Strange Doctrines

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.)

Save It

Nate Silver beautifully disposes of Greg Mankiw's takedown manqué of Sotomayor in a single headline: "Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offended by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination?"

And besides, how easily Mankiw forgets -- if we save, the terrorists will win.

(Via Jonathan Zasloff.)

Spinning Sotomayor Sotto Voce

Kieran Healy's got it.

Lies, Placebos and Prayer: Bad Medicine as "Good" News

An NPR story on the medical effects of prayer has elicited an interesting colloquy among bloggers of the Reality Based Community. Michael O'Hare (from whose post you can link back to the others) makes what for me is the key point:

Prayer for diabetic shock may occasionally have effected a cure. But therapy directed physically at blood sugar levels is a much better bet, almost infinitely better, to the point that not dialing 911 for a comatose child is properly dealt with by the courts as involuntary manslaughter, especially after several hours of prayer not doing the job and the child getting worse.

There's an ocean of difference between a delicate, hard-to-observe, ephemeral effect that might lead to real scientific advance but will probably come to nothing, and treatments and practices that can be shown again and again to have big useful effects. It's cruel to describe the former in a news context so that it might be confused with the latter.

He also makes (in the same post) a nice point about the use and misuse of lies for life:

[P]lacebos of all types raise a perplexing issue for the health system that I have never seen examined. We can't just put them aside, because they do work sometimes, and sometimes when we have nothing else to offer. But they only work to the extent that we lie about them; a hospital that uses placebo treatment whenever it might help should have a sign over the door saying "placebo treatments are never used in this facility" and the health authorities must conspire never to uncover the scandal of this coverup.

But doing this as policy is an intermediate Russian doll; every context outside it has to maintain the same lie; one can easily imagine this leading to a tangled mess of unaccountable mendacity "for our own good" that ensnares an army, for example, to lie about Pat Tillman. If it's OK for us to believe wrong things to maintain certain medical efficacy, is it OK for us to believe wrong things to maintain military effectiveness?

I'd just note that the argument applies beyond the narrow context of social policy. While "[t]he falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment," chances are still high that upon any invitation to believe a falsehood, we should want to decline, because any method you want to cook up for incorporating "healthy" fictions into our lives threatens to degenerate into incontinent, debilitating forms of dishonesty.

Which Way Intentionality?

Does intentionality depend on mind, or mind on intentionality? Those interested in the question might check out our comment thread under Concrete Thoughts, starting at Charlie Huenemann's question here.

A somewhat similar question -- does metabolism depend on "life" (i.e., living cells or protocells), or life on metabolism? -- is addressed here (via 3 Quarks Daily). The action starts here (page 3):

In our version of Metabolism First, the earliest steps toward life required neither DNA nor RNA, and may not even have involved spatial compartments like cells; the earliest reactions could have occurred in the voids of porous rock, perhaps filled with organic gels deposited as suggested in the Oparin-Haldane model. We believe this early version of metabolism consisted of a series of simple chemical reactions running without the aid of complex enzymes, via the catalytic action of networks of small molecules, perhaps aided by naturally occurring minerals. If the network generated its own constituents—if it was recursive—it could serve as the core of a self-amplifying chemical system subject to selection. We propose that such a system arose and that much of that early core remains as the universal part of modern biochemistry, the reaction sequences shared by all living beings. Further elaborations would have been added to it as cells formed and came under RNA control, and as organisms specialized as participants in more complex ecosystems.

Obama Administration Greeted as Liberators

Just now on CNN's news ticker:

'Liberating feeling' to be out of office, says Bush.

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 War On a Rock

When an idiot quotes a dolt,* what you get is rank inanity:

As a friend succinctly puts it, "'When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?" I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top.

On the upside, you also get ripostes like Robert Reed's. And balance is restored to the universe.

*Though to be fair, at least Peter Kirsanow gives proper attribution.

(Via Robert Waldmann.)

Fancy Footwork

Hurry, while supplies last.

(Via Not Hired <-- Lumber Room <-- Cliché Reality.)

Bad for the Jews

Ilya Somin points us to poll results that suggest that 18.4 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of Democrats blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis.

It goes without saying that if the poll results are reliable, they are disgraceful for the Democratic Party, the party of "tolerance." (I shudder to think what the result would have been had they been asked about how much they blamed "the Negro.") But I guess I should also note that this evidence is a clear rebuff to my argument a few years back, contra Pejman Yousefzadeh, and in defense of Noam Chomsky, that there is a meaningful "a sense in which it is perfectly reasonable to say that anti-Semitism 'scarcely exists anymore.'" Not on these data there isn't.

