January 2014 – Maverick Philosopher

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy. And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research. Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy. A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader. It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]." In the body of the article we read:

This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience.

For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly – although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.

Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.

Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.

Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner. (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.

I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point. Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about. What is conscience?

Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference. It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.

The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions. Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't. Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should. If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is. Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness: if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.

So just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience. Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains. Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question. Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong. That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.

Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole? If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain. But this is impossible. A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state. But no physical state is object-directed. So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state.

So that is one absurdity. A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain. Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds. What is being examined here? Obviously not some bit of brain matter. And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.

If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan. But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate. No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.

There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk? Either way, absurdity. Examining is an intentional state. So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.

I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense. And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms. I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain. Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.

Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist: how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme? Answers: It is not possible, and they don't.

Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation? Maybe not. Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity. David Gelernter is good on this.

Are You a True Boomer or a Shadow Boomer?

We boomers are one self-absorbed generation, further evidence of which fact is a post like this. You are a boomer if you were born between 1946 and 1964. Call the elder half of that cohort the true boomers, or the classics. Call the second half the shadow boomers, or the reboots. Take this test to see where you fall.

I'm talkin' 'bout my generation. If music is the sound track of one's life, then you must admit that we boomers have the best soundtrack of any American generation.

No Country for Young Men

The young especially ought to read this excellent Victor Davis Hanson piece. It begins as follows:

It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort — the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy Davis is not the poster girl for a resurgent misogyny. There is no epidemic of homophobia. Instead, if this administration’s policies are any guide, we are witnessing a pandemic of ephebiphobia ^[2] — an utter disregard for young people.

The war against those under 30 — and the unborn — is multifaceted. No one believes that the present payroll deductions leveled on working youth will result in the same levels of support upon their retirements that is now extended to the retiring baby-boom generation. Instead, the probable solutions of raising the retirement age, cutting back the rate of payouts, hiking taxes on benefits, and raising payroll rates are discussed in an environment of après moi le déluge ^[3] — to come into effect after the boomers are well pensioned off.

The baby-boomer/me generation ^[4] demands what its “greatest generation” parents got — or, in fact, far more ^[5], given its increased rates of longevity. The solution of more taxes and less benefits will fall on young people and the unborn, apparently on the premise that those under 18 do not vote, and those between 18 and 30 either vote less frequently than their grandparents or less knowledgeably about their own self-interest.

The Social Security pyramidal scheme ^[6] is merely the tip of the ephebiphobic iceberg. Currently student indebtedness exceeds $1 trillion. Many of these loans begin compounding before graduation and are pegged at interest rates far higher than parental mortgages. The cause of this tuition bubble is also not controversial. The prices colleges charge for annual tuition, room and board have for over two decades far exceeded ^[7] the annual rate of inflation.

There were four causes of such price gouging of students. None of them had anything to do with offering better education for a more competitive price for job-hungry graduates. The first was automatic escalations in the amount of money students could borrow that would be backed by federal guarantees. If campuses hiked their wares at prices consistently twice the rate of inflation, they could assume that students — while in college — could qualify to borrow the needed sums. What happened afterwards was not all that much a concern of the campus, at least as long as it did not affect subsequent admissions.

Second, the size and compensation of the administrative class exploded ^[8]. Again, the reason why was not difficult to understand. Awash in federally backed loan dollars, hoping to lure students with high-tech and social amenities, and to indoctrinate them with race, class, and gender ideology, campuses created new positions from diversity associate provosts to technology gurus — all to oversee everything from rock-climbing walls to on-campus lectures and paid workshops from fashionable cultural icons.

Third, there was a radical bifurcation ^[9] among faculty, a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy that rewarded fossilized tenured professors with reduced teaching loads and support for research, while cutting back on new replacement tenure-track billets and upping the percentage of units taught by pastime adjunct teachers. The new younger Morlocks did the grunge 1A work for their more rarefied and contemplative elder Eloi, and the students who paid for it sat through their lectures on fairness and equality.

Finally, the idea of medieval exemption masked the oppression. Colleges were loudly progressive. Faculties sided with the Palestinians and Walmart greeters in the abstract, never the exploited part-timers in their midst. The noble poor were always distant, not the supposedly clueless lower-middle-class student who went into hock ^[10] to subsidize academic rants on equalitarianism.

Read the rest.

On Conceiving that God does not Exist

In a recent post you write:

The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence.

