Month: March 2010

A Strange Experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite

I had a strange experience in the late 1980's. Although my  main residence at the time was in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, near the bohemian district called Coventry, I was teaching at the University of Dayton and during the school year rented rooms not far from the University. One night, spirited philosophical   conversation with a graduate student aroused the ire of a bitter old man by the name of Charles Doughty. He occupied an adjoining  efficiency and thought we were being too loud. So he started shouting  at us through the closed door: "I'll kill you, you son of a bitch, God damn you, etc." Just to be on the safe side, when back in Cleveland Heights I  fetched my snub-nosed Colt .38 Detective Special — which I had   purchased from yet another graduate student — but luckily did not   have to use on old Doughty.

The lonely and miserable old bastard obliged me some time later by dying of a heart attack. Conversation with Mrs.  Brunner, my landlady, confirmed that he had had a heart condition and knew that he was not  long for this earth. Since Doughty's apartment was bigger and better situated than the ones I usually occupied, I took it over. I dubbed it  the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

Now in those days, I never ever listened to the AM band on the radio.   I was still something of a liberal and stuck to the FM band where not only  the frequency is modulated but the voices of the announcers are as  well. I listened mainly to WYSO out of Antioch College in Yellow  Springs, Ohio, a sleepy little dorf redolent of the '60s where the scents of sandalwood and  patchouli still hung in the air. WYSO was the local NPR affiliate, and I listened regularly to "All Things Considered."  (For more on Yellow Springs and Antioch College, see my Death By Political Correctness.) 

One night after moving into Doughty's old digs, I woke up in the   middle of the night to the sound of the radio in the living room. I  would not have left the radio on, being a very careful and cautious sort of fellow. So I got up to investigate. The radio was indeed on,  but what amazed me was that it was set to the AM band, which, as I said, I never listened to in those days.

Was the ghost of Doughty still hanging around the place? He was a bitter old man who ended his miserable life without family or friends in a crummy, shabbily furnished couple of rooms in an old 1940's building in a third-rate Midwestern city. Did he have nothing better to do than screw around with the radio of a sleeping philosopher who once disturbed him with the sounds of his dialectic?

So there you have it. The facts are that I awoke that night to a radio tuned to the AM band. Is that good evidence of a ghost? No. Did I  sleep well on succeding nights? Absolutely. I've trained myself to be skeptical. You can't be a philosopher without being at least a methodological sceptic. Doubt is the engine of inquiry and the mother-in-law, if not the mother, of philosophy.

But when Halloween approaches, and black cats cross my path, I give a thought to old Doughty and his crummy efficiency, the Chas. Doughty  Memorial Suite at the Paul Brunner Estates.

If you want to read an excellent, balanced book on the paranormal by a very sharp analytic philosopher, I recommend Stephen E. Braude, Immortal Remains: The Evidence of Life After Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

Welcome to Civil War

To Dennis Prager's "The bigger the government the smaller the citizen," I add my "The bigger the government, the more to fight over."  The more the government takes over, the more they violate the individual liberty of the citizens, the more they insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life, the more protests, the more lobbying, the more lawsuits, the more money and time wasted on pointless bickering.  I floated my observation months ago and recent events demonstrate its accuracy.  Brace yourself  for ever larger doses of acrimony as the months and years wear on.  Some are speaking of civil war.  It's a Civil War: What We Do Now.

David Harsanyi's The Mugging of Personal Freedom is worth reading.

The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio

The qualifier 'conservative' borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth talking about that is not conservative.  This is part of the reason the Left hates the conservative variety so much.  They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their own attempts such as Air America have failed miserably. And so, projecting their own hatred, they label conservative talk 'hate radio.'

In a 22 March op-ed piece in the NYT, Bob Herbert, commenting on the G.O.P., writes, "This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry."

I find that vile outburst fascinating.  There is no insanity, hatred, or bigotry in any of the conservative talk jocks whom I listen to:  Laura Ingram, Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager or Michael Medved.  There is instead common sense, humanity, excellent advice, warnings against extremism, deep life wisdom, facts, arguments, and a reasonably high level of discourse.  Of the six I have mentioned, Prager and Medved are the best, a fact reflected in their large audiences.  See for yourself!

