Maverick Philosopher

I have been critical of Sam Harris, but here he talks sense. (HT: Malcolm Pollack)

On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance

How Some View Religion

Religion is for old women, children, and womanish men. Without this clientele it would wither away. It is for the weak. The strong are able to face life without its false comforts and childish superstitions. It is used by priests and other religious professionals to exploit the gullible. It is a form of social control, an opiate that renders people accepting of their lot and subservient to the rulers of this world. It is indistinguishable from superstition and an enemy of science and enlightenment.

It would be an interesting exercise to write similarly onesided paragraphs about government, science, philosophy, poetry, chess, evangelical atheists, and so on.

‘Not Sure’ and ‘Don’t Know’

They are not semantically equivalent.

Suppose you have no idea who Hitler's Minister of Propaganda was. If asked, you should say, 'I don't know,' not 'I'm not sure.' If, on the other hand, you think it was Joseph Goebbels on the basis of a history course taken long ago, then 'I'm not sure' is appropriate.

'Not sure' implies some knowledge of the subject matter but not enough to justify one's being, well, sure. 'Don't know' lacks this implication.

Copy Editors and Political Correctness

The Recent Referrers list pointed me to this old Feser post that links to a similar protest of mine. Excerpt:

At least the PC “non-sexist” stuff is not entirely the fault of copy editors, however. Many publishers of academic books and journals insist on this “inclusive language” nonsense, and it is an outrage. It is bad enough that one has to listen to PC-whipped academics at colloquia and the like gratuitously inserting “she” into their talks and comments wherever they can so as to prove their feminist bona fides. At least there one can just roll one’s eyes, say a quick prayer for the poor soul, and move on to the refreshments. But to have this ideological use of language foisted upon one by an editor is no more defensible than a requirement that all submissions reflect (say) a commitment to direct reference theory or four-dimensionalist metaphysics.

Ed outdid himself with the coinage 'PC-whipped.' I trust my astute readers will understand to which similar expression he is alluding.

A Life Prolonged

A life prolonged by playing it safe, by not living, may not be worth prolonging.

The Company We Keep Away From

The company we keep away from is as salient for our flourishing as the company we keep.

A Life Well Lived

A life well lived must include inquiry into the well-lived life.

Lecturer on Personal Identity Denied Honorarium

The members of the philosophy department were so convinced by the lecturer's case against personal identity that they refused to pay him his honorarium on the ground that the potential recipient could not be the same person as the lecturer. This from a piece by Stanley Hauerwas:

It is by no means clear to me that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. Although philosophically I have a stronger sense of personal identity than Daniel Dennett, who after having given a lecture to a department of philosophy on personal identity, was not given his honorarium. The department refused to give him his honorarium because, given Dennett's arguments about personal identity, or lack thereof, the department was not confident that the person who had delivered the lecture would be the same person who would receive the honorarium.

That has to be a joke, right? It sounds like the sort of tall tale that Dennett would tell.

My understanding of character, which at least promises more continuity in our lives than Dennett thinks he can claim, does not let me assume that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. I cannot be confident I am the same person because the person who wrote Hannah's Child no doubt was changed by having done so. While I'm unable to state what I learned by writing the book, I can at least acknowledge that I must have been changed by having done so.

Hauerwas is confusing numerical and qualitative identity. Yes, you have been changed by writing your book. No doubt about it. Does it follow that you are a numerically different person than the one who wrote the book? Of course not. What follows is merely that you are qualitatively different, different in respect of some properties or qualities.

Perhaps there is no strict diachronic personal identity. This cannot be demonstrated, however, from the trivial observation that people change property-wise over time. For that is consistent with strict diachronic identity.

The Unmediated Man

The overall quality of the Grey Lady's op-ed pages is piss-poor to be sure, but the rag of record can boast two very good columnists. One is Ross Douthat, the other David Brooks. The latter's The Solitary Leaker is outstanding and I recommend that you study it. Libertarians won't like it, see below, but I'm not a libertarian.

That said, I'll take a libertarian over a liberal any day. We can and must work with libertarians to defeat liberals.

