As dark as the world has become, there is yet beauty in nature, in music, in the souls of a few mortals, and in the depths of a quiet mind embraced by solitude.
Month: February 2018
Should Gun Manufacturers be Sued for Gun Crimes?
Suppose I sell you my car, transferring title to you in a manner that accords with all the relevant statutes. It is a good-faith transaction and I have no reason to suspect you of harboring any criminal intent. But later you use the car I sold you to mow down children on a school yard, or to violate the Mann Act, or to commit some other crime. Would it be right to hold me morally responsible for your wrongdoing? Of course not. No doubt, had I not sold you that particular car, that particular criminal event would not have occurred: as a philosopher might put it, the event is individuated by its constituents, one of them being the car I sold you. That very event could not have occurred without that very car. But that does not show that I am responsible for your crime. I am no more responsible than the owner of the gas station who sold you the fuel that you used for your spree.
Suppose I open a cheesecake emporium, and you decide to make cheesecake your main dietary item. Am I responsible for your ensuing health difficulties? Of course not. Being a nice guy, I will most likely warn you that a diet consisting chiefly of cheesecake is contraindicated. But in the end, the responsibility for your ill health lies with you.
The same goes for tobacco products, cheeseburgers, and so on down the line. The responsibility for your drunk driving resides with you, not with auto manufacturers or distilleries. Is this hard to understand? Not unless you are morally obtuse or a liberal, terms that in the end may be coextensive.
The principle extends to gun manufacturers and retailers. They have their legal responsibilities, of course. They are sometimes the legitimate targets of product liability suits. But once a weapon has been legally purchased or otherwise acquired, the owner alone is responsible for any crimes he commits using it.
But many liberals don't see it this way. What they cannot achieve through gun control legislation, they hope to achieve through frivolous lawsuits. The haven't had much success recently. Good. But the fact that they try shows how bereft of common sense and basic decency they are.
Don't expect them to give up. Hillary was in full-fury mode on this one. According to the BBC, "She proposes abolishing legislation that protects gun makers and dealers from being sued by shooting victims."
Aren't you glad that Hillary was sent packing? You should be.
There is no wisdom on the Left. The very fact that there is any discussion at all of what ought to be a non-issue shows how far we've sunk in this country.
When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism
Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.
Virtue and Opportunity
A man ought not plume himself on his virtues if his opportunities to go astray have been few or nonexistent. Virtue untested is virtue in doubt.
Better Latte . . .
. . . than nero.
(Is this racist code? A 'dog whistle'? Or is it just a bad pun consequent upon a deployment in an e-mail of the phrase, 'better late than never'?)
Voting and the Stupidity of Liberals
Michelle Malkin:
Two adult men, occupying lofty perches as law professors, argued this week that the voting age in the U.S. should be lowered to 16 because some high school survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting who want gun control "are proving how important it is to include young people's voices in political debate."
There is really nothing so idiotic that it won't be embraced by some destructive leftist. And you are still a member of the Democrat Party?
If breathing is a sufficient condition for voting, then cats and dogs should have the vote. So I should have three votes, my own and two cat proxies. The cat lady down the street, who is reputed to have nine cats, should be allowed ten votes. After all, cats and dogs and children and illegal aliens and felons have an interest in clean air and clean water and other things affected by political arrangements. So why shouldn't they have a vote?
If I have to explain to you why, then you are too obtuse, morally or intellectually or both, to profit from any explanation. Do you remember that race-hustler Jesse Jackson? He wanted felons to have the vote. He wanted people who lack the sense to order their own lives to have a say in how a society, or rather our lives, should be ordered. But of course the destructive leftist is not interested in right ordering, but in any ordering that grants him and his ilk maximum power. So it is no surprise that leftists never miss an opportunity to assault our Constitutional rights.
Vile, mendacious, and stupid. In that order.
The House Mate from Hell
The moral of the story: never let anyone into your life whom you haven't vetted. It seems that all the people Jamison Bachmann tormented were liberal do-gooders. So a little blaming of the victim is in order here.
I can't expect a liberal to understand it, but one has a moral obligation, to oneself and to others, to do one's level best to not allow oneself to be anyone's victim.
More on this topic to tee off liberal knuckleheads in On Blaming the Victim.
Once More on Whether Consciousness Could be an Illusion
The following just in from a Scandinavian reader:
Thank you for your great blog, I’ve been a regular reader for some time!
You have often made the point, that it is incoherent to say that consciousness in an illusion, because it is a presupposition to the distinction between appearance and reality. In an interesting article defending the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, Keith Frankish has a response to this. (“Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23, 11-12, 2016, pp. 11-39.) I’m not convinced, but I have the feeling that I don’t even understand what Frankish is saying here. (Well, if Frankish is right, this feeling is an illusion, so I should be alright.)
Here is a recent version of my argument in which I have that brilliant sophist, Daniel Dennett, in my sights:
Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that we presuppose it when we distinguish between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there were no consciousness there would be no illusions either.