So what is it about Herbert and people  of his ilk that causes them to react routinely in such delusional fashion?

It is a long story, of course, but part of it is  that lefties confuse dissent with hate.  They don't seem to realize that if I dissent from your view, it doesn't follow that I hate you.  This confusion goes hand in hand with the strange notion that the Left owns dissent, which I duly refute in a substantial post.

I leave you with a quotation from David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence, 2003), p. 273, emphasis added:

The image of the right that the left has concocted — authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited — is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum — or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about "blood and soil" nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves "liberal," but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself — and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term "liberal" to obscure its radical agenda.

One more thing.  You can see from Herbert's picture that he is black. So now I will be called a racist for exposing his outburst.  That is right out of the Left's playbook:  if a conservative disagrees with you on any issue, or proffers any sort of criticism, then you heap abuse on him.  He's a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a 'homophobe,' a bigot, a religious zealot . . . .

5 K or Marathon: Which is Harder?

5K

Which is harder, to run 3.1 miles or 26.2?  They are equally hard for the runner who runs right.  The agony and the ecstasy at the end of a race run right is the same whether induced by 42.2 km of LSD or 5 km of POT.  Above, I am approaching the final stretch of a 5 K trail race (2nd annual CAAFA 5K Race Against Violence, Prospector Park, Apache Junction, Arizona).  The date is wrong: should be 3/21/2010.  I finished in 45th place in a mixed field of 113, and 28th among 44 men.  Time: 33:38.8 for a pace of 10:49.8.  That's nothing to crow about, but then I'm 60 as is the gal right behind me.  Twenty years ago I could cover this distance at a 7:45 min/mile pace.  There were five 60+ males and I finished first among them.  Not a strong field!  But a beautiful cool crisp morning and a great course and a great run.  I could have pushed harder!  Could have and should have.

LSD: long slow distance.  POT: plenty of tempo.  Both terms borrowed from Joe Henderson.

More on the Law of Non-Contradiction and its Putative Empirical Refutability

A reader's e-mail with my comments in blue:

Nice post on the LNC. That topic is a real quagmire, isn't it?

I’ve lost the link to the Science Daily report of the Cleland experiment, so the details of how he confirmed the superposition are lost to me, but I’m really struck by the fact that you are defending LNC as a transcendental, not transcendent, principle. Kant doesn’t take this route in the First Critique, does he? LNC is not some form of sensibility, is it?

 

That's right, I am defending LNC as a transcendental, not a transcendent principle, and for two reasons.  First, I believe that LNC is well-nigh unassailable if presented as a transcendental a priori condition of  the possibility of (i) meaningful discourse and (ii) experience of the objects of Sellar's manifest image or of Kant's phenomenal world, with (i) being more unassailable than (ii).   Second, the transcendental defense  is all I need to turn aside what I take to be your conclusion from the Cleland experiment, namely, that there are macro-objects of direct perceptual acquaintance that serve as counterexamples to LNC.  To show that LNC applies beyond our thought and beyond our experience to whatever lies beyond our thought and experience, if anything,  is not so easy.  One cannot just dogmatically assume that a law of thought is automatically a law of reality, especially since this has been denied by any number of philosophers.  Aristotle in Metaphysics Gamma, 3, 4, attempts a proof by retortion of LNC, but as far as I can see, all he establishes is that LNC is a necessary condition of meaningful thinking and speaking, not that its validity extends beyond thought and speech and their objects to things in themselves.

 

I would also urge in passing against certain dogmatic Thomists that the Critical Problem — the problem of showing how a priori conditions of thinking apply to things external to us — is already present in nuce in Aristotle.  But that's another long series of posts.

LNC is surely not a form of sensibility for Kant, but it is a form of understanding.  Since there is for Kant no experience (Erfahrung) without a 'marriage' of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) and understanding (Verstand), it seems reasonable to impute to Kant the view that no macro-object of experience can violate LNC.