I’m not convinced this is right. Conceivability has a close analogue with perception. If it seems to S that p, then S is prima facie justified in believing that (actually) p. So consider cases of perceptual seemings. Care must be taken to distinguish two forms of negative seemings:

1. It does not seem that p.
2. It seems that ~p.

Clearly, (1) is not properly a seeming at all; it is denying an episode of seeming altogether. If I assert (1), me and a rock are on epistemic par with respect to it seeming to us that p. (2) also faces an obvious problem: how could ~p, a lack or the absence or negation of something, appear to me at all? Photons do not bounce off of lacks. There are ways around this, but for now I just want to register the distinction between (1) and (2) and the prima facie difficulties with them that do not attend to positive seemings.

BV: Excellent so far, but I have one quibble. Suppose I walk into a coffee house expecting to encounter Pierre. But Pierre is not there; he is 'conspicuous by his absence' as we say. There is a sense in which I perceive his absence, literally and visually, despite the fact that absences are not known to deflect photons. I see the coffee house and the people in it and I see that not one of them is identical to Pierre. So it is at least arguable that I literally see, not Pierre, but Pierre's absence.

Be this as it may. You are quite right to highlight the operator shift as between (1) and (2).

So now consider conceivability. The analogue: If it is conceivable to S that p, then S is prima facie justified in believing that possibly p. Now for our two negative conceivablility claims:

1’. It is not conceivable that p.
2’. It is conceivable that ~p.

Again, (1’) is trivial; it is (2’) we’re interested in. Does (2’) provide prima facie evidence for possibly ~p? It depends. What we do when we try to conceive of something is imagine "in our mind’s eye" a scenario—i.e., a possible world—in which p is the case. So really (2’) translates:

2’’. I can conceive of a possible world in which ~p.

BV: Permit me a second quibble. Although 'conceive' and 'imagine' are often used, even by philosophers, interchangeably, I suggest we not conflate them. I can conceive a chliagon, but I cannot imagine one, i.e., I cannot form a mental image of a thousand-sided figure. We can conceive the unimaginable. But I think we also can imagine the inconceivable. If you have a really good imagination, you can form the mental image of an Escher drawing even though what you are imagining is inconceivable, i.e., not thinkable without contradiction.

More importantly, we should avoid bringing possible worlds into the discussion. For one thing, how do you know that possibilities come in world-sized packages? Possible worlds are maximal objects. How do you know there are any? It also seems question-begging to read (2') as (2'') inasmuch as the latter smuggles in the notion of possibility.

Given that the whole question is whether conceivability either entails or supplies nondemonstrative evidence for possibility, one cannot help oneself to the notion of possibility in explication of (2'). For example, I am now seated, but it is conceivable that I am not now seated: I can think this state of affairs witout contradiction. The question, however, is how I move from conceivability to possibility. How do I know that it is possible that I not be seated now?

It is obvious, I hope, that one cannot just stipulate that 'possible' means 'conceivable.'

(2'') seems innocent enough, but whether it gives us prima facie evidence for possibly ~p will depend on what p is; in particular, whether p is contingent or necessary. Consider:

3. There is a possible world in which there are no chipmunks.
4. There is a possible world in which there are no numbers.

(3) seems totally innocent. I can conceive of worlds in which chipmunks exist and others in which they don’t.

BV: It seems you are just begging the question. You are assuming that it is possible that there be no chipmunks. The question is how you know that. By conceiving that there are no chipmunks?

(4), on the other hand, is suspect. This is because numbers, unlike chipmunks, if they exist at all exist necessarily; that is, if numbers do not exist in one world they do not exist in any. Thus, what (4) really says is

(4*) There is no possible world in which there are numbers.

BV: (4) and (4*) don't say the same thing; I grant you, however, that the first entails the second.

With its conceivability counterpart being

(4’) I cannot conceive of a possible world in which there are numbers.

which looks a lot like the above illicit negative seemings: negations or absences of an object of conceivability. But my not conceiving of something doesn't entail anything! But suppose we waive that problem, and instead interpret (4’) as a positive conceiving:

(4’’) It is conceivable to me that numbers are impossible

The problem now is that (4’’) is no longer a modest claim that warrants prima facie justification. In fact, (4*) has a degree of boldness that invites further inquiry: presumably there is some obvious reason—a contradiction, category mistake, indelible opacity—etc. apparent to me that has led me to think numbers are impossible. But if that’s so, then surely my critic will want to know what exactly I’m privy to that he isn’t.

Mutatis mutandis in the case of God qua necessary being.

