Science – Maverick Philosopher

Notes on John Dupré, The Metaphysics of Biology, I

A friend of mine is a medical doctor with a decided philosophical bent. He solicits my assistance in helping him understand a 2021 addition to the Cambridge Elements series entitled The Metaphysics of Biology by John Dupré. I am happy to help him, thereby learning something myself about the philosophy of biology, about which I know very little. It’s actually a double deficiency since I know even less about biology. But, like my M.D. friend, I am a perpetual student. So here goes.

This exercise will require a series of posts. This one covers three sections in Part I: Metaphysical Perspectives, pp. 1-13. Double quotation marks are used to quote verbatim; inverted commas or single quotation marks are used to mention a term or phrase. Material in brackets is my insertion. Numbers in parentheses are page numbers.

A summary is inevitably an interpretive summary. Bear that in mind. I will add some critical remarks. Such remarks attempt to evaluate the claims I take the author to be making.

1 What is the Metaphysics of Biology?

We are told that metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to describe reality in the most general and abstract way. Metaphysics of biology, then, deals with the most general and abstract features of that special region of reality we call “the living world.” The author is assuming that not everything real is animate (living, dying, or dead): there is also the inanimate. He doesn’t explicitly say this, but he implies it. If so, I agree. Not everything is animate. Concrete items such as tectonic plates are not animate, and neither are such abstract items as numbers and mathematical sets. Hylozoism, then, is out, and so is panpsychism to the extent that the former supports the latter.

I hope the reader appreciates that if something is dead, then it was once alive, and so belongs to the category of the animate. The category of the inanimate, on the other hand, embraces items that are never either alive or dead.

If I may be allowed a quibble, the author’s concern is with the metaphysics of the biotic, not the metaphysics of biology, which is the study of the biotic. The biotic is both logically and temporally prior to biology since (a) the study of a subject presupposes the subject studied, and (b) life processes were transpiring long before rational animals like us made the scene. The biotic is what it is whether or not anyone studies it, whether or not there ever is any biology. Biology, the logos of bios, is something we do, a social construct; the biotic is not: it needn’t be ‘biologized.’ Whether this is a quibble or an important distinction, you are free to decide.

Now biology cannot be done a priori from the armchair: “biology proceeds not by reason [a priori] but by observation and experiment [a posteriori].” (2) I take it that everyone will agree with that; biology is an empirical science. The author appears to conclude that the same goes for the metaphysics of biology: it proceeds by observation and experiment. In fact, he appears to conclude that all metaphysics must proceed in this way, in a manner “more or less continuous with [empirical, natural] science.” The author thus advocates “a naturalistic or scientific metaphysics.” Both science and naturalistic metaphysics “draw essentially on experience.” This continuity thesis is far from obvious; Edmund Husserl, for one, would reject it. The thesis is however reasonable, so let’s play along with it.

But now the question arises whether “a metaphysics specifically of biology [biotic reality] makes any sense.” It would clearly make sense if vitalism were true. Vitalism is the view that holds “living things to be made of, or partly made of, something quite distinct from ordinary matter.” (3) But vitalism is not an option these days. Or at least no one in the life sciences these days takes it seriously. There is only one world, the physical world in which everything is made of the same “physical stuff.” So, “does not the world of physics subsume that of biology?” This amounts to the question whether biological or rather biotic phenomena reduce to physical phenomena. We will see that the author eschews reductionism in favor of emergentism.

I will reformulate the question in terms of an aporetic triad the constituent propositions of which cannot all be true.

A. Natural reality divides into the biotic (living) and the abiotic (nonliving).
B. Vitalism is not an option: there is only one world and everything in it is composed of the same sort of physical stuff. (3)
C. Physics subsumes biology: biotic phenomena are reducible to the “properties, behaviour, and interactions of the smallest elements of matter.”

If (A) and (B) are true, then (C) cannot be true. Why not? Because if the biotic reduces to physical, then the biotic is not really animate (living).

As I read him, the author solves this problem by rejecting (C) while affirming (A) and (B).

