Leslie Kean's Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017) just arrived via Amazon. HT to Vito for recommending it. It looks good. Have book, will blog. Pressed for time this evening. But not so pressed that I can't scrounge up three tunes.
Highwaymen, Ghost Riders in the Sky
Spiderbait rendition
Blood, Sweat, and Tears, And When I Die
Time for Mark Levin.
Stack topper
Our friend Malcolm Pollock in Brake Failure expresses a reasoned pessimism about our future under AI. I share his concerns. Will we humans have a future? Or are we facing what I have elsewhere called the Ultimate Replacement?
In Stephen Wolfram on AI and Irreducible Complexity, Malcolm explains
. . . a distinction between two [disjoint] subsets of deterministic systems: those whose behavior are describable by simplifying formulas that can be used, by taking their initial conditions as inputs, to predict their future state, and those for which no such reduction is possible.
An example of the former is the movement of two bodies under mutual gravitational attraction, such as a planet and its moon, or the earth and a ballistic projectile. Given the masses of the two, and their initial positions and velocities, it is possible to calculate their positions for any future time.
A good example of the latter is what Wolfram examined at length in his book A New Kind Of Science (which I labored through when it cam[e] out in 2002): the behavior of “cellular automata“, simple systems whose behavior is defined by a small set of rules, but for which, given the system’s state at time t, the only way of determining its precise configuration at time t+n is actually to iterate over every step between t and t+ n. Chaotic systems, such as weather and turbulent flow, are of this kind. So is biological evolution.
Fascinating. What struck me is that the first type of deterministic system allows for prediction, whereas the second type decouples determinism from predictability. I would add that if time is a continuum, then there are continuum-many iterations between t and t + n, which implies then there will have to be continuum-many iterations total. That would be the ultimate nail in the coffin of predictability, a nail that not even the ultimate claw hammer could remove.
A couple of further questions occur to me.
In the second type of determinism, what becomes of the distinction between determinism and indeterminism? There would presumably still be the distinction, but how could one tell if a type-2 system was deterministic or indeterministic? Malcolm, glossing Wolfram and Greene, writes, "There is no quicker way, no shortcut, for predicting the future state of such systems than simply letting them run, and seeing what they do." That boils down to saying that in the second type of deterministic systems there would be no way at all of predicting future states of such systems. How then could one 'determine' (come to know) whether such a system was deterministic or indeterministic?
If the deterministic systems that really interest us are of the second type, then Laplace's Demon is, if not out of a job, then bound to be underemployed.
Second question. If we humans are deterministic systems of the second type, might this permit a deterministic reduction of the much-vaunted free will that we feel ourselves to possess? I don't think so, but knowing Malcolm, he may want to take this ball and run with it.
I am happy to retract last year's Thanksgiving post, reproduced below, if not in plenary fashion, then substantially. Thanks to Donald J. Trump and his supporters, the mendacity-fueled forces of tyranny and totalitarianism have suffered a major setback. It is morning in America again. But our political enemies, bent on overturning our system of government, will not give up. So starting tomorrow, we must all get back to work in the great national sanitation project, one which may take a generation or more.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING?
The last four horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:
And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free," let alone "the home of the brave." We are in steep decline. You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful, fact-based, and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you run the risk of being destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion. Here is one of an increasing many.
Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for. But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty." Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful.
So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.
Righteously pissed off by the depredations of our political enemies and their long train of outrageous lies, abuses, and slanders, my tendency is to urge a girding of the loins for a long battle in which we give them a taste of their own 'medicine.' But there is a complementary approach that may work with the less vicious and self-enstupidated among them. After all, the majority of Dems are useful idiots who are, all things considered, not all that bad as people and somewhat open to a honeyed appeal. All avenues toward the betterment of our constitutional republic and the world as a whole must be explored. Hear Steve Cortes:
In the aftermath of any big victory in life, there is a natural human tendency to gloat a bit…or maybe a lot. But in the wake of the amazing Trump and America First electoral success of November 5th, those of us in the patriotic populist movement should, instead, make a humble, thoughtful, and heartfelt appeal to our fellow citizens who voted for the Democrats, but are persuadable.
Millions of them, no doubt, voted blue with the best of patriotic intentions. Many of them simply pursued the comfortable path of well-worn political behavior patterns. Others were surely misled by the constant barrage of propaganda from legacy media platforms. Still others live busy and complicated lives – especially in stressful times like these, created by Biden and Harris – and do not follow politics closely, for understandable reasons.
