Squelching them is good in two ways. It is good to be rid of them since their presence keeps the positive from streaming in. And the very act of squelching them is a form of self-denial, something without which there can be no moral or spiritual progress. Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Bukowski’s Juvenilia and Mine
Here are the first few lines of Charles Bukowski's one-page late poem "Zero" (You Get So Alone At Times it Just Makes Sense, Ecco 2002, p. 104, originally publ. 1986 by Black Sparrow Press):
sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go
around and
around . . .
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.
Here is an adolescent effort of mine when I was literally an adolescent:
tiredly picking my nose
listening to the grinding sounds of
clocks, air conditioners and refrigerators
i can hear it all this night
snarfing a fart now and then, tiredly
checking beef pies cooking in the oven
picking at a jammed-up typewriter
in confusion
dancing around on featherweight fright flights
and tiredly picking
picking my nose & my acne
and eating it
is this any way to run an airline?
I'll grant that Bukowski's poem, published when he was around 66, especially if you read the whole of it, is better than mine, which is not saying much. But there are plenty of common elements: self-indulgence, self-absorption, diasaffection, alienation and disconnectedness. My excuse is that my adolescent rubbish was written when I was 16. At 66 that particular excuse lapses.
Intentionality Not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?
The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism. The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable. An earlier post discussed a version of the knowledge argument, which is one of the qualia-based objections. (Two others are the absent qualia argument and the zombie argument.) It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent reason to reject physicalism.
Before proceeding I want to make two preliminary points.
The first is that the untenability of physicalism does not entail the acceptability of substance dualism. Contrapositively, the unacceptability of substance dualism does not entail the tenability of physicalism. So if a physicalist wishes to point out the problems with substance dualism, he is free to do so. But he ought not think that such problems supply compelling reasons to be a physicalist. For it is obvious that the positions stand to each other as logical contraries; hence both could be be false.
My second point is that considerations of parsimony do favor physicalism over dualistic schemes — but only on condition that the relevant data can be adequately accounted for. And that is one big 'only if.' (See The Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity.)
An Argument Sketched. Mary, Meet Marty.
We were talking about Frank Jackson's Mary. Now I introduce Marty, a Martian scientist who like Mary knows everything there is to know about human brains and their supporting systems. So he knows all about what goes in the human brain and CNS when we humans suffer and enjoy twinges and tingles, smells and stinks, sights and sounds, etc. We will suppose that Marty's sensorium is very different, perhaps totally different than ours. He may have infrared color qualia but no color qualia corresponding to the portion of the EM spectrum for which we have color qualia. Marty also knows everything there is to know about what goes on in my head when I think about various things. We may even suppose that Marty is studying me right now with his super-sophisticated instruments and knows exactly what is going on in my head right now when I am in various intentional states.
Suppose I am now thinking about dogs. I needn't be thinking about any particular dog; I might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that I am thinking about getting. Indeed, one can think about getting a dog that is distinct from every dog presently in existence! How? By thinking about having a dog breeder do his thing. If a woman tells her husband that she wants a baby, more likely than not, she is not telling him that she wants to kidnap or adopt some existing baby, but that she wants the two of them to engage in the sorts of conjugal activities that can be expected to cause a baby to exist. Same with me. I can want a dog or a cat or a sloop or a matter transmitter even if the object of my wanting does not presently exist.
So right now I am thinking about a dog, but no presently existing dog. My thinking has intentional content. It is an instance of what philosophers call intentionality. My act of thinking takes an object, or has an accusative. It exhibits aboutness or of-ness in the way a pain quale does not exhibit aboutness of of-ness. It is important to realize that my thinking is intrinsically such as to be about a dog: the aboutness is not parasitic upon an external relation to an actual dog. That is why I rigged the example the way I did. My thinking is object-directed despite there being no object in existence to which I am externally related. This blocks attempts to explain intentionality in terms of causation. Such attempts fail in any case. See my post on Representation and Causation.
The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that intentional content is by monitoring my neural states during the period of time I am thinking about a dog. The content before my mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best friend . . . . But none of this content will be discernible to the Martian neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of my neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. To strengthen the argument we may stipulate that Marty lacks the very concept dog. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism) is false.
The argument is this:
1. Marty knows all the physical and functional facts about my body and brain during the time I am thinking about a dog.
2. That I am thinking about a dog is a fact.
3. Marty does not know that I am thinking about a dog.
Therefore
4. Marty does not know all the facts about me and my mental activity.
Therefore
5. There are mental facts that are not physical or functional facts, and physicalism is false.
Credit where credit is due: The above is my take on a more detailed and careful argument presented here by Laurence BonJour. Good day!
