basically a food fight, Beale's thinking is so unoriginal that he even repeats the bland falsehood about there being only "two rival points of view when it comes to human progress," the optimistic and the pessimistic. The former he credits to "the Enlightenment," consists of the idea "that humanity progresses as its scientific knowledge base expands and the technology derived from that knowledge base is improved. Old and outdated modes of thought will be cast aside, and eventually humanity will arrive at ... something." (By the way, this is the sort of thing that inspires me to quote people as often as I can - we have no reason at all to believe that anybody even holds this view.) Pessimism, which Beale locates in the Bible, "states that progress is impossible because there is nothing new under the sun. Empires rise and fall, but though names and superficial customs change, Man's nature and behavior remains essentially the same." Why anybody continues to make this argument anymore is beyond me.
These two alternatives quite clearly do not exhaust the possible views of human progress; indeed, they don't even form a complete list of the views actually held by people. Even if they did, moreover, Beale would be shooting himself in the foot. Unless he really doesn't see any moral differences between, say, the U.S. and Darfur, he would have to admit that there is in fact progress and that the pessimistic view is wrong. Not that this should come as a surprise: it's a non-sequitur. "Man's nature" can both remain essentially the same (that is, the same in essence) and produce different results, so even Beale's first false dilemma isn't strong enough to eliminate the need for a second.
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In another WND column, Beale makes the fantastically stupid argument that "the common belief in the beneficial nature of science rests on an underlying assumption that knowledge of all truth is desirable in all circumstances." Well, actually, he doesn't so much argue that as state it outright without any kind of support or justification; it is, after all, easier to pass off a straw man at a distance.
That same article continues on in a cavalcade of errors. "[M]edical science," he says, "must...take responsibility for the estimated 783,000 annual iatrogenic deaths it now causes every year" - but "the wealth produced by capitalism and human liberty" is responsible only for its good consequences. Science, he continues, bears just as much blame for the Holocaust as Islam does for jihads - never mind the fact that science has no holy text that requires its followers to murder others. "Most inventors," Beale finishes with a sense of exasperation, are not scientists...the inventors of what is considered to be the most significant invention of the century, the silicon chip, were not scientists but electrical engineers." Okay, so technically he wrote this in 2007, which would make the silicon chip the most significant invention of the previous century, but still - is he trying to say that electrical engineers do not practice science? That they are not paid scientific researchers is entirely irrelevant: even a pope can practice science and therefore be a scientist (if only temporarily). Again, if he has so little sympathy for science, he should try living for a while in some country like Haiti.
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And, since no poseur is satisfied these days without delving into the realm of classical philosophy, Beale also pretends to know things about historical problems like the Euthyphro. In response to the classic dilemma, he offers these two reformulations:
- Is that which is science performed by scientists because it is science or is it science because it is performed by scientists?
- Is that which is legal legislated by the legislature because it is legal, or is it legal because it is legislated by the legislature?
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Given his penchant for sophistry - of which you now have just the merest taste - I don't think Beale will be making too many more appearances on this blog. Still, his name crops up enough that I thought it was worth giving a post's attention.
Yeesh - this accountability stuff is hard. The most recent two games I'd marked in my preseason NBA highlights prediction turned out to be oddly similar. I selected them because they looked like games between equals and therefore good measurements of each team's talent, chemistry, and so on. As it turns out, that pretty much didn't pan out.
Both the 3/7 game between Portland and Denver and the 3/20 game between New Orleans and Utah featured one team looking to fine-tune itself for the playoffs (Denver, Utah) and one team just hoping to make it through the night (Portland, New Orleans). The teams in the latter category both have a recent history of being physically fragile: their combined injuries over that time include Chris Paul, Peja Stojakovic, Brandon Roy, Joel Przybilla, Greg Oden, Sean Marks, Travis Outlaw, Rudy Fernandez...the list goes on for quite a while. This is an aspect that goes unmentioned most of the time in conversations about team management but is extremely important - you just can't win if your franchise players are in suits on the bench. You hear a lot from players about money, opportunities to win, and playing with specific other players, but if they were really smart they'd also take a team's physical training staff into account. Neither New Orleans nor Portland has a poor enough roster to justify their performance this year; it's almost all health issues.
Denver and Utah, meanwhile, are both teams that I badly underestimated coming into this season. Even so, neither looks to be a serious title contender - their road records just aren't good enough. (In Denver's case there's also a concern about their head coach, but that situation changes too frequently for me to track it.) In some sense that's the worst position for a team to occupy, since that's a hard affliction to cure and they can't possibly get away with blowing up their top-four-seeded teams. Whereas the 'blazers and Hornets just need a competent doctor to improve their situations, these teams need something really serious - a new coach, say, or a major roster shift (which, if you think it's not feasible, the Cavs pulled off just fine). I consider both of those teams to be candidates for a first-round upset, especially if San Antonio continues to gel for the remainder of the season.