2 Reduction, Emergence, and Levels of Organization

The solution to the above problem by the rejection of (C) takes the form of a doctrine of emergence. “Biological properties” are “emergent — appearing in novel ways at higher levels of organisation, so that no knowledge of the properties of constituent parts is sufficient in principle for predicting such properties.”(3)

And so our author rejects various arguments for reductionism. His discussion strikes me as less than pellucid, but here is my way of putting one of the arguments he rejects:

D. “Physics is causally complete.” (4) The idea is that if we had “full knowledge of the laws governing the behaviour” of the smallest constituents of the material world at a given time, we would be able to predict any future state of the material world.

If so, then

E. “any macroscopic objects entirely composed of these [micro] constituents will have its behaviour fully determined by these same laws.”

What is murky here is the author’s apparent conflation of ‘horizontal’ (past-to- future) causal determination with ‘vertical’ (upward as opposed to downward) causal determination. Suppose past states of the material world determine future states in accordance with the laws of nature. That is different from saying that at any given time the behavior of the micro-constituents of a thing (whether inanimate or animate) determine the behavior of the macro-thing. But let’s move on.

3 Causation, Laws, Mechanisms and Models

If emergentism is to supplant reductionism, then we need to be able to make sense of downward causation. “For if there is downward causation, causation that acts from wholes on the parts of which they are composed, then surely parts do not fully explain causally the behavior of wholes . . . .” (9)

The author uses the heart as an example. It is a whole consisting of parts including chambers, valves, arteries. It functions as a pump causing oxygenated blood to circulate through the body of an animal. From a reductionist point of view, the behavior of the heart is wholly explainable in terms of the parts and their interaction. The causation would then be bottom-up, from the interacting parts to the whole. How then does the heart differ from a non-living machine the behavior of which is fully explainable by the interaction of the parts?

The author makes the unexceptionable point that “Hearts cannot sit unused in drawers” (13) the way non-living machines can remain unused in storage without detriment to their functionality. A heart that stops pumping for even a few minutes may be fatally damaged. The author then makes a very interesting point. While there can be no contractions without chambers, it is also the case that there can be no chambers without contractions. This is because when the contractions cease, the chambers atrophy and die. “Contractions are necessary to provide the flow of oxygenated blood to the heart muscle tissue without which in a very short time it loses its capacity to function.” (13) The author then generalizes: “Such causal dependence of the entity on its activity is characteristic of all biological systems . . . .” (13, emphasis added)

The heart is an entity whose characteristic activity is to pump blood. The author accepts a dualism of entities and activities. He goes on to say that the dualism is not egalitarian in that “Activities are more fundamental” than the entities — which he will later understand as processes — that support them. To bolster this point, he bids us compare the heart to a storm. It’s a bit of a stretch, but very interesting. He means a heart functioning normally, not a heart gone haywire electrically due to atrial fibrillation.

A storm is not a thing or substance that pre-exists its activity, but that very activity itself. It is composed of air and water molecules in motion, and so we can distinguish between the stuff a particular storm is composed of and the storm without holding that there is a self-identical something — a substrate of storming if your will — that persists through the time the storm is occurring. There is no diachronically self-same thing that storms; the storm just is its storming. The matter of the storm — air, water, leaves, whatever is swept up into it — is ever-changing as the storm arises, moves from place to place and finally subsides. We could give a particular storm the name ‘Hillary’ for ease of reference and to distinguish it from a person such as Hillary Clinton whose ‘storming’ is periodic, occasional and accidental (as opposed to essential): there is no nomological necessity that Hillary Clinton be in a continuous state of emotional outburst in the way a storm must of necessity be at every time in a state of meteorological upset.

“The storm is a process that takes in bits of matter that are, for a time, parts of it. Just the same should be said of a heart or an elephant.” (13)

A striking assertion!