Thoughts?

BV: You lost me during that last stretch of argumentation. I am not sure you appreciate the difficulty. It can be expressed as the following reductio ad absurdum:

a. Conceivability entails possibility. (assumption for reductio)

b. It is conceivable that God not exist. (factual premise)

c. It is conceivable that God exist. (factual premise)

d. God is a necessary being. (true by Anselmian definition)

Ergo

e. It is possible that God not exist and it is possible that God exist. (a, b, c)

Ergo

f. God is a contingent being. (e)

Ergo

g. God is a necessary being & God is a contingent being. (d, f, contradiction)

Ergo

~a. It is not the case that conceivability entails possibility.

Is short, as John the Commenter has already pointed out, it seems that the Anselmian theist ought to reject conceivability-implies-possibility.

An Anselmian Antilogism

Philosophy is its problems, and they are best represented as aporetic polyads. One sort of aporetic polyad is the antilogism. An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are more than plausible, if they are self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense. (From the Greek a-poros, no way.) Aporiai are intellectual impasses, or, to change the metaphor, intellectual knots that we cannot untie. Here is a candidate:

1. God is a perfect being.

2. A perfect being is one that exists necessarily if it exists at all.

3. Whatever exists exists contingently.

It is easy to see that the members of this trio are collectively inconsistent. So the trio is an antilogism. Now corresponding to every antilogism there are three valid syllogisms. (A syllogism is deductive argument having exactly two premises.) Thus one can argue validly from any two of the propositions to the negation of the remaining one. Thus there are three ways of solving the antilogism:

A. Reject (1). The price of rejection is high since (1) merely unpacks the meaning of 'God' if we think of God along Anselmian lines as "that than which no greater can be conceived," or as the greatest conceivable being. It seems intuitively clearly that an imperfect being could not have divine status. In particular, nothing imperfect could be an appropriate object of worship. To worship an imperfect being would be idolatry.

B. Reject (2). The price of rejection is steep here too since (2) seems merely to unpack the meaning of 'perfect being.' Intuitively, contingent existence is an imperfection.

C. Reject (3). This is a more palatable option, and many will solve the antilogism in this way. If ~(3), then there are noncontingent beings. A noncontingent being is either necessary or impossible. So if God is noncontingent, it does not follow that God is necessary. He could be impossible.

Unfortunately, the rejection of (3) is not without its problems.

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God.

Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.

The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence.

The price of rejecting (3) is that one must deny that conceivability entails possibility.

Is our antilogism an aporia in the strict sense? I don't know.

Links and Plinks

Tatto this: Think before you ink. Or this: I think therefore I do not ink. Better: I inked, therefore I did not think. Or the equivalent of: This page intentionally left blank.
Michael Sudduth, Getting Sober about Survival (1/3). HT: Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace
Ed Feser trains his polemical laser upon Jerry Coyne and blows his scientistically shrunken pate 'clean off' as Dirty Harry might have put it. "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne. Jerry-built atheism
I take aim at Coyne in these entries: Jerry Coyne on why you don't really have free will; Jerry Coyne on religion as child abuse; The abysmally ignorant Jerry Coyne; Jerry Coyne's modal confusion; More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will
The church of liberalism must have its demon, and its name is Tobacco.
Spencer Case writes about testimony in 1000-Word Philosophy, which looks to be a good venue for aspiring philosophers.
Mike Valle issues a challenge to supporters of Obama on same-sex marriage.
Howlin' Wolff, the stoned philosopher, is at it again in a scurrilous attack on his moral and intellectual superior, Charles Krauthammer. And the Wolff still hasn't learned how to spell 'Seeger.'

A Being-Knowledge Antilogism

An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are not merely plausible but self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense. (From the Greek a-poros, no way.) Aporiai are intellectual impasses, or, to change the metaphor, intellectual knots that we cannot untie. Here is a candidate:

1. Being is independent of knowledge: what is or is the case is not made so by anyone's knowledge of it.

2. Knowledge is knowledge of being: we cannot know what is not or what is not the case.

3. Knowledge requires an internally available criterion or justification.

Each of the limbs of this aporetic triad is exceedingly plausible if not self-evident.

Ad (1). If a thing exists, its existence is not dependent on someone's knowledge of it. It is rather the other around: knowledge of thing presupposes the logically antecedent existence of the thing. And if a proposition is true, it not true because someone knows it. It is the other way around: the proposition's being true is a logically antecedent condition of anyone's knowing it.