Piggybacking off of Dale's post on this same topic, let us pause to consider some of the less prominent aspects of the still-developing Catholic abuse story. Andrew Sullivan, Catholic cheerleader and Dale's primary subject, is also well-known for supporting the sort of small-government conservatism that springs from a distrust in centralized power; when it comes to regulating lives, he refers back to the Socratic maxim that the wisest people are those who know what they don't know. And yet his analysis of the church's misdeeds concludes that "[t]hese men are too objectively disordered to run a church. They bask in self-denial, while they wage a culture war against gay men who have actually dealt with their sexuality, who have owned it, and celebrated it and even found ways to channel it into adult relationships and even civil marriage." My emphasis is there to illustrate a point - but more on that in a bit.
The abuse scandal, which we should all be familiar with by now, is at its core a story of confused priorities. It's not that the relevant Vatican officials were confused about or ignorant of the ends they sought - as the New York Times reports, one of the many cases of abuse featured "American bishops repeatedly warne[ing Vatican officials] that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church." That's a strikingly honest complaint for them to have made, and it's almost tempting to congratulate these bishops for their impressive level of hubris. If they had any moral reaction at all to the fact that "a priest...molested as many as 200 deaf boys" under his care, they successfully beat that reaction into submission in order to fill its shoes with a far colder and more pragmatic concern. Given our society's laissez-faire position with respect to religion, one can't help but wonder how this sort of wrongdoing could be prevented in the future or even just punished post facto - or, at least, one does if one isn't Bill Donohue.
According to Donohue, the church is like Las Vegas: what happens there stays there. His Catholic League, moreover, "is to come to the aid of the Church when it is under fire" so that it can proceed with its activities - ahem - unmolested, starting with confession.
"Freedom of religion, and the establishment clause which keeps church and state separate, will not mean much if the state is permitted to encroach on the Church’s doctrinal prerogatives. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is not something the state can be allowed to trespass upon without doing irreparable harm to Catholicism. It would be a violation of separation of church and state of grave magnitude, having wide implications for all religions. Nothing would be sacrosanct.Actually, Bill, yes - if the government ever decides that it can subpoena priests for the information they heard in confession, then that's precisely what they'll do to the ones who "simply refuse": put them in handcuffs. That is, after all, how the legal system works. As Dale says, "prosecutors would bring charges, cease and desist orders would be promulgated, premises would be barred, inquests would be undertaken, records would be seized, persons of interest would be detained for questioning, and so on." None of this should be new or confusing to Donohue, yet somehow it apparently is. Setting his concerns about "doing irreparable harm to Catholicism" aside - religions have a history of being surprisingly malleable and also he can cry about it - his incredulity brings us back to Sullivan's remarks.
Then there is also the problem of unenforceability. How could the state possibly know whether a priest has learned of sexual abuse in the confessional? The priest is certainly not going to say. In the event the penitent calls the cops after revealing such knowledge, and the priest is questioned about what he knows, he could simply refuse to discuss anything he learned in the confessional. What are they going to do, put him in handcuffs?"
What Donohue wants is for nobody "to meddle in the Church’s internal affairs," but this presumes that the Vatican has any affairs that are strictly internal as such. Perhaps they do and perhaps they don't (I think it depends on the definition of "affairs"), but it would be absurd and seriously worrying if he stated outright his implied view that crimes committed in a church or by church are unquestionably "internal affairs." Ontologically that's plainly false, as crimes by definition affect society at large, but it's also extremely questionable from a normative point of view. Following Sullivan's political conservatism, no group (and especially no very small group) can be trusted to police itself or to have unquestioned control over others' lives. Donohue's plea, for example, rings hollow because we've already seen what happens when the Vatican conducts its own "internal affairs": its officials turn a blind eye towards moral atrocities. If Sullivan realizes all of this - and he seems to - why does he insist that only these men, only this group, is incapable of effective self-policing?
The shower answer, of course, is that he's a cheerleader - no big surprises there. A better answer, I think, would be that he has hitched his political cart to an inferior horse. Acknowledging known unknowns is good and should be encouraged, true, but a better guiding admonishment exists: that absolution is granted most easily to one's allies. The Vatican, unlike the U.S. government, feels qualified to make definitive pronouncements on very nearly everything, from economic and foreign policy to our sex lives. Yet Sullivan has evidently given the Catholic church a benefit of doubt that he withholds from all governments: he is willing to believe that somebody out there is trustworthy enough "to run a church" secretively and authoritatively. If he had any philosophical pride this massive inconsistency would be an embarrassment - but he is after all his own ally and has on those grounds already forgiven himself.
Philosophy - the even-handed and persistent search for truth - requires more than just a willingness to accept debate when debate arises, because that attitude is one of passivity. Sullivan's palpable hypocrisy stands as a warning to those of us who value philosophy and seek to practice it that you must always actively seek out debate, even to the point of reevaluating yourself on a regular basis. Maybe he'll get there one day, but for now Sullivan's attitude towards his religion marks him as someone whose critical thinking skills are stunted at best.
To be totally honest I wasn't sure I'd make it - as always, the internet is really quite impressive. Still, that impressiveness notwithstanding, this last argument isn't precisely an argument for dualism; rather, it's one of the strongest arguments against the most intuitive brand of monism. Most people who want to avoid the idea of a nonmaterial mind do so by appealing to some variation of the idea that human minds operate like computers, but this is precisely the possibility that John Searle's Chinese room problem is designed to defeat.
