November 11, 2007 – 12:10 am
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 [...]
November 7, 2007 – 12:59 am
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.
November 6, 2007 – 12:54 am
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 [...]
October 23, 2007 – 12:00 am
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 [...]
September 12, 2007 – 11:39 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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.
February 4, 2007 – 3:02 pm
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.
February 1, 2007 – 12:37 am
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.)
January 30, 2007 – 12:46 am
I’ve been reading 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.
January 15, 2007 – 10:49 pm
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 post entitled Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?
Thank you Kevin Kim for linking to this post, which I might otherwise have missed.
January 4, 2007 – 12:39 am
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.
December 17, 2006 – 4:13 pm
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 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.
December 4, 2006 – 1:23 pm
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, 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.
December 2, 2006 – 12:16 am
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 eduaction, and second, about the “Reason and Faith” requirement in the core curriculum.
November 2, 2006 – 1:51 am
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.
October 23, 2006 – 9:47 pm
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.
October 22, 2006 – 10:51 pm
One of the obstacles that some people face in understanding evolutionary theory is the natural tendency to think in discrete terms, 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.
September 10, 2006 – 11:59 pm
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.
August 28, 2006 – 3:12 pm
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?
August 27, 2006 – 5:37 pm
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.
August 23, 2006 – 5:58 pm
One of the greatest benefits of blogging is the opportunity one has to converse with, and learn from, people that 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.
August 17, 2006 – 11:25 pm
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.
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 amatuers 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.
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.
Well, 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.
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 spent all of my spare time and brainpower today 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 described example after example of Ms. DuBois’ abilitites. For example, DuBois 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 been purchased for the father’s wake. What are we to make of this sort of thing?
April 11, 2006 – 11:44 pm
For fans and foes of Daniel Dennett, here is a page that has links to several audio files of recent interviews with the feisty philosopher. They are big files, so they take a minute to download and get running.
April 10, 2006 – 10:56 pm
In a previous post about C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles we began to look at his treatment of the Natural vs. the Supernatural. In Chapter 3 Lewis rolls out the argument that serves as the necessary underpinning for the rest of the book; he calls it The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.
I know today’s post was supposed to follow on the previous item about C.S. Lewis, but in this morning’s email was a very interesting note from my friend Gus Spathis.
It is always with happy anticipation that I begin reading a book; I wouldn’t have taken it up in the first place had I not some reason to think that I would profit by it, and when the writer is someone I admire as much as C.S. Lewis, I know that I will be in the company of a man of immense erudition, elegant refinement of style, and – perhaps most fascinating to me – one who is both a skeptic and a believer. So it was with great interest that I opened his book Miracles, which deals directly with a question that has been vexing me no end lately – the question of Natural vs. Supernatural.
In the mail yesterday came an envelope from my good friend Jess Kaplan, who is, due to his sharp and perpetually curious mind, a constant source of fascinating material. Inside was a printout of a lengthy essay, by one Arthur M. Young, on the subject of science and consciousness. I am embarrassed to say that I had not heard of the man, because when I looked him up I discovered him to be, quite obviously, one of the brighter lights of the twentieth century, a restless and productive polymath who, among other accomplishments, invented the magnificent Bell helicopter – a task he apparently set himself simply as an exercise for the training of his mind and the growth of his wisdom.
March 12, 2006 – 12:55 am
If you are interested in logic and philosophy, or are just plain argumentative, here is an interesting site that I found out about over at Bill Vallicella’s place: The Fallacy Files.
Onto the sidebar it goes.
I’ve finally taken up Daniel Dennett’s latest effort, Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The book is an attempt to apply the methods of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to a critical examination of the possible reasons for our fondness for religion. It has unsurprisingly ruffled a few feathers, something Dennett seems to relish.
