Necessary Being: A Note on a Post by James Barham

In the context of a reply to a "nasty attack on [Alvin] Plantinga by Jerry Coyne that cannot go unanswered," James Barham explains why he is an atheist:

The other reason I balk [at accepting a theism like that of Plantinga's] is that I can’t help suspecting there is a category mistake involved in talking about the “necessity” of the existence of any real thing, even a ground of being. When we speak of the ground of being’s existing “necessarily,” perhaps we are conflating the nomological sense of “necessity”—in the earth’s gravitational field an unsupported object necessarily accelerates at 32 feet per second squared—with the logical sense of the word—if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then necessarily Socrates is mortal.

Many experience intellectual discomfort at the thought of a being that is, as Barham says, real (as opposed, presumably, to ideal or abstract) but yet exists of broadly logical (metaphysical) necessity.  To discuss this with clarity I suggest we drop 'real' and use 'concrete' instead.  So our question is whether it is coherent to suppose that there exists a concrete being that necessarily exists, where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The question is not whether it is true, but whether it is thinkable without broadly logical contradiction, and without 'category mistake.'   But what does 'concrete' mean?  It does not mean 'material' or 'physical.' Obviously, no material being could be a necessary being. (Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Here are a couple of definitions:

D1. X is concrete =df X is causally active or passive.
D2. X is abstract =df X is causally inert, i.e., not concrete.

The terms of the concrete-abstract distinction are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive:  everything is one or the other, and nothing  is both.  And the same goes for the physical-nonphysical distinction.  The distinctions are not equivalent, however: they 'cut perpendicular' to each other.  There are (or at least it is coherent to suppose that there could be) nonphysical concreta.  Whether there are physical abstracta is a nice question I will set aside for now.

Plantinga's God, if he exists, is concrete, wholly immaterial, and necessarily existent.  Obviously, one cannot imagine such a being.  (A point of difference with Russell's celestial teapot, by the way.) But I find Plantinga's God to be conceivable without contradiction or confusion or conflation or category mistake.   Barham thinks otherwise, suggesting that the notion of a necessarily existent concretum trades on a confusion of nomological necessity with logical necessity.  I find no such confusion, but I do find a confusion in Barham's thinking.

First of all, there is a genuine distinction between nomological necessity and logical necessity. Barham's sentence about an unsupported object in Earth's gravitational field is nomologically necessary, but logically contingent.  It is the latter because there is no logical contradiction in the supposition that a body in Earth's gravitational field accelerate at a rate other than 32 ft/sec2.   The laws of nature could have been other  than what they are.  But what does this have to do with the possibility of the coherence of the notion of a concrete individual that exists in all broadly logically possible worlds if it exists in one such world?  Nothing that I can see.  Barham points, in effect, to a legitimate difference between:

1. Necessarily, an unsupported object in Earth's gravitation  falls at the rate of 32ft/sec2
and
2. Necessarily, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.

The difference is in type of modality.  In (1) the modality is nomological while in (2) it is logical.  Both cases are cases of de dicto modality: the modal operator operates upon a dictum or proposition.  But when we speak of God as a necessary being, we are not speaking of the necessary truth of a proposition, whether the necessity be nomological or logical.  We are speaking of the necessary existence of a 'thing,' a res. Accordingly, the modality is de re. So I am wondering whether Barham is succumbing to de dicto-de re confusion.  Of course, there is the proposition

3. Necessarily, God exists

where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The truth-maker of this proposition, however, is God himself, a necessarily existent concrete individual.

My point, then , is that there is no logical mistake involved in the concept of God as necessary being, no confusion, no category mistake.  Even if the concept fails of instantiation, the concept itself is epistemically in the clear.

Barham will no doubt continue to be an atheist.  But he ought to drop the above accusation of category mistake.  He can do better. He could argue that all modality is de dicto.  Or that all necessity is linguistic/conventional in origin.  Or he could give J. N. Findlay's 1948 ontological disproof, which I will feature in my next post.  

I should add that Barham's post, What Happened to Jerry Coyne's Sensus Divinitatis, only a small part of which I examined above, is extremely good and should be carefully read.

The Sudduth Surge Continues

Before I posted Michael Sudduth's open letter on Saturday, site traffic for the month was averaging between 1600-1900 page views per day;  yesterday, however, saw a surge — the Sudduth surge to give it a name — up to 2880, and now, at high noon Tuesday, I'm at 2200.  Meanwhile, the industrious Mr. Lull (cybernaut extraordinaire, etc. etc.) has supplied me with two further links on the topic.

Daniel Silliman, The Experience of Conversion as Always-Already Having Been.  From the title alone I know that Mr. Silliman has come under the influence of Heidegger:  'always already'  is a Heideggerism familiar to students of Sein und Zeit as immer schon.

