Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed

    Here:

    In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

    Metanoia is a forward-looking change — a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change — a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity — a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

    Under the second Trump administration, America will be transformed — and it will be an epistrophic transformation. The citizens of the country have unmistakably rejected the Left’s claim that our traditional identity was morally untenable.

    Very good over all, but is the last quoted sentence true? 

    The concept democracy includes at least four sub-concepts: majority rule, universal franchise, equality before the law, and consent of the governed.  Consider the first and the fourth.  They are in tension with each other. Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, but he won the latter only by about 2%.  So almost half of the voters did not give their consent to be governed by Trump and his entourage and to be subjected to his and their agenda. 

    As a citizen and a patriot, I am very happy with the outcome: I want to see our political enemies soundly defeated and demoralized.  As a philosopher, however, one who values truth above all else, and along with it, the ancillary virtues of  precision in thought and speech,  I must point out that that it is false that the citizens have unmistakably rejected the depredatory Left's signature allegation.

    The false claim is being thoughtlessly repeated by too many media pundits on our side. Widely bruited as it is, it may have the negative effect of causing complacency. We are in a war with the Left and it won't be over soon, if ever. The National Sanitation Project, as I have been calling it, may take a generation or more. All of our institutions need the political equivalent of fumigation.  That includes, of course, the RCC which, though not part of the state apparatus, is an institution that affects the course of the ship of state.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed”

  • Thomas Sowell Quotation

    Remember Dr. John Jay Ray? He is a like-minded blogger buddy of mine from the early days. I received some traffic today from one of his sites, Dissecting Leftism. Over there, I found this:

    Thomas Sowell on Edison et al..jpg

     

    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Thomas Sowell Quotation”

  • Soul as Homunculus? On Homuncular Explanation

    The following quotation is reproduced verbatim from Michael Gilleland's classics blog, Laudator Temporis Acti: 

    Augustine, Sermons 241.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1134; tr. Edmund Hill):

    They could see their bodies, they couldn't see their souls. But they could only see the body from the soul. I mean, they saw with their eyes, but inside there was someone looking out through these windows. Finally, when the occupant departs, the house lies still; when the controller departs, what was being controlled falls down; and because it falls down, it's called a cadaver, a corpse. Aren't the eyes complete in it? Even if they're open, they see nothing. There are ears there, but the hearer has moved on; the instrument of the tongue remains, but the musician who used to play it has withdrawn. (emphasis added by BV)

    Videbant corpus, animam non videbant. Sed corpus nisi de anima non videbant. Videbant enim per oculum, sed intus erat qui per fenestras aspiciebat. Denique discedente habitatore, iacet domus: discedente qui regebat, cadit quod regebatur: et quoniam cadit, cadaver vocatur. Nonne ibi oculi integri? Etsi pateant, nihil vident. Aures adsunt; sed migravit auditor: linguae organum manet; sed abscessit musicus qui movebat.

    Read uncharitably, Augustine is anthropomorphizing the soul: he is telling us that the soul  is a little man in your head. This uncharitable eisegesis is suggested by inside there was someone looking out through these windows. A couple of sentences later the suggestion is that the open eyes of a dead man see nothing because no one is looking through these un-shuttered windows — as if there had to be someone looking through them for anything to be seen.

    The uncharitable reading is obviously false. The one who sees when I see something cannot be a little man in my head. There is obviously no little man in my head looking through my eyes or hearing through my ears.  Nor is there any little man in my head sitting at the controls, driving my body.  Neither the thinker of my thoughts nor the agent of my actions is a little man in my head. And even if there were a little man in my head, what would explain his seeing, hearing, controlling etc.? A second homunculus in his head?

    A vicious infinite explanatory regress would then be up and running. Now not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, benign.  The homuncular regress, however, is vicious. It doesn't get the length of a final explanation, which is what we want in philosophy.

    Charitably read, however, the Augustinian passage raises  legitimate and important questions.

    Who are the seers when we see something?  Who or what is doing the seeing? Not the eyes, since they are mere instruments of vision. We see with our eyes, says Augustine, likening the eyes to windows through which we peer. There is something right about this inasmuch as it is not my eyes that see the sunset, any more than my glasses see the sunset. Put eyeglasses on a statue and visual experiences will accrue neither to the glasses nor to the statue. Eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, etc., are clearly instruments of vision, but they themselves see nothing.

    But then the same must also be true of the eyes in my head, their parts, the optic nerve, the neural pathways, the visual cortex, and every other material element in the instrumentality of vision. None of these items, taken individually or taken collectively, taken separately or taken in synergy, is the subject of visual experience.  Similarly for ears and tongue. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. But it is not these auditory transducers that hear; you hear and understand — or else you don't. You cannot speak without a tongue, but it is not the tongue that speaks.  You speak using your tongue.