A couple of questions we might explore. First, are the author’s arguments for emergentism affected by the existence of totally artificially hearts? Second, if an elephant is a process, then so is a human being. Could a human being be understood adequately as a process? This is connected with the question of how emergentism in the philosophy of biology is related to emergentism in the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy and Science: Continuity or Discontinuity? Presentism Meets Physics

Malcolm Pollack writes,

I hope you'll forgive me for hammering you with emails, but I just wanted to thank you for inviting me to join you in giving this paper a careful going-over. [Christian Wuetrich, "The Fate of Presentism in Modern Physics" in New Papers on the Present, Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 91-131. ] It has given me, as a civilian, yet another opportunity to appreciate the care and attention to detail that professionals in your field must bring to their work. I was struck in particular by this paragraph, from section 3:

"The acceptance of a conflict between presentism and not only SR [Special Relativity], but all of current, as well as prospective, fundamental physics paired with an insistence on presentism amounts to a rather comprehensive rejection of physics. It thus fundamentally contravenes naturalism, a venerable tradition going back at least to Aristotle. According to naturalism, philosophical—and metaphysical—inquiry is continuous with scientific inquiry. To be sure, naturalism is not a logical truth—it is a substantive philosophical thesis. But it is one whose defence has to wait for another day; for present purposes, I simply assume a minimal naturalism which demands that no philosophical thesis be in manifest contradiction to facts established by our best science. Restricting this weak thesis to metaphysics, it can be translated as necessitating that the physically possible worlds are a subset of the metaphysically possible ones, for if the metaphysical theories were in contradiction to the physical ones, then there would have to be some physically possible worlds (and perhaps all) which are metaphysically impossible, as for the metaphysical theory to be incompatible with physics, it would have to rule out some physically possible worlds as impossible. In other words, metaphysics would a priori deem impossible what physics affirms is possible. Assuming that all physically possible worlds are also logically possible, I see little justification for disavowing this weak form of naturalism."

I find this precision, clarity, and style delightful entirely on its own, quite apart from any conclusions it may be leading to. Much obliged.

Malcolm,

I thank you in return for giving me the opportunity to achieve clarity on these topics in connection with a book on metaphilosophy I must finish before the Grim Reaper (Benign Releaser?) lops my head off. As a chess player you know what it is like to be in time trouble with Sudden Death looming, except that it this case it is a scythe and not a flag that will fall. And what the fall will end won't be a mere game.

I will begin by listing some of the main points in W's article, clarifying the key terms, and formulating some of the issues that arise. Ask any questions or make any objections that occur to you. If you find anything I say less than clear, say so. Double quotes mean that I am literally quoting the author. For all other purposes I use single 'quotes.' (One of those uses is instanced in the immediately preceding sentence.) Numbers in parentheses are page references.

1) The author is committed to thinking of time as spacetime, a four-dimensional manifold M composed of "points." (92) These are spacetime points or temporal locations specifiable by x, y, z, and t coordinates, where a spacetime point is a punctuate (duration-less) instant. I take it that M is a continuum so that, between any two instants, or temporal locations, there are continuum-many (2-to-the-alepth-null) instants or temporal locations. This assumes Cantorian set theory and the actual (as opposed to potential) infinite. But then on the same page, he speaks of "events." As I see it, an event is not the same as the time(s) at which it occurs. (The occupant of a spatiotemporal location is not the same as the location it occupies.) I should think that there are times when nothing happens, i.e., when no event occurs, but that whenever an event occurs it must occur at a time or over times. The same goes for spacetime points. Some are unoccupied by physical events, no? An event that is not punctuate like an instant I call a process, even it it lasts only a nanosecond. Nanoseconds and related terms pertain to the "metric" which applies to M. (92) An example of a process, i.e., an extended event, is a storm or a melody. A side point worth pondering is that the universe, supposing it began to exist with a Big Bang, could be metrically finite (12 or so billion years old) despite M's having the cardinality of the continuum, which implies that there are continuum-many events/times between now and the Big Bang

One of the issues that arises here, one not discussed by W., is whether concrete things such as the piano on which the melody is played can be "assayed" (technical term of Gustav Bergmann with mining provenience) as extended events or processes. If so, then pianos and piano players have temporal parts in addition to spatial parts — a view vehemently denied by many philosophers. A melody is not wholly present at every time at which it exists; is the same true of Billy Joel? Melodies and storms unfold over time; they have phases. Do persons unfold over time? Is a person a diachronic collection of person-phases? A person persists through time, no doubt — 'persists' is a datanic term in my lexicon — but does he persist by enduring or by perduring? Is a person or a concrete thing/substance wholly present at every time at which it exists or not? This question goes to the back burner.

