The Human Question

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2015/08/atheism-remarkably-childlike-atomistic-faith.html

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.                                                                         —Daniel J. Boorstin

For quite a while, scientists said that DNA functions as information.  More recently, however, this claim has been marginalized.  There are certainly patches of DNA that encode for protein molecules in a digital manner.  In a manner that reminds me of the way a computer processes 1s and 0s, except, I guess, there are four basic bits of information rather than just two.  That sounds like information to me.  But more recently, scientists have been talking about patches of DNA consisting not of coding for proteins, but of instructions on how to combine the proteins coded for.  The latter sort of DNA patches are call CIS regulatory mechanisms. Okay, I have only a primitive grasp of all of this, but it seems to mee that the CIS regulatory areas are to protein coding patches like the ingredients of a cookbook recipe are to the instructions about whether to add those ingredients in a bowl or whether they should be chopped, julienned, boiled, baked or the like. Furthermore, the cis regulat

When Dawkins clarifies what he means by the term "gene" in the title of his work, he states that it refers not an to individual but to a whole population of genes of a certain type.  He then proposes that we apply a metaphor as a kind of shortcut for understanding the conclusions of mathematical genetics: imagine that the gene is an individual trying perpetuate itself by competing with its allele and cooperating with other genes in producing a vehicle that will behave in such a way as to enable the genes to survive to the next generation. According to this heuristic, those genes that are most ingenious at producing effective survival machinesl will tend to become predominant in a population. This metaphor is, in my opinion, a great device for giving a basic idea about population genetics. But Dawkins also uses it to make a philosophical point, and in doing so seems to change the subject in a manner that is misleading. He talks of individual genes using an individual organis

Richard Dawkins'  The Selfish Gene  proposes a new way of looking at biology, one that reverses the relationship between genes and organisms.  Whereas biologists have tended to look at the organism as central and genes as interesting inasmuch as they affect the lives of organisms, Dawkins proposes that we look at genes as central and at organisms inasmuch as they contribute to the perpetuation of genes. He initially proposes this shift in the form of a mere metaphor: what would a gene think and do if it could deliberate about ways in which it might perpetuate its form?  Well, it would look at the organism as a vehicle that it, alongside with other genes with whom it is cooperating, could use to make it to the next generation.  A survival vehicle.  It would look at the organism as a "lumbering" robot that it could use to manipulate its environment so that opportunities and dangers to self-perpetuation could be dealt with.  The book begins by employing this figure, which he

Daniel Dennett has an interesting rebuttal to Frank Jackson's argument for qualia.  Jackson's argument takes the form of a story about Mary, who--although she has lived in an environment devoid of color since her earliest days--has nevertheless become the world's foremost scientific expert on color, studying the outside world through a black and white monitor. Once Mary leaves the confines of her achromatic environment for the normal, colorful world, she will finally get to see blue things.  And, Jackson tells us, she will discover something that she hadn't previously known through her scientific studies.  If that is so, then there is more to color than what science can measure and report, and that something more is called qualia. Dennett counters in Consciousness Explained  that if Mary knows absolutely everything there is to know about this color and our perception thereof, then she already knows, in terms of physics, how blue differs from yellow even before she has

Among the Disrupted

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousHonderichonSearle.htm

He says there's no beginning or end of time, for we move in a circle: we are always coming back to where we (or one of our dopplegangers) have been before. Okay, this is all hearsay, but I still want to mull over it. This eternal return provokes a question:  is the same "I" here that was here eons ago?  If one replies yes, then it seems that time as we conceive it normally is illusory. A more adequate grasp of time recognizes that there is nothing new under the sun.  Or rather, it is only because we are limited to seeing things "under the sun" that anything seems to be new.  Ironically, Hawkins, a materialist, attributes to science a God-like grasp of nature, a perspective through which he sees -- rather abstractly -- every actuality that will be and/or has already been as if it is present to him.  Wow! What an irony: a man who claims that you and I are nothing but dust in the wind also claims to have a kind of infinite gaze.  Might not the very fact tha