One thing I think Cleland would say is that observing the paddle in the normal sense, i.e, bombarding it with lots of photons, disturbs the superposition and collapses the ambivalent quantum state into a moving or a not moving state. So he would seem to agree with you as far “seeing” in the ordinary sense goes. We don’t see something moving & not moving—and one could add: our eyes and brains are just not designed to experience such objects even if we could do so without disturbing them. But, seeing is  not the same as sensing, and presumably the paddle in its quantum state has effects (on us) that are unambiguously different from its effects in states where the superposition has collapsed. So, as you say, no naked eye observations of superposition, but perhaps that’s too narrow a focus and we should admit that we might experience a superposition is some other unique way.

 

You seem to be assuming the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.  But as you know, it is not the only game in town.  Bill Hill, a U.K. immunologist, e-mailed me the following, which is very helpful:

 

There are two main interpretations of quantum mechanics which are popular in the physics community (there are a few others, but they are mostly propounded by eccentrics).  The first is the "Copenhagen" interpretation, in which quantum events really do exist in multiple incompatible states at the same time, but only when there is no outside observer looking at them.  I am not making this up, though I should add that by "observer", they do not just mean conscious beings but any information-carrying system (such as a sensor) which can report data about the quantum event.  Though it is implausible at first glance, this interpretation does in fact solve the boundary problem that so vexes many scientists.  Because sub-atomic particles are too small for us to see, they are free to exhibit this behaviour.  But people, planets and so on are so large that they are always under observation in some sense, they cannot behave in this way.  Hence, when the little bit of metal in the article is observed, it will either appear moving or not moving to the person looking at it, but when nobody is looking it is in fact doing both.  This raises enormous questions about perception and causality, and many people are very unhappy with it as a result.  The important point is that your suggestion that there cannot be an empirical counterexample to the Law of Non-Contradiction remains intact under the Copenhagen interpretation.
 
The most popular alternative to Copenhagen is the "Many-Worlds" interpretation, in which the universe splits into two duplicates every time a quantum event occurs.  So when the little bit of metal in the article is put into its quantum state, in one universe it is moving, and in the other it is not.  Of course, it is impossible for us to tell which one we are in.  Many people (rightly, in my opinion) think that this is just silly, and embrace Copenhagen on grounds of parsimony.  However, it is consistent with the data, and also with the Law of Non-Contradiction, since two incompatible states cannot exist in the same universe under Many-Worlds.
 
So as far as I can tell from my limited experience, you are correct and neither the Copenhagen nor the Many-Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics offer an empirical counterexample to the Law of Non-Contradiction, whatever other fascinating philosophical questions they may raise in their own right.

 

 

The salient point is that, on the 'many worlds' interpretation of QM there is no violation of LNC not even  on the micro-level let alone on the macro-level.  Given that there is no one settled interpretation of QM accepted by all physicists, the case against LNC at either level is bound to be weak.

 

This is very tricky stuff, but I think it is the paddle, a macro object that we can directly observe under other conditions, that is now in the superposition state of moving and not moving. We in fact have put it into this state. The paddle is not some ding an sich, but an ordinary object that can transition from existing “normally” in one state or its opposite to existing at once in both contradictory states. In principle any macro-object could be reduced to such a quantum ground state but we just can’t physically do so.

 

I am afraid that you are not making sense.  You have already granted that the paddle that we see with the naked eye cannot be seen by the naked eye to be both moving and not moving,  But now you are saying that that very visible paddle — and not some invisible micro-constituents of it – has been put by the experimental apparatus into a state in which it is  both moving and not moving.  This implies that one and the same visible paddle is both (moving & not moving) and not (moving & not moving).  Which is is higher -order contradiction.

 

Are you saying that there are two paddles?  Then they can't both be visible.

 

Furthermore, if you say, as you do above, following the Copenhagen interpretation, that observation of the paddle forces it into  one state or the other, then cannot also say that that very same visible paddle is in both states.

 

I am afraid  that the science  journalist's report on the Cleland experiment has delivered us into a realm of rank gibberish.