And scroll down here for a review of Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology.

UPDATE (5 PM):  traffic for the day came to 2965 page views.  I thank you for your patronage.

Could Free Will Be an Illusion? (2012 Version)

1.  Could freedom of the will in the strong or unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense be an illusion?

2.  Suppose A and B are mutually incompatible but individually possible courses of action, and I am deliberating as to whether I should do A or B. (Should I continue with this blogging business, or give it up?) Deliberating, I have the sense that it is up to me what happens. I have the sense that it is not the case that events prior to my birth, together with the laws of nature, necessitate that I do what I end up doing. Seriously deliberating, I presuppose the falsity of determinism.  For if I were thoroughly and truly convinced of the truth of determinism it would be psychologically impossible for me to deliberate.  (Compare:  were I thoroughly and truly convinced of the truth of naturalism it would be psychologically impossible for me to pray or engage in any spiritual practice the successful outcome of which requires the falsity of naturalism.)

3. Determinism is the thesis that, given the actual past, and the actual laws of nature, there is only one possible future. When I seriously deliberate, however, my deliberation behavior manifests the belief that there is more than one possible future, and that it is up to me which of these possible futures becomes actual. There is the possible future in which I hike tomorrow morning and blog in the afternoon and the equipossible future in which I blog tomorrow morning and hike in the afternoon. And which becomes actual depends on me.

One may be tempted to say that the indisputable fact of deliberation proves the reality of free will.

4.  But then someone objects: "The sense that it is up to you what happens is illusory; it merely seems to you that you are the ultimate source of your actions. In reality your every action is determined by events before your birth." The objector is not denying the fact of deliberation; he is denying that the fact of deliberation entails the reality of free will. He is claiming that the fact of deliberation is logically consistent with the nonexistence of free will.

5.  To evaluate this objection, we need to ask what is meant by 'illusory' in this context. Clearly, the word is not being used in an ordinary way. Ordinary illusions can be seen through and overcome. Hiking at twilight I jump back from a tree root I mis-take for a snake. In cases of perceptual illusion like this, one can replace illusory perceptions with veridical ones. Something similar is true of other illusions such as those of romantic love and the sorts of illusions that leftists cherish and imagine as in the eponymous John Lennon ditty. In cases like these, further perception, more careful thinking, keener observation, 'due diligence' and the like lead to the supplanting of the illusory with the veridical.

But if free will is an illusion, it is not an illusion that can be cast off or seen through no matter what I do. I must deliberate from time to time, and I cannot help but believe, whenever I deliberate, that the outcome is at least in part 'up to me.' Indeed, it is inconceivable that I should disembarrass myself of this 'illusion.' One can become disillusioned about many things but not about the 'illusion' of free will. For it is integral to my being an agent, and being an agent is part and parcel of being a human being. To get free of the 'illusion' of free will, I would have to learn to interpret myself as a deterministic system whose behavior I merely observe but do not control. I would have to learn how to cede control and simply let things happen. But this is precisely what I cannot do.

It would be nice if one could 'switch off' one's free agency.  Sophie's choice was agonizing because she knew that it was up to her which child would remain with her and which would be taken away by the Nazi SS officer.  Now which is more certain:  that she knows that she is a free agent responsible for her choices, or that she knows that she is a wholly deterministic system and that the sense of free agency and moral responsibility are but illusions?  The answer ought to be obvious: the former is more certain .  One is directly aware of one's free agency, while it is only by shaky abstract reasoning that one comes to the view that free will is an illusion.

We are not free to be free agents or not.  It is an essential  attribute of our humanity.  Thus we are  "condemned to be free" in a famous phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre. The sound core of the Sartrean exaggeration is that being free is constitutive of being human. No doubt I can try to view myself as a mere deterministic system pushed around by external forces, but that is a mode of self-deception, a mode of what Sartre calls mauvaise-foi, bad faith. Determinism is "an endless well of excuses" as I seem to recall Sartre saying somewhere.  Being free is constitutive of being human.

6. Or is it only the (false) belief that one is free that is constitutive of being human? Perhaps the fact of deliberation proves merely that one must view oneself as free when in reality we are not free.   Why couldn't it be the case that we all go through life with the irremovable false belief that some of what happens is up to us when in reality nothing is up to us?

My considered opinion is that this ultimately does not make any sense. It makes as little sense as the notion that consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness.  Similarly for the difference between the illusion of being a free agent and the reality of being a free agent. It is difficult to see any (nonverbal) difference.