Roughly speaking, the argument goes like this:
"(A1) 'Programs are formal (syntactic).'The Chinese room referred to in premise A3 is one in which a person sits with a written copy of a program that takes Chinese sentences as input and produces other Chinese sentences as output - in other words, a program that converses in Chinese. This program, following Searle's thought experiment, is one that passes the Turing test (i.e., it can fool humans into believing that it's a human) and the person is one who doesn't already know Chinese. Put together, all of these various factors go to show that the syntax required to pass a Turing test is not the same as the semantics required to pass a Turing test and thus that achieving a semantic understanding requires some special additional factor that only minds possess. So far as I can see, there are at least three problems with this argument.
A program uses syntax to manipulate symbols and pays no attention to the semantics of the symbols. It knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean. For the program, the symbols are just...objects like any others.
(A2) 'Minds have mental contents (semantics).'
Unlike the symbols used by a program, our thoughts have meaning: they represent things and we know what it is they represent.
(A3) 'Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.'
This is what the Chinese room argument is intended to prove: the Chinese room has syntax (because there is a man in there moving symbols around). The Chinese room has no semantics (because, according to Searle, there is no one or nothing in the room that understands what the symbols mean). Therefore, having syntax is not enough to generate semantics. [Therefore,]
(C1) Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
This should follow without controversy from the first three: Programs don't have semantics. Programs have only syntax, and syntax is insufficient for semantics. Every mind has semantics. Therefore programs are not minds."
As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a fan of thought experiments, and this case is no different: Searle's ability to spin this yarn is no indicator of how realistic or accurate any of his suppositions are. For example, consider the fact that modern programs (especially those dealing with language interpretation) frequently contain tens of thousands of lines of code and refer to vast libraries of data. Even if a person could run such a program in the first place - which is extremely doubtful; see "Churchland's luminous room" at the wiki link above - it's painfully obvious that their replies would no longer be fast enough to pass a Turing test. By relegating his argument to Willy Wonka's realm of pure imagination, Searle conveniently skips over difficulties such as these. Moreover, we philosophers can quibble back and forth about whether his elisions are relevant and still not get anywhere; until somebody actually tries this, the argument is moot.
A second problem is that the Chinese room problem assumes that all minds are in some sense or other compatible. Phrased differently, Searle's argument says that computers and human brains are categorically different if computer software cannot run properly on a human platform. His expectation, that is to say, is that a program that produces semantics when executed by a machine will likewise produce semantics when executed by a human consciousness (which, by the way, isn't even the same thing as a whole human mind or brain). I for one have no idea why he would expect this, though - as of yet, human brains and computers aren't nearly comparable in terms of their construction, their operation, or their capabilities. He could have just as (in)effective an argument, it seems, if he said that human software could never be run by machine hardware, but he doesn't say this because this formulation of his argument is drastically less intuitive than the Chinese room formulation: we all know that computers aren't designed to execute human algorithms, so why should we be surprised when they fail to do so? The same lack of surprise, it seems to me, should be applied in the other direction as well.
Even if he overcomes those problems, Searle must also prove that he hasn't made a quantification error. If you read enough mathematics papers, you'll eventually run into the acronym WLOG. This stands for "without loss of generality," and its intent is to reassure the reader that the author hasn't made a quantification error by inadvertently narrowing the scope of the argument. Searle's Chinese conversation program, it seems to me, is one that very well might cost him in terms of generality. If we append "...as it applies to conversation" to the end of A3, the argument suddenly looks significantly weaker:
(A1) Programs are formal (syntactic).C1' is totally harmless to the mind/body identity theorist: what Searle really needs to prove is that no algorithm can generate semantic understanding, and it appears that he has fallen well short of that. He can reply - and probably would - that he selected conversation arbitrarily and that therefore it serves as a general representative of all programs. I can't see how that's possibly the case, though: we gain understanding by interacting with objects and ideas in multiple ways and with the involvement of sensory input, none of which is at all present in his Chinese conversation program. Maybe sensory input and/or multiple storage representations aren't required for understanding, but at the very least it seems like those are things that can be handled programatically and are sufficient for understanding. Since they make no appearance in Searle's argument, however, it's really very unclear how successful that argument is.
(A2) Minds have mental contents (semantics).
(A3') Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics as it applies to conversation.
(C1') Therefore, conversational programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
As much as I admire Searle's Chinese room argument - and actually, despite its problems, I do - it strikes me as too hasty. We have to admit that our understanding of semantics is still very limited, psychologically, philosophically, and computationally. When the majority of one's knowledge about a subject is of the gut variety, it's just not safe to make arguments like this. Mathematics, and particularly computer science, often results in counterintuitive findings about relationships and definitions, for starters. More importantly, those findings are grounded in specific, technical argumentation and not thought experiments. I welcome anyone who can tighten Searle's argument by applying fine-grained definitions of words like "meaning" and "mental contents," but until somebody does so it's hard for me to see how it rises above the level of speculative musing.
I was trying to give myself as long as possible to decide between these two, but I can't do it - each is as funny to me as the other. Truly, this is an embarrassment of riches!
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Just some things I thought you should see, that's all.
These are the directions printed on some vaguely frightening machine at my gym. A little something for you Engrish lovers out there - if you can figure out how to "keep a same balance to stepping board," please do let me know.