For all of these voters, here are the three most compelling reasons to at least consider joining our America First cause — and to vote Republican into the future.
The rag has high production values. I'll say that much for it. Otherwise, the current issue is a tsunami of folderol. Sample:
“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”
Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.
I think not. Substack latest.
That philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge.
The contemporary Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs begins his book Illusions of Sceptics (2016) by considering this question. He grants that the "cognitive potential of philosophy" is called into question by the "embarrassing fact that there is not a single thing that philosophers would agree on." (13) Nevertheless, Fuchs insists that we have no good reason to be skeptical about the possibility of philosophical knowledge. His view is that "Discord among philosophers can . . . be sufficiently explained by the frequent prejudices of philosophers . . . Consequently, the existence of discord among philosophers does not imply that their work is of fundamentally unscientific character." (16)
Besides the prejudices of philosophers, the lack of consensus among philosophers may also be attributed to philosophy's difficulty: "the discord may just be a consequence of the specific challenging character of philosophy."(19)
Fuchs maintains that "consensus has no relation to the core of scientific quality. . . ." (24). The core of scientific quality is constituted by "proof or demonstration." (24) His claim is that interminable and widespread disagreement or lack of consensus has no tendency to show that philosophy is incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, where such knowledge involves apodictic insight into the truth of some philosophical propositions.
There are two main issues we need to discuss. One concerns the relation of consensus and truth; the other the relation of consensus and knowledge. My impression is that Fuchs conflates the two issues. I will argue, contra Fuchs, that while it is obvious that consensus and truth are logically independent, it is not obvious that consensus and knowledge are logically independent. My view, tentatively held, is that the lack of consensus in philosophy does tend to undermine philosophy's claim to be knowledge.
Consensus and Truth
I maintain, and Fuchs will agree, that the following propositions are true if not platitudinous.
1) Truth does not entail consensus. If a proposition is true, it is true whether or not there is consensus with respect to its truth.
2) Consensus does not entail truth. If most or all experts agree that p, it does not follow that p is true.
3) Consensus and truth are logically independent. This follows from (1) in conjunction with (2). One can have truth without consensus and consensus without truth.
Lack of consensus, therefore, does not demonstrate lack of truth. Even if no philosophical proposition wins the agreement of a majority of competent practitioners, it is possible that some such propositions are true. But it doesn't follow that some philosophical propositions have 'scientific quality.' To have this quality they have to be true, but they also have to be knowable by us. But what is knowability and how does it relate to consensus? To answer this question we must first clarify some other notions.
Truth, Knowledge, Knowability, Cognitivity, Justification, and Certainty
I add to our growing list the following propositions, perhaps not all platitudinous and perhaps not all agreeable to Fuchs:
4) Knowledge entails truth. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true. There is no false knowledge. There are false beliefs, and indeed justified false beliefs; but there is no false knowledge. You could think of this as an conceptual truth, or as a truth about the essence of knowledge. These are different because a concept is not the same as an essence.
5) Truth does not entail knowledge. If p is true, it does not follow that someone (some finite mind or ectypal intellect) knows that p. If an omniscient being, an archetypal intellect, exists, then of course every true proposition p is known by the omniscient being.
6) Truth does not entail knowability by us. If, for any proposition p, p is true, it does not follow that there is any finite subject S such that S has the power to know p. There may be truths which, though knowable 'in principle,' or knowable by the archetypal intellect, are not knowable by us.
7) Cognitivity does not entail knowability. Let us say that a proposition is cognitive just in case it has a truth value. Assuming bivalence, a proposition is cognitive if and only if it is either true, or if not true, then false. Clearly, cognitivity is insufficient for knowability. For if a proposition is false, then it is cognitive but cannot be known because it is false. And if a proposition is true, then it is cognitive but may not be knowable because beyond our ken.
8) Knowledge entails justification. If S believes that p, and p is true, it does not follow that S knows that p. For knowledge, justification is also required. This is a bit of epistemological boilerplate that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus.
9) Knowledge entails objective certainty. Knowledge implies the sure possession, by the subject of knowledge, the knower, of the object of knowledge; if the subject is uncertain, then the subject does not have knowledge strictly speaking. Objective certainty is not to be confused with subjective certitude.