    Question is: what does 'you' refer to in the immediately preceding sentence?  Who are you? Who or what am I?  Substituting a third-person designator for the first-person singular pronoun won't get us anywhere. I am BV.  No doubt. But 'BV' refers to a publicly accessible animated body who (or rather that) instantiates various social roles.   You could of course say that the animal bearing my name is the subject of my experiences. That would involve no violation of ordinary language. And it makes sense from  a third-person point of view (POV). It does not, however, make sense from a first-person POV. I see the sunset, not the animal that wears my clothes or bears my name.

    And please note that the first-person POV takes precedence over, since it is presupposed by, the third-person POV.  For it is I who adopts the third-person POV.  The third-person POV without an I, an ego, who adopts it  is a view from nowhere by nobody. There is no view of anything without an I whose view it is.

    So I ask again: who or what is this I?  Who or what is the ultimate subject of my experience? Who or what is the seer of my sights, the thinker of my thoughts, the agent of my actions, the patient of my pleasures and pains? Two things seem clear: the ultimate subject of my experience, the transcendental subject, is not this hairy beast sitting in my chair, and the ultimate subject, the transcendental subject, is not an homunculus. 

    Homunculus

    Should we therefore follow Augustine and postulate an immaterial soul substance as the ultimate subject of visual and other experiences? Should we speak with Descartes of a thinking thing, res cogitans, as the source and seat of our cogitationes? Is the res cogitans literally a res, a thing, or is this an illicit reification ('thingification')? On this third approach, call it Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian, there is a thing that is conscious when I am conscious  of something, but it is not a little man in my head, nor is it my body or my brain or any part of my brain.  It cannot be my body or brain or any part thereof because these items one and all are actual or possible  objects of experience and therefore cannot be the ultimate subject of experience. And so one is tempted to conclude that, since it cannot be anything physical, the ultimate subject of experience must be something meta-physical. 

    This third approach, however, has difficulties of its own. The dialectic issues in the thought that the ultimate subject of experience, the transcendental ego, is unobjectifiable. But if so, how could it be a meta-physical thing? Would that not be just another object, an immaterial, purely spiritual, object? Are we not, with the meta-physical move, engaging in an illicit reification just as we would be if we identified the ultimate subject with the brain or with an homunculus? And what would a spiritual thing be if not a subtle body composed of rarefied matter, ghostly matter, geistige Materie. Reification of the ultimate subject appears to terminate in 'spiritual materialism,' which smacks of contradiction.

    But maybe there is no contradiction. There may well be ghosts, spooks made of spook stuff.  I told you about my eldritch experience in the Charles Doughty Memorial Suite in which, one night, someone switched on my radio and tuned it to the AM band that I never listened to.  Maybe it was the ghost of the bitter old man who had recently had a heart attack and who had threatened to kill me.  But who was the seer of that ghost's sights and the agent of his actions?   

    Do you see the problem? The regress to the ultimate subject of experience is a regress to the wholly unobjectifiable, to 'something' utterly un-thing-like composed of no sort of matter gross or subtle.

    Should we adopt a fourth approach and say, instead, that the ultimate subject of experience is no thing at all whether physical or meta-physical? If we go down this road, we end up in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre and Panayot Butchvarov.  

    But there is fifth approach, homuncular functionalism, which cannot be explained here. The idea is that there is a regress of stupider and stupider homunculi until we get to a level of homunculi so stupid that they are indistinguishable from mindless matter.  See here and here. 

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Soul as Homunculus? On Homuncular Explanation”

  • Encouraging Trends

    • The acquittal of Daniel Perry. He should never have been charged with a crime. Although there are instances of toxic masculinity,  there was nothing toxic about Perry's manly behavior. He ought to count as a hero in the mind of anyone who can think straight. 
    • The decline of race-delusional BLM bullshit.
    • The death of DEI. 
    • The de facto presidency of Donald J. Trump over a month before his inauguration.
    • The decline of gas prices. I paid $3.099/gal for unleaded regular at Costco, Mesa, AZ two days ago. What did you pay?
    • The resignation of Christopher Wray.
    • And the list goes on. Morning in America!
    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Encouraging Trends”

  • Melania and Donald

    She supplies the class that he lacks. As witness her coy reserve re: the Trump dance.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Awesome Power of TDS . . .