Seriously, I do not know how to use this device except that it has something to do with pressing buttons and apparently being the silhouette of a woman.
I saw some blue sky the other day and figured I'd better take some pictures before it went back to being overcast. You're welcome.
I think that all of those stately-looking buildings belong to a college campus, but I'm not sure which.
A few days later it was finally nice enough for me to bike into town. This trail runs roughly southwest along the Allegheny river into downtown Pittsburgh - the bridge is on 40th Street, and that tall building in the background belongs to UPMC (it is, in fact, the same one from the SSW photo series.)
I was not at all the only one out for a ride - this is particularly cute, though, the whole father/son thing.
Local high schools (mostly the affluent white ones) use the Allegheny for practice, but that's not actually why I took this picture. Central Catholic is infamous among Pittsburghers my age for having gone through a bit of a scandal some years ago.
"...two [Central Catholic football] players -- a 15-year-old sophomore from Lincoln-Lemington and a 16-year-old junior from the North Side -- were charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old teammate during what police believe was a hazing incident Aug. 15 following a football practice.Eerie, isn't it? At the time we all thought this was a riot - we had no idea that these asshole kids were apparently training for a career in the priesthood.
The suspects are accused of restraining the 15-year-old victim and slapping him in the face with their genitals, an act known as 'tea-bagging.'
The parents of the victim said they took the matter to police only after getting no satisfaction from school officials, who they say stonewalled the investigation."
I know I said earlier that everything in Pittsburgh is always under construction, but I feel that this goes too far. The bike path was fine before! It had better be absolutely fantastic by the time they're done with this...
About halfway down the trail there's a bridge leading to Herr's Island. Quoth wiki, "George Washington reputedly slept on the island after his raft capsized in the Allegheny River while on a diplomatic mission to the French at Fort Le Boeuf near Lake Erie during the French and Indian War." Until I explored around a little bit I had thought that Herr's Island was just an historical site, but it turns out people actually live there - go figure.
Also residing on the island, a stegosaurus.
...without much in the way of fashion sense. A little while back the city decided to install a bunch of dinosaur statues everywhere but I think most of those are t-rexes, so I'm not totally sure what this one is for. Neat, though.
See? Crew practice - told you so. This is one of those things that looks much easier than it is, I think - if any of you out there have tried rowing, I suspect you'll agree.
And who is this dramatic gentleman, you may ask?
It occurs to me that the image described here - the permanent shadow - appears quite frequently in western art (this, Watchmen, "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service...). As far as I'm aware, the mushroom cloud is the more iconic symbol in Japanese art; I wonder why we gravitate towards the one and they to the other? (And, for that matter, if we actually gravitate towards one and they to the other - I am just going on my anecdotal experience here.)
Remember all the stuff about statues in Pittsburgh? Yeah, this is yet another one of those. Check out that building just above their heads, though - see the arch? There are windows on the inside of that arch, which always struck me as very odd. Why would you want a window out of which you can only see the window of the room across from yours? I really don't get it.
Yet another statue! Whee! At least this one is positioned so that you can frame the city against it - thanks, whoever made that decision.
At this point on my little excursion I realized I was pressed for time and had to cool it with the photography schtick. Here's one more pic and a riddle to tide you over until next time:
Which location in the city of Pittsburgh can be reached by detouring through Australia?
And so we do - this one, for instance, requests the writer to list "the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world." Well, ask and ye shall receive:
- The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien. It has always seemed to me that the absurd should occupy a respected position in our thought processes, and this novel confirmed that to a great extent. It's a challenging book without losing either its entertainment value or its ability to make good sense when that's required.
- Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely. Just search for the title on this blog and you'll see for yourself the extent to which this informs my thinking.
- You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen. I think this book is the main reason that I have any patience at all in dealing with other people (and, symmetrically, the reason that it's so incredibly frustrating when others don't display that same kind of patience). Especially in matters of philosophy (both the academic and pop senses), you're going to run into people who seem to speak a different language. This book helped me realize that there are ways around that - but only if the other person is willing to play along, which is why I try to limit my various social circles to people who are reasonably open-minded.
- Stumbling On Happiness, Dan Gilbert. His explanation of memetics, though very brief and entirely non-technical, is still far more advanced than most that I've seen. It's a great book overall, but those few pages present a very important idea that goes ignored far too often.
- 1984, George Orwell. This had better be on everybody's list: Orwell's portrayal of how people brainwash one another is simply too accurate to be ignored. There's a danger here in that it can be tempting to blow things out of proportion - calling people Big Brother, misidentifying simple confusion as doublethink, and so on - but it's still an incredibly important disquisition on the ways and means of sophistry.
- Watchmen, Alan Moore. Looking back on it, I think this is the book that got me to take ethics seriously. Philosophy has this way of getting caught up in technicalities and spinning in circles, whereas Moore explores all of the same issues with enough power that he just blows right through all of that dithering. There aren't any answers offered, granted, but you'll note that philosophy hasn't exactly settled things, either.
- Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy. Okay, so you might not want to go read this book yourself, but boy are its ideas interesting. If you can make it through the desiccated writing style you'll probably feel similarly. Bellamy certainly wasn't right about everything, but at least he was thinking about it.
