May 2013 – Maverick Philosopher

The World’s Criterion of Worth

Something is worth doing if and only if one is paid to do it.

The theme is developed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

Obama the Sophist

[. . .]

In short, Obama is the most impressive sophist of his age. In classical rhetoric, when the speaker was about to equivocate, he added an emphatic adjective or parenthetical that he was never more candid and sincere. Sometimes he inserted “on the one hand / on the other hand” to show his awareness of every point of view other than his own. Rhetoricians often projected their own base motives onto others, using straw men like “some will say” or “there are those who…”, as if illiberal enemies were so ubiquitous that there was no mundane need to name them all. Obama has mastered all that and more.

He excels especially in the expression of dramatic anguish. His attorney general is “upset” that he had to resort to tapping the phone records of reporters. Barack Obama is torn because his drones sometime kill those beyond the four thousand intended. Obama is so bothered that his subordinates have gone after journalists that he wants Congress to stop him from himself, by passing a law to prevent his own team from doing what he finds politically advantageous. It is outrageous, Obama thunders, that the IRS is monitoring his political enemies — and so outrageous that the person who oversaw the illegal program had to be promoted to enforce the fiscal protocols of Obamacare. Benghazi really was a terrorist act, because the president right after the killings jailed a filmmaker for it, blamed the attack on spontaneous demonstrations — and yet in passing said he opposed generic terrorist acts. Presto — he could post facto claim that he meant all the time that Benghazi was just one of those preplanned acts of terror.

Sophists tip their hand in jest — and none better than Barack Obama. Beware when he jokes that he will send the IRS after you, or that Predators will guard his daughters. And be even more vigilant of the preemptory denial. Barack Obama can brag ad nauseam about killing Osama bin Laden, because he first swore that he would never “spike the ball” by referencing the hit.

[. . .]

On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day. Seize it and squeeze it.

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site. Here it is again, considerably reworked.

………..

I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it turned up for $13 in a used bookstore. So I bought it, unable to resist the self-infliction of yet more Dennettian sophistry. What am I? A masochist? A completist? A compulsive consciousness and qualia freak?

The subtitle is "Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness." That raises the question of how there could even be philosophical obstacles to such a science. I am not aware that philosophers control the sources of funding for neuroscience projects. And what could a philosopher say that could stymie brain science?

But let's look at a passage:

     If we are are to explain the conscious Subject, one way or another
     the transition from clueless cells to knowing organizations of
     cells must be made without any magic ingredients. This requirement
     presents theorists with what some see as a nasty dilemma . . . . If
     you propose a theory of the knowing Subject that describes whatever
     it describes as like the working of a vacant automated factory —
     not a Subject in sight — you will seem to many observers to have
     changed the subject or missed the point. On the other hand, if your
     theory still has tasks for a Subject to perform, still has a need
     for a Subject as witness, then . . . you have actually postponed
     the task of explaining what needs explaining.

     To me, one of the most fascinating bifurcations in the intellectual
     world today is between those to whom it is obvious — obvious —
     that a theory that leaves out the Subject is thereby disqualified
     as a theory of consciousness (in Chalmer's terms, it evades the
     Hard Problem), and those to whom it is just as obvious that any
     theory that doesn't leave out the Subject is disqualified. I submit
     that the former have to be wrong. . . . (p. 145)

Dennett has done a good job of focusing the issue. On the one side, the eliminativists who hold that the only way to explain the conscious Subject is by explaining it away. On the other side, those who are convinced that one cannot explain a datum by denying its existence.

What we have here fundamentally is a deep philosophical dispute about the nature of explanation, and not a debate confined to the philosophy of mind. What's more, it is not a debate that is going to be resolved by further empirical research. Not all legitimate questions are empirical questions.

It ought to be self-evident that any explanation that consigns the explanandum (that which is to be explained) to the status of nonexistence is a failure as an explanation. Eliminativist moves are confessions of failure. Any genuine explanation of X presupposes (and so cannot eliminate) the
existence of X. One cannot explain something by explaining it away. Two related points:

1. One cannot explain what does not exist. One cannot explain why unicorns roam the Superstition Wilderness, or why the surface of the moon is perfectly smooth. There is nothing to explain. In the case of consciousness, however, there is something to explain. So it at least makes sense to attempt to explain consciousness.

2. An explanation that entails the nonexistence of the explanandum is no explanation at all.

Both (1) and (2) are analytic truths that simply unpack the concept of explanation.