In  Consciousness Explained (1 hour 22 minutes into the audio),   Daniel Dennett give four objections to his materialism.  He describes these as four reasons against the reduction of the mind to the brain or as reasons for believing in "mind-stuff." The four reasons are the claims that nothing in the brain could... 1. ...be the medium in which the (imaginary) purple cow is rendered; 2. ...be the "I" in "I think therefore I am"; 3. ...appreciate wine, hate racism, love someone, be a source mattering; 4. ...act with moral responsibility More on this later.  Meanwhile, it's worth noting that his description of the objection to materialism as belief in "mind stuff" is the sort of straw man that a reductionist would find quite natural: he finds it so natural to think materialistically, that he thinks anti-reductionists must be positing a different kind of matter.  It may be true that dualism does posit something like "mind stuff"

In Freedom Evolves , Daniel Dennett uses Benjamin Libet's experiment as a basis for arguing that  we are not free.  That is because Libet's experiment shows that the brain gets ready to act about a third of a second prior to our becoming consciousness of our choosing to act.  Because a non-mental process precedes and makes highly probable the mental process, the will is neither spontaneous nor free.  So the argument goes.  After having made this point, Dennett adds in passing that the buildup in the readiness in the brain (i.e., the build up of the action potential) is not always followed by the movement of the  hand: sometimes, at the very last fraction of second the test subject decides not to move at the last fraction (and I mean fraction) of a second. Searle points out that since this build up of action potential in the brain is not always followed by hand movement, one cannot rightly say that the former necessitates the latter.  I would agree and make a comment or two.

David Chalmers proposes protopsychism as part of an attempt to give an account of how it is that we have minds--an attempt to locate consciousness within nature.  I think this move and the positing of panpsychism are both motivated by the recognition of the need to overcome the assumptions that create the false dilemma of dualism vs. (reductive) materialism. These two approaches get to the heart of the problem: they recognize that as the non-living things in the natural world are thought of as consisting only of the quantifiable, we won't be able to make room for cognition without seeming dualistic.  Those who recognize this problem respond by inserting something more than the Democritan quantifiable back into nature so sensation won't seem so radically different from the non-living things that humans and other sentient beings sense. The Aristotelian approach is, I propose, less exotic, and less of a target for those ready to wield Ockham's razor.  It consists of affirm

To Teilhard de Chardin the human form arose naturally from its antecedents through evolution, yet that necessity has its ultimate origin in divine providence. The question of how this relates to the Genesis story is not my concern here: I am instead interested in how it relates to the philosophical claim that there is something in human operations transcending what can be done by other animals. For example, humans can know everlasting truths.  To have such knowledge (in the most robust sense of the word "knowledge") could not be mere perception, imagination or expectation.  But if the human form arose naturally from simian antecedents, then it would seem that the human way of cognizing would be nothing more than a highly developed imagination, etc.  Since human cognition is as different from imagining as an infinite ray in geometry (which we cannot properly imagine) is from a finite line segment (which we can), then it follows that it is problematic to say that the human ps

Dennett suggests that Conway's game of life can model the workings of organisms and thereby show that they are machines .  But this game (which consists of a computer program controlling how black squares cluster together and interact, with these squares forming somewhat life-like interacting clusters of spots) might also be able to model a perpetual motion machine (we'll call this "Conway's Machine").  If it can, then (given the fact that such a machine would violate the second law of thermodynamics) something is wrong with applying this game to nature, and the claim that it can model life is undermined. I wonder if the Democritan view of nature (which I like to call "geometry in motion") goes hand in hand with acceptance of the applicability of Conway's game to nature (that is, one it true if and only if the other is as well).  If so, then the Democritan view of nature is likewise undermined by the possibility of a Conwayesque  model of a perpetu