Rock, Reality, Ed Abbey, and the Attraction of the Incoherent
There is no denying the charm, the attractive power, of incoherent ideas. They appeal to adolescents of all ages. Edward "Cactus Ed" Abbey writes, "I sometimes think that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and that only rock is real." Well, Cactus Ed, is this thought of yours an illusion too?
Cactus Ed's thought is a conjunction of three sub-thoughts: man is a dream; his thoughts are illusory; only rock is real. If our thoughts are illusory, then each of these sub-thoughts is illusory too, and Abbey's
clever formulation refutes itself. But this won't stop Abbey or his admirers from finding it attractive. Man, and especially the literary type, is a perverse animal. He will believe anything and say anything, no matter how false. He will assert himself even unto incoherence. He will not be instructed.
Thus if I were to run this little argument past Cactus Ed and his admirers they would most likely snort derisively and call me a logic-chopper. Their misology would make it impossible for them to take it seriously. You see, literary types are too often not interested in truth, but in literary effect, when it should be self-evident that truth is a higher value than literary effect. But it is more complicated than this. Abbey is trying to have it both ways at once: he wants to say something true, but he doesn't want to bother satisfying the preconditions for his saying something true, one such precondition being that the proposition asserted not entail its own negation.
Continue reading “Rock, Reality, Ed Abbey, and the Attraction of the Incoherent”
Glenn Reynolds on the What Comes After the Higher Ed Bubble Bursts
Here. Excellent analysis of the problem, but he also offers solutions:
For higher education, the solution is more value for less money. Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years — but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance. Up until now, the loan guarantees have meant that colleges, like the writers of subprime mortgages a few years ago, got their money up front, with any problems in payment falling on someone else. Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they'll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer.
[. . .]
Another response is an increased emphasis on non-college education. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, skilled trades are doing quite well. For the past several decades, America's enthusiasm for college has led to a lack of enthusiasm for vocational education.
Absolutely right. The notion put forth by the foolish Obama and others that anyone can profit from a college education is absurd on the face of it.
Remembering George Harrison
It is hard to believe, but George Harrison died ten years ago, last Sunday. All Things Must Pass is one of his best songs, from the album of the same name, released 27 November 1970. The album got a lot of play by me and my housemates in December of that year. 41 years later, I find the song even more moving. Whatever you say about the '60s — and 1970 was the last year of the '60s — the music of that era had a depth that was entirely lacking in the popular music of preceding decades. Or can you think of a counterexample?
On Paul Churchland’s ‘Refutation’ of the Knowledge Argument
If this post needs theme music, I suggest Party Lights (1962) by the one-hit wonder, Claudine Clark: "I see the lights/I see the party lights/They're red and blue and green/Everybody in the crowd is there/But you won't let me make the scene!" (Because, mama dear, you've kept me cooped up in a black-and-white room studying neuroscience.)
…………………………..
The 'Knowledge Argument' as it is known in the trade has convinced many of the untenability of functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Here is Paul M. Churchland's presentation of Frank Jackson's version of the argument:
1. Mary knows everything there is to know about brain states and their properties.
2. It is not the case that Mary knows everything there is to know about sensations and their properties.
Therefore, by Leibniz's law [i.e., the Indiscernibility of Identicals; see my post 'Leibniz's Law': A Useless Expression],
3. Sensations and their properties are not identical to brain states and their properties.("Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of the Brain," Journal of Philosophy, vol. 82, no. 1, January 1985, pp. 8-28, sec. IV, "Jackson's Knowledge Argument.")
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state. Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray. You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system. Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV. The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.
Churchland finds two "shortcomings" with the above argument. I will discuss only the first in this post.
Churchland smells a fallacy of equivocation. 'Knows about,' he claims, is being used in different senses in (1) and (2):
Knowledge in (1) seems to be a matter of having mastered a set of sentences or propositions, the kind one finds written in neuroscience texts, whereas knowledge in (2) seems to be a matter of having a representation of redness in some prelingusitic or sublinguistic medium of representation for sensory variables, or to be a matter of being able to make certain sensory discriminations, or something along these lines. (Emphasis in original)
Rather than argue that that there is no equivocation in the argument as Churchland formulates it, I think it is best to concede the point, urging instead that Chuchland has not presented the Knowledge Argument fairly. He finds an equivocation only because he has set up a straw man. Consider the following version:
4. Mary knows all of the of the physical facts about color vision.
5. Venturing outside her black-and-white domain for the first time, she comes to know a new fact: what it is like to see red.