I once heard a proponent of Advaita Vedanta claim that advaitins don't explain the world; they explain it away. Now it is surely dubious in the extreme to think of this insistent and troubling plural world of our ongoing everyday acquaintance as an illusion. Whatever its exact ontological status, it exists. If it didn't there would be nothing to explain or explain away. And if one were to explain it away, as one with Brahman, then one would have precisely failed to explain it.

What Dennet is maintaining about consciousness and the Subject is even worse. There is some vestige of sense in the claim that the world is an illusion. It makes sense, at least initially, to say that there is an Absolute Consciousness and that the world is its illusion. But it is utterly absurd to maintain that consciousness is an illusion. The very distinction between illusion and reality presupposes consciousness. In a world without consciousness, nothing would appear, and so nothing would appear
falsely. Necessarily, no consciousness, no illusions. Illusions prove the reality of consciousness.

This is a very simple point. It is an 'armchair' point. All you have to do is think to know that it is true. But neither its being 'armchair' nor its being simple is an argument against it. The law of non-contradiction is simple and 'armchair' too.

The denigration of a priori knowledge is part and parcel of the pseudophilosophy of scientism.

Since consciousness exists, the project of explaining it at least makes sense, by (1). By (2), an eliminativist explanation is no explanation at all.

The thing about consciousness is that the only way to explain it in terms satisfactory to a materialist is by denying its existence. It is to Dennett's 'credit' that he drives to the very end of this dead-end road, thereby showing that it is a dead-end.

My most rigorous demolition of Dennett's scientistic sophistry is in Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

If Dennett were right, then we would all be zombies, including Dennett. (See Searle, Dennett, and Zombies.) But then there would be no consciousness to explain and to write fat books about.

The demand that consciousness be exhaustively explained in terms involving no tincture of consciousness is a demand that cannot be met. Explanation of what by whom to whom? Explanation is an inherently mind-involving notion. There are no explanations in nature. There is no way the science of matter can somehow close around the phenomena of mind and include them within its ambit. Science, like explanation, is inherently mind-involving.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Further Commentary

Poetically translated: The Going Under of the Land of the Evening. Literally: The Decline of the West.

Victor Davis Hanson, Western Cultural Suicide. The philosopher in me likes it that Hanson begins with a distinction and ends with a paradox. (Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox. And of course they are masters of distinction. Distinguo ergo sum, saith the philosopher.) The distinction, and an important one it is, is between multiculturalism and a multiracial society united by a single culture. A distinction being elided as the melting pot melts and we drift down the path to Balkanization too weak and self-doubting to defend our values.

The paradox:

Is not that the ultimate paradox: The solution to the sort of violence we saw in Britain and Sweden the past week, or to the endless acrimony over “comprehensive immigration reform,” is that the Western hosts will so accede to multiculturalism that the West will be no longer unique — and therefore no longer a uniquely desirable refuge for its present legions of schizophrenic admiring critics. If the immigrant from Oaxaca can recreate Oaxaca in Tulare, or the Pakistani second-generation British subject can carve out Sharia in the London boroughs, or a suburb of Stockholm is to be like in one in Damascus, then would there be any reason to flee to Tulare, London, or Stockholm?

Leon Wieseltier, Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities. With scientism in the ascendancy, the humanities are dying. I would also point to the ideologizing of philosophy via scientism and leftism.

Dallas Willard on Being and Modes of Being

How do we best honor a philosopher, especially one who has passed on? By taking him seriously as an interlocutor and re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically.

What follows is pp. 37-42 of my article, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.

Willard on Existence: The Question of Univocity

Dallas Willard endorses a theory of existence that he finds in Husserl: "to exist or have being (which are one and the same thing) is simply to possess qualities and relations." ("Is Derrida's View of Ideal Being Rationally Defensible?" in Derrida and Phenomenology, eds. McKenna and Evans, Kluwer 1995, p. 28) Since members of diverse categories of entity have properties and stand in relations, Willard takes this view to imply an ontological (not just semantic) Univocity Thesis: the Being of beings "is the same in every case: a univocity extending across all ontological chasms, including the real and the ideal, the reelle and the irreelle." (p. 28) To supply some examples of my own, the number 2, a token of the numeral '2,' the type of which this token is a token, the proposition expressed by '2 is an even number,' a pair of rocks, a rock, a Husserlian rock-noema, an act of perceiving a rock . . . all of these exist in the same way or in the same mode. Or perhaps it would be better to say that there are no modes or ways of existence, and of course no degrees of existence. An item either exists or it does not.