Connected with this is the impossibility of existentially appropriating the supposed truth of determinism. Suppose determinism is true. Can I live this truth, apply it to my life, make it my own? Can I existentially appropriate it? Not at all. To live is to be an agent, and to be an agent is to be a free agent. To live and be human is not merely to manifest a belief, but an all-pervasive ground-conviction, of the falsity of determinism. Determinism cannot be practically or existentially appropriated. It remains practically meaningless, a theory whose plausibility requires a third-person objective view of the self. But the self is precisely subjective in its innermost being and insofar forth, free and unobjectifiable.

If you look at the self from a third person point of view, then determinism has some plausibility, for then you are considering the self as just another object among objects, just another phenomenon among phenomena subject to the laws of nature. But the third person point of view presupposes the first person point of view, and it is the latter from which we live. We are objects in the world, but we live as subjects for whom there is a world, a world upon which we act and must act. Subjectivity is irreducible and ineliminable.

We are left with a huge problem that no philosopher has ever solved, namely, the integration of the first-person and third-person points of view. How do they cohere? No philosopher has explained this. What can be seen with clarity, however, is that subjectivity is irreducible and ineliminable and that no solution can be had by denying that we are irreducibly conscious and irreducibly free. One cannot integrate the points of view by denying the first of them.

All indications are that the problem is simply insoluble and we ought to be intellectually honest enough to face the fact.  It is no solution at all, and indeed a shabby evasion, to write off the first-person point of view as illusory.

The 2012 Election Circus

For commentary on the passing scene, Victor Davis Hanson is hard to beat.  Here is his latest. Bill Keezer deserves thanks for keeping me apprised of what flows from Hanson's pen.  Hanson on Ron Paul:

For someone so savvy about the nature of the disaffected, why did Dr. Paul believe that in the South he could go on rants about U.S. foreign policy that centered around American culpability? Of course, South Carolinians would be receptive to arguments that U.S. expense abroad earned only ingratitude or was counter-productive; but when Paul suggests that we earned hostility on 9/11 by our foreign policy, did he not expect to be widely repudiated? (e.g., So the country that saved Muslims in Kuwait, fed them in Somalia, helped them against the Russians, and bombed a European Christian country to keep them alive in Bosnia and Kosovo had a worse record on Islam than China and Russia, who were not attacked on 9/11?)

Paul has an eerie ability to win over almost anyone on matters of debt and financial insolvency, and lose them in a nano-second when he turns to foreign policy, where he loses clarity and conflates American gullibility with American culpability. A conservative might think it is unwise right now to attack Iran, but he does not wish to be told to look at the situation through the creepy Iranian regime’s eyes.

Hanson on Obama:

What a strange fellow: damning the 1% only to hire three-in-a-row multimillionaire “fat-cat” ex-Wall-streeters as his chiefs-of-staff, while he lives a life indistinguishable from those he caricatures. Obama brags of killing bin Laden, without the slightest concession that he employed protocols to do it that he once smeared, or that he got the troops home for Christmas, without a peep that he followed the Bush-Petraeus plan and not his own that once called for complete flight by March 2008. Poor conservatives: should they praise him for get-real flip-flops or damn him for his hypocrisy and the damage he once did as a critic of what kept us safe? He is a figure right out Aristophanes, a polypgramon scoundrel, a demagogic genius, who can bomb Libya without congressional authority, claim it was not military action — and all the while keep the Michael Moore left silent if not proud of their guy’s duplicity, while begging the right to dare argue that Libya is not better off without the nightmare of Gaddafi.

The man's brilliant and penetrating. (Those are distinct attributes. And of ocurse I'm talking about Hanson.) 

Belief Change

The indefatigable Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace, friend and facilitator of many a blogger, pointed me this morning to Triablogue where there is some commentary here and here of a mainly churlish sort on the recent conversion of Michael Sudduth.  Comments like those encountered there reinforce me in my view that comboxes are often better kept closed, except that our old friend Tony Flood did surface there and made a decent comment.  (I wouldn't be surprised if it was the industrious Lull who hipped Flood to the Triablogue posts.)

In any case, reading Flood's comment put me in mind of his main site and I wondered what was happening over there.  Well, it looks like old Tony himself has made a doxastic shift too, one  back to his origins:

I have returned to the Christian orthodoxy from which (this may come as a surprise to some of you) my thinking strayed. Those fields did not yield what they seemed to promise. The harvest of my intellectual discontent is still on display here, but henceforth new content will reflect my new-old interests.

My current priority is situate myself mentally within Christian orthodoxy, a matter that I do not think has been settled for me. I believe myself to be a member in good standing of the Roman Catholic communion within the Catholic Church, from whose fold I do not exclude Eastern Orthodox and Reformed Christians.