2) Given the fundamental presupposition that time is in reality spacetime, eternalism and presentism are defined by the author as follows. Eternalism is "the position claiming physical existence for all events in M," whereas presentism "partitions events into past, present, and future events" together with the proviso that only the events belonging to the present partition enjoy ontological privilege. (92) "Thus the sum total of physical existence is a proper subset of that according to the eternalist." (92)

This I find less than clear. What does the author mean by physical existence? As opposed to what? Surely not mental or abstract/ideal existence. Does he mean the existence of events at times, as opposed to the times at which they exist? An event is not the same as the spacetime point or points at which it occurs. Is it not obvious that the occupant of a location, whether spatial or temporal or spatiotemporal, is not the same as the location? A location exists just as well occupied as unoccupied. Does the author mean to tell us that events exist physically but that times, though they exist, do not exist physically?

Connected with this lack of clarity is the following objection. Presentism is usually explained as the view that temporally present items (whether times or events or members of other categories) alone exist, and thus that wholly past items and wholly future items do not exist, where 'wholly' rules out overlap with the present. If that is what is meant by presentism, then W. hasn't captured it in his definition. For if present items are a proper subset of all existing items (spatiotemporal locations and events at those locations) then those past and future items also exist. But then we are no longer talking about presentism. Presentism is precisely the denial of the existence of the past and the future. The author appear to be begging the question in favor of eternalism by assuming that eternalism is true and that presentism can be defined in terms of it. This ignores the fact that eternalism and presentism are mutually exclusive.

If presentism is the logical contradictory of eternalism, then what exists according to presentism cannot be a proper subset of what exists according to eternalism. The author my be fudging the issue with his obscure talk of physical existence.

3) We were told that presentism partitions M into past, present, and future events. Now what makes present events present? Here is where simultaneity comes into the picture. Simultaneity is an equivalence relation (reflexive, symmetrical, transitive) that effects the partition that creates a proper subset of events, the present ones, and distinguishes them from those to their past and those to their future. This puzzles me for a couple of reasons which I will sketch now, and try to explain more clearly tomorrow.

First, the present as we experience it is not punctuate but specious, in William James's sense of 'specious.' It has a certain spread or duration. 'Now' in 'The sun is now rising' picks out a short period of time that had not yet begun when the sun was below the horizon and will be over a short time later, say in an hour. Sunrise is not an instantaneous event by a a process.

Second, how does what the author says distinguish the present present from past and future presents? After all, at every time or temporal location t in M there is an equivalence class of simultaneous events at t. It follows that there are many — continuum-many! — presents, each equally present at itself. The present present, however, is not merely present at itself, but present simpliciter. It is the 'privileged present,' the absolute present. Presentism is committed to an absolute present. So again, it seems that our author has not put his finger on what privileges the present present, and distinguishes it from past and future presents.

Explanation and Understanding: More on Bogardus

What follows are some further ruminations occasioned by the article by Tomas Bogardus first referenced and commented upon here. I will begin by explaining the distinction between personal and impersonal explanations. The explanation I am about to give is itself a personal explanation, as should become clear after I define 'personal explanation.'

A lightning bolt hits a tree and it bursts into flame. A young child coming on the scene sees a tree on fire and asks me why it is on fire. The child desires to understand why the tree is on fire. I seek to satisfy the child's desire by providing an explanation. I explain to the child that the tree is on fire because it was struck by a bolt of lightning.

Personal explanation

My explanation to the child is an example of a personal as opposed to an impersonal explanation. One person explains something to another person, or to a group of persons, or in the zero-case of personal explanation, to oneself. Personal explanations of the first type — the only type I will consider here — have a triadic structure and involve a minimum of three terms: P1, P2, and E where E is a proposition. One person conveys a proposition to a second person. In the example, I convey the proposition A lightning strike caused the tree to explode into flame to the child. This communicative process or act of explaining is not itself a truth-bearer: it is neither true nor false.