February 23, 2006 – 11:42 pm
One difficulty in developing a coherent philosophical account of consciousness is that the foundation upon which it rests – our subjective experience itself – is not as solid as we take it to be. We tend to think that the features of our inner life – our representation of the world, and the qualia that compose it – are stable and beyond dispute, and that our conscious “now” is a definite, pointlike event – as if there is an inner screen upon which consciouness plays, with Us as the viewer, and that whatever goes up on that screen is a matter of unambiguous fact.
February 16, 2006 – 12:50 am
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, wrote a post today called Nirvana as Asphyxiation. He’s been reading Emil Cioran, whom he quoted as having written:
In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second?
Bill goes on to examine the question of salvation. What lies at the end of the path? Annihilation of self? Why should we desire that? But if not that, then what? Some sort of “life of Riley” upgrade? A fluffy cloudscape, and an eternity of harps and halos? Might wear thin after the first million years or so. An endless carnal romp with a half-gross of raven-haired virgins? Not bad for a weekend in Vegas, but as a reentrant “lockout groove” for aeons without end? I’d rather play the record again. So Bill has set himself, and the rest of us, a philosophical problem. I quote from his post:
It is the problem of elaborating a conception of salvation that avoids both annihilationism and reduplicationism.
But is this, in fact, a philosophical problem at all?
January 13, 2006 – 10:05 pm
All right, maybe pondering arcane numerical sequences, even the really unusual and interesting ones, isn’t everybody’s idea of a rollicking good time. If you would like an explanation of the one I offered in the previous post, click here.
And for a final – I promise! – note on this topic, here is a really nifty website, where such sequences are studied, catalogued, and explained, and where you can enter a sequence andlook up the underlying rule.
January 12, 2006 – 11:56 pm
I few days back I inked a post about Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which I showed a little item from the chapter Figure and Ground, which is about recursively enumerable systems. The tidbit I offered was a most unusual number series. Here it is again, for those of you who didn’t see it the first time around, or who just passed it by without really thinking about it:
1 3 7 12 18 26 35 45 56 69 …
I admit it takes a minute or two to make sense of it, but it is worth the effort. It is wonderfully strange, and is typical of the little jewels that are everywhere in that amazing book.
January 11, 2006 – 11:16 pm
A recurring theme in here, and in some of the blogs I’m fond of visiting, is the mystery of consciousness. How is it that “mere” matter can become self-aware? Canmatter be the engine of consciousness at all, or does it merely serve as a temporary and intermittent host?
There seem to be three avenues by which people approach this mystery – philosophy, science, and mysticism. I have the intuitive conviction that they will, ultimately, give consistent answers – in other words they are all three digging toward the same hidden truth, though from different directions, and with different tools. My wish is to try to follow the progress on all three fronts, and to participate actively where I can.
January 1, 2006 – 11:32 pm
One of my favorite books is the astonishingly imaginative Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, published in 1979, is an extended meditation upon the underlying connections between the work of the three men mentioned in the title – Johann Sebastian Bach (who needs no introduction), the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, and mathematician Kurt Gödel. It is hard to describe the tone and content of the book – it is at times witty and playful, at times dense and didactic, but always unflaggingly, utterly brilliant. Really, and I mean this, GEB is so startlingly clever and original that at times it quite literally – and I do not ever misuse the word “literally” – took my breath away.
December 27, 2005 – 1:46 am
“Just as a monkey roaming through the forest grabs hold of one branch, lets that go and grabs another, then lets that go and grabs still another, so too that which is called ‘mind’ and ‘mentality’ and ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night.”
(Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p. 595)
December 24, 2005 – 4:02 pm
There are many in the scientific community – some of its most prominent spokespersons – who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible, but there are many others.
I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.
December 7, 2005 – 11:45 pm
A common idea in esoteric teachings is the notion that we live our lives too mechanically, that we are in fact in a kind of waking sleep. The notion seems silly at first. Of course we aren’t asleep! Sleep is what we do at night in our beds. During our busy days we are conscious, we are active, we are engaged. But consciousness is a tricky business, and one of its sneakier properties is that it can’t see its own edges. To put that another way, it takes consciousness to be aware of consciousness, and that means that unconsciousness cannot be aware of itself.