Author: Bill Vallicella

Ron Radosh on George McGovern

A  balanced assessment.  The piece concludes (emphases added):

Years later, I heard McGovern at the PEN International Writers Conference in New York City, where he spoke on a panel with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bruno Kreisky, the former chancellor of Austria who was virulently anti-Israel. At that meeting, McGovern said that had he been elected president, the first thing he would have done to deal with the Middle East would have been to go to ask Kreisky for advice. Kreisky, with McGovern’s support at the panel, also called for recognition by the West of Communist East Germany, and rejected  any policy that would have sought to isolate the regime. It was clear then, listening to McGovern at that event, what a disaster he would have been for his country had he been elected.

McGovern, it is true, opposed the war in Vietnam before it was popular to do so, and showed rare political courage, taking a position he thought was right although it could not help his political career. He was a straight-shooter, honest, and principled, and one could reject his policies and still respect him as a person of honor who thought what he fought for was in the nation’s best interest. A war hero, he did not ever mention his war record to try and show that he had fought valiantly for America, even though Nixon was condemning him for weakness and for having no concern for America’s position in the world. He simply did not feel to raise his own war record was the right thing to do, especially since he had become anti-war.

His defeat revealed to most people that standing for national office on a platform of extreme leftism, if openly proclaimed, could lead only to political destruction. Future leftist candidates learned from the outcome in 1972 that a more stealth approach to a move to the left was the way to operate if one wanted to achieve, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States based on redistribution of wealth and attainment of a social-democratic model for a future America.

A good and decent man who advocated policies that were both dangerous and wrong, he passed away living into his 90th year. R.I.P.

A good part of Obama's deep mendacity is his use of the stealth approach.  He won't say plainly what he is really for, and he will say he is for things he isn't.  For example, did you notice that in the third debate he came out in favor of American exceptionalism?  He was lying, of course.

Why Can’t Reason Be a Fluke? Intelligibility and the Existence of Rational Animals

This is the fifth in a series of posts, collected here, on Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.  The question that concerns me in this entry is whether we can forge a link between the intelligibility of nature and the existence of rational beings. 


For Nagel, the existence of rational animals is not a brute fact or fluke or cosmic accident.  Nagel's somewhat sketchy argument (see p. 86) is along these lines:

1. There are organisms capable of reason.
2. The possibility of such beings must have been there from the beginning.
3. This possibility, however, must be grounded in and explained by the nature of the cosmos.
4. What's more, the nature of the cosmos must explain not only the possibiity but also the actuality of rational animals: their occurrence cannot be a brute fact or cosmic accident.

I take Nagel to be maintaining that the eventual existence of some rational beings or other is no accident but is included in the nature of things from the beginning — which is consistent with maintaining that there is an element of chance involved in the appearance of any particular instance of reason such as Beethoven.  So eventually nature must produce beings capable of understanding it.  We are such beings. "Each of our lives is part of the lengthy process of the universe waking up and becoming aware of itself." (85)

Nagel's thesis is not obvious.   Why can't reason be a fluke?  Even if we grant Nagel that the intelligibility of nature could not have been a fluke or brute fact, how does it follow that the actual existence of some rational beings or other, beings capable of 'glomming onto' the world's intelligible structure, is not a fluke?  Nagel's argument needs some 'beefing up'  so that it can meet this demand.

1. Let's start with the idea that nature is intelligible.  Why?  That the world is intelligible is a presupposition of all inquiry.  The quest for understanding rests on the assumption that the world is understandable, and indeed by us.  The most successful form of this quest is natural science.  The success of the scientific quest is evidence that the presupposition holds and is not merely a presupposition we make.  The scientific enterprise reveals to us an underlying intelligible order of things not open to perception alone, although of course the confirmation of scientific theories requires perception and the various instruments that extend it.

2.  Now what explains this underlying rational order? Two possibilities.  One is that nothing does: it's a brute fact.  It just happens to be the case that the world is understandable by us, but it might not have been.  The rational order of things underpins every explanation but  itself has no explanation.  The other possibility is that the rational order has an explanation, in which case it has an explanation by something distinct from it, or else is self-explanatory.  On theism, the world's  rational order is grounded in the divine intellect and is therefore explained by God.  On what I take to be Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.

Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding.

Our second premise, then, is that the intelligibilty of the world is self-explanatory, hence a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.

3.  Our third premise is that intelligibility is an an inherently mind-involving notion.  Necessarily, if x is intelligible, then x is intelligible to some actual or possible mind.  Nothing is understandable unless it is at least possible that there exist  some being with the power of understanding. 

The conjunction of these three premises entails the possibility of rational beings, but not the actuality of them. There would seem to be a gap in Nagel's reasoning.  The world is intelligible, and its intelligibility is a necessary feature of it.  From this we can infer that, necessarily, if the cosmos exists, then it is possible that there be rational beings.  But that is as far as we can get with these three premises.