Neither true nor false, it is either successful or unsuccessful. The act of explaining is successful if the recipient of the explanation 'gets it' and comes to understand something he did not understand before. It is unsuccessful if the recipient fails to 'get it.' Now I nuance the point with a further distinction.

Strongly successful versus weakly successful

Two conditions must be satisfied for a personal explanation to be what I will call strongly successful. First, the proposition conveyed must be true. Second, the proposition must be understandable and understood by the recipient of the explanation. If either condition goes unsatisfied, the personal explanation is not strongly successful. For a personal explanation to be what I will call weakly successful, it suffices that the recipient of the explanation be satisfied by the explanation, where satisfaction requires only that the recipient understand the proposition conveyed in the explanation, and find it believable, whether or not the proposition is true.

Although the act of explaining is not a truth-bearer and thus not a proposition, the act of explaining embeds a proposition. Call the latter the content of the act of explaining. Every act of personal explaining has a content which may or may not be true. But the explaining, although it includes a propositional content, is not itself a proposition. As a performance of a concrete person it is itself concrete and thus not abstract as is a proposition. Note also that the performance as an individual event is categorially barred from being either true or false.

Impersonal explanation

Impersonal explanations are two-termed, both terms being propositions that record events. For example Lightning struck the tree explains The tree burst into flame. Schematically, p explains q, where 'p' and 'q' are free variables the values of which can only be propositions. No person is a proposition, although of course there are plenty of (infinitely many) propositions about every person, some true, the others false.

Now if two propositions are related by the impersonal explanation relation, then the result is itself a proposition. We could say that an impersonal explanation is a dyadic relational proposition.

I think it is obvious that the explains relation must not be confused with the causation relation, assuming that causation is in fact a relation. (To dilate further on whether causation is, strictly speaking, a relation would open up a can of worms that is best put on the back burner for the nonce, if you will forgive my highly unappetizing mixed metaphor). What is the difference? Well, the impersonal explains relation relates propositions which are abstracta whereas the causal relation relates events which are concreta. Roughly, explanation is at the level of thought; empirical causation is at the level of concrete reality.

Complete impersonal explanations

Now consider the second premise in Bogardus's main argument:

2) Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls
out for explanation but lacks one.

In the simple example I gave, call the two events Strike and Ignition. Strike is the salient cause of Ignition. I won't pause to proffer a rigorous definition of 'salient cause,' but you know what I mean. Salient cause as opposed to all the many causal factors that have to be in place for Ignition to occur. If there is no oxygen in the atmosphere around the tree, for example, then there is no Ignition. Nobody will say that the cause of Ignition is the presence of oxygen even though its presence is a necessary condition of Ignition, a condition without which Ignition is nomologically impossible. (The nomologically possible is that which is possible given the laws of nature. These laws are themselves presumably broadly logically, i.e. metaphysically, contingent.)

I read "no element" in (2) as covering both salient causes and what I am calling causal factors. I also read (2) as telling us that one cannot provide a successful causal explanation of any particular empirical fact unless (i) it is possible in principle to explain every temporally antecedent salient event and causal factor in the entire series of events and factors culminating in the fact to be explained (Ignition in the example) subject to the proviso that (ii) the explanation cannot 'bottom out' in brute or unexplainable facts.

I am having trouble understanding (2): it strikes me as ambiguous as between

2a) Any personal explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one

and

2b) Any impersonal explanation can be complete only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one.

It seems to me that (2a) is false, whereas (2b) is true. (2a) is false because I can stop explaining right after citing the lightning strike. I do not need to explain that lightning is an atmospheric electrical discharge, caused by electrostatic activity occurring between two electrically charged regions, etc. Same with the other example I gave. Kid asks, "Why did the crops fail, Grandpa?" Old man replies, "Because of the drought." The kid's desire to understand has been satisfied, and so the personal explanation is successful without being complete. There is no need to regress further although one could, and in some context should.