Ad (2). 'Knows' is a verb of success: what one knows cannot be nonexistent or false. There is no false knowledge. What one 'knows' that ain't so, as the saying goes, one does not know. Necessarily, if S knows x, then x exists; necessarily, if S knows that p, then p is true. The necessity is broadly logical.

Ad (3). If I believe that p, p a proposition, and p happens to be true, it does not follow that I know that p. There is more to knowledge than true belief. If I believe that Jack is at home, and he is, it does not follow that I know that he is. Justification is needed, and this must be internalist rather than externalist. If I see a cat, it does not follow that I know a cat exists or that the cat I see exists. For I might be dreaming or I might be a brain in a vat. There are dreams so vivid that one literally sees (not imagines, or anything else) what does not exist. If I know a cat just in virtue of seeing one, then I need justification, and this justification must be available to me internally, in a way that does not beg the question by presupposing that there exist things external to my consciousness. Note that 'I see a cat' and 'No cat exists' express logically consistent propositions. They both can (logically) be true. For in the epistemologically primary sense of 'see,' seeing is not existence-entailing. In its epistemologically primary sense, 'see' is not a verb of success in the way 'know' is. 'False knowledge' is a contradictio in adiecto; 'nonexistent visual object' is not.

The limbs of our antilogism, then, are highly plausible and for some of us undeniable. Speaking autobiographically, I find each of the propositions irresistable. But I think most philosophers today would reject (3) by rejecting internalist as opposed to externalist justification.

The propositions cannot all be true. Any two, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus, corresponding to this one antilogism, there are three valid syllogisms. That is true in general: every antilogism* sires three valid syllogisms.

The first takes us from (1) & (2) to ~(3). If what exists is independent of knowledge, and knowledge is of what exists, then it is not the case that knowledge requires an internally available criterion.

The second syllogism takes us from (1) & (3) to ~(2). If being is independent of knowledge, and knowledge requires a purely internal criterion, then being is inaccessible to knowledge: what we know are not things themselves, but things as they appear to us. To solve the antilogism by rejecting (2) would put us in the vicinity of Kant's epistemology according to which there are things in themselves but we know only phenomena.

The third syllogism takes us from (2) & (3) to ~(1). If knowledge is of what exists, and knowledge is knowledge only if justified internally, then being is not independent of knowledge, and we arrive at a form of idealism.

Is our antilogism insoluble? In one sense, no aporetic polyad is insoluble: just deny one of the limbs. In the above case, one could deny (3). To justify that denial one would have to work out an externalist theory of epistemic justification. An aporetically inclined philosopher, however, will expect that the resulting theory will give rise to aporetic polyads of its own.

And so we descend into a labyrinth from which there is no exit except perhaps by a confession of the infirmity of reason, a humble admission of the incapacity of the discursive intellect to solve problems that it inevitably and naturally poses to itself.

______________

*The term and the theory was introduced by Christine Ladd-Franklin.

So Long, Pete Seeger

Peter Seeger is dead at 94.

Never forget, we are all just passing through. A great song, my favorite version being this one.

More on Seeger on Saturday night. We'll have to get into his politics, but it would be a mistake to allow aversion to his political entanglements to detract from the enjoyment of his music.

Tobacco-Wackery in Tempe

Last week I quit my desert outpost and headed West to Tempe in quest of books and conversation. When in town I often stop at Churchill's, off of Mill Avenue, near ASU, for a cigar.

But things had changed since my last visit. The outdoor tables in front of the store had been moved to the curb. When I asked the man on duty why, he said that a city ordinance demanded it. It is permissible to smoke in the store and at the curb, but not in front of the doors of the smoke shop.

Now that's crazy, but worse is to come. When I asked the man whether I could smoke in the shop, he said I could, as long as I remained there for the duration of my smoking, it being illegal to walk a few feet with a lit cigar from the shop to the tables at the curb. I was going to do it anyway except that not only would I be subject to a fine, but the shopkeeper as well. To protect him, I complied with the absurd law.

Here then we have yet another illustration of the lunacy of the contemporary liberal loon. There is no common sense on the Left, no wisdom, nothing that could be called good judgment or reasonableness. What there is is extremism and misplaced moral enthusiasm.

A liberal is the kind of moral and intellectual idiot who has no problem with the legalization of marijuana and partial-birth abortion, but gets his moral hackles up over a bit of highly diluted sidestream smoke in the vicinity of a — wait for it — SMOKE shop.