The distinguished members of Tony's Gallery of Heroes are now under quarantine.

Inasmuch as mature religion is more quest than conclusions, a truth  lost on the New Atheists and their cyberpunk auxiliary legions, belief change is to be expected and is often  a sign of a vital and sincere seeking for a truth which is hard for us in our present predicament to discern.  So my hat is off to Mike and Tony as the one swims the Ganges while the other refreshes himself in the Tiber.

Addendum 1/23:   Logging on this morning, I found three messages from Dave Lull and one from Tony Flood.  Lull apprises me of a second comment by Flood at Triablogue, a comment even better than the first, one that I have just now read, and mostly agree with.

More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will

This is a sequel to an earlier discussion.  You should read it first.  Coyne writes,

There's not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It's impossible, anyway, to act as though we don't have it: you'll pretend to choose your New Year's resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

This, Coyne's concluding paragraph, has it all: scientism, incoherence, and liberal victimology.

1.  Coyne realizes that we cannot deliberate, choose, and act without the belief in free will. He realizes that one cannot, say, choose to eat less in the coming year without believing (even if falsely) that one is freely choosing, without believing that the choice is 'up to oneself.'    But then Coyne immediately confuses this unavoidable false believing with pretending to choose.  He seems to think that if my choice is determined and not free (in the libertarian sense explained in the earlier post), then it is not a genuine choice, but a pretend choice.  But that is not the case.  A choice is genuine whether or not it is determined. 

People deliberate and choose.  Bicycles don't. That's part of the pre-analytic data.  It is also part of the pre-analytic data that people sometimes pretend to deliberate and pretend to choose.  It is a grotesque confusion on Coyne's part to think that if one is determined to choose then one's choice is not genuine but pretend.  (Note also that if determinism is true, then one's pretending to choose is also determined without prejudice to its being a real case of pretending to choose.)

Coyne is making a mistake similar to the one he made at the beginning of the piece.  There he implied that if a choice is not free then it is not a choice. But a choice is a choice whether free or determined.  Coyne was confusing the question, Are there choices? with the question, Are there free choices?  He now thinks that if a choice is determined, then it not a real, but a merely pretend, choice.  That is doubly confused.  Just as a pretend choice can be free, a real choice can be determined.

2. We are then told that consciousness, free choice, and the idea of the self are "illusions fashioned by natural selection."  This is nonsense pure and simple.

First of all, consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness. If one is under the illusion that one is conscious, then one is conscious, really conscious, and therefore not under any illusion about the matter.

The thesis that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting.  If I merely seem to be conscious, but am not conscious, then I am conscious.  And if I do not merely seem to be conscious, but am conscious, then (of course) I am conscious.  Therefore, necessarily, if I seem to be conscious, then I am conscious. Here we bite on granite, and "our spade is turned" — to mix Nimzovich and Wittgenstein metaphors.  Or in the words of a German proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. 

Consciousness, in this regard, is analogous to truth.  If you try to say something about truth, you presuppose truth.  For if you try to say something about truth, presumably you are trying to say something true about truth.  So if you say that truth is an illusion, and that there are no truths, then you are saying that in truth there are no truths — which is self-refuting.  If, on the other hand, you are simply making noises or perhaps aiming to say something false, the we ignore you for those reasons.

3. I don't believe that one can show in the same clean 'knock-down' way that free will is not an illusion.  That consciousness is an illusion is a plainly incoherent idea; the incoherence of the notion that free will is an illusion is harder to uncover.  But suppose we ask, "In which sense of 'illusion' is free will an illusion?"  It is nothing like a correctable perceptual illusion of the sort we are subject to on a daily basis.  The 'illusion' of free will, if illusion it be, cannot be thrown off.  I cannot function as an agent without taking myself to be free, and I cannot cease being an agent short of suicide.  Echoing Sartre, I am condemned to agency and to that extent "condemned to be free."  Even a mad-dog quietist who decided to renounce all action, would be deciding to renounce all action and thereby demonstrating willy-nilly the ineradicable reality of his agency.  An 'illusion' that it constutive of my very being an agent is no illusion in any worthwile sense of the term. 

It's a bit like an Advaitin (an adherent of Advaita Vedanta) telling me that the multiple world of our ordinary sense experience is an illusion.  "OK, but what does that mean?  When we are at the shooting range, you are going to take care not to be down range when the shooting starts, right?  Why, if the world of multiplicity, the world of shotguns and shells and targets and tender human bodies is an illusion?  Why would it matter? Obviously, you are playing fast and loose with 'illusion' and don't really believe that this gun and your head are illusions.)

