The Human Question

Could a group of thoroughly wicked persons play a good game of baseball? Is any set of social rules entirely divorceable from moral principles?

When engaged in the philosophical dialectic, we should be careful to avoid proving our point on the basis thought experiments regarding scenarios that are far-fetched.  I think everyone would grant that no thought experiment that involves two contradictory claims can be allowed.  And pretty much everyone would agree that a thought experiment involving an event that is highly improbable but quite possible should be allowed.  Besides these two alternatives there is a thought experiment of a third type: it asks us to imagine something that may in fact be impossible in the same way that it's impossible that "green ideas" would "sleep furiously": not a contradiction between two statements but an incoherency in one statement.  When we are unsure of what the words mean; when determining what those words mean; and when one of the candidate meanings would mean, if accepted, that the scenario in our thought experiment is incoherent, then making use of such a thought exper...

To the degree that determinism is true, apparent contingency in the world is illusory.  And if contingency, which seems so obvious, is illusory, then it would seem that all bets are off regarding the veracity of other beliefs.

In a moment of humility, Daniel Dennett tells us in  Intuition Pumps that he just doesn't get quantum theory, no matter how hard he tries. Perhaps we shouldn't use candid admissions made at such moments against the speaker.  I hope not, because that's what I'm about to do... It seems to me that quantum theory is a bit of an embarrassment to the argument for materialism found in another book by the same author.  In  Freedom Evolves , Dennett makes an analogy between the way in which one playing Conway's Game of Life  can design life-like items and the way we might come to see ourselves as constructed of atoms. Dennett assures us in that book that Conway's Democratean approach to nature is "sophisticated." But what if that approach is now dated, thanks to quantum theory?  In proposing this, I am not relying on any of the mystical-sounding statements relating quantum theory to consciousness.  I am proposing that even the most staid, sober,...

Right now I'm listening to Michael Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge , a delightful book on split-brain experiments by neurological pioneer lacking any pretentiousness but is instead, full of wit and cheer  For reasons already discussed in this blog, I wouldn't reach the same reductionist conclusions as he does.  But instead of going into those objections here, I will only point out that in basing his view of human nature, as he does, on an exceptional case he reminds me of the Chinese astronomers who noted only the irregular occurrences in the sky.  That sort of information became useful centuries later to those who were trying to understand the lawfulness of nature.  Split-brain experiments are similarly useful to one who is trying to understand human nature. But to take such experiments as the starting point is to proceed "bassackwards": the way human nature behaves most of the time is the primary source of our understanding of what sort of being we humans are. ...

Upon listening to SH's talk on Free Will (or rather the lack thereof), it occurred to me that while Richard Dawkins is a bully, Daniel Dennett is a wee bit of a showoff, Sam Harris seems like a mensch--a regular guy. Good for him! But when you compare the his arguments against theism with the arguments proposed by theists themselves, it is obvious that he is a skillful employer of the straw man fallacy. Looking at his website, I appreciate also that he recognizes the irreducibility of consciousness to matter.  He is a non-reductive materialist, because he navigates this issue with the help of his own common sense and careful analysis. But given his arguments against free will, it seems to me that he lets himself be seduced by scientism rather easily.  For the arguments employed by him against free will prove too much:  they render desire epiphenomenal.

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

What if, while administering the Turing test, you asked a computer questions about its sensations?

I think the contemporary notion of qualia is helpful insight into the insufficiency of scientism.  But that does not mean that its advocates have conceptualized it very well.  Something to study more. Meanwhile, I note that Daniel Dennett, true blue reductionist that he is, argues that the notion of qualia is incoherent.  The premise in this argument is the list of properties of properties that he kindly offers his reader: ineffable, subjective, intrinsic and private.  By setting his argument this way at the beginning, he may be offering a straw man.  I dunno: I haven't really surveyed what everyone out there thinks qualia are like.  But in any case, later on in the argument on this topic that I listened to in Intuition Pumps , he seems to argue in a very clearly circular manner.  I need to find where he does that and transcribe it here ... maybe later this week.