At some point, self-induced idiocy becomes morally censurable. I'd say that here we are beyond that point.

The Parable of the Tree and the House

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

The tree replied to the house: "Why, Mr. House, do you begrudge me the natural unfolding of my potentiality, especially when I provide you with cooling shade? I have not made you small. It is not in my power to add or subtract one cubit from your stature. The change you have ‘undergone’ is a mere Cambridge change. You have gone from being taller than me to being shorter; but this implies no real change in you: all the real change is in me. What’s more, the real change in me accrues to your benefit. As I rise and spread my branches, you are sheltered and cooled. The real change in me causes a real change in you in respect of temperature."

Heed well this parable, my brothers and sisters. When your neighbor outstrips you in health and wealth, in virtue and vigor, in blog posts or the length of his curriculum vitae – hate him not. For his successes, which are real changes in him, need induce no real changes in you. His advance diminishes you not one iota. Indeed, his real changes work to your benefit. You will not have to tend him in sickness, nor loan him money; your tax dollars will not be used to subsidize his dissoluteness; the more hits his weblog receives, the more yours will receive; and the longer his CV the better and more helpful a colleague he is likely to be.

Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.

Two Cures for Envy

To feel envy is to feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the positive attributes or success or well-being of another. It is in a certain sense the opposite of Schadenfreude. The envier is pained by another's success or well-being, sometimes to the extent of wanting to destroy what the other has. The 'schadenfreudian,' to coin a word, is pleasured by another's failure or ill-being.

Envy is classified as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and rightly so. Much of the mindless rage against Jews and Israel is the product of envy. Superiority almost always excites envy in those who, for whatever reason, and in whichever respect, are inferior.

This is why it is inadvisable to flaunt one's superiority and a good idea to keep it hidden in most situations. Don't wear a Rolex in public, wear a Timex. It is better to appear to be an average schmuck than a man of means. In some circumstances it is better to hide one's light under a bushel.

If greed is the vice of the capitalist, envy is the vice of the socialist. This is not to say that greed is a necessary product of capitalism or that envy is a necessary product of socialism. There was greed long before there was capitalism and envy long before there was socialism.

One cure for envy is moderate, the other radical. I recommend the moderate cure.

Consider the entire life of the person you envy, not just the possession or attribute or success that excites your envy. You say you want what he or she has? Well, do you want everything that comes with it and led up to it, the hard work, the trials and tribulations, the doubts and despairs and disappointments and disasters? Unless you are morally corrupt, your envious feelings won't be able to survive a wide-angled view.

The radical cure is to avoid all comparisons. Comparison is a necessary condition of envy. You can't envy me unless you compare yourself to me, noting what I have and am as compared to what you have and are. So if you never compare yourself to anyone, you will never feel envy for anyone.

The radical cure ignores the fact that not all comparisons are odious, that some are salutary. If I am your inferior in this respect or that, and I compare myself to you, I may come to appreciate where I fall short and what I could be if I were to emulate you.

That being said, "Comparisons are odious" remains a useful piece of folk wisdom. You can avoid a lot of unhappiness by appreciating what you have and not comparing yourself to others.

As for the bombshells at the top of the page, the blond is Jayne Mansfield and the other Sophia Loren. The picture illustrates the fact that, typically, envy involves two persons, one envying the other in respect of some attribute. Jealousy, however involves three persons. This why you shouldn't confuse envy with jealousy. This is jealousy, not envy:

On Taking Pleasure at the Death of an Enemy

Schadenfreude at the death of an enemy presupposes that being dead is an evil state of affairs. The decedent, however, might express, if he could, Schadenfreude of his own: "I have been released from all evils while you remain trapped."

Is being dead an evil? See article below.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: British Invasion, the Ds

Last time I left out one of the Cs, Petula Clark. A major omission, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Here's 1964's Downtown.

From the sweet to the Dionysian hard core of rock and roll, Spencer Davis, Gimme Some Lovin. A great driving song. Try not to pound a hole in the dashboard.

And from there to the folk strains of Donovan, Catch the Wind. Colours. Here is a dumbassed YouTube comment: "The singing style, the guitar style, even the cap: everything here screams, 'Dylan impersonator!'" You may as well argue that Dylan was a Woody Guthrie impersonator. Though not on Dylan's level, Donovan was a major ingredient in the flavor of the fabulous and far-off 'sixties.

Colours duet with Joan Baez at Newport Folk Festival. Here's another great duet version of Catch the Wind: Joan and Mimi Baez. Season of the Witch. Drifting psychedelic . . . .