    . . . is demonstrated by the fact that George F. Will, horribile dictu,  voted for Kamala Harris. The bow-tied, yap-and-scribble pussy-wussy is hard at work destroying whatever legacy he might have enjoyed had he not gone bonkers over DJT, something he has in common with the rest of the Bulwark bunch. Staunch conservative and constitutional scholar that he is, Will voted for four more years of a wide-open border, with all that that brings in its train, including Tren de Aragua, drug smuggling, human trafficking and slavery, gun running,  not to mention the other outrages Kamala would have continued, such as the trashing of the Constitution.

    You won't find an entry for TDS in DSM-IV, but it is real, and it has no counterpart on the Right.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “The Awesome Power of TDS . . .”

  • From the B-Theory to Eternalism

    Temporal dynamism denied!

    Substack latest.

    Tangentially related to the question whether Joe Dementia lied when he promised not to pardon his worthless son.

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “From the B-Theory to Eternalism”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

    We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

    Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage, and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

    [. . .]

    The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosie, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

    The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

    Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

    And now for some love songs.

    Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

    Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

    Four for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, an Everly Bros. cover, and my favorite from the Seekers.

    Addendum:

    1.  On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

    Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
    She's sleeping here right by my side
    And in her right hand a silver dagger,
    She says that I can't be your bride.

    All men are false, says my mother,
    They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
    The very next evening, they'll court another,
    Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

    My daddy is a handsome devil
    He's got a chain five miles long,
    And on every link a heart does dangle
    Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

    Go court another tender maiden,
    And hope that she will be your wife,
    For I've been warned, and I've decided
    To sleep alone all of my life.

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder”

  • Family Life with the Cheever’s

    I'm sure family life has its compensations. But it is not for everybody. I live with an angelic wife and two black cats.  All four of us will die without issue. My contact with relatives is minimal. Blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and in some cases the former seems to exclude the latter. * I can relate to Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation, somewhere in his Journal, “I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone.”

    The goods of family life I am missing, in a second sense I am not missing: one cannot miss what one never had.  But the bad things I am missing in the first sense I am happy to miss in that same sense.  The following from The Journals of John Cheever:

    My daughter says that our dinner table is like a shark tank. I go into a spin. I am not a shark. I am a dolphin. Mary [Cheever's wife] is the shark. Etc. But what we stumble into is the banality of family situations. As for Susie [Cheever's daughter] she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong times and of speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove I am incapable of love, or can love only myself? (282)

    Well, John, it doesn't prove it, but it is pretty good evidence of it. You would prefer your daughter to be your own creation, a creature of fiction, who does not laugh at the wrong times and speaks only the right lines, a fictional object rather than the subject she is, an ipseity resistant to, and  in adolescent rebellion against, the will of pater familias.  You sired her; you did not create her.**

    "Every craft makes crooked" as German folk-wisdom has it,*** and so it is with the novelist. He invents and gets carried away.   Here is an entry on family life illustrating the manipulation of memory by invention:

    I think of my father, but nothing is accomplished. The image of him is an invention, not a memory, and an overly gentle invention. There was his full lower lip, wet with spit; his spit-wet cigarette, his hacking cough; the ash on his vest; and the shabby clothes he wore, left to him by dead friends. "Let's give Fred's suits to poor Mr. Cheever." I find in some old notes that my mother reported that he had, just before his death, written a long indictment of her — as a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and a woman. I never saw the indictment. I suppose, uncharitably, that the effect on her would have been to fortify her self-righteousness. She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation.  Sigh — how deep were her sighs. I have no idea what their marriage was like, although I suspect that he worshipped her as my brother worshipped his choice and as perhaps I have worshipped mine. In my brother's case there was, I think, that rich blend of uxoriousness in which praise has a distinct aftertaste of bitterness, not to say loathing. I think that Mary was wounded years before I entered her life, and who is this ghost whose clothes I wear, whose voice I speak  with, what were the cruelties of which I am accused? (275)

    From Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever, I take it that the ghost who wears Cheever's clothes and speaks through him, and haunts Mary, is the ghost of Mary's father, the formidable Dr. Milton Winternitz, "the legendary dean of the Yale School of Medicine" (as Bailey puts it in Cheever: A Life, Vintage, 2010, p. 102).  Winternitz was an oppressive and domineering presence who beat Mary as a child with a belt. One moral to extract from this is that one ought not marry a woman until one understands the relation she had with her father, lest you suffer through a marriage as bad as Cheever's. A girl's attitude toward men is formed in large part by her relationship with her father.  A recurrent theme of Cheever's journal is his rotten marriage to the woman he often refers to as Mary maldisposta. The Italian adjective is in the semantic vicinity of unwell, hostile, unfriendly, ill-disposed, and disinclined.

