It is pointless to supply answers to unasked questions or to promote questioning among those who have all the answers.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Points of the Compass
Johnny Cash & Joni Mitchell, Girl from the North Country
Joan Baez, North Country Blues. A great cover of a great song. The only Dylan tune I am aware of written from a female point of view. This self-certified Dylanologist invites refutation.
Johnny Horton, North to Alaska
Orlons, South Street, 1963
Neil Young, Southern Man
The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Baez version.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Southern Cross
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, East-West (full album)
Cheech and Chong, Born in East L. A.
Bob Dylan, West Texas, 1962
Marty Robbins, (West Texas Town of) El Paso, 1959
Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not?
From an interview with Daniel Dennett in the pages of The Guardian (HT: Dave Lull):
I was thinking that perhaps philosophers are exactly what’s needed right now. Some deep thinking about what is happening at this moment?
Yes. From everybody. The real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages.
Dennett is currently much exercised over Donald Trump's alleged lies, exaggerations, unverifiable speculations, and whatnot. But I don't recall Dennett taking umbrage at the unprecedentedly brazen presidential lying of Barack Obama or the seemingly congenital lying of Hillary Clinton. He is a typical uncritical Left-leaning academic. Still, he is right to take aim at postmodernism. Read on:
There’s a perception that philosophy is a dusty discipline that belongs in academe, but actually, questions such as what is a fact and what is the truth are the fundamental questions of today, aren’t they?
Philosophy has not covered itself in glory in the way it has handled this. Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.”
So far, so good.
Yes and one’s true and the others are false. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren’t; it’s as simple as that.
Is it really so simple? Dennett is suggesting that his naturalist narrative is not a mere narrative, but the true narrative. If so, then there is truth; there is a way things are in themselves apart from our stories and beliefs and hopes and desires. I agree that there is truth. But I wonder how consistent it is for Dennett to hold that there is truth given the rest of his views. This is a man who holds that consciousness is an illusion. He explains consciousness by explaining it away. Now I would say that the urge to explain and understand is the central animating nerve of the philosophical project. As Dennett says,
I put comprehension as one of my highest ideals. I want to understand everything. I want people to understand things. I love understanding things. I love explaining things to myself and to others.
My question, however, is how consciousness could be an illusion but not truth. I say neither is an illusion. Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that we presuppose it when we distinguish between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there were no consciousness there would be no illusions either.
This is because illusions have a sort of parasitic status. They are ontological parasites, if you will, whose being is fed by a host organism. But let's not push the parasitological comparison too far. The point is that, while there are illusions, they do not exist on their own. The coyote I wrongly take to be a domestic dog exists in reality, but the domestic dog does not. But while the latter does not exist in reality, it is not nothing either. The dog is not something in reality, but it is something for consciousness. If in the twilight I jump back from a twisted root on the trail, mis-taking it for a rattlesnake, the visual datum cannot possibly be regarded as nothing since it is involved in the explanation of why I jumped. I jumped because I saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') a rattlesnake. Outright hallucinations such as the proverbial pink rat of the drunkard are even clearer examples. In dreams I see and touch beautiful women. Do old men have nocturnal emissions over nothing?
Not existing in reality, illusions of all sorts, not just perceptual illusions, exist for consciousness. But then consciousness cannot be an illusion. Consciousness is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. As such, it cannot be an illusion. It must be real.
But here comes Danny the Sophist who asserts that consciousness is an illusion. Well, that is just nonsense sired by his otherwise laudable desire to explain things coupled with an uncritical and not-so-laudable conceit that everything can be explained. If consciousness is an illusion, then it is an illusion for consciousness. But then our sophist has moved in a circle, reinstating the very thing he was trying to get rid of. Or else he is embarked upon a vicious infinite regress.
Calling Dennett a sophist is not very nice, even though I have very good reason to impugn his intellectual integrity, as you will discover if you read my entries in the Dennett category. So let me try to be charitable. Our man is a naturalist and an explanatory rationalist: he is out to explain everything. But not everything can be explained. Consciousness is not only presupposed by the distinction between reality and illusion, it is also presupposed by the quest for explanation. For where would explanations reside if not in the minds of conscious beings?
So I say consciousness cannot be an illusion. One cannot explain it the way Dennett wants to explain it, which involves explaining it away. For details, see Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.
But if consciousness, per impossibile, were an illusion, why wouldn't truth also be an illusion? Consciousness is an illusion because naturalism has no place for it. Whatever is real is reducible to the physical; consciousness is not reducible to the physical; ergo, consciousness does not exist in reality: it is an illusion.
By the same reasoning, truth ought also to be an illusion since there is no place for it in the natural world. Note also that Dennett obviously thinks that truth is objectively valuable and pursuit-worthy. Where locate values in a naturalist scheme?
Wouldn't it be more consistent for Dennett to go whole hog and explain away both consciousness and truth? Perhaps he ought to go POMO. There is no truth; there are only interpretations and perspectives of organisms grubbing for survival. What justifies him in privileging his naturalist narrative? It is one among many.
I say consciousness and truth are on a par: neither can be explained away. Neither is eliminable. Neither is an illusion. Both are part of what we must presuppose to explain anything.
