Maverick Philosopher

Could I Support a Muslim for President?

It would depend on the Muslim.

Consider first a parallel question: Could I support a Christian for president?  Yes, other things being equal, but not if he or she is a theocrat.  Why not?  Because theocracy is incompatible with the principles, values, and founding documents of the United States of America.

Similarly, I could easily support a Muslim such as Zuhdi Jasser for president (were he to run) because he is not a theocrat or a supporter of Sharia. To be precise: Jasser's being a Muslim would not count for me as a reason not to support him, even though I might have other reasons not to support him, for example, unelectability.  

When Dr. Ben Carson said he could not support a Muslim for president what he meant was that he could not support a Muslim who advocated Sharia.  That was clear to the charitable among us right from the outset.  But he later clarified his remarks so that even the uncharitable could not fail to understand him.

Some dismissed this clarification as 'backtracking.'  To 'backtrack,' however, is to say something different from what one originally said.  Carson did not 'backtrack'; he clarified his original meaning.

Nevertheless, CAIR has absurdly demanded that Carson withdraw from the presidential race.

Is there anything here for reasonable people to discuss?  No.  Then why is this story still in the news?  Because as a nation we are losing our collective mind.

It's like Ferguson.  What's to discuss?  Nothing.  We know the facts of the case.  Michael Brown was not gunned down by a racist cop seeking to commit murder under the cover of law.  Brown brought about his own demise.  On the night of his death he stole from a convenience store, assaulted the proprietor, refused to obey a legitimate command from police officer Darren Wilson, but instead tried to wrest the officer's weapon from him.  He acted immorally, illegally, and very imprudently.  He alone is responsible for his death.

So there is nothing here for reasonable and morally decent people to discuss.  But we are forced to discuss it because of the lies told about Ferguson by the Left.  The truth does not matter to leftists; what matters is the 'empowering' narrative.  A narrative is a story, and a story needn't be true to be a good story, an 'empowering' story, a  story useful for the promotion of the Left's destructive agenda.

Another pseudo-issue  that deserves no discussion except to combat the lies and distortions of the Left:  photo ID at polling places.

Exercise for the reader: find more examples.   

Sloppy Liberal Thinking About Equality

Equality of opportunity is one thing, equality of outcome quite another.  The former is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the latter.  Yet many liberals think that any lack of equality of outcome for a given group argues an antecedent lack of equality of opportunity for that group.  This is a non sequitur of the following form:

P is necessary for Q

Ergo

~Q is sufficient for ~P.

This is an invalid argument form since it is easy to find substitutions for ‘P’ and ‘Q’ that make the premise true and the conclusion false.  For example, being a citizen is necessary to be eligible to vote; ergo, not being eligible to vote is sufficient to show that one is not a citizen.  The conclusion is false, since there might be some other factor that disqualifies one from voting such as being a felon, or being under age.  Similarly, an unequal outcome is not sufficient to show discrimination or unequal opportunity for the simple reason that there might be some other factor that explains the unequal outcome, such as a lack of competitiveness, an inability to defer gratification, or a lack of ability.

Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Reader K. G. writes,

I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the percipient, rather than upon his mind.” [. . .] On the contrary, I propose that any tenable definition of qualia must construe them as mental items, i.e. items whose esse is their percipi. [. . .]

 

What are your thoughts on this argument?

 

I think you are confusing qualia with sense data.  I grant you that qualia are mental items, and that they cannot exist apart from minds.  But sense data are not qualia.  First of all, Russell does not use 'quale' (singular) or 'qualia' (plural) in the two essays you mention.  But he does tell us what he means by 'sense data':  ". . . I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects or sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter." (10th ed., 128)

 

Suppose I am staring at a blue coffee cup.  The particular blue that I visually sense, precisely as I sense it, is a sense datum: it is the direct or  immediate object of my visual sensing.  It is distinct from the sensing. The sensing is something I undergo or experience or live through; it is part of my mental life.  As such it is mental in nature.  The sense datum, however, is not mental.  It is not an episode of experiencing or part of an episode of experiencing; it is the direct object of  an experiencing.  For Russell, the blue sense datum is not only not mental; it is physical: it is a proper part of the coffee cup.  I read Russell in these essays as a bundle theorist: physical objects are bundles of sense data both synchronically and diachronically.

 

Note also that while a blue sense datum is blue, a sensing of a blue sense datum is not blue.  (An adverbialist who speaks of sensing-blue-ly gives up the act-object schema that Russell presupposes.) 

 

Sense data, then, are objects of sensings.  For Russell, they are extra-mental and indeed physical.  Qualia, however, are the phenomenal characters of experiencings.  For example, the felt quality, the what-it-is-like, of a twinge of pain, precisely as it is felt.  Or the smell of burnt garlic.  Or the taste of licorice. 

 

There are many tricky questions here.  Suppose I am given a piece of black, semi-soft candy and asked  what it is.  I put it in my mouth to find out.  I discover that it is a piece of licorice.  I seem to have discovered something objective about a physical object, namely, that this bit of candy is licorice.  This would suggest that the object of my gustatory sensing is extra-mental and indeed physical.  Or should we say merely that I had a gustatory experience with a certain phenomenal character and that the characteristic taste of the thing I put in my mouth is wholly mental in nature?

 

Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

Here (emphasis added):

According to "The Black Book of Communism," between 1959 and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 (out of about 10 million) Cubans spent time in the island's gulag. Between 15,000 and 19,000 were shot. One of the first was a young boy in Che Guevara's unit who had stolen a little food. As for quality of life, it has declined compared with its neighbors. In 1958, Cuba had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Today, as the liberal New Republic describes it:

"The buildings in Havana are literally crumbling, many of them held upright by two-by-fours. Even the cleanest bathrooms are fetid, as if the country's infrastructural bowels might collectively evacuate at any minute.

"Poverty in Cuba is severe in terms of access to physical commodities, especially in rural areas. Farmers struggle, and many women depend on prostitution to make a living. Citizens have few material possessions and lead simpler lives with few luxuries and far more limited political freedom."

This left-leaning pope (who failed to stand up for the Cuban dissidents who were arrested when attempting to attend a mass he was conducting) and our left-leaning president have attributed Cuba's total failure to the U.S.

It's critically important to care about the poor -- but if those who claim to care for the poor and the oppressed stand with the oppressors, what are we to conclude?

Much is made of Pope Francis' Argentine origins -- the fact that the only kind of capitalism he's experienced is of the crony variety. Maybe. But Pope Francis is a man of the world, and the whole world still struggles to shake off a delusion -- namely, that leftists who preach redistribution can help the poor.

Has this pope or Obama taken a moment to see what Hugo Chavez's socialist/populist Venezuela has become? Chavez and his successor (like Castro, like Lenin, like Mao) promised huge redistribution from the rich to the poor. There have indeed been new programs for the poor, but the economy has been destroyed. The leader of the opposition was just thrown in jail. Meanwhile, the shops have run out of flour, oil, toilet paper and other basics.

If you want moral credit for caring about the poor, when, oh when, do you ever have to take responsibility for what happens to the poor when leftists take over?

We know what actually lifts people out of poverty: property rights, the rule of law, free markets. Not only do those things deliver the fundamentals that people need to keep body and soul together, but they accomplish this feat without a single arrest, persecution or show trial.

Catholic Doctrine on Capital Punishment

It is generally not understood. Catholic doctrine allows capital punishment.   Here according to Avery Cardinal Dulles is the gist of it:

The doctrine remains what it has been: that the State, in principle, has the right to impose the death penalty on persons convicted of very serious crimes. 

[. . .]

1) The purpose of punishment in secular courts is fourfold: the rehabilitation of the criminal, the protection of society from the criminal, the deterrence of other potential criminals, and retributive justice.

2) Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness, which is reprehensible.

3) Punishment may and should be administered with respect and love for the person punished.

4) The person who does evil may deserve death. According to the biblical accounts, God sometimes administers the penalty himself and sometimes directs others to do so.

5) Individuals and private groups may not take it upon themselves to inflict death as a penalty.

6) The State has the right, in principle, to inflict capital punishment in cases where there is no doubt about the gravity of the offense and the guilt of the accused.

7) The death penalty should not be imposed if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment.

8) The sentence of death may be improper if it has serious negative effects on society, such as miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life.

9) Persons who specially represent the Church, such as clergy and religious, in view of their specific vocation, should abstain from pronouncing or executing the sentence of death.

10) Catholics, in seeking to form their judgment as to whether the death penalty is to be supported as a general policy, or in a given situation, should be attentive to the guidance of the pope and the bishops. Current Catholic teaching should be understood, as I have sought to understand it, in continuity with Scripture and tradition.

The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism

Peter Lupu called me last night to report that it had occurred to him that the famous Euthyphro Dilemma, first bruited in the eponymous early Platonic dialog, reflects a difference between two conceptions of God. One is the God-as-Being-itself conception; the other is the God-as-supreme-being conception.  After he hung up, I recalled that in June, 2009 I had written a substantial entry on the Euthyphro Problem.  I reproduce it here with some edits and additions  in the expectation that it will help Peter think the matter through.  I look forward to his comments.  The ComBox is open.

 

The Euthyphro Problem

 

The locus classicus is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them? 

But leaving piety and its definition aside, let us grapple with the deepest underlying issue as it affects the foundations of morality. As I see it, the Euthyphro problem assumes its full trenchancy and interest in the following generalized form of an aporetic dyad:

1. The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands.

2. The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it.

It is clear that these propositions are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. What's more, they are contradictories: each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb of the dyad is quite reasonably accepted, or so I shall argue. Thus the problem is an aporia:  a set of propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.  Specifically, the problem is an antinomy:  the limbs are logical contradictories and yet each limb make a strong claim on our acceptance.