- In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders. He's a stunning writer, Saunders. This book of short stories delineates the best of human behavior by vividly illustrating everything around it. If Moore was my inspiration to take morality seriously as a theoretical matter, Saunders grounds that by driving home the importance of actually acting humanely.
- Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk. I know, right? Something by Palahniuk that isn't Fight Club - surprising, ain't it? He might not have intended it this way, but to me this is a great book on suffering, the human response to suffering, and maybe even the meaning of life. Yeah, he's a little gimmicky as a writer; yeah, this book in particular is stylistically on the chintzy side. Still, it'd be a mistake to dismiss it on those grounds or to lump it together with the rest of his works.
- A Hat Full Of Sky, Terry Pratchett. It can be hard for us skeptics to embrace mythology. In terms of what's been handed down to us from history, almost all of it is riddled with factual inaccuracies, moral atrocities, and fake wisdom. But we, or at least I, still need a mythology with which to associate ourselves, and I've found no better producer of mythologies than Terry Pratchett. There are probably ten or fifteen other books that could've filled in for this one, but there's something about A Hat Full Of Sky that really appeals to me personally. Whatever that thing is, it reminds me that reason can and must coexist with the emotional needs of actual humans.
After three days of doing this I'd better not have to provide you with an intro; if you don't have the gist by now I give up.
"Are we merely a brain or are we both brain and mind? This is a fundamental question in science, philosophy, and theology. New advances in science seem to be challenging the notion that we are both mind and brain.I guess in the wide view twenty-five-year-old research counts as "new advances," but personally I think that's a bit misleading. Anyway, this is Kerby Anderson talking, and he runs Probe Ministries so he ought to know what he's talking about when it comes to this Custance guy.
...A quarter century ago, Probe Ministries published a book that showed that we are both mind and brain. The book, The Mysterious Matter of Mind, by Dr. Arthur C. Custance presented experimental evidence that led scientists to conclude that the mind is more than matter and more than a mere by-product of the brain."
"One of the most famous findings in this field involved the research of Wilder Penfield. Although he was born in the U.S., he did most of his research in Canada and was later celebrated as 'the greatest living Canadian.'Would it be an honor or an insult to be named "the greatest dead [member of a class]"? I wonder. Anyway, Penfield said that he poked at somebody's brain with an electrode - like, directly poked it, as you would poke a corpse with a stick - and that resulted in electrical signals firing out,
In 1961, Penfield reported a dramatic demonstration of the existence of a mind that is separate from the brain. He found that the mind acted independently of the brain under controlled experimental conditions."
"causing the opposite hand to move, and when he asks the patient why he moved the hand, the response is: 'I didn't do it. You made me do it.' . . . It may be said that the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.Similarly to Tuesday's post, the real argument here is not the one Anderson spotlights with his writing style. That electrodes and exposed brain tissue were involved is neither here nor there: it's not as though this was the first time in recorded history when a person's body acted in such a way that they dissociated that action from their self or their identity. It's true that using an electrode is significantly more reliable than hypnosis, freaky drug side-effects, or just waiting for somebody's body to twitch randomly of its own accord - but so what? The phenomenon itself has absolutely nothing to do with the electrode and would be just as meaningful (or not) if we couldn't reliably reproduce it in a controlled setting: if Anderson's argument is a good one, he only needs one known case. (The easiest disproof of the phrase "all Xs are Ys" isn't "no Xs are Ys" but rather "some X or other isn't a Y.") As a result, the question now becomes whether a single case of Anderson's "dramatic demonstration" suffices to prove dualism.
Once when I warned a patient of my intention to stimulate the motor area of the cortex, and challenged him to keep his hand from moving when the electrode was applied, he seized it with the other hand and struggled to hold still. Thus, one hand, under the control of the right hemisphere driven by the electrode, and the other hand, which he controlled through the left hemisphere, were caused to struggle against each other. Behind the 'brain action' of one hemisphere was the patient's mind. Behind the action of the other hemisphere was the electrode."
In short - can you guess? - the answer is no. Penfield, greatest Canadian or otherwise,* should really have emphasized the irrelevance of the fact "that the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body." From a medical perspective, that fact is very nearly useless (and, at any rate, had long been established by the time Penfield rolled around); from a philosophical perspective, it's entirely useless. What people believe - even about themselves - is just not good evidence for anything. The best Anderson can hope for here is to use his stated conclusion, that "the mind acted independently of the brain," in a semantic sense. It would be fair of him to say that our consciousness fails to reflect each and every transition in our brains and therefore that the two can act independently in some sense, but that's a far cry from saying that the mind is a disembodied entity that inexplicably directs the brain to do whatever it wants.
Perhaps the most interesting question here is whether or not we should expect to feel like we are our brains. Given that normal human experience never involves seeing one's brain or receiving tactile input from one's brain, it would be a bit surprising if we all just knew to identify the brain as being responsible for our sense of identity. Further, why would the brain automatically attribute all of its signals to itself? If the brain really does create the mind, it follows trivially that one's sense of having done something is itself some kind of activity in the brain, which just as trivially means that lacking that activity means triggering the "I didn't do it" state described by Penfield's patient. None of this means that I know exactly which signals to look for or anything like that, it's just to say that we ought to stop acting as though the default position is dualism and therefore that any minor hole anywhere in mind/brain identity theory is a sure indicator of its wrongness.
