waka waka waka

It’s late in the day, and it’s been a long, full day: up early this morning to drive our son back to college, then an evening memorial service here in Wellfleet for a truly remarkable woman — Ellen Rafel, our next-door neighbor here on Hiram Hill, who lost her fight with cancer this spring. So for tonight I want to direct readers to an ongoing discussion at The Maverick Philosopher on what is perhaps the most intractable social and political dilemma of them all: abortion.

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A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work by Daniel Dennett, that the regress argument might not block a suitable naturalistic account. This led to a long discussion in the comments thread, with over a hundred entries. Toward the end, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some extensive criticisms of my position, which I would like to begin to address here.

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We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Note: Don’t read the comments below before you take the test!!

Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either have an objective basis, or founder in an infinite regress.

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Debating philosophical or religious questions in the blogosphere can be awfully unproductive; it shows you why some of the same questions that vexed the ancients are still confounding us today. People with different fundamental assumptions live in inner worlds that are quite irreconcilable: words mean different things to different speakers, and often serve only to highlight these differences while doing nothing to bridge them. For a splendid example of all this, have a look at this protracted comment thread over at the Maverick Philosopher, which starts out as a post about recent atheistic critiques of religion.

In a recent post, The Maverick Philosopher imagined a possible world in which he might have blogged about Schopenhauer under the banner The Scowl of Minerva (a play on the owl as the symbol of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and philosophy). Things like this always set my own mental wheels in motion, and I soon had hatched a brood of kindred websites, each devoted to a different aspect of philosophical inquiry:

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I’ve been watching a spate of videos, over the past week or so, featuring various members of the group often referred to as the “New Atheists”: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. The last two links I’ve posted here were debates between one or another of these fellows with some religiously-minded opponent, but most recently I ran across a conversation amongst all four of them at once. This video ought to be an instant hit with all the atheists out there: these fellows have achieved rock-star status amongst the heathens, and getting them all together like this constitutes sort of a Supergroup of the Damned. (Too bad the name “Blind Faith” is already taken.)

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In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.

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As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of moral nihilism by arguing that moral systems such as ours are sort of an evolutionary “forced move” — which I also think is about the most one can do in that department — will be unsatisfying to some. (Then again, the Copernican system was unsatisfying to some, too.)

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Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher upon whose posts we often comment in these pages, has put up a good one today on the topic of God and evil. He makes an important distinction, one that people often fail to keep in mind, between what is called the “argument from evil” and its close cousin, the “problem of evil”. The former is an attempt to prove the nonexistence of God, and the latter is simply a difficulty that the theist must struggle with.

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We wrote recently on the “problem of evil”, and argued that it is hardly necessary that good and evil be absolute, objective features of the world for subjective beings like us to have difficulty reconciling the notion of an omnipotent, loving, and infinitely merciful God with the gruesome and arbitrary suffering we see all around us, and with the many horrendous examples of divinely encouraged murder, rape, torture, enslavement and genocide that are reported in the Bible.

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In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about himself. I believe he is right about this, but I have also thought for some time now that even Dennett, arch-naturalist that he is, has stopped short of acknowledging what is perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of Darwinism:

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There’s much more that I want to say about the important questions raised in the previous post, but for tonight I just want to let you know about a website I’ve just run across. It’s called Philosophy Talk, and it’s associated with a radio show by the same name. The show is hosted each week by two Stanford University philosophers: Ken Taylor, the chairman of the philosophy department, and John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy.

The website offers downloadable recordings of archived programs for a nominal fee, but if you don’t want to pay for your own copies you can listen to them as streaming audio at no cost.

There are an awful lot of shows in the archive, featuring some well-known guests. Topics include Consciousness, with David Chalmers; The Mystery of Mind, with John Searle, Predicting the Future, with Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan); Intelligent Design, with Daniel Dennett; Philosophy and Neuroscience, with Patricia Churchland, and dozens and dozens more, on all the Big Questions: free will, religion, truth, art, beauty, love, virtue, time, evil, you name it. It looks like a hugely entertaining resource.

As I’m always saying, there just aren’t enough hours in a day. Or days in a life.