I think it of central importance to theism to argue that non-reductive materialism is more plausible than reductive materialism.  Or rather, to argue on the basis of what humans and non-humans have in common rather than on the basis of distinctively human characteristics, that the sort of materialism appealed to in order to attack theism is incoherent. I suppose someone could consider that surrender.  To a philosophically ignorant person who is in the habit of thinking that there are only two choices--Cartesian dualism and reductive materialism--it will appear to be a move from dualism toward materialism. But to someone who sees that there are at least four options, it may look quite different.  More like an invasion (and a justified one, at that) than a surrender. Consider a German living in his country near the border with France late in WW II, when the allied forces had just started invading.  It would be delusional for him to imagine that the allies crossin...

The contemporary tendency to identify thought with the activities on fMRI scans is akin to the readiness of the phrenologist of yesteryear to locate thought centers with bumps on the head, says Malcom Jeeves, in  Neuroscience Psychology and Religion. Interesting comparison!

Because of the non-linear way in which neurons respond to inputs, the computer programmer who would like to simulate the way brain processes information must create a mini-program to imitate the input/ output relation found in each neuron. Perhaps simulating the operation of a neuron with a computer program is akin to generating a CD (with its digitalization of sound) to simulate the sound of a record.  In both cases, the imitation can be conceived of in terms of ones and zeros, while the thing being imitated is approximated but never truly duplicated by the imitation.

If it works against non-reductive materialism, then doesn't it imply that brute perception is unreliable?  In that case, wouldn't our perception fare no better?  And wouldn't our non-materialistic soul have a overcome a substantial obstacle in order to get to the truth, if it's perceptions were no more reliable than those of non-rational (and hence presumably material) animals.

It seems to me to be effective against certain materialist rationalizations for naturalism (the sort that are used to buttress reductive materialism), but not necessarily against every version of anti-theism.  It works, at the end of the day, against reductive materialism only inasmuch as the zombie objection likewise works (and I think it does) against the same . In fact, one could construct a zombie version of Plantinga's argument (sort of a Halloween version). That is because Plantinga's argument hinges upon the question of whether or not the actions of a percipient beings are entirely caused by the neuro-physical states of perceiver.  If those states suffice, then any correlative perceptions are themselves superfluous--we have a case of epiphenomenalism. It follows that the truth or accuracy of those perceptions would likewise be irrelevant if the perceptions themselves are.  But those neuro-physical processes do  suffice according to reductive materi...

At the individual level, we desire to survive because we desire to thrive rather than vice versa.  And that is where the action is.

Emergence (or something more Aristotelian) is not complexification, it's simplification.  It's not taking another force and placing it beside the lower forces, it's taking the lower forces and appropriating them as part of a higher action.

David K. Johnson argues that there is no free will because propositions in some sense already exist and are already true (or are already false); hence, since it is already true that I will do x tomorrow, it follows that I cannot not-do x tomorrow. I'll try to argue with him on his own terms. Isn't the very existence of these propositions contingent? If yes, then it's hard to believe that something contingent could do the sort of necessitating that DKJ has it doing. If no -- if these propositions had to be -- then there is something rather god-like about them.  Too god-like to be plausible for a materialist like DKJ.

The concept of the integral is introduced by asking the student to imagine breaking the area under a curve into smaller and smaller parts (each of which is a column whose width is delta x or change in x) and then figure out how, as delta x (the change in the value of x) approaches zero and then number of columns (each of whose width is delta x) approaches infinity, ... how one better forms an approximation of the area under the curve.  This series of approximations is then superseded by an insight into another a formula that can more simply calculate for the area of that curve. It might be helpful to see this process as illustrative of how we use our imagination to stretch our experience and thereby arrive at new insights that go beyond possible experience.  Also, it illustrates how the notion of the infinite is at work in the formation of new concepts. Let's try to apply it to our concept of truth: we think that claim which is obvious to ourselves and those we know as tru...

cognition is an example of the appropriation of the form of another thing/part of moi without taking away the form's being the form of something other than the appropriating cognizer. For that reason, the concept of appropriation might be used to help solve the bundling problem. Appropriation, which is what Aristotle says the common sense ( koine aesthesis or somethin' like that) does to the operation of the proper senses, is a kind of bundling.  And it is analogous to what the proper sense does to the many qualities that concomitantly act up the proper/external senses.  In both cases, the higher power takes the operation of the lower power and owns it without taking it away from the other.