Nietzsche had a great insight: No God, no truth. For the POMOs there is neither. For me there is both. For the inconsistent Dennett there is the second but not the first. Again, there is simply no place for truth in a wholly material world.
For an argument from truth to God, see here.
Continue reading “Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not?”
A Catholic Populism?
Worth reading. By James Kalb.
If He’s Not Your President . . .
. . . how can you impeach him? (HT: Chris Cathcart)
Why Milo Scares Students and Faculty Even More
Is Donald Trump Your President?
The graphic infra may help clear things up for those of you lefties who are not permanently lost to TDS. I will add that if Trump is not your president, then you are not my fellow citizen. You are a subversive element, and due no respect, if you do not accept our system of government and the procedurally correct outcome of an election.
See Prager's Note to the Left: Four Years Ago, Conservatives Were Just as Depressed:
Many of us believed that President Obama was doing great damage to America. Now we are convinced that he did more damage to America domestically, to America’s position the world and to the world at large than any other two-term president. He left office with racial tensions — many of which he exacerbated — greater than at any time since the civil rights era half a century ago. He left the world’s worst regimes — Iran, China, Russia, North Korea and radical Islamist terror groups — stronger and more aggressive than before he became president. Economic growth never rose above 3 percent, a first for a two-term president. He nearly doubled the national debt and had little to nothing to show for it. Obamacare hurt more people financially than it helped medically, including physicians. More people than ever are on government aid. The list is far longer than this.
James Kalb on Illegal Immigration
This is a re-run from 24 April 2010. The quotation from James Kalb is worth studying.
But the times they are a'changin' and with Trump in the saddle, a man with the cojones to punch back hard against destructive leftards and quisling wimp-cons, we are likely to see some improvement. Trump's dressing-down yesterday of the lamestream media was a delight to watch.
…………………………
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Illegal aliens are of course up in arms over it. But why do the ruling elites tend to tolerate mass illegal immigration? Why are they not upholding the rule of law? James Kalb (The Tyranny of Liberalism, ISI Books, 2008, pp. 49-50) writes,
As to immigration, the people value the ties that make them a people and believe that the country should be run for their own benefit. Ruling elites, by contrast, are concerned with the power and efficiency of governing institutions, the status and security of those who run them, and maintenance of the liberal principles that support and justify their rule. It is in their interest to expand the human resources available to them, even at the expense of those who are already citizens, and to weaken the mutual ties that make it possible for the people to resist rational management and to act somewhat independently. In addition, any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order. Restrictionist arguments are scantily presented in the mainstream media, and concern with cultural coherence, national identity, or even the well-being of one's country's workers is routinely denigrated as ignorant and racist nativism.
Kalb's book is proving to be an insightful and stimulating read.
Life as a Self-Improvement Project
You are well-advised to view your life as a self-improvement project, but beware of viewing the lives of others likewise. I mean: as your improvement project. If you are drawn to a member of the opposite sex, be sure you are drawn to her for what she is, not for what you fancy you can make of her. The few exceptions prove the rule: people do not change.
There are 'fixer-upper' houses but no 'fixer-upper' wives.
He who seeks a "fundamental transformation" does not love that which he seeks fundamentally to transform. Wherein lies a proof that Obama and his ilk are not patriots.
Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?
A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"
The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question. (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.) Now what exactly am I being asked? The question is ambiguous as between:
Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?
Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God?
My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God. My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day. Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore). It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body – can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? — but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.
By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did. Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.' (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)
So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist. But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists. The evidence is a lot slimmer. This is not to say that there is no evidence. There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling. There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets. But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.
When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists. Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun." In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things. But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.
The difference could be put like this. The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God. Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know. But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.
In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil. It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil. How do you know there is evil? No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain. But is pain evil? Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil. Pain is given. But is evil given? Pain is undeniable. But one can easily deny the existence of evil. Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.
As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God. Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value. I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists. As certain as I am that I have hands? More certain. I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way. But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?
Do You Live to Eat?
One who lives to eat is almost as ridiculous as one who drives a car to pump gas into its tank. In both cases a vehicle; in both cases fuel; in both cases means-end confusion.
So Much to be Grateful For
An Aristotelian on Earth, a Platonist in Heaven
It's been said of Aquinas.
On Aristotle's hylomorphic ontology, form and matter are 'principles' or ontological factors involved in the analysis of sublunary primary substances. These factors are not substances in their own right. Now Thomas is an Aristotelian in ontology. But when it comes to God and the soul he goes Platonist. God is forma formarum, the form of all forms, and yet self-subsistent. The soul after death is capable of existing in separation from matter while it awaits the resurrection of the body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. But in the human case the soulic form is more than a principle invoked in hylomorphic analysis. It is capable of existence independent of matter.
The sublunary Aristotelianism and the superlunary Platonism exist together in a certain tension. Whether this tension gets the length of a contradiction is a further question.
"Get the length of" is a classy phrase which has long languished in desuetude. I resurrect it from the writings of F. H. Bradley.
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The Liberal
Concerned as he rightly is with the pollution of the physical environment, the liberal yet cannot seem to muster much moral enthusiasm over the pollution of the cultural environment, if he's even aware of it. Hillary, you will recall, cozied up to Jay Z. If you don't know who he is, good.