Now if only I can find one more of these for tomorrow...
*For the record, it's otherwise. Leonard Cohen is the greatest Canadian.
Have you heard yet about Tom Farley? Tom Farley just quit his job - a somewhat brave act in this economy, to be sure, but also a necessary one. "I am writing this letter out of love and respect for you," Farley wrote in his resignation. Continuing to address his clients, he said,
"I have tried to be honest and 'transparent' with you hoping my humanity and struggles to be a disciple of Jesus could somehow be an example for you. I have something very personal to share and ask your patience should I do it poorly or insensitively. Through a recent gut-wrenching discernment process with my spiritual director, therapist, and some priests, I have come to the decision to leave St. Clare Parish and the priesthood. I came to this decision not because I don't love being a priest or serving you as your pastor, but because I can no longer live the celibate life."His letter continues on for a bit, but all you need to know is in that opening paragraph. As a result of his career choice, Farley lived for decades without being (in his words) a "whole person," a lifestyle that eventually led him into therapy and eventually forced him out of a job that he otherwise deeply enjoys. On top of all of that, he very much seems to regard his decision as a failure on his part and perhaps even an indictment of his whole life; "I can no longer live the celibate life," he says, as though adherence to that standard defined him.
This is some seriously fucked up stuff. As much as I want to congratulate Farley for having resisted the apparently common temptation to take his frustration out on the children in his care, I fear that that would reinforce his bad behavior. Serving as a communal leader is often admirable, true, but only when that leadership is good; Farley's public (and, his letter indicates, often explicit) struggle against his own happiness is practically the antithesis of good leadership. There's also the problem of his having decided not to use this drama in his life as a force to drive him towards an unbiased search for truth, which again will likely rub off on the many minds under his supervision. In and of himself, however, Farley is a predictable and easily comprehensible phenomenon; the subtle questions enter when we try to integrate his experience into a model of society.
The easiest way out of this converastion would be to say that Farley, as an adult, was properly left free to select his own beliefs and practices. Nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to remain celibate, someone might say, he chose it of his own volition and surely we can't undermine that. To such arguments I reply that each of us is obliged to help others, an obligation that consists in no small part of aiding them in thinking and deciding. I find it hard to believe that Farley didn't have a single friend who was skeptical about his decision to join the priesthood - how many of them kept quiet or even supported him despite their doubts? Surely many his seminary teachers, fellow students, and other Catholic contacts experienced similar difficulties - how many of them understated or outright hid their problems from him? Maybe his life up to this point was saturated with honest naysayers whose advice he stubbornly refused to heed...but I doubt it. Here, then, is a proposal on how to start changing society into something less dangerous for people like Tom Farley: be honest and direct not just with the random strangers to whom one pontificates on the internet but also with the people with whom one interacts on a regular basis. It'll be harder and riskier on a personal level, but that's why we call it "the right thing to do."
Presenting an object lesson in the dangers of arguing via analogy:
"You’ve been experiencing what you take to be hallucinations. You’re being followed around by a monster with big teeth. You’ve seen a psychiatrist who tells you that you’re suffering from a mental illness. You believe her. You know that monsters with big teeth don’t exist in the real world (notwithstanding crocodiles). You’re a logical sort of person. If you weren’t too classy, you’d even consider becoming a New Atheist. But the experiences remain absolutely real to you. They have a veridical quality.How so? In that religions are like hideous, disgusting monsters that disrupt your everyday life and pressure you into believing things you would otherwise know to be false?
You carry on with your life on the (rationally justified) assumption that these experiences are not real. You pretty much just ignore the monster – think John Forbes Nash after he realises he’s hallucinating – but then things start to change. The monster becomes more aggressive. It pinches the remote control when you’re trying to watch 90210, that kind of thing.
By this point you’re getting a little more worried: okay, it’s a hallucination, but what happens if you’re attacked by it? You know it’s not real, but … just suppose for a minute it is real? There are no monsters, obviously, but they’re not ruled out as a matter of logic, are they now?
And then it happens. It’s late at night. You’re alone in your bathroom, and the monster comes crashing in through the window - at least this is what you experience - and it’s on you. It doesn’t attack, but it’s right in your face, and you can smell rotting flesh on its breath. You close your eyes hoping it’ll just disappear, but you can hear its breathing, sense its malevolence, and in your head there’s this insistent thought: What if it’s real?
...[This] is, in a way, analogous [to religious belief.]"
"...the argument is that if an experience seems to have a veridical quality, and if belief in its truth is a matter of pressing and utmost personal significance, then it is reasonable to believe in its truth. If this is right, it follows that religious belief is at least sometimes perfectly reasonable."Oh. Well, I was close.
Some people might take these survey results as really bad news, but I see them as an opening:
The original source frets about "some sort of addiction to social media" - probably they mean the bad, dangerous sort and not the happy, empowering sort - but for me this is potentially a really exciting finding. Here's my premise: the sort of person who would stop fucking in order to check facebook, or who must return to facebook immediately after fucking, is exactly the sort of person who should never ever ever be allowed to leave facebook.