Did the State Make You Great?

Liberal Education and Government Abuses

Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column under an awful title: Tenets of Liberal Education Underpin Government Abuses. (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that Berkowitz chose the title.) The problem is not liberal education. The problem is the hijacking of liberal education by leftists, and the PoMo Prez who is a product of left-hijacked educational institutions. Excerpt:

The administration’s misleading of the public reflects a teaching that is common to much literary theory, sociology, anthropology, political theory, and legal theory on college campuses today: Knowledge is socially constructed, and therefore the narrative is all.

The very word 'narrative' should raise eyebrows and and set off your LBD (leftist bullshit detector). A narrative is a story, and stories needn't be true. Talk of narratives is a way of suppressing the crucial question: But is it true?

Knowledge is socially transmitted, but not socially constructed. The very notion is incoherent.

Truth is absolute.

Do Blacks and Liberals Really Believe that Opposition to Obama’s Policies is Race-Based?

Do they really believe it or do they merely say it to intimidate opponents? Not good either way.

Should a philosopher be upset that his country is unravelling? He might find consolation in the thought that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.

The Folly of “I Have Nothing to Hide”

This is an entry from the old blog, first posted 28 December 2005. It makes an important point worth repeating, especially in light of such recent scandals as the harassing by the Internal Revenue Service of individuals and groups whole political views differ from those of the current administration.

…………..

In an age of terrorism, enhanced security measures are reasonable (see Liberty and Security). But in response to increased government surveillance and the civil-libertarian objections thereto, far too many people are repeating the stock phrase, "I have nothing to hide."

What they mean is that, since they are innocent of any crime, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and so there cannot be any reasonable objection to removing standard protections. But these people are making a false assumption. They are assuming that the agents of the state will always behave properly, an assumption that is spectacularly false.

Most of the state's agents will behave properly most of the time, but there are plenty of rogue agents who will abuse their authority for all sorts of reasons. The O'Reilly Factor has been following a case in which an elderly black gentleman sauntering down a street in New Orlean's French Quarter was set upon by cops who proceeded to use his head as a punching bag. The video clip showed the poor guy's head bouncing off a brick wall from the blows. It looked as if the thuggish cops had found an opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being under cover of law, and were taking it. And that is just one minor incident.

We conservatives are law-and-order types. One of the reasons we loathe contemporary liberals is because of their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. (We loathe them qua liberals: the cynosure of our disapprobation is the sin, not the sinner.) But our support for law and order is tempered by a healthy skepticism about the state and its agents. This is one of the reasons why we advocate limited government and Second Amendment rights.

As conservatives know, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have no illusions about human nature such as are cherished by liberals in their Rousseauean innocence. Give a man a badge and a gun and the power will go to his head. And mutatis mutandis for anyone with any kind of authority over anyone. This is the main reason why checks on government power are essential.

The trick is to avoid the absurdities of the ACLU-extremists while also avoiding the extremism of the "I have nothing to hide" types who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of secure pottage.

Companion post: Cops: A Necessary Evil

A Reader Defends Kurzweil against McGinn

Will Duquette e-mails and I respond in blue.

Having followed your link to McGinn's review of Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind," it seems to me that there's something McGinn is missing that weakens his critique. Mind you, I agree that Kurzweil is mistaken; but there's a piece of Kurzweil's view of things that McGinn doesn't see (or discounts) that is is crucial to understanding him.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Kurzweil; but I've been a software engineer for over two decades where McGinn has not, and there are some habits of thought common to the computer science community. For example, computer software and hardware are often designed as networks of cooperating subsystems, each of which has its own responsibility, and so we fall naturally into a homunculistic manner of speaking when working out designs. And this is practically useful: it aids communication among designers, even if it is philosophically perilous.

Anyway, here's the point that I would make back to McGinn if I were Kurzweil: patterns outside the brain lead to patterns inside the brain. A digital camera sees a scene in the world through a lens, and uses hardware and software to turn it into a pattern of bits. Other programs can then operate on that pattern of bits, doing (for example) pattern recognition; others can turn the bits back into something visible (e.g., a web browser).

