Maverick Philosopher – Page 527 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Mind and Matter

Here are a couple of theses that are part of my credo, though I do not merely believe them, but think I have good reasons for believing them:

Thesis 1: One cannot get mind from matter no matter how the matter is arranged or how complexly arranged. That mind should arise from matter is unintelligible.

To appreciate the force of this thesis, let's run through some objections. And I do mean run: what follows has to be cursory.

Objection 1. "There is no question of getting mind from matter; mental states and properties just are states and properties of the material world, patterns of behavior perhaps, or patterns of neural activity."

Response 1. Of course I reject identity theories that reduce the mental to the physical, whether they be type-type identity theories or merely token-token identity theories. I have written an 'unconscionable' number of posts on this topic I and am not inclined to repeat myself in any detail. But if you tell me that, say, my thinking about Prague is identical to a complex state of my brain, I would dismiss that as obvious nonsense and for a very good reason. My occurent thinking, at this moment, is of or about or directed to an object that, for all I know, was nuked out of existence — God forbid — a second ago and this without prejudice to my act of thinking's now being about precisely the object it is about. Now this intrinsic object-directedness or intrinsic intentionality of my act of thinking — to use the philosopher's term of art — is not a property that it makes any sense to ascribe to any physical object or state. Now if x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then of course x cannot be identical to y.

Objection 2. "There simply are no mental states as you claim, and the argument from intentionality you give can be run in reverse so as to prove it."

Response 2. The objector is suggesting the following argument: "(1) If mental states such as thinking about Prague are anything, then they are brain states; (2) such mental states exhibit intrinsic intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits intrinsic intentionality; therefore (4) there are no mental states."

This eliminativist argument issues in a conclusion that is obviously, breathtakingly false, and so one of the premises must be false. The stinker is of course (1).

Objection 3. "Granted, it is unintelligible that mind should arise from matter as conceived in current physics. But the matter that we know might hide and contain within itself occult powers beyond the ken of current or any future physics, including the power to give rise to mind."

Reply 3. The game is up when materialists reach for occult powers. The only matter we know about is the matter of ordinary experience and physics. And there is no place in matter so conceived for occult powers that give rise to mind. If you tell me that what thinks when I think is an intracranial hunk of meat, then you are ascribing a power to matter that destroys the very concept of matter that you started with and that you need to articulate your materialism.

Thesis 2: That matter should arise from mind is not unintelligible.

Why not? Because intrinsic to mind is object-directedness, or object-positing. Mind by its nature is of objects distinct from mind. Mind has the power to create objects distinct from itself and its states. This power is not occult. It is open to us in reflection. The entire material cosmos could be be just a huge system of intentional objects for a sufficiently capacious and powerful mind. The thought is thinkable. It is intelligible. That is not to say it is true or to say that we have good reasons for believing it. It has its difficulties, but it makes sense in the way it makes no sense to maintain that mind arises from matter. That is an absurdity that can be seen to be such by hard thinking.

So we get an asymmetry. Matter could, for all we know, be the product of mind, but mind could not, for all we know, be the product of matter.

Contractions

My rule on contractions: though permissible in informal writing such as blogging, they ought to be avoided or used sparingly in formal writing. I came across the following sentence in a well-written piece in a serious publication.

"Heroic" would have pleased Ranke, who'd died nine years earlier.

The contraction distracted me, so much so that I am now writing about it. And note that in the very same sentence we find the uncontracted "would have." This is better:

"Heroic" would have pleased Ranke, who had died nine years earlier.

Credo

Simone Weil's Profession of Faith begins as follows.

There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.

Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Another terrestrial manifestation of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.

Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.

That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.

"At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men.

Advice for Hollywood Liberals

Robert M. Thornton, ed., Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock (Irvington-on-Hudson: The Nockian Society, 1970), p. 59:

If realism means the representation of life as it is actually lived, I do not see why lives which are actually lived on a higher emotional plane are not so eligible for representation as those lived on a lower plane. (Memoirs, 200)

Exactly. If the aim is to depict reality as it is, why select only the most worthless and uninspiring portions of reality for portrayal? Why waste brilliant actors on worthless roles, Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses, Robert De Niro in Goodfellas and Casino, to take four examples off the top of my head from a potential list of thousands. The Grifters is another example. A very good film in any number of respects. But imagine a film of the same cinematic quality which portrays in a subtle and intelligent manner a way of life — I avoid 'lifestyle' — that has some chance of being worth living. Notice I said "subtle and intelligent." I am not advocating Sunday School moralizing or hokey platitudinizing. And note that I am not opposing the above mentioned, but pointing out that a constant diet of dreck is both boring and unhealthy.