I suppose that some professional panickers out there would interpret my suggestion as the kind of thing that unravels society or destroys interpersonal bonds or whatever - and if they do, fine. That attitude seems needlessly backwards to me, though, cause it's not as though there's literally no social interplay happening on facebook and similar sites; it's called social media for a reason. I'm also quite leery of saying that face-to-face interactions are somehow inherently more desirable or valuable than online ones. Sure, I would rather eat some tasty food than play Farmville, but that's why I'm me and not half the people who are no longer a part of my news feed. On the level of allowing people to be themselves in harmless ways, then, it's hard to see why this is objectionable (well, unless you're the person they stopped having sex with in order to reply to a text message). Furthermore, if we play our cards right this phenomenon could actually be helpful to those of us who are less plugged-in.
As somebody who genuinely likes low- to medium-tech activities - nature stuff, movies, etc. - the last thing that I want is for someone to interrupt my experience by yammering at me about the latest whatever-it-is that happened online. Given that this yammering is now being characterized as an addiction, it occurs to me that the odds of taking afflicted people along and expecting them to stay focused is unrealistic. But - and here's the key thing - maybe I can encourage them to just stay home. I mean, why not? If you get that much more pleasure out of reading tweets than you do out of, say, paying attention at a rock concert, why bother with the concert in the first place? I'm all for you enjoying the things that make you happy; there shouldn't be any need for a social-media-oriented person to feign interest in other events, just like there shouldn't be (and currently isn't) any need for people like me to keep up a pretense of a deep involvement with facebook.
And, again, none of this implies anything negative or stigmatizing about people who sign on first thing in the morning. Obviously I have nothing against the internet or serious personal involvement with it - this is, after all, a weblog - I just want people to do what they prefer to do. I say that it's time we embraced this addiction! If Mafia Wars makes you happy, then own that and don't feel like you have to make a big (doomed) show of your not-actually-existent independence from your smartphone; the rest of us will thank you, even if we are forced to do so in the form of a wall post.
You'll have to forgive me if I stretch a little bit from today through Friday, I wasn't really planning on doing a whole week about the mind/body problem. It seemed like a waste to start the week with two relevant arguments and then just drop it, though, so...
Today's subjects are Jeffrey Scwhartz and Sharon Begley(!), who coauthored a book addressing this topic some years ago. In it, they argue that the effectiveness of a certain therapeutic technique developed by Schwartz provides evidence for dualism. The technique, which he has termed "the Four Steps," consists of instructing people with OCD or similar conditions to Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, and Revalue - in other words, to think in specific, tightly controlled ways about themselves and their behavior. The details of this Four Step plan are philosophically irrelevant; all that matters is that, in Schwartz and Begley's words, "that the mind can affect the body: mere thoughts can [e.g.] set hearts racing and hormones soaring" (244). They follow the physicist (and clearly not philosopher) Eugene Wigner in concluding from this evidence and the success of quantum physics* that it's nonsensical "to describe the mind and consciousness in terms of the positions of atoms, for one simple reason: the latter are derived from the former and have no fixed and non-probabilistic existence outside the former" (283). William Dembski summarizes their argument thusly:
"If materialism is correct, then mentation is the product of brain processes (much as digestion is the product of stomach processes, to use an analogy proposed by the philosopher John Searle). But this would mean that even though the brain can readily affect the mind, there’s no sense in which the mind can affect the brain except by way of the brain. That is, top-down causation in which the mind affects the brain must invariably presuppose bottom-up causation of the brain first affecting the mind. And yet Schwartz clearly shows that a conceptual act with no clear physiological underpinnings (for instance, the conscious decision by an OCD sufferer to implement the 4-R therapy) can dramatically and lastingly alter patterns of brain activity. And in such cases, top-down causation seems to operate without prior bottom-up causation."There are at least three problems with this, the cleanest of which I'll discuss first. If we assume along with Wigner, Schwartz, Begley, and many others that free will is a quantum effect, we can fairly easily achieve libertarian free will (i.e., the state of having been able to do otherwise) but we still won't have anything remotely like willpower or the magical self-direction that Schwartz and Begley are looking for. This is for a very simple reason that people nonetheless have a very hard time understanding: statistics, if it actually operates in the world, is itself a form of determinism.
Mike Almeida has evidently just discovered this over at the Prosblogion - a so-called fair die that "fails to come up 5" in any possible worlds "is not fair," he says. I've been making this point for literally years by now: even if the best predictive model of an event is a standard statistical pattern (like Almeida's unfair die), that model is in fact inaccurate if one or more of its results are (for whatever reason) logically impossible. I've usually made this argument, as Almeida does, with respect to good and evil, but it applies as a general rule. In this particular case, it's incoherent to say that one "freely" or "willfully" chooses (or, in Dembski's terminology, "mentates") anything by means of quantum mechanics: by definition, decisions that depend on quantum probabilities suffer from the same affliction as Almeida's quantum-unfair die. Taken world by world it looks like the choices are made by some unconstrained immaterial force, but once you look at all the possible worlds together the probabilities reassert themselves - if there's, say, a 10% chance that I'll eat a sandwich for lunch today and a 90% chance that I'll have Chinese, that's precisely the distribution you'll see across the collection of possible worlds. Nor can I even "choose" which world I find myself in: strictly speaking, I'm in all of those worlds. This is, and seemingly always will be, the problem with quantum or other multiple-worlds explanations of freedom: even if just the probability of your choice is fixed before you make it, you're not really free in the sense that these explanations say you are.
