Author: Bill Vallicella

Roger Scruton on the Art of the Aphorism

Speaking Neatly. Excerpt:

FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More significant than Wilde's, on account of its influence, is Marx's dismissal of religion as "the opium of the people." For this implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe the wounds of society, and that there is some other condition to which humanity might advance in which religion would no longer be needed. Both those implications are false, but they are boiled into a stock cube as tasty as any that has been seen on the intellectual menu. How many would-be intellectuals have dissolved this cube into their prose and given their thought, in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, a specious air of wisdom?

Permit me a quibble.  Should we call a striking formulation lifted from a wider context an aphorism?  I don't think so.  An aphorism by my lights is a pithy observation intended by its author to stand alone.  Accordingly, Marx's famous remark is not an aphorism.  The wider context is provided here.

Dylan’s New Album

In lieu of oldies this Saturday night, a taste of  Bob Dylan's latest, Tempest.  Duquesne Whistle.  Sampler. 1962 version of "Roll on, John"  50 years of  assimilation  and creative  reworking of musical Americana by the unlikely Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Jody Rosen's New Yorker review. Insightful:

The hunt for Dylan in Dylan songs is a mug’s game. Dylan is a genius; he’s also  the greatest bullshitter and jive-talker in popular-music history. He began  laying boobytraps for his exegetes before he even had any, and they—we—have  never stopped taking the bait. Today Dylanology is a midrashic enterprise  rivaling Talmudism and Shakespeare Studies, and it’s worth remembering its  origins: it started with the hippie gadfly A .J. Weberman, who took to “reading” toothbrushes recovered from garbage bins outside of Dylan’s MacDougal Street  townhouse.

[. . .]

The original Dylanological sin is to focus too much on the words, and too little  on the sound: to treat Dylan like he’s a poet, a writer of verse, when of course  he’s a musician—a songwriter and, supremely, a singer. “Tempest” reminds us what  a thrilling and eccentric vocalist he is.

Scientism

Those who hold that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge will not be content to restrict themselves to such knowledge; they will be tempted to pass off as scientific what is not.  The prime and best example is scientism itself: it is passed off as scientific when it is a philosophical thesis with all the rights, privileges, and debilities pertaining thereunto.

(Details in Scientism category.)

Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects.  When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing.  In the end he swindles himself.

How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot?  You have  otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.

Or take the Enron employees.  They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries!  Now how stupid is that?  But they weren't stupid; they stupified themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.

The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature.  Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt?  A lack of money?  No, a lack of virtue.  People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

Nagel’s Reason for Rejecting Theism

This is the second in a series.  My overview of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos, is here.

I agree with Nagel that mind is not a cosmic accident.  Mind in all of its ramifications (sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, cognition, rationality, normativity in general) could not have arisen from mindless matter.  To put it very roughly, and in my own way, mind had to be there already and all along in one way or another.  Not an "add-on" as Nagel writes, but "a basic aspect of nature." (16) 

Two ways mind could have been there already and all along are Nagel's panpsychistic way and the theistic way.  My task in this entry is to understand and then evaluate Nagel's reasons for rejecting theism.  

But first let's back up a step and consider the connection between mind and intelligibility.  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.

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.

"The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17)  The same is true of mind.  The two go together: an intelligible world is one that is intelligible to mind, and mind is mind only if it can 'glom onto' an antecedent order of things.  (This is my way of putting it, not Nagel's!)  Intelligibility is necessarily mind-involving, and mind (apart from mere qualia) is necessarily an understanding of something.  One could say that there is an antecedent community of nature between mind and world which allows mind to have an object to understand and the world to be understandable by mind.  What I am calling the antecedent community of nature between mind and world Nagel expresses by saying that "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17)

That neither mind nor intelligibility are cosmic accidents, and that they 'go together' as just explained  could be accepted by both Nagelian panpsychists and theists.  So why does Nagel reject theism?

His main reason seems to be couched in the following quotations:

. . . the disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive understanding is not that it offers no explanations but that it does not do so in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural order. [. . .] But it would not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit into the world.  The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing is intelligibility of the natural order itself — intelligibility from within. (25-26)

Nagel does not do a very good job of presenting his argument clearly, but the following is what I take him to be driving at.