But I don't expect the folks in HollyWeird (Michael Medved's expression) to comprehend the simple point I have just made. They are too mesmerized by the color of money for that. Nor do I expect most liberals to be able to wrap their minds around it. They are too bereft of moral sense for that. So I'm preaching to the choir and to a few fence-sitters. But that has value: Maybe a fence-sitter or two will slide off to the Right Side; and perhaps the choirboys and girls are in need of a little extra ammo.

A deeper question concerns the purpose of art. To depict reality? That is not obvious. A good topic for someone else to take up. Conservative bloggers, get to it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Songs from Inside Llewyn Davis

The Llewyn Davis character in the brilliant Coen Bros. film suggests, I don't say represents, Dave van Ronk. So let's start with some tunes (not necessarily the renditions) from the movie done by the Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Hang me, Oh Hang Me

Green, Green Rocky Road

Dink's Song. Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac version. Punch Bros. live version. Carolyn Hester. Odetta. Dylan.

Tom Paxton, The Last Thing on My Mind

Justin Timberlake, et al. Five Hundred Miles. PPM version. Journeymen version.

Please Mr. Kennedy clip

A. J. Ayer’s Near-Death Experience

Here. (Via Reppert. Merry Christmas, Vic)

Welcome to the Age of Liberal Intolerance

The totalitarian Left aims to inject its political poison into everything. Not even chess can claim neutrality. Emphasis added.

Mark Steyn:

A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.

Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

The gaying of America if you will. One good thing about leftists, though, is that they tend to turn on, and purge, their own ilk.

Re-collection

Recollection is a flight from the diaspora of animal inclinations and social suggestions. One collects oneself. Life is one long battle against the centrifugal pull of these two. Time too flees and flies not just by passing unaccountably but also by losing itself in the diaspora of its own modes, past, present, and future. What is, is not, because its element, time, is not, but is past, or future, or fleeting.

Friday Cat Blogging: Inside Llewyn Davis

To Scottsdale this drizzly dreary dark December morning to see the Coen Bros. latest on its opening hereabouts, Inside Llewyn Davis. A tale of two kitties is a sub-motif that symbolizes the self-destructive folksinger's troubles, but it would take a couple more viewings for me to figure it out.

The film gripped me and held me its entire running length, but then I lived through that era and I know the music and its major and minor players. Figuring out the the cinematic references and allusions is part of the fun. Tom Paxton, Albert Grossmann, Jim and Jean, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan . . . they are all there — or are they?

A distinction is made between purely fictional objects (native objects) and immigrant objects: historical individuals that have been imported into fiction from reality. Many of the characters in the Coen Bros. film seem to belong to a third category. They are not wholly unreal like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or lightly fictionalized individuals like many of the characters in Kerouac's novels, but fictional surrogates of real-life individuals. For example, there is a character who suggests Tom Paxton, but could not be said unambiguously to represent him, pace Dave van Ronk's ex-wife who writes, in a critical review, "The character who represents Tom Paxton has a pasted-on smile and is a smug person who doesn't at all resemble the smart, funny, witty Tom Paxton who was our best man when we married."

Ann Hornaday's Washington Post review ends brilliantly:

In many ways, “Inside Llewyn Davis” plays like a waking nightmare of creeping anxiety and dread, as the era’s grandmaster of brazen self-invention arrives unseen in New York while Llewyn’s self-defeating near-misses pile up like so much street-sullied snow. But this soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

The era's grandmaster of brazen self-invention is of course Bob Dylan, who blew into town that bitter winter of '61 and who in a few short years brought about a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung of the folk era: its simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transmogrification into the heart of the '60s as represented by the trilogy of Dylan at his most incandescent: Bringing it It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde.

It's all Over Now, Baby Blue from the the first-mentioned album perhaps sounds the theme of cultural shift.

Obesity is not a Disease

Liberals spout nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem. True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony. The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.

Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it. There are two separate issues here. One is whether obesity is a disease. Here are some arguments pro et con. But even if it is classified as a disease, it is surely not a contagious disease and so not something there can be an epidemic of.

I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal ideology into what is supposedly science. Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'? Is obesity contagious? If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus.

Obesity is not contagious and not a disease. I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious. But now you've shifted the sense of 'contagious.' You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief. It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social. Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans adjective.

Why then are you fat? You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise. For most people that's all there is to it. It's your fault. It is not the result of being attacked by a virus. It is within your power to be fat or not. It is a matter of your FREE WILL. You have decided to become fat or to remain fat. When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food.

