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.â€
(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.
November 20, 2005 – 11:59 pm
Are there abstract objects? Do numbers, for example, have an existence that is independent of our minds? This is one of the Big Questions, and has been a recent topic of debate over at Maverick Philosopher, where I have been outnumbered as usual. It’s a pretty tough room for materialists, that place.
What, exactly, have we been wrangling over? Consider the following proposition:
The statement “3 is prime” was true even before there were any minds to conceive it.
Is this true? Bill Vallicella and company say it is (and seemed a bit shocked that I might think otherwise), but I think the question is more subtle that they realize, and doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer. Here’s the view I am proposing:
November 9, 2005 – 1:23 am
I’ve been spending a lot of time around philosophers lately, and I’ve noticed something.
Before I begin, let me say, for purposes of full disclosure, that although I have had a lifelong interest in philosophy, I was raised by two scientists. My mother is a physical anthropologist, and my father, an immunologist, did the research that led to the eradication of rH hemolytic disease. He was in fact recently considered for the Nobel Prize.
So, despite my deep and genuine admiration (envy, even, on occasion) for the purity and discipline of the trained philosophical mind, sometimes I can feel a bit, shall we say, conflicted. And although what we now call science (a relatively recent arrival) was, in its infancy, known as “natural philosophy”, science and philosophy are two different things entirely.
November 6, 2005 – 2:45 am
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Bill Vallicella’s place lately, as anyone who reads these posts is bound to have noticed. We’ve been arguing dualism vs. phsyicalism, and the fur has been flying. Here’s a recap. I apologize if this post is of rather unseemly length.
November 5, 2005 – 5:01 pm
As I walked along William Street in Lower Manhattan yesterday morning on my way to the PubSub command center, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a dazzling light twenty feet or so off the ground. Looking up at it I couldn’t make out what it was for a moment, then realized that it was only a metal fixture attached to a building. It wasn’t really any sort of lamp at all, but was catching a thin shaft of sunlight (the streets are narrow, and the buildings tall, in the Financial District) and bouncing it my way. This was an interesting perceptive shift; at first I had thought I was seeing a primary light source, then realized that its illuminative virtue was not intrinsic but contextual.
I was immediately struck by what an apt metaphor this was for the topic of derived vs. intrinsic intentionality.
October 27, 2005 – 11:35 pm
For many years I have been curious about consciousness. It is something that most people never think much about, but when you begin to wonder about it it is hard to let the subject go. Consciousness is at the same time the most familiar phenomenon there is, and the oddest of all. We give it up every night and regain it each morning, without wondering how such a change might be possible. We know that consciousness is bound, somehow, to our bodies (and, we assume, not to the ordinary objects of the world), but we cannot begin to imagine how such a binding might be arranged. Consciousness can be aware of itself, but unconsciousness cannot, and so we do not see the “edges” of our consciousness, as we can demonstrate by trying to observe ourselves in the act of falling asleep. Our experiences of our lives in the fleeting present, and of the memories that are all we have of the past, are dependent for their very existence upon our our consciousness.
As reader of these pages will know, I follow quite closely the conversation at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website. Lately Bill has treated his visitors to a good hard look at the philosophical treatment of several aspects of consciousness, such as qualia, dualism-vs.-physicalism, and intentionality. I highly recommend his site to any readers who are curious about the various views that animate this discussion; Bill’s blog is a rara avis in philosophical discourse: simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and accessible. He also attracts a respectable ensemble of readers and commenters.
October 20, 2005 – 10:23 am
This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
The philosophers, logicians and doctors of law were drawn up at court to examine Nasrudin. This was a serious case, because he had admitted going from village to village saying: ‘The so-called wise men are ignorant, irresolute and confused.’ He was charged with undermining the security of the state.
‘You may speak first,’ said the king.
‘Have paper and pens brought,’ said the Mulla.
Paper and pens were brought.
‘Give them to each of the first seven savants.’
They were distributed.
‘Have them separately write an answer to this question: “What is bread?” ‘
This was done.
The papers were handed to the king who read them out:
The first said: ‘Bread is a food.’
The second ‘It is flour and water.’
The third: ‘ A gift of God.’
The fourth: ‘Baked dough.’
The fifth: ‘Changeable, according to how you mean “bread”.’
The sixth: ‘A nutritious substance.’
The seventh: ‘Nobody really knows.’
‘When they decide what bread is,’ said Nasrudin, ‘it will be possible for them to decide other things. For example, whether I am right or wrong. Can you entrust matters of assessment and judgement to people like this? Is it or is it not strange that they cannot agree about something which they eat each day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?’
September 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory†of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.