In the news this morning a story about a young man, 18, who lived not far from here in Apache Junction, whose body was found dead near his abandoned SUV in the woods of southern Oregon. According to his father, Johnathan [sic] Croom was "a young man who had a broken heart." He was grieving the end of a relationship with "someone back in Phoenix."
"He was a young man who had a broken heart and headed out to try to find himself," the elder Croom said. "We're looking forward to finding out exactly what happened."
[. . .]
Hutson said Croom also talked to his parents about Christopher McCandless, whose journey to Alaska was documented in the book "Into the Wild." McCandless gave up his worldly goods to live in the Alaska wilderness, only to die there, perhaps from eating wild potatoes.
A book can change your life. J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is an even better example. It changed countless lives, some in very bad ways.
The last-mentioned ends like this, with some good advice for the young and in search of themselves:
In McCandless' case, the scorn for security, his fleeing a living death, led to a dying death. In an excess of self-reliance he crossed the Teklanika, not realizing it was his Rubicon and that its crossing would deposit him on the Far Shore. Be bold, muchachos, be bold; be not too bold.
Eric Holder's out-of-control Department of (Social) Justice is at it again, this time going after Bobby Jindal's school choice program in Louisiana.
Yet another attack on federalism. This is not a word that wears its meaning on its sleeve, and the average panem et circenses American would be hard-pressed to define it.
Federalism is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that both the central and the constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs. Federalism is implied by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Federalism would make for less contention because people who support high taxes and liberal schemes could head for states like Massachusetts or California, while the conservatively inclined who support gun rights and capital punishment and border control could gravitate toward states like Texas.
The fact of the matter is that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues (abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, school vouchers, photo ID at polling places, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, wealth redistribution, the purposes and limits, if any, on governmental power . . .) and we will never agree on them. These are not merely academic issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.
I fear that we are coming apart as a nation. We are disagreeing about things we ought not be disagreeing about, such as the need to secure the borders. The rifts are deep and nasty. Polarization and demonization of the opponent are the order of the day. Do you want more of this? Then give government more say in your life. The bigger the government, the more to fight over. Do you want less? Then support limited government and federalism. A return to federalism may be a way to ease the tensions, not that I am sanguine about any solution.
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author, and our end.
Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking about what it means to be a king or to be a man.
The 1963 March on Washington now lies 50 years in the past. Those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. What could be achieved by legislation and government intervention was achieved. Unfortunately, the civil rights movement gradually transmogrified into a civil rights hustle and grievance industry as the original ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. were betrayed by race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And now look at the mess we are in. But it was a time of great and inspiring music. Here are some of Dylan's singular contributions.
After Dylan did his bit to change the world, the quietist and poet in him won out over the activist and he bid farewell to his past, and, like a quintessential American, moved on down the line.
"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651)
This seems right. Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:
1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.
2. If scientism is true, then it is not the case that (1).
Therefore
3. Scientism is not true.
I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason. To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life. For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be a succession of consciousnesses but not the consciousness of succession. But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument. And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory. To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion — and thus as following from the premises — I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.
But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument. The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions. ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.) This retention — a term Husserl uses — is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.
And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.
The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.
Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3). Example of commutativity: (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3. The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind). Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge? Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.
But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat. We are of course meatheads. But squeezing meaning out of mere meat — there's the trick!
My 1995-1996 Turkish Journal contains quotations from, and commentary on, some of S.K.'s journal entries. Unfortunately, I don't have complete bibliographical data, just the entry numbers. What sent me back to my Turkish Journal was London Karl's request that I dig up Kierkegaardian passages that smack of anti-natalism.
S. K. on Women, #4998. ". . . there is a moment in her life when she deceptively appears to be infinitude herself — and that is when man is captured. And as a wife she is quite simply — finitude."
S. K. seems to be alluding to the Platonic-Augustinian idea that woman (man too in Plato) can be either a deceptive appearance or a sort of reminder of Transcendence, a waker-upper from our Cave-like amnesia. (Anamnesis doctrine).
S. K. #5000. ". . . Christianity and all more profound views of life take a dim view of the relation to the opposite sex, for they assume that getting involved with the other sex is the demotion of man."