To exist, then, is to have properties/relations, and each existing item exists in the same way. But can we move directly from

1. To exist = to have properties and relations

2. There are no modes of existence?

This is a valid inference only in the presence of

0. There are no modes of property/relation-possession.

But (0) is not obvious. Why must there be only one way of having properties/relations? Such classical theists as Augustine and Aquinas held to a doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God has his
omni-attributes (omniscience, etc.) by being identical to them. A contingent being such as Socrates, however, does not have his properties by being identical to them, but by exemplifying them. But if God and Socrates differ in the way they have properties, then, given the truth of (1), according to which it is the having of properties rather than the properties had that confers existence, God and Socrates also differ in the way they exist. God is (identical to) his existence; Socrates is not.

One may also question whether Socrates himself has all his properties in the same way. If his whiteness is taken to be an accident of him, then he does not have whiteness in the same way he has humanity. Near the beginning of the Categories (1a20 ff.), Aristotle makes a distinction between what is predicable of a subject and what is present in a subject. Humanity is predicable of Socrates but not present in him, while whiteness is present in him but not predicable of him. Whether or not this view in tenable in the end, its existence shows that one cannot move directly from (1) to (2).

And if the substance/accident scheme is coherent, then of course there are at least two further modes of existence, the mode of existence appertaining to contingent substances, and the mode appertaining to their accidents. Substances exist in se, accidents in alio, namely, in a substance. Substances would have an independent mode of existence, whether absolutely as in the case of God or relatively as in the case of Socrates, while accidents would have a dependent mode of existence. All of this in contravention of the Husserl-Willard commitment to the thesis that the Being of beings is "logically independent of independence. . . ." (p. 30)

Thus the first critical point to be made is that the move from (1) to (2) is a non sequitur without the assumption (0), an assumption which is tantamount to the question-begging assumption that there are no modes of existence. One is not entitled to move directly from (1) to (2).

To put it another way, one could easily hold that to exist = to have properties/relations while holding consistently with this a doctrine of modes of existence. Thus a Thomist could maintain that for both God and Socrates, to exist is to have properties, since, necessarily, neither can exist without having properties, and neither can have properties without existing. Indeed, our Thomist could hold this thesis in its strongest form by identifying existence with the having of properties. Consistently with this, he could also hold that the existence of God is identical with God while the existence of Socrates is distinct from Socrates. There is no inconsistency here because existence construed as the property of having properties/relations is quite clearly distinct from the existence of individuals. Call the former general existence, the latter singular existence. If there are no modes of general existence, which seems obvious, it does not follow that there are no modes of singular existence. Let me explain.

But first a caveat. Strictly speaking, general existence is not existence at all: 'general' functions here as an alienans adjective like artificial' in 'artificial leather' or 'negative' in 'negative net worth.' It is not as if there are two kinds of existence, general and singular. Artificial leather is not leather, but it resembles it closely enough to be confused with it. Similarly, general existence is not existence, but there is sufficient resemblance to the genuine article to beget confusion. If no one ever fell into confusion there would be no need for the phrase 'singular existence.' We would just say 'existence.' 'Singular' in 'singular existence' is not a specifying adjective, but a 'de-alienating' adjective (to coin a term) whose job is to undo the semantic mischief caused by the 'alienating' adjective, 'general,' when it is juxtaposed with 'existence.' In the same way, 'absolute' in 'absolute truth' undoes the semantic mischief caused when 'relative' is brought into juxtaposition with 'truth.'

General Versus Singular Existence

General existence is a property that absolutely everything has. As a supremely general property, general existence, or the property of having properties, is supremely abstract: it abstracts from the specific properties had in specific instances, and it abstracts from the individual havings of these properties. Thus a and b cannot have the (higher-order) property of having properties unless they have certain first-order properties in virtue of whose possession they have the higher-order property; but these first-order properties may be and typically will be different for a and b. Thus it
may be that a has the property of having properties in virtue of having F, G, H . . . while b has the higher-order property in virtue of having I, J, K . . . .