Materialism cannot explain the origin of life from inanimate matter, the origin of consciousness from pre-conscious life, or the origin of reason in conscious beings.  Nondeistic theism can explain these crucial transitions by means of divine interventions into the workings of nature.  (Deism would leave the crucial transitions as brute facts and is  rejectable for this reason.)  To subscribe to such interventionist hypotheses, however, is to deny that there is a comprehensive natural order.  Nature would not be intelligible from within itself, in its own terms.  So maybe Nagel's argument could be put like this:

1. Nature is immanently intelligible: it has the source of its intelligibility entirely within itself and not from a source outside itself.

2. On theism, nature is not immanently intelligible: God is the source of nature's intelligibility. (This is because divine intervention is needed to explain the crucial transitions to life, to consciousness, and to reason, transitions which otherwise would be unintelligible.)

Therefore

3. Theism suffers from a serious defect that make it reasonable to pursue a third course, panpsychism, as a way to avoid both materialism and theism.

Now I've put the matter more clearly than Nagel does, but I'd be surprised if this is not what he is arguing, at least on pp 25-26.

As for evaluation, the argument as presented is reasonable but surely not compelling. A theist needn't be worried by it.  He could argue that it begs the question at the first premise. How divine interventions into the course of nature are so much as possible is of course a problem for theists, but Plantinga has an answer for that.  The theist can also go on the attack and mount a critique of panpsychism, a fit topic for future posts. 

There is also the question of why the cosmos exists at all.  It is plausible to maintain that the cosmos is necessarily intelligible, that it wouldn't be a cosmos if it weren't.  But necessary intelligibility is consistent with contingent existence.  Will Nagel say that the cosmos necessarily exists?  How would he ground that?  Panpsychism, if tenable, will relieve us of the dualisms of matter-life, life-consciousness, mind-body.  But it doesn't have the resources to explain the very existence of the cosmos.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview

I think I shall have to write a number of posts on this exciting and idea-rich book by one of our best philosophers.  Here is the first.

Short (128 pp.) and programmatic, Thomas Nagel's new book explores the prospects of an approach in the philosophy of mind that is naturalistic yet not materialistic.  His approach is naturalistic in that he locates the source of the world's intelligibility in it, and not in a transcendent being such as God outside it.  As Nagel rightly observes, "Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world." (p. 45)

Nagel's  approach is also naturalistic in that he views mind as a biological phenomenon as it could not be if substance dualism were true.  But while naturalistic, Nagel also rejects "psychophysical reductionism" or "reductive materialism."  Thus he rejects naturalism as currently articulated without embracing any form of anti-naturalism such as theism.  Nagel, we might say, seeks a middle path between theistic anti-naturalism and materialistic naturalism. The latter is just materialism which Nagel defines as follows:

Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing.  This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded. (37)

This is a useful definition.  Materialism is either eliminativist or reductivist.  Now obviously there is such a thing as mind, so eliminativism is not an option. (41)  My arguments against it here.  So the materialist must try to show that mind  belongs to objective physical reality and that everything about it is understandable in the way everything else in objective physical reality is understandable.  In this way materialism closes upon itself, explaining not only the world the mind engages, but the engaging mind itself.  I agree with Nagel that reductive materialism is untenable.

Treading his via media between theism and materialism,  Nagel reopens the case for neutral monism and panpsychism. How does he get to these positions?  This is what I will try to figure out in this post.

Mind is a biological phenomenon.  We are organisms in nature, not Cartesian egos contingently attached to physical bodies.    But we are conscious organisms.   We are subjects of such qualitative states as pleasure and pain, and we are  individuals with a subjective point of view.  If psychophysical reductionism fails, as both Nagel and I maintain, then physical science, even if it can explain our existence as organisms adapted to an environment,  cannot explain our existence as conscious organisms.  We are not just objects in the world, we are subjects for whom there is a world.  Even if the first fact can be adequately explained by physical science, the second, our subjectivity,  cannot be.