Therefore
6. This new fact is not a physical fact.
There is no equivocation on 'knows' in this argument. Mary knows all of the physical facts about the brain and the visual system. If the physical facts are all the facts, then, when she emerges from the room and views a red sunset, she learns nothing new. But this is not the case. She does learn something new, something she might express by exclaiming, "So this is what it is like to see red!" That is a new fact that she comes to know.
The best counter to this argument is to deny (2) by arguing that that no new fact is learned when Mary steps outside. Mary simply acquires a new concept, a new way of gaining epistemic access to the same old physical facts, namely, the physical and functional facts involved in seeing a red thing. As Churchland puts it,
. . . the difference between a person who knows all about the visual cortex but has never enjoyed a sensation of red, and a person who knows no neuroscience but knows well the sensation of red, may reside not in what is respectively known by each (brain states by the former, qualia by the latter), but rather in the different type of knowledge each has of exactly the same thing. The difference is in the manner of the knowing, not in the nature(s) of the thing known. (Emphases in original)
Churchland's suggestion is that one and the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. The sensory quale is not an item distinct from the underlying state of the brain, an item that escapes the physicalist's net; the quale is a mode of presentation of the brain state. The quale is an appearance of the brain state. And so Churchland thinks that one can have knowledge of one's sensations via their qualitative features without knowing any neuroscience without it being the case that "sensations are beyond the reach of physical science."
In sum, sensations are identical to brain states. But they can be accessed in two ways, via qualia, and via neuroscience. That there are two different modes of epistemic access does not entail that qualia are distinct in reality from brain states. One and the same btrain "uses more modes and media or representation than the simple stoarge of sentences."
Critique
Unfortunately, there is no clear sense in which a quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the quale is of or about the brain state. Phenomenal redness does not present a brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, qualia are non-intentional: they lack aboutness. No doubt a quale has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of. I can't desire without desiring something, a cold beer, say. So 'cold beer' enters, and enters necessarily, into the description of the mental state I am in when I desire a cold beer. But no words referring to neural items need enter into the description of what I experience when I experience a yellowish-orange afterimage, or feel anxious.
Qualia do not play a merely epistemic role as Churchland thinks. They are items in their own right. They are not mere appearances of an underlying reality; they are items with their own mode of being. For a quale, to be is to be perceived. Its reality consists in its appearing. For this reason it makes no sense to say that the reality of a quale is something distinct from it, something physical to which the quale refers.
Suppose someone, armed with the Indiscernibility of Identicals, were to argue that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise, the one, but not the other, being the brightest celestial object in the morning sky. Such an argument could be easily rebutted by pointing out that the two 'stars' are merely different modes of presentation of one and the same physical thing, the planet Venus. Difference in epistemic access does not argue difference in being! Churchland thinks he can similarly rebut the person who argues that qualia are distinct from brain states by claiming that qualia and sentences of neuroscience are different modes of presentation or "media of representation" of one and the same thing, which is wholly physical.
But here is precisely where the mistake is made. Qualia do not present or represent anything. In particular, they do not represent their causes. They are items in their own right with their own mode of being, a mode of being distinct from the mode of being of physical items. For a quale, to be is to be perceived. For a physical item, this is not the case. One cannot drive a wedge between the appearance and the reality of a quale; but one can and must drive such a wedge between the appearance and the reality of physical items.
Even if one were to insist that qualia present or represent their underlying brain states, the materialist position would still be absurd. For if x represents y, then x is distinct from y — in reality and not merely for us. So if phenomenal redness is an appearance of a complex brain state, the two items are distinct. Churchland thinks he can place qualia on the side of representation and then forget about them. But that is an obvious mistake.
Underlying this obvious mistake is the fundamental absurdity of materialism, which is the attempt to understand mind in wholly non-mental terms. It cannot be done since the very investigation of physical reality presupposes mind.
A Recipe for Brussels Sprouts
This just over the transom from Kevin Wong:
I greatly enjoy your blog. I especially enjoyed today's post, as I too had brussels sprouts at Thanksgiving with my in-laws. What I did was halve or quarter them. In a hot pan with no oil, I threw in some sliced up bacon. After the bacon starts to acquire some color and a little crispiness (but has not fully cooked yet), I then toss in the brussels sprouts. They will begin to absorb some of the bacon grease. Then I crush some black pepper over the mixture. Continue to toss. After taking a fork to test some of the sprouts for tenderness, when it gets close, I will toss in some grape tomatoes. Once some of the tomatoes start to blister, serve. It's that simple and very tasty.