Materialists deny the existence of an immaterial necessary being while affirming that matter itself operates as it does necessarily.  They posit the laws of nature as the source of this necessity. Aquinas argues for a self-necessary being in an interesting manner: starting with contingent beings, inferring that there must be at least one necessary being, distinguishing derived from underived necessity, and finally inferring the existence of a self-necessary being, i.e., one with underived necessity.  Also worth noting is the fact that part of this argument is said to commit the fallacy of composition. What I'd like to  do here is explore (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "invent") an analogy between the two ways of thinking.  My starting point is the suggestion, made by Sean Carroll and other scientists, that we are in a multiverse. Here goes... Suppose there is a multiplicity of universes, each with its own laws of nature, and that these universes aris

I think it's Dawkins who states that atheism should be easy for a monotheist, for a monotheist has already gotten rid of many gods: he only has to get rid of one more. Suppose I tell Dawkins that he really should have no problem with celibacy.  After all, as a monogamist, he is already foresworn the possibility of having many wives: he just has to get rid of one more!

He describes what it's like for a statement to be true (he says in many more words that a statement is true when it corresponds to reality) and assumes that he's given an account also of what it's like to believe   that one's statement is true. They are not the same. To believe that one's statement is true is, in part, to expect it to be consistent with other truths that one and others also know.  It is to expect that others who have an adequate knowledge of what you claim to know will concur in their judgment because of what they perceive and understand. There is a tacit awareness of the an open-ended duration of time and a community of rational beings that is larger than one's possible experience. Does a calculator have all that?  Does a computer?

It occurred to me recently that any position that seems to suggest dualism is dismissed as "spooky." It seems that such a dismissal would be quite effective because of the way that it links the immaterial to ghosts and ghosts to superstition. But what about the opposite of spooky?  Would that be beautiful?  Is materialism beautiful? I don't think that reducing a whole to its parts is beautiful.  Useful, perhaps, but not beautiful. (For future revision: discuss engineering, it's beauty, here.  Then contrast with nothingbuttery). Perhaps beauty is experienced only when one is looking holistically.  If holism is (in different ways) opposed to both dualism and materialism, then perhaps we should say that both of the two latter positions are spooky.

Sam Harris seems to be a master of disinformation when it comes to history, but I trust him when he says that sociopaths, "do not experience a normal range of anxiety and fear, and this may account for their lack of conscience." (p. 97 in  Moral Landscape ). My thought:  that dovetails well with the notion that we can, in a manner of speaking, perceive emotions (interestingly, Aquinas says something like that in his commentary on Aristotle's De anima ).  For seeing someone else in a different situation than our own, we imagine an emotion-laden situation and somehow in virtue of our own capacity for feeling we -- without inference -- see that situation as painful, pleasant or whatever for the other.  I suppose, then, that if one lacks such emotions, that person will fail to perceive those emotions in others.  Nor shall that person be concerned about the presence of something that he or she can't perceive. Just a hunch: perhaps sociopaths lack those emotions because

Aristotle spoke of the soul as the first activity (activity is an English translation of the Greek word entelecheia --a word made up by Aristotle to signify an activity done for the sake of the doer and which tends to be continuous) of a body suitably organized for life.  There is a metaphor in play here: for an activity is, in our everyday usage, something we do in virtue of our already being alive.  That sort of activity can't be, of course, that which makes us alive.  But I suppose that Aristotle is making an analogy rather than being poetically metaphorical: he sees something in human nature that is difficult to name directly, but which operates like something else for which we already have a name. That is, the soul of a person or other organism is to the body of that person (or other sort of organism) in a manner analogous to how the  activity  of a person is to their readiness, disposition to act. You still have the problem or paradox that the second term in this analogy--the

A book on Lublin Thomism that is in the public domain: http://www.hyoomik.com/lublin/understanding_philosophy.html

In Where the Conflict Really Lies , Alvin Plantinga makes the point that our enjoyment of music is evolutionarily inexplicable to Steven Pinker.  Perhaps music and even dance are distinctly human examples of a kind of exuberance that Nietzsche points to when he says, "in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life."