You can find the site here. Onto the sidebar it goes.

Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.

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I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.

I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.

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As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make claims that are carefully tuned to be unfalsifiable, then insist that, simply by virtue of being unfalsifiable, they are every bit as respectable as models that include no supernatural agents. (One of this faction’s most articulate spokesmen is Dr. William Vallicella, who has joined the battle again in recent posts, and who defends his theism with considerable agility.)

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The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.

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Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and budget. So this evening, rather than spend an hour or two meticulously whittling into shape an original blog-post of my own, I gave the time over to what I knew would be some interesting reading — and, careful shopper that I am, I was well satisfied with the purchase.

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In a recent post at his Maverick Philosopher website, Bill Vallicella responds to the following brief remark by philosopher Jim Ryan:

The reason I’m an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn’t the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

I agree with most of what Ryan says here, but consider Bill to be as nimble and astute a theist as one is likely to find, so I was interested to see how he would reply.

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Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org.

First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws on recent shifts in how the notion of group selection is understood, and introduces some non-traditional functional concepts about morality.

Next, read responses by Michael Shermer, David Sloan Wilson, and Sam Harris, here.

I haven’t had time to digest all of this myself yet. Have a look, and let’s talk about it a little later.

I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled and seeded these fields for decades now, yielding a bountiful harvest of books, academic papers, lectures, and philosophical insights for the nourishment of interested laymen like me. One needn’t always agree with him — in particular, his “eliminativist” account of consciousness has many harsh critics — but agree or not, there is no denying the unusual fecundity of his intellect, and his remarkable ability to cut away the conceptual underbrush that often surrounds these persistent philosophical conundrums, and to bring what is unclear about the questions themselves sharply into focus.

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I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants.

Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God Delusion.

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Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?, What Do You Believe is True, Even Though You Cannot Prove It, and What Is Today’s Most Important Underreported Story? (you can see the whole list here).

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There’s a quirky little item in the science news today: some researchers in Germany have been studying fruit flies, and have observed that their behavior seems surprisingly flexible.

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In remarking on a recent post, commenter Titus Rivas offered a link to a paper he and Hein van Dongen wrote in 2001, in which they launch an assault on the mind-body model known as epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism is the view that the subjective, conscious mind is a causally impotent byproduct of the physical activity of the brain — that it only witnesses our cognitive processes, without having the ability to influence them in any way.

I’ll admit that I have found epiphenomenalism attractive myself; it squares nicely with, to pick one example, the experimental results of Benjamin Libet, which seem to show that we act on our decisions before we are conscious of them. But it has its difficulties, too, and I think Rivas and van Dongen have mounted a successful refutation, which I will summarize here, of this philosophical position. It’s also worth mentioning that they stand in agreement on the insupportability of epiphenomenalism with philosopher Daniel Dennett¹, and when you have two committed dualists in firm agreement with Dennett that a particular mind-brain model doesn’t work, you have good reason to be skeptical of it.

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1. see Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp 398-405  

Readers of these pages will certainly be familiar with Daniel Dennett, the prominent Tufts University philosopher who has done important work over the last several decades on the subjects of free will, evolutionary theory, and, most notably, the philosophy of mind. Dennett has also been a major player lately in the increasingly voluble science-vs. religion debate; his book Breaking the Spell is must reading for those who have an interest — from either perspective — in this vital dialogue.

Well, our Dan has been through quite a lot in the past few months; in October he suffered an aortic dissection, and nearly died.

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Dr. William Vallicella calls our attention to a post by Dr. Alan Rhoda in which Dr. Rhoda argues that the “problem of evil” is as much a difficulty for the atheist as for the theist. But Dr. Rhoda’s post, which Dr. V. calls a “good solid crack at it”, rests on the unwarranted assumption that the atheist will be as troubled as the theist by the notion that there might not be an objective basis for morality.

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As so often happens, there is an interesting conversation underway over at The Maverick Philosopher. In this case the topic is the recurring theme of mind-body dualism, and in particular how a non-physical mind might causally interact with a physical body. (The original post has to do with a rather arcane metaphysical system known as “hylomorphic” or “Thomistic” dualism, but a lively chat ensued.)