Moreover, quantum free will fails for the same reason that Wigner's observer thesis fails, namely, that the universe has been happening literally forever. Quantum physics describes physical laws, obviously, even if some of those laws are statistical in nature and not strictly deterministic. The thing about laws of physics - at least, so far as we have ever known - is that they apply across time and across (at least a great deal of) space, which means that waveforms collapsed before life existed and continue to collapse outside of the purview of any conscious observer. To attribute our free will to events that happen ubiquitously is wildly arbitrary - what are we to say of the same events happening in rocks, that rocks are therefore free? If you don't trust me to make this argument, maybe you'll trust John Bell - he said the same thing way back in nineteen eighty-one. It says nothing good about quantum free will theorists that they've had almost thirty years to reply to this objection and have not done so (at least, that I've ever seen).
The last problem with the Schwartz/Begley argument from mentation is that it begs the question. Roughly speaking, their claim would look like this if put into the form of a syllogism:
- The Four Steps technique and other mentation therapies are capable of causing measurable changes in brain activity and observable changes in behavior. (Findings of various scientific studies)
- The Four Steps technique and other mentation therapies operate on the basis of some causally efficacious component of mentation. (From 1, definition of "causaully efficacious")
- Therefore, "the [nonmaterial] mind can affect the body" (or, in Dembski's phrasing, "top-down causation...operate[s] without prior bottom-up causation").
It would be one thing if Schwartz's studies had mapped each and every brain activity prior to the instances of mentation, but since we don't yet have the technological capability to do that it's a pretty safe bet that he's working with approximations. Empirical evidence goes a long way, and it'd be much more convincing if Schwartz produced a series of results showing that identical initial brain states led to very different ending brain states depending only on the presence or absence of mentation. What he actually has, in contrast, is some fMRI results - accurate and helpful, yes, but not exactly knock-down proof. It would be one thing, too, if he had a detailed and complete understanding of how each person's brain worked. After all, perhaps mentation simply is one of the changes that he observed. Since he himself can't say for sure which part of the brain are responsible for willpower or which pattern of activity represent mentation - if indeed something as broad as willpower is located in only one area of the brain or represented by only one pattern - it's more than a little silly for him to conclude outright that none of the material changes represent mentation.
This last problem is much farther-reaching than it may initially appear. Our instinct, likely encouraged by the cultural mythologies that support dualism, is to attribute any and all unexplained or unclear brain activity to a soul or some other non-material mind. Given how much we still don't know about the brain, though, those attributions are nothing short of ridiculous - you can't very well say what's pragmatically impossible for a system to accomplish until you know how that system actually works. Especially since Schwartz and Begley's proposed alternative has always been and remains incoherent (just what is an immaterial mind?) and their preferred explanatory mechanism is a logical disaster (remember all that stuff about how quantum physics is a law), a far wiser reaction would have been to adopt a sort of agnosticism about the mind/body problem. I'm perfectly willing to say that a significant proportion of the evidence in favor of mind/body identity is circumstantial and therefore to moderate my stance accordingly, but what I'm not willing to do is to throw up my hands in surrender every time a question arises.
*I told you people did this.
And since this was penned in 2007 it doesn't even take into account Roy Ashburn, Bruce Barclay, Troy King...
Those of us who dabble in media criticism may be familiar with the sad story of Glenn Beck's TV advertisers. Having realized that his vitriol turns people away, some of the larger corporations declined to associate themselves with Beck. As Oliver Willis reports, that leaves room for advertisers that "aren't exactly blue-chip enterprises." The most infamous of these is the Survival Seed Bank, whose 1996-esque website you can find here.
I wouldn't be the first or the most clever person to make fun of Survival Seed Bank - it's just not hard enough. From their excitable reference to WordNet "WordNut" Daily ("some government agencies are stockpiling huge amounts of canned food"!) to the painfully transparent pandering (the "lower class" is "demanding handouts" and the "ruling elite" are "aloof" and "totalitarian, but you the customer are happily nestled in the "middle class"), the entire business smacks of being just one step above a Nigerian prince scam. But if you're really dying for some cutting remarks about these people, Colbert has your back.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Survival Seed Bank | ||||
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Hopefully your desire for teh lulz has been sated, because I'm moving on to something quasi-serious: the idea of using the ground as a storage facility.
One of the several giant green messages on their site crows that the "Indestructible [sic] Survival Seed Bank Can Be Buried To Avoid Confiscation." It's an excellent sentence, isn't it? First they call their product indestructible, a trivial lie; then they say it can be buried, a trivial truth; then they suggest that somebody might be dropping by to confiscate it, which is gloriously unhinged. But okay - let's pretend that some unfortunate person out there runs into a real reason to need plastic bottle of seeds. The ground is not the place to keep it until that need arrives.
Unless you want to end up as a bloody smear across some frozen midwestern scene cut from a postcard, do yourself a favor and come up with a less stupid plan than "make everything I need inaccessible except by means of time-consuming hard labor." Oh - and also, try not to make a habit of working with sociopathic Scandinavian mercenaries.