And then there was the Dave Clark Five, Glad All Over. A little plastic . . . . 'Plastic' is '60s slang for fake, less than authentic, artificial. Here is a glossary of '60s slang. Not entirely accurate, but pretty good.

An Argument Against an Open ComBox

Seeing versus Imagining a Ghost: Another Round with Hennessey

It is plain that 'sees' has many senses in English. Of these many senses, some are philosophically salient. Of the philosophical salient senses, two are paramount. Call the one 'existence-entailing.' (EE) Call the other 'existence-neutral.' (EN) On the one, 'sees' is a so-called verb of success. On the other, it isn't, which not to say that it is a 'verb of failure.' Now there is difference between seeing a tree (e.g.) and seeing that a tree is in bloom (e.g.), but this is a difference I will ignore in this entry, at some philosophical peril perhaps.

EE: Necessarily, if subject S sees x, then x exists.

EN: Possibly, subject S sees x, but it is not the case that x exists.

Now one question is whether both senses of 'see' can be found in ordinary English. The answer is yes. "I know that feral cat still exists; I just now saw him" illustrates the first. "You look like you've just seen a ghost" illustrates the second.

So far, I don't think I've said anything controversial.

We advance to a philosophical question, and embroil ourselves in controversy, when we ask whether, corresponding to the existence-neutral sense of 'sees,' there is a type of seeing, a type of seeing that does not entail the existence of the object seen. One might grant that there is a legitimate use of 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) in English according to which what is seen does not exist without granting that in reality there is a type of seeing that is the seeing of the nonexistent.

One might insist that all seeing is the seeing of what exists, and that one cannot literally see what does not exist. So, assuming that there are no ghosts, one cannot see a ghost.

But suppose a sincere, frightened person reports that she has seen a ghost of such-and-such a ghastly description. Because of the behavioral evidence, you cannot reasonably deny that the person has had an experience, and indeed an object-directed (intentional) experience. You cannot reasonably say, "Because there are no ghosts, your experience had no object." For it did have an object, indeed a material (albeit nonexistent) object having various ghastly properties. (Side question: Is 'ghastly' etymologically connected to 'ghostly'?)

This example suggests that we sometimes see what does not exist, and that seeing therefore does not entail the existence of that which is seen. If this is right, then the epistemologically primary sense of 'see' is given by (EN) supra.

Henessey's response: "I grant the reality of her experience, with the reservation that it was not an experience based in vision, but one with a basis in imagination, imagination as distinguished from vision." The point, I take it, is that what we have in my example of a person claiming to see a ghost is not a genuine case of seeing, of visual perception, but a case of imagining. The terrified person imagined a ghost; she did not see one.

I think Hennessey's response gets the phenomenology wrong. Imagination and perception are phenomenologically different. For one thing, what we imagine is up to us: we are free to imagine almost anything we want; what we perceive, however, is not up to us. When Ebeneezer Scrooge saw the ghost of Marley, he tried to dismiss the apparition as "a bit of bad beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of an underdone potato," but he found he could not. Marley: "Do you believe in me or not?" Scrooge: "I do, I must!" This exchange brings out nicely what Peirce called the compulsive character of perception. Imagination is not like this at all. Whether or not Scrooge saw Marley, he did not imagine him for the reason that the object of his experience was not under the control of his will.

The fact that what one imagines does not exist is not a good reason to to assimilate perception of what may or may not exist to imagination.

Second, if a subject imagines x, then it follows that x does not exist. Everything imagined is nonexistent. But it is not the case that if a subject perceives x, then x does not exist. Perception either entails the existence of the object perceived, or is consistent with both the existence and the nonexistence of the object perceived.

Third, one knows the identity of an object of imagination simply by willing the object in question. The subject creates the identity so that there can be no question of re-identifying or re-cognizing an object of imagination. But perception is not like this at all. In perception there is re-identification and recognition. Scrooge did not imagine Marley's ghost for the reason that he was able to identify and re-identify the ghost as it changed positions in Scrooge's chamber. So even if you balk at admitting that Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, you ought to admit that he wasn't imaging him.

I conclude that Hennessey has not refuted my example. To see a ghost is not to imagine a ghost, even if there aren't any. Besides, one can imagine a ghost without having the experience that one reports when one sincerely states that one has seen a ghost. Whether or not this experience is perception, it surely is not imagination.

But I admit that this is a very murky topic!