Ad (1). The obligatory comprises what one ought to do, what one must, morally speaking, do.  Now one might think that (1) is obviously false. If I am obliged to do X or refrain from doing Y, then one might think that the obligatoriness would be independent of any command, and thus independent of any person or group of persons who issues a command. The obligatory might be commanded, but being commanded is not what makes it obligatory on this way of thinking; it is rightly commanded because it is obligatory, rather than obligatory because it is commanded. And if one acts in accordance with a command to do something obligatory the obligatoriness of which does not derive from its being commanded, then, strictly speaking, one has not obeyed the command. To obey a command to do X is to do X because one is so commanded; to act in accordance with a command need not be to obey it.  So if I obey a divine command to do X, I do X precisely and only because God has commanded it, and not because I discern X to be in itself obligatory, or both in itself obligatory and commanded by God.

There is a difference between obeying a command and acting in accordance with one.  One can do the latter without doing the former, but not vice versa.  Or if you insist, 'obey' is ambiguous: it has a strict and a loose sense. I propose using the term in the strict sense. Accordingly, I have not obeyed a command simply because I have acted in accordance with it; I have obeyed it only if I have so acted because it was commanded.

Consider an example. If one is obliged to feed one's children, if this is what one ought to do, there is a strong tendency to say that one ought to do it whether anyone or anything (God, the law, the state) commands it, and regardless of any consequences that might accrue if one were to fail to do it. One ought to do it because it is the right thing to do, the morally obligatory thing to do, something one (morally) must do. Thinking along these lines, one supposes that the oughtness or obligatoriness of what we are obliged to do as it were 'hangs in the air' unsupported by a conscious being such as God or some non-divine commander. Or to change the metaphor, the obligatory is 'laid up in Plato's heaven.' William James, however, reckons this a superstition:

 

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true "in themselves," is therefore either an out‑and‑out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in The Will to Believe, p. 194.

 

James' point is that there is no abstract moral 'nature of things' existing independently of conscious beings. Thus the obligatoriness of an action we deem obligatory is not a property it has intrinsically apart from any relation to a subject who has desires and makes demands. The obligatoriness of an act must be traced back to the "de facto constitution of some existing consciousness."

Building on James' point, one could argue persuasively that if there is anything objectively obligatory, obligatory for all moral agents, then obligatoriness must be derivable from the will of an existing consciousness possessing the power to enforce its commands with respect to all who are commanded. A theist will naturally identify this existing consciousness with God.

Ad (2). In contradiction to the foregoing, however, it seems that (2) is true. To derive the obligatoriness of acts we deem obligatory from the actual commands of some de facto existing consciousness involves deriving the normative from the non-normative — and this seems clearly to be a mistake. If X commands Y, that is just a fact; how can X's commanding Y establish that Y ought to be done? Suppose I command you to do something. (Suppose further that you have not entered into a prior agreement with me to do as I say.) How can the mere fact of my issuing a command induce in you any obligation to act as commanded? Of course, I may threaten you with dire consequences if you fail to do as I say. If you then act in accordance with my command, you have simply submitted to my will in order to avoid the dire consequences — and not because you have perceived any obligation to act as commanded.

The Problem Applied to Islam

Now it seems clear that there is nothing meritorious in mere obedience, in mere submission to the will of another, even if the Other is the omnipotent lord of the universe. Surely, the mere fact that the most powerful person in existence commands me to do something does not morally oblige me to do it. Not even unlimited Might makes Right. It is no different from the situation in which a totalitarian state such as the Evil Empire of recent memory commands one to do something. Surely Uncle Joe's command to do X on pain of the gulag if one refuses to submit does not confer moral obligatoriness on the action commanded. In fact, mere obedience is the opposite of meritorious: it is a contemptible abdication of one's autonomy and grovelling acceptance of heteronomy.

And here is where Islam comes into the picture. The root meaning of 'Islam' is not 'peace' but submission to the will of Allah. But a rational, self-respecting, autonomous agent cannot submit to the will of Allah, or to the will of any power, unless the commands of said power are as it were 'independently certifiable.' In other words, only if Allah commands what is intrinsically morally obligatory could a self-respecting, autonomous agent act in accordance with his commands. In fact, one could take it a step further: a self-respecting, autonomous agent is morally obliged to act in accordance with Allah's commands only if what is commanded is intrinsically obligatory.

Of course, this way of thinking makes God or Allah subject to the moral law, as to something beyond divine control. But if there is anything beyond divine control, whether the laws of morality or the laws of logic, then it would seem that the divine aseity and sovereignty is compromised.  For perhaps the best recent defense of absolute divine sovereignty, see Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012.  For my critique, see "Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 149-161.

God is the absolute, and no absolute can be subject to anything 'outside' it. (If you say that God is not the absolute, then there is something greater than God, namely the absolute, and we should worship THAT. Presumably this is one of Anselm's reasons for describing God as "that than which no greater can be conceived.") Otherwise it would be relative to this 'outside' factor and hence not be ab solus and a se.

The antinomy, therefore, seems quite real and is not easily evaded. The divine aseity demands that God or Allah not be subject to anything external to him. A god so subject would not be God. On the other hand, the unlimited voluntarism of the Muslim view (see Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges for documentation here and here) is also unacceptable. A god who, at ontological bottom, was Absolute Whim and Arbitrary Power, would not be worthy of our worship but of our defiance.  I am reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens who thought of God as an all-seeing, absolute despot.

The Muslim view is quite 'chilling' if one thinks about it. If God is not constrained by anything, not logic, not morality, then to use the words but reverse the sense of the famous Brothers Karamazov passage, "everything is permitted." In other words, if the Muslim god exists then "everything is permitted" just as surely as "everything is permitted" if the Christian god does not exist. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality has no foundation. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality's foundation is in Absolute Whim.

To put it in another way, a foundation of morality in unconstrained and unlimited will is no foundation at all.

To 'feel the chill,' couple the Muslim doctrine about God with the Muslim literalist/fundamentalist doctrine that his will is plain to discern in the pages of the Koran. Now murder can easily be justified, the murder of 'infidels' namely, on the ground that it is the will of God.

In the West, however, we have a safeguard absent in the Islamic world, namely reason. (That there is little or no reason in the Islamic world is proven by the fact that there is little or no genuine philosophy there, with the possible slight exception of Turkey; all genuine philosophy -- not to be confused with historical scholarship -- in the last 400 or so years comes from the West including Israel; I am being only slightly tendentious.) God is not above logic, nor is he above morality. It simply cannot be the case that God commands what is obviously evil. We in the West don't allow any credibility to such a god. In the West, reason acts as a 'check' and a 'balance' on the usurpatious claims of faith and inspiration.

A Thomist Solution?

But this still leaves us with the Euthyphro Problem. (1) and (2) are contradictories, and yet there are reasons to accept both. The unconditionally obligatory cannot exist in an ontological void: the 'ought' must be grounded in an 'is.' The only 'is' available is the will of an existing conscious being. But how can the actual commands of any being, even God, the supreme being, ground the obligatoriness of an act we deem obligatory?

Suppose God exists and God commands in accordance with a moral code that is logically antecedent to the divine will. Then the obligatory would not be obligatory because God commands it; it would be obligatory independently of divine commands. But that would leave us with the problem of explaining what makes the obligatory obligatory. It would leave us with prescriptions and proscriptions 'hanging in the air.' If, on the other hand, the obligatory is obligatory precisely because God commands it, then we have the illicit slide from 'is' to 'ought.' Surely the oughtness of what one ought to do cannot be inferred from the mere factuality of some command.

But if God is ontologically simple in the manner explained in my SEP article, then perhaps we can avoid both horns of the dilemma. For if God is simple, as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas maintained, then it is neither the case that God legislates morality, nor the case that he commands a moral code that exists independently of him. It is neither the case that obligatoriness derives from commands or that commands are in accordance with a pre-existing obligatoriness. The two are somehow one. God is neither an arbitrary despot, nor a set of abstract prescriptions. He is not a good being, but Goodness itself. He is self-existent concrete normativity as such.

But as you can see, the doctrine of divine simplicity tapers of into the mystical. You will be forgiven if you take my last formulations as gobbledy-gook. Perhaps they are and must remain nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But then we have reason to think the problem intractable. (1) and (2) cannot both be true, and yet we have good reason to accept both. To relieve the tension via the simplicity doctrine involves a shift into the transdiscursive — which is to say that the problem cannot be solved discursively.

One thing does seem very clear to me: the Muslim solution in terms of unlimited divine voluntarism is a disaster, and dangerous to boot. It would be better to accept a Platonic solution in which normativity 'floats free' of "the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness," to revert to the formulation of William James.

Peter's Insight

My friend Peter Lupu sees clearly that there is a connection between the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma and the competing conceptions of God.  The first horn -- The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands -- aligns naturally with the conception of God as Being itself, as ipsum esse subsistens, as self-subsistent Being.  God is not a norm enforcer, but ethical Normativity Itself. The second horn -- The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it -- aligns naturally with the conception of God as a being among beings, albeit a being supreme among beings.  Supreme, but still subject to the moral order.

But of course there is trouble, and the alignment is not as smooth as we schematizers would like.  For on either horn, God is a supreme commander, and this makes little sense if God is self-subsistent Being itself. One feels tempted to say that on either horn God is a being among beings.

Concluding Aporetic Postscript

We cannot genuinely solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by affirming either limb.  Our only hope is to make an ascensive move to a higher standpoint, that of the divine simplicity according to which God is self-subsistent Being and Ethical Requiredness Itself.  But this ascension is into the Transdiscursive, a region in which all our propositions are nonsensical in Wittgenstein's Tractarian sense.  We are in the Tractarian predicament of  trying to say the Unsayable.

So I submit that the problem is a genuine a-poria.  There is no way forward, leastways, not here below. Both horns are impasses, to mix some metaphors.  But here below is where we languish.  The problem is absolutely insoluble for the Cave dweller.

Philosophers who simply must, at any cost, have a solution to every problem will of course disagree.  These 'aporetically challenged' individuals need to take care they don't end up as ideologues.