4.  What Nagel seems to need is a principle of plenitude that allows us to pass from the possibility of rational beings to their actual existence.  J. Hintikka has ascribed to Aristotle a form of the principle according to which every genuine possibility must at some time become actual.  This would do the trick, but to my knowledge Nagel make no mention of any such principle.

5.  I suggest that theism is in a better position when it comes to explaining how both intelligibility and mind  are non-accidental.  Intelligibility is grounded in the divine intellect which necessarily exists.  So there must be at least one rational being.  We exist contingently, but the reason in us derives from a noncontingent source. 

 

On Applauding While Being Applauded

At the beginning of last night's debate, both the president and the governor received the applause of the audience.  But Obama did something Romney did not do: he began applauding.  I've seen Hillary do this sort of thing too.  Maybe it's a liberal behavior.  Who was Obama applauding, and for what reason?  Was he applauding the audience for applauding him?  I hope not.  Was he applauding the audience for some other reason?  But what did they do to deserve applause?  Was he joining in the applause directed at himself?  Or at Romney?

It is a ridiculous innovation, but then liberals are big on ridiculous innovations.

Humble acknowledgement is the correct response to applause.  Take a bow, nod your head, say 'thank you,' but don't start applauding in the manner of 'monkey see, monkey do.'

And another thing.  The correct response to 'thank you' is 'you're welcome,' not 'thank you.'  Humbly accept the thanks of the one who wants to thank you.

Addendum 10/24.  A reader claims that Stalin, Mao, and Saddam Hussein used to applaud themselves.  So maybe this is another case where PC derives from the CP.  A little poking around turned up  this: "Zizek is also known to call himself a 'good Stalinist,' and there is reason to believe that he fancies himself a petty Stalin, going so far as he sometimes does to adopt Stalin's habit of clapping for himself with an audience."

I seem to recall having written a couple of posts about Slavoj Zizek.  I should bring them over from the old blog. 

Chris Mathews, Unhinged, Shamelessly Plays Race Card

Does Mathews really believe what he says here?  If he does then he is mentally unhinged.  I'll assume he's unhinged just to be charitable.  If he doesn't believe what he says,  then he is a scumbag.  But he seems like a nice guy!

Note also the psychological projection.  Unwilling or unable to face the hatred that animates him, he projects it into his opponents.  It is also projection when he claims, absurdly, that conservatives are more political than liberals.  That's delusional.  For libs and lefties politics is their religion, which is certainly not the case for conservatives.  Conservatives don't  seek their meaning in the political sphere; they enter it mainly to counteract and undo the mischief of liberals.

In fact, we conservatives are at a considerable disadvantage because we are not 24/7 political activists.  'Conservative activist' borders on an oxymoron.  There are a few, though, David Horowitz being one.  But don't forget that he was a red diaper baby who imbibed activism with his mother's milk.

Liberty Forever?

Liberty stampHow many Americans care about liberty?  The depressing fact that Obama may well win the election shows that vast numbers of Americans care more about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, than about liberty.

We're running on fumes.  The stamp is border-line Orwellian.

Time was, when liberty was a state.  Now it's a stamp.

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Victor Davis Hanson

 

 

 

An Evolved Animal With a Higher Origin? Some Theological Speculation

I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns.  Written February 2008.

…………….

I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation  may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of  Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that there need be nothing miraculous about revelation as such. So I was pleased to find some  support for this notion from another quarter. The following is from an   essay by Leo Strauss on Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism:

   
     Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the
     rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by
     revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo
     Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago
     Press, 1983, p. 237.)

This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it may offer us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and  likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary processes most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes  common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms.

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat  without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

I suggest that what 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission was not by semen,  but by some spiritual (socio-cultural) means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being (Sein) achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.

Revealing himself to man as Being itself — Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" — God creates man as understandor of Being.

Here’s to You, Jack Kerouac, on the 43rd Anniversary of Your Release . . .

. . . from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish: "The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead."  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Jack Kerouac's Octoberish Magic

Sunday Events Honor Kerouac

Jack's grave

"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)

Derbyshire’s Defenestration: Six Months Later

Derb calls it a six month anniversary, but how can there be a six month anniversary?  (L. annus, anni, year.) Call me a pedant and a quibbler.  So while I'm just being myself, I'll also point out that he uses the pleonastic 'true fact.'  What, as opposed to a false fact?

Much more importantly, the man spoke the truth about race and has paid a  price for so doing.

I seem to recall a rant of mine against the simultaneous crudification and wussification of American culture.  Ugly words for ugly things.  Derb in his Anniversary of a Defenestration laments "the pathetic pussification of the official right."  Here is Part II.