Indeed, there are cases in which two individuals share the formal property of having properties without sharing one single 'material' (in the sense of the German sachhaltig) property. The number 2 and a token of the numeral '2' have no 'material' properties in common. The number 2 subsists in serene isolation from the flux and shove of the causal order, something not true of a token of '2.' To press some recently fashionable jargon into service, we may say that the property of having properties — call it P — is a supervenient property in the sense that, necessarily, if anything has P, there is a subvenient or base property Q such that it has Q, and necessarily anything that has Q has P. The crucial idea, of course, is that variations in the base properties are logically consistent with strict sameness (univocity) of the supervenient property. (Just as variation in the base properties in respect of which Mary and Martha are morally good persons is consistent with their both being (univocally) morally good.)

Thus general existence is a supervenient property that abstracts from property differences in individual cases. But it also abstracts from the havings of these properties in individual cases. General existence is thereby involved in a double abstraction which completely eviscerates it of all content: abstraction is made from the properties had in individual cases and in the havings of these properties. It should be obvious that these havings are individual havings and thus numerically distinct. Thus a's having of F-ness is distinct from b's having of F-ness. These havings are as distinct as the facts Fa and Fb. Even if you think there is a universal relation Having, this relation is at most the ground of, and not identical to, the particular havings that connect a and F-ness and b and F-ness. The particular connectedness of a and F-ness is numerically distinct from the particular connectedness of b and F-ness, and both are distinct from the ontological ground of the connectednesses, whatever we decide this ground is.

In sum, general existence, involved as it is in the double abstraction lately noted, has absolutely nothing to do with what makes an individual concrete existent exist. That general existence should have no modes is therefore exactly what we should expect. To assert as much would be trivial. But it would not be trivial to claim that singular existence has no modes.

Singular existence is the existence of individuals. It is in every case the existence of some particular thing, the existence of a, the existence of b, etc. Singular existence cannot be existence in general, or existence in abstracto. Singular existence cannot itself exist except as the existence of some definite item, as the existence of a, the existence of b, etc. Moreover, singular existence is not repeated in a, b, etc. in the way a universal is repeated in the things that share it. There are no 'repetitions' or examples of singular existence, strictly speaking. There are no examples of it for the simple reason that singular existence is not a property, and only properties can be exemplified. Not being repeatable, singular existence cannot be a property.

The crucial upshot is that although singular existence is common to all that exists, it cannot be common in the manner of a property. Singular existence therefore has no examples or instances, strictly speaking. Although there are no examples or instances of singular existence, we can say that there are cases of it, and that singular existence itself is a case of it, the prime or paradigm case of it.

The difference between a case and an instance (example) is as follows. Any two instances of a universal property P are qualitatively identical as instances of P; what makes them two is therefore external to their being instances of P. Thus two instances of the universal redness, one in pen A, the other in pen B, are not numerically diverse as instances of redness; their diversity must be grounded in something else, diversity of the pens themselves, perhaps. But it cannot be that any two cases of singular existence are qualitatively identical as cases of singular existence: singular existence is not a quality. Two cases of singular existence differ numerically as cases of singular existence without prejudice to the fact that singular existence is common to all of its cases. This is not a contradiction since singular existence is not a property, and so is not common in the manner of a property. (Compare a common cause: it is common to its effects without being common in the manner of a property they both instantiate. This shows that one cannot assume that the only mode of commonality is property-commonality.) What makes any two cases two is therefore not external to singular existence. Singular existence is implicated in the very individuation of distinct existents. This should come as no surprise given what was said above about aâs having of F-ness being numerically distinct from bâs having of F-ness. Given that these havings are distinct and that the existing of each thick particular is its having of properties rather than a property had, it follows that the two thick particulars are numerically distinct in their very existence.

In sum, once one grasps that (i) it is the having of a property rather than the property had that confers existence, and that (ii) in each case the having of a property is an unrepeatable having, one is in a position to see that (iii) the existing of a is numerically distinct from the existing of b. Thus Socrates and Plato differ in their very existence. Even if they did not differ property-wise, they would differ in their existence. Max Black's famous iron spheres differ in respect of no property or relation, and yet they differ in their existence since there are two havings, one for each sphere, and not one for both of them. If there were one having, then either there would be only one sphere – contrary to the hypothesis – or the having would be a universal common to them. But the universal Having (exemplification) relation, as I argued above in critique of Moreland, cannot be what actually connects a thing and its properties. This is not to say that there is no exemplification relation, but that if there is, it cannot play the role of unifier. The ground of particular havings cannot be a universal. Existence itself cannot be a universal, whether a universal relation or a universal property.