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

We are coming up on the 60th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene.  He died  in 2010 at the age of 88.   But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming?  His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964).  But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal.  Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)

James Dean, Public Service Announcement

James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby

Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951).  The first R & R song?  With footage of Bettie Page.  'Footage' indeed.

Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young

Public Service Announcement.

Slow down, speed kills.  You'll die soon enough.   And stop tail-gating.  And turn off that bloody cell phone.  Or I kill you.

Like Aaachmed the Terrorist.  Trigger warning!  Not for liberals. 

 

 

 

The Psalms

I find in the Psalms too much praising of a tribal god, and not enough seeking of the hidden God. But both are there.

Inconclusive

The conclusions of the philosopher are -- inconclusive.

Evidence and Actuality: A Modal Punch at W. K. Clifford

W. K. Clifford is often quoted for his asseveration that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  Now one of my firmest beliefs is that I am an actual individual, not a merely possible individual. A second is my belief that while there is an infinity of possible worlds, there is exactly one actual world and that this world of me and my world mates is the world that happens to be actual.  (Think of the actual world as the total way things are, and of a merely possible world as a total way things might have been.  For a quick and dirty primer, see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.)

But not only do I have insufficient evidence for these two beliefs, it looks as if I have no evidence at all.  And yet I feel wholly entitled to my acceptance of them and in breach of no plausible ethics of belief, assuming there is such a subject as the ethics of belief.

Consider the following argument that I adapt from D. M. Armstrong, who borrowed it from Donald C. Williams:

1. Exactly one of the infinity of possible worlds is actual.

2. This world of me and my mates is a possible world.

Therefore, very probably,

3. This world of me and my mates is merely possible.

This is an inductive argument, but a very strong one.  While it does not necessitate its conclusion, it renders the conclusion exceedingly likely.  For if there is an infinity of worlds, how likely is it that mine is the lucky one?

And yet the conclusion is absurd, or to be precise: manifestly false.  Is it not perfectly obvious that this world of ours and everything in it is actual?  I am convinced that I am actual, and that all this stuff I am interacting with is actual.  I am sitting in an actual chair in an actual room which is lit by an actual sun, etc. 

But how do I know this?  What is my evidence?  There are no facts known to me that are better known than the fact that I am actual (that I actually exist).  So my evidence cannot consist of other facts.  Is it self-evident that I am actual?  You could say this, but how do I know, given the above argument, that my actuality is objectively self-evident as opposed to merely subjectively self-evident?  Subjective self-evidence is epistemically worthless, while objective self-evidence is not to be had in the teeth of the above argument.  No doubt I seem to myself to be actual.  But that subjective seeming does not get the length of objective self-evidence.  I now argue as follows:

4. If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe anything on no evidence.

5. I have no evidence that me and my world are actual.

6. It is not wrong to believe what is obviously true.

7. It is obviously true that I am actual.

Therefore, contra Clifford,

8.  There are some things it is not wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.

This is not a compelling argument, but it is a very powerful one.  Not compelling because the Cliffordian extremist could bite the bullet by denying (7).  He might say that the ethics of belief enjoins us to suspend belief on the question whether one is actual.  

Now this is psychologically impossible, for me anyway.  But apart from this impossibility, it is surely better known that I am actual than that Clifford's extreme thesis is true.

There are other obvious problems with the thesis.  Any tyro in philosophy should see right away that it is self-vitiating.  If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe Clifford's thesis on insufficient evidence.  But what conceivable evidence could one have for it?  None that I can see.  It is not only a normative claim, but one stuffed with universal quantifiers.  Good luck!  If you say that the thesis needn't be taken as applying to itself, then other problems will arise that you can work out for yourself.  Why do I have to do all the thinking?

Note also that if you take Clifford's thesis to heart you will have to suspend belief on all sorts of questions outside of religion, questions in ethics, politics, economics, climatology, etc., questions you have extremely firm opinions about.  The practical upshot, if one were consistent, would probably be a full retreat into Skeptic ataraxia.  At least until the political authorities came to put you in prison.  Then you would begin believing that some things are just and some are not, etc., and damn the insufficiency or nonexistence of the evidence for the contentious beliefs.

Our doxastic predicament is a bitch, ain't she?  Well, what do you want for a Cave?

The Decline and Fall of American Political Debate

A good article by John Daniel Davidson.  Excerpt:

For years it’s been remarked that we no longer have one American culture but many, that we’ve become Balkanized into a dizzying array of interests and identity groups separated by race, ethnicity, religion, and much else.

But we’re also separated, increasingly, by the news and commentary we read and watch. To the extent that it informs us of what’s going on, and why, and what to expect, our fragmentation and insularity has reached a dangerous tipping point: we no longer agree on what’s real.

Davidson illustrates his point by analysis of three recent examples: Ahmed Mohamed the Clock Maker; Carly Fiorina vs. Planned Parenthood; the invasion of illegals from Central America.

But what makes Davidson's article especially good is that he provides historical context by suggesting that the current mess had its origin in 1968 in a rancorous exchange between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal.

Buckley and Vidal met ten times over the course of the two conventions and spent most of their time attacking one another. Much of the debate footage is online, but the documentary plumbs the motivations of each man and the profound consequences of their televised battle. Of Vidal, Heritage Foundation historian Lee Edwards said, “I don’t think he was really interested in conducting a debate about the issues, or about the parties, or about the policies, or about the platforms of the two parties. What he wanted to do was to expose Bill Buckley.” In this Vidal succeeded, but not quite in the way he’d hoped.

The infamous moment came while they were debating the Vietnam War. Buckley compared opponents of the war to Nazi appeasers. Vidal, an opponent of the war, responded: “The only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” Back then, calling someone a Nazi was taboo (unlike today, when it is mostly ridiculous). Buckley lost his temper. He leaned toward Vidal, shaking with anger, narrowed his eyes and said: “Now listen, you queer, quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

That moment, together with all the rancor and ad hominem attacks that had led up to it, inaugurated a new era in American media: the end of the old, sober centrism and the beginning of open ideological warfare. It didn’t happen overnight, but ABC’s success—the Buckley-Vidal debates propelled them to No. 1—didn’t go unnoticed, and on-air political debates between liberal and conservative pundits gradually became a regular feature of TV news programming: “The McLaughlin Group,” “Capital Gang,” “Crossfire,” and all the rest. The personal, vituperative tone of the Buckley-Vidal debates became the now-familiar register of political punditry.

We are now one step further into the cultural sewer:

Instead of shouting each other down the way they did on “Crossfire,” the new pundits are more apt to sneer and mock in the style of Jon Stewart. There’s little to be gained in arguing with an opponent but much to be gained by mocking him. What this means in practice is that we tend to seek out news and commentary that more or less reflects our own opinions back to us. Reading the news becomes an exercise in confirmation bias.

Related:  Pessimistic Thoughts on Political Discourse in America

A Case for Voluntary Segregation

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A Warning

Apropos of my last entry, a warning to those may be thinking of heading for the desert.  The following observation from a November 2009 post, "Demons of the Desert."

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.

Distracted from your distractions, you may get more than you bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.

My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did

A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus.

. . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything all the time? I have been thinking a lot about the issues you raised both in The Big Unplug post and in your post on Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration . . . . Thanks for reading this and for the writing you have contributed over the years - it has truly been  signal amidst a great deal of noise.

How did I go about it?  I got as far away as practicable from the hype and hustle and hyperkineticism of the modern world.

From July 26th to August 30th I lived in a hermitage on the grounds of the most remote monastery in the Western hemisphere in a place of great natural beauty.  I have decided not to post any photographs or reveal the identities  of any interlocutors in keeping with the monastic spirit of silence, solitude and seclusion.

An average day went something like this.  Up at my usual time of 2:00 AM. (The monks arise at 3:30.) Instant coffee.  I drank no good coffee for five weeks as part of the self-imposed discipline.  Spiritual-philosophical reading until 3:00: Bible, Garrigou-Lagrange, Edith Stein, Theresa of Avila, et al.  Formal, seated meditation until 3:30 in the hermitage.  Then a 10-15 minute hike through a dark and spooky canyon to the oratory for Vigils at 4:00.  This is the first hour of the liturgia horarum, the liturgy of the hours.  It lasts one hour weekdays, one hour, twenty minutes on Sundays.  Some of the 'little hours' are as short as ten minutes.  The liturgy, chanted by the monks, is essentially psalmody with Christian elements interspersed.  After Vigils, a light breakfast outside the monks' refectory. Then back to the hermitage for study and writing.  I usually attended three of the seven hours per day and meditated on a 'regulation' Zen cushion and mat three times per day.  I gave myself the rule, "No pray, no eat."  So I attended Vigils before breakfast, Sext before the main meal, taken with the monks in the refectory, in silence of course, with one of the monk doing a reading, and Vespers before supper.

Did I struggle with the urge to check my 'devices' all the time?  Not at all.  I brought only a laptop computer for writing, but there was no wi-fi at the hermitage.  For that I had to hike to the monastery proper where I could tap into a weak wi-fi signal.  I did that a grand total of four times in five weeks, and only to check e-mail.  The only other device I had with me was a primitive cell phone which was useless to me in the remote location.

From my journal:

Here in the hermitage I stand naked before my own conscience.  Its penetrating power is enhanced by the exterior and interior silence.

No Escape.  And now it is night.  Alone in the hermitage which is itself alone and off by itself under stars undiminished by light pollution.  Dead silence.  No distractions of the usual sort: other people, pets, television, radio, Internet.  Just me, my books, and my past -- and the spiritual dimension that the silence and solitude allow to approach.  The hour glass of my existence is running out, which is why I am here to repent of my sins and prepare for death.  The hour of death is the hour of truth when the masks fall, and evasions evaporate.

Modern man, distracted and diverted by endless self-referential yammering, firmly entrapped within the human horizon, is so deluded and lost as to be incapable of even raising the question, seriously, of whether anything lies beyond that stifling horizon.

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. . . take it.  (Yogi Berra)  My favorite Yogism:  "Hey Yogi, what time is it?" "You mean now?"