Consensus and Knowledge
Fuchs and I will agree that consensus is not necessary for truth: a true proposition need not be one that enjoys the consensus of experts. But consensus may well be necessary for knowledge. Fuchs, however, seems to conflate truth and certainty, and thus truth with knowledge. A truth can be true without being known by us; indeed, without even being knowable by us. But, necessarily, whatever is known is true. On p. 30 we read:
By denying that the thought processes of philosophers can exhibit a scientific quality simply because of the existence of discord among philosophers, we make consensus a necessary condition for the general validity and potential certainty of scientific knowledge, which is the attribute of science. (Emphasis added.)
On the following page we find the same thought but with a replacement of 'potential certainty' by 'certainty':
. . . the necessary question of whether the consensus of experts is really such an essential and indispensable condition for the certainty and general validity of scientific knowledge. (31, emphasis added.)
When one speaks of the validity of a proposition, one means its truth. ('Valid' as a terminus technicus in formal logic is not in play here.) So it seems clear that Fuchs is maintaining that consensus is necessary neither for the truth of propositions nor for their certainty. He seems to be maintaining that one can have certain knowledge of a proposition even if the consensus of experts goes against one. This is not obvious. Why not?
Knowledge requires justification. Now suppose I accept the proposition that God exists and that my justification takes the form of various arguments for the existence of God. Those arguments will be faulted by an army of competent practitioners, not all of them atheists, on a variety of grounds. What's more, the members of the atheist divisions will marshal their own positive arguments, the strongest of them being arguments from evil. Now if just one of my theistic arguments is sound, then God exists.
But I do not, by giving a sound argument for God, know that God exists unless I know that the argument I have given is sound. (A sound argument is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true.) But how do I know that even one of my theistic arguments is sound? How can I legitimately claim to know that when a chorus of my epistemic peers rises up against me?
If what I maintain is true, then it is true no matter how many epistemic peers oppose me: they are just wrong! Truth is absolute: it is not sensitive to the vagaries of agreement and disagreement. Justification, however, is sensitive to agreement and disagreement. My justification for considering a certain argument sound is undermined by your disagreement assuming that we are both competent in the subject matter of the argument and we are epistemic peers.
In a situation in which my justification for believing that p is undermined by the disagreement of competent peers, there is no objective certainty that p. If knowledge logically requires objective certainty, and objective certainty is destroyed by the disagreement of competent epistemic peers, then I can no longer legitimately claim to know that p. So, while truth has nothing to fear from lack of agreement, knowledge does. For knowledge requires justification, and justification can be augmented or diminished by agreement or disagreement, respectively.
Interim Conclusion
Fuchs makes things too easy for himself by conflating truth and knowledge. We can agree that consensus is logically irrelevant to truth. Protracted disagreement by the (morally) best and the (intellectually) brightest over the truth value of some proposition p has no tendency to show either deductively or inductively that p is not either true or false. Truth is absolute by its very nature and thus insulated from the vagaries of opinion. But truths (true propositions) do not do us any good unless we can know them. It is not enough to know that some truths are known; what we need is to know of a given truth that it is true. But disagreement inserts a skeptical blade between the truth and our knowledge of it.
Disagreement in philosophy undermines her claims to knowledge. As I see it, Fuchs has done nothing to undermine this undermining.
The tormenting question Devil or Angel? was posed by the Clovers in 1956. But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover.
Elvis Presley learned the hard way that appearances can deceive.
Marty Robbins succumbs to the temptations of a Devil Woman and begs his Mary for forgiveness. Angel that she is, she forgives him. But his grip on custodia cordis is weak and so he succumbs once again in El Paso where the charms of the wicked Felina prove irresistible. This time the upshot is rather less favorable.
Jay the American risks an encounter with a fickle she-devil but has the good sense to high-tail it in the nick of time.
An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.
But not all women are devils. The Peguins, 1955, sing about an earth angel. Is this a case of angelic possession?
When I first saw the woman I married, I fell in love with her on the spot, no lie. It was her angel eyes that did it.
Flip, flop, flounder, flail, fake. And yet, despite all the gyrations and page-turnings of her and "Tampon Tim" and Mrs. Tim, the fatuous fool failed.