    The topic of uxoriousness and the related one of putting women on pedestals beg to be ruminated upon. Romantics are prone to these related errors. Italians are well-represented among romantics, not that Cheever was of Italian extraction, but he had a thing for Italy and swotted up a lot of the lingo. According to G. M. Hopkins' biographer Robert Bernard Martin, Coventry Patmore was ". . . one of the most flagrantly uxorious men of the [19th] century, one who quite seriously worshipped women and all they stood for." (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991, p. 355.)

    Finally, you can see that Cheever is a good writer. How do I know that? It takes one to know one. Like alone knows like. (I recall this principle's being referred as the homoion theorem. But Google turns up nothing. Paging Dave Lull!) 

    _____________

    * This is evidence of a sort for our dual status. If we were animals merely, why would some of us find the spiritually affine only among the non-blood-related?  And why would be feel spiritually alienated from the blood-related?

    ** Can we understand divine creation in analogy to the creation of fictional characters by a novelist?  Hugh McCann makes a brave attempt in this direction in his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. I bring up some weighty objections in my review article Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty, published in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2014, 88 (1):149-161.

    *** Jeder Handwerk zieht krumm. I picked up this folk phrase from Nietzsche, The Gay Science [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft], 1882:

    Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, [you get] the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

    No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training.

    Could old Fritz write or could he write? He puts us all to shame. He and his century-mate Kierkegaard, a prodigious engine of literary productivity if ever there was one. He lived for a scant 42 years (1813-1855); Nietzsche a mere 56 years (1844-1900).

    Bill Vallicella

  • Biden Broke his Promise, but Did He Lie? Promising, Lying, Predicting

    I have no respect for Joe Biden, but a very high degree of respect for Jonathan Turley, who writes:

    President Biden's decision to use his presidential powers on Sunday to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the president used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past controversies about the use of this pardon power, Biden has cemented his legacy for many, not as the commander in chief, but as the liar in chief. 

    The question is not whether Biden is a liar; he is. The question I am asking is whether he lied when he promised not to pardon his son.  He did in fact make that promise on several occasions, and he did in fact break it.  Those are known facts. But did Biden lie when he made that promise? What Turley says implies that he did lie.  I beg to differ.

    I should make it clear that I am not defending Biden. The man is morally corrupt to the core and a national disaster. I am merely using him to focus a question that interests me, namely, if a subject S promises to do X at time t1, and refuses to do X at some later time t2, did S tell a lie at t1 by his act of promising at t1? (I assume that the circumstances at t2 do not prevent S from delivering on his promise.  I also assume that no weightier consideration such as a death threat justifies a change of mind on the part of S with respect to X during the period from t1 to t2.)  

    Can one lie about a future event? If not, then how could Biden's promising not to pardon his son be a lie? The pardoning was later than the promisings. It was therefore future relative to those promisings and had yet to occur. At the time of the promisings, there was either no fact for Biden to lie about, or no fact he could have known about. Either way, Biden did not lie when he made his promises, promises that he later broke.

    On one natural way to think about the future, it ain't real until it happens.  If we think about the future in this way, there was no fact for Biden to lie about when he made his promises, in which case he did not tell a lie when he made his promises.

    On another way to think about the future, all future events are tenselessly real.   If we think about the future in this way, then there is (tenselessly) a fact for Biden to lie about at the times of his promisings, but there is no way anyone not possessing paranormal precognitive powers could know what this fact is. 

    I am assuming that to lie is to issue a verbal or written statement intended to deceive one's audience about a state of affairs that the issuer of the statement either knows or believes to be the case.  If so, then one cannot lie about what may or may not become the case, or about what is tenselessly the case but not accessible to our present knowledge.

    Turley's response, based on the quotation above, would presumably be that Biden lied about his intention to pardon Hunter.  Now if one forms a firm intention at time t to do X (or not do X) in the future, then at t there is the fact of  the forming of that intention. That is something one can know about and lie about.  

    It is reasonable to conjecture that Biden at the time of his public promisings had no intention of delivering on his promise not to pardon his son, or, equivalently, had the intention to not deliver on the promise. But then the problem becomes: how could anyone know what Biden or anyone intends?  Preternatural powers aside, one cannot peer into the mind of another and 'see' what is going on there.  

    And so we ought to distinguish between promise-breaking and lying.  It is verifiable that Biden broke his promise: we simply compare the publicly accessible records of what he said with the publicly accessible record of his pardoning.  What we cannot know is the nature of the inner mental intention behind the outwardly expressed promises.  Hence we do not and cannot know whether Biden lied about his intention.  