Strawson's Vacuous Materialism

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics.  My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case.  But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case.  A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation.  Christians believe that God became man.  Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction.  For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc.  One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible.  The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us -- where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense --  does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways.  He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential.  The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics.  And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel.  I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic  (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical.  But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving. 

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.

The Dawkins Hustle

Karl White sends us to this Spectator article and provides this summary:

For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak. . . . But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.

The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’.  I don’t think any irony is intended.

Just as religion is a hustle for some, anti-religion is for others.

Kolakowski on the Catholic Church

I hope the Church is not about to commit 'suicide by pope.'  Pope Francis might do well to meditate on the following truths from the pen of the agnostic philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski.  The following from an interview:

It would be silly, foolish, to object to the Church on the grounds that it is "traditionalist". The whole strength of the Church is that it is faithful to its tradition - otherwise, what is the Church for? If the Church is going to become a political party which merely adapts its beliefs to changing opinions, it can be safely dismissed altogether, because there are political parties doing such things. If the Church is there to sanctify and bless in advance every change in intellectual and moral fashion in our civilisation, then again - what is the Church for? The Church is strong because it has a traditional teaching, a spiritual kernel, which it considers its immutable essence. It cannot just yield to any pressure from people who think that whatever is in fashion at the present moment should immediately be adopted by the Church as its own teaching, whether in the field of political ideas or of daily life.

I think the Church is not only right in keeping its historically shaped, traditional identity. Its very role, its very mission on earth would become unclear if it did not do that. And so I would not be afraid at all, and I would not take it as an insult, that critics describe the Church as traditionalist or conservative.

There must be forces of conservatism in society, in spiritual life, by which I mean the forces of conservation. Without such forces, the entire fabric of society would fall apart.

[. . .]

In my view, there is no way in which Marxist teaching could be reconciled with Christianity. Marxism is anti-Christian, not contingently, not by accident, but in its very core. You cannot reconcile it.

There is no Christianity where no distinction is made between temporal and eternal values. There is no Christianity where [the word 'where' is wrong; should be UNLESS] one accepts that all earthly values, however important, however crucial to human life, are nevertheless secondary. What the Church is about essentially is the salvation of human souls, and the human soul is never reducible to social conditions.

There is an absolute value in the human person. The Church believes that the world - the social world, the physical world - is merely an expression of the divine, and as such it can only have instrumental or secondary value. Without this, there is no point in speaking about Christianity.

I don't want to hear the pope talk about  global warming or capitalism or any other topic he knows nothing about.  Let him stick to faith and morals.  Let him show that he understands that Christianity is not just another load of secular humanist claptrap.  Let him demonstrate that he understands Kolakowski's point that this world has only instrumental or secondary value.  Let him preach on the Last Things. 

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A Note on a Common Misunderstanding of Hypocrisy

I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.

Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.

A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.

After Jeb Bush admitted to smoking marijuana during his prep school days, Rand Paul called him a  hypocrite on the ground that he now opposes what he once did. 

This accusation shows a failure on Paul's part to grasp the concept of hypocrisy.

Diana West on Dr. Ben Carson's Muslim Comment

Here is what Diana West says verbatim:

A reporter just asked me if Dr. Ben Carson was correct to rule out a Muslim in the presidency. Below is my reply -- the short version. No caliphate, no jihad, even. First things first.

Is this the first time the media have focused directly on such a question regarding Islam? It feels that way, which, in itself, is an astonishment.

***

Your question: Do I support Dr Carson’s comments on a Muslim in the presidency? 

Yes, I do, and resoundingly so — as I assume anyone familiar just with the intractable differences between the U.S. Constitution and the tenets of Islam would agree.

Let’s look at just a couple of the basic contradictions. 

1) We have freedom of religion under the Constitution. 

Under Islamic law (sharia), there is no freedom of religion. Jews and Christians live as “dhimmi," without equal rights (and with many burdens which may include the “jizya” tax and other humiliations).

Also, renouncing or leaving Islam  (“apostasy”) is a capital crime according to Islamic law (sharia). 

2) We have freedom of speech under the Constitution. 

Under Islamic law (sharia), there is no freedom of speech: indeed, criticizing Islam constitutes apostasy, which, again, is a capital crime in Islam.

To take another stunning example of the differences between Islamic and American law, women and non-Muslims {“dhimmi”) are not equal to Muslim men before Islamic law (sharia). 

Thus, if by “Muslim” we mean someone who has not renounced Islamic teachings and laws (sharia), we are describing a person who would be unable to fulfill his presidential oath “to preserve, protect and defend" the U.S. Constitution without simultaneously betraying his faith.

And, more importantly for the country, vice versa. It’s a little like considering the qualifications of a committed pacifist as leader of the armed services; or a vegan as steak-taster. The creed and the mission are diametrically opposed.

Dr. Carson is correct because the teachings of Islam, which define being a Muslim, are not compatible with the presidential oath of office. 

The simple fact is, Islam outlaws the very liberties the president is sworn to protect.

Exactly right.  Now what would prevent someone from understanding these simple truths?  One factor is political correctness which includes the notion that all religions say the same thing and that they are all equally conducive to human flourishing.  Obviously false on both counts.

Neologism: A Merton

A merton is a person who doesn't distinguish between studying a subject and writing a book about it.

 

Cf. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. III, 136:  "Thought of writing a book on Columbia under Spain . . ..")  In his short life Merton published some 60 books, some of them good, some of them but attempts to work his way into a subject.

Memo to Pope Francis: Capitalism is the Solution, not the Problem

I mean if he is serious about reducing poverty.  Stephanie Slade in a very good Reason article:

He has been called the "slum pope" and "a pope for the poor." And indeed, it's true that Pope Francis, leader to 1.3 billion Roman Catholics, speaks often of those in need. He's described the amount of poverty and inequality in the world as "a scandal" and implored the Church to fight what he sees as a "culture of exclusion."

Yet even as he calls for greater concern for the marginalized, he broadly and cavalierly condemns the market-driven economic development that has lifted a billion people out of extreme poverty within the lifetime of the typical millennial. A lack of understanding of even basic economic concepts has led one of the most influential and beloved human beings on the planet to decry free enterprise, opine that private property rights must not be treated as "inviolable," hold up as the ideal "cooperatives of small producers" over "economies of scale," accuse the Western world of "scandalous level[s] of consumption," and assert that we need "to think of containing growth by setting some reasonable limits."

Given his vast influence, which extends far beyond practicing Catholics, this type of rhetoric is deeply troubling. It's impossible to know how much of an impact his words are having on concrete policy decisions—but it's implausible to deny that when he calls for regulating and constraining the free markets and economic growth that alleviate truly crushing poverty, the world is listening. As a libertarian who is also a devout Roman Catholic, I'm afraid as well that statements like these from Pope Francis reinforce the mistaken notion that libertarianism and religion are fundamentally incompatible.

I'm a conservative, not a libertarian, but the above is basically on the right track.   Read it all.  When I say capitalism is the solution, I mean, of course, capitalism under the rule of law.  It is curious that neither capitalism nor the rule of law fare well under administrations like the current one in the USA.

Galen Strawson on Zombies and Whether 'Physical' is a Natural Kind Term

1. What is a zombie? 

You will have gathered that a zombie is a creature of philosophical fiction conjured up to render graphic a philosophical issue and to throw certain questions in the philosophy of mind into relief.    A zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.)  When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a horny zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a horny zombie.  Indeed, there is nothing it is like to be a zombie, period.) 

2. Where do zombies come from?  

Zombies surface within the context of discussions of physicalism. Physicalism is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what ultimately exists,  what exists in the most fundamental sense of 'exists.'  The physicalist is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties. What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. This implies that all mental facts supervene upon physical facts.  So if a being is conscious, then this fact about it supervenes upon, is determined by, its physical properties.  This implies that there cannot be two beings, indiscernible with respect to all physical properties, such that the one is conscious while the other is not.  This in turn rules out the possibility of zombies.  For, if physicalism is true, once the physical properties are fixed, the mental properties are also automatically fixed.

3. What useful work do zombies do? 

If zombies are metaphysically (broadly logically) possible, then physicalism is false.  That's their job: to serve as counterexamples to physicalism.  For if zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation: a zombie has all the same physical properties as its indiscernible non-zombie twin, but is not conscious.  The possibility of zombies implies that consciousness is non-supervenient, something in addition to a being's physical makeup.  So one anti-physicalist argument goes like this:

1. If physicalism is true, then every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation. 
2. If zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
3. Zombies are possible.
Therefore
4. Physicalism is not true.

This is a valid argument the soundness of which rides on premise (3).  Here is where the fight will come.  Without questioning the validity of the argument the physicalist will run the argument in reverse.  He will deny the conclusion and then deny (3).  In effect, he will argue from (1) & (2) & (~4)  to (~3).  He will deny the very possibility of zombies.  He will insist that anything that behaves just like a conscious person and has the 'innards' of a conscious person JUST IS a conscious person.

Now I find that absurd: it is a denial of that subjectivity which is properly accessed only via the irreducible first-person singular point of view.  Nevertheless, I will have a devil of a time budging my materialist-functionalist interlocutor.  Materialists are objectivists: they think that anything that is not objectively accessible in the third-person way just isn't there at all, or it if is 'there,' is not to be taken seriously.

Can one support (3) in a manner so compelling as to convince the recalcitrant materialist?  After all, (3) is not self-evident.  If it were self-evident, then we would have a 'knock-down' argument against physicalism.  But there are few if any  'knock-down' (absolutely compelling)  arguments in philosophy. 

Now zombies are certainly conceivable.  But it is not clear whether conceivability entails metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility, which is in play in (3).    So it is not clear whether the conceivability of zombies is a compelling  reason to reject physicalism.  The question of the relation between conceivability and possibility is a difficult one.  There is some discussion of this in the conceivability category.