Numerical difference is therefore numerical-existential difference. Given that there is a plurality of individuals, and that each differs in its existence from every other one, it follows that existence itself, that which makes them exist, cannot be a property they share no matter how extraordinary it is. Existence itself is implicated in the very individuality of each existing thing as explained above. As such, existence itself cannot be the property of having properties/relations. For this property, being supremely general, can have no bearing on what makes one individual numerically different from another.

This is not to say, but neither is it to deny, that singular existence is the principium individuationis. It is quite natural to say that bare or thin particulars are needed to do the job of numerical differentiation. (J. P. Moreland, Universals, pp. 148-157) But since such particulars cannot exist unless they have properties, and since the having of properties is just what singular existence is, a difficult set of questions arises as to whether numerical differentiation can be assigned to thin particulars or to singular existence or to the two working in tandem. None of this can be pursued here. The main point, however, is that singular existence in some way enters into the very individuation/differentiation of distinct existents.

This implies that each case of singular existence is essentially unique in the manner in which each instance (example) of a property is not essentially unique. A brief excursus into the phenomenology of love will serve to illustrate the crucial distinction between a case of singular existence and an instance of a property. Paramount cases of singular existence are persons.

Sensus Divinitatis: Nagel Defends Plantinga Against Grayling

Anthony Grayling writes:

The problem with Alvin Plantinga’s defense of theism is a simple but wholly vitiating one [Where the Conflict Really Lies, reviewed by Thomas Nagel in “A Philosopher Defends Religion,” NYR, September 27, 2012]. It is that it rests on the fallacy of informal logic known as petitio principii. Plantinga wishes to claim that we can know there is a deity because the deity has provided us with a cognitive modality, which Plantinga calls “a sensus divinitatis,” or sense of the divine, by which we detect its existence. So, we know there is a god because that god arranges matters so that we know there is a god. The circularity is perfect, and perfectly fallacious. I can claim with equal cogency that I know there are goblins in my garden because they provide me with a goblin-sensing faculty of mind…and so for anything else whatever that we would antecedently like to exist.

Plantinga assumes that everyone has a sensus divinitatis but in some of us it is faulty. The name of this fault is “rationality.”

Thomas Nagel replies:

Anthony Grayling’s charge of circularity would be right if Plantinga offered the sensus divinitatis as evidence for the existence of God, but he does not. He says merely that belief in God is knowledge if it is in fact caused by God in this way, much as perceptual belief in the external physical world is knowledge if it is in fact caused by the external world in the appropriate way. It would be just as circular to try to prove the existence of the external world by appealing to perception as it would be to try to prove the existence of God by appealing to the sensus divinitatis. But Plantinga holds that it is nevertheless reasonable to hold either type of belief in this basic way, without further proof. I assume he would deny that anyone has, or thinks he has, a basic, unmediated belief in goblins.

MavPhil comment:

Clearly, Grayling is not at the level of Plantinga and Nagel. He is more of a New Atheist ideologue and polemicist than a genuine philosopher. This is shown by the sophomoric zeal with which he attempts to pin an elementary informal fallacy on Plantinga, one that "wholly vitiates" his defense of theism. It takes chutzpah and lack of respect for a formidable opponent to think one can blow him out of the water in this way. This is typical cyberpunk behavior. The punks hurl fallacy labels at each other: fallacy of composition! Hypostatization! Begging the question!

And then there is the polemical swipe Grayling takes at the end of his letter. Polemics has its place, but not in philosophy.

The palm goes to Nagel!

Here are my anti-Grayling posts.

The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?

According to the The New York Times, Daniel Dennett has a new book coming out entitled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Here are a couple of tidbits from the NYT piece:

The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams.

The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

This sure sounds like the sort of sophistry Dennett is known for. Selves are fictions that allow us — selves — to integrate data streams. I hope I will be forgiven for finding that unintelligible.

Now which is more likely to be true, that qualia are "sheer illusion" or that Dennett is a sophist?

You know my answer. Here are a couple of anti-Dennett posts:

Searle, Dennett, and Zombies

Dennett's Dismissal of Dualism

Others, of equal trenchancy, are in the Dennett category.

The ‘No Spin’ Zone is Gluten-Free!

Here.

And so is my blog!