 

Your second point that LNC is also a “form of intelligibilty” is surely right, and it just invites incomprehension to say that the paddle is both moving and not moving. I guess we need to learn the jargon of the physicists here. I’m not sure exactly what they say but something like the paddle in its quantum ground state is in a superposition of motion and no motion.  That I get, and it says something remarkable about the really weird universe we apparently live in. I’m saving up my money and moving to a good old Newtonian universe at the first opportunity!

 

But now you are sounding like certain Trinitarian theologians who say that we should just repeat the creedal formulae without worrying whether or how they make any bloody sense.  It is curious that defenders of the coherence of the Trinity often bring up QM.  You of course grant no authority to the Bible or the Church.  Why then do you genuflect before the authority of scientists when they spout gibberish?  I am being intentionally provocative.  ComBox is open if you care to counterrespond.

Bernard Goldberg on Health Care

Bernard_goldberg_whitebg_252 I enjoy Bernie Goldberg's commentary on The O'Reilly Factor and I generally agree with it.  But I just heard him say something that is not quite right.  He sees the leftist-conservative disconnect on the recent health care legislation in the following terms:  for leftists it is a moral and civil rights issue whereas for conservatives it is an economic issue.  Leftists are for it because they think citizens (and presumably anyone who resides in this country whether legally or illegally) have a RIGHT to it, whereas conservatives are against it because the country cannot afford it.  (If you listened to that preternatural dumbass Nancy Pelosi last night, you heard her lame attempt to 'derive' the positive right to health care from the genuine constitutionally grounded negative rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

But Goldberg's is a superficial analysis.  It is true that we cannot afford it.  Hell, we cannot afford the entitlements already in place.  See here for a breakdown of medicare expenditures.  But the conservative objection is not merely an economic one.  It too is a moral objection:  it is morally wrong, among other things, for the government to force its citizens, on pain of being heavily fined, to buy a privately-sold product such as health insurance.  It is an affront to the liberty which is our birthright as Americans.  Think about it:  they are going to force you to buy something from a private company, 'for your own good'  whether you can afford it, want it, or need it.  Now either you see what is wrong with that or you don't.  If you don't then I put you down as hopeless.

This is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue.  In this respect it is no different from taxation.  It too is a liberty, and hence a moral, issue long before it is an economic issue.  But individual liberty is one of those things that 'liberals' don't understand (unless it is the liberty to be a cultural-polluter) — which is one of the reasons we should retire the word 'liberal' and call leftists what they are.  We contemporary conservatives have a much better claim to the 'liberal' label.

Goldberg made a mistake tonight that conservatives routinely make.  They fail to see that they do in fact occupy the moral high ground, or perhaps I should say that they are strangely reticent about proclaiming the morality of their position.  When they put the issues in economic terms alone they play right into the hands of their opponents who are all too eager to paint them as mean-spirited, moneygrubbing protectors of their supposed economic privileges.

Liberty took a beating yesterday.  That's the main thing.  The economic considerations, important as they are, are secondary.  Bill and Bernie need to 'wise up' to use Bill's expression.  This war is about ideas first and money only second.

Now the Battle Begins in Dead Earnest

Speaker Pelosi really outdid herself last night in point of mendacity.  She referred to the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . ."  She then tried to link yesterday's successful leftist takeover of the health care system to the principles and values of this great document, suggesting that there is a right to health care.  How's that for chutzpah?  What is despicable about her and her ilk is their mendacity: they know full well that their welfare state principles are radically at odds with the founders' conception of limited government, but they refuse to state clearly to the American people what they stand for.

But it ain't over til it's over and these lying leftists will have hell to pay.  The battle is just beginning.  Some commentary:  Victor Davis Hanson, Newt Gingrich, Varadarajan, Trende.

An Empirical Refutation of the Law of Non-Contradiction?

Nice work if you can get it!  Here we read:

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical "ground state"– the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.