To fully appreciate this, we must understand what Bogardus takes to be the link between explanation and understanding. The following is from one of his endnotes:

Recall the link between explanation and understanding. A successful explanation can produce in us understanding of the phenomenon, an understanding of why or how it’s happening. But if there’s part of a proposed explanation that cannot be understood, because it’s brute – how can it produce in us understanding of why or how the phenomenon is happening? Yet if it cannot produce in us that understanding, then it isn’t a successful explanation. In each of these cases, there is a part of the proposed explanation that cannot be understood – in the first, the mare, in the second, the meal – and, so, in neither case do we have a successful explanation. To put it another way, to understand why (or how) is to understand an acceptable answer to the relevant ‘Why?’ (or ‘How?’) question. But if part of that answer is unintelligible, unable to be understood, totally mysterious, then one cannot understand the answer. And, in that case, one cannot understand why (or how) the phenomenon is happening. But, if so, then these answers cannot be successful explanations. In that case, they are not counterexamples to premise 2, despite appearances.

On the basis of this passage and other things Bogardus says in his article, I fear that he may be confusing personal with impersonal explanation. He seems to be talking about personal explanation above. If so, how, given that our paltry minds are notoriously finite, could we grasp or understand any complete explanation? I am also wondering whether 'brutality,' brute-factuality is a red herring here.

Suppose I grant him arguendo that there are no brute facts. I could then easily grant him that a complete impersonal explanation of an event such as Ignition must take the form of proposition of the form X explains Y, where Y is the proposition Ignition occurs and X is a huge conjunction of propositions (and thus a conjunctive proposition) the conjuncts of which record all of the salient causes and causal factors involved at every step in the causal regress from Ignition back in time.

But as I said, our minds are finite. Being exceedingly finite, they cannot 'process,' i.e., understand an impersonal explanation given that an impersonal explanation is a proposition with a huge number of conjuncts, even if the number of conjuncts is itself finite. An explanation we cannot understand may be, in itself, complete, but for us, must be unintelligible. An unintelligible explanation, however, cannot count as either strongly or weakly successful as I defined these terms above. To be either, it must be able to satisfy our desire for understanding.

Dilemma: Explanation is either personal or impersonal. If the former, the explanation may be successful in generating understanding, but cannot be completely true. If the latter, the explanation may be completely true, but cannot be successful in generating understanding in finite minds like ours.

I may take up the ex nihilo mare and meal examples in a separate post.

Could Kamala Explain the Difference between True and Magnetic North?

I doubt it. She thinks 'the cloud' in cyberspeak refers to a physical object in the sky. Remember that howler?

Why are the Dems so dumb? They lack both a message and messenger. The think they failed to 'get their message across.' But they had no message to get across, and no one to get it across. Did you see the unedited Sixty Minutes video? Kamala the Joyous could not explain why she wanted to be president. She is perhaps fit to be a kindergarten teacher, but not POTUS. Is that not blindingly evident? And are you not an emotion-driven fool if you let your TDS impel you to embrace the Joyous One? I'll leave Tampon Tim and his page-turner of a wife out of this rant.

Part of what make the Dems dumb is their inability to learn from experience, as witness their continuing to play the race and Hitler cards. Do they have a death wish? And what does it say about the nearly half of the voters who cast their ballots for that intersectional dumbass?

Collateral observation. The voters are not the electorate. Two reasons. First, the voters include those who vote illegally; the electorate, used normatively, as I am using the term, does not. Second, the electorate include those who do not vote in a given election. The electorate comprise those who are legally entitled to vote. You are legally so entitled only if you are a citizen who has not disqualified himself by, say, committing a felony. Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote. I make an invective-free case against this foolish and indeed asinine view at Substack, sine ira et studio.

By the way, it appears that magnetic north has shifted position.

Lee’s Lunar Lunacy

Another example of a dumb-as-dirt Dem.

No Sheila dear, the Moon is not a planet, but a natural satellite of the Earth, the only one in fact. Its singularity is why, in correct orthography, we write 'the Moon' and not 'the moon.' Jupiter has a number of moons, whereas the Earth has exactly one. Our moon is therefore properly referred to as 'the Moon.' And as you may have just now noticed, our home planet is properly referred to as 'the Earth,' not 'the earth.' And our sun, which the distinguished Congresswoman informs us is "a mighty powerful heat," is properly referred to as 'the Sun.' So-called 'journalists' take note.

