This site got a nice surge yesterday pushing traffic way over 2000 page views, an uptick that I attribute to Ed Feser's linkage to my recent Nagel posts. (I've been averaging about 1200-1600 pageviews/day) So today Ed gets a 'mavalanche' for his trouble.
Be sure to take a gander at Ed's First Things review of Nagel.
How many Americans care about liberty? The depressing fact that Obama may well win the election shows that vast numbers of Americans care more about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, than about liberty.
We're running on fumes. The stamp is border-line Orwellian.
Time was, when liberty was a state. Now it's a stamp.
I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns. Written February 2008.
…………….
I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that there need be nothing miraculous about revelation as such. So I was pleased to find some support for this notion from another quarter. The following is from an essay by Leo Strauss on Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism:
Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the
rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by
revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo
Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago
Press, 1983, p. 237.)
This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it may offer us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary processes most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal.
Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms.
As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.
I suggest that what 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.
But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission was not by semen, but by some spiritual (socio-cultural) means.
If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)
Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being (Sein) achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.
Revealing himself to man as Being itself — Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" — God creates man as understandor of Being.
We are all in the dark, but the philosophers among us know it. The enlightenment they provide is mainly of a negative nature: they cast a bright light on our ignorance. And sometimes they do so willy-nilly, by contradicting each other.
Whom did you vote for in '72? I voted for McGovern! But of course the Dems back then weren't the extremists they are today. John Fund remembers what was good about the man.
. . . from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish: "The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).
Jack Kerouac's Octoberish Magic
"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)
Derb calls it a six month anniversary, but how can there be a six month anniversary? (L. annus, anni, year.) Call me a pedant and a quibbler. So while I'm just being myself, I'll also point out that he uses the pleonastic 'true fact.' What, as opposed to a false fact?
Much more importantly, the man spoke the truth about race and has paid a price for so doing.
I seem to recall a rant of mine against the simultaneous crudification and wussification of American culture. Ugly words for ugly things. Derb in his Anniversary of a Defenestration laments "the pathetic pussification of the official right." Here is Part II.
My posts on Derbyshire:
PC Conservative Andrew McCarthy's Lame Response to John Derbyshire
First John Derbyshire, then Naomi Riley
There is much more on the delightful topic of race in my aptly entitled Race category.
Before you even think of getting married, make sure you have plenty of Money. Then Shop Around. Consider who will become your Mother-in-Law. If you want to be happy, don't worry too much about physical beauty. If she has a cheatin' heart, hit the road, Jack.
But then again you might be better off without a wife.
One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations. If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer:
A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study brain activity while the subject is deep in prayer/meditation. The red in the language center and frontal lobe areas indicates greater brain activity when the subject is praying or meditating as compared to the baseline when he is not. But when atheists "contemplate God" — which presumably means when they think about the concept of God, a concept that they, as atheists, consider to be uninstantiated — "Dr. Newberg did not observe any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that he observed in religious people."
The upshot?
Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while God is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, God is as real as the physical world. "So it helps us to understand that at least when they [religious people] are describing it to us, they are really having this kind of experience… This experience is at least neurologically real."
First of all, why do we need a complicated and expensive study to learn this? It is well-known that serious and sincere practioners of religions will typically have various experiences as a result of prayer and meditation. (Of course most prayer and meditation time is 'dry' — but experiences eventually come.) The reality of these experiences as experiences cannot be doubted from the first-person point of view of the person who has them. There is no need to find a neural correlate in the brain to establish the reality of the experience qua experience. The experiences are real whether or not neural correlates can be isolated, and indeed whether or not there are any.
Suppose no difference in brain activity is found as between the religionists and the atheists when the former do their thing and the latter merely think about the God concept. (To call the latter "contemplating God" is an absurd misuse of terminology.) What would that show? Would it show that there is no difference between the religionists' experiences and the atheists'? Of course not. The difference is phenomenologically manifest, and, as I said, there is no need to establish the "neurological reality" of the experiences to show that they really occur.
Now I list some possible confusions into which one might fall when discussing a topic like this.
Confusion #1: Conflating the phenomenological reality of a religious experience as experienced with its so-called "neurological reality." They are obviously different as I've already explained.
Confusion #2: Conflating the religious experience with its neural correlate, the process in the brain or CNS on which the experience causally depends. Epistemically, they cannot be the same since they are known in different ways. The experience qua experience is known with certainty from the first-person point of view. The neural correlate is not. One cannot experience, from the first-person point of view, one's own brain states as brain states. Ontically, they cannot be the same either, and this for two sorts of reasons. First, the qualitative features of the experiences cannot be denied, but they also cannot be identified with anything physical. This is the qualia problem. Second, religious/mystical experiences typically exhibit that of-ness or aboutness, that directedness-to-an-object, that philosophers call intentionality. No physical states have this property.