But how on earth could she be beaten in an electoral college landslide by a freaking fascist? Explanation here, with a tip of the hat to a blogger buddy from way, way back, Kevin Kim. Happy Thanksgiving, Kevin. Blog on!
The topic of anarchism surfaced in an earlier thread. Dmitri and Hector introduced us to David Graeber. But let's go back a century or so for a bit of historical perspective. Herewith, a brief examination of Emma Goldman's definition of anarchism.
ANARCHISM: the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ("Anarchism: What it Really Stands For" in Anarchism and Other Essays, Dover, 1969. p. 50. The Dover edition is a republication of the third revised edition originally published in 1917)
Goldman is advancing five claims, either explicitly or tacitly. By 'government' she means "the State." (p. 52) That's what I mean by it too. She does not mean a mutually beneficial form of social order that arises spontaneously and thus without coercion or authoritarian regulation. One could mean that by 'government.' The word is ambiguous as between those two meanings. (See Richard Sylvan, "Anarchism" in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell 1993, pp. 216-217.)
I will now state and comment on five assertions I extract from the passage quoted:
1) Anarchism aspires to promotes the liberty of the individual.
So far, so good. I'm all in! Liberty is a very high value. "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (Patrick Henry)
2) Liberty is unrestricted by man-made law.
Our anarchist is telling us that liberty cannot exist under man-made law, that liberty and law are mutually exclusive. Here is where she begins to go off the rails. What she is saying would be true only in an ideal world, which is to say, a world that does not actually exist. In the world that actually exists, with human being as they actually are, (2) is false. It is blindingly evident that her ideal world does not exist, which is not to say that it cannot exist. But if her ideal world cannot exist, then her (2) is impossible. Now I cannot prove (demonstrate, conclusively establish) that her ideal world is impossible, but there is nothing in our past experience to show that it is possible. In fact, all of our past experience suggests the opposite.
I say that liberty, to be liberty, must be (i) attainable, and (ii) attainable for all. Attainable liberty is possible society-wide, or for all, only under man-made laws. This is because people inevitably come into conflict, for all sorts of reasons (scarcity of resources, innate bellicosity, etc.) and there can be no conflict resolution without laws. Now laws are laws only if they are enforceable and enforced. (The mere possibility of enforcement is insufficient.) There is therefore need for agents of enforcement. The practical necessity of the state follows from the need for agents of enforcement who will equitably enforce the laws.
3) All forms of government rest on violence.
This is in the vicinity of a truth, but one better expressed as follows: there cannot be government without coercion. What this means is that to countenance government is to countenance situations in which some people will be compelled to do things they don't want to do, and compelled to desist from doing things that they want to do. This coercion, without which there cannot be government (a state), will involve either violence or the credible threat of violence, violence which in many if not most cases will be physical, e.g., throwing a man to the ground and handcuffing him.
In sum: No attainable liberty for the greatest number without man-made (positive) laws that are both enforceable and enforced. No enforcement without enforcers. No enforcers without a state apparatus. No state apparatus without allowance of the possibility of coercion. No possibility of coercion without the credible threat of violence, which, given the stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, and bellicosity of human beings in the state of nature, will inevitable result in the actual use of violence against malefactors.
4) Governments, since they "rest on violence" are "wrong and harmful."
Goldman thinks they are "wrong and harmful" presumably because governments cannot exist without coercion, and thus cannot exist without the threat if not the execution of violence, where all violence, whether threatened or actual, is deemed morally wrong.
To my way of thinking, however, (4) is obviously false. While is is true that governments "rest on violence," the violence that they sometimes mete out is not "wrong and harmful," but right and helpful. The state is a 'necessary evil.' A necessary (needed) evil is not something evil, full stop, but something that it would be better not to need, but something we do need given the actual state of things. For example, a cancer treatment consisting of chemotherapy and radiation that partially destroys one's salivary glands and taste buds is a necessary evil. That partial destruction is evil, but it is necessary (needed) to prevent a worse evil, namely, death. A rational man, such as your humble correspondent, will in such a predicament choose to undergo the nasty protocol despite its being nasty. He is rational in the means-ends sense: he chooses means conducive to his end in view, namely, to live a few more years. This is all predicated upon the actual state of things which a rational man takes into account.
5) Government is unnecessary, which is to say, not needed for human flourishing.
