Strange Doctrines

Petroleum Antinomy

To make up for all the oil lost in the Gulf, I'm trying to use fewer water bottles.

On the other hand, material from those bottles would come in really handy should there be a need for Operation Junk Shot II.

So maybe I should use more water bottles.

4'33'' - the Blog Post

Theogony

In the beginning, there were no meanings.

And then Man said, “Let there be Meaning!”

And on that day, God was born.

Simple Probabilities

David B. Hart muses about a new book featuring fifty essays the "new" atheists. His credulity, so robust when it comes to matters of the Spirit World, has apparently met its match in the Bad Writing of Smug Humanists:

Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God.

But why should that be, when no one believes in God based on arguments?

Anyway, reading Hart's piece, which is (simple probability being what it is) only mostly horrible, [1] was at least worth it qua set up for the withering riposte waged by Ars Artia in the first comment:

Any comment I could make about the content of this essay would necessarily be banal (one does not want to join the ranks of Daniel Dennett, et al). I can only acknowledge that the intellectual and spiritual power of David Hart steadies one's spine, so to speak, for the terrible things that already exist and may lie ahead. This essay provides hope. There are still men of faith, courage, and good will on earth. Can they prevail?

NOTES

1. In fairness, I found his enthymematic riffing amusing, even edifying. One must take the sweet with the bitter.

The Roundup

In my capacity as Blogger at the Federal Public Defender, I've taken to doing a "TGIF Roundup" series on Fridays (as you will have guessed from the series title). My brief for the series is to enable members of the federal indigent criminal defense bar in our district to get plugged into the Juristischerzeitgeist of the past week in under 60 seconds. (And maybe get a laugh or two.)

The blog is currently designed mostly for internal use, so there are no bloggy accoutrements like RSS, tags, comments, trackbacks or the like. Still, I thought some readers might be curious, and legal readers might even find it useful, so a link to today's Roundup post is here. An item for the nonlegal readers:

Kind Only to Be Cruel. The AP reports that condemned Ohio inmate Lawrence Reynolds took an overdose of medication in an apparent suicide attempt just hours before his execution, which had been scheduled for Tuesday. Authorities say that Reynolds is recuperating in a Youngstown hospital and should be well enough by next week to be put to death.

Personal Confessions

Eric Schwitzgebel makes out a problem with Kant as a problem for philosophy:

Kant's philosophical moral reasoning appears mainly to have confirmed his prejudices and the ideas inherited from his culture. Therefore, we should be nervous about expecting more from the philosophical moral reasoning of people less philosophically capable than Kant.

Health Insurance and Health Care Denialism

I haven't had time to get up to snuff on the studies (or actually I guess it's just "study") Megan McArdle and others cite in support of the notion that health insurance has no discernible effect on mortality. But there are heuristics one can use to evaluate their claims.

Spare the Rod

...and pour the water instead. Such has long been my counsel.

And I am most gratified to learn that, at last, a forward-looking head of household appears to have taken heed of my call.

Let it not be gainsaid: one can make a difference.

Thoughts on the Rose Parade

Why? Why?

Happy New Year? Sure, Why Not.

I was going to abjure a "happy" New Year (per my usual), and instead recommend a thoughtful one.

But the coda to Tony Judt's reflection on life with advanced stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) has given me, well, second thoughts:

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

What's the Connection?

Jonathan Benthall reviews five new books* that "reflect the withering away of the 'secularization thesis' that prevailed in sociology thirty years ago." It's a good review, and it made me think about the common trope that religion is uniquely concerned with achieving a sense of connectedness with something greater or other than oneself.

That First Step's a Doocy

Shorter Steve Doocy: One mustn't be rude to the brownshirts.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Nihilistic Wisdom

[T]he first perfect nihilist . . . has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.

I am frequently gripped by the cosmic unimportance of my life. Most people would assume this sort of preoccupation necessarily precipitates an existential crisis. But at least in my experience, no particular kind of attitude seems to follow. I might be foundering in anguished catatonia; or soaring in exhilarated engagement, bounding from wonder into wonder. In fact, sometimes the very knowledge of this profound insignificance itself seems oddly exhilarating. (I'm weird that way.) The point is, if nothing matters, the the fact that nothing matters doesn't matter. So you might as well seize the day.