Now here is what Galen Strawson has to say:

4. Strawson on Zombies.

It is, finally, a mistake to think that we can know that ‘zombies’ could exist—where zombies are understood to be creatures that have no experiential properties although they are perfect physical duplicates (PPDs) of currently experiencing human beings like you and me.

The argument that PPD-zombies could exist proceeds from two premisses—[1] it is conceivable that PPD-zombies exist, [2] if something is conceivable, then it is possible. It is plainly valid, and (unlike many) I have no insuperable problem with [2]. The problem is that we can't know [1] to be true, and have no reason to think it is. To be a materialist is, precisely, to hold that it is false, and while materialism cannot be known to be true, it cannot be refuted a priori—as it could be if [1] were established. ‘Physical’, recall, is a natural kind term, and since we know that there is much that we do not know about the nature of the physical, we cannot claim to  know that an experienceless PPD of a currently experiencing human being is conceivable, and could possibly (or ‘in some possible world’) exist.

This is just blatant question-begging on Strawson's part.  We can't know that it is conceivable that zombies exist?!  That zombies are conceivable is a very weak claim, and of course we can know it to be true, just by conceiving a zombie, whence it follows that we have excellent reason to think it is true.  Strawson simply begs the question by assuming that materialism is true.  He also begs the question by claiming that materialism cannot be refuted a priori.   If you grant [2], as Strawson does, then what we have is an a priori refutation of materialism.

Strawson tells us that 'physical' is a natural kind term.  What a strange idea! 'Water,' 'gold, 'tiger' are uncontroversial natural kind terms.  They succeed in referring to what they were introduced to refer to despite our knowledge or ignorance of the nature of what they refer to.  The ancient Greeks thought water was an element; Dalton held it to be HO; we take it to be H₂O.  Water turned out to be a lot different than we thought, without prejudice to the reference of 'water.' So if 'physical' is a natural kind term, then it too can refer to things very different in nature than what we might have supposed.  And so Strawson thinks that 'physical' can refer to what is irreducibly mental or experiential in whole or in part.  In fact, Strawson allows that the physical -- that which physics studies -- could be wholly mental.

I don't know what this means.  Perhaps Vlastimil can explain it to me.

Does Matter Think?

If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not  be matter as currently understood.

Can abstracta think?  Sets count as abstracta.  Can a  set think?  Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number?  Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter.  Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think.  To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism.  I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here.  (Here is a characteristic post.)

But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think?  Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare?  Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not.  Why not?  Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the  set of evens.  It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible. 

Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains.  We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think.  But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.

Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines.  But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement.  For that is a sort of dualism too.  There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.

There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!)  of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states.  For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat?  You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle.   Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter?  But then it is not matter any more, is it?  It is an emergent from matter.  Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it.  Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat?  Do you believe in magic?

There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions.  Why are some brain states mental and others not? 

The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics.  On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel.  (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)

"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case."  True.   Two possibilities.  It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p.  The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.

My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels.  But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong.  It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Go Carly!

Carly Fiorina is beginning to look good to me, politically speaking.  Let's see what we can scrounge up on the Carly/Carla/Carl/Karl/Karla theme.

Carly Simon, You're So Vain.  Good video. This one goes out to Donald Trump.  I like Trump and his cojones (metaphorically speaking), but a lack of gravitas condemns him.  Reagan had the right blend of cojones and gravitas:  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Ray Barretto, El Watusi (an old '60s number featured in Carlito's Way).  Don't ask me what it means.

Carl Wilson, I Can Hear Music

Karla Bonoff, When you Walk in the Room.  The old Jackie De Shannon tune from '64.  While we have Jackie cued up: Put a Little Love in Your Heart.

Carlos Santana, Black Magic Woman

Another reason to like Fiorina:

 

“I graduated from Stanford with a degree in medieval history and philosophy -- there is life after a medieval history and philosophy degree,” she said happily.​ After graduation, Fiorina said, she was “completely unemployable” so she tried out law school.

 

“I was an obedient, goody two-shoes middle child,” she said of that decision, explaining that her parents wanted her to go. “Hated law school. Quit law school after one semester. And now my resume reads, ‘Medieval history and philosophy. Law school dropout.” Fiorina then went to work as a secretary. Six months in, two of her male colleagues saw her potential and asked if she wanted to learn the business.

 

“And still, in 2014, there is no other country on the face of the earth where a young woman can start out as a secretary and become CEO of the largest technology company,” she said.

 

This is where the politics comes in. “I’m a conservative because I think our policies unlock potential in people and I have seen too many lives and too many livelihoods sacrificed at the altar of liberal ideology and it happens all the time,” she said. Fiorina talked about the evils of bureaucracies and the virtues of entrepreneurship, education, jobs and freedom.

 

Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today.  Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere.  You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?) 

.....................

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights.  Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull.  I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion.  Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here.  Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and  unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it.  We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else.  If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin.  Feel that, Dan?  That's a quale.  (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions.  But I can't prove he isn't.  Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself.  He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think.    The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings.  So far I understand him.  It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts.  This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter.  So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third.  For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon.  How does he know it?  Obviously, he doesn't know it.  It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one.  After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel.  I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances.  But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so.  All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's  argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3.  There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2).  It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism.  I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume -- it is wholly gratuitous to assume -- that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false. 

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings."  Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful.  But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious?  What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"?  There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast.  'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast.  And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical.  To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting.    It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous.  It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast.  If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical.  We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't.  That is a huge difference.  What Strawson has to say is that  in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter.  Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter,  does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical?  God is a mind too.  Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition.  But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious -- if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness -- then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of.  Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible.  God is pure spirit, pure mind.  How can Christ  ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body,  enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity?  It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical.  A mysterian would say it is a mystery.  It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us. 

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here:  some parcels of matter have amazing powers.  For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel.  It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat!  If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and -- without prejudice to his physicality -- has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity.  It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability.  He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul. 

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven.  She too entered bodily into heaven.  On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up.  If matter actually thinks and feels  in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter.  But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

The Fact-Free Flamboyance of Francis

George Will takes the present Pope to task.  Francis is as foolish as Obama.  Both are much exercised over 'climate change' but not so much when it comes to the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East and the destruction of their languages and culture.  If Obama is an Obamination, Bergoglio is an imbroglio of politically correct nonsense.  Both are disasters.  The first for the USA and the world, the second for the Catholic Church.  The real disaster is not climatic but cultural , and these two clowns have nary a clue.

Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media otherwise disdainful of his church. Secular people with anti-Catholic agendas drain his prestige, a dwindling asset, into promotion of policies inimical to the most vulnerable people and unrelated to what once was the papacy’s very different salvific mission.

Related:  The Pope is a Buffoon When it Comes to Economics

Click on that link, boys and girls, it is a fine post.  If you are liberal you will learn something.

Other People

We need those distorting mirrors called other people to achieve self-knowledge.  For a distorting mirror, while it distorts, also mirrors.

Why Write?

Why Do I Write?

I write to know my own mind, to actualize my own mind, and to attract a few like-minded and contrary-minded people.  The like-minded lend support, and the contrary-minded – assuming that their criticisms are rationally based – allow me to test my ideas.  Dialectic is to the philosopher what experiment is to the scientist.

Why Do I Blog?

If you are going to write at all, why not publish?  Why hide your light under a bushel?  To publish is to make public, and the beauty of blogging is that no editor stands between the blogger and his audience.

Writing and Self-Expression

Good writing is not any sort of petty self-expression, but an expression of the engagement of mind with world whereby the little logos of the individual seeks to adjust itself to the world-Logos.

Related:  Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Jack Cashill

I saw him on C-Span the other night.  

Liberals and Standards

Heather MacDonald reports:

Monday’s violence [at the West Indian American Day Parade] also should provide advance warning that the New York City Council’s plan to decriminalize such quality-of-life laws as public drinking and public urination is a recipe for disaster. The decriminalization agenda in New York and nationally is driven by the specious claim that enforcing the law unfairly targets blacks and subjects them to draconian penalties. The parade toll shows the opposite: the best way to save black lives is to enforce the law.

This suggests a polemical definition of 'liberal':  a person who never met a standard he didn't want to erode.  You have to be pretty far gone to think that public intoxication and public urination are acceptable behaviors, and are you not a racist if you think that blacks cannot be held to minimal standards of public behavior?

If reasonable laws unfairly target blacks, do laws against armed robbery unfairly target males inasmuch as males as a group are much more likely to commit such a crime than females?

Suppose someone said that the latter laws are 'anti-male' because they 'target' males rather than females.  You'd say the person is an idiot, right?  You would explain to the fool that, of course, anti-armed-robbery laws have a 'disproportionate impact' on males because -- wait for it -- males, as a group, are much more aggressive than females, as a group, and much more likely to commit murder, armed robbery, rape, and other dastardly deeds.

Eyes in the Mirror

The eyes you see in the mirror when you look at yourself are not seeing eyes but seen eyes.  Strange but true:  your seeing eyes are and must remain invisible.

A Tautology at John 19:22?

"What I have written, I have written."  (Pilate)  Another example of a tautological formulation the meaning of which is non-tautological:  What I have written I will not change.  Sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart.

I explore this phenomenon in detail in the following posts:

When is a Tautology not a Tautology?

Seldom Seen Slim on Tautologies that Ain't

'He's His Father's Son': More on Tautologies that Ain't

Use and Abuse

Abuse is no argument against right use.

Parents

Honor them for what is or was honorable in them.  As for the rest, forgive and forget, or at least forgive.  Honor the honorable; forgive the rest.

Mass Incarceration?

Leftist lies here demolished.

To understand the Left you must never forget that truth is not a leftist value.  Living proof: Obama and Hillary.

Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda.  And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance  since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The 'glorious' end justifies the shabby means. 

As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.

Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.

You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says.  Always assume they are lying and then look into it.  Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie.  It is right out of the commie playbook.  "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."

Companion post:  Orwellian Bullshit

You may also enjoy Hillary the Fabulist

Is the Christian the True Philosopher?

Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy.  The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, "The Wisdom of God embodied," as Nemes accurately puts it.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Here is Nemes' second point:

So Christ falls into the category of god or sage (or both), rather than that of philosopher. On the other hand, the Christian -- the person who desires to learn of Christ, and who finds in him the fount of all wisdom -- is the true philosopher. The Christian admits that she lacks wisdom, yet she desires it. So she goes to the source of all wisdom, which is Christ, in order to learn from him.

Christian life can therefore be understood as philosophy: a desirous effort to learn wisdom from Wisdom Itself, embodied in the person of the Godman Jesus Christ.

I disagree with this second point. A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself .  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification?  You say  our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness ?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact known by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

On Indoctrination

Is indoctrination ever a good thing?

Presumably, to indoctrinate is to teach one doctrine as if it is true, as opposed to presenting a variety of different doctrines on the same topic without endorsing any one of them.  In general, indoctrination ought not be done at the college level: Competing positions should be presented fairly and objectively and students should be encouraged to think matters through themselves and form their own opinions.  But this point demands careful qualification. 

For surely indoctrination is legitimate in some subjects such as mathematics and the hard sciences.  No one could fault a math or science teacher for failing to give equal time to the views of numerologists, alchemists, astrologists, flat earthers and geocentrists.  And in political science classes short shrift should be given to 9-11 'truthers' and other conspiracy enthusiasts.  Their views may be discussed in passing, but to present them as if such theories are serious contenders in the arena of ideas makes a mockery of the search for truth, which presumably is what universities ought to be about. Certain views are beyond the pale and ought not be dignified by being taken seriously, e.g., Holocaust denial, the allegations made in the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the views of NAMBLA members, and so on.

But even in philosophy some indoctrination could well be justified, in logic, for example. One is justified in teaching introductory standard logic dogmatically without bringing in Hegelian and Marxist and dialetheist critiques of the law of non-contradiction, say.  But not only in logic.  To borrow an epithet from Arthur Collins, eliminative materialism is a 'lunatic" philosophy of mind.  I would cover it in a philosophy of mind course, but I would not present it as a possible view that one might justifiably hold; I would present it as not merely false but as incoherent.  And I would take myself to be justified in doing so.  Of course, I would present the doctrine and the arguments thought to support it accurately; but I would not present it as if it were one epistemically possible view among others.  So in that sense I would be engaged in legitimate indoctrination: if not by the promotion of the true view, at least by the rejection of false or incoherent ones.

If one were to oppose all indoctrination, then one would have to present every extant view on every issue as if it had a legitimate claim on our attention.  But this would encourage the view in students that all views are equally good, which is obviously not the case.   For example, in the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, and type-type identity theory are all very bad theories with eliminativism being the worst and the identity theory being the best of the three.  But nothing hinges on this example.  I could give many from different areas of philosophy.  The point is that a pedagogic posture of studied neutrality with respect to every view is as bad as an extreme doctrinalism in which contentious positions are tendentiously promoted.

One can see from these sketchy remarks that the issue is not easily sorted out.  Teaching that promotes relativism and skepticism, that leaves the student with the notion that all views are equally good or that nothing can be known is bad teaching.  Equally bad is teaching that merely foists opinions on students without inculcating habits of critical thought or without fairly presenting the debates surrounding reasonably debatable issues.  (Not all issues, however, are reasonably debatable.) Navigating between the Scylla of of the one and the Charybdis of the other is no easy task.

The Prescience of Obama bin Laden

We need to face reality as gloomy and 'doomy' as it is.  Richard Fernandez, Prediction from the Grave (HT: Bill Keezer):

Very few would have predicted on September 11, 2001 that the headlines 14 years later would feature an American president arming Iran; that there would be millions of Middle Eastern Arabs flooding into the heart of Europe.  Or  Saudi Arabia ^[1], while refusing to accept any refugees from an Islamic civil war in Syria, would instead offer to build 200 mosques in Germany,  one for every hundred who has arrived to spare the Germans the trouble and expense of building the mosques themselves.

Few could have imagined that rail and road transport from Hungary to Germany would be interrupted to hold back floods of people in numbers unseen since World War 2 ^[2].  Not many would have guessed that the Palestinian flag would fly over the UN in New York ^[3], despite the objection of the United States.

Hardly anyone would have foretold the return of the Russia to the Middle East ^[4], spearheaded by a legion of forces who had honed their skill at “hybrid warfare” — then an unknown term — in Ukraine.  Not just anyone mind you, but as Michael Weiss in the Daily Beast ^[5] notes, “the Kremlin isn’t sending just any troops to prop up the Assad regime. It’s dispatching units that spearheaded Russia’s slow-rolling invasion of Ukraine.”

Except one man: Osama bin Laden.  Unlike the American public, which still expected its leaders to defend them against aggression on that fatal day, Bin Laden had come to the conclusion the American elite would run at the slightest difficulty.  What convinced him was the precipitate withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in 1996 following the incident popularly known as Blackhawk Down ^[6].

The photos taken by Canadian photographer Paul Watson, of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu spelled the beginning of the end for U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force. Domestic opinion turned hostile as horrified TV viewers watched images of the bloodshed—-including this Pulitzer-prize winning footage of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed’s supporters dragging the body of U.S. Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, cheering. President Clinton immediately abandoned the pursuit of Aideed, the mission that cost Cleveland his life and gave the order for all American soldiers to withdraw from Somalia by March 31, 1994. Other Western nations followed suit.

When the last U.N. peacekeepers left in 1995, ending a mission that had cost more than $2 billion, Mogadishu still lacked a functioning government. The battle deaths, and the harrowing images prompted lingering U.S. reluctance to get involved in Africa’s crises, including the following year’s genocide in Rwanda. In 1996, Osama bin Laden cited the incident as proof that the U.S. was unable to stomach casualties: when “one American was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear.” Never before or since had a photo altered a nation’s political destinies so much so.

Bin Laden knew that the weakness of the West lay, not in it’s armed forces, technology or economy, but in the alienation of its own elites. Attempting to explain the complete capitulation of the Western decision makers to the refugee flood rushing at their borders Peggy Noonan notes in her Wall Street Journal ^[7]article that the political and cultural elites no longer even regard territorial integrity as an existential issue. It was something well enough to have, but certainly nothing worth defending to the point of inconvenience; and most assuredly not unto the death.

Like the barons of yesteryear, they were secure in castles rising above the squalid countryside, safe from pestilence, hunger and even war. Noonan describes the modern aristocracy as a law unto themselves,  living in a world unto itself,  with more in common with foreign princes, other elite classes than with the commoners who surround them.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.

Economists describe this as the principal-agent problem ^[8]. “The dilemma exists because sometimes the agent is motivated to act in his own best interests rather than those of the principal. … Common examples of this relationship include corporate management (agent) and shareholders (principal), or politicians (agent) and voters (principal).”   In layman’s language, the principal-agent problem occurs when it is the interest of the agent to sell out the principal.

The problem arises where the two parties have different interests and asymmetric information (the agent having more information), such that the principal cannot directly ensure that the agent is always acting in its (the principal’s) best interests, particularly when activities that are useful to the principal are costly to the agent, and where elements of what the agent does are costly for the principal to observe. Moral hazard and conflict of interest may arise. … The deviation from the principal’s interest by the agent is called “agency costs”.

Read it all.

You may also enjoy, if that's the word, Jerking Toward Social Collapse.

"Black Lives Matter"

Victor Davis Hanson argues that this is just another of a series of silly slogans fated  to perish of its own inanity and be forgotten.   He gives it a year.

Meanwhile lawlessness rises as Heather MacDonald documents.

Part of the problem, of course, is the refusal to hold the Black Lives Matter crowd and their leftist enablers to account.

All lives matter.  It follows that black lives matter, including the lives of the peaceful, law-abiding, hard-working black residents of Ferguson, Missouri.  And because these black lives matter, it matters that laws be enforced.  All reasonable laws from traffic laws to laws against looting and arson.

As if to prove once again that that there is no coward like a university administrator, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney, after having said in an e-mail to students that all lives matter, has retracted her statement and apologized.

Horribile dictu.  And yet another proof that the universities of the land, most of them, have turned  into leftist seminaries and hothouses of political correctness.  And yet another example of abdication of authority by those in positions of authority. 

And so I pinch myself once again.  Am I awake?  Or is this all a bad dream?  Could this stuff really be happening?

Memo to President McCartney:  grow a pair, or the female equivalent thereof.  You don't apologize for speaking the truth; you stand up for the truth and fight back against the the foolish know-nothings whom you are supposed to be 'educating.'

A more recent case is that of Martin O'Malley who after proclaiming the self-evident "All lives matter"  apologized for his 'insensitivity' to people who parade around chanting "Pigs in a blanket! Fry 'em like bacon!"

Disgusting. Pathetic.  Never apologize to scumbags and thugs.  Never grovel before evil doers.

The Neo-Com Left's Nihilist Agenda

The following reproduced verbatim from Tully Borland's weblog.

 

In the absence of a practical alternative to the capitalist system, the [Marxist] revolutionary project is a nihilism--the will to destroy existing societies without an idea of what to do next.

The persistence of the revolutionary illusion without the revolutionary fact has given rise to what should properly be called a neo-communist movement--one that has learned nothing from the failures of Communism but has not abandoned the cause itself. Neo-communist radicals add new dimensions of oppression to the Marxist model, like racism and "sexism." But it is the same Marxist model that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, identifies capitalism as the root cause of global problems, and regards the United States as the global system's guardian-in-chief.  Consequently, like the Communist perspective it has replaced, the contemporary radical outlook opposes America's wars and opposes America's peace.  All that really distinguishes this neo-communist perspective from its Communist predecessor is its ad-hoc attitude towards the revolutionary future, and the nihilistic agenda that follows.