A problem for S. K. If the human race ought to come to an end, if procreation and propagation of the species is better not engaged in, then where will the souls come from to share in the divine life? Or does S. K. believe in the pre-existence of souls? Cf. #3970 where S. K. seems to endorse pre-existence.
Again the tension of Platonic-Gnostic and Jewish-Aristotelian elements in Christianity.
But, given problems like these, would it not be absurd to give up the quest for metaphysical truth and sink into a mundane existence?
S. K. #5003. To marry a woman is to be finitized and mediocratized by her. [A paraphrase, apparently, not a quotation.]
S. K. #5005. "Man was structured for eternity; woman leads him into a side remark."
S. K. 5006. "An eminently masculine intellectuality joined to a feminine submissiveness — that is the truly religious."
Wherein resides the dignity of the king? At every time in every possible game, the king is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on. He alone is 'necessary,' all other pieces are 'contingent.'
But at game's end, he too goes into the box with the lowliest of the pawns, as if to demonstrate that the high and mighty in life are equalized in death.
This is a really good collection of state-of-the-art essays that comes at the right time in my philosophical development. I thank Ed Feser, editor and contributor, for sending me a complimentary copy. (I didn't ask for one, and you shouldn't either.)
Do you understand lasagne? Of course you do. But I understand it better because I know how to make it from ingredients none of which is lasagne. (If I were to 'make' lasagne by fusing eight squares of lasagne, and you were a philosopher, you would protest that I hadn't made lasagne but had 'presupposed' it. And you'd be right. That would be like making coffee by pouring eight cups of coffee into a carafe.)
It is tempting to suppose that what we know how to make, we understand. (He said with a sidelong glance in the direction of Giambattista Vico.) Let's give into the temptation. Suppose one day humans create a robot that is really conscious, conscious in the way I believe my wife is conscious. Whether or not I know that she is, in that tough sense of 'know' that entails being certain, I do not doubt for a second that my wife is a genuine bearer of intentional and non-intentional mental states. She has feelings just as I do and she thinks about things just as I do, and this is not a matter of ascription on my part as when I ascribe to my chess computer the 'desire' to inflict mate. Her verbal and non-verbal behavior do not merely simulate, even if exactly, behavior that is expressive of real consciousness; it is behavior that is expressive of real consciousness.
So suppose we have a really conscious robot fabricated to look like a woman, so well fabricated, let us assume, as to fool a gynecologist. If we know that that conscious being is a robot, we may find it hard to believe that she is really conscious. But suppose we can convince ourselves that our robot is really conscious and enjoys an 'inner' life just as we do.
What implications would this have for the mind-body problem? Would the existence of a really conscious robot that we had constructed from non-conscious material parts show that consciousness was a natural phenomenon that arises or emerges from sufficently complicated configurations of wholly material parts? Would it put paid to substance dualism? Would it show that there was nothing supernatural about consciousness? Could one refute substance dualism and the notion that consciousness (including self-consciousness and all spiritual functions) has a higher (non-natural) origin by building a conscious robot?
Many would say 'yes.' But I say 'no.'
If we make a really conscious robot, if we 'synthesize' consciousness and the unity of consciousness from non-conscious materials, what we have done is to assemble components that form a unified physical thing at which consciousness is manifested. But this neutral description of what we have done leaves open two possibilities:
1. The one is that consciousness simply comes into existence without cause at that complex configuration of physical components but is in no way caused by or emergent from that complex configuration. In this case we have not synthesized consciousness from nonconscious materials; we have simply brought together certain material components at which consciousness appears.
2. The other possibility is that consciousness comes into manifestation at the complex configuration of physical componets ab extra, from outside the natural sphere. A crude theological way of thinking of this would be that a purely spiritual being, God, 'implants' consciousness in sufficiently complex physical systems.
On both (1) and (2), consciousness arises at a certain level of materal complexity, but not from matter. On (1) it just arises as a matter of brute fact. On (2), consciousness comes from consciousness. On neither does consciousness have a natural origin. On (1) consciousness does not originate from anything. On (2) it has a non-natural origin.