This might not ultimately be relevant to questions about God, but it's interesting that a material personal being that could travel faster than the speed of light (already cheating here bc it may be impossible) could predict the future because our future would have been  present to it -- not because the future had been predetermined.

Perhaps semantics always involves appropriation, and appropriation is always organic, so that only organisms can operate semantically, while machines can at most operate syntactically.

Science-talk (at least natural science) takes the behavior of things, taken in the third person and recombines them in paradoxical ways (we might not notice the paradoxes because thinking of them has become second nature to us).  Consider waves, for example.  I experience waves in a pond or pool.  Then my science teacher tells me that sound travels in waves.  Hmm: sounds paradoxical, but not impossible.  Learning about sine waves, I see the analogy between the repeated and regular compression and decompression of air and the waves in the pool. Philosophical talk of the soul, on a good day, isn't about the sort of things that I can point to (what I call third person things, even though they typically aren't persons at all).  But it can talk about things that have a special connection to the first person: ability, disposition, action, striving, fulfillment.  It uses these terms to describe realities that escape the third person perspective: acting, bei...

Asking, as Daniel Dennett does, what an antireductionist would have to say once he or she encountered a robot that behaved in every way in a manner indistinguishable from a human (okay, it wouldn't breathe, eat, excrete or reproduce), is kind of like my asking what he would say if, upon confirmation of the multiverse hypothesis, he also discovered that every single one of the component universeses is finely tuned for life.  Okay, it is much harder to imagine how one might confirm the latter.  But suppose that he did: what would he say to that?

Functionalism, inasmuch as it treats the other as a machine that functions for me, always abstracts from the other's desire.

That might be a good title for a chapter discussing scientific praxis' need for human agency and human agency's need for judgment and judgment's need for the identity of the one making the judgment with the one apprehending the many thing being judged together.

If the notion of appropriation that I stole/borrowed from Aristotle/Aquinas is correct, then perhaps one way to respond to split brain objections to the unity of the soul/psyche is to say that one sub-organ of the brain normally appropriates the operations of the other(s), and, under very unusual circumstances, may be prevented from doing so.  Hence the zombie-like rebellion of the side not associated with my awareness (the awareness of the one -- or the "one-half" reporting to the scientist)

Add to that example the following detail:  two doctors are working on the same patient.  One believes the patient is the president of the United States, the other does not.  They have no disagreement, however, about how to operate.  Or rather, their disagreement about who the patient is does not come into play in their discussion about how to treat that person.  Only afterwards, when they reflect together on the significance of their work, does the question of the identity of the patient come into play.

Natural science involves equations and models. Equations involve an apparent completeness that imitates the completeness of mathematics: 2+2=4 doesn't seem to need any clarification. There doesn't seem to be some new truth that will undermine it either: in fact it really seems necessarily true. Models, however, are analogies with the sort of causal relations that we find in the prescientific lifeworld. And in that life world, human agency is, as it were, the prime instance of causality. Billiard balls are not.  But inasmuch as the models used in science are parasitic of human agency(albeit in a good way), they include some characteristics that look quite different from equations. They don't even seem to have the sort of clarity that equations at least seem to have. And they involve dependence on other, unmentioned factors, a dependence that can be forgotten when staring at equations. And of course, they involve striving, purpose, satisfaction. Such characteristics are indis...

Said in his talk at the conference on science and religion at Steubenville, where he stands out from the others: "Recent decades have seen within mainstream academic philosophy, a renewed interest in traditional Aristotelian metaphysical notions, like substance, essence, causal power, act vs. potency (these days referred to as the distinction act  distinction between categorical and dispositional properties) and finality (these days referred to as 'physical intentionality' or the 'directedness of dispositions toward their manifestions')--different jargon, substantively the same.  Moreovers this revival has taken place among secular metaphysicians with no Thomistic axe to grind..." Contemporary analytic metaphysicians use the term "disposition" rather than "power." George Molnar in his book Powers: a Metaphysical Study , calls it "physical intentionality," and John Hyle calls it "natural intentionality" for similar ...