Strange Doctrines

Socratic Metaskepticism

All I know is that I know nothing. And I'm not even sure about that.

The Universal Apologetic

The fact that the existence of God may seem inconsistent with some arbitrarily well-established fact is only proof that God is more mysterious than we thought.

(This generalizes my comment here at Conscious Entities.)

Philosophy and the Meaning Of It All

Brian Leiter links to this editorial preface to a book review of Examined Lives.

The editors begin with a common bugbear: "These days, the question of how to live a meaningful life seems to have been banished from philosophy departments." Colin McGinn (quoted by Leiter) teases out the thought: "The general message [of the piece] was that philosophy used to be about the meaning of life (good) but now it's about the meaning of language (bad)."

There are a lot of good comments in the thread to Leiter's post in response to this supposed problem. David Velleman's methodological and historical points are very apt, for example. But Charlie Huenemann delivers the riposte I wish I'd thought of:

Physics used to be about understanding nature. But now, if you read the journals, it's just about a bunch of math.

The Unbearable Lightness of Talk About Being

Adam Frank offers up some standard-issue NOMAic tripe tropes about how in fact there is no tension between science and religion, in particular because religion actually has nothing to do with knowing. Good to know.

Anyway, he says, "Spirituality, at its best, points us away from easy codifications when it shows us how to immerse ourselves in the simple, inescapable act of being."

Well, if it's simple and inescapable, why would we need to be shown how? Why would we have to immerse ourselves?

I know, I know - these claims aren't about knowledge. They're about, well, they're about...

Wait - what are they about, exactly?

Null Jurification

"Coherence-based reasoning posits that the mind shuns cognitively complex and difficult decision tasks by reconstructing them into easy ones, yielding strong, confident conclusions."  Dan Simon, "A Third View of the Black Box: Cognitive Coherence in Legal Decision Making," 71 U. Chi. L. Rev. 511, 513 (2004); see also Bertrand Russell.

Against Narrativity (cont'd)

Q. Which stories end in the death of the protagonist?

A. The ones that try to subvert conventions of narrative.

What Is It Like to Be a Mouse?

Christine O'Donnell might just have the brains to bridge the phenomenological divide and tell us.

John Cottingham: Undergraduate Sophist

Shorter John Cottingham: Would that all atheists had the humility to realize that the only thing that can save all of humankind from its moral inventions are the religious doctrines I prefer to believe in.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Voting for the 2010 3QD Prize in Philosophy...

...is now open. A list of the nominees is here. Vote here.

If you were to vote for my submission (No. 23, "Getting Really 'Hard Nosed' about Real Realism"), that would be fine.

Note: Multiple voting is not kosher.

A $100 Bill Is Lying on the Sidewalk

Unbelievable. Well, okay, somewhat believable. In any case, a rather large market niche has opened up.

Nominations for the Annual 3QD Philosophy Prize...

...are now open. To spare you the effort of advocating on my behalf, I've generously nominated myself.

This Post Contains Six Errors

Ron Rosenbaum makes it clear by his third sentence here that he simply does not know anything about his chosen subject matter:

[Agnosticism] is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

I count three incorrect definitional statements and one false presupposition - four errors, in a mere 20 words. And all stated with a self-certitude that, given Rosenbaum's overarching thesis, should count as a fifth. Impressive.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

Kids Today

According to this New York Times piece, a meta-analysis by Sara Konrath purports to find that "college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than those of 30 years ago, with the numbers plunging primarily after 2000." This claim somewhat dovetails with previous studies that supposedly document "an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s."

Conceding the point that kids today are just awful people, I still think we really should try a little harder to see things from their point of view. (We're the ones with all the empathy, after all.)

Anyway, the article ends by noting the practical implications of this "rapid deterioration" (Bruce Perry, quoted in the article) in empathy: "Low empathy is associated with criminal behavior, violence, sexual offenses, aggression when drunk and other antisocial behaviors."

Thing is, after the late 1980s, the rate of violent crime began to decline.

Must be that lacking empathy takes all the fun out of being cruel.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Blessed Are the Pasta Makers

Skeptics of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are missing the point. Obviously, it isn't meant to be taken literally. It refers to any divinity in wheat products.

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.

Getting Really "Hard Nosed" about Real Realism

References are from "Galen Strawson: 5 Questions on Mind and Consciousness," in Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, Grim, P. (Ed.), Automatic Press/VIP (2009).

Galen Strawson makes the following argument:

Real materialism incorporates real realism about experience. It accepts that all mental goings on, including crucially all experiential goings on, are wholly physical goings on, but doesn't take it to follow, reductively, that there must somehow be less to experience than we thought.... Rather, it concludes that there must be more to matter than we thought.... (194-95)

Strawson makes it clear that when he speaks of there being "more to matter," he means that

any genuinely naturalistic, parsimonious, plausible and indeed 'hard-nosed' materialist position [must] take seriously the possibility that panpsychism or equivalently panexperientialism--the view that everything has mental or experiential being, whatever other being it has--may be true.... (197)

It's pretty obvious, though, that this argument doesn't work for your garden variety "real" phenomenon. Take the weather, which seems "real" enough:

Real materialism incorporates real realism about the weather. It accepts all meteorological phenomena, but it doesn't follow that there must be somehow less to weather than we thought. Rather, it follows that there must be more to matter than we thought. Any genuinely naturalistic materialist position must take seriously the possibility that panmeteorism may be true.

Clearly, that argument is a non sequitur, and a rather spectacular one. So why does the analogous argument for panspychism get a free pass?

A typical response would be to say that weather is clearly a physical phenomenon, whereas phenomenal consciousness isn't, so you can't compare the two. But that response simply denies Strawson's premise that consciousness is a "material" phenomenon. Besides which, even on its own terms, the response is worse than irrelevant: the fact that weather is a stipulatively material phenomenon makes it only that much more suitable than consciousness as a premise in an argument about the nature of the material world.

Of course, most people intuitively just feel like they can understand the multiple levels of physical explanation that bridge the fundamental objects of physics to the macro-level phenomena we call "weather," whereas they feel like there can be no way to build that bridge in the case of consciousness. I don't think that feeling is right. (For one thing, we probably don't even really understand the fundamental objects of physics themselves; and to the extent that we do "understand" them, we probably understand consciousness too.) But even if we assume the explanatory asymmetry is true, the move from this felt explanatory gap to the conclusion that matter must have a mental aspect is an utterly vacuous move of the sort famously lampooned by Molière centuries ago. Worse than illegitimate, it is by now just embarrassing.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

And Now It's All This

Bob Somersby gives Christopher Edley a razzing:

Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” [] According to Edley, rubes like us should want our “betters” in important posts, like the post in which Kagan will serve:

EDLE: The tension between elitism and populism is embedded in our national DNA because America rejected the model of a monarch ruling by divine right in favor of an iffy experiment in democratic self-governance. So now you are responsible for choosing your leader. Do you want someone like you or someone better than you?

What an astonishing framework! But so it goes when people like Edley spends decades inside institutions like Harvard, convincing themselves that they and their peers are “better” than all the rest of us rubes.

Not fair. What Edley meant, of course, was merely to ask whether in choosing your leader you would want someone better than Yoo.

(Via Angry Bear.)

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.

Consolation of the Imperilled

The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refugium. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and we recover from it, and calm ourselves down, with our way of life.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 154.