This I have to try. Sounds delicious.
Of Brussels Sprouts and Professor Mondo
Professor Mondo describes himself as follows:
I am a medievalist at a small college in a small college town. I like reading, writing, music, and thinking — practicing any of these individually or in combination. Turnoffs include Brussels sprouts, bad music, and creeping totalitarianism.
Excellent, except I simply do not understand food aversions. Nothing edible is foreign to me. Pursuing the Terentian parallel into the precincts of (bad) humor: I am edible; nothing edible is foreign to me.
Brussels sprouts were on the menu at Thanksgiving, and mine were pronounced delicious by all parties to the feast. But you have to steam the hell out of them and then drench them in a good Hollandaise sauce, itself laced with Tabasco, that marvellous Louisiana condiment simply unsurpassed in its class.
The same steaming-and-saucing treatment works wonders with broccoli and other stink-weeds.
Mavalanche
What you get if I link to you.
Middle-Sized Happiness
The best of this blog is hidden in its vast archives, a fact that mitigates 'You're only as good as your last post.' So there is justification for the occasional repost. Think of a repost as a blogospheric rerun. It has been over two years since I ran Middle-Sized Happiness. Having mentioned its topic in the entry immediately preceding, here is the post again, slightly emended.
***************
Life can be good. Middle-sized happiness is within reach and some of us reach it. It doesn't require much: a modicum of health and wealth; work one finds meaningful however it may strike others; the independence of mind not to care what others think; the depth of mind to appreciate that there is an inner citadel into which one can retreat at will for rest and recuperation when the rude impacts of the world become too obtrusive; a relatively stable economic and political order that allows the tasting of the fruits of such virtues as hard work and frugality; a political order secure enough to allow for a generous exercise of liberty and a rich development of individuality; a rationally-based hope that the present, though fleeting, will find completion either here or elsewhere; a suitable spouse whose differences are complementations rather than contradictions; a good-natured friend who can hold up his end of a chess game. . . .
All of these things and a few others, but above all: the wisdom to be satisfied with what one has. In particular, no hankering after more material stuff; no lusting after a bigger house, a newer car, a bigger pile of the lean green.
So much for middle-sized happiness. It falls short of true happiness for various reasons one of which is that one cannot be truly happy in the knowledge that many if not most will never have even the possibility of attaining middle-sized happiness.
Another reason meso-eudaimonia is not true happiness is that it is under permanent threat by impermanence, which argues the unreality of everything finite, as noted in an earlier meditation. But middle-sized happiness has an irrefragable advantage over true happiness: it is certain for those who have attained it for as long as they abide in it. And when it is over, there are the memories, and the knowledge that nothing that happens can change what was, which fact confers upon what was a modality the Medievals called necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. True happiness, however, the happy life St. Augustine speaks of, is uncertain and for all we know chimerical. You can believe in it, of course; but I for one am not satisfied with mere belief: I want to know.
Perhaps it is like this: one day you die and become nothing for ever. Anyone who claims to know with certainty that death is annihilation is most assuredly a fool. But it still might be the case that the death of the individual is the utter destruction of the individual.
Well, suppose that is the case: you die, you are utterly dead, and that's it. All of that struggling and striving and caring and contending and loving and despairing come to nothing. You and all your works end up dust in the wind. Your fall-back position is this meso-eudaimonia I have been writing about. You have it in your possession; it is here free and clear and certain while it lasts. Part of it is the rational hope that there is some sort of completion unto true happiness if not here below (which is arguably impossible), then yonder. A hope exists whether or not its intentum is realized. So, immanently speaking, you have the benefit of hoping whether or not the goal is ever attained.
But take away the hope, and then what do you have? If you believe that it is all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then you ought to find life more difficult to construe as meaningful. Indeed, if you really believe this, can you live it without flinching, without evasion?
It is a curious predicament we are in. If you believe in this Completion of the fleeting present whether in a temporal eschaton or in eternity, and the Completion doesn't exist, then in a sense you are being played for a fool. If, on the other hand, you believe both that life is a tale told by an idiot, etc., and that it is nonetheless meaningful, then you are also being played for a fool: you are playing yourself for a fool. You are self-deceived, in despair without knowing it. (Kierkegaard)
To paraphrase Brenda Lee, "Are you fool number one, or are you fool number two?"
The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell
Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red — and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue — and no one should be allowed to read them." (Recollections of Wittgenstein,* ed. R. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 112.)