This is because illusions have a sort of parasitic status. They are ontological parasites, if you will, whose being is fed by a host organism. But let's not push the parasitological comparison too far. The point is that, while there are illusions, they do not exist on their own. The coyote I wrongly take to be a domestic dog exists in reality, but the domestic dog does not. But while the latter does not exist in reality, it is not nothing either. The dog is not something in reality, but it is something for consciousness. If in the twilight I jump back from a twisted root on the trail, mis-taking it for a rattlesnake, the visual datum cannot possibly be regarded as nothing since it is involved in the explanation of why I jumped. I jumped because I saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') a rattlesnake. Outright hallucinations such as the proverbial pink rat of the drunkard are even clearer examples. In dreams I see and touch beautiful women. Do old men have nocturnal emissions over nothing?
Not existing in reality, illusions of all sorts, not just perceptual illusions, exist for consciousness. But then consciousness cannot be an illusion. Consciousness is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. As such, it cannot be an illusion. It must be real.
Back to my reader:
Frankish says that this ”no appearance-reality gap” objection to illusionism is ”far from compelling”. His reason seems to be something like this: According to illusionism, when we are having, say, a greenish experience, we introspectively represent ourselves as having a greenish experience, and this can be done without having a greenish experience. This is because “the content of introspective representations is determined by non-phenomenal, causal or functional factors”. So when one sees green, and there something it is like to see green for that person, he is in fact mistaken; there is nothing it is like to see green. The mistake is generated by a non-veridical introspective representation. The “feelyness” of this is an illusion. But the illusion itself is not a case of phenomenal consciousness, because it is possible to represent oneself as having a state of phenomenal consciousness, without actually having such a state. And thus the “no appearance-reality gap” objection to illusionism fails.
Is must confess that I don’t understand this point. Even if phenomenal consciousness is an illusion generated by non-veridical representations, there is still this illusion of seeming left, and thus the “no appearance-reality gap” objection is not refuted. Am I missing something?
I haven't read the article in question so I will have to go by the reader's report. From what he says, the account sounds like question-begging gibberish: "when we are having, say, a greenish experience, we introspectively represent ourselves as having a greenish experience, and this can be done without having a greenish experience." Unsinn!
Here is a Killer Quote from Thomas Nagel directed against Dennett that sums things up nicely:
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”
That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' – bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.
Another thing strikes me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.
The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself,' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke relativizes what comes within its scope. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)
Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an phenomenological-idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?
No philosophy is worth anything that gets the phenomenology wrong, or simply ignores the phenomenology. For that is where we must start if we are responsible philosophers, as opposed to apologist for theories we accept without critical examination.
Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.
Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.
Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.
The ‘Perverted Faculty’ Argument . . .
. . . is well-explained by Edward Feser in Drunk Stoned Perverted Dead.
Courage Under Fire
Pratityasamutpada
Claude Boissons writes to express puzzlement over the following quotation pulled from a Buddhism site:
Everything exists dependently upon everything else. Nothing exists independently in and of itself. Therefore, everything is empty of inherent existence. Every phenomenon is empty of true existence, therefore emptiness is the ultimate nature of everything that exists.
Professor Boisson remarks:
I don’t understand how the second "therefore'' is used. Is it true that if nothing exists independently, the consequence is that nothing exists, period? And so I feel there is a play on words in moving from "empty of inherent existence" to "empty of true existence."Maybe some day you might tell us what you think about this?
How about right now?
Charitably understood, the Buddhist claim is not that nothing exists, period. For that would fly in the face of what we all know to be the case. The claim is not that nothing exists, but that what exists lacks self-nature. This is the famous doctrine of 'no self' or anatta, which, along with anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering), make up the three pillars of Pali Buddhism.
The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' We can explain this in Western terms as follows.
If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. The world is a Heraclitean flux of momentary items, dharmas, each of which is insubstantial, impermanent, and something which breeds suffering among the ignorant who try to cling to what in itself cannot be clung to.
Causation in such a system is understood as paticcasamuppada (Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) usually translated as dependent origination or dependent arising according to which all dharmas arise in dependence upon other dharmas.
What is puzzling you is the move from 'empty of inherent existence' to empty of 'true existence.'
There is no puzzle if you understand 'empty of inherent' existence to mean 'empty of substantial existence' and 'true existence' to refer to a mode of existence that Buddhists claim nothing has.
Let me know if this makes sense to you. Of course, I am not endorsing it.
Guns and Rights
Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire adequate means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the law-abiding citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for personal and home defense? Yes. Does this include the right to keep and bear tactical nukes? No.
Very good. You passed the test. You are worth talking to about this issue.
I go into details here.
Has Benatar Refuted the Epicurean Argument?
This is the tenth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the very rich Chapter 5, "Death." Herewith, commentary on pp. 123-128. My answer to the title question is No, but our author has very effectively shown that the Epicurean argument is not compelling, and perhaps even that it is more reasonably rejected than accepted.
It may smack of sophistry, but the Epicurean argument is one of the great arguments of philosophy, forcing us as it does to think hard about ultimates. That's what philosophy is: thinking as hard as we can, and as honestly as we can, at the very margins of intelligibility, about great questions that tax our paltry minds to their limits. It is sobering to realize that not even the greats got very far in this enterprise. How far, then, can we lesser lights expect to get? But it is noble to strive, and as St Augustine says,
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
So much for the sermon. Now let's get to work.