My posts on Derbyshire:

Derbyshire's Defenestration

Derbyshire's 'Racism'

PC Conservative Andrew McCarthy's Lame Response to John Derbyshire

First John Derbyshire, then Naomi Riley

There is much more on the delightful topic of race in my aptly entitled Race category. 

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations.  If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer:


Brain PrayerA test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study brain activity while the subject is deep in prayer/meditation.  The red in the language center and frontal lobe areas indicates greater brain activity when the subject is praying or meditating as compared to the baseline when he is not.  But when atheists "contemplate God" — which presumably means when they think about the concept of God, a concept that they, as atheists, consider to be uninstantiated — "Dr. Newberg did not observe any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that he observed in religious people."

The upshot?

Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while God is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, God is as real as the physical world. "So it helps us to understand that at least when they [religious people] are describing it to us, they are really having this kind of experience… This experience is at least neurologically real."

First of all, why do we need a complicated and expensive study to learn this?  It is well-known that serious and sincere practioners of religions will typically have various experiences as a result of prayer and meditation.  (Of course most prayer and meditation time is 'dry' — but experiences eventually come.)  The reality of these experiences as experiences cannot be doubted from the first-person point of view of the person who has them.  There is no need to find a neural correlate in the brain to establish the reality of the experience qua experience.  The experiences are real whether or not neural correlates can be isolated, and indeed whether or not there are any. 

Suppose no difference in brain activity is found as between the religionists and the atheists when the  former do their thing and the latter merely think about the God concept.  (To call the latter "contemplating God" is an absurd misuse of terminology.)  What would that show? Would it show that there is no difference between the religionists' experiences and the atheists'?  Of course not.  The difference is phenomenologically manifest, and, as I said, there is no need to establish the "neurological reality" of the experiences to show that they really occur.

Now I list some possible confusions into which one might fall when discussing a topic like this.

Confusion #1: Conflating the phenomenological reality of a religious experience as experienced with its so-called "neurological reality."  They are obviously different as I've already explained.

Confusion #2: Conflating the  religious experience with its neural correlate, the process in the brain or CNS on which the experience causally depends.  Epistemically, they cannot be the same since they are known in different ways.  The experience qua experience is known with certainty from the first-person point of view.  The neural correlate is not.  One cannot experience, from the first-person point of view, one's own brain states as brain states.  Ontically, they cannot be the same either, and this for two sorts of reasons.  First, the qualitative features of the experiences cannot be denied, but they also cannot be identified with anything physical.  This is the qualia problem.  Second, religious/mystical experiences typically exhibit that of-ness or aboutness, that directedness-to-an-object, that philosophers call intentionality.  No physical states have this property.

Confusion #3:  Conflating a religious entity with its concept, e.g., confusing God with the concept of God.  This is why it is slovenly and confused to speak of "contemplating God"  when one is merely thinking about the concept of God.  The journalist and/or the neuroscientist seem to be succumbing to this confusion.

Confusion #4:  Conflating an experience (an episode or act of experiencing) with its intentional object.  Suppose one feels the presence of God.  Then the object is God.  But God is not identical to the experience.  For one thing, numerically different experiences can be of the same object. The object is distinct from the act, and the act from the object.  The holds even if the intentional object does not exist.  Suppose St Theresa has an experience of the third person of the Trinity, but there is no such person.  That doesn't affect the act-object structure of the experience.  After all, the act does not lose its intentional directedness because the object does not exist.

Confusion #5:  Conflating the question whether an experience 'takes an object' with the question whether the object exists.

Confusion #6:  Conflating reality with reality-for.  There is no harm is saying that God is real for theists, but not real for atheists if all one means is that theists believe that God is real while atheists do not.  Now if one believes that p, it does not follow that p is true.  Likewise,  if God is real for a person it doesn't follow that God is real, period.  One falls into confusion if one thinks that the reality of God for a person shows that God is real, period.

We find this confusion at the end of the video clip. "And if God only exists in our brains, that does not mean that God is not real.  Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us."

This is confused nonsense.  First of all God cannot exist in our brains.  Could the creator of the universe be inside my skull?  Second, it would also be nonsense to say that the experience of God is in our brains for the reasons give in #2 above.  Third, if "God exists only in our brains" means that the experience of God is phenomenologically real for those who have it, but that the intentional object of this experience does not exist, then it DOES mean that God is not real.

Confusion #7:  Conflating the real with the imaginable.  We are told that "God is unimaginable for atheists."  But that is true of theists as well: God, as a purely spiritual being, can be conceived but not imagined.  To say that God is not real is not to say that God is unimaginable, and to say that something (a flying horse, e.g.) is imaginable is not to say that it is real.

What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt.  What I am objecting is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.