This too is plainly false. It would be true if men were angels. But men are not angels. They are not demons either. They are beings capable of great good and of great evil. And some are better than others, both intellectually and morally (and in other ways too). And the same goes for governments: some are better than others, both in their form and in their matter (the people who wield power). Formally, the U.S. system of government is the best the mind of man has yet devised, but materially, the current regime, headed by Biden and Harris and their appointees and hidden puppet-masters is arguably the worst in the history of our great republic. But the times they are a'changin.
So we need the state. We need government, limited government. For we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable, who love liberty and hate tyranny, want only as much government as is necessary to secure ordered liberty, domestic tranquillity, and international peace. And note: we need government whether or not we can solve the problem of its moral justifiability. The state is practically necessary whether or not anyone can show on the theoretical plane that it is morally justifiable.
To understand the justifiability question, see my Substack articles on Robert Paul Wolff:
Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism
I have been using the title phrase for some time now to refer to Trump-supporting conservatives. But what makes us sane and reasonable? Victor Davis Hanson compiles a list in The Trump Counterrevolution is a Return to Sanity.
In an earlier post I referred to the take-back of our country as a National Sanitation Project, opining that it might take a generation or two. But what does sanity have to do with sanitation? The words are in fact connected etymologically, sharing as they do a common root in the Latin sanus, meaning healthy or sane or sound, as in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano, "a sound mind in a sound body." We Trumpians are of sound mind, and some of us inhabit sound bodies.
We need to return the nation to health by draining swamps, enforcing laws, erecting barriers both territorial and moral, and by fumigating institutions. Leftists want to tear down our institutions; we of sound mind want to fumigate them, removing therefrom the termites who presently infest them.
You need to get with the program and do your bit. Don't be slacker, a defeatist, an ingrate. But if you are on the wrong side of this struggle, understand that we consider you enemies.
A threat? No, a warning. Are you wise enough to heed a warning? I can't resist yet another reference to 'Biblical Bob':
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
A Substack tale haunting but true.
Megyn Kelly steals my thunder. Brace yourself.
Dreher quotes Martins:
Between these two goals—tempting man and gaining him for eternity—there is another evil desire that the Devil aims to satisfy: the possession of his victim. Possession is the state where the victim is under demonic control from the inside. The demon takes over the body of the one he possesses. During possession, a victim’s consciousness is suppressed, and the demon animates his body as his own.
Given that demons exist outside of time and space, how can a demon be “inside” someone during demonic possession? While a demon’s lack of physicality frees him of the limitations to which physical objects are subject and gives him access to everything in the physical universe simultaneously, he does not have power over all things equally. When the Devil possesses a victim—and is now “inside” him—the Devil has gained legal jurisdiction over him in such a manner that he can bully and manipulate the victim from the inside. The legal control a possessing spirit has is so great that the body he possesses appears to be his own.
I'd like to hear more about this legal jurisdiction. If the possessing demon has a legal right to occupy and use the body of the human being who is possessed, from where does the demon get this right? Suppose some children are quite innocently fooling around with a Ouija board. Are they thereby inviting demons into their lives, and granting them the legal right to oppress or possess them? Would a good God allow these kids to be ensnared in this way? I should think not. Is there the makings here of an anti-theistic argument from evil? My Ouija board example is quite different in obvious ways from the Faust legend or the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a variant of which is here.
Dreher too is intrigued by the the legal aspect of possession, oppression, and the milder forms of demonic influence. "To me, the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the legalistic one. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that the demons are extremely effective lawyers." From 'Demons are effective lawyers' it does not follow that effective lawyers are demons, though many will be 'tempted' to embrace that non sequitur. Remember Michael Avenatti? But I digress.
Dreher quotes some more:
An exorcist must focus not on the demon but on why the demon is present. Stated differently, if a demon inhabits someone, he has been granted the right. Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his. Just as someone who owns a deed to a property cannot be evicted from it, an exorcist cannot evict a demon from a victim over whom he has gained the right to possess.
Uncovering demonic rights is challenging and can be the most difficult part of an exorcist’s work. A victim himself often does not know how he has acquired demons. In the case of Jeremy, this was not the case. He knew exactly why he had a demon: he had agreed to a pact with him. But it is often not that easy. An exorcist will probe a victim’s experience, personal history, and psyche to locate the legal claims a demon may have. The demon will do everything he can to remain hidden.
I plan to return to these questions after I read the book by Martins which I expect to arrive in early December.