The Epicurean argument proceeds from two premises, both of them highly plausible:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
Given these assumptions, how can being dead be bad for the one who dies? When we are, death is not; When death is, we are not. Death is therefore nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
If being dead cannot be bad for the deceased, it cannot be good either. But surely we sometimes without sarcasm or malice say of a person who has died, 'He's better off dead.' What we say makes sense, and it is sometimes true. Suppose Jack is in excruciating pain from a terminal illness and then dies. It is true of him after he dies that he is better off dead than he would have been had he lived longer and suffered more.
But how is this possible if Jack no longer exists? How can it be true of him that he is better off at a time when he no longer exists? The puzzle is generated by the conjunction of (1) and (2). If both are true, then it cannot be true of Jack that he is better off dead. But it is either obvious or extremely plausible that he is better off dead. Given that Benatar, as a metaphysical naturalist, assumes the truth of (1), it is off the table.
Now which is more credible, that Jack is better off dead, or that (2) is true? The former according to Benatar. (p. 123) So while the Epicurean cannot be decisively refuted, there are good reasons to hold that a person who is dead and therefore no longer existent can be the subject of goods and bad. This strikes me as a reasonable position to hold. Whether or not we can make sense of how something could be good or bad for a person at a time when he doesn't exist, it is evident, if not quite self-evident, that Jack is better off dead.
How Bad is Painless Murder?
Here is a another consideration that casts doubt on the Epicurean view.
To be murdered is bad, but how bad is painless murder? If one is an Epicurean, it seems one would have to 'dial down' one's assessment of the evil of murder. What follows is my example, but it is based on Benatar's discussion. Suppose Henry the hermit, about whom no one cares except Henry, is murdered while in a deep sleep by an injection that he doesn't even feel. Suppose Henry has no enemies and does not fear for his life.
If our Epicurean holds that conscious states alone are either intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, then it would seem that there is nothing bad about Henry's being murdered. If it is held that there are non-experiential goods and bads, then it would presumably be bad for Henry at the moment of his being murdered, but only then.
These counterintuitive consequences may not refute the Epicurean, but Benatar is on solid ground with his claim that death is part of the human predicament. (127)
School Shootings: It’s the Culture, Stupid
It is not guns that are the problem, but the culture that liberals and leftists have created. We've got plenty of gun control; what we need now is liberal control. The contributors to the piss-poor pages of the NYT's Op-Ed section need to STFU and listen to someone with sense such as Andrew Klavan (emphasis added):
. . . rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.
. . . a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.
[. . .]
The left wants to defend gangstas and "transgressive" art and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns.
The left wants to get rid of feminine modesty and masculine protectiveness and social restrictions on sex — but when the abuse and rape and harassment rise to the surface, they start whining about toxic manhood. Perhaps they should have listened to the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the difference between reforming society and deforming it — a passage that was neatly paraphrased by John F. Kennedy: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
Now the left wants to legitimize disrespect for the flag and for Christianity. They want to ignore the rule of law at the border and silence protests against Islamic ideas that are antithetical to every good thing the west stands for. They should look to Europe where all that's been accomplished. And now, when European women are molested in the public square, the gormless authorities advise them to behave more modestly lest immigrants get the wrong idea. When Islamic knives come out and Islamic bombs go off, the police rush to harass — who? Those who question the dictates of the Koran.
[. . .]
For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.
The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they should start by hunting up a mirror.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Sorts of One-Hit Wonders
There are one-hit wonders whose hits have endured and one hit wonders whose hits have pretty much sunk into oblivion, which is why you need me to prowl the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for these moth-eaten memories.
Norma Tanega and her Walkin' My Cat Named Dog belong to the latter category. If you remember this curious tune from 1966 I'll buy you a beer.
Another example is Larry Verne's politically incorrect, and therefore good, Mr. Custer from 1960. This one goes out to that Cherokee maiden formerly of the Harvard Lore School, Elizabeth Fauxcohantas Warren.
Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, Stay, 1960. "Woops, la-di-da." Under two minutes!
Ernie K-Doe, Mother-in-Law, 1961. "Sent from down below."
Bruce Channel, Hey! Baby, 1962
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore, 1962. If you don't remember this lovely tune, you dropped too much acid.
David Rose, The Stripper, 1962. An instrumental from an age of instrumentals, with footage and 'leggage' of a period stripper. Tame stuff.
Vangelis, Chariots of Fire Theme, 1982
An example of a one-hit wonder whose hit gets plenty of play is Curtis Lee's Pretty Little Angel Eyes from 1961. This one goes out to wifey.
Land of a Thousand Dances was Cannibal and the Head Hunters' one hit. Its obscurity lies perhaps midway between the Tanega and Lee efforts. This one goes out to my old friend Tom Coleman whose hometown is Whittier, California. He most likely listened to this song some Saturday night while cruising Whittier Blvd. in his beat-to-shit old Chevy, or else while enroute to a dance at the El Monte Legion Stadium. "Be there or be square."