Confusion #3: Conflating a religious entity with its concept, e.g., confusing God with the concept of God. This is why it is slovenly and confused to speak of "contemplating God" when one is merely thinking about the concept of God. The journalist and/or the neuroscientist seem to be succumbing to this confusion.
Confusion #4: Conflating an experience (an episode or act of experiencing) with its intentional object. Suppose one feels the presence of God. Then the object is God. But God is not identical to the experience. For one thing, numerically different experiences can be of the same object. The object is distinct from the act, and the act from the object. The holds even if the intentional object does not exist. Suppose St Theresa has an experience of the third person of the Trinity, but there is no such person. That doesn't affect the act-object structure of the experience. After all, the act does not lose its intentional directedness because the object does not exist.
Confusion #5: Conflating the question whether an experience 'takes an object' with the question whether the object exists.
Confusion #6: Conflating reality with reality-for. There is no harm is saying that God is real for theists, but not real for atheists if all one means is that theists believe that God is real while atheists do not. Now if one believes that p, it does not follow that p is true. Likewise, if God is real for a person it doesn't follow that God is real, period. One falls into confusion if one thinks that the reality of God for a person shows that God is real, period.
We find this confusion at the end of the video clip. "And if God only exists in our brains, that does not mean that God is not real. Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us."
This is confused nonsense. First of all God cannot exist in our brains. Could the creator of the universe be inside my skull? Second, it would also be nonsense to say that the experience of God is in our brains for the reasons give in #2 above. Third, if "God exists only in our brains" means that the experience of God is phenomenologically real for those who have it, but that the intentional object of this experience does not exist, then it DOES mean that God is not real.
Confusion #7: Conflating the real with the imaginable. We are told that "God is unimaginable for atheists." But that is true of theists as well: God, as a purely spiritual being, can be conceived but not imagined. To say that God is not real is not to say that God is unimaginable, and to say that something (a flying horse, e.g.) is imaginable is not to say that it is real.
What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt. What I am objecting is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.
What did we learn from the article cited? Nothing. We don't need complicated empirical studies to know that religious experiences are real. What the article does is sow seeds of confusion. One of the confusions the article sows is that the question of the veridicality of religious experiences can be settled by showing their "neurological reality." Neither the phenomenological nor the neurological reality of the experience qua experience entails the reality of the object of the experience.
Genuine science cannot rest on conceptual foundations that are thoroughly confused.
This is the fourth in a series of posts on Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012). The posts are conveniently collected under the rubric Nagel, Thomas. Before proceeding with my account of Chapter 4, I will pause in this entry to consider Elliot Sober's serious, substantial, and sober Boston Review review. Sober's sobriety lapses only in the subtitle (which may have been supplied by the editor): "Ending Science as We Know It."
According to Sober, Nagel " . . . argues that evolutionary biology is fundamentally flawed and that physics also needs to be rethought—that we need a new way to do science." This seems to me to misrepresent Nagel's project. His project is not to "end science as we know it" but to indicate the limits of scientific explanation. A legitimate philosophical task is to investigate the limits of even the most successful sciences. (4) Now, to investigate and point out the limits of evolutionary biology and physics is not to argue that they are "fundamentally flawed." They do what they are supposed to do, and the fact that they do not, or cannot, explain certain phenomena that certain scientistically inclined people would like them to explain, is no argument against them. After all, physics cannot explain the proliferation of living species, but that is no argument against physics. If evolutionary biology cannot explain how consciousness arises in certain organisms or the objectively binding character or normative judgments, that is no argument against evolutonary biology. To oppose Darwinian imperialism as Nagel does is not to oppose Darwinism. To suppose that every gap in our understanding can be filled with a Darwinian explanation is rightly ridiculed as "Darwinism of the gaps." (127)
Nagel's targets are not existing successful sciences. He tells us right at the outset what his target is (bolding added): "My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics — a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification." (4) He goes on to characterize this worldview as "materialist reductionism" and "reductive materialism."
Nagel is therefore not opposing any science but rather a philosophical position, materialist reductionism, that is reached by a speculative-philosophical extrapolation from some of the results of the sciences.