There is no such thing as junk food.

There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them. It is a private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family.

Ted Honderich is One Quirky Writer

I am reading Ted Honderich, On Consciousness (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and trying to get a handle on just what his theory of consciousness as existence amounts to. An awkward and quirky writer, he doesn't make things easy on the reader, and doesn't seem to realize that in this very fast brave new world of ours the writer must get to the point without unnecessary circumlocution if he wants to keep his reader glued to the page. Here is an example of Honderich's style, from p. 206:

The other option from spiritualism now deserves the name of being devout physicalism. You can say and write, in a career that keeps an eye on some of science, maybe two, and is forgetful of reflective experience, that being conscious or aware of something is only having certain physical properties in the head. Usually this cranialism is a matter of only neural properties as we know them — thought of computationally or with microtubules to the fore or in any other way you like.

[Note the awkward placement of "Maybe two." It belongs right after "eye."]

Nobody not on the philosophical job of trying to approximate more to some of science or horse sense believes this either. We all know, to make use of a pefectly proper and enlightening parody, that consciousness, isn't just cells, however fancily or fancifully conceived. Everybody on the job tries to give a place to or register what they know when they're not on the job. But they can't do it if they have it that consciousness has only neural properties or conceivably silicon or otherwise physical properties, no matter how they are conceived additionally.

Honderich's thought is not so much expressed as buried in the above mess of verbiage. Here is the thought which is correct as far as it goes expressed in three sentences.

Devout physicalism is the main alternative to spiritualism, or substance dualism. But only someone who fails to reflect on his actual experience could suppose that being conscious of something is a matter of the instantiation of neural properties in the brain. Both philosopher and layman know that consciousness is not brain cells, but the philosopher trying to be scientific is apt to forget it.

Here is Colin McGinn's savage review of Honderich's book. Be aware that there is personal animus between the two men.

Homo Homini Lupus

A 28 year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets. The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man. What lessons are to be learned from this?

The first is one that serves as a criterion to distinguish conservative from liberal. The latter lives and dies in the pious belief that people are inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself. The conservative knows better: human nature is deeply flawed, structurally flawed, flawed beyond the hope of merely human amelioration. The conservative takes seriously the idea of original sin, if not the particulars of any particular doctrinal formulation. Though capable of near- angelic goodness, man is capable of near-diabolical evil. History records it, and only the foolish ignore it. The fact of radical evil cannot be gainsaid, as even the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (1781-1804) deeply appreciated. The timber of humanity is crooked, and of crooked timber no perfectly straight thing has ever been made. (Be it noted en passant that conservatives need to be careful when they generalize about the Enlightenment and wax critical of it. They might want to check their generalizations against the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Sage of Koenigsberg.)

My second point will elicit howls of rage from liberals, but their howling is music to my ears. The victim must bear some moral responsibility for the crime, albeit a much lower degree of responsibility than the perpetrator. For he allowed himself to be victimized by failing to make use of his faculties. (I assume the 85 year-old was not senile.) He did not think: "What could an attractive young woman see in a decrepit old specimen like me? What is she after?" He let his vanity and ego swamp and suborn his good judgment. He had a long life to learn the lesson that romantic love is more illusion than reality, but he failed to apply his knowledge. Blaming the victim is, up to a point, justified.

So man is a wolf to man and man is a lamb to man. Wolf and lamb 'need' each other. Be neither. You have a moral obligation to be neither.

Story here.

Santa Claus: Still White After All These Years

More data for my theory of fiction.

Celebrate Diversity

You have heard it said, "Celebrate diversity." But I say unto you: Celebrate unity, or better yet, celebrate the dialectical unity-in-diversity of unity and diversity. In all seriousness: avoid the diversity fetish, or, if you must celebrate diversity, celebrate hoplo-diversity:

Addiction is not a Disease

The liberal wussification initiative needs ever more victims, ever more government dependents, and ever more sick people. Hence the trend in this therapeutic society to broaden the definition of 'disease' to cover what are obviously not diseases. Need more patients? Define 'em into existence! Theodore Dalrymple talks sense:

There are cheap lies and expensive lies, and the lie that addiction is a disease just like any other will prove to be costly. It is the lie upon which Washington has based its proposed directive that insurance policies should cover addiction and mental disorders in the same way as they cover physical disease. The government might as well decriminalize fraud while it is at it.

The evidence that addiction is not a disease like any other is compelling, overwhelming, and obvious. It has also been available for a long time. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s definition of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” is about as scientific as the advertising claims for Coca-Cola. In fact, it had its origin as a funding appeal to Congress.

To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.

Read it all.