Given these two possibilities, one cannot validly infer that consciousness is a wholly natural phenomenon from the existence of conscious robots. The existence of conscious robots is logically consistent with (1), with (2), and with the naturalist hypothesis that consciousness is purely natural.
My point could be put as follows. Even if we succeed in creating machines with (literal) minds, this has no bearing on the mind-body problem. This is because it leaves open the three possibilities mentioned. Suppose you are a conscious robot who is thinking about the mind-body problem. Substance dualism would be an option for you. You could not validly infer that your mind is not an immaterial substance from the fact that you were created in Palo Alto by robotics engineers. Same goes with me. I am not a robot, but a conscious animal who came into the world inter faeces et urinam. (Actually, if the truth be told, I came into the this vale of tears by Caesarean section; but let's not quibble: you came into it inter faeces et urinam.) But I cannot validly infer from the fact of my animal origin that my consciousness is a wholly natural function.
Now suppose naturalism is true. There is still the problem of the unintelligibility of the arisal of consciousness from brain matter, an unintelligibility that Colin McGinn, naturalist and atheist, has rightly insisted on. This unintelligibility will not be diminished one iota by the arrival of conscious robots should such robots make the scene in the coming years.
Robert Paul Wolff of The Philosopher's Stone too often comes across as a stoned philosopher. I gave one clear example last month in The Rage of the Wolff wherein I quoted the good professor's hyperventilation over the Martin-Zimmerman case. He spoke, delusionally, of "The judicially sanctioned murder of Trayvon Martin . . . ." But now the Wolff is howling and raging and losing sleep (literally) over the North Carolina photo ID law:
What is happening in North Carolina right now . . . triggers such rage in me that I cannot talk about it with my customary ironic detachment. I spent a good deal of last night tossing and turning, trying unsuccessfully to calm myself with fantasies of magical powers with which to visit great misery and pain on the Republican controlled State Legislature.
All throughout North Carolina, local Boards of Election, packed with Republican appointees and emboldened, empowered, and encouraged by the State Legislature, are openly, nakedly, unabashedly moving to deny the basic right to vote to any group that shows signs of inclining Democratic. It is perfectly clear what is happening. Throughout the state are countless White southerners who have never accepted the freeing of the slaves, the extension of suffrage to Blacks, or the ending of such comforting traditions as segregated schools and public facilities. The election of Obama and the steady move of the state in the direction of the modern Democratic Party has made them feel like aliens in their own home, and now they are unashamedly striking back, emboldened by the Supreme Court's appalling Voting Rights Act decision.
Does this outburst merit a response? No. But it is a telling specimen of leftist pathology. There is no wisdom and no common sense on the Left.
I coined the word here. Christina Hoff Sommers combats the thing. While so doing she provides further proof that the Left is devoid of common sense:
Across the country, schools are policing and punishing the distinctive, assertive sociability of boys. Many much-loved games have vanished from school playgrounds. At some schools, tug of war has been replaced with “tug of peace.” Since the 1990s, elimination games like dodgeball, red rover and tag have been under a cloud — too damaging to self-esteem and too violent, say certain experts.
Tug of peace? Is that a joke? Peace is better than war, of course, but to secure and maintain peace one must be prepared to wage and win war. Or as the Latin saying has it, Si vis pacem, para bellum. "If you want peace, prepare for war."
And another thing. Bring back the monkey bars and the long summer vacations. Enough with the wussification. (Not a word? It is now.)
$100M Calif. mansion has unusual sale requirement.
HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. (AP) — As if the $100 million asking price wasn't deterrent enough, the owner of a mansion for sale in a ritzy San Francisco suburb says the buyer can move in only after his death.
That is indeed a highly unusual requirement. Why would anyone buy a house that he could inhabit only after he was dead? And why would he need a mansion for such necrotic tenancy?
This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.
There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.
Nagel, of course, rejects each of (a)-(d).
My overview of Nagel's book is here. More detailed posts on Nagel are in the aptly denominated Nagel category.
The comments on Nagel's piece are mostly garbage. There is something offensive about allowing any birdbrain to leave his droppings on an essay by one of our best philosophers.
The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.