Man’s Greatness Deducible From his Wretchedness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

Man's greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals is wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own. (Pensées, Penguin, p. 59, #117, tr. Krailsheimer)

"What is nature in animals is wretchedness in man." That is a profound insight brilliantly expressed, although I don't think anyone lacking a religious sensibility could receive it as such. The very notion of wretchedness is religious. If it resonates within you, you have a religious nature. If, and only if.

Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as healthy and well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. Pascal writes that we "must have fallen from some better state." That is not obvious. But the fact remains that we are in a dire state from which we need salvation, a salvation we are incapable of achieving by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

How do we know that? From thousands of years of collective experience.

Philosophy Always Buries Its Undertakers

Philosophy always buries its undertakers (Etienne Gilson) and resurrects its dead.

There is a semi-competent article in The Guardian entitled Philosophy Isn't Dead Yet that is worth a look. Why 'semi-competent'?

The author characterizes metaphysics as ". . . the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space and time, the fundamental stuff of the world." That is just wrong. If I were in a snarky mood I would say it is hilariously wrong. For it forecloses on the possibility that there is more to reality than nature, the realm of space-time-matter. You can't define out of existence, or out of the province of metaphysics, God, the soul, unexemplified universals and the rest of the Platonic menagerie. If they aren't metaphysical topics, nothing is.

The author would have done much better had he defined metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that aspires to an understanding of reality. A central question in philosophy is precisely whether reality is exhausted by nature.

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

The middle sentence in this paragraph is exactly right. But it is sandwiched between two very dubious sentences. First of all, why is it a failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings? It is undoubtedly a failure of naturalistic metaphysics, but the latter is not physics. Don't confuse physics with a scientistic metaphysics based on physics. Physics cannot be said to fail to accommodate consciousness for the simple reason that that is not the job of physics to do any such thing.. Physics abstracts from consciousness. Conscious beintgs such as me and my cats can be studied from the point of view of physics since we are physical objects, though not just physical objects.

Suppose you throw a rock, a cactus, a coyote, and me off a cliff at the same time. Rock, cactus, coyote and man will fall at the same rate: 32 ft per sec per sec. (Ignore my arm-flailing and the resultant wind resistance.) The foursome is subject to the same physical laws, the same physical constants, the same idealizations (center of mass, center of gravity, etc). Physics abstracts from reason, self-consciousness, intentionality, qualia, animal life, vegetative life. To expect physics to "accommodate" life, consciousneness, self-consciousness, agency, intentionality and all the rest is to tax it beyond its powers.

In his third sentence, the author tells us that ". . . physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists)." This is an inept and confused way of making an important point. The important point is that matter is known: Our physics gives us knowledge of the physical universe. It is indeed a strange and wonderful fact that matter reveals itself to us, that it possesses an inherent intelligibility that we are in some measure able to discern. The author spoils things, however, by adding that matter reveals itself to material objects. Of course, physicists are material beings; but it is to the minds of these material beings that matter reveals itself.

The author is making an absurd demand: he is demanding that physics explain how knowledge is possible. But it is actually worse than that: he is demanding that physics explain how knoweldge of the material world is possible by wholly material beings. Good luck with that.

We are also told that current physics "mishandles time." Smolin is mentioned. Really? Why demand that physics accommodate the full reality of time? Physics, I would argue, does well, for its limited purposes, to abstract from the A-series. The B-series is all it needs. (See "Why Do We Need Philosophy?" below for an explanation of the distinction.) Physics can't account for temporal becoming? Why should it? One possibility is that temporal becoming is mind-dependent and not part of reality as she is in herself. Another possibility is that physics simply abstracts from temporal becoming in the way it abstracts from life, consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality, etc.

The author is right, however, to smell "conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication" when it comes to attempts by Lawrence Krauss and others to explain how the universe arose ex nihilo from spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, as if theose fluctuations and that vacuum were not precisely something.

If all's well that ends well, the author ends well with a paragraph that earns the coveted MavPhil stamp of approval and nihil obstat:

Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality". The dismissive "Just shut up and calculate!" to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists' picture of the universe is simply inadequate. [. . .]This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead

Gibson Guitars and Government Abuse of Power

On 1 September 2011 I commented on the Obama administration's attack on Gibson. Now the Gibson guitar raids make sense. The article concludes:

The Gibson Guitar raid, the IRS intimidation of Tea Party groups and the fraudulently obtained warrant naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as an "aider, abettor, co-conspirator" in stealing government secrets are but a few examples of the abuse of power by the Obama administration to intimidate those on its enemies list.