Contrary to what Sheila thinks, the Moon is not made up mostly of gases. Nor is it a "complete-rounded circle" only when it is full. Does she perhaps think that the phases of the Moon are changes intrinsic to the Moon as opposed to changes in the way it appears to us? Does she think that the Moon is a two-dimensional object? Her talk of a circle suggests as much. May I suggest 'sphere' or even better 'spheroid'? Does she perhaps also think that the Moon is the source of its light? Is she aware that moonlight is reflected sunlight?

Please realize that when you vote for Democrats you are voting for people who, as a group, are not only morally inferior to Republicans, but also intellectually inferior as well. I am speaking of the contemporary Democrat party.

Story here.

Finally, what was the name of that black male pol who, if memory serves, opined that islands float and can sink?

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before. Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

………………………..

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation.

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up. And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack. So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties. As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it. Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem? Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed. Now science brings enlightenment and the enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia. Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought. Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.) Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down. The cosmogonic myths were called into question. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Doubt is the motor of scientia. Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden. Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious. But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why. In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment. Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus. But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt. If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle. I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise." (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.) I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example).

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical. (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good. But good things can be taken too far. So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable. Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right. But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive. The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas. Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following: Is it real as people say? Is it truly valuable? Is it true? Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense? Is the explanation truly explanatory? Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)? Is there evidence for it? Does the earth really rest on a turtle? Is it turtles all the way down? Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor? Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing? Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power. But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect. Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey. He would not recognize any authority other than his own will. His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality. He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself. He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another. In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) — not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.) Zwei –> zwo –> two –> duplicity. Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity.

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition. How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests?

I don't know. I do know that Islam is not the answer. And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy.

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas. What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry. It needs skepticism. It needs philosophy. What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study. Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world. This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess. Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was not a conceptual relativist. One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above.

Continue reading “Is the Enlightenment the Problem?”

Jews, Muslims, Science and Technology

Which group has contributed more to science and technology? Jews or Muslims? And why?

Question prompted by this:

Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA [Coalition Against Apartheid, apparently].

The Grain Problem

Ed Buckner writes,

Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.

I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.

However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.

That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.

It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.

The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.' A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.

Here is Sellars fils in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.

It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem — the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.

BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.

Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct. He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity. When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time — a series of temporally extension-less moments — the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is $\,2^{\aleph _{0}}~.$

$And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:$

$Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'$

$But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.$

Continue reading “The Grain Problem”

A Map of the Philosophy of Science

A Frustrating Discussion with a Non-Philosopher about Stephen Hawking

Ed reports on a recent trip to Africa:

I didn’t run into any philosophers, but there was a chap I met over dinner who was banging on about Stephen Hawking. I have a strict rule never to discuss philosophy with anyone who has no obvious training in the subject, but he was insistent, and I gave way. A brief summary which may appeal to you:

He asked me if I had read any Hawking and I said I hadn’t, as I was not particularly interested in modern physics, and particularly not interested in those with an undoubted aptitude in some scientific or technical subject, but with doubtful philosophical expertise. Philosophers with no training in physics should not write about physics, likewise physicists without training in philosophy should not write about philosophy.

He demurred. Hawking was writing about physics, but then we looked up some chapters of his last work Brief Answers To The Big Questions, one of which was about the existence of God, et habui propositum.

He then said that everyone has a right to their opinion. I agreed, but I also had a right not to read their opinion. Equally I had a right to say anything about astrophysics, without him having the obligation to read it.

He said I should not dismiss Hawking’s work without having read it. I objected that there are hundreds of thousands of books in print, and life is short. This is why we have book reviews. I had read reviews of Hawking’s work by people I respected, suggesting it was not worth reading him, so I didn’t. The principle of taking opinions on trust is a well-established one, and mostly useful, though not infallible.

