The Human Question

Relativity makes it impossible to say two events are simultaneous except with respect to an observer's position. Two observers looking upon the same set of events from very different perspective will disagree about whether or not they simultaneous. But doesn't this lead to an absurd scenario: isn't it impossible for me to say that I exist since the co-existence of my body parts is only apparent. In other words, the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph seems to be true even within an individual, except on a smaller scale.

Around p. 71, Pinker illustrates what he means by "good reductionism" by applying Chomsky's division of the analysis of mind into five mutually irreducible levels(: "good reductionism")to language. The first four levels treat language as an "intervnal, individual entity." The fifth, however, is "external language," i.e., language as it exists in a culture. Such a treatment of language has its problems. For language is never simply internal. Nor is culture simply external. Pinker would perhaps agree and add that it involves an interaction of the two and that culture studies one side of that interaction, the other four disciplines study the other side. But my point is that language can never be grasped as an interaction of inner and outer events. It consists of individuals sharing something in common: the sharing is personal, that which is shared is common. But the sharing is not an internal event observed in the same manner that the ac...

There is an important equality among human beings only if there is a real heirarchy of being within the cosmos.

He has an ingenious (ly wrong) take on folks with divided cc's: must review and comment upon. Also, it would be fun rhetorically to compare is own lack of awareness of internal inconsistency with the examples given by him of how a person with a disconnected corpus callosum talks in a manner that suggests that he has a "divided mind" about the issues.

Pinker contrasts "greedy" reductionism, which he rejects, with "good" reductionism , which he advocates (note the moralizing grade-school teacher language). Good reductionism as he sees it is the sort that admits of different explanatory levels. Citing Hilary Putnam, he says that you can't explain why a round peg doesn't fit in a square hole by talking about what happens at the quantum level. The whole may be the sum of its parts, but we can grasp the one explanation of why the square peg doesn't fit into the round whole only by thematizing the whole (in this case, the peg and the hole) as such. Digression: actually, a more adequate explanation must also talk about how forces at a micro level are responsible for the resistance we feel when pressing the non fitting parts together. An adequate explanation must include BOTH how the parts as such tend to interact and the configuration of the whole made of these non-matching parts (the square/round shape...

I would direct these toward one who thinks of evolution as leading away from theism. Isn't evolution beautiful? Isn't beauty good? and Isn't the source of that goodness likewise good?