    Let's not forget that the man is non compos mentis, not of sound mind. He is suffering from dementia. It is entirely possible that the superannuated grifter forgot or suppressed an original intention to not pardon his worthless son.  If so, he broke a promise but did not lie.

    And so, pace the estimable Turley, the massive case for Biden's being a liar cannot be and need not be augmented by citation of his pardoning of the apple that fell not far from the tree.

    In sum, one can break a promise without lying. This argument-form is invalid:

    1) S promised to do (or refrain from doing) X.

    2) S broke his promise.  

    Therefore

    3) S told a lie.

    Promising is relevantly like predicting. Both are future-oriented. Many predicted in 2016 that Trump would lose the 2016 election. They were wrong in their prediction. Were they lying when that made their predictions? Of course not.  Either the proposition Trump wins in 2016 had no truth-value prior to the election, or it had a truth-value, but one not known to the predictors. Either way, there as no lie.  That's blindingly evident.

    Promising is trickier, and so it is harder to think clearly about it.  S's publicly accessible speech-act of promising  to do or refrain from doing X is animated by S's mental and thus publicly inaccessible intention to do or refrain from doing X. The difference is that while one can predict one's own behavior — taking a third-person POV with respect to oneself — one is the agent of one's own actions and omissions.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Biden Broke his Promise, but Did He Lie? Promising, Lying, Predicting”

  • Do I Repeat Myself?

    Repetitio est mater studiorum.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Soul Survivalism

    Vita mutatur non tollitur.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ghosts and Death

    Leslie Kean's Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017) just arrived via Amazon. HT to Vito for recommending it. It looks good. Have book, will blog.  Pressed for time this evening. But not so pressed that I can't scrounge up three tunes.

    Highwaymen, Ghost Riders in the Sky

    Spiderbait rendition

    Blood, Sweat, and Tears, And When I Die

    Time for Mark Levin. 

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ghosts and Death”

  • What I Like About Wittgenstein

    LW one serious man

    Stack topper

    Bill Vallicella

  • Malcolm Pollack on AI and its Threat: Determinism, Predictability, Free Will

    Our friend Malcolm Pollock in Brake Failure expresses a reasoned pessimism about our future under AI. I share his concerns. Will we humans have a future? Or are we facing what I have elsewhere called the Ultimate Replacement?

    In Stephen Wolfram on AI and Irreducible Complexity, Malcolm explains

    . . . a distinction between two [disjoint] subsets of deterministic systems: those whose behavior are describable by simplifying formulas that can be used, by taking their initial conditions as inputs, to predict their future state, and those for which no such reduction is possible.

    An example of the former is the movement of two bodies under mutual gravitational attraction, such as a planet and its moon, or the earth and a ballistic projectile. Given the masses of the two, and their initial positions and velocities, it is possible to calculate their positions for any future time.

    A good example of the latter is what Wolfram examined at length in his book A New Kind Of Science (which I labored through when it cam[e] out in 2002): the behavior of “cellular automata“, simple systems whose behavior is defined by a small set of rules, but for which, given the system’s state at time t, the only way of determining its precise configuration at time t+n is actually to iterate over every step between t and t+ n. Chaotic systems, such as weather and turbulent flow, are of this kind. So is biological evolution.

    Fascinating. What struck me is that the first type of deterministic system allows for prediction, whereas the second type decouples determinism from predictability. I would add that if time is a continuum, then there are continuum-many iterations between t and t + n, which implies then there will have to be continuum-many iterations total.  That would be the ultimate nail in the coffin of predictability, a nail that not even the ultimate claw hammer could remove.

    A couple of further questions occur to me.

    In the second type of determinism, what becomes of the distinction between determinism and indeterminism? There would presumably still be the distinction, but how could one tell  if a type-2 system was deterministic or indeterministic? Malcolm, glossing Wolfram and Greene, writes, "There is no quicker way, no shortcut, for predicting the future state of such systems than simply letting them run, and seeing what they do." That boils down to saying  that in the second type of deterministic systems there would be no way at all of predicting future states of such systems.  How then could one 'determine' (come to know) whether such a system was deterministic or indeterministic?

    If the deterministic systems that really interest us are of the second type, then Laplace's Demon is, if not out of a job, then bound to be underemployed.

    Second question.  If we humans are deterministic systems of the second type, might this permit a deterministic reduction of the much-vaunted free will that we feel ourselves to possess? I don't think so, but knowing Malcolm, he may want to take this ball and run with it.

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Malcolm Pollack on AI and its Threat: Determinism, Predictability, Free Will”

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