Dennett talks of higher level neurons performing a more complex operation than the lower ones while taking the operations of lower level operations as a kind of basis for their higher operations. Question: If the processes occurring in the higher and lower neurons are chemically the same except for their placements, then wouldn't the purportedly higher-level neuron simply do the same sort of thing as the lower?  Why would it "know" more than the neurons earlier in the feeding chain of information described (albeit not as such) by Dennett?  In simply pointing to different parts of the brain and saying this part does that, etc.,  isn't Dennett engaging in the sort of mysticism that he derides elsewhere? Also, if the higher level operation has the lower as its object, then doesn't that make for a lot of cognitive redundancy?  For example, suppose the lowest level neuronal response to a very, very small and faint light on a surface mapped with gridlines.  The very

Got that from a lecture by Tracy Rowland.

"Like all the arts, music is founded upon the exalted symbols of the moral sense.  To submit to these inscrutable laws, and by means of these laws to tame and guided our own mind so that  the manifestations of art may pour out: this is the isolating principle of art.  To be dissolved in its manifestations: this is our dedication to the divine,which calmly exercises its power over the raging of untamed elements, and so lends to the human imagination its highest effectiveness, so always art should represent the divine, and the relation of the human person toward art is religion.  What we obtain from art comes from God, its divine inspiration which appoints an aim for human faculties, which we cannot attain on our own."

Last weekend Ken Miller and three other panelists at the New York Encounter spoke on theism and evolution.  Miller himself did an exquisite job of showing why it is absurd to reject the evolutionary origins of the human form (not a hard thing to do, in my opinion, but Miller did it with both clarity and panache).  One thing that struck me, however, is that he is reluctant to say that human beings are exceptional. In a way, that's understandable.  Before discussing claims regarding human exceptionality, one would do better to first note that part of the universe points to God precisely by asking the question (mentioned by the other panelist, Martin Nowak), why all this?  Granted, it seems that only humans go around asking that question, but more important than the impression that only humans ask it is the fact that any being asks it at all.  What would happen to natural theology if we discovered that other terrestrials or even extra-terrestrials asked it as well? Nothing. The same

For a materialist who believes that we can know about necessity in nature, the following question occurs: Assuming for the moment that the materialist is correct in saying that all physical processes, including cognitive ones, occur necessarily, then the nature of our knowledge of that necessity becomes interesting.  That is, it's worth asking how the necessity characterizing the physical processes constituting the knowledge are related to the necessity characterizing the process in nature that is one's object of knowledge.  We might ask the following:  does the the latter cause or determine the former? If the answer is no, then where does our knowledge of necessity come from? If the answer is yes, then wouldn't every cognition be recognition of such necessity? After all, every cognitive process is, for a materialist, a necessary one.  In such a case, the fact that some truths seem to be of contingent matters would be an embarrassing counterexample.

Different materialists (thinking here of Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) say that choice is predetermined by preconscious processes.  Ditto with our thoughts.  The following thought experiment is my attempted rebuttal. Imagine that are an engineer assigned the task of making all-purpose machine that can do tasks like washing clothes, cooking food, cleaning house.  You are making a robot-servant. You are competing with another engineer, and the bases for judging who will win this competition is the degree to which the robot is made more quickly, less expensively; which machine is less likely to break down, and which machine is more efficient and effective in producing desired results.   Assume, for the sake of argument, that materialism is true and that the technology needed to make a conscious machine is available.   You have two options, you could make a machine that is conscious or one that is unconscious.  Both would get the job done equally well, at least when they are

Biologist Joshua Lederberg says in Science magazine, "What's incontrovertible is that a religious impulse guides our motive in sustaining scientific inquiry." So says Dinesh D'Souza in What's Great about Christianity

"In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions."