REPLY: McGinn needn't disagree with any of this, though he would bid you be very careful about 'see' and 'recognition.' A digital camera does not literally see anything any more than my eye glasses literally see things. Light bouncing off external objects causes certain changes in the camera which are then encoded in a pattern of binary digits. (I take it that your 'bit' is short for 'binary digit.') And because the camera does not literally see anything, it cannot literally remember what it has (figuratively) 'seen.' The same goes for pattern recognition. Speaking literally, there is no recognition taking place. All that is going on is a mechanical simulation of recognition.

To the extent, then, that sensory images are encoded and stored as data in the brain, the notion that memories (even remembering to buy cat food) might be regarded as patterns and processed by the brain as patterns is quite reasonable.

REPLY: This is precisely what I deny. Memories are intentional experiences: they are of or about something; they are object-directed; they have content. One cannot just remember; in every case to remember is to remember something, e.g., that I must buy cat food. No physical state, and thus no brain state, is object-directed or content-laden. Therefore, memories are not identical to states of the brain such as patterns of neuron firings. Correlated perhaps, but not identical to.

Of course, as you've noted fairly often recently, a pattern of marks on a piece of paper has no meaning by itself, and a pattern of marks, however encoded in the brain, doesn't either. But Kurzweil, like most people these days, seems to have no notion of the distinction between the Sense and the Intellect; he thinks that only the Sense exists, and he, like Thomas Aquinas, puts memories and similar purely internal phenomena in the Sense. I don't think that's unreasonable. The problem is that he doesn't understand that the Intellect is different.

In short, Kurzweil is certainly too optimistic, but he might have a handle on the part of the problem that computers can actually do. He won't be able to program up a thinking mind; but perhaps he might do a decent lower animal of sorts.

REPLY: Again, I must disagree. You want to distinguish between sensing and thinking, and say that while there cannot be mechanical thinkers, there can be mechanical sensors, using 'thinking' and 'sensing' literally. I deny it. Talk of mechanical sensors is figurative only. I have a device under my kitchen sink that 'detects' water leaks. Two points. First, it does not literally sense anything. There is no mentality involved at all. It is a purely mechanical system. When water contacts one part of it, another part of it emits a beeping sound. That is just natural causation below the level of mind. I sense using it as an instrument, just as I see using my glasses as an instrument. I sense — I come to acquire sensory knowledge — that there is water where there ought not be using this contraption as an instrumental extension of my tactile and visual senses. Suppose I hired a little man to live under my sink to report leaks. That dude, if he did his job, would literally sense leaks. But the mechanical device does not literally sense anything. I interpret the beeping as indicating a leak.

The second point is that sensing is intentional: one senses that such-and-such. For example, one senses that water is present. But no mechanical system has states that exhibit original (as opposed to derivative) intentionality. So there can't be a purely mechanical sensor or thinker.

As for homunculus-talk, it is undoubtedly useful for engineering purposes, but one can be easily misled if one takes it literally. McGinn nails it:

Contemporary brain science is thus rife with unwarranted homunculus talk, presented as if it were sober established science. We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons. To put the point a little more formally: states of neurons do not have propositional content in the way states of mind have propositional content. The belief that London is rainy intrinsically and literally contains the propositional content that London is rainy, but no state of neurons contains that content in that way—as opposed to metaphorically or derivatively (this kind of point has been forcibly urged by John Searle for a long time).

And there is theoretical danger in such loose talk, because it fosters the illusion that we understand how the brain can give rise to the mind. One of the central attributes of mind is information (propositional content) and there is a difficult question about how informational states can come to exist in physical organisms. We are deluded if we think we can make progress on this question by attributing informational states to the brain. To be sure, if the brain were to process information, in the full-blooded sense, then it would be apt for producing states like belief; but it is simply not literally true that it processes information. We are accordingly left wondering how electrochemical activity can give rise to genuine informational states like knowledge, memory, and perception. As so often, surreptitious homunculus talk generates an illusion of theoretical understanding.