Although Nagel admits that there are some brute facts, mind, the intelligibility of the world, and the fact that there are conscious organisms (45) are not among them. Mind is not an accident or fluke (16) and "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." One of the limits of current evolutionary theory is that it cannot explain why these remarkable fact are non-accidental. Sober does not understand why, if some facts are brute, the remarkable facts of mind, intelligibilty and consciousness are not among them:
My philosophical feelings diverge from Nagel’s. I think that Beethoven’s existence is remarkable, but I regard it as a fluke. He could easily have failed to exist. Indeed, my jaded complacency about Beethoven scales up. I don’t think that life, intelligence, and consciousness had to be in the cards from the universe’s beginning. I am happy to leave this question to the scientists. If they tell me that these events were improbable, I do not shake my head and insist that the scientists must be missing something. There is no such must. Something can be both remarkable and improbable.
Sober seems to be imputing to Nagel the following argument:
What is remarkable cannot be improbable.
Life, consciousness, reason, etc. are remarkable
Therefore
Life, consciousness, reason, etc. cannot be improbable.
Now this is an unsound argument, of course: Beethoven's existence was remarkable but improbable. But this is not the way Nagel is arguing. He needn't be read as denying that there is an element of chance in the appearance of Beethoven, a particular instance of life, consciousness, and reason. His point is rather that consciousness and reason in general cannot be cosmic accidents. Sober ignores what is specific to reason, and views it as just another remarkable fact. Nagel's actual argument (see p. 86) is rather along these lines:
1. There are organisms capable of reason.
2. The possibility of such beings must have been there from the beginning.
3. This possibility, however, must be grounded in and explained by the nature of the cosmos.
4. What's more, the nature of the cosmos must explain not only the possibiity but also the actuality of rational animals: their occurrence cannot be a brute fact or accident.
I take Nagel to be maintaining that the eventual existence of some rational beings or other is no accident — which is consistent with maintaining that there is an element of chance involved in the appearance of any particular instance of reason such as Beethoven.
Of course, Sober will still balk. Why can't reason be a fluke? Even if we grant Nagel that the intelligibility of nature could not have been a fluke or brute fact, how does it follow that the actual existence of some rational beings or other, beings capable of 'glomming onto' the world's intelligible structure, is not a fluke? In a later post I will try to beef up Nagel's argument so that it can meet this demand.
For now, though, we have a stand-off. Nagel has this deep sense, which I share, that "rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order . . . ." (17) Sober in his sobriety does not share that sense.
There is more to Sober's criqiue than this, but this is enough for today.
If someone questions your right to have an opinion about abortion if you are man, say Arguments don't have testicles.
In section 53 of The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege famously maintains that
. . . existence is analogous to number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought. Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down. (65)
Frege is here advancing a double-barreled thesis that splits into two subtheses.
ST1. Existence is analogous to number.
ST2. Existence is a property (Eigenschaft) of concepts and not of objects.
In the background is the sharp distinction between property (Eigenschaft) and mark (Merkmal). Three-sided is a mark of the concept triangle, but not a property of this concept; being instantiated is a property of this concept but not a mark of it. The Cartesian-Kantian ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus lauter Begriffen), according to Frege, runs aground because existence cannot be a mark of any concept, but only a property of some concepts. And so one cannot validly argue from the concept of God to the existence of God.
Existence as a property of concepts is the property of being-instantiated. We can therefore call the Fregean account of existence an instantiation account.
My concern in this entry is the logical relation between the subtheses. Does the first entail the second or are they logically independent? There is a clear sense in which (ST1) is true. Necessarily, if horses exist, then the number of horses is not zero, and vice versa. 'So 'Horses exist' is logically equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.' This is wholly unproblematic for those of us who agree that there are no Meinongian nonexistent objects. But note that, in general, equivalences, even logical equivalences, do not sanction reductions or identifications. So it remains an open question whether one can take the further step of reducing existence to instantiation, or identifying existence with instantiation, or even eliminating existence in favor of instantiation.
(ST1), then, is unproblematically true if understood as expressing the following logical equivalence: 'Necessarily Fs exist iff the number of Fs is not zero.' My question is whether (ST1) entails (ST2). Peter van Inwagen in effect denies the entailment by denying that the 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a predicate of concepts:
I would say that, on a given occasion of its use, it predicates of certain things that they number more than zero. Thus, if one says, 'The number of horses is not zero,' one predicates of horses that they number more than zero. 'The number of . . . is not zero' is thus what some philosophers have called a 'variably polyadic' predicate. But so are many predicates that can hardly be regarded as predicates of concepts. The predicates 'are ungulates' and 'have an interesting evolutionary history,' for example, are variably polyadic predicates. When one says, 'Horses are ungulates' or 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' one is obviously making a statement about horses and not about the concept horse. ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," pp. 483-484)
It is this passage that I am having a hard time understanding. It is of course clear what van Inwagen is trying to show, namely, that the Fregean subtheses are logically independent and that one can affirm the first without being committed to the second. One can hold that existence is denial of the number zero without holding that existence is a property of concepts.