What did we learn from the article cited?  Nothing.  We don't need complicated empirical studies to know that religious experiences are real.  What the article does is sow seeds of confusion.  One of the confusions the article sows is that the question of the veridicality of religious experiences can be settled by showing their "neurological reality."  Neither the phenomenological nor the neurological reality of the experience qua experience entails  the reality of the object of the experience.

Genuine science cannot rest on conceptual foundations that are thoroughly confused.

Elliot Sober on Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012).  The posts are conveniently collected under the rubric Nagel, Thomas. Before proceeding with my account of Chapter 4, I will pause in this entry to consider Elliot Sober's serious, substantial, and sober Boston Review review.  Sober's sobriety lapses only in the subtitle (which may have been supplied by the editor): "Ending Science as We Know It."

According to Sober, Nagel " . . .  argues that evolutionary biology is fundamentally flawed and that physics also needs to be rethought—that we need a new way to do science." This seems to me to misrepresent Nagel's project.  His project is not to "end science as we know it" but to indicate the limits of scientific explanation.  A legitimate philosophical task is to investigate  the limits of even the most successful sciences. (4) Now, to investigate and point out the limits of evolutionary biology and physics is not to argue that they are "fundamentally flawed."  They do what they are supposed to do, and the fact that they do not, or cannot, explain certain phenomena that certain scientistically inclined people would like them to explain, is no argument against them.  After all, physics cannot explain the proliferation of living species, but that is no argument against physics.  If evolutionary biology cannot explain how consciousness arises in certain organisms or the objectively binding character or normative judgments,  that is no argument against evolutonary biology.  To oppose Darwinian imperialism as Nagel does is not to oppose Darwinism.  To suppose that every gap in our understanding can be filled with a Darwinian explanation is  rightly ridiculed as "Darwinism of the gaps." (127)

Nagel's targets are not existing successful sciences.  He tells us right at the outset what his target is (bolding added):  "My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics — a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification." (4)  He goes on to characterize this worldview as "materialist reductionism" and "reductive materialism."

Nagel is therefore not opposing any science but rather a philosophical position, materialist reductionism, that is reached by a speculative-philosophical extrapolation from some of the results of the sciences. 

Although Nagel admits that there are some brute facts, mind, the intelligibility of the world, and the fact that there are conscious organisms (45) are not among them.  Mind is not an accident or fluke (16) and "The intelligibility of the world is no accident."  One of the limits of current evolutionary theory is that it cannot explain why these remarkable fact are non-accidental.  Sober does not understand why, if some facts are brute, the remarkable facts of mind, intelligibilty and consciousness are not among them:

My philosophical feelings diverge from Nagel’s. I think that Beethoven’s existence is remarkable, but I regard it as a fluke. He could easily have failed to exist. Indeed, my jaded complacency about Beethoven scales up. I don’t think that life, intelligence, and consciousness had to be in the cards from the universe’s beginning. I am happy to leave this question to the scientists. If they tell me that these events were improbable, I do not shake my head and insist that the scientists must be missing something. There is no such must. Something can be both remarkable and improbable. 

Sober seems to be imputing to Nagel the following argument:

What is remarkable cannot be improbable.
Life, consciousness, reason, etc. are remarkable
Therefore
Life, consciousness, reason, etc. cannot be improbable.

Now this is an unsound argument, of course: Beethoven's existence was remarkable but improbable.  But this is not the way Nagel is arguing.  He needn't be read as denying that there is an element of chance in the appearance of Beethoven, a particular instance of life, consciousness, and reason.  His point is rather that consciousness and reason in general cannot be cosmic accidents.  Sober ignores what is specific to reason, and views it as just another remarkable fact.  Nagel's actual argument (see p. 86) is rather along these lines:

1. There are organisms capable of reason.
2. The possibility of such beings must have been there from the beginning.
3. This possibility, however, must be grounded in and explained by the nature of the cosmos.
4. What's more, the nature of the cosmos must explain not only the possibiity but also the actuality of rational animals: their occurrence cannot be a brute fact or accident.

I take Nagel to be maintaining that the eventual existence of some rational beings or other is no accident — which is consistent with maintaining that there is an element of chance involved in the appearance of any particular instance of reason such as Beethoven.

Of course, Sober will still balk.  Why can't reason be a fluke?  Even if we grant Nagel that the intelligibility of nature could not have been a fluke or brute fact, how does it follow that the actual existence of some rational beings or other, beings capable of 'glomming onto' the world's intelligible structure, is not a fluke?  In a later post I will try to beef up Nagel's argument so that it can meet this demand.

For now, though, we have a stand-off.  Nagel has this deep sense, which I share, that "rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order . . . ." (17)  Sober in his sobriety does not share that sense. 

There is more to Sober's criqiue than this, but this is enough for today.