One cannot distinguish (except verbally) the mere appearance of consciousness and the reality of consciousness.  Similarly, I suggest that one cannot distinguish between the 'illusion' of free will and its reality.  This thesis of course requires much more development and support!  But hey, this is a blog, just an online notebook! 

Those who claim that free will is an illusion are simply playing fast and loose with the word 'illusion.' There are not using it in an ordinary way, in the sort of way that gives it its ordinary 'bite'; they are using it in some extended way that drains it of meaning.  It is a kind of bullshitting that scientists often fall into when they are spouting scientism in the popular books they scribble to turn a buck.  Doing science is hard; writing bad philosopohy is easy.  By the way, that is why we need philosophy.  We need it to expose all the pseudo-philsophy abroad in the world.

We need philosophy to bury its undertakers lest there be all those rotting corpses laying about.

4.  Finally, Coyne tells us we are all "victims of circumstance."  But I've had enough of this guy for one day.  I shouldn't be wasting so much time on him. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Remembering Johnny Otis and Etta James

Both passed on this last week Otis at 90, James at 73.  Johnny Otis' signature number is of course "Willy and the Hand Jive."  In this curious clip, we are first treated to a late '50 car commercial which should stir up memories in Los Angelenos of a certain age and then to a performance  by Otis and his band with the hand jive itself illustrated by a trio of meaty mamas.  I always thought that Otis was a very light-skinned black man.  But in real life he rejoiced under the name Veliotes and was pure Greek.

Etta James' signature number is of course At Last.  Her version of "The Very Thought of You" compares favorably with Billie Holliday's.

Michael Sudduth Converts to Vaishnava Vedanta!

The New Year has brought me quite a lot of surprising e-mail, but the following missive wins the surprise prize.  (Since Dr. Sudduth has sent his open letter to numerous correspondents, and has posted it on his Facebook page, I feel entitled to post it here in its entirety without his explicit permission.)  Comments later, perhaps.  A fascinating document. 

Continue reading “Michael Sudduth Converts to Vaishnava Vedanta!”

Dennett on the Consequence Argument Against Compatibilism

Daniel Dennett is a compatibilist: he holds that determinism and free will are logically compatible. (Compare Dennett's position to Coyne's hard determinism and free will illusionism.)  On p. 134 of Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003), Dennett considers the following incompatibilist argument. It
will be interesting to see how he responds to it.

1. If determinism is true, whether I Go or Stay is completely fixed by the laws of nature and events in the distant past.
   
2. It is not up to me what the laws of nature are, or what happened in the distant past.

3. Therefore, whether I Go or Stay is completely fixed by circumstances that are not up to me.

4. If an action of mine is not up to me, it is not free (in the morally important sense).

5. Therefore, my action of Going or Staying is not free.

Dennett considers the above argument to be fallacious: "it commits the same error as the fallacious argument about the impossibility of mammals." (135) The 'mammals argument' is given on p. 126 and goes like this (I have altered the numbering to prevent confusion):

6. Every mammal has a mammal for a mother.
   
7. If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only a finite number of mammals.

8. But if there has been even one mammal, then by (6), there have been an infinity of mammals, which contradicts (7), so there can't have been any mammals. It's a contradiction in terms.

The two arguments, says Dennett, "commit the same error." He continues:

     Events in the distant past were indeed not "up to me," but my
     choice now to Go or Stay is up to me because its "parents" — some
     events in the recent past, such as the choices I have recently made
     — were up to me (because their parents were up to me), and so on,
     not to infinity, but far enough back to give my self enough spread
     in space and time so that there is a me for my decisions to be up
     to! The reality of a moral me is no more put in doubt by the
     incompatibilist argument than is the reality of mammals. (135-136)

It is clear that the 'mammals argument' goes wrong since we know that there are mammals. There are mammals even though there is no Prime Mammal nor an infinite regress of mammals. Gradual evolutionary changes from reptiles through intermediary therapsids led eventually to mammals. Thus mammals evolved from non-mammals. Dennett wants to say the same about events that are 'up to me.' Events before my birth were not up to me, but some events now are up to me since they are the causal descendants of acts that were up to me. Dennett seems to be saying that events that are up to a person, and thus free in a sense  to support attributions of moral responsibility, have gradually evolved from events that were not up to a person, and hence were unfree. Freedom evolves from unfreedom.

This is a creative suggestion, but what exactly is wrong with the above consequence argument? I see what is wrong with the 'mammals argument': (6) is false. But which premise of the incompatibilist   argument is false? The premises are plausible and there is no error in logic. If the error is the same as the one in the 'mammals argument,' as Dennett say, what exactly is this error? Presumably, the error is the failure to realize that the property of being up to me is an emergent property. So is Dennett rejecting premise (1)?