Given the failure of psychophysical reductionism, and given that mind is a biological phenomenon encountered only in conscious organisms that have evolved from pre-conscious organisms, evolutionary theory cannot be a purely physical theory. (44)  The 'makings' of conscious organsims must already be present in pre-conscious life forms.  In this way the mind-body problem spreads to the entire cosmos and its history.  Thus "the mind-body problem is not just a local problem" that concerns such minded organisms as ourselves. (3) 

Inanimate matter evolved into pre-conscious life forms, and these evolved into conscious life forms.  Since conscious organisms qua conscious cannot be understood materalistically, the same is true of pre-conscious life forms: the reduction of biology to physics and chemistry will also fail.   This is because life must contain within it the 'makings' of consciousness.  That is my way of putting it, not Nagel's. 

Turning it around the other way, if we are to have an adequate naturalistic explanation of conscious organisms, then this cannot be "a purely physical explanation." (44)  And so Nagel floats the suggestion of a global (as opposed to local) neutral monism "according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its [mental life's] physical but its mental character." (56)  Conscious organisms are composed of the same ultimate stuff as everything else is.  For this reason, neutral monism cannot be kept local but goes global or "universal." (57)  The idea, I take it, is that even the merely physical is proto-mental, the merely living being even more so.  When conscious organisms arrive on the scene, the proto-mental constituents achieve an arrangement and composition that amounts to mental life as we know it.

Now how do we get from this universal neutral monism to panpsychism?  Well, a universal neutral monism just is panpsychism: the ultimate constituents of nature are all of them proto-mental.  Mind is everywhere since everything is composed of the same proto-mental constituents.  But it is equally true that matter is everywhere since there is nothing mental or proto-mental that is not also physical.

Thus we arrive at a position that is neither theistic nor reductively materialistic.

Let me now try to list the key premises/assumptions in Nagel's argument for his panpsychistic naturalism.

1. Consciousness is real.  Eliminativist materialism is a complete non-starter.

2. Naturalism:  Consciousness occurs only in conscious organisms, hence cannot occur without physical realization.  Mind is a biological phenomenon.  No God, no Cartesian minds.  No substance dualism, no theism.

3. Reductive Materialism  (psychophysical reductionism) is untenable.

4. Consciousness cannot be a brute fact.  Mind is not an accident but "a basic aspect of nature." (16) It cannot be that consciousness just inexplicably occurred at a certain point in evolutionary history when organisms of a certain physical complexity appeared.  The arrival of conscious organisms needs an explanation, and this explanation cannot be an explanation merely of their physical character.  It must also explain their mental character.  But this materialism cannot do.  Hence "materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms as its most striking occupants." (45)

5.  Nature is intelligible.  Its intelligibility is inherent in it and thus not imposed on it by us or by God.  The intelligibility of nature is not a brute fact: nature doesn't just happen, inexplicably, to possess a rational order that is understandable by us. I take Nagel's position to be that intelligibility is a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.  Thus it needs no explanation and surely cannot have a materialist one: it cannot possibly be the case that the intelligibility of nature arose at some time in the past via the operation of material causes.   The universe is so constituted as to be understandable, and we, as parts of it, are so constituted as to be able to understand it.  (16-17)

I accept all of these propositions except (2).  So in a subsequent post I must examine whether Nagel's case against theism is stronger than his case for his panpsychism. 

Sex and the ‘Sixties

London Ed writes,


Another thing from that era [the '60s], now surfacing in  England, is the rampant promiscuity disguised as 'alternative' and  'liberation'.  Jimmy Savile (I assume you have been following this case)  was one of them. But I remember John Peel, who was an icon of English  counterculture, boasting of sleeping with girls as young as 13, and there is a  splendid passage in Playpower, by Richard Neville (editor of IT and OZ) about  bedding a 'cherubic' fourteen year old, after smoking pot with her.  It was  meant to be liberated then, but in retrospect … ?

