The Human Question

Our answer to this question is a function of how we understand laws of nature. If we see them as descriptions of forces at work--that is, as things forcing each other to behave a certain way, then we imagine that consciousness or biology would add another force to the mix, one that works against the other forces. If we see laws of nature as descriptions of what things naturally try to do or as attractions, then the "trying to" or "seeking" that pertains to biology, animality or rationality does NOT countervail the lower level but rather gives it a super-directedness.  Think here of how an architect doesn't direct the bricklayer by applying force against the bricklayer's efforts (at least not on a good day).  Instead, the architect gets the bricklayer to direct his or her efforts toward a goal that is not just bricklaying, but housebuilding. A helpful contrast here is between the Euclidian and non-Euclidian conceptions of parallel lines.  One looks at t...

To call the problem of the unity of consciousness the “bundling problem” is misleading: it gives the impression that that what we sometimes call "consciousness" is a cluster of ideas or thoughts that have mysteriously been yoked together.  A better metaphor would be the “electromagnetic problem”: that is, the problem of how what from the outside appears to be two very different things is really both at once, always inseparable yet always distinct from each other? What is true of electricity and magnetism is true in many ways of consciousness, e.g., of desire and cognition.

One who measures with instruments and explains with metaphors.

The laws of nature are just teleology's way of acting anonymously.

Before one can talk clearly about moral relativism, one must first address relativism at a more general level, a level that includes statements that have nothing to do with practical or moral matters.  Suppose you are talking to a man about whether the sun is a gaseous star possessing a gravitational pull on the earth that keeps our planet in orbit around it.  He denies that this is true.  You cannot tell whether he is sincere or just being silly, and you don't know how to argue scientifically about matters that we tend take for granted as true.  You simply object, therefore, that science seems to show that he is wrong in his denial.  He replies, "That is true for you, but not for me." You may not at this moment have the resources to be able to present a cogent (convincing) argument about the sun and gravity, but you can point out that his last comment is incoherent.  By "incoherent" I mean that, regardless of what one thinks of astronomy, that last sente...

Aristotle says that friendship involves a kind of equality between the friends.  I propose that our talk of equality in other contexts, such as ethics or politics, must, in order not to be vacuous, have its roots in the experience of friendship.

A humorist is one who enables us to take delight in our limitations, and to share that delight with others through laughter.

The Fifth Way of arguing for the existence of God, according to Thomas Aquinas, is taken from the fact that non-cognizant things act for a purpose.  He believes that this shows that an intelligent being is directing things now to a goal.  This argument is not an intelligent design argument inasmuch as it does not argue from the present existence of purposive activity in a thing to a previous event in which the thing so acting was engineered to act in that manner.  Rather, Aquinas argues that the fact that a thing acts now to attain a goal implies that it is now being directed by an intelligent being toward that goal. To a contemporary reductionist, this argument must seem quaintly mistaken, for what passes as purposive activity is really a mechanical process.  The sunflower's turning toward the sun is the result of the flower's components acting essentially like levers in a machine.  The same is true for all other things, both living and non-living. One...

The reason why human experience is inherently theory laden is because of the infinitizing tendency of our cogitations about things.  We tend to extrapolate beyond not only my experience up till now and my expected future experience, but our future possible experience (after all, we think together via language), and beyond even that to what would be thought about the matter by one or many rational beings capable of knowing reality in all of its factors.  When we seek the truth of the matter, we are  chasing after God's thoughts.

In Plato's  Euthyphro , Socrates poses the following question to a young man of the same name, who is heading to the courthouse in order to indict his own father: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?  If the former alternative is correct, then the study of philosophy is more worthwhile than learning stories about the gods. If the latter, then it is appropriate to study the stories of the gods in order to learn how to act so as to win their approval. Euthyphro believes that the latter is correct, but the way he withers under Socrates' questions suggests that the that the gods are not our guide: if we want to understand piety, we are wise to study philosophy rather than be concerned about whether it is approved of by the gods. If we turn our attention from ancient Greece to the monotheistic cultures of the Abrahamic faiths, we can ask a similar question, but this time keeping in mind that God, as understood in mono...

Suppose you already have a graduate degree but need to take a continuing education course or two.  So you decide to go out of town to do this so that you can both tourist and student at the same time.  You need to rent an apartment for the summer, so you contact the university to see if any year-round students are going to sublet their flats.  This inquiry results in your getting the phone number of Brenda, who is offering her place for rent.  Before you sign, however, you need to know if, in the event of a plumbing emergency, the pipes/sink/toilet/whathaveyou will be fixed gratis under the contract.  You call Brenda, who tells you that, as she is a student, she too is renting it, but she can give you the number of Carlos, from whom she is renting the place.  So you call Carlos and ask him about his plumbing policy.  He says that there have been no problems so far with the pipes, but he can't guarantee that they would be fixed at all, as he is subletti...

 In any account of nature offered by physics, there is always something that is basic or primitive, something that explains but is not itself explained.  And that "primitive" is better described as an attraction than a force.

"...[O]n his deathbed Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous atheist French philosopher, confessed that 'I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.'" http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2017/03/03/jean-paul-sartres-confession-of-belief-and-other-surprises-in-a-fine-new-book/

If our identity with other members as members of the same group is a function of our sharing desires together, then there is always the danger that we will find it impossible to identify at all with those whose goals seem to differ from ours entirely.  If they seem to differ from in their desires, then why not treat them as either threatening or useful to our attainment of goals that we share in common with each other but not with them, but not as possible friends, compatriots or cosmopolitans. Without common desire, there is no common life, and without a common life, there is no justice. There is only one basis that guarantees that we can truly identify with others, regardless of how very different their world may be from ours (think of science fantasy scenarios): that is a regard for the other as not only desiring specific goods that differ from yours, but as having a more basic desire for what cannot be specified to being of "this kind" rather than "that kind" ...

...and looks at those who are as being afraid of dying. Perhaps eternity is scary... like the ocean... to those who are comfortable on the land.  Do we look down on those who long to sail as cowards?

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. ...

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 t...