But the truth of (1) is merely a consequence of the definition of 'determinism.' Since Dennett does not reject determinism, it is quite  unclear to me what exactly is wrong with the incompatibilist argument. The analogy between the two arguments is murky, and I fail to see what exactly is wrong with the incompatibilist argument. Which premise is to be rejected? Which inference is invalid? Talk of freedom evolving is too vague to be helpful.
 
Or am I being too kind?  The notion that freedom evolves from unfreedom is perhaps better described as inconceivable, as inconceivable as mind emerging from "incogitative Matter" in Locke's memorable phrase.

Tim Maudlin: Hawking “Just Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About”

In this Atlantic article on the philosophy of cosmology, Tim Maudlin states:

Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently. Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do. But I think he's just . . . uninformed.

This became evident to me in October of 2010 when I sat down to study Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design.  I soon discovered it was rubbish.  Here are my notes on Chapter One.  After studying Chapter Two I decide the trash-to-treasure ratio was so unfavorable as not to justify further discussion.  I mean, it's work writing these posts!

This Atlantic piece is well worth attention.  It is free of sort of nonsense I have criticized in Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and others.






The Paradox of the Preface and the Law of Non-Contradiction

Suppose an author exercises due diligence in the researching and writing of a nonfiction book. He has good reason to believe that all of the statements he makes in the book are true. But he is also well aware of human fallibility and that he is no exception to the rule. And so, aware of his fallibility, he has good reason to believe that it is not the case that all of the statements he makes in the book are true. He makes mention of this in the book's preface. Hence 'paradox of the preface.'  Thus:

1. It is rational for the author to believe that each statement in his book is true. (Because he has exercised due diligence.)
2. It is rational for the author to believe that some statement in his book is not true. (Because to err is human.)
Therefore
3. It is rational for the author to believe that (each statement  in his book is true & some statement in his book is not true.)
Therefore
4. There are cases in which it is rational for a person to believe statements of the form (p & ~p).

"What the paradox shows is that we need to give up the claim that it is always irrational to believe statements that are mutually inconsistent." (Michael Clark, Paradoxes From A to Z, Routledge 2002, p. 144)
  
Is that what the paradox shows?  I doubt it. The paradox cannot arise unless the following schema is valid:

a. It is rational for S to believe that p.
b. It is rational for S to believe that ~p.
Ergo
c. It is rational for S to believe that (p & ~p).

It is not clear that the schema is valid. Rational believability, unlike truth, is a relative property. What it is rational to believe is relative to background knowledge among other things. Relative to the author's knowledge that he exercised due diligence in the researching and writing of his book, it is rational for him to believe that every statement in the book is true. But relative to considerations of human fallibility, it is rational for him to believe that it is not the case that every statement in his book is true. So what (a) and (b) above really amount to is the following where 'BK' abbreviates 'background knowledge':

a*. It is rational for S to believe relative to BK1 that p.
b*. It is rational for S to believe relative to BK2 that ~p.

From these two premises one cannot arrive at the desired conclusion.  So my solution to the paradox is to reject the inference from (1) and (2) to (3).

"But doesn't the author's background knowledge (BK) include both the truth that he exercised due diligence and the truth that human beings are fallible?" Well suppose it does. Then how could it be rational for him to believe that every statement in the book is true? It is rational for him to believe that every statement is true only if he leaves out of consideration that people are fallible. Relative to his total background knowledge, it is not rational for him to believe that every statement in his book is true.

In this way I avoid Clark's draconian conclusion that it is sometimes rational to believe statements that  are mutually inconsistent.  

Can Consciousness Be Explained? Dennett Debunked

To answer the title question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.'

1. An obvious point to start with is that only that which exists, or that which is the case, can be explained. One who explains the  phenomenon of the tides in terms of the gravitational effect of the moon presupposes that the phenomenon of the tides is a genuine phenomenon. One cannot explain the nonexistent for the simple reason that it is not there to be explained. One cannot explain why unicorns run faster that gazelles for the simple reason that there is no such explanandum. So if consciousness is to be explained, it must exist.

2. A second point, equal in obviousness unto the first, is that a decent explanation cannot issue in the elimination of the explanandum, that which is to be explained. You cannot explain beliefs and desires by saying that there are no beliefs and desires. A successful explanation cannot be eliminativist. It cannot 'explain away' the explanandum.  To explain is not to explain away.

3. Summing up (1) and (2): the very project of explanation presupposes the existence of the explanandum, and success in explanation cannot  result in the elimination of the explanandum.