Here is a passage from Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (Liveright 1930, p. 24) whose urbanity, wit, and superficiality might well have irritated the self-tormenting Wittgenstein:
I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.
This observation ties in nicely with my remarks on short views and long views. If middle-sized happiness is your object, then short views are probably best. But some of us want more.
__________
*This title is delightfully ambiguous. Read as an objective genitive, it refers to recollections about Wittgenstein, while read as a subjective genitive, it denotes Wittgenstein's recollections. The book, consisting as it does of both, is well-titled.
Enigmas
Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas.
Excluded Middle and Future-Tensed Sentences: An Aporetic Triad
Do you remember the prediction, made in 1999, that the DOW would reach 36,000 in a few years? Since that didn't happen, I am inclined to say that Glassman and Hasset's prediction was wrong and was wrong at the time the prediction was made. I take that to mean that the content of their prediction was false at the time the prediction was made. Subsequent events merely made it evident that the content of the prediction was false; said events did not first bring it about that the content of the prediction have a truth-value.
And so I am not inclined to say that the content of their irrationally exuberant prediction was neither true nor false at the time of the prediction. It had a truth-value at the time of the prediction; it was simply not evident at that time what that truth-value was. By 'the content of the prediction' I mean the proposition expressed by 'The DOW will reach 36,000 in a few years.'
I am also inclined to say that the contents of some predictions are true at the time the predictions are made, and thus true in advance of the events predicted. I am not inclined to say that these predictions were neither true nor false at the time they were made. Suppose I predict some event E and E comes to pass. You might say to me, "You were right to predict the occurrence of E." You would not say to me, "Although the content of your prediction was neither true nor false at the time of your prediction, said content has now acquired the truth-value, true."
It is worth noting that the expression 'come true' is ambiguous. It could mean 'come to be known to be true' or it could mean 'come to have the truth-value, true.' I am inclined to read it the first way. Accordingly, when a prediction 'comes true,' what that means is that the prediction which all along was true, and thus true in advance of the contingent event predicted, is now known to be true.
So far, then, I am inclined to say that the Law of Excluded Middle applies to future-tensed sentences. If we assume Bivalence (that there are exactly two truth-values), then the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM)can be formulated as follows. For any proposition p, either p is true or p is false. Now consider a future-tensed sentence that refers to some event that is neither impossible nor necessary. An example is the DOW sentence above or 'Tom will get tenure in 2014.' Someone who assertively utters a sentence such as this makes a prediction. What I am currently puzzling over is whether any predictions, at the time that they are made, have a truth-value, i.e., (assuming Bivalence), are either true or false.
Why should I be puzzling over this? Well, despite the strong linguistic inclinations recorded above, there is something strange in regarding a contingent proposition about a future event as either true or false in advance of the event's occurrence or nonoccurrence. How could a contingent proposition be true before the event occurs that alone could make it true?
Our problem can be set forth as an antilogism or aporetic triad:
1. U-LEM: LEM applies unrestrictedly to all declarative sentences, whatever their tense.
2. Presentism: Only what exists at present exists.
3. Truth-Maker Principle: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.
Each limb of the triad is plausible. But they can't all be true. The conjunction of any two entails the negation of the third. Corresponding to our (inconsistent) antilogism there are three (valid) syllogisms each of which is an argument to the negation of one of the limbs from the other two limbs.
If there is no compelling reason to adopt one ofthese syllogisms over the other two, then I would say that the problem is a genuine aporia, an insoluble problem.
People don't like to admit that there are insolubilia. That may merely reflect their dogmatism and overpowering need for doxastic security. Man is a proud critter loathe to confess the infirmity of reason.
A Diversity Paradox for Immigration Expansionists
Liberals love 'diversity' even at the expense of such obvious goods as unity, assimilation, and comity. So it is something of a paradox that their refusal to take seriously the enforcement of immigration laws has led to a most undiverse stream of immigrants. "While espousing a fervent belief in diversity, immigrant advocates and their allies have presided over a policy regime that has produced one of the least diverse migration streams in our history." Here
In the once golden and great state of California, the Left's diversity fetishism has led to a letting-go of academics in the Cal State university system with a concomitant retention of administrative 'diversity officers.' Unbelievable but true. Heather McDonald reports and comments in Less Academics, More Narcissism.
My only quibble is her failure to observe the distinction between 'less' and 'fewer.' Use 'fewer' with count nouns; 'less' with mass terms. I don't have less shovels than you; I have fewer shovels. I need fewer shovels because I have less manure.