Happiness Maxims (2013 Version)

These maxims work for me; they may work for you. Experiment. The art of living can only learned by living and trying and failing.

0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit. Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others.

1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you.

2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it. Don't dwell on the limits; push against them and expand them. Refuse entry to all unwanted guests. With practice, the power of the mind to control itself can be developed. There is no happiness without mind control. Don't dwell on the evil and sordid sides of life. Study them unflinchingly to learn the truths of the human predicament, but know how to look away when study time is over.

3. Set aside one hour per morning for formal meditation and the ruminative reading of high-grade self-help literature, e.g., the Stoics, but not just them. Go ahead, read Seligman, but read Seneca first.

4. Cultivate realistic expectations concerning the world and the people in it. This may require adjusting expectations downward. But this must be done without rancour, resentment, cynicism, or misanthropy. If you are shocked at the low level of your fellow human beings, blame yourself for having failed to cultivate reality-grounded expectations.

Negative people typically feel well-justified in their negative assessments of the world and its denizens. Therein lies a snare and a delusion. Justified or not, they poison themselves with their negativity and dig their hole deeper. Not wise.

Know and accept your own limitations. Curtail ambition, especially as the years roll on. Don't overreach. Enjoy what you have here and now. Don't let hankering after a nonexistent future poison the solely existent present.

5. Blame yourself as far as possible for everything bad that happens to you. This is one of the attitudinal differences between a conservative and a liberal. When a conservative gets up in the morning, he looks into the mirror and says, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. What happens to me today is up to me and in my control." He thereby exaggerates, but in a life-enhancing way. The liberal, by contrast, starts his day with the blame game: "I was bullied, people were mean to me, blah, blah, people suck, I'm a victim, I need a government program to stop me from mainlining heroin, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam. A caricature? Of course. But it lays bare some important home truths like all good caricatures do.

Perhaps we could say that the right-thinking person begins with a defeasible presumption in favor of his ability to rely on himself, to cope, to negotiate life's twists and turns, to get his head together, to be happy, to flourish. He thus places the burden of proof on the people and things outside him to defeat the presumption. Sometimes life defeats our presumption of well-being; but if we start with the presumption of ill-being, then we defeat ourselves.

We should presume ourselves to be successful in our pursuit of happiness until proven wrong.

6. Rely on yourself for your well-being as far as possible. Don't look to others. You have no right to happiness and others have no obligation to provide it for you. Your right is to the pursuit of happiness. Learn to cultivate the soil of solitude. Happy solitude is the sole beatitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo. An exaggeration to be sure, but justifed by the truth it contains. In the end, the individual is responsible for his happiness.

7. Practice mental self-control as difficult as it is. Master desire and aversion.

8. Practice being grateful. Find ten things to be grateful for each morning. Gratitude drives out resentment. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.

9. Limit comparisons with others. Comparisons often breed envy. The envious do not achieve well-being. Be yourself.

10. Fight the good fight against ignorance, evil, thoughtlessness, and tyranny, but don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism. We are not here to improve the world so much as to be improved by it. It cannot be changed in any truly ameliorative and fundamental ways by our own efforts whether individual or collective. If you fancy it can be, then go ahead and learn the hard way, assuming you don't make things worse.

11. Hope beyond this life. One cannot live well in this life without hope. Life is enhanced if you can bring yourself to believe beyond it as well. No one knows whether we have a higher destiny. If you are so inclined, investigate the matter. But better than inquiry into the immortality of the soul is living in such a way as to deserve it.

Companion post: Middle-sized Happiness

The Real Voter Suppression of 2012

An excellent article by John Fund that begins thusly:

The 2012 election season was filled with angry cries of “voter suppression,” almost all of them regarding attempts by states to require voter ID and otherwise improve ballot integrity. Bill Clinton warned that “there has never been — in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting — the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Democratic-party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “photo-ID laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”

All of this proved to be twaddle.

'Twaddle' is far too polite a word for the absurd and willfully mendacious Clintonian hyperbole emitted regularly by leftists on this score. See my articles below.

I will quibble, however, in a manner most pedantic, with one of Fund's sentences: "Indeed, several conservative groups I talked with said they were directly impacted by having their non-profit status delayed by either IRS inaction or burdensome and intrusive questioning."

Are we to understand that the members of these groups suffered constipation as a result of the IRS shenanigans? Presumably not. Why then write 'impacted' when the perfectly good word 'affected' is available?