4. Daniel Dennett points out that there can be no explanation without a certain 'leaving out': "Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations."  (Consciousness Explained, 1991, p. 454.) Thus if I explain lightning as an atmospheric electrical discharge, I leave out the appearing of the lightning to lay bare its reality. That lightning appears in such-and-such a way is irrelevant: I want to know what it is in reality, what it is in nature apart from any observer. The scientist aims to get beyond the phenomenology to the underlying reality.

5. It follows that if consciousness is to be explained, it must be reduced to, or identified with, something else that is observer-independent. Dennett puts this by saying that "Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all." (454) For example, if your explanation of pain in terms of C-fibers and Delta A-fibers (or whatever) still contains the unreduced term 'pain,' then no satisfactory explanation has been achieved. There cannot be a "magic moment" in the explanation when a "miracle occurs" and unconscious events become conscious. (455)

6. Now if a successful explanation must explain conscious events in terms of unconscious events, then I hope I will be forgiven for concluding that consciousness CANNOT be explained. For, as I made clear in #2 above, a successful explanation cannot issue in the elimination of that which is to be explained. In the case of the lightning, there is a reduction but not an elimination: lightning is reduced to its observer-independent reality as electrical discharge.

Now suppose you try the same operation with the sensory qualia experienced when one observes lightning: the FLASH, the JAGGED LINE in the sky, followed by the CLAP of thunder, etc. You try to separate the subjective appearance from the observer-independent reality. But then you notice something: reality and appearance of a sensory quale coincide. Esse est percipi. The being of the quale is identical to its appearing. This is what John Searle means when he speaks of the "first person ontology" of mental data.

7. It follows from #6 that if one were to explain the conscious event in terms of unconscious events as Dennett recommends, the explanation would fail: it would violate the strictures laid down in #2 above. The upshot would be an elimination of the datum to be explained rather than an explanation of it. To reiterate the obvious, a successful explanation cannot consign the explanandum to oblivion. It must explain it, not explain it away.

8. I conclude that consciousness cannot be explained, given Dennett's demand that a successful explanation of consciousness must be in terms of unconscious events. What he wants is a reduction to the physical. He wants that because he is convinced that only the physical exists. But in the case of consciousness, such a reduction must needs be an elimination.

9. To my claim that consciousness cannot be explained, Dennett has a response: "But why should consciousness be the only thing that cannot be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that are not solids, and liquids, and gases. . . . The  illusion that consciousness is the exception comes about, I suspect, because of a failure to understand this general feature of successful explanation." (455)

Dennett's reasoning here is astonishingly weak because blatantly question-begging. He is arguing:

A. It is a general feature of all successful explanations that F items be explained in terms of non-F items
B. Conscious items can be explained
Ergo
C. Conscious items can be explained in terms of nonconscious items.

(B) cannot be asserted given what I said in #6 and #7. I run the  argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (C) to the negation of (B): conscious items such as pains are irreducible.

10. Recall from #4 that Dennett said that successful explanations must leave something out. But in the case of a conscious item like a pain, what is left out when we explain it is precisely what we needed to explain! For what is left out is precisely the sensory quale, the felt pain, the Feiglian "raw feel,' the Nagelian "what it is like."

11. Amazingly, on p. 455 he retracts what he said on the previous page about successful explanations having to leave something out. He now  writes:

     Thinking, mistakenly, that the explanation leaves something out, we
     think to save what otherwise would be lost by putting it back into
     the observer as a quale — or some other "intrinsically" wonderful
     property. The psyche becomes the protective skirt under which all
     those beloved kittens can hide. There may be motives for thinking
     that consciousness cannot be explained, but, I hope I have shown,
     there are good reasons for thinking it can. (455)

Do you see how Dennett is contradicting himself? On p. 454 he states that a successful explanation must leave something out, which seems plausible enough. Then he half-realizes that this spells trouble for his explanation of consciousness — since what is left out when we explain consciousness in unconscious terms is precisely the explanandum, consciousness itself! So he backpedals and implies that nothing has been left out, and suggests that someone who affirms the irreducibility of qualia is like a lady who hides her 'kwalia kitties' under her skirt where no mean neuroscientist dare stick his nose.

The whole passage is a tissue of confusion wrapped in a rhetorical trick. And that is the way his big book ends: on a contradictory note.  A big fat load of scientistic sophistry.

12. To sum up. A successful explanation cannot eliminate the explanandum. That is nonnegotiable. So if we agree with Dennett that a successful explanation must leave something out, namely, our epistemic access to what is to be explained, then we ought to conclude that consciousness cannot be explained.