But I am having trouble with the claim that the predicate 'the number of . . . is not zero' is 'variably polyadic' and the examples van Inwagen employs. 'Robbed a bank together' is an example of a variably polyadic predicate. It is polyadic because it expresses a relation and it is variably polyadic because it expresses a family of relations having different numbers of arguments. For example, Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank together, but so did Ma Barker and her two boys, Patti Hearst and three members of the ill-starred Symbionese Liberation Army, and so on. (Example from Chris Swoyer and Francesco Orilia.)
Now when I say that the number of horses is not zero, what am I talking about? It is plausible to say that I am talking about horses, not about the concept horse. What I don't understand is why van Inwagen says that 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a variably polyadic predicate. As far as I can see, it is not even polyadic, let alone variably polyadic. What is the relation that the predicate expresses, and why is that relation multigrade? I grant that there are indefinitely many ways the number of horses could be not zero: there could be one horse, two, three, and so on. But what is the relation between or among horses that this supposedly polyadic predicate expresses?
'. . .exist(s)' is monadic. It expresses no relation. Why not say the same about 'such that their number is not zero'?
Now consider 'are ungulates.' If an ungulate is just a mammal with hooves, then I fail to see how 'are ungulates' is polyadic, let alone variably polyadic. 'Are hooved mammals' is monadic.
The other example is 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.' This sentence is clearly not about the concept horse. But it is not about any individual horse either. Consider Harry the horse. Harry has a history. He was born in a certain place, grew up, was bought and sold, etc. and then died at a certain age. He went through all sorts of changes. But Harry didn't evolve, and so he had no evolutionary history. No individual evolves; populations evolve:
Evolutionary change is based on changes in the genetic makeup of populations over time. Populations, not individual organisms, evolve. Changes in an individual over the course of its lifetime may be developmental (e.g., a male bird growing more colorful plumage as it reaches sexual maturity) or may be caused by how the environment affects an organism (e.g., a bird losing feathers because it is infected with many parasites); however, these shifts are not caused by changes in its genes.
While it would be handy if there were a way for environmental changes to cause
adaptive changes in our genes — who wouldn't want a gene for malaria resistance
to come along with a vacation to Mozambique? — evolution just doesn't work that
way. New gene variants (i.e., alleles) are produced by random mutation, and over the course of many generations, natural selection may favor advantageous variants, causing them to become more common in the population.
'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history,' then, is not about the concept horse or about any individual horse. The predicate in this sentence appears to be non-distributive or collective. It is like the predicate in 'Horses have been domesticated for millenia.' That is certainly not about the concept horse. No concept can be ridden or made to carry a load. But it is also not about any individual horse. Not even the Methuselah of horses, whoever he might be, has been around for millenia.
A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F. Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them. 'Blue' is an example. If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.
If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective). If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded. If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did. If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct. Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries. If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.
My problem is that I don't understand why van Inwagen gives the 'Horses have an interesting evlutionary history' example when he is committed to saying that each horse exists. His view , I take it, is that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate. 'Has an interesting evolutionary history,' however, is a first-level non-distributive predicate. Or is it PvI's view that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate?
Either I don't understand van Inwagen's position due to some defect in me, or it is incoherent. I incline toward the latter. He is trying to show that (ST1) doe not entail (ST2). He does this by giving examples of predicates that are first-level, i.e., apply to objects, but are variably polyadic as he claims 'the number of . . . is not zero' is variably polyadic. But the only clear example he gives is a predicate that is non-distributive, namely 'has an interesting evilutionary history.' 'Horses exist,' however, cannot be non-distributive. If some horses exist, then each of them exists. And if each of them exists, then 'exists' is monadic, not polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.
The ComBox is open if there is anyone who knows this subject and has read PvI's paper and can set me straight.
Documented by VDH. His mojo's risin' and with it his mendacity. Yes, they played politics on Libya.
Here is the video clip of Obama lying to Romney and the rest of us in their second debate. Obama lies when he claims that on the Arizona law (S. B. 1070) law enforcement officers can stop people whom they merely suspect of being undocumented workers. Obama has told this lie before.
The details are in an earlier post which I now reproduce:
Debra Saunders' article begins:
President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."
All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires
that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.
Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring. The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this. So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."
Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years. See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue. Other
of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.
Why are leftists so mendacious? Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.
Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.