Monterey Tom sends a link that provides a response, The Sexual Revolution and its Victims.  The piece concludes:

At every step of his life, though, the sexual revolution wrought its harm.  It perversely rewarded the irresponsible behavior of his parents and his stepparents.  It had, even by then, made sexual activity among young people something to be expected, so that a lonely kid like Danny would constantly have to wonder about himself.  It had corrupted the popular culture, so that well-chaperoned and innocent CYO dances were a distant memory.  It set him up for a short-circuited sexual relationship with a mother-substitute, depriving him of the children that might have sweetened his advancing years.  It swept away all the institutions that used to bring boys together, as boys, to train them to be decent and well-adjusted men.  It raised him up in an anti-culture of faithlessness, as he would witness one sexual “relationship” after another dissolve by ill-will or boredom.

It has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness.  Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim. 

The Converse Does Not Hold

If you paid attention in Logic 101 you may remember that the immediate inference called 'conversion' is valid  for the I and E forms of the traditional square of opposition but not for the A and O forms.  Poetic illustration courtesy of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) where 'Every poet is a fool' is an A-proposition:

Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

(Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 82)

National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

Big bird

This is something I wrote 10 March 2011.  The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama.  Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed.  Maybe this will help.

……….

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  At least not now.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  Think about it.  If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship.  But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.  Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc.  If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I leave that question open for the space of this post.  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do. 

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can.  "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits.  So I hope NPR stays on the air — on its own fiscal steam.  Hell, if they wean themselves from the  mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself!  And the same goes for PBS. 

Why is the Gore Lane So-Called?

Gore LaneSee the triangle-like piece of roadway where the routes diverge?  That's called the gore lane.  Gore lanes are also found near on ramps and exit ramps. Driving across such a lane is a moving violation.  The gore lane is not, strictly, a lane, nor is it named after Al Bore Gore. 

This scintillating topic came up in conversation with Peter L. yesterday morning after we had done with Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.    Peter maintained that the 'lane' was so-called because of one Officer Gore, a motorcycle cop who supposedly had been killed in a gore lane near an entry ramp to a freeway.  But I learned this morning that the noun 'gore' has among it meanings, "a small usually triangular piece of land."  This leads me to suspect that Peter's explanation is a bit of urban folklore.

Any Good Reviews Yet of Nagel’s New Book?

So far I have run across David Gordon's very good treatment of one aspect of Thomas Nagel's project in Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012) entitled Moral Realism vs. Evolutionary Biology?  Other than that it has been slim pickin's when it comes to informed, nontendentious discussions of Nagel's latest.  I've heard that Plantinga is writing a review, but it hasn't yet appeared to my knowledge.

A certain blogger famous for his academic gossip site, arguably the preeminent such site in the whole of the philososphere, published a hit piece  in a certain left wing publication but it is not worth reading. (Antecedent of 'it' left ambiguous: take it both ways.)

ComBox is open should anyone know of any good reviews or discussions of Nagel's book.  I'm on p. 76  and will  post something in the next few days.

Here are excerpts from a Gordon review of an earlier Nagel book.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Three Who Didn’t Survive the ’60s

1970 was the last year of the 'sixties, and these three died in September and October.

Alan 'Blind Owl' Wilson of Canned Heat.  Date of death: 2 September 1970.  Cause: "acute accidental barbituate intoxication."  I saw him live with Canned Heat in 1968 in a club named  Kaleidoscope on Sunset Boulevard  in Hollywood.  Wilson's high-pitched voice drew jeers from some members of the audience.  On the Road Again.  Going Up the Country.  On the bill with them when I saw them at the Kaleidoscope was an obscure psychedelic band name of "Fever Tree."  They were damned good as witness The Sun Also Rises and San Francisco Girls and Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing.

Jimi Hendrix.  Date of death:  18 September 1970.  Cause: unclear.  In '67 I heard him play The Wind Cries Mary at the Monterey Pop Festival. Third Stone from the Sun.

Janis Joplin. Date of Death: 4 October 1970.  Cause: heroin overdose. She was at Monterey too.  My favorite  is her rendition of Kris Krisofferson's Me and Bobby McGee.  Otherwise, I didn't much like her vocal stylings: too screechy and screamy.  Dead 42 years, she's been dead longer than she lived.