The Human Question

"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 wel...

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...

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 illus...

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 atemp...

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 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?...

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 t...

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...