He got very upset by this point, saying that Hawking was one of the most brilliant men who had ever existed, one had a duty to read him etc. I was about to launch into a discursus on brilliant people throughout the ages, some of whom had considered precisely the arguments that Hawking had put forward as his own (e.g. Hawking argues that there are only three types of matter, and nothing else exists, ergo God does not exist), but Fiona, seeing the glint in my eye and the lust for a kill, wisely said we had to be up early the next morning, and we departed.

Wittgenstein: ‘[the physicist Sir James Jeans] has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading. Take the title…I might say that the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.’

I may look at the Hawking, notwithstanding.

Have a look, but Hawking's philosophical books are bad. I offer my opinion here; I quote Tim Maudlin's negative judgment here.

Ideology at Odds with Open Inquiry

(Cross-posted at my FB page where comments are allowed.)

You will recall how Galileo got in trouble with the Inquisition. But now the Roman Catholic Church is a spent force culturally speaking and, under the 'leadership' of Bergoglio, is busy accommodating itself to the Left, which is now the arbiter of what is 'correct' and 'permissible.'

This philosopher asks: Could it be racist if it is true?

The Left responds: It cannot be true, because it is racist, and it is racist since it implies that we are not all equal as a matter of empirical fact.

Note what has happened. Christianity taught the equality of persons as sons and daughters of the Supreme Person. The Left jettisons the metaphysical foundation and misunderstands the normative claim about equality as a factual claim.

The Left goes only half way with the death of God. They reject God, but not the equality that makes sense only if God exists. This incoherence fuels their opposition to scientific research that contradicts the leftist equality axiom. And so Dr. Watson, despite his accomplishments, must be banned to scientific Siberia.

Science must play the handmaiden to leftist ideology just as philosophy and science had to play the handmaiden to theology in the Middle Ages and a long time thereafter.

And you STILL support the Left?

DNA pioneer loses honours over race claims

Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson has repeated remarks about…

Identity-Political Infiltration of the Hard Sciences

More proof that leftists are destructive:

A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being de-emphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

Politically correct physics? Is there no limit to leftist lunacy? A leftist is someone who never met a standard he didn't work to erode.

Did You Know that there are Climate Heretics?

Malcolm Pollack quotes extensively from Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist, about whom Scientific American published an article in 2010 entitled, "Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues."

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Or am I exaggerating? By how much?

One thing is clear: talk of heresy and heretics has no place in the hard sciences. If a 'science' has heretics, then it is no hard science. Current climate 'science' is science only by analogy to a serious science such as physics. And this for two reasons. First, it is heavily infected with ideology. Second, climatology falls short of strict science if strict science must satisfy all of the following:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

You need to study Malcolm's post.

And then to further clarify your thoughts, study my Global Warming: Questions that Need Distinguishing.

UPDATE

Malcolm sends this:

Thanks for all the recent linkage. This climate business, in particular, really winds my stem. One thought about your post – you wrote:

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.

I'd go one level deeper: I think, in fact I am completely certain, that current climatology is a religion masquerading as an anti-capitalist ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Plenty of people have done the spadework to make a persuasive case that the modern Left is actually a secular religion that continues, in more or less a straight line, the "mission into the wilderness" that so animated the Puritans. I'm thinking, for example, of Paul Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, George Kenna's outstanding The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, and pretty much all of Mencius Moldbug. (By the way, if you want to get to grips with "neoreaction", you really have to read some Moldbug, if you haven't already. A great place to start is here.)

I know we may trip on the definition of "religion", but global warmism has all the features, save one, of a good universalist religion: sin, atonement, redemption, salvation, indefinite time-frames, and unfalsifiability (if the 19-year pause, the expanding Antarctic icecaps and the consistent failure of all the models to make even moderately accurate predictions don't do it, I suspect nothing will). It also happens to coincide very satisfyingly with the "progressive" goals of centralized power and a general sort of "boffinocracy", if you'll forgive the coinage.

On Natural Science

Natural science pursued for its own sake is a magnificent and noble thing. But in the end one ought to consider whether it is but a high-minded diversion, an extremely high-level form of Pascalian divertissement.

The Empirical and the Experimental

The hard sciences are not only empirical but experimental. I leave it to you to work out the distinction and to pursue the question as to how 'hard' climate science is.