As an expression of its nihilism, the contemporary left defines and organizes itself as a movement against rather than for.  Its components may claim to be creating egalitarian futures in which racism, "sexism" and corporate dominance no longer exist and in which "social justice" prevails.  But unlike Communists, the neo-coms are not committed to even a rudimentary blueprint as to what such an order might be.  It is this lack of programmatic consensus that leads some leftists to deny that there even is a "left," and makes it possible for a fragmented coalition of neo-coms--including anarchists, eco-radicals, radical feminists, "queer" revolutionaries, Maoists, Stalinists, and vaguely defined "progressives"-to operate side by side in improbable coalitions like the antiwar movement.  It is why they can do so in ways that benefit such anti-egalitarian allies and regimes as Islamic radicals and the Baathist, fascist state of Iraq.

David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left, Vol II: Progressives (2013): pp.28-29

The Ghost Town Of Dunmovin, California

Dunmovin is a California ghost town, now little more than a wide spot in the road on U. S. 395, one of my favorite highways.  I have driven past it many a time, but never stopped to explore, not that there is much there to explore.  An Internet search turned up an interesting post, dated 15 September 2008, The Ghost Town of Dunmovin, California.  It was written by the late Harry Helms and is copied below  in toto from his defunct weblog. 

After reading the post, I brought up the topmost page of the Harry Helms Blog and was both surprised and saddened to find that the relatively young Mr. Helms lost his battle with cancer.  Here is his farewell post. May we all accept our deaths with as much peace and equanimity.

...............................

Highway 395 in California runs from Interstate 15 (just beyond Cajon Pass) up to the Nevada state line. For much of its route, it parallels the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada range and offers jaw-dropping mountain scenery. It is a road I have driven dozens and dozens of times, and is one of my all-time favorite highways. And along it you can see the ghost town of Dunmovin, California. If you like Dunmovin, you can buy it! Take a look at this photo:



Dunmovin is located about three miles north of the Coso Junction rest stop along Highway 395, but getting there is complicated because the rest stop is located on the northbound side of Highway 395 but Dunmovin is on the southbound side; you'll have to drive a little north and then loop back south. When you arrive, you'll find the town site is enclosed behind a fence (or at least it was last time I visited back in 2003). It's a very isolated area, and the chances of anyone knowing (or caring) that you trespassed on the property are remote. However, I preferred to respect the property rights of the owner(s) and instead looked at it from afar. Below is what seems to have been a store, judging from that faded and now illegible sign atop the front:


I've had zero luck in finding out anything about Dunmovin. According to post office records, there was never a post office there nor does the state of California have any record of an incorporated town at this location. It appears on some road maps (especially those from the AAA) but not others. My guess is this location served travelers back when Highway 395 was the main route between Los Angeles and Reno. The neon sign below was probably a welcome sight in the night for weary travelers way back when:


I'm guessing the structures below are some of the guest cabins, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them also housed workers-----Dunmovin is a long way from any place to live (CalTrans workers at the nearby Coso Junction rest stop live in mobile homes belonging to the state). You can see a mobile home in the photo below, but looking at it through binoculars I saw that it was abandoned (door and windows open, etc.), The whole site seemed 100% deserted, with not even a caretaker on the premises:


I get the feeling this structure may have been a restaurant; it has "the look" of one, especially with those windows and curtains:


What is most puzzling about Dunmovin is its enigmatic web site, which offers no history or background about Dunmovin but does offer several photos of the construction of a mountain home (click the "Now Showing" link at the site) along with hosting server data (click the other links at the site). If anyone knows more about Dunmovin, I'd certainly like to hear from you!

Posted by Harry Helms at 5:20 PM

 

Labels: Ghost Towns

Peter Kreeft on the Trinity

This from reader D. B.:

 

The doctrine of the Trinity does not say there is one God and three Gods, or that God is one Person and three Persons, or that God has one nature and three natures. Those would indeed be self-contradictory ideas. But the doctrine of the Trinity says that there is only one God and only one divine nature but that this one God exists in three Persons. That is a great mystery, but it is not a logical self-contradiction.

Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith, (Ignatius, 1988), p.42.

I don't think that the doctrine as so stated (above) rises to a level of clarity that allows for Kreeft's last sentence. Do you?

I agree with you, Dave.

First sentence:  Exactly right.

Second sentence:  Right again.

Third sentence:  Also correct.

Fourth sentence:  this is a bare assertion sired by confusion.  The confusion is between the explicitly or manifestly  contradictory and the implicitly or latently contradictory.  The following are all explicitly self-contradictory:

a. There is only one God and there are three Gods.
b. God is one person and God is three persons.
c.  God has one nature and God has three natures.

To be precise, the above are self-contradictory in the logical presence of the proposition that nothing can be both numerically one and numerically three.  To be totally precise, then, I should say that the above three are near-explicitly self-contradictory to distinguish then from, say, 'God is one person and it is not the case that God is one person,' which is an explicitly formal-logical contradiction, i.e., a contradiction whose contradictoriness is rooted in logical form alone: *p & ~p.*  Such contradictions I call narrowly-logical to distinguish them from (wait for it) broadly-logical contradictions such as *Some colors are sounds.* But

d. There is exactly one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

though not explicitly or near-explicitly contradictory as are the above three examples, is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails (in the logical presence of other orthodox doctrinal claims and self-evident truths) contradictions.  How?   Well, consider this aporetic septad:

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  (That identity is a transitive relation is an example of a necessary and self-evident truth.) But this contradicts (5): The Father is not the Son.

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.

What this shows is that (d) above, while not explicitly and manifestly contradictory as are (a)-(c), is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails three explicit formal-logical contradictions, one of them being *The Father is the Son and the Father is not the Son.*

Of course, there are various ways one might try to evade the inconsistency of the above septad.  But this is not the present topic.  The present topic is whether Kreeft's fourth sentence is justified.  Clearly it is not.  The mere fact that (d) is not obviously contradictory as are (a)-(c) does not show that it is not contradictory.  I have just argued that it is.

Kreeft says in effect that (d) is a "great mystery."  Why does he say that it is a mystery if not because it expresses a proposition that we find contradictory?  If we didn't find (d) contradictory we would have no reason to call it mysterious.  So Kreeft is in effect admitting that we cannot make coherent logical sense  of (d).  This suggests that Kreeft may be waffling between two views:

V1:  The doctrine of the Trinity, though of course not rationally provable by us (because known by revelation alone) is yet rationally acceptable by us, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and can be see by our unaided reason to be free of logical contradiction

and

V2:   The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be seen by us to be rationally acceptable in the present life, and so must remain a mystery to us here below, but is nonetheless both true and free of contradiction in itself.

(V1) and (V2) are clearly distinct, the latter being a form of mysterianism.  I raised some doubts about Trinitarian mysterianism yesterday.

Mysterian Materialism and Mysterian Trinitarianism

Here are some thoughts that may provoke a fruitful discussion with Vlastimil Vohanka on the topic of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind and in theology.  He kindly sent me his rich and stimulating paper, "Mysterianism about Consciousness and the Trinity."  The paper is available here along with other works of his.  His view is that a mysterian line is defensible in both the philosophy of mind and in Trinitarian theology.  I have some doubts.

.................

There are different sorts of materialism about the mind, among them eliminative materialism, identity-materialism, and functionalism.  There is also mysterian materialism. Here is a little speech by a mysterian materialist:

Look, we are just complex physical systems, nothing more. And yet we think and are conscious.  Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious.  We  cannot understand how this is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or we we are able to understand how it is possible.  So the fact that we cannot understand how it is possible that thinking and consciousness are nothing more than brain activity does not show that they are not brain activity.   It shows that the how is beyond our understanding.  What we have here, then, is a mystery: a proposition that is true  and non-contradictory despite our inability to understand how it could be true.  

What motivates this mysterian materialism?  Two things.  There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this mind-independent physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly natural and in no respect supernatural.  This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature.  We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or higher destiny.  There is no God who created us in his image and likeness.  And there is no higher happiness other than the transient and fitful happiness that some of us can eke out, if we are lucky, here below.  We are irremediably mortal and natural, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, ability to reason, love and longing, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation.  Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc.  So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological  (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states.  The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, a proposition that for us is and most likely will remain unintelligible, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make moral demands, feel subject to them, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position  according to which our contingent but unalterable make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious.  The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us.  Our cognitive architecture (a phrase I believe Colin McGinn employs) blocks our epistemic access to those properties the understanding of which would render intelligible to us how we can be both wholly material and yet the  subjects of intentional and non-intentional mental states.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintelligibility of a material thing's thinking to  the nonexistence of its thinking.  But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up.  I won't waste any words here refuting this mindless doctrine; I have wasted words elsewhere. 

We should note that one could be a mysterian in the philosophy of mind without being a mysterian materialist. One could be a mysterian substance dualist.  Some maintain that the interaction problem dooms substance dualism.  A mysterian might hold that substance dualism is true, that mind-body interaction is unintelligible, that interaction occurs, and that our inability to understand how mind-body interaction occurs  merely shows a cognitive limitation on our part.  It seems obvious that there is nothing in the nature of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind to require that one be a mysterian materialist/physicalist/naturalist.

We should also note that one could be a mysterian in areas other than the philosophy of mind, in theology, for example.   

Mysterianism as a general strategy rests on a fairly solid foundation.  First of all, it is a self-evident modal axiom that actuality entails possiblity.  It is also self-evident that if x is possible, then it does not follow that we are in a position to understand how it is possible.  So it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations.  Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality.

But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries.  A true mystery is a true proposition that is unintelligible to us, though not unintelligible in itself. Now here is my difficulty in a nutshell. If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind.  And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Bear with me as I try to clarify my objection.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what that proposition is.  I must know the identity of the proposition.  But a proposition that strikes my mind as unintelligible is not one about whose identity I can be sure.