UPDATE: The authors of the survey research have an interesting response to some of the reactions to their piece, hosted by John Holbo at Crooked Timber.

Tweet It!*

Henkjan Honing has an interesting post on recent studies inquiring into the beat-inductive capacities of a certain youtubed cockatoo, along with 25 other parrots. Here's the (famous-on-the-internets) cockatoo footage:

Henkjan is moderately skeptical that this is bona fide, innate beat induction, suspecting instead "learned behavior and a mimicking phenomenon." I'm not sure where I stand on that issue. What I do think, though, is that learning to keep a beat this well based on visual mimicking is almost as remarkable as the "real" thing. (I'm pretty sure I've had one or two guitar students who couldn't have done it as well as this bird.)

*Alternate post title: "The Birds and the Beats." Just didn't want it to go to waste.

Helter Skelter

Jesse Ventura, on waterboarding:

[G]ive me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

I always knew it was Dick Cheney.

Jocko Killed Marti

Via Doug Berman, a Third Circuit case here (pdf) involves a defendant who based an insanity defense on  dissociative identity disorder. According to a forensic psychiatrist who testified,

[Defendant] Hammer had four alter personalities: 1) Jocko, a violent male; 2) Tammy, a female; 3) Wilbur, a child; and 4) Jasper, a chimpanzee.  He contended that Jocko killed Marti.

Doug poses what might initially seem like a Kripkean riddle: "[H]ow exactly could the forensic psychiatrist know that the 'Jasper' alter personality was a chimp and not, say, a gorilla or a baboon?"

But of course anyone who's ever actually hung out with chimps, gorillas and baboons wouldn't ask such silly questions.

Anyway, I strongly suggest any rock bands trying to come up with a name adopt "Jocko Killed Marti." You'll be huge.

Menage à Squab

Speaking of tweets, there were three pigeons trying to mate outside the window, just now.

It didn't work out.

The Great Entwittment

I am on Twitter.

The difference between me and Levenson is that my tweets could quite easily wind up constituting the greater part of my output.

Updated Concrete Thoughts

Mark Kleiman and I continue the conversation here.

Strange Fruit

I've paid scant attention to substantive changes in the law since I graduated from law school in 2002. But now that I'm in the thick of actual legal practice, I'm learning all kinds of new, interesting stuff.

Concrete Thoughts

(Substantive update ["UPDATE II"] below the fold.)

Mark Kleiman contends that

the question of how the mechanics of neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters produces the subjective experience of consciousness [is] not a question that can be answered by the analysis of matter-in-motion, because consciousness and its operations, such as knowing and intending, inescapably involve immaterial entities and relations.

This begs the question, because of course if naturalism is correct, then knowing and intending inescapably involve entities that are material through and through. So I think the correct thing to say, the most that we can say, is that mental properties and attitudes pose an explanatory problem that is as perplexing now as the problem of gravitational "action at a distance" was in Newton's time (and, let's admit it, in some ways probably still is). This mysterium fascinas might invite the illicit, Berkeleyan temptation, but given the continued success we've enjoyed on the naturalist assumptions of science, it seems pretty clear that physicalism is a better induction.

And while I appreciate Mark's point (not quoted above) about the tendency toward tone-deafness about "spiritual" questions among some atheists (though admittedly not among those he names), it's important to see that we can motivate those questions even on the physicalist picture, namely, by pointing out that even if we could translate all our experience into nature (and vice versa), we still couldn't grok what it means to be a conscious physical system (even though we necessarily know "what it's like"). After all, there's no reason a priori to think that once endowed with an ideally complete physics we could convert all the true propositions about the microstructure of a brain in the thrall of some experience or another into isomorphic phenomenal content in our own. That would be a bit like having a complete physical description of a typical desktop running Linux and a complete understanding of the relevant programming languages at all levels of hierarchy, and thinking that based on that you could make iTunes play Le Sacre du Printemps by typing MIPS instructions into Word. (Or something like that.)

Anyway, as with most any post by Mark Kleiman, you should read the whole thing.

UPDATE: John Holbo posts on a related matter.

Life Blogging

Starting a temporary (10 weeks) lawyering stint today. I'll enjoy the work, but will rue the counterblogging effects of full-time employment. There are worse problems to be faced with, I guess.