This is why the standard reaction to nihilism - that nihilism would leave anyone without any reason to do anything - is so deeply misbegotten. Why would anyone need an external inducement to engage in satisfying, fulfilling activity? Once posed, the question can be seen immediately as absurd. It reminds me of the perverse notion (often attributed to Dostoevsky) that without God everything is permitted. If it is only the threat of eternal torment in the Lake of Fire that keeps you continent in your impulses to crude, thuggish violence and debauchery, your problem probably isn't so much the absence of divine punishment as it is an absence of a decent-sized prefrontal cortex. Much the same goes with the relationship between reasons and self-realizing activity - if you find yourself unable to get excited about doing cool stuff, reasons aren't going to help; what you need is therapy.

The best way to overcome nihilism is to accept it. And leave it behind, outside yourself.

UPDATE: Aaron Weingott dissents.

Original Meaning

I tunnel and scan in and out of statutes and precedents, dislodging bits of semantics and syntax and propelling them against other particles extracted from other statutes and precedents, and, instead of finding clarity in the results, I find more anomalies. Reasons for further experiment? or evidence of a leaky apparatus? Either way, the deeper I go, the less things stay still. I test each new harmony, but like a piano chord struck with the sustain pedal depressed, if you wait, and listen, you can hear what begins as seeming euphony dissolve into thick streams of harmonics and shifting, sympathetic dissonances, turbulent jets of interference, eddies of minor stability, a brief, vaporous hiss, then - silence.

Sad Effects

Sam Munson says a dumb thing:

Given his fundamentally anti-philosophical positioning, and his hard, ironic voice, as well as his unorthodox political views, Cioran has come in for a great deal of comparison to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a latter-day representative of corrosive, fearless scepticism. It’s hard to dispute such claims, but they have the sad effect of dating Cioran. In philosophy, the sceptical nihilists have lost. This is to say nothing of that fact that his concern with artful writing by itself places him well outside the scope of our professional philosophers, or that right-thinkers consider Cioran anathema for the fascistic undercurrents in his thought (although this seems both intellectually useless and hypocritical in light of the large number of Stalinists who have managed to pass unhindered into the European canon).

Nietzsche, a dated, skeptical nihilist? An exemplar of garden variety "professional philosophy"? Who knew?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

What It's Like to be a Bot

In his 2009 Tillich Lecture at Harvard, physician, inventor, and theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman laments

that since the Age of Enlightenment, science has been increasingly captive to reductionism. That’s the notion that physical laws alone determine the course of the universe, that everything is describable, and that somewhere there exists a single language capable of describing it all.

Most radically, reductionism is the idea that the only reality of the universe is the reality of particles in motion — “a vast computer system,” Kauffman said, capable of reducing every action we take and every emotion we feel and every idea we have to quantum events at the level of atoms and electrons.

He drew a word picture of two lovers strolling by a river. A machine of atoms and electrons at work? “I don’t think so,” said Kauffman.

Well, I do. And I just can't detect any contradiction between that fact and the fact that "reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our live," or that "intuition, imagination, stories, and metaphor" are for us ineliminable "ways of knowing the world." Reducible or not, our experienced lives unfold the very same way.

(Via Butterflies and Wheels.)

The Use and Abuse of Mendacity for Life

Kurt Vonnegut:

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

If That's an Answer, What Was the Question?

From the moral idiots at Answers in Genesis:

I can't think of a starker proof of Nietzsche's dictum: "The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly."

(Via Will Wilkinson, via Andrew Sullivan.)

Looking Away

Some days I find it impossible to affirm life. And it makes me feel guilty.

Caption Needs Artist

A man suddenly finds himself in an impossibly comfortable chair in a quiet home tucked in a Pearly-gated community nestled atop a shining hill of Elysian cumulus. He realizes he has died and gone to Heaven.

Gathering his bearings, and now somehow looking over the entirety of his life, he muses:

Well, what the Hell was that all about?