I count four positions or attitudes one can take toward a proposition: accept as true, reject as false, suspend judgment as to truth-value, practice epoché , ἐποχή.  Pithier still: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withdraw.  The first three are self-explanatory.  By Withdraw I mean: take no position on whether or not there is even a proposition (ein Gedanke, a complete thought) before one's mind.  (The notion of Withdrawal is derived via Benson Mates from Sextus Empiricus.)  Withdrawal goes farther than Suspension.  To suspend is to refuse to accept or reject a well-defined proposition while accepting that there is such a proposition before one's mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I take no position on whether or not there is a well-defined proposition before my mind.  In the state of Withdrawal I have before my mind a verbal formulation, and the senses of its constituent words, but I take no position on the question whether the verbal formulation expresses a proposition.

Example.  A Trinitarian says, 'There is exactly one God in three divine persons.'  Studying the doctrine I come to the conclusion that I can attach no definite sense to it on the ground that it seems to me to entail one or more logical contradictions.   That is not a case of rejection or of suspension; it is a case of epoché.  I 'bracket' (to borrow a term  from Husserl) two questions: the question as to truth-value, and the more fundamental question as to whether or not there is even a proposition (a unified, coherent, sense-structure) before my mind as opposed to an incoherent, un-unified bunch of word-senses.

Suppose you say to me, "Snow is white and snow is not white."  Being the charitable fellow that I am known to be, I would not churlishly impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction.  I would take you to be using a contradictory form of words to express a non-contradictory proposition, perhaps, the proposition that snow is white where I didn't relieve myself, but not white where I did.  Or something like that.  The time-honored method of showing an apparent contradiction to be merely apparent is by making a distinction in respect of time, or respect, or word sense.

But if someone insists that he means literally that snow is white and snow is not white where there is no distinction in respect of time, respect, or sense of the word 'white,' then I wouldn't know what the content of the assertion was.  I wouldn't know which proposition my interlocutor was trying get across to me.  For if my interlocutor was otherwise rational,  the Principle of Charity would forbid me from imputing a contradiction to him.  I would have to practice withdrawal.

If you say with a straight face "Snow is white and snow is not white" and you are neither equivocating on any term, nor making any distinction with respect to time or respect, and I charitably refuse to impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction of the form *p & ~p,* then I must say that I have no idea at all which proposition you are trying to convey to me.  And so I naturally practice epoché with respect to your utterance.

(I grant that there is a sense in which a self-contradictory proposition -- *No dog is a dog* for example -- is intelligible (understandable): for if I did not understand the proposition I would not understand it to be self-contradictory and thus necessarily false.  What I mean by 'intelligible' here is 'understandable as broadly-logically possibly true.'  On this narrow use of 'intelligible,' a claim to the effect that no dog is a dog or that snow both is and is not white is unintelligible.)

Back to the mysterian materialist.  I must put his asseverations within the Husserlian brackets.  He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all.  A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept  make no sense.  For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain.  That makes no sense.  Memory states are intentional states: they have content.  No physical state has content, or could have content.   So no intentional state could be a physical state.  The very idea is unintelligible.  To be precise: it is unintelligible as something broadly logically possible.  The vocabularies we use when speaking of brain states and mental states respectively are radically incommensurable.  Axon, dendrite, synapse, etc. on the one hand, qualia, intentionality, content, etc. on the other.  Even if one were to know everything there is to know about the electro-chemistry and neuro-anatomy of the brain one would still have no clue as to how consciousness arises from it.  By consciousness, I mean not only qualia but intentional (object-directed) states. 

But where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words.  So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head'  or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.'  But one cannot attach a non-contradictory thought to the words.

No doubt there is an illusion of sense.  There is nothing syntactically wrong with 'Thoughts are brain states' or 'Sensory qualia are physical features of the brain.'  And the individual words have meaning.  What's more, the words taken together seem to convey a coherent thought in the way in which 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' does not seem to convey a coherent thought.  But when the meaning is made explicit, the unintelligibility becomes manifest.

To say of a sensory quale q that it is identical to a brain state b is to say something that is unintelligible.  For if q = b, then they share all properties, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  But it is plain that they do not share all properties: the quale but not the brain state has a phenomenological feel, a Nagelian what it-is-like, an element of irreducible subjectivity.  Thus the materialist identity claim is seen with a just a tiny bit of reasoning to be utterly unintelligible.

If you tell me that one and the same item in my skull has both physical and phenomenological properties, then I say you have changed the subject: you now have a dual-aspect theory going.  I will then press you on what this third item is that has both physical and phenomenological features. 

Suppose you stick to the topic but make a mysterian move.  You grant me that it is unintelligible for us that q = b, but insist that it is intelligible in itself.  You say it is true in reality despite the irremediable appearance of unintelligibility.  It is true and non-contradictory in reality that  sensory qualia and  thoughts are nothing other than events or processes  transpiring inside the  skull.  You say it is true and non-contradictory that when I think about Boston that thinking is just something going on in my head, adding that it is and will remain a mystery how this could be.

My objection can be put as follows.  We have a verbal formulation (VF) such as 'Qualia are brain states.'  VF expresses the unintelligible-for-us proposition (UFUP) *Qualia are brain states.*  We are told that VF is true even though we, with our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true.  So there must be a true intelligible-in-itself proposition (IIIP) distinct from (UFUP) to which we have no access.  How is IIIP related to VF?  It cannot be that VF expresses IIIP.  VF expresses UFUP.  So we are supposed to accept a proposition to which we have no access, a proposition that stands in no specifiable relation to VF.  But surely that I cannot do.  I cannot accept a proposition to which I have no access.

The formulations of the trinitarian theist appear to be in the same logical boat.   I am of course assuming that the logical problem of the Trinity cannot be solved on the discursive plane.  That is, one cannot solve it in the usual way by making distinctions.  If one could solve it in this way, then there would be no need to make a mysterian move.  The doctrine would be rationally acceptable as it stands, though not rationally provable since the triunity of God can be known only by revelation.

To sum up my objection.  We are offered a verbal formulation, e.g., "There is one God in three divine persons."  This verbal formulation expresses a proposition that is unintelligible to us.  (It is unintelligible to us because contradictions can be derived from it using given doctrinal elements and unquestionable notions such as the transitivity of identity.)  We are assured, however, that while the manifest proposition is unintelligible to us, the verbal formulation expresses  a second proposition that is true and intelligible in itself.  But since this proposition is inaccessible, one annot accept it, reject it, or suspend judgment with respect to it.

If you tell me that there are not two propositions, but that one and the same proposition is both unintelligible to us but intelligible in itself, then I will ask you which proposition this is.

I suppose what I am saying is that a true proposition that is a mystery is an item so indeterminate that one cannot take up any attitude to it except that of Withdrawal or epoché as I defined this term.

Reality: Sentence-Like or List-Like?

Echoing his teacher John Anderson, the late David M. Armstrong maintains that reality is sentence-like rather than list-like. (Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford, 2010, p. 34)

I would push the thought further, in a direction Armstrong would not approve of:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

What I have just written will anger the shade of another dead Aussie, David Stove: Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,

That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says’ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’,  sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)

A few comments are in order.

 

1. Let’s start with the parenthetical claim at the end. To say that two statements are (logically) consistent is to say that they (logically) can both be true, that there is a (logically) possible world in which both are true. But a statement cannot be true or false unless it possesses meaning: meaningfulness is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of having a truth-value. Now to be meaningful and to be intelligible are the same. It follows that Stove is wrong and that it is not the case that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible. Consistency is defined in terms of truth, and truth requires intelligibility.

2. Are The Word was with God and The Word was God, taken singly, unintelligible? Not unless you are a positivist who ties intelligibility to empirical verifiability. But the principle of cognitive significance that positivists employ (according to which every cognitively meaningful statement is either logical/analytic or else empirically verifiable in principle) is itself empirically unverifiable. And since it is neither a truth of logic nor an analytic truth, it is itself meaningless by its own criterion. Stove is hoist by his own petard, or cooked by his own stove.

3. To say or imply that no concrete thing in the world could have a proposition-like structure, and that anyone who thinks this is a lunatic, is itself a lunatic thing to say. I maintain that the world’s basic particulars are concrete facts and thus have a proposition-like structure, and I am no lunatic. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002). Closer to Australia, atheist David Armstrong, no slouch of a philosopher, and sane as far as I can tell, argues, quite sensibly, that contingent truths require truth-makers and that the latter are states of affairs, proposition-like entities. Stove’s suggestion that a view like this is insane shows that there is something deeply wrong with Stove. 'I am seated’ is true in virtue of the fact of my being seated. Insanity? Or common sense?

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh.  What justifies it?  The even harsher tone this  two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.

On Keeping Folks in Check

An appeal to reason works with a few, and an appeal to self-interest with most.  But then there are the hopelessly recalcitrant for whom only the appeal to force is effective.  The only argument that reaches them is the argumentum ad baculum.  Herein yet another reason to uphold Second Amendment rights.

Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment not only fail to appreciate its importance but also vastly underestimate the difficulty of actually repealing it.  On the latter point, see Charles C. W. Cooke.

Obama's Iran Swindle

My man Krauthammer nails it again.

America's Descent into Lawlessness

Excerpt:

Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated about her improper use of a private e-mail account and server has been proven false. A State Department staffer who worked on Clinton’s private server plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional committee about his role in privatizing Clinton’s email.

But like Lerner, Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.

Not so Kim Davis. She is a conservative Christian court clerk in Kentucky who apparently thought, given the lawless times, that she could ignore without consequence a Supreme Court decision making gay marriage legal.

Davis was jailed for not enforcing the law. That is a justifiable punishment — if it were applied equally to the progressive mayors of sanctuary cities and all officials who likewise ignore federal law.

Living Well and Living Large

One can live well without living large.  And in most cases living large will militate against living well.  Schopenhauer's exaggeration is apropos:

"Every limitation makes one happy."  It is true.  In many if not most cases, restrictions, limitations, reductions in options, and the like are conducive to contentment and well-being. 

But only up to a point, of course.

Life Without Views

Could one live well without views, 'long' views?  I address the question in Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

Monkish Haiku

Avoid the near occasion
Of unnecessary conversation.