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Yesterday I picked up The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle. Searle is perhaps best known for his long-standing wrangle with Daniel Dennett; they have clashed often over the years, with Dennett running roughshod over Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment, and Searle excoriating Dennett (quite fairly) for his rather extreme position as regards the subjective ontology of consciousness.

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Readers will probably be familiar with one Deepak Chopra, who has made a handsome pile over the years by peddling pseudo-scientific New Age pablum to legions of credulous and uncritical admirers. Now, in an item at the Huffington Post, he swivels his intellectual popguns to bear upon Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, and does about as little damage as you might expect. If you enjoy seeing intellectual justice in action, visit the website eclexys, where blogger “gordsellar” gives Chopra’s gormless review, which is a basinful of the purest hogwash, the fisking it deserves, in a satisfying post entitled Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?

Thank you Kevin Kim for linking to this post, which I might otherwise have missed.

As I’ve mentioned recently, there is always something at Edge.org to engage the curious mind. One of the more interesting features of the website is the annual World Question project, which consists of asking a diverse collection of thinkers some simple but provocative question, and presenting their responses.

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Friday’s post (sorry for yesterday’s service interruption; I had a very long day of recording and mixing) mentioned the “Beyond Belief” convention sponsored by Edge.org, and alerted readers to the availability of streaming video feeds of the presentations. I’ve been watching them myself as time permits, and the discussions, if not exactly balanced — the speakers generally regard the influence of religion on society as something that we ought be outgrowing sometime around now — are calm, thoughtful, and considerate of the centrality of religion in many people’s lives.

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If you haven’t noticed, there are a growing number of scientists, authors, and other thinking sorts who have decided to stand up in public and question the enormous influence that religion still exerts in 21st-century affairs. Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and, of course, Richard Dawkins are leading the charge, but others are growing bolder as well, and are adding their intelligent and articulate voices to the gathering chorus. One of these is Natalie Angier, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her science writing at the New York Times, and author of several outstanding books.

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In a characteristically pointed essay, Steven Pinker comments on Harvard’s forthcoming Report of the Committee on General Education. While he is generally laudatory, he has “two reservations”: first, about the characterization of the place of science in a general education, and second, about the “Reason and Faith” requirement in the core curriculum.

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In a typically interesting discussion over at the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella says at one point that the “wholly nonlinguistic fact of Santa’s nonexistence cannot depend on a linguistic fact about a word.” Now the subject in question is a rather technical one — it’s about the philosophical difficulties of references and their referents — but it reawakened for me some nagging questions about “facts”, about Platonism, and about the degree to which we are justified in assuming that the categories we impose on the external world are independent of our own minds.

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Yesterday’s post was about “ring species”, both as interesting natural phenomena in themselves, and as a reminder that the persistent human tendency to impose discrete categories on continuous phenomena can lead us, if not to outright error, at least to an inaccurate model of the world. Keeping in mind that we are all inclined toward this prejudice — Richard Dawkins calls it the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — can help us to avoid not only taxonomic pitfalls, but philosophical ones as well.

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One of the obstacles that some people face in understanding evolutionary theory is the natural tendency to think in excessively discrete terms, insisting on parsing the continuity of the world into distinct categories. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, addresses this problem — which he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — and offers some examples of how the categories we see in the natural world are not sharply bounded, but merge quite seamlessly into one another. I have promised to write about some of the fascinating ideas in this book, and this topic seems a good one to begin with.

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I’ve gone and done it again; I’ve jumped into an argument about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s. There are two threads at the moment; they are here and here.

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In an ongoing discussion over at Maverick Philosopher, one of the interlocutors has made the assertion, in defense of dualism, that the human mind must be more than the physical activity of the brain, because the brain is a finite physical system, and the mind of Man, allegedly, is infinite. To quote from the thread over at Dr. Vallicella’s place:

Because the human mind is not bounded, it cannot be physical.

Sounds good. We all have the feeling that we can accommodate any new concept that comes before us (though, on reflection, a peek at contemporary political discourse might be sufficient rebuttal), and adjust our behavior with limitless flexibility. But why do we think so? What makes us so sure?