Jerry Coyne on Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will

It does not inspire much confidence when a writer begins his piece with a blatant confusion.  But that is what Jerry A. Coyne does in Why You Don't Really Have Free Will:

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. . . . And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

Suppose you have chosen to read Coyne's essay and have decided on scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Well then, you have made a choice and a decision and it is nonsense for Coyne to claim that you haven't just done those things.  It is also nonsense to claim that you had no choice concerning your New Year's resolutions.  It is a plain fact that one chooses, decides, and deliberates.  What is debatable, however, is whether one freely chooses, decides, deliberates.  Coyne gets off to a rocky start by conflating these two questions:

1. Do human beings ever choose, decide, deliberate?
2. Do human beings ever freely choose, decide, deliberate?

Only the second can be debated reasonably, and this, to be charitable, is the question Coyne is posing.  His answer is that we never freely choose, decide, deliberate.  His thesis is that "free will is a complete illusion."

Suppose you ordered the scrambled eggs.  No one held a gun to your head: your choice was uncoerced and in that sense free.  So you made a choice and you made a free (uncoerced) choice.  But there is another sense of 'free' and it is the one with which Coyne is operating:

3. Do human beings ever freely choose, etc.  in the sense that they could have done otherwise even if all the antecedent conditions up to the point of the choice, etc. were the same?

Call this the libertararian sense of 'free' and distinguish it from the compatibilist sense of the word.  To refine Coyne's thesis, he is claiming that libertarian freedom of the will is an illusion.  Why should we believe this?  Coyne says that there are "two lines of evidence."

Although Coyne uses the word 'evidence' and postures as if empirical science is going to step in, do some real work, and finally solve a problem that philosophers in their armchairs merely endlessly gas off about, the first "line of evidence" he provides is just a stock deterministic argument that could have been given in the 18th century. Determinism is the thesis that the actual past together with the actual laws of nature render only one present nomologically possible. Determinism has two consequences: it deprives the agent of alternative future possibilities, and it insures that the agent is not the ultimate source of any action. For if determinism is true, the agent himself is nothing other than an effect of causes that stretch back before his birth, so that no part of the agent can be an ultimate origin of action.  Hence when you chose the scrambled eggs you could not have done otherwise given the actual past: you could not have chosen oat meal instead.  You made a choice all right; it is just that it wasn't a libertarianly-free choice.

There 's nothing new here.  We are just complex physical systems, and determinism is true.  So everything that happens in our bodies and brains is necessitated, and libertarian freedom of will cannot exist.  Hence our sense that we are libertarianly free is an illusion.

That's a nice philosophical argument that makes no appeal to empirical facts.  Amazing how so many of these scientistic science types with their contempt for philosophy cannot help doing philosophy (while disingenuously denying that that is what they are doing) and simply trotting out old philosophical arguments all the while displaying their ignorance as to their origin and how to present them rigorously.

The argument is only as good as its premises.  Even if we assume determinism, it is scarcely obvious that we are just complex physical systems:  "Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics."

Really?  I am now enjoying a memory of hippy-trippy Pam from the summer of '69.  So my memory state is identical to a brain state.  But that  is arguably nonsense: the one exhibits intentionality ,the other doesn't, and so by the  Indiscernibility of Identicals, they cannot be identical.  No materialist has ever given a satisfactory account of intentionality.

So the first argument is rather less than compelling despite Coyne's scientistic posturing: "And what they're [neuroscientists] finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion."

The other "line of evidence" is from neurobiology:

Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. [. . .] "Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.

This argument is hardly compelling.  For one thing, it appears to confuse predictability with unfreedom.  Suppose I am able to predict accurately how Peter will behave in a range of situations.  It doesn't follow that he does not act freely (in the libertarian sense) in those situations.  On the basis of my knowledge of his character and habits, I predict that Peter will smoke a cigarette within an hour.  That is a prediction about the future of the actual world.  Suppose he does smoke a cigarette within an hour.  My correct prediction does not entail that could not have done otherwise than smoke a cigarette within an hour.  It does not entail that there is no possible world in which he refrains from smoking a cigarette within an hour.

So if, on the basis of unconscious brain activity, it is predicted that the subject will make a conscious decision, and he does, that does not entail that the decision was not free.  Furthermore, why should 'decision' be used to cover the whole seven second brain process? If 'decision' is used to refer to the conscious pressing of the button, then no part of the decision is unconscious, and Coyne's argument collapses.  What scientistic types don't seem to understand is that empirical science is not purely empirical.  It cannot proceed without conceptual decisions that are a priori.

If Coyne thinks that contemporary neuroscience has proven that there is no libertarian freedom of the will, then he is delusional: he is passing off dubious philosophy as if it were incontrovertible science while hiding the fact from himself.

In the sequel I will will adress the question whether libertarian free will could be an illusion.  Does that so much as make sense?

Companion post:  Free Will Meets Neuroscience.