http://www.templeton.org/evolution/Essays/Nowak.pdf

If our choices are predetermined by a preconscious process, as Sam Harris believes, then the experience of desire and will would be redundant, for our brain could direct our actions without engaging our conscious desire or will at all.  Their appearance would be an example of evolutionary inefficiency. Evolution is sometimes wasteful, or at least untidy, but often the forms that evolve are there precisely because they are adaptive.  Assuming that the acts of desiring and of willing are adaptive rather than superfluous, then it would seem that the desire and choice that we experience contribute something to our action that could not have been accomplished through preconscious processes.  That is, we  rather than some underlying mechanism do the choosing.  The objection proposed by Sam Harris and others to free will is thus undermined. One way to avoid the thrust of this counterargument is to say that the freedom that we seem to experience in choosing is illusory, but this illusion i

David K Johnson is a reductive materialist--as far as I can tell.  He has an interesting argument against freedom of the will: instead of arguing from the necessity of the laws of physics, he argues from the nature of truth.  It goes something like this:  Given that X has happened, then it it is true that X, then it cannot be false that X, then X is true necessarily, then the event described by X cannot be contingent, then if that event is an act of human choosing, then that human chose necessarily, then no human choice is contingent.  But such contingency is a necessary condition for freedom; hence no human choice is free.  I must be missing some of the subtleties that he would like introduced, but please excuse that for the moment, as I don't so much want to undermine the argument by looking at how its premises might fail to support its conclusion as much as I want to explore its implications. Important:  to pull this off he treats propositions as atemporal. If the combinatio

A speaker in an audiobook on geometry (I forget the title and author) mentioned that circles and spheres are boundless but not infinite.  Well, yes. And no.  For to think of the circle as boundless, one must imagine everlasting duration: one must think of what it would be like to go around and around and around again, etc. In this context, at least, boundlessness is a function of infinity. Geometry is not about the timeless: it's about what is (purportedly, seemingly, truly--take your pick) everlasting.

Imagining is to thinking as the drawing of line <--ab--> is to the infinite line that it represents.

Searle is an awesome philosopher, but he's highly allergic to God-talk as well as anything even suggesting immortality because of his reluctance to embrace anything that would at all seem dualistic. He loves to debunk reductionism, and has a lovely way of doing it (for example, the Chinese Room Argument).  But the one thing he hates to talk about is freedom.  Being true to his experience, he grants that it looks as though we are free. And having disemboweled and given the coup de gras to reductionism, he has none of the reductionists' reason for rejecting freedom.  So he claims that we are free, but is uneasy in doing so, for he has nothing to say about why we are free, or how we even could be free. Theists are not as uneasy with freedom as Searle is, for they can say that God exists, is free and wants us to be free so that we can freely relate to God.  For theists, the question "Why freedom?" has an answer, even though the question "How does freedom work?&qu

If it is, well, then I've got a problem. I just love the following passage from chapter one.  Excuse me, I meant Chapter One.  There I discuss how there are two ways to try to understand sensation: by making an analogy between it an sub-cognitive processes and by making an analogy between it and higher operations.  The latter captures something missing in the former.  More interestingly, the higher operation that Aquinas compares it to is judgment, which is closely related to speech acts.  That dovetails with a new thought I've had recently, based on what I've read in Thomas Reid (i.e., that Aristotelians are to be faulted for using naturalistic analogies to understand things like sensation), and that is: when seeking to describe the so called metaphysical aspects of cognition, operation, desire, and the like  we should prefer analogies taken from speech acts--like judgment. "We propose that Aquinas compares the way in which the common sense is related to the proper

Roger Scruton made an interesting point in Soul of the World that I'm recasting in terms of the contrast between the first-person/third-person   perspectives on reality. Referring to Robert Axelrod in  The Evolution of Cooperation , Scruton points out that the third-person definition of altruism given by Axelrod ("An organism acts altruistically if it acts in a way that benefits the other at a cost to itself") cannot serve to help us understand how one can be motivated to act altruistically.  In other words, it can't tell us what it's like for the one who acts altruistically to knowingly and deliberately act in that manner.  That sort of description must recognize that the first-person, teleological perspective tells us something that the quantitative, a-teleological, third-person perspective can't, so that one can't construct the former from the latter.