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Well, I’ve gone and got myself into another tussle over at Maverick Philosopher, which is one reason I’ve been confecting such weightless froth over here.

These arguments never get anywhere - if it were possible, at our current stage of development, to answer such questions as the mind-body problem, we’d have done so already - but I just can’t help myself. If you’d like to drop by over there and razz the opposition, here’s the link.

One of the greatest benefits of blogging is the opportunity one has to converse with, and learn from, people whom one might otherwise never have met. Scott Carson, professor of philosophy at Ohio University and author of the blog An Examined Life, has taken the trouble to respond to my comments on his post about the defensibility of torture. He makes some excellent criticisms of my post, and I am very grateful to him for taking the time to do so.

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An item in the English newspaper The Guardian has touched off a heated controversy. The piece refers to the airline-bombing plot that British authorites nipped in the bud last week, and says that the key witness in the case, one Rashid Rauf, a British citizen, revealed what he knew only after he was “broken” under interrogation by Pakistani questioners, which suggests rather strongly that he was tortured. The information obtained, however, most likely prevented the murder of thousands in simultaneous midair bombings. The question, of course, is whether the benefit thus achieved justifies the use of methods from which compassionate people and humane societies recoil in horror.

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Dr. William Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher, will of course be familiar to readers of these pages (in fact many of you will have come here in the first place as a result of our occasional cross-linking). Bill is a professional philosopher - the real McCoy, as opposed to the loquacious amateurs who drive taxis and cut hair here in Gotham - and his site is a fascinating forum for discussion of philosophical topics. He attracts interested laypeople like me as well as his academic colleagues, and the discussions are always at a high level both of erudition and civility. I have learned a great deal by reading and participating, and have been persuaded to rethink many of my own opinions as a result.

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We should never underestimate the pervasiveness of human nature. Among the many drives that motivate us is the desire for status, which in primate groups like ours is obviously correlated with one’s reproductive prospects. This yearning to increase our standing in the group affects our behavior even in the most rarefied spheres of endeavor, for example the practice of philosophy.

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As it happens, the featured article on the front page of Wikipedia today is Philosophy of Mind. In the article we find the question:

“How can the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties be explained in naturalistic terms?”

Small world.

One of the knottier topics in philosophy of mind is intentionality. The term refers to the way our thoughts are about their objects, and intentionality is often considered to be an exclusive hallmark of the mental. A thought can be “about” Paris, but a stone, or a lampshade, cannot be.

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Sorry, I’m just too tired tonight to write anything worth reading. But I don’t want anyone who has taken the trouble to pay us a visit to go away empty-handed, so here’s an interesting link: a website where author Robert Wright (whose insightful book Nonzero I have just begun reading) has posted video clips of his interviews with an impressive assortment of prominent thinkers.

Well, I seem to have got myself into quite a scrap over at Bill Vallicella’s place, to the extent that I’ve worn myself out writing comments over there, rather than confecting something interesting or amusing for waka waka waka.

The argument is about whether abstract, Platonic objects, such as the number 7, really have an autonomous, mind-independent existence. Most philosophers, I think, would say, perhaps grudgingly, that they do, but the matter is not settled, and I am playing Devil’s advocate, to the best of my dilettantish ability, to see if the non-platonist view - that such things exist only insofar as there are minds to instantiate them - holds water.

Please feel free to let me know what you think about this.

My lovely wife Nina was just reading to me some excerpts from an article about one Allison DuBois, who is the real-life sibyl behind television’s popular series Medium. The magazine article gave examples of Ms. DuBois’ abilites; for example, DuBois once told a woman that she saw her recently deceased father sitting nearby, wearing a clown nose - when, as it happens, a box of clown noses had in fact been purchased for the father’s wake. What are we to make of this sort of thing?

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For fans and foes of Daniel Dennett, The Prosblogion has posted a page with links to several audio files of recent interviews and panel discussions with the feisty philosopher.

They are big files, so they take a minute to download and get running. Worth the wait, though, for those who are interested.