So we have a little object, visible to the naked eye, that is simultaneously moving and not moving.  Is that possible?  Yes, if one part is moving and a distinct part is not moving.  Presumably that is not what is meant above.  What is meant is that the whole object is simultaneously both moving and not moving.  That too is possible if 'simultaneously' or 'at the same time' is being applied to an interval of time.  Consider a temporal interval five seconds in duration.  Let 't' refer to that interval.  It is surely possible that object O, the whole of it,  be at rest at t and in motion at t.  But this triviality is also not what  is meant above. 

Continue reading “An Empirical Refutation of the Law of Non-Contradiction?”

I’m Telling You All I Know

The Website of Novelist, Short Story Writer & Poet William Michaelian.  A search for writing about Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel brought me to this site.  Couldn't find a copy in Border's the other day.  Moving from the Rs to the Ws, I noted the resurgence of Ayn Rand: several of her titles in new editions were prominently displayed.  I had the thought that, as long as there are adolescents, there will be no lack of readers of Nietzsche, Rand, and Kerouac.  Every generation discovers them anew and finds something to relate to before moving on to the better and the truer.

At first in the bookstore I drew a blank: couldn't remember the name of the author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.  So I asked a matronly lady who worked that section and who looked intelligent.  She had never heard of these titles.  People nowadays don't know jackshit.  But I feel too good this Sunday afternoon to start in on a rant, having acquitted myself nobly and without screw-up this morning in a 5 K trail race.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Baker’s Dozen Road Songs Plus One

Entangled deep in the psyche of every true American is a deep love of the open road.  Here are some tunes to be enjoyed while seated at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, while 'motorvatin' over some lonesome desert highway in the magic west of buttes and mesas, with four on the road, one in the hand, and the other wrapped around a fine cigar or a cup of steaming java.

Woody Guthrie, Hard Travelin'.  Hank Williams, Lost Highway.  Spade Cooley, Detour.  Leonard Cohen, Passing Through.  Bob Dylan, Highway 51 Blues.  Robert Johnson, Crossroad Blues.  Eric Clapton, Crossroads. Nelson Riddle, Route 66.  Chuck Berry, Get Your Kicks on Route 66.  Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere.  The Doors, Roadhouse Blues.  Johnny Cash, Highway 61 Revisited.  Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited.

Steve Allen and Jack Kerouac, A reading from On the Road.

Aphorisms Good and Bad

These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good:

With God there are only individuals. (I, 16)

Continue reading “Aphorisms Good and Bad”

An Analogy for the Categorial Difference Between Consciousness and Matter

Some people pin their hopes on future science for a solution of the problem of consciousness as if hope, which has a place in religion, has any place in a strictly scientific worldview. If we only knew enough about the brain, these people opine, we would understand how consciousness arises from it.

But consider an analogy. Suppose you explain to a person that the natural number series is infinite, that there is no largest natural number since for every n, there is n + 1. The person seems to understand, but then objects when you say that it is impossible that there be a largest natural number due to the very nature of the natural number series. Your use of 'impossible' sticks in the guy's craw. He tilts Leftward, you see, and he thinks, quite confusedly, that anything's possible. He doesn't like it when people invoke natures and impossibilities and necessities and  lay claim to a  priori knowledge.  That's too rigid and static for his taste. So he says,

Troubles With Truthmaking: The Truthmaker and Veritas Sequitur Esse Principles

Some recent attempts (by G. Oppy, J. Brower, A. Pruss and perhaps others) at making sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) have invoked the truthmaker principle (TMP).  I made heavy use of TMP in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence  (Kluwer 2002), though not in defense of DDS. Being a self-critical sort, I am now re-examining the case for TMP.  Note that acceptance of TMP does not straightaway commit one to acceptance of any particular category of entity as truthmakers such as concrete states of affairs.  One could accept TMP and hold that truthmakers are tropes.  And there are other possibilities. So before we can address the truthmaker defense of DDS we must (i) argue for TMP and then (ii) decide on what can and cannot function as truthmakers.  In this post I consider some of what can be said for and against truthmaking in general. It looks like we might be in for a long series of posts on this fascinating but difficult topic.

Continue reading “Troubles With Truthmaking: The Truthmaker and Veritas Sequitur Esse Principles”