I'm kicking around some ideas about world view, paradigm, truth, belief, explanation, description and folk psychology.  I'll probably revise this a number of times... In the case of a scientific discovery or revolution, the new explanation uses analogies taken from the world as known prior to that revolution or discovery; hence the new paradigm necessarily assumes that there is something truthful about the previous understanding of the world: the analogies in the new paradigm are always parasitic (in a good way) upon the old. When a new opinion replaces an old one, it justifies this (or attempts to do so) by referring to beliefs previously and still held to be true. All scientific revolutions necessarily presuppose the truth of some part of the prescientific world view (aka "Lebenswelt").  To accept any one part of the prescientific world view, however, one must grant that human agency is what it seems to be: we must grant that we can perceive at least some thin

An argument that qualia are not private: The fact that we can't know what it's like to be a bat doesn't make what they experience private: it's just not open to us. After all, even in the human world, there are some things that are public to some but not to others. Another (goofy) way of making the same point:   if there were bat-like rational animals, I'm sure they'd have a lot to say about the "sonarous" qualities of this or that cave...

To argue that only a god or God could have engineered this or that life form is to argue about nature in mechanistic terms and thereby open the door to the possibility that future scientists will be able to do that sort of engineering some day -- for some day we may seem like gods (although we'll never seem like God).

I found a lovely quote from Wittgenstein's  Tractatus , quoted by Brendan Purcell in From Big Bang to Big Mystery : "It's not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.  We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life remain completely untouched... One keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations.  One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down."

Sean Carroll asks this question, the answer to which might be Matthew 11:25: "What you have hidden from the wise you have revealed to little children."

One cannot scientifically prove that the laws of nature necessitate anything, for one does not observe necessity.  But one can use philosophy to argue (unsuccessfully) that they do.  Or one can engage in a kind of isogesis, reading necessity into nature. That said, I must add that undermining claims regarding necessity in nature is not the same as showing that humans do in fact possess free will.  That's another discussion for another day... Meanwhile, Carroll's claim shows a certain teleology to human reasoning.  It seems that he's longing for a necessary being of some sort... (hmmmn).

Dennett begins Freedom Evolves by proposing Conway's game of life as a allegory for how what seems to us to be irreducible could be constructed from mechanical parts following the laws of nature.  He admits that his allegory presupposes a Democratean view of nature; or rather, he brags that his Democratean approach, being "sophisticated" (would that I had a dollar for every time he uses that word!), is able to yield interesting results. In order to problematize the Democratean approach to nature presupposed in Dennett's use of Conway's game of life, I am constructing the following thought experiment: Like CGL, this thought experiment is of a game that starts with a grid representing a definite arrangement of particles.  But whereas CGL allows the player to stipulate the rules for interaction (i.e., a kind of analog to laws of nature) which, when combined with one's knowledge of the initial positions yield a deduction of the arrangements at later phases, m

In one of his books (I think it was Intuition Pumps ) Daniel Dennett attempts to reply to Searle's Chinese Room Argument, saying that the man in the Chinese Room isn't really equivalent to a computer.  That is because a computer involves both higher-level language ("natural language"?) and lower level language (uh, I forget his name for this), whereas the man in the Chinese Room uses only the higher. Two responses come to mind that show the weakness of Dennett's reply. First of all, what if instead of making a Chinese Room with one operator, we constructed a large auditorium with many operators, each of whom was responsible for executing a part of the lower level language.  If you like, you can add operators executing the higher-level language as well. Wouldn't this Chinese Auditorium defeat Dennett's desperate objection to the Chines Room Argument?  That is, wouldn't the Chinese